“What are you trying to do?” the Sergeant had roared, so close at hand she had nearly leaped off the platform.
She had fought him on the way down and they had both nearly fallen. But she did not start the really large scene until he had strapped her into that impossible belt again and forced the link shut and said, sadly, “If’n you can’t be trusted at all, Missy, then I just have to do this ever’ time I have to leave you alone, and ever’ time I have to get some sleep. Don’t like it any better than you do. But you won’t pay attention to good sense!”
“Good sense!” she had yelled. “Good sense! You’re a crazy! Don’t you even know it? You got that great big dent in your head where they took your brains out. You’re kidnapping me! You know what they’ll do to you? They’ll take you away and they’ll lock you up forever in a big room full of other crazies!”
But he had just kept looking mournfully at her, shaking his head, and finally he had gone down and brought her bedding up and taken his own down and gone to sleep on the boat.
This morning he had seemed the same as usual. Perhaps a little quieter. He’d been opening a can of franks and beans when suddenly the can and the can opener fell from his hands. He stood there swaying from side to side in a strange way, and then she remembered what it reminded her of, a long time ago, stopping at that roadside place when she was little, and there was an elephant there chained in the sun, swaying just like that.
She watched him. She moistened her lips. She glanced at the belt and chain over by the post. The shorts and halter top she wore were good enough for swimming. Run and grab a cushion off the Muñequita. Jump in and swim his little channel through the mangroves and out into the open bay. A hundred yards of channel. Lots of boats on a Saturday.
He wasn’t looking at her, or at anything. Then she saw the water running out of his eyes. She had to tug and pull at him to get him turned around and, in his sticklike walk, over to his thinking place. She put his big hands on the greasy places on the peeled uprights. He moaned and gripped with such a terrible strength she heard little gratings and poppings of muscle and bone and gristle. He thunked his head against the beam so violently, she screamed and ran and got the thin faded cushion from the old wicker chair and folded it once and held it against the beam. He butted his head against it.
“You’re not crazy, Sarg,” she kept telling him in a pleading tone. “You’re not. I’m sorry.”
His hands fell to his sides. He looked at her, half frowning, and he walked over and sat on the bed, face in his hands.
“Missy?” he said at last.
“I’m right here, Sarg.”
“Things spin around and around and get sucked down, like they went down a drain.”
He shook himself like a big, tired hound and stood up. “Takes it out of me,” he said.
“That lump on your head is getting huge.”
He felt of it with cautious fingertips. “Whomped me a good one that time.”
He started toward the kerosene stove then stopped and looked at her. “I wouldn’t have knowed you’d left, Miss Leila. Why didn’t you?”
“It never entered my mind.”
He picked up the can and the opener. “Lost my hunger, but you could eat some I expect. If you’d eat real good — and sleep as much as you can...”
“Yes?”
“And if you could run that nice boat down to the city all by yourself and promise word of honor you wouldn’t remember a thing about where you were or who doctored you...”
“I promise, Sarg. Honest. Cross my heart.”
“Three or four days more, I could let you go.”
“Do you mean it?”
“It’s a promise for sure. Can you wait just that little bitty time more, Missy?”
“Oh, yes!”
“Then I don’t have to put that danged chain on you. I sure to God hate to see you fastened up that way. In the night I decided I just couldn’t do it one more time, no matter what.”
Gordon Dale liked to work in the silence and emptiness of the law offices on Saturday morning. He solved the problems of the brief, and when he was ready to leave he remembered he hadn’t heard from Detective Sergeant Dickerson. He was told that Dickerson should just about be arriving at his home. He phoned the home number. Dickerson had just walked in. His voice was weary.
“Who? Oh, Mr. Dale. To tell you the truth, I forgot all about it. Just when I was ready to go off at midnight, we had a real dandy. I wish to God they’d been one motel further away. That would have taken it over the city line. Fellow on vacation got slopped and beat his little kid to death. His wife put the body in the car and tried to be an ambulance, and took out two palm trees and a light post. So I worked on through. The post showed the kid had a lot of old breaks, green stick fractures that had healed without attention. A lousy night, Mr. Dale. I’m sorry I didn’t get around to...”
“That’s all right. No rush. Get some sleep, Dave.”
“Soon as I can get anything, I’ll get back to you, Mr. Dale.”
Sam Boylston lay propped up on two pillows on one of the Bahama beds in the motel cabana. He wore blue swim trunks he had purchased at a dime store in the shopping center a block away. He talked on the phone to Corpus Christi. He was listening for the third time to the kid’s excited tale of danger and injury. He made the right sounds in the right places. He could look out through the window wall and see the three girls horsing around, taking turns off the low board — the fat girl with the red sunburn, the skinny dark one with a loud laugh, and the little chunky one with the deep tan and the straight hair bleached egg white.
“Well,” he said, “you sure had yourself a time, Boy-Sam. Want to put your mom back on?”
Lydia Jean came back on the line. “That was a long talk,” she said. “Oh, just a minute.” In the background he heard her shouting something to Boy-Sam. “Sorry. He was going to go running out without his sweater. There’s an edge in the wind for this time of year. Out of the north.”
“Was it a bad break?”
“A very clean simple fracture, and he really didn’t cry very much. He turned white as ghosts. You were very very patient with him, dear. He’s being a terrible bore about it. He can make a description of falling out of a tree last practically forever. He had to be so sure you found out he didn’t cry very much. Sam, all the time he was talking to you, I kept thinking of what you told me about Jonathan. How long is he going to — keep doing that, keep looking for her?”
“Until he accepts the fact she’s dead.”
“With Leila, that isn’t easy. She was so much more alive than — most of the rest of us.”
“I know.”
“Are you going back to Harlingen now?”
“Pretty soon, I guess. Why don’t you go down and open the house and wait for me there?”
“I thought of it.”
“So why don’t you?”
“Sam, dear, my heart bleeds for you in this whole thing. I know how you felt about your sister. I loved her too. You know that. And I should be with you. Time of need and all that. I don’t want to be cold and hard, but it would be coming back for the wrong reason. I’ve invested — too much heartache in this to come back for anything but the right reason. You’ll have to understand why I had to leave. And when you do understand, I can come back to you.”