John Gardner - October Light

“Now,” Wong Chop said again, and waited. He had a large forehead and beautiful, womanly features. An aristocrat, Dr. Alkahest surmised. Man to be trusted. The plump fingers which Dr. Alkahest clutched were dimpled like a girl’s. Sign of generosity.

“I want to get to the source,” Dr. Alkahest said. He leaned so far forward that he almost fell out of the wheelchair. “I’m a wealthy man.” In his excitement he let it out as a yelp.

“As for that—” Wong Chop said sadly, thoughtfully. With his free hand he waved the marijuana joint. “I am humble restaurateur. Now and then a little token may fall into Wong Chop unworthy hands, but as to source —” He seemed grieved that he couldn’t be more help. Dr. Alkahest was delighted, though of course not fooled. Wong Chop was brilliant; they would come to an understanding. Wong Chop was growing larger, swelling gradually like a balloon, and that too was delightful.

“Tell me about your friends,” Wong Chop said, momentarily forgetting his pidgin, “—the people for whom you serve as agent.” Behind his little eyes lay tigers.

“With pleasure,” Dr. Alkahest said. “In fact, it’s information that might be of some use to you.” He giggled, beside himself. Wong Chop’s eyes narrowed, and Dr. Alkahest hurried on. “They are people, in fact, who are not what you might call friendly to you.” Wong Chop’s eyes narrowed more. “I’ll trade my information for yours,” Dr. Alkahest piped, believing he was falling though in fact he was not — not yet. It came to him that his chin was on the table.

“Information on smuggler?” Wong Chop asked, reserved.

Dr. Alkahest tried to nod. “That’s what I meant.”

Wong Chop pushed back from the table, musing, puckering his lips, drawing in hard on the cannabis. After a while he said, abandoning his pidgin, squinting thoughtfully, “The information would be useless to your friends. Better to deal, I suggest, with Wong Chop. Here today, gone tomorrow, that’s how it is with marijuana smugglers. No ‘ice,’ you see. The rackets are in on the hard drugs, so the authorities get paid off. Marijuana smugglers, on the other hand, are mere peasants — foolish children and crazies. The police knock them off like flies. Good public relations.”

“You’re an honest man,” Dr. Alkahest said, and meant it. Tears sprang to his eyes.

Wong Chop went on musing, eyes narrowed. He blew smoke through his nose. “Any smuggler I might name would be pinched, I assure you, before your friends ever got to him.”

“I’ll risk it! I’ll risk it!”

Wong Chop nodded. “And in return—”

“Yes, yes!”

Wong Chop leaned forward, put his elbows on the table. “The Indomitable,” he said softly. “Just off Mexico. Lost Souls’ Rock.”

Dr. Alkahest’s heart beat crazily. With violently shaking hands he hunted through his pockets for pencil and paper. At last he found them, tried to write. He couldn’t. Wong Chop reached over and wrote in swift strokes like knife cuts, then jerked back his hand. “Now, Doctor?” His whole face was suddenly a stranger’s face, malevolent and keen, “these ‘friends’ you represent?”

“Oh, I don’t represent them,” Dr. Alkahest exclaimed. He couldn’t tell whether it was his body trembling or the room. He raised one finger, like a teacher, and shook it, full of joy. “I got your name from the Society for the Hindrance of International Trafficking,” he squeaked. “An organization of dedicated American doctors, he he he! with whom, by merest chance—”

He had no clear idea what happened next. One moment he was looking at Wong Chop’s face — it was swelling, turning purple — the next, the table was flying past his chin and he was falling through blackness, like a man in a dream. He looked up, saw a light, a blurry lantern. Then he was awash in some overwhelming stench, some sludgy liquid that carried him along through echoing darkness like a stream in the bowels of a whale. “You’ve misunderstood me!” he howled. And then, with his hypersensitive ears he heard, or imagined he heard: “Hello? This is Wong. Narcotics. Listen, it’s another false alarm. If you could spare me a couple of men and a rowboat—” Dr. Alkahest gasped and fainted.

He woke up on a ledge, his trousers snagged on a comb of rusted pipes, his wheelchair beside him. Black sewage dribbled over him and trickled away with a soft noise into the ocean. It was a lovely day, seagulls and an infinitely gentle sky. Two old men in a rowboat looked up at him and sadly shook their heads.

~ ~ ~

Sally smiled and closed her eyes, meaning to put the book on the white wicker table in a minute, and also get up to turn off the lights. She was instantly asleep. Her mouth fell open. When she awakened it was early afternoon.

1

She’d stood knocking for five minutes on her father’s kitchen door, chickens looking up at her, and still no one answered. She’d never seen the door locked before tonight. She was beginning to be alarmed.

Lewis was behind her, standing dejectedly by the fat, silent Chevy — he’d turned the engine off — looking at the bright yellow maple leaves strewn across the yard, here and there a few bright red ones from the red maple by the mailbox. “He’d ought to rake these,” Lewis said mostly to himself. It was a stupid idea and she was tempted to tell him so. The branches were still full; if her father were to bother with the leaves already fallen, there’d just be more tomorrow. Anyway, you didn’t really need to rake leaves in the country. They’d be blown away before snowfall. But Lewis wouldn’t know that, brought up in a prim little house with a prim picket fence in prim North Bennington — just four blocks away from Aunt Sally’s old house — and she decided to say nothing, merely set her jaw tighter and frowned up at Aunt Sally’s narrow window. She knocked harder and called, “Aunt Sally, you up there?” Still no answer. She looked over at Dickey.

He was standing with his hands in his coatpockets, the bill of his dark blue cap pulled low so that he had to tip his head back to see things straight in front of him. He was looking at the bushes under Aunt Sally’s window. His expression was thoughtful. “Somebody went the bathroom in the bushes,” he said.

“Oh Dickey,” Virginia said, “for heaven’s sakes.”

But Lewis, from his angle, could see something she couldn’t. He came over from the car to a little behind Dickey, looked for a minute at the bushes then up at Aunt Sally’s bedroom window. “My God,” he said.

“What’s the matter?” Ginny asked.

Lewis half smiled, then sobered again. Matter-of-factly he said, “She been throwin her shit out the window, looks like.”

“What are you talking about?” She turned from the door and went over to look. What caught her eye first was what appeared to be flowers on the lilac bushes, though the leaves on the bushes were withered to brown and bits of red. Nevertheless there were bits of white blossom, and not having quite registered what Lewis had said, though she had in fact heard it, she moved closer, scattering the chickens, and was suddenly assaulted by the stench. The bottom of her abdomen punched upward, trying to make her vomit, and she instantly covered her nose and mouth with her hands and backed away. She looked up at the window, horrified and enraged, so that her face, as Lewis and Dickey saw it, was not the Ginny they knew at all. She had bulging eyes, a sudden puffiness and redness of adrenaline — a kind of crackling look, as if she were shooting off electricity — and the sight made them cower, though they showed no outward sign. Looking up at the window Ginny saw now, despite the glow of sunset on the panes, her Aunt Sally standing there cool as a cucumber, saying not a word. Ginny drew in breath and bellowed, angrier than ever, “Aunt Sally!”