A Flash of Green

One

When she heard the rattle of the old tin wheelbarrow, Kat Hubble knew it was after four. On Tuesdays, after he had finished up at the Lessers’, and on Fridays, when he was through at the Cable home, Barnett Mayberry would do one extra hour of yard work at her house before getting into his stuttering old car and driving back home to Pigeon Town, the Negro community on the far side of Palm City.

Before Van had been killed, Barnett had come one full day a week, and though now it added up to only one quarter of the time, he seemed to keep the place looking as neat as ever, though of course she had begun no new landscape projects in this past year, and she did more of the work herself.

The arrangement with Barnett had just seemed to happen. Beginning the week after the funeral, he had stopped by to take care of things which obviously needed attention, such as clipping the side hedge of Australian pine, and she had given him a dollar for each after-work hour. In some mysterious way it had become a routine. It so exactly fitted her diminished purse and her needs that she could not help suspecting it was not entirely satisfactory to Barnett, that he had entrapped himself through some murky idea of loyalty and pride in past projects. Yet when she had at last taxed him with it, he had looked rigidly beyond her and shuffled his feet and said, “I got a place for them dollahs, Miz Hubble. It working out good for me.”

She had always felt slightly indignant that Van should be able to get along so effortlessly with Barnett and the other Negroes who had worked for them from time to time. But, as he had reminded her, there was quite an environmental gap between a girlhood in Plattsburg, New York, and a boyhood in Orlando, Florida.

She would hear Van out in the yard, laughing with Barnett, and once when he came in she said, “Hee-hee-hee. Yuk, yuk, yuk. I’ll bet he doesn’t laugh that way when he’s with his own people.”

Van had stared at her in honest surprise. “Of course he doesn’t, cutie. And he doesn’t talk the same way either. He uncle-toms me a little, but without losing his dignity, and I pull the mahster a little on him, but not too much. It’s a protocol thing, Kat, and it makes us both feel at ease because we both know so very damn well the limits of the relationship in which we have to operate. He’s just as respected a citizen in his neighborhood as I am in mine. If I try to push him beyond the limits he sets, he’ll just get slower and stupider until I leave him alone. And if he tries to take advantage of me, he expects to get chewed.”

“But when I go out to tell him what I’d like him to do, he stares into space and acts terrified.”

“He probably is. He knows you don’t know the rules. He knows you’re a Wellesley liberal. You might ask him what he thinks of Faubus. And the next time you listen to us have an attack of the jollies, dear heart, you might note that I probably laugh differently and speak differently than when I’m with my own people. He’s probably as wary with Burt Lesser as he is with you, and as comfortable with Martin Cable as he is with me.”

Since Van’s death, Barnett had given her the curious impression he had been trying to put her at ease. He would make some empty remark and then laugh. Five years ago she had bought a little rubber tree in a pot for twenty-five cents. Now it was nearly twenty feet tall and continually covered with the upright bloody spears of new leaf growth. “Heee!” Barnett would say. “Little ol’ two-bits tree.” That was their signal for the vague social laughter. But once it had brought too clear a memory of Vance, and one laugh had become a sob and she had fled into the house.

When she heard the sound of the wheelbarrow, she left the letter she was writing her sister and went out into the side yard. The lower Gulf Coast, from Tampa to the Keys, was enfolded in an airless July heat which was so merciless it had little flavor of tropic languor. Instead, it seemed to have a humming intensity, an expectancy, as though any moment the Gulf and the bays would be brought to the boiling point and all the roofs would break into flame. Each afternoon the thunderheads made their lazy, ominous, atomic symbols out over the Gulf. Sometimes there would be a riffle of rain-wet air turning the leaves, but all the storms moved ashore across other counties.

Barnett had trundled the wheelbarrow over to the pile of cuttings under the punk trees. She saw that he was wearing one of Van’s discarded shirts, a pale-blue Orlon knit that she had always liked on Van until the sun of Saturday golf had faded it unevenly and he had given it to Barnett. She tested the familiarity of that shirt upon herself, like touching and retouching something which might be a little too hot to hold and then finding, with a certain pride, that you can hold it after all.

Barnett Mayberry was of an unusual muddy saffron hue, and his features seemed more Asiatic than Negroid. When Van had been annoyed with him, he would call him, never to his face, “That damned Manchurian.”

“Fixin’ to tote thisheer bresh over to burn, Miz Hubble.”

“That’s fine, Barnett. I wanted to ask you about this thing that’s growing up into the live oak.”

