Hale's Point (22 page)

She looked at him. “What would you do here? Something with
airplanes?”

He shook his head. “I’ve had my fill of airplanes for the
time being.”

“Then what, if not music? Drive a forklift? Patch roofs?”

He put the glass down and lay on his back with his arms
folded behind his head. The sky was an ever-deepening violet scattered with
winking pinpoints of light. “Maybe I’ll buy a sailboat and sail around the
world and think about it for a while.”

“
Mmm
.” From the corner of his eye
he saw her looking at him. “Nice work if you can get it.”

They drank their champagne in silence for a while. When their
glasses became empty, he refilled them. He tried to clear his mind of all
thoughts. He listened to the waves and the popping of the fire, breathed in the
salt air and the sharp
woodsmoke
. He ate a peach and
reveled in its sweet perfume. He watched Harley’s mouth—that amazing mouth—
close over a cherry and nibble it off the stem.

He drained his glass and poured half of the remaining
champagne into it, and the rest into Harley’s.

“This is probably not a good idea.” she said, between sips. “I
don’t hold my liquor very well. I’m likely to fall asleep on you.” She did
appear exceptionally relaxed.

“I’m not much of a drinker, either,” he admitted. “Drinking
and flying don’t mix any better than drinking and driving. If anything, worse.”

“You weren’t drinking when you had your… when you crashed
your airplane. Were you?”

“No way. I’ve never flown under the influence. That crash had
nothing to do with alcohol. Mainly it just had to do with bad luck.” She nodded
and deposited a cherry pit into her hand, then flung it into the woods. There
was an enormous boulder at the edge of the blanket, and he leaned back against
it and looked away from Harley and the fire, toward the black waves slapping
the shore. “Extreme bad luck.” He tossed back the last of his champagne and set
the glass aside.

She stared at him, her own empty glass on the blanket next to
her. When he looked at her, she looked away, rubbing her arms.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“A little.”

He reached for the second blanket and unfolded it. “Come
here. Sit next to me.” He draped the blanket over their shoulders and wrapped
his arms around her. She settled back against him, her head nestled against his
chest, her small body curled comfortably into his.

“Extreme bad luck,” she murmured, as if the words had an
interesting sound.

“Mainly extreme bad weather,” he said, and expelled a long,
heavy sigh. “But there were other problems. Instrument failure no one could
have anticipated, plus I was flying at night, which never helps.” Did she want
to hear this? As if in unspoken answer, she nodded, and he continued. “I was on
a routine cargo run between Anchorage and Fairbanks when it happened. You know
Mount McKinley?” She nodded again. “Just down the block from there. All of a
sudden this blizzard came out of nowhere. Totally unpredicted. Complete
whiteout, high winds, no visibility. Suddenly I was shearing the tops off
trees. I guess I hit the mountain at a pretty good angle—not dead-on, or I
wouldn’t be here to tell the tale. Kind of tumbled down, rolling over as I
went. The fuselage broke up, my cargo went all over the place. Finally came to
rest on a flat spot in the middle of all these fir trees.”

She twisted her head to look up at him. “Were you able to get
out, go for help?”

“Oh, no. Not a chance. The whole left side of the cockpit had
gotten smashed up, and the whole left side of me with it. There were pieces of
metal and glass sticking out of me.” He felt her shiver, and held her tighter. “I
was pinned in there like a butterfly in a box.”

“Could you reach the radio?”

“Yeah, but it was out of commission.”

“What did you do?”

