The Man Who Lost the Sea (31 page)

“It isn’t that, Paul—”

“It is that. And … for that I got to miss the best game of the year.”

“You said it yourself. It’s the best game of the year. It’s important to all of us. Stay away from it, Paul.”

Paul Cahill stood by the bus and watched the coach shamble inside. Then he opened up the bus, flipped up his seat; and fumbled through the tools. After a while he got out again and entered the building. Once inside, he remembered he had not locked up this time. He shrugged and sidled into the noisy gym. No matter what the coach said, this was a game he did not intend to miss.

At the tapoff, Romeo coiled down like a huge steel spring and then didn’t jump. The opposing center, caught by surprise, barely tipped the ball. Romeo’s long arms snapped up like the business end of a rat trap; he double-palmed the ball and snapped his wrists. The ball took off like a flying saucer, seemingly self-propelled, and flew by itself to the Johnson hoop, where it swished through without touching iron at all. First blood in the first second of play, and Romeo hadn’t even moved his feet.

“Hey Jenny!”
he roared. Blind rage came and went in Paul Cahill. The second time it happened he clenched his fists and turned to go. Then it happened a third time, the roar
Hey Jenny!
and this time Paul Cahill roared with it, a sound without words in it. He rushed forward, a ten-inch box wrench flailing the air. Then something like a railway mail-hook caught his left arm and spun him around, and the wrench disappeared out of his right hand, and he was being hustled in the opposite direction, Coach McGurk on one side of him, young Curtis on the other.

A door opened for them; Big Dome Craig opened it, from inside.

“Sorry, son, but you got to stay in there,” said the coach, and they shoved him into a room and the door closed. Through the frosted glass, Paul Cahill could see one of them take up what looked like sentry duty. It had all happened so fast he had stopped thinking.

Hey Jenny!
He heard Romeo clearly, and a huge noise from the crowd. He scurried all around the room. There was another door, locked. The windows were hinged vents, high up in a glass ceiling. It had once been part of the gym, he recalled. He saw—now that he looked—that it was a chem lab.

He stood by the glass door after that, listening to the biggest game of the year.
Hey, Jenny!
He thought he would go out of his head. Maybe he did, a little. He heard his wife’s name again. He heard the crowd pick it up. He heard that almost thirty times. It was Charley Romeo’s big night.

After some hours—months—of this, the door opened and Coach McGurk came in. He spent a moment looking carefully at Paul Cahill’s face:

“We won it,” he said at last.

Paul Cahill didn’t say anything. After a long silence he moved his head tiredly and said, “Let’s go.”

On the way back, the team was boisterous. Well, they’d won it; that was what they’d come for. Everybody kept patting Romeo on the back. As soon as they were on the road and the lights out, Paul Cahill dimly saw, in his mirror, Romeo’s long arm snake up and get his lunch box.

Paul Cahill settled down to his work, and let everything else trickle into a place inside him that had a one-way cork on it.

Therefore he heard the noise a little later than anyone else. It had to filter through to him—a steamboat-whistle kind of
Hoo! Hoo!

Romeo, of course. Paul Cahill ground his teeth. Then the
Hoo Hoo!
noise turned into a gibbering burble, and a sort of scream so alarming that the boys began to make worried noises. Someone yelled for light and the coach went back. Immediately he called out:

“Stop when you can, Paul.” Coach McGurk said it in such a strange tense tone that all Paul Cahill’s anger evaporated.

Paul Cahill had to drive nearly half a mile before he could stop, for they were in the pass; still climbing, and they had to get through to the wider road on the other side. But at last he could pull over and stop. He turned on the inside dome lights, and saw his passengers
pressing forward from behind, drawing back from around the long figure of Romeo, stretched out in the aisle.

Without the motor, the silence was like a crash.

Then Coach McGurk said, in a weary, puzzled voice:

“Romeo is dead.”

“Dead?” they asked each other. “Dead,” they kept answering; the word flicked and frothed over them like whitecaps; while they moved under it like waves, craning to look, pressing away.

Somebody said something about getting the police. The remark just lay there.

“Well, what happened to him?” Paul Cahill suddenly barked.

Coach McGurk extended something—a flask—toward him. Paul Cahill started to take it but the coach used it to push his hand away and put it up to his face instead.

Paul Cahill smelled it: sweet bitter coffee smell, and the odor of something else, like … coffee cake? Sugar buns, the kind with …

“Almonds,” Paul Cahill said.

“Almonds hell, that’s arsenic,” Coach McGurk said positively.

