Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (14 page)

The first people he recognized were running along the pier and jumping from one of its broken concrete chunks to another. Rex and Calla and Rover and a number of their indistinguishable friends. Calla was wrapped in what looked like—what was—an old chenille bedspread, half the pink and brown tufts worn away. They cavorted, they splashed barefoot in the water. One boy on the shore was playing a flute, or the thing like a flute, the same thing Eugene had—a recorder. He played well, though monotonously. The two old sisters were there, the blind one with her white cane lifted while she talked, pointed at the water. She reminded
you of Moses at the Red Sea. The other one talked to her, explaining. Mr. Clifford and Mr. Morey and a few other old men, judicious, chatting, had stationed themselves not too close by. Altogether there were maybe three dozen people, all over sixty or under thirty. Eugene was sitting rather far out on the pier, by himself. Mr. Lougheed had thought he might put on some special outfit for the occasion, some rough robe, or loincloth, if he could locate such a thing, but he was wearing his usual jeans and white T-shirt.

One of the old men took a watch out of his pocket and called straight ahead, as if addressing nobody in particular, “I see here it's ten o'clock.”

“Ten o'clock, Eugene!” called Rex who had jumped into the water and was naked from the waist up, wet to the thighs.

Eugene's back was to them all, his knees were bent, his head was on his knees.

“Holy, holy, holy,” intoned Rex, throwing back his bushy head, spreading his arms wide.

“We should sing,” a girl said.

At the same time two ladies wearing hats, in front of Mr. Lougheed, spoke to each other.

“I didn't expect so many of them would be here.”

“I didn't come to listen to sacreligion.”

The girl began to sing by herself, in competition with the recorder player. She whirled unsteadily around on the shore, singing without words, a scarf of many soft colors flying out from her throat. After a bit of this the two ladies in front of Mr. Lougheed looked at each other, cleared their throats, nodded, and started up in shaky sweet voices, modestly determined.

“Let's get the show on the road!” called out Mr. Morey rambunctiously.

“What's happening?” said the blind sister. “Is he on it yet?”

Eugene got up and walked farther out on the pier. He walked without hesitation into the water which lapped around his ankles, then his knees, then his thighs.

“He's in it more than he's on it,” said Mr. Morey. “Say a prayer, boy!”

Rover squatted down on the stones and began to say loudly, “Om, om, om, om—”

“What, what?” said the blind sister, and the girl who was singing paused long enough in her song to call, “Oh, Eugene! Eugene!” in a voice of loving hopelessness, renunciation.

Eugene walked to his waist, to his chest, and Mr. Lougheed roared in a voice he thought he had lost, “Eugene, come out of that water!”

“Weightlessness!” Mr. Morey shouted at the same time. “Turn your weightlessness on!”

Eugene bowed his head and went under.

The singing girl gave a joyful scream.

Mr. Lougheed had gone down to the pier and a little way out on it. He said to Calla, wrapped in her bedspread like a Biblical woman, “Do you know if he can swim?”

“Swim, swim!” cried Rex, that buffoon, and fell upon the water, while the not-blind sister was spinning around calling, “Somebody, somebody! Don't let him drown!”

Eugene appeared hanging onto the pier where it came out of the water. He got to his feet, dripping, and stood braced there clearing the hair out of his eyes, while a girl called, “Sea monster, sea monster!” The men, led by Mr. Morey, broke into ironical clapping.

The recorder player had not paused for any of this.

“That's what it amounts to, walking on water,” Mr. Morey said.

“Don't let anybody torment him,” said the blind sister. “He did his best.”

Eugene walked slowly towards them, smiling. “I don't even know how to swim,” he said, gladly drawing in air. He sounded nearly triumphant. “I crawled along the pier. I could have stood up sooner but I liked—being under water.”

“Go home and change your clothes if you don't want to get pneumonia,” said Mr. Lougheed.

“Was it just a joke then?” said one of the hymn-singing ladies, and though she was not speaking to him Mr. Lougheed turned and said to her harshly, “What did you think it was?” The two ladies looked at each other, pressing in their lips at his rudeness.

“I'm sorry if this has not been what you all hoped for,” said Eugene in a gently raised voice, looking around. “The fault is all in me. I haven't reached the point I hoped I might have reached, in my control. However if this has been disappointing for you it has been very interesting and wonderful for me and I have learned something important. I want to thank you.”

The ladies clapped now kindly, and some of the young people joined them, clapping more exaggeratedly. Two groups with more in common than they knew, Mr. Lougheed was thinking. Neither would have admitted that. But didn't their expectations run along the same lines? And what was it in them that prompted such expectations? It was despair, it was being at the end of the track. Nevertheless pride should forbid one.

Without speaking any more to anyone he went off by himself. He went along the beach and up the steps wondering how he had ever managed to get down the bank without breaking a leg, which at his age would have finished him, and all for this nonsense. He walked a mile or so along the sea to a café he knew stayed open Sundays. He sat for a
long time over a cup of coffee and then walked back. There was music coming from the open downstairs windows of the house, from Miss Musgrave's windows; the kind of music they always played. He walked upstairs and knocked on Eugene's door, calling out, “I just wanted to see if you got those wet clothes off!”

