Deep Water (28 page)

       "Isn't Melinda going?" Brian asked.

       "No. I don't think so," Vic said. Melinda hadn't the least interest in Trixie's glee club. She had been sleeping this morning when they left the house, so Brian had not had an opportunity to say good-bye to her.

       "She's a 'most remarkable' woman," Brian said, pronouncing the words slowly and firmly, "but I don't think she knows her own mind."

       "No?"

       "No. It's a pity. She's got such vitality."

       Vic had no reply. He did not know precisely what Brian was thinking in regard to Melinda and he really didn't care. He felt extremely nervous and irritable that morning, felt the kind of nervousness that comes from a fear of being late for something, and he kept looking at his watch as if they were going to arrive in Wesley in plenty of time.

       "I've 'certainly' had a good time up here," Brian said. "And I want to thank you for taking such trouble about the—the format. There's not another publisher in the world who'd take the trouble you would about it."

       "I enjoy it," Vic said.

       At the station, they had five minutes or so before Brian's train arrived. Brian pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket.

       "I wrote a poem last night," he said. "I wrote it all at once in about five minutes, so it's probably not one of my best, but I'd like you to see it." He held it out abruptly to Vic.

       Vic read:

       'What has been done cannot be undone.

       The ultimate effort made before the ultimatum was given,

       The positive and overflowing gesture made,

       And the love lost like a flower floating

       Down the stream, just beyond, just too fast

       For the hand to recapture.

       I cannot make the stream turn back,

       For there I am, too, floating,

       Just behind the fleeing flower'.

       Vic smiled. "For five minutes, I don't think it's bad at all." He handed it back to Brian.

       "Oh, you can keep that. I have another copy. I thought you might show it to Melinda."

       Vic nodded. "All right." He had known Brian was going to say that. He had known from the first line that the poem had been inspired by Melinda, and that the poet's objectivity to his own work had allowed Brian not only to show the poem to him but to ask him to deliver it.

       In the remaining minutes they walked slowly up and down the platform, Vic keeping an eye on Brian's small suitcase for him, because Brian was not watching it at all. Brian stretched himself tall as he walked, his hands in his pockets and his eyes looking into the distance everywhere with the eager, planless, undoubting optimism of youth, just as he had looked when he had arrived in Little Wesley, Vic remembered. Vic wondered if he had given much of a thought to what Cameron might mean in his and Melinda's life, or whether his meeting with Melinda had been sufficient unto itself—like one of those brief infatuations Goethe had so often had with chambermaids and barmaids and people's cooks, which had always struck Vic as 'infra dignitatem' and somehow ludicrous, though they had netted Goethe a poem or even two. Biology was really the major miracle of existence. That this dedicated young man with a heart like a clean pane of glass had, at any rate for a few hours, fallen under the spell of Melinda. How glad he was that Brian was not staying up here! So glad, that he began to smile.

       The tram was coming in.

       Brian whipped his hand out of his pocket suddenly. "I'd like to give you this."

       "What?" Vic said, not really seeing anything in the boy's bony fist.

       "It's something that belonged to my father. I've got three pairs of them. I value them very much, but I intended—if I liked you—to give you a pair. I hope you'll take them. I do like you, and you're the first person to publish—to publish my first book." He stopped as if he were choked off. His fist was still extended.

       Vic put out his hand, and Brian dropped something wrapped in wrinkled tissue paper into it. Vic opened it and saw two bloodstone cufflinks set in gold.

       "My father always encouraged me to write poetry," Brian said. "I didn't tell you much about him. He died of tuberculosis of the throat. That's why he took so much trouble to make me like the out-of-doors." Brian glanced at the train that was stopping. "You will take them, won't you?"

       Vic started to protest, but he knew Brian would be displeased. "Yes, I'll take them. Thank you, Brian. I feel very honored."

       Brian smiled and nodded, not knowing what to say now. He climbed the train steps with his suitcase, and stopped to wave back at Vic, wordless, as if they were miles apart.

