The Scarred Man Read online

  Basil Heatter

  The Scarred Man

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  A novel of vengeance and strange terror.

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  Scanning by unknown hero.

  OCR, formatting & proofing by P.

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  THE FIRST MAN

  ONE

  The little Honda was sick. It spat, gurgled, and coughed. Stacey tightened her grip around my waist and leaned forward to shout, "Your mule is dying."

  I had come to that conclusion myself some ten miles back. Gunked carb or bad plug. With luck we might just make it back to the main road.

  We had not seen a car for more than an hour, and there was not much daylight left. So far as I could judge we were about forty miles from Miami. Once we reached the Tamiami Trail we could probably flag a ride to Miami, but if the Honda quit now we would have a long hike ahead of us in the dark.

  The situation reminded me of a night two years before when we had been coming down over the Pyrenees on our way to Spain. By dint of hard-peddling on the upgrades, we had managed to push the little Peugeot motorbikes over the mountains, but what we hadn't reckoned on was getting a flat at night in heavy rain turning to snow. Before a large admiring audience of scruffy-looking French sheep we considered the possibilities and finally crawled into an abandoned stone hut. The sheep tried to follow us, but after one whiff we kicked them out again. Fortunately we still had a couple of liters of strong red wine and my rain jacket for warmth, and we had made love on the stone floor and then caught a little sleep while the sheep regarded us through the window.

  It had been a night to remember. Very likely we were now in for another.

  What kind of idiot would go off on a rented bike into the boondocks without so much as checking to see if there was a spare spark plug on board? Well, this particular idiot was William Shaw, brilliant young corporation lawyer from New York, now soaking up the Florida sunshine while preparing to sail his 45-foot ketch south through the Bahamas.

  The jaunt out into the Everglades had been Stacey's idea. The more daring ideas usually were. She had turned over in her bunk that morning and stared up at the overhead-the splinters of sunlight coming off the Miami River were like diamond chips against the new paint-and said, "I love you truly, Mr. Shaw, but if I have to look at another bloody can of varnish this morning I will empty it over your little pointed head."

  "What seems to be your problem, Mrs. Shaw?"

  "My problem is I have been painting, sanding, and varnishing for twenty-one days without a stop. Now I have had it up to here. What do you say we play hooky for a day?"

  I wasn't really keen on it. I had set myself on completing the splices for the stainless steel mizzen shrouds. Still, she had a point. We had been driving ourselves too hard in trying to get everything finished by the first of January. For some reason New Year's Day on the high seas had seemed important. But I had owned enough boats in my time to know it was the wrong way to go about it. We were trying to do it all at once and when you begin an affair with a boat there is no sense rushing it. A boat is a loving thing, it takes time and attention. An old boat that has passed through a lot of different hands and felt the great seas under her keel, and perhaps an occasional rock too, has to be brought back slowly and carefully. Yet old as she was Corazon was still beautiful, a long, lean, 45-foot John Alden ketch, with the breathtaking sheer and towering mainmast that were so characteristic of the old gentleman's best designs.

  We had not really set out to buy a boat, just as one doesn't really set out to fall in love. It happened. One look across a crowded marina and we'd had it. The yacht broker-a smooth young man in a blue blazer with some damned emblem on the breast-was making the mistake of trying to sell a boat the way you might sell a used car, and he was losing us fast. He was giving us the hard sell on a slab-sided, 38-foot fiberglass job. I knew the type. With her fin keel and spade rudder she would do all right around the buoys, but it would take three men and a boy to hold her downwind in a seaway.

  He was in the middle of a sentence when I told him we were not interested in Clorox bottles at any price and what about the old Alden over there. He allowed as how she was up for sale all right, but who would want her-she was made of wood. I pointed out that wooden boats had been going around the waters of the world for three or four thousand years, and I, for one, still loved them, and how soon could she be hauled for survey.

