A Dark Matter (40 page)

“Around me, don’t even mention handcuffs,” Boats said.

“I have come a long way,” Olson said. He turned to the stark shadow Boats had become. “As soon as I got to Chicago, I called Lee and asked if he’d meet me at Mike Ditka’s place. So this was my first day out, and I came on a little too strong with our waitress. She was one pretty woman. Come to think of it, so’s this kid.”

“You know what I realized just the other day?” Boats asked. “Everybody young is beautiful.” That his face was still only half visible made his pronouncement sound oracular.

“Nice thought. And true, besides.”

The young woman returned with drinks and menus, and a little while later, we ordered conch fritters, fried catfish, coconut shrimp, and jerk pork.

“Now that we’re settled and all is well, Jason, maybe you could tell us about the second time you stole a boat and went out on Lake Michigan. Why did you imagine you were going to see Mallon and Don? Were you drunk?”

“Nope. Though back in those days, my drinking sometimes got out of hand. Not this night, though. I was staying at the Pfister, working there, too, but this night I thought I’d just walk down to the lakefront after dinner. It was summer, so the days were long, and we still had about an hour of light. I walked up Wisconsin Avenue from the Pfister, went past the War Memorial and through the parking lot, and turned toward a marina I could see off in the distance. Even before I got there, something funny happened to me.”

Jason Boatman’s voice, almost that of the young man he had been, floated out from his indistinct form. Particular features became truly visible only when he turned to look at one of his listeners, or when he leaned forward. I thought he almost looked as though he were wearing a shroud and tried to suppress the unhappy image.

| The Dark Matter, II |

Voices seemed to come to him from out on the water,
Boats said
, as though an ocean liner had anchored just out of sight, and all the passengers were out on the decks, whooping it up. Definitely the noise of a big crowd, definitely the noise of a party. Some things you can’t mistake. It was all wrong, though; it was impossible. Sound carries over water, everyone knows that, although not that far. He could not see this ship, so it would have to be at least a mile out on the water. At that distance he might hear some noise, faintly, but it would hardly be so distinct. Voices threaded through the uproar, and he could almost make out individual words. One high-pitched female voice was screaming with laughter, and a man with a resonant tenor repeated the same thing over and over. It sounded like an order, a command. Everyone else jabbered and gibbered, some at the top of their lungs. The scream of laughter flared out, as if the liner had drifted much nearer. Boats heard the man with a ringing tenor voice pronounce the words “
I need what you need”
before his voice retreated back out onto the water.

The party ended; the liner sailed on; whatever the explanation, the sound of many voices abruptly vanished into silence.

I need what you need?

He walked on. The marina seemed a great distance away. The aural hallucination, if that was what it had been, troubled him. He settled on the explanation that the wind, or some strange property of the water, had managed to blow voices ten or fifteen miles across the lake. He had heard a party on a ferry, not an ocean liner, and the people at the party were having fun while losing their minds. That happened at a lot of parties, but, now that he had time to think about it, this one had sounded almost hellish. Really disorderly, and a little demonic. He was glad he was not out on that ferry.

Now he had reached the narrow, far end of the enormous parking lot behind the art museum. A series of gardens lay before him, leading to a greensward with a duck pond. Beyond that lay the marina, a complex series of long curving piers shaped like breakwaters and studded with hundreds of pleasure boats, some with thin, upright masts, some more massive, broader, wearing wheelhouses like stiff white hats. The boats bobbed before a breeze he could not feel. To his right, Lake Michigan sent in roll after roll of ruffles and foam sparkling with the light that glinted, far out in the deeper blue, on its massive hide. Boats stepped over the low concrete barrier at the end of the parking lot and planted one sneaker-clad foot on the springy grass.

An uproar of voices bloomed in the air to his right, a woman screamed with hysterical, dangerous laughter. A tenor voice like a trumpet rang out,
I need what you need
.

He froze, and the sounds vanished. His thief’s protective instinct told him to go back to the hotel, pack his bags, and get out of this city.

