361 - Donald E. Westlake [44]
Inside, there were three large rooms, all with straw-mat rugs and bamboo or wicker furniture and a lot of dark red cushions. The flooring gleamed rich and well-cared-for in the wide archways between the rooms. There was also a kitchen, white and glittering like an operating room for midgets, with a window overlooking the empty beer cases on the porch. In the middle of it all was a railinged oblong hole in the floor and a staircase with black rubber runners. This led down to the middle floor, where there were four bedrooms, all done in walnut, with little green curtains over the small windows. There were windows at the front and sides, and a side door which led to a path running down the slope from the road to the lake. There was another set of stairs under the first, this one closed off with knotty pine and a varnished door. It led down to the bottom floor, with storage rooms and the boathouse and another screened porch. Off this porch was a square wooden dock beside the boathouse. The whole house was ringed by trees on three sides, and the fourth side was built right down to the water’s edge.
We moved in and found the phone wasn’t working, but it was too late that day to do anything about it. The next morning, we drove back around the lake to town and got the phone company to activate the phone. Some sort of belated summer had come in during the night, so I bought a bathing suit. Then we went back to the house.
We didn’t talk to each other much, going or coming. Kapp was full of his plans. I was already losing my patience. It was the same as doing the tape for Beeworthy, only that hadn’t been any more than half an hour, and this was going to be for two weeks. I wasn’t sure I’d last two weeks. The only thing that kept me there was the sure knowledge that it would take me longer than two weeks to get the name I wanted if I was just bulling around New York on my own. I’d told Bill I didn’t want to do any Pacific campaign. I still felt the same way.
There was a full-length mirror on the closet door in the bedroom I’d picked for myself. That afternoon, when I put the bathing suit on, I looked at myself in it. It was two and a half months since the accident, and this was the first time I’d really looked at myself full length.
Both shins were criss-crossed with white scars down to the ankles. The right ankle looked wrong. A couple of bones were missing from it, and the doctors had had to rebuild it a little. It was too thin and too smooth. It looked more like a pipe joint than part of a human body. There were more of the white scars above my right knee and across my belly and over my right shoulder.
I opened the closet door all the way, so the mirror was against the wall. I kept it that way from then on. Then I went out and went swimming.
It stayed warm all the rest of the first week. I swam a lot, always by myself. Kapp spent most of his time on the phone. He made a lot of long distance calls to New York and to Miami and to East St. Louis and other places. After the first couple of days, he started getting other calls coming back. He did a lot of grinning and winking, whenever he saw me. But we didn’t talk much. I didn’t know what he was doing, and I didn’t care. And he was too busy with his plans for small talk.
We’d stocked up with House of Lords, and he usually had a glass in his hand. He was smoking cigars all the time, and his voice was getting raspy. He seemed pleased with life.
The air was warm, but the water was cold. I liked it. I couldn’t swim as well as before, because I couldn’t kick with any coordination, but I did pretty well.
I developed a swimming routine. Every time I went into the water, I swam straight out into the lake as far as I could go. Then I rolled over on my back and rested there until I had the strength to swim back. Sometimes I thought about diving down and walking on the bottom. But not seriously.
They say the Army is hurry up and wait. Air Force, too. When I was in, we used to bitch about