A Flash of Green

Eleven

As Jimmy Wing crossed the causeway to the mainland there was a strange lemon light across the land. The rays of the setting sun were almost horizontal. Every surface facing the west was touched with this luminous glow in contrast with the blue shadows of dusk which lay against everything else. From time to time a fitful rain wind turned the leaves and died away.

On the car radio the seven-thirty newscaster said, “... three tenths of an inch recorded for Palm County, far below the normal rainfall for this time of year. The current temperature at County Airport is ninety degrees, relative humidity ninety-five percent, winds out of the southeast at three to five miles per hour...”

He turned the radio off so as to focus himself with no distraction upon a special textural memory of Kat. When he had turned back at her doorway, she was a step closer to him than he had expected, standing tall and near in the aquarium light of the living room, so close for an instant that the detected fragrance of her hair mingled with the imagined feel of it, sweet and harsh against his lips, and he had come all too close to reaching for her. Another collector’s item, he thought. Another image to file away.

He worked hard at his newsroom desk for an hour, and then walked down a dark block on Bayou Street to Vera’s Kitchen. He was starting to eat his sandwich when Bobby Nest came in and sat on a counter stool beside him. Bobby at eighteen concealed a fervent love for the newspaper business behind a pose of cynicism acquired from scores of movies and television shows. He had been the paper’s official correspondent at Riverway High School during the past year, and this summer Borklund, for very small money, had him doing routine sports, the city and county recreation program events, summer bowling and golf leagues, shuffle-board, tennis, pram races. In the fall Bobby would go away to school and Borklund would find another serf, equally eager. Bobby was a small wiry boy with big glasses and a surprisingly authoritative baritone voice. He wrote pounds of copy which was never printed.

“This girl’s old man is going to drive me nuts,” Bobby said.

“Teach you to mess with girls.”

“Who would mess with this one? She’s fourteen and she looks like a twenty-year-old Marine sergeant. I think she shaves, even. But she can belt a golf ball two hundred and forty yards. It’s her damn name, Jimmy. The Caroline is easy, but the last name is Smidt. S-m-i-d-t. I know how it’s spelled, for God’s sake. I print it in block letters. I put a note in the margin. But every time she wins something — not every time, but at least every other time — somebody decides it should be Smith or Schmidt or Smidth or some other goddam thing and then her old man calls up and chews out Jesus-Jesus and he chews me. There’s gremlins in that shop, Jimmy, honest to God.”

“Marry her and make her turn pro, Bobby. Nest is an easy name. And those gals make nice money.”

“Nest is the name but I’m not about to build one. I wish she’d pick up a bad slice or something, so I wouldn’t have to put her kook name in the paper.” He sighed. “She doesn’t seem to give a damn. It’s her old man. He taught her the game. And he can sure talk nasty. Just coffee and Danish, Mike, thanks.”

Jimmy Wing edited his next comment before he made it, then said, “Funny how unattractive most of those little girl athletes are. But some of them are worth staring at. Like that little water-skier, Burt Lesser’s daughter.”

“Frosty. Oh, sure. I think her real name is Frances Ann.”

“There’s the one for you, Bobby.”

“Not for me. She runs with a pack of rich kids. She’s only fifteen, I guess, but if you want her to look twice at you, you got to own a boat that will pull her all over the bay at forty miles an hour, and you’ve got to be seven feet tall and able to pick up the front end of a Buick.”

“Sounds like a description of her brother.”

“Jigger? I guess he could pick up the front end of a car. But he doesn’t run with the pack. He’s a year behind me at Riverway. He’s sort of a fink.”

“What does that mean?”

“He’s a loner. And he’s got a sarcastic way of speaking. He could make any team we’ve got, but he doesn’t go out for anything any more. He gets good grades. But he doesn’t mingle. You’re walking and he’s driving an empty car, he won’t even slow down. He isn’t the most popular kid around.”

“How does he make out with the girls?”

“That’s another thing. He doesn’t try. He’d have no trouble, but he doesn’t try. There’s some talk.”

“What kind?”

Bobby Nest looked uneasy. “I shouldn’t say anything because I don’t really know for sure. But you remember two years ago, the trouble at West Bay Junior High, the gay English teacher they had, and after one kid squealed, they found out there was a whole group of boys going over to the instructor’s place, you remember, Jimmy.”

“I remember. Was Jigger one of them?”

