Bright Orange For The Shroud

Bright Orange For The Shroud

John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee #6 Bright Orange For The Shroud

John D. MacDonald

One

ANOTHER SEASON was ending. The mid-May sun had a tropic sting against my bare shoulders. Sweat ran into my eyes. I had discovered an ugly little pocket of dry rot in the windshield corner of the panel of the topside controls on my houseboat, and after trying not to think about it for a week, I had dug out the tools, picked up some pieces of prime mahogany, and excised the area of infection with a saber saw.

Cutting and sanding the new pieces to fit was a finicky chore. Sawdust stuck to my sweaty chest and arms. I was sustained by an awareness of the cool dark bottles of Dos Equis beer in the stainless steel box below, and by the anticipation of trudging from Bahia Mar over to the public beach where a mild wind from the east was capping the deep blue swells with white.

Also I was sustained by the determination that this would be a slob summer for McGee. It wouldn’t be a gaudy summer. There wasn’t enough bread for that. But a careful husbanding of funds would see me through, leaving the emergency fund untapped, ready to finance some kind of an operation in the fall.

I needed a slob summer. The machine was abused. Softness at the waist. Tremor of the hands. Bad tastes in the morning. A heaviness of muscle and bone, a tendency to sigh. Each time you wonder, Can you get it back? The good toughness and bounce and tirelessness, the weight down to a rawhide two oh five, a nasty tendency to sing during the morning shower, the conviction each day will contain wondrous things?

And I wanted it to be a loner summer. There’d been too much damned yat-a-ta yak, fervid conversations, midnight plots, and dirty little violences for which I had been all too unprepared. The pink weal six inches below my armpit was a reminder of luck. If my foot hadn’t slipped exactly when it did…

A knife blade grating along a rib bone is a sound so ugly and so personal it can come right into your sleep and wake you up ten nights running.

I got a good fit on the biggest piece, drilled it, and was setting the long bronze screws home when I heard a tentative and hollow call from dockside.

“Trav? Hey, Trav? Hey McGee?”

I turned and walked to the aft end of my sundeck and looked down at the dock. A tall, frail, sallow-looking fellow in a wrinkled tan suit too large for him stared up at me with an anxious little smile that came and went-a mendicant smile, like dogs wear in the countries where they kick dogs.

“How are you, Trav?” he said.

And just as I was about to ask him who he was, I realized, with considerable shock, that it was Arthur Wilkinson, dreadfully changed.

“Hello, Arthur.”

“Can I… may I come aboard?”

“Certainly. Why ask?”

The gangplank chain was down. He came across, stepped onto the afterdeck, tottered, tried to smile up at me, grabbed at emptiness and collapsed onto the teak deck with a knobbly thud. I got down there in two jumps, rolled him over. He’d abraded the unhealthy flesh under one eye in the fall. I felt the pulse in his throat. It was slow and steady. Two fat teenage girls came and stared from the dock, snickering. See the funny drunk, like on television.

I opened the aft door to the lounge, gathered Arthur up and toted him in. It was like picking up a sack of feather dry two-by-fours. He smelled stale. I took him all the way through and put him down on the bed in the guest stateroom. The air conditioning was chill against my bare sweat. I felt Arthur’s head. He didn’t seem to have a fever. I had never seen a man so changed by one year of life.

His mouth worked, and he opened his eyes and tried to sit up. I pushed him back. “You sick, Arthur?”

“Just weak, I guess. I guess I just fainted. I’m sorry. I don’t want to be…”

“A burden? A nuisance? Skip the social graces, Arthur.”

I guess you always look for a little spirit, a little glint of the fang on even the most humble dog in town.

“I’m very polite,” he said listlessly. “You know that, Trav. A very polite man.” He looked away. “Even… even when he was killing me, I think I was probably very, very polite.”

He faded away then, like a puff of steam, quickly gone, his eyes not quite closed. I put my fingertips against the side of his throat-the pulse was still there.

As I was wondering just what the hell to do next, he came floating back up, frowned at me. “I can’t cope with people like that. She must have known that. Right from the start she must have known about me.”

“Who tried to kill you?”

“I guess it really doesn’t matter very much. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been the next one, or the one after that. Let me rest a little while and then I’ll go. There wasn’t any point in coming to you. I should have known that too.”

Suddenly I recognized a part of that stale smell about him. It was a little bit like freshly baked bread, but not as pleasant. It’s the distinctive smell of starvation, the effluvium of the sweat ducts when the body has begun to feed on itself.

“Shut up, Arthur. When did you eat last?”

“I’m not real sure. I think… I don’t know.”

“Stay where you are,” I told him. I went to my stainless steel galley, looked in a locker, picked out a tin of clear, rich British broth, poured it into a pan and turned the burner on high. As it heated I looked in on him again. He gave me that reappearing nervous smile. He had a facial tic. His eyes filled with tears, and I went back to the broth. I poured it into a mug, hesitated, then tapped the liquor locker and added a fair jolt of Irish whiskey.

After I helped him get propped up, I saw he could hold it all right in both hands and sip it.

“Good.”

“Take it slow, Arthur. I’ll be right back.”

I sluiced the sawdust and sweat off in a fast shower in the huge stall the original owner had built aboard the Busted Flush, put on denims and a T-shirt and checked him again. The mug was empty. He was slightly flushed. I opened the promised bottle of dark beer and went back in and sat on the foot of the bed.

“What the hell have you done to yourself, Arthur?”

His voice blurred. “Too much, maybe.”

“Maybe I asked it the wrong way. What has Wilma done to you?”

Again the tears of weakness. “Oh Christ, Trav, I… ”

“We’ll go into it later, boy. You get out of the clothes and into a hot shower. Then you eat some eggs. Then you sleep. Okay?”

“I don’t want to be a…”

“Arthur, you could begin to bore me. Shut up.”

After he was asleep, I took a good look at his arms. Big H could pull a man down quickly. No needle marks. But it didn’t have to mean anything. Only the eyedropper group, the ones who pick the big vein open with a pin, acquire scars. Any tidy soul with a decent hypo and enough sense to use an alcohol swab afterward can go unmarked indefinitely, as any urban cop can tell you. He was still a little grimy. It was going to take more than one shower, or two. The beard stubble didn’t help either. I checked through his clothes. They had been cheap originally. The labels were from Naples, Florida. He had a flat cigarette package with three one-inch butts carefully stowed therein. He had a match folder from Red’s Diner in Homestead. He had two pennies and some lint. I rolled his shoes up in the clothing, carried the bundle out at arm’s length and dropped it into the trash bin on the dock. Then washed my hands.

The sun was going down. I went topside. The cockpit cocktail hour, with music and girl laughter from neighbor cruisers. As I drove the remaining screws home without working up a sweat, I kept thinking of Arthur Wilkinson as I had seen him last, over a year ago.

A big fellow, big as I am, but not the same physical type. Slow, awkward, uncoordinated-a mild and rather pedantic guy. I could remember coming across a few of the same breed way back in high school basketball days. Coaches would hustle them on the basis of size alone. They were very earnest, but they had no balance. You could catch them just right, with the hip, and they would go blundering and crashing off the court. For them, high school was the final experience in any body-contact sport.

Arthur Wilkinson had been a member of the group for a few months. I met him when he was trying to decide whether or not to invest some money in a marina enterprise. He was going around, talking earnestly to boat people. He surveyed me at drinking time, and stayed, and came back other times-came back once too often, perhaps, that time somebody had brought Wilma around.

He had told me about himself. Upstate New York boy. Little Falls. Department store family. Got a degree from Hamilton College. Went to work in the store. Became engaged to a doctor’s daughter. Didn’t particularly like or dislike the department store trade. Future all lined out, nailed down. Then it all fell apart, one piece at a time, beginning with the death of his widower father, then his girl marrying another guy, until, restless, irritable, unhappy, he had sold out his controlling interest to a chain, liquidated other properties and headed for Florida.

He got along fine with the group. He was amiable and very decent. We felt protective about him. He had been schooled for survival in Little Falls, and might indeed have been formidably adapted to that environment, but away from it there was something displaced about him. He was perfectly frank about his problem. He had left, after taxes, almost a quarter of a million dollars. It was in good solid securities, bringing in, after personal income taxes, nearly nine thousand a year. But he felt it shameful to squat on it. He wanted to move it around, put some work with it, make it produce. Some of the genes of his great granddaddy kept prodding him.

The group changes; the flavor remains the same. When he was in the pack, he was the gatherer of driftwood for the beach picnics, the one who drove drunks home, the one who didn’t forget the beer, the understanding listener who gets girl-tears on his beach coat, the pigeon good for the small loan, the patsy who comes calling and ends up painting the fence. All groups seem to have one.

He had a fair complexion, blushed readily. He always looked scrubbed. He laughed at all the jokes, nearly always at the right place, even though he had heard them before. In short, a very nice guy, that Arthur Wilkinson. Part of the group, but nobody got really close to him. He had that little streak of reserve, of keeping the ultimate secrets. Liquor might have unlocked him except for one thing. When he took one over his limit, he fell smilingly, placidly, irrevocably asleep. And smiled in his sleep.

I could remember that for a little while Arthur and Chookie McCall had something going. She had just finished a dancing engagement at the Bahama Room at the Mile O’Beach. She’s big, beautifully proportioned, vastly healthy, a dynamo brunette with a stern and striking face. Chook had fought with Frank Durkin and he had taken off and she was rebounding, and certainly Arthur was a better deal than Frank.

Without a dime, Arthur would have been worth nine Frank Durkins. Why do so many great gals latch onto a Frank Durkin to mess up their lives? When she got a three-week gig up at Daytona Beach perhaps Arthur could have gone with her, but he didn’t make the right moves. Then Wilma Ferner moved in when Chook was away…

There are a lot more Arthur Wilkinsons in the world than there are Wilma Ferners. And this Wilma was a classic example of the type. Little, but with a bone structure so delicate she made a hundred and five pounds look like a lush abundance. Fine white-blonde hair always in that initial state of disarray which creates the urge to mess it up completely. Husky theatrical voice which covered about two octaves in what was, for her, normal conversation.

Lots of anecdotes, in which she played every part, face as mobile as a clown’s, making lots of gestures, flinging herself around, the gestures seemingly awkward at times until one noticed that they kept that ripe little body in a constant state of animation and display, a project given a continuous assist by her wardrobe. There were little traces of accent in her normal speech, when she wasn’t imitating someone, but it seemed to vary from day to day. Hold a small clear wineglass of Harvey’s Bristol Milk up to the light and it is pretty close to the color of her eyes. And, once you got past all the crinkling and sparkling and winking, her eyes had just about as much expression as still wine.

She came in on a big Huckins out of Savannah, amid boat guests in various conditions of disrepair, much of the damage evidently being accomplished by people beating people in the face with their fists. She moved into a hotel room ashore, in the Yankee Clipper, and after the cruiser took off without her, she somehow managed to affix herself to our group, saying that the lovely people on the Huckins were going to pick her up on their way back from Nassau, and she had begged off because she could not endure Nassau one more stinking time.

In that venerable and useful show biz expression, she was always on. The gals seemed to have an instinctive wariness of her. The men were intrigued. She claimed to have been born in Calcutta, mentioned the tragic death of a father in the Australian diplomatic service, mentioned directly and obliquely her own careers as set designer in Italy, fashion coordinator in Brussels, photographer’s model in Johannesburg, society and fashion editor on a newspaper in Cairo, private secretary to the wife of one of the presidents of Guatemala.

As she cooed, twisted, bounced, exclaimed, imitated, chuckled, I must admit that I had a few moments of very steamy curiosity. But there were too many warning flags up. The pointed nails curved too extremely over the soft tips of the little fingers. The poses and pauses were too carefully timed. And there was just a bit too much effervescence and charm. Perhaps if she had come along a few years earlier-before I had seen and learned all kinds of con, before I had found some of the sicknesses no clinic can identify…

So we wondered who would nail it. Or vice versa. She was carrying a weapon at port arms, waiting for a target of opportunity.

I remember a very late night when I sat alone with my hairy economist friend named Meyer in the cockpit of his small cruiser which he christened the John Maynard Keynes, after a beach time when Wilma had been so totally on she had sparkled like the moonlit surf.

“Wonder how old she is?” I asked idly.

“My friend, I have kept meticulous track of all pertinent incidents. To have done what she claims to have done, she is somewhere between one hundred and five and one hundred and seven. I added five more years tonight.”

“Psychopathic liar, Meyer?”

“An inexact science uses inexact terms. I spit on parlor expertise, Travis.”

“Sure. I have one suspicion, though. There is so much merchandise in the showcase there’s nothing left back in the storeroom.”

“I wouldn’t gamble on that either.”

“What the hell would you gamble on, Meyer?”

“A man with no trace of the feminine in him, with no duality at all, is a man without tenderness, sympathy, gentleness, kindness, responsiveness. He is brute-mean, a hammer, a fist. McGee, what is a woman with no trace of the masculine in her makeup?”

“Mmm. Merciless in a different way?”

“You show promise, McGee. The empathy of kindness is a result of the duality, not of the feminine trace. Our strange friend, the Alabama Tiger, is maneuvering the lady just right. And she resents it. He moves in with a forked stick, and he’ll pin her head to the ground and then pick her up in such a way she can’t get her fangs into him. Maybe women are the only things in the world he knows so well.”

I told Meyer he was crazy, that anybody could see that the Alabama Tiger and Wilma Ferner had disliked each other on sight. Meyer wouldn’t argue it. On the adjoining deck, in a big rich Wheeler, the Alabama Tiger maintains what is by now the longest floating houseparty in the world. He is a huge, sloppy guy, once a murderous All-American tackle, who later made a pot of money and decided to spend it on boats, booze and broads. He stays blandly, cheerfully tight during all waking hours. He has a face like crude stone sculpture, carved into a mild grin. In forty seconds he can make you feel as if you are the most interesting person he has ever met, and you will feel as if you never met anyone more understanding. He could charm tenement landlords, post office employees, circus dwarfs and tax assessors.

When Wilma finally took aim, Arthur Wilkinson was the hapless target, and there was not one damn thing any of us could do about it. He had less chance than a lovely wench when the Goths came to town. His eyes glazed over. A broad fatuous grin was permanently in place. She was at his elbow, steering him, to keep him from walking into immovable objects. He thought her junebug cute, delicate and dear, infinitely valuable. He felt humble to be so favored, to be awarded this rare prize. Any hint that the junebug might be a scorpion didn’t offend him. He just couldn’t hear what was said to him. He laughed, thinking it some kind of joke.

After the minimum waiting time, they were married late one afternoon at the court house, and left in a new white Pontiac convertible, the back seat stacked with her matched luggage, her smile as brilliant as a brand new vermin trap ordered from Herter’s catalogue. I had kissed the dear little cheek of the junebug bride. She’d smelled soapy clean. She called me a dear boy. My present was a six pack-Metaxa, Fundador, Plymouth gin, Chivas Regal, Old Crow and a Piper Heidsieck ‘59. For the expendable marriage, you give the expendable gift. She left a message for the yacht that wouldn’t be back to pick her up. And I knew the two of them would not come back to Lauderdale as long as she was in command. She had sensed the appraisal of the group, and would require a more gullible environment.

Three days after they left, we all knew something was wrong with the Alabama Tiger. Instead of his benign and placid condition of mild alcoholic euphoria, he swung between morose sobriety and wild, reckless, dangerous drunks. The permanent houseparty began to dwindle. It was Meyer who dug the reason out of him after finding the Tiger sitting lumpily on the beach at dawn with a loaded.38 tucked inside his shirt. And because he wanted a little help keeping an eye on him, Meyer told me the story.

Wilma had secretly invited the Tiger over to headquarters at the hotel one morning. With a deftness, Meyer said, more common in the Far East than in our less ancient cultures, she had quickly learned how to turn him on and off, as if he were a construction kit she had wired herself. Then, with a dreadful control, she had taken him right to the edge and hung him up there, incapable of either release or retreat.

“In his own deathless words,”, Meyer said, “whooflin‘ and shakin’ like an ol‘ hawg hung on the charger wires. He honestly began to believe it was going to kill him. He could feel his heart beginning to burst. And she was laughing at him, he said, her face like a spook. Then suddenly, without release or warning, he felt dead. He heard her singing in her shower. After she was dressed, she kissed him on the forehead, patted his cheek and left. He thought of killing her as she bent over to kiss him, but even that seemed too unimportant for the effort involved. Suddenly he had become an old man. She had accepted the tension between them, the contest of wills, and had taken a little time out to whip him before leaving. It might interest you, McGee, to know that it happened last Thursday morning.” She had married Arthur Thursday afternoon. “There could be a little heart damage,” Meyer said. “There certainly seems to be plenty of emotional damage.”

Monday night, late, I walked over to the Tiger’s big flushdeck Wheeler and from fifty feet away I decided, with that sense of loss you have when a legend ends, that the oldest permanent floating houseparty in the world had finally ended. One small light glowed. But from twenty feet I picked up the tempo of Hawaiian music on his record player system, turned very low. Approaching, I made out a girl-shape in the glow of dock-lights, dancing alone slowly on the after deck under the striped canvas canopy, highlights glinting on the glass in her hand as she turned.

She saw me and angled her dance toward the rail, and I saw that it was one of the Ching sisters; Mary Li or Mary Lo, the identical twins who sing-and-dance at the Roundabout, closed Mondays. She was involved in a variant of the dance forms of her native Hawaii. It is impossible to tell the twins apart. Almost impossible. I had heard that Mary Lo is distinguished by a tiny vivid gemlike tattoo of a good luck ladybug, but so ultimately located that by the time one encounters it, any thought of choice has long since been obviated.

Her hair swayed dark and heavy as she turned, and her smile was white in duskiness. “Hey you, McGee,” she said in a low tone. “Long as one little thing keeps swinging, Poppa Tiger’s bash is still alive. You haul aboard, make yourself a cup there.”

As I made my drink she said, “We running a fox roster, man, the chicks who swung good here, keeping him braced up.”

“How is he making it, Mary?”

“Now he smiled some tonight, and he cried just a little time because he said he was done for good and all, but a little time back my sister came topside all tuckered and said he made out, and now they sacked out like death itself, and this here is the party, McGee man, down to just me. And now you, but Frannie coming by after she gets off work at two, bringing the bongo cat, and I say things pick up from here, pick up good. A swinger boat, with booze like a convention, you got to brace the management when he’s down.”

“The only reason, Mary?”

She stopped her dance eye to eye, a handspan away. Like that dirty-mind cop wants to close us down, Poppa Tiger goes way upstairs and has the clout to mend his ways. Like our nephew needed the school letter that time, Poppa Tiger writes pretty. I just want to keep the free booze coming man, and tap that locker full of prime beef, and get the boat kicks.“

“I knew better. I thought it would be nice to hear you say it, Mary.”

“Brace up this dead drink for me, on the house. It’s fat vodka, one cube and a smitch from the little cranberry juice can.”

“Gah.”

“Don’t drink it, just make it.”

We had some drinks, and I watched her dance, and we had some laughs because the old bear was on the mend. Frannie brought along some other kids from the club she was working. And as an unexpected by-product of celebration, I learned beyond any chance of confusion that the night dancer had been Mary Lo.

Selections from the Tiger pack are not my usual type, as it tends to be too casual and mechanical for the ornamented romanticism of the McGee, who always wants a scarf in token to tie to the crest of the cut-rate helmet, wants the soul-torn glance, the tremors of the heart, the sense-or the illusion-of both choice and importance. But Mary Lo left no bad taste. She made it like a game for kids, chuckling and crooning her pleasures, and it did indeed pleasantly blur the use Wilma made of the same game.

After they have strangled the king with boiling wine, it is therapeutic to get a little tipsy on a more palatable brand.

