SEVEN

I cannot say that either of us was cheered a good deal by how the other looked. My father was making instant coffee, but at his first sight of me, he put down the jar and whistled softly.

I nodded. I had come downstairs with a swollen foot, a left arm I could not raise above my head, and a bucket of ice water inside my chest. Who knows what circles were beneath my eyes.

Dougy was the greater shock, however. There was almost no hair left on his head and he had lost a lot of weight. High on his cheeks was a fierce pink flush that reminded me of a fire in a windswept place.

The recognition came like a touch of the crud itself. He must be on chemotherapy.

I guess he had become accustomed to the quick wipe from people’s eyes of the initial aversion, for he said, “Yeah, I got it.”

“Where’s it situated?”

He made a gesture to indicate that was neither here nor there.

“Thanks for sending a telegram,” I said.

“Kid, when there’s nothing anybody can do about your story, keep it to yourself.”

He looked weak, which is to say, he did not look all-powerful. I couldn’t tell, however, if he was in discomfort.

“Are you on chemotherapy?” I asked.

“I quit it a couple of days ago. The nausea is a disgrace.” He walked forward and gave me a little hug, not too close, as if he felt infectious.

“I heard a joke,” he said. “This Jewish family is waiting in the hospital lobby. The doctor comes up to them. He’s a prosperous son of a bitch with a peppy voice. He choips like a boid.” My father liked on occasion to remind me, as he used to remind my mother, that the roots were back in Hell’s Kitchen and be damned to you. His snobbery remained unflaggingly inverse, so he would go out of his way to say “boid” for “bird.”

Now he could proceed with his joke. “ ‘I have,’ says the doctor, ‘good news and bad news for you. The bad news is that your father’s disease is incurable. The good news is that it is not cancer.’ The family says, ‘Thank God.’ ”

We laughed together. When we were done, he handed me his untouched cup of instant coffee and started to spoon himself out another. “Here we have bad news,” he said.

“It’s incurable?”

“Tim, who the fuck can say? Sometimes I think I know the moment I got it. If I’m that close to the source, maybe I can find my cure. I tell you, I hate those pills the doctors push. I hate myself for taking them.”

“How do you sleep?”

“I never been a famous sleeper,” he said. Then he nodded. “Kid, I can handle anything but the middle of the night.” That was quite a speech for him. He cut it off. “What happened to you?” he asked.

I found myself telling him about the fight.

“Where’d you leave the dog?” he asked.

“Buried him in the yard.”

“Before you went to sleep?”

“Yes.”

“Somebody raised you right.”

We stayed in the kitchen all morning. After I made some eggs, we tried the living room, but Patty’s furniture was not for an old longshoreman. Soon we were back in the kitchen. Outside it was another gray day, and looking through the window, he shivered.

“What do you like about this godforsaken place?” he said. “It’s like the back coast of Ireland in winter.”

“No, I love it,” I told him.

“Yeah?”

“The first time I came here was after being kicked out of Exeter. Remember we got drunk?”

“I sure do.” It was a pleasure to see him smile.

“Well, in the morning you went back to New York, and I decided to come here for the summer. I’d heard of this town. I liked it right off, and then when I was here a week, I went to a dance joint out near the highway one night. There was a good-looking girl I kept watching, but I didn’t go near her. She was with her crowd and dancing. I just kept observing. At closing, I took a shot at it. I went up to her on the dance floor, looked in her eyes, she looked in mine, and we went out the door together. Screw the dudes she was with. They didn’t do a thing. So the girl and I crossed the road, went into the woods, lay down, and, Dougy, I was in her. I figure it took six minutes from the time I walked up to her till I was in. That impressed me more about myself than anything I’d done till that day.”

He enjoyed my story a good deal. His hand reached out in an old reflex for his tumbler of bourbon and then he realized it wasn’t there. “So this place is your luck,” he said.

“To a degree.”

“Are you all right?” he asked. “For a guy who’s just beaten up a hood with a tire iron, you don’t look too happy. Are you afraid he’ll return?” What a look of happiness came into my father’s eyes at the thought that Stoodie might decide to come back.

“There’s a lot to talk about,” I said, “but I don’t know if I’m ready to tell you.”

“Have to do with your wife?”

“Some.”

“Say, if I was going to be around for another ten years, I wouldn’t say a word, but since I won’t, I’ll tell you. I believe you married the wrong broad. It should have been Madeleine. She may be a vindictive guinea, but I liked her. She had class. She was subtle.”

“Is this your blessing?”

“I kept my mouth shut on too many things for too many years. Maybe it started to rot inside. One of the causes of cancer, says the choipy boids, is a harsh environment.”

“What do you want to tell me?”

“A guy who marries a rich woman deserves every last thing he gets.”

“I thought you liked Patty.” They had loved to drink together.

“I liked her guts. If all the other rednecks was as macho as her, they’d be running the world. But I didn’t like what she was doing to you. Certain dames ought to wear a T-shirt that says: ‘Hang around. I’ll make a cocksucker out of you.’ ”

“Thanks.”

“Hey, Tim—it’s a figure of speech. Nothing personal.”

“You were always worried about me, weren’t you?”

“Well, your mother was delicate. She spoiled you a lot. Yeah,” he said, looking at me out of his ice-blue eyes, “I worried about you.”

“Maybe you didn’t have to. I took my three years in the slammer without a fall. They called me Iron Jaw. I wouldn’t take cock.”

“Good for you. I always wondered.”

“Hey, Dougy,” I said, “what’s the virtue? You think I feel like a man most of the time? I don’t. What was I protecting? You’re an old-line fanatic. You’d put all the faggots in concentration camps including your own son if he ever slipped. Just cause you were lucky enough to be born with tiger’s balls.”

“Let’s have a drink. You’re off your feed.”

“Should you have a drink?”

He made a move with his hands again. “It’s an occasion.”

I got two glasses and put bourbon in them. He added a considerable amount of water to his. If nothing else, that was enough to tell me he was ill.

“You have me wrong,” he said. “Do you think I’ve been living alone for twenty-five years in a furnished room, and I do no thinking? I try to keep up. In my day, if you were queer, you were damned. Don’t even ask. You were an agent of hell. Now, they got Gay Liberation. I watch them. There’s faggots everywhere.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

“Ha, ha,” he said and pointed a finger at me. The early liquor was obviously doing angel’s work on his spirits. “My son wins the round.”

“Good at dancing,” I said.

“I remember,” he said. “Costello, right?”

“Right.”

“I’m not sure I know what that means anymore,” he said. “Six months ago they told me to stop drinking or I was dead. So I stopped. Now, when I go to sleep, the spirits come out of the woodwork and make a circle around my bed. Then they make me dance all night.” He gave a cough filled with all the hollows of his lungs. It had been an attempt to laugh. “ ‘Tough guys don’t dance,’ I tell them. ‘Hey, you bigot,’ the spirits answer, ‘keep dancing.’ ” He looked into the lights of the bourbon as if their kin could be found there, and sighed. “My illness makes me less of a bigot,” he said. “I think about faggots and you know what I believe? For half of them, it’s brave. For the wimps, it takes more guts to be queer than not. For the wimps. Otherwise they marry some little mouse who’s too timid to be a dyke and they both become psychologists and raise whiz kids to play electronic games. Turn queer, I say, if you’re a wimp. Have a coming-out party. It’s the others I condemn. The ones who ought to be men but couldn’t show the moxie. You were supposed to be a man, Tim. You came from me. You had advantages.”