“He was there at the time. They tried to keep it quiet, the kids who got mixed up in that mess, their names. But that’s what they say about Jigger, that he was one of the group, and he’s a queer. This last spring two pretty husky guys tried to needle Jigger about it. They thought they could handle him, but they couldn’t. He cracked them up pretty good.”

“I guess the rumor must be wrong, Jimmy. This summer I’ve seen Jigger riding around with a pretty little dark-haired girl.”

“In the red Jag? I’ve seen him too. But I don’t know who she is. She looked pretty nice.” Bobby snickered. “I saw him twice with her, and the second time I saw him, he didn’t want me to. He slid way down in the seat, but he wasn’t quick enough.”

“Where was that?”

“You know that brand-new motel, set way back, where Bay Highway comes out onto the Tamiami Trail below Everset? The Drowsy Lady Motor House, very fancy?”

“Yes.”

“About a week and a half ago, when Jesse Gardner came down and gave the exhibition at Cabeza Knolls, he stayed there. He gave me a good interview, remember? Anyhow, he had to catch a real early flight so I agreed to go down there at dawn and pick him up and take him to the airport. I got there about twenty after five. He was in a unit in the building furthest back. You have to drive around behind it. Just as I went down the driveway to that building, the red Jag was coming out. It was just getting light. The girl was driving. Jigger didn’t duck quick enough. I guess he hasn’t got anything against girls.”

Wing was tempted to ask more questions, but instead he finished his coffee and said, “We won’t worry about him, then. We’ll worry about you, Bobby, and how you’re going to get friendly with Miss Frosty.”

“No thanks. If I had the time and the money to have a steady girl, I wouldn’t want one who could snap my spine in her bare hands. And I wouldn’t want any sexpot pushover anyways.”

“At fifteen?”

“Since thirteen, Jimmy. It’s no secret. And she isn’t the only one in West Bay Junior High. There’s a whole crowd of them in that school, and, I don’t know, they make me nervous. The way they look at you, you know they just don’t give a damn. They don’t even go steady. They just go around in a rat pack and do any damn thing. They know how to keep from getting in trouble, but it just doesn’t seem right. I know I’m only eighteen, but those kids make me feel as middle-aged as you are.”

“Thanks so much.”

“Aw, you know how I mean it, Jimmy. Say! Why couldn’t we do a story on it together? I could get the facts.”

“Much as I hate to deprive you of the chance to do creative research, Bobby, we don’t work for a crusading paper. Too many of our advertisers have probably fathered those little sluts. Borklund would drop in a dead faint if I suggested it.”

“I guess he would. When I get out of college, I’m going to work for a paper with some guts. Why do you hang around this crummy town, Jimmy? You’re good enough to get on a better paper.”

“Thanks again.”

“I mean it. Why do you stay here?”

“I left once, and it didn’t work out.”

“Oh.”

“And I always get lost driving around a strange city. I haven’t got much sense of direction.”

“Don’t talk down to me, Jimmy.”

Wing stood up and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Okay. I won’t. I’ll tell you one of the great truths I’ve learned. Every place in the world is exactly like every other place.”

Bobby, looking up at him, shook his head slowly. “I can’t believe that. I wouldn’t want to let myself try to believe that. If that’s true... there wouldn’t be much point in anything.”

“It’s just something you don’t want to find out too soon,” Jimmy Wing said, and walked out and back to the newsroom. He checked the files for the previous week and found that Gardner had given his exhibition of golf on a Wednesday afternoon at Cabeza Knolls.

It took him a half hour to drive to the Drowsy Lady. He arrived a little before ten-thirty. On the way out he had time to plan his approach.

Floodlights blazed against the lobby entrance to the Drowsy Lady. As Wing turned in he remembered, fondly, Van Hubble’s explosive reaction to motel architecture. Van had been a mild man, until something offended his sense of taste and decency.

“They cantilever a great big goddam hunk of roof at a quote daring unquote angle and hang big vulgar sheets of glass off it and light it up like an appendectomy. You can’t tell a bowling alley from a superburger drive-in from a motel from a goddam bank, Jimmy. They all turn people into bugs crawling across aseptic plastic. It’s all tail-fin modern, boy. It’s cheap, jazzy and sterile. It isn’t architecture. There’s nothing indigenous about it. It’s all over the country, all the same, like a red itch, like junk toys dumped out of a sack. And it’s so stinking patronizing.”

A huge sign displayed a single heavy-lidded feminine eye, the trademark of the establishment, repeated on highway signs thirty miles in every direction.