He followed her across the yard. “I seen him,” Barnett said. “This here a strangle vine.”

“It’s growing awfully fast. Should it come out?”

“Fixin’ to take him out. I’ll cut him off low now, and next week he lets go enough up there, I pull him down easy. Take a long long time to kill that tree, we let it go. By the time it die, all you can see is the strangle vine aholt all over it.”

A car turned into her drive and stopped. It was an old blue Plymouth station wagon. She felt a quick pleasure as she recognized it as Jimmy Wing’s car and saw him clambering languidly out from behind the wheel, grinning at her, lifting his arm in a lazy greeting. He came across the yard toward them, loose-jointed, a sandy man in his middle thirties, a man with a long narrow head, a thrusting, fleshy nose, a face more deeply lined than his years warranted. His hair, brows, lashes and his light-blue eyes were not as dark as the slightly yellowed tan of his face. He had a crooked mouth and an ugly crooked grin — both sweet and wry in an attractive simultaneity. He wore a white short-sleeved sport shirt and light-gray slacks. He had the unconscious knack of giving the most ordinary clothes a look of elegance. She had decided it was partly because of the lazy grace of the way he moved, partly because of his spare bony frame, partly because he was so consistently immaculate.

Whenever he recalled how she had disliked him before Van had been killed, she was astonished at how blind she had been. Jimmy had been the only one of Van’s close friends she had actively disliked.

“If it’s any help to you, it’s worse in town, Kat. How you, Barnett?”

Barnett’s grin was broad, his voice emphatic. “Fine, Mist’ Wing. Just fine.”

“You get those pictures?”

“I sure thank you, Mist’ Wing.”

“She get in up there to Tuskegee?”

“They said for her to come.”

“That’s one fine girl, Barnett.”

“What’s this all about?” Kat asked.

She found herself walking toward the house with Jimmy and knew he had effortlessly avoided explaining in front of Barnett. And she knew she had once again violated some obscure clause of the protocol.

“His daughter was valedictorian at their high school last month. Sandra Nan. Not much for looks, but hellish bright and energetic. Barlow got a good picture of her, so I had the darkroom make up three glossies and send them to the family.”

“Darn it! I should have known that.”

“He’s got one good boy, and one boy headed for trouble, so he’s batting high in the league.”

“Jimmy, do you know everything about everybody in Palm County?”

“Now, if I did, honey, everybody would be paying me not to work on the paper.”

They went through the screened portion of the cage at the rear of the house. He slid a glass door open and they walked into the roofed portion of the patio.

“Well, now!” he said, looking at her quizzically. “You’ve sissied out, Kat.”

“And every time I turn the noisy thing on I remember how Van hated air conditioning, and I feel immoral and guilty. You know my tenants stayed to the middle of June, and you know it got hot early this year. So they wanted one and we dickered around, and we finally decided I’d pay a hundred dollars against it, and if they take the house again next year, I’ll cut the lease another hundred. It’s a three-ton thing, and it’s sticking in the wall between the living room and the bedroom wing. What can I fix you to drink?”

“Can of beer is fine, if you’ve got it.”

“Coming up.” She went to the kitchen and brought the two opened cans back to the glass-top patio table, sat across from him.

“Will the whosises want the house next season?”

“The Brandts. They say so. They’ll let me know for sure by the first of November. Let me make my full confession on the air conditioner, Jimmy. I wasn’t going to use it. I was just going to let it sit there. But you know how cold they keep the darn bank all day. When I’d get out, I’d just wilt. I held out until last week, wearing my prickly heat rash like a badge of honor or something. Then I woke up in the middle of the night and my hair was sopping wet and it was too hot to go back to sleep. So like a thief I snuck around and closed the windows and plugged the beast in, and slept so hard I nearly didn’t hear the alarm.”

“Now you’re hooked.”

“I’ve fallen so low I even like the noise it makes.”

Jimmy stood up and walked toward the living room to stand and look the length of it. “Looks just the same,” he said.

“It is, and it isn’t. Jean Brandt had different ideas. I suppose any woman would, really. She moved things around, and she stored things away. I’ve been getting things back the way they were, but they won’t be exactly the way they were. It looks a little different, and it feels different. Do you know? It was our house, but now I feel a little bit as if I were renting it too — from the Brandts. It isn’t as important to me as it was, which is very probably a good thing. I’m glad you talked me out of putting it on the market.”

He came back to the table. “You would have taken a whipping, Kat.”

“I just didn’t think I could endure living here.”

