A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel (28 page)

Slowly, because he can't move quickly, comically, because the left leg remains dead, Augustus gets to his stick and picks it up. The familiar transfer of weight's a relief. He stands over Paulie.

“Take your jacket off.”

“What?”

“Take your jacket off.”

Paulie in pinched shock merely looks at Augustus. With a force and accuracy that surprises everyone, especially himself, Augustus reverses the stick and whacks Paulie on the head with the heavy end. Paulie screams, throws up an arm to protect himself, then in an access of rage lunges at Augustus, screaming: You fucking black cunt I'll fucking kill you I'll fucking kill you I'll fucking—

It's a close thing, a second's blurred calculation, but Augustus doesn't fire. She's an accessory. The machinations of dull justice will follow. Which means what? This is the labored business of being involved with someone. He should never have said she could stay. But again why did he if not for something like this?

He hits Paulie ferocious blows in rapid succession. The stick's not cudgel enough to knock him out but it hurts, can't be withstood. Paulie takes a shot on the right hand that breaks a bone (Augustus believes he hears it) and with a scream curls up on the floor, crying and repeating:
Black bastard…black…bastard
.

“Take your jacket off.”

“I'm not fucking armed!” Paulie screams. This rage is the satanic toddler's who for once is telling the truth.

“Take it off or I'll shoot you in the other foot.” Augustus is thinking this would have been less of a problem in summer. Getting away in this weather's going to be an ordeal. Practicalities, the first buzzing outriders of the swarm, are starting to arrive. You don't get any concessions. Which thought makes him laugh, quietly. Lame one-eyed leftover no longer a man freak. Vigilante restaurateur.

Paulie struggles out of his jacket.

“Throw it to the girl.”

Paulie tosses the jacket. “I'll find you, Mor. I'll find you and—”

Augustus whacks the broken hand with his stick and Paulie spasms in silence as if he's been electrocuted. He can't, Augustus sees, get past the outrage, can't accept the power relationship's been reversed. It's a mental block. Harper wouldn't have had it. Harper understood power aside from himself, a neutral tool that serves anyone who acquires it.

“Go through the pockets,” Augustus says to Morwenna. She's very calm, holding her ribs, saddened by her satisfaction in this, underneath it angry that he's turned her into someone who can take such satisfaction. Augustus can imagine how she fell in love, what Paulie can be to a fifteen-year-old runaway with his diver's wristwatch and quick decisions and casual knowledge of everything and all the people who know him and smile when he walks in. He needs you to love him first, the foxy glamorous ease of him. He has to make you his princess. That's the whole point.

Wallet. Police ID. Cuffs. Two mobile phones. Condoms. Camel filters. Lighter. Change. Keys. Notebook.

“Over to the stove,” Augustus tells Paulie. “Move. I know how much that hand hurts but I'll hit it again, as hard as I can. Move. Morwenna, the handcuffs.”

Paulie, dragging himself backward to the stove, starts laughing. This, Augustus knows he's meant to infer, is Paulie enjoying the certainty of his future revenge. This is Paulie
tickled pink
by letting these two have their moment. A gesture of vital self-comfort.

“Facedown on the floor,” Augustus says. “Left hand on the leg of the stove. You don't need me to spell this out.”

Paulie, still chuckling, complies. Augustus kneels on his neck. There's the option of giving the gun to Morwenna for a moment but he doesn't like it. Better to struggle one-handed himself. He knows cuffs, of course. In any case Paulie's past trying something.

“Okay, sit up.”

Augustus helps him get his back to the stove, legs stretched out in front of him. From here he can reach the logs and toss them on the fire. Enough for maybe a day. Then cold. Augustus checks how much blood to make sure it's not an artery.

“We should get going,” he says to Morwenna. “Warm clothes, no more than you can carry in your shoulder bag.”

“He'll find me,” she whispers.

“Not this time.”

She closes her eyes. Replaying the worst of it, Augustus assumes, the footage, the episodes. He doesn't want to know. She'll have to tell someone, eventually, but he'd rather it wasn't him. “Come on, let's get out of here. How much money in the wallet? Might as well have that, right?”