“I never heard you talk so much before. Not once in my life.”

“That’s cause you and I are strangers.”

“Well, you look like a stranger today,” I said. It was true. His large head was no longer crowned by his rich white hair, white with the corrupt splendors of ivory and cream. Now he just had an enormous bald head. He looked more like a Prussian general than the model of an Irish bartender.

“I want to talk to you now,” he said. “I may be acting thick, but it came over me at Frankie Freeload’s funeral: Tim is all I got.”

I was moved. Sometimes a couple of months would go by, sometimes a half-year, before one of us called. Still, it seemed all right. I had always hoped so. Now he confirmed it.

“Yes,” he said, “I got up early this morning, borrowed the widow’s car and told myself all the way here that this time we speak it out face to face. I don’t want to die without you knowing of my regard for you.”

I was embarrassed. Therefore, I leaped on the way he said “the widow’s car.” “Did you have any hanky-panky with Freeload’s wife?” I asked.

Not often did I see my father look sheepish. “Not lately,” he said.

“How could you? With a friend’s wife!”

“For the last ten years, Frankie was pickled in booze. He couldn’t find his tool or the pot.”

“A friend’s wife?” I gave him the family laugh. High tenor.

“It was only once or twice. She needed it. An act of mercy.”

I laughed until the tears came. “ ‘I wonder who’s kissing her now,’ ” I sang. It was wonderful to have your father at his own wake. Suddenly I felt like crying.

“You’re right, kid,” he said. “I hope and pray Frankie never knew.” He looked at the wall for an instant. “You get older and you begin to feel as if something is wrong. You’re in a box, and the sides keep coming closer. So you do things you didn’t do before.”

“How long have you known you were sick?”

“Ever since I went into St. Vincent’s forty-five years ago.”

“That’s quite a while to have cancer and never show it.”

“None of the doctors have a feel for the subject,” he said. “The way I see the matter, it’s a circuit of illness with two switches.”

“What are you saying?”

“Two terrible things have to happen before the crud can get its start. The first cocks the trigger. The other fires it. I’ve been walking around with the trigger cocked for forty-five years.”

“Because you couldn’t recover from all those hits you took?”

“No. Cause I lost my balls.”

“You? What are you talking about?”

“Tim, I stopped, and I felt the blood in my shoes, and there was St. Vincent’s in front of me. I should have kept chasing the bastard who did the shooting. But I lost my nerve when I saw the hospital.”

“Hell, you had already gone after him for six blocks.”

“Not enough. I was built to be that good anyway. The test came when I stopped. I didn’t have the nerve to go on and catch him. Cause I could have. Something in the scheme of things might have made him trip. I didn’t push my luck. Instead, I stopped. Then I heard a voice clearly in my head. It’s the only time I would say that God or someone highly superior was speaking to me. This voice said, ‘You’re out of gas, kid. It’s your true test. Do it.’ But I went into St. Vincent’s and grabbed the orderly by the collar, and just at the moment when I got tough with that punk in the white jacket was when I felt the first switch get thrown in the cancer.”

“What threw the second switch?”

“It never got thrown. It corroded. Cumulative effects. Forty-five years of living with no respect for myself.”

“You’re crazy.”

He took a big belt of his watered bourbon. “I wish I was. Then I wouldn’t have cancer. I’ve studied this, I tell you. There’s buried statistics if you look for them. Schizophrenics in looney bins only get cancer half as often as the average population. I figure it this way: either your body goes crazy, or your mind. Cancer is the cure for schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is the cure for cancer. Most people don’t know how tough it is out there. I was brought up to know. I got no excuse.”

I was silent. I stopped arguing with him. It is not easy to sort out what effect his words were having. Was I coming to understand for the first time why the warmth he had for me always seemed to cross a glacial field? I may once have been a seed in Douglas Madden’s body but only after that body was no longer held by him in high esteem. I was, to a degree, defective. Agitation had to be stirring in all my old wounds, well-buried and long-resigned. No wonder my father had taken no great joy in me. Intimations came how in years ahead—if I lived—the memory of this conversation might make me shake with rage.

Yet, I also felt compassion for my father. Damnable compassion. He had cast a long shadow across my understanding of him.

Next, I knew a considerable amount of fear. For now it seemed real to me again that I had murdered two women. How many times over these last few years had I come to the edge of battering Patty Lareine with my bare hands? And each time I resisted the impulse, had not a sense of oncoming illness settled more firmly into me? Yes, like my father I had been living in a harsh environment. I thought once more of the impulse that led me to climb the tower. Had that been the night when I hoped to keep the first switch from being thrown?

I knew then that I would confide in Big Mac. I had to talk about the two murders and the plastic bags in the damp cellar of this house. I could hold it no longer. Yet I could not bring myself to speak about it directly. Instead, I more or less sidled up to the topic.

“How much do you believe,” I asked, “in predestination?”

“Oh, yeah,” he answered, “what kind of predestination?” The shift in subject made him happy. Long years behind a bar had left my father adept at living with questions as wide as the heavenly gates.

“The football spreads,” I said. “Can God pick the team that will cover?”

It was obviously a question Dougy had lived with. He revealed that glint in his eye which showed that he was debating whether to disclose useful knowledge. Then he nodded. “I figure if God bet the spread, He’d win eighty percent of the time.”

“How do you come up with that number?”

“Well, let’s say the night before the game He passes over the places where the players are sleeping and takes a reading. ‘Pittsburgh is up for this game,’ He says to Himself. ‘The Jets are jangled.’ Pittsburgh, He decides, is worth a lot more than three points. So He bets them. I’d say He’s right four times out of five.”

“But why four out of five?”

“Because footballs,” said my father ominously, “take funny bounces. It is not practical to get better than four out of five. That’s good enough. If He wanted to take account of the physics of every bounce, He’d have to do a million times more work in His calculations in order to get up from eighty to ninety-nine percent. That’s not economical. He’s got too many other things to work at.”

“But why did you settle on four out of five?”

My father took this as a most serious question. “Sometimes,” he told me, “a football handicapper can get a great streak going and hits up around seventy-five percent against the spread for a month or more. I figure that’s because he’s got a pipeline for a little while into higher places.”

I thought of Harpo. “Can some keep it going longer?”

My father shrugged. “Dubious. These pipelines are hard to maintain.” He showed no concern at mixing his metaphor: “It’s a high-wire act.”

“What about a terrible losing streak?”

“Those guys are on the pipeline too. Only the flow is in reverse. Their hunches are one hundred and eighty degrees wrong.”

