The Great Wheel (37 page)

He ran after her, but she was quick, slamming open the doors, leaping, half-flying over the rough grass and fallen gravestones, blown and disappearing through rags of darkness into the streets below, swallowed up by the cackling wind. He went back inside the church and saw the crisscrossed outline of her palm where she’d pushed back the wooden door, the dribbles on the floor, the circles and stripes that she had smeared over the stone crusader. He could smell salt and wet stone. The knight’s hollowed face now had the shocked animation of a child’s painting: round eyes, a grinning slit for a mouth. The stumps of his hands had fingers of a kind again—two on one, three on the other, a bird’s hooked claw for a thumb, still beaded and gleaming as the blood formed tiny bubbles and sank into the spongy stone. She’d drawn a phallus too, although, like the knight, that was also slumbering. Staring down, he decided that taking a bucket and washing it all off would be more of a desecration than leaving the figure as it was. He removed a glove and touched the blood, already sticky and fibrous, and sniffed and studied the spot it left on his fingertip. Then he pulled the glove back on and crossed himself.

He closed the church and walked the rest of the way back to the presbytery, his head bowed in the wind. Just before he reached Gran Vía, the clouds broke, and, beating in heavy droplets like fists, it began to rain.

T
HERE WERE NIGHTS WHEN
the River Ocean was at one with the sky. Entering one element, you broke the surface of the other.

Omega
’s prow scattered constellations and billowing nebulae of jellyfish drifting on the tide. Here, sometimes, it was just possible to catch a clear glint and a flash of something so high, that it could only be the solar wings of a satellite. The cloud-pickers were far away, anyway, and the night was warm enough to touch. There were no clouds.

John sat at the stern of the boat with the throttle of the outboard alive in his hands as they skimmed the outer harbor, away from the hills that cupped the lights of Ley. The engine went
chuck, chuck
as they steered out between the last of the shining yachts and the undersea bubbles, and he imagined the people in their beds, in hotels and in holiday homes, in cabin rooms or tangled together in love, sinking half asleep as this sound rocked by them, soothing them, it and the tinkle of spars and the beat of the sea. He was proud of this engine, of the way it puffed and clucked, the way it broke the deep black water, shattering the stars. Yesterday, it wouldn’t even start, and this very morning he took tools from the house’s small cellar and walked along the cool early streets past the cottage with the yellow windows to the stretch of sand in the inner harbor. There he unbolted
Omega
’s engine, wiped it, drained it, and stripped it down, laying it out on a canvas sheet amid the wormcasts in the seagull-wheeling sunlight as the sky blued and brightened. When it was readjusted, made fresh and new, he pieced it all together again. He did it just as he’d watched Hal do it every summer before—always believing, until now, that the task was difficult, complex, arcane, and probably permanently beyond him. But from the time he opened his eyes and gazed up at the pine beams of the cabin this morning, everything had clicked. There was only
here,
only
now,
only pure and intense certainty as the bolts unslid and the two polished pistons began to gleam.

John looked now at his brother’s silhouette as Hal sat gazing out from the prow across a moonlight-skimmed patch of water and, although he knew the night at Seagates would not happen for many years, he was reminded of Felipe. He blinked and frowned, looking back at the dark of the harbor. Even here, his memories were compromised by other memories. Time had become disordered, but he knew that if he tried to explain this, it would only distract and confuse Hal.
Omega
began to buck and rise when they hit open water. He sensed that Hal was annoyed because of his servicing and fixing
Omega
’s outboard this morning, or at least a little distant—and puzzled, and strained. But then he’d been waiting for Hal to do something about it for weeks. He couldn’t wait forever. The holiday would end. What else was he supposed to do?

“You know, Hal,” he said, trying a slightly different tack, “I don’t feel as though I’ve ever really left here. I don’t mean this particular night. I mean here—I mean Ley. I mean those—
these
summers that we spent together.”