He parked and went into the tall lobby. The restaurant had closed at ten. A desk clerk placed a registration card in front of him with a hospitable flourish.

“Is the manager around?”

“What would you like to see him about? Maybe I can help you.”

“I’m not selling anything, if that’s what’s worrying you. Is he around?”

“He’s in the cocktail lounge, watching the fights. I could get him now, if it’s that important...”

“I’ll go watch the fights too. What’s his name?”

“Mr. Frank Durley. He’s a heavy-set man, bald.”

The cocktail lounge was very dark. Some lens spots shone directly down onto the bar, and there was a light behind the bottle racks. So much crowd noise came over the television set Wing got the impression there were a lot of people in the room. After he felt his way to the bar his vision adjusted and he saw there were but five people in addition to the bartender. A couple in a corner were leaning toward each other, ignoring the television set. Three men sat at the bar, watching it. The bald man sat alone. The other two were together.

Wing ordered a beer. He had taken a first sip when the fight was stopped in the seventh round. The bartender went to the set and turned it off, turned on some kind of background-music system, and increased the intensity of the light over the bar.

Durley got off the bar stool and said, “So you make another half buck off me, Harry.”

“A pleasure,” the bartender said.

As the manager started to leave, Jimmy Wing stopped him, introduced himself. When he said it was private, Durley led the way over to a table in the corner near the door.

“This is a delicate matter,” Jimmy said. “I’m a reporter for the Record-Journal, but this isn’t newspaper business. It’s more a favor for a friend.”

“That’s how come the name struck a bell. James Wing. I’ve seen it in the paper. I’ve seen you before too. Out here?”

“I came out to your opening in April. I don’t remember meeting you then. I met two of the owners.”

“I’m one of the owners too, fella. And manager. What’s this delicate matter you got on your mind?”

“A couple of kids. They’ve checked in here at least once, I think. Both the girl’s parents and the boy’s parents are friends of mine. I want to nail it down, prove it, so the parents can straighten those two out and get them off this kick.”

Durley had a fleshy, unrevealing face, a casual voice. “You want to nail it down.”

“I suppose the registration card would be the best way.”

“You got any kind of writ or warrant to check my books?”

“Mr. Durley, that isn’t a very cooperative attitude.”

Durley leaned forward, wearing a rather strange smile. “You want to know about my attitude? I got this kind of an attitude. I got the attitude of a man with a heavy piece of money in this thing. I sold out a nice operation in Jersey. You know when we were due to open? December first last year. So we open in April with the season over. You know the occupancy I run? Forty percent is a good night, a helluva good night. You know where the break-even is? Seventy-one per cent. So you come around doing a favor for a friend. I’m hurting, fella. I’m hurting real bad, and I’ll rent units to anything that’s warm, breathing and has money. Nobody around here ever heard of your kids. Anybody rents an overnight key here, they buy privacy too. You want something on anybody, fella, you don’t get it the easy way, not from me. You go around the other way, like following them. If we got to do a hot-pants trade to keep alive, we’ll do it until we get fat enough to pick and choose. You following me? In the meantime, they rent the key and they buy privacy. We need the local plates we’re getting, and if I fink on any of that business, word gets around and we lose it. Right now I’m running a hot-pillow trade in a six hundred thousand dollar plant, which makes no sense at all and sometimes makes me feel ashamed, but I’m doing it to survive, and I’ll keep doing it until I decide I don’t have to. That’s the kind of attitude I’ve got.”

Jimmy Wing poured the rest of his beer into his glass. He smiled and shook his head and said, “Rough talk, Mr. Durley. This local trade, you put them way in the back units so the cars are out of sight?”

“I got a lot of book work to do tonight, fella, so if you’ll...”

“Wait a minute. You’re in Palm County. I was born and raised here. I know a hell of a lot of people, Durley. I’ve done favors for so many of them, they’d do little favors for me without asking why. I know everybody in the courthouse.”

“Where are you going with it?”

“You got hard with me, right sudden. I don’t know as that’s too smart. This isn’t like Jersey. This is small town around here. Do all your signs conform to county ordinances? How much inspection are you getting on those county licenses you took out? How about sanitation? How about setbacks? All your kitchen help fingerprinted? Maybe it could even be a lot easier than that, Mr. Durley. Maybe a sheriff’s deputy could take a swing through all your parking areas every hour on the hour all night long, with that big red flasher working so nobody would miss him. Now, I’m telling you just as honestly as I can that the biggest mistake you can make right now is to decide I’m bluffing.”