“I watched it snow. I just stared out through the broken
windshield and watched it fall out of the night sky. It never stopped, just
kept coming, big flakes the size of my fist piling up outside. Piling up fast,
in this deadly silence. The plane was getting buried under it. I knew by
morning there’d be no trace of me. They’d never find me. I realized I was going
to die. I didn’t see how I could get to help, or how I could recover, if I did.
My left leg was destroyed. And I knew that just about every other bone on my
left side was broken. The bleeding wasn’t very bad, but the pain was. It was
overwhelming, but there was no way to make it go away, so I had to concentrate
on denying it. I tried to think about other things—anything except the pain and
the cold and the fact that I was going to die. Mainly I thought about my dad.”
He realized this was the first time in years that he had referred to his father
as anything other than
R.H.
“I kept wondering if he’d
ever find out I’d been killed. I don’t think dying bothered me as much as his
not knowing, which struck me as kind of strange, considering how long it had
been since I’d even seen him. I thought about him and about my mother.”

“Do you remember her very well?”

“Mainly bits and pieces. But I remember the Christmas before
she died. She wore a green silk dress and her hair was in a braid down her
back. I got my first guitar that year, a little one. I’m sure it was her idea.
For a while I couldn’t get that Christmas out of my mind. I think it was the
smell of all the broken fir trees around.”

“Were you awake the whole time?”

“No, eventually I lost consciousness, but apparently I was
awake until dawn. The snow completely covered the plane by then, but I remember
seeing the glow of sunlight through it, and I thought, this is the last
sunlight I’ll ever see. Now that there was some light, I could see my
cigarettes, just out of reach. Drove me crazy, not being able to get to them. I
thought, damn, I won’t even have to feel guilty about smoking, ‘cause I’m dying
anyway. Then I was out of it for a while, and I woke up to the sound of a
shovel scraping against the windshield. Then this face looked through the glass
and smiled at me, and I realized they’d found me, after all. I don’t remember,
but they said I asked for a cigarette before I passed out again. I came to in
the hospital a week later.”

“You were unconscious for a whole week?”

“More or less. They said I came out of it once in a while,
but I don’t remember. The first couple of days they thought I was going to die,
and they wanted to notify my next of kin. They asked my pilots and my friends,
but all they could say was they didn’t know. I had never gotten close enough to
any of them to tell them who my father was or where he lived. I pictured the
funeral, if it had come to that. Some small, generic ceremony at some funeral
home in Seward with about a dozen people, tops—my pilots and a few buddies,
guys I hung out with. They would have said, ‘Wasn’t Tucker Hale a swell guy and
aren’t we lucky it happened to him and not us?’ The only women there would have
been Molly Little and maybe a few of the girlfriends and wives. No other woman
knew me well enough to come. No one would have cried.”

Harley murmured something. It sounded like, “I’d have cried.”

Tucker was seized with desire for her, but it was more than
the simple physical desire he had felt a thousand times before. He wanted to
feel her beneath him and around him. He wanted to be a part of her, he wanted
to lose himself inside her. At that moment it took all of his self-control not
to lower her to the blanket and make love to her.

He took a deep, shaky breath. He had to wait. For one thing,
she had drunk half a bottle of champagne, for which she had little tolerance, and
he drew the line at taking advantage of an inebriated woman. For another, they
had a deal. In a day or two she would be his, on her own terms. She had to know
that, and it didn’t seem to bother her—in fact, he sensed that she looked
forward to it as much as he. He had often speculated on her motives for
initiating the deal in the first place. She had to know she might lose. She had
seen his trophies. Of course, she had wanted to rehabilitate him—and it had
worked—but he suspected she had another, perhaps subconscious, motive. It was
possible that she had simply wanted to enforce a waiting period before they
consummated their relationship. She knew that he had no interest in waiting; he
had made that clear from the beginning. But she did. Hence the deal. Hence six
weeks of being with her, taking his time with her, getting to know her. He felt
as if he knew her as well as he knew himself. She had changed him. She was a
part of him now. That felt both comforting and frightening.

