Just After Sunset

needed. As far as his dandruff went, who knew? Perhaps he could gift the world with a new treatment: the Aged Urine Rinse. He would be sure to check his scalp for improvement when he got out of here. If he got out of here.

Sitting up, at least, was no problem. It was fearsomely hot, and the stench was terrible (he didn’t want to think what might have been stirred up in the holding tank, and at the same time couldn’t push such thoughts away), but at least there was headroom.

“Must count blessings,” he muttered. “Must count those sons of bitches carefully.”

Yes, and take stock. That would be good, too. The water he was sitting in wasn’t getting any deeper, and that was probably another blessing. He wasn’t going to drown. Not, that was, unless the afternoon showers turned into downpours. He had seen it happen. And it was no good telling himself he’d be out of here by afternoon, of course he would, because that kind of magical thinking would be playing right into The Motherfucker’s hands. He couldn’t just sit here, thanking God he at least had some headroom, and waiting for rescue.

Maybe someone from the Charlotte County Department of Building and Planning will come out. Or a team of headhunters from the IRS.

Nice to imagine, but he had an idea it wasn’t going to happen. The Motherfucker would have taken those possibilities into consideration, too. Of course some bureaucrat or team of them might take an unscheduled swing by here, but counting on it would be as stupid as hoping that Grunwald would have a change of heart. And Mrs. Wilson would assume he’d gone to an afternoon movie in Sarasota, as he often did.

He rapped on the walls, first the left, then the right. On both sides he felt hard metal just beyond the thin and yielding plastic. Cladding. He got up on his knees, and this time he did bump his head, but hardly noticed. What he saw was not encouraging: the flat ends of the screws holding the unit together. The heads were on the outside. This wasn’t a shithouse; it was a coffin.

At this thought, his moment of clarity and calm vanished. Panic descended in its place. He began to hammer on the walls of the toilet, screaming to be let out. He threw himself from side to side like a child having a tantrum, trying to roll the Port-O-San over so he could at least free the door, but the fucking thing hardly moved at all. The fucking thing was heavy. The cladding that sheathed it made it heavy.

Heavy like a coffin! his mind shrieked. In his panic, every other thought had been banished. Heavy like a coffin! Like a coffin! A coffin!

He didn’t know how long he went on like that, but at some point he tried to stand up, as if he could burst through the wall now facing the sky like Superman. He hit his head again, this time much harder. He fell forward on his stomach. His hand splutted into something gooey-something that smeared-and he wiped it on the seat of his jeans. He did this without looking. His eyes were squeezed shut. Tears trickled from the corners. In the blackness behind his lids, stars zoomed and exploded. He wasn’t bleeding-he supposed that was good, one more goddam blessing to count-but he had almost knocked himself out.

“Calm down,” he said. He got up on his knees again. His head was down, his hair hanging, his eyes closed. He looked like a man who was praying, and he supposed he was. A fly did a touch-and-go on the nape of his neck. “Going nuts won’t help, he’d love it if he heard you screaming and carrying on, so calm down, don’t give him what he’d love, just calm the fuck down and think about this.”

What was there to think about? He was trapped.

Curtis sat back against the door and put his face in his hands.

Time passed and the world went on.

The world did its thing.

On Route 17, a few vehicles-mostly workhorses; farm trucks bound for either the markers in Sarasota or the whole-foods store in Nokomis, the occasional tractor, the postman’s station wagon with the yellow lights on the roof-trundled by. None took the turnoff to Durkin Grove Village.

Mrs. Wilson arrived at Curtis’s house, let herself in, read the note Mr. Johnson had left on the kitchen table, and began to vacuum. Then she ironed clothes in front of the afternoon soap operas. She made a macaroni casserole, stuck it in the fridge, then jotted simple instructions concerning its preparation-Bake 350, 45 mins-and left them on the table where Curtis’s note had been. When thunder began to mutter out over the Gulf of Mexico, she left early. She often did this when it rained. Nobody down here knew how to drive in the rain, they treated every shower like a nor’easter in Vermont.

In Miami, the IRS agent assigned to the Grunwald case ate a Cuban sandwich. Instead of a suit, he wore a tropical shirt with parrots on it. He was sitting under an umbrella at a sidewalk restaurant. There was no rain in Miami. He was on vacation. The Grunwald case would still be there when he got back; the wheels of government ground slow but exceedingly fine.

Grunwald relaxed in his patio hot tub, dozing, until the approaching afternoon storm woke him with the sound of thunder. He hauled himself out and went inside. As he closed the sliding glass door between the patio and the living room, the rain began to fall. Grunwald smiled. “This’ll cool you off, neighbor,” he said.

The crows had once more taken up station on the scaffolding which clasped the half-finished bank on three sides, but when thunder cracked almost directly overhead and the rain began to fall they took wing and sought shelter in the woods, cawing their displeasure at being disturbed.

In the Port-O-San-it seemed he’d been locked in here for at least three years-Curtis listened to the rain on the roof of his prison. The roof that had been the rear side until The Motherfucker tipped it over. The rain tapped at first, then beat, then roared. At the height of the storm, it was like being in a telephone booth lined with stereo speakers. Thunder exploded overhead. He had a momentary vision of being struck by lightning and cooked like a capon in a microwave. He found this didn’t disturb him much. It would be quick, at least, and what was happening now was slow.

