A Flash of Green

Ten

Except for the foundation pilings and the post and beam frame, trued and bolted, Ross and Jackie Halley had built their house themselves. It was an oblong eighty feet long and thirty feet wide, set on slender pilings which raised it four or five feet above raked shell. It was on a small bay-front lot, and was nested so closely against a fringe of water oak and mangrove that the highest tides came up under the structure. It had a big roofed redwood deck on the water side, looking out toward Grassy Bay, and an unroofed deck on the other side, facing the parking area. The central part of the structure was one big living area, with a kitchen island in the middle completely encircled by a bar. The bedroom and bath were to the left, and Ross’s studio was to the right.

From the parking area the whole side of the building was alternating rectangles of fixed glass, glass jalousies, and panels painted chalk blue, yellow-white and coral.

As soon as Kat had stopped the car, Roy and Alicia piled out, yelping and running toward Jackie’s fond loud greeting. She was good with children, and Kat knew how desperately disappointed they were to be unable to have any.

“Go climb into the stuff Ross laid out on my bed, Kat, then yell for the mahster. I’m putting your brats to work. We’re going oystering. The one that gets the biggest one gets to wear the straw sombrero.”

Kat went into the bedroom and changed into the fussy yellow blouse and wide vivid skirt. When she called Ross, he came out of the studio with camera and sketch pad. “Hi, Lady Kat. Mmmm. Just about right.”

“This shade of yellow makes me look like death.”

“I don’t want it for the color, m’am.”

“Hair?”

“As is, I think. No, you better sleek it back a little. Give me more ears.”

“I’ve got horrible ears.”

“I’ve got a whole file drawer full of ears.”

Smiling, she went and fixed her hair. Ross took her out into the side yard and had her sit in a garden chair under the shade of a punk tree. He squatted on the corner of the deck above her and had her move the chair a few times until the angle was right and the play of light and shadow was what he wanted. He was a square quick man with a metallic voice, a tall black brush cut which looked dense and harsh as a nylon brush, a solid bar of black eyebrow, little black shoe-button eyes.

“Little more toward me. Chin up. You’re looking up at a guy you didn’t expect to see, but you’re glad to see him. And you’re going to get out of the chair. Lean just a little forward. Okay. Now start to reach out a little with the right hand. Okay. Chin higher. Okay. Not so much smile. Okay. Pull your feet back a little. Okay.”

The camera ticked. Ross perspired in the sun. He changed angles slightly. He took two rolls of film, then made a few quick free sketches of details. After they went back into the house, he paid her in cash and she signed a receipt form. Jackie came back with the children, and a bucket of oysters. After Kat had changed back into her sun dress, she found that Ross had gone back out onto the oyster bar with the children.

“Can he take the time off to mind those two?” Kat asked.

“Heck, he’s way ahead of the art directors for a change. Let’s get going on our gals. I got the file out last night. Take turns? Here’s your stack. I’ll go first.”

By five o’clock on that Saturday afternoon, Kat Hubble and Jackie Halley were depressed and concerned. They sat on stools at the kitchen bar, the phone between them, their file cards and notes in front of them. Roy and Alicia were out at the end of the Halleys’ narrow dock, catching bait fish on tiny hooks and putting them in the bait well of Ross’s old skiff at the customary rate of two cents a fish.

Ross came out of his studio into the living room and said, “I developed the roll of black and white, Kat. It’s fine. Hey, are you two about to break into tears or something?”

“Shuck the oysters, dear,” Jackie said in a weary voice.

“Shuck the oysters, please, dear,” he corrected. “Where’s the oyster knife?”

“Please, then. Where it always is.”

“Hey, Ross, we got eleven!” Roy yelled.

“Good work, men! What’s with you sad ladies anyhow?”

“We’re not scoring so well,” Jackie said.

“Some of our best gals won’t do it this time,” Kat said.

“Word seems to have gotten around,” Jackie explained.

“They don’t even want to be members any more.”