Two

ARTHUR FELL back into my life on that Tuesday afternoon. Acquaintance rather than friend. The dividing line is communication, I think. A friend is someone to whom you can say any jackass thing that enters your mind. With acquaintances, you are forever aware of their slightly unreal image of you, and to keep them content, you edit yourself to fit. Many marriages are between acquaintances. You can be with a person for three hours of your life and have a friend. Another one will remain an acquaintance for thirty years.

While he slept I dug into the more remote lockers in the bow section until I found the small ragged suitcase I remembered. Girl-bought clothes for a version of McGee of long ago, when I hid out and they hunted me, and I was afraid the stink of my rotting leg would clue them in. Killed the two of them while in delirium. No

20 John D. MacDonald memory of how she got me to the hospital, HeaW later 1101V she managed to keep them hmm taking the leg off. Now there is that crooked pale arroyo, long down the right thigh, deep into muscle tissue. Function unimpaired. But a chancy time, deep there in fevers, seeing the pearly gleam of the gates, talking to the dead brother, sometimes looking up out of a well at the prokssional faces bending over the bed.

17hese were thEe clothes she brought me, the clothes in which I was wheeled out into the vivid unreal world, clothes in which I first tottered about, ten feet tall and two inches wide, certain that if I fell off the crutches I would break like a glass stoW TWO, would fit Arthur nicely in his dwindled condition and were only slightly musty from long staragn. In a housewifely inood, I hung them out to air, dunking of the money the dead ones had stolen, quite legally, from the dead brother and how, quite illegafly, the girl and I had stolen it back, cut it down the middle.

While Arthur slept, I wondered how the hell to get rid of him. 17hat was the event of my Christian chariqi I could accept being an aid station but not a convalescent clinic. I went over the composition of the group as Arthur had known it, looking for a substitute pigeon. I had my slob summer all planned. Immediately after the dry rot surgery and a few other maintenance matters, I wanted to take the Busted Flush down to Dinner Key, get her hauled and get the bottom scraped and painted, and then chug at my stately 6+ knots-with a six-hundred mile range on the

RIGHT ORANGE FOR THE SHROUD 21

two 58 hp Hercules Diesels-over to the Bahamas on a dead calm day. The 52-foot barge-type houseboat can take pretty rough weather if Orced to, but she rolls so badly she tends to bust up the little servomechanisms aboard which make life lush. I had been mentally composing a guest list, limited to those random salty souls who can get amm, hold their liquor; endure sunshine, make good talk, swim the reefs, navigate, handle the lines, slay food fish and appreciate the therapeutic value of silence. It is the McGee version of being a loner-merely having some people about to whom you don’t have to constantly react. Arthur did not fit that specification closely enough.

When darkness came, I took the aired clothes below and put them on a chair in the guest stateroom. He was snoring in a muted way. I closed his door, fixed myself a Plymouth gin on the rocks, closed the lounge curtains, looked up Chookie McCall’s number. No answer. I hadn’t seen her or heard anything about her in two months.

I tried Hal the bartender at the Mile O’Beach who keeps good track of our gypsy contingent of entertainers. Hal said she’d been working at Bernie’s East up to May first when they closed the Brimstone Room, and as far as he know all she was doing “as a Saturday morning one-hour show of dance instruction on KLAKAY But he had it on good authority she was all set to regroup her six pack and open back at the Mile O’Beach in the Bahama Room come November 15th.

“Hal, is Frank Durkin back yet?”

“Back yet! Don’t sit on your hands until he gets back. Dint you hear what they got him on?”

“Only that he took a fall.”

“It was assault with intent to kill, or felonious assault or whatever the hell they call it. Three to five up in Haiford, and you can bet Frankie will get smartass with those screws up there and they will keep him for the five. Chook goes up to see him once a month. She’ll be making a lot of trips. All that woman could find something better, McGee, and you know it. She don’t get any younger.”

“Younger? Hell, she’s only twenty-five at the most.”

“Ten years in the entertainment business, and thirty when they turn Frankie Durkin loose. It adds up, Trav. If I was trying to locate her tonight. I think maybe Muriel Hess would be a good bet. She’s in the book. They’ve been working together on material for when she starts up here in the fall.”

I thanked him and tried the number. Chook was there. “What’s on your mind, stranger?”

“Buying a steak for the dancing girl.”

“Plural?”

“Not if you can help it.”

There was a long palm-over-the-mouthpiece silence, and then she said, “What kind of a place, Trav?”

“The Open Range?”

“Yum! I’ll have to go back to my place and change. How about coming over for a drink? Forty minutes?”

I shaved and changed, and left a note for Arthur in case he woke up. Because of all the boat errands, I had Miss Agnes parked nearby, my electric blue Rolls pickup truck, an amateur conversion accomplished by some desperate idiot during her checkered past. She is not yet old enough to vote. But almost. She started with a touch, and I went along the beach to where Miss McCall lives in the back end of a motel so elderly it has long since been converted from transient to permanent residence. She’s in what used to be two units. Wrapped in a robe, smelling of steam and soap, she gave me a sisterly kiss, told me to fix her a bourbon and water. I handed it in to her.

In a reasonably short time she came out in high heels and a pale green-gray dress. “McGee, I think I say yes because how many guys I go out with can I wear heels with?” She inspected me. “You’re too heavy.”

“Thanks. I feel too heavy.”

“Are you going to do anything about it?”

“I’ve started.”

“With booze in your hand?”

“I’m starting a little slow, but I’m one of those who lose it with exercise. Not enough lately. But a lot more coming up. Chook, you are not too heavy.”

“Because I work at it all the time.”

She was indeed something, All that woman, as Hal had said. Five ten, maybe 136 pounds, maybe 39-25-39, and every inch glossy, firm, pneumatic-intensely alive, perfectly conditioned as are only the dedicated professional dancers, circus flyers, tumblers, and combat rangers. Close up you can hear their motors humming. Heart beat in repose is in the fifties. Lung capacity extraordinary. Whites of the eyes a blue-white.

Not a pretty woman. Features too vital and heavy. Brows heavy. Hair harsh and black and glossy, like a racing mare. Indian-black eyes, bold nose, big broad mouth. A handsome, striking human being. When she was five years old they had started her on ballet. When she was twelve she had grown too big to be accepted in any company. When she was fifteen, claiming nineteen, she was in the chorus of a Broadway musical.

While I freshened the drinks she told me what she was working out with Muriel, a New Nations theme, researching the music and rhythms. She said it would give them some exotic stuff and some darling costumes and some sexy choreography. We sat to finish the drink. She said Wassener, the new manager, was considering a no-bra policy for the little troupe next season, and was sounding out the authorities to see how bad a beef he might get. She said she hoped it wouldn’t work out, as it would mean either canceling out two good girls she already had lined up, or talking them into wax jobs. “Posing and blackouts and that stuff,” she said, “it’s a different thing. You just keep your chin up and you arch your back a little and tighten your shoulders back, but I’ve been trying to tell Mr. Wassener dancing is something else. MiGod, a time step in fast tempo, and all of a sudden it could look like a comedy routine, you know what I mean. If he thinks it’ll draw, what he should get is a couple of big dumb ponies and just let them stand upstage on pedestals maybe, in baby spots and turn slow.”

After I agreed, there was a last inch of the drink silence, and I knew I had to say something about Frank Durkin. Like being forced to discuss ointment with somebody with an incurable skin rash.

“Sorry to hear Frank took such a long count.”

She sprang to her feet and gave me a look Custer must have gotten very tired of before they chopped him up.

“It wasn’t fair, goddam it! The guy was being very smartass, and Frankie didn’t owe him any fifty dollars. It was a mistake. When he followed him out into the parking lot, all Frankie was going to do was scare him. But he jumped the wrong way and Frankie ran over him. What they did, Travis, believe me, they judged him on the other times he’s been in trouble. And that’s unconstitutional, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.”

“He has that terrible temper. Right in court he tried to get his hands on the judge. Believe me, he’s his own worst enemy. But this isn’t fair at all.”

What could anyone tell her? To forget him? She’d swing from the floor and loosen your teeth. The only times she ever tried to forget him was after their savage quarrels. She was a very fine woman, and Frankie Durkin was no damned good. Sponged off her. Kept her on the hook with promises of marriage. Fancied himself crafty and managed to outsmart himself in most deals. Then cursed his luck.

I would have said his luck was excellent because he would have long since been caged or fried as a murderer if, in several known instances, he’d achieved his heart’s desire. I saw him in his fury once. His pale blue eyes turned white as milk. His underprivileged face went slack as taffy. And, grunting with each breath, he began to try to kill a friend of mine. Could have made it if they’d been alone. As he wasn’t worth breaking any hand bones on, I took the billy I kill toothy fish with and bounced it off his skull. After three lumps he was still trying to crawl toward Mack’s throat, but the fourth one pacified him. When he woke up he seemed unfocused, like a man after a hard fever. And had no hard feelings at all.

“How is he taking it?”

“Real hard, Trav. He keeps telling me he can’t stand it, he’s got to do something.” She sighed. “But there’s nothing he can do. Maybe… when he gets out, he’ll be ready to settle down. Let’s get out of here.”

Miss Agnes drifted us silently over to the mainland, to the open Range, a place disfigured by mass production Texas folk art, steer horns, branding irons, saddle hardware, coiled lariats and bullwhips. But the booths are deep and padded, the lights low, the steaks prime and huge. Chook ordered hers so raw I was grateful for the low candlepower of the booth lamp. I invested some additional ditch-Arthur money in a bottle of burgundy. I have seen Chook under other circumstances do the social-eating routine. But with me she could follow her inclination and eat with the busy, dedicated, appreciative silence of a farmhand or roustabout, chugging her way deftly through tossed, baked and extra rare, and at last leaning back from the emptiness to give me an absent, dreamy smile, and stifle a generous belch.

Judging I was at the exact moment, I said, “Small favor?”

“Anything at all, Trav darling.”

“I’m cutting you in on a lame duck who showed up. In bad, bad shape. It would be sort of for old time’s sake for you.”

“Who?”

“Arthur Wilkinson.”

I thought I saw a momentary softness in her eyes before they turned fierce. She leaned forward. “I tell you what I am not. I am not a trash basket. I am no place you can dump the leavings from that pig.”

“Put your wheels down, Chookie. Who’s the most naive little chick in your troupe?”

“Huh? Well… Mary Lou King.”

“She engaged?”

“Sort of. What is this, anyway?”

“Now suppose say… Rock Hudson came barreling in at her, all guns blazing. What would Mary Lou do?”

Chook giggled. “Gawd, she’d roll over like a dead bug.”

“I’m under a handicap. I never did find out what status you reached with Arthur. He’d never volunteer that sort of information, as you well know. It was my guess it got pretty humid.”

She studied her nails. “When Frankie took off that time, he busted my place up before he went. Everything. He even tore up my scrapbooks. He said I’d never lay eyes on him again as long as I lived. And I don’t even know what it was we were fighting about. Okay, so I needed a gentle guy. Not for sex. I’m not cold-maybe I’m more the other way than I should be, but, hell, I can always put on old music and dig out old routines and a practice uniform, work hard for a few hours and sleep like a baby.” She gave me a quick dark glance.

“I guess I should be honest. Mostly it was to have somebody close, but that’s no reason to knock the other part of it. And maybe I was trying to use him to tear loose from Frankie. At first I told him all my lousy troubles. And we took some walks. And then after one walk, we ended up in my bed. And if I left it entirely up to Arthur, we wouldn’t have. I had to make it easy for him without letting him catch on to what I was doing. You know me, Trav. I’m not a pig. I suppose… if I taught third grade in Webster Falls, I wouldn’t last too long. But in the business I’m in… I’m thought square. You know?”

“I know.”

For just an instant I had a feeling of waste and loss. There was so much shrewdness, native intelligence, perception there. The awareness of self, undistorted, a virtue growing ever more rare in our times. It made you wonder what this creature of such vast vitality could have become if she had taken some other direction with her life. Too many of the good ones aren’t being used up all the way.

But a little personal resonance got to me. Because I’d never found the right way of using myself up. So I had settled for a variation of the lush life, bumming along the golden strand until funds sagged too low, then venturing forth to clip the clip artists, wrestling the stolen meat-legally stolen usually-out of the bandit jowls, then splitting the salvage down the middle with the victim-who, without the services of MeGee, would have had to settle for nothing, which, as I have often pointed out, is considerably less than half.

It isn’t a very respectable dedication. So just say it’s a living. Sometimes I get a very faint echo of the knight errant psychosis. And try to make more out of it than is there. But everybody’s hall closet is full of lances and shields and other tourney gear. The guy who sells you insurance gets singed by his own secret kind of dragon breath. And his own Maid Marian yoo-hoos him back to the castle tower.

Maybe, somewhere along the line, I could have gone the other route. But you get a taste for the hunt. You keep wondering how close the next one is going to get to you. And you have to see. And nothing can slow the reflexes like the weight of mortgages, withholding, connubial contentment, estate program, regular checkups and puttering around your own lawn.

But now they are phasing out the hunters. Within this big complex culture, full of diodes, paperclips, account numbers, they are earnestly boarding up the holes, sealing the conduits, installing bugs and alarms in every corridor. In a few years there’ll be no room left for the likes of McGee. They’ll grab him, carry him away and adjust him to reality, and put him to work at something useful in one of the little cubicles in the giant structure.

So who are you to think of a fuller life for Miss Chookie McCall?

“Could it have worked out with Arthur?” I asked her.

She shrugged those strong shoulders. “He’s almost five years older, but he seemed kind of like a kid. I don’t know. So considerate and so… grateful. He was getting to be a better lover. It was like at first, getting him to think things were his idea. Trav, honest to God, what was I supposed to do? Ask him to please come to Jacksonville with me? I mean there’s pride too. He wanted to. But he thought it wouldn’t be right. I wanted him there. Maybe it was like putting up a wall, a little at a time, shutting out the hurt from Frankie. Maybe we could have made the wall thick enough and tall enough. Maybe not. Maybe when Frankie came back, it would have been the same for me, Arthur or no Arthur, Frankie crooking his finger and I crawl to him. I won’t ever know, will I, because Arthur didn’t go up to Jax with me, and so we didn’t have that three weeks and we didn’t have the four months back here before Frankie came back, broke and sick and mean as a basket of snakes. I came back and Wilma had Arthur skinned and nailed to the bar, and the son of a bitch shook hands with me as if he couldn’t remember my name. Pride still counts with me. I am not going to be a damned rescue mission, Trav. Believe me. Go look for a little mother somewhere else. He made his lousy choice.”

“Okay. I see your point. But just stop by the boat and take a look at him.”

“No! You don’t get clever with me. Once in Akron the dressing room was alive with mice, and I set a trap. All it did was maim one little bastard, and three weeks later, after I got him back on his feet, I turned him loose. He’d lick peanut butter off my fingertip. Trav, I wouldn’t go anywhere near Arthur.”

Three

WHEN I got back to the Busted Flush with Chook, Arthur Wilkinson was as I had left him, the note still there. I put on the overhead light. I heard her suck air. Her strong cool fingers clamped on my hand. I looked at her thoughtful profile, saw her tanned forehead knotted into a frown, white teeth indenting her lower lip. I turned the light off and turned her, and we went back to the lounge, two closed doors between us and Arthur.

“You should get a doctor to look at him!” she said indignantly.

“Maybe. Later on. No fever. He passed out, as I told you, but he said he just felt faint. Malnutrition is my guess.”

“Maybe you got a license to practice? Trav, he looks so horrible! Like a skull, like he was dying instead of sleeping. How do you know?”

“That he’s sleeping? What else?”

“But what could have happened to him?”

“Chook, that was a very nice guy, and I don’t think he had the survival drive you and I have. He’s the victim type. Wilma was his mousetrap, and nobody cared if he got maimed. No peanut butter. We had one in Korea. A big gentle kid fresh out of the Hill School. Everybody from my platoon sergeant on down tried to get the green off him before he got nailed. But one rainy afternoon he got suckered by the fake screaming we’d gotten used to, and he went to help and got stitched throat to groin with a machine pistol. I heard about it and went over as they were sticking the litter onto a jeep. He died right then, and the look on his face was not pain or anger or regret. He just looked very puzzled, as if he was trying to fit this little incident into what he’d been taught at home and couldn’t quite make it. It’s the way some earnest people take a practical joke.”

“Shouldn’t we see if Arthur is really all right?”

“Let him get his sleep. Fix you a stinger?”

“I don’t know. No. I mean yes. I’m going to take another look at him.”

Five minutes later I tiptoed into the companionway beyond the head. The guest stateroom door was closed. I heard the tone of her voice, not the words. Gentleness. He coughed and answered her and coughed again.

Back in the lounge I locked the big tuner into WAEZ-FM, and fed it into the smaller speakers at low volume, too low to drive my big AR-3’s. I stretched out on the curve of the big yellow couch, took small bites of the gin stinger, listened to a string quartet fit together the Chinese puzzle pieces of some ice-cold Bach, and smiled a fatuous eggsucking smile at my prime solution to the Arthur problem.

In about twenty minutes she joined me, eyes red, smile shy, walking with less assurance than her custom. She sat on the end of the couch beyond my feet and said, “I fixed him some warm milk and he went right to sleep again.”

“That’s nice.”

“I guess it’s just being exhausted and half starved and heartsick, Trav.”

“That was my guess.”

“The poor dumb bastard.”

“Outclassed.”

I got her stinger out of the freezer and brought it to her. She sipped it.

“There isn’t anything else you can do, of course,” she said.

“Beg your pardon?”

She looked at me and opened her eyes very wide. “Get it back, of course. They cleaned him clean. That’s why he came to you.”

I got up and went over to the tuner and killed Mr. Bach. I stood in front of Chook.

“Now just one minute there, woman. Hold it. There’s no…”

“For God’s sake, stop looking as if you’re going to bray like a wounded moose, McGee. We talked about you once.”

“Make some sense.”

“He wondered about you. You know. What you do. So I sort of told him.”

“You sort of told him.”

“Just how you step in when people get the wrong end of the stick, and you keep half of what you can recover. McGee, why in the world do you think he came right to you! Could anything be more obvious? Why do you think that poor whipped creature crawled across the state and fell on your doorstep? You can’t possibly turn him down.”

“I can give it a very good try, honey.”

Silence. She finished the drink. She clacked the empty glass down. She came up off the couch, moved close, stood tall, fixed me with a poisonous stare, upslanted, fists on hips.

“Did I do you a favor coming here?” she said in almost a whisper. “Do you owe me for that, and for one or two other small things I could name? Do you want me to go after them myself? I will, you know. I’m calling you on this one, you big ugly lazy jerk. They smashed him. They gutted him. And there’s no other place he can turn.” Giving emphasis to each word by rapping my chest with a hard knuckle, she said, “You-are-going-to-help-that-man.”

“Now listen… ”

“And I want a piece of the action, Travis!”

“I have no intention of… ”

“The first thing we have to do is get him on his feet, and pry every living piece of information out of him.”

“How about that weekly television thing you… ”

‘I’m two tapes ahead, and I can go down there and do three more in one day. Trav, they didn’t leave him a dime! It was some kind of land development thing. Over near Naples.“

“Maybe by fall…”

“Travis!”

By the following Saturday afternoon the Busted Flush was swinging on two hooks in Florida Bay, two miles off Candle Key, all larders stocked, five hundred gallons in the fresh water tanks With alterations from time to time, I’ve tried to make the old barge-type houseboat ever more independent of shoreside services. Except when home at Bahia Mar, I like to avoid the boat basin togetherness. Under one hatch I have a whole area paved with husky batteries, enough of them so that I can stay at anchor and draw on them for four days before they begin to get a little feeble. When they’re down, I can use them to start up an electric trickle-feed generator which can bring them back up in six hours. If I ever get careless enough to run them all the way down, I can break out the big 10 kw gasoline generator and use it to get the electric one started. At anchor I switch everything over to 32 V. I can’t run the airconditioning off the batteries, but I can run it off the gas generator. Then it is a decision as to which will be the most annoying, the heat or the noise.