Durley went over to the bar and came back with a drink. He sat quietly for almost a full minute. Finally he said, “I got so much on my mind, sometimes I forget how to be smart.”

“It was a week ago last Wednesday. They were in a unit in the last building in the back. Dark-haired girl, small and pretty. Big husky blond boy. Red Jaguar.”

“They would have checked in in the evening.”

“Probably. And left very early.”

“Let’s go check it with Pritch. He was on.”

They went into a small office beyond the switchboard. The desk clerk could not recall at first, and remembered when Wing said it was the night Gardner had stayed there.

“Oh, I think I’ve got it now. Let me check the cards.”

Pritchard came back with a card in his hand. “The girl came alone and registered right after I came on. Here’s the time stamp. Twelve after four. Haughty as hell. Wanted one way in the back. Went and looked at it and came back and paid cash. Eighteen fifty-four, with tax. She wanted to pay on her way in instead of out because she said she and her husband would be leaving early. Yes, I remember seeing the car out in front. Red Jag. She’s got here on the card Michigan plates.”

“That would be right,” Jimmy said.

“She said they’d take occupancy later on. And she...” He stopped, snapped his fingers, and excused himself again.

Durley examined the card and handed it to Wing. The writing was firm, large, angular, yet unmistakably feminine. Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Tannis of Flint, Michigan. Wing was dryly amused to notice that Tannis was Sinnat spelled backward.

Pritchard came back and placed an identical card on the desk between them. “They’re in the house tonight, Frank. I thought it was familiar. But Gil checked them in before I come on. Is there something wrong?”

“Nothing you have to know about, Pritch,” Durley said. “All you have to remember is how Mr. Wing here is a man we’re real good buddies with. We’re such good buddies, you take these two cards in and run off a photo copy for our good friend Mr. Wing.”

The clerk took the cards away. “I appreciate this,” Jimmy said.

“That’s why I’m doing it. So you’ll appreciate it. So if I get in a jam I’ve got a local buddy to turn to. I wouldn’t want anybody thinking of all the things you thought of, and wanting a shakedown.”

“It isn’t likely to come to that around here.”

“That’s nice to know. Funny, the girl doing the check-in.”

“The boy looks too young.”

“If you want to make my damn day perfect, now tell me the girl is fifteen.”

“Nineteen.”

“That’s a small help.”

“Are you going to make it?”

“We’ll make it,” Durley said. “If my wife has to make up every bed herself, and if I have to be desk clerk, bartender, chef and janitor, we’ll make it. We can’t afford not to. The trouble was, we missed the season that would carry us through the first summer.”

“The rates seem high.”

“The rear units have kitchen deals in them. We start at ten for a single. Once we hang out the low, low, summer rates signs, you’ll know we’ve been whipped. We’re not after the shoppers. It has to stay a class operation.”

Pritchard brought him the copies of the registration cards. Durley walked him to the lobby door. Durley said, “I don’t have to tell you what not to talk about and you don’t have to tell me, right? We understand each other. Come out to dinner. Bring a friend. The food is good. It cost a hundred grand over estimate, and it was four months late opening, but the food is good.”

Wing started to drive out, then turned and drove past the registration lobby and the big sapphire pool, back to the last unit. He estimated there were twenty rooms in the building. There were five cars parked in the darkness, faintly illuminated by a parking-area light on a tall pole. The little red car was nosed up to the low shrubbery in front of number sixty-six. The canvas top was up. The windows of sixty-six were dark. The little car looked more patient than furtive.

He turned around and drove out. Durley was standing in the parking area in front of the office watching him as he turned out onto the highway and headed back toward Palm City.

It was quarter after midnight when he knocked at the side door, the office door, of Elmo’s home.

Elmo let him in. “Set, boy. When you phoned I was so far asleep Dellie liked to shook me to death waking me up.” He yawned and leaned against the edge of his desk, looking at Jimmy sitting on the couch. “Saturday night I used to howl till break of day, but I’m slowed a lot. Wish you could have waited until morning.”

“I don’t want to see too much of you in the daylight, Elmo. Here or in public places. It might not be smart. And if I’d waited until tomorrow I might have changed my mind about the whole thing. And you had the idea this was urgent, the last time I talked to you.”