“Twelve!” Alicia yelled.

“Just one card left?” Jackie said. “Go ahead, dear. Who is it?”

“Donna Armstrong.”

“Hmmm. Whose husband happens to be a car dealer,” Jackie said. She laughed bitterly. “Make three guesses. Go ahead.”

Kat dialed. “Donna? This is Kat Hubble. The S.O.B.’s are declaring a state of emergency, and we’re calling you back onto active duty. What? Yes, it’s Grassy Bay again. How did you know? Oh, I see. Well, you will help us...? I’d like to know, of course.”

Kat put her hand over the mouthpiece and looked hopelessly at Jackie and said, “She doesn’t want it filled, but...” She listened for a few more moments and then said, “We’ll miss you, Donna. You were so wonderful last time. But if Si really says you shouldn’t, I guess there isn’t much you can do. But please do ask him again, will you? And let us know if you can. Thank you, dear. I’m sorry too. ’Bye.”

Kat hung up. “It seems a Mr. Flake buys his cars and trucks from Mr. Armstrong’s agency. And it even seems that Si Armstrong has a teeny tiny piece of Palmland Development. And just last week Si let her in on the secret and laid down the law.”

“Well, that’s it. Let me check this thing. We called forty-two women. I’ll mark Donna for a flat no. At least she’s more honest than the ones who got so terribly vague about the whole thing. Thirteen acceptances. There is a nice lucky number. Fifteen refusals. Excuse me. Eleven refusals. Plus Donna is twelve. Nine couldn’t be reached. Six gave us that let-you-know-later jazz. So out of the group who worked like dogs last time, it’s twenty-one to thirteen against. So we should pick up maybe three more out of that nine — sixteen when we’ll need forty. And we’ve lost some of the very best ones, dammit!”

“I keep thinking about Hilda.”

“I’d rather not think about her.”

“Just how did she word it?”

“Oh, she just gave a merry little ho ho and said, ‘But, Jackie, lamb, I’ve promised to organize a telephone campaign in favor of this project. This will be a delicious program, and it won’t hurt Grassy Bay a bit, and my Danny says only the forces of reaction will be against it.’ And so on and so on. Ugh! Her Danny was dragging his feet the last time. Remember? Eight hundred potential customers for dear Danny’s appliance business. Do I sound like a snob? I’m not. Selling appliances is a good wholesome way to make a living in America. But damn if I like them filling the bay so they’ll have a place to put them. Hilda was our best man, Kat.”

“So we’ll find other women just as good.”

“You have considerable jaw on you when you shove it out that way, honey.”

“And we’ll make the sixteen work twice as hard as last time, and you and I will work four times as hard. And, as Tom says, if the commissioners vote the wrong way after the public hearing, we’ll take the fight to Tallahassee.”

“Stop glaring at me, for goodness’ sake! I’m with you. Don’t you think we’ve earned a drink?”

“I guess so. Weak for me, please.”

“It’ll have to be something with rum. Okay?”

“Fine.”

As Jackie fixed the drinks, Kat walked out on the deck. The kids were quarreling over their fish count. Ross was finishing the oysters down on the dock. As she watched, he scraped the last one into the pan and waded out with the two buckets of shells and dumped them back onto the oyster bar.

“Jackie, would it cover that oyster bar?”

“Probably not that one, but it would cover the big ones out there, and it would block the tide flow to this one so that it would probably die. Here’s your drink.”

The first tall tree shadows were reaching out toward the dock, the intent children, the old skiff. The thunderheads were over the mainland, far inland, piled seven miles high, suddenly as monstrous in her mind as the tree shadows. “Seventeen!” Alicia called, her voice unbearably clear and sweet in the first silence of the coming evening. “That makes seventeen! Take him off my hook, Roy.”

Kat felt a coldness along her back, like a leathery touch, reptilian. “Everything changes,” she said. “Everything dies.”

“Hey now,” Jackie said gently.

