Gulf Coast Girl aka Scorpion Reef

Six

I tried to roll over. I was conscious she was on her knees beside me, helping.

“The animals,” she said. “The filthy—unspeakable-animals—” Her voice broke.

When I could sit up I slid backward and sat propped against the side of the car while the waves of sickness subsided. My whole right arm prickled and felt numb except for the hard welt of pain above the elbow, and I couldn’t move the hand. I rubbed it with the left. She sat down on the sand beside me, took the arm gently in her hands, and massaged it.

“I’m sorry, Bill,” she said. “I’m terribly sorry.”

“It’s all right,” I said. The left hand clenched, down against the ground, and sand ran between my fingers I opened and tightened it again, and swallowed, conscious of the dry, metallic taste in my mouth. After another deep breath some of the shaking went away. “There’s nothing we can do about it. Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she said. “I just fell down.”

In a minute we got back in the car and sat down. She lit a cigarette for me; I held it in my left hand and tried to work some feeling into the right. I could hear the surf swishing dreamily behind us. All the violence had washed out of the night as suddenly as it had come. They’d given me their little demonstration and were gone. They didn’t have to stick around and tell me what would happen if they caught me again. That was understood. And in just a few more hours they were going to start wondering what had happened to that little thug. When they did they’d come and ask me.

Some of the numbness was leaving my arm now and I could drive. We started back. Neither of us said anything about the way I had kissed her when she put on that act for them. It would only be embarrassing.

“What did Macaulay do to them?” I asked.

She hesitated.

“It’s all right,” I said. “If it’s none of my business—”

“No,” she said slowly, staring ahead at the headlights probing the edge of the surf. “It isn’t that. It’s just that I don’t know the whole story myself.”

“Didn’t he tell you?”

“Most of it. But not all. He says I’ll be safer if I never know. It happened about three months ago. He had to go to the Coast on business, for about a week, he said. But three days later he called me late one night, from San Antonio, Texas. I could tell he was under a bad strain. He said for me to pack some bags, put as much of our stuff in the car as I could, and leave right away for Denver. He didn’t explain; he just said he was in trouble and for me to get out of New York fast.

“I did, and he met me in Denver. He said it was something that happened at a party he went to, in some suburb of Los Angeles. I could see he didn’t want to talk about it, but he finally admitted a man had been killed, and he had seen it—”

“But,” I said, “all he has to do is go to the police. They’ll protect him. He’s a material witness.”

“It’s not that simple,” she said. “One of the people involved is a police captain.”

“Oh,” I said.

It sounded too easy and too pat, but on the other hand there wasn’t any doubt she was telling the truth. I tried to discount the fact I’d probably have believed her if she’d told me the other side of the moon was an amusement park, but it still came out the same way. She wasn’t lying. But what about Macaulay himself?

“How long have you been married?” I asked.

“Eight years.”

“And he’s been with that marine insurance firm all the time?”

“Yes,” she said. “He’s been with them ever since he came out of law school, back in the thirties, except for three years in the service during the war.”

I shook my head. There was nothing in that. We came into town. The traffic lights were flashing amber now, and the street-sweeping trucks were out. I stopped beside her car and got out with her. She put out her hand. “Thanks,” she said. “It’ll be bad, waiting for that card.”

There was nobody on the street. I was still holding her hand, hating to see her leave. Then I remembered the awkward thing I’d said in that bar as a result of looking at her like this, and let it drop. “Don’t go out of the house at night while I’m gone,” I said. “If you have to come downtown, do it during rush hours when there are lots of people on the streets.”

“I’ll be all right,” she said.

“If you see a car behind you on the way home, don’t worry about it. It’ll be mine.”

