11: The Boat

We moved toward the boat, which lay athwart the channel like a black hulk. From it, there came no sound, no glimmer of light, and were it not for the faint sparkle of its polished brass in the moonlight, I would have taken my oath that it was an old, abandoned hulk, left to rot in the swamp. But then a slight shift in our position brought its lines into silhouette, and I saw that it was no hulk, but a fine cruiser—the kind of boat that a man who cares for boats will dream about all of his life.

We approached it very slowly, dipping our oars slowly and giving our boat just enough motion to counteract the tidal flow and to move us ahead—so slowly that it must have taken at least ten minutes to cover the eighty or ninety yards. This was the heart of the Meadows, wild and silent and lonely, a seemingly endless wilderness of twisting channels and swaying reeds. I was aware of distant and delicate splashing, water snakes and muskrats, and once the rush of wings that told of a water fowl awakened and put to flight. Alice started and I almost dropped my oar. Shlakmann grinned a silvery, moonlit grin.

Larger and larger the cabin cruiser loomed, and then we were alongside of it. I had been wondering whether Shlakmann would be able to pull his great bulk on board, and then I saw that the cruiser was equipped with a small stair-ladder and a little landing float, a necessary convenience for the fat man, Montez. Shlakmann eased our boat in, and passed the bow rope around a stanchion on the float. Our boat swung in and nested against the landing float, the aluminum tapping, not a loud sound by any means, but seemingly loud and echoing in that quiet night. Alice and I crawled forward.

“The dame stays in the boat,” Shlakmann whispered. “You come with me.”

Alice began to protest, but I shook my head. “Do as he says now. Wait here. I’ll be all right.”

She stared at me, then nodded. Shlakmann had already started up the ladder. I followed him. At the top he paused, and behind him my eyes were just above the rail. There was the deck of the cruiser, a large, spacious deck, two lounge chairs covered in patterned chintz, and four folding chairs. At one side there was a portable bar, glasses, bottles, and an ice bucket. At the stern was a broad, curving bench or couch, and at first I did not see the figure of the man sprawled there. Then I noticed him and I thought he was asleep, but as Shlakmann stepped through onto the deck, this man leaped to his feet.

It was Angie, and for the moment he didn’t see me, still on the ladder and hidden by the rail.

“Shlakmann!” he said. “What the hell are you doing here now? Did Montez send you? I didn’t hear no boat.”

“You didn’t?” Shlakmann giggled.

I took that moment to clear the rail, and three steps brought me to the door to the cabin. Shlakmann was between Angie and myself, and as I opened the cabin door and plunged into the darkness there, I heard Angie cry, “Shlakmann, who the devil is that?”

“Camber.”

“Camber. You must be out of your mind. Who said to bring Camber here?”

“Nobody said to bring Camber here.”

“Does Montez know about this?”

“Montez don’t know one friggin’ thing, Angie—not one friggin’ thing.”

“Are you crazy, Shlakmann?”

“Sure. I’m crazy like a fox.”

The talk between the two of them was background. I heard other things. I stood in the Stygian blackness of the cabin, my heart pounding like a triphammer, and a woman’s voice called, “Is that you, Angie? I told you to stay out of here.”

A child’s voice said, “Lenny? Lenny?”

And then a lamp came on, Lenny sitting up in its light on the couch where she had been lying, her hand still on the lamp switch as she stared at me incredulously—and at the other end of the long couch, curled in a ball of gray coat and golden hair, my daughter. A moment later, I had her in my arms, my whole body shaking with dry sobs, while she complained, “Daddy, you squeeze too hard.”

Outside, Angie cried, “Shlakmann, you’re out of your mind. That’s the trouble with you—nuts. You’re nuts! You ain’t got a brain in that whole thick square head of yours!”

I have said that time was condensed; it raced, overlapped, and then stood still. I tried to think and plan and act, but my shaking hands found no key in either pocket of the gray coat.

“The key,” I heard Shlakmann say.

“The key,” I snapped at Lenny. “Where is it? It was in her coat pocket.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Daddy, I’m sleepy,” Polly said.

“Did you look?” I demanded of Lenny.

“Of course I looked. Don’t you think I thought of that?”

“Who else is here?”

“No one. Just the two of us. That’s Shlakmann outside. How did he get here? How did you get here? Where’s Montez?”

I didn’t answer the questions. “Watch Polly,” I said to her, and then I went to the door.