The sun was heading for Hawaii. Just enough breeze for a pattycake sound against the hull. I was stretched out on the sun deck. A line of pelicans creaked by beating and coasting, heading home to the rookery. What I had learned so far from Arthur didn’t sound promising. But I comforted myself with thinking that while we were getting him in shape, I was doing myself some promised good. I was on cheese, meat and salad. No booze. No cigarettes. Just one big old pot pipe packed with Black Watch for the sunset hour. Due any time now.

Every muscle felt stretched, bruised and sore. We’d anchored at mid-morning. I’d spent a couple of hours in mask and fins, knocking and gouging some of the grass beards and corruption off the hull. After lunch I’d lain on the sundeck with my toes hooked under the rail and done about ten sets of situps. Chook had caught me at it and talked me into some of the exercises she prescribed for her dance group. One exercise was a bitch. She could do it effortlessly. You lift your left leg, grab the ankle with your right hand, and play one-legged jump rope with it, over and back. Then switch hands and ankles and jump on the other leg. After that we swam. I could win the sprints. In our distance events, she had a nasty habit of slowly drawing even, and then slowly pulling away, and an even nastier habit of smiling placidly at me while I wheezed and gasped.

I heard a sound and turned my head and saw her climb the ladderway to the sundeck. She looked concerned. She sat cross-legged beside me. In that old faded pink suit, dark hair in a salty tangle, no makeup, she looked magnificent.

“He feels kind of weak and dizzy,” she said. “I think I let him get too much sun. It can sap your strength. I gave him a salt tablet, and it’s making him nauseated.”

“Want me to go take a look at him?”

“Not right now. He’s trying to doze off. Gee, he’s so damn grateful for every little thing. And it broke my heart, the way he looked in trunks; so scrawny and pathetic.”

“He eats many lunches like today, it won’t last long.”

She inspected a pink scratch on a ripe brown calf. “Trav? How are you going to go about it? What are you going to try to do?”

“I wouldn’t have the slightest idea.”

“How long are we going to stay here?”

“Until he has the guts to want to go back, Chook.”

“But why should he have to? I mean if he dreads it so.”

“Because, dear girl, he is my reference library. He doesn’t know what very small thing might turn out to be very important, so he doesn’t think of it or mention it. Then when it’s about to go off in my face, he can tell me where the fuse is, which is something he can’t do from a hundred miles away.”

She looked at me speculatively. “He wants to give up the whole idea.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“Damn you!”

“Sweetie, you can take a good and gentle horse, and you can start using a chain on it. Maybe you turn it into a killer. And maybe you break it right down to nothing, to a trembling hunk of meat. Then can you ever turn it back into a horse? Depends on the blood line. Sometimes you don’t want the victim along. Sometimes, like this time, you have the hunch you’ll need him. I won’t go into this without him. So he has to forget the chain. You’re along to turn him back into a horse, Chook. You’ve got to prop him up. I don’t want you in on any of the rest of it.”

“Why not?”

“It sounds just a little too dirty so far.”

“And I have just walked out the convent gates in my little white pinafore. Come on, Trav!”

“Miss McCall, the most dangerous animal in the world is not the professional killer. It’s the amateur. When they sense that somebody is taking back what they went to so much effort to acquire, that’s when they get violent. The essentially dishonest man is capable of truly murderous indignation. In this instance, the bitch will be looking on, heightening the performance, looking for blood. I don’t think she’ll relish losing.”

I sensed mischief as she studied me.

“I guess any man would find her pretty exciting.”

“Hell, it’s exciting to be pushed out a window. Or run over.”

“And you didn’t have the least little urge, darling? She did sort of have an eye on you.”

“The scorpion is a very cute little brown bug, the way she plods along with that tail curled over her back. She’s a living fossil, you know, unchanged in millions of years. It’s imaginable that some bug-lover might want to pick one up and stroke her scaly little back.”

Big brown girl in scanty pink, in Zen-pose on my splendid vinyl imitation of teak. It is real teak on the aft deck below, partially justifying such trickery. Staring dubiously at me.

“Men aren’t that bright about those.”

“Arthur wasn’t.”

“And what have you got? Radar?”

“Alarm systems. Bachelor devices to detect poisonous types. One good way is to watch how the other women react. You and the others, when Wilma Ferner was around, all your mouths got a little tight, and you were very very polite to her. And you made no girl talk at all with her. No clothes talk. No date talk. No guided trips to the biff. No girl secrets. Just the way, honey, a woman should be damned wary of a man other men have no use for.”

That was a little careless, and too close to home. Frankie gives most men the warm sweet urge to hit him heavily in the mouth. Chook’s dark eyes became remote.

“If the breeze dies it could get buggy here.”

“The long-range forecast says we’ll get more wind instead of less.”

I rose smartly to my feet. If I’d been alone, perhaps I would have crawled moaning to the sundeck rail and hauled myself up. Vanity is a miracle drug. I could count on three or four more days of torment before, I hoped, the limberness would come back, along with the hardened belly and lost pounds and unjangled nerves.

As I stretched and yawned, Chookie said, “Hey!” and came to me and in a very gingerly way touched, with one fingertip, the pink weal below my left armpit.

“I didn’t notice that. It’s new, huh?”

“Aw, it’s just a scratch.”

“Knife?”

“Yup.”

She swallowed and looked ill. “The idea of knives, it makes my stomach turn over. And it makes me think of Mary Lo Ching.”

While I’d been away on this last one, the one that gave me the funds for a slob summer, an animal had gotten to Mary Lo with a knife. The twins had been working in Miami Beach, in March. They got him in a few hours by rounding up known sex offenders. They’d thought this one harmless. He’d been tucked away a few times for short falls. Peeping, indecent exposure. His profession was fry cook. All the time he was working himself up to a big one, and Mary Lo had been in just the wrong place at the wrong time. He hadn’t been selective. Just the first one he could get to. They didn’t count the wounds. They just said “more than fifty.”

The psychiatrists call it a sickness. The cops call it a hell of a problem. The sociologists call it a product of our culture, our puritanical tendency to consider sex a delicious nastiness. Some of them escalate to the big violence. Others stay with a small kick, peering into bedrooms. You can’t give a man life for that, nor even constructive psychiatric help during a short sentence. He cuts brush on the county gang, tormented by the other prisoners, driven further into his private madness. Then he comes out and cuts up Mary Lo, and at once everybody is an expert on how he should have been handled by the authorities, up to and including gelding the very first time he committed a nuisance in a public park.

“Anybody know anything about Mary Li?” I asked.

“Just that she went back to Hawaii.” Chook stepped back a pace and looked at me from ears to heels as if examining one of the metal sculptures in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. She shook her head sadly and said, “McGee, I swear, I never really noticed before how many times you’ve been torn up.”

“This one here happened when I was three. My big brother threw a hammer up into a tree to knock some apples down. The hammer came down too.”

“Do you like being in a crazy kind of business that gets you so close to being killed?”

“I don’t like to hurt. Every little nick makes me that much more careful. Maybe I’ll get so careful I’ll have to find some other line of work.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. Miners get silicosis. Doctors get coronaries. Bankers get ulcers. Politicians get strokes. Remember about the alligators? Honey, if nothing happened to people, we’d all be ass-deep in people.”

“And I should see what happened to the other guys. Okay, you can’t be serious.” She marched off, and went down the ladderway like a… a dancer going down a ladderway.

I could be serious in that particular area, but not on her terms. I’d had enough stitches to make a quilt, and had enjoyed not one of them at all, at all. And most floor nurses have a top sergeant syndrome. I went below and packed the promised pipe. Chook was in the stainless steel galley, banging pots. I went through to the guest stateroom where I had quartered myself. Chook had made that decision while we were provisioning the boat, when she brought her gear aboard. She had declared flatly that she wasn’t going to mouse around. All three of us knew she’d slept with Arthur before his marriage, and the huge bed in the master stateroom-the bed that had been there when I’d won the boat-gave her a better chance to keep watch over him, and if he wanted to make something of it, then she was willing to be compliant on the basis of therapy, affection, old time’s sake, morale-call it whatever the hell you feel like calling it, MeGee.

I had told her I avoided putting names on things whenever possible, and I transferred my personal gear and went back to the hot greasy chore of smoothing out the port engine which, after too much idleness; was running hesitantly, fading when I gave it more throttle, complaining that it wanted its jets cleaned.

By mid-evening, Arthur Wilkinson felt better. It was a soft night. We sat in three deck chairs on the afterdeck, facing the long path of silver moonlight on the black water.

I overpowered his reluctance and made him go over some of the stuff he had already told me, interrupting him with questions to see if I could unlock other parts of his memory.

“Like I told you, Trav, I had the idea we were going to go farther away, maybe the southwest, but after we stayed overnight in Naples, she said maybe it would be nice to rent a beach house for a while. Because it was April we could probably find something nice. What she found was nice, all right. Isolated, and a big stretch of private beach, and a pool. It was seven hundred a month, plus utilities. That included the man who came twice a week to take care of the grounds, but then there was another two hundred and fifty for the woman who came in about noon every day but Sunday.”

“Name?”

“What? Oh… Mildred. Mildred Mooney. Fifty, I’d guess. Heavy. She had a car and did the marketing and cooking and housework. She’d serve dinner and then leave and do the dishes when she came the next day. So it came to maybe twelve hundred a month for operating expenses. And about that much again for Wilma. Hairdresser and dressmaker, cosmetics, mail orders to Saks, Bonwits, places like that. Masseuse, a special wine she likes. And shoes. God, the shoes! So say in round figures there’s twenty-five hundred a month going out, which would be thirty thousand a year, three times what was coming in. After wedding expenses, and trading for the convertible, I had five thousand cash aside from the securities, but it was melting away so fast it scared me. I estimated it would be gone before the end of June.”

“You tried to make her understand?”

“Of course. Wilma would stare at me as if I was talking Urdu. She couldn’t seem to comprehend. It made me feel cheap and small-minded. She said it wasn’t any great problem. In a little while I could start looking around and find something where I could make all the money we’d ever need. I was worried-but it was all kind of indistinct. The only thing that really seemed to count was just… having her. In the beginning, it was so damned… wonderful.”

“But it changed?”

“Yes. But I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Later?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. It all turned into something… quite different. I don’t want to try to explain it.”

“If I left?” Chook said.

“No. Thanks, but that wouldn’t make any difference.”

“Get on with it then. When was the first contact with the land syndicate people?”

“Late May. She’d gone walking down the beach in the late afternoon, and she came back with Calvin Stebber. Some kid had hooked a shark and as he was fighting it and beaching it with people watching him. That’s how she got in casual conversation with him, and it turned out they knew a lot of the same people, so she brought him back for a drink. Short and heavy and very tan. Always smiling. I’d say he wasn’t much over forty, but he looked older. And he seemed… important. They jabbered away about people I’ve read about. Onassis, Niarchos; people like that. He was very vague about what he was cloing. He just said that he’d come down to work out a small project, but it was dragging on a lot longer than he’d estimated. He seemed… fond of Wilma. He wished us happiness.

“After he left, Wilma got quite excited. She told me that Calvin Stebber was enormously rich and went around making very successful investments in all kinds of things. She said that if we played our cards right, maybe he would let us in on whatever he was doing, and certainly the very least we could expect would be four times our money back, because he was never interested in smaller returns. To tell the truth, it seemed to me like a good way out, if she could swing it. With four times the capital I’d have enough income to keep her the way she wanted to live. Stebber was staying aboard a yacht at the Cutlass Yacht Club, and when he left he asked us to stop by for drinks the next day.

“The yacht was absolutely huge, maybe a hundred feet long, some kind of a converted naval vessel, I think.”

“Name and registry?”

“The Buccaneer, out of Tampa, Florida. He said friends had loaned it to him. That’s when I met the other three men in the syndicate.”

I had to slow Arthur down so that I could get the other three men nailed down, made into separate and distinct people in my mind.

G. Harrison Gisik. The old one. The sick one. Tall and frail and old and quiet. Bad color. Moved slowly and with apparent great effort. From Montreal.

Like Stebber, G. Harrison Gisik had no woman with him. The other two each had one. The other two were each local.

Crane Watts. Local attorney. Dark, good looking, friendly. And unremarkable. He came equipped with wife. Vivian. Called Viv. Dark, sturdy, pretty-scored by sun and wind-an athlete. Tennis, sailing, golf, riding. She was, Arthur thought, a lady.

Boone Waxwell. The other local. From a local swamp, possibly. Sizable. Rough and hard and loud. An accent from way back in the mangroves. Black curly hair. Pale pale blue eyes. Sallowy face. Boone Waxwell, known as Boo. And he came equipped with a non-wife, a redhead of exceptional mammary dimension. Dilly Starr. As loud as good ol‘ Boo, and, as soon as she got tight, slightly more obscene. And she got tight quickly.

“So okay,” I said. “The four members of the syndicate. Stebber, Gisik, Crane, Waxwell. And Stebber the only one living aboard. A party, with Boo and his broad making all you nicer folks a little edgy. So?”

“We sat around and had drinks. There was a man aboard who made drinks and passed things, a Cuban maybe. Mario, they called him. When Calvin Stebber had a chance, when Dilly was in the head and Boo had gone ashore to buy cigars, he explained to us that sometimes, in deals, you weren’t able to pick your associates on the basis of their social graces. `Waxwell is the key to this project,‘ he said.”

“How soon did they let you in on it?” I asked him.

“Not right away. It was about two weeks. Wilma kept after him, and she kept telling me that he said there wasn’t a chance, that there wasn’t really enough to go around as it was. But she didn’t give up hope. Finally one morning he phoned me from the yacht and asked me to stop by alone. He was alone too. He said I had a very persistent wife. Persistence alone wouldn’t have been enough. But this deal had dragged on so long that one of the principals had backed out. He said he felt obligated to offer it to other associates, but as long as I was on the scene and because he was so fond of Wilma, he had talked Mr. Gisik into agreeing to let me in, with certain stipulations.”

“Is that when he explained the deal to you?”

“Just in broad outline, Trav, not in detail. We were in the main lounge, and he spread the maps out on the chart table. What he called the Kippler Tract was marked off and tinted. Sixty-one thousand acres. It was a strange shape, beginning north of Marco and getting wider over east of Everglades City, and going practically to the Dade County line. The syndicate was negotiating the option of it on a two-year basis at thirty dollars an acre against a purchase price of a hundred and twenty an acre. As soon as they had a firm option, he and another group were setting up a development corporation to buy the tract from the syndicate for three hundred and eighty dollars an acre. It meant that, after taking off syndicate overhead and operating expenses, the members would end up with five dollars for every dollar invested in the option-which would come to one million eight hundred and thirty thousand just for the option. He showed me the prospectus of what Deltona was doing at Marco Island, where the Collier interests along with Canadian money were planning a community of thirty thousand people. He said his staff had investigated every aspect of the plan, projected growth, water resources and so on, and if we could just get the option, it couldn’t miss.

“Then he told me that he was in for seven hundred thousand, Gisik for four hundred thousand, a New York associate for five hundred thousand. The remaining two hundred and thirty thousand was represented by Crane Watts and Boo Waxwell, one hundred even by Watts. He said those small pieces were a nuisance, but it was essential to have a bright young lawyer on the scene, and that Boo Waxwell was the one with the close association with the Kippler heirs and able, if anybody was, to talk them into the deal. The New York associate had bowed out and there was five hundred thousand open. He said my five hundred thousand would become three million, a net return of one million nine after taxes, and my investment back.

“I said I’d like one hundred thousand worth, and he looked at me as if I was a dog on the street and he rolled up the maps saying he hadn’t realized he was wasting his time as well as mine, and thanks for stopping by. Wilma was furious. Site said I’d blown the whole thing. She said she’d talk to Calvin Stebber again and see if there was any chance at all of his taking me in on the basis of two hundred thousand. I said it didn’t seem smart to gamble the whole thing, and she said it wasn’t a gamble.”

“Then he let you in.”

“Reluctantly. I sent an airmail special to my brokerage house to sell at current market and airmail me a certified check for two hundred thousand. We met on the yacht, I signed the syndicate agreement, and it was witnessed and notarized. It gave me 9 and 15/100ths shares in the syndicate.”

“And you didn’t have a lawyer of your own check it out.”

“Travis… you can’t understand haw it was. They seemed so important. They were doing me n favor to let me in. Without Wьma, they would never have let me in. It was my chance to afford her. And from the moment I’d messed the deal up when I had the first chance, Wilma wouldn’t let me near her. She’d hardly speak to me. She moved to a different bedroom in the beach house. And… they said it was a standard agreement. It was about six pages, single-spaced, on Iegal size paper, and I had to sign four copies.

Wilma stood with her hand on my shoulder as I signed and gave me a big kiss wheen was over.“

“Stebber left soon after that?”

“A day or two later. About then Boo Waxwell began to hang around. He’d stop by without warning. It was obvious to me that he was attracted to Wilma. And she seemed too friendly toward him. When I complained to her, she said Calvin Stebber had said we had to be friendly to him. I tried to find out from Waxwell how things were going, but he’d just laugh and tell me not to sweat it.”

“When did they ask for more?”

“On August first I got a letter from Crane Watts. It referred to paragraph something, subparagraph something, and asked for my check in the amount of thirty-three thousand three hundred and thirty-three dollars and thirty-four cents at my earliest convenience. I was shocked. I dug out my copy and looked at the paragraph. It said that members of the syndicate could be assessed on the basis of participation to cover additional expenses. I went to see him right away. He wasn’t as friendly as before. I hadn’t seen his office before. It was north of the city on the Tamiami Trail, and it was just a cubicle in a roadside real estate office. He acted as if I was taking up valuable time. He said that negotiations had progressed to the point where the Kippler heirs had decided they wanted thirty-five dollars option money per acre, which meant the syndicate members had to come up with an additional three hundred and five thousand dollars, and simple mathematics showed that 9.15 percent of that was what he had requested by letter.

‘’I said that I didn’t think I could make it, and that I guessed I’d just have to accept a proportional reduction of my share of the venture. He gave me a funny look and said he could understand my request, but if I had examined the subparagraph immediately following, certainly I’d realize it couldn’t be done. I hadn’t brought it. He got out an office copy and showed me the paragraph. It said, in effect, that if any participant failed to meet approved assessments, his share of the venture was forfeit, and would be divided among the remaining members in proportion to the interest they held at the time. He said it was perfectly legal, and the document had been signed, notarized and recorded.

I went back to the beach house and it took me quite a while to get it through Wilma’s head. Finally she understood that unless I came up with the additional money we’d lose the two hundred thousand. She said it wasn’t fair. She said she would phone Calvin Stebber and get it all straightened out. I don’t know where she finally located him. She didn’t want me in the room. She said I made her nervous. After she talked to him, she came out and told me that he’d said his hands were tied. If he made any special arrangement for me, the others would raise hell. She said she’d asked him if he’d buy my share out, but he said his cash position at the moment was loo low even to consider it at that time. He recommended raising the money, saying it was undoubtedly the last assessment, and he was certain the deal would go through any day. Wilma was agitated for a long time, but finally we sat down and tried to work it all out. I had, at current market, about fifty-eight thousand left in just two stocks. Standard Oil of New Jersey and Continental Can. I was going to have to sell something anyway to meet current expenses, as we had five hundred in the bank and three thousand in unpaid bills. I left twenty thousand in stocks, paid Crane Watts and the bills and put three thousand in the checking account.