“I’m sorry. Everything seems... like some kind of a dirty trick on people.”

Jackie gave her a quick, rough, shy hug, a one-armed gesture which spilled some of Kat’s cool drink on the back of her hand. “In the deathless words of my husband, dear, you can’t win ’em all. He has a crapshooter’s approach to eternity. He says he’s small time at a big table. He drags back when he wins, and he covers so many numbers they can’t ever hurt him too badly.”

Kat turned and stared at her. “What does that make me?”

“The same as me, dear. We’re hunch bettors. We win big and we lose big.” She cocked her head. “Now who the hell is that dropping in?”

“Oh, I forgot. It’s Jimmy Wing. I should have told you.”

“Jimmy is welcome here any time, honey. You know that.”

As they walked toward the front door, Kat said, “I wonder how Jimmy fits into that dice game idea.”

“I think he just watches the game. I don’t think he makes any bets,” Jackie said.

“And Martin Cable owns the table?”

“We’ll have to play that game with everybody we know.”

Jimmy came smiling up onto the deck. Ross brought the oysters up to the house. Jackie fixed four oyster cocktails. They all sat on the rear deck with drinks and generous servings of the oysters, their chairs placed so they looked past the twisted trunks of the water oaks toward the quiet bay, the competitive children. Jackie and Kat reported the meeting, and told Jimmy of their bad luck with the women they had phoned. Ross took no part in it.

Jimmy said, “They’re handling it well. It’s the same doctrine we were up against last time. Growth, progress. Last time it was outsiders coming in, bearing gifts. This time it’s our own people, and it’s more persuasive. No absentee ownership. All the profits stay in town. Broader tax base. Nice new residents and so forth. I heard one of their battle cries today. Eight hundred families means sixteen million in new investment plus four million a year into the local economy. So they’ve been quietly lining up the local businesspeople, getting them all set to be boosters.”

“But that misses the point of the whole thing!” Kat said. “That bay bottom out there is public land. It belongs to all the people, all the people who don’t have a prayer of ever owning a home there, or making any profit off it. It belongs to all the people now living in the state and all the future generations, and this takes it away from them forever, and turns it into eight hundred pieces of private land. It’s like stealing it from the public.”

“I know that,” Jimmy said. “You know it and Jackie knows it and Ross knows it. The trustees are supposed to consider the health and welfare of the people of the State of Florida. But it’s going to be used for the health and welfare of the bank accounts of the businessmen of Palm County, and done with so many reasonable arguments it’ll be years before the public realizes what a polite screwing it took, here and all up and down this coast. Maybe what I’m saying is this, people. Nobody is going to listen to sweet reason. It’s going to be a very emotional squabble. The fighting is going to get dirtier than you can imagine. So I’d say get out of it right now. Just as I told you the day before yesterday, Kat. It isn’t the same thing it was last time. It won’t be a gallant battle and an honorable victory. So resign now.”

“No,” Kat said in a small firm voice.

“He’s right,” Ross said. “If you are lucky, they’ll ignore you. If you get too energetic, they’ll clobber you. It makes me damn uneasy.”

“You’re always uneasy, dear,” Jackie said. “You’ve got the idea the world is full of monsters.”

“But it is,” he said. He smiled at Jimmy Wing. “You see what we’ve got here? A pair of innocents. Their strength is as the strength of ten because their hearts are pure. Oh boy! I mind my own store. Back when I was sure I was going to be Van Gogh, I was full of social messages. I did a little marching and a little poster work and a little singing and carrying banners. I think I was coming out strong in favor of human decency. Three Chicago cops took me into an alley. They were real jocular. I told them fiercely I was an artist. I was ready to die for mankind, but I wasn’t ready for what they did to me. They held my hands against a brick wall and used a night stick on them. I couldn’t hold a brush or a pencil for eight months. Back in Dayton it cost my father twelve hundred bucks’ worth of corrective operations. And I can’t even remember why I was marching that day. I mind my own store. Messages are for Western Union. They always find a way to hurt you, some way you’re not expecting.”