Shlakmann stood only a few feet from the cabin door, his back to me. Angie, lithe, on the balls of his feet, stepping like a long cat, was moving slowly toward Shlakmann. Angie wore his brass knucks now, the knucks gleaming over his right hand, the small, bent claw of a beer-can opener peering out of his left hand. Beyond him, Alice crouched on the ladder outside the rail, her head and shoulders darkly visible.

“Come on, Angie,” Shlakmann taunted in a guttural singsong. “Come by me, you mongrel son-of-a-bitch—come, come, come, Angie! You know what I do—I break every bone in your friggin’ body, every bone. I got it planned, Angie. You know how long I say to myself, some day I break that Angie Cambosia into pieces—”

Angie darted in and out, like a mongoose. I saw a film once of a mongoose fighting a cobra; Angie was like that, in and out. I never saw a man move so quickly. He left his mark. Shlakmann let out a roar of rage and leaped after him. Angie dodged him. Shlakmann was facing me now, jacket open, shirt ripped away from his body, and down the front of his chest a long, dark streak where the can opener had sliced through his flesh.

Facing Angie, Shlakmann grinned. I call it a grin, but it wasn’t. It was something Shlakmann had learned to imitate in people; he pulled his mouth back from his teeth. He stood there, grinning at Angie and cursing him, and then he lunged at Angie and swung.

The blow would have finished Angie; human bone and flesh were not constructed to resist blows from Shlakmann. But Angie dodged again, and Shlakmann lost his footing, crashed into the bar, and sent bottles and glasses flying, and as he staggered past, Angie sent the brass-knuckled fist into the side of Shlakmann’s face, like a whiplash. Shlakmann swung around, and again Angie brought him up with a blow on the same side of his face.

The two blows tore Shlakmann’s cheek open, exposing the bone. He was strong as an ox, but his skin was soft and delicate. Roaring, bellowing with pain and rage, he crowded Angie, his two huge fists sending a wild flurry of blows that Angie miraculously avoided. And meanwhile, the brass knuckles and the can opener did their work. His body arching and weaving, Angie cut and cut and cut. Shlakmann’s shirt and jacket hung in shreds. His head was covered with blood, and blood ran from his neck and his arms and his chest and his back.

The brass knuckles smashed his mouth; they chopped at an ear, turning it into a shapeless mass; they landed again on the exposed bone; but Angie was losing the whiplash speed of his reflex. He was moving too much, too fast, straining his body to the utmost of speed and motion—and finally he miscalculated.

He was not quick enough, not quick enough by the fraction of a second that would have avoided Shlakmann’s right fist entirely. The blow glanced, but such was the force of it that it lifted Angie from his feet and sent him head over heels across the lounge. Shlakmann flung the chaise aside and lunged after Angie, who got to his feet and avoided Shlakmann’s charge. Angie had enough. He tried to get to the rail, but Shlakmann caught his shoulder and flung him back onto the deck. As Angie staggered up again, Shlakmann curled his two enormous hands around Angie’s neck and lifted him from the deck.

“Now, you son-of-a-bitch!” Shlakmann grunted, his mouth so full of blood he could hardly get the words out. He swung Angie like a pendulum. Angie struck at his face with the knuckles, clawed at him with the opener, and Shlakmann’s elbows came up, his hands tensing. There was a snap as he broke Angie’s neck, and dangling there, the knuckles and the opener fell from Angie’s hands to the deck. Shlakmann let go of him, dropping him like a sack.

I don’t know how long that fight took. Afterwards, Alice was of the opinion that it had happened quite quickly; to me, it appeared to stretch on for an agonizing and endless period. It held me in a spell of terror and anticipation, for from the very beginning, I knew what my own role in the outcome would be. I didn’t have to think about it or debate it with myself. I knew. I suppose you know when death comes, and I suppose there are few other things that are known so truly—beyond question or doubt.

I turned back to the cabin room twice during the fight. The first time, Lenny was watching it. She stood a little behind me, staring through the door, her eyes fixed on the struggle, her face set and expressionless. Beyond her, Polly curled on the couch, hands over her face, whimpering the way a kitten whimpers. The second time I turned back, Lenny sat on the couch, Polly’s head buried in her lap, no longer looking at the door, but staring straight ahead of her at the opposite wall of the cabin.

