In here, sheltered by the reef, they felt only a mild swaying, and then everything was still again.
Thompkins clapped his hand over his mouth. His eyes were bulging. “Jesus,” he said after a moment. “Jesus! How the fuck am I going to get out there?” He turned toward Denise. “Can you row this thing back to shore by yourself?”
“I suppose so.”
“Good. Take it in and tell the boat boy what happened. I’m going after your friend.”
He stripped with astonishing speed, the dinner jacket, the sharply creased pants, the shirt and tie, the black patent leather shoes. Denise saw him for a moment outlined against the stars, the fleshy burly body hidden only by absurd bikini pants in flamboyant scarlet silk. Then he was over the side, swimming with all his strength, heading for one of the openings in the reef that gave access to the outer face.
She was waiting among the crowd on the shore when Thompkins brought the body in, carrying it like a broken doll. He had been much too late, of course. One quick glance told her that Holt must have been tossed against the reef again and again, smashed, cut to ribbons by the sharp coral, partly devoured, even, by the creatures of the night. Thompkins laid him down on the beach. One of the hotel boys put a blanket over him; another gave Thompkins a robe. He was scratched and bloody himself, shivering, grim-faced, breathing in windy gusts. Denise went to him. The others backed away, stepping back fifteen or twenty feet, leaving them alone, strangely exposed, beside the blanketed body.
“Looks like you were wrong,” Thompkins said. “About that sixth sense of his. Or else it wasn’t working so good tonight.”
“No,” she said. For the past five minutes she had been struggling to put together the pattern of what had happened, and it seemed to her now that it was beginning to come clear. “It was working fine. He knew this would happen.”
“What?”
“He knew. Like I said before, he knew everything ahead of time. Everything. Even this. But he went along with it anyway.”
“But if he knew everything, then why… why…” Thompkins shook his head. “I don’t get it.”
Denise shuddered in the warm night breeze. “No, you don’t. You can’t. Neither can I.”
“Miss Carpentah?” a high, strained voice called. “Mistah Thompkins?”
It was the night manager, Mr. Eubanks of the dazzling grin, belatedly making his way down from the hotel. He wasn’t grinning now. He looked stricken, panicky, strangely pasty-faced. He came to a halt next to them, knelt, picked up one corner of the beach blanket, stared at the body beneath it as though it were some bizarre monster that had washed ashore. A guest had died on his watch, and it was going to cost him, he was sure of that, and his fear showed in his eyes.
Thompkins, paying no attention to the Jamaican, said angrily to Denise, “If he knew what was going to happen, if he could see the fucking future, why in the name of Christ didn’t he simply not take the boat out, then? Or if he did, why fool around outside the reef where it’s so dangerous? For that matter, why didn’t he just stay the hell away from Jamaica in the first place?”
“That’s what I mean when I tell you that we can’t understand,” she said. “He didn’t think the way we do. He wasn’t like us. Not at all. Not in the slightest.”
“Mistah Thompkins—Miss Carpentah—if you would do me de courtesy of speaking with me for a time—of letting me have de details of dis awful tragedy—”
Thompkins brushed Eubanks away as if he were a gnat.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re saying,” he told Denise.
Eubanks said, exasperated, “If de lady and gemmun will give me deir kind attention, please—”
He looked imploringly toward Denise. She shook him off. She was still groping, still reaching for the answer.
Then, for an instant, just for an instant, everything that was going on seemed terribly familiar to her. As if it had all happened before. The warm, breezy night air. The blanket on the beach. The round, jowly, baffled face of Jeffrey Thompkins hovering in front of hers. Mr. Eubanks, pale with dismay. An odd little moment of déjà vu. It appeared to go on and on. Now Eubanks will lose his cool and try to grab me by the arm, she thought; now I will pull back and slip on the sand; now Jeffrey will catch me and steady me. Yes. Yes. And here it comes. “Please, you may not ignore me dis way! You must tell me what has befallen dis unfortunate gemmum!” That was Eubanks, eyes popping, forehead shiny with sweat. Making a pouncing movement toward her, grabbing for her wrist. She backed hastily away from him. Her legs felt suddenly wobbly. She started to sway and slip, and looked toward Thompkins. But he was already coming forward, reaching out toward her to take hold of her before she fell. Weird, she thought. Weird.
Then the weirdness passed, and everything was normal again, and she knew the answer.
That was how it had been for him, she thought in wonder. Every hour, every day, his whole goddamned life.
“He came to this place and he did what he did,” she said to Thompkins, “because he knew that there wasn’t any choice for him. Once he had seen it in his mind it was certain to happen. So he just came down here and played things through to the end.”
“Even though he’d die?” Thompkins asked. He looked at Denise stolidly, uncomprehendingly.
“If you lived your whole life as if it had already happened, without surprise, without excitement, without the slightest unpredictable event, not once, not ever, would you give a damn whether you lived or died? Would you? He knew he’d die here, yes. So he came here to die, and that’s the whole story. And now he has.”
“Jesus,” Thompkins said. “The poor son of a bitch!”
“You understand now? What it must have been like for him?”
“Yeah,” he said, his arm still tight around her as though he didn’t mean to ever let go. “Yeah. The poor son of a bitch.”
“I got to tell you,” said Mr. Eubanks, “dis discourtesy is completely improper. A mahn have died here tragically tonight, and you be de only witnesses, and I ask you to tell me what befell, and you—”
Denise closed her eyes a moment. Then she looked at Eubanks.
“What’s there to say, Mr. Eubanks? He took his boat into a dangerous place and it was struck by a sudden wave and overturned. An accident. A terrible accident. What else is there to say?” She began to shiver. Thompkins held her. In a low voice she said to him, “I want to go back to my cottage.”
“Right,” he said. “Sure. You wanted a statement, Mr. Eubanks? There’s your statement. Okay? Okay?”
He held her close against him and slowly they started up the ramp toward the hotel together.