“Maybe it’s just the law of averages.”

“The law of averages,” he said with disgust, “has done more to mess up people’s minds than any idea I know. It’s horse manure. The pipeline is either feeding you or it’s tricking you. Greedy people get fucked by the pipeline.”

“What if your bets turn out fifty-fifty?”

“Then you’re nowhere near the pipeline. You’re a computer. Look in the papers. The computer predictions end up at .500.”

“All right,” I said, “that’s prediction. What I really want to talk about is coincidence.”

He looked troubled. I got up and freshened our drinks. “Put a lot of water in mine,” he said.

“Coincidence,” I said. “What do you make of it?”

“I’ve been doing the talking,” he said. “You tell me.”

“Well,” I said, “I think it’s not unlike the pipeline. Only it’s a network. I believe we receive traces of everyone’s thoughts. We’re not aware of it usually, but we do.”

“Wait a minute. You’re saying people are able to send and receive wireless messages? Telepathy? Without knowing it?”

“Whatever you want to call it.”

“Well,” he said, “for the sake of argument, why not?”

“Once,” I said, “I was up in Fairbanks, Alaska, and you could feel it. There was a network.”

“Yes,” he said, “near magnetic north. What were you doing in Fairbanks?”

“A scam. Nothing significant.” Actually, I had gone up on a cocaine run after Madeleine and I had split. It was in the month before I got busted on a quick trip to Florida for the same deed. Selling two kilos of cocaine. Only the services of a lawyer well paid for his powers of plea bargaining got it down to three years (with parole).

“I had a ruckus one night with a guy in Fairbanks,” I told him. “He was bad news. In the morning when I woke up, I saw his face in my thoughts. His expression was ugly. Then the phone rang. It was the same fellow. His voice sounded as ugly as his face. He wanted a meet with me late that afternoon. All day I kept running into people I had seen the night before, and not once was I surprised by their expression. They looked angry or happy in just the way I expected them to look. It was as precise as a dream. At the end of the day I met with the heavy. But now I was no longer uptight about it. Because, as the afternoon went on, I could see him clearly in my thoughts and he was looking wasted. Sure enough, when I met up with him, that’s how he was, a bigger coward than me.”

My father chuckled.

“I tell you, Dougy,” I said, “I think everybody in Alaska drinks so they can shut themselves out from living in everybody else’s head.”

He nodded. “Northern climes. Ireland. Scandinavia. Russia. Drunk like skunks.” He shrugged. “I still don’t see what this has to do with your argument.”

“I’m saying people don’t want to live in each other’s heads. It’s too scary. It’s too animal. Coincidence is the sign that they’re approaching such a state.”

“What kicks it off?” Dougy asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said. I took a breath. Everything considered, there were worse matters to contend with than my father’s scorn. “I think that when something big and unexpected is about to happen, people come out of their daily static. Their thoughts start pulling toward one another. It’s as if an impending event creates a vacuum, and we start to go toward it. Startling coincidences pile up at a crazy rate. It’s like a natural phenomenon.”

I could almost feel him brooding over his own past. Had he lived through experiences to compare with this on the morning he was shot? “What kind of impending events do you mean?” he asked.

“Evil events.”

He was being cautious. “What kind of evil events?”

“Murder, for one.”

He pondered what I said. Then he shook his head as if to say, “I do not like your input.” He looked at me. “Tim,” he said, “do you remember the bartender’s guide?”

In my turn, I nodded. When I started my first job as a bartender, he had given me a schedule. “Son,” he had said, “keep this in mind. In New York, on the streets, it’s Peeping Toms from twelve A.M. to one A.M., fires from one to two, stickups two to three, bar fights three to four, suicides four to five, and auto accidents from five A.M. to six A.M.” I had kept it in my head like a typed schedule. It had proved useful.

“Nothing special about murders,” he now said.

“I’m not talking about New York,” I said, “but here.”

“You’re saying a murder in this place is an extraordinary event?” I could see him all but measuring the cold damp of Cape Cod air against the blood and steam of the act. “Yeah,” he said, “all right, I’ll grant the point.” He looked not altogether happy. “What’s the purpose of this discussion?”

“I’m tangled up in coincidences,” I said.

“Well, by your line of reasoning, you must be close to something bad,” he said.

“I’m closer than that.”

He took the pause.

“There was a suicide last week,” I said, “although the man may have been killed. I believe I stole his woman the night it happened.” The most curious thought came to me next: because my father had cancer, whatever I told him would never touch the air for others. That might be one of the virtues of his cancer. He could receive messages like a tomb and never send them out again. Was my father now on the other side of the spirits from all of us?

“There’s more to tell than that,” I said. “It’s not public knowledge as yet, but two women have been killed in this town in the last week.”

“My Lord,” he said. That was a lot of news, even for him. “Who did it?”

“I don’t know. I have a few ideas, but I’m not certain.”

“Have you seen the victims? Are you sure of your facts?”

I hated to reply. As long as I said no more, we might still cling to the premise that we were drinking in the kitchen: we could surround his visit with lulling recollections of other boozy meanderings through the uncharted spaces of philosophy. But by my next remark, we would both be brought up dripping, sober, and on another beach.

I suppose I took so long to reply that my father repeated the question. “Have you seen the victims?”

“Yes,” I said. “They’re in the cellar.”

“Oh, criminey!” His tumbler was empty. I saw his hand go for the bourbon bottle and then withdraw. Instead, he turned his glass upside down. “Tim, you do it?” he asked.

“No.” I couldn’t refuse my own liquor. I swallowed what was left in my glass. “I don’t think I did,” I said, “but I can’t be certain.”

So we got into it. Bit by bit, detail by detail, I told him more and more of what I could remember of each of these days after the night I went to The Widow’s Walk, and when I soon confessed (for confession is indeed how it felt) that Patty Lareine was one of the two women dead, my father gave one groan of the sort you might utter if you fell from a window to be impaled on a spike.

Yet I cannot say he looked terrible. The fierce pink flush, which had been restricted to his cheekbones and left the rest of his face pale compared to his once red color, now spread a flush to Dougy’s forehead and chin. That provided the illusion he was less ill than before. Indeed, I think he was. No matter his antipathy to cops, he looked so much like one himself—Captain of the Precinct or Lieutenant of Detectives would have been seized on instantly by any casting director—that willy-nilly he found himself playing the role for a good part of his life. I have to say on the strength of his questions, he was no mean interrogator.

Finally I came to a halt in my account (although in the telling we passed from morning to afternoon, made a few sandwiches and drank a little beer). He said at last, “There are two questions that keep me from seeing straight on this. One is whether you are innocent or guilty. I find it hard to believe the first, but then, you’re my son.” He stopped and scowled, and said, “I mean, I find it hard to believe the second—that you’re guilty.”

“What you’re saying,” I told him, “is that I could have done it. You said it! The reason is: You are capable of murder. In fact, maybe you did pull off one or two in the union days.”