He placed his right foot on the grass. Jason Boatman was not going to be spooked by a trick of sound over water. The look of the big marina pleased him. It reminded him of his dad, a little, in a nice way: Charles Boatman sailboats were beautifully made, each one (Boats now understood) a work of art, like a guitar handcrafted from mahogany and walnut, every gleaming inch of it the product of assured and careful labor. It would be a kick to spot a couple of them bobbing beside the dock at that undoubtedly private marina. Why not have a look?

At the same time, a fearful instinct within him told him to return to the hotel, check out, and get on the first train leaving the downtown station. Isn’t that weird? Some bizarre snatches of sound come off the water, and he almost let this
phenomenon
drive him away.

Everybody is made of two people, you know, the guy who says no and the one who says yes, the one who says, Oh, Jesus, don’t you go in there/You can’t ever touch that stuff, and the get-along, riskier lad who says, It’ll work out fine/Come on, a little wouldn’t hurt. Boats generally sided with the second guy, though maybe four or five times the other one had kept him from walking into what might as well have been quicksand. His long career on the dark side of the law had reinforced a conviction held in his youth, that you jump into no situation without being at least 80 percent sure you will be able to jump out again. Play the odds, and don’t get greedy about your chances.

This time, though, because he was putting nothing at stake, he had nothing to lose. Some odd noises had managed to awaken Mr. C’mon-let’s-get-outta-here, and the guy’s anxiety was in overdrive. It didn’t make sense. Boats decided to override these hysterical warning signals and figure them out, if he could, later.

It was true, however, that the blaring trumpet-like voice and the screaming laughter rolling out of that hubbub had unsettled him, almost as though these horrible party noises reminded him of something his more cautious and perhaps wiser self had wrapped up and shoved to the back of a cupboard. For a second, for less than that, something else, another element, an odor, put his confidence in check: ozone and wet granite, yet a smell suggestive of vast strange places, a whiff of electricity flowing through the darkness of deep space, a whiff of rotting flesh …

In the last moment of the day when he would have any choice about what he did, Boats thought,
Man, there’s something funny out there in the lake
. Yet, even then, before he found himself once again walking toward the distant marina, it had all been set in place. He was going to steal a boat made by his father, sail it out into Lake Michigan, which had once nearly succeeded in killing him, and there, in its distant shores or reaches, encounter whatever waited for him. As if in objection to an agreement already in force, Boats looked back over his shoulder and watched a quick, sudden whirl in the air freeze and solidify into a man of a type once familiar, at least from the party at the Beta Delt house and Lee Harwell’s most famous novel, accompanied in the usual manner.

And this appearance from nowhere and nothing, a twist of the air’s fabric, from the same vast dark space whose odor he had just caught, of an alert-looking fellow in a neat gray suit and a buzz cut served only to reinforce what had just taken place. Beside the man, a big dark dog with a thick black ruff and a tail like a curved sword jumped to his feet and swung his head to capture Boats with his shining, attentive eyes. He could think all he liked about packing his bags and catching trains to fat, sleepy, little towns, but he could not go back to the Pfister. That way had been barred.

So now one of those agent guys, they might as well call them that, was watching Boats from behind, and the dog wasn’t anything like a real dog. If you asked Boats, that made him scarier. That agent and his mutt were from the same place as those noises that might or might not have been from some big private yacht where the drunks were whooping it up.

If a person shouts
I need what you need
, is he saying
I need you?
Is he saying,
Your appetites fill me up?

Boats had to walk around the duck pond. The grass felt stiff, like bristles. The ducks swept their wings over their heads when he approached, and when he looked back after he had passed, they stayed floating that way, wings over their heads, looking like so many folded envelopes, inanimate things without consciousness. The agent guy trolled along forty feet behind, not paying nearly as much attention to Boatman as the fierce-looking dog.

The sky darkened. The clouds ceased to scud through the air, and at once looked as if they had been painted on the flat, hard surface above them. The remaining light, so pale it was almost blue, held no warmth. The atmosphere around the marina had a neutral, dead quality, the quality of the inert and unmoving. The grass beneath his feet, no longer yielding, felt dry and crunchy, as if it had turned brittle, yet its vibrant green had not changed. After taking two more crunching steps, Boats felt curious enough to lower himself and inspect the paradoxical grass.

