Linda came to the doorway.
“Oh,” he said, sitting back on the bed.
“I didn’t want to knock or call, in case you were asleep.”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
He heard her go to the kitchen, run water. She came back with a glass of water and two pills. “They’ll relax you.”
“How did you know I’d need them?”
“The whole town knows what happened. Al Wright said you acted funny. I guessed that you might have said things to her that would make you feel bad now. Losing something twice — sometimes the second time is the worst.”
He took the pills, handed her back the glass. She took it back to the kitchen and came in again. “Why don’t you lie down, Paul?”
He swung his legs up and stretched out. She stood by the bed. “I could sit here until you go to sleep, if it wouldn’t bother you.”
“I think I’d like it. But you didn’t want to see this house again.”
“It isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.” He moved over a little, and she sat on the side of his bed and took his hand.
They sat in silence, and he knew it was a bad room for her. Bad for them both. The pills began to work, began to make a thick feeling in his ears, a faint, not-disagreeable numbness of lips. He watched the silhouette of her face against the faint light from the window. She had the art of silence, of warmth through silence. Death, he thought, is a final erasure. But under the smear, the words can still be read. Valerie was a few words in a scrawling childish hand. Something that had once been shining and bright and new. In an odd way it seemed that the Valerie of long ago had died, and the stranger, in her chippy clothes and knowing arrogance, had never existed.
He did not awaken until predawn light was smoke-gray at the windows. Before she left, she had apparently eased off his shoes and loosened his belt. It had happened to Valerie long ago. A memory from the other side of a high wall of drugged sleep. The suitcase was still in the living room. He took it near a window, opened it, and found swimming trunks. He went out on the beach. There was a shore mist, just lifting. In the east there was a touch of gold in the gray. He walked into the water and saw, out beyond the reef, the battered cruiser he had seen in Winkler’s improvised basin. It was still against the corroded steel plate of the water, like a toy in a shop window. A doll figure swam clumsily in the water toward the stern, and another figure came out of the cabin and went to the stern and helped it aboard.
He stood thigh-deep and watched. One figure went to the bow, and the cruiser moved slowly as the man hauled on the anchor line. The powerful engines started, and as the anchor was swung aboard, the cruiser picked up speed, turning out toward the small bare island of rock several hundred yards beyond the reef. It turned in a long half circle around the far end of the reef, and as it came up the shore line between beach and reef, Paul instinctively moved out into the water so that he would not be so visible. The speed dropped, and the cruiser turned into the channel. The first sun rays were coppery on the red hair of Moss Winkler at the wheel. Donny sat cross-legged on the cabin roof.
In the morning stillness, between the lap of the small waves, Paul heard the engines die. He swam slowly for a time, showered, put on ancient khaki shorts, a T-shirt. It was too early to go to breakfast, so he used the morning coolness to chop away some of the brush. He went up the road at seven-thirty and walked along the highway, locating the place where he could most easily have fill dumped to form a driveway.
As he stood looking over the situation, he heard a car slow down. He turned and watched it turn left and dip down by the sagging sign. It was a black Chrysler sedan, new and of the largest size, chrome winking, tire-sides blazing white. It had Miami plates. A thin dark man drove it, sitting alone in the front seat. Two men and a woman sat in back. Paul saw them for just a moment, and got the impression of a Latin foreignness, a look of richness and importance. They did not look at all like the sort of people who would be visiting Winkler out of friendship. He wondered if the driver was the one they called Corson. He fitted the vague description Al had given him.
He walked to the Sand-Dollar. Linda was alone behind the counter. He sat on one of the low stools and said, “Whatever they were, they worked.”
“I’m glad, Paul. It was all pretty hideous, wasn’t it?”
“I thought I’d grown some pretty good calluses. That peeled me right down to the pink.”
“Paul, who is Rip?”
He stared at her. “Rip? He was a sergeant. A damn good one.”
“When you were going to sleep, you got all tense. You shut your hand so hard on mine I thought you were going to break bones. And you were calling him in a funny way. A kind of whisper. ‘Rip! Rip! Over here!’ As if you didn’t want anybody to hear you calling him. Then you gave a big sigh and went all limp.”
“He was a big stringy kid from Kansas. Acted like he didn’t have a nerve in his body. One morning we had tank support, and we walked right into trouble. Enfilading fire from both sides. It was one of those things that may or may not have been my fault. I couldn’t decide. I dove for a shallow ditch, and I was calling him, and I saw him get it just as he turned. He was a good man, and I couldn’t afford to lose any good men. I blamed myself for a long time, and then I forgot it. I didn’t know there was any part of it left in my mind.”
“Maybe now it will be gone.”
“Talking will make it go quicker than I dreaming about it, Linda. I’ve never talked about it until now. I depended too much on tanks that day. After that I got colder and harder and smarter. I didn’t waste any people. When I lost people, it was an exchange that had to be made. People traded for real estate. I kept my people tough and wise and ready. I found out the battalion was calling me the Iceman. My people killed well and inexpensively. When we lost people, it was because we had come up against people who knew what they were doing, too.”
She put her hand on his wrist and said, “Paul!”
He realized that his voice had gone too loud and harsh. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly and felt his tight cheeks relax. He smiled at her and said, “All appearances to the contrary, I wasn’t discharged psycho. I seem to keep racing my motor.”
“We’re going to find a time and a place, and I am going to sit while you pace and talk and walk and talk and talk it all out.”
“Some date for a girl. But you have a funny knack. You seem to keep loosening a valve I’m trying to keep tied down. You know, on the plane I was thinking I’d go in a room with two fat quarts of whisky and lock the door and sit down and drink every damn drop. And wake up cured.”
“I tried that after Eddie’s funeral. Only I just got sick. Say, you did come here for breakfast?”
He was eating when Linda’s mother came, and Marie came in a few minutes later. Marie kept giving him nervous sidelong glances and wetting her lips, and Paul knew she wanted to say something about Valerie but didn’t know what the proper thing to say could possibly be. So he turned to her and smiled and said, gently, “You don’t have to say anything about it.”
Marie flushed. “Well, I wondered. I guess I’m sorry. I liked her. She was always nice to me, right up until before she left.”
“Then she wasn’t nice?”
“Not the last time I saw her, after selling it was all arranged. We all thought that you probably didn’t know about it, and it seemed like a dirty trick, so we were all cold-acting. The whole town was. She felt it, I guess. I was in the store, and she came in and she had a bandage on her wrist and, gee, I just said what anybody’d say. I sort of asked her if she fell or something, and she looked at me as if she wanted to kill me. She leaned real close to me, and it sort of scared me. She said, almost whispering. ‘Yes. I fell a long way.’ You know, that was the last time I ever talked to her, and she had no reason to bite my head off.”