“How do you stand on decency now, killer?” Jackie asked in a deadly voice.

He looked at her for a long moment, then stood up. “By now you shouldn’t have to ask the question. Excuse me. Couple of little things to do.” He went to his studio and closed the door.

“Me and my mouth,” Jackie said. “I’m sorry.”

“I’d always wondered about his hands,” Kat said.

“This is awkward as hell,” Jackie said. “I’m sorry. I’m no good at the game of pretending nothing happened. So I’m going to have to shoo you away and then go in there and tell him he’s a good man and I love him as he is, seeking no alterations in the merchandise.”

“I was going to have to leave in minutes anyhow, Jackie.”

“And we’ve got to pay those commercial fishermen out there,” Jackie said.

The kids had caught twenty-six bait fish, eleven by Alicia and fifteen by Roy. Jackie paid them the agreed rate to the penny, wise enough to know that any careless generosity at that time would have spoiled the game for them. As they walked out to the cars, Jackie and the children lagging behind, Kat said, “Can you come to my place, Jimmy? I didn’t get a chance to tell you about last night.”

He nodded. Just then Ross came out. “I didn’t know you people were going to run off so soon.”

“I tried to keep them around,” Jackie said.

As Kat turned around to drive out she saw Ross move close to Jackie and, with a slight defiant awkwardness, put his arm around her slender waist and hold her close.

When she arrived home, Kat had a slight problem convincing Roy and Alicia it was too late to go up to the Sinnats for a swim. She took their minds off it by reminding them of tomorrow’s picnic, and they went off to play in Roy’s room. She made herself a rum drink and opened a beer for Jimmy. They sat in the coolness of the living room, the draperies closed against the glare of the western sun.

“That’s the first time I ever saw any flaw in that united front,” Kat said.

“I admire the guy for the way he came out to say goodbye. She hit him a dandy. It’s easier to sulk.”

“You think it’s dramatic, and later you realize you were only being silly. It’s pride, I guess. The wrong kind. Last night was strange, Jimmy. I didn’t open my mouth. I just listened.”

She told him the conversation Martin, Eloise, Dial and Claire had, and then spoke of how Dial had reacted to it afterward. “He seems to think there’s somebody else behind it, Jimmy, somebody smarter than those five men we know about.”

“Where would he get that idea?”

“I don’t know. He’s a strange man. He’s big and hearty and sort of obvious, but there’s something... almost feline about him too. Intuition or something. And you’re never quite sure whether he’s laughing at you. And he’s also got the idea that somebody has been coaching Eloise, teaching her how to work on Martin, or Martin would never have gotten into this thing as deeply as he has.”

“They need Martin,” Jimmy admitted. “They need the access, and they’ll need the line of credit to develop the land once they get it.”

“If they get it. But they won’t.”

“That’s going to be a matter of considerable opinion around this town for a while, Katherine.”

“Why did you call me Katherine then?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s probably because you heard Van do it. Whenever he said anything to me like that, sort of dry and skeptical, when he thought I was getting a little too carried away, he’d call me Katherine.”

“That’s probably it. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t mind it, Jimmy. It just seemed odd.”

She looked at him and looked away. The light was strange in the room. The draperies were blue, yet the light had a green tinge. His face was in shadow.

“I talked to Nat Sinnat today,” he said, and she was relieved that he had interrupted the odd and awkward silence.

“Oh, did you? What about?”

“A story on the children’s art classes she teaches. Mortie said she was the one to talk to, and he was right. She was articulate and she has good ideas. But she seemed a little... odd.”

“Odd?”

“That’s not a good word, I guess. A little tense maybe. Not the tension of being interviewed. A more chronic kind.”