  The surveyor turned out to be redheaded and honest. He did not go around with an icepick making holes where there should be none. Instead, he tapped with his little hammer and found some minimal rot and a few busted frames around the turn of the bilge. I told him I could put in the sister frames myself by laminating strips of ash with epoxy, and that so far as the standing rigging went I could still tuck in a wire splice or two if he knew where I could buy a fid. Whereupon he began to warm to the subject and allowed as how she was a real beauty and would undoubtedly sail like a witch. True, she drew six feet of water, which was a bit long-legged for the Bahamas, but if a man took reasonable care and watched the tides, there was no reason why he should have any particular trouble.

  So that was it. Stacey looked at me with that gleam in her eye which meant "Go, baby, go." We went. The Westerbeke 407 diesel showed evidence of an oil leak, and her Ratsey dacrons were a bit thready, but those were minor ills. Three days later she was ours and we moved on board.

  After that of course our troubles began. Replacing that bum seal in the diesel was not as simple as it had sounded. Most of the time I was head down in the bilge and up to my shoulders in grease and sweat. My temper showed and Stacey kept her distance, working patiently by the hour with sandpaper and varnish. She had lost her New York pallor and turned honey-colored in the Florida sun. She wore paint-stained denims torn off at the knees and an orange-colored halter that barely covered her lovely breasts. She soaked up the sun like a cat and stretched and yawned and purred. I had never loved her more. When I left the bloody diesel and put an arm around her to demonstrate my affection, she said, "You smell like a buffalo."

  "Sorry."

  "Don't be. I happen to dig buffaloes."

  "Kinky."

  "Well, you know how it is, to each her own."

  "Mmm."

  "Why, Mr. Shaw, what do you think you're up to?"

  "Let's go below and find out."

  "But, Captain, the work."

  "To hell with the work."

  Funny how we never got tired of each other. I know that after X number of years of marriage it's supposed to happen. Practically guaranteed to happen. A little boredom, a little staleness. Then the roving eye and the traveling hand or knee under the table. The assignation with the secretary or the best friend's wife. The motel with the sign reading HAVE YOUR NEXT AFFAIR WITH US. All very much taken for granted in these days of out-of-town conventions and office parties. Good for the soul, they said, and the libido, and perhaps ultimately even the marriage.

  It hadn't worked that way with me. I had wanted Stacey badly from the first moment I ever saw her. I still wanted her. I hadn't wanted anyone else. Nor expected to. I felt myself to be an extraordinarily lucky man in that department.

  Perhaps one of the things that kept it going was her volatile nature. She was ten women in one, and I never knew which one to expect. She had a way of keeping me off balance. Sometimes she would wander around in the night, up into the forward cabin for instance, and bed down there in solitary with the door barred against me. That had happened last night and I knew what it meant; the daily routine of work and the confinement of the boat were getting her down. If I didn't want her going into one of her bouts of melancholia, I had better do something about it. Fortunately she had made the suggestion about playing hooky for the day. Renting the Honda had been her
idea too. Turning off the main road out into the Glades had been mine, and I was stuck with it.

  We had started off merrily enough, raiding the ship's stores for the bag of oranges and the chunk of Greek feta cheese and the bottle of Spanish red. We buzzed along past the cane pole fishermen and the Seminole villages and air boats and swamp buggies and shell emporiums. Much of it was a front for the tourist buck, but a lot more was genuine-the great sea of grass rippling in the wind, the buzzards circling the blue, a fly fisherman fast to a leaping snook, the whiskers of Spanish moss growing down to the black waters of the canals.

  Stacey's melancholia vanished with the wind that whipped our faces. It was good to see her with so much Corazon again. Back in the Pyrenees a kid had come up to us after our night with the sheep and said, "It is good to see people of such an advanced age with so much heart." And that's how the Corazon got its name.

  Advanced age my bloody foot! But in the era of the youth cult I suppose we were getting along at that-Stacey just thirty and myself pushing forty. All the same we were not quite ready to turn in our uniforms and head for the showers.