“We can always stand a little more than we think we can. One thing on my mind, Kat, I’ve got to drive up to Sarasota next Sunday. Borklund wants me to do a feature on their public beach program. I’ve got about everything I need, but there’s one fellow I want to talk to. And he won’t take up much time. So how about you and the kids coming along?”

She studied him, wondering if it was coincidence, then saw his casualness was a little too elaborate. “Thank you, dear Jimmy. I know it’s going to be a rough day for me. I’ve been dreading it for weeks. But I’ll manage.”

He shrugged. “But if coming along with me would make it any easier...”

“It would. Indeed it would, and I’m grateful. But, you see, the neighbors have been conspiring to keep me distracted, and I’ve given so many polite refusals I wouldn’t feel right saying yes to you. Van died on July ninth. Once I’m past this one, it will be over a year. I can manage it. The kids and I are going on a beach picnic by ourselves. I’ll have a lot of July ninths to get over. This will only be the second worst. Jimmy, it’s nice to have you stop by. I like seeing you in the bank too, but that’s when I have to keep being the happy hostess. Ready for another beer?”

“I’ll ride with this, thanks.” He frowned at his big, bony, freckled fist for a few moments, then looked at her with an odd expression. “I thought you’d come along on Sunday, and it would have given me a chance to talk to you about something.”

“You act as if it’s something unpleasant.”

“It is, and I better give it to you now. It’s off the record, honey. You’re still active in the S.O.B.’s, aren’t you?”

“Recording secretary, but there hasn’t been anything to record. Save Our Bays, Inc., has sort of been resting on its laurels.”

“It might be a very timely idea for you to resign.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“That project of filling in Grassy Bay is going to be opened up again soon.”

“You can’t mean it, Jimmy! You can’t be serious. Two years ago we licked it. I never worked so darned hard in my life. And Van too. All those phone calls and petitions and ringing doorbells and going to public meetings and taking all that abuse. We whipped them. We mobilized all the conservation groups and we got a bulkhead line established in Palm County, and nobody can fill beyond that line. Nobody can touch Grassy Bay. We saved it! You must be joking.”

His smile was bitter. “It’s going to astound a lot of other people too. Let’s say you saved it for two years. It’s a different deal this time. They’ve been setting it up quietly for almost a year. Last time, it was an outfit coming in from outside.”

“Sea ’n Sun Development. From Lauderdale.”

“This time it’s local.”

“Local men?”

“Don’t look so incredulous. And the fill project is a little bigger. Eight hundred acres. They have an option on a good big piece of upland to give them access to the bay. The financing has been arranged for. When the county commissioners set that wonderful bulkhead line, they reserved the right to change it.”

“But they have to have a public hearing.”

“I know. The new syndicate will petition for a change in the bulkhead line along the bay shore of Sandy Key, to swing the line out to enclose eight hundred acres of so-called unsightly mud flats, and request county permission to buy the bay bottom from the State Internal Improvement Fund. The commissioners will set a date for a public hearing, at which time prominent local businessmen will go to the microphone, one after the other, and say what a great boon this will be to the community, a shot in the arm for the construction business and the retail stores. Captive experts will get up and say the fill will have no effect on fish breeding grounds or bird life, and will not change the tide pattern so as to cause beach erosion. It will be nicely timed, because a lot of the militant bird-watchers and do-gooders will be north for the summer, and they won’t give the ones who are left here much time to organize the opposition. The commissioners will change the bulkhead line and approve the syndicate application to purchase. The trustees of the IIF will sell the bay bottom at an estimated three hundred and fifty dollars an acre, and then the drag lines and dredges will move in. It’s going to be a steamroller operation, Kat, and it’s going to run right over anybody who stands in the way.”

“We can’t let it happen.”

“We can’t stop it this time. Kat, there’s a fortune sitting out there in that bay. I figure total development cost at a max of three million against a total minimum gross sales of lots of six and a half million. Where else along this coast is there water that shallow so close to an urban area?”

“But we must stop them, Jimmy!” She stared at him. “Why do you think I’d resign now?”

He stood up. “Need another beer. Stay where you are.”

She heard the refrigerator door slam. Barnett rapped at the patio door. She got his money from her purse and took it to him. He told her he’d cut the vine off close to the ground, and when he came next Tuesday he’d trim the big pepper hedge.

She walked, frowning, back to the table where Jimmy Wing sat. “You should resign because it’ll be easier now than later. The new deal is called the Palmland Development Company. Your neighbor, Burton Lesser, is heading it up.”

“Burt! But he was against...”

