“You think I can’t touch you,” Badger said. “I see it in your face.”
“You’ve no idea what I think.” But it was true. Badger could not.
An incongruity returned to Dexter: the call from Frankie Q. had come in the wee hours, when Badger was still getting his beauty sleep. How had Mr. Q. known Dexter wouldn’t come to the boathouse right away? Might he have gotten wind of what Dexter was doing instead?
If that was so, then he’d read the situation backward: he was the one to be taught a lesson, and what Mr. Q. wanted from him was not instruction but apology. The amateurish setup was for his own protection: keep it in the family, avoid a public reprimand or any real danger. Dexter’s failure to consider this possibility was an uncharacteristic lapse—perhaps a consequence of his throbbing head. Had the dive blunted his thinking? It was obvious now how this was supposed to go: he would grovel to Badger, and word of his groveling would reassure Mr. Q. as he unswaddled his grapevines when the weather turned. Dexter would carry on as before, on a tighter leash. Badger would be Jimmy, his equal.
All of that lay in one direction, predictable as sunrise. And in another lay something less distinct: an unfathomable landscape, flickering and dark, full of glowing dust. A mystery.
Mr. Q. was an old man. A very old man by now.
Dexter was tired of groveling. He’d been groveling most of his life. And the fact was, he didn’t have to. He knew that, and so did Mr. Q.
With a swiftness he hadn’t known he still possessed, he grabbed the throat of one of Badger’s boys in each hand and squeezed until he felt cartilage snap. They fired wildly. One must have hit Badger, because someone shouted, and the room was full of pain. Then Dexter was on the floor clutching his belly, recalling that the Negro had warned him about stomach cramps.
But he hadn’t the bends. Badger had shot him in the back.
The kid loomed over him, his face suffused with the lurid wonder of someone gazing into a bonfire. Dexter knew then that his murder had been sanctioned. But how? By what radical reordering of the world had such an act become feasible? The answer arrived with cold certainty: his father-in-law had forsaken him. The old man had cut him loose.
Badger stood above him, gat raised and ready. Like any garrulous killer, he wanted his victim to hear him out before he finished him off. As long as Dexter appeared to listen, he would live. He fastened his eyes on his assailant’s face while the contours of what had happened revealed themselves like parts of a building through fog: George Porter had blabbed preemptively, out of fear of being exposed. The channel Dexter had yearned for between the old man and Mr. Q. had come into being—perhaps had existed for years. And both men had done with him.
Badger spoke eagerly, apparently flattered by Dexter’s captive interest. Dexter didn’t hear a word. He slipped the confines of his skull like a boat sliding away from a pier when her lines are cast off. Soon he found himself on open water, the wet night in his face. The skipper was beside him, erect and commanding, the stroke not having felled him yet. Kerrigan lay crumpled on the bottom.
“Will you remember where we are?” Dexter asked the skipper.
“Always do.”
“Suppose they tell you not to.”
The skipper lifted his hands, raw and knotted as newborn calves. “They own these,” he said. Then, tapping his skull, “Not this.”
Dexter’s boys wrapped the chain around Kerrigan and fastened it to the weight. No one wanted him floating to the surface in the April thaw. Now, having seen that chain, Dexter knew that nothing of his friend remained inside it—not a bone, stitch, hat, or shoe leather. This irregularity filled him with hope. His discovery of the night before returned to him with effortless clarity: rising through the dark harbor, he’d felt his own edges dissolve, and a surge of current had leaped from inside him toward a glowing intimation of the future. What he was trying so hard to do, he’d already done! He was American! The lust and yearning that seethed in his veins had helped to fashion whatever was to come.
“You’re smiling,” Badger said. “You know something I don’t?”
Keeping his eyes on Badger, Dexter sank into the pause that followed, dividing it in half, then in half again, determined not to arrive at its opposite shore. He fell into the stillness, dark enclosing him like the harbor water, while on the open boat he helped his boys hoist Kerrigan’s chained and weighted body up to the gunwale and tip it over the side.
Eddie held still just long enough that anyone watching from the boat would see him disappear. Then he commenced the spastic writhing he’d been practicing in his mind’s eye from the moment he began to feign unconsciousness—tentatively at first, half expecting Styles to jump to his feet and ask what the matter was. Eddie had had an inkling of what might be in store, and come to the boathouse armed with a few tricks from his vaudeville days: razors in the lining of his trousers, a lock pick nestled between his jaw and gum. He’d been afraid of swallowing the pick while pretending to drink, but in the event, he hadn’t had to pretend. Styles had looked away, and Eddie had flicked the shot over his shoulder.
He’d left his affairs in order, the second bankbook open on the bureau for Agnes, who knew nothing. That had been his sole condition to Bart Sheehan: his wife must never know, even if the worst should happen. Especially then. Knowledge invited action, and Eddie was resigned to be remembered as the worst sort of rat rather than risk Agnes training her single-mindedness on the question of who’d done him in. Too hazardous. Men walked out on their families every day—miscreants he’d always said should be jailed. Yet, if murdered, Eddie would be remembered as such a man. So often did he remind himself of this fact that at times he was surprised to find he was still alive, still at home, where his presence had become superfluous. He’d mattered once to Anna, but not anymore. It might relieve her to be rid of him.
The weighted chain hurtled him downward at such a clip that he thought his skull would be squashed by the water’s pressure like a walnut under a boot. His writhing freed up a leg, then an arm, and at last the chain and weight divested themselves of his person and continued their rush to the bottom. Nobody chained an unconscious man with the care they would use on a man who was fully awake.