Cape Fear (22 page)

He put the beer can down, rested his cigarette on top of it, uncorked the lotion bottle, poured it warm into the palm of his hand, and stroked it into the long, clean brown lines of her back. One of the rarest of women, he thought. Woman of grace and spirit, pride and delicacy. And once
again he thought of the nightmare thing that had so nearly happened to her. A duller spirit might have survived the crime without too much emotional damage, but Carol never. It would have broken her utterly and forever. When he thought of the narrowness of the escape, it made his eyes sting, and it blurred the shape and pattern of her.

“Um,” she said contentedly as he recapped the bottle.

“You are far too lazy to go in the water, I suppose.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I was cheated,” he said somberly. “When I bought you at the slave market in Nairobi, the auctioneer said you would work like a dog, from dawn to exhaustion. You seemed firm of flesh, clear of eye. You had all your teeth.”

“The price was right,” she said dreamily.

“But they cheated me.”

“You remember the sign. No merchandise can be returned.”

“I’m thinking of selling you.”

“Too late. Years of slaving for you have turned me into a hag, mister.”

He sighed theatrically. “I suppose I can get a few more years of use out of you.”

“Ha!”

“Don’t go ‘Ha.’ It’s impertinent.”

“Yes, master.”

It was the sort of gentle game they had played all of their married life. They could pick up clues from each other and go on and on, enjoying the play of invention, and making of it a game of love.

He threw the empty beer can into the lake and watched
it move away, glinting on the ripples, pushed by the wind. He watched Nancy eel up onto the stern of the
Sweet Sioux
and go off in a clean dive as lovely as music.

Carol fastened the bra and sat up. “Maybe I will swim. You’ve made me feel guilty, you swine. What do you do? Swill beer and make insulting comments.”

“You swim. I’ll wait awhile.”

He watched her walk down to the water, tucking her hair into the white rubber cap. She waded in and swam out, her crawl competent and leisurely. He toasted himself with a fresh beer from the ice chest and said to himself, Moment of significance. On this day and this hour and this minute, I have come all the way out from under a dark cloud labeled Cady. I am, unexpectedly, quite whole again.

Carol came back dripping wet and slightly winded, and demanded a beer of her own. She sat beside him to drink it.

She looked at him, her head slightly tilted. “You’ve got that thoughtful look again.”

“Instead of the usual idiot vacancy?”

“What is it?”

“Cady.”

Her face changed. “I wish you wouldn’t do that. I lock it in a neat little closet in the back of my mind, and you keep blundering in and yanking him out and waving him at me.”

“You asked. I was trying to detect change. You kill a man, you should change. I don’t know how. Coarser, maybe. Certainly less sentimental. Less of an amiable ass loose on the world.”

“There is a change,” she said.

“Can you see it?”

“In me, I mean. I’m not such an idiot about myself and my tight little world, Sam. I thought it was my absolute right, my unalterable heritage, to be happy and raise my kids and eventually shoo them out of the nest and spend a dignified old age with you. I knew I was going to die some day, and would be a little old lady, white-haired and smelling of lavender, dying in my bed with my grandchildren around me. And you would linger on a few years, to give you a good chance to miss me, and then you would join me. That’s what was in my mind. An enormous and infantile trust that this world was made for me to be happy in.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Only with luck, my darling. Only with the greatest of good fortune. There are black things loose in the world. Cady was one of them. A patch of ice on a curve can be one of them. A germ can be one of them.”

“I know, darling.”

She took his hand and held it hard and frowned at him. “So just this little thing is what I learned. That all over the world, right now, this minute, people are dying, or their hearts are breaking, or their bodies are being broken, and while it is happening they have a feeling of complete incredulity. This can’t be happening to me. This isn’t the way it was
meant
to be.”

“I know.”

“I think maybe I’m stronger and braver. I hope I am. Because I know that everything we have is balanced on such a delicate web of incidence and coincidence.” She flushed. “Your turn now.”

He sipped his beer and looked out across the lake. “My
turn. Okay. All that you’ve said, plus something else. It’s like recovering from a serious illness. All the world looks fresh and new. Everything looks special. I feel enormously alive. And I don’t want that to fade. I want to hang on to that. I think I was getting stuffy. I was idealizing my profession, and leaning on it too heavily. Now I know it’s just a tool. You use it like any other tool. Use it wisely and it can help you. And when it’s of no use to you, you take a course of action that will be of use.”

“Golly, such interestin’ traveling salesmen stop here at the farm to see me and Daddy.”

He looked at her round and innocent eyes. “Betty Lou, it’s always a pleasure to stop by here and eat your cooking.”

“Oh,
that
old stuff. You just want to flatter me.”

“Betty Lou, have you ever seriously considered having a baby?” He saw the sudden gravity in her face, saw the thoughtfulness, saw the almost immediate decision.

“I’d just love one. But gosh, I go look under the cabbage leaves nearly every morning and there just never is one there somehow.”

“Now that just isn’t exactly the way you go about it, honey.”

“Out here on the farm you don’t get much up-to-date information.”

He kissed her on the mouth. “It sort of starts this way.”

“Does it? I think I might like it, then.”

He laughed at her and she grinned back at him.

“Let’s go swim, you bawdy wench,” he said.

“You need some cold water, Samuel.”

They walked down to the water hand in hand. Suburban
husband and suburban wife. A handsome, mild and civilized couple, with no visible taint of violence, no lingering marks of a dreadful fear.

He swam out with her, stopped and smiled lovingly at her, ducked her unexpectedly and violently, then swam for his life toward the stern of the boat, while the kids yelled for her to catch him.

J
OHN
D. M
AC
D
ONALD
was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel
The Executioners
, which was adapted into the film
Cape Fear
. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.