Robert Stone - Fun With Problems

When Eric lay unconscious, Annie half dragged her husband into their bedroom. "You stop where you are!" Annie told Taylor when she had him behind the closed door. "He's passed out and I'm not going to let you kill him in my living room. Forget about it."

"The prick is still laughing," her husband protested.

Annie opened the door a crack and peeked out at Eric, who remained unconscious on their sofa.

"He's dead to the world! Let him be. He'll be gone tomorrow."

Assured of her control, she leaned against him.

"Come, baby. Come on to bed, sweethome."

She got under the handsome white-and-yellow sunburst quilt her friend Vera Gold had done in Boston. Taylor sat down on the bed and slowly undressed. But in a moment he was on his feet again, raging. She knew, however, that it was unlike Taylor to attack in his underwear. He was physically quite modest. When he was settled beside her she took up her night's reading, which involved the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson.

"What does he mean, 'the lists'?" Taylor asked.

"Honey? Do you not see that he's a crazy? He's sort of a homeless person, I think."

"I think maybe we should call Lou. Find out if he really knows her."

"Taylor," Annie said, "if anyone would come up with such a guy, it would be Lou."

"I don't like it, Annie," Taylor said. "That conference happens. Then this jerkoff turns up. Then he says we're 'on the lists.'"

"Taylor, everything is not connected. Shit happens, right?" Annie was not sure this was the explanation for it all. It would have to do.

In the morning, somewhat to their astonishment, Eric and his bag had vanished. Their dinner table was clean and scrubbed, the dishes all washed and stacked. Eric had left a daisy and a wild rose on the table, and a note with them that read:

"Daisies are better than meat, and roses are sweeter than wine."

"Fuck's that mean?" Taylor asked her.

When she went outside the fog was still heavy on the island. As she drove Taylor to the ferry slip they passed Eric slogging unhappily downhill.

"It's him!" Taylor said, craning his neck to look.

"Yup." Annie said.

"Well, at least you didn't stop to give him a ride."

"At least he's not riding a black helicopter," said Annie.

At the ferry slip armed men in flak jackets who looked as though they actually belonged in black helicopters had more or less barricaded the dock.

"You're late for school," Taylor told his wife as he put his ID card around his neck. "Better rush."

"I'm late anyway." She watched Taylor hold up his papers in a surly way for the agents. They looked after him briefly as he walked up the gangway.

Annie drove back through town and up the hill toward home. On the way she passed Eric making slow progress down. She made a two-point turn and pulled up beside him.

"C'mon, Eric," she said. "I'll give you a ride as far as town." Eric threw his bag in the back and climbed into the passenger seat.

"Do you remember us?" she asked him. "Taylor and me?"

"I remember you."

"Thanks for the daisy," she said. "Hey, you're the height of weirdness."

"Right."

"You were living dangerously last night."

"Yeah. I blunder into that." As they rounded a bluff over the ocean, going slowly in the bad visibility, Eric said, "I fell in love with you. You're beautiful."

She laughed.

"But really," Eric said. He seemed close to tears. "I love you, Annie."

"Yeah? You're funny. Last night you were a scream."

"Didn't you feel it?"

"I'll take you as far as town," Annie said. "Don't forget your bag."

"But didn't you?"

"I'm attracted to you," she said. "That's true."

He raised his hand to his forehead. "So?"

"So nothing," she said.

On Heron's Neck that morning the Secretary was cross. When the steward came knocking he swore at the man.

"Aye aye, sir," the steward said soothingly through the door. Of course they were Navy stewards and that was naval usage, but it was not a phrase often heard outside the uniformed branch. Then, from a distant corridor, what sounded like a disrespectful utterance echoed for a second or two. Some barbarous holler, maybe in Tagalog. It was strange and it made the Secretary angry. Certain arms of the naval intelligence service believed an Austronesian-speaking spy agency was providing Moro jihadis with information on naval operations. It was similar to the Mormon yeoman spies the Joint Chiefs had run in the Nixon days and to the Mossad frames that functioned with American collaborators under several Israeli governments.

The fog was thicker than ever. There was a breeze spinning the mist but it seemed not to help, and the settled damp looked dirty to the Secretary. No poetry in this soiled cotton blanket. The Secretary actually wrote poetry. One poem began:

If I manifest manhood'S pride

Yet I know its pain, its secret

Griefs…

Not much poetry in anything that day, though. And he had the odd feeling that the night before, his six-month plan had been brushed aside politely. Better, he thought, to have kept his mouth shut and waited for signals.

There seemed no question of flight this Monday. Coast Guard cutters prowled the fog for foolhardy windsurfers, lost sport fisherman, disoriented boaters. The Navy's small boats were one cape away. The Secretary ordered that the ferry be chartered again. His security detail drove him to the pier.

"I guess it didn't occur to you to provide for this," he said to the chief of his detail as they drove over the moor. Depressing dark green vegetation, what you could see of it.

"Sir" was all the agent said. A swarthy man, short hair treated at the top in some contemporary fashion. The Secretary looked at him long enough for his stare to register. "I suppose that's not your job." The damn automated foghorn kept sounding its cadences as it had in and out of his anxious dreams.

"Transport confirmed at the seat of government, Mr. Secretary."

A gruff military type, the Secretary thought. More gruff than ought to be allowed. The Secretary wanted some explication of the agent's jargon but thought better of it. He knew enough to recognize it as an unfavorable portent. Everyone seemed ill-tempered, even people who had no right to be.

On Heron's Neck, the Secretary had spent an uneasy night, though not for want of medication. He had lain awake a long time, and just when he began to drop off, a steward rapped quietly but insistently at his door. The steward knocked quietly out of discretion, but also because, awakened suddenly, the Secretary sometimes shouted. Even screamed, the stewards told each other, and the word passed into use from the Secretary's households into government and political circles. A woman he happened to know who had called him owlish had also referred to him as Screamin' Newton. Someone had managed to let him know this, a false friend, a subordinate who had not been well-intentioned toward either of them. The word was that the pressures were getting to him.

While the Secretary waited in his vehicle on the dock, his security detail's chief and Captain Negus of the MV Squanto were having a bad-tempered, pointless exchange over the gangway's having been down all night. The chief of security had angered Negus by insisting the captain had been ordered to secure it.

"Wasn't by you," Captain Negus said.

"No, it wasn't by me, Ace. Personally, not by me. But you were ordered to keep the vessel secure with the gangway up. That didn't get done, did it? So guess what?"

Captain Negus did not like to be dressed down by people in sunglasses, which, off season, he took as a sign of moral inauthenticity. He was a buoyant soul, pretty easygoing but not used to scoldings. When the local Coasties checked his underway on-board passenger numbers or the supply of children's life jackets, the atmosphere was not chummy, but it was respectful, and there were handshakes without snipe or snip or snot like with the goddamned Heron's Necks. Captain Negus did not like being asked to "guess what?" because it brought to mind his unhappy childhood. Least of all did he like being addressed by a younger man as Ace. Captain Negus was proud of his past military time, although he shared several attitudes with Taylor Shumway, who was after all his second cousin.