I followed her out. It was an upper-bracket suburb out near the country club. She pulled into a drive and stopped under a Carport beside a two-storied Mediterranean house with a tile roof and ironwork balconies. I stopped at the curb, looking along the streets where the old, peaceful trees made shadowy patterns in the lights and all the lawns were sleek and well-kept. Violence? Here? Then I turned my head and stared at the house across the street. The windows were all dark. But they were in there, watching her as she got out of the car and fumbled in her bag for the key. She waved a white-gloved hand, and went inside.

I went on, looking the place over. It was the second house from the corner. I turned at the intersection and drove slowly down the side street. There was an alley behind the house. A car was parked diagonally across the street from the mouth of it, in the shadows under the trees, and as I went past I saw a man’s elbow move slightly in the window. They had it covered front and back. There’d be one at the other end of the alley.

All I had to do was get Macaulay out of there alive. And by that time they’d be after me, too.

* * *

I drove the car out on the pier and as I got out I thought of him down there somewhere below me in the impenetrable blackness of night and silt-laden water, and for a moment he wasn’t a vicious little hoodlum but just somebody who’d been alive a few hours ago looking at sunlight and feeling hungry and thinking about girls and inhaling smoke from a cigarette. I brushed it away savagely. There wasn’t any time for being morbid about a dead gangster. I’d be dead myself very shortly if I didn’t get out of there.

I hurried down the ladder. The waterway was dark and still, like a jungle river, and it was hot in the thick clots of shadow below the side of the pier. When I opened the door and went inside the trapped air was stifling. I looked at my watch. It was nearly three.

I went out in the galley and put some water on to heat in the big electric percolator, and then examined my face in the bathroom mirror. The puffy places were worse. That was all right, leaving here, because I wanted them to remember me, but I had to start work on them so they’d be gone by the time I returned. My stomach felt as if I’d been run over by a tank, but at least that wouldn’t show.

While I was waiting for the water to heat I pulled the bag from under my bunk and began to pack. Carter was going to think I was a sad bastard, quitting with ten minutes’ notice, but if I wanted eulogies I could stick around and there’d be lots of them at the funeral. I shaved, and put the toilet gear in the bag. The clothes hanging in the bathroom were still wet. I rolled them in a newspaper and packed them anyway.

The water was hot. I poured it into a pan and started a new batch heating. Sitting on the side of the bunk with the pan before me on a chair, I shoved the hand in and let it soak until it was, as red as fire coral while I squeezed out a cloth with the left and held it against the puffed places on my face. It was intensely still except for the humming of the fan, and the minute I stopped moving and planning the room was full of her. Knowing it was absurd didn’t make any difference. She was everywhere.

She slid toward me and I kissed her again with that odd sensation of being suddenly overrun and flooded with her like a compartment below water line when the bulkhead buckles under pressure of the sea. One minute there’d been only that unstoppable trickle of her running through the mind, and the next I was drowning in her.

Nuts, I thought irritably. Who ever heard of anything as stupid? And there was another slight matter. She was Macaulay’s wife. Maybe I should try to work that into my thoughts from time to time so it didn’t elude me altogether.

Who was Macaulay? I stared at a parboiled hand in a basin of water, looking for Macaulay, and found nothing at all. There wasn’t even the framework on which to start building a Macaulay. An executive in an insurance firm who was being hunted down by gangsters who wanted to kill him—what did you get from that?

Nothing.

He could fly a plane. Why hadn’t I thought to ask her how it happened he could fly? Of course, lots of people could nowadays; maybe I was the only one left who couldn’t. But flying came in sizes. Even I could see that. Hopping a Piper Cub sixty miles from Booster’s Junction to East Threadbare along two sets of railroad tracks and a six-lane highway was one thing; taking off across 500 miles of empty Gulf and God knows how many miles of green broadloom jungle was something else. You had to be a good dead-reckoning navigator, and you had to know you were good, to tackle it.