Hal grunts and keeps looking forward, out across the water. Perhaps John has said the wrong thing. It has to be admitted that this summer at Ley isn’t Hal’s finest hour. Even the mackerel in the outer harbor haven’t been biting as they usually do. Last year, when Annie came along, was better. Far better. John now even entertains the heretical thought that Annie’s company—or at least Annie-with-Hal’s company—is better than Hal on his own. They’ve walked their usual walks over the clifftops this year mostly in silence, and found their secret coves and wrecks and drowned houses, but they have all been frozen, spectacularly unchanged. Now, he misses Annie’s laughter and her scent. And he misses, although the moment will always be with him, the nights when she stooped to undress close beside him in the cabin. Although this summer separation was apparently agreed on without rancor between the two of them, he senses that Hal misses Annie too.

They were beyond the headland now, and the water dropped and rose around them, throwing waves against the side of the boat in easy sucking blows. Hal and Annie, he supposed, were less of an item than they used to be. After all, he could understand that himself now. Better, at least, than he did. People come apart. They drift together. And briefly, not that you’d ever understand it, there’s the possibility of love. You must never look for it, but you know that somewhere, over your shoulder and fleeing even as the thought occurs, it’s there.

“It’s like that moment,” he said to Hal, “when you reach out to take something—say, a cup, just a cup from a table. And you know, even as your arm extends and your hand opens, that your grip isn’t right, there’s something about the whole movement that you’ve misjudged. You’re already certain that the thing will drop from your fingers, yet you can’t stop reaching and pull back. You can’t simply pause and give up, or try again. You take the cup in your hand, and it falls even as you take it. Do you understand what I’m saying by that, Hal? To you, does that make any kind of sense?”

Hal grunted. At least this time John got a grunt out of him. The whole coastline stretched in darkness behind them now, and there was a gantry up in the hills that linked with the satellites, and the pale lights of a car. He ran his hand along the boat’s thick, paint-slick gunwale and shifted his feet to keep them out of the oily slop of water that gleamed on the floor. An old lobsterpot lay there too. Most summers, they’d have charged it up long ago and tossed it over the side. And the receiver, lost as usual in one of house’s back drawers, would have started to bleep at some wildly inappropriate time, and they’d pile into the boat anyway to trace it and set the flotation ring to draw the thing up. And later in the kitchen, feelers still waving, the lobster would crawl drunkenly around the counter until Hal, laughing at everyone’s squeamishness, tossed it into the boiling water and the shell began to scream.

The days have all been different this year, although no matter how hard John tries, he cannot trace the reason back to any root. The sun is as hot, the sky is as blue. This afternoon, for example, on Chapel Beach: lying with Hal on a wide white space of sand, petals of sunlight and sails flecking the water and the drowning heat pressing down. And kids laughing from somewhere by the waves…

Leaning on his elbows, he’d seen their heat-quivering shapes move as they redirected the stream that ran from the apparently undrinkable well (although they’d all gulped it down with salt-hungry lips) at the promenade above the beach. Just figures stooping, carrying, digging, searching for stuff along the strand. Hal had his eyes closed, and his breathing was slow as he lay beside John on the towel, but John knew that he wouldn’t be asleep. He knew that if he gazed too long at the strong chest and arms, at the little coppery line of hair that ran from his navel into his trunks, that Hal’s eyes would open and he’d say, What is it, Skiddle? What would you like us to do? But that question would have been too much responsibility today, and John hoped, anyway, that they would take
Omega
out late this evening now that he’d fixed the engine. Just go where the water hung cool over the jellyfish and the stars, where you hovered between two worlds, where the sky was blackly bright. He closed his eyes on the beach, listened to the shouts of the kids and the pulling sigh of the tide, and let the afternoon slip by.

When he looked again, the sky had changed color, the wind had picked up, and he was almost within the extending shadow of the promenade wall. He sat up and saw Hal standing a little way off, hands on hips, elbows at right angles, the pink scar like a tightly closed mouth along his spine. The beach was empty now. The kids had gone. The ice-cream machine had gone. The surfers and pedalos had all been moored.

“What is it?”

John stood up. His feet scuttled across sand that was still warm on the surface, cooler beneath.