While Morwenna stuffs clothes into the shoulder bag Augus
tus builds up the fire, making sure Paulie gets to see his wallet, ID, condoms and notebook going into the flames. The two cell phones and car keys go into Augustus's coat pocket.

Morwenna's ready, but stands staring at Paulie. Augustus wishes he could shoot him for her, since there's blood on his hands already and nothing will happen to him after he's dead (though habit imagines a bulge in the ether even as he thinks it—and where or what is the invisible collective he's been in confab with? Just him, he tells himself. Juliet, Selina, Harper—it's all him); but Paulie dead will do her more harm than Paulie alive. Paulie dead will set the unpredictable Law in motion. He has no faith in the Law.

“You're a piece of shit,” Morwenna says to Paulie. Augustus worries she's going to kick him or spit on him, hopes not because such things go awkwardly and you end up with aesthetic horror and disgust with yourself and the inadequacy of the act. But she turns her back on him and goes to the door.

“I'll be out in a minute,” Augustus tells her, quietly. “Just want to make things secure here. Wait for me outside.”

When Morwenna closes the door behind her Augustus lights one of the Camels and drops the lighter and pack in Paulie's lap. Paulie has difficulty with the damaged hand but manages eventually. Augustus pulls the one chair up and sits down.

“You have to understand something,” he says. “If it was just me I'd shoot you. Point-blank, in the face, the mouth, the back of the head. Right now you'd be looking at death. Actually I think you've worked that out. Your instincts are fine and you know the sound of a liar. You've got the nose for character, you've got the psychology.”

“Who the fuck
are
you?”

“No one important. A rancid old coon who turned out to have a gun.”

“You can't fucking leave me here like this.”

“Don't waste time, just listen. If you come after us, I'll kill you. No hesitation. I'll kill you. Look at me, closely. Understand: I'll kill you because I'm not afraid to die. Do you see this? Look at me. Do you see it?”

Paulie doesn't want to look at Augustus in the way Augustus wants to be looked at, but when their eyes meet for a moment Augustus feels the rejuvenating purity, sees Paulie, knows Paulie sees him. Nothing's had this quality since the night of his escape. This is the only version of himself that feels familiar, as if he's briefly sober in an epic of drunkenness. “She's told me everything,” he says. “And within the next twenty-four hours my lawyers will have the same information. Which will remain inert, unless anything happens to me or the girl, anything at all, the slightest suspicion you're trying to reach us. In which case an investigation will begin. Look at me.”

“Get fucked.”

Augustus stamps on the broken hand and keeps his foot there. Paulie screams and twists against the cuff, his feet slither in the little pool of blood.

“Okay okay please, fuck, please—”

Augustus presses harder. Paulie's scream turns to silence, face scrunched, bearing the unbearable.

“You feel that force there on your hand? That's the world. The story of the world is the story of force. It's just some people are better at applying it than others.”

Augustus stands, releases Paulie's hand. There's an almost full bottle of Glenfiddich on the table. Augustus sets it down within the policeman's reach. “The farmer or his boy'll be down. Maybe a couple of days.” He feels tired, suddenly, remembers the doctor sitting in the drain cleaners' van on the dead forecourt, door open, smoking. You never know what you've got in the tank. Halfway through a sentence it's empty. The doc, as far as he knows, got his flight out of Casablanca, but it's hard to believe there was a life for him. He hopes he made it somewhere like Mexico, got absorbed into a small town or village, has a doorway he can sit in watching the dust swirl in the sunlight. Romantic fantasy. The old man will have drifted into vagrancy. Sores and sour clothes. He was already at the end of himself at the gas station.

Augustus pauses at the door, takes a last look at the room it seems he's seeing for the first time. The fire blazes in the hearth. He has no conclusions. This all feels, approximately, like an accident. Life's dervish mass spins erratically and sometimes snags you on a spur. It might have come nowhere near him had he not let the girl in, or a dozen times near-missed and passed by in the night. But he concedes he did let the girl in. This is the source of his weariness now, the thought that all along the living part of him has been meticulously plotting, that the dead part has had no control over it. Not an accident. A setup. A sting.

