Dover Beach (11 page)

"The Sandman wishes his soup were thicker," I said.

Linc whistled a few more notes. "The Sandman apparently doesn't want to bare his soul, even to his good buddy Linc," he observed.

"He wishes his soup were thicker and his case were solved," I said, baring my soul. "The Sandman spent a good part of the day at his office, staring at the walls. He wishes he could think of some way to solve the case besides asking his friends for help. He wishes he knew what his life was all about."

Linc slid down in his chair and scratched at his beard. "I thought," he said, "that private eyes had self-confidence coming out their ears. Nothing bothers them; they're always in control."

I stirred. "The Sandman perhaps wonders if he's really a private eye."

"The Sandman can be whatever he wants to be."

"Yes, indeed. Maybe that's why the Sandman is upset." I stirred and stirred. Eventually Linc started whistling again.

* * *

Later, while we all ate the watery soup, I quizzed Stretch. "Have you come up with anything yet?"

"Well, no, not really, Walter. I've got a call in to a guy I know in Atlanta, but he hasn't got back to me. I've checked around with some people locally, but they don't know anything."

"Don't they even remember the British taking people?"

"Sure, vaguely. But as for names..." He shrugged.

"Well, keep trying. Maybe Bobby'll have better luck."

Stretch was miffed. "You've got Bobby looking too?"

"Why not? He knows people. He owes me a favor. People owe him favors."

"If what you want exists, I'll be able to find it," Stretch said defensively.

"Great. Maybe Bobby'll find it too."

"You know," Linc said, "if you got one case, you're bound to get another. It's just a matter of time."

"Yeah. This is the one I've got, though, and this is the one I want to solve."

"I thought," Gwen said, "that you were pretty sure you had solved it—that this fellow was dead."

"But I don't have any proof. And my client would prefer it, obviously, if the guy was still alive."

"But what you're after is the truth, isn't it?" she asked.

I shrugged and looked at Linc's bowl. "Eat your soup," I said to him. "You need it."

"You didn't stir it enough," he replied.

* * *

I think I should explain how I met Gwen.

It was during the Frenzy, that awful time when we all teetered on the brink of barbarism, and some fell in. The youth camp where I had been living had pretty much fallen apart, so I wandered back to the city with a kid named Miguel. We lived in the North End and spent our days scrounging for food—fishing on the waterfront, trapping pigeons, stealing whenever we had the chance. Nights, we stayed inside. The barbarians came out at night, and we had no desire to meet up with them. Miguel found a guitar and taught himself to play. I read books. There have been worse times in my life.

One day we split up as usual to scour the city for food. I returned at dusk; Miguel didn't. I never saw him again.

What happened to him? Who knows? People come and go, and life continues. I lived by myself, lonely and afraid—emotions I was all too familiar with.

The Frenzy got worse, and even daytime wasn't safe. I was walking along Atlantic Avenue one sunny afternoon carrying a fishing rod and a bucket with one lousy bluefish in it, when the biggest man I had ever seen came out from behind one of the girders supporting the Central Artery. He had a bushy black beard and a scar on his forehead that extended from temple to temple. He was pointing a submachine gun at me.

I thought the submachine gun was a bit much.

"Gimme," he said.

I gave him the bucket.

"Gimme," he repeated.

I gave him the rod.

He looked me over and apparently decided there was nothing else worth taking, including my life. He stomped off.

I took out my gun and aimed it at him. Then I put it away. Even when I was fifteen I didn't kill people.

That's when I decided to leave the city. I could understand the guy taking my fish, but not the rod too. Stealing a person's food is sometimes necessary; stealing a person's means of getting food is barbaric. It was time to find someplace less barbaric.

I packed up a few belongings and left the North End. I had vague dreams of heading south, where I had heard there was still civilization. Mostly, though, I just wanted to move on, to be somewhere else besides Boston. I made it to the next town over: Brookline.

I have mentioned the danger of the suburbs. If you are streetwise (and I am that, if nothing else), and you are caught in a suburb at dusk, you find a house that looks empty, and you hole up for the night. That's what I did.

I looked for one with no smoke coming out the chimney, no vegetables planted in the yard, no barbed wire or guns or barking dogs. The house I chose was a fancy Colonial with a two-car garage attached to it. There was an in-ground pool in the backyard half filled with rotting leaves. A rusted wheelbarrow lay face down in the high weeds. The place was dark and quiet and most of the windows had been broken. It looked okay.

I climbed into the house through one of the broken windows and searched it from top to bottom. It had been pretty well picked clean over the years, but I saw no evidence of recent inhabitants. There was a thick layer of dust over everything; the plumbing didn't work; no one answered my friendly shouts. So I settled in.

A bed in one of the rooms was still made. I took off the dusty spread, sat down, and ate some of the food I had brought: leftover fish, an apple, a stale biscuit. I found a few
Ladies' Home Journals
in the corner of a closet and read them contentedly until there was no more light. Then I got under the covers and tried to sleep.

Back then, I still hadn't gotten used to my peculiar brand of insomnia.

It must have been a couple of hours later that I began to think that I was not alone. Clearly a hallucination. No one could have been quiet enough to come into the room without my noticing. But I became convinced that someone was there in the dark, watching me, judging me, getting ready to do what people generally do to intruders.

Finally, I couldn't stand it. I inched my hand across the bed toward my jacket, where my gun lay waiting; meanwhile I strained to hear someone breathing, a floorboard creak, clothing rustle.

My hand made it to the edge of the jacket before I felt cold metal against my head.