“On September first the option price went up to forty dollars an acre, and they asked for exactly the same amount again. By then I had four hundred in the bank and the twenty thousand. But I knew we had to raise it. I’d taken the agreement to another lawyer by then. He said it was ironclad, and only a damn fool would have signed such a thing. That was the time Wilma really cooperated. I thought that she was really beginning to understand the value of money. We sat down together and put everything into the pot. The rest of my stock, the car, my cameras, her furs and jewels. She went over to Miami and sold her stuff. We were just able to get it all together, with about four hundred dollars over. We paid off, and gave up the beach house and moved to a cheap motel room five or six blocks north of the intersection of Fifth Avenue and the Traь, the Citrus Blossom it was called. We cooked on a grill in the room.

“She kept asking what in the world we’d ever do if they asked for more. And she’d cry. It was her idea that I should make up a list of old friends who might come in on a good thing. She kept after me. I didn’t want to do it. Finally I had a list of thirty-two reasonably successful people who might be willing to trust me. She rewrote my letter several times, making it sound like the greatest opportunity in the world, and we made up thirty-two originals on the motel typewriter and sent them off, asking for a minimum of one thousand each, and any amount up to ten thousand they might want to put in. Then we waited. There were sixteen replies. Eight of them said they were sorry. Eight sent money. Four of them sent a thousand each. Two sent five hundred. One sent a hundred dollars and one sent fifty dollars. Fifty-one hundred and fifty that we put in the joint account. No letters came in the next week. I sent signed notes to the eight friends as I had promised in the original letter. Then I got a call at the motel from Crane Watts. Calvin Stebber was staying at the Three Crowns in Sarasota and he wanted us to come up and see him. Watts said it might be good news. Wilma had such a headache she said I better go alone. We had no car. I took a Trailways bus to Sarasota and got there at five o’clock, and at the desk they told me Mr. Stebber had checked out but he had left a message for a Mr. Wilkinson. I identified myself and they gave it to me. It merely said that it looked as if it might be another six months or so before the deal would go through, and probably before the time was up there would be another assessment, just a small one, for operating expenses. My share would probably not be over eight or ten thousand.

“I just sat there. I couldn’t seem to think clearly. I took a bus back. I didn’t get to the motel until a little after midnight. My key wouldn’t work. I hammered on the door. Wilma didn’t answer. I went to the office and the owner came to the door after I’d rung the night bell a long time. He said the lock had been changed and he hadn’t been paid for two weeks, and he was holding my clothes and luggage until I paid up. I said there was some mistake, that my wife had paid him. He said she hadn’t.

“I asked where she was, and he said that in the middle of the afternoon he’d seen her and some man carrying suitcases out to a car and driving away, and it made him think we were going to beat him out of the rent, so he had put my stuff in storage and changed the lock. He hadn’t noticed the car particularly, just that it was a pale-colored car with Florida plates. She hadn’t left any message far me. I walked around the rest of the night. When the bank opened I found out she’d cleaned out the account the previous morning, when I thought she’d gone grocery shopping and came home with that headache.”

Toward the end of it his voice had grown dull and listless. Chook stirred and sighed. A gust of the freshening breeze swung the boat, and some predatory night bird went by honking with anguish.

“But you found her again, later on,” I said, to get him started.

“I’m pretty tired.”

Chook reached and patted him. “You go to bed, honey. Want me to fix you anything?”

“No thanks,” he murmured. He got up with an effort and went below, saying goodnight to us as the screened door hissed shut.

“Poor wounded bastard,” Chook said in a half whisper.

“It was a very thorough job. They got everything except the clothes he had on. They even milked old friendships.”

“He hasn’t much resistance yet. Or much spirit.”

“Both of those are up to you.”

“Sure, but try to make it a little easier on him, Trav, huh?”

“She took off in late September. It’s late May, Chook. The trail is eight months cold. Where are they, and how much do they have left? And just how smart are they? One thing seems obvious. Wilma was the bird dog. Rope a live one and bring him to Naples. Remember, she got booted off that cruiser out of Savannah. I think there was one on there a little too shrewd for her, so she took a long look at what we had around here. And picked Arthur. Marriage can lull suspicion, and she used sex as a whip, and when she had him completely tamed and sufficiently worried about money, she contacted Stebber to tell him the pigeon was ready for the pot. It was a professional job, honey. They made him ache to get in on it. They made him so eager he’d have signed his own death warrant without reading it.”

“Was it all legal?”

“I don’t know. At least legal enough so that you’d probably have a three-year court fight to prove it wasn’t, and then it would be only a civil action to recover the funds. He can’t finance that. He couldn’t finance two cups of coffee.”

“Can you do anything?”

“I could try. If you can prop him up a little, I can try.”

She stood up and came over and gave me a quick hug, a kiss beside the eye, and told me I was a treasure.

Long after she left, the treasure lifted a few score aches and sorenesses and went to bed.

Four

LATE SUNDAY afternoon, up on the sundeck I got the rest of the account from Arthur Wilkinson. Chook had him heavily oiled against additional burn. She was using the sundeck rail as a torture rack, and I was pleased to turn so that I could not see her. I had taken so much punishment all day, it hurt to watch her. But over Arthur’s recital I could sometimes hear her little gasps of effort, a creak of a joint strained to the maximum, and even that was mildly upsetting.

Arthur had gotten absolutely no satisfaction from the young lawyer. He had offered to sell Watts his syndicate shares for twenty-five thousand. Crane Watts said he wasn’t interested. Next, in a kind of bemused desperation, he had tried to find Boone Waxwell, had learned that Waxwell had a place at Goodland on Marco Island. With the last of the small amount of money he had taken on the Sarasota trip, he had taken a bus to the turnoff to Marco, had hitched a ride to the island bridge, and then had walked to Goodland. At a gas station they told him how to find Waxwell’s cottage.

He got there at sunset. It was an isolated place at the end of a dirt road, more shack than cottage. A pale gray sedan was parked in the yard. Country music was so loud over the radio they didn’t hear him on the porch, and when he looked through the screen he saw Wilma sprawled naked, tousled and asleep on a couch, and with a particular vividness he remembered her pale blonde head resting on a souvenir pillow from Rock City. Boo Waxwell, in underwear shorts, sat slumped by the little radio, bottle on the floor between his feet, trying to play guitar chords along with the radio music. He saw Arthur and grinned at him, and came grinning to the screen door, opened it and pushed Arthur back, asking him what the hell he wanted. Arthur said he wanted to speak to Wilma. Waxwell said there wasn’t much point in that on account of Wilma had gotten herself a temporary divorce, country-style.

Wilma had then appeared in the doorway beside Waxwell, light of the sunset against her face, a small and delicate face puffy with sleep and satiation, eyes drained empty by bed and bottle, nestling in soiled housecoat into the hard curve of Boo Waxwell’s arm, looking out at him with a placid and almost bovine indifference, outlined in that end-of-day glow against the room darkening behind her.

He said it was strange how vivid the little things were, the precise design in faded blue of an eagle clutching a bomb, wavering as the muscles of Waxwell’s upper arm shifted under the tattoed hide. The irregular deep rose shade of a suckmark on the side of Wilma’s delicate throat. And tiny rainbow glintings from the diamonds of the watch on her wrist-the watch she had claimed she sold in Miami.

Then he knew that it had all been lies, all of it, with nothing left to believe. Like an anguished, oversized child, he had rushed at Waxwell to destroy him, had landed no blow, had been pummeled back, wedged into a corner of porch post and railing, felt all the grinding blows into gut and groin and, over Waxwell’s diligent shoulder had seen the woman small in the doorway, hugging herself and watching, underlip sagging away from the small even teeth.

Then the railing gave way and he fell backward into the yard. He got up at once and slowly walked back the way he had come, hunched, both forearms clamped across his belly. He had the feeling that it was the only thing holding him together. His legs felt feathery, floating him along with no effort.

Somewhere along the dirt road to the cottage he had fallen. He could not get up. He felt as if something was shifting and flowing inside him, the life moving warmly out of him. He would have slept, except for mosquitoes so thick he breathed them in, snuffing them from his nose, blowing them from his lips. He squirmed to a tree and pulled himself upright and went on, trying all the time to straighten himself up a little more.

By the time he got to the bridge he was almost straight. There was a pink glow left in the west. He began the long walk back to the trail and for a time he was all right, and then he began falling. He said it was very strange. He would find himself way out by the center line, and then when he went over to the shoulder, a dark bush would seem to leap up at him and he would land heavily, gasping.

An old pickup truck stopped as he was trying to get up, and they came and put a bright flashlight beam on him, and from far away he heard a man and woman discussing in casual nasal tones how drunk he was and from what.

Summoning the last of energy, he said very distinctly, “I’m not drunk. I’ve been beaten.”

“Whar you want we should take you, mister?” the man asked.

“I’ve got no place to go.”

When things came back into focus, he was between the man and the woman on the front seat of the pickup. They took him home. East on the Trail to the turnoff to Everglades City, through Everglades and across the causeway to Chokoloskee Island, and over to the far shore, where these people named Sam and Leafy Dunning lived with their five kids in a trailer and attached cottage and prefab garage. He learned later they had spent a picnic day over on Marco Beach, and when they had picked him up, the five kids and the picnic gear and beach gear were in the bed of the old pickup.

Sam Dunning, in season, operated a charter boat out of the Rod and Gun Club over at Everglades City. It was out of season, and he was netting commercial with a partner, even shares, using an old bay skiff.

For three days Arthur could hobble about like an old man. All he could keep down were the soups she fixed for him. He slept a great deal, sensing it was in part an aftermath of the beating, and partly the emotional exhaustion of what had happened to him. He slept by day in a string hammock in the side yard, and by night on a mattress in the garage, waking often to find the children staring solemnly at him.

Leafy borrowed old clothes from a neighbor, big enough to fit him, while she washed and cleaned and mended what he’d been wearing. He thought that it was the fourth day before she asked him any questions at all, came out into the yard when he was walking around in the afternoon, feeling a little steadier on his feet. There were pieces of old car and pieces of marine engine in the yard, coarse grass half hiding them. He sat in the shade of the live oak tree on an overturned dinghy, and Leafy leaned against the trunk, arms folded, head tilted, a wiry, faded, bright-eyed woman in khaki pants and a blue work shirt, visibly pregnant.

“Who did beat on you, Arthur?”

“Boone Waxwell.”

“All them Waxwells are pure mean as moccasin snakes. You got folks to go to someplace?”

“No.”

“What kind of work you do, mostly?”

“Well… in a store.”

“Get yourself fired?”

“I quit.”

“Clothes you had on were right good. Messed up, but good. And you talk nice, like you had good schooling, and you eat polite. Sam and me, we looked in your clothes, but you got no papers at all.”

“There should be a wallet, with a license and cards and so on.”

“And maybe a thousand dollars? If you had one, Arthur, you spilled it out falling all over that road. What we got to know, Sam and me, is if the police got some interest in you, because they can go hard on folks giving anybody house room.”

“I’m not wanted for anything. Not for questioning or anything else.”

She studied him and nodded to herself. “All right, then. What you got to have, I guess, is some kind of work to get some money to be on your way, and you can stay on here till you got it, paying me board when you start drawing pay. I guess there’s some men got it in them to just roam. That’s all right for kids, Arthur, but a grown man, it turns into something different, and without a steady woman you can grow old into a bum. You think on that some.”

Sam had found him work on the maintenance crew readying the Rod and Gun Club for the season opening. He sent in the bureaucratic forms necessary to reassemble the paper affirmations of his identity, a replacement driver’s license, a duplicate social security card. When he was laid off at the Club, he found a job as common labor on a development housing project over near the airport.

Sam Dunning partitioned a small corner of the garage, and Leafy fixed it up with a cot, chair, lamp, and packing box storage disguised by a piece of cotton drapery material thumb-tacked to the top edge. He paid her twelve dollars a week for room and meals, after long earnest bargaining. She wanted ten. He wanted to give fifteen.

There on the sundeck, in a thoughtful voice, Arthur told us that it was a strange time in his life. He had never done manual labor. Until he acquired a few basic skills, the foreman came close to firing him several times for innate clumsiness. The skills pleased him-rough carpentry without owl eyes surrounding the nail heads, learning when the cement mix was the right consistency, learning how to trundle a wheelbarrow along a springy plank. He said it was as if he had turned half of himself off, settling into routine, speaking when spoken to, sitting with the Dunning kids when Sam and Leafy went out on Saturday nights. On days off he helped Sam with boat maintenance, and sometimes crewed for him on a charter.

He felt as if he was in hiding from every familiar thing, and, in the process, becoming someone else. He spent almost nothing, and accumulated money, without counting it. He could lay on his cot and keep his mind empty. When it would veer toward Wilma or toward the lost money, he would catch it quickly, return it to the comforting grayness, feeling only a swoop of dizziness at the narrowness of the escape. Sometimes he awoke from sleep to sense erotic dream-memories of Wilrna fading quickly, leaving only some of the tastes of her on his mouth, textures of her on his hands.

Leafy had her child in January, her third boy. His present to her was an automatic washing machine, a used one in good condition. He and Sam got it tied into the water line and wired the day before Sam brought her home. She was ecstatic. Her attitude toward him warmed perceptibly, and soon, in the most obvious ways, she began to try to make a match between Arthur and a seventeen year girl down the road named Christine Canfield. Christine had run off to Crystal River with a stone crab fisherman and had come home alone at Christmas, slightly pregnant. She was the youngest of three daughters, the older two married and moved away, one to Fort IViyers, the other to Homestead. Christine was a placid, pleasant, slow-moving child who smiled often and laughed readily. She was husky, brown-blonde, pretty in a childlike way.

“Nobody’s in the place Cobb Canfield put up for his Lucy before Tommy got the good job in Fort Myers. You could fix it up right nice,” Leafy said.

“Listen, she’s only seventeen years old!”

“She’s carrying proof she’s a woman, and it hardly shows yet. She likes you fine, just fine, Arthur. She’s healthy and she’s a worker, and they’re good stock. And she got the wild run out of her, and Cobb’d be so grateful to get it worked out, he’d do you goad, believe me. Christine’d make you a good steady woman, not like some I her age on the island.”

“I should have told you before, Leafy. I’m married.”

Her eyes narrowed as she accepted this new poblem. “You plan on taking up again with your wife, Arthur?”

“No.”

“She got cause to come looking for you?”

“NO.”

She nodded to herself. “The law doesn’t pay it no mind unless somebody comes along to make a fuss. You just keep your mouth shut about that wife. Cobb is too proud to let her set up any common law thing with you, so all you have to do is keep your mouth shut and marry her, and who does that hurt? Nobody, and does you both good, and gives that bush kitten she’s carrying a daddy. Christine, she can make a garden bear the year round, and with a snitch hook she’s good as you’ll ever see, and it don’t make for bad living having a young wife grateful to you.”

Chook completed her series of tortures and came and sat by us, breathing deeply, brown body gleaming with perspiration, hair damp.

“Surprised we ever saw you again, Arthur.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t have. I thought about it. She was as trusting and affectionate as a dog you I bring in out of the rain. I could have stayed right there the rest of my life. But I kept remembering eight friends who had believed in me. Somehow that was worse than my money being gone, the way theirs went with it. I couldn’t hide from that the rest of my life. And the pressure from Leafy and Christine merely made me more aware of it. So I told them I had something personal to take care of, and I’d be back as soon as I could, maybe in a few weeks. That was two months ago. I went back to Naples thinking I could try to recover enough just to pay back my friends.”

He had gone to the Citrus Blossom Motel and found that his possessions had long since been sold, leaving a deficit of nine dollars on the room. He paid it out of the seven hundred he’d saved. He found another room. He bought the clothing I’d thrown in the dockside trash can. He went to see Crane Watts. Watts got the file out. There had been one additional assessment. When attempts to contact Mr. Wilkinson had failed, his participation was eliminated according to the terms of the agreement.

As they had been unable to acquire an option on the Kippler Tract after lengthy negotiations, the syndicate had been dissolved and all monies remaining in the account had been divided on the basis of final participation. Arthur had demanded the addresses of Stebber and Gisik, and Watts had said that if he wished to write them, the letters could be sent to Watts’ office for forwarding. Arthur told Watts, with some heat, that he felt he had been defrauded, and he was damned well going to stir up all the trouble he could for them, and if they wanted to settle, to avoid investigation, he would sign an unconditional release in return for a ten-thousand-dollar refund.

Watts, Arthur told us, looked unkempt in beard stubble, soiled sports shirt and bourbon breath at eleven o’clock that morning. Heartened by Watts’ lack of assurance, Arthur had lied to him, saying that his attorney was preparing a detailed complaint to be filed with the Attorney General of the State of Florida, with a certified copy to the Bar Association. Watts, angered, said it was nonsense. There had been no illegality.

Arthur gave his temporary address, and said that somebody better get in touch with him, and damned soon, and bring the money.

He got a phone call at five that evening. A girl with a brisk voice said she was phoning at Crane Watts’ request, to say that Calvin Stebber would like to have a drink with Mr. Wilkinson at the Piccadilly Pub on Fifth Avenue at six and discuss Mr. Wilkinson’s problem.

Arthur was prompt. The tap room was luxurious and exceedingly dark. He sat on a stool at the padded bar, and when his eyes had adjusted, he searched the long bar and nearby tables and did not see Smiling Calvin. Soon a young woman appeared at his elbow, a trim and tailored girl, severe and pretty, who said she was Miss Brown, sent by Mr. Stebber who would be a little late, and would he come over to the table. He carried his drink over.

Miss Brown parried his questions about Stebber with secretarial skill. She took microsips of a dry sherry. He was paged, went to the phone, found that it was a mistake. Someone wanted a Mr. Wilkinson, sales representative for Florida Builders Supply. Back at the table, suddenly the room tilted and he sprawled over against Miss Brown. She giggled at him.

Then, in foggy memory, Miss Brown and a man in a red coat were helping him out to Miss Brown’s car. He woke up in another county, in Palm County, in the drunk tank, without funds or identification, sick, weak and with a blinding headache. In the afternoon a sheriff’s deputy, with a massive indifference, told him the score. He’d been picked up, stumbling around on a public beach, stinking and incoherent, brought in and booked as John Doe. They had a film strip of him. Standard procedure. He could plead guilty and take a thirty-day knock right now, or plead not guilty and go loose on two hundred dollars bail and wait for circuit court which would be about forty days from now. And he could make one call.

He could have called Leafy. Or Christine. He elected the thirty days for himself. After four days of lockup, he signed up for road work as the lesser of two evils, swung the brush hook in lazy tempo under the tolerant guards, always turned his face away from the glitter of the tourist cars staring their way by, wore road gang twill too small for him.

Out of tension, or despair, or afte reffects of whatever Miss Brown had dolloped his drink with, or the greasy texture of the rice and beans, he could keep little in his stomach. Road gang work gave him a fifty cents a day credit. He bought milk and white bread, and sometimes he kept it down and sometimes he didn’t. Sun and effort dizzied him.

One bush to be chopped was Stebber, and the next was Watts, then G. Harrison Gisik, Boo Waxwell, Wilma, Miss Brown. As he began to fit the issue work clothes, in afternoon delirium he recalled what Chook had told him about me. And he knew that he’d be a fool to try anything else on his own. Maybe a fool to even ask for help. They gave him back his clothes and let him go, with a dollar thirty left from his work credit.

He tried to hitch his way across the peninsula, but something was wrong, somehow, with the way he looked. They would slow down, some of them, then change their minds, roar on into the pavement mirages. Sudden rains soaked him. He bought sandwiches, had to abandon them after the first bite. He got a few short rides, found dry corners to sleep in, remembered very little of the last few days of it, then had the vivid memory of coming aboard the Busted Flush, and the deck swinging up at him, slapping him in the face as he tried to fend it off…

“Just enough to pay my friends back,” he said. “I understand you take the expenses off the top and divide what else you can recover. If it wasn’t for them, I’d give up, Trav. Maybe it’s hopeless anyway. I had all that money, and now it’s all unreal, as if I never really had it. My great grandfather barged a load of fabrics, furniture and hardware up from New York, rented a warehouse and sold the goods for enough to pay off the loan on the first load and buy a second free and clear. That’s where the money started. Eighteen fifty-one. By nineteen hundred there was a great deal of money. My father wasn’t good with money. It dwindled. I thought I was better. I thought I could make it grow. God!”