       "I'll send you the galleys the day they're done!" Vic called. He put the cufflinks into his jacket pocket and walked back to his car, starting to wonder if Melinda was up yet, to wonder if she had an appointment to meet Cameron in Ballinger, or wherever she was going to start the divorce business. Melinda would not actually go into a lawyer's office with Cameron, but she would probably have him wait outside for her. Vic knew her well. She would wake up with a hangover today, full of nervous, remorseful, destructive energy, and she would start the thing rolling. Vic could imagine the face of the lawyer to whom she would speak, in Ballinger or wherever. It would be somewhere near—she might even do it in Wesley after a bolstering visit to the Wilsons'—and the lawyer would undoubtedly know of Victor Van Allen. Little Wesley's number one cuckold. Vic lifted his head and began to hum. For some reason, he hummed "My Old Kentucky Home."

       Driving through the main part of Wesley, he looked around for Don Wilson, and for June Wilson. He saw Cameron. Cameron was coming out of a cigar store, yelling back and smiling at somebody and stuffing something into a trousers pocket. Vic saw him when he was about half a block in front of him on the right side of the street, and not really knowing what he was about, Vic stopped his car in the middle of the block at just the place where Cameron was about to cross the street.

       "Hello, there!" Vic called cheerfully. "Need a lift?"

       "Well! Hi!" Cameron grinned. "No, my car's right across the street."

       Vic glanced over. Melinda was not in the car.

       "If you've got a few minutes—get in and let's have a little chat," Vic said.

       Cameron's smile collapsed suddenly, and then as if he thought he ought to pull himself together and face it like a man, he gave the belt of his trousers a hitch and smiled and said, "Sure." He opened the car door and got in.

       "Fine day, isn't it?" Vic said genially, moving the car off. "Fine, fine."

       "How's the work going?"

       "Oh, great. Mr. Ferris isn't too pleased with the speed, but—" Cameron laughed, and laid his big hands on his knees. "I suppose you're used to that from clients."

       The conversation went on like that for several more exchanges. It was the kind of conversation that Cameron enjoyed, the only kind, Vic supposed. Vic had decided not to mention Melinda, not even in the most casual way. He had decided to take Mr. Cameron to the quarry. It had come into his mind all at once, lust after he had said, "If you've got a few minutes—" There was lots of time, lots of time still to be in Ballinger for Trixie's performance with the chorus. Vic was suddenly calm and collected.

       They talked of the growth of Wesley in the last few years. The dull aspect of this conversation was that it hadn't particularly grown in the last few years.

       "Where're we going?" Cameron asked.

       "I thought we might drive out to that quarry I was telling you about last night. The old East Lyme quarry—which is not a pun. It'll only take about two minutes from here."

       "Oh, yeah. The one you said they abandoned?"

       "Yes. The owner died, and nobody else came along before all the machinery rusted. It's quite something to see. An enterprising man could still do something with it if he could put up the money to buy it. There's nothing wrong with the rock there." Vic had never heard himself sound calmer.

       Vic turned off the East Lyme road into a dirt road, and then at a certain place, invisible until one was upon it, he turned into a rutty, single-lane road so nearly overgrown with young trees and hushes that he could hear them brush the sides of his car as they I moved through.

       "This is one place you don't want to meet somebody else head on," Vic said, and Cameron laughed as if it were terribly funny. "That was a great evening last night," Vic went on. "You've got to come again soon."

       "You're the damnedest hospitable people I ever met," Cameron said, shaking his head and laughing with boorish self-consciousness.

       "Here we are," Vic said."You've got to get out to see it properly."

       Vic had stopped the car in a small area between the edge of the woods and the abyss of the quarry. They got out, and Roger hopped out with them. The quarry spread before them and below them, an impressive excavation of some quarter of a mile in length and somewhat half that in depth. At the very bottom of it lay a lake of water, shallower on their left where fragments of rock had slid down the nearly white rock cliff into the water, but deep to their right where the neat excavations of the engineers had removed the limestone in right-angled blocks, like giant steps, and where the water lapped only a few feet over some blocks and became black with depth just beyond. Here and there on the perimeter of the quarry stood stiff, rusted cranes at various angles as if the work men had simply stopped one day at quitting time and not come back.

