Short Stories Read online

  “How a wrong number?”

  “I’m a sinking ship.”

  “And your lawyer?”

  “He’s a rat. He doesn’t know me. He never heard the name.”

  “Oh,” said the detective. He stood up. “I guess we can go then, huh?”

  Winthrop shrugged. “I guess so.”

  He followed them out of the apartment. They walked to the elevator, Winthrop pushed the button, and they waited without speaking. When the elevator came, they stepped in and the detective pushed the button marked ‘1’.

  On the way down, the detective said, “Mind if I ask you a question?”

  “For the insurance,” said Winthrop. “I was in debt. Either I paid or chhhhk.” He ran a finger across his neck.

  “That isn’t the question. I want to know why you waited for us to come before you called the lawyer. You had a lot of time before we got there. Why did you wait?”

  Winthrop stared at the door. Why had he waited? He thought a minute, then said, “I don’t know. Bravado or something.”

  “Okay,” said the detective. The door slid open and they walked across the vestibule to the street. A few passersby watched curiously as Winthrop got into the back seat of the police car.

  “I’m twenty four,” said Winthrop, as they drove through the streets to Police Headquarters.

  “So?” said the detective.

  “Seems like a hell of an age to stop at.”

  “How old was your mother?” asked the cop.

  Winthrop closed his eyes. “Do you hate me?”

  “No,” said the cop.

  Winthrop turned and looked at the cop. “I do,” he said.

  “I hate my guts.”

  DREAM A DREAM

  I’m dreaming, Nora thought, and she was right, but it didn’t matter.

  The dream was very realistic, even to the glitter on the knife in the hand of the tall Mayan priest. He faced Nora in a small chamber she knew to be at the base of the temple, and even while her attention was on the stone knife she was aware of the rightness of every detail, both in his costume and the room itself, a narrow stone-walled space with a dry-smelling thatch roof. Stylized hummingbirds and vultures flowed on the priest’s robes as he gestured, saying, “Well? Are you ready?”

  Of course he isn’t speaking English, and of course I understand him. “Ready for what?”

  “After the rains,” the priest said, “we must sacrifice a virgin to ensure fertility in the new fields.

  Astonished, almost offended, not yet scared, Nora said, “I’m not a virgin!”

  His free hand extended toward her. “Come, you keep everybody waiting.”

  A great crowd could be faintly heard outside. Nora shrank away, feeling the rough wall against her back through the thin white cotton tunic. “I’m a married woman,” she said. Safe in that other world, beyond the edge of the dream, Ray was now asleep in the cot next to hers, the two of them peaceful and at rest in the Central American night. “I’m twenty-seven years old,” Nora said. “I’ve been married nearly three years. I am not a virgin!”

  “Of course you are.” His impatience made him draw quick cutting motions in the air with the blade. “There is no passion in your life,” he said, “—not for anything with juice in it. You married your husband not for love of him but of archaeology,” the word dripping with contempt. “You’ve never loved anything but dust. You’re a virgin, no question. Come along.” Eyes determined, his wiry hand closed around her arm.

  “No!” She sat up straight in the dark, disturbing the mosquitoes, staring at the night. On the other cot, Ray turned heavily in his sleep, smacking his lips, a fiftyish man who slept profoundly after the hard physical days in the field.

  “I’m not,” she whispered. The pressure of that bony hand could still be felt, a tight band around her upper arm. The glassless screened rectangle of the window let in air and the tiny night sounds of the jungle. Nora slowly lay back, hands holding the sheet under her chin, eyes very wide in the dark.

  During breakfast at one of the long tables in the dining shed, Nora pensively picked at her eggs and beans while Ray talked with the oil company man. His name was Stafford, and he had come to this remote jungle camp five days ago for a stay of about a month. By day he wandered the high land to the west, and in the evenings after dinner he sat here in the dining shed in the circle of light, where he drew his tiny maps and made notes in a small, neat hand. Now he was saying something about tall mounds he had seen in the jungle, similar to those concealing the structures here in the main part of Actun Ek, the Mayan city whose excavation Ray was directing. “Thanks, Bill,” Ray said. “We’ll have a look.”

