The Edge of the Gulf (20 page)

Charlie, a nice enough man who had fatally presumed on other people’s capacities and dreams, would simply make his exit a few years before expected, dispatched by a madman. And the madman, in turn, would, happily, no doubt, be dispatched by Terry from this corrupted mortal wasteland for an early meeting with his Maker.

Terry mentioned that he would probably sell the Blue Bar. Getting, Sydney and Chaz reckoned, at least a couple more million. That, plus the five, would make for a promising new start. He’d always wondered, he said, about Santa Fe. Perhaps, Antigua. Or even farther afield—Geneva or Florence, maybe Marbella.

Buyers would be lining up for that land. It could all be over and done with by winter, spring at the latest.

It seemed a bit of a pity to Sydney that there was little to no likelihood they’d ever spend much time in Laurel. From what she’d seen of it, it seemed, after all, in a ramshackle sort of way, a pretty enough little place.

Chapter 27

Hudson and Susie had biked the trail from Laurel to Seaside, stopping for a paperback Susie had ordered at the bookshop and to refill their water bottles, before heading east along 26-A through Seagrove. After the houses and beach traffic thinned out and the road veered away from the sea into the bridge at the inland neck of Eastern Lake, Hudson called out to pull over into the shade of some pines.

Susie creaked to a halt beside him on the old clunker she had liberated from use as a hose rack in the Sandifords’ tool shed. “I can feel the pounds evaporating into the torrid ozone.” Susie drew her arm across her brow and readjusted her cap and sunglasses.

Hudson momentarily considered her willowy twenty-four-year-old frame. “A real problem, I’m sure.”

“I’m reading Edith Wharton and, you know, all that Gilded Age stuff—it just makes me feel
fat
.”

Hudson laughed. “Ozone? That’s where things evaporate?”

“Oh, what do I know? I’m an English major. It just sounded appropriate. Are we nearly there?”

“I think so.” Hudson scrutinized the hand-drawn map Charlie had roughed out for them. It wasn’t terribly detailed but Hudson remembered enough to think that the area lay not very far ahead.

***

Charlie’s commentary hadn’t been terribly detailed either, though he had volunteered the destination eagerly enough when earlier in the week Hudson had mentioned wanting to break in his new bike. “Some of the trails are just footpaths, though. You’ve been over that way once. I sent you and Kate on a picnic. I own some land over there,” he had added dismissively. “That whole stretch of beach and wilderness is really something, the highest dunes on the coast. You told me you saw herons on the back lagoon.”

Of course Hudson had remembered.

Kate, standing like a statue in the violet and green twilight, a full golden moon staring at her through the oaks and cypress and he staring at them both; the herons, some seventy-five yards away, seeming at once the masters of the scene and gorgeously, almost unbearably vulnerable, like an etching from memory of some dream of perfection.

He remembered, too, that a day or two later when Libby and Brad had had them over for dinner they had smiled at one another over Charlie’s modest characterization of his property. “‘Owns some property’ is right,” said Libby. “There’ve always been rumors about the exact acreage and value but we try to protect his privacy and not add to the speculation.”

Brad had added, “Real estate has been the most popular topic of conversation in these parts for over fifty years. But that’s just not Charlie, and that’s one of the things we’ve always respected about him. He’s said, and of course he’s absolutely right, that it could become the only conversation of his life and that more agents and developers than already do would be bothering him constantly. I mean, I suppose it’s a matter of public record if someone wanted to go down and look through the county assessor’s office.”

“In a way,” said Libby, “that huge St. Joe Corporation resort development site has gotten him off the hook somewhat. For the last six or eight years that’s been the big question mark.”

“He’s told us that every once in awhile somebody in the media will approach him but he’s always declined to be interviewed.”

Libby had smiled. “And isn’t
that
refreshing?’

And that had been all there was to that.

***

It was after seven when Hudson wheeled his bike into the large storage closet at the back of the cottage. He had been drenched, dried, and re-drenched in sweat so many times that his shorts, tee shirt, socks, and especially his skin felt as if they had been varnished. He changed into his trunks and headed for the beach with Moon.

