A Man of Affairs (12 page)

I thought of the head of the yellowtail and I said, “Tommy, I wouldn’t go down there with those things for ten thousand dollars.”

“Chicken!” Warren said harshly.

EIGHT

VIOLENCE GIVES NO WARNING, usually. But sometimes there is a curious forewarning. The world changes in a strange way. It can happen at an automobile race, or a bullfight, or at an air show—anywhere where death is an acknowledged participant.

One moment everything will be going well, the cars roaring nimbly into the turns, the
torero
fixing the bull for the kill, the airplane circling high, ready to release the parachutist.

And then the world will change. Colors will seem more vivid, outlines and shapes more precise, and there will be an odd feeling of hush. And soon, then, you know it will happen. The careening car will slam the wall to send the rag doll driver flopping high, pinned for one endless moment against the blue of the sky. The bull will swerve and when the horns come up they will thud deep into blood and tissue and bone, and the
torero,
carried high and jolting ludicrously, will ride his life out on the white horns and the hump of throwing muscle. The tiny figure will come endlessly down through the holiday sky from the circling plane, the tangled white of the chute as straight as the tail of a comet, and it will strike the baked August earth and rebound horridly to the height of a tall man. And the crowd noise is always the same, a grating concerted shriek that dies into a long gasping sigh.

“Chicken!” he said, and I looked along the dock at his bloated face with its look of contempt and hatred. And I felt the familiar hush that precedes violence.

“Don’t be childish,” I said as casually as I could. “I just don’t have any warm and kindly feelings toward barracuda. Frankly, they scare hell out of me.”

He stood up. “Chicken bastard,” he said. “Give me the stuff, Tommy.”

Puss’s short laugh had a brittle sound. Louise said, “Honey, Tommy’s very good at it and you’ve only done it three or four…”

“Shut up,” he said.

“She could be right,” Cam Duncan said.

Warren was fixing the mask strap and Tommy, on his knees, was adjusting the heel straps of the fins. “You will shut up too,” Warren said harshly. There seemed to be a driving urgency about him. I knew it was related to everyone having seen him refuse to get up the night we fought.

He jumped off the dock, spat into the mask, rinsed it out and adjusted it. Tommy leaned down and handed him the spear gun. “Don’t be stupid enough to try for a ’cuda, boy,” Tommy said.

“I’m not crazy,” Warren said. He swam out from the dock, swam to where Tommy had been diving.

“Wait a minute!” Tommy called. “If you spear something, don’t…” But Warren was gone. Tommy looked nervous and uncertain. He said, in a flat voice, “I was going to tell him that if he speared anything, not to haul it in. The ’cuda might try to hit it when he’s taking it off the spear. But he’s not likely to get anything. And maybe he knows enough not to do that anyway.”

I hadn’t seen the others get up, but we were all standing. With the angle of the sun and the wind riffles on the water, we could not see below the surface. And the world was very still.

He broke through the surface, head craned back, cords in his throat standing out. And he broke the silence with a monstrous bray of pain and outrage and terror. And the water around him was a red stain.

Tommy hit the water first in a flat racing dive. I saw Puss poise herself to dive in and I pulled her back and dived from where she had been standing. I heard Warren yell again, and this time it seemed to me there was less body to the yell. Tommy reached him before I did and had started to tow him toward shore, pulling him along by one wrist, kicking strongly. The red spread thickly in the water. For a few seconds I could not figure how to help without getting in the way. Then I swam behind Warren, ending each stroke with a firm push against him. When we reached shallow enough water, I picked him up and carried him to the low sea wall and laid him on the grass. Tommy ripped the mask off. Warren was whining weakly, his eyes squeezed shut, rolling his head from side to side.

“Hit him twice,” Tommy said.

“Tourniquets, quick!” Amparo Blakely said in a voice of command. Puss was vomiting into the grass a dozen feet away. Cam jumped down into a skiff and he had a pocket knife out and was cutting lengths of nylon mooring line. I ran to the dock house, vaguely aware that people were pouring out of the house and hurrying down across the lawn. I snatched an unrigged glass boat rod and snapped it across my thigh, and snapped it again, and ran back with two pieces.