  But for a while, after we had come back from Spain, the fun had gone out of it; melted away on the gritty streets of New York, dissolved in the two-martini luncheons and the heavy propriety of Bannister, Wexley, Hartford and Shaw-bastion of corporate law. Working too hard and leaving her alone too much and coming home too late to find that she had already gone to bed in the spare room.

  I suppose if there had been kids, it would have been different, but there were none. And I was up to my neck in work. On how many Sundays had Stacey struggled through the ponderous turgidity of the Sunday Times while I plowed ahead on antitrust suits and a $40,000,000 tax rebate for Stavros Shipping? It was my own conviction that old man Stavros was a crook from way back, but even though we were a highly ethical firm, we had been hired to act as lawyers, not judges. If it were required of lawyers that they always believe in the innocence of their clients, the practice of law would be immediately cut by eighty percent. Which might not be a bad thing either. Anyway, I had just about locked up the Stavros brief (after thirty-two hours without sleep and five packs of Winstons-they no longer tasted good like anything should-frankly they tasted awful) when Sy Bannister, our senior partner, closed my door behind him and said, "William, I think you ought to consider a little vacation."

  I regarded him through a smoky haze. Proper Bostonian, throwback to H. M. Pulham, Esq., the kind of man who always wore vests long before they came back into fashion. I was very fond of him really and beginning (after five years of close association) to understand him. Perhaps in twenty years' time I would have replaced him and been having the same sort of conversation with another junior partner on the way up. He was concerned about me, true, but what was really on his mind was that he was just a little embarrassed by Stavros. We had won the case and could attach a walloping fee to that $40,000,000, but all the same, shifty Greeks were hardly our line. Not quite on a level with Hollywood producers but still…

  "You're right," I said. "A vacation might not be a bad idea at that. And it would do Stacey some good too to get away into the sun." The last time I had been in the sun myself was in Florida several years ago. I had gone down to take the bar exam in connection with one of our cases.

  "I'm very glad that you agree, William. I'm sure any final details on Stavros can be handled here in the office. And by the way, William, there will of course be a substantial bonus for you as a result of the termination of the government's action." That was the way he talked. You couldn't help loving the old geezer.

  Once the seed had been planted, I could hardly wait for it to flower. I dictated half a dozen notes and letters at top speed and dashed off home to break the good news. She was out, and I felt a little disappointment as always. Then I did something I hadn't done in a long time. I checked her closet to see if her clothes were still there. Neurotic? Probably. Any reasonably good psychiatrist can explain that love, and the dependency and possessiveness that go with it, are forms of anxiety. Be that as it may, Stacey was quixotic and mercurial enough so that on occasion I felt it necessary to check her closet just to see that her things were still there.

  I spent a restless hour pacing, and by the time she came in I had it all planned. For years now we had been talking about a cruise through the Bahamas. Not one of those crash jobs in a rented boat but a really long, leisurely cruise in a boat of our own. Maybe, if the conditions were right and the wind held fair, all the way down through the Windward Passage and on to Jamaica.

  There had always been two problems that stood in the way-time and money. Now we had both. It remained to be seen if we still had the heart. From the way her eyes lit up when I made the proposal I knew we had.

  TWO

  The Honda had breathed its last. It wheezed to a stop and quit.

  "She may just be clogged." I said without much conviction. "I'll check the gas line."

  "Do that, love." She had taken off her helmet and was shaking out her dark glossy hair. She walked over to the side of the road and lay down in the coarse saw grass.

  "Look out for snakes," I said. "They're supposed to be thick in this kind of country."

  She laughed and shook her head.

  Along with everything else I did not much like the look of the sky. Greasy-looking sausages of black were building up to the westward. The breeze had died, and it was too hot and still. With all of that, I could not quite account for my feeling of depression and anxiety. So we would leave the damned bike. We would walk. It would rain and we would get wet. We would dry out again. At least it would be warm.