This time of day, anywhere, was Hudson’s favorite but nowhere, he suddenly knew, more than here. It was still warm, but the grinding white heat of the day had ebbed away with the tide and a breeze from the northwest brought the slash pines and tall oaks along Pendennis Street to life. The sun would be just on the horizon, but an hour before it had nestled into a mass of towering cumulus clouds which, except for their fiery coronas, were darkening by the minute into grays and indigo. Overhead, small land birds and terns cruised the opalescent sky and along the shore gulls awakened from one-legged slumber and began to bathe and strut.

A man watering his small patch of lawn and a row of hibiscus waved and said hello to Hudson. A band of kids loaded down with every imaginable sort of paraphernalia staggered past on their way from the beach, and Hudson suddenly saw himself at that age, never happier than dead-tired after a day in the sand with his head already filled with plans for the next. But, now, he was just another invisible adult to them. They said hello only to Moon.

Occasionally they passed through a riff of music drifting out from a screened porch or the low chime of ice in glasses. From the end of the road, where it elbowed east and became the main drag, he could see several vehicles lounging around the Blue Bar, people coming and going.

***

The Gulf was as calm as a lake. He swam some laps until he realized that he had had more than enough exercise for one day. Then he contented himself with bobbing in the shallows while Moon pranced in and out of the low surf and for awhile they played fetch with a piece of driftwood. The walkers and joggers were thinning out and the last of the die-hard children were being corralled by parents who were long past their feet-up-with-a-drink time.

After an hour or so Hudson dried off, Moon shook with brisk efficiency, and they began trudging across the wide beach.

Suddenly, for several minutes, he lost his connection to the glorious twilight and fell into a cavernous maw of grief and rage.

The dog looked up several times and finally sounded a wistful moan. Hudson, finding that they were halfway up Pendennis, reached down and ruffled his neck.

“Thought you’d lost me again, huh? It’s okay, boy. I’m here.”

***

That evening he knocked off a healthy chunk of reading for school, and even wallowed for an hour in the tawdry suspense novel that he had begun purely for pleasure. Then he checked another review.

The only difficulty with some of the reviews, of course, was that in selecting and editing them, he inevitably relived the particular afternoon or evening he and Kate had seen the film. Her reaction. To the film or to his review, or both. She always either read them or had him read them aloud to her. He remembered their discussions, how certain lines that had passed into their lore repeated themselves over and over again at opportune moments. Her face, now pensive, now smiling, as they talked. He had never in his life seen a woman whose intelligence was so ineffably related to her sensual appeal. He had once told her, “You are never more beautiful than when we’re discussing ideas. I feel as though we’re making love. And when we do make love I often feel as though we’re talking.” That had evoked one of her great murmuring laughs. But she knew what he meant and seemed pleased.

He had decided to arrange the book by emphasis sections. Directors, writers, performances, best overall, and, for laughs, a few representatives of the bottom of the cinematic barrel. But, for now, what he most needed to do was to e-mail Alex, something he’d been intending for the last few days to do.

Dear Alex,

First of all, I want to thank you for helping me.

Of course, I’ve been aware that I don’t know what I would’ve done without you from time to time, but it seems that being here these past two weeks has enabled me to realize the full scope of your effort. Trying to determine whether its source is in your being a priest or in your role as a counseling psychologist seems a futile exercise. I simply know that you have a rare capacity for seeing into a person’s heart and mind, for understanding, for communicating the difficult and the complex, and for knowing just how to inspire someone to help himself even when he can find very little, if any, reason for doing so.

You asked me for a progress report.

You were, as you seem to have an eerie way of always being,
right
about what coming back to this place I love could do for me. I’m seeing old friends and, I think, making a couple of new ones. I run on the beach every morning and pass the day working with pleasure. I had lost sight of how extraordinary this place has always been for me. It’s that place in the world—I hope everybody has one—where time means everything and nothing, where the past, present, and future are capable of converging with less painful consequences than I had begun to believe was possible.