       "Sa-a-ay!" Cameron said, putting his hands on his hips and surveying it. "That's pretty colossal! I had no idea it was this big."

       "Yep," Vic said, moving off toward the right a little, and closer to the edge. The puppy followed him. "Plenty of stone left, don't you think?"

       "Sure looks like it!" Cameron was going closer to the edge himself now.

       The place where they were standing was where Vic and Melinda and Trixie had come in the past to picnic, and Vic told Cameron so, but he did not add that they had stopped coming because it was too nerve-racking to keep watching to see that Trixie did not go too near the edge.

       "It's a good place for swimming, too, down there," Vic said "You can get down to the water by a little path." He strolled away from the edge.

       "Say, I bet Ferris would've liked this color," Cameron said "He's complaining because the stone we've got's too white."

       Vic picked up a jagged, off-white rock about the size of his head as if to examine it. Then he drew his arm back and threw it, aiming at Cameron's head, just as Cameron turned toward him.

       Cameron had time to duck a fraction, and the rock glanced off the top of his head, but it staggered him back a little, nearer the Cameron glowered at him like a bewildered bull, and Vic—in what seemed to take him a whole minute—picked up another rock twice the size of the other, and running with it a step or two, launched it at Cameron. It caught Cameron in the thighs, and there was a quick flail of arms, a bellowing half scream, half roar, whose pitch changed as Cameron dropped downward. Vic went to a lie edge, in time to see Cameron bounce off the steep slope very near the bottom of the cliff and roll noiselessly onto the stone flat. There was no sound then, except for the dwindling trickle of little stones that were following Cameron's path downward. Then the puppy gave an excited yip, and turning, Vic saw Roger with his forelegs down and his rear end up, ready to play with him.

       Vic glanced around the rim of the quarry, at every edge of trees, then down at the shallow end of the lake, where sometimes he had seen a pair of small boys or a wandering man. There was no one around now. He went to his car for a rope. He thought there was a rope in the trunk compartment.

       There wasn't, and he realized that it had been months since the rope had been there and that he had used it for something that Trixie had wanted. He debated a coil of heavy twine versus one of his snow chains, and took a snow chain.

       Then he hurried along the edge of the quarry toward the path he knew. The path was steep and sometimes he slid a yard almost straight down, catching onto a tough little bush to slow himself, but he was not really hurrying, he felt, and he took the time to look back to see if Roger was making it all right. Once Roger hesitated and whimpered at a steep spot, and Vic reached back and put a hand under his chest and lifted him down.

       Cameron was lying on his back with one arm over his head, a position he might have assumed while sleeping. His big square face was obscured by blood, and there were wide patches of blood on his shirt under the unbuttoned tweed jacket. Vic looked around fur a suitable rock. There were rocks galore to choose from. He hose one shaped rather like a flattened horse's head, and carried it to the edge of the limestone flat on which Cameron lay. It would take several stones, Vic thought, so he selected four more slab-like ones. Then he dragged Cameron's body, gingerly to avoid being stained by his blood, to the edge of the stone where the water lapped. Roger was cavorting about Cameron, sniffing at the blood spots and barking as if he expected Cameron to get up and play with him, and Vic automatically snapped his fingers to call him off.

       Vic laid the chain out on the stone, and rolled Cameron's body on to it. Then on a sudden inspiration, he unbuckled Cameron's alligator belt, opened his trousers, and pushed an elongated stone part way into his trousers, fastened them again and fastened the belt and buttoned the jacket. He laid two of the heavier stones against Cameron's ribs, and brought the two ends of the chain up over them. The chain was like a flexible ladder, some twelve inches wide, and he had a choice of where to lock the fastener. It was a dog-leash type of fastener, and it went over any length of the chain. He drew the chain as tightly as possible over the rocks and fastened it obliquely to a link. Then he took a look into the water, found the darkest point just off the corner of the flat on which he stood, and rolled the heavy body off. He was painfully conscious of the sharp, jutting corner of rock going into Cameron's spine as he rolled off, and it seemed to him that Cameron arched his back against the dig of the stone.