“Everything is urgent, boy. The only un-urgent thing in the world is taking your pleasure, and that’s a sometime urgent thing if you set it off too long. I hope to God you got something worthwhile on Sinnat.”

“I don’t know what it’s worth, but I damn well know it’s about the only thing you’re going to get.”

“Leroy said you’d get nothing at all. He poked around some.”

“When you ask me to do something, I don’t want a lot of other people I don’t know about doing the same thing.”

Elmo chuckled. He hitched himself up onto the desk, reached inside his silk robe and scratched his chest. “You got so many ideas about what you will do and what you won’t do, you leave me confused. So far, Jimmy, right up to now, I can’t see as you’ve done anything yet.”

“Maybe I’ve done something about Dial Sinnat. I don’t know how you can use it, or if you can use it. I don’t want to be mixed up in that end of it. I want that clear before we go into it, Elmo.”

“You keep this up, you’re going to put me in an ugly condition, boy. We’re going to get along fine. I won’t ask anything of you you can’t do. We went into that. I want you for what you can do... better than other people.”

“Sinnat is a tough-minded man. Pushing him the way I have in mind might not work out. By the way, he told Kat Hubble this deal is being handled smarter than any of the five men involved, and he wondered who could be the silent partner with the brains.”

Elmo’s eyebrows went up in wonder. “Well. How about that? So there’s another real good reason to make him stop thinking about any part of it. What have you got?”

“I had good luck getting it,” Jimmy said, and told him precisely what he had found out, and turned the copies of the registration cards over to him.

Elmo studied the copies, walked around his desk and sat down. “Too bad it had to be Burt’s boy.” He shook his head and smiled. “No beaches and backseats for that little gal. No bugs and bushes for her. She travels first class. Whether it’s any use to us, then, depends on how much he thinks of his little girl.”

“We can assume he’s partial to her.”

“You look beat and you talk mean, Jimmy. You tired?”

“A little. This isn’t my normal line of work.”

“It’s a little special for all of us. But don’t you start bleeding for her, hear? She’s a little girl got herself a husky young buck to while away the long summer with. You sure Burt’s boy is seventeen?”

“Positive.”

“I’ll have to check the law on it with Leroy, but I got the idea she’s been tampering with the morals of a minor. And there’s some kind of an ordinance about conspicuous cohabitation, but I don’t know as it would fit this here situation.”

“I hope this won’t turn into some kind of a public mess.”

Elmo looked benignly at him. “Now, if there is any way in the world of this turning into a public mess, this girl’s father is going to be the first one in the world to want to prevent it. The way I see it, those men that run fast and loose through all the women they can reach, it’s an entirely different thing when it comes to their own daughters. He might be right sensitive about this, Jimmy.”

“He might be.”

Elmo leaned back and looked at the ceiling. “There’s another way to go at it too. There’s no way in the world this little girl could prove it was Burt’s boy with her these two times. She could be claiming it was Burt’s boy just because if it came out it was somebody else, it would be a worse mess.”

“I don’t see what you...”

“She could be trying to hide the fact it was actual old Tom Jennings seducin’ her. Two birds with one stone, you could say.”

“Now wait a minute!”

“I was just thinking out loud.”

“But I don’t want anybody making it into more than...”

“Hold it!” Elmo said sharply, raising both hands. “Lord God, what the hell kind of game are we playing here? Get yourself back in focus, boy. What are we talking about? Robbing the poor? We got a snotty little rich girl playing around with Burt Lesser’s innocent boy. And we got Dial Sinnat, with more money than Carter got pills, and a little cute-ass wife a quarter century younger than him. And they’re outsiders, boy! They come down here from Rochester, New York, or some goddam place like that. You and I were born and raised here. If they died here, they wouldn’t even be buried here. And if they decide they don’t like it, they can go any damn place in the world and live fat. You look at that committee list. There isn’t a one of them didn’t come here from some other place. What the hell right have they got telling us what to do with the landscape we were raised in? Boy, you act as if I’m going to skin those folks, salt ’em down and fry ’em. All I’m going to do is give a little bitty nudge here and there, just enough to make every one of them take a sudden disinterest in Grassy Bay. I want to do it nice and gentle, with your help. If you haven’t got the stomach for a little thing like this, a little job that’s going to work out fine for everybody, with nobody getting hurt bad, then I can have Leroy bring some folks in who maybe set their feet down a lot heavier than you and me. Now, I’m not going to do any more thinking out loud. I’ll maybe find a good way to use this, and maybe I won’t, but you don’t have to know about it if it makes you feel easier. This is the way the world works, boy. This is the way things get done. You should know that much by now.”