Alice watched. Trapped at the head of the ladder, unable to tear herself away and retreat back into the boat, unable to come on deck where the two men were whirling and clawing at each other and slipping on Shlakmann’s blood, she remained there and watched. There are some things that should not be seen, and this fight and what followed was one of those things, yet Alice remained.

It caused me to think about the woman I had married. Perhaps a few minutes of time—time locked in the death struggle of two frightening and psychopathic hoodlums—is not an appropriate moment to review one’s life in terms of a woman; but then it seemed to me to be all the time I would ever have, and that made it appropriate enough. The fact was that I knew nothing of women, understood nothing about them, and was, in a sense, going away empty-handed. I think that took my mind off the full implications of the immediate future. I thought about Alice, and in all truth, I also thought about the other woman, who sat with my child’s head buried in her lap. I thought quickly, but not very clearly.

I could not remember why I had married Alice. It appeared, via a series of recollections strung together like beads on a string, that we had both been very lonely and that we had a desperate need for each other. I had to ask myself whether it was love? It wasn’t the romantic kind of love that is specified as the only path to happiness. In fact, it wasn’t quite happiness, and only now and then actually approaching happiness. There were gaps in the string of beads I made out of my recollections; there were spaces where Alice simply did not exist, and this was not before I had married her but after our wedding; and there were a great many spaces where she was a symbol, a cutout of paper, a silhouette that had woman spelled out on its tag.

That’s all. I had never learned her. The least of my subjects in college, the ones I had done most poorly in, were better learned than this woman I had been married to for eight years. I had not even properly asked who she was.

As bits of her past continued to emerge after we were married, I was more impatient than interested. I had never taken the time or had the inclination to ask her properly what she dreamed about; it had been enough to involve her in my own dreams and berate her for their real life frustration. Whatever went wrong, she paid for it, by tolerating my whining, by holding up my head, by being a mother instead of a wife, by building up my ego, by gently and very skillfully doctoring my mind, so that I could work another day, another week, another month—and so, year by year, she had held the fabric of myself together.

But I could not recollect the reverse. I could say nothing about her dreams. Had I ever asked her what she desired? I didn’t have to, I was decent and kind to her, and full of contempt toward men who misused their wives and cheated on them and treated them like servants. I never treated Alice like a servant, only like a crutch, a cane, a sling, and a weeping post.

What had she been married to? She must have known. She must have looked at me, and if she had, what was there was inescapable. So what did she see when she looked at me? What did Lenny see? Whatever Lenny was, she was not totally stupid. You don’t approach a strong man with the proposition that he abandon his wife and child and go on a honeymoon with a good-looking prostitute—not unless you are out of your mind, and Lenny was not out of her mind. You don’t approach a good, a decent, an upright man with such a proposition. Whatever else Lenny’s life had failed to give her, it had at least granted her an instinct for corruption, a recognition of the smell of rot and disintegration. She had watched me during the luncheon in the Consulate, and she had taken my measure. Who was I to claim that she had taken it poorly or falsely?

So they knew me, these two women—Alice perhaps better than the other, for Alice had stayed for a longer time and had watched more resignedly.

Shlakmann faced the cabin door. He was something to see, all right, this Hans Shlakmann, whose father had kept a concentration camp. He was the superman. He translated life into the strength of his two hamlike paws. His lipless, lizardlike mouth, stuffed with blood and broken teeth, thundered the diluted doctrine of a master race. He had lived to prove himself. His shirt and jacket hung in rags and strips from his belt. His trousers were soaked with blood, and blood welled from the cuts and slashes that covered his trunk. His face was only the semblance of a face, the mouth and nose smashed, the left cheek open to the bone and bleeding profusely, the right cheek covered with welts and bruises.

He swayed as he stood there, but he was not done. He was more dangerous than anything I had ever faced, more frightening. About fighting, I have no illusions, and it is something I did poorly if at all. I had a few fights in my childhood, one in my teen years, and none as an adult. In that, I am no different from my kind all over America, a part of the perplexing puzzle of a people whose chief form of entertainment is to watch, on one silver screen or another, men battering themselves into insensibility—yet whose distaste for physical combat is perhaps unmatched anywhere in the world. Perhaps we fear our own best qualities most, and it hurts to know how gentle we are. Some of us make a cover, but I never had, and I admit frankly that for a man to drive the clenched and delicate bones of his hand against the delicate, easily injured organs of another human being is unworthy at best and bestial at worst.

So I was afraid, sick, terror-stricken, and self-doomed, yet I faced Shlakmann.