  Or would it?

  Conceivably that black stuff to the northwest was the advance guard of a cold front. In these interior sections of low ground, it could get down to the thirties on a snappy night. All we had were our light cotton jackets.

  Stacey was watching me. "What are you worried about?" she asked.

  "Nothing," I lied.

  "Something always happens, you know that."

  "Sure."

  "Oh, I don't know what's the matter with you," she said. "What are you so glum about? Now get on with it and fix that fool machine."

  So I did. At the expense of a little skin I managed to work the plastic gas line loose. Plenty of gas at both ends. Too simple of course. Probably the plug. It is almost always something electrical with these little beasts. Feed them plenty of clean plugs and they will run forever. And if you don't have a fresh one, clean the old. But how do you get the damn thing loose without tools?

  Stacey was asleep with her head on her arm. I strolled over to the canal in search of inspiration. Something big and dark switched its tail at me and ruffled the black water. The thought of snakes had given me an idea. If I could get something thick and ropey such as a heavy vine around the head of the plug, I might be able to get a grip on it. Since the plug was slightly recessed it would not be easy, but it would be worth a try. When the metal cooled it would shrink, and if I could just find something to start it with, I might be able to work it loose. It is man's ability to improvise that distinguishes him from the apes. That and his sense of humor, or so they say. The apes have yet to be heard from.

  There was a heavy parasitic vine of some kind trailing from the oaks among the Spanish moss. By teetering nervously out over the water, I managed to get a grip on it and slash off a foot or so with my little pocket knife. Whenyl got back to the road, Stacey still slept. She had confidence in her stalwart captain. And why not? Aren't all Americans born mechanics? Can't they fix anything? Like that time with the First Marine Division. It was twenty below zero in Korea that winter, and Captain William Shaw, USMCR, along with a hundred thousand other bewildered young Americans, was out for a stroll in the brisk weather. He had found the busted jeep by the side of the road and had told himself: It's perfectly okay, Americans can fix anything; any fool knows that. So he had stared down into the machine's frozen guts for a while, and tinkered with this and that, and c
ranked his arm half off, and had finally given it up and started walking 250 miles through the snow and the Chinese army. Since that time he had been highly suspicious of his ability to fix anything.

  I shrugged off the memory of that distant war and concentrated on the vine. About a quarter of an inch of octagonal metal at the base of the plug rose above the recess. I wrapped a few inches of the vine around it and tugged. It slipped off of course and did the same thing the next ten times. By the eleventh time the vine was pretty well shredded, but that very fact seemed to assist in gaining a purchase. I could have sworn it moved. I tried it again, but this time the vine snapped in half and I cursed softly under my breath. There wasn't enough left to bother with, and I had to go back to the canal for another chunk of the stuff. I was racing against darkness now and a little leery of falling into the black water. I found the vine more by touch than sight. As I reached it my foot slipped, and I went in up to the knee. I heaved on the vine and got myself out again in a hurry. The thought of what might be waiting for me below the surface was not too pleasant. Squadrons of mosquitoes were zeroing in on my face, hands, and neck.

  In the darkness, I worked too hard with the little knife and felt the blade snap when I was only halfway through the vine. I cursed again. There was still the tiny nail file but I had to save that for the electrodes. This, I told myself, is what the good lord gave you teeth for. Trying to ignore the attacks of the insects, I chewed away on the tough stuff. It was singularly bitter. At last I got a chunk off and lumbered back through the blackness to the road.

  I lit a match and in its quick glare wrapped the vine around the plug. This time it came easily enough. I unscrewed it and examined the electrodes. They were black with oil and carbon. I had to spread them a little to get the file between them. When I was down to clean bare metal, I cautiously reinserted the plug, praying that I would not have to go through the whole procedure again. I kicked the starter and the engine caught at once.