find the reason why. Just the MacGuffin, the bookstore boy had said, a device. There was no explanation. Would he have to accept that, in the poem and in his own life? Silence thickened, tangible, immobilizing. JFK broke it by saying, “Hey! You all right?”
Eddie grew aware of JFK leaning on the card-table chair across the room, separated from him by golden bars of light. The light burnished all his bony parts, as though they were already exposed.
“You better lie down,” Eddie said.
JFK nodded, made his way to the mattress, sat, used his hands to pull up his legs, lay down. Eddie could hear him breathing, fast and shallow. After a few minutes he groaned, then breathed more slowly. He looked at Eddie.
“Too weak, man. But I be wanting you to know.”
“Know what?”
“That it wasn’t me.”
Eddie nodded. “More water?”
“Not a drop to drink.”
“Why not?”
“Too far to go, all the way down from ninety-seven percent. Nine or ten, maybe. I could reach it from there. But not ninety-seven.”
Eddie opened the backpack, took out a wad of bills, put them in JFK’s hand.
“What this?” said JFK.
“For medicine, the doctor, whatever you need.”
“Your brother’s money?”
“Mine.”
“You got money? That be something, anyway.” JFK’s eyes went to the Marley poster: “One World.”
“I be wanting to make a little confession,” he said.
Eddie waited.
“JFK no be a gay man.”
“You said that.”
“But he be doing some gay things at one time, despite his own self.”
“So what?” Eddie said.
There were no buses in Cotton Town, no jitneys, no taxis. Eddie borrowed JFK’s rusty bicycle, promising to send it back from Galleon Beach. In fifteen years he had made no plans other than to quit smoking, to take nothing with him, to have a steam bath. He had realized all of them, not hard to do. The hard part was knowing what you wanted. And now Eddie knew. He wanted a house on a bluff and a bay for swimming. There were other islands. He bicycled north, toward the airstrip and a flight to the next one in the chain.
It was hot, the road bumpy, the pack increasingly heavy on his back. Eddie was aware of all those things, but they didn’t bother him. He was alive, he was free, he had money, all he would ever need. He tried dividing fifteen into $488,220. Thirty-two thousand and something per annum, as though he had spent those years teaching high school: not an excessive return.
Eddie pedaled JFK’s bike. The track widened slightly, grew smoother. Soon he would see the white house on the bluff, the hippie house with the peace sign on the roof. Five or ten minutes had passed without a single thought of Jack. That was good. That was the way it would have to be. He came to the bluff, saw a lane leading up to the house, paused.
A dust cloud rose in the distance, over the treetops. It drew closer, like a small approaching storm. A car appeared beneath the dust cloud, sunlight glinting off the windshield. It topped a rise a few hundred yards from Eddie, going fast, much too fast for the road. He pulled to the side, got off the bike.
The car roared by, so quickly and spewing so much dust that Eddie didn’t see the driver at all. He pushed JFK’s bike back on the road, adjusted the backpack, got ready to remount. Then the car made a shrieking sound. Eddie looked in time to see it skidding sideways, wheels locked, on the edge of control. But not out of it: the car spun around and came toward him, slower now. The dust began to settle, leaving a little smudged dome across the sky.
The car stopped beside him. The door opened. Karen got out.
32
“The world is much smaller than you think,” Karen said.
They stood on the Cotton Town road, Karen beside her car, Eddie at the head of the lane leading to the hippie house.
“I’m familiar with the concept,” Eddie replied.
Karen laughed, a complex sound and not particularly friendly. “Maybe it’s Jack who’s not.”
He saw himself reflected in her sunglasses, two uncertain little Eddies, leaning on their bikes.
“I’m going to disappoint you this time,” Eddie said.
“In what way?”
“If you’ve come to pump me about my brother.”
Karen took off her sunglasses. There were shadows under her eyes and her face was pale. “We’re just like an old couple,” she said, “picking up the conversation in mid-fight.”
A breeze stirred in the trees, clearing away the dust, blueing the sky. Karen looked up at the hippie house. “Why don’t we just go up and talk to him?”
“He’s not there.”
Her eyes went to Eddie, and then to the backpack. “Aren’t you the loyal little brother.”
There was no reason to be loyal, now that he knew what Jack had done. Still, Eddie replied: “You’re a cop.”
“Not exactly,” Karen said. “And he’s no longer the subject of an investigation.”
“Why is that?” Was it simply the returning of the $230,000, or did she know Jack was dead? Had his body been found and identified? Eddie couldn’t think of any reason why Senor Paz would let that happen.
“Lack of evidence,” Karen replied.
“And you’ve come to dig up more.”
“I told you-the investigation is over.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I just want to talk to him.”
“About what?”
Karen didn’t answer right away. Her eyes weren’t quite the same now. Same shade of blue, of course, but because of her fatigue, or the heat, or something else, not as cool as before.
“You,” she said.
“You’re investigating me?”
“In a sense.”
“Meaning what?”
“In the broadest sense. I’m interested in you. In what happened to you.”
“For your thesis?”
“If you like.” Karen put her sunglasses back on. “I’ve read the transcript of your trial. You denied knowing the marijuana was on board. I found myself inclined to believe you.”
“That’s nice.”
There was a long pause. Then Karen said: “They executed Willie Boggs last night.” She waited for Eddie to speak. He watched his close-mouthed reflection in her sunglasses and said nothing. “Some odd things happened,” Karen went on. “First I spoke to a man named Messer. He seemed very curious to know your whereabouts. Not long after that, not long after Willie died, in fact, Messer died too. Bullet in the head. I found him in the ambulance that should have been carrying Willie. Willie’s body bag was empty. They counted the inmates. One was missing. Can
