The sun beat down from its meridian, the air still, salty, so wet it could choke you.
"Hurts me that you think that. Really does. Can’t you see, I’m letting you operate on free will? I could’ve turned you into little robots. You spent nine months with me. I could’ve kept you in that basement five, seven years. Your minds would’ve gone to mush after two. Think what you want about me, but you can’t say I don’t respect free will. You can’t say it."
"Sweet-Sweet," Maxine whined, looking up from her book. "I’m so hot. Put up the Bimini top, will you?"
"Kind of busy, Beautiful."
It hit me—Rufus was anxious about something.
"You three," he continued, "you see the world through good and evil glasses. Least you did when I found you. I’ve only tried to help you take them off, and now it’s time to see was I successful. I’ll be honest—I’m nervous. Big day for us all."
Maxine closed her book and took notice.
Rufus approached Vi, her baby grasped tightly to her chest. He reached to rip the tape from her mouth.
"What about the baby, Pop?" Luther asked.
"What about it?"
"If she doesn’t—"
"The baby stays with her, whether that’s back to the house, or down to the ocean floor."
"But—"
"Luther, please. Deal with it."
Rufus removed the tape from Vi’s mouth. There was a hardness in her eyes she had not possessed when I’d first met her back in November. She’d grown rough edges.
"Violet, you have a very important choice to make. Will you—"
"I’ll do anything you want," she said. "Just don’t hurt my baby."
"Good girl. But know that I’m gonna call your bluff tomorrow, Violet. And let me say this. Should I find that you’ve lied to me today, it’ll be bad for you, worse for little Max there."
She pulled a blanket over her son’s head to shield him from the sun.
"I’m telling you this for your own good. If you don’t think you’re capable of doing whatever I ask you to do, it would be better for you both to be thrown overboard right now. Because, if you fail, you’ll see things no mother should ever have to see."
"Said I’d do it."
He re-taped her mouth, then pulled the tape from mine.
I drew in a lungful of thick air.
Saying "no" never even occurred to me. We would get back ashore with our lives and go from there.
Luther got up and came over. He looked down at me, pushed his long black hair behind his shoulders, and spit the white pit of the Lemonhead over my head into the water.
"Well, Andrew?" he said.
"I’ll do it. Whatever you want."
"That’s right. You know the drill from the desert. I saw the video of you and that cowboy in Orson’s shed. Maybe this time you’ll do it with a smidgen of composure."
While Luther silenced me with a new piece of tape, Rufus stepped forward and ripped the duct tape off the soft mouth of Elizabeth Lancing.
I turned my head, gazed at Beth. Light nourishment and the havoc of narcotics had drawn her once lovely face into a gaunt suggestion of a skull. I doubted if she were even in her right mind. Part of me hoped she wasn’t.
"Mrs. Lancing," Rufus said. "Tell me—was our time together successful?"
"I don’t know."
"Well, there’s a real easy way to find out. Would you take someone’s life if I asked you to? Take it with indifference? Without guilt or remorse? Take it in the face of all those ridiculous values that have been imposed on you your whole life?"
Beth looked at me. It broke me to see her like this. I thought of all those late nights at my house on Lake Norman, drinking, playing cards, laughing with her and Walter. How did we ever reach this moment? Just tell him what he wants to hear, Beth. Come on.
"Andy doesn’t have the answer," Rufus said. "Beth, look at me."
She stared up at the old man, said, "I um…know I’ll never see my kids again. I know that. I don’t remember much of the last nine months. But I remember enough to know what you tried to turn me into. Who gave you the right?"
"Actually, Beth, I gave—"
"Well, you failed with me, Rufus. I won’t hurt anybody for you. So now it’s time for you to be a big fucking coward and throw me over."
Rufus smiled.
"Course, I’m extremely disappointed to hear you say that. Luth, give me a hand with her."
The two men lifted Beth’s chair up onto the gunwale.
She began to cry, and that ignited Vi’s baby.
"If I were you," Rufus said, still gripping her chair so that it balanced on the side of the boat, "I’d inhale that saltwater just as soon as I went under. I mean you’re going to inhale it eventually, after a minute or two. It’s just a natural response when your lungs are starving for air. Why spend ninety seconds, holding your breath in sheer terror, when you can begin drowning immediately and get it over with?
"You know, you’re the first person I’ve ever thrown into the sea. So don’t go washing up on the beach a month from now and make me regret not taking care of you in the basement."
Beth looked at Vi and me.
"Don’t be afraid to follow me in," she said, crying now. "I’ll be with Walter soon, won’t I?"
Her chair splashed into the Atlantic. I craned my neck and looked over the edge of the boat. She bobbed in the water, struggling to keep her head above the surface.
"Andy!" she called out.
She was on her back, the chair beginning to sink, water rising above her ears. She swallowed a mouthful and coughed.
"I forgive you," she said and went under.
Because the sea was calm, I could see her descending, writhing violently, down, down, past five feet, ten. Then the Atlantic swallowed her into its warm navy darkness. Fifteen seconds passed, then a herd of air bubbles ascended to the surface and broke beside the boat and died.
They left Vi and me to roast in the sun, stunned and horrified for Beth, for whatever was coming tomorrow.
Maxine returned to her book.
Rufus and Luther fished off the bow for several more hours, catching three sea bass and a baby shark.
# # #
That evening, Vi and I reclined in lawn chairs in the Kite’s backyard, in the shadow of the great stone house, sunburned from a day at sea. Across the Pamlico Sound, we could see storms ravaging the mainland. It was cool now, going dark, the tree frogs screaming.
We’d been allowed to change into fresh shorts and T-shirts prior to being chained to the lawn chairs. Torches and citronella candles perfumed the air with a pungent smoke that did little to protect us from the plague of mosquitoes. While Rufus dumped charcoal into a grill, Luther finished cleaning the last sea bass. Tonight was for us, they’d said. A celebration, a sendoff for tomorrow.
When the meat was cooked, Maxine (now mercifully clothed in a hot pink sweat suit) brought me a paper plate, steaming with ivory steaks of grilled shark and coleslaw and potato salad. Luther handed me a bottle of Dergy’s beer and sat down beside me with his plate.
The shark was excellent. Night came on before I finished eating. It was very still, the sound as smooth and black as volcanic glass. I did everything I could not to dwell on Beth, sitting in her chair, several hundred feet down on that ocean floor.
When Luther got up and walked toward the rotten dock, I glanced over at Vi who was nursing her baby.
"When did you have him?" I asked.
"Couple weeks ago."
"Jesus. Where’d you get baby clothes?"
"Hand-me-downs. Used to be Luther’s. Isn’t he beautiful? I named him Max, after my husband."
"You gave birth in that basement? On that dirt floor?"
"Yeah."