Coming through the door of this cottage was, as we’d imagined, the hardest thing I’ve done since I walked back into the house in Memphis that first time…

Alex, I have just come back to this letter, after being on the porch, sitting and staring into the night and having two glasses of wine. Now I’ll say what brought me to a crashing halt an hour ago.

I sense that you will be expecting this. From a couple of our more recent conversations, I would guess that it is a progression which you probably have anticipated, or hoped for for me, but which, of course, in your astute kindness, you have waited for me to discover. To say.

Kate is becoming more like a memory.

If I live another fifty years, and no matter how life may become new for me or I for it, I will in all probability forget nothing of our life together. It was life as fully as I’ve ever known it.

But I have, as I believe you’ve foreseen, ceased to struggle and I don’t mean by that that I’ve given up. You always said that giving up would never prove an option for me.
“You’re just a little too driven, I think, for that. No, you’ll
either go on, or go
really
crazy.”
Your inimitable bedside manner at its best, eh, Alex?

I’m going on. Where? I have no idea. How? Even less. Why? I’m not sure. Except that it has to do with God, and the relentless sorrows and joys of being human. And Kate. And good friends and teaching and writing. And people like you. And trees, and the air at dawn, and the light of the world in the evening.

Hud

P.S.…and Moon, who sends his warmest regards, and Olive, who doesn’t give a rat’s ass.

It was nearly one when he padded down the hall to the bedroom. He looked as he almost always did at the framed photograph on the old teak dresser. It had been taken at their engagement party and like most great true portraits, it had been spontaneous. They were holding hands and had just turned in toward one another and back at the friend who’d said their names. They were framed in a pale wash of late-afternoon radiance from the French doors just beyond them. They looked so indescribably happy that it seemed they might just have, together, only moments before, been born.

Hudson picked up the picture and carried it to the other bedroom, where he left it on a small table. Then he came back into his bedroom, went into the closet and found, in a box padded with socks, another framed photo which he placed on the dresser. It was of Kate alone, standing in the middle distance. They had been hiking in Colorado and she had gone ahead on the trail while he fiddled with the camera. Just as he was getting her in focus she stopped at a point where the trail jagged around an outcropping of rock. She had raised her hand to beckon him on.

Moon looked a bit confused by the unaccustomed trip to the spare room.

Hudson was not.

“Goodnight, Kate,” he said.

Chapter 28

Terry Main sat on one of the benches that faced the large fountain in the middle of the small city park. Despite the still-throbbing, early evening heat, there were, as he knew there would be, plenty of people milling about and sitting on the benches, on the grass, and along the ledge of the fountain. Giant live oak trees, some draped with Spanish moss, cloaked nearly the entire square block of the park with long shards of deep shade. Parents watched as squealing children took turns on the three-seat swing set, the slide, and jungle gym. A historical marker flanked by tall flagpoles bearing the colors of the various nations that had ruled Pensacola was always a popular site for tourists. They still wrangled cameras in the last light and bumped their knees with huge shopping bags; downtown office workers crisscrossed the square on their way from businesses, or to cocktails; people lounged or strolled idly about, chatting, while others sat here and there still reading, or listening to headsets; a few stalwart runners loped with fixed stares through the humidity.

He unfurled a newspaper he had already read and hoped that no one would take the other end of the bench. Three or four minutes passed before Michael appeared, also carrying a newspaper.

“Hey,” he said quietly, scarcely nodding to Terry as he sat down. He looked around the park for a full minute, fingering his beard. He crossed one leg up over the other knee and spread the newspaper. After a few minutes he refolded one section carefully and lay it down.

“Mind if I take a look?” Terry smiled.

Michael nodded.

Tucked within the pages of the paper, Terry found one sheet of plain white paper, covered with cramped but neat handwriting.

He read with a concentration so fierce that he forgot about the rivulets of sweat coursing down his back. It was perfect. They couldn’t have done better themselves. The awkward phrasing, the misspellings, the ignorance and fear transmuted by a steady diet of demagoguery into hatred and weird, grotesque logic.