No answer. After a moment he opened the door. Eugene never locked it.

“Eugene?”

Eugene was not there and neither were his wet clothes. Mr. Lougheed had seen the room without Eugene in it before, when he had brought back a book. The sight of it had not bothered him then as it did now. The window was all the way up now, for one thing. Eugene usually put it down before he went out, for fear of rain getting at his books or a wind coming up. There was some wind now. Papers had blown off the top of the bookcase and were scattered on the floor. Otherwise the place was tidy. The blanket and sheets were folded at the end of the mattress, as if he did not intend to sleep there any more.

Mr. Lougheed knocked on the downstairs door. Calla came.

“Eugene's not home. Do you know where he is?”

Calla turned and called into the room, which was darkened by red and purple curtains, dyed bedsheets, always shut.

“Did anybody see Eugene?”

“He went out towards the golf course. He was headed east.”

“What do you want him for?” said Rex amiably, leaning on Calla's shoulder.

Somebody in the background shouted, “Ask him how he liked his door.”

“Ask him how he liked his bird.”

Not the cat, then. Calla smiled at him. She had a
large, sweet white face, white as chalk, dotted by many little inflamed pimples.

“Thank you,” said Mr. Lougheed. He ignored Rex.

“What does he want Yew-gene for?” said another voice in the background, probably Rover's, his tinny whine. This voice offered a conjecture Mr. Lougheed immediately and ever afterwards pretended he had not heard.

“Have a fig?” said Calla.

He took their word for it, there was nothing else he could do. He went east, walking along the sea, retracing his route of that morning. Past the pier, deserted now, past the café where he had drunk his coffee, on to the golf course. It was a pleasant afternoon, there were many people walking. Sometimes he thought he saw Eugene. Half the young men in the world seemed to be wearing jeans and white T-shirts, to be short and slight and have hair of about that length. He found himself looking into people's faces and wanting to ask them, “Have you seen a young man?” He thought he might meet somebody who had been at the pier this morning. He looked for Mr. Clifford or Mr. Morey. But it was too far, it was out of their territory.

On the other side of the golf course was an area of wild brush, bushes about as high as a man's head. There were rocks slipping into the water. No beach here. The water looked fairly deep. A man was standing out on the rocks holding onto a kite string. There were small boats out on the water, with red and blue sails. Could a man fall here, and not be noticed? Could a man slide in quietly causing no stir, and be gone?

Earlier in the day, in fact while he was sitting drinking his coffee in that café, something had come to him, a scene which he took to be the ending of his dream. It was
a clear and detailed scene effortlessly retrieved from somewhere—either from the dream or from his memory, and he did not see how it could have come from his memory.

He was walking behind his father in some long gray grass. It was gray because the night was ending and everything could be seen clearly but the sun was not yet up. They seemed to have become separated from the other men searching. They were near a river, and in a little while climbed a bank onto a dirt road. The road led to a bridge, crossing the river, and Mr. Lougheed, a child of course in this scene, hurried out onto the bridge. He was about a third of the way across it before it occurred to him what an unlikely, and positively unsafe, structure this was. Boards were missing from its floor, and the girders seemed crumpled up in some way, as if the bridge were a toy someone had stepped on. He looked back for his father, but his father was not there; this was as expected. Then he had to look down through the floor of the bridge where a plank was missing and in the shallow water of the river which flowed among white stones he saw a boy's body spread out, face down. Which in the dream, if that was what it was, seemed just as natural a sight as the stones, and as clean and white.

But in his wakened mind of course this sight could not be received so casually and he asked himself if that was Frank McArter, if that young man after killing both his parents had actually thrown himself into the river. There was no way now of finding out.

Once he had suffered what the doctor told him later was a tiny stroke, in which a jagged line, blinding white, danced in a corner of his vision for forty-eight hours or so, then disappeared. There was no damage, such things were not uncommon, the doctor told him. Now the dream, or the ending of the dream, kept doing the same thing in his mind. He expected it would go away after a while. And another thing which he hoped would go away, when he got back to himself, were these fears or strange thoughts about Eugene
going into the water—committing suicide would not be his words for it, not Eugene's; you might be sure he would have some far-fetched and tricky way of describing it—for which that morning's show might have been only a rehearsal, an imitation.

He was very tired. Finally he came to an empty bench and sat there a long time, wondering if he would ever gather the strength to walk home.

“Eugene's door is unlocked and his window is wide open,” he said to Calla. The room behind her was silent now. She smiled at him as before. He thought to look at her eyes but as far as he could see they were normal. He was so tired, so shaken he had to hang onto the newel post.

“He always leaves his door open,” Calla said.

“I have reason to worry about him,” said Mr. Lougheed, trembling. “I think we ought to get in touch with some authority.”

“The
police
?” said Calla in a soft horrified voice. “Oh, you can't do that. You can't ever do that.”