Envious Moon(9)
I tucked the bills in among my socks. Now my thoughts turned to the stairs inside that great house. If only I had not melted into the wall. If only I had been able to stop staring at the girl. If only I had run when the light came on. Then I would have made it outside before her father reached me. He wouldn’t have been able to tackle me. I wouldn’t have ridden him into the railing and he wouldn’t have fallen. And I wouldn’t have heard him hit below. There was nothing terribly human about it, the sound of him. It was like a sack of flour had dropped to the floor.
I woke to rain, heavy, driving rain, coming down so hard that to look out the window was like looking into the back side of a waterfall. I was just staring at it blankly, and I had this strange feeling, like I had been awake for a while and I didn’t know it. The phone was ringing. It had been ringing for a long time, I realized. The incessant peal of it. When I finally trotted downstairs in my underwear to answer it, Victor told me that the man had died. It was all over the papers and on the radio and the television. His name was Jacob Forbes, Victor said. His daughter, the newspaper said, was named Hannah Forbes and she was the lone witness to the robbery. They were from Boston. The house had belonged to his late mother. Victor went on about all the details. Police searching for two men in a boat and all that. Nothing appeared to be missing, etc. And to be honest with you, I stopped listening to him when I heard her name. Hannah Forbes. I said it a few times over and over in my mind. There is something that happens when something that had previously been unnamed becomes named. It becomes more important somehow. Or maybe just clearer. Either way, hearing her name did something to me. As Victor read the article to me, I pictured the girl sitting in some cold police station, in a metal chair next to a metal desk. Perhaps she had a blanket slung over her shoulders since she had not had time to change yet. Her long hair hung down over the bars of the chair. She was crying. A police officer consoled her, and I wondered if it broke his heart to watch a pretty girl cry.
I met Victor for lunch at his apartment and he chain-smoked and paced back and forth and said we should turn ourselves in. He showed me a copy of the Journal with its front-page picture of the mansion in daytime, when it was even more impressive, rising up against an uneven sky.
I said, “We can’t turn ourselves in.”
“What else we going to do, Tony?”
“Listen, I was the one who went in there. Not you. I’m the one who’d go to prison. That’s not going to happen.”
“How many people, Tony, saw us leave the harbor last night?”
“Lots of people left the harbor,” I said. “And not only our harbor. They got to be looking at everything from Fire Island to the Vineyard. We do what we normally do and we have nothing to worry about.”
This seemed to relax him a little bit and when I left, he promised to call me if he heard anything else.
That afternoon the rain clouds moved off the coast and the sun that burned through was summer hot and as I walked to my skiff the puddles on the pavement steamed from its heat. I walked across the wharves and past men baiting lobster traps with baby skate and stacking them onto the flatbed of an old rustbucket. Other men stood in huddled groups smoking and I knew some of them and they’d call “Hey, Anthony,” to me or I’d shout out to them. When I reached my skiff, I spent a few minutes just peering down into the black water, to where oil had collected around the pilings and shone a rainbow in the sunlight. Maybe it had something to do with the rainbow, this piece of beauty among the filthy oil, but standing there, I started to cry. I looked around to make sure no one saw me. And I cried good and hard, harder than I had since my father died. I saw men going out on their boats and I knew that there was one less man in the world and it was because of me. That I had killed somebody. It didn’t matter that it was an accident. It didn’t matter that the last thing I wanted to do was to kill a man. It had happened and it was my fault.
After a while, the tears slowed and I got them under control. I rubbed at my eyes. Then I climbed in my skiff and I maneuvered my way through the fishing boats and followed the buoys to the mouth of the harbor.
The bank of clouds loomed over the horizon to the south now but here it was so clear I could see the bluffs of Cross Island. I was suddenly tempted to follow our path from the night before, to ride under the turret of the house and see what I could see. But instead I turned down coast and I spent the rest of that summer day fishing the shoals. It was a halfhearted effort and I didn’t even have live bait. But I found that the rhythmic tossing of the line over and over, and the gentle rocking of the small craft, soothed me. I did not cry again that day. You would think out there alone like that my mind would race, that I would have become overwhelmed with fear. But I gave in to the simple pleasure of casting the surf rod, watching the speckled lure tumble through the air before diving under the waves near the rocky shore. The reeling in when it danced like a mouse across the surface of the water. I would’ve probably stayed out until late if it were not for the fact that I had forgotten to eat. The hunger came on like a rush and I put my gear away and turned back toward town.
By the time I reached my street, I was so hungry that the only thing on my mind was what Berta might have on the stove. She usually cooked for two and left mine for me to reheat. She made a great peppery kale soup with lots of sausage. And sometimes they cleaned out the walk-in at the college and she brought home a chicken or some beef. I was so engrossed with the possibilities, that I almost didn’t notice the red-and-white sheriff’s car parked right in front of our house until I stood right next to it.