"Don't move or I'll blow your fucking brains out," Gwen said.

Not very convincingly, I'm afraid. A certain tone is required for sentences like that, and Gwen had not mastered it. Nevertheless, I thought it prudent not to move.

Then an astonishing light burst into my eyes, and for a split second I thought: the bitch did it—she blew my brains out.

Reason prevailed, however. I blinked, and my pupils did what they were supposed to do, and I saw a flashlight shining, not very steadily, in my direction. I hadn't seen a working flashlight in years.

"You're a kid," Gwen said.

I tried to make out something of the figure holding the flashlight. The figure wasn't very large. "So are you," I said.

"But I've got a gun."

"True. Listen, I didn't know anyone was here. I'll be happy to leave."

The gun stayed pressed against my head.
Jesus,
I thought,
gimme a break.

Finally, the gun moved away. The flashlight's beam dropped to the floor. There was a strange, low noise, and the figure slumped onto the bed.

Gwen started crying her eyes out.

I was young; I wasn't sure of the etiquette in situations like this. I waited until the bawling had subsided somewhat, and then I said, "You want an apple?"

And that's how I met Gwen. In fact, she didn't want my apple, although she was touched by the offer—touched enough to share her secret with me. After we had both calmed down a bit, she took me to the basement and showed me where she lived. Hidden behind a workbench, which cleverly rolled away when you pushed an inconspicuous little lever, was a fully equipped, mint-condition, top-of-the-line fallout shelter, stocked with a portable generator and canned goods and medicine and a radio and a dosimeter and all the other neat stuff that was supposed to help you survive a nuclear war.

The family who built the thing was probably camping next to a Minuteman silo when the bombs fell.

Gwen had found the shelter by accident, while doing exactly what I had done: checking out the house to make sure it was empty. Having first pinched herself to make sure she wasn't dreaming, she then did what anyone would have done: she moved in, and she kept quiet.

Paradise, huh? For a while. But it's a dull sort of life, hoarding your good fortune. If you're starving, all you want is food. If you have more than enough food, all you want is someone to share it with. Gwen was scared of everyone, but she needed a friend.

I was happy to be her friend.

We opened up a can of pineapple slices and talked. I had never eaten pineapple before; I was a little scared that I'd be poisoned, but I wasn't scared enough to resist the temptation. The pineapple was delicious.

Gwen told me her story. It wasn't that different from mine, I suppose. She, too, had been orphaned, had wandered from youth camp to youth camp, had begged in the city and scrounged in the country, had somehow managed to survive until she stumbled into paradise. But her story
was
different, because it was her life she was talking about, in that shy, laconic way of hers. And even then, even that first night, her life seemed special.

I told her my story, too, and to my ears it sounded exceedingly dull and commonplace. So we started talking about other things—about everything, about God and California and television, about the old days and these days and the days to come, and we ate lima beans and beef stew and tunafish until we couldn't eat or talk anymore.

Then she asked me—shyly, laconically: "Wanna dance?"

There was a cassette tape player among the many treasures in the shelter. She loaded a tape (the Beatles, I found out later), started it, and held out her arms to me. There wasn't much room for dancing, but we didn't need much. We swayed to the music, we felt the warm reality of our bodies locked together, and we were happy—utterly happy, for the first time in our difficult young lives.

"If I fell in love with you,

would you promise to be true

and help me understand..."

And when the dancing was over, the kissing started, and before long we were making awkward love on the floor. "Are you a virgin?" she asked me.

"No," I said. It was the first time I lied to her. And I suppose she knew, because Gwen knows everything, but she didn't say anything. Our life together had begun.

We probably set some records for lovemaking over the next few months, if anyone had bothered to count. We were too young and stupid to worry about pregnancy; anyway, it would've been a waste of time, as a doctor subsequently informed Gwen. And anyway, it wouldn't have made any difference. We both had a lifetime of need waiting to be satisfied, and we just couldn't tear ourselves apart.

During our occasional rest periods, I taught Gwen how to write.

We stayed there through the winter, rationing the lima beans and the pineapple slices, burying our garbage at night in the swimming pool, going once in a while on forays to a nearby library that had not yet been sacked. We didn't speak to another human being for seven months. By spring we were both a lot older and healthier and better educated, and we knew it was time to move on. We took the medicine and the flashlight and a few other irreplaceable items from the shelter and headed back into Boston. A passerby on Beacon Street told us the latest news: troops had come up from Atlanta and were setting things right downtown. The Frenzy was over; people were starting to live lives that might pass for normal in this abnormal world.

Gwen and I held hands and smiled at each other in the warm April sun. What more could life offer us?

Next stop, Louisburg Square.

* * *

And here we still were. But time changes everything, doesn't it? Decisions have to be made, dreams have to be dreamt. I couldn't stay in paradise forever, and Louisburg Square was hardly paradise. Was it?

We lay in bed together, awake.

"I ran into Cindy Tappen at Northeastern yesterday," I said.

"How is she doing?"

"Great. She loves it. She says I ought to go to school too."

Silence.

"I was thinking maybe she's right," I said.

"What would you study?" Gwen asked.

"I dunno. Something useful. Agriculture. Creative writing."

Silence. I had said all I could force myself to say. "Is this because your case is going badly?" Gwen asked finally.

"No, not at all. A person just has to—to plan for the future. Maybe I could be a private eye in my spare time."

"It's not exactly a spare-time job," Gwen observed. Silence. She moved away from me and stared up into the darkness. "Going to school would kill you," she said.