The moment held — perfect balance, utter silence, the slow grace of gathering movement — and then off she went, all one hundred six feet and thirteen tons of her, pulling away from him like a figure in a dream. She followed her nose and the flood tide and she drifted out across the invisible river, dead on for Gees Point and the black haunted immemorial depths of World’s End. He watched till the snow closed over her, and then he turned away.
He was trembling — with cold, with fear, with excitement and relief — and he thought of the car. Almost wistfully, he looked once more out into the night, out over his shoulder and into the slashing strokes of the snow and the void beyond, and then he turned to go. But the dock was slick and his feet betrayed him. Before he could take a step, the hard white surface of the dock was rushing up to meet him and he hit it with a boom that seemed to thunder through the night. And then the unexpected happened, the unaccountable, the little thing that pumped him full of dread: a light went on. A light. Out there at the end of the dock, thirty feet from him, a sudden violation of the night, the river, the storm. He lay there, his heart hammering, and heard movement from below: heavy, muffled sounds.
And then he saw it — the low shadow of a boat drawn up on the other side of the dock, a second light gone on now, much closer. He pushed himself up, choked with panic, and his feet slid out from under him again. “Hey,” a voice called out, and it was right beside him. There was a man on the boat, a man with a flashlight, and as the boat materialized from the shadows, Walter went numb. He knew it. He knew that boat. He did. Peterskill Marina. Halloween. The floating outhouse with the bum aboard, the Indian — what had Mardi called him?
Jeremy. She’d called him Jeremy.
Suddenly he was on his feet and running — scrambling, flailing, staggering, pitching headlong into the night — the voice raking him from behind. “Hey,” it called, and it was the bay of a hound. “Hey, what’s going on?”
Walter didn’t know how many times he’d fallen by the time he reached the end of the dock and broke right along the tracks, his jacket torn and heavy with snow, the strap of his left foot twisted loose. He kept going, whipping himself on, expecting to hear the Indian’s footsteps behind him, expecting the madman to leap out of the gloom and throw himself at him, lock onto his throat, his ear. …
The snow came at him like a judgment. He went down again and this time he couldn’t get up — he was winded, out of shape, he was a cripple. There was a stitch in his side. His lungs burned. He gagged. And then it was coming up, all of it, beer, pastrami, artichoke hearts, crullers, the stuffed pork chops and canned asparagus. The heat of it rose in his face and he pushed himself away from it, sprawling in the snow like a dead man.
Later, when the cold made him move, his fingers refused to work. The prosthesis was loose — both of them were — and he couldn’t pull the straps. When finally he stood, he couldn’t feel the ground. He could feel his bleeding knuckles, could feel the tightness in his chest, but he couldn’t feel the earth beneath his feet. And that was bad, very bad. Because the earth was covered with snow and the snow was mounting and everything seemed like something else. He knew he had to get to the car. But which way was the car? Had he crossed the tracks? And where was the station? Where were the lights?
He started off in what must have been the right direction — it must have been — but he couldn’t feel the ground, and he fell. The cold had begun to sting now, the cold that was eighty degrees warmer than Barrow’s, and he pushed himself up. Carefully, methodically, putting one foot in front of the other and lifting his arms high for balance, he started off again. Counting steps — three, four, five, and where was the car? — but he went down like a block of wood. He got back up and almost immediately pitched forward again. And again. Finally, he began to crawl.
It was while he was crawling, his hands and knees gone dead as his feet, that he heard the first tentative whimper. He paused. His mind was fuzzy and he was tired. He’d forgotten where he was, what he’d done, where he was going, why he’d come. And then there it was again. The whimper rose to a sob, a cry, a plaint of protest and lament. And finally, shattering and disconsolate, beyond hope or redemption, it rose to a wail.
Heir Apparent
There was no reason to have come in at all, really. Orders were traditionally slow this time of year, and even if they weren’t, even if another world war broke out and they had to cook aluminum and cast aximaxes around the clock, they wouldn’t have needed him anyway — except maybe to sign the paychecks every other week. He was superfluous, and no one knew it better than he. Olaffson, the production manager, could have handled ten times the volume without even switching his brain on, and the kid they’d found to replace Walter in sales and advertising was a natural. Or so they told him. Actually, he hadn’t even met the kid yet.
But Depeyster liked the office. He liked to stretch out for a nap on the leather couch in the corner or cogitate over a paperback thriller in the rich spill of light from the brass desk lamp with the green glass shade. He liked the smell of the desk, liked the sound of the electric pencil sharpener and the way the big walnut chair tilted with the small of his back and glided across the carpet on its smooth silent casters. In the afternoons, he liked taking a two-hour lunch or slipping off to play a round of golf with LeClerc Outhouse — or, when the weather permitted, sailing up to Cold Spring for a Beefeater’s martini, straight up, at Gus’ Antique Bar. Best of all, though, he liked to get out of the house, liked to feel productive, useful, liked to feel he’d put in his day like anybody else.
Now, idly fanning the pages of a magazine and sitting over a cup of stone-cold coffee, he lifted his gaze to the window and the parking lot beyond, and saw that it was raining. Again. It seemed as if it had rained every day now since that freak snowstorm two weeks back. The plow had left a snowbank five feet high at the far end of the lot, and now there was nothing left of it but a broken ridge of dirty ice. All at once he had a terrible premonition: the rain would turn to sleet, the roads would ice up like a bobsled run and he’d be stuck here, away from home, and there’d be no way to get Joanna to the hospital.
He jerked open the drawer and fumbled with the phone book. “Weather service,” he muttered to himself, “weather service, weather service,” and he paged through the book and muttered until he gave it up and had Miss Egthuysen dial for him. Bland and indifferent, the recorded voice came over the wire with a crackle of static: “Rain ending late this afternoon, temperatures in the mid to high thirties, slight chance of overnight freezing in outlying areas.”
In the next moment he was pacing around the desk, half-frantic with worry, fighting the temptation to call home again. He’d called not five minutes before and Lula, in her laconic way, had done her best to reassure him. Everything was fine, she told him. Joanna was resting. She didn’t think she should be disturbed.
“Her water hasn’t broken yet, has it?” he asked, just to hear his own voice.
“Nope.”
There was a silence over the line. He was waiting for details, an update on Joanna’s condition, today was the day, didn’t she know that for christ’s sake? Didn’t she know that Dr. Brillinger had called it, right down to the very day — to this very day? The only reason he’d come into the office in the first place was because Joanna said he was making her nervous poking his head in the door every other minute. Pale to the roots of her hair, she’d squeezed his hand and asked him if he wouldn’t feel better at the office, the diner, a movie — anything to make the time pass for him. Just leave a number, that’s all. She’d call him. Not to worry, she’d call.