“I borrowed some of their money.”
“Borrowed?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, for God’s sake, give it back.” Her head emerged from her T-shirt.
“I don’t have it right now.”
“What have you done with it?”
“It’s gone.” He opened his hands. “I’m in a deep hole.”
She wept again. “Oh, tell them — anything.”
“I’ve been doing that.”
She hugged herself. “This is too much.”
“It’s business. I can’t panic, or they’ll be on me like sharks.”
“Aren’t we talking about your life — our lives? Is it all some kind of a game to you?”
“No.” He felt her receding from him and he wanted to set things right between them. He told her that he loved her, and he em-braced her, breathing in her smell, waiting to feel her soften. She didn’t, so he stepped back and willed a smile onto his face. “Look,” he said, “I screwed up, but I know a way to get out of it.”
“How?”
“My luck’s got to hold out a day or so, and then I’m clear. I want a different life. I can’t go on like this. And that’s a definite promise. We’ll sit down and you’ll tell me what you want and we’ll make a plan.”
She stared at him. “You’re never going to change, are you?”
He remembered the flour in his hair and felt self-conscious. He must look absurd. “I’m changing,” he said. “You’ll see.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“My biggest worry at the moment,” he went on, rubbing his head, “is how I’m going to get this gunk out of my hair. Go back to the house and round up the kids and we’ll go out to Dairy Queen. I’ll use the boat dock hose and be right there.”
She climbed down onto the concrete edge of the canal and then looked toward their house. It was dark and silent. Compared to the Dominguezes’, so bright, throbbing with music and energy, her house seemed like the negative of a house. The children, she thought, were being unusually patient and quiet. She looked up at Darryl. She was angry at him and disappointed. “Oh, hurry up,” she said.
“I love you,” he said.
She gazed up at him, then turned and started into the darkness. Darryl tried, and failed, to find something reassuring to call after her.
He stepped into the cockpit, groped around, found a key, fitted it into the ignition, and tried to start the twin diesel engines.
The Lay-Z-Girl was Darryl’s province, one in which Caroline was not interested. She hated fishing, and she complained about sunburn and seasickness.
The Lay-Z-Girl badly needed repairs. Now the main engines wouldn’t start. He couldn’t work the radio. The gauges for the three fuel tanks were hovering near empty. He gave out a deep sigh. How he had loved this boat. And what a mess his life had become. He had told Caroline the truth. He wanted to change. But what was he going to do about Narciso? A solution seemed impossible but at the same time close, very close.
On his way back to the railing, he almost tripped over the sheets that Caroline and he had shed on the deck. He threw them over his shoulder, climbed down onto the concrete dock, turned on the hose, then changed his mind and turned it off.
He’d seen the Dominguezes’ lawn explode into low fountains of water. Their automatic sprinklers had come on. In the light from their porch, Darryl saw droplets sparkling on their grass. It was a strange and beautiful sight. His own lawn was dark. So was the house. Caroline hadn’t turned on the lights. He halted, uneasy, and stared at his house and around his backyard. He felt that something was wrong with it all, but he didn’t know what it was.
His house was perfectly quiet. Darkness seemed to flow out of it toward him in dense waves. He felt a spurt of anxiety and fought to control it. Where was Caroline? Where were the kids?
“Caroline?” he called. There was no answer. He thought that he glimpsed a dark movement behind the sliding glass door to the living room. “Caroline?” he called again. Why didn’t she answer?
Darryl studied his house. For some reason, it didn’t look like his home. It seemed alien. He didn’t like it. He glanced with irritation at all the bright lights illuminating the Dominguezes’ house, and he wrestled down his anxiety.
He made up his mind: he’d had enough paranoia for one day. He was tired and he wanted this game to be over. There was, he decided, only one reason for the silence in his house. His family was waiting inside in the darkness to surprise him. Well, he’d play along, even though the notion of moving into that darkness gave him the creeps.
He wanted to be greeted by warmth and light and happy children. He had a vision of them standing just inside the door, holding their breath, waiting to switch on the lights and yell “Boo!” That vision propelled him forward, smiling.
Perhaps, he thought, as he walked up the lawn, rubbing the flour from his hair, perhaps when they got back from Dairy Queen, he’d switch on his porch lights and turn on his sprinklers and show the kids how beautiful water can be, even at night.
Tom Berdine
Spring Rite
From Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
“Which is even weirder yet,” Gowen said. “But that ain’t the best part.”
At approximately which point, Kramer didn’t want to hear any more. It had been a mistake to let Gowen get started. He went outside into the mild March evening to take a leak and get away from Gowen for a little while before hitting the sack.
“Seriously, I got the skinny on ’em,” Gowen said, unzipping and joining him at the edge of the porch.
“Tell it to someone who gives a good goddamn,” Kramer said.
The elder of the brothers and known his entire adult life simply by his last name, Kramer felled trees for a living, had a nagging pain in his right shoulder, had to get up before dawn, and felt certain the sources of Gowen’s information would turn out to be his stoner drinking buddies down at the Trail’s End Tavern. People from the Community Church used to get on Kramer about Gowen: do this for him, do that for him, this or that about or to him. Orphaned at age three, with only Kramer left, Gowen had been permitted the discovery of leisure, then self-indulgence, inevitably rebellion, and on down the line to a number of vices including drug use and actual dope peddling.
Kramer accepted that he had done a poor job with Gowen, who now as an adult in his mid-thirties still brought the law around on occasion and still had that tendency to get mixed up in things that were none of his business. Mr. Town Gossip was one of Kramer’s nicknames for him. Arguably a clearer infraction of the social code than even dope peddling in a neighborhood of millions of trees and few people, most of whom, even the straight ones, did something a little illegal from time to time, poached a deer or an elk, a few salmon, a load of firewood out of the state forest, gossip had from homesteader times actually gotten people killed. Gowen, never one to back off an argument, purported to have read a magazine article somewhere that said that scientific research showed gossip was seventy-five percent accurate.
“Amazing stuff happens right under your nose, Kramer.”
“Gowen...” Kramer used the parental voice on him, and they were quiet for a time. A lone housedog harooed somewhere in the distance.
“There’s Wes Greenly’s dog. Figures. Word is that Wes is going in with them.”
This was standard Gowen. Kramer was supposed to ask, going in with who on what? At minimum, experience in this country should have led to a circumspect attitude as to who was doing what and with whom, and even more generally what was coming from where. Sense of direction itself was confounded here. Rescuing hunters who got themselves lost in the twists and turns of river and ridge was a local industry. A compass was useless because of the iron in the hills, and with the unpredictable airs that ran upstream and down over the surface of the Neslolo River, the suddenly uprising mists, downrolling fogs, and various other phenomena of distinctly odd and possibly magical nature depending upon your point of view and maybe level of intelligence, the local acoustics fooled even the natives. It was Gowen, for that matter, who was always yacking it up, by way of proving any number of different points, about how Mount St. Helens had blown her stack right on the eastern horizon and nobody there had heard a pop. It had been Gowen, just the previous spring, who had found Jake Armbrister in the river dead of hypothermia, pinned in the current by the limbs of a snag but with his head above water so that obviously he had screamed his lungs out in the hour or so before all his heat was gone, screamed and screamed but was unheard by his wife at home fifty yards away and for that matter by the Kramer brothers upriver a quarter of a mile, who on any number of occasions had been able to hear the Armbrister family in normal conversation in their yard, sometimes been able to pick out several words.