“How do things get done, Elmo?”

“Why, I was just now... Is there more to that question?”

“I was wondering about Martin Cable the Third. And I was wondering about Eloise. How did you get things done with Eloise, Mister Commissioner?”

“She’s a fine-looking woman.”

“Lately she’s taking a big interest in local economics. Martin says she’s real bright about it.”

“You know, you’re being real bright too.”

“Thanks.”

“You ever see that shack Leroy has down in the Taylor Tract east of Everset?”

“No.”

“He calls it a shack, but it’s more a lodge, I guess. Fifty-some acres he’s got down there, gate and cattle guard and a little old windy road going in, so you’d never know he had it fixed up so nice back in there. It’s about the onliest place Leroy can get away from his maw. He’s got power going in there. He’s even got an unlisted phone. Real fine. I guess Eloise has been going down there off and on for six, eight months, little afternoon visits like. There were only three knew about it, them and me. Now it’s four. He’s been teaching her about business, you might say. Martin is a stubborn man, but when he won’t listen to her, she just won’t have anything to do with that poor man at all. And he’s been coming around to her way of thinking. Or Leroy’s way, you might say.”

“Or your way.”

“But she doesn’t know that. She’s just real anxious to help Leroy. Somehow she’s got the idea that unless this development goes through, Leroy is ruined. She’s got a tender heart.”

“I’ll be damned!”

“Leroy wouldn’t like you acting all that surprised, Jimmy. Women take to that old boy.”

“It’s pretty stupid for her to get into something like that, isn’t it?”

Elmo shrugged. “I don’t guess Martin is the most exciting fella in the world for a woman like that to be married to. Granting you it’s stupid for her to fool around at all, she’s doing better with Leroy than if it was some fathead who’d get all carried away and get careless and get them caught. Or take it too serious. A man like Leroy, he understands women like Eloise. They want a little spice on account they get bored, but they don’t want to take any chance on messing up their marriage. Leroy is careful, and he pleasures them nice and he talks the sweet way they like to hear. But if they try to take charge, if they get uppity with him, he takes a switch to them, and that’s something new and different for them too, not getting any of that kind of treatment at home. Leroy, he says he doesn’t see her as often as it could be arranged, because she’s one godawful strenuous woman. He took up with her because we had it figured out that she could help us out with Martin. And she’s done just fine.”

Jimmy pictured Leroy Shannard, the thick white hair, the lean, hard, brown, sleepy face, the wise, remote, indolent eyes, the soft and cynical voice. He imagined Shannard with Eloise, and the match became more plausible — a cautious, civilized lechery appealing to her peasant shrewdness.

Jimmy sighed and said, “I’ve been around. I know a hell of a lot of things I couldn’t put in the paper. But you are beginning to make me feel wet behind the ears, Elmo.”

“Keep standing in the wind and you’ll dry off fast. The next one on the list, Jimmy, is that Doris Rowell. Next to Sinnat, she worries me the most. She does too good a job lining up those fish experts and erosion people. You get onto her next. Get her out of the picture, and maybe we won’t have so many people down here using big words and confusing the voters. But you get some sleep. You did fine on this, but you don’t look so good.”

As Jimmy Wing was heading north on Cable Key toward his cottage, he looked at his watch and saw that it was ten minutes of two. The neon of the Sea Oat Lounge was just ahead, on his left. He was exhausted, but he knew his nerves were so raw he would not sleep without some assistance, such as a couple of quick strong drinks. He braked sharply and turned in and parked. There were three other cars in front of the place.

He went in and sat at the bar, under the festooning of nets and glass floats. There was a noisy party of four in a corner, and one couple dancing, tight-wrapped and slowly, to the muted juke. There was a half drink and a woman’s purse on the bar three stools away. Bernie, the fat bartender, was checking the bar tabs against the register.

He came over and said, “Long time, Jim. You off it?”

“Not so anybody could notice. Beam on the rocks, Bernie. Uh... make it a double. Slow for a Saturday.”

“We did our share, earlier on. We made new friends. We carried out a few.” He put the drink in front of Jimmy.

“Move over here cozy,” a familiar girl-voice commanded. He turned and saw that the half-drink and purse belonged to Mitchie McClure. He grinned and moved to the stool beside her.