“Camber!” he roared. “Camber, you filthy, friggin’ son-of-a-bitch—where are you?”

I stepped through the door of the cabin. Beyond Shlakmann, Alice clung to the rail in the darkness, but not total darkness, and there was moonlight enough to sketch her round face and light hair, but not what the face said. She might have said, “You’re alone now, Johnny, God help you. But you’ve had it coming.”

I had it coming. The fear began to leave me.

“Look at me, Camber,” he grinned. “Look at me, you friggin’ bastard! I earned that key. Give it here.”

I prayed to God for only one thing, that my voice would be clear and unshaken as I said, “There’s no key, Shlakmann.”

“You lousy bastard! Give me that key!”

“Shlakmann,” I shouted, “there is no key! Not here! Not anywhere! There—is—no—key!”

“You said it was on the kid!”

“I lied! I lied, Shlakmann!”

“Lousy bastard! Get out of my way, Camber! I go in there and rip that kid apart! I take her apart bone by bone and find that key!”

“No!”

“Get out of my way, Camber!”

I flung myself at him, and he brushed me aside with one bloody hand. As he stooped to enter the cabin door, I found my footing, pivoted, and leaped onto his back. I locked my arms around his broken face and managed to find leverage for one foot against the cabin bulkhead. I kicked out. Shlakmann fought to maintain his balance with me clinging to his back; then he slipped in his own blood, lost his footing and fell back onto the deck, myself still clinging to him. I felt an eye under one finger, and gouged with all my strength. I no longer existed by intellect, reason, fear, or caution. I knew only one emotion—rage. I was going to die, but I would take killing.

Shlakmann screamed as my finger dug into his eye socket. He flung a hand back to sweep me off, and I sank my teeth into two fingers, bit the way an animal bites, and felt the fingers separate, the blood welling into my throat and choking me.

He flung me off then as a man would fling away an alley cat, and I went skidding on my face through the blood on the deck, to fetch up against the overturned chaise. One outstretched hand touched something hard and cold. It was Angie’s brass knuckles, and without thought or decision, I slipped my fingers through them.

I came up on my hands and knees, coughing out Shlakmann’s blood. Shlakmann was standing in front of the cabin door, his hands pressed over the eye I had destroyed. Again and again, he screamed in pain—and then, seeing me, he hurled himself upon me.

I knew that to get up to his height was to die, that my only hope was to knock him off his feet again, and braced by the chaise, I flung myself, head and shoulders, against his feet. He fell over me, and sprawled into a wedge created by the rail and the overturned chaise. For a part of a second, he struggled helplessly to free himself—even his giant strength feeling the toll that had been exacted by pain and the loss of blood. It was that fraction of a second that saved me. I was able to fling myself on him again, hook my left arm under his chin, and begin pounding his skull with the brass knuckles on my right hand.

He heaved himself up to his feet, apparently heedless of the blows I rained on his skull, reached back, and clawed me off. I fell heavily, striking my head on the deck, and lay there a moment, stunned—and then Shlakmann bent over me, grasped my neck between his hands, and lifted me up off the deck.

For an instant I hung there in Shlakmann’s grip, my breath cut off, plunging toward a black and bottomless pit, the shapeless, bloody thing that had been his face, close to mine and staring at me—and then he let go of me and I fell to the deck.

Alice told me afterward that, in that moment, she had been screaming, but I had not heard her. I had no memory of hearing anything, or seeing anything but Shlakmann’s face so close to mine. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the deck and staring up at Shlakmann, who was swaying back and forth—until he appeared to crumple, as if the bones in his knees had become jelly. On his hands and knees, a few feet from me, he managed to say:

“Lousy bastard—give me the key.”

Or at least I think that was what he attempted to say, and it was the last thing he ever did say. He stiffened, attempted to rise, and then sprawled full length on his face.

I crawled to him and tried to turn him over, but that was beyond my strength. I took his wrist and felt for the pulse, but could find none. His blood had stopped flowing, and he was dead.

I still have nightmares about Shlakmann, and I suppose that I will continue to have nightmares about him until the day I die. In some of these dreams, I must fight him again, and there is never an outcome to the fight.

That’s because I know that I didn’t stop Shlakmann; I didn’t defeat him and I didn’t kill him. As with our other actions that day, I simply postponed the inevitable, but this time we were lucky. It was Angie who had killed Shlakmann. Shlakmann bled to death.