  Nora was relieved when the breakfast was done and they could tramp on out to the site, where the workers already crawled over high-stepped sides of Building B-1, the primary temple of Actun Ek. I was here last night, Nora thought.

  The workers, Indian tribesman who made their living from archaeological sites, had nearly finished the first task, clearing away the centuries of growth and decay, the earth and brush and trees that covered the cunningly nested old stones, the steep lines of stairs. Unlike the Egyptian pyramids, Mayan temples were built solid, without rooms or corridors, just the steps and walls and sculptures reaching upward. Only at the base had there originally been the small thatch-roofed rooms built out from the temple’s side.

  Nora and Ray worked behind the Indians, collecting shards, filling in site maps. This was Nora’s third year at Actun Ek, her eighth year since she had fallen in love with the dignity, strength and confidence of the Mayan civilization, the impervious mystery of their individual persons. Who had they been? When they awoke in the morning, what had they thought of themselves and the jungle around them and the high temples to which they devoted their lives?

  Human sacrifice; yes, that was part of it but hardly everything. Something was known of their agriculture, their trade, their religion, even their sports, but never very much. Never enough to hamper Nora’s imagination.

  Every day, in her mind, as she gleaned her way across the uneven steps, Nora was a Mayan priestess. Not even Ray knew of this game, this fantasy she had lived and elaborated for eight years. She imagined her clothing, her food, the understated drama of her days. Little was known of the place of women among the Mayan upper class, so her invention could float unimpeded.

  At dinner, Bill Stafford showed them, on his neat maps, the location of the mounds he’d seen. This earnest geologist seemed even younger than Nora, which from the beginning had pleased her. She’s married a man much older than herself, was mostly around people of his generation, and resented their usual assumption that she was too young to be serious. Stafford was barely out of engineering college, but there could be no doubt of his seriousness. He had a square-jawed, handsome face, softened by a faint vagueness of expression. His eyeglasses were square-lensed, with plastic frames just a bit darker than his tanned skin. His hair was blond but already very thin, sunlight reflecting from his scalp through his widow’s peak. He wore hiking shoes, khaki slacks, a short-sleeved white dress shirt; in a white hard-plastic pouch in his shirt pocket, his pens and pencils were neatly arrayed. He shaved every day.

  She didn’t dream that night but she barely slept either. Every time she dozed off, the fear of the dream startled her awake. She spent the night remembering her life, seeing herself as Dr. Helm’s promising student, then as Mr. Helm’s gifted graduate student, then as Raymond Helm’s assistant, and now as Ray’s wife. She had not slept with him until after his divorce from Joanna. He was Nora’s first husband.

  In another shed in the compound, Bill Stafford would be asleep. This is terrible, Nora told herself. I must get over this. I must sleep. Toward morning, she did.

  “I’m just here to do the stuff on the ground,” Bill Stafford was explaining to her. “Confirm or deny the technology’s guesses.”

  “Does technology guess?” Nora asked, following him. She had volunteered at breakfast to go with him to see if t
he mounds he’d described did contain buried structures. Perspiration ran down behind her ears, between her breasts.

  “It’s all step by step,” Stafford told her. “We’ve got satellite pictures to map the terrain, aerial survey using infrared. SLAR scanning. Now we have to walk the groun—”

  “What kind of scanning? Help here, will you?”

  They were crossing a gully. He held his hand back for her. His teeth glistened when he smiled. Sweat made gray islands on his shirt. He said, “SLAR—for Side-Looking Airborne Radar.”

  “Sounds very suggestive,” she said, laughing and released his hand. Then she had to clasp his arm to keep from slipping backward on a muddy stone.

  His hand pressed to the small of her back. “Careful.”

  Not careful. “You’re all wet,” she said, showing her tongue, tracing with her fingertip a line of perspiration that ran from his throat down his chest and under the shirt.

