Any ambition Galilee might have entertained of fathering a child had gone at that moment: to be the father's agent in the murder of a son had killed all appetite in him. Not simply the appetite for parenthood-though that had been the saddest casualty of the night at Smith Point Beach; the very desire to live had lost its piquancy at that moment. Destroying a man because he stood between your family and its ascendance was one thing (all kings did it, sooner or later); but to order the death of your own child because he disappointed you: that was another order of deed entirely, and to have been obliged to perform it had broken Galilee's heart.
And still, after all this time, he couldn't get the scene out of his head. The hours of the whorehouse in Chicago, and his memories of the yellow dog shitting on the stairs, were bad enough; but they were nothing by comparison with the memory of the look on George Geary's face that rainy night.
And so it went on for a week and a half: memories by day and dreams by night, and nothing to do but endure them. He ventured out of the house at evening, and went down to check that all was well with The Samarkand, but even that journey became harder as time passed; he was so exhausted. This could not go on. The time had come to make a decision. There was no great heroism in suffering, unless perhaps it was for a cause. But he had no causes, nor ever had; not to live for, not to die for. All he had was himself.
No, that wasn't true. If he'd just had himself he wouldn't have been haunted this way.
She'd done this to him. The Geary woman; the wretched, gentle Geary woman, whom he'd wanted so badly to put out of his heart, but could not. It was she who'd reminded him of his capacity for feeling, and in so doing had opened him up as surely as if she'd wielded a knife, letting these unwelcome things have access to his heart. It was she who'd reminded him of his humanity, and of all that he'd done in defiance of his better self. She who'd stirred the voice of the man on the whorehouse floor, and roused the yellow dog, and put the sight of George Geary before him.
His Rachel. His beautiful Rachel, whom he tried not to conjure but who was there all the time, holding his hand, touching his arm, telling him she loved him.
Damn her to hell for tormenting him this way! Nothing was worth this pain, this constant gnawing pain. He no longer felt safe in his own skin. She'd invaded him, somehow; possessed him. Sleeplessness made him irrational. He began to hear her voice, as though she were in the next room, and calling to him. Twice he came into the dining room and found the table set for two.
There was no happy end to this, he knew. There would be no escaping her, however patiently he waited. She had too strong a hold on his soul for him to hope for deliverance.
It was as though he were suddenly old-as though the decades in which time had left him untouched had suddenly caught up with him-and all he could look forward to now was certain decline; an inevitable descent into obsessive lunacy. He would become the madman on the hill, locked away in a world of rotted visions; seeing her, hearing her, and tormented day and night by the shameful memories that came with love: the knowledge of his cruelties, his innumerable cruelties.
Better to die soon, he thought. Kinder to himself, though he probably didn't deserve the kindness.
On the sixth evening, climbing the hill to the house, he conceived his plan. He'd known several suicides in his life, and none of them had made a good job of it. They'd left other people with a mess to clear up, for one thing, which was not his style at all. He wanted to go, as far as it were possible, invisibly.
That night, he made fires in all the hearths in the house, and burned everything that might be used to construe some story about him. The few books he'd gathered over the years, an assortment of bric-a-brac from the shelves and windowsills, some carvings he'd made in an idle hour (nothing fancy, but who knew what people would read into what they found here?). There wasn't a lot to burn, but it took time nevertheless, what with his state of mind so dreamy and his limbs aching from want of rest.
When he had finished, he opened all the doors and windows, every one, and just before dawn headed down the hill to the harbor. His neighbors would get the message, seeing the house left open. After a couple of days some brave soul would venture inside, and once word spread that he'd made a permanent departure the place would be stripped of anything useful. At least so he hoped. Better somebody was using the chairs and tables and clocks and lamps than that they all rot away.
The wind was strong. Once The Samarkand was clear of the harbor, its sails filled; and long before the people of Puerto Bueno were up and brewing their morning coffee or pouring their breakfast whiskies their sometime neighbor was gone.
His plan was very simple. He would sail The Samarkand a good distance from land, and then-once he was certain neither wind nor current would bear him back the way he'd come-he'd surrender his captaincy over both vessels, his body and his boat, and let nature take its course. He would not trim his sails if a storm arose. He would not steer the boat from reef or rocks. He would simply let the sea have him, whenever and however she chose to take him. If she chose to overturn The Samarkand and drown him, so be it. If she chose to dash the boat to pieces, and him along with it, then that was fine too. Or if she chose to match his passivity with her own, and let him linger becalmed until he perished on deck, and was withered by the sun, then that lay in her power too, and he wouldn't lift a hand to contradict her will.
He had only one fear: that if hunger and thirst made him delirious he might lose the certainty that moved him now, and in a moment of weakness attempt to take control of the vessel again, so he scoured the boat for anything that might be put to practical use, and threw it all overboard. His mariner's charts, his life jackets, his compass, his flares, his inflatable life raft: all of it went. He left only a few luxuries to sweeten these last days, reasoning that suicide didn't have to be an uncivilized business. He kept his cigars, his brandy, a book or two. Thus supplied, he gave himself over to fate and the tides.
Most murder, as you're probably aware, is domestic. The conventions of popular fiction tell an untruth: the person most likely to take your life by violence is not some anonymous maniac but the man or woman with whom you breakfasted this morning. So I doubt that I'm spoiling any great mystery if I confirm here that the man who murdered Margie was Garrison Geary.
He didn't do it because he despised her, though he did. He didn't do it because she had a lover, though she had. He did it because she refused him knowledge, which may seem like an obscure reason for slaughtering your spouse, but will probably be one of the lesser strangenesses ahead.
By the time Rachel got back to New York, Garrison had confessed. Not to cold-blooded murder, of course, but rather to an act of self-defense in the face of his wife's crazed attempt on his life. According to his testimony it had happened like this: he'd come home to find Margie in a drunken state, wielding a Colt .38. She was sick of their life together, she'd told him, and wanted an end to it all. He'd tried to reason with her, but she'd been in far too inflamed a state to be talked down. Instead she'd fired at him. The bullet had missed, however, and before she could fire a second time Garrison had attempted to disarm her. In the struggle the gun had gone off, wounding
Margie. He'd called the police instantly, but by the time medical help arrived it was too late. Her body-weakened by years of abuse-had given up.
There was a good deal of evidence in support of Garrison's account. The first and most potent piece was this: the gun was Margie's. She'd bought it six years ago, after one of her drinking circle had been attacked on the street, and died in the resulting coma. Margie hadn't concealed her pleasure in the weapon; it was a "pretty gun," she'd said, and she'd have not the least hesitation in using it should the occasion arise.