Paul Cahill made as if to take the flask to sniff, unbelievingly again, but the coach moved it out of his reach, picked up the cover from Romeo’s seat, and screwed it down tight. And all the while the Coach kept looking and looking at Paul Cahill out of his tired eyes.

Abruptly Paul Cahill realized what was going through Coach McGurk’s mind. He looked at all the other faces and saw the same idea percolate through the crowd.

Who had threatened to kill Romeo?

Who had, with the box-wrench, actually tried?

Who had the best chance, alone in the bus, to put the fatal dose of poison into Romeo’s flask?

Paul Cahill said “I—” and again; “I—” and then could only shake his head; and if there were any faces left in the crowd that the idea hadn’t reached by then, they got it.

“We can’t just sit here … put Romeo on the long seat at the back,” said Coach McGurk.

Nobody wanted to. Finally Paul Cahill and Coach McGurk had to do it. Romeo’s eyes were open and he was kind of snarling, all
his front teeth bared. No matter what, Paul Cahill was never going to forget that.

Paul Cahill went back to the driver’s seat and switched out the domes. Everyone settled down. He started the motor and released the brake. The bus nosed downhill, began to roll immediately. In thirty seconds it was going fifty. In another ten, Coach McGurk sat bolt upright and shouted at him:

“Hey! Take it easy.
Hey!
”

Paul Cahill did not answer. He was too busy picking out the details of the curve ahead, and its one high wall of cliff. Coach McGurk got up and was thrown right down again as Cahill wheeled around the turn.

“Paul! Paul!” the coach shouted.

Hand over hand in the lurching bus, Coach McGurk got up behind Paul Cahill and clutched at his arm. Paul Cahill removed one hand to throw him off, and the back of the bus slewed and nipped the rock wall on the left. At the crash and tearing sound of aluminum skin, one of the boys screamed.

The speedometer needle hit ninety-four. One dead, more dead coming. He could be dead strapped in a chair, with a prison chaplain snaking it as easy as he could. Or he could be dead much quicker than that, just by not taking the next turn, or the one after.

Evidence or not, no matter what anyone had heard him say or seen him do, there was one thing Paul Cahill knew for sure:

He hadn’t killed Charley Romeo
.

Which meant that someone else had. Someone right here in this bus.

He bellowed, then, at the top of his voice:

“
Listen
. I don’t touch the brake until I know who killed Romeo.”

“You’re crazy!” yelled the coach. “Stop this bus, Paul!”

Paul Cahill yelled back. “Look out!”

Twelve tons of bus entered a turn, sliding, sliding, crossing the pavement to the far side. At the last possible split second the wheels seemed to be taking hold, but there was nothing, nothing at all under the left front—just black dark and distant downward lights.
And as the bus plunged over the edge, the road shook itself and moved under the wheels again, and they went howling down the road again.

“One more like that and we’ve had it!” Paul Cahill bellowed. “Well?”

The speedometer needle lurched upward.

One hundred and twelve … fourteen.

“Stop! Stop!” yelled Coach McGurk.

“Shaddup!”
Paul Cahill roared at him. “Look!”

Somebody back there began shrieking over and over. The turn beginning to take shape before their headlights was impossible. The shrieking went on and on—more boys started to yell.

Coach McGurk yelled, “For God’s sake, Paul. This is murder!”

Paul Cahill didn’t answer. He couldn’t take his attention for an instant from the approaching turn—a narrow cut, a sharp left with a wall on one side and a precipice on the other, then a right bend to a second cut.

“We’ll all die!” wailed a voice that Paul Cahill dimly recognized as belonging to Big Dome Craig.

Then they were into the turn, and were never coming out of it. Coach McGurk got the idea that saved them, temporarily. He put cupped hands around his mouth and shouted:

“Right side, everybody! Get over to the right side!
Jump!
”

As the bus shuddered into the turn, yawing away toward the sharp drop to eternity, thirty-two healthy youngsters—somewhere close to two tons of flesh—flung hard to the right side of the bus.

That did it. The two tons turned the trick, by the narrowest of margins. A giant tire spun on emptiness for a second, but the other tires held the road.

Paul Cahill fought the wheel like a bucking bronc.

Behind him someone started to scream.

“Stop him, somebody! Stop him!”

That was Big Dome Craig again. He was cracking. But nobody made a move to interfere with Paul Cahill at the wheel. They all knew that would speed the moment of annihilation.

Paul Cahill heard, somewhere at his back, a shrieking, sobbing
breath, a scuffle. Big Dome Craig had tried to get at him, but the others were holding him back.

