Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [32]
There was something sad and deserted about Matson’s body, some forlorn, fruitless aspect of his humanity still lingering in his final pose of desperation. The will to live was evident in that outstretched arm, the unfulfilled and empty fingers that had reached but not grasped, a semaphore gesture broken off by a bullet. I shook my head at the sight of him and thought, Vivian, you stupid, stupid bitch.
I had stopped liking Matson a long time ago, but there had been flashes of brilliance in our friendship. There’d been times when I was sure we had something strong enough between us to preclude betrayal. I had believed that Randy Matson was a man who would bail you out of jail with a slap on the back or listen to you over a beer when the hope was gone from you. And for a time he had been just that. Looking at him now, I realized that I’d lost more than Vivian had the night I found the two of them together. I had also lost a friend.
There was a stool behind the bar, and I sat down on it and poured myself a scotch. I was in a peculiar mood, and I wanted a drink, an indulgence that, even under the circumstances, I failed to deny myself. I checked my dive watch; it was three o’clock. Time enough for a last drink with a former friend, even if he had been a prick in the end.
Men betray women and women betray men, but when one man betrays another man, something else is lost. Who knows exactly what it is? Maybe what’s lost is the illusion that the basic inalienable loneliness of men might be nothing more than an illusion, a series of mirages in a desert more imagined than real; that maybe, just maybe, there were handshakes that meant something. When that’s lost, the desert comes back, and you have to start crossing it all over again, this time with the burden of wondering if that illusion of loneliness you’d once believed defeated was real after all. Matson, I thought, you stupid ass.
I kept thinking of that night in that out-of-the-way bar, the expression on Matson’s face when I grabbed him by the shoulder. It was a look of shock combined with a sudden penetrating regret that nothing could contradict, countermand, or set right ever again, a fine thing lost irretrievably. Randy, you son of a bitch, I said to myself without rancor, look where it got you.
I finished my drink, stood up, and went back around the bar again. I didn’t like to do it, but I needed to see his face. There was nothing morbid or spiteful in it, but it’s true what they say: Once a cop, always a cop, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do what I was going to do without seeing his face.
Using two fingers like tweezers, I lifted his head up by the hair. A bloody paste held it to the carpeting, and I had to pull hard. The left eye was a viscous mess of red where the bullet had gone in. There is nothing heavier than a dead man’s head, and I felt every ounce of it. The rest of his face had been terribly distorted from having lain for so long on a flat surface. Rigor mortis had come and gone, and the constant pressure of the floor had transformed the skin of his left cheek into what looked like a solid mass of melted wax.
Death had turned his long, sunburned neck into such an inflexible stalk that had I dropped his head, it would have slammed down onto the floor like a rock hurled by a catapult. I estimated that he’d been dead for not much more than a day and a half. It wouldn’t be long before the stench would set in, but he’d be way out deep by then. That is, if everything went according to plan. I put Matson’s head down as gently as I could. I didn’t get up right away, though. I just knelt there next to him with the light on the back of his head for a few moments, trying to regain my focus and thinking of the time when he and I had been friends. After a while I stood up.
I went out of the cabin and up the stairs to the helm and sat down in the bucket chair in front of the controls. The keys, as I’d been told they would be, were still in the ignition. But