The Jetty Page 9

  Within minutes the room was strewn with beautiful clothes, a pink Chanel blouse flung over a chair, a silver Schiaparelli gown in a clump on the floor, a charcoal grey Pross travel ensemble spread awkwardly on the foot of the bed. Also scattered about were scarves, evening slippers, Italian shoes and handbags. The magnum bottle of champagne was down to its last remains. Vivian, at that moment, was trying to extract a particularly handsome leather riding boot from Kathy’s foot. Both were laughing. Vivian pulled and pulled – a Cinderella-esque moment – and suddenly the boot came loose and Vivian went backward, falling in a sitting position in the corner. Kathy, still laughing and hobbling with one foot still booted, reached awkwardly from the bed to help her up.

  But Vivian’s gaze turned past Kathy toward the door – and Kathy followed her gaze. Standing in the doorway was Jack – wearing only a swim suit and still soaking wet from what appeared to be a midnight swim. Vivian struggled to her feet, gathering up a handful of clothes, and then

  moved with increasing speed past Jack and out of the room, avoiding his eyes and instead glancing fleetingly at the sea water dripping on the floor.

  Kathy was still perched awkwardly on the edge of the bed, one booted foot on the floor (for fear of soiling the white comforter), and her bare foot tucked almost modestly underneath her. She felt as if she were suspended in time and space – and could only watch as Jack crossed the room toward her, dripping with sea water and what? Danger? Menace? He stood before her, dripping wet, with tiny streams running down his chest.

  It was after midnight when Michael returned the Mercedes to the Leffler mansion. The Subaru was nowhere to be seen. The garage door was still open, and he returned the Lefflers’ car to its original place. He dropped the car keys on the kitchen counter and called out but no one answered.

  One of the kitchen cabinets was open, and he instinctively reached out to close it. As he did so, he noticed it was empty. The cupboard was bare. He opened the cabinet next to it. Empty too! Cabinet after cabinet. All empty.

  The lights were on in the house, but it was totally silent, eerily quiet. He walked quickly through the rooms, but there was no one in the library, no one in the salon. Upstairs there was no one in the bedrooms, though through the doorway, Michael saw clothes scattered all over what had earlier been a tidy room. On a table in the adjoining sitting room, there was a canvas bag on a mirrored dressing table, set down casually amidst a host of mascara and lipsticks and perfumes. He lifted it to find it heavy. He unzipped it. Inside were several stacks of cash! Bundles of cash, neatly wrapped bundles of cash! No wonder the Lefflers could live like this. They probably never paid taxes.

  Finally, Michael climbed up to the widow’s walk. There – to his relief

  – he found Vivian, wearing a long dressing gown and drinking champagne. The moon was out and gleaming on the ocean below.

  “I left the keys in the kitchen,” Michael said, and then looking over the railing, “wow, it really is high up here.”

  “Yes,” she answered dreamily, “you can see forever. Have you got any more marijuana?”

  “No,” Michael said, startled by the question, not realizing how he

  reeked of the weed.

  “The black jazz musicians called it ‘Mary Jane,’” Vivian said, as if remembering something from long ago. “You’re sure you don’t have any marijuana?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, at a loss as how to respond. “I don’t.” “Pity,” she said. “Well, you’d better get home to your wife.” “She’s not . . . we’re not married.”

  “Well,” Vivian said, “then you should get back to . . . whatever she is.” As if to punctuate her command, Vivian turned back to the balustrade.

  The walk to the cottage took Michael over half an hour. He wondered if Kathy would be sleeping. From a distance, there appeared to be no lights on in the cottage, but as he approached the porch stairs he saw the door was open. He peered inside before entering. Kathy was standing in the darkened living room. As he approached her he could see that she had been crying.

  “Kathy, what’s wrong?”

  “I’m so sorry, Michael,” she said.

  “Sorry?” He could not bear to see her cry. She was sobbing, her sobs, her tears, her trembling growing like a storm. He had never seen her like this, even when Gail died.

  “I have to tell you,” she said, sobbing, hardly able to speak.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Please don’t worry about it.” He didn’t want her to dwell on past history, to revisit her sadness. Whatever was bothering her it wasn’t worth rehashing. Kathy might talk herself right back into depression. “Besides,” he added, “it wasn’t that bad a party.”

  Michael didn’t see Kathy’s expression – somewhere between regret and incredulity. He wrapped his arms around her. She still trembled, but it seemed to him that her trembling suddenly felt more like fear than sadness.

  He embraced her more tightly, desperate to comfort her, to protect her. On the dining room table, Michael noticed The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, propped open as if Kathy had just finished reading the last page, as if reading the book had left her in this distressed state of mind.

  The Leffler mansion looked smaller and more prosaic in the daytime. It was late morning when Michael walked up the driveway toward the house. He had walked all the way to the Lefflers, leaving Kathy the car in case she needed it. He didn’t say where he was going.

  Jack was in the courtyard in front of the house washing the Mercedes. He was shirtless, his arm no longer bandaged, and he looked powerful as he sprayed water from the hose over the car’s chassis.