He closed his eyes for a while and listened to the reassuring
rhythm of the waves. Quietly he said, “I did a lot of thinking in the hospital.
Nothing had really mattered to me for a long time. Then I cracked up the plane
and things started to matter. People…my father. I came back here because, no
matter what he did or didn’t do, he’s my father. He matters. And now… I don’t
know how this happened, but… you matter, too. You matter a lot. I think I’ve
fallen… I think I’m…”

He shook his head. “I’ve never said this to a woman before.
It’s hard. How do people do this? Help me out, Harley. Tell me you want me to
say it.” Her breathing was very regular and she felt warm and heavy against
him. “Harley?”

She was asleep. She had warned him that might happen. He
kissed the top of her head. Now what? Wake her up? He didn’t have the heart for
that. And he certainly couldn’t carry her back up to the house. Carefully he
laid her down on the blanket, curled on her side, then fit his big body to
hers, spoon-style, and covered them both with the second blanket. It wouldn’t
be the first time he had spent the night on this beach—in this very spot, in
fact. But it would be the first time he’d have someone to hold while he slept.

Chapter 11

Late the next morning,
Harley opened and closed drawers in
R.H’s
desk, idly searching for stamps, her mind preoccupied
by three conflicting forces: the warm afterglow of having awakened on the beach
in Tucker’s arms, the nausea and pain of her first hangover, and the knowledge
that the phone bill was due in two days.

She remembered
R.H.
taking a sheet
of stamps from one of the drawers and placing it on top of the desk, saying, “That
should be enough, but if you need more, get them from the drawer.” Well, now
she did need more, but she couldn’t remember which drawer he stored them in.
She began searching them one by one, finding them irritatingly neat and
organized, everything in tidy stacks at right angles. Or maybe she was just
irritated because of the hangover. Everything ached. Her
eyes
hurt. It hurt to
think
—just
to string one thought onto another.

She came to a drawer containing a monogrammed leather photo
album, which she lifted without opening. Beneath it lay a yellowed newspaper
folded to reveal a particular article. The article was illustrated by a
photograph of two policemen flanking a young man in handcuffs.

The young man was Tucker.

She blinked several times in an effort to clear her eyes and
mind. Tucker in handcuffs.

She took the newspaper from the drawer. It was an old copy of
the
Miami Herald,
and paper-clipped
to its edge was a business card engraved “Charles Madison, Jr., Attorney at Law,”
giving a Wall Street address. There was a message written in fountain pen,
beginning on the front of the card and continuing on the back: “
R.H.
— A friend in Fla. sent me this. Read it. It should
cure you of the notion that it’s my Chet who’s the bad influence. —
C.M.
”

Boldface words above the article read:
Feds Crack Down On Drug Smugglers.

Tucker Hale, twenty, was
arrested at 5:30 a.m. today, charged with transporting cocaine and marijuana—

Her stomach did a slow flip, and she suddenly felt starved
for air. Lurching to the window, she raised it and tried to breathe deeply, but
found herself gasping in time to her runaway heartbeat.

She looked at the photograph. It had been taken indoors and
lit with the glare of flashbulbs. Tucker, his hands cuffed in front, towered
over the two burly policemen. His uncombed hair brushed his shoulders, and he
wore jeans and a dark sweatshirt. He still had some adolescent lankiness, and
his face looked smooth, unscarred and very young. Despite the indignity of the
situation, he stood tall and looked straight ahead, his expression grim but
calm.

She skimmed the article, then reread it slowly. It described
how, shortly after midnight, federal drug-enforcement agents aboard a
surveillance vessel off the Florida coast had observed seven plastic-wrapped
bundles being dropped into the water from a Piper Comanche.

The agents intercepted the drugs as they were being loaded
into a powerboat by an as-yet-unidentified accomplice. The accomplice opened
fire and was killed in the ensuing exchange. The plane had been identified and
was located two hours later at the
Opa-Locka
Airport just
outside Miami. Tucker Hale was registered as the owner. The agents, accompanied
by Dade County Police, went to Mr. Hale’s home, and he and his house-mate,
Charles Madison III, were taken to the police station for questioning.
Following lengthy interrogations, Mr. Madison was released and Mr. Hale was
arrested and taken into custody.