Bernie Zegma could hardly complain about business. His Mohawk gas station on the northeast corner of Ojibway and Thebes on the northwest side of Chicago had kept up a steady trade ever since he’d purchased it seventeen years before with his wife Helen’s money. Their marriage of twenty-one years was uneventful, a generally calm alliance based not on passion but respectful understanding. Having married relatively late in their lives—Bernie’s age kept him out of the war—by mutual agreement they had no children. Now in their fifties, Bernie and Helen enjoyed their individual privacy, he with his reading and she with her music. Bernie harbored a desire to someday write a novel, and Helen was a competent, devoted classical pianist.
Bernie retained only two employees at the station, high school kids named Roy and Ralph, who came to work after school to pump gas and change tires. Bernie took care of the gasoline trade in the morning hours and read books in his office in the afternoons. He no longer provided mechanical services as he had during the first fifteen years, doing only oil changes, replacing windshield wipers, headlamp and taillight bulbs.
One afternoon Bernie read about a remote part of French Polynesia called The Islands of Disappointment. Comprised of two small islands with a combined population of approximately three hundred, they had been named in 1752 by the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron, also named Byron, captain of an English trading ship that had been refused landing by the islanders. Byron applied the word “disappointment” to these bodies of land because of his displeasure at having been unable to explore the possibility of farming coconuts for the copra trade, coconut oil being a valuable commodity in Europe. Drawings of the islands made them seem a veritable paradise, unbothered by strife in the greater world, protected by their isolation. Bernie decided to go there.
That he murdered his wife could not be positively determined. The official reason given for Helen’s death was a heart attack, but Ralph told Roy that his parents suspected Bernie had done away with her in order to inherit her family money.
“She was lying on the kitchen floor,” Bernie told investigators. “I thought she was sleeping so I went out to buy cigarettes. When I came back she was still lying there. That’s when I called the police.”
“Did your wife often fall asleep on the kitchen floor?” an investigator asked.
“I don’t know,” Bernie answered. “I’m at work every day from five o’clock in the morning until eight p.m., when I close up the station. During the winter our kitchen is the warmest room in the house.”
Once Helen’s estate was settled, Bernie sold both their house and the Mohawk station. He gave each of the boys a twenty dollar bill and disappeared from the neighborhood.
“Remember when Bernie told us about those disappearing islands in the South Pacific?” Ralph asked Roy.
“Islands of Disappointment,” said Roy. “Yeah, why?”
“Maybe that’s where he went, to get away from the lousy Chicago weather. It don’t snow out there. I seen what they look like in that dumb movie South Pacific my mother made me go with her to see.”
“Hurricanes,” Roy said. “There’s floods and winds hundreds of miles an hour. Even worse than Chicago.”
“Probably that’s when the natives harvest the coconuts. They wait until the big winds blow ’em off the trees, then they pick ’em off the ground. Easier than climbin’ up to get ’em.
“Could be. Do you think your parents are right, that Bernie killed his wife?”
“Who knows? I never heard him say nothin’ about her. He was always the same, with that Gloomy Gus expression on his face. You know. I bet nobody around here ever hears from him again.”
“He was a good enough guy to us,” said Roy.
“I think he should have given us more than a double sawbuck,” Ralph said. “He must have got plenty for sellin’ the gas station.”
A little more than a year after Bernie Zegma left Chicago, Roy got on a bus at the corner of Minnetonka and Western and saw him sitting in the last row. Roy walked back and sat down next to him.
“Hi, Bernie. I thought you were camped out with a bunch of beautiful brown island girls like in those paintings in the Art Institute.”
“Hello, Roy. I was, but then I got sick, very sick, so I came back. I just got out of the hospital. I’m still not completely well.”
“Are you going to buy another gas station?”
“No, I’m not going to stay in Chicago.”
“Where are you going to?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
Roy looked closely at Bernie’s face. He wore the same gloomy expression as always but his face was pale, not bronzed by the Polynesian sun.
“I guess it’s not paradise out there,” Roy said.
“I’m getting off here. It’s nice to see you. Say hello to Ralph.”
Before the bus stopped, Bernie stood by the rear door. He looked back at Roy and said, barely loud enough for Roy to hear him, “Paradise is a dark forest.”
Then he got off.