And if he knew exactly where that crashed plane was, he wasn’t only a good navigator—he was a superb one. Of course, she had said it was within sight of the coast, but that didn’t mean much. One part of a coast line can have a hellish knack of looking just like another part of a coast line, even when you’re approaching it under sail at five knots, and I imagined it was a lot more so when it was flying back toward you at a hundred miles an hour. Of course, you were higher; but that probably didn’t help a great deal. You could just see more things you were probably wrong about.

Then suddenly I thought of something else that was odd. The plane was in sixty feet of water, but still it was within sight of land, near enough to see some landmark to identify the spot. Off Yucatan? I’d never been down there, but I’d seen it on the charts plenty of times, and it was my impression the ten-fathom curve was a lot farther out than that. I shrugged. Maybe she had meant something else was near enough to get a bearing on, an old wreck, or a shoal.

I went on soaking the hand and holding hot compresses on my face. At dawn I drove out to the nearest cafe and drank some coffee. I was beginning to feel people behind me now. It had been nearly twelve hours since he’d disappeared.

I drove downtown to the bus station. There’d be an eastbound bus at 10:35. I got in line with a few other people at the window. When my turn came I asked for a ticket to New York. After the man had filled in the blanks on a yard of paper and stamped it in half a dozen places I looked in my wallet and made the awful discovery I was seven dollars short of the price.

Actually I had it, of course, but I slapped all my pockets and turned them out and looked stupidly through my wallet three or four times while the line behind me grew longer and people began to mutter. I milked it until his patience began to wear thin, and then told him to set the ticket aside and I’d be back later with the rest of the money.

I went out in the street again. It was a hot, still morning, but the cold place between my shoulder blades was growing larger all the time. I watched in shop windows, and stopped suddenly, looking around as I lit a cigarette. Sure, there were people behind me. There were hundreds of them, going to work.

As soon as the used car lots began to open I drove around to one. A man with a cigar glanced at the Ford with complete indifference, told me tearfully how bad business was, and offered me half what it was worth. I knew I wouldn’t get any more, but I screamed like a wounded rug merchant and drove away. Twenty minutes later I came back and turned the papers over to him and he gave me a check. He’d remember me, too. I’d cried louder than he had.

I took a taxi out to the pier, looking at my watch every few minutes now. This was the first place they’d come when they began to wonder what had happened to him, and I was cutting it too fine. There was no one around the gate, however, and the watchman shook his head when I asked if anybody’d been looking for me.

“But you got a telegram,” he said.

It was from Carter. There’d been a delay in opening the bids for the salvage job and he wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. We drove out to the end of the pier and I asked the driver to wait while I picked up the bag. We met no one coming out. I turned the keys over to the watchman, said something vague about sickness in the family, and told him I was leaving for New York.

Back at the bus station the ticket agent gave me a surly grunt and reached for the ticket before I’d opened my mouth. I checked the bag through, and looked at my watch again. It was 10:10. I walked over to the bank, cashed the car check, and drew out my account.

There was a telegraph office in the same block. I wrote out a wire to Carter so he’d have a chance to pick up a new diver around New Orleans. It was the least I could do.

The last ten minutes were rough. I kept looking around for them, knowing at the same time it was stupid because I’d never seen any of them except Barclay. After a long time they called the bus over the P.A. system and I went out and climbed aboard. I got a seat on the aisle, away from the window, and just sat there, enduring it. At last the driver swung the door shut and we rolled out of the station into traffic.

The little man in the seat next to the window wanted to know where I was going and when I told him he said, no offense, but he just couldn’t stand the place. All them foreigners, he said.

While he was telling me what was wrong with it the driver cut in the air-conditioning unit and we began to roll faster through the outskirts.

I unwound all at once. It was something like melting.

I straightened suddenly and looked around. It must have been some time afterward, for we were out in open country. People in near-by seats were staring at me, and the man who didn’t like New York was shaking my arm.

He grinned apologetically. “Thought I ought to wake you up,” he said. “You was having a nightmare.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.” I was clammy with sweat.

“Must have been a fire in it,” he said. “You kept moaning and saying something about smoke.”