THE COAST ROAD WAS easy to follow by boat. You couldn’t very well miss it. But west of the Port there were a lot of coves and inlets the road cut inland to skirt. I was afraid we might lose Chuck in one of these and miss him.
“Do you mind telling me what’s up?” Sonny asked, as he followed my instructions about going back into the inlets.
“Never mind,” I said. “Just do what I tell you. That’s what Freddy Tarkoff pays you for.” I didn’t know what I was going to do with him when I found him. But I meant to find him if I had to walk the road.
We finally found him along a long ugly straight stretch. He was trudging along in the sun with his Kelty packframe on his back. Even from a hundred yards out I could see he was wearing his machete. I hadn’t thought I’d be that lucky.
“Pull in there. Up in front of him,” I said to Sonny. “Where there’s sand.” The sand, when we got to it, was half mud. That was what made the place look so unappetizing.
“Hey!” I called. “Hello!” Under me the bow nudged into the sand gently. Chuck looked at us a minute, then came walking down onto the sand.
“What are you doing out here?” I called.
“Going to St. Friday’s,” he said sullenly.
“Well, come on,” I called. “We’ll give you a lift.”
“You will? Really?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“I could sure use a ride, man.” He came down to the water’s edge. When he got that close, I could see he had been weeping. He was still sniffing, and wiping his nose. Dirty streaks ran down both his cheeks. He kicked off his sneakers.
“Here,” I said. “Hand me up your pack.”
He came out into the water and passed it up.
“Pass me your machete,” I said. “So it won’t get wet.”
He pulled the scabbard off his belt and handed it up, without a word. I laid it on the seat bench beside the pack.
Behind me Sonny was keeping his mouth laudably shut.
“Now. Give me your hand.” I leaned down. He came on out up to the bottoms of his shorts. I got hold of his hand and heaved, and he clambered up over the rail.
“There,” I said amiably. “Sit down. This beats hoofing it.” I moved my head at Sonny, and he began backing us off.
“It sure does,” Chuck said, and sniffled, and wiped his nose. He looked glum. He sat down by his pack and machete.
I sat down myself. But I kept my feet under me.
“Why are you going to St. Friday’s?” I asked.
“I’m being punished.”
“I see you’ve been crying,” I said after a minute.
“Yeah,” he admitted, and began to sniffle again.
“Why are you being punished?”
“Because I took the speedboat out yesterday by myself,” Chuck said. “Without asking permission.”
I felt fire surge up into my ears. I had to do a slow blink, to keep it from showing. “Who’s punishing you?”
“Steve,” he said, amiably enough, and sniffled. “Steve’s my mentor. So now I have to walk to St. Friday’s and do a three-day fast and walk back. That’s my penance.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t be picking you up, then.”
“I won’t tell him,” he said. He looked up, “If you won’t?”
“I won’t tell him. But it seems to me he’s a little hard on you,” I said.
He agreed. “He is, sometimes, man.”
We lapsed into silence. Chuck sat sniffling. Sonny had got us backed off, and was swinging the boat. We started chugging along the coast toward the next point in the hot, orange sun. I was still digesting what he’d said about the speedboat. It was hard to believe even he would volunteer a piece of information like that, without any reference at all to Marie.
I supposed if you wanted to you could feel sorry for him, on a kind of basic animal level. I had friends who would. I didn’t want to. He was enough to make you believe in euthanasia. Unless you were a liberal anarchist like me. His mental processes were on about the level of a smart dog.
“Do you have to do many of these penances?” I said.
He shrugged. “I had to do one couple days ago. I beat up some guy.” He grinned. “But I fooled Steve. I didn’t come all the way. I sneaked back.” His eyebrows popped up. “I never did figure out how Steve found out I didn’t come.”
This made me feel ridiculously pleased, since I was the cause. “Is a three-day fast hard to do?”
“It sure is, man. But I’ve got a chicken in my pack, and a couple bottles of wine. Tomorrow, Steve and Diane are bringing me another chicken.”
“Then it’s not a real fast?”
“Well, it sort of is. You get awful hungry.” He looked down, and rubbed his hand over the machete, and tears started to run down his face again. “I just wish he wouldn’t make me throw away my machete, though.”
“You mean he’s making you throw away your beautiful machete?” I said.
“Yeah. He said I got to throw it away, man. It’s part of my penance. I’m supposed to take it up on the bluff at St. Friday’s, and throw it out in the sea as far as I can. It’s a propitial offering” to the One God for my penance.” He looked at me.
I didn’t have any ready answer to that one.
“He’s going to buy me another one,” Chuck said, his face strained. “But I want to keep my old one.”
