The shadows changed shape, grew longer. Hartley’s muscles gave out on him, left him to sink. The gator’s face became indistinct. Didn’t move.
“Freak.” Hartley knew this was his last gasp. He tried to put some final power in the words. “Meat. I could have you. I could have all of you.”
Maybe eating the swamp dog had left the gator comatose. Maybe the eyes that terrified Hartley were already sightless with sleep, veiled by some filmy additional reptile’s lid. Or maybe the thing was sick. Yes. The alligator might have been dying of some gutty infection even as Hartley screamed for its rough body in the swamp. Who knows why? The soldier never got the comeuppance that had been sniping night and day at his nerves, the man-eating proof that he’d been so positive he could discover beyond AP, beyond TV.
He was a long time getting out. In his exhaustion the heavy suck of the mud against his boots seemed like home itself. He floated with just his eyes and nose above the water. But after the sky darkened, while the pool lost its heat, Hartley understood with great clarity that he would die in the Everglades. So much mapless space. Already he was starving. And the certainty of his death in some perverse way energized him. Hartley wrestled out of the muck, through the oppressive growth at the pool’s edge, back out onto the moonlit plains of saw grass. He never gave a thought or glance to the alligator. He began almost to run, moving half-blind across miles of open territory, a black and silver fit of searching for where he would die. Then Hartley stumbled onto a road.
As if the swamp weeds had been holding him up, he collapsed.
For the Park Security, the next morning, it was a simple matter to trace the officer, filthy and stone asleep though he was. He still wore his dogtags. The TV shooting schedule in his pocket was soaked but still legible. The only delay in his getting to Fort Pope came when the soldier insisted on making a phone call from the airport. He insisted on leaving word with the TV people that the man who drove the limousine should not be fired. Between sneezes and wretched phlegmy coughs, Hartley repeated into the phone that it was not the driver’s fault, not the driver’s fault. So the Park Security never got to tell the soldier that his wife would meet him at Fort Pope.
She had left Friday, Claire said. When she hadn’t been able to reach him in his hotel room, neither Wednesday night nor Thursday night, she’d left the kids with another officer. She’d taken the first plane south. In Fort Lauderdale, the hotel switchboard operator and one of the TV publicity crew had told the wife all — and she broke down, her tears staining the paper on which she’d written a numbered list of Hartley’s lies — all she needed to know.
“Now you tell me what happened,” she said through her teeth, through her tears. “The truth, Philip Hartley! The truth!”
He tried for days to win back her trust. He bought so many flowers it seemed the entire outpost was drenched in the bloomy smell. The orchids down here, especially, tore him up. Their petals were speckled and gummy, suggesting the spread arms of an octopus or some unknown brown amphibian, but hold one up in the least breeze and you’d see the flower was thin and shivery as paper. Hartley bought them from a Spanish kid who worked out of a tent nearby. Just a raggedy-ass kid who’d stand there singing “Flores, Flores, Flo-ri-da.”
The Return
Though Rucker had designed the house in New Canaan himself, and though he had designed it for every season in the long year, these past couple summers he had traveled to Cape Cod. His wife’s family owned beachfront property. She had pointed out that, since now Rucker was semi-retired anyway, the world would go on without him if he took off eight weeks solid. Rucker wore bowties and garters, and for thirty-nine years he’d worked as a stockbroker, but he had an open mind. His wife’s idea seemed like a way to celebrate his change of life. Therefore during June, this year and the last, he found a young couple to take care of his Connecticut house.
The first year he had seen as a lark. It had seemed like no time at all. This year however the time off felt always in some way wrong. The sun on the ocean was to him a nervewracking light. Either Rucker slept heavily in his own sweat, or he was overexcited, with each glance at the bright windows like a new cup of black coffee, Rucker started to go round angry. He slapped his youngest grandchild over a dropped spoonful of cereal. Then during the next-to-last week of vacation, he was called away from the Cape because the couple babysitting his New Canaan house had been shot.
Rucker insisted on going alone. He arranged the return so that he would arrive in the morning, and be done with the ugly business early. But once there it seemed as though no one could tell him anything he didn’t already know. He heard again that his house was handsome and unusual. He heard that the young couple hadn’t been married, that the woman was an astronomer with a telescope thrust out the attic window, that the man owned a sailboat and studied the music of the Renaissance, that the police didn’t like any of this. Rucker himself was still in what he knew was his traveling frame of mind, a heavy-headed mix of relief at getting away and shame about feeling relief. In this case, moreover, the mix had become painful. The aggravation of the sun on the sea was still too much a part of his thoughts, and also he could remember the outcry when he’d slapped his grandchild with the same overbearing clarity. As he listened to the police talk and talk, he crossed his arms over his lapels and declined to sit.
At last the murder itself was described to him. The couple had been led into the kitchen and shot there, apparently while standing holding on to each other.
Abruptly the tone of his experience in the police station changed. Rucker was shown a diagram. A detective made the explanations in an unnaturally loud voice. Rucker was shown a minute-by-minute chronology.
8:25—First three bullets fired
.
8:25-8:35—Approximate time of death, male victim
.
8:38-8:39—Second three bullets fired
.
8:40—Approximate time of death, female victim
.
Rucker saw ballistics reports. He saw computations of the angle of fall. Several times he found himself gasping and blinking and shaking his head, because under the rush of brutal data, without knowing it, he kept holding his breath. On the police diagrams the corpses were designated by dotted outlines.
Eventually Rucker understood that this preferential treatment, his being shown so many police documents, was out of respect for his age. When the detective at last fell silent, Rucker knew it was incumbent on him to say something.
But the stockbroker discovered then that his feelings had been let out — blown out — on a long, very thin line. They were miles away, years away, and he was unable to bring any of them in close enough for use. He attempted to concentrate, turning away from the detective and closing his eyes, but in the darkness all he could make out were the distant words for the emotions he should be going through, like kites up in winter weather. He opened his eyes to find himself facing the dotted heaps on the police diagram. If he turned around, he would have to face the detective.