  Michael approached the car and stood silently watching. “Michael,” Jack said.

  “I’m returning your book,” Michael said, throwing The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock violently onto the front seat of the car.

  “Careful, Old Man. That’s a first edition.”

  “And don’t give Kathy any more books, or anything else for that

  matter.”

  “You’re not making sense, Michael,” Jack said, pausing for a moment in his car washing, holding the hose as water ran onto the driveway.

  “I want you to stay away from her,” Michael said.

  Jack looked up again briefly, then went back to washing the car. “Stay away from Kathy!”

  Jack laughed. “Old Man – she won’t stay away from me.” Jack accented each word as if using each syllable as an instrument of pain. “You’d best talk to her.”

  Michael grabbed Jack’s arm.

  “I’m talking to you!”

  Jack threw him down hard. Michael struggled to his feet. Again he went after Jack; again he was thrown back, this time against the side of the car. He remembered the gun in the Mercedes. He reached over the door and into the glove compartment. Empty.

  “Looking for this?” Jack said. Michael looked up to see Jack, standing

  pale and frightening, holding the gun.

  Boom! Suddenly the gun exploded. Michael had never heard a gun fired so close by. It was louder, more frightening that he ever imagined. He held his ears. They were ringing. He wondered if he would ever hear again, but hardly had time to worry about hearing loss when the gun went off again. The sand at Michael’s feet splashed as he realized the bullet had landed only inches from his foot. He started running, running as fast as he could, running so that he could hardly breathe, hardly hear save for Jack’s laughter, Jack’s haunting laughter.

  “I returned Jack’s book,” he told Kathy when he got back to the cottage.

  She nodded, but said nothing.

  They packed up for the beach. They did it automatically, perhaps desperate for something to do, to keep from having to talk to each other. He had tried to avoid making her sad but had accomplished just the opposite. Silence descended on them like a heavy fog. They hurried to the beach where they knew the crowd noises would at least give them some respite.

  It was Sunday. The last weekend of summer was receding like a tide. Even th
ough the next day was a Labor Day holiday, many people were leaving to have a day off at home before going back to work. By late afternoon the crowds would no longer be the cumbersome mass they’d been the day before. Michael had always wondered what Port Aransas would be like after Labor Day; this year he’d made plans to find out. He and Kathy had each gone more than a year without taking a vacation; now that summer was ending they’d leased the cottage for ten days.

  It should have been nice to lie on the beach in the morning, watching the short-timers packing and leaving, free of the tension of a time of departure. But Michael was hardly relaxed; he was feeling a tension of a different kind. Something had happened, but he was unsure what. Whatever it was had thrown Kathy back into the gloom. A week on the island with Kathy in such a state? He wasn’t sure he could stand it.

  “Michael,” she said.

  She spoke his name. It was amazing how his heart leapt at the simple

  sound.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she continued. “Maybe we should go on one of those tour boats.”

  “A tour boat! A tour boat! Fabulous!” He almost shouted with relief. “Michael, not so loud,” she whispered.

  “Sorry,” he whispered in return. Oh, but he was so delighted by her

  sudden return from the deep.

  She reached out and touched his arm. “I know you don’t like boats,”

  she said.

  “Not like them? Are you kidding? I love them.” “Michael.”

  “Well I’m going to learn to love them.”

  “Maybe we could just rent a boat ourselves,” she said. “You know how to drive a boat, don’t you?”

  “Absolutely. I won the yachting cup every year in Laternia.”

  Kathy smiled. Laternia was at the pan-end of the Texas panhandle, closer to Oklahoma than to civilization, on the great plains where a body of water large enough to float on seemed mythical. Michael’s parents still lived there and he went dutifully home to see them twice a year. She realized she had never even met Michael’s parents, nor had he met hers – either one.

  Kathy’s mother lived in Dallas. Her father was in, probably, Saudi Arabia, or wherever there might still be a living to be made in the oilfields; “where” didn’t matter. Her parents had divorced so long ago that Kathy sometimes had trouble remembering what the family had looked like together. And now losing Gail. Christmas would be an especially dreary affair.

  What a bizarre thing to be thinking about, Christmas, when the sun was high and hot. “Want to go in the water?” she asked.

  That was one thing he definitely did not want to do, but he said

  “Absolutely,” still surprised by her sudden energy. “You’re okay with it?”

  “No problem,” he said.

  They ran in, they dove into the waves, they floated beyond the waves, feeling almost bodiless until they brushed against each other. When they came out, already almost dry by the time they reached their lawn chairs, Kathy began smoothing on sun block and after Michael had helped her he found his own tube, but, when he squeezed it, it only gave one little splat into his hand followed by a wheezing sound.

  “Use some of mine,” Kathy said.

  “Thanks, but I need the industrial strength. I’ve got some more back at the cottage, I’ll just run back and get it.”

  Michael had very fair skin that didn’t freckle and barely tanned and did nothing much at all until it suddenly turned bright red after only twenty minutes or so of sun. He’d learned to be lavish with high-grade sun block. Kathy shaded her eyes to look up at him.

