"No biggie," he says.
"Where'd you learn to run blue water?"
"Hatteras. Where I grew up."
"Ever been through anything like this before?" I ask.
"Anything like what?"
"You know. The diving accident, losing your best friend—"
Trailing blue smoke, Burns levers to his feet and lurches toward the head. "I gotta take a crap," he says, shedding a sandal en route.
I use the interlude to pluck from the galley stovetop the latest issues of Spinand Rolling Stone,both of which are open to obituaries of Jimmy Stoma. The articles are kindly written and differ little in the details of the drowning. Even Cleo Rio's words are practically the same. "Jimmy died doing what he loved best," she is quoted as saying in Spin.And in Rolling Stone:"Jimmy died doing what made him happiest."
Interestingly, there's no mention of her "wicked bad vibe" in advance of her husband's fatal dive. Perhaps because I'd braced her at the funeral, the widow Stomarti has omitted the tale of the tainted fish chowder. She has not, however, failed to plug her upcoming Shipwrecked Heartin both articles. I would have been flabbergasted if she hadn't. I also expected at least one of the magazines to get wind of Jimmy Stoma's unfinished solo project, yet there's not a word about this—maybe Cleo told them it wasn't true.
When Jay Burns finally emerges, unzipped and shoeless, I ask about Cleo's premonition on the day Jimmy Stoma died. Burns squints blearily. "You lost me on that one, sport."
"She told the New York Timesshe'd begged him not to make the dive. Said he'd gotten food poisoning and was in so much pain he could hardly put his tank on."
As stoned as he is, Burns still senses quicksand. "Cleo would know," he mumbles, "if anybody."
"Jimmy didn't say anything to you before he went in the water?"
"He wasn't no complainer. He coulda had a broken neck for all I know and he wouldn't of said word uno.That was Jimmy."
Burns is growing jittery. He spits his doobie and gropes over my head for a pack of Marlboros, stashed beside the CD player. He sucks down half a cigarette before speaking again.
"I'm fuckin' bushed, man."
"Got anything to drink?" I ask.
Burns stares heavily at me.
"Relax, Jay. I'll get it myself." I squeeze past him toward the refrigerator. The cabin is cramped and rank. A cold beer takes the sour burn out of my throat.
Burns says, "These questions, like I tole you, Cleo would be the one to say. She could help you."
"That wreck you guys were diving on—what kind of plane was it? Cleo wasn't sure."
To signal his annoyance, Burns emits a rumbling gastric grunt. "DC-6," he says, cigarette bobbing.
"She said it was a drug plane."
"Twenty years ago, sport. Now it's Disneyland for lobsters." Burns is bracing himself upright on the cabin steps because he doesn't want to sit down again until I'm gone. He figures if he stands there long enough, I'll take the hint.
"Did you see Jimmy swimming around the wreck?"
"The plane's in pieces, man."
"Yes, Cleo told me. You didn't see Jimmy at all?"
Burns says, "We dove off the boat together. He went one way, I went the other."
"How was visibility?"
"Sucko. The wind blew twenty all night long so the bottom got churned to hell." Burns digs a beer from the refrigerator. From his body language it's obvious he's lost his patience, and possibly his temper.
For deterrence I take out my notebook, which Burns regards with a mixture of disgust and apprehension.
"Weird," I remark, as if to myself.
"What?" Burns strains to see what I'm writing.
"A twenty-knot wind all night long in August," I say. "Isn't that pretty unusual for the Bahamas?"
Jay Burns draws on his beer and shrugs.
"Yet it was glassy calm," I say, "the next day when you guys went out."
"That's the islands for ya."
"So the last time you saw Jimmy alive was right after you jumped in the water."
"The tail of the plane is, like, fifty yards from the nose section. Every now and then I could see bubbles but that was it. The bottom was all muddied up, like I tole you."
"Jay, what do you think happened down there?"
"Me?"
The telltale stall. Burns is trying to roust his brain and bear down. He's trying to avoid saying something that might contradict what he told the Bahamian authorities, or what Cleo told me. His fixed, furrowed expression is that of a drunk trying to wobble his way through a roadside sobriety test.
I nudge him along. "Jay, it's hard to understand. Jimmy was an experienced diver—"
"What're you tryin' to say? Anybody can swim off and get lost. It happens," he says. "The cops in Nassau, they said they see it all the time. He coulda used up his tank and had a heart attack on the way to the top. Who knows."
"I suppose. But it just seems weird."
Burns scowls. "You fuckin' people are all alike. Stirring up shit—Jesus, a man's dead. My best friend! Cleo's husband! He's dead and here you're tryin' to make some goddamn mystery out of it, just to sell papers."
I should inform Mr. Burns that the days are long gone when headlines sold significant numbers of newspapers; that the serious money comes from home subscriptions, not rack sales. I should tell him that most of the shrill tabloids have died off, and that the predominant tone of modern American journalism is strenuously tepid and deferential.
But I can't explain any of this to Jay Burns because he's suddenly seized me in a clinch and we're caroming from one side of the cabin to the other, literally rocking the boat. He outweighs me by at least fifty pounds, but luckily—being loaded to the gills—he is neither tireless nor exceptionally nimble. I still remember a few basic wrestling moves from high school and so, in two quick motions, I'm able to twist free and dump Jay Burns on his fat ass. Kicking out with both feet, he manages to nail me in the shins and I topple backward, snapping the door off the head.
Burns struggles to rise, making it all the way to one knee before I jump him. This time I drive an elbow into his nose and he stays down, slobbering blood like a gutshot boar. I sprawl on his chest, plant a knee in his groin and pin both arms over his head.
Lowering my face to his, I say: "Oh, Jay?"
"Huhhggnn."
"You hear me?"
Rage has fled from his eyes. All he wants now is to breathe without choking on viscous fluids.
"How old are you, Jay?"
"Wha-uh?"
"Simple question. How old?"
Burns sniffs to clear bubbles of blood from his nostrils. "Forty," he says thickly.
"That's awful young. Jay, I'm talking to you."
"Yeah, what?"
I point out that Kafka didn't make it to his forty-first birthday. Burns blinks quizzically. "Who's that?"
"Franz Kafka, a very important writer. Died before he got famous."
"What'd he write—songs?"
"No, Jay. Books and stories. He was an existentialist."
"I think you busted my fuckin' nose."
"Guess who else checked out on the big four-oh? Edgar Allan Poe."
"Him I heard of," Burns says.
"Raving like a cuckoo bird, he was. No one knows what happened there. When's your birthday?"
"October."
"It pains me, Jay, to think you've had more time on this planet than John Lennon. Does that seem right?"
"Lennon?" Finally Burns looks worried. "He was forty when that asshole shot him?"
"Yep," I say. "Same as you."
"How do you know all this stuff?"
"I wish I didn't, Jay, I swear to God. I wish I could flush it out of my skull. Did you kill Jimmy Stoma?"