Then Big Dome Craig was yelling, “I did it! I DID IT!”

Coach McGurk stumbled up behind Paul Cahill.

“It’s Craig, Paul. He says he killed Romeo. For God’s sake, hit the brakes! Paul!”

That’s when Paul Cahill told him. Even as he swung the wheel as far as it would go and held on, he gritted:

“Brakes gone, coach. Air … out. Can’t … even shift gears … air powered.”

Coach McGurk wasted no time on a reply. He barked to the others:

“Left, now. Left.
Jump!
”

The two tons dove across to the other seats. That helped—but not enough. In the split second before he swung the wheel, Paul Cahill shifted his grip. There was the tortured rending of aluminum sheathing as the bus slid along the rock wall—enough to slow it. Then the tires kicked gravel out and down into the empty night, and again found the road.

They shot through the cut and, blessedly, ahead of them the road turned up for a half mile before entering the last plunge to the valley. Paul Cahill rode the uphill stretch with the right hand wheels at the very edge of the ditch and, as the bus started to lean, Coach McGurk and the boys shifted again and she settled and ran, and slowed, and not fifty yards from the top of the rise, she stopped.

“Paul,” said Coach McGurk. That single word was the finest compliment the little man had ever heard.

Some of the boys began crying, with released tension, crying like the youngsters they were.

Big Dome Craig was crying too, his hands over his face, crying and talking at the same time as the truth poured out of him.

Paul Cahill stood by Coach McGurk and listened. Once, during a break in the confessional, the coach muttered to Paul Cahill:

“I couldn’t believe you were doing it on purpose, Paul. Not even when it was happening.”

“Thanks,” Paul Cahill said.

“Just a coincidence, the brakes going when they did. But I guess I made the most of it.” He grinned.

Big Dome Craig was telling now about Romeo and his sister—a long story and a sad one—and how after she had been in that trouble and gone to the doctor, she had still wanted to go live with the big fellow, and the only way Big Dome could stop it was by becoming Romeo’s personal valet, doing his school work for him, taking his unending abuse. He had thought of killing Romeo for a long time but he might never have done it, if he hadn’t found out about the weekend a month ago, when Romeo went to meet his sister. He only found out about it after his sister had taken the overdose of sleeping pills and had died, and the weekend was the reason. It seems Romeo had waited until the weekend was over before he told her that he didn’t intend to see her again. That was Romeo, all right. Take your cake and hand it back, too.

Finally Big Dome Craig ran down and just sat there, strangely relieved.

It was a long time later, after they’d flagged a passing car and were waiting for the tow truck, that Coach McGurk said to Paul Cahill:

“Sorry you had to miss the game, Paul. It was great.”

“That’s okay,” Paul said thoughtfully. “Anyway, we won.” They sat quietly, then, thinking about winning.

Some towns seem to defy not only time, but change; when this happens in the far hinterland, one is hardly amazed. Yet, amazingly, it happens all the time quite near some of our largest cities. Occasionally one of these is found by the “project” entrepreneur, and becomes the setting for winding windrows of coops and hutches, alternately “ranch” and “split”; yet not even these, and the prefabricated, alien, chain-driven supercilious superservice shopping centers in symbiosis with them, ever become a part of such towns. Whatever span of years it takes to make the “projects” obsolescent only serves to make these towns themselves more solid, more—in the chemical sense—set. Modernity does not and cannot alter the character of such a place, any more than one might alter a suit of chain mail by topping it with a Panama hat.

In such towns are businesses—shops and services—which live as the unassailable town lives, that is to say, in their own way and forever. Purveyors of the same shoes, sheets and sundries as the multi-celled merchandizing mammoths sell go by the board, quite deserving of all that their critics say of them, that they can’t keep up with the times, that they’re dead and now must lie down. Defiance of time, of change, of anything is, after all, only defiance, and does not in itself guarantee a victory. But certain businesses, by their very nature, may be in a town, may
be
a town and achieve this defiant immortality. Anyone who has reflected with enough detachment on recent history is in a position to realize that, in revolutionary days, there must have been a certain market for genuine antiques made in America of American materials more than a century earlier. No technology advancing or static can eliminate the window-washer, the launderer, the handyman-smith and their establishments. Fashions in invention might change the vestments of their activity, but never
their blood and marrow. The boatwright becomes a specialist in wooden station-wagon bodies, and then in mobile-home interiors. The blacksmith trades his leather bellows for a drill-press and a rack of epoxy resins, but he is what he was, and his shop is his permanence and his town’s.