  Behind the glasses his eyes looked surprised, but when she kissed him he knew what it meant.

  Before dinner, she used the primitive bucket-and-cistern-in-a-tree shower, the sun-warmed water plashing over her heated body. She lifted her right breast and, yes, his watchband had left a scratch. She smiled at it.

  I wasn’t wrong, she thought late that night, slipping silently through the sleeping camp, away from Bill’s room, back toward her own cot. I was right in the college, right to follow my own needs and grow at my own pace. I wouldn’t have been ready then for this. But now I’m right again!

  She was brand-new, tingling with rebirth. The dream had rescued her before she withered, using her Mayans as the symbol. Her stone passion had pointed the way to a richer, truer passion of the flesh.

  Not that she would run off with Bill, nor leave Ray. There was no need to throw away the life she already had, the work she’d already accomplished. She would still admire Ray just as much, esteem and help him, serve him and the Mayans and the work, absorbed and satisfied; but now there would be more. A lifetime of Bill Staffords smiled in her mind, all young, all loving and giving, all a kind of delicious dessert. And no one need ever know, no one need ever be hurt. She could have it all.

  Ray’s breathing was long and regular. Nora slid between the cool, damp sheets.

  The same cell. She stared, unbelieving. The same cell, the same rough thatch ceiling, square stone walls, tall imperious priest in all his finery, grasping the same rough-edged knife. “Now,” he said, “what we do with adulteresses…”

  JOURNEY TO DEATH

  Although ocean voyages are not new to me, I have never grown accustomed to the sway and roll of ships, especially at night. For that reason, I normally get very little sleep while crossing the Atlantic, not being able to close my eyes until I have reached such a point of exhaustion that it is no longer possible for me to keep them open. Since business often makes it necessary for me to journey to America, my wife has urged me, from time to time, to go by air, but I’m afraid I’m much too cowardly for that. The rolling of a ship at sea causes uneasiness in both my stomach and mind, but the mere of traveling through the air terrifies me. A sea voyage, then, is the lesser of two evils, and I face my insomnia, after all these years, with the calm of old resignation.

  And yet, it is impossible to merely lie in bed awake, eyes staring at the ceiling, through all the long rolling nights between Dover and New York, and even reading begins, at last, to pall. On so many voyages, I have been reduced to aimless pacing of the deck, watching the million moons reflected in the waves surrounding me.

  I was delighted, therefore, on the last and latest crossing, to discover, the third night out, a fellow-sufferer, an insomniac like myself, named Cowley. Cowley was an American, a businessman, younger than me, perhaps forty five or fifty. A direct and sensible man I found him, and enjoyed his company, late at night, when all the other passengers slept and we were alone in an empty and silent sea. I found no fault in him at all, save for an occasional example of rather grim and tasteless humor, a reference to the decaying bodies in Davy Jones’s locker, or some such thing.

  The nights were spent in conversation, in strolls about the decks, or in billiards, a game which we both loved but neither had ever mastered. Being of equal incompetence in the sport, we contentedly wiled away many hours in the large billiard room located on the same deck as my cabin.

  The eighth night of the voyage was spent in this room, where we puffed happily at cigars, played with our normal lack of skill, and waited patiently for dawn. It was a brisk and chilly night, with a cold wet wind scampering across the waves like a chilled and lonely ghost searching for land, and we had closed every door and window in the room, preferring an atmosphere polluted by cigar smoke to being chilled to the bone.

  It was only fifteen minutes after thus sealing ourselves into the room that the catastrophe struck. I don’t know what it could have been, an explosion in the huge and mysterious engines somewhere in the bowels of the ship, perhaps unexpected contact with a mine still unreclaimed from the Second World War. Whatever it was, the silence of the night was suddenly torn apart by a tremendous and powerful sound, a roar, a crash that dulled the senses and paralyzed the body, and the whole ship, the Aragon, shuddered and trembled with a violent jerking spasm. Cowley and I were both thrown to the floor, and on all the tables, the billiard balls clacked and rolled, as though their hysteria and fear were equal to our own.

