Strawberries in the Sea (30 page)

She put the clothes on a chair and picked up the damp ones still in a heap from last night. “What's the matter?” she said.

“I'm sick. I think I'm going to die.”

“Don't talk so foolish,” she said angrily. She put her hand on his forehead and the dry heat startled her. When she started to take her hand away he held onto it and pressed the side of his face into it, and she remembered unwillingly the heat of his breath against her throat when she woke this morning. “See, I
am
sick,” he muttered.

“Then you need to go ashore and be taken care of,” she said.

“You mean give myself up, don't you?” He pulled her by the wrist till she had to sit on the side of the bed. “Well, I won't. I can't. I told you what would happen.”

“Look, if it was the way you said, it was an accident. Everybody was milling around in boats. They'd probably call it manslaughter, if they went that far. Not murder.”

“But I'd be locked up, wouldn't I?” His eyes were wild. “Listen, do
you
call me murderer?”

She looked away from the mad stare. “I don't think you meant to kill, no. If it's the way you said.”

“Locking me up—driving me out of my skull—making me kill myself—that would be murder, wouldn't it?” When she didn't answer he jerked on her wrist. “Wouldn't it? And it wouldn't bring the guy back.”

I'll be around. Just put your head out the door and whistle
.

“No,” she said, looking past him with yearning at the green yard outside and the inviting shadows of the woods.

“Then promise you won't turn me in.” He tightened his grip. “Just hide me a little while, till my friend comes. You'll have to write the letter, my hands are too sore. I'll tell you what to say. When's the boat come again?”

“Tomorrow.” It was like saying
next year
, the minutes were so excruciatingly long.

“He'll come as soon as he gets the letter. It'll be all over then. You won't even have to think about me again.” He stopped, listening, his black eyes glazed, and she thought he was delirious until she heard the heavy rhythm of a helicopter. “Coast Guard,” he whispered. “Well, here's one body that'll never show. When I get ashore I'll split for Canada. No, down South. Somewhere good and warm this winter.” He shivered. “Christ, that water was so cold last night it's still in my bones. How the hell can anybody burn and freeze at the same time?”

His hand had fallen away from her wrist, and she started to get up, but he seized her again. “You haven't promised me yet.”

She looked down at him wearily, her mind refusing to think. Suddenly he sat up, wrapped his arms around her and pressed his face into her breast. “Promise,” he said against her flesh. “You got to. I haven't got anybody else. . . . I don't even know if he'll come. Maybe he isn't even there any more.”

After her dream, the familiarity of a male head and bare torso pressed against her caused a purely instinctive response. She wanted to thrust him away in revulsion, yet she could not refuse or deny the strong impulse to shelter and comfort. She both despised and pitied. With dismay at her own actions she put her arms around him and said, “All right, I promise.”

The helicopter went low over the house, she felt its vibrations and it set up another vibration in him, from far inside, and his embrace was like a vise. Without thinking she put her face down to his hair and murmured, “It's all right. . . . It's all right.”

His name was Quint Learoyd. For some unknown reason that filled him with disgust he'd been named Quintus. Rambling, making no sense, he told her no more than that. She moved him upstairs into a little room whose only window opened onto the woods toward the cove. Nobody could glance up at that window unless it was someone in the yard, and she expected no one to be there today. She would surely be forgotten.

But she pulled the shade anyway, in case Marjorie Percy or Maggie Dinsmore should come up to tell her the tragic news. Quint was groggy and weak. She had to help him up the stairs. She gave him some aspirin and left him already half asleep in the clean sheets.

She hung the sleeping bag as the sun grew hot and strong, and rinsed the salt water out of his clothes with water from the rain barrel. She spread them out to dry over the bushes behind the toilet, well away from the paths. She rinsed her loden coat too, but hung that on a hanger in the open; she could always say she'd just decided to wash it.

