Was it the mention of the fisherman? Was it the mention of the moon? Suddenly Sam stood and turned around. “Look,” he said. “I’m going to get a policeman.”
The man frowned, put his head to the side.
“I’m going to get a policeman. This isn’t right — ” He thought: How do you explain to this fellow that the boat was really empty, that a man had really drowned?
“But you don’t have to do — ”
“I’m sorry! But I have to tell somebody! Look, we just can’t — ”
The man was looking at Sam’s hands — which, in his excitement, had come loose to wave all over the day.
“I know all about it — the force of the club in the hand of the working man. Really,” the man added, with a worried look, “policemen are so dull. Laughter’s what you want here. Celebration of the city. Beauty. Higher thoughts. Get yourself lost in that lattice of flame. Humor’s the artist’s only weapon against the proletariat — and, in this city, my friend, the police are as proletarian as they come. Hey, I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t — I mean I only asked… only offered you a sociable drink — ”
“I’m going to get a policeman,” Sam repeated. “Now.” He added: “Maybe we’ll be back — !” He started away. “In a few minutes.”
From behind him the man called out, almost petulantly: “That’s not the way to Atlantis!”
Sam glanced back.
“And you’re a damned fool if you think I’m going to wait around for you.” The man stood now, one hand on the bench back, like someone poised to run. His final salvo: “Don’t think you’ll ever get to it calling the law on people like me!”
Sam started again. Really, the fellow was a fool! What in the world had made him sit there listening, letting the man drench him in his lurid monologue? Sam broke into a lope, into a run — turned and, practically dancing backwards, looked once more:
The man was hurrying off, into Brooklyn, into Flatbush, or wherever he’d said he lived, moving away almost as fast as Sam was moving toward the city. Sam turned ahead, in time to take the stairs down the Manhattan stanchion — two at a step. Three minutes later, he almost missed the narrow entrance down to Rose. He had to swing around the rail, come back, and, at the entrance, plunge in silence by gray stone.
He found a policeman coming along the black metal railing by City Hall Park, where tall buildings’ shadows had already darkened the lower stories to gray — save when Sam passed an east-west street, gilded with sudden sun. He hurried up to the officer. “Excuse me, sir. Please.” On the other side of the park’s grass, light glinted on the edge of the sprawling trolley terminals tin roof — where some of the green paint had come away…? “But I think someone’s drowned — in the river, sir. I was up walking across, into Brooklyn, and — ”
“You saw someone do a Brodie off the bridge?” Below the midnight visor, webbed in forty-plus years’ wrinkles, river-green eyes were perfectly serious.
“Someone jump, you mean? No. He was in a boat. I could see it, down in the water. And later on, I saw the boat again — and it was empty. A green rowboat — I think.”
The policeman said: “Oh. You saw him go over?”
Sam watched the man’s dull squint and his ordinary thumb laid up against the belly of his shirt between his jacket flaps, like something inevitable. He thought about putting his own hands in his pockets, but kept them hanging by force. “Well, no — not really. I mean, I didn’t actually see it. But later — I saw the same boat. The oar was floating behind it. And there was nobody in it.”
“Oh,” the policeman said again. The ordinary thumb rose, and the officer scratched ash-blown blond, cap edge a-joggling on the walnuts of his knuckles. “And how long ago was this?”
“Just a few minutes,” Sam said, trying to figure how long he’d been talking with the man on the bridge. “Maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes.” Probably it was over thirty. Could it have been an hour? “But, well, you know. It takes some time to get all the way back over, to this side, from Brooklyn.”