“The arm first,” Amparo said. He had been hit on the under side of the right upper arm, close to the armpit. Half the biceps muscle was gone. Amparo was groping for the artery with her fingers, but the blood continued to pulse strongly with each beat of his heart. He had lost consciousness. Cam slipped the nylon loop over the inert and ruined arm and I inserted the piece of glass rod. I twisted it quickly as Amparo tried to work the loop into proper position. But it was slippery work, and the great bite had been taken so close to the armpit that there was very little room.

The jetting pulse of blood slowed and seemed to stop. Amparo sat back on her heels, her face gray, her bloodied hands resting carelessly on the thighs of her ruined skirt.

“Does that stop it?” I asked. She shook her head and I saw that I had misunderstood. I looked at his face. I released the improvised tourniquet and stood up. The other wound had stopped bleeding too. It was on the outside of his right thigh, slightly toward the back, and up near the buttock. It was badly shredded, and wide enough and deep enough to hold a grapefruit.

Warren did not look big any more. He looked grayish and quite shrunken and very old. The green swim fins were the final touch of ludicrous horror. Nobody had to ask if he was dead. It was far too obvious that his life had run quickly into the roots of the green lawn.

I saw Skylark standing beyond all the others, eyes wide and white, and I could see his lips soundlessly forming the word barracuda over and over. Mike Dean looked as if he had bitten into something very sour. Tommy was slowly pounding his fist into his palm and there was no expression on his face. Bowman wore a strange expression. He stood with his head tilted a little, and he looked puzzled, as though he heard some distant sound he couldn’t identify. I wondered if he was acquiring his first true awareness of his own mortality. Bonny Carson stood spread-legged, three fingers in her mouth, looking like a soiled, elderly, frightened child. Guy Brainerd’s face expressed sincere and dignified disapproval of the entire incident. Elda Garry stood beside him, hugging his arm, her face against his shoulder. Bridget stood with her eyes shut, swaying. And I saw her lower herself to the grass in a gingerly way in a half faint.

And then I looked at Louise. She stood not far away, leaning forward from the waist, stood in a strangely tense way. From her expression she seemed not so much to be looking at him as inward at herself in a hypnoidal trance. And on her face was a revealing and sickening expression of exaltation. It was as though, of all the girls in her class, she had been selected to play Joan of Arc.

“For God’s sake, cover him up!” Bundy squealed, breaking the spell that was over all of us. Cam went quickly and quietly to the dock house and came back with a paint-stained tarp and spread it over the body. Louise flung herself onto the tarp, sobbing in a lost and hysterical way, and everybody, it seemed, tried to ask questions at once.

“How did it happen?”

But only Warren knew how it had happened.

Tommy, later on, after he had dived and retrieved the spear gun and found that it had been fired, and found a fragment of fish flesh adhering to the barb that hadn’t been there before, made a logical reconstruction of what had probably happened.

“He nailed a fish. God knows what it was. Then he should have come up and got out of the water and hauled the spear line up and hoped no barracuda would nail the struggling fish. But he wanted to show off. So he pulled the spear toward him. The blood in the water and the flapping fish got the barracuda all heated up, and they flashed in. I’d guess that one nailed the fish and the next one hit him in the leg. Then when he threw his arms up to head for the surface, another one hit at the white underside of his arm, because it may have looked something like a fish. It’s a damn sorry way to die and the only good thing you can say about it is it didn’t last very long.”

As with all emergencies, it had to be handled by the conference method. Mike, Bowman, Amparo, Cam and Guy went into conference, and in a half hour they had all the answers. Bowman had contacted Nassau and had gotten in touch with the proper officials. A man who could issue the necessary certification of accidental death would fly up from Nassau to West End to inspect the body and talk to the witnesses. He had also made contact with the mainland, and Mike’s plane would be at West End. The body would be flown to West Palm Beach and turned over at once to a funeral director who would arrange for proper shipment north.

These decisions were given to us in a meeting of all hands aboard, with Fletcher Bowman acting as spokesman, and Mike Dean not present.

“Cam will accompany you people,” Bowman said, “and you can be certain he’ll see that everything is handled as quietly as possible.”

