The Man Who Lost the Sea (36 page)

“This is the craziest thing I ever heard of.”

“You’re absolutely right.” Noat physically turned Smith around and faced him to the door. Outside, a horn blared. The sound seemed to loop and lock lassolike round the confused and upset Smith. He allowed it to pull him outside. He might then have been frightened if he had been given a chance to think, but Gorwing roared at him: “Where’s G-Note?”

“You come in my car or not at all,” Smith parrotted, his voice far more harsh than he had intended. He then marched to his car, got in and started the motor.

Livid, Gorwing sprang out of the other car. “G-Note!” he bawled at the unresponsive store front, then cursed and ran to Smith’s car and slammed inside.

“Whose stupid idea was this?” he snarled.

White and shaken, but, feeling that in some way he had already tipped over the lip of some long slide, Smith said, “Not mine. You going some place?”

Gorwing hunched back against the door, as far from Smith as he could get. “You know the Thruway exit southbound?”

“All right.”

He turned out into the street and right at the main avenue. Once or twice he glanced at his passenger, the slick black hair, the fevered dark eyes, the lips ever curled back from the too-sharp, too-white
teeth. It was a tormented, dangerous kind of face, and the posture—this had been true as he had seen Gorwing stand, walk, turn, sit—was always one of imminent attack, like some small furious cornered animal.

He knew a short cut just here, and was on it before he quite realized he had come so far. He swung the wheel abruptly and turned into Midland Avenue, and from the corner of his eye, seemed to see the feral silhouette of his passenger sink and disappear. Astonished, he glanced at Gorwing, to find him bent almost double, his hands clasping the back of his neck, his eyes screwed shut.

“You feel sick?” He applied the brakes.

Gorwing unlaced the fingers behind his neck and, without opening his eyes, freed a hand for some violent semaphore. “Just drive,” came his strained, hissing whisper. Puzzled beyond bearing, Smith drove. Was Gorwing in pain? Or—could this be it—was he hiding? Who from? There was a football field and a high school on the left, a row of houses—mostly nurses’ residences for the nearby hospital—on the right. No one seemed to be paying special attention to the car.

Two blocks further on Gorwing slowly sat up.

“You all right now?”

In a very, very quiet voice, a deathly, a deadly voice, Gorwing spoke. He tipped the side of his mouth toward Smith as he spoke, but stared straight ahead. He said, “Don’t you ever drive me near the hospital. Not ever.”

Crazy as a coot, thought Smith. “Nobody told me.”

“I’m telling you.”

They came to the underpass and crossed beneath the Thruway, and Gorwing came out of himself enough to lean forward and scan the road and the sides of the road, ahead. Suddenly he pointed. “There he is. Pull over there.”

Smith saw a young man in a grimy flannel suit and a white sport shirt, standing on the grassy shoulder just by the Thruway exit. There was a suitcase with a broken clasp on the grass by his feet. Smith pulled off the pavement and stopped.

The man picked up his suitcase and came toward them, trying to smile. “Give us a lift into town?”

Gorwing’s tongue darted out to wet his lips, and his eyes seemed to grow even brighter. He waited until the man was abreast of the car, was even elevating his suitcase to let it precede him into the back seat, then sprang out and, chest arched, eyes flaming, blocked the man. “Lift hell,” he snarled, “this town wouldn’t give a cup o’ water to the likes of you. Don’t you set foot in it. We don’t wancha.”

The stranger slitted his eyes. “Now wait, Mac, you wait a minute here. Who the hell you think you are? You own this—”

“Git,” said Gorwing, and his voice descended to something like the hissing, strained note that Smith had heard in the car. He mouthed his words—spittle ran suddenly from the corner of his mouth. As he spoke he walked, and as he walked the other man backed away. “You gawd … damn … junky … you think you can come here and pick up a fix, well this place is cold turkey for you and you’d better be on your way out of it, never mind who I am, I killed a man once.”

The man tried to shout him down, but Gorwing kept talking, kept crouching forward. “We’re stayin’ right here to see you walk up the pike or down the pike or hitch a ride, I don’t care which way, an’ don’t think you c’n slide into town without my knowin’, I got guys spotted all over town and your life ain’t worth a bar o’ soap if you so much as show your face let alone tryin’ to find a pusher. There ain’t no pusher an’ if you meet another gawd damn hophead you c’n pass the word—” but it was pointless to go on; suitcase and all, the man had turned by then and fled. Gorwing put his thumbs in his belt and watched the hitchhiker, white-faced, scampering to the northbound lane. Then Gorwing sighed, and turned tiredly back to the car.

