Shutter Island(66)
He found a cut at the top of the hill, a narrow opening where it met the promontory and enough erosion had occurred for Teddy to stand in the cut with his back against the sandy wall and get both hands on the flat rock above and push himself up just enough so that he could flop his chest onto the promontory and swing his legs over after him.
He lay on his side, looking out at the sea. So blue at this time of day, so vibrant as the afternoon died around it. He lay there feeling the breeze on his face and the sea spreading out forever under the darkening sky and he felt so small, so utterly human, but it wasn’t a debilitating feeling. It was an oddly proud one. To be a part of this. A speck, yes. But part of it, one with it. Breathing.
He looked across the dark flat stone, one cheek pressed to it, and only then did it occur to him that Chuck wasn’t up there with him.
17
CHUCK’S BODY LAY at the bottom of the cliff, the water lapping over him.
Teddy slid over the lip of the promontory legs first, searched the black rocks with the soles of his shoes until he was almost sure they’d take his weight. He let out a breath he hadn’t even known he’d been holding and slid his elbows off the lip and felt his feet sink into the rocks, felt one shift and his right ankle bend to the left with it, and he slapped at the cliff face and leaned the weight of his upper body back against it, and the rocks beneath his feet held.
He turned his body around and lowered himself until he was pressed like a crab to the rocks, and he began to climb down. There was no fast way to do it. Some rocks were wedged hard into the cliff, as secure as bolts in a battleship hull. Others weren’t held there by anything but the ones below them, and you couldn’t tell which were which until you placed your weight on one.
After about ten minutes, he saw one of Chuck’s Luckies, half smoked, the coal gone black and pointed like the tip of a carpenter’s pencil.
What had caused the fall? The breeze had picked up, but it wasn’t strong enough to knock a man off a flat ledge.
Teddy thought of Chuck, up there, alone, smoking his cigarette in the last minute of his life, and he thought of all the others he’d cared for who had died while he was asked to soldier on. Dolores, of course. And his father, somewhere on the floor of this same sea. His mother, when he was sixteen. Tootie Vicelli, shot through the teeth in Sicily, smiling curiously at Teddy as if he’d swallowed something whose taste surprised him, the blood trickling out of the corners of his mouth. Martin Phelan, Jason Hill, that big Polish machine gunner from Pittsburgh—what was his name?—Yardak. That was it. Yardak Gilibiowski. The blond kid who’d made them laugh in Belgium. Shot in the leg, seemed like nothing until it wouldn’t stop bleeding. And Frankie Gordon, of course, who he’d left in the Cocoanut Grove that night. Two years later, Teddy’d flicked a cigarette off Frankie’s helmet and called him a shitbird Iowan asshole and Frankie said, “You curse better than any man I’ve—” and stepped on a mine. Teddy still had a piece of the shrapnel in his left calf.
And now Chuck.
Would Teddy ever know if he should have trusted him? If he should’ve given him that last benefit of the doubt? Chuck, who’d made him laugh and made the whole cranial assault of the last three days so much easier to bear. Chuck, who just this morning had said they’d be serving eggs Benedict for breakfast and a thinly sliced Reuben for lunch.
Teddy looked back up at the promontory lip. By his estimation, he was now about halfway down and the sky was the dark blue of the sea and getting darker every second.
What could have pitched Chuck off that ledge?
Nothing natural.
Unless he’d dropped something. Unless he’d followed something down. Unless, like Teddy now, he’d tried to work his way down the cliff, grasping and toeing stones that might not hold.
Teddy paused for breath, the sweat dripping off his face. He removed one hand gingerly from the cliff and wiped it on his pants until it was dry. He returned it, got a grip, and did the same thing with the other hand, and as he placed that hand back over a pointed shard of rock, he saw the piece of paper beside him.
It was wedged between a rock and a brown tendril of roots and it flapped lightly in the sea air. Teddy took his hand from the black shard and pinched it between his fingers and he didn’t have to unfold it to know what it was.
Laeddis’s intake form.
He slid it into his back pocket, remembering the way it had nestled unsteadily in Chuck’s back pocket, and he knew now why Chuck had come down here.
For this piece of paper.
For Teddy.
THE LAST TWENTY feet of cliff face was comprised of boulders, giant black eggs covered in kelp, and Teddy turned when he reached them, turned so that his arms were behind him and the heels of his hands supported his weight, and worked his way across to them and down them and saw rats hiding in their crevices.
When he reached the last of them, he was at the shore, and he spied Chuck’s body and walked over to it and realized it wasn’t a body at all. Just another rock, bleached white by the sun, and covered in thick black ropes of seaweed.
Thank…something. Chuck was not dead. He was not this long narrow rock covered in seaweed.
Teddy cupped his hands around his mouth and called Chuck’s name back up the cliff. Called and called it and heard it ride out to sea and bounce off the rocks and carry on the breeze, and he waited to see Chuck’s head peek over the promontory.