He stood for a time, watching the light patterns and the restless advance-and-retreat of the surf. He wondered where Alix had gone. And wished she were here with him, up above the Mitch Novotnys of the world. And dreaded what she might have to say to him when she returned.
He knelt to work on the lens again. In order to achieve maximum visibility, each lens had to be placed at a substantial height to compensate for the curvature of the earth-a minimum of one hundred feet for a First Order Fresnel, so that the light could be seen a minimum of eighteen miles at sea. Awkward sentence. One maximum and two minimums made for a minimum of clarity and a maximum of confusion. He cleaned a lens, polished it, cleaned another and polished that. First Order Fresnels can generate 680,000 candlepower, which allows them to be seen nventy-two miles at sea. Much better. Simple, declarative, exact. Always remember the rules of good composition, professor.
He finished the last of the prisms, straightened, and moved back near the open trapdoor. The incoming sunlight made the prisms and bull’s-eyes sparkle like jewels. Magnificent creation, the Fresnel. The correct pronunciation is Fray-nell, accent on the last syllable. More beautiful to his eyes than any diamond, any precious stone.
Reluctantly he stepped through the trap opening and started down the steep, creaky stairs. Nothing more to do in the lantern, and he needed to keep busy. That was the key to maintaining control, to keeping the crippling headaches at bay. Busy, busy. Busy, busy.
He entered the lightroom. The various parts of the diaphone and its air-compressor were strewn over the workbench: he had dismantled them again yesterday, for the third time. The tanks he had picked up in Portland were there too. But he wasn’t ready to test the diaphone yet, not until he was absolutely certain the parts were clean and rust-free and in proper working order. It fretted him that the diaphone might not work after all these years because his skill as a pseudo-wickie was lacking. In the days of manned lighthouses, keepers performed many maintenance and repair duties, among them winding the clockworks, refueling lamps, and trimming wicks. It was this last-named duty that led to the generic term “wickies.”
At the workbench he picked up one of the diaphone’s internal parts, studied it for a moment. He was reaching for a screwdriver when the telephone rang downstairs.
The hair on his neck prickled; he felt himself stiffen. He stood listening to two more rings. Then, taking his time, he put the metal part down, wiped his hands on a rag, and went out and down the two flights to the living room. The bell was ringing for the eleventh or twelfth time when he picked up.
“Hello?”
“How’d you like your running water this morning? How’d it smell to you?”
“It smelled like shit. The same as you do, Novotny.”
There was a pause, brief but satisfying. Then the muffled voice said, “Listen, you asshole, there’s more we can do-plenty more. You stay in that lighthouse, you’ll get hurt. Or your wife will.”
“You can’t threaten me,” Jan said. “And you can’t drive me out of here. I’ll fight you, Novotny. With my bare hands if that’s the way you want it.”
“Try fighting with a rifle slug in the belly.” There was a click and the line went dead.
Jan put the receiver down, gently. There was a line of tension across his neck and shoulders; otherwise he felt as he had before. His head didn’t hurt at all, hadn’t hurt in such a long time now that he could almost believe the pain and the bulging and the failing vision would never plague him again, that some sort of miraculous cure had been effected.
He started back to the stairwell. From outside, the sound of a car came to him faintly. He did a slow about-face, went into the kitchen, looked through the curtains. But it wasn’t Alix. The car that had stopped out by the fence was unfamiliar-an old sedan-and so was the tall, middle-aged, dark-haired woman getting out of it. He watched the woman come resolutely through the gate and approach the watch house. Whoever she was and whatever her reason for coming here, he wanted nothing to do with her. He retreated from the window, climbed up into the tower to the lightroom.
He didn’t hear her knock and he didn’t hear her drive away; he heard nothing. He worked in a kind of vacuum, watching his hands manipulate the diaphone and compressor parts as if the fingers were the steel extremities of a machine, listening only to the random ebb and flow of his thoughts. He might have been one of the old-time lightkeepers-the last lightkeeper on the West Coast. There are 450 lighthouses still operating in the continental United States; of that number, only thirty-four are manned. None of these is on the West Coast. It will not be long before all 450 U.S. lighthouses are fully automated under the long-range Lighthouse Automation and Modernization Project (LAMP), introduced by the Coast Guard in 1968.
The last wickie. A man alone against the dark…
He had finished reassembling both the diaphone and the compressor when Alix called his name from downstairs. It startled him: he hadn’t heard the car (odd, when he’d heard the other woman’s), nor had he heard her enter the house. She was just there, calling him in a voice that echoed and re-echoed in the brick hollow of the tower.
“I’m in the lightroom. Stay there; I’ll come down.”
He did not hurry this time either-especially not this time. Wiped his hands carefully, put some of his tools away first. Steeled himself on the way downstairs, because he expected this to be the beginning of the end. Expected to see her sitting on the couch, knees together, hands folded-her I-Have-Something-Very-Important-to-Say pose. Expected her to give him an ultimatum, and then, when he rejected it, to tell him good-bye.
But he was wrong-so wrong that a few minutes later, in a sudden release of tension, he burst out laughing.
She wasn’t sitting on the couch; she was standing in front of the wood-burner, her hair wind-blown, her cheeks ruddy from the wind, smiling at him. And she didn’t give him an ultimatum. And she didn’t tell him good-bye.
All she wanted was to invite him out for dinner!
Alix
She turned the car left off Highway 1 and drove into the parking lot of a seafood restaurant called the Seaside Inn, two miles south of Bandon. “Look okay to you?” she asked Jan.
At first he didn’t respond; he was slouched against the passenger door, apparently lost in thought. He’d been that way for much of the drive up the coast. She had monitored his silence, trying to gauge if he were suffering a headache or merely feeling introspective. Introspective, she’d decided. And not the brooding or depressed kind of introspection; the reflective kind. The cold, controlled anger of the morning was gone, and that was all for the good. Jan was a reasonable man, provided his mood was an equable one.
She asked the question again-“This place look okay to you?”-and this time her words penetrated. He roused himself, took note of their surroundings.
“Fine,” he said. “You said you wanted fish, and judging from that sign, fish is what they have.”
The sign was a pink neon fish standing upright on its tail fins, a jaunty smile on its face. It reminded Alix of the TV ads featuring Charlie Tuna-except that Charlie, vain as he was, would never have consented to wear the Afro-style toupee that was inexplicably perched on this fellow’s head.
“Nice toup,” Jan said, indicating the fish as he got out of the car. He seemed, at least in this moment, almost cheerfut-his old self again.
Inside they found the standard seaside tourist-trap decor: gamefish trophies on the walls; suspended nets full of shells and glass bobbers; booths with cracked vinyl covering, checked plastic tablecloths, vases with imitation flowers. Jan ordered a half-carafe of the house white wine; when it came, Alix found it surprisingly good. They sipped it while considering the menu, and finally opted for buckets of steamed clams.