Saturday afternoon
He drives them back to the beach where they walked earlier and pulls Pam’s spare binoculars from the glove compartment. They follow the trail over the dunes to the beach and head in the opposite direction than before, southward, past more fishermen. The air seems heavier now, more saturated with the primal odors of the sea. Booms of the surf echo against the violet undersides of thickening, gray clouds.
They leave the beach and turn back across the dunes and bending sea oats to a large wetland that runs from the dunes to a faraway line of woods. Onyx-colored water spreads among bright green skeins of duckweed and water lilies and disappears into drying stands of cattails around the edges. The scene looks bright and slightly luminescent under the gloomy sky. They use the binoculars to find egrets and herons and one roseate spoonbill and at the far end of the marsh, a great horned owl sitting on a snag, its neck and chest feathers rising and twitching in the wind.
“I didn’t know owls ate fish,” she says.
“They don’t,” he says. “It’s picked an odd spot to hunt. Marsh rats maybe, young nutria.”
He lowers the binoculars. “Let’s sit.”
They find a sandy spot near the top of a dune and sit quietly for a few moments to observe the marsh.
“I don’t believe in God,” he says, “but when I’m in places like this, I feel something that seems eternal.”
“Hmmm,” she says. “You mean in nature.”
“Special places in nature, like this. The sensation comes on slowly and grows until it becomes very strong. It’s like a sense of God.”
“Do you feel it a lot?”
“No, and I’m not sure why I feel it sometimes and not others, except that something catches my eye that seems like a signal, a tap on the shoulder or a bell tolling. Like, for example, that owl.”
He hands her the binoculars.
“See where the wind catches that little tuft of feathers and lifts it up from that otherwise perfect, speckled breast, not more than three or four feathers, and they hang there and twitch. Not another thing on that owl is moving, not even its head, and yet that bird is keenly aware of everything in this marsh. It’s as if, even if I’d never heard of owls, that image has been in my consciousness forever waiting for the right moment to show itself—a perfect embodiment of, of what I don’t know, but perfect.”
“And you see that owl, with its tuft of feathers lifted by the wind, as a glimpse of God?”
“I feel that owl and its tuft of feathers as a suggestion of God, not quite a belief, more a confirmation of yearning.” He pauses. “Sort of like your Zulu dance.”
She takes another look through the binoculars and lowers them to her lap.
They sit for a moment in silence. The owl shifts slightly on the branch.
“After I leave the place,” he says, “I feel this deep sense of gratitude. And I ask myself: gratitude to whom, to what?”
She says in a half-whisper: “Who was it said that if God did not exist, we’d have to invent Him?”
“Voltaire.”
“Wow! Impressive,” she says.
“I’m not sure where I dug that up.”
“So, is that what we are doing—making up our own version of God?”
“I have no idea.”
They sit for a while in silence until he scoops up sand in his fist and releases it slowly over her foot and watches it run between her toes.
“Nice,” she says. “What brought that on?”
“I don’t know. A token, I guess. Maybe a baptism.”
A pair of blackbirds has arrived at the far end of the marsh to harass the owl. Ace pushes himself to his feet and nods toward the circling, diving blackbirds. “They’ll stay after him until he leaves,” he says. “Apparently, they have a different view of him than I do.”
He extends his hand to help her up.
As they walk back to the car, the wind whistles in their ears and skitters stinging pellets of sand against their ankles. Waves rush in to slosh about their feet. Some of the fishermen have given up fighting the surf and left the beach. A man and woman, in an SUV with six surf rod holders attached to its roof bars, drive past them, eyes focused straight ahead. The SUV’s fat tires make a scrunching sound on the sand.
At the parking area, Ace’s car, a Subaru old enough to have a straight drive transmission, is the only car left. They keep their silence, as if the serenity of the marsh has followed them down the beach.