Dougy gave no reply to that. Instead he said, “Good people kill for duty, or for honor. Not for money. A sleazo kills for money. A coked-up greed bag slays for money. But not you. Do you stand to benefit from her will?”

“I have no idea.”

“If her will leaves you real money, you’re in a load of trouble.”

“She may have had no money left. She was always secretive about how much was there. I suspect Patty Lareine made some terrible investments in the last couple of years. We could be broke.”

“I sure hope so,” he said. Then he laid his frozen blue eyes on me. “The problem is in the manner of those killings. That’s my second question. Why? Why would someone decapitate those two women? If you did it, then you and me, Tim, have to pack it in, I figure. Our seed has got to be too hideous to continue.”

“You speak calmly about such matters.”

“That’s because I don’t believe you’re capable of such an atrocity. I mention it only as an option. Set the record straight.”

His monumental sense of always knowing the right thing to do irritated me in the most peculiar fashion. It was as if we were not speaking of ultimate matters so much as having a family spat. Ideological divergences. Kill the son of a bitch, says Dougy Madden. No, says the son, put him in a home for the mentally ill. I wanted to shake my father.

“I am capable of such atrocities,” I said to him. “I can tell you. I know that. I’m prey to the spirits. If I did do it, I was in some kind of coma. I would have been carried to it by the spirits.”

Big Mac gave me a look full of distaste. “Half the killers in this world make that claim. Fuck ’em all, I say. What does it matter if they’re telling the truth? They’re just a lightning rod for all the shit that other people are putting on the air. So they’re too dangerous to have around.” He shook his head. “You want to know my real feelings? I’m hoping and praying you didn’t do it because, in fact, I couldn’t off you. I couldn’t even turn you in.”

“You’re playing with me. First it’s one option, then the other.”

“You damn fool,” he said, “I’m trying to find my own head.”

“Have a drink,” I said and spilled a little more bourbon down my throat.

“Yes,” he said, ignoring me, “the second big question takes care of the first. Why would anyone perform a decapitation? All you do is avoid a maximum prison in order to get a maximum mental hospital. You can even bring capital punishment on yourself by the hideousness of the crime—at least if they hang you in this state. So you’d have to be nuts. I don’t believe you are.”

“Thank you,” I said, “but I don’t believe the killer is nuts either.”

“Why would anybody sane cut off the head?” he repeated. “There’s only one good reason. To entrap you.” Now he beamed like a physicist who has found his hypothesis. “Is the burrow in your marijuana patch large enough to hold an entire body?”

“Not unless the footlocker is removed.”

“Could it hold two bodies?”

“Never.”

“The decapitation may have been reasoned-out. There are people capable of anything once they decide it gives them a practical advantage.”

“You’re saying …”

But he was not about to relinquish the fruits of his thinking process to me. “Yeah, I’m saying those heads were cut off so they’d fit your burrow. Somebody wants you to take the fall.”

“It’s got to be one of two people,” I said.

“Probably,” he said, “but I can think of a few others.” Now he tapped the table with his middle fingers. “Were the women shot in the head?” he asked. “Can you see from the heads how they were killed?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t study them.”

“What about their necks?”

“I couldn’t look at that.”

“So you don’t know if the beheading was done by a hacksaw, a knife, or whatever.”

“No.”

“Don’t you think you ought to find out?”

“I can’t disturb them any more.”

“Tim, it’s got to be established. For our own sakes.”

I felt ten years old and ready to blubber. “Dad,” I said, “I can’t look at them. It’s my wife, for God’s sakes.”

He took that in. The heat of the chase had made him oblivious to much.

“Okay,” he said at last, “I’ll go down and take a look.”

While he was gone I went to the bathroom and threw up. I wish I could have wept instead. Now that I was alone and no longer had the fear of breaking down in front of my father, there were no tears. Instead, I took a shower, put my clothes back on, splashed my face with after-shave lotion and went back to the kitchen. He was there and looking pale. All of the flush was gone. His cuffs were damp and I realized he must have washed up at the cellar sink.

“The one who’s not your wife …” he began.

“Jessica,” I said. “Oakwode. Laurel Oakwode.”

“Yeah,” he said, “that one. She was decapitated with a sword. Or maybe it was a machete. One big stroke. Patty is a different business. Somebody who didn’t know how to do it sawed her head off with a knife.”

“Are you certain?”

“Want to look for yourself?”

“No.”

I saw it anyway. I do not know whether it was in my imagination or a true glimpse of his retina, but I saw Jessica’s throat. There was a straight slash across, and the nearest flesh was bruised by the weight of the blow.

Patty’s neck I did not have to visualize. I would not forget a red jungle.

My father opened his hand. The fragment of a spent bullet was in it. “That’s from Oakwode,” he said. “I can’t get the rest without making a mess in your cellar but I’ve seen stuff like this before. It comes from a .22 with a hollow tip. That’s what I’d say. It spreads on contact. In the brain, one .22 can do all the work. Probably with a silencer.”

“Fired into her mouth?”

“Yes,” he said. “Her lips look bruised, like somebody forced her to open her mouth. Maybe with the gun muzzle. You can still see the powder burns on her upper palate where the entrance hole is. Small enough. Just right for a .22. No exit wound. I was able to fish this much out.” He pointed to the bullet fragment.

Tough guys don’t dance. You had better believe it. Fish this much out. My knees were quivering and I had to put both hands on the glass to get the bourbon to my lips. I found that I was not ready to ask about Patty.

He told me all the same. “There are no marks, entrance wounds or bruises on her face and scalp. I would assume she was shot in the heart and died quick.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Just a guess. I don’t know. It could have been a knife. Her head tells me nothing but who she is.” He frowned as if forgetting a most important detail. “No—it tells me one more thing. You would need a coroner to be sure, but I would guess that your wife,”—now he could not say Patty Lareine either—“was killed twenty-four to forty-eight hours later than the other woman.”

“Well, we’ll find out,” I said.

“No,” he said, “we will never know.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Tim,” he said, “we have to dispose of these heads.” He held up his hand to forestall me. “I know the price,” he said.

“We’ll never be able to find out who did it,” I blurted.

“We’ll determine that, I think. We just won’t be able to prove it.” The flush was coming back to his face. “If you want satisfaction, we’ll have to look for other means.”

I let that pass for now.

“Follow my reasoning,” he said. “I figure there’s more than one executioner. People who use machetes don’t fuck with knives.”

“People who use machetes don’t usually have .22s with special bullets and silencers.”

“I have to think about that,” he said.

We were silent. I was doing very little thinking myself. A numbness was settling through my limbs as if I had been walking for many hours through the November woods and had just stopped to rest.

“Here’s what I am clear on,” he said. “Somebody chose to use your marijuana stash to hide Jessica’s head. That implicates you so deeply you still can’t say you didn’t do it. Then the head is removed. Why?” He held up both fists as if he were steering a car. “Because somebody has decided to kill Patty. This person wants to be certain both heads will be found there later. He doesn’t want you or the first killer going back to destroy the evidence. Or suppose you panic. You might reveal it to the authorities. Therefore, this second person, he takes the head.”

