Read Online Under Radar by Michael Tolkin - Free Book Online

this.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œCome on, man, it was a mistake. I told you that. She’s fine. Look at her.”
    Tom put a hand on Seckler’s arm. Seckler now saw in his eyes the mournful resolve of an error gone too far for restoration. Tom thought, I can die here. This can kill me, too.
    Tom pushed Seckler to the edge. Tom had the advantage; his foot was braced against a rock, and Seckler was slipping in the swift-moving water.
    â€œDon’t do this,” said Barry.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI think you want to kill me.”
    â€œI don’t know what else to do.”
    â€œI can help you.”
    â€œIt’s too late.”
    Seckler cried out, “Help! He’s killing me! Help me!” He sounded like what he was, a man about to die, a man frightened for his life, a child.
    â€œThis is for my daughter,” said Tom.
    Later, someone would say that from the next step up the falls, the two men looked like friends having fun; what had been desperate was seen as exuberant pleasure.
    Barry Seckler dropped forty feet, breaking open his head. As he fell, everyone watching heard his anguish, theagonal cry of a man knowing that at the end of this, his children would lose their father.
    Debra Seckler grabbed her children and pushed them away from the edge. In fractions of seconds, up and down the line of tourists, the word went out that something terrible had happened.
    Rosalie, Alma, and Perri saw what happened. They had never seen Tom fight before.
    It was understood that this was a murder and not an accident.
    There he was, dead in the water. The difficult climb up the rocks from that pool was harder going down. Debra could not find a hold, and kind people lifted her away from the rocks and lowered her, passing her along from hand to hand. Those who touched her would remember their meticulous intention, only to help her, and the reward of a sensation of intense honesty.
    Barry was face down. Debra, beside him, asked for help, and from a watchful crowd of young Jamaican men, two stepped forward, and then all, and they turned him over. The cracked side of his head seeped blood. She lifted his head out of the water and cupped a hand and washed the wound with water. She looked up and met Tom’s eyes. Tom was surrounded by Jamaicans and tourists.
    She kissed her fat dead husband’s lips, and cried to him, and sang. Tom couldn’t hear the song over the water.
    Tom hated everything, the sullen beauty of the falls, the easy way that the tropics delivered clarity. Tomthought: I never understood the world until now. I never understood the danger of evil until now.
    I was a good man who did one thing wrong. Then he thought, More than one.
    ...
    Children cried, “Daddy!” The voices of his daughters, the voices of Rita and Adam Seckler, who were in the lower pool. Tom leaned over the edge of the cliff to get a better view, but then the men crowding around him pulled him away, fearing that he would jump.
    I won’t jump, he could have told them, but who would have believed him, and why be reasonable now? He could toss them an apology like a chunk of meat, watch the apology rise and fall on a parabola of their anticipation and then disappointment at such a meager offering. Better to stay silent and keep them entertained by their fantasies of what he should or might do now that they had him on the way to prison.
    All of this happened at once: James the driver was called by the river guides. James brought a woman from the ticket booth who gently coached the Seckler children away from the body and led them to the side of the river, where others lifted them out of the water. There was a policeman in the water, his pants rolled up, and someone gave him a video camera. The policeman, and others, watched the playback on the camera’s screen, and Tom understood that they were looking at him pushingBarry Seckler to his death. At the same time, Rosalie, with the girls beside her, cried out,