The Winter Beach Page 3

  “Thought of that,” Hugh Lasater said. “Decided against it. Little place like this, who knows how the lines are connected, who might be listening? Anyway I might have to apply a little pressure.”

  “I think it's a bust, she's stringing you along.”

  “I think you're right. That's the reason I might have to apply a little pressure.”

  He drove slowly, collecting information: Standard Gas, attached gift shop; Salmon Key Restaurant and Post Office, a frame building painted red; Reichert's Groceries, having a canned food sale—corn 3/$1.00, tomatoes, beans, peas 4/$1.00; Thom's Motel, closed; a sign for a lapidary shop; farmers’ market and fish stand, closed ... Tourist town, closed for the season. There were a few fishing boats docked behind the farmers’ market, and space at the dock for four times as many, unused for a long time apparently. A dying fishing town, surviving now with tourist trade a few months out of the year. Lasater had seen numberless towns like this one; he touched the accelerator and left the dismal place behind and started up another hill.

  “Sure could have used a road engineer and a few loads of dynamite,” he said cheerfully, shifting down for the second time on the steep incline. The hill rose five hundred feet above sea level, reached a crest, and plunged down the other side. He did not shift into higher gear as he went down. The wind was starting to shake the monster, forcing him to hold the steering wheel around at an unnatural position for a straight road. The wind let up, and the vehicle rebounded. He slowed down more.

  “Another mile's all,” he said. “We'll be in camp in time to see the storm hit.”

  “Terrific,” Milton growled.

  Lasater made the turn off the highway onto a narrow gravel road that was steeper than anything he had driven that day. The trees had been shaped here by the nearly constant wind and sea spray; there were stunted pines and dense thickets of low, contorted spruces. The motor home was vibrating with the roar of the ocean and the explosive crashes of waves on cliffs. There were other people already in the state park; a couple of campers, a van, and even a tent. As they pulled into the camping area a sleek silver home-on-wheels pulled out. Lasater waved to the driver as they passed in the parking turn-around; he took the newly vacated spot.

  Milton refused a walk with him, and he went alone to the ridge overlooking The Lagoon. That was its name, said so on the map, and there it was, a nearly perfect circle a mile across surrounded by cliffs with a narrow stretch of beach that gave way to a basalt terrace, which, at low tide, would be covered with tide pools. The lagoon was protected from the sea by a series of massive basalt rocks, like a coral reef barrier. Although they ranged from twenty to forty feet above water, the ocean was pouring over them now; the lagoon was flooded and was rising on the cliffs. Waves crashing into the barrier megaliths sent spray a hundred feet into the air.

  He looked at the lagoon, then beyond it to the next hill. Over that one, down the other side was Werther's drive, then the bridge over Little Salmon Creek, and then her drive. Here we all are, he thought, hunching down in his coat as the wind intensity grew. Time to go to work, honey, he thought at Lyle Taney. You've had a nice vacation, now's time to knuckle down, make a buck, earn your keep.

  He had no doubt that Lyle Taney would do as he ordered, eventually. She was at a time of life when she would be feeling insecure, he knew. She had chucked her job, and if he threatened to pull the rug from under her financially, she would stand on her head in any corner he pointed to. He knew how important security was to a woman like Lyle Taney. Even when she had had a reason to take a leave of absence, she had held on grimly, afraid not to hold on because she had no tenure, no guarantees about tomorrow. He had imagined her going over the figures again and again, planning to the day when her savings would be gone, if she had to start using that stash, trying to estimate royalties to the penny, stretching that money into infinity. He understood women like Taney, approaching middle age, alone, supporting themselves all the way. It was fortunate that she was nearing middle age. The kid was too young to interest her, and Werther too old; no sexual intrigues to mess up the scenario. He liked to keep things neat and simple. Money, security, revenge, those were things that were manipulable. They were real things, not abstracts, not like loyalty or faith. He did not believe a woman could be manipulated through appeals to loyalty or faith. They were incapable of making moral or ethical decisions. They did not believe in abstracts. Maternal devotion, security, money, revenge, that was what they understood, and this time it had worked out in such a way that those were the very things he could dangle before her, or threaten. Oh, she would do the job for him. He knew she would. He began to hum and stopped in surprise when he realized it was a tune from his boyhood, back in the forties. He grinned. Who would have thought a song would hang out in a mind all those years to pop out at just the right moment? He sang it to himself on his way back to the motor home: “They're either too young or too old/They're either too gray or too grassy green...”