***

To whom it may concern (Police, FBI, the Media, Government Officials, the Public)—

“They will conform to my statutes and keep my laws. They will become my people, and I will become their God. But as for those whose heart is set upon their vile and abominable practices, I will make them answer for all they have done. This is the very word of the Lord God.” (Ezekiel 11:20-21)

I take no credit for this act. That would be putting myself above the holy justice that is our cause. I am nothing. God has seen fit to use me and that is all I know. “You are my battle-axe, my weapon of war” (Jeremiah 51:20)

We are Godless in this country and we will answer for it. The colored races are God’s children but they have got dominyon over us and they take the family values down. Some have gone over to the Infedel Alah and dress in his rayments and they want to get down and pray on mats in the schools when you can’t even pray to the true God or have the Ten Commanments by the pencil sharpner. While our so-called leaders (New World Order) sleep with harlots the Devil does not sleep. His handywork is seen thruout the land. The children have no respect for the adults and women do not obey their husbands or God’s laws, dress like whores of Babylon and killing their inocent babies in their own womb. The homosexual agenda is taught in the schools and they infilltrate the t.v. and shown to be acepptable everywhere even by some radicle pastors who are in the cult religions (Jews, Freemasons, Unitarions, Methodists, Episcable, xct.) God’s wrath is upon them with the AIDS (Leviticus 14,15, 20:13) and they do not turn from evil but take more with them to perdision.

Satan has control of much of the Media and Innernet except for some Godly men who have begun to fight back in the Name of the Lord. Pornography is rampet but it is most the ones that coruppt the soul and the flesh of inocent young ones who must be stopped. There are godless laws that protect evildooers but not those who are inocent. Godfearing people must act. I have been called and I am an obedient and humble servant of The Lord.

This man Charlie Brompton has made millions of dollars in the trade of Evil. He has a restrant and a bar and owns property and because he has this power of Mammon no one will speak against him or take action. But mostly it is pornography and no one knows this. But now some Men of God do know and it and his evil will be made known. The Lord has said “Do not blot out their wrongdoing or annul their sin (Jeremiah 18:23). So now the sword of truth and Vengefull Justice is risen up to protect other inocents from being abused beyond belief in pornography and killed by AIDS at the hands of this man. I have seen what he sells to make his fortune and I will never forget it. Twice in my life I have seen manifest the very face of the Devil, once the Abortion killing on video and the other is this man’s videos. I can never forget. God has seen fit to torment even my sleep. But I know that is His way of leading me to redemtion as a soldier in his Holy War and I praise His Name.

Someday you may know who I am. But it does’nt matter. I have been told that God has a plan for me in another place now and so I will follow his chosen leaders. But we do not know the days of our coming or our going. God’s will be done and to Him all the glory. If we must be persecuted as His peculier people then we are truly in the company of angels. The law of man is coruppt and I must answer to the law of God. His is the only true judgment.

You will find a sacrifice here acording to God’s laws of purification and atonement. When this is on CNN and in the papers, Godefaring people will know this for a Holy Symbol and even the others will know that God’s army is no longer fearfull on the sidelines of this sick culture but on the march. Evil will be driven out by The Sword and Our House will be made pure.

“In order to rid the house of impurity, he shall take two small birds, cedar-wood, scarlet thread, and marjoram. He shall kill one of the birds over an earthenware bowl containing fresh water. He shall then take the cedar-wood, marjoram, and scarlet thread, together with the living bird, dip them in the blood of the bird that has been killed and in the fresh water, and sprinkle the house seven times. Thus he shall purify the house, using the blood of the bird, the fresh water, the living bird, the cedar-wood, the marjoram, and the scarlet thread. He shall set the living bird free outside to fly away over the open country, and make expiation for the house; and then it shall be clean.”

