Harlan's Race

back—to that curve of shore where the dark Front Runner still waited to challenge my kick.
    SEVENTEEN
    Summer of 1980
    In the South Shore boatyard, I got the clam-boat out of dry dock, and checked her for security. After a trip to the supermarket, not forgetting coffee beans for the cops, I loaded the boat.
    By late afternoon my boat was thrumming slowly, cautiously into the Hotel Brown cove.
    When I tied up, a silence closed around me. The area was alive with birds feeding. I walked around on the dunes. In the warm level rays, the cherry brush was filled with gentle flitterings of tiny finches. A male warbler sat on some bayberry, and poured his song everywhere. The contrast between all that vibrant life and my own battered spirit was so stark that I just stood there, stunned. The song pierced my heart, and I knew that I’d come to the Beach to have something unexpected and unutterable happen to me.
    Something winked at my feet. A bit of sea-smoothed glass.
    Feeling a twinge about Steve, I dropped it in the jar.
    The house stood dark and silent as a tomb, closed up since last autumn. But I felt positive that someone had been inside. Why? To place a bug? While Striper stalked her first mice, I went nuts with the bug detector, checking everywhere. Someone had definitely been there — things were knocked over, drawers open. Had LEV. done this just to give me jitters? Or was a little surveillance transmitter going to appear — nestled behind a beam or inside my desk, where it could tap its tiny wire into the phone line for power? I didn’t find a thing. But my nerves were screaming as I unloaded the boat, and furiously planned how to re-do all the old booby traps.
    When night came, lights in other beach houses felt as far away as stars in deep space.
    At 9 p.m., I was startled by the boardwalk squeak. It was the two cops. Their Jeep was parked on the beach.
    “We saw your light,” they said. “Wanted to make sure it was you.”
    Glad to see them, for some reason, I put coffee on. They weren’t such bad guys after all — crass, but good-hearted. They seemed glad to see me too. When they found out somebody had broken in, they got somber. They’d kept an eye on the place, they said, but hadn’t seen anything suspicious. So I broke down and told them the bare minimum about my problem with harassment. They didn’t ask naive questions about why the FBI and other authorities weren’t concerned. For the first time, I had the full attention of the FIPD.
    “A weirdo coming on our Beach,” Bob said, “it’s some bad.”
    “No one needs to know but the three of us, right?” Lance added.
    After they left, I spent a nervous night, jumping at every sound.
    Around 3 a.m., I finally slept, and had another of those recurring dreams.
    This time, the dead man and I were running through the night, along starlit dunes, with slow-motion strides. I threw a tremendous kick, and drew even with him. He surged, to get ahead of me again. So I did something I’d never done before: grabbed him by the arm, tried to spike his ankle with my track shoe — any dirty trick to take command. He spun on his heel, and seized me in his arms. His mouth took mine in a long terrible tongue-twining kiss. He was streaming with blood, bathing me in that hot smell that I remembered from Montreal. I was berserk, wanting to get him off me. We went down, rolling over and over in splashes of sand. I had my stick, and pounded him with it. He screamed with pain. I was about to crush his head with an awful blow, and stopped myself just in time. Under the stick, there was now a strange handsome boy, maybe 13, with dark hair. Calmly, he stared up at me.
    “Don’t hurt me,” he said. “I’m your pacing partner.”
    I awoke with a gasp, trembling and sweating.
    As soon as it was light, my clam-boat was putt-putting across the bay to work.
    It was a magnificent morning—the water glassy calm, the island laying under an opal mist. But that dream haunted me. My nerves were screwed as tight as a miler’s spike. Driving here and there aimlessly, I couldn’t decide where to dig. Rage drove me, at this stupid, deadly, soap-opera thriller scenario where I was trapped — driven crazy by the thought of a voice-activated bug in my house, transmitting every confidential word, every breath of love-making, to a receiver hidden somewhere outside, maybe in a neighboring house or a boat, with long-play tape reels that turned and turned, capturing my life. NICE TO