While Quint slept, she spent most of the day in the yard, to head off any callers. She felt as if she were mired in the quicksands of a dream. The helicopter came and went; each time it passed above the house she wondered if the crew could feel the emanations of guilt rising up from her. It seemed particularly sinful to let their useless search go on and on. Boats left the harbor and returned, the air pulsed with engines. Nobody would be hauling, she was positive; they too would be hunting. A different, heavier engine drew her to the stairway window, and she saw a Coast Guard launch tied up at the big wharf, a cluster of men talking gravely on the car. Most of the island children stood respectfully on the wharf.

Next door Marjorie Percy didn't sing as she usually did at her chores, and when the children were home they were extraordinarily quiet, as if they too were awed and oppressed by the presence of death.

Quint slept on and on. She washed the floor where he had dripped, forever stopping to look out the windows so she wouldn't be taken unaware. His clothing dried and she brought it in and draped it over chairs upstairs to air. By mid-afternoon she felt as if the day had been a year long and relentlessly bright the whole time. Her eyes ached with tiredness, and she had gotten too stale for grief. With cruel slowness the cold shade began to creep out from the woods. She lay in it with her hands over her eyes, thinking longingly of night.

A footfall on the ground brought her up with a startled gasp. Quint stood there smiling at her surprise. It was a weak and weary smile and he was not altogether steady. He wore his own jeans, no shirt, and was barefoot. He was the color of a gypsy.

“What are you doing out here?” she demanded in a low fierce voice.

“I'm only human. Man has to take a leak once in a while.”

“Then be quick about it!”

She thought he'd never get to the toilet. Once he was there, she heard a screen door slam at the Percys', and was sure that either Marjorie or Ralph was on the way across. But Ralph was going to the well instead, and Marjorie called after him to collect the children from across the harbor. She'd be getting supper, then. The pressure around Rosa's lungs loosened, but she felt as weak as Quint looked.

Walking carefully, he returned to the house, and sat down to rest in the kitchen. She wanted him to go back to bed, but he insisted on washing up at the sink. Then he borrowed a comb and looked in the mirror; he shook his head, and swore to himself.

“I sure look like hell when I need a shave,” he complained.

“This is a hell of a time for vanity,” she said, despising the way he fooled with his hair. Jamie's hair was cropped short. This time yesterday he might have been running a hand through it as he talked. Who was combing his hair now for the funeral?

“You wouldn't have a razor, I suppose.” Quint squinted at himself with distaste.

Edwin had left a spare shaving kit, and she had an extra toothbrush. She went and got them. “Go back upstairs,” she said. “I'll bring the water up.” His fingers were too stiff to unwrap a new razor blade and she had to do it for him. “If I cut my throat with that, it would solve everything, wouldn't it?” he said, watching her.

“Except what I'd do with the body and all that blood,” she said, handing him the razor. She went downstairs and fixed a meal of scrambled eggs and toast, which she carried up to him on a cookie sheet as a tray. She set it on the small stand beside his bed and went back for coffee.

He had managed to shave, after a fashion, and smelled of Edwin's lotion. “Stay,” he said. “Please?” His normal voice was soft and husky. His smile was tentative. “I know I'm asking a hell of a lot from you, and you probably figger I don't deserve any conversation but—”

“Maybe we'd better write that letter to your friend.”

“Sure! Okay. Anything you say.” He was eager. “You promised you'd help. I promise you won't be sorry.”

“Eat while it's hot.”

“I shouldn't be hungry, but I am.” His smile deepened. He had long dimples like slashes in his cheeks, and she suspected that he knew it. She did not smile back. She went downstairs for a note pad, pen, and envelope, and took her time about it. He had finished eating when she returned, and was reclining on the bed with pillows behind him, drinking coffee.

“Good thing I don't smoke,” he said cheerfully, “or I'd be nuts by now. I smoked when I was a little kid, but then I got the idea I was going to be this great fighter, see, and I started taking care of my wind.”

She said impassively, “What do you want to say in this letter?”

“Oh, yeah. I got it all written in my mind.” He began to dictate as if he had indeed memorized it. “ ‘Dear Danny, come to Bennett's Island and get me. It will have to be at night because nobody knows I'm on here except the girl who is writing this letter for me. I'm in some trouble, so don't talk about this, huh? I'll start looking for you as soon as I think you've got this. Lay off—' What's the name of your cove?” he asked Rosa.