“What a blistering,” breathed the thunderstruck Smith as Gorwing got in and fell back on the seat. “Who was that?”

“Never saw him before in my life,” said Gorwing absently. With great tenderness he touched the back of his neck. He looked at Smith by rolling his fevered eyes, as if the neck were too tender to disturb. “I never killed a man,” he said. “I just say that to scare ’em.”

A thousand questions pressed on Smith’s tongue, but he swallowed all but, “You want to go back now?”

“How’s our li’l buddy doing?”

Smith peered down the ramp. Through the underpass, he could see the grimy-white of the hitchhiker’s clothes. “He’s still—no wait, I think he’s got a lift.”

Gorwing joined him in peering. They saw a green Dodge slow and stop, and the man climb in. “And good riddance,” murmured Gorwing.

“I don’t think he’ll be back,” said Smith, for something to say.

“He’ll wish he didn’t if he does,” said Gorwing, so offhandedly that Smith knew the man, the episode, the whole subject was leaving Gorwing’s mind; and in a way this was the most extraordinary part of this inexplicable episode, for Smith knew that he himself would never forget it. Gorwing said, “Drive.”

Smith made a slightly illegal turn and got the car headed back toward town. When he saw the yellow and black HOSPITAL ENTRANCE—500 FEET sign, he turned left and went into a long detour. Gorwing sat abstractedly, and Smith was certain he had not noticed the special effort he was making, until they turned back again on to Midland Avenue, well past, and Gorwing said, “Hospitals, they give me the creeps.”

“Me, too,” said Smith, remembering a tonsillectomy when he was fourteen—his only contact with the healing arts in all his life. Gorwing laughed at him—a singularly unpleasant and mirthless laugh. Anything in Smith that was about to formulate conversation—maybe even a question out of his vast perplexity—dried up. Smith’s petulant pink underlip protruded, and he drove without speaking until they pulled up in front of the Anything Shoppe. Smith had never been so glad to see anything in his life. He had had, as of now, exactly all he could take of this man.

He swung his door open but “Oh, hell,” Gorwing said. He said it in the tones of a man who has conducted a theater party in from the suburbs and finds, under the marquee, that he has forgotten the tickets. In spite of himself, “What’s the matter?” asked Smith.

“Shut up,” said Gorwing. Suddenly he closed his eyes and said again, “Oh hell.” Then he opened his eyes and snapped, “Get goin’. Quick.”

Reflexively Smith shut the door, then demanded of himself
why?
Argumentatively he asked, “Where do you want to go?”

“
Move
, will ya?” He waved vaguely toward Hook Mountain. “Up that way. I’ll tell you.”

“I don’t see—”

Gorwing’s words tumbled out so fast they were almost indistinguishable. “Dammit you want somebody should be dead it’s your fault you didn’t jump when I said jump now
drive!
”

The car was started and heading north before Smith was aware of it, so stunned was he by this hot spurt of language. When a man speaks like that, you want to throw your hands up over your face as if you had seen raging heat through sudden cracks in something you knew, too late, might explode.

A mile later Smith asked timidly, “What do you mean, dead?”

“Your place,” Gorwing growled, directing, not responding.

They wheeled into the private road and up the hill.
Dead? My place?
Smith was terrified. “Listen—”

“You got any rope?” Gorwing snapped.

“Rope?” Smith repeated stupidly. He went into his own driveway in a power-slide; he hadn’t known he could drive like that. “No, I haven’t got any rope. What—”

“Oh, you wouldn’t,” spat Gorwing. “Chains. You got tire chains?”

“I don’t—yes. In the trunk.” He braked to a slithering stop in the turnaround. Gorwing was out of the car while it was still sliding, and tugging at the trunk lid. He roared to find it locked. Smith tumbled out with the keys and opened it. Gorwing flung him aside in his dive as he clawed through the trunk, throwing tire iron, jack pedestal, a can of hydraulic fluid behind him like a digging dog. The chains were in a cloth sack; he up-dumped the sack, shook out the chains, hooked the end of one into the end of the other, draped them over his shoulder and sprinted down toward the house.

“Wait, you—” gasped Smith, and trotted after him.

