Next comes a kick to his wounded side, just above the beltline. Sanderson’s head hits the right front hubcap of his Subaru and bounces off. He tries to crawl out from under Tat Man’s shadow. Tat Man is yelling at him, but Sanderson can’t make out any words; it’s just wah-wah-wah, the sound adults make when they’re talking to the kids in the animated Peanuts cartoons. He wants to tell Tat Man okay, okay, you say tomato and I say tomahto, let’s call the whole thing off. He wants to say no harm and no foul (although he feels he has been fouled quite badly), you go your way and I’ll go mine, happy trails to you, see you tomorrow, Mouseketeers. Only he can’t catch his breath. He thinks he’s going to have a heart attack, may be having one already. He wants to raise his head – if he’s going to die he would like to do it looking at something more interesting than the surface of Commerce Way and the front of his own wounded car – but he can’t seem to do it. His neck has become a noodle.
There’s another kick, this time in the high meat of his left thigh. Then Tat Man gives a guttural cry, and red drops begin to splash the composition surface of the roadway. Sanderson at first thinks it’s his nose – or maybe his lips, from the double-handed blow to his face – but then more warmth splashes the back of his neck. It’s like a tropical rain shower. He crawls a little farther, past the hood of his car, then manages to turn over and sit. He looks up, squinting against the dazzle of the sky, and sees Pop standing beside Tat Man. Tat Man is bent over like a man suffering serious stomach cramps. He is also groping at the side of his neck, which has sprouted a piece of wood.
At first Sanderson can’t understand what has happened, but then he gets it. The piece of wood is the handle of a knife, one he’s seen before. He sees it almost every week. You don’t need a steak knife to cut the kind of chopped meat Pop always has at their Sunday lunches, a fork does the trick very nicely, but they bring you a knife, anyway. It’s all part of Applebee’s service. Pop may no longer remember which son comes to visit him, or that his wife is dead, he probably no longer even remembers his middle name, but it seems he hasn’t lost all the clever ruthlessness that enabled him to rise from a no-college oilfields roughneck to an upper-middle-class jewelry merchant in San Antonio.
He got me to look at the birds, Sanderson thinks. The crows on the Dumpster. That’s when he took the knife.
Tat Man has lost interest in the man sitting in the road, and never casts a single glance at the older man standing beside him. Tat Man has begun coughing. A fine red spray comes from his mouth each time he does it. One hand is on the knife in his neck, trying to pull it out. Blood pours down the side of his tee-shirt and splatters his jeans. He begins walking toward the intersection of Commerce and Airline (where all traffic has stopped), still bent over and still coughing. With his free hand he gives a jaunty little wave: Hi, Ma!
Sanderson gets to his feet. His legs are trembling, but they hold him. He can hear sirens approaching. Sure, now the cops come. Now that it’s all over.
Sanderson puts an arm around his father’s shoulders. ‘You all right, Pop?’
‘That man was beating on you,’ Pop says matter-of-factly. ‘Who is he?’
‘I don’t know.’ Tears are coursing down Sanderson’s cheeks. He wipes them away.
Tat Man falls on his knees. He has stopped coughing. Now he’s making a low growling sound. Most people hang back, but a couple of brave souls go to him, wanting to help. Sanderson thinks Tat Man is probably beyond it, but more power to them.
‘Did we eat yet, Reggie?’
‘Yeah, Pop, we did. And I’m Dougie.’
‘Reggie’s dead. Didn’t you tell me that?’
‘Yeah, Pop.’
‘That man was beating on you.’ His father’s face twists into the face of a child who is horribly tired and needs to go to bed. ‘I’ve got a headache. Let’s blow this pop stand. I want to lie down.’
‘We have to wait for the cops.’
‘Why? What cops? Who is that guy?’
Sanderson smells shit. His father has just dropped a load.
‘Let’s get you in the car, Pop.’
His father lets Sanderson lead him around the Subaru’s crumpled snout. Pop says, ‘That was some Halloween, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah, Pop, it was.’ He helps the eighty-three-year-old Caped Crusader into the car and closes the door to keep the cool in. The first city police car is pulling up, and they’ll want to see some ID. The sixty-one-year-old Boy Wonder, hands pressed to his aching side, shuffles back to the driver’s side to pick it up off the street.
For John Irving
As I said in the note to ‘Batman and Robin,’ sometimes – once in a great while – you get the cup with the handle already attached. God, how I love that. You’re just going about your business, thinking of nothing in particular, and then, ka-boom, a story arrives Special Delivery, perfect and complete. The only thing you have to do is transcribe it.
I was in Florida, walking our dog on the beach. Because it was January, and cold, I was the only one out there. Up ahead I saw what looked like writing in the sand. When I got closer, I saw it was just a trick of sunlight and shadow, but writers’ minds are junkheaps of odd information, and it made me think of an old quote from somewhere (it turned out to be Omar Khayyam): ‘The Moving Finger writes, and having writ, moves on.’ That in turn made me think of some magical place where an invisible Moving Finger would write terrible things in the sand, and I had this story. It has one of my very favorite endings. Maybe not up there with ‘August Heat,’ by W. F. Harvey – that one’s a classic – but in the same neighborhood.
The Dune
As the Judge climbs into the kayak beneath a bright morning sky, a slow and clumsy process that takes him almost five minutes, he reflects that an old man’s body is nothing but a sack in which he carries aches and indignities. Eighty years ago, when he was ten, he jumped into a wooden canoe and cast off, with no bulky life jacket, no worries, and certainly with no pee dribbling into his underwear. Every trip to the little unnamed island lying like a half-submerged submarine two hundred yards out in the Gulf began with a great and uneasy excitement. Now there is only unease. And pain that seems centered deep in his guts and radiates to everywhere. But he still makes the trip. Many things have lost their allure in these shadowy later years – most things – but not the dune on the far side of the island. Never the dune.
In the early days of his exploration, he expected it to be gone after every big storm, and following the 1944 hurricane that sank the USS Warrington off Vero Beach, he was sure it would be. But when the skies cleared, the island was still there. So was the dune, although the hundred-mile-an-hour winds should have blown all the sand away, leaving only the bare rocks and knobs of coral. Over the years he has debated back and forth about whether the magic is in him or in the island. Perhaps it’s both, but surely most of it is in the dune.
Since 1932 he has crossed this short stretch of water thousands of times. Usually he finds nothing but rocks and bushes and sand, but every now and then there is something else.