Chook reached and gave his oily shoulder an affectionate, comforting pat. “Some very smart people get terribly cheated, Arthur. And usually it happens far from home.”

“I just… don’t want to go back there,” he said. “I dream that I’m there and I’m dead. I see myself dead on the sidewalk and people walking around me as they go by nodding as if they knew all along.”

Chook took my wrist and turned it to look at my watch. “Time for you to choke down another eggnog, Arthur old buddy. Nicely spiked to give you a big appetite for dinner.”

After she left, Arthur said, “I guess the biggest part of the expense is feeding me.”

I laughed more than it was worth. After all, it was his first mild joke. Sign of improvement. Other signs too. Stubble shaved clean. Hair neatly cropped by Chookie McCall, an unexpected talent. Sun burning away the pasty look. Pounds coming back. And Chook had him on some mild exercises, just enough to begin to restore muscle tone.

She came up with his eggnog and a list. Perishables were dwindling. Eggs, milk, butter, lettuce. Candle Key had a Handy-Dandy-Open-Nights-and-Sunday. The wind would make easy sailing in the dink. The little limey outboard runs like a gold watch. My shoulders felt as if they were webbed with hot wires. So, with an excess of character, I left sail and motor behind, climbed down into the dink, and headed across the two miles of bay, rowing with the miniature oars.

Coming back against the wind was almost as much fun as a migraine, and it didn’t help a bit to have the wind die the instant I clambered aboard and made the dinghy fast. Chook came and took the groceries. As she did so, and with a dull red sun sitting on the horizon line, we were invaded by an advance guard of seven billion salt marsh mosquitoes.

They are a strange kind. They don’t bite, but some ancestral memory tells them they should get in position to bite. They are large and black and fly slowly, and when you wipe a dozen off your arm, they leave black streaks like soot. They are inept at the mosquito profession, but come in such numbers they can rattle the most easy going disposition. As you breathe them in, you find yourself asking in desperation-But what do they want?

Chook and Arthur had showered and changed, and it was immediately obvious they had somehow made each other totally unhappy. Arthur was leaden and remote. Chook was brisk and remote. All they would exchange were the most formal politenesses. I showered amid the fading scent of Chook’s perfumed soap, in that absurd mirrored stall, big enough, almost, for a Volkswagen garage.

It is a grotesque waste of space in a fifty-two-foot houseboat, even with a twenty-one foot beam, almost as much of a waste as the semi-sunken pale blue tub, seven feet long and four feet wide. I imagine that the elderly Palm Beach party who lost the vessel to me over the poker table needed such visual stimulations to do right by his Brazilian mistress.

In response to the unexplained drearies of my boat guests, I had a vicious attack of the jollies, regaling them with anecdote, absurdity and one-sided repartee, much like a solitary game of handball. Once in a while they would pull their lips away from their teeth and go heh-heh-heh. And then politely pass each other something that was within easy reach of everyone in the small booth adjoining the galley.I judged,it a favorable development. People were choosing up new sides. Chook and I had been united in caring for the sick. Now any relationship, even a rancorous one, which shut me out, was proof that he was not entirely defeated. She had to pump some spirit into him or my chances of any salvage were frail indeed. And maybe this was a start.

Five

ON MONDAY we pulled the hooks and droned in stately fashion down to a new anchorage off Long Key, charging the batteries and getting beyond the range of the sooty mosquitoes which were restricting us to the belowdecks areas. During the swimming that followed, I was heartened by a small triumph. The long contest was around a distant marker and back to the boarding ladder. Halfway back she pulled even and moved a half length ahead. I knew from the pain in my side that in another hundred yards I would begin to wallow and roll and lose the stroke.

Suddenly the reserves were there-missing so long it was like welcoming an old friend. It was as if a third lung had suddenly opened up. I settled into it until I was certain, then upped the tempo and went on by her in a long sprint finish, was clinging to the ladder when she arrived, and feeling less like a beached blowfish than on other days.

“Well now!” she gasped, looking startled and owlish.

“You had to let me win one of these.”

“The hell I did! I was busting a gut trying to keep up.” She snapped her head back and gave me the first grin I had seen since rowing back with the groceries.

“Come with me,” I said, and swam slowly, away from the Flush, rolled and floated and, looking back, saw Arthur busy at the chore I had given him, putting new lacing in a section of the nylon fabric that is lashed to the rail around the sun deck. Chook made a surface dive and came up beside me, and blew like a porpoise.

“I could put you two in the shower stall,” I said. “What you do, you each take a corner of a silk handkerchief in your teeth, left hands tied behind you, six-inch knife in the right hand.”

“Skip it, McGee.”

“It’s just that the way you two go around chuckling and laughing, it gets on my nerves. I keep wondering what could make two people so hilarious.”

“Maybe you could guess. I’m a big girl. I’m a big healthy girl. And I’m leading a very healthy life. I’m sleeping with him, in that half acre bed of yours. And that’s the precise word, McGee. Sleeping. Just that. So I thought maybe he was well enough, and it was going to take you a long time to get back with the groceries. I showered first, and got into a sexy little thing made of black cobwebs, and dabbed a little Tigress here and there and yonder, and spread myself out like picturesque, with my girlish heart going bump bump bump. It’s not as if it had never happened with him before. And the son of a bitch acted as if I’d solicited him on a street corner. He was offended, for God’s sake. He made me feel sleazy!”

“Maybe you’re putting the wrong interpretation on it.”

“There comes a point when I stop being understanding, friend. And that was it. It’s his move. And unless he makes one, there’s an invisible wall right down the middle of that bed. It’s made of ice cubes. All he’ll get from me is some practical nursing care.”

In the night I was awakened by the creak of the lines as the Flush was trying to go around on the tide change, swinging further each time until pushed back by the breeze, I always rig two bow hooks in such a way that she shifts her weight from hook to hook when she changes end for end. As this was the first night at the new anchorage, I wanted to check and see that she wasn’t working loose with all the swinging, and that she would swing the way I had guessed. As a rule of thumb they will always swing with the bow toward the nearest shallows. But the wind can make a difference, and there can be a tide current you didn’t read.

So, as the easiest way out, I went forward and up through the hatch. I pulled the line she was still on and found it firm. I have a reflector plate under my riding light, and it keeps the decks in relative shadow, but just enough gets past the plate so you can check lines when your eyes are used to the darkness. From the relation of the way she was swinging to the lights along the keys, I could tell she was going to go around the right way. I decided to wait until she was around and then check the other anchor line.

I had a lot of scope, big Danforths and a good bottom, so it was a thousand to one I was fine. But there are a lot of dead sailors who took things for granted. On a boat things go bad in sets of threes. When you pull a hook and then go hustle to get the wheels turning, something will short out on you so that you go drifting, dead in the water. And that is the time when, without lights, you drift right out into the ship channel, see running lights a city block apart coming down at you, run to get your big flashlight, fumble it and drop it over the side. A boat is something that never has just one thing wrong with it.

As I sat on the corner of the bow hatch, waiting, I felt a little faraway thud. I felt it through the soles of my bare feet, wondered what the hell, then realized it was the dink tied astern, swinging in the wind, nudging mother. I padded back along the side deck, put another line on its little stern cleat and snubbed it up against the two fenders hanging over the transom.

I’d gone aft on the port side, and went forward on the starboard side, and came suddenly on a pale ghost that nearly made me leap over the rail. It startled her too, and then she made a miserable snorting sound and came into my arms for comfort. She had on a skimpy white hip-length nightie. She clung, snorting again. Her body heat was high, her breath hot and timid. She had that flat-sweet unmistakable scent of female sexual effort. Her nipples were hard as little pebbles against my bare chest.

“Oh God, God!” she whispered. “He can’t do it. He tried and tried and tried. I helped and helped and helped. Then he was no damn good at all, and he started crying, and I had to get out of there. Oh God, Trav, my nerves are shot, shot, shot.”

“Steady, girl.”

“That damn bitch might just as well have cut them off,” she said, and sobbed again, and got the hiccups. She hicked and gasped and ground her face into my throat, held me in an iron grip, and, with each hick, gave me a little thud with those powerful hips. I was not unresponsive. Hell, a bronze statue three thousand years old would have made its reaction as evident to her as I did.

“God, darling-hic-be a dear-hic-and take me off hic-the hook.”

“And you know it wouldn’t stop there, and wouldn’t that do Arthur a lot of good, though? Wouldn’t that brighten his hours, improve his morale?”

“But you-hic-want me, darling. Please-hic-”

“Okay Chook.”

“Bless you!” she said. “I love you so. Hic.”

“I’ll help you out,” I said. I bent to get one arm behind her knees. She went loose, thinking, perhaps, I was going to tote her topsides to the sun pads on the upper deck. I swung her up and out and over the rail and let go.

Shriek. Ka-swash. Then some coughing, and then some strident and bitter abuse from the dark water. I strolled back to the boarding ladder, bent and gave her a hand, hauled her up onto the after deck and told her to stay right there. I brought her a towel and a terry robe.

“After all!” she said in a cold and level voice. “Really!”

“Your language is improving.”

As she belted the robe, she said, “You’re all bastard, aren’t you?”

“Listen. Did it or did it not cure the hiccups?”

Suddenly we were laughing, and in laughing we were friends again, and went topsides to the big padded bench at the topside controls. I went and checked the anchor line, came back with cigarettes for her, a pipe for me. The running light dimmed the stars, but not entirely.

“You were absolutely right, of course,” she said. “And let me believe, damn it, that it cost you something too.”

“More than I care to think about.”

“So maybe failure finished him off. We don’t know that. But I damn well do know that I would have moved into your bed for the duration of the voyage, captain, and that certainly would finish him.”

“Like that little knife they use when the matador hasn’t been able to kill with the sword. Some stocky little guy, like a butcher, moves in and gives it to old bull right behind the ears. And he goes down as if he’d been dropped off a roof.”

“Then those damned mules pull him all the way around the ring instead of right on off stage. Why do they have to do that?”

“A tribute, maybe.”

“Trav, how in the world am I going to act toward Arthur tomorrow? He felt so… wretched about everything.”

“Open and obvious affection, Chook. All the little pats and smiles and kisses. Little hugs. Just as if it had worked.”

“But why in the world should… Oh, I think I get it. No penalty for failure. Encouragement to try again. No social disgrace. But if it ends up the same way I don’t think I can endure it. Oh hell, I suppose I can always run out and jump overboard, screaming.”

“And hiccuping.”

“Honestly, and you have to believe me, I never got in such a state before in my life. It’s something about a boat, I guess. And the phase of the moon. And Frankie gone for years. And feeling… so damned sorry for Arthur. And, of course, being so bloody awful healthy. Poor lamb. He was so apologetic and crushed. Well, thanks for practically nothing, McGee. Night.”

I made the pipe last. I sat up there, bare feet braced on the wheel spokes, and wondered why Chook should bring out the martyr in me. Twice now, with her, I had gone so noble it semi- sickened me. And such a glorious package. But was she? Maybe she was a little too much. She created a certain awe in the standard issue male. I had noted that fewer passes were made at her than she had a right to expect. All that robust, glowing, powerful vitality might actually have given me a subconscious block, a hidden suspicion that I might, in the long run, be unable to cope-an alarming prospect for male vanity, of which I was certain I had my share. When these dreary suspicions threatened to spoil a pretty night, I went forward, back down through the hatch and into my spartan bed.

Too restless to go to sleep quickly, I found another reason, perhaps just as ego-damaging, why I could resist intimate involvement with Chook. Except for her inexplicable bondage to Frank Durlcin, she was uncommonly staunch and stable. Though shrewd, diligent and perceptive, she did not have any of those inner contradictions, complexities and vulnerabilities that are born of self-doubt.

She was all of a piece, confident of her total survival, and-in that sense-utterly wholesome. Maybe I could be stirred only by the wounded ducklings. Maybe I could respond best to the cripples I cut out of the flock, the ones who, by contrast, could give me a sense of inner strength and unity. And a whole woman might, conversely, serve to give me a less fictional image of the inner McGee, showing the fracture lines and the clumsy ways I had pasted myself back together, and too many tricks with mirrors.

When you have learned control over your own dear little neuroses, you can have empathy with the ones who are shaking themselves apart, and get your jollies out of teaching them how to dampen the vibrations. But a sound and solid one can only make you aware of how frequently precarious your acquired controls can become. It could be that this wariness of the sound ones and the true ones was one of the hidden reasons why I had to be a roamer, a salvage expert, a gregarious loner, a seeker of a thousand tarnished grails, finding too many excuses for all the dragons along the way.

This kind of emotional introspection, this self fondling, is strange medicine. A little bit, now and again, can acrete a small quotient of wisdom. But, like nitroglycerin for the weakened heart, too much of it at one time can blow your head off.

Maybe it was all a lot simpler than that. Physical attraction was strong, but without emotional attraction. Once begun, we would go the long route, and at the end of it there would be absolutely nothing, very probably not even the friendship. And that was good enough to warrant a knowing abstention.

Tuesday Chook seemed to be overdoing the whole routine. The response was perhaps as noticeable as she would have gotten from petting a dead dog. Pats and squeezes, kind words and quick kisses, and special little treats from the galley. Arthur seemed too deep in humble apathy to notice or care. But from time to time I saw him stare toward her with a mildly baffled expression. She laid it on so thick, I felt more comfortable at long range. I gave myself the most rigorous day yet. There is one which can match anything they thought up during the Inquisition.

Sit. Hook feet under something solid. Lace fingers behind neck. Lean slowly back until shoulders are approximately ten to twelve inches off the deck. Stop right there. And stay there until the sweat bursts and every muscle is jumping, and then stay there a little while longer, then come slowly, slowly back up to the sitting position. Another: One-legged deep knee bends, taking about two seconds to go down and two seconds to come back up. Continue until body weight seems to approximate seventeen tons.

Alternate ten minute rest periods with fifty minute workouts all day long, then soak in a tub so hot you have to get into it by inches, then eat twenty ounces of rare beef, a peck of salad, stretch out topsides and look at the stars, and blunder off to bed.

I was awake for a little while in the first gray of the false dawn, and heard the lovers. It was a sound so faint it was not actually a sound, more a rhythm sensed. It is a bed rhythm, strangely akin to a heartbeat, though softer. Whum-fa, whum-fa, whum-fa. As eternal, clinical, inevitable as the slow gallop of the heart itself. And as basic to the race, reaching from percale back to the pallet of dried grasses in the cave corner. A sound clean and true, a nastiness only to all those unfortunates who carry through their narrow days their own little hidden pools of nastiness, ready to spill it upon anything so real it frightens them.

Heard even in its most shoddy context, as through the papery walls of a convention motel, this life-beat could be diminished not to evil but to a kind of pathos, because then it was an attempt at affirmation between strangers, a way to try to stop all the clocks, a way to try to say: I live.

The billions upon billions of lives which have come and gone, and that small fraction now walking the world, came of this life-pulse, and to deny it dignity would be to diminish the blood and need and purpose of the race, make us all bawdy clowns, thrusting and bumping away in a ludicrous heat, shamed by our own instinct.

Hearing them I felt placidly avuncular. Enjoy. Find that one time that has no shred of self or loneliness. Seal it so that from now on McGee is the third wheel, all interrelationships solidly structured from now on. Celebrate the “nowness” of it, and subside into affections.

The almost inaudible pulse hastened, then slowed, and ended. I heard the far off drone of a marine engine, fading into the distance, a commercial fisherman perhaps, heading for the grounds off East Cape. Ripples slapped the hull. What assurances, gratitudes, immediate memories were the lovers entwined whispering to each other? Did they listen to the slowing of their hearts? Were there little catches at the end of those long breaths that were deep as sighs? Was it beautiful for you too, darling?

When I awoke again it was with the sense of total well-being I had been aiming for. The pounds were gone. A few slight areas of muscle soreness were not enough to diminish that good feeling of resiliency and vitality.

The body, once you are old enough to stop taking it for granted, becomes like a separate entity. The way it will endure neglect makes you feel guilty. Having survived trauma, and being still willing to carry you around after healing itself, it deserves better. Cherishing it and toughening it is an act of appeasement for past omissions.

In my line of work, neglect was especially asinine. Like being a front-line type with a rusty rifle, or a neurosurgeon with a hangover. One half step, or one twentieth of a second lag in reaction time can make the difference. Any violent necessity is usually the result of something having gone wrong, a probable error of judgment. But the probability is always there.

Now, with just minor versions of the total torture of the days past, it would hold its edge.

My shower serenade did not stir the drowsy lovers, nor did the banging of pots. After breakfast I broke out a small spinning rod, rigged it with a yellow jig, installed sail, rudder and centerboard on the dinghy, and went off to circle the edge of distant grass flats. I released a couple of small jacks, one weakfish, and then, just as I was coming about, hooked into a stranger, a stray pompano who didn’t belong in that kind of area.

He ran better than three pounds, and I had him split, buttered, and on foil under the broiler as the lovers came fumbling, blinking and yawning out into the daylight. Call the pompano a sacrifice on a special altar. They claimed nothing had ever tasted as good. They finished him, every crumb, while I stood smirking like a kindly old aunt in a TV commercial.

All her actions toward him that Wednesday were precisely as on the day before. But without the Charge Nurse flavor. She had a doe-eyed glow, a lazy smugness. The gestures were returned in kind. I was the outsider. Arthur had his chin up, for a change. And he risked a few of his mild, strained jokes-rewarded with girlish howls of glee. I tried to keep out of their way. But at times the Busted Flush can seem small. In midafternoon I invented an errand at Long Key, a replacement filter, and with an identical expression of repressed anticipation on their faces, they waved to me as I went putting off toward Long Key.

Friday morning I put the essential question to him. I brought the anchors in, and he helped me spread the lines at the bow to dry before stowing them. In the early gray, so silent and eerie it gave one a tendency to whisper, the Flush floated dead in the water at the high tide change, with the mist magnifying the sun image in the east to a gigantic ball, suitable to a science fiction movie.

Arthur was beginning to look fit. Scrawny, but fit.

“What about it?” I asked him.

Squatting, he stared at me. “About it?”

“You ready to help me go after the loot, Arthur?”

He stood up. “I…guess I’m ready now.”

I made an appraisal. He wasn’t the same fellow who’d been a part of our ever-changing group better than a year ago. He looked almost the same, though thinner. I guess it was the eyes. Before, he had been able to watch you with the same pleasant fixity of stare of a family beagle. Now the eyes came up, then fell away, came back, shifted away.

“Listen, Arthur. The attitude is not anger, nor indignation, nor hate. No heroics. No punishments. We go in cold and shrewd and savvy. And you stay out of contact. You are my intelligence officer. I bring you pieces of it and we work out how they fit. But if I need you for any contact, I want to know you’ll do it exactly as I say, whether you understand or agree. I want to know you won’t let it shake you up.”

“Trav… all I can do is promise to try.”

“How do you feel about it?”

He tried to smile. “Butterflies.”

“You can have butterflies, but you’ve got to have an operational attitude too. We’re going to steal meat out from under the tiger’s paw. We’ll divert the animal’s attention. We’ll keep Chook out of it. And it starts right now.”

He moistened his lips and swallowed. “Where are we going?”

“On a hunch, I’m going to start at Marco.”

Six

TOOK the Flush up to Flamingo, through Whitewater Bay, and out the mouth of the Shark River into the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf was flat calm, so I took her about six miles out, figured the course to take me just outside Cape Romano, and set the reliable old Metal Marine. It began turning the wheel back and forth in fussy little movements of a few inches at a time. I checked it to see that it was holding. Sun came hot through the slight overcast, and in the greasy calm the only breeze was from our stodgy cruising speed.