“How’s the ink-stained wretching business?” she said. “Tuck the paper to bed, full of scoops and excitements?”

Her voice had the drawling quality which drinking always caused with her. She had a ripely sturdy body, a bland pretty childish face, so unmarked, so much in contrast with the knowing eyes, the sardonic voice, that it had a masklike quality. They had known each other for many years. Her hair was bleached almost white, paler than he had ever seen it, and piled in a contrived tousling which curved to frame her face and curled down almost to her eyebrows in a silky fringe.

“The hair is really something, girl.”

“This week’s hair. The only thing I haven’t tried yet is shaving it off. Every time I get it done I feel like a new woman for twenty minutes.”

“You alone? On a Saturday night?”

“Shocking, isn’t it? There are clowns you can take and clowns you cannot take. I reserve the right to choose, Jaimie. I didn’t send this one on his way early enough. I should know by now. Stick with a friend of a friend. It’s when you get to a friend of a friend of a friend the system collapses. Look up good old Mitchie if you ever get down that way. God, what a boor! I’ll tell you something, Jaimie. It makes a girl treasure her stinking little inadequate alimony, because maybe without it, life would turn into a wilderness of boors. Ha! Adrift in a sea of dullards. I’m a lucky girl. Right, Bernie?”

“Right, doll.”

“One for the road, Bernie. And hit my friend again.”

“Not right off like that,” Jimmy said. “We go to the matches.”

“That’s my game. You can’t win.”

He tore matches out of the ashtray book. She went first, calling two. Their clenched fists were side by side. They glowered at each other. He had one match in his fist. “One,” he said, displaying it. She opened an empty hand. “Horse on me,” she said. “Your call.”

He decided to use bad strategy. He used all three matches, and called four. She waited a long time, guessed three, opened her hand and showed one.

“You lucked out,” she said indignantly. “Your lucky day, eh?”

“Sure. I’m up to here in luck, Mitchie.”

She tilted her head and looked at him more closely. “I’ve seen you looking better, Mr. Wing. Much better. On the other hand, everybody used to look a lot better, every one of us. Right, Bernie?”

“Right, doll.”

“I took canoeing and boating at Sweet Briar,” she said. “It readied me for the world. Heavy weather. We run before the wind, Jaimie. No sea anchors.”

The noisy foursome had paid and left. Bernie went and unplugged the juke. The dancing couple left.

“You have the look of a man trying to close the joint, Bernie.”

“Right, doll.”

They paid, said goodnight and went out. Bernie went to the door and they heard the click of the latch behind them. The spray of sea oats in yellow neon went off. A car whined by. The Gulf mumbled against the dark beach.

They stood between his station wagon and her ancient Minx.

“Old Saturday night,” she said. “Sunday morning.”

“One of each every week.”

“You are down, aren’t you, dear?” She moved closer to him, put her hands on his waist and looked up at him. “Got all dressed up and ended up with no place to go. We could share a little gesture of friendship. I’m not being brazen. Just cozy. And it wouldn’t matter a hell of a lot either way.”

He kissed the bridge of her nose and said, “Follow me,” and got into his car. Her lights followed him up the Key and down his long driveway. She saved out some breakfast eggs and scrambled the rest. They talked aimlessly for a little while and went to bed. Just before they went to sleep, she rubbed the coal of her cigarette out in the bedside ashtray, settled back down against him and said, “Who is she, Jaimie?”

“Who is who?”

“Don’t give me that. I told you my long sad story of unrequited love a long time ago, with tears and everything. Remember? Who is she?”

“She’s somebody who isn’t going to work out.”

“On account of Gloria?”

“On account of a lot of things, Mitchie.”

“She married?”

“You talk too much, honey.”

She changed position, put her arm across him, nestled more closely and sighed. “I know. Anyhow, I feel more even with you. People like us, Jaimie, we have two things we can go with. One thing, you can wake up in the morning and know you’re alive. That’s something, I guess. The other is this. Having somebody close to hold onto sometimes.”

“Mmm hmm.”

“But neither is really so much, is it, when you think about it?”

“Go to sleep, Mitchie.”