  * * * *

  Werther's house was a surprise to Lyle. It was almost as messy as her own, and with the same kind of disorder: papers, books, notebooks, a typewriter. His was on a stand on wheels, not an end table, but that was a minor detail. Carmen was almost laughing at her reaction.

  “I told Mr. Werther that I thought you would be very simpatico," he said, taking her coat.

  Then Werther came from another room, shook her hand warmly, and led her to the fireplace.

  “It's for a book I've wanted to do for a long time,” he said, indicating the jumble of research materials. “A history of a single idea from the first time it's mentioned in literature, down to its present-day use, if any. Not just one idea, but half a dozen, a dozen. I'm afraid I keep expanding the original concept as I come across new and intriguing lines of inquiry.” His face twisted in a wry expression. “I'd like to get rid of some of this stuff, but there's nowhere to start. I need it all.”

  He was five feet eight or nine, and stocky; not fat or even plump, but well-muscled and heavy-boned. He gave the impression of strength. His hair was gray, a bit too long, as if he usually forgot to have it cut, not as if he had intended it to be modish. His eyes were dark blue, so dark that at first glance she had thought them black. He had led her to a chair by the fireplace; there was an end table by it with a pile of books. He lifted the stack, looked about helplessly, then put it on the floor by the side of the table. A History of Technology, Plato's Republic, a volume of Plato's dialogues, Herodotus, Kepler ... There was a mountainous stack of the New York Times.

  Many of the books in the room were opened, some with rocks holding the pages down; others had strips of paper for bookmarks.

  “My problem is that I'm not a writer,” Werther said. “It's impossible to organize so much material. One wants to include it all. But you...” He rummaged through a pile of books near his own chair and brought out her book on hawks. “What a delightful book this is! I enjoyed it tremendously.”

  “I'm not a writer either,” she said quickly. “I teach—taught—history.”

  “That's what the jacket says. Ancient history. But you used the past tense.”

  Although there was no inflection, no question mark following the statement, she found herself answering as if he had asked. She told him about the magazine, and the book contract, the nest.

  “And you simply quit when you couldn't get time off to do the next book. Doing the book on eagles was more important to you than remaining in your own field. I wonder that more historians don't lose faith.”

  She started to deny that she had lost faith in history, but the words stalled; he had voiced what she had not wanted to know. She nodded. “And you, Mr. Werther, what is your field? History also?”

  “No. That's why my research is so pleasurable. I'm discovering the past. That's what makes your hawk book such a joy. It sings with discovery. It's buoyant because you were finding out things that gave you pleasure; you in turn invested that pleasure in your words and thoughts and shared it with your
readers.”

  She could feel her cheeks burn. Werther laughed gently. “What capricious creatures we are. We are embarrassed by criticism, and no less embarrassed by praise. And you have found your eagle's nest after all those days of searching. Congratulations. At first, when you moved in next door, I thought you were a spy. But what a curious spy, spending every day getting drenched in a rain forest!”

  “And I thought you were a smuggler,” she said, laughing with him, but also watching, suddenly wary again.

  “The lagoon would make a perfect spot for landing contraband, wouldn't it? Ah, Carmen, that looks delightful!”

  Carmen carried two small trays; he put one down at Lyle's elbow on the end table, and the other one within Werther's reach, perched atop a stack of books. There was wheat-colored wine, a small bowl of pink Pacific shrimp, a dip, cheese, crackers...