“Barque. It's on the charts.”

“Good. Tell him to lay off there around midnight, and bring a skiff so he can row in. If any of these wild men around here come along and ask him what he's up to, say he's got engine trouble. . . . Got that?”

She nodded. He signed his name awkwardly, and she addressed the envelope to a waterfront street in Limerock. When she looked up he was gazing thoughtfully at her. “You're good, you know that? I don't know when anybody's been so good to me.”

“Since your mother,” she said sarcastically. The liquefying compassion she'd felt earlier had dried up in the light of this endless day which Jamie had never seen.

“
Her!
” He spat the word. “If I knew where she was buried I'd go piss on her grave. She and her boyfriend used to beat me up for kicks. The neighbors were always complaining, so we'd keep moving just ahead of the welfare people.” He lay back and folded his arms under his head and stared at the ceiling. “And if I ever came across
him
again, it wouldn't be an accident this time. It'd be murder in the first degree. Premeditated since I was four years old.”

She was affected in spite of herself. She said, “I wouldn't blame you. But where was your father?”

His sly smile mocked her innocence. “I never had one. She found me in a cup of tea. . . . Naw, even she didn't know who he was. Maybe he was two marines from Galveston, like the old joke.”

“What became of her?”

“When I came to one day that I could go to the police and talk for myself, and show 'em the marks his belt buckle made, and the cigarette burns—” He saw her involuntary wince, and gave her that mocking grin again. “Nasty, isn't it? . . . I told 'em that's what I was going to do, and he'd have strangled me then to shut me up, except I had the carving knife in my hand. I was about eleven.” He chuckled. “I can see them now. She had eyes like green gooseberries. They were practically out on sticks she was so scared. He was a big guy and a great kicker. I used to go sailing across the room and end up against the wall. I was reading that nowadays the hospitals get real suspicious about babies coming in with broken bones, but back in those days they used to take my mother's word it was an accident, she was such a good cryer. Could drown the place in salt water and you didn't have to drop a hat, just me.”

He spoke with a dry lack of self-pity, almost as if he were amused by the whole squalid picture, or by her horrified reaction.

“What did they do when you said you'd go to the police?” she asked. “Promise to stop beating you?”

“No, but they let me do what I wanted. I didn't want to go to the police and be stuck in a foster home, I never figgered on
that
. But there was this old guy—well, I guess he wasn't so old, but he'd lived hard. He was a haker, and I wanted to go with him. We lived in a back alley where the rats killed the cats, but I could get across Main Street down onto the waterfront. You know where that fancy marina is today?” She nodded. “Well, it was, far from fancy then, but it was salt water and there was the whole harbor and the breakwater, and the big bay outside. . . .” He watched it on the ceiling. “Seems like it was always blue, never rough. He taught me how to bait trawl. Gave me a dime sometimes. I used to hate to go back across the street. I'd fool around down there till the other kids would be coming home from school. Christ, those afternoons. It was coming summer, and the alley stunk worse than the city dump, and there were those two to come home to.” He laughed and shook his head. “Well, I asked Mick if he'd hire me to bait trawl and wash down the decks, and cook, and he laughed and said sure. He never expected me to show up, but I did, and they left town.”

“Was it a good summer?” she asked.

“You better believe it. It might not've been like life in the TV commercials, Mick wasn't much of a mother as far as making me drink milk and brush my teeth, but he was a damn sight better than the one I had. . . . Turned out sometimes I was tending
him
, when he had a skinful. But we made out.” His voice faded. He was seeing it all on the ceiling again. “We made out.”

“For how long? What about school?”

He shrugged. “He had this little shack, that's about all it was, down at the South End. He'd get chewing on how I ought to go to school, but I convinced him that as long as I didn't turn up they'd think I'd left town with my so-called folks.” He pronounced the last word with loathing. “But if I did go, they'd find out where I was living and that I was an abandoned kid, kind of, and they'd say Mick wasn't any fit influence, and then where'd I be? Besides, who'd he get so cheap to be so useful to him? Well, by that time I could talk him around pretty good. I could think a lot faster than old Mick.”