At noon I got the marine forecast from the Miami Marine Operator. Fair for the next twenty-four hours, winds slight and variable. A tropical disturbance centered below the Yucatan Straits, moving north northeast at five to six knots. Chookie brought lunch topside. They both seemed subdued. I realized uncertainty was bothering them. You have to have an instinct about how much briefing the troops should have. Too little is as unsettling as too much.

“What we’re up against,” I said, “is the big con. It’s a quasi-legal variation of one of the little cons, the finding the wallet routine.”

“What does that mean?” Chook asked.

“Once they select a mark, the operator drops a wallet, a fat one, where he’ll spot it. The accomplice gets to it a fraction of a second ahead of the mark. They move into an alley. The accomplice counts the money, and the mark sees that there is, say nine hundred dollars. Then the operator moves in, a very plausible guy. An acquaintance of the accomplice, but the accomplice very respectfully calls him mister. Says he found it, alone. Operator takes the mark’s side, proclaims they both found it and should share equally. Accomplice agrees, grudgingly. No name or identification in wallet. Operator says the honest thing to do is watch the want ads for one week. If nothing appears, then it is theirs to split. Gets a brown envelope, seals wallet inside with tape, accomplice and mark initial the tape as a form of seal. Okay, who is to hold it? After argument, it is decided the mark can hold it, provided he gives the accomplice three hundred dollars to hang onto as a proof of good faith. Operator holds the envelope until mark can return with the three hundred. Addresses are exchanged. Mark watches want ads for a week, gleefully tears envelope open, finds ratty old wallet stuffed with newspaper. The switch was made while they waited for him to come back with the three hundred.

“Or, when the mark is smarter, they make the switch right in front of him, let him carry the envelope, and go to the bank with him. These things always depend on human greed. This option con, Arthur, was a more sophisticated version of the same tired old thing, with Stebber as the operator, Wilma as the roper, Gisik, Waxwell and Watts as accomplices. When they make a hit, they go to the ground. But as this one was quasi-legal, some of them had to stay out in the open-Watts and Waxwell. I suspect they got small pieces. So what we have to do is put out some bait.”

Chook scowled at me. “To get Stebber and Gisik out in the open? You don’t look like a mark, Trav. And if you run into Wilma, she knows you.‘’

“I have somebody all roped, and I need some competent help to pick him clean.”

“Who?” Arthur asked blankly.

“We’ll have to invent him. But if I have to produce him, we should have somebody in mind, somebody who could run over here at short notice and put on a good act.”

“And you do have somebody in mind, don’t you?” Chook said accusingly.

“You ever run into Roger Bliss?”

She didn’t know him. I told them about Roger. Except for an unfortunate taint of honesty, he could have become one of the great confidence men of our times: After a fine arts education, he had gone to Italy to study and paint. There he had gotten in with the movie crowd and had been put to work doing character bits. He was a natural mimic. He’d learned he’d never make it as a painter. And, in time, the movie thing bored him.

Now he owned a small expensive sales gallery in Hollywood, Florida, had nutured a profitable list of art patrons, lived well, was often restless, particularly during the slack season, and had helped me a couple of times in the past, when I needed someone who could be, on request, a convincing psychiatrist, air force colonel, college dean or Oklahoma wildcatter. He had a wicked ability of being absolutely plausible, down to the smallest mannerism and detail of dress. I would make sure he was available, just in case. And think up a cover story which would make Stebber and company salivate freely.

So we cruised up the flank of the Everglades, past the misted shoreline of the Ten Thousand Mangrove Islands. It is dark strange country, one of the few places left which man has not been able to mess up. The great river of grass starts up near Okeechobee, the widest shallowest river on the continent, and flows south. The hammocks of oak, cabbage palm, fifty other varieties of trees, are the quaking islands in the thirty-mile width of the sawgrass river.

On the broad moist banks are the silent stands of cypress. Where the tides seep up into the river, at the northernmost limits of brackishness, the dwarf mangrove starts. The Ten Thousand Islands comprise the vast steamy tidal basin where the river enters the Gulf and Florida Bay.

Man, forever stubborn, has made but a few small dents in this eternal silence. Perimeter outposts-Everglades, Marco, Flamingo, Chokoloskee. But he has never thrived. There is rich soil there, rich enough so that a hundred years ago tomatoes grown in the Everglades were bringing twenty-four dollars a case in New York during the winter season. But hurricanes thrash through, pushing salt tides that take years to leach out of the poisoned soil. The fevers, the bugs, the storms, the isolation-these things have always broken the spirits of all but the toughest, the kind of human who can describe the peak of the mosquito season as the time when you can swing a one-pint jar and catch a quart of them.

The tough Calusa Indians were there at the time Christ was born, building storm shelter islands out of the shells of the oysters and clams they ate, leaving a staggering enough tonnage of shells by the time the Spaniards totally eliminated them that miles and miles of the first rude roads into the edges of the Glades were paved with those shells.

This is the land of the great enduring myth of the Seminole. They, were a ragtag ethnic jumble, driven all the way down from Georgia and the Carolinas, until finally after the forced resettlement of most of them in the southwest, there were not two hundred and fifty left-scattered, hiding, demoralized-not worth any further military effort. For fifty years their numbers remained about the same.

Then slowly they reestablished a new culture composed of remembered fragments of many old ones, speaking pidgin versions of old tongues. They had even begun to acquire a kind of plaintive dignity, but then the white man pushed the Tamiami Trail across the Glades from Naples to Miami, eliminating them as a tribe, turning them into roadside merchants of such a vast gypsy cynicism that of all the artifacts they manufacture and sell to the tourists-not one bears any relation to their customs, habits, or prior way of life. They are the carnival Indians, degraded by commerce, curious heirs to the big colorful lie that they were never whipped, never made a truce. They are the comedy Indians who, never having tomtoms in their history, never having used the tomahawks or bows and arrows like the Plains Indians, now made vast quantities of each and sell them to people from Ohio.

Now, of course, having failed in every attempt to subdue the Glades by frontal attack, we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass. In the questionable name of progress, the state in its vast wisdom lets every two-bit developer divert the flow into the draglined canals that give him “waterfront” lots to sell. As far north as Corkscrew Swamp, virgin stands of ancient bald cypress are dying. All the area north of Copeland had been logged out, and will never come back. As the Glades dry, the big fires come with increasing frequency. The ecology is changing with egret colonies dwindling, mullet getting scarce, mangrove dying of new diseases born of dryness.

But it will take a long time to kill it. And years from now foolish men will still be able to kill themselves off within miles of help, hopelessly lost among islands which all look exactly alike. It is a black land, and like every wilderness in the world, it punishes quickly when a mistake is made, quickly and with a casual, savage indifference.

I studied the chart and picked a spot. I went beyond Marco Pass to a wide pass named Hurricane Pass. The channel was easy to read from the topside controls. The Flush draws four feet and is heavily skegged to protect the shafts and wheels. Roy Cannon Island, deserted, lies just inside the pass. It was low tide as we came in just before sunset. The pass is so wide, Roy Cannon has a sand beach. I edged a little north to get the protection of the headland which forms the north edge of the pass. At dead slow I ran the bow into the beach sand.

With Chook and Arthur helping, we put out all four anchors, the two bow ones well up on the beach, wedged into the skeletal whiteness of mangrove killed by the sand which had built up, probably after Hurricane Donna had widened the pass. I carried the stern hooks out into water neck deep, wedged them in, stomped them firm. She would rest well there, lifting free with the incoming tide, settling back at the low. I’d topped off the fuel and water at Flamingo. We swam as the sun went down, and then clouds of mosquitoes, shrill with hunger, drove us below decks to break out the bombs and drop the ones that had come in with us. It was such a hot and airless night, I started the generator and put the air-conditioning on. After dinner, over coffee, I took Arthur through the best physical descriptions of the four men that he could manage, particularly Stebber and Gisik. I wanted to be certain to know them if the names were changed.

Saturday morning early I saddled up the dinghy and, taking Chook with me, droned south inside the islands to Marco Village. We achieved invisibility. There is an easy way to do it along the coast. I wore khaki pants, a white T-shirt, a baseball hat with a long bill, dark glasses. She wore white denim stretch pants, blue halter, dark glasses, and a little pot-shaped straw hat some female had left aboard, embroidered in red yarn across the front-Drink Up. We brought along a tackle box, two rods and a red beer cooler.

Marco Village saddened me. The bulldozers and draglines had gotten to it since my last visit. The ratty picturesque old dock was gone, as was the ancient general store and a lot of old weatherbeaten two-story houses which had looked as though they had been moved down from Indiana farmland. They had endured a half century of hurricanes, but little marks on a developer’s plat had erased them so completely there was not even a trace of the old foundations.

But even the scurry of multimillion dollar development slows to a sleepy pace in the island heat of late May. Loafers identified us instantly by type as we tied up and clambered out of the dinghy, and from then on their total bemused attention was on the fruitful flexible weight encased in the white stretch denim, with Chook quite comfortably aware of admiration and speculation. I asked my question, and we got one bad lead and then a better one, and finally found a sallow, thoughtful young man who took us to where his boat sat lashed to a trailer. Sixteen foot, heavyduty fiberglass hull, with a forty horse Evinrude bolted to the reinforced transom. Twin tanks. All required gear.

“I don’t know about a week,” he said. “Figured on using it some myself. I’d have to get” -he wiped his mouth, stared into the distance- “a hundred dollars, mister?”

“Seventy-five. I buy gas.”

“I got fourteen hundred dollars in it, mister.”

“Seventy-five right now, and if I only keep it three days, it’s still seventy-five.”

He made a responsible show of studying my driver’s license, giving sidelong glances at Chook’s scanty halter, and got very helpful and cheery when he had the seventy-five in hand, describing places where we could hook into big snook and baby tarpon. He put it in the water for us. Boldly lettered on the white fiberglass, in pink, and for some obscure reason in Old English calligraphy, was the name Ratfink.

We took off sedately, towing the dinghy astern, dock loafers watching us out of sight. Arthur was waiting on the beach when we returned. Without the burdens of Chook and the dinghy I took Ratfink out into open water and found I had made a good guess on the hull design. It was very fast and stable, and when I came smashing back through my own wake, I found it was a dry boat.

Another can of gas aboard would give it all the high speed range I’d need. It had one of the new control rigs, shift and throttle on the same handy lever. The cable control gave it a quick steering ratio. I taped a piece of white cloth over the too-memorable name, and with some black electrician’s tape I made an alteration in the registration number, turning a six into an eight and a one into a seven. It would stand inspection from ten feet away.

I changed to slacks and a sports shirt, stowed a light jacket and tie in the locker under the forward deck, told them to be good kids, and took off up the inside route to Naples, an estimated twelve miles away, less than a half hour in my jazzy craft.

I found an adequate little marina just short of the highway bridge on the southeast side of Naples. I filled the tanks, bought an extra five gallon can, had it filled with the right gas and oil mix and stowed it aboard. I said I might be leaving it there off and on for a week. The man said a dollar a day. And how about leaving a car here when I’m out in the boat? I asked. Right over there next to the building, where that pickup is, it’ll be okay there, no charge.

I paid him a week on the dockage, and after he had shown me where to put it and wandered away I tied it up in such a way that though the lines were firm, I could free them with one yank, shove off bow first, hit the starter button and be on my way. This was one of the elemental precautions. Never go in until you are damned well sure how you are going to get out.

There are few roads in the Glades country, but more waterways than have ever been counted. With the jacket over my arm, I went up to Route 41 and walked across the highway bridge and down the other side of the bayou to the Fish House Restaurant. It was clean and quiet. The decor was seashells stuck into cement on the pillars, beams and ceiling. Tourists had pried out a lot of the ones within reach. I found they served a clam chowder with character. It would cure debility, angry the blood, and turn a girl scout troop into a baritone choir.

I didn’t bother phoning Crane Watts’ office. His residence was on Clematis Drive. A maid announced it as The Watts Resydense and told me, “They’s at the Club.” And when I asked if it was the Cutlass Yacht Club, she said, “Nome, they play tennis at the Royal Palm Bath Club.”

I looked up car rentals, phoned one and was told they couldn’t deliver. Just one man on duty. I took a cab to the place the other side of town. I signed up for a dark green Chev, four door, with air-conditioning. The attendant told me to go about another mile north and then look for the Bath Club sign on a road to the left, turn and go about a half mile. I couldn’t miss it. I didn’t.

I found a parking place in the lot. The huge pool, behind woven fencing, was a gabbling, shrieking, belly-whomping mass of kids. They had a crescent of private beach dotted with bright umbrellas and oiled brown flesh, prone and supine. Despite the early afternoon heat, their dozen asphalt courts beyond the pool area were all full. You could see at a glance it was very proper tennis. Everyone raced about in spotless white, sweating and banging hell out of the ball, calling out Love, Add, Out and Nice Shot.

The club house was a flaking Moorish pastry onto which had been pasted a big wing in supermarket modern. I wandered in and found a bulletin board in a corridor. They are always useful. The bulletin board was folksier than the tennis. There was a mimeographed copy of the last club bulletin tacked to it. Seems that on May tenth the Taylors had given a big farewell bash for Frank and Mandy Hopson, before they left on their dream trip, three whole months in Spain. Crane and Viv Watts were listed among the guests. I found a phone booth and book, but it gave me no clue as to good old Frank’s occupation, if any. I roamed until I found a door labeled OFFICE. I knocked and pushed it open. A thin girl was alone in there, typing. She had a pert look, a large toothy smile.

“May I help you, sir?”

“Sorry to bother you. I just got to town today. I called Mr. Frank Hopson at his home but I couldn’t get an answer. I remember him speaking of this place, and I thought maybe Frank and Mandy might be out here.”

She made a sad mouth. “Oh, dear! They went away on a long trip.”

“Don’t tell me they finally made it to Spain. Son of a gun.”

“They were as excited about it as a pair of little kids, believe me, Mr…”

“McGee. Travis McGee. They’ve been after me for years to come over and see them. Well… that’s the way it goes. At least I got a look at the club.”

She hesitated for some additional inspection. I am conspicuously large, and I have a permanent deep-water tan, and I would not look out of place on a construction crew. But the slacks and shirt and jacket were top grade and she knew it. And I smiled at her like Stoney Burke admiring a speckled calf.

“Well, I think we can do better than that for any friend of the Hopsons,” she said, making her decision. “How long will you be in town?”

“Maybe a week. On business.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Hopson would certainly want you to use the Club.” She winked. “In fact, I distinctly remember Mr. Hopson saying that you should have a guest card if you ever appeared while they were gone.”

She pulled the sheets out of her typewriter, ran a card in and filled it out. I gave her the Bahia Mar box number. She signed the club manager’s name, put her initials under it, and handed it to me with a little flourish.

“These are good for two weeks, Mr. McGee. You can sign and be billed directly. The only restriction is that you can’t bring guests here. Except your wife, of course.”

“Unmarried. How about just one lady? One at a time.”

“No one could object to that. Please don’t be shy about mingling and introducing yourself. You’ll find all the members very friendly, particularly toward any friend of Mr. Hopson. And please put the card number on the chits you sign. Tonight we’re having an outdoor steak roast, buffet style. If you want to stay for it-it’s really very good-I can take your reservation.”

“Might as well. Thanks. You’ve been very kind, Miss… ”

“Benedict. Francie Benedict.” The smile opened her up back to the wisdom teeth. “I do wish I could show you where everything is, but I do have to finish this.”

“I’ll just wander around.”

“You can rent swim trunks from Albie in the men’s locker room.”

She was typing agahn as I pulled the office door shut. I found a dark, cool, quiet bar in the Moorish part. The sedentary types were there and in the adjoining card room, several grim tables of male bridge. I stood at an empty expanse of mahogany bar. The bartender approached with one eyebrow shoved up in cautious, supercilious interrogation. I whipped out my card, and his smile of acceptance would have looked more plausible if he’d been outfitted with those stainless steel teeth the Russians have developed. After he served my Plymouth gin on ice, the clot of members down the bar motioned to him. He leaned across the bar. There was a whispered question and answer; they looked me over and got back into their argument.

A pudgy chap with a statesman’s face and careful coiffure of white locks said in liquor-slurred tones, “But you got to face facts, Roy. The fact remains, we got the evidence right in front of us, the decay of the nashal moral fiber, mob rule in the streets, violence, punks killing decen‘ people. Am I right or am I right?”

I could imagine the same tired concept being stated in a thousand private clubs across the country on this May afternoon. They see the result, but they are blind to the cause of it. Forty million more Americans than we had in 1950. If one person in fifty has a tendency toward murderous violence, then we’ve got eight hundred thousand more of them now. And density alone affects the frequency with which mobs form. The intelligence of a mob can be determined by dividing the lowest IQ present by the number of people in the mob. Life gets cheaper. Cops, on a per capita basis, get fewer. And the imponderables of the bomb, of automation, of accelerating social change create a kind of urban despair that wants to break loose and crack heads. All the barroom sociologists were orating about national fiber while, every minute and every hour, the most incredible population explosion in history was rendering their views, their judgments, even their very lives more obsolete.

They should hark to the locust. When there is only a density of X per acre, he is a plain old grasshopper, munching circumspectly, content with his home ground. Raise it to 2X and an actual physical change begins to occur. His color changes, his jaw gets bigger, and the wing muscles begin to grow. At 3X they take off in great hungry clouds, each cloud a single herd instinct, chomping everything bare in its path. There is no decline in the moral fiber of the grasshopper. There is just a mass pressure canceling out all individual decisions.

“Am I not right, sir?” demanded the pundit, making a stately turn to include me. I had not heard the more recent statements.

“Absolutely,” I said. “Right on the button.”

I was roped into the group, met the mellowed and important gentlemen, heard fond words about good old Frank Hopson, and discovered, fortuitously, that Frank was a realtor. “But with his holdings, he doesn’t have to work at it much. It’s mostly management and rental stuff on what he owns. Poor bastard, he’s a land merchant, and he can’t take a capital gains on anything, so he just doesn’t sell it off.”

One of them said, not to me, “I heard that for a while there, young Crane Watts was trying to work something out for Frank, some deal whereby he could put everything in one package, real estate business and all, give up his license and retire and sell all his holdings to an outside corporation and take his capital gains.”

A man beside me lowered his voice and said, “He’d be a fool to let Watts work on anything.”

“It was some time ago,” another said in the same low tone, and they stared toward the card room. I spotted the one who most clearly matched Arthur’s description. He was playing bridge at the furthest table, slumped, peering slack-jawed at his holding. He selected a card slowly, raised it high, whacked it down with a wolf yelp of laughter, then hunched forward, glowering, as the opposition gathered the trick in.

“I don’t know how he can afford that game.”

“He seems to get it somewhere when he needs it.

“She’s such a damned fine girl.”

“Sure is.”

I detached myself and went wandering to the courts, looking for that damned fine girl, Vivian Watts. A kid resting between sets pointed her out to me. She was in a singles match against an agile blonde boy of about nineteen, almost ten years her junior I would guess. It was the only court with an interested gallery. She was of the same physical type as Chook, not as tall. She was dark and tanned, sturdily built but lithe. And, like Chook, she had that hawk-look of strong features, prominent nose, heavy brows. As with all natural athletes, she had an economy of motion which created its own grace. She wore a little pleated white tennis skirt, white sleeveless blouse, white band on her dark hair. Her brown and solid legs had a good spring, bringing her back into a balanced readiness after each stroke, the way a good boxer moves.

It was easy to see the shape of the match. The boy was a scrambler, going after everything, returning shots it didn’t seem plausible he could reach, lobbing them high enough to give him time to get back for the smash, and preventing her from coming up to the net to pull them away. She tried a cross-court volley and put it just outside.