The water began to rise again, but not fast. Curtis was actually glad about this, now that he had determined there was no actual risk of drowning like a rat that has tumbled into a toilet bowl. At least it was water, and he was very thirsty. He lowered his head to one of the holes in the steel cladding. Water from the overflowing ditch was bubbling up through it. He drank like a horse at a trough, sucking it up. The water was gritty, but he drank until his belly sloshed, constantly reminding himself that it was water, it was.

“There may be a certain piss content, but I’m sure it’s low,” he said, and began to laugh. The laughter turned to sobbing, then back to laughter again.

The rain ended around six P.M., as it usually did this time of year. The sky cleared in time to provide a grade-A Florida sunset. The few summer residents of Turtle Island gathered on the beach to watch it, as they usually did. No one commented on Curtis Johnson’s absence. Sometimes he was there, sometimes he wasn’t. Tim Grunwald was there, and several of the sunsetters remarked that he seemed exceptionally cheery that evening. Mrs. Peebles told her husband, as they walked home hand in hand along the beach, that she believed Mr. Grunwald was finally getting over the shock of losing his wife. Mr. Peebles told her she was a romantic. “Yes, dear,” she said, momentarily putting her head on his shoulder, “that’s why I married you.”

When Curtis saw the light coming through the holes in the cladding-the few that weren’t facedown in the ditch-fading from peach to gray, he realized he was actually going to spend the night in this stinking coffin with two inches of water on the floor and a half-closed toilet hole at his feet. He was probably going to die in here, but that seemed academic. To spend the night in here, however-hours stacked on more hours, piles of hours like piles of great black books-that was real and unavoidable.

The panic pounced again. He once more began to scream and pound the walls, this time turning around and around on his knees, first beating his right shoulder against one wall and then his left against the other. Like a bird caught in a church steeple, he thought, but could not stop. One flailing foot splattered the escaped turd against the bottom of the bench seat. He tore his pants. He first bruised his knuckles, then split them. At last he stopped, weeping and sucking at his hands.

Got to stop. Got to save my strength.

Then he thought: For what?

By eight o’clock, the air had begun to cool. By ten o’clock, the pud dle in which Curtis was lying had also cooled-seemed cold, in fact-and he began to tremble. He clutched his arms around himself and drew his knees up to his chest.

I’ll be all right as long as my teeth don’t chatter, he thought. I can’t bear to hear my teeth chatter.

At eleven o’clock, Grunwald went to bed. He lay there in his pajamas under the revolving fan, looking up into the dark and smiling. He felt better than he had felt for months. He was gratified but not surprised. “Goodnight, neighbor,” he said, and closed his eyes. He slept through the night without waking for the first time in six months.

At midnight, not far away from Curtis’s makeshift cell, some animal-probably just a wild dog, but to Curtis it sounded like a hyena-let out a long, screaming howl. His teeth began to chatter. The sound was every bit as awful as he had feared.

Some unimaginable time later, he slept.

When he woke up, he was shivering all over. Even his feet were jerking, tapdancing like the feet of a junkie in withdrawal. I’m getting sick, I’ll have to go to the damn doctor, I ache all over, he thought. Then he opened his eyes, saw where he was, remembered where he was, and gave a loud, desolate cry: “Ohhhh…no! NO!”

But it was oh yes. At least the Port-O-San wasn’t entirely dark anymore. Light was coming through the circular holes: the pale rose glow of morning. It would soon strengthen as the day brightened and heated up. Before long he would be steam-cooking again.

Grunwald will come back. He’s had a night to think it over, he’ll realize how insane this is, and he’ll come back. He’ll let me out.

Curtis did not believe this. He wanted to, but didn’t.

He needed to take a leak in the worst way, but he was damned if he was going to piss in the corner, even though there was crap and used toilet paper everywhere from yesterday’s overturning. He felt somehow that if he did that-a nasty thing like that-it would be the same as announcing to himself that he had given up hope.

I have given up hope.

But he hadn’t. Not completely. As tired and achey as he was, as frightened and dispirited, part of him still hadn’t given up hope. And there was a bright side: he felt no urge to gag himself, and he hadn’t spent even a single minute of the night just gone by, nearly eternal though it had been, scourging his scalp with his comb.

There was no need to piss in the corner, anyway. He would just raise the toilet seat lid with one hand, aim with the other, and let fly. Of course, given the Port-O- San’s new configuration, that would mean pissing horizontally instead of at a downward-pointing angle. The current throb in his bladder suggested that would be absolutely no problem. Of course the final squirt or two would probably go on the floor, but-

“But thems are the fortunes of war,” he said, and surprised himself with a croaky laugh. “And as far as the toilet seat goes…fuck holding it up. I can do better than that.”

He was no Mr. Hercules, but both the half-ajar toilet seat and the flanges holding it to the bench were plastic-the seat and ring black, the flanges white. This whole goddam box was really just a cheap plastic prefab job, you didn’t have to be a big-time construction contractor to see that, and unlike the walls and the door, there was no cladding on the seat and its fastenings. He thought he could tear it off pretty easily, and if he could he would-if only to vent some of his anger and terror.

Curtis seized the seat and lifted it, meaning to grip the ring just beneath and pull sideways. Instead he paused, looking through the circular hole and into the tank beneath, trying to make sense of what he saw.

It looked like a thin seam of daylight.