“Skiddle, look…”

He walked with Hal to the edge of the waves, where the children had been playing and an elaborate mandalalike complex of sandcastles and canals had been embroidered by the tide. Even now, with the stream left to its own whims and the walls picked at by waves, the canals functioned perfectly. Moats filled. Little pebble-banked falls frothed and cascaded. Elaborate windows and shell-scalloped arches still held. The walls of the bigger structures were embellished with seaweed and shells and other catchings from the strand. Polished glass, driftwood, and bones. A string of foil turned and flashed in the sun’s rays, and at the top of one mound higher than John’s waist there was an old beaker filled with something that could have been oil or blood but certainly wasn’t water from the spring or the sea. They stepped to the center of the complex, and found it enclosed by a high wall in such a way that, as the sea rose around and destroyed the city, the center would remain dry and be the last to fall. The wide, scooped-out, and flattened hollow inside was ornamented with a mosaic of beads, scraps of sea-corroded circuitry, bottle caps, and pebbles. In the middle was a gull’s head. As John stared, he saw the eye twitch, and the black-tipped beak parted slightly.

He and Hal looked at the buried gull. The waves, warm and curdled with sand, broke around their feet. Up on the promenade, music was playing; a brass band. But they seemed to be alone here, separated in a frozen counterworld.

When Hal stepped over the bank, the sand slid and the beads and the pebbles were scattered. The spell was broken. Working together, the brothers dug the seagull out with their hands. It had been buried so that its wings were outstretched as if in flight, but both were broken, and the pecks it tried to aim at them were feeble. One of its eyes, John saw, had run out, and the sharp edge of a shell had been used to pierce its breast. Why, he thought, would anyone do this? But the question somehow seemed irrelevant. He hadn’t recognized the kids who were playing here, but, even if he had, it was the kind of act for which you could never know the real truth about. And the seagull had probably been injured in the first place. Otherwise, how could they have caught and buried it in the sand? He looked over at Hal, the bleached stubble and eyelashes and the falling blond shock of hair, and felt, as he always felt when he was troubled, an unworthy sense of release; of knowing that it was really his brother who bore the burden of all these questions, and that Hal would pass the answers on to John someday when he’d worked them out.

Hal lifted the bird. Its sand-clotted wings stirred and flapped. It mewed, turned, twisted its head. He stepped across the falling walls of sand to a nearby flat rock, and John looked away as his brother raised a stick of driftwood to smash its skull. But even so he heard the repeated sound that was made—hard at first, then soft—and when he looked again, he saw Hal standing with the stick raised and the bloody feathers clinging to it, his brow furrowed. And he knew then that he and Hal, as much as the kids who’d buried the gull, were a part of this thing that had happened.

He was glad that the gull was dead. Hal carried it along the beach, swinging its dead weight by the legs, up the steps to the causeway above the rocks where the water always pulled. And when they broke the beam of the sign that warned of the danger to swimmers, John knew it was right that he should take the seagull from his brother and toss it into the quickening water himself. There, he thought, there goes something, feeling the weight and the swing, then watching as it bobbed and turned like a crushed flower, feeling the smile that cracked his face. There goes something. But I don’t know what.

Now, he scanned the water near
Omega
’s hull, briefly wondering if the seagull would float by, still caught on the gleaming surface between the water and the stars. But the sea was clean and sweet here, dark with the fragrance of brine, and the cliffs were now rising and falling behind them, where the caves went deep. Sometimes, on quiet afternoons on the clifftops, you could put your ear to the flat hot earth and hear, hidden and far below, the boom and roar and rage of a subterranean sea. But the land looked tiny now, and although tonight John was holding the tiller and was in control, he felt that without his willing or deciding it they’d somehow gone farther out than they should have. If they continued, they’d hit the colder water that rose off the continental shelf. Too strong, really, for this little boat to cope with—certainly without a navigator, at night. He was afraid that this outboard would fail them, that some vital piece of the ancient engine still lay gleaming where he’d left it on the sand of the inner harbor. He thought of his parents, probably contentedly asleep. He thought of his own bed, empty, and the creaking of the house around it.

“We should go back now.”