“Broke her service again,” a bald little man beside me said. He was as brown and knotty as walnuts.

“How does it stand?”

“Six-three to Viv, seven-five to Dave. Now then he’s got her nine-eight.”

He had a big serve and she waited well back, handled it firmly, moved to center court and drove his ground stroke right back at his ankles. He aced her on his next serve. Then on the next serve he tried to come to the net and she made a beautiful passing shot. Her return of his next serve floated and he let it go out by six inches. He took the advantage on another service ace. At match point, she again tried the passing shot as he moved up quickly, but the ball slapped the tape and, to the accompaniment of a concerted partisan groan, fell into her court.

She went to the net and, smiling, tucked her racket under her left arm and held out her right hand to the boy in a quick, firm congratulatory handshake. The smile was the first change of expression I had seen. Her tennis was pokerface, with no girlish grimaces of despair when things went wrong.

They moved off the court as other players moved on, and I drifted along with them, over toward tables in the shade. The boy went off, apparently to get her something to drink. When I moved near enough, she looked up at me with an expression of inquiry, and I saw that her eyes were a very deep blue instead of the brown I had expected.

“Just wanted to say that was very good tennis to watch, Mrs. Watts.”

“Thank you. Last year I could take Dave. Next year I won’t take a set. Do I know you?”

“Frank and Mandy Hopson fixed up a guest card for me. I’m just in town for a short time. Travis McGee, Mrs. Watts. East coast.”

The boy brought drinks, a Coke for himself and iced tea for Viv Watts. She introduced him. Dave Sablett. He seemed a little stiff-necked about her asking me to join them. He had a proprietary air toward her, to which she seemed quite oblivious. She was still breathing deeply, her hair damp with sweat. We chatted for a little while. They were signed up for mixed doubles beginning in a few moments. They were the club’s mixed doubles champions.

I watched the match begin and it was clear after two points they were going to take it readily. So I went back inside to see, perhaps at closer range, the other half of this happy marriage.

Seven

IN THE Saturday dusk I got a drink from the outside bar and moved out of the throng. In a few minutes Viv Watts came over to where I was standing. She had on a yellow summer cotton, a new mouth. Her manner and expression were tense.

“Maybe you’ll tell me what happened in there, Mr. McGee.”

“Nothing important. I guess your husband got a little abusive and his partner quit. So he was getting ugly about having no chance to get even. Nobody wanted to partner him. It was turning into a scene, so I… sat in.”

“How much did you lose?”

“Not enough to matter, Mrs. Watts. When I found out what the stakes were, I said it was too much for my blood. Three cents a point can be murder. I said I’d go for a half cent, and your husband said he’d pick up the slack.”

She looked away with a slightly sick expression. “Five and a half cents a point. Dear God!”

“He wasn’t in any shape to play. Oh, he wasn’t leading out of turn or forgetting the bid. Nothing like that. He just got too optimistic.”

“What did you lose?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I insist!”

“Twenty-one dollars. But really…”

She bit her lip, unsnapped her white purse and dug into it. I put my hand on her wrist, stopping her.

“I really won’t take it.”

She gave up, saying, “I really wish you would. Did he go home?”

“No. After he settled up he didn’t feel very well. He’s in that small lounge off the card room… resting.”

She frowned. “Maybe I should take him home.”

“He’s sacked out. So he’s just as well off there, isn’t he?”

She stared beyond me at nothing, her eyes bleak. “He just seems to be getting wor…”

She caught herself, gave me an awkward glance. A man going sour puts an attractive wife in a strange bind. Still tied to him by what remains of her security, and by all the weight of the sentimentalities and warmths remembered, she is aware of her own vulnerability and, more importantly, aware of how other men might well be appraising that vulnerability, hoping to use it. Feeling the weight of interest and speculation on the part of friends and neighbors, and sensing that she is moving ever closer to disaster, she feels obligated to be more circumspect. Because this, too, is a kind of loyalty. She wants, when it is over, to find no way to blame herself.

“Get you a drink?” I said.

“Please, Scotch and water, please. Tall and weak.”

As I brought it to her I saw young Dave Sablett talking to her and saw her quite obviously send him away. He looked back at me, surly and indignant.

“Mr. McGee… ”

“Trav.”

“All right. Trav, do you think he might make a fuss if I tried to take him home now?”

“He well might, Vivian.”

She looked startled. “That makes me feel strange. Vivian. Vivi when I was little, and Viv now. Vivian when my mother was really cross with me. Vivian on official papers. But it’s all right. Maybe I’d like to be called that by someone. It could… remind me I have to be a grownup these days.”

“None of my business, of course. But is something really wrong with him? Health? Business?”

“I don’t know. He just… changed.”

“Recently?”

“I couldn’t say just when it started. A year ago anyway. Trav, I just can’t stay here and… be calm and social and charming, damn it. Not knowing they’re watching me and saying poor Viv. He promised it would be different this time. But if he refuses to come home… it could be worse.”

“I could bring him along without a fuss.”

She chewed her lip. “He might respond better to you. But I don’t want to spoil your evening.”

“I’m here only because I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”

“Well… if you wouldn’t mind.”

She showed me where I could bring him out the side door to the far end of the parking lot… The sun was gone, the steak grills cherry red, orange flames flickering atop the Polynesian pedestals in the cookout area, music resonant over the outdoor speakers. We brought both cars around and I parked behind hers, a small white Mercedes with dented fenders. I told her to wait and start up after I put him in my car, and I would follow her home.

I shook Crane Watts up out of the murks of sleep, and he came up thrashing and whining with irritation. “Lemme lone! Chrissake!” He focused on me, the uncertain peer of the still drunk. “You, partner. Cheap half a cent basser, and you were no damn help at all. I needed you like a head cold, partner what’s-is-name. Gimme anything better than clowns and I can take that pair.”

“You’re going home, Crane.”

“Hell you say! You being boyscout for that bitch? Screw you, samaritan. I’m staying. I’m going to have a ball.”

I plucked him up off the couch and caught the fist he threw at me, opened it quickly, regrasped it in an effective come-along, a hold which leaves the index and little finger free, and presses the middle two fingers against the palm of the captive hand. Crane Watts, face convulsed, drew his other fist back, and I gave him a good taste of a pain sufficiently exquisite to bypass the alcohol. His face went blank and sweaty and the blood drained out of it. He made a small squeak and lowered the poised fist.

“Is there some trouble here?” a nervous voice asked, and I turned and saw a club employee in the doorway.

“No trouble. I was just getting ready to take Mr. Watts home.”

I cued Watts with a little pressure. “Just going home,” he said in a gassy whisper, and with a strange imitation of a reassuring smile. The employee hesitated, said goodnight and went away.

Crane Watts made a very cautious attempt to pull his hand free, and found that it added to the pain. He walked out very carefully beside me, quite erect, taking small dutiful steps, not wavering a bit. A Nassau police official had showed me that hold. Improperly applied, it snaps the bones or dislocates the knuckles. In correct adjustment, it pulls the nerves of the two middle fingers against the knuckle bones in a way that you can hit ten on the dolorometer. Nine is the peak for childbirth and migraine, and all but the most stoic faint at some point between nine and ten. You watch their color, their sweat and the focus of their eyes to keep it below the fainting point. And it is a quiet thing. Small pain makes people roar and bellow. The excruciating ones reduce them to an almost supersonic squeak. Also, intense pain is one way to induce a sudden sobriety. By the time I opened the car door for him, I knew he would be no further trouble. I pushed him in and went around and got behind the wheel, started up and followed the Mercedes.

“Jesus,” he groaned, hugging his hand against his belly.

“It’ll throb for ten minutes or so, and then it will be all right.”

“It goes all the way up into the back of my neck fella. Is it some kind of judo?”

“Something like that.”

After a few minutes he slowly straightened up. “Beginning to go away, like you said.”

“Sorry I had to do it, Crane. I promised your wife I’d get you home.”

“Maybe I didn’t give you a hell of a lot of choice. Or her.” I felt him staring at me as we passed street lights. “What’s your name again?”

“Travis McGee. Friend of Frank Hopson. Over here from the east coast on business.”

“Look at that! She turns without any kind of signal at all.”

“Maybe she’s got a lot on her mind.”

“Sure. Like how to get more overspin on her backhand. Don’t let her sucker you, McGee. That’s an ice cold bitch. She’s slowing for the driveway. It’s on the left there.”

It was a broad driveway and one of those long low Florida block houses with a tile roof, a double carport and, beyond any doubt, a big screened cage off the rear, with or without a pool. Awning windows, glass doors on aluminum tracks, a heat pump system, you could guess it all before you saw it, even to a couple of citrus trees and cocoanut palms out back. Terrazzo floors, planting areas in the screened cage and a computerized kitchen. But even at night I saw other clues, a front lawn scruffy and sunbrowned, a dead tree at the corner of the house, a driveway sign saying The Watts which was turned, bent and leaning from someone clipping it on the way in.

I parked in the drive, behind her car. He got out at once, advancing to meet her as she walked back toward my car.

“Congratulations, sweetie baby,” he said. “Now you got proof I spoiled your evening. See how early it is? Now you can suffer.”

She planted her feet, squared her shoulders. “There might be one member left who would trust you to write up a simple will or even search a title, dearest. So let’s protect all that charming innocent faith as long as we can, shall we? Come on in the house before you fall down.” She turned toward me. “I’d offer you a drink, but I guess you’ve had about all anyone would want of this, Trav.”

“I might come in far a few minutes, if it’s all right. I would like to ask Crane about something. something maybe he could help me with.”

“Him?” she said, loading the word with enough contempt for a month.

“Loyalty, loyalty,” Crane mumbled.

We went into the house. She turned lights on. She kept turning lights. on, even to the outside floods in and beyond the screened cage, rolling the glass doors open, and, with a gaiety very close to hysteria, she said, “And this is our happy mortgaged nest, Mr. McGee. You may note a few scars and stains. Little domestic spats, Mr. McGee. And did you see that the pool is empty? Poor little pool. It’s a heavy upkeep item to operate a pool, more than you’d think. And we don’t care to run the air-conditioning this summer. You wouldn’t believe the bills. But you know, I do have my little indulgences. My tennis, and my once a week cleaning woman for some Saturday scrubbing, in case we entertain on a Saturday night, but there aren’t many people left we could invite, really. But, you see, I pay for the tennis and the cleaning woman. I have this lovely little trust fund, a whole hundred and twenty-one dollars a month. Don’t you think wives should have an income of their own, Mr. McGee?”

She gave me a brilliant smile, sobbed suddenly, whirled and ran, her hands over her face. She went out of sight down a corridor and a door closed behind her.

Mumbling almost inaudibly, Crane Watts took a bottle from a bar corner and headed for the kitchen. As he passed me, I lifted it out of his hand.

“I need that!”

“Not if we’re going to talk. If we’re going to talk, you need a shower and you need some coffee, before and after the shower.”

“Talk about what?”

“Maybe how you can help me make some money.”

He wiped his face slowly with his hand, stopped and looked at me with one skeptical eye between his fingers. “Mean it?” I nodded. He sighed. “Okay. Hang around. Make coffee, if you can find the stuff.”

I found powdered coffee. I made a strong mug of it and took it toward the sound of the shower. The bathroom door was ajar. I put it on the counter top next to the sink, yelled to him that it was there, and went back to the living room. Houses where love is dead or dying acquire a transient look. Somewhere there are people who, though they do not know it yet, are going to move in.

He came wandering in, mug in his hand, hair damp, wearing a blue bathrobe. He sat wearily, sipped the coffee, stared at me. His color was not good. There were dark stains under his eyes. He had a drinker’s puffiness, not far advanced, but enough to alert the observant and the wary. But the mists had lifted.

“Why me?” he asked. “That’s the best question I can ask.”

“I could need a hungry lawyer.”

“You found him. Maybe I’m not as hungry as I have to be. I won’t know, will I, until you tell me.”

“I’m doing a favor for a man. For a fee. He trusts my judgment and my knowledge of Florida land values. He just came into a very big piece of money. He wants to put half of it in securities and half in land. A broker is working up a portfolio for him. I’m… hunting around.”

“You an agent?”

“No. If I could locate something good, a very promising investment, something in the eight or nine hundred thousand range, he’ll give me ten thousand finder’s fee. He’s interested in raw land.”

“And you need a lawyer to check out something quietly?”

“Not exactly. I found a couple of very clean deals, one near Arcadia and the other up the coast, south of Cedar Keys. Each is worth the finder’s fee.”

“So where does a hungry lawyer fit?”

I stood up. “Let’s adjourn to the office.”

Looking bewildered, he followed me to the bathroom. I turned the cold water in the shower on full, then leaned on the countertop. He understood quickly enough. “You’re more careful than you have to be, McGee.”

“I always am.”

He leaned against the countertop beside me, and we spoke over the roar of the shower. “Ten thousand seems smaller every day, Watts. If a deal could get more complex, maybe a little more would rub off. Like if something could be picked up and held and resold. You might have more ideas about that kind of thing than I would.”

“Why should you think so?”

“From some bar talk today I got the idea you pulled off something pretty cute.”

“Oh, it was cute all right,” he said angrily. “It was even legal. But all I got was peanuts, comparatively speaking. It wasn’t anything I set up. This lousy town. Other lawyers get a little tricky and everybody says how smart they are. You know what I got? A whispering campaign. I’m down to a practice that just about pays the light bill.”

“Maybe you could try it again, and cut yourself a bigger piece. Legally, of course.”

“Maybe your guy is too shrewd for it. The one they cleaned was truly stupid.”

“My guy is no giant, and he’s never held a job in his life. You said they cleaned. Who?”

“Some out-of-town operators.”

“Would we need them?”

He frowned, tugged his lip. “It wouldn’t hurt at all to bring one of them in on it. He’s damned good.” He straightened up. “You’re acting as if we’re going to try it, and you don’t know a damn thing about it.”

“All I want to know is that there’s no ten years in Raiford afterwards.”

“Nothing like that. It’s all legal, believe me.”

“How does it work?”

“Your guy has to go along with certain things. Like being willing to be in on a land syndicate operation. And your guy should be off balance a little. They used a woman on the last one.”

“Is she still around?”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“It could work with my man too.”

“Listen. You said he trusts you. The way this thing works, it isn’t halfway. It has to clean him completely, or it doesn’t work. Would that bother you?”

“Not on his account. But it makes me a little nervous. We’re talking about close to two million dollars, Watts.”

“With family lawyers riding herd on it, maybe?”

“No. How does it work? Make it simple. I’m not a lawyer.”

“You make your man believe the syndicate is going after one hell of a big piece of land. Everybody puts money into the syndicate trust account, on a share basis. The trustee is one of the syndicate. In this case it would be that man I told you about. The sucker thinks everybody is putting in cash. But, by separate letter of agreement, the trustee agrees to accept demand notes from the other partners, in view of their long association and so forth. There’s a clause in the syndicate agreement permitting additional assessments. Every time one comes along, the sucker comes up with cash and the others turn over promissory notes for their assessment. Another clause in the agreement says that if anyone can’t meet an assessment, they are dealt out, and their share is divided pro rata among the other partners. Another clause says that if it is decided the operation is not feasible, the syndicate will be disbanded and the funds in the trust account divided among the partners pro rata. So you just assess him until he’s dry, cancel him out with due notice, and a little while later close up shop and divide the pie. You have to keep him thinking that the whole thing is right on the verge of turning into a big fat gold mine.”

“And you got a piece of that pie?”

“Hardly. I got a twenty-five hundred dollar fee and a five thousand bonus. I was promised ten, but after it was over there was no way I could blow the whistle on them without putting myself in a sling, and they knew it.”

“What did they take the man for?”

“About two hundred and thirty thousand. When it was too late, he went to another lawyer. That’s how the news got all over town.”

“But you can still afford to lose five hundred dollars in a bridge game?”

He put his head in his hands. “Cut it out, will you?”

“Could you rig the same kind of operation again, for my man?”

“I don’t know. It’s a lot bigger. I don’t know how good my nerve is. I’d have to bring the other man in on it. Maybe he wouldn’t want to come in alone. Maybe he’d want to use the same people as before. They’d cut themselves big pieces.”

“So how could we defend ourselves against being left the small end?”

He shook his head. “I’ve got a headache, McGee. There are ways. You work this thing out in the open. We could set up the trust account so it would require three signatures for any withdrawal, and with our promissory notes being as good as the others, we could get in for any percentage we could dicker for.”

“He’s my man. What if we go for half between

122 John D. MacDonald

BRIGHT ORANGE FOR THE SHROUD 123

us, forty percent for me and ten for you? And let them cut the rest up any way they want, just so they swing it.“

“But wouldn’t he know you can’t come up with that kind of cash? I think it would have to…” The bathroom door opened and Vivian stared in at us. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m getting rich, sweetheart. Close the door. As you leave.”. I got a duplicate of the look she gave him. She yanked the door shut.

“One other thing, Watts. I suppose you have to set up a fictitious piece of property.”

“Oh, no. That would classify it as fraud. We dealt with the executor of the Kippler tract, sixtyone thousand acres. We made legitimate option offers.”

“So where are you if he said okay, let’s deal?”

“He couldn’t. It’s all tied up by the terms of the will. But how could we know that if he didn’t tell us?”

“And he didn’t?”

“No. He wrote nice letters. Seriously considering your last offer. Must discuss it with the heirs and the tax attorneys and so on. They went in the file, in case anybody ever had to see the file. And he kept demanding a higher option offer.”

“Which required assessments. So he was coached?”

“Of course. And he got a nice little gift afterward. Hell, McGee, the whole file on this thing is clean. as a whistle.”

“Could we use the same tract again?”

“Well… not on option terms. Too much money involved this time. Maybe on a purchase basis. With a good chance of resale if we could pick it up right, say at two hundred an acre. Twelve million. Then your man comes in for one twelfth… something along that line, where it would leave enough plausible spread to assess him out of the picture. You see, you have to know just about the absolute total the sucker can come up with. Once hooked big, then they have to keep throwing more in because they think it’s the only way they can protect themselves. The beauty of it is that when it’s over, they are picked so clean there’s hardly any chance at all of them coming up with any civil action to recover, and it’s a little too clean to make it attractive to any lawyer to tackle on a contingency basis. What’s your man’s name?”

“We’ll have to think about this and talk about it later. What’s the name of your expert?”

“He might be busy with something else. You’ll get in touch?”

“Soon.”

“In the meantime, just for the hell of it, and it can’t do any harm, call your man and act excited and tell him you think there’s a chance you can get him into something that will double his money in a year. Is he interested in doubling his money?”

“He wants to be nationally known as a wheeler and dealer.”

“What line of work are you in?”

“Salvage and demolition.”

“On your own?”

“Without overhead. Whenever the right kind of job comes along, I bid it in, rent the equipment, subcontract everything I can, come out with a low profit percentage that’s big enough to live well until the next chance opens up.”

He nodded. “Very smart. Very nice. So why all this sudden larceny, friend?”

“I wasn’t the low bidder the last few times, and the operating capital is getting a little too puny.”

“How can I contact you, McGee?”

“I’m staying with friends. I’ll be in touch.”

I did not see Vivian when I left. And I would well imagine how Crane Watts would feel the next morning when he remembered the conversation. The man suddenly and artificially sobered has a period of fraudulent lucidity. He thinks he is under control, but the cerebral cortex is still partially stunned, all caution compromised. Attempts at slyness are childlike and obvious. The business of the shower had reassured him. If I was that careful to drown out any listening devices, then, hell, I had to be okay.

In the sober morning it would have a dreadful flavor to him, and he would be aghast not only at all he had told me, but at the memory of even contemplating the same sort of thing with so much money involved. He’d know it was too big for that same kind of operation.