“What do you mean, quietly?” Bridget asked.

“It isn’t something we want to beat any drums about, is it? Death by barracuda is extremely rare. Maybe, Guy, you can enlighten… your employee.”

Guy smiled at Bridget, a wise and tolerant smile. “Murphy, dear, I explained to Mike that this isn’t the sort of publicity that helps anyone concerned, or helps the area. We
certainly
don’t want any tabloid headlines saying ‘Guest of Mike Dean Eaten by Barracuda.’ I’m sorry, Mrs. Dodge. Perhaps that example was distasteful to you. I’m certain that it can be handled in such a way that it will be reported in the press that Mr. Dodge drowned. Knowing Cam as I do, I can safely say that he’ll be able to convince all officials concerned of the wisdom of the decision.”

“But that isn’t what happened!” Louise said in a small voice. She looked, and sounded, both hurt and disappointed.

Guy Brainerd’s answer showed he had more perception than I had given him credit for. “It doesn’t have to be a deep dark secret, Mrs. Dodge. After a few days have passed, so the information would no longer be considered newsworthy, I’m sure you can tell your intimate friends, in confidence of course, just what did happen to your husband.”

She sat back with a frail brave smile.

I was grimly amused at how quickly the first name rule was beginning to break up. Maybe a sudden and nasty death had made us all aware that we were strangers to one another.

“When do we go?” Tommy asked.

“Right after lunch. I believe you’ll have time to pack before lunch. You and your wife and Mrs. Dodge and Cam.”

“Aren’t I a part of that group?” I asked.

Cam answered for Bowman. “I suggested that it would be easier and probably go more smoothly if it’s just the members of the family, Sam. Then, when I release the news to the press in West Palm Beach this afternoon, I have a more legitimate reason to handle all press interviews myself. While I’m at the West End Airport this afternoon, I’ll make reservations with Mackay Airlines for you and Guy and Miss Hallowell and Miss Garry to West Palm tomorrow, and while I’m in West Palm today I’ll see what I can do about reservations north by commercial airline for you.”

“Bonny and me want to get off this island too,” Bundy said with unexpected belligerence.

Bowman looked at him calmly. “I’m certain Cam will be glad to make similar arrangements.”

“Right,” Cam said. “But you ought to remember, Bundy, we’ve got some oil people coming in next week.”

“The hell with them,” Bundy said. “I’d rather scrabble around for angels in the city. We’re not doing any good here. It’s May already and we haven’t even got a house lined up.”

Louise and I said our tender farewells on a settee on the veranda not far from my room door. She wore a dark dress and had managed to acquire the look of a woman in mourning for a dearly beloved husband.

“I have thanked God a hundred times that I didn’t tell him I wanted a divorce. Then I would have had to blame myself.”

“Very lucky,” I said.

She took my hand in both of hers and held it.

“You’re a sweet guy, Sam. But it must have been madness.”

“You mean we could never have found happiness.”

“That’s right, my darling,” she said, tears standing in her beautiful eyes, her perfect features like ancient ivory.

Tommy had clued me, and I had read the rest of it in her face when she had looked at her dead husband. She had to hurt. She had to be martyred. She fed on unhappiness. And now she would give me up gladly because she had the juiciest role of her life. She would soon come to believe that hers had been a perfect marriage. She would edit her memories until Warren lost all the whisky bloat, until he had never looked at another woman. And then she would be a darkly tragic figure with a story in which there was a delicious touch of the macabre. In the prime of his life, in the fullness of their love, her darling husband had been killed by barracuda. Or would it become sharks in time? And she could drift through the old house, and nurse her tragedy in her walled garden, and be deliciously miserable all the days of her life.

I was tempted to tell her just what she was doing, but I remembered the look in Bundy’s eyes as I had turned away from him after speaking my little piece. If she wanted to hoke it up, the least I could do was play along.

So I lifted her hand to my lips and kissed it and said, “I’ll spend the rest of my life thinking of what might have been.” I did not mention the intense relief I would feel whenever I would think of it.

“You’re a dear, Sam. I’ll see you back home, of course, but we will be very correct with each other, won’t we?”

“No matter how difficult it is.”

“That’s a promise?”