Thornton Wilder said, “There is a land of the living
and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival,
the only meaning.” But what if that bridge be rotted out?
FRIEND FOR LIFE
It had been sixteen years, and here Jimmy was dead. Holter Lauren sat with the body in his arms in the bare living room of the small, two-room house of the Daclan sea-farm. Outside, the cold waves of the globewide Daclan ocean beat like heavy, gray ghosts on the rocky slopes below the house. Jimmy’s fishing boat, laden with its nets, rocked at the dock’s end.
Jimmy would be over thirty now, Holter thought. But under the stubble of blond beard, the dead face was still youthful . . . relaxed and innocent, gentle. Jimmy had not bled much—where the slim curve of the net-hook entered his body below the left shoulder blade, the heavy coat of coarse sisal fiber was marked by only a small stain of red.
It had happened with such impossible swiftness.
Jimmy, Holter had been going to say, remember when they shipped us back from the Belt stars? Remember when we were orphans together, after an epidemic that killed off the grown people on Belt Four? How’s it been with you since, Jimmy? What friends and neighbors you got, Jimmy boy? How’s Dacla as a place to call home? But he never had a chance to say any of it. Holter was rich now, a ship-hopper, a perambulating tourist who wandered where his whims took him. They had brought him to Dacla now, after sixteen years—hours too late.
He had come directly here from the ship. He had waited in this cold little room until Jimmy’s fishing boat came into the dock. He’d heard Jimmy’s uncertain footsteps up the rocky walk to the house, and seen the front door open.
“Hi, Jimmy,” Holter had said. “Long time no see, kid.”
And Jimmy had looked at him and coughed a little blood. Then he fell forward into Holter’s arms and died, with nine centimeters of steel and the plastic handle of a net-hook sticking out of his back.
Holter Lauren had never known anything could touch a man like this. Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief, Holter had been all of those. But always on the bright, slick surface of life. Now he crouched like a dog above another, dead dog, with a dog’s dumb, savage misery in his heart. Sixteen years he had followed the dark angel of his own dark spirit until it no longer had anything more to give him. So he had come back to what might have been his bright angel, one day too late.
There was a small sound beyond the front door. Sudden new purpose flamed up in Holter. He reached to the net-hook in Jimmy’s back and with easy strength drew it gently out. Dark and slim and hard, he moved noiselessly to the wall alongside the door and flattened himself out. The stained net-hook twitched in his hand.
There was a shuffle on the doorstep, a hesitant sound. Then, slowly, the door began to open. There was a movement—
Holter leaped. A flurry of action, and he slammed a slight form against the inside wall and held it there, the needle point of the net-hook centimeters from a throat. A rabbit face with thin strands of black straggling beard gabbled in terror at him.
“Who’re you?” whispered Holter.
“Dummy . . . don’t hurt Dummy . . . no, no, please don’t hurt Dummy . . .”
Slowly, but keeping the net-hook close, Holter released his grip. The obvious half-wit sagged against the wall. His eyes went to the body of Jimmy, and he began to cry.
“Oh no . . . oh no . . . oh no . . . oh—”
Holter dropped the hook to lift both hands and fit them around the narrow neck. The idiot reiteration died and for a minute something like intelligence gleamed in the black, vacant eyes.
“Don’t know you—” whispered Dummy through the strangling hands.
Holter forced himself to let go and step back.
“I’m Jimmy’s friend,” he said. “Do you know what happened? Tell me!”
“No. Dummy don’t know. Jimmy say stay home. Dummy couldn’t go today in boat. Jimmy come home with hook in back. Oh no . . . oh no—”
“Shut up!” said Holter. The singsong voice cut off as if a switch had been snapped. Holter lifted the body of Jimmy with smooth strength.
“Where you take my Jimmy?” whimpered the half-wit, scrambling after him.
“To the police,” said Holter.
The Daclan police lieutenant, an older man who wore his sisal-cloth uniform carelessly, but neatly, sat on the corner of his desk.
“What are you going to do first?” asked Holter.
“Don’t worry,” said the lieutenant. His gray eyes under faded brows considered Holter. “We’ll check into it.”
“Check into it?” Behind Holter, standing half-crouched in a corner, the half-wit, Dummy, stirred. “Damn it!” burst out Holter. “This is murder!”
The lieutenant drew a long breath.
“Look, Mr. Lauren,” he said. “You’re a tourist. No offense—but you don’t know Daclan. We’re a young world, geologically as well as colonially. Our land is rock and we make our living from the sea. We’re over-worked and under-populated.” He stood up from the desk. “I’ll do what I can.”
Holter stood up also. With the fury in him, he felt taller even than he was.
“What did you have against Jimmy?” he asked softly.
“Have against him?” echoed the inspector. “There wasn’t anyone I liked better than Jimmy. Everybody liked him—loved him. You come here after all this time and ask me what I had against him. How good a friend were you, these last sixteen years?”
Holler turned on his heel and walked out, down concrete corridors and into the cloud-broken sunlight of the street. He stopped, undecided; and in that moment he heard the hesitant scurry of feet behind him. He turned and saw the half-wit.
“Come here,” Holter said.
The little man sidled closer.
“All right,” said Holter, impatiently, “I won’t hurt you. Now listen. Who was Jimmy’s closest friend?”
Dummy didn’t understand, put his thumb in his mouth to bite it.
“How about girl friends? A girl—did Jimmy have a girl?”
Dummy’s thin face lit up. “Mincy!” he cried; and clapped his hands. “Mincy!”
Dummy led him by narrow, pedestrian streets between the blocky concrete buildings of the business section down to the harbor, past countless wharves and many ships until they came at last to a cordage warehouse. In the interior, the dim outlines of men at work moved to and fro; on the dock itself, a young girl in rough work pants and shirt sat on a coil of rope cable, gazing toward the sea. As soon as he caught sight of her, Dummy gave a little whimper, ran ahead and knelt down beside her. He hid his face in her lap and she put one hand on his head and stroked it absently. She did not look away from the sea.
Holter hesitated, then approached slowly. The hand which stroked Dummy’s tangled black hair was brown and hard, with short, blunted nails; her hair was yellow and alive and her face beautiful with fine, strong bones. She had not been crying but her face was stony.
“I see you’ve heard . . .” said Holter. “I’m an old friend of his.”
“They were all his friends,” she said. After a moment she added, “Would you leave me alone, please. I’d like to be alone.”
“I want to do something about it!” Holter broke out, angrily. “That lieutenant I talked to—he’s worse than nothing. I want to find the man who did it.”
“You can’t do anything,” she said, expressionlessly. “You’re a tourist.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” he demanded. “He was the only—the best friend I ever had. I’m going to get the man that did it. You can give me a lead.”
“Please,” she said. “Go away.”
“What’s wrong with you?” he shouted at her. “You’re as bad as the lieutenant. Weren’t you his girl?”
“His girl?” she said. “I was his wife.”
“His wife—” Holter stared at her and the mounds of sisal-cable on the dock. “What are you doing here? The sea-farm—”
* * *
END OF SAMPLE
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