But he was hungry. His seams were splitting and the sawdust was leaking. I wondered if he was bright enough to realize that under the seedy look of failure was an old time conscience, prodding him into self-punishment. Such as playing losing bridge for high stakes.

Now I had things to go on, pieces to pry loose. The solo operator is often invulnerable. But group operations are weak as the weakest thief in the team. An equation applies. The weakest is usually the one who gets the smallest end of the take. And knows the least. But because of the quasi-legality of this operation, Crane Watts had useful information. The big con often needs a plausible local front man. I could guess how Arthur’s money had probably been split. A hundred thousand to Stebber, fifty to Wilma, fifty to G. Harrison Gisik, the balance to Watts, Waxwell, the Kippler executor and operating expenses.

The role of Boone Waxwell troubled me a little. Beating Arthur so severely had been stupid. But maybe they felt they needed an enforcer. For whom? Watts wasn’t likely to get out of line. Perhaps there’d been a germ of truth in their story to Arthur, that Waxwell was essential to negotiations on the Kippler tract. That could mean control of the executor. And where was the coldly efficient Miss Brown? And would that cheap redhead with the improbable name-Dilly Starr-know anything useful if she could be found?

I drove slowly toward the center of the very rich and pleasant little city of Naples, wondering how good old Frank was enjoying Spain.

Eight

WHEN I walked into the big drugstore on Fifth Avenue in Naples, I was slightly surprised to see that it was not yet nine o’clock. There were some rowdy teenagers at one of the counter sections, and I sat as far from them as possible. I like them fine in smaller units. But when they socialize, showing off for each other, they sadden me. The boys punch and shove, and repeat each comment in their raw uncertain baritone over and over until finally they have milked the last giggle from their soft little girls with their big, spreading, TV butts. And they keep making their quick cool appraisals of the environment to make certain they have a properly disapproving audience of squares. And have you noticed how many fat kids there are lately? And the drugstore comedians are usually the rejects. The good ones, as in any year, are taut, brown, earnest, and have many other things to do, and can even-unthinkably-endure being alone. This little fatpack was nearing the end of their school year and, predictably, would slob around all summer, with a few of them impregnating each other. They would dutifully copy the outlook and mannerisms of their momentary idols. Some of them would check out this summer as a bloody stain on a bridge approach. The survivors, ten years hence, would wonder how come their luck was turning so bad, why life wasn’t giving them any kind of break at all.

I had coffee and a sandwich, and went to a booth to check the thin Naples phonebook. Mrs. Mildred Mooney was listed. 17 Twenty-first Avenue. After the fifth ring she answered in a listless voice, said she was Mrs. Mooney.

“I wondered if I could stop by and talk to you about something. My name is McGee.”

“I guess not. Not tonight. I was supposed to babysit and I got one of my sick headaches and I had to get somebody else, and I already gone to bed, mister.”

“At least I can tell you what it’s about, I’m trying to help a man you worked for. He needs help. Arthur Wilkinson. You might have some information I could use, Mrs. Mooney.”

“He’s a real nice man. He was real good to me. He had some terrible bad luck, losing all his money like that, so sudden and all. But I don’t see how I could help.”

“I won’t take up much of your time.”

After a long silence, she said, “Well, I can’t seem to get to sleep anyhow.”

“I’ll be along in a few minutes then.”

She sat in a corner chair in the small living room of her efficiency apartment, sat in the dimness of a single small lamp burning in the opposite corner. Dumpy woman with a worn face and bushy gray hair, wearing a quilted wine-colored robe.

“When I’m like this,” she said, “it’s like bright light was needles sticking in my eyes. It comes on me about three or four times a year, and then I’m just no good for anything until it goes away. I got regular people, and I can get enough work to keep me going. Working at that big beach house last year was more than I like to take on. It was good pay, for around here, and just the two of them, but she didn’t lift a finger. And I lost a lot of regular people taking steady work like that, and it took so long to get my regular people. It seems like I ended up about even, except for working harder. Oh, I don’t mind work, but when they come and go you have to look out for yourself so you have something coming in steady. But I want to tell you right now, I make it my rule not to talk about my people. You start that and the first thing you know it gets around, then they don’t want you. Land, the things I seen, I could fill a book, and you better believe it.”

“I wouldn’t want to ask you to talk about any of your regular people, Mrs. Mooney. I want you to consider something that maybe you never thought of. I want you to think back, and see if it would make any sense to you to believe that Wilma was a part of a conspiracy to defraud Arthur Wilkinson of his money.”

“But wasn’t she his wife like they said?”

“They went through a ceremony. Maybe she wasn’t free to marry. Maybe it was just one of the ways of setting him up, to make it easier to take his money.”

She made several little clicking sounds with her tongue. After a thoughtful silence she said, “I came close to quitting a lot of times out there, believe me, and stayed on account of him. She was a pretty little thing, and real lively, but I’d say older than maybe he knew. She sure did spend an awful lot of time on her face and hair. You know one thing she would do I never did hear of before? She would sandpaper her face, and that’s God’s truth, take little strokes and get it raw almost and then put on white goo and some kind of mask and lay down for an hour. She was loving to him, most of the time, nice enough to me when he was close, but with me and her alone, I was just a piece of furniture. She didn’t see me, and if I said anything, she didn’t hear me. She’d turn on me sometimes, just as mean as a wasp, eyes all narrowed down. Not hot angry, but cold as can be. I don’t have to take that from anybody. But he was a nice nice man. I tell you, the way she used him was wicked. She had him waiting on her hand and foot, something she wanted that was closer to her than him, he had to go get it and bring it to her. He brushed her hair, that real pale thin kind of hair, a hundred strokes, putting a little bitty dab of some kind of perfume oil on the soft brush every ten strokes, with her whining if he lost count. She had him oil her head to foot for going in the sun, and another sickening thing, I tell you, she had him run her little electric razor, shaving the fuzz off her pretty legs, then she’d feel to see if he did it good, tell him where he missed, and pat him when he finished. My husband Mr. Mooney God rest his soul, was a man, and no woman ever lived could have turned him into a lady’s maid like she done with Mr. Wilkinson. I felt so sorry for that poor man. I don’t know, Mr. McGee. I thought it was just bad judgment, him investing in something that turned out bad for him. But I guess she was the kind out for herself and no regard for anybody else.”

“So let’s say she was setting him up for Mr. Stebber to cheat him. Would that fit?”

“Mr. Stebber seemed like a real gentleman, the kind that thanks you nicely for any little thing. A smiley man. And you could tell he was a real big man, successful and all. She knew him from someplace. Then there was that tall sick-looking man with the funny name.”

“Gisik.”

“He didn’t have much to say at any time. He acted as if he was busy thinking about important things happening far away. I guess if Mr. Wilkinnom got cheated, then young Crane Watts must have got the same dose. They say he’s going down hill something terrible, drinking and gambling and his practice going down to nothing, and probably they’ll lose the house, so it’s a blessing there’s no children. It’s children get hurt the worst in a thing like that. They don’t understand. They’re not regular people of mine, or ever were, so it isn’t like I’m saying anything nearly everybody doesn’t know already.”

“I understand.”

“There was one hanging around they called Boo. From out of the swamps around here from the way he talked. Low class man I’d say. And if anybody was robbing anybody I’d say he was the one. And if she was in on it, I’d say she was in on it with that Boo fellow.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I guess because he kept dropping in.”

I sensed reservations.

“There must have been something else.”

“I’d rather not say”

“Any little thing might help.”

“It… it isn’t a decent kind of talk, and I don’t want you thinking the wrong thing of me for staying on where that kind of thing was going on. It’s not I’m an old maid. I was married twelve years to Mr. Mooney, God rest his soul, and had three dear babies who died, every one of them, breaking my heart every time, and breaking it for good when Mr. Mooney passed away in such terrible pain it was a blessing when it ended. What happened, it was an afternoon not long before they had to give up the house, and Mrs. Wilkinson and that Boo fellow were out by the pool, side by side in those tip back chairs, her keeping her face turned up to the sunshine. The mister had gone into town for some reason, and I just happened to look out the utility room window where I was sorting laundry. I was looking at them sideways, sort of, her in a naked little white suit, the bottom part like a little narrow band with fringe on it. And I just happened to see him reach over slow and put… put his hand down into her lap. It came into my mind that she was sleeping and she’d wake up fighting mad. But she didn’t move. You know how you want to stop looking at something and you’re kind of froze? When she did move… it was just to make things a little bit easier for him, her face still turned up for the sun and her eyes closed. When she did that, I stopped looking, and I worked like a crazy woman, throwing those clothes around, getting them all mixed up, so I had to sort them all out again, spilling soap all over when I got them in the machine. When I heard them sploshing around I looked out and by then they were in the pool, laughing around. I knew then and there that the mister had a wicked wife, and I made my plans to give notice the end of the month, but before I could tell them, they told me they were giving up the beach house. That Boo man was around there a lot, and by then, those last weeks, Mr. Stebber and the sick one had gone away, back to Tampa I guess.”

“Tampa?” I said it so loudly I startled her.

“Well, of course, it being where he lives.”

“How are you sure of that?”

“Because I’m a real good cook. Mr. Mooney, God rest him, said I was the best he ever knew of. And that man loved to eat. I don’t measure things. I just put things together the way they seem right. I did restaurant work once, but I hated it. There you have to measure everything because you have to make so much. I’m not lying when I say there’ve been visitors down here offered me more money than I’d care to mention to go back north with them. Mr. Stebber is one of those who lives for eating. You can tell it. Mostly it’s fat happy men like him. They shut their eyes when they take the first taste, and they make a little moan and smile all over themselves. He came out there to the kitchen at that beach house and said it was just between the two of us, and when the Wilkinsons didn’t need me any more, I should come to Tampa to cook for him. He said I’d have no heavy housework, and my own room and bath with color television. He said he was away a lot and when he was away it would be like a vacation for me. He said that I’d never have to cook for more than seven or eight at the most, and that wouldn’t be often. He said he had a great big apartment in one of those cooperative places, looking out over Tampa Bay, with a colored woman that came in by the day to do the heavy housework.

“Well, I told him that I just couldn’t bring myself to move that far away from Mr. Mooney’s grave. The three babies lived a little while, every one, long enough to have their names given to them, Mary Alice and Mary Catherine and Michael Francis, marked on the stones. There isn’t a Sunday no matter how I might feel or how the weather is, I don’t go out and neaten up the plot and set there and feel close to the only family I ever had.

“He said again that it was just between us, and if I changed my mind later on, then I could call him up, but the number wasn’t in the book, and he gave it to me and told me not to lose it. But on that very next Sunday out there it seemed to me that Mr. Mooney somehow knew I was carrying that number in my pocketbook, so I took it out then and there and tore it up and let the wind blow it away. Are you sure it wasn’t just maybe the missus and that Boo fellow cheated the mister?”

“They were all in on it, Mrs. Mooney.”

“I do declare. You never can tell, can you? And they cheated that Mr. Watts too?”

“I think that’s a very accurate statement.”

“I can’t think of anything else that would help.”

“Do you know a redheaded girl named Dilly Starr?”

“I can’t say as I do. I guess a person would remember a name like that.”

“Or a Miss Brown, possibly Mr. Stebber’s secretary?”

“Her neither,” she said. “Is Mr. Wilkinson all right?”

“He’s fine.”

“Kindly give him my regards when you see him. He’s a nice person. I suppose she ran off. Well, that’s good riddance. I guess he couldn’t help himself with her. When she was mad at him, she’d treat him like she treated me all the time, like a piece of furniture, wouldn’t let him anywheres near her, and when he did exactly like she wanted, then she was… after him all the time. A woman shouldn’t use that to break a man’s spirit. That part of it is a wife’s duty.” She shook her head and clucked. “That little woman had him so he didn’t know what end was up or what time of day it was. It makes a man a living fool.”

When I thanked her for giving me the time, she said, “I’m glad you came by Mr. McGee. It took my mind off the way I feel, and maybe I can drop off to sleep now. I hope the mister gets his money back.”

At ten thirty I stopped at a gas station and picked up a road map to refresh my memory about distances in that sparsely settled area. I was wondering about taking the thirty or forty minute drive to Marco Island and seeing if I could locate Waxwell, but I didn’t have any sound ideas about the approach. The radio news, announcing thunderstorms moving in from the Gulf, estimated to hit the area about midnight, made up my mind for me. I went to the marina, parked and locked the green Chev, and took a cautious fifty minutes driving the Ratfink home through unfamiliar waters.

The lovers had the lights out and the Flush buttoned up. I unlocked the after door to the lounge and went in and put some lights on. In a few minutes Chook came aft, into the lounge, black hair a-tangle, pulling and settling a flowered shift down on her hearty hips, squinting through the light at me.

“The thunder woke me up,” she said. “Then I heard you.”

“And didn’t know it was me, and came blundering out. Without the pistol.”

She sprawled into a chair, yawned, combed her hair back with her fingers. “So those things spook me, Trav. And it isn’t going to get that rough anyway.”

“I’m so glad to hear the reassurances of a qualified expert.”

“Are you serious?”

“If somebody put neat little holes in our three heads, took the Flush out into that pass, headed her west, set the pilot, opened the sea cocks, dived overboard and swam back, then they could stop being nervous about a quarter of a million dollars. Some people just as alive as you, dear girl, implausible though that may seem, were probably killed today somewhere in the world for the price of a bowl of rice. If I come aboard at night again, and there’s no gun in your pretty paw, I’m going to welt you pretty good, enough to keep you on your feet for a few days.”

“Man enough?”

“Try me.

She made a face. “Okay. I’m sorry.” She jumped at the next white flash of lightning, and the rain came with the thunder, roaring against the deck overhead, hissing into the bay waters around us.

“Have a happy day?” I asked.

“Nice, Trav. Nice.”

“How is he?”

She gave me a wicked grin. “I think if you hung him by his heels in a barrel of ice water, he might start to wake up a little.”

“Don’t overdo a good thing, girl.”

“And does that happen to be any of your damned business?”

“Don’t flare up at me. It’s a reasonable suggestion. You’ve got ten times his vitality. If I have to use him, I don’t want some damned zombie.”

“You won’t have. You’ll have a man. Something you wouldn’t have had before. Who set you up to know everything about everything, you silly bastard? It’s up to him every time. He deals every hand. So who’s pushing him into more than he can handle? I want him to strut a little. To take charge. With her, you know what he got? When the cupboard was locked, nothing. Other times, she took charge. Until there just wasn’t any response possible, and then she’d tell him he was a damned poor excuse for a man. That was poisonous, Trav. Poisonous. Merciless. Any woman can accept more than any one man can give. It’s a question of mechanics. She can make him feel inadequate, and once she gets him really worrying about whether he can or he can’t, then more often he can’t.

“I tell the poor guy he’s too much, that he’s ruining me. Here is a great triumph. We were walking on the beach there, making dumb jokes. All of a sudden he gave me a great wallop across the fanny with the flat of his hand, laughed like a maniac, and ran like a kid with me chasing him and cursing him, just because, you see, all of a sudden he felt good. It made me want to cry. That sweet guy, he’s a sexual convalescent. I don’t demand. I take it as it comes and fake it when it doesn’t, because right at this stage he has to feel that he’s terrific. And another thing, that’s the same for man or woman. When it’s good, it doesn’t drag you down. It refreshes. When it’s a bad thing between people, bad in their heads and bad in their hearts, maybe hating a little, that’s when it makes you drag around afterward, feeling sour and old. This way, you have a little nap, you wake up starved, you go around humming and whistling. So don’t give me this quack about zombies, Trav. Maybe I’m being a damn fool. I don’t know. I don’t love him. He just isn’t… quick enough, maybe, the way he thinks, and we don’t really laugh the same way at the same things. But I am terribly fond of him. He’s so decent. Now it’s like watching a kid grow up. Maybe it’s penance for me. I’ve bitched up some guys, sometimes meaning to, sometimes not.”

She gave me a rueful smile and shook her head. “Oh, hell. I sound as if I was making such n big fat sacrifice, huh? Yes sir, old girl, it’s a terrible chore, isn’t it? Such dull work. McGee, if you’ve earned one of those beautiful Mexican beers for yourself, I’ll open one for each of us. And you can tell me your adventures. Believe me, we did worry about you.”

“Every minute. Get the beers.”

As she came back with them, the rain moved on away from us as quickly as it had come, making the night silence more intense. She listened intently, her face still, as I recounted events, facts and the resultant guesses.

She shook her head. “That club part. You’ve got a lot of gall, you know that?”

“People take you at the value you put on yourself. That makes it easy for them. All you do is blend in. Accept the customs of every new tribe. And you try not to say too much because then you sound as if you were selling something. And you might contradict yourself. Sweetie, everybody in this wide world is so constantly, continuously concerned with the impact he’s making, he just doesn’t have the time to wonder too much about the next guy.”

She frowned. “You want to move fast, and find out as much as you can in a hurry. Right?”

“Right.”

“Then I think this Boone Waxwell might be more up my alley.”

“You have just one job, and you’re doing it nicely.”

“Do you want to be efficient? Or protective?”

“Both, Chook.”

“But you’ve got no approach to Waxwell.”

“I didn’t until this moment.”

“Like what?”

“The simplest thing in the world. Crane Watts happened to mention him. Watts won’t ever be sure he didn’t. Let me see. Watts said Waxwell might know where to locate the woman they’d used last time.”

“But if he does, that’s no good. Wilma knows you.”

“I have a feeling he won’t take me at face value.”

“He’ll get in touch with Watts, won’t he?”

“And raise hell. Hell conditioned by the idea that maybe there’s another pigeon to be plucked. Myway, it never works to line it all out ahead of time. It’s better to stay loose. And go in any direction that looks good.”

“Tomorrow?”

“I’ll run over to Goodland in the reliable Ratfink. Alone.”

Nine

IN THE milky early mist of Sunday morning, the Gulf was placid, so I went out the pass. I looked back as the Busted Flush dwindled, looking smaller and smaller against the beach, blurring into the mist. Her lines are not lovely. She is a burly lady, and she waddles. But she has, on some intensely festive occasions, slept more than I bothered to count. In fact I have a treasured memory of one leisurely trip up the Intercoastal-destination, a big birthday binge for an old friend at his place at Fernandina Beach. On the third morning out I came across a sandy little girl up on the bow, sunning herself in a cute little suit, painting her toenails, whistling with great precision a series of riffs I recognized as Ruby Braff improvisation. She had a great figure, and an ugly charming buggy little face, and I had never seen her before in my life. She looked up at me in pert inquiry and asked me who in the world happened to own this darling boat, because she had just decided to buy it.

There was a crowd aboard again. A crowd of two, and I had left Chook to brief Arthur when he got out of the shower.

I turned south, running a half mile off shore, watching the day brighten as the mist began to burn off. I again had the clothes and gear of the fisherman and almost became one when I saw an acre of water being slashed white ahead of me and further off shore, birds working over it. I ran at it, killed the motor at the point where momentum drifted me to the outer fringe of the activity. I peered down into the green and saw, a few feet below the surface, a combat squad of big bonita wheeling to hit back into the bait school.

School bonita run all of a size, and allowing for the magnification of the water, and my momentary glimpse of them, they had to be upwards of six pounds. All they would do would be tear up my light spinning gear on the chance of boating something inedible. They are the great underrated game fish of the Gulf coast. On light gear, a six pound bonita is the equal of a twenty pound king mackerel. There is one thing they all do. Work them, with great effort, close to the boat, and they give you one goggle-eyed stare, turn and go off in a run every bit as swift and muscular as the first one. And they will keep doing that until, on light tackle, they die in the water. It seems a poor reward for that much heart in any living thing, particularly when the meat is too black, bloody, oily and strong to make edible. Bonefish quit. Barracuda dog it. Tarpon are docile once they begin to show their belly in the slow rolls of exhaustion. But the only way you can catch a live bonita is to use gear hefty enough to horse him home before he can kill himself.