Toward dawn a great raw clangor of thunder awakened him. He heard the lisping roar of heavy rain moving toward the cottage, moving across water and tropic growth. He was trying to pull himself far enough awake to go see to the windows when he heard them being closed. He thought Gloria was closing them, and then he remembered Mitchie. The heaviest rain came. As it began to die away after ten minutes he heard a small thin whining sound. He was on the edge of sleep. He wondered if some animal was under the house. He tried to fall back into sleep and could not. Finally he sat up. The world was a drab dark gray. The rain was almost gone. Both the bedroom and the kitchen opened out onto the small screened porch on the back of the cottage. The door was open. He could barely see the pale figure of Mitchie standing out there on the porch by the screen, naked, making that stifled whimpering sound. He lay back. In a little while the sound ended. The rain was gone. He heard the sound of her bare feet on the wooden floor, heard the rattle of a towel rack in the bathroom. Soon the bed moved as she eased back into it. He rolled toward her, pretending to embrace her in sleep. Her skin was cool, freshened by the rain which had blown against her. He mumbled and held her and kissed her eye and tasted salt with the tip of his tongue. While they made love he wondered exactly what had been in her mind as she had stood out in the rain, crying. Perhaps she thought of nothing but her own tears.

She woke him at eleven. She had gone back to her place to change, and she had picked up some fresh orange juice on the way back. When he finished his shower, the eggs, toast and bacon were ready. He was glad she had awakened him, but he wished she had done it by phone. He did not relish having her around, not in the morning. She came cheery and too bawdy and too much at home. She came down too heavily on her heels when she walked. Her hips looked heavier than he had realized they were as she stood at the stove in her chocolate-colored shorts and her yellow blouse. And she made weak coffee. She could not possibly be the same person who had wept in the dawn rain.

She sat across from him with her coffee and said, “Cheer up, pal. I’m not here for keeps.”

“It’s nice to have you here.”

“And it hurt your mouth to say it, poor boy. But no matter how churlish you feel right now, you do look better.”

“I haven’t slept this late in a long time, Mitch.”

“We had a good rain. Did you hear the rain?”

“Vaguely.”

“When I drove to my place the air was wonderful. All clean and fresh and sweet. Now it’s like hot soup again. Are you in any kind of trouble?”

He looked up from the paper. “Huh?”

“Trouble! Are you in any?”

“I’m with you. My sister wouldn’t approve.”

“Laura is a dull, righteous frump, and she always has been. I remember you were about fourteen. I was eleven. You were teaching me how to throw a curve. I came over on Saturday morning. She chased me out of the yard with a rake. Called me boy-crazy. She was wrong. I was curveball-crazy. I wasn’t boy-crazy until I was twelve.”

“That’s when you started teaching me how to throw curves.”

“Not throw them, darling. Appreciate them. Oh God, remember how we were going to wing up to Georgia and get married? What was I then? Fifteen, I think. Look at us, honey. Could we have done any worse?”

“I forget why we didn’t go to Georgia.”

“Because Willy wouldn’t loan us his car. Anyhow, Jaimie, you were my first. Remember the guilt? God, how wicked we felt! We pledged our sacred honor we’d never slip again. And we didn’t, did we? Not for three whole days. Can you remember what we fought about?”

“No.”

“You went away to school. End of romance. And here we are again. But without the romance. I wonder what kind of life we’d be having if we’d... if Willy had been a little more generous with his car. Have you slept with her, Jaimie?”

“What? Who?”

“With the gal who’s messing you up.”

“No. And it’s none of your business, Mitchie.”

She poured more coffee. “Maybe that’s what you have to do. To break the spell.”

“Get off it!”

She made her eyes wide and round. “Ho, ho, ho, yet. So with my dirty mouth I’m soiling some princess? This is Grace Kelly you’re swooning over?”

“Mitchie, for God’s sake!”

“Are you a grown man? What kind of a kid-stuff torch are you carrying? Listen to the voice of experience, dear. I have been around. Oh, way way around, and back several times and out around again. I’ve still got my disposition, half my looks, and twice my early talent. The bed part is pure mirage, until proven otherwise. Friendship is a bigger part of the rest of it than anyone will admit. One little smidgin is magical romance. Anybody who mistakes the smidgin for the whole deal is retarded.”

He stared at her. “Mitchie, I am fine. I am nifty dandy.”

“Then you got more on your mind than a girl.”

“What I have on my mind is how late I’m going to be getting to the shop.”

“I’d like to see you better adjusted to whatever the hell you’re adjusting to.”

“I don’t cry in the rain, at least.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You know, you’re a bastard sometimes.”

“You learned that a long time ago. You keep forgetting.”

She stood up quickly, grabbed her purse and headed for the door without a word. She stopped