Gorwing passed the house and plunged across the lower lawn into the woods, Smith after him, already panting. “Hey, watch yourself, that’s full of poison ivy back there!”

Gorwing was already out of sight in the rank woods below the house.

Stumbling, gasping, Smith floundered after him, until he came to the edge of the cliff that overlooked the broad Hudson. At this point it was sheer about a hundred feet, then slanted down and away in a mass of weed-grown rubble almost to the railroad tracks. For a moment he thought Gorwing must have plunged straight over the edge, but then he saw him working his way along the ragged brink to the right.

“Hang on! Hang on!” Gorwing yelled. Totally perplexed, Smith looked around him for whatever it was he was supposed to hang on to and failed to find it. He shrugged and stumbled after the man. Gorwing kept bellowing to hang on. Suddenly Smith saw him fall to his knees and crawl to the crumbling lip of the precipice. He yelled again, then moved on a couple of feet and hooked a free end of the tire chains to itself around the trunk of a foolhardy pine tree with a ten-inch bole, which grew bravely at the lip of disaster.

At last, Smith reached Gorwing, who had hunkered down with his back to the tree. He had described the man to himself before as “fevered”—he now looked sick as well; there was a difference. “What are you—”

Gorwing motioned toward the drop. “You’ll have to do it. I can’t stand high places.”

“Do what?”

Gorwing pointed again. Smith heard a weak bleating sound that seemed to come from everywhere. But it was specifically outward that Gorwing had pointed. So he fell to his knees and crawled to the edge and looked over.

Eight or ten feet below him he saw the chalk-white, tear-streaked face of a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boy. The child was hanging by his hands to a protruding root, which angled so sharply downward that it was clear no grip could last too long on it. The boy’s toes were dug into loose earth, a fresh damp scar of which surrounded his feet and, widening, showed where to his left a ledge had fallen away. To his right was rock, almost sheer, and without a handhold.

“Hang on!”
yelled Smith, at least half again as loud and urgently as Gorwing had. He caught up the end of the chain and lowered it carefully down. At its fullest extent it reached about to the boy’s
belt-line. Smith looked at Gorwing, who looked back out of sick black eyes. “You got to,” he said in strained tones, “I tell you I can’t. I just can’t.”

Smith, whose usual activities involved nothing more strenuous than stamp tongs, found himself on his stomach, hanging his legs over, hunting wildly with his toes for the rungs formed by the crosslinks of the tire chain. Then he was stepping down, while the earth and grass of the edge rose up and obscured Gorwing like some crazy inverted theater curtain. “Hang on,” he said, and was startled when the boy answered, “Okay …” because that remark had been for himself.

Tire chains may be roughly the size and shape of a small ladder, but they take unkindly to it. The rungs roll and their parts pinch, and the whole thing swings and bends alarmingly;
you
know they won’t break, but do
they?
Too soon the next rung under his seeking foot just—wasn’t, and he withdrew the foot from nothing-at-all and stood on the last crosslink, gulping air. He was then of a mind to freeze to his shaky perch and stay there until somebody else figured a way out, but there came a whimper nearby and he saw clods and stones spin sickeningly down and away from the boy’s toes. He glanced at the boy’s face, saw and would forever see the muddy pallor, the fear-bulged eye, the lips gone whiter than the tanned cheeks. The youngster’s foothold was gone, and only his grip on the slanted root held him. Afterward, Smith was to reflect that, if the kid had been standing on anything solid, he would never in life have been able to figure out a way to bring him in; but now he
had
to, so he did.

“Lift your foot!” he screamed. “Give me your foot!”

The foot was already dangling, but for an endless, mindless moment the boy stretched downward with it, trying to make a toehold if he could not find one; then Smith screamed again, and the boy brought the foot up slowly, shakily … and he said, “My hands, I can’t …” but then Smith had the foot, leaning far sidewise to get it; he lifted it, thrust it through the last “rung” down to the knee. One more reach, and he had the skinny upper arm in a grip that astonished both of them. “Let go,” he panted, and the boy let go; it may well be that he could not have held on any longer to the root
if he had wanted to. With the release, the chains swung nauseatingly sidewise; with one hand Smith ground steel into his own flesh, with the other drove flesh into the arm-bone; but he had the boy, now, thrust the arm through the next rung. “Hold with your arms, not your hands,” he said through his teeth.