“Or she,” I said, “takes the head.”

“Or she,” said my father, “although I don’t know what you mean by that.” When I said nothing further—I had spoken out of impulse—he said, “Yes, I figure two principals. The one who killed Jessica, and the one about to kill Patty. The first puts the head there to implicate you. The second removes it so that both can be put back later. At which time, or soon after, you will have to take the onus for both crimes.”

“You’re assuming an awful lot,” I said.

“When people do these things,” my father said, “they believe they are viewing the scene clearly even if all they’re doing is dropping one more ingredient into the soup.”

“Who’s the cook?” I asked.

“Wardley, for one. He could have known Patty was dead all the while he was talking to you. He could have done it, and been setting you up.”

“I don’t see how.”

“He has a low opinion of you. I don’t blame him. Maybe he heard Jessica’s head was now floating around, and he supposed you knew where it was. So he decided to ask, instead, for Patty’s head. He figured you’d try to pass Jessica off as Patty. Then he’d have what he wanted—both heads.”

“Can you stop repeating that word?”

“Heads?”

“It’s getting to me.”

“There’s no substitute for it.”

“Just use their names.”

“Until we find their bodies, it’s misleading.”

“Just use their names,” I repeated.

“Hey,” he said. “You’re as fancy as your mother.”

“I don’t care if my great-grandparents cut peat in Irish bogs every stinking day of their lives, I’m, yes, I’m as fancy as my mother.”

“Ho, ho,” he said, “score one for her side. May she rest in peace.” He belched. The bourbon, the beer and his illness were working on him together. “Pass the bottle,” he said.

“You’re assuming too much,” I said. “Why wouldn’t Wardley know where Jessica was? If Regency did, Wardley would. Spider is their go-between.”

“Let’s say they’re crossing each other up a little. It’s amazing what people know and don’t know in such situations.” He tapped the table with his knuckles. “I say Wardley didn’t know where Jessica was, and wanted you to bring her to him.”

“I think Wardley had put them both in the burrow already. Keep to the given. Spider and Stoodie were following me. Wasn’t that so they could be there when I went back to the burrow? To grab me just as I’m coming out with the heads? They would have been the foulest scumbags ever to make a citizen’s arrest.”

That impressed him. My father’s brow gave his assent. “It rings true,” he said. “They think you’re going to the burrow, but the beeper tells them you’ve stopped. No wonder they go apeshit when you come back.”

“I think we have a case against Wardley,” I said.

“Concerning Patty, you have the beginnings of a real possibility. But who killed Jessica?”

“Maybe Wardley did that also.”

“He would enjoy using a .22 with a silencer. But do you see Mr. Hilby with a machete?”

“How about Stoodie?”

“Maybe.”

“Who are you thinking of?” I asked.

In how many conversations across his bar had my father served as surrogate private detective, acting criminal lawyer or honorary appeals court judge? He brought his hand to the corner of his mouth as if debating whether to peel the truth from his lips like an adhesive plaster.

Now he removed his hand. “I don’t like this Regency,” he said. “Not the way you describe him. He could be the fellow.”

“Do you think he killed Jessica?”

“He could use a high-powered .22 handgun and a machete. He’s the only one who could. You told me about his house. He’s a weapons freak. He probably has flamethrowers in the basement. He would study how to kill you by putting a bamboo spear with poison on its tip in your path. I have met the type. ‘When it comes to weapons,’ they say, ‘I know them all. I’m a Renaissance man.’ ”

“Yeah, but you hate cops.”

“You bet I do. Only, some are less unreliable than others. This guy’s a prairie wolf. A professional soldier who becomes a cop! I read him for a narc all the way. He’s no Acting Chief of Police. That’s a cover. He’s a troubleshooter for the Drug Enforcement Administration, and I’ll bet, back at the agency, they’re scared of him. They pee in their pants when he’s around.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“I know cops better than you do. For how many years did I have to pay off the Mafia on Wednesday night and the police on Thursday? I know cops. I know their psychology. Why do you think a high-powered gung ho like Regency has been buried on Cape Cod?”

“It’s a big narcotics center.”

“Nothing next to Florida. They could really use him there. They’re fobbing him off. You have to understand police psychology. No cop likes to work with a fellow professional who makes him uneasy. You can’t give orders that are resented, or you make an enemy. A guy with a legal weapon has too many opportunities to shoot you in the back. So when cops have to put up with a crazy, they don’t try to fire him. They fob him off. Make him Head-of-the-Universe in Twin Acres, Montana. Pee-town, Mass. No,” he concluded, “I don’t like Regency one bit. That’s why we’re going to dispose of the heads.”

I started to argue with him, but he kept cutting me off. “If those plastic bags are found in your cellar,” he said, “there is no way out of it for you. You’re a sitting duck. And if you try to remove them, it’s worse. The moment they see you getting into your car, they’ll follow you.”

“I’ve got to bury my wife.”

“No, you don’t. I’ll do it. I’ll take your boat and your fishing gear and two tackle boxes. Do you have an extra anchor on board?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll use the one that’s there. For Patty and Jessica both.”

Now it was my turn to say “Oh, criminey!”

“Hey,” said Dougy, “you look at me and see a crude man. I look at you and see a sitting duck.”

“I have to go with you. It’s the least I can do.”

“If I set out alone, it’s just an old gink fishing. They won’t look twice. But you! They’ll see you there. They’ll alert the Coast Guard. What’s your story when they find the two ladies on board complete but for their bodies? ‘Oh,’ you’ll say, ‘I found them. Voices told me where to look.’ ‘Yeah,’ they’ll say, ‘you’re Joan of Arc. Next case.’ ” He shook his head. “This, Tim-Boy, is where you firm up. I’ll be gone a few hours. Why don’t you, in the interim, make a few phone calls.”

“To whom?”

“Try the airport. Maybe you can find out when Jessica arrived.”

“She and Lonnie came by car.”

“How do you know that was her first night in town? Or his?”

I shrugged. I didn’t.

“Find out,” he said, “who the real estate agent is.”

When he went down to the cellar, however, I stayed immobile in my chair. I would not have moved if he had not called up the cellar stairs, “Tim, I’m ready to row the dinghy out to your boat. Go for a walk. I want to get them away from the house.”

I saw spirits and he saw real people. All right. He was taking the chances, and the least I could do was walk.

I put on a parka, and went out the front door and down Commercial Street in the deserted afternoon sunlight, but I could not keep on the street for too long. It was a silent day, quiet as the sunlight that came down in fluted pillars through the gray banks overhead, and I knew there would be a play of brights and shadows on the beach. Just when I was certain I heard the motor starting on our twenty-foot Whaler (Patty’s boat) I turned into an empty beach lot and onto the sand and, yes, there on the water, the dinghy left behind at the mooring, and all but alone in the harbor, no Coast Guard in sight and only a couple of fishing boats coming into Town Wharf, was my father heading the Whaler out to the bay, and I took a breath and returned with my aching foot over the sand.