  And then the ship seemed to poise, to stop and hold itself immobile while time flashed by, and I struggled to my feet, hearing the hum of absolute silence, of a broken world suddenly without time or movement.

  I turned toward the main door, leading out to the deck, and saw there, staring in, a wild and terrified face, a woman, still in her nightgown, whose mouth was open and who was screaming. I started toward her, staring at her through the glass in the door, and time began again. The ship lurched, bent, and as I struggled to keep my balance, I saw her torn away, out to the emptiness, and eager waves dashed against the window panes.

  It was like an elevator gone mad, hurtling down from the uppermost story. The water boiled and fumed outside the window, and I clung to the wall, sick and terrified, knowing that we were sinking, and in a matter of seconds I would surely be dead.

  A final jolt, and all movement stopped. The ship lay at a slight angle, the floor was at a slant, and we were at the bottom of the sea.

  A part of my mind screamed in horror and fear, but another part of me was calm, as though outside myself, separate, a brain not dependent upon this frail and doomed body. It—this part of my mind that I had never known before—it thought, it conjectured, it reasoned. The ship was lying on the sea floor, that much was obvious. But how far down, how far from the surface? Not too far, surely, or the pressure of the water would have burst the glass of the windows. Was the surface close enough for me to dare to leave the ship, this room, this pocket of trapped air? Could I hope to fight my way to the surface before my lungs burst, before my need for air drove open my mouth and let the water in to kill me?

  I couldn’t take the chance. We had fallen for so long, and I was not a young man. I couldn’t take the chance.

  A groan reminded me of Crowley. I turned and saw him lying on the floor against one wall, apparently rolled there when the ship sank. He moved now, feebly, and touched his hand to his head.

  I hurried to him and helped him to his feet. At first, he had no idea what had happened. He had heard the explosion, had stumbled, his head had hit the edge of a billiard table, that was all he knew. I told him of our situation, and he stared at me, unbelieving.

  “Underwater?” His face was pale with shock, pale and stiff as dry clay. He turned and hurried to the nearest window. Outside, the feeble light from our prison faintly illuminated the swirling waters around us. Cowley faced me again. “The lights—” he said.

  I shrugged. “Perhaps there are other rooms still sealed off,” I said, and as I finished speaking, the lights flickered and grew dim.

  I had expected Cowle
y to panic, as I had done, but he smiled instead, sardonically, and said, “What a way to die.”

  We may not die,” I told him. “If there were survivors—”

  Survivors? What if there were? We aren’t among them.”

  “They’ll be rescued,” I said, suddenly full of hope. They’ll know where the ship went down. And divers will come.”

  “Divers? Why?”

  “They always do. At once. To salvage what they can, to determine the cause of sinking. They’ll send divers. We may yet be saved.”

  “If there were survivors,” said Cowley. “And, if not?”

  I sat down, heavily. “Then we are dead men.”

  “You suggest we wait, is that it?”

  I looked at him, surprised. “What else can we do?”

  “We can get it over with. We can open the door.”

  I stared at him. He seemed calm, the faint smile was still on his lips. “Can you give up so easily?”

  The smile broadened. “I suppose not,” he said, and once more the lights flickered. We looked up, staring at the dimming bulbs. Yet a third time they flickered, and all at once they went out. We were in the dark, in pitch blackness, alone beneath the sea.

  In the blackness, Cowley said, “I suppose you’re right. There’s nothing to lose but our sanity. We’ll wait.”

  I didn’t answer him. I was lost in my own thoughts, of my wife, of my children and their families, of my friends on both continents, of land and air and life. We were both silent. Unable to see one another, unable to see anything at all, it seemed impossible to converse.

  How long we sat there I don’t know, but suddenly I realized that it was not quite so dark any more. Vaguely, I could make out shapes within the room, I could see the form of Cowley sitting in another chair.

  He stirred. “It must be daylight,” he said. “A sunny day. On the surface.”

  “How long,” I asked him, “how long do you suppose the air will last?”