  “I've never tasted such good shrimp as these,” Werther said, spearing one of the tidbits. “I could live on the seafood here.”

  “Me too,” Lyle agreed. The wine was a very dry sherry, so good it made her want to close her eyes and savor it. The fire burned quietly, and Carmen made cooking noises that were obscured by a door. Werther had become silent now, enjoying the food; outside, the wind howled and shook the trees, rattled rhododendrons against the windows, whistled in the chimney. It was distant, no longer menacing; through it all, behind it, now and then overwhelming the other sounds, was the constant roar of the surf. She thought of the pair of eagles: where were they now? Were they starting to feel twitches that eventually would draw them back to the nest?

  Presently Werther sighed. “Each of us may well be exactly what the other thought at first, but that's really secondary, isn't it? How did you, a history professor, become involved with hawks?”

  She brought herself back to the room, back to the problem Lasater had dumped in her lap. Slowly she said, “Five years ago my son, he was twelve, took something one of the boys in his class had bought from a drug dealer. There were twenty boys involved; three of them died, several of them suffered serious brain damage. Mike died.”

  Her voice had gone very flat in the manner of one reading a passage in a foreign language without comprehension. She watched him as she talked. She could talk about it now; that was what she had accomplished under Dr. Himbert. She had learned how to divide herself into pieces, and let one of the pieces talk about it, about anything at all, while the rest of her stayed far away hidden in impenetrable ice.

  Werther was shocked, she thought, then angry. One of his hands made a movement toward her, as if to touch her—to silence her? or share her grief? She could not tell.

  “And you turned to the world of hawks where there is no good or evil, only necessity.”

  She felt bathed in the warmth of his words suddenly, as if his compassion were a physical, material substance that he had wrapped around her securely. He knew, she thought. He understood. That was exactly what she had looked for, had needed desperately, something beyond good and evil. Abruptly she looked away from his penetrating and too understanding gaze. She wanted to tell him everything, she realized in wonder, and she could tell him everything. He would not condemn her. Quickly then she continued her story, trying to keep her voice indifferent.

  “I found I couldn't stay in our apartment over weekends and holidays after that. My husband and I had little reason to stay together and he left, went to California, where he's living now. I began to tramp trough the woods, up and down the Appalachian Trail, things like that. One day I got a photograph of a hawk in flight, not the one on the cover, not that nice, but it made me want to get more. Over the next couple of years I spent all my spare time pursuing hawks. And I began to write the book.”

  Werther was nodding. “Therapy. And what good therapy it was for you. No doctor could have prescribed it. You are cured.”

  Again it was not exactly a question; it demanded no answer. And again she felt inclined to respond as if it had been. “I'm not sure,” she said. “I had a breakdown, as you seem to have guessed. I hope I'm cured.”

  “You're cured,” he said again. He got up and went to a sideboard where Carmen had left the decanter of wine. He refilled both their glasses, then said, “If you'll excuse me a moment, I'll see how dinner's coming along. Carmen's a good cook, but sometimes he dawdles.”

  She studied the living room; it was large, with a dining area, and beyond that a door to the kitchen. The west wall was heavily draped, but in daylight with the drapes open, it would overlook the sea, as her own living room did. Probably there was a deck; there was an outside door on that wall. One other door was closed, to the bedroom area, she guessed. The plan was very like the plan of her cabin, but the scale was bigger. Both were constructed of redwood, paneled inside, and had broad plank floors with scatter rugs. She began to look through the piles of magazines on tables: science magazines, both general and specialized. Molecular biology, psychology, physics ... History journals—some probably had papers of hers. There was no clue here, or so many clues that they made no sense. It would be easy to pick up a digest magazine or two, slip them in her purse, put them in the envelope and be done with it.

  But he wasn't a smuggler, she thought clearly. Lasater had lied. She picked up a geology book dog-eared at a chapter about the coast range.

