“She killed herself,” Roger said.
“When?”
“While I was up in the hills. Before I went on to the Coast and wrote that picture.”
“I’m sorry,” Thomas Hudson said.
“She was headed for it all the time,” Roger said. “I’m glad I stepped out in time.”
“You wouldn’t ever do that.”
“I don’t know,” Roger said. “I’ve seen it look very logical.”
“One reason you wouldn’t do it is because it would be a hell of an example for the boys. How would Dave feel?”
“He’d probably understand. Anyway when you get into that business that far you don’t think much about examples.”
“Now you are talking wet.”
Bobby pushed over the drinks. “Roger, you talk that kind of stuff you get even me depressed. I’m paid to listen to anything people say. But I don’t want to hear my friends talk that way. Roger, you stop it.”
“I’ve stopped it.”
“Good,” Bobby said. “Drink up. We had a gentleman here from New York lived down at the Inn and he used to come here and drink most of the day. All he used to talk about was how he was going to kill himself. Made everybody nervous half the winter. Constable warned him it was an illegal act. I tried to get Constable to warn him that talking about it was an illegal act. But Constable said he’d have to get an opinion on that from Nassau. After a while people sort of got used to his project and then a lot of the drinkers started siding with him. Especially one day he was talking to Big Harry and he told Big Harry he was thinking of killing himself and he wanted to take somebody with him.
“ ‘I’m your man,’ Big Harry told him. ‘I’m who you’ve been looking for.’ So then Big Harry tries to encourage him that they should go to New York City and really pitch one and stay drunk until they couldn’t stand it and then jump off of the highest part of the city straight into oblivion. I think Big Harry figured oblivion was some sort of a suburb. Probably an Irish neighborhood.
“Well, the suicide gentleman took kindly to this idea and they’d talk it over every day. Others tried to get in on it and proposed they form an excursion of death seekers and just go as far as Nassau for the preliminaries. But Big Harry, he held out for New York City and finally he confided to the suicide gentleman that he couldn’t stand this life no longer and he was ready to go.
“Big Harry, he had to go out for a couple days crawfishing on a order he had from Captain Ralph and while he was gone the suicide gentleman took to drinking too much. Then he’d take some kind of ammonia from up north that would seem to sober him up and he’d come down to drink here again. But it was accumulating in him some way.
“We all called him Suicides by then so I said to him, ‘Suicides, you better lay off or you’ll never live to reach oblivion.’
“ ‘I’m bound for it now,’ he says. ‘I’m en route. I’m headed for it. Take the money for these drinks. I’ve made my dread decision.’
“ ‘Here’s your change,’ I said to him.
“ ‘I don’t want no change. Keep it for Big Harry so he can have a drink before he joins me.’
“So he goes out in a rush and he dives off of Johnny Black’s dock into the channel with the tide going out and it’s dark and no moon and nobody sees him any more until he washes up on the point in two days. Everybody looked for him good that night, too. I figured he must have struck his head on some old concrete and went out with the tide. Big Harry come in and he mourned him until the change was all drunk up. It was change from a twenty-dollar bill too. Then Big Harry said to me, ‘You know, Bobby, I think old Suicides was crazy.’ He was right, too, because when his family sent for him the man who came explained to Commissioner old Suicides had suffered from a thing called Mechanic’s Depressive. You never had that, did you, Roger?”