Leviticus 14:49-53

Terry folded the letter and eased it into the fold of his own newspaper. He took off his round wire-rimmed sunglasses and squinted up into a slant of orange sunlight that penetrated the canopy of oaks. He rubbed his hand over his eyes, appearing to be on the verge of tears, and then he turned and looked at Michael.

“Michael.”

Michael shifted, uncrossing his legs and, for the first time, lifting his downcast face, questioningly. “Yeah?”

Terry lay down the borrowed section of newspaper beside Michael and smiled, tapping his finger vaguely as if to indicate something he had read there. “I will take your draft of the message to Miss Rachel and The Reverend, as we’ve talked about.”

“Sure. I don’t have all the words….”

“We just want it to be perfect because it’s going to be such an important statement. But Michael…”

“Yeah?”

“I feel confident that they will change very little, if anything. It is very powerful and very beautiful. This proves again that you are God’s instrument in this mission. Oh, our leaders may want to touch up a spelling or a phrase just here or there. But this is from the heart and I know what they’ll say. They’ll say ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’ This letter is filled with God’s inspiration. I’m very….” He hesitated and pointed to another area of the newspaper. “Michael, I’m just very, very moved.”

He looked away. He was thinking that Michael might not have time for his little ritual with dead birds and marjoram or whatever, but, as he watched some children who had taken off their shoes and were splashing at the side of the fountain, what he said was: “Those children are going to grow up in a cleaner world because of you and because what you are doing will embolden more people to join our cause.”

He then gathered up his newspaper with the letter inside, and stood. Looking down, he said, “You know, Michael, I look forward to working with you in the open, out front and shoulder to shoulder, when this mission is complete and we go to Houston, or Merida, or wherever the Lord sends us to work with the Reverend and Miss Rachel.”

Michael said, “They sent me a letter the other day.” He almost smiled. “It made me feel pretty good.”

“That’s fine. I’m not surprised. They have grown to respect you very much.” He paused. “I have to get back, now.” He looked up again into the sunlight. “My pretending to be a bar manager has helped us gather a lot of useful information for our efforts—but to tell you God’s truth my soul is sick with feeling dirty. I do not see many spirit-filled persons in that place. And if I were to witness, it would draw too much attention to us.” He put on his sunglasses. “But we’re almost there, my friend.”

Michael nodded.

Terry locked eyes with him. “Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“You know every step of the plans?”

“Yes.”

“You have nothing with any of our names or anything like that on it in your room, or in your truck?”

“No.”

“I’ll get you whatever few changes they may need in the letter so that you can copy it over.”

“Okay.”

“And should there be any changes in the plan we’ll go over them in our final checklist the day before. I’ll be in touch, the usual way. Goodbye, Michael. Godspeed.”

“’Bye, Terry.” He looked up, his eyes wide with the only hint of joy Terry had ever noticed there. “Godspeed.” Clearly unaccustomed to the word, he seemed to savor it for a moment before releasing it like a kiss blown hopefully to one’s beloved.

***

Terry sauntered out of the park and walked over two blocks to his vehicle. He would, indeed, get revisions back to Michael for his final copying of his letter. They would be few and they would be minor. The real McCoy couldn’t be improved on and, except to help keep poor Michael on task and feeling that his spiritual leaders were in there pitching with him, they really wouldn’t matter. Michael might feel especially conscientious to think he had a brand-new final edit to leave in Charlie Brompton’s house after the holy act was done, but Terry now had in his possession what he needed as insurance.

Just in case something went wrong once Terry dispatched Michael himself on an unannounced flight to paradise. Just in case, despite his meticulous planning, the worst case scenario occurred, and he was somehow discovered before getting away from the house with not one, but two dead bodies inside.

He would produce this perfect specimen (somewhat dusty, wrinkled, and torn), in Michael’s handwriting (perhaps a draft?) of a disturbing letter that he had found under some paintbrushes while putting away cases in the storage room after closing. He would have remembered his concern over some passing comments that the painter had made. Despite the late hour, he would have decided to stop by on his way home to check on Charlie.

He would seem dazed, distraught, grieving.

He would have been too late.