“Against somebody else doing it. Leroy Shannard is in on it, handling the legal end. He handled Van’s estate, I know. And the uplands they took the option on is part of the Jerome Cable estate, and your neighbor and employer, Martin Cable, is the executor of that estate. A good piece of the financing has been worked out through the Cable Bank and Trust Company. And this time the newspaper isn’t going to be so scrupulously neutral.”

“Ben Killian should have been on our side last time,” she said indignantly.

“He won’t be this time. This is home industry, kid. It’s going to be patriotic to be for it, and like some unspeakable act to oppose it.”

She leaned back in her chair and stared at him in dismay. “But all those men know better, Jimmy.”

“And they know how much cash is sitting out there on those flats.”

“Grassy Bay is one of the most unique and beautiful...”

“You don’t have to sell me, honey.”

“You helped us last time.”

“Not this time.”

“Are you scared to, Jimmy?”

“I’m scared of a lot of things. This might as well be one of them. Katherine, you’d better take stock. There’s one hell of a difference between being Mrs. Vance Hubble, wife of an architect, and Mrs. Vance Hubble, the young widow who works at the bank.”

“I should keep my head down?”

“That’s my message. These are men you know, but they aren’t going to fool around. It could get dirty, honey.”

She stood up and walked away from the table, turned and looked back toward him with a puzzled expression. “So I should give up on something Van believed in? Just like that?”

“I know he took a certain risk in taking the stand he did. He lost some contracts. But he got some new ones to make up for it. So you could call it a calculated risk. I can tell you this, Kat. If he could see the way this one is set up, he wouldn’t mess into it.”

“That’s a filthy thing to say!”

“Why so? My God, the world is a practical place and Van was a pretty practical guy.”

“But he fought for what he believed.”

“Most men do, up to a point. But when they stand to lose too much, and gain too little, they think up reasons to stay out of it.”

“Van wasn’t like that.”

“It’s a point we can’t argue. I just don’t want you to get into any kind of... of a memorial campaign. The bay is gone.”

She moved slowly back toward the table. “When Van first brought me down here, I hated it. I missed the hills and the snow and the familiar seasons. One morning very early — it must have been nine years ago, because I was pregnant with Roy — we went to Hoyt’s Marina and went out in the boat. It was that old skiff we used to have, and he’d just bought it, used, and fixed it up a little. There was a heavy mist. The tide was going out of Grassy Bay, flowing out through Turk’s Pass. It was warm and still. He stopped the old engine and we drifted across the flats. It was a private little world, with the mist all around us. It was a time when if you wanted to say anything, you felt like whispering. I heard the sea grass brushing the bottom of the boat. Sometimes we’d catch and turn slowly and come free, or Van would push us off with the pole. I heard fish slap the water, and once we heard the snuffling of porpoise over in the channel next to the mainland shore. It grew brighter in the mist. I looked over the side and watched the sand, the mud, the grass, and a million minnows. Van told me to look up. Directly overhead the morning mist was so thin I could see the blue of the sky through it, and just then a flight of white pelicans went over, much lower than you usually see them. I saw them through the mist, and I heard a hushed creaking of their wings. It was a magic time, Jimmy, and that was the moment when I began to love this place. The rest of the mist burned away, and we were out in the middle of the wide blue bay. Van started the engine and we went chug-chug down to Turk’s Island and spent the day.”

“But it didn’t add a dollar to the economy. Kat, I’ve told you what’s going on because I don’t want you to be hurt. I gave my word I wouldn’t tell anyone, and I’ve broken it.”

“I appreciate it, Jimmy. And I know what you’re trying to tell me.”

“But?”

“I just couldn’t let all the work Van did go to waste. You can understand that.”

He grinned. “I knew what the reaction had to be. But I had to make the attempt. At least you have some idea what you’re up against. I’ll be standing by, Kat. Use me for a rest camp, a first-aid station.” He stopped smiling. “But I’d rather you keep this to yourself.”

“I can’t even do that.”

“But, honey, if the leak is traced back to me, they’ll put lumps on my head.”

She thought for a few moments. “I was at my desk in the bank and I heard two men talking about Grassy Bay.”

“That isn’t likely. They’ve been very careful. I know Sally Ann Lesser is in on it, because Burt couldn’t have come up with some of the basic money otherwise. So can’t you pry it out of her?”

“Now that I know what I’m after, I can. Otherwise, I can’t tell when she’s lying.”

He looked at his watch and stood up. “Thanks for the beer.”

“And thank you for the advance information, Jimmy. I think I really need a project right about now.”

