Маргарет Миллар - The Cannibal Heart

“He may be walking on the beach,” Miss Lewis said.

“The tide’s still in,” Mrs. Wakefield said. She was shivering, and her arm ached from the weight of the lantern. “There’s no place to walk.”

“I will look anyway,” Mr. Roma said. “If you will go back to the house, I will look personally, when the tide goes out a little.”

“I’m afraid.”

“I know, I know.”

“He’s dead, I feel it.”

“Go back to the house sensibly and have some coffee, something to warm you.”

“Coffee sounds wonderful,” Miss Lewis said in the bright firm voice she used on Billy. “Come along.”

Mr. Roma set out along the cliff toward the stone steps. When he had nearly reached the bottom, just out of reach of the waves, he sat down with the lantern beside him and waited wearily until the tide went out.

Picking up the lantern he stepped down into the damp sand. Water crept into the top of his shoes and as he walked his feet made a squishing noise that increased his uneasiness; it sounded as though someone was walking behind him. He drew his coat closer, against the insinuating wind that seemed to be coming from all directions and slid up his sleeves and down his collar and up the soggy legs of his trousers.

He moved ahead slowly and cautiously. After each tide the beach changed; things were added and things were taken away. You could never walk along it as you walked on a path through the woods with the certainty that it was the same now as it was yesterday. There were always changes. A boulder had been shifted, a stranded stingray flopped in a tangle of kelp. The tide, heavier than normal, had swept away a foot of sand, exposing hundreds of fist-sized stones.

He paused for a minute, trying to decide whether to ease the stingray back into the water, or to kill and bury it so that no one would get cut by its barbed tail. As he leaned over to free it from the kelp he saw Mr. Wakefield crushed between two boulders, limp and boneless as a sponge, oozing water.

The deputy sheriff, Bracken, came in the middle of the night, and again the next day, and the next.

Bracken was a barrel-shaped man who wore a ten-gallon hat and Western boots. He had started out as a man of ideals. But as the gap increased between his ideals and the facts, he found himself owning a ranch almost paid for by contributions from the Mexican aliens who’d been smuggled into Marsalupe. They arrived by plane, they swam in from freighters, they came in false-bottomed trucks and bales of hay, and in other ways so diverse and ingenious they surprised even Bracken. The aliens didn’t want to be picked up by the Immigration officers and sent back to Mexico, and Bracken didn’t want to help pick them up, as long as they behaved themselves and laid off greasing their knives. After he’d had a few drinks, Bracken got very sad thinking of what a hell of a fine fellow he’d been once, before those damn jigaboos came pouring into town.

He knew Mrs. Wakefield by sight. She had never spoken to him or even nodded at him, and Bracken was sensitive to slights. He thought it was a wonderful opportunity to let her know she was no better than he was, no matter where her money came from.

“Funny thing,” he said, “us being neighbors all this time and never getting together for a powwow until this tragic occurrence.”

She sat in silence, rubbing the knuckles on her left hand and wondering why this terrible man kept coming back to ask her the same questions over and over.

“I’ve told you everything I could,” she said finally.

“Sure, sure, you have. We got to have an inquest, though. It’s the law. You don’t want to break the law, do you?”

“Naturally not. But all this endless prying into my husband’s affairs... He’s dead. What difference does it make whether it was accidental or intentional?”

“The law says we got to find out. I got to collect evidence, see what I mean?”

“Surely you’ve collected enough evidence already.” Enough evidence , she thought, and beer and coffee and ham sandwiches and anything else you could cram into your fat mouth.

Billy came to the door to stare at the man with the funny shoes.

Bracken said, “Get rid of the kid, will you? He gives me the heebie jeebies. I can’t think.”

It was that same day that the curiosity-seekers began to arrive from town. They came up the driveway in cars and along the beach on foot, pretending they were collecting shells or gathering mussels or looking at the view. They took away, as souvenirs, Mr. Roma’s No Trespassing signs and boughs of jacaranda and pieces of stone from the beach.

Though Billy was kept in the house, he could see the people from the windows and he sensed the excitement. The terrible and mysterious excitement made his legs tremble and brought quick tears to his eyes. No one could explain it to him, and no one tried. He was isolated in bewilderment. It was the same house he’d always known, only it was changed, like the beach after a tide.

On the morning of the inquest he was left alone with Carmelita. He sat on her lap for a long time while she rocked back and forth in her chair by the kitchen window. They were both quiet.

In the courtroom, under the drab light of the fly-specked chandeliers, a verdict of suicide was returned.

Before she had time to get away, Bracken came over and told her what a real pleasure it had been meeting her.

“Only one thing bothers me, Mrs. Wakefield. It’s about that there watch of his that’s still missing.”

“I know nothing about it except what I’ve told you. He had it with him when he went out that night. He liked to — he was very conscious of time.”

“Brainy guy, oh?”

She looked at him with hatred. “Oh, yes, very brainy.”

“Some of these brainy ones go off their rocker just like that.” He snapped his fingers; the nails were bitten to the quick. “Well, if the watch turns up, let me know. I’m a curious guy. Facts, that’s what I like.”

“I see.”

“Well, it’s been real nice meeting you anyhow. Now we’ve broke the ice, like they say, how about me coming over and...”

She turned and walked away.

She never saw Bracken again. Four days later she drove away in the Lincoln with Billy and Miss Lewis.

Looking now at the horses on the hillside that belonged to Bracken, she wondered what he would say if she phoned him and told him that the watch had been found: Yes, on the side of the cliff, Mr. Bracken, by a little girl who is as curious as you are. How did it get there, in a cormorants’ ledge? I have no facts to satisfy you, Mr. Bracken. But he must have had the watch in his hand when he was standing at the top of the cliff. I’ve told you how he was always checking the time, looking at the minute hand on his watch, marking off the days on the calendar. Well, time was ending for him. He threw the watch as he fell, he threw it away from him, perhaps he was sick of time... Quite a brainy guy, Mr. Bracken.

But the words would never be spoken. She could no longer feel any real anger at Bracken’s boorish stupidity. We are all victims, she thought, of ourselves and of each other. Bracken, John, Billy, myself, and now Mark, whom I love.

She rose, turning her eyes to the sky, and thought how foolish they must all look in the eyes of heaven, how foolish and impotent and grubby, not fit to live.

She returned through the woods, walking very slowly, with her arms folded across her breasts. Her eyes were still swollen with tears and her cheeks stung, as if she had bathed her face in the old well that had gone to salt, thinking the water would refresh her and finding out too late that it was sharp as acid.

She passed the swimming pool that she had boarded up herself, nailing it down like a coffin, without anyone even knowing about it except Mr. Roma who had helped her fetch the planks. (“A tarpaulin would be just as good,” Mr. Roma had said. “He couldn’t fall in then.” “No, no. It must be boarded. I had a dream, I dreamt he fell...”) What was under the planks now? What strange dark-loving creatures lived in the concrete coffin and crept through the dust and the leaves powdered by time?