“I guess there’s reasons. Her mother was Di’s second wife. And it wasn’t a friendly divorce. I think Nat was about five at the time. Her mother is a real pinwheeling neurotic, according to Di. She didn’t marry again. She’s done a lot of traveling. She and Nat lived in France for a while. Her mother was bitterly opposed to Nat’s coming down here this summer. There was a big stink about it. All in all, I think Nat is wonderfully well balanced, considering her background. But she isn’t what you’d call exactly a normal girl of nineteen. She’s independent, in more ways than financial. She’s what I guess you’d call unconventional. She doesn’t give a damn what anybody thinks, really. She goes her own way. But I guess she took some kind of emotional beating last year. Claire has hinted about it. That’s why she came down here.”

“She’s a pretty kid.”

“Unusual looking.”

“Apparently she’s dating some boy younger than she is, a high-school kid.”

“Dating? Oh, no! That’s Jigger. You know. Burt Lesser’s boy. I guess he’s got a crush on her. She says Jigger is a very unhappy boy. I would have guessed that. Anyhow, that would make two of them, misery loving company or something like that. Why do you ask?”

“I was just curious about her. Just making conversation, I guess.”

“If you can stay, I think I can feed you.”

“Thanks, Kat. But I’ve got some more work to do. The load is a little heavier the last couple of days. Brian Haas got taken drunk.”

“Oh, no! Really? But wasn’t it almost certain that Mr. Borklund would fire him the next time he...”

“We’re trying to cover it, and maybe we have. If he got it out of his system it may come out all right.”

“Nan must be terribly upset.”

“She’s handling it pretty well. I’m going to stop in later on and see how things are going. We have to get him back to work by noon tomorrow. It will be up to him to hide the shakes.”

Again there was the heavy silence. She felt she should make some listless effort to break it. Perhaps it will rain? It’s been a very warm day? She felt trapped within an almost unbearable slowness of the passing moments. Tomorrow — anniversary of death — would be the worst time, and then it would be over and the second year of it could start. A year from tomorrow would not be so bad a day.

He leaned forward, bringing his face into the unusual light. His forearms rested on his knees, his strong hands clasped. He looked at the floor, then raised his head slightly to look at her, his face almost without expression.

“Kat?” His voice was low and hoarse.

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

He smiled and stood up, with that lithe and utterly relaxed elegance of movement. “Matter? Nothing’s the matter. I have to go.”

She walked to the door with him. “I thought you were going to tell me some terrible thing. Isn’t that a crazy impression to have? Bad tidings. Now I’m chattering. Damn it, I hate chattering women.”

He paused at the door and said, “Kat... if tomorrow turns out to be rough, call me, will you?”

“Aren’t you going to be out of town?”

“I canceled.”

“Not because of me, Jimmy.”

“For several reasons. I should be handy to see how Brian makes it. Where are you going for your picnic?”

“Up to Sanibel so we can look for shells.”

“The bugs will be fierce this time of year.”

“We’ll be plastered with goo.”

She went to the window and watched him back out and waved to him as he drove away. She walked thoughtfully to the kitchen and began to prepare dinner. She was aware of a little area of strangeness in her mind, elusive and unidentifiable. It was like trying to remember a name momentarily forgotten. There had been a strangeness at the Halleys, when the four of them had been on the back deck. She and Van had spent many hours there with Ross and Jackie. Today, for the first time, there had been four of them again, but the fourth person had been Jimmy instead of Van. She realized, with a merciless honesty, that the situation had made her resent Jimmy for being Jimmy rather than Van. There had been at least one time when there had been six of them on that deck on a night of cool moonlight, drinking wine and talking wonderful nonsense. Jimmy would have just as much right to resent her because she was not Gloria. There was one awkwardness on that clear evening long ago. Gloria had been recently released, and it was her first social evening since her release. It had made the conversation more guarded and selective than it might otherwise have been.

Now, of course, she was as remote, as unreachable as Van. Hers was a subtler form of death, but no less final. Which was easier, she wondered, the slow regression to that point where there was, at last, no communication at all, or the sudden brutal stunning departure? And she wondered if Jimmy had made this same comparison, and envied her.