The Hour of Bad Decisions by Russell Wangersky Read Free Book Online

given up calling by then. She clearly planned to wait him out instead, and the echoes of other daytime voices had long since stopped ringing off the sides of the cabins.
    Fire pits were lit in front of some of the cabins now, burning sappy wood that snapped and cracked and filled the air with a thin grey smoke that smelled strongly of pine. Slab wood, the bark-covered, outside-edge leftovers from sawmill lumber, rough-cut and splintery and dry as dust, and, from around the fires, John could hear low voices, fragments of conspiratorial sentences, tossed out haphazardly from the chairs grouped around the small pools of firelight.
    â€œRight over the green, and he said…”
    â€œI couldn’t believe…”
    â€œJust one more time and I would have said ‘No way, you’re gone,’ but…”
    They were soft words, almost murmurs, escaping only occasionally from the fire’s edge as if each individual syllable had tunneled its way out under the blanket of darkness.
    His attention was wandering – his body strangely heavy and his face felt flushed with sunburn. The water bottle was more than half empty. He hung his arms out over the edge of the hot tub, watched them loll, over-fat, fleshy and almost beyond his control. He imagined himself as a drowned man, caught in theebb and flow of the tide, seaweed and sea-wrack all around him. He could imagine lying limp in the Irish moss washed up at the edge of the ocean, the delicate, rolled edges of the pink seaweed curled around him, the iodine smell thick in the air, face up to the sun and the blue sky. He could feel how the shallow, lapping waves would lift his ankles, then the rest of his body, could hear their light, open-handed slap against the shore.
    Perhaps two early beach-walkers, wearing serious walking shoes and multi-pocketed khaki shorts, would be the first to find him. Big, safe, sun-shielding, sensible hats, sunglasses dangling on strings, they would be faced by the wreckage left behind after the shrimp and the seagulls and the crab and lobster had all taken their turn at his exposed flesh. He could imagine their shock and horror, how they would step back and hunt in their pockets for the handy efficiency of a cell phone. In his imagination, John drew limply-flapping yellow police tape around himself on the beach, sand grains thick in his hair and in the corners of whatever might be left of his eyes.
    And then a different thought: he imagined Heather and the kids walking along the beach, walking above the tide line on the ruled-flat, fine sand, their footprints webbed out behind them, their eyes downcast, faces serious, as if they expected to find something important in all that sand. He imagined them walking and walking, their steps stretching out behind them in ever-longer sentences of explanation and regret, rambling words unspoken, unheard, unread.
    As the lights inside the cabins were winking out, he began to smile – a thin, hard smile that made his mouth seem all wrong inside the round softness of his face.
    By two in the morning, lit only by the single streetlight near the outdoor phone, he was asleep, lulled by the gentle whirr of the pump, bubbles coming up in waves under his armpits, lingering across his chest. Almost floating, he dreamt about rain, about the ditches filling quickly with fast brown water, about the brush on both sides of the road heavy with rain, branches trailing down to the ground. The ditch water overflowing, forcing itself into culverts. Branches and small uprooted trees rushed by in the flowing water and, in his dream, he could hear the sibilant speech of the gravel wicking over the ridges in the metal culverts. The water was undercutting the edge of the road’s shoulder, then sweeping away falls of gravel that toppled into the water. Small rocks hissed and sang, and the water pulling down into the culverts built brown sucking whirlpools capped with dirty round hats of brown-flecked