some headroom, and waiting for rescue.
Maybe someone from the Charlotte County Department of Building and Planning will
come out. Or a team of headhunters from the IRS.
Nice to imagine, but he had an idea it wasn’t going to happen. The Motherfucker
would have taken those possibilities into consideration, too. Of course some
bureaucrat or team of them might take an unscheduled swing by here, but counting on
it would be as stupid as hoping that Grunwald would have a change of heart. And Mrs.
Wilson would assume he’d gone to an afternoon movie in Sarasota, as he often did.
He rapped on the walls, first the left, then the right. On both sides he felt hard metal just beyond the thin and yielding plastic. Cladding. He got up on his knees, and this
time he did bump his head, but hardly noticed. What he saw was not encouraging: the
flat ends of the screws holding the unit together. The heads were on the outside. This wasn’t a shithouse; it was a coffin.
At this thought, his moment of clarity and calm vanished. Panic descended in its place.
He began to hammer on the walls of the toilet, screaming to be let out. He threw
himself from side to side like a child having a tantrum, trying to roll the Port-O-San over so he could at least free the door, but the fucking thing hardly moved at all. The fucking thing was heavy. The cladding that sheathed it made it heavy.
Heavy like a coffin! his mind shrieked. In his panic, every other thought had been banished. Heavy like a coffin! Like a coffin! A coffin!
He didn’t know how long he went on like that, but at some point he tried to stand up,
as if he could burst through the wall now facing the sky like Superman. He hit his
head again, this time much harder. He fell forward on his stomach. His hand splutted
into something gooey—something that smeared—and he wiped it on the seat of his
jeans. He did this without looking. His eyes were squeezed shut. Tears trickled from
the corners. In the blackness behind his lids, stars zoomed and exploded. He wasn’t
bleeding—he supposed that was good, one more goddam blessing to count—but he
had almost knocked himself out.
“Calm down,” he said. He got up on his knees again. His head was down, his hair
hanging, his eyes closed. He looked like a man who was praying, and he supposed he
was. A fly did a touch-and-go on the nape of his neck. “Going nuts won’t help, he’d
love it if he heard you screaming and carrying on, so calm down, don’t give him what
he’d love, just calm the fuck down and think about this.”
What was there to think about? He was trapped.
Curtis sat back against the door and put his face in his hands.
Time passed and the world went on.
The world did its thing.
On Route 17, a few vehicles—mostly workhorses; farm trucks bound for either the
markers in Sarasota or the whole-foods store in Nokomis, the occasional tractor, the
postman’s station wagon with the yellow lights on the roof—trundled by. None took
the turnoff to Durkin Grove Village.
Mrs. Wilson arrived at Curtis’s house, let herself in, read the note Mr. Johnson had
left on the kitchen table, and began to vacuum. Then she ironed clothes in front of the afternoon soap operas. She made a macaroni casserole, stuck it in the fridge, then
jotted simple instructions concerning its preparation— Bake 350, 45 mins—and left them on the table where Curtis’s note had been. When thunder began to mutter out
over the Gulf of Mexico, she left early. She often did this when it rained. Nobody
down here knew how to drive in the rain, they treated every shower like a nor’easter
in Vermont.
In Miami, the IRS agent assigned to the Grunwald case ate a Cuban sandwich. Instead
of a suit, he wore a tropical shirt with parrots on it. He was sitting under an umbrella at a sidewalk restaurant. There was no rain in Miami. He was on vacation. The
Grunwald case would still be there when he got back; the wheels of government