Locked Doors - Crouch Blake - Страница 37
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Vi rolled onto her back.
Swallowed blood.
Warm liquid rust.
The spindly branches of a live oak overhung the road. Between its limbs the night sky shone in pieces—cloudless, black, filling up with stars.
Rufus and Maxine stood arm-in-arm grinning down at her.
A walkie-talkie crackled.
Rufus pulled it from his back pocket, pressed the talk button, said, “Yeah, son, we got her. See you back at the house.”
Vi’s brain told her arm to unzip the poncho and take out the gun but she remembered that she didn’t have it and besides the arm wouldn’t move.
“Now that’s what you call a good ol’ fashioned wallop,” Rufus said and chuckled.
Then the old man kissed his wife on the cheek and leaned down toward Vi, all gums tonight.
“Her lips are still moving,” he said. “Go ahead and clonk her again, Beautiful.”
S W E E T – S W E E T
&
B E A U T I F U L
However, there is a locked room up there
with an iron door that can’t be opened.
It has all your bad dreams in it.
It is hell.
Some say the devil locks the door
from the inside.
Some say the angels locked it from the outside.
The people inside have no water
and are never allowed to touch.
They crack like macadam.
They are mute.
They do not cry help
except inside
where their hearts are covered with grubs.
—Anne Sexton, “Locked Doors”
F o u r D a y s L a t e r
50
MONDAY morning, 10:00 a.m., Horace Boone leaned back in his chair and sipped from an enormous mug of coffee, watching through the window as the sun made its brilliant ascent above the Outer Banks, whetting the sky into cloudless November cobalt.
It should’ve been a lovely morning, sitting in that warm sunlit nook of the Ocracoke Coffee Company, amid the smell of fresh coffee beans and newspapers and baking pastries and the murmurs of browsing customers in the adjoining Java Books.
But Horace was a wreck.
It had been four days now since he’d watched Andrew Thomas board the Island Hopper with that pretty young woman and taxi out through Silver Lake harbor into the sound. He’d waited and waited, staring through the windshield as the sky dumped cold unrelenting rain. An hour had passed and the Island Hopper returned without them.
By nightfall there was still no sign of them so he made his way back to the Harper Castle B&B, had supper, and went to bed.
First thing Friday morning, he returned to the Community Store docks. The Jeep Cherokee that Andrew and the woman had arrived in was gone. Horace drove to Howard’s Pub, saw that the Audi Andrew had rented wasn’t there either.
Behind the wheel of his own subcompact rental, a tiny white Kia, Horace felt the hot tears begin to roll down his cheeks. Up until a few days ago he’d sensed that he was fated to tail Andrew Thomas and record his story. He’d managed to follow him nearly three thousand miles from Haines Junction, Yukon, to Denver International Airport. There, he’d lost Andrew in security, waited all weekend in despair near a stand of payphones in the food court of Terminal B, berating himself for flushing his savings on this ridiculous endeavor. Watching the stream of travelers, he resolved to fly back to Anchorage, apologize profusely to Professor Byron, and finish his MFA in the creative writing program. This last year of his life had been derailed by a twenty-four-year-old megalomaniac who fancied he would write a book about Andrew Thomas and become famous.
As Horace gathered his backpack and came to his feet he stared down the terminal and watched in astonishment as the man he thought he’d lost glided toward him on the moving walkway. Andrew Thomas walked right up beside him, grabbed a payphone, and with his back turned to Horace, proceeded to make a phone call.
Horace felt certain he was hallucinating but he stood there and listened as Andrew called the North Carolina Department of Transportation and inquired about the ferry schedules from the mainland to a place called Ocracoke Island. Had Horace any lingering doubt about whether fate and fortune were in his pocket, he then observed Andrew hang up, redial, and book a room at the Harper Castle B&B on Ocracoke for the following week.
His rejuvenation was instantaneous.
Once on Ocracoke, Horace spent Wednesday and Thursday following Andrew’s movements throughout the island—the two trips to the stone manor on the sound, Andrew’s visit to Tatum Boat Tours, Bubba’s Bait and Tackle, his peculiar meeting with the pretty blond at Howard’s Pub, and finally, Andrew and the blond’s departure on that boat in the middle of a nor’easter.
Apparently they had returned late in the night and for some reason left the island. Had Horace waited by the docks he might be with them now. Instead he’d come thousands of miles only to lose Andrew permanently on a small island off the coast of North Carolina. He’d let the story of a lifetime slip away. Andrew was long gone by now, pursuing Luther Kite, in a story that Horace would never get to tell.
No question, he’d missed the party.
Horace set the coffee mug down on his little table and lifted the purple notebook containing the first four chapters of his book on Andrew Thomas. He didn’t have the heart to write about Andrew this morning. Thumbing through the pages, he relived the thrill of finding him and standing outside the window of Andrew’s cabin in Haines Junction, watching the master write. For a month at least, Horace had known hope.
Rising from the table, he acknowledged that this would probably be his final morning on Ocracoke. But he wasn’t going to waste it as he’d done the last three days—driving aimlessly around the island searching for Andrew’s Audi and that blue Jeep Cherokee. Tonight he would try one last thing and if that proved futile (as he suspected it would) he’d fly back to Alaska, beg his parents for a little money, and never again do anything this reckless and stupid.
51
BETH and Violet stirred as we entered our fourth period of light.
It passed through a crack in the stone and slanted through darkness—a dusty shaft of daylight come to illuminate our miserable faces for an hour.
We sat across from one another in a cold stone room, our wrists manacled and chained to an iron D-ring, bolted to the rocky floor between our feet.
A doorway opened into a dark corridor, through which spilled the disconcerting sounds of hammering and drilling that had been ongoing without respite for what seemed like days.
I raised my head.
In the twilight I could see that the women were also conscious.
A stream of water trickled down the stone beside Violet.
Two roaches crawled through the oval patch of daylight at my feet.
A strained and hopeless silence bore down upon us.
Beth wept softly as she always did when the light appeared.
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