Back in the house, surprisingly refreshed by this walk, I decided, by way of Dougy’s suggestion, to make those phone calls. I tried the airport first and had a piece of good fortune. The girl at the ticket desk was a drinking friend, and she was on duty. So I could ask if Jessica Pond or Laurel Oakwode and/or Lonnie Pangborn had been in or out of Provincetown in the last few weeks. A few minutes later she called me back: Jessica Pond came in on an afternoon flight fifteen days ago. She left nine days ago on the first morning plane. The airline booked her return ticket from Provincetown to Boston to San Francisco to Santa Barbara. Nobody named Pangborn had come in or out. However, the girl recalled she was at the desk on the morning the Pond passenger left, and Chief Regency brought her to the airport. “ ‘Take good care of this lady,’ he told me,” said the girl.

“Did he and she look friendly?” I asked.

“Tim, I was too hung-over to take a look.” She deliberated. “I guess there was some oovie-groovie going on.”

Well, that opened the possibilities. If Jessica Pond had been here for a week alone, then flew to Santa Barbara and came back, the question became: Was she working with Pangborn for Wardley or was she working for herself?

I called the real estate agent in town whom I knew best. She could, however, give me no more than the name of the Boston lawyer who represented the Paramessides estate. As far as she knew, the property was not for sale. When I rang the lawyer’s office, I gave my name as Lonnie Oakwode. When the lawyer came on, I said, “Mr. Thwaite, my mother, Mrs. Oakwode, had to go over to Europe to take care of an urgent matter but asked me to contact you.”

“Well, I’m glad you called. We’ve all been standing on tiptoe the last few days. Your mother was supposed to be here with a certified check.”

“Yes, I know,” I said.

“Good. Give her a message for me. I’m a bit concerned that the price is going to be given an adjustment upward. Or will be if we don’t hear from her. I can’t hold the fort on short rations, you see. A promise is a promise, but we’ve got to have her check. Another party put in a bid last week.”

“I’ll get to her quickly.”

“You must. It’s always like that. Years go by and an estate gets back nothing from the property but penalties and taxes. Then everybody wants it all at once, and in the same business week.” He coughed.

“Mr. Thwaite, she’ll get back to you.”

“Hope so. Lovely woman, your mother.”

“I’ll tell her.”

I hung up quickly. I was playing her son with much too little knowledge to stay on the line for long.

Still, my guess had been given some confirmation. Laurel Oakwode must have been planning to acquire the property for herself. Was it to hold up Wardley and, thereby, Patty Lareine?

I posed the question: What would Patty Lareine do to a woman who tried such a maneuver?

“She would kill” was the unmistakable reply that came back to me.

In that case, if Patty Lareine had done it, and with a .22 silencer, why did Regency behead the victim? Was it to leave the most recognizable part of her on my plot of marijuana? Did Patty Lareine hate me to that extent, or did Regency?

He did, I decided. It was Regency who had suggested I should go to the patch.

I got up from the phone with more clarity, more anger and more sense of purpose than I had felt in a while. Was it possible I had a hint of my father’s moxie? I am obliged to believe that optimism is my most dangerous inclination. For now I had an impulse to look at the nude Polaroids I had taken years ago of Madeleine and more recently of Patty Lareine. What a curious desire. To think of obscene Polaroids at just the moment one is feeling encouraged by signs of character in oneself. Let no one say I have a classic personality.

I went upstairs, and sequestered in a file box, was an envelope with the pictures. There were three of Patty and two of Madeleine. All, I fear, had their legs sufficiently separated to show the Luciferean gleam of their nether soul, yes, the labia were well exposed. Now, however, there were ten pieces of glossy paper in the envelope. All the heads had been neatly snipped from the bodies.

Do you know, I believe that was the moment when my father, having used baling wire to fasten the two heads to the links of the anchor chain, had chosen—out where he was in deep water—to drop his grisly assemblage overboard. I know I was immediately laid low by an attack from Hell-Town. It was the most prodigious bombardment I ever received.

“Fuck-face, foul and moldy,” shrieked the first voice. “Sieg heil to the ghoul, fool,” said the second.

“It’s Timmy Light-Fingers, smash his yeggs.”

“Maim the bloody sandbagger. Open the moon cancer full of pus.”

“Hey, Timmy, sniff the rot, burn the snot.”

“You’re a raider, you’re a depredator, you traitor.”

“Bring him in—he stole my house.”

“You ravisher, you floated across on my bed.”

“Disembowel the pikeman. Masticate his prick.”

“He and his dad did the job. Crazy kooks. Cockeyed killers.”

“You murdered Jessica!” came the howl in my ear.

“Dougy killed Patty!” screamed the harpy in the other ear.

“Why? Why did we kill?” I asked aloud.

“Oh, darling boy, Dad is looking for his cure. That’s the cure. Sniff the blood.”

“That’s him,” I said aloud, “but what of me?”

“You’re sick as well, you swagman. You’re under our spell.”

“Go away, you whores!” I shouted.

Standing alone in the rosy-gray air of twilight in that third-floor study, my eyes out to sea, my ears in the sands of Hell-Town, and my feet, for all I knew, on the floor of the bay, I saw in my mind how the heads, blonde hair waving, descended like sea flowers tied to the stem of the chain and the root of the anchor. Down they went through palisades of water to the bottom of the sea, and I believe I knew the moment when the anchor touched, for the voices ceased. Had their cries in my ear been a welcome to the head of Patty Lareine? I stood soaked in my own perspiration.

Now my limbs began to tremble freely of one another. Parts of my body were shivering while the rest was still, an experience I had not had before. It was then I felt an idea coming forward to the center of my attention, pressing into my spirit against all resistance, as if the thought and I were on opposite sides of a door. Then I could hold it off no longer: I had to examine my pistol (Patty’s pistol). It was a .22.

How implausible this sounds, but, do you know, for the last five days I had succeeded somehow in avoiding the thought. Now, however, the subpoena was served: I had to examine the .22.

It was where it had always been, there in a cabinet on her side of the bedroom. It was sitting in its case. The lid once raised, the box reeked. Someone had fired it recently and put it back uncleaned. Was it myself? The casing had been ejected from the chamber and there was a round missing from the magazine.

I did not feel guilty. I was angry. The nearer the evidence, the more furious I became. The pistol was particularly infuriating, as if I were a criminal lawyer presented with one more nasty witness inserted without fair notice; yes, I felt innocent and full of anger. How dare they? Whoever they were. What was being done to tear my mind from its hinges? How curious that the more likely it would seem to others—including my father—that I had killed at least one of these women, the more certain it seemed to me that I had not.

The telephone was ringing.

I took it for a sign that it was Madeleine.

“Thank God, it’s you, darling,” she said and began to weep.

That rich and husky voice had dimensions for expressing misery. Her emotion soon opened into those deeps of sorrow that speak of the loss of years of love, and hot vows of fucking in the wrong bed. “Oh, baby,” she managed to say, “Oh, darling,” and was off again. I could have been listening to the wails of a woman who had just learned she was a widow.