They walked through the house to the front door. He shook his head and said, “Believe me, honey, nobody needs what you’re thinking of taking on. It could break your heart.”

“Again? Maybe I’m sort of invulnerable.”

“They’ll try to find out. You take care, hear?” He stood there for a rare moment of awkwardness, then walked on out to his car. He backed out and waved to her as he drove off down the narrow asphalt of Pine Road, toward the exit gate of Sandy Key Estates.

Katherine walked through the living room. She stopped at a west window. Beyond the pepper hedge the last smoke of the dying brush fire rose in a hazy column, bending slightly toward her as an imperceptible breeze off the Gulf shifted it.

Too many things were moving through her mind simultaneously, immobilizing her so that she could not begin any one of them. But the considerations of strategy had to give way to the homely obligations. She went to the phone to call Claire Sinnat and tell her to shoo the kids home from the Sinnat pool, then decided to walk up the road and collect them. She fixed her lipstick, ran a hasty brush through her cropped red hair, and went outside.

At first she thought it as stunningly hot as before, but in a little while she realized the sting had gone from the sun’s heat as it moved closer to the Gulf horizon. But the big black salt-marsh mosquitoes were out early. They whined in her hair and tickled her long legs and needled the backs of her shoulders and the small of her back between her green halter and the waistband of her white shorts.

By the time she reached the Pavilion she was being driven out of her mind by them. Gus Malta, the official caretaker, was hobbling around the Pavilion on his bad leg, fogging the ground, the shrubbery and the low branches of the trees with the rackety gasoline fogger he carried slung over his meaty shoulder. He stopped the motor and called to her in the sudden silence.

“You come over here,” he ordered. “You’ll get bit to death walking around like that tonight.”

She hesitated and went over toward him. She did not like the man. He adopted a pseudo-fatherly air toward all the younger matrons of Sandy Key Estates, and toward the daughters of the older ones, but his manner seemed to mask sly insinuations. He did yard work for some of the residents, maintained the shell roads, the community tennis court and the Pavilion. For his community efforts, he was paid out of the treasury of the Sandy Key Estates Association, replenished by the quarterly assessment levied against each resident, based on the size of his lot.

“Now you stand right there and I’ll put a cloud of this upwind from you, and it will drift onto you. You hold your breath and turn around slow while it’s going by.”

“But I don’t want to get that stuff in my hair.”

“Won’t hurt your hair,” he said and yanked the starter cord, and belched a cloud of bug fog toward the beach. As it enveloped her she held her breath and turned slowly, dutifully, vastly annoyed at herself. Now if he tells you to go roll in the sand, you’ll do that too, you darn ninny.

It drifted past her and she stopped turning and began breathing. “That’s better,” Gus said. “Now they won’t mess with you, and raise all them red lumps.” He grinned at her, exposing the ruin of his teeth. “You coming to the party?”

“I didn’t know there was one.”

“Now, when you see me fogging this place, you know somebody wants it for a party, Mrs. Hubble.”

He always seemed to know exactly how impertinent he dared be, and he altered it to fit the temperament of each target. She knew that if she acted angry, he would pretend to be hurt and bewildered.

The Pavilion was the only community structure. It was open on three sides, forty by twenty, with a slab floor, steel uprights, and a thatched roof. There was a bamboo bar against the single wall. On the beach side was a big barbecue pit, and there were picnic tables under the Australian pines and under the coconut palms. The Pavilion was in the center of the two hundred feet of Gulf beach open to all the landlocked residents of the Estates.

“Who is giving the party, Gus?” she asked evenly.

“It’s the Deegans and Mrs. McCall giving it, for about forty people, the way I heard it.”

“Thanks for the spray job,” she said and walked away from him, heading north on Gulf Lane toward the Sinnat house. The fogging machine did not start up. She resisted the impulse to look back, and knew she would see him standing there, watching her walk away. If she turned, he would grin placidly at her. It was a part of the mythology of the Estates that if a woman appeared in a swimsuit in the farthest corner of the area, within ten seconds Gus Malta would find some work to be done within ten feet of her. Eloise Cable swore that she had turned quickly one evening and seen his face just outside the screen of her open bathroom window. It was generally agreed that if he wanted to gamble his job by risking the Peeping Tom act, Eloise Cable was the logical candidate. In spite of his manner, and all the work he left half done, it was agreed that he was very good with the kids.

As she pushed open the Sinnats’ garden gate, she heard the concerted yapping of a dozen assorted children, and the sloshing and slapping of the water in their big pool.