On the Macal River, Cayo, Belize

CANEK IS PADDLING ME BACK DOWN the river, toward San Ignacio. From there I’ll take one of the ubiquitous taxis to the airport. I’m ready to get the hell out of Belize. My hand hurts from a bite, it is swelling with a frightening rapidity, and I suspect the botfly larva is squirming there beneath my skin. I wonder if I have to declare the beefworm to customs when I land. I scratch it and it burns and I scratch it some more. Maybe they have some glue and some Scotch tape at the hotel. I scratch it and think on Caroline.

I suspected that Nat was Caroline’s father before he ever admitted it to me, the remark by Calvi before our gun-fight on Pier Four was what clued me, but I didn’t tell Caroline about Kingsley’s vasectomy or my suspicions and I won’t tell her of Nat’s admission of paternity either. It is not my place, I think, to tell her that her real father is an evil son of a bitch.

We have ended whatever it was we had, Caroline and I. The love expressed between Emma and Christian too powerfully illuminated what wasn’t between us to allow us to continue as anything but friends. True to her word, after learning from the letter why her grandfather had thrown away his medal, she signed the contingency fee agreement. She found something else in the letter too, the one good thing she had been looking for, the transformation of her grandfather from a coward to a man. She has taken again to wearing her grandfather’s medal and she is working, along with her therapist, to re-create for herself the history of her life, building on the base of Christian Shaw’s transformation and late-found love, as well as on her understanding of the crimes that so deformed her family. This exercise in self-emendation has given her an attractive tranquility. She smokes less, drinks less, has taken some of the hardware out of her body. She doesn’t interrupt me anymore when I speak. She has even adopted Sam the cat. Now that she has learned her family truths, her ailurophobia seems to have receded. She has not become one of those strange cat people, she does not allow Sam to sleep in her bed nor does she talk incessantly about how cute he is, but they have reached an understanding and he seems quite content in his new home in her loft on Market Street. I guess, like his former master, he figures anything beats Florida. Caroline pines still for Harrington, I think, not knowing he is her brother and not understanding why he can’t be with her anymore. I suspect he’ll tell her someday.

Caroline and Beth have become fast friends. I fear they talk about me over coffee when I am not around, though they deny it. Beth left the Church of New Life a while ago, turned off finally by the avarice with which Oleanna envelops her truths, and is now trying out Buddhism. Caroline went with her on her last Zen retreat, to an ashram in New Jersey. I maintain that seeking enlightenment in New Jersey is oxymoronic but they think they are on to something. Both women seemed subtly changed by the weekend, more at peace.

“What did you talk about?” I asked.

“We didn’t talk.”

“What did you do?”

“We did nothing.”

“What did you think about?”

“We denied ourselves the luxury of thought.”

“I’m not impressed,” I said. “I spent the whole weekend watching golf on television and did the exact same thing.”

The most hopeful aspect of Caroline’s progress is that she is devoid of the bitterness over the past that has plagued the Pooles. There is a great peril to history. As a Jew I have learned to never forget, but some history, I believe, is best left behind. History is a warning to ourselves, and only by remembering where we have been and how low we have fallen can we know to where we aspire, but we lose everything when it is history that drives us completely, as it drove Nat and his mother and her mother and her husband. If we are to be more than pigeons pecking for pellets then we must transcend the bitterest of our histories and strike out on our own. Remembrance without forgiveness is a curse and there is no better proof of that than the Reddmans and the Pooles, fighting through generations over a fortune like two dogs worrying a bone. Caroline is learning of the necessity of forgiveness, as did Christian Shaw and as did, surprisingly, his wife, Faith.

I find it difficult to reconcile the young Faith Reddman Shaw, three-time murderess, with the woman who handed over so much to Nat in vain absolution of her past and her father’s past. It is touching and sad, both, to think of her acceding to Nat’s vile demands one after the other in hopes that, finally, her debts and her father’s debts would be paid. That she was a monster, that her attempts were flawed, that the object of her attempts was evil makes the effort no less noble. This has been a tale of the basest sort, but I think that the most interesting part remains forever hidden, and that is the story of Faith’s conversion from criminal to penitent. It is a story written on the human soul, indecipherable but no less real because of it. It is the true story of redemption in the Reddman history, heroically epic because she had so far up to climb. My guess is that her transformation followed a similar path to her husband’s and is a journey being embarked upon by Caroline now. Good luck to her and I hope to hell she finds whatever it is she is looking for.

As for me, I don’t go in for that spiritual crap, as Nat so tactfully put it. It is just a balm, I think, to conceal the painful truths we’re stuck with, like a flesh-colored zit cream. Sure it is comforting to see oneself as part of the great mystical all, destined to be reborn again and again, like it is comforting to loll about in a tub of warm water, but it strikes me as a false refuge. Maybe my near-death experiences have turned me existential, but I can’t help thinking now that I was born for no reason, I live for no reason, I will die for no reason. My task now is to figure out how to deal with those ugly truths without succumbing to depression and spending the rest of my life shivering with despair beneath the covers of my bed. One thing I do know for sure is that if I’m going to contemplate my place in the universe I’d just as soon do it on a beach in Aruba with an umbrella drink in my hand.

I agreed to Nat’s offer. I promised to leave him alone, to tell no one where I found him, to halt all my attempts to collect on the debt pending his death. If he dies with ten million we’d get a third, half of which goes to my partner, a third of which goes to taxes, leaving me with about a million. So sometime in the future, the far future because he seemed a healthy man despite his age, I’m going to get a million dollars. As long as Nat has told me the truth. It’s not all I was hoping for, but I can live with it, I suppose. Better it goes to me than to some corrupt government on the Seychelles. I don’t like the idea of leaving him alone as if he got away with it but I’m nobody’s instrument of retribution. “Vengeance is Mine,” sayeth the Lord, and He can have it. I’m just a lawyer trying to make the best deal I can. Besides, I figure leaving Nat alone with his beastly flowers in that mosquito-infested jungle to face the heat of the dry season and the swarms of the rainy season is as close as I can come to sending him to hell. If I can do that and still end up with a million dollars, then that’s what I’m going to do.

Am I still obsessed with finding a great fortune after all I’ve seen of the Reddmans and the Pooles? Hell yes. Obscene wealth is the great American obsession and I am nothing if not a patriot. It’s just that now I think how I make it and how I spend it is every bit as meaningful as the money itself. Someday, if luck ever finds me, I’ll be graced with a child of my own. The tragedy of the Reddmans has taught me that everything we’ve ever done is passed to our children like an inheritance. I can live with my crimes, I think, but to curse my child with my crimes is criminal and to commit them knowing that later on I’ll have to hide the truth is positively craven. I’m still chasing as hard as the next guy, sure, but from here on in I act as if a child is judging every stride.