“Yes. I suppose if you’ve had it a long time,” I said. “I suppose it gets to be, like, part of you.”
“That’s it, exactly, man.”
Whether he had killed Girgis and Marie or not, it was plain as hell his buddy Steve sure as hell thought he had.
Suddenly, he started pouring out to me all the troubles of his life. First he looked at the stern to see if Sonny could hear. In his simple-minded distress, he seemed to forget he had ever been mad at me and was supposed to hate me.
He had plenty of troubles. I got a picture of a kooky kind of semi-religious, knock-up kind of cult worship, not organized at all, cemented together and laced with an almost constant smoking of hash and pot. It sounded like enough to crack the nervous system of a lesser nut than Chuck.
They believed in the right of freedom from work. They also believed in the moral obligation to steal, no sexual repression, love of nature and the protection of the woods and waters. Chuck had been appointed grand vizier. By Steve.
But that wasn’t all his troubles. Not by a long shot. There was Diane. He was Diane’s second husband, he explained to me in a garbled way that made historical reference to polygamy, polyandry, Moslems and harems, only he didn’t use the big words. Steve was Diane’s first husband. He was second husband. One husband couldn’t take care of her, in the sack. But now he, Chuck, was falling in love with Diane and it was making his life a torment. Now in addition to all that, Steve was making him throw away his machete.
“Let me see your machete,” I said. “May I?”
“Sure, man.” He handed it over.
“It sure is a beauty,” I said. I drew the blade half out. There were the celebrated bloodstains, rust-colored and brown, on the blade near the haft. The blade below was clean.
“This looks like bloodstains?”
“It is,” Chuck said. “That’s goat’s blood.”
“It ruins a blade to leave blood on it. It rusts it.”
“I know. I know all that, man. But that blood’s special. I had to fight a man once with that machete in Mexico. A Mexican. Blade to blade. He had his machete and I had mine, and I won. I swore I’d never wash his blood from my sword. If I washed that goat’s blood off there, there by the hilt, I’d wash his blood off, too, see?” He peered at me. “I keep the rest clean.”
“That’s quite a souvenir,” I said.
“Yeah. You see? You can see why it’s so hard for me to throw it away. Even as a penance.”
I pushed the blade back in and hefted the scabbard. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t I keep it for you? I’d hate to see you lose a souvenir like this. I think Steve’s wrong. This time. Let me keep it for you and in a couple of weeks, when Steve isn’t mad anymore, I’ll give it back to you.”
He thought it over. If you could call it that, with him. “Okay,” he said. “That’s a deal.” He got up, and walked up to the prow and back a couple of times, agitatedly. “I think it’s a great idea, man. And I won’t tell Steve?”
“No,” I said. “Don’t tell him.”
“You don’t know what a help you are to me, man.”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “I’ll take good care of it.”
I had been wiping the machete’s grip with my shirt tail. I held it out to him, holding it by the scabbard. “It’ll be safe for you with me.” He took it by the grip. Gently I pulled it back. He let go.
“I’ll just put it where it’s safe,” I said, and got up and took it aft. I ran down the hatchway stairs and put it in the toilet cubicle, got the key from the inside and locked the door from the outside. I put the key in my pants pocket, and patted it. So I had it. And with it a perfect set of prints, if Pekouris wanted them. I came back up.
“How long to St. Friday’s?” I asked Sonny.
“About ten minutes.”
“Well, hurry it up. As much as you can.”
I went back forward. Behind me the motor went up in pitch several tones. Chuck was sitting with his arms spread along the rail-rope, happily smoking a cigarette and looking as if a great load was off his mind. I just hoped it would last. But I was afraid it wouldn’t.
St. Friday’s was just as pretty as they had said it was. The fine sand beach ran on back to become a sandy loam strewn with rocks, on which grew a grove of high old pines that soughed gently in the sea breeze. A carpet of brown needles covered the loamy ground. The chapel was a low one-story building of whitewashed stone with an ancient red tile roof and a Greek cross at one end tilted slightly askew. It gave the chapel a rakish look, as if it were winking at you. Somebody had tried to steal it apparently, but hadn’t been able to get it loose.
There wasn’t a living soul anywhere.
In all that tranquility I made the bow line fast at the concrete dock built against one rock wall of the little cove, and put over the bumpers while Sonny made fast the stern line.
Then I helped Chuck off with his pack. I brought him up a couple of extra bottles of wine from my store below. He took the bottles and set them on the dock by his pack and then turned back to me. I stepped off onto the dock.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said sullenly. “And I’ve decided I want my machete back.”