"Shit," said Jimmy Slaughter Senior, "you fuckin' got me. Don't seem they like him a lot."
The town constable's patrol car, which had been idling behind a taffy stand, rolled out to receive Eric. The chief security agent, the one Captain Negus particularly disliked, was trying to make himself heard in the pilothouse, turning colors, dancing, silently singing, waving his hands alternately in menace, supplication, inviting harmonies. He wanted the captain to get the boat under way. The Coast Guard had driven their Secretary, invincible within the vehicle, thirty feet onto the car deck. The security agent refused to stop capering below the wheelhouse.
Negus buried it all under the sounding of his vessel's horn. He hardly looked down at the agent, who was half kneeling, holding his ears.
On the pier Eric was smiling dementedly.
"Well I'll be goddamned," Taylor said. "That dipstick thought it was a joke."
"He was over your house last night, I heard," Jimmy Slaughter said.
Taylor grunted.
As they pulled away from the pier, Officer Ussolini, the constable, drove Eric slowly up the hill in his squad car. "I thought he was one of them," Taylor told Scully. They were swabbing an interior passage that had been soiled by the authorities' unnecessary second inspection.
"They're all one of them," Scully said. "Eat from the same trough. Fuck their little differences, they ain't no friends of mine." He paused and leaned over his swab. "You all right, kid?"
Taylor kept swabbing, trying to dig the mop deeper into the steel deck than was possible or the work called for. When he had worn himself down he stepped out through the hatch onto the ladder that led to the wheelhouse and looked out over the ocean. There was a fair wind up, the sky clearing fast. Scully spotted Taylor in his half reverie and winked at Jimmy Junior three ladder steps above them. Taylor was in deep-think mode.
"Guy was okay," he said quietly to Jimmy Junior, "once he stopped drinking and trying to grow weed out west."
In his reverie Taylor was pondering Eric. Just a nihilist. Nihilists, Taylor believed, were the living dead. They couldn't take a punch and you couldn't wake them up with one. Whatever made them the way they were made them allergic to light, so they lived their lives outside it, laughing down holes. No wonder this Eric had transformed himself into the world's biggest asshole. Wasn't even his fault. And that was why he was so ugly and stupid and clammy and walked and talked and drank and mocked like a fool. Dead to grace. All of it suspended, withdrawn, none within, none without. But, he thought, Annie was wicked smart and you needed to pay attention to her at times. She had done well, Taylor considered, to spare Eric the beating of his life.
"Look at that bastard," Scully said to Taylor. "Looks like a fat turkey, don't he?"
"That's about it," Taylor said. His attention turned to the Secretary, who was walking to lean on the car deck's rail. You can't teach a man like that through mercy, Taylor thought. Born to kill — kill the grass they walk on and their own kind. Then you got a lot of them never knew a goddamn thing except what some flunky told them that they wanted to hear and they never so much as thought about it again.
Scully and Taylor looked off to starboard and saw an old swordfishing boat, all lines and shrouds and pulpit, running toward the ferry harbor. The fog was clearing as fast as your eyes could handle it.
"Holy shit," said Scully. "How long since you saw one of them? There ain't even any more swordfish."
"Sportfishing," Taylor explained. "Too much time and money. Now, the old man" — he meant Negus—"could tell you how they ran thirty, thirty-five of them sweethearts from Block Island Sound to Nova Scotia. Right outa this harbor."
The Secretary stood against the rail of the car deck between two worried-looking agents, the Afro-American woman and a younger man. The agents' concern did not seem to center on the Secretary in any personal way, but to involve the things around them, spare, uncomplicated things that seemed to menace them — the ocean, the clearing sky, car vibration from the ferry's engines.
"I need more air," the Secretary told his guardians. None of the three looked at the others.
"Where would you be comfortable, sir?" one of the agents asked.
The Secretary looked up the ladder toward the next deck. Taylor and Scully were working just above that one, right below the wheelhouse.
"Would you like to sit on a bench outside, sir?" the young man asked. "There's a row of benches topside."
"He's speaking to me like I was a geriatric patient," the Secretary complained to the woman. "I'll tell you where I want to go."
The younger agent led the way up to the A deck. The woman climbed behind. Jimmy Slaughter Junior popped his head out of the hatch to have a look.
"You people have to be there?" the young agent called up. Captain Negus heard him on the bridge, looked down through the glass and swore at him.
"No," he muttered, "we'll just let you shitbirds drift over to Portugal."
The Secretary took a seat at the end of the row of outside benches. This left the young male agent with no place to sit, so he manfully placed his hands on the backing of the seat row and stood to the Secretary's right. The young woman stood behind them.
The Secretary turned his head to fix the agents with his raptor's eye.
"Sometimes," he said, "I wonder if I get the best of you people."
The woman in the pantsuit flushed under her dark skin.
"Sir, the presidential detail…" she began. Her colleague was violently shaking his head to caution her. From farther down the A deck the chief agent was walking toward them, arms folded.
Then the Secretary leaped to his feet. He pointed up at Taylor.
"You stupid long drink of water," he screamed. "You useless little scut runner. You're staring at me!"
The agents leaped to their feet, but the Secretary was halfway up the metal stairway to the hatch where Taylor was polishing brightwork. Taylor was taken by surprise. The younger agents were coming up fast, the chief agent behind them. The victim of his own astonishment, Scully froze and stared.
"You murdering dog!" Taylor shouted back at the Secretary. "Shittin' up our island while mothers' sons die! You goddamned pirate." Scully backed down the ladder, keeping an eye on them.
"You faggot," the Secretary yelled at Taylor. "Think you push me around? You measly punk." The agents struggled with him in vain. He commanded the strength of madness.
Taylor's recollection of the struggle would always be compounded of confusion and a lust to kill. His veins and muscles were engorged for combat, but his arms still trembled. He was so surprised and angry he could not make his hand obey his own strength. Next, to his disbelief, he was airborne, falling and headed straight for the water below.
Captain Negus killed the engines and wheeled to port. Scully was shouting. The whole crew came to the rail one deck down, all of them shouting at once, "Man overboard!" as the young agents looked on. Scully turned on the Squanto's emergency siren and slid down the rails of the inboard ladder. Everyone took off for their man-overboard stations. The two youngest agents, male and female, were in a tangle at the foot of the ladder.
The Secretary raised his arms to heaven, looking wild-eyed and triumphant. Captain Negus's repeated blasts of the ship's horn were confusing to everyone.
The Secretary's face was as bright as Moses' own. Laughter foamed and bubbled in his throat and spilled over his teeth. He had lost his glasses.
"Did you see that? Pathetic punk of a loser. Tried to kill me and got his own skinny ass wasted."
In the water, not as cold as he had feared, Taylor felt himself slipping toward the Squanto's hull. The green-painted freeboard below the fender rose and fell above him like a living wall; she was underloaded and high in the water. With all his strength Taylor set off in a rowing backstroke to put ocean between himself and the hull, the slowing screws aft. Falling, he had sunk deep, but he was quick and at home in the water. The Squanto hurried past him as though she were fleeing for the ferry dock. He rested on his back and breathed regularly.