  “I wonder what our children would look like – if we had children, I

  mean.”

  This was an interesting topic, Michael thought. Had it been one of Kathy’s offhand spontaneous remarks, or had she been lying here thinking long thoughts about having children with him? Michael knelt beside her.

  “My mother was abducted by space aliens nine months before I was born.”

  She smiled. “That explains a lot.”

  In the last year there had been sadness in her smiles. Even her laughter seemed tentative, short-lived. He thought of her laughter at the burned steaks. Yes, she laughed, but it seemed born of disappointment. Like Voltaire, who laughed to keep from crying. Like that night at the Lefflers’. Kathy seemed to be enjoying herself, only to be totally depressed afterward. He couldn’t understand it.

  He remembered when Kathy used to laugh – really laugh. Her laugh was enchanting. She gave herself up to it as if nothing else mattered but the enjoyment of the moment. He would have liked to make her smile that way again; perhaps laugh again; or to ease back into the subject of children, so gradually it might be days before she realized she’d obliquely admitted she wanted to spend her life with him. But in his imagination he could hear the pop and sizzle of the skin between his shoulder blades.

  “I’ll be back.”

  He slipped a T-shirt over his head, deciding to carry his thongs, and ran a few steps, hot sand quickly covering his legs. They had trekked some distance to find a spot for their chairs. It was hard to run through the loose sand and he soon slowed to a walk. A cloud passing over the sun provided welcome shade. The beach was still crowded. He had to wend his way between walkers and runners and lie-ers and Frisbee-throwers.

  He negotiated the sandy trail through the weeds. Halfway to the

  cottage the sounds of the beach disappeared, replaced by a strange silence

  – that strange lonely silence that attaches to places apart from people – lonely, inaccessible places – and suddenly to Michael’s mind – frightening. Why he had a sudden fearful premonition he could not tell – but he had it nevertheless – and it was a feeling of unease that increased with each step. “If you’ve seen them, you may be in danger.”

  The cottage came into sight. Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary. The Subaru was parked in front. There was the lazy hum of insects, the distant sound of the waves on the shore. Michael chastened

  himself for his timidity. He almost laughed out loud.

  He remembered the reason for his return to the house – the sun screen. Where had he put it? Had he taken it out of his Dopp kit, placed it in a drawer, in the bathroom medicine cabinet? He tended to be rather careless about putting things away. Distracted, he flung open the front door before he realized that it should have been locked.

  The scene inside the door shocked him. The living room, the cottage had been – well, ransacked. Drawers and cabinets opened, a few items scattered on the ground. A window was open; a stiff breeze was blowing in the curtains.

  Instinctively Michael reached down and picked a cushion off the floor and placed it on the couch. As he straightened up he felt for the first time the presence of someone in the cottage. A shadow fell across the room. He turned. There in the kitchen stood the giant from the volleyball game.

  “Where’s my money?” the giant said.

  “You’re . . . breaking and entering!” Michael said, sputtering.

  “Call the sheriff,” the giant said, tearing the phone from the wall and throwing it at him. Michael dodged the projectile, and it clanged on the wall behind him.

  Money? It took Michael a moment to understand. Of course, the giant meant the money from the volleyball game. Michael was perfectly willing to give him the money – and was about to say so when the giant threw a punch that caught him on the side of the head and sent him spiraling backward. He regained his balance and dove forward into the giant’s midsection. It was a move that surprised them both, Michael for having attempted it and the giant for its swiftness. Nevertheless, the move only temporarily postponed the inevitable and the giant soon had Michael in a grip and hurled him across the room where he lay in a heap in the corner, unable to move. He could only watch as the giant moved toward him and prepared to give him a good kicking.

  But just as he reached his leg back to plant a kick – the giant’s leg

  was suddenly caught in place, his leg stretched out behind hi
m till he lost his balance and fell forward, his hand breaking his fall, leaving him in a position much like one preparing to do a somersault. But instead of falling forward, the giant suddenly lurched back in the opposite direction, moving in a herky-jerky motion as if something powerful was dragging him back toward the front of the cottage. He continued his retreat backwards through the open front door, across the small porch, bumping down the stairs, and into the sand and weeds. Michael got to his feet, staggered to the porch in time to see the giant rise again and take a step back toward Michael and the cottage. But an unseen force intervened. The giant reached for his own throat. He was fighting for air. His face wore a mask of pure horror, a feeling Michael shared. And then, whatever force held the giant, released him, and he fell to the ground again. Now, eyes wide, his terrified stare pinned on Michael, the giant half crawled, half crouched, not back toward the beach but in the opposite direction, disappearing into the dunes. Only unanswered questions remained. How had the giant found him? What force stopped the giant’s attack? Why did he crawl away?

  In shock, Michael went back inside the cottage, closed the cabinets and drawers, shut the windows, put the sofa cushions back on the sofa, and plugged the phone back in. He tried in every way possible to return the cottage to its previous appearance. Finally, he locked the cottage up tight, even giving an extra tug just to make certain the doors were secure.