Odd Hours

got a plan.”
    “They who? What plan?”
    “I don’t know. Really. See? Even this much, it’s more than I should know—okay?—stuff I found out they don’t know I know. Okay? There’s no more. I swear to God. There’s no more.”
    I believed him, but even if I had not taken his protestations as the truth, I would have had no opportunity to question him further.
    The knife must have been up the right sleeve of his shirt, in a sheath on his arm. How he released it, I don’t know, but it came under his cuff and into his hand. The blade flicked from the handle.
    I saw the wink of light along the razor-sharp edge, but he thrust before I shot him in the throat.
    The crack of the gun was not loud in the small cabin. The tug’s engines, the boom and clatter from the work on the afterdeck, and the squeal of one boat’s bumpers rubbing those of the other would have masked it easily.
    Joey slid out of the chair and folded onto the floor, as if he had been a scarecrow with flesh of straw that couldn’t fully support the clothes that now draped baggily around him.
    The switchblade was so sharp that it had sliced open the thick fabric of my sweatshirt as though it had been silk.
    I reached through the tear to feel my right side where it stung, above the lowest rib. He had cut me.

 
    THIRTY-SEVEN
    I SAT ON THE RADIO OPERATOR’S DESK, WHERE no blood had showered.
    In an arc across a bulkhead, ending in spatters on the round of glass, was his blood from the lethal shot, as if it were the spoor of a fleeing soul that had used a porthole as a portal out of this world.
    My cut was shallow, the bleeding light, the pain less than that of loss but troubling. Left hand pressed over the wound, I closed my eyes and tried to dream into existence the blue lake of abiding hope.
    Stormy Llewellyn and I, at eighteen, had gone to the lake to bake on beach blankets and to swim.
    A sign warned that no lifeguard was on duty that day. Swimmers were advised to stay in the shallows close to shore.
    The hard desert sun sprinkled diamonds in the sand and displayed a vast wealth of jewelry across the water.
    The heat seemed to melt the mechanism of time, with the promise that she and I would never age or know a change of heart, or be apart from each other.
    We took a boat out on the lake. I rowed into the blue, sky above and sky spread across the water.
    I shipped the oars. On every side, the gently lapping blueness appeared to curve down and away, as though we had been given a small world of our own, where the horizon was nearer than on the former Earth.
    We slipped from the boat and floated on our backs in the buoyant salt lake, kept afloat by the lazy winglike motion of our arms. Eyes closed against the sun, we talked.
    All the talk was in essence about one thing. We were dreaming our future into existence.
    From time to time, we noticed that the rowboat had drifted from us. We swam nearer to it and floated once more, dreaming aloud as before.
    Later, as I rowed us back to the beach, she heard the cry and saw the drowning boy before I did.
    He had been nine or ten and, showing off, had swum too far. His arms went weak, his legs cramped, and suddenly he could not keep himself afloat even in the brine.
    Stormy went over the side, so lithe and swift, the arc of her stroke pulling the water away from her with determination.
    On the sand, the mother and a sister, neither swimmers, became aware of the crisis only as Stormy side-stroked to shore with the boy in tow.
    She swam faster than I could row. I beached the boat and ran to her, to assist, but resuscitation was not necessary. She had snared him before he had breathed the lake into his lungs.
    This is a moment that will remain forever fresh in my memory: the coughing boy, the crying mother, the frightened sister—and Stormy tending to them in the way that each required.
    She always was a savior of others. I know that she saved me.
    Although I had thought that I had beached the boat securely when I had been eager to get to Stormy’s side, I must have left it adrift, for when I looked, it bobbed beyond the shallows.
    The lake is big, and the dynamics of deep water apply. While it appears placid on the surface, currents are always working.
    I waded into the water and then swam, but at first the boat, in the influence of a current, moved farther away from me.
    Perhaps the irrational fear that gripped me was inspired by the near-drowning of the boy, the reminder of ever-present death, also by