Each identical stalk had been embedded, as if by an assembly line, into a raised cone of dark brown plastic. With their perfectly rounded edges, the cones resembled tiny volcanoes. Boats tried to pull a stalk from one of the molded cones, and was forced to give it a sharp, hard pull he feared would snap it in two. Instead, the green stalk separated cleanly, followed by a little puff of air from the crater and the sound of tiny metal parts locking together. He held up the stalk he had extracted from its fitting and watched it shrivel in his hand. When it resembled a sagging toothpick, he dropped it, stood up again, and continued crunching across the grass until he reached the white concrete at the edge of the marina.

He stepped off the grass, noticed that the impression he had left behind was turning a pale brown, and looked back. All along the side of the duck pond, his footsteps recorded his passage in prints of dead, sand-colored grass. On the sidewalk, the man in the gray suit opened his hand parallel to the ground and raised it a few inches. The big dog, already upright and alert, lifted its tail, bared its pointed teeth, and trotted out on the grass. As if scorched, the false grass died beneath its pads, and rows of tidy paw marks followed the creature in its course toward Jason Boatman. The animal paused twenty feet away. Flat, inert blueness filled the air. Forcing himself to hold his ground, Boats inspected the dog. It resembled a stuffed thing on a wheeled cart. The ruff of bristles looked artificial, and he thought he could see that each of the dog’s fearsome and perfectly white teeth emerged from a small, molded, pink mound that looked nothing like actual gum tissue.

At that moment, wing beats and birdsong awakened the air, and Boats looked up. Overhead, a skylark sailed, wheeling in its course. It was blatantly, gloriously present, burning with life, pouring out a fresh, ardent, unending melody that nearly stopped his heart. Boats thought:
This painful goddam life is full of blessings
. Then, as abruptly as it had appeared, the lark vanished.

How, you ask, did he know it was a skylark? Anyhow, you say, he must have been mistaken. The guy’s a washed-up criminal, not a birdwatcher, isn’t he? Doesn’t he know that skylarks have never been seen on this continent? That they don’t
exist
on this continent? The guy saw a barn swallow. Well, guess again, pals, because when Boats finally managed to get home from his encounter with the dark matter, he looked up “skylark” in the encyclopedia. And there it was, a longish brown bird streaked with black above the wings and with dull white below. There was a picture, and it was the bird he saw, all right, the same exact bird. Let me tell you, that song, that melody, of the skylark … well, all he can say is, he heard it, and it’s something, all right.

(I should have been there
, I almost said.)

   In the blue air, beneath the coruscating sun, the memory of the skylark already growing dim, he walked out onto the long, curving slip and within a few minutes spotted one of his father’s boats, a little sloop with a bright yellow nylon spinnaker that hung limp and raglike from the mast. Just to make sure he was right, he hunkered down at the edge of the dock and looked at the topmost section of the hull. Exactly where he had expected it to be, he found his father’s lightly burned-in mark, C. BOATMAN, 1974, along with his logo, the letters C and B placed together with no space between them, so that it looked like a letter from an unknown alphabet. But really, he had not needed to see the logo: the sloop had the tidy,
Alles im Ordnung
air common to Charles Boatman’s products. As soon as you saw one, you knew it would be fast as hell, too. It was pretty funny, when you thought about it. This guy whose life was a funky mess, who stayed as stoned as possible for long stretches of the day, detested authority, and had a lifelong, sentimental connection to the working class, made these perfect vessels that were essentially playthings for rich people. The poor could learn to sail, if they grew up in the right places, but you had to have a lot of money to buy a Charles Boatman product.

A single line wound around an iron staple tied the sloop to the dock. The spinnaker should have been taken down and folded into the little bag called the turtle, but instead it drooped like a dead thing from the mast. The owner must have rushed back to the marina, jumped out, tied up, and run off to a meeting, intending to return to his boat as soon as possible. But where was the mainsail? The harried owner was nowhere in sight. Neither was anyone else, but for the creature with the attentive dog. Both of them still gazed at him, waiting for whatever he would do next.