He has no resolution. Inertia nuzzles and he knows it'll offer itself at every step from here out and up the hill, into Marle, onto the ferry, the mainland and beyond. He isn't fortified. Already the reactive momentum's spent, adrenaline on the ebb. In fact he regrets what he's done, or rather resents how unthinkingly he's done it. No qualms about Paulie, but a feeling of being shystered
by spontaneity, carried away by impulse. Art would demand an epiphany (quiet admission or Carlylean
Yea
) a realization that life's worth living. He doesn't have any of that, only the rueful feeling of having hoodwinked himself into action. Absurd action, moreover. Paulie handcuffed to the stove looks like a life-size ventriloquist's dummy. Yet the man has a childhood, dreams, memories, a history. There are moments you glimpse everyone's cluttered uniqueness, the endless particularity that requires so much effort, too much effort. The thought of the long trudge with Morwenna (who, back in the world of demand and exigency will be different, possibly irritating, at the very least more talkative) exhausts him where he stands, brings the brutal realization that he doesn't have to stick with her, owes her nothing, could shoot
her
in the head and consign her body to the sea. And yet God has not said a word!

Oh come off it
.

Not God but the self-conjured cabal of ghosts says this—Juliet, Selina, Cardillo, Elise—all the good dead or all the bits of him their living fashioned. At his center is what Harper helped him find, the solitary eye that sees the void and the darkling plain, that knows the dead don't speak, that no one's keeping score, that earth receives the bodies of the evil and the good with null equalizing silence. This is his center, to which he'll go when his time comes. He supposes until then the ghosts prove his pleasure in remembering them. He could put a bullet in the girl's brain, cut off her head, gouge out her heart and wolf it down—but it would spoil his pleasure in remembering the ones he loved. There's nothing necessary about this. The presence or absence of love in a life is purely contingent, which if it points to a grand narrative points
to one of spectacular natural injustice. But the fact remains that contingently, he, Augustus Rose, had these people, had that love, takes this pleasure in remembering. Contingently, he's doomed to live under the rule of certain durable habits.

There's nothing more to say to Paulie. The policeman will either come after them or not. That's out of Augustus's hands now. If he wants a project it's getting the girl away. Again the thought leaves him leaden. Even the struggle up the hill seems beyond him, though he's made it a dozen times at least since the snow.

Heaving against sleepiness, Augustus opens the door, steps out and pulls it shut behind him.

Morwenna's waiting for him at the bottom of the hill, woolen-hatted, scarved, hands in the leather jacket pockets, shoulder bag bulging. The rib's keeping her from straightening up properly. Now he's outside Augustus feels wide awake, horribly alive to the difficulties crowding ahead. Remember to toss the phones into the sea. That's the least of it. The car key on Paulie's bunch is for an Audi. With luck you find that where the track comes off the lane. If not there won't be many Audis in the ferry car park. No choice but to take it and switch on the mainland. It occurs to him Morwenna isn't likely to have a passport. Her look over the scarf says she's not sure how or if this has changed things between them, what he might want from her, what he might do. It gives him a small pleasure (as when he noticed Selina's broken silver chain and knew he could spare her its loss) to know she's got nothing to fear from him, since he's made his decision, since the habits, thus far, have endured.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I told him not to come after us. He'll be stuck there for a while anyway.” He holds up the Audi key. “We may have transportation.” It's just striking him that he'll never see Calansay again. He feels the need for a gesture of acknowledgment, but it passes.

“It's up to you,” Augustus says, “but if you want, I can help you for a while.”

Morwenna's nostrils are raw. The last hour's left her eyes bright. Her lip's split and swollen.

“Thanks,” she says—and suddenly tears well and fall. Augustus understands: not because she's suffered but because he's helping her. When you're a child people's cruelty makes you cry. When you're an adult it's their kindness. Seeing her making this shift he feels ancient, flimsy as a paper lantern, for just a second or two wholly not up to the job.

“Sorry,” she says. “Sorry.”