The road home runs along the narrow isthmus between the sound on one side and soaring dunes on the other. The car floats along as if carrying the day and the things they have done, and Ace floats along with them. His mind runs back to that night in high school, when they were in his car driving away from the two cops, and she was across the seat from him before she moved close, and he just sat there behind the wheel and everything he did not know in the whole wide world sat on the seat between them.
• • •
Back at the house, J’nelle excuses herself for a nap. Ace finds an old Peter Matthiessen novel, Far Tortuga, and climbs to the roof deck. Beyond the dunes, white-capped, gray-green waves surge toward the beach, throwing off strings of soapy spray that blow ahead of them in the wind. Regardless of Faye-Marie’s Uncle Ike’s prediction, this storm is not going to veer north. He’s almost sure of it.
A pessimist, Pam called him. There’s a proper time for pessimism; it can save your ass.
After a few minutes of trying to control his book’s flapping pages, he gives up. He goes out to his tool shed, finds his hedge-trimmer, and goes to work on the beach hollies that have overgrown the back steps. Clip, snip, snip—tough bushes. His mind soon wanders to the woman napping in his guest bedroom, who sat across the table from him at lunch with her swinging wine glass, the light through the window lighting her features, and the meaning in what she said weaving in and out of her words, staying just beyond his reach. She’s an ace at complicating things; she always was.
And that story about them making out in the graveyard: he’s not sure it happened exactly the way she told it, but like the sight of the red-winged blackbirds rising in his dream, it stirred an excitement in him that bled into an infinite tenderness. And the other sensations, the cold earth and night air, the movement of her body under him, all seemed so strong when she told the story. Was she naked under her dress? He would have remembered that, wouldn’t he? But she was sure of it, and she looked him straight in the eye when she told him, and her lips were not tense or pressed but relaxed like they used to be when he bent to kiss her.
He pauses his clipping. For the first time since he can remember, an erection pushes at the front of his pants.
Sweet Jesus. That cannot be what this is about.
An old feeling returns, a sense of suddenly being alone in the midst of things going on around him. It used to happen when he was a lawyer trying a case, right in the middle of the courtroom when he was cross examining a witness or making an objection or arguing to the jury. He stepped out of himself and became a silent spirit, watching what he was doing.
Those were times when he often made mistakes—asked a witness one too many questions on cross examination, brought a witness to tears, objected to a piece of favorable evidence he should have let in. Lost a case he might have won.
Maybe he’s screwing up now. Maybe he screwed up when he asked her down here. The graveyard story unsettled him. It brought back that old feeling of being behind and out-of-step, of her pulling him along, taking them both into something he did not understand, or for that matter, even see. It happened a lot back then—maybe because she was older, smarter, quicker, who knows? And there is some of that feeling now, isn’t there, of scrambling, trying to catch up?
He resumes his clipping, that absent part of himself still watching from above.
The case he regrets most from his days as a lawyer still gives him that watched-from-above feeling. But it is not one in which he made mistakes. In fact, he was brilliant; he won a case no other lawyer wanted to touch, a nasty spouse-abuse case, handled the witness for the prosecution just right—like a magician, one observer said, like an ace—trapped her in her own lie. Even as he and his client walked out of the courtroom, he did not feel good about it—not only the result, but what he had done to achieve it. And he did not feel good about what happened next either, between his client and the prosecution witness. It still haunts him, as if his conscience wakes up and begins to pound the walls of his skull with a hammer.
Pam tried to help: “You did nothing wrong, Ace. In fact, you did everything right; you are a very good lawyer, and you did what good lawyers are supposed to do—defend their clients.”
He had already told himself that; he’s told himself at least a thousand times since, and it’s got nothing to do with anything, especially what happened in that case.
And the woman asleep right now in his guest bedroom, who watched her husband disintegrate before her eyes, who ruined her own chance to have kids, who lost not only her husband but her adopted daughter, just watched them slip slowly away—might she understand how he feels about that case?
And if she did, what difference would it make to him? What difference, when he gets right down to it, does she herself make—conjurer of graveyard memories, or are they graveyard tales?