‘Did we eat yet, Reggie?’

‘Yeah, Pop, we did. And I’m Dougie.’

‘Reggie’s dead. Didn’t you tell me that?’

‘Yeah, Pop.’

‘That man was beating on you.’ His father’s face twists into the face of a child who is horribly tired and needs to go to bed. ‘I’ve got a headache. Let’s blow this pop stand. I want to lie down.’

‘We have to wait for the cops.’

‘Why? What cops? Who is that guy?’

Sanderson smells shit. His father has just dropped a load.

‘Let’s get you in the car, Pop.’

His father lets Sanderson lead him around the Subaru’s crumpled snout. Pop says, ‘That was some Halloween, wasn’t it?’

‘Yeah, Pop, it was.’ He helps the eighty-three-year-old Caped Crusader into the car and closes the door to keep the cool in. The first city police car is pulling up, and they’ll want to see some ID. The sixty-one-year-old Boy Wonder, hands pressed to his aching side, shuffles back to the driver’s side to pick it up off the street.

For John Irving

As I said in the note to ‘Batman and Robin,’ sometimes – once in a great while – you get the cup with the handle already attached. God, how I love that. You’re just going about your business, thinking of nothing in particular, and then, ka-boom, a story arrives Special Delivery, perfect and complete. The only thing you have to do is transcribe it.

I was in Florida, walking our dog on the beach. Because it was January, and cold, I was the only one out there. Up ahead I saw what looked like writing in the sand. When I got closer, I saw it was just a trick of sunlight and shadow, but writers’ minds are junkheaps of odd information, and it made me think of an old quote from somewhere (it turned out to be Omar Khayyam): ‘The Moving Finger writes, and having writ, moves on.’ That in turn made me think of some magical place where an invisible Moving Finger would write terrible things in the sand, and I had this story. It has one of my very favorite endings. Maybe not up there with ‘August Heat,’ by W. F. Harvey – that one’s a classic – but in the same neighborhood.

The Dune

As the Judge climbs into the kayak beneath a bright morning sky, a slow and clumsy process that takes him almost five minutes, he reflects that an old man’s body is nothing but a sack in which he carries aches and indignities. Eighty years ago, when he was ten, he jumped into a wooden canoe and cast off, with no bulky life jacket, no worries, and certainly with no pee dribbling into his underwear. Every trip to the little unnamed island lying like a half-submerged submarine two hundred yards out in the Gulf began with a great and uneasy excitement. Now there is only unease. And pain that seems centered deep in his guts and radiates to everywhere. But he still makes the trip. Many things have lost their allure in these shadowy later years – most things – but not the dune on the far side of the island. Never the dune.

In the early days of his exploration, he expected it to be gone after every big storm, and following the 1944 hurricane that sank the USS Warrington off Vero Beach, he was sure it would be. But when the skies cleared, the island was still there. So was the dune, although the hundred-mile-an-hour winds should have blown all the sand away, leaving only the bare rocks and knobs of coral. Over the years he has debated back and forth about whether the magic is in him or in the island. Perhaps it’s both, but surely most of it is in the dune.

Since 1932 he has crossed this short stretch of water thousands of times. Usually he finds nothing but rocks and bushes and sand, but every now and then there is something else.

Settled in the kayak at last, he paddles slowly from the beach to the island, his frizz of white hair blowing around his mostly bald skull. A few turkey buzzards wheel overhead, making their ugly conversation. Once he was the son of the richest man on the Florida Gulf coast, then he was a lawyer, then he was a judge on the Pinellas County Circuit, then he was appointed to the State Supreme Court. There was talk, during the Reagan years, of a nomination to the United States Supreme Court, but that never happened, and a week after the idiot Clinton became president, Judge Harvey Beecher – just the Judge to his many acquaintances (he has no real friends) in Sarasota, Osprey, Nokomis, and Venice – retired. Hell, he never liked Tallahassee, anyway. It’s cold up there.

Also, it’s too far from the island, and its peculiar dune. On these early-morning kayak trips, paddling the short distance on smooth water, he’s willing to admit that he’s addicted to it. But who wouldn’t be addicted to a thing like this?

On the rocky east side, a gnarled bush juts from the split in a guano-splattered rock. This is where he ties up, and he’s always careful to tie well. It wouldn’t do to be stranded out here; his father’s estate (that’s how he still thinks of it, although the elder Beecher has been gone for forty years now) covers almost two miles of prime Gulf-front property, the main house is far inland, on the Sarasota Bay side, and there would be no one to hear him yelling. Tommy Curtis, the caretaker, might notice him gone and come looking; more likely, he would just assume the Judge was locked up in his study, where he often spends whole days, supposedly working on his memoirs.

Once upon a time Mrs Riley might have gotten nervous when he didn’t come out of the study for lunch, but now he hardly ever eats at noon (she calls him ‘nothing but a stuffed string,’ although not to his face). There’s no other staff, and both Curtis and Mrs Riley know he can be cross when he’s interrupted. Not that there’s really much to interrupt; he hasn’t added so much as a line to the memoirs in two years, and in his heart he knows they will never be finished. The unfinished recollections of a Florida judge? No tragedy there. The one story he could write is the one he never will.

He’s even slower getting out of the kayak than he was getting in, and turns turtle once, wetting his shirt and pants in the little waves that run up the gravelly shingle. Beecher is not discommoded. It isn’t the first time he’s fallen, and there’s no one to see him. He supposes he’s mad to continue these trips at his age, even though the island is so close to the mainland, but stopping them isn’t an option. An addict is an addict is an addict.

Beecher struggles to his feet and clutches his belly until the last of the pain subsides. He brushes sand and small shells from his pants, double-checks his mooring rope, then spots one of the turkey buzzards perched on the island’s largest rock, peering down at him.

‘Yi!’ he shouts in the voice he now hates – cracked and wavering, the voice of an old shrew in a black dress. ‘Yi-yi, you bugger! Get on about your business!’

After giving a brief rustle of its raggedy wings, the turkey buzzard sits right where it is. Its beady eyes seem to say, But Judge – today you’re my business.

Beecher stoops, picks up a larger shell, and shies it at the bird. This time it does fly away, the sound of its wings like rippling cloth. It soars across the short stretch of water and lands on his dock. Still, the Judge thinks, a bad omen. He remembers Jimmy Caslow of the Florida State Patrol telling him once that turkey buzzards didn’t just know where carrion was, but where carrion would be.

‘I can’t tell you,’ Caslow said, ‘how many times I’ve seen those ugly bastards circling a spot on the Tamiami where there’s a fatal wreck a day or two later. Sounds crazy, I know, but just about any Florida road cop will tell you the same.’

There are almost always turkey buzzards out here on the little no-name island. Judge Beecher supposes it smells like death to them, and why not?