“Darling,” she said at last, “I thought you were dead. I had a chill in my heart.” She started to wail again. “I was so afraid no one would answer your phone.”

“What is it?”

“Tim, don’t go out. Lock your door.”

I could not remember a time when she had wept so terribly as this. “What’s the matter?” I begged.

Slowly it came from her. Phrase by phrase. Every few words were followed by her woe, her fear, her outrage. Now there were moments when I did not know if she failed to speak from horror or fury.

She had found some photographs. That was clear at last. She had been putting fresh laundry in his drawers and came across a locked box she had not seen before. It had enraged her that he kept a locked box in their bedroom. If he had secrets, why didn’t he hide them in the cellar? So she smashed the box.

How her terror keened into me. Over the phone, I could hear her trembling.

“Madeleine, no,” I said, “speak clearly. You must speak clearly. Who is in these photographs?”

“Patty Lareine,” she said. “They’re of Patty Lareine. They’re nude. They’re obscene.” She began to choke on her words. “They’re worse than the ones you took of me. I don’t know if I can bear it. The moment I saw those pictures, I thought you were dead.”

“Am I in them?”

“No.”

“Then why did you have such a thought?”

Her weeping changed. It was not unlike the whimpering of a young girl who has been thrown from a horse and now must, no matter the shock, sheer panic and bottomless fright, get back on again. So did Madeleine force herself to see the photos in her mind. Then she said, “Darling, he cut the head off every one of them.”

“You better get out of that house,” I told her.

“I believe he’s decided to kill you.”

“Madeleine, get out of your place. It’s more unsafe for you than for me.”

“I’d like to burn his house,” she said. Then she began to giggle. That was more upsetting than her grief. “I can’t, though. I might burn the neighbors down.”

“You would.”

“But think of his face when those guns melted.”

“Listen to me carefully. Does he have a machete in his collection?”

“Several,” she said. “And swords. Only he uses a pair of scissors.” She began to giggle once more.

“Do you see any swords missing?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t keep up with his collection.”

“Could you recognize a .22 handgun?”

“Is that a pistol?”

“Yes.”

“He’s got all kinds of pistols.”

I let it go.

“Madeleine, I want you to join me here.”

“I don’t know if I can move. I ripped up a few gowns he bought for me. It’s left me paralyzed.”

“Hey,” I said, “you can do it. You can make the move.”

“No,” she said. “Nothing works right now.”

“Madeleine, if you won’t come, I’ll drive down to get you.”

“Don’t,” she said. “With his timing, he’ll walk in on us.”

“Then pack your bags and get in your car.”

“I don’t want to drive,” she said. “I’ve been up all night. I haven’t slept since you were here.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you,” she said.

“All right,” I said.

“All right, what?”

“I can understand that,” I said.

“Sure,” she said. “Both of us loving you. That’s not hard to understand.” She actually stirred out of her woe long enough to give one suspicion of a merry laugh. “You’re a fiend,” she said. “Only a fiend could hit a happy note at a time like this.”

“If you don’t want to drive,” I said, “call a cab. Take it to Provincetown.”

“Take a cab fifty miles? No,” she said, “I won’t support the cab companies.” Yes, she still had her dependable thrifty streak.

“I need you,” I told her. “I think Patty Lareine is dead.”

“You think?”

“I know it.”

“You saw her?”

“I know it.”

“All right,” she said after a time, “I’ll come. If you need me, I’ll come.”

“I need you,” I said.

“What if he shows up?”

“Let’s face him here.”

“I don’t want to see that man anywhere,” she said.

“Maybe he’s afraid of you too.”

“You better believe,” said Madeleine, “that he is afraid of me. Before he left the house this morning, I told him not to turn his back. I said, ‘If it takes ten years, you filthy horror, I’m going to shoot you from behind.’ He believed it. I could see his face. He would believe something like that.”

“I’d believe it more,” I said, “if you knew what a .22 was.”

“Oh,” she said, “please don’t understand me too quickly.”

“Who said that?” I asked.

“André Gide.”

“André Gide? You never read him.”

“Don’t tell anybody,” she said.

“Take your car. You can do it.”

“I’ll get there. Maybe I’ll call a cab. But I’ll get there.” She asked for the address and was fortified when I told her my father would be with us.

“There’s a man I could live with,” she said and hung up.

I calculated that it should take her no more than an hour to pack, and an hour to drive here. Madeleine’s habits, however, being likely to remain constant over ten years, I could count on waiting four to five hours before she showed. Again, I wondered whether I should drive out for her and decided I wouldn’t. We would be stronger here.

Now I heard the rattle of the dinghy being hauled up the davits, then the heavy tread of my father on the deck. He went around, however, to the front door of the house and let himself in with the key Patty Lareine gave him years ago when he first visited us.

Patty Lareine was dead.

This thought, which kept arriving in my mind like a telegram delivered every fifteen minutes, still had nothing to offer but its integument. It was like the envelope to a telegram that has no message inside. Certainly no emotion. Yes, Madeleine, I said to myself, I could get crazy about you, but not now.

My father came into the kitchen. I took one look at him and poured some bourbon into a glass, and put the water on to boil for coffee. He looked as tired as I had ever seen him. Yet the flush on his cheekbones was still spread across his face. He also looked virtuous.

“You did a good job,” I said.

“Pretty good.” He squinted at me like an old fisherman. “You know, I was three miles out in the bay before I realized they might be following me with field glasses or worse. Maybe they even had a surveyor’s transit. If they get two of those on you, they can take a finding on where you drop it off. Then they send a diver down. Nothing to it. So I realized I better drop my package while I’m moving at medium throttle, and make sure I do it casual on the side of the boat away from shore. That way my body covers what I’m doing. I’m sure it was all for nothing,” he said, “and nobody was watching. That’s the likelihood. But that’s not how I felt then.”

The coffee was ready. I handed it to him. He poured it down his throat as if he were an old diesel taking in fuel. “Just at the moment I was about to drop it off,” he resumed, “I started to worry if the baling wire would hold. You know, getting those heads onto the chain was the toughest part of the job.” He went into detail. Like an obstetrician describing how he got two fingers in to turn the baby’s head out of breech, or, yes, like an old fisherman taking you along step by step on how to bait a hook so that the wriggler stays alive, he accompanied his account with motions of his hand. I followed enough of it to realize that the operation had carried him through the socket of one eye and out through a hole he had driven in the skull with a spike. It left me startled again at how little I knew my father. He gave his account with a ruminative relish like a man who works for the Department of Sanitation giving a recital of the worst barrel he has collected in an interesting work career, and it was only when he was done that I could recognize why he had enjoyed the account. There was some kind of cure in process. Do not ask me to certify my statement. But there was a smug complacency in my father’s air as if he were a convalescent who was getting better by disregarding doctor’s orders.