  “Are you interested in geology?” Werther asked, coming up behind her.

  “I don't know a thing about it,” she admitted, replacing the book.

  “According to the most recent theory, still accepted it's so recent, there are great tectonic plates underlying the rock masses on earth. These plates are in motion created by the thermal energy of the deeper layers. Here along the coast, they say, two plates come together, one moving in from the sea, the other moving northward. The one coming in from the west hits the other one and dives under it, and the lighter materials are scraped off and jumbled together to make the coast range. That accounts for the composition, they say. Andesite, basalt, garnetite, sandstone, and so on. Have you had a chance to do any beach combing yet?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet. I'll have more time now that I've located the nest.”

  “Good. Let me take you to some of my favorite places. South of here. You have to be careful because some of those smaller beaches are cut off at high tide, and the cliffs are rather forbidding.”

  Carmen appeared then. “I thought you were going to sit down so I can serve the soup.”

  * * * *

  Carmen dined with them and his cooking was superb. When she complimented him, he said, “No, this is plain everyday family fare. I didn't know we were having company. Next time I'll know in advance. Just wait.”

  There was a clear broth with slices of water chestnut and bits of clam and scallion; a baked salmon stuffed with crab; crisp snow peas and tiny mushrooms, salad with a dressing that suggested olive oil and lime juice and garlic, but so faintly that she could not have said for certain that any or all of those ingredients had been used.

  “And take Anaxagoras,” Werther said sometime during that dinner, “nearly five hundred years before Christ! And he had formulated the scientific method, maybe not as precisely as Bacon was to do two thousand years later, and without the same dissemination, but there it was. He wrote that the sun was a vast mass of incandescent metal, that moonlight was reflected sunlight, that heavenly bodies were made incandescent by their rotational friction. He explained, in scientific terms, meteors, eclipses, rainbows...”

  The ancient names rolled off his tongue freely, names, dates, places, ideas. “Empedocles identified the four elements: air, earth, fire, and water, and even today we speak of a fiery temper, an airy disposition, blowing hot and cold, an earthy woman, the raging elements, battling the elements, elemental spirits ... An idea, twenty-five hundred years old, and it's still in the language, in our heads, in our genes maybe.”

  Before dinner there had been the sherry, and with dinner there was a lovely Riesling, and then a sweet wine she did not know. She told herself that
no one gets drunk on wine, especially along with excellent food, but, once again before the fire, she was having trouble following the conversation, and somewhere there was a soft guitar playing, and a savage wind blowing, and rain pounding the house rhythmically.

  She realized she had been talking about herself, her lack of tenure and seeming inability to get tenure. “I'm not a hotshot scholar,” she said, thinking carefully of the words, trying to avoid any that might twist her up too much. She thought: hotshot scholar and knew she could never say it again. She knew also that if she repeated it to herself, she would start to giggle. The thought of breaking into giggles sobered her slightly.

  “You're interested in what people thought,” she said almost primly, “but we teach great movements, invasions, wars, successions of reign, and it's all irrelevant. The students don't care; they need the credit. It doesn't make any difference today, none of it.”

  “Why don't you do it right?”

  “I'd have to go back to Go and start over, relearn everything. Unlearn everything. I've always been afraid. I don't even know what I'm afraid of.”

  “So you bailed out at the first chance. But now I think Carmen had better take you home. You can hardly keep your eyes open. It's the fresh air and wind and climbing these steep hills, I suspect.”

  She nodded. It was true, she was falling asleep. Suddenly she felt awkward, as if she had overstayed a visit. She glanced at her watch and was startled to find that it was eleven-thirty.

  “Ready?” Carmen asked. He had her coat over his arm, had already put on a long poncho.

  Werther went to the door with them. “Come back soon, my dear. It's been one of the nicest evenings I've had in a very long time.”

  She mumbled something and hurried after Carmen to the car. The wind had died down now, but the rain was steady.