Lucia! the girl said, and we heard something from the room with the light at the end of the hall. A woman’s voice and a Spanish word.
We got to the doorway of the room. There was a large tousled bed and the threads of a canopy hanging from the posts. A white matted rug was on the floor and wallpaper ran down the sides of the room like brown water. A small dresser was directly opposite us, with a mirror.
In the mirror I caught the momentary dark reflection of someone’s black hair. There was a movement to my side, I saw it out of the corner of my eye. I turned and lurched for it, my hands in front of me to catch the blow of a knife.
Lucia, said the girl.
Lucia said something in Spanish.
The woman called Lucia indeed had black hair. She wore a black robe. But she was ten years too old and her hands were one weapon and one victim too empty. She looked at me like I was crazy.
I stopped and stared back at her. Then I looked at the other girl. She looked at both of us, and Lucia said something else, or maybe it was the same thing she’d said before.
Not your Lucia? the girl said.
She said something to Lucia and while they talked a moment I went back into the hall. I waited for the girl to come out. When she did she said, Sorry. That’s it for Spanish women with black hair, at least around here.
I knew it wasn’t her, I said. I’m glad it wasn’t her.
The girl shrugged and we headed back for the stairs. She sighed and said, I’m going to have to take you up to the Rossmore. That’s the best place for you to catch a ride back to town. If I put you back where I found you, you’ll never get anywhere.
I have one more favor to ask, I said to her.
“What’s that?”
“Take me out to the old hotel. You can drop me off there.”
She shook her head. “I can`t do that, mister. I’d help you out if I could, I’ve tried to help you. But that hotel is out there, and I don’t just mean the distance. There are people who have been in that hotel for years.”
She wasn’t going to change her mind. We got to the stairs and dragged the boat down the steps; I was in front pulling the boat behind me, and she followed. I feIt bad that she didn’t catch on. She had tried to help and she trusted me. I got the boat in the water and she was three steps behind me. I got in the boat and looked over at her, and she reached out her hand.
I pushed off alone. She stood on the steps watching me drift away. In the dim light of the moon she seemed even younger, childlike, which she had not seemed before. It took her several full seconds to figure out I was leaving her there.
I’m sorry, I said. I heard my echo in the dark and on the water.
You bastard, I heard her say.
I said, I’m sorry. But I have to get out to that hotel.
You don’t know the water, she said.
I’ll bring the boat back, I called to her.
Don’t fucking bother. You come back and I’ll fucking slit your throat.
So I’ve heard, I said. I pushed my way out into the lobby and then glided toward the doorway. She stood in the distance on the stairs as though at the back of a cave, the water black and wounded with occasional light. You don’t know the water! she shouted. I nodded and turned a corner, and she disappeared from view.
I emerged from the house and floated out into the canal. She was right of course; I didn’t know the water, and all I did was meander aimlessly between currents. Finally I got myself to the nearest of the docks where I tore off one of the posts that was lit at the top. I doused it in the canal and pulled it back into the boat with me. It wasn’t flat enough to use as an oar but it was ten or twelve feet long and, kneeling in the boat, I could push myself along the shallow part of the river. I kept as quiet as I could, heading back up canal until I reached the main waterway from where we had originally come. I imagined a tribal horde of women suddenly emerging from the houses with weapons, to get back their boat and take care of me good.
I got to the southern edge of the lagoon and could see the old hotel plainly in the distance. But I could also see the girl was right: the hotel was far, farther than I’d thought, and now I was in some trouble. The water was too deep for the pole to do any good. I was somewhere between lagoon water and ocean water; the sea itself wasn’t a quarter of a mile behind me, and while the tide was washing me in rather than out, the island where the hotel stood was still far away. I was sitting in the dark staring into the distance and trying to gauge whether I had the remotest chance of making a swim for it when I heard a voice that sounded as though it were directly behind me. I turned and a large schooner was some twenty feet away, sailing silently by; someone on deck shone a light. Need a tow? came his voice, and out here on the flat water beneath the flat black sky his words carried as though he were sitting in my boat.
I’m trying to get to the hotel, I said.
He answered in an even lower voice than before, I can’t take you there, that’s off limits you know. I can tow you in to the southern harbor, though.
The southern harbor was not the one in Downtown but rather where the East Canal emptied out onto the coast, near the beach where I’d seen the Latin girl and Ben Jarry the first night. All right, I said. Toss me a line and I’ll follow you in.
The schooner edged up to me and this guy in a jacket and T-shirt tossed me a line. In the dark he looked as if he was probably friendly. Then we started on our way.
Everybody trusted me tonight.
Because the point was, of course, that since we were heading to the southern harbor rather than Downtown, we were going to pass the island with the hotel — if not right by it, then a hell of a lot closer to it than I was now. It’s possible the guy on the schooner suspected something. He insisted that I ride in his boat instead of remaining in my own, which dragged along behind us at the end of a rope. So the blonde in the mansion wouldn’t be getting her boat back after all.
I kept watching the island, waiting. When we had almost passed by, skirting its eastern tip on our way to port, I knew this was as near as I was going to get, about half the distance from where I had been before, out in the middle of the water. In another three minutes the island would be irrevocably behind me. I never even thought of not going.
In midair, when my hands were inches from touching the water, I could already feel the cold of it. Then there was the shocking black rush, and when I came up the first time I almost thought I might have heard shouting in the distance. But I went back under, and for a moment I saw her in the sea, where blood knows no stain but only rivers. That was only for a moment. I’ve been acting funny, I said to myself. I’ve been doing strange things.
I began swimming hard. The most difficuIt thing was maintaining my orientation, keeping my head clear as to where I was and where I was trying to get. After it seemed I had swum half an hour I began to panic; I feIt my effort collapsing. In fact I probably hadn’t swum half an hour at all. Probably it was more like ten minutes. I was treading and thinking to myself, I’m thirty-eight or thirty-nine; my body does not believe it. My body believes my face, which believes my heart, and it makes me an old man in the water, who believes his panic and exhaustion. For the moment I cared nothing about her, I cared nothing about Ben Jarry. This, I said to myself, maybe aloud though I don’t remember, this is as my damned traitor heart would have it. It would have me in my tower living in the gloom of moral death. I began to swim again. I swam against my face and my heart, I swam as though I had my face in one hand and my heart in the other, and I pummeled the sea with them in order that they would take me, against their will, where I chose to go.