Then he startled me. “Did you feel anything unusual,” he asked, “while I was gone?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I wasn’t going to tell you,” he said, “but when I dropped the anchor I heard a voice.”

“What did it say?”

He shook his head.

“What did you hear?”

“I heard you did it.”

“You believe such voices?”

“Considering the circumstances—no. But I’d like to hear you say so.”

“I didn’t do it,” I said. “As far as I know, I didn’t do it. I’m beginning to think, however, that I’m responsible in some way for the minds of all the others.” When I saw that he did not really follow me, I said, “It’s as if I was polluting the pipeline.”

“I don’t care if you’re only half Irish,” he said. “You’re certainly degenerate enough in your mentality to be all Irish.”

“Shove the abuse,” I said.

He took another sip from his coffee.

“Tell me about Bolo Green,” he said.

“I can’t keep up with you,” I told him.

Our conversation was taking on the slippery frustrations of a dream. I felt close to some elusive truth and he wanted to talk about Bolo Green.

He certainly did. “All the while,” he said, “that I was bringing the boat back, this Bolo Green kept coming into my head. I felt as if Patty was telling me to think about him.” He stopped. “Am I being a sentimental son of a bitch about Patty?”

“Maybe you’re a little drunk.”

“I’m getting a lot drunk,” he said, “and I miss her. I tell myself—you want to see how crude I am deep down?—I tell myself, if you put a weight on an old dog and sink him at sea, you’re going to miss the dog. Is that crude enough for you?”

“You said it.”

“It’s gross. But I miss her. I buried her, god-damnit.”

“Yes, Dad, you did.”

“You didn’t have the balls to do it.” He stopped. “I’m getting unreasonable, aren’t I?”

“What’s the good of being a Mick if you can’t welcome senility?”

He roared. “I love you!” he cried out.

“I love you.”

“Tell me about Bolo.”

“What do you think?”

“I think he’s part queer,” said Dougy.

“What’s your evidence?”

He shrugged. “Patty. Patty told me on the water.”

“Why don’t you take a nap,” I said. “We may need each other later.”

“What are you up to?”

“I want to do a little snooping around town.”

“Stay alert,” he said.

“Get your rest. If Regency comes around, talk to him nicely. When he’s not looking, hit him over the head with a shovel, then tie him up.”

“Too bad you ain’t serious,” my father said.

“Give him a wide berth. He may be able to hold his own against both of us.”

I could read my father’s thought, but he pinched his lips together and said nothing.

“Get some sleep,” I told him, and left.

I had been casual but, truly, I was not in hailing distance of such a state. An outsize stimulation had begun as soon as I said, “I’m responsible for the minds of others.” A recognition stirred that I must get into my car and drive around town. The impulse was as powerful as the force that came through my drunkenness on the night I tried to climb the Monument. I knew the same fear, delicate, near to exquisite in my chest, like the shadow of one’s finest pride.

I obeyed. I had not spent close to twenty years contemplating the lessons of my climb up the tower for too little—no, with as much marching grace as my bunged-up toe and half-paralyzed shoulder would permit I crossed the street, got into my Porsche and drove slowly with one arm on the wheel down Commercial Street, not knowing what I looked for, nor whether feats would be demanded of me, no, it was something like the excitement, I must suppose, of an African hunter when big animals are near.

The town was quiet. The town bore no relation to my mood. In the center The Brig was half empty, and through the windows of The Bucket of Blood I could see only one pool player contemplating his next shot. He looked as lonely as the waiter Van Gogh once painted standing in the middle of the café at Arles.

I took a turn to the right at Town Hall and parked across the street from the basement entrance to the police station. Regency’s car was outside, standing double-parked and empty. The motor was running.

Then came a temptation clear as the mandate to mount the tower. It told me to step out of my car, walk over to his, turn off the motor, take his keys, open his trunk, look inside—speak of creative visualization, I saw the machete in the trunk!—remove it, lock the trunk, put the keys back in the ignition, start the motor, leave his car and stroll back to my Porsche and a good exit, yes, I saw all of this in advance and as vividly as any trip to the burrow I had thought out for myself before I went. Now my first reaction was yes, do it! My second was no.

It was then I understood, as never before, that we live with not one soul but two, our father and our mother—at the least!—the night and the day, if you will; well, this is no exposition of dualities, but two souls I possessed that were equal to two matched horses—badly matched!—if one said yes, the other said no, and the poor driver was nothing but my own person who now cast the deciding vote: Yes, I would do it, I had to. I could not live through the debacle of the Monument one more time.

So I got out of my car. To my misery, the side street was deserted, thereby giving me no excuse to delay, and with an exaggerated hobble (as if a maimed man could do less harm in the eyes of the police) I crossed to his car, my heart beating at such a pitch that fear passed right through vertigo into the delirium of intoxication itself. Have you ever taken an anesthetic through a mask and seen the concentric circles bore in upon your brain as you go under? I saw them now as I took the keys from his car.

“Oh, hullo, Regency,” I said. “Hope you don’t mind. I need a tire iron from your trunk.”

“Oh, yes, I mind,” said he and drew his gun and shot me.

That passed. The vision passed. Toes tingling, hand shaking, I got the key into the lock of his trunk.

The machete was there.

In that instant when my heart spun like a cat on a high power line and I thought I would die, I knew some far-off chord of exultation and woe: He exists, or It exists, or They are out there. It was confirmation that the life we live with all our wit and zeal is only half our life. The other half belongs to something other.

My first impulse was to run. Instead, I pried the machete from the floor of the trunk—it was stuck to it!—slammed down the rear deck of the police cruiser, forced myself (it was the most demanding measure in the sequence) to get inside his vehicle long enough to start his motor again and only then was I free to cross the street to my own car. Under way, the steering wheel of the Porsche kept oscillating in my good hand until I was obliged to hold it with both.

Five blocks down Bradford Street I pulled under a lamp for a moment and looked at the machete. It was covered with dried blood on the side of the blade that had not been stuck to the rubber mat. All my notions of Regency collided. Never could I have conceived he would be so careless as this.

Of course, if he had used this weapon upon Jessica (and, yes, he must have used it) was it possible that he had not been able to go near the blade since? If one is going to perch on the abyss, it is reassuring to discover that one’s fellow maniacs also know fear and trembling.

Awash in my thoughts, I drove through all of town before I came to the simple conclusion that the machete ought to be transferred to my trunk rather than kept beside me in the front seat. I happened to be then at the circle at the end of Commercial Street where the Pilgrims landed and the breakwater now crosses the marsh. There I stopped, lifted my front lid and laid the machete in—its blade was nicked, I noticed—closed the trunk and saw a car stopping behind me.

Wardley got out. He must have put a new beeper on my rear bumper. God, I had not even checked my car.

Now he came toward me. We were all alone by the breakwater and there was just enough moon to see.

“I’d like to talk to you,” he said. He had a gun in his hand. It most certainly had a silencer on its muzzle. And, yes, it looked just like my .22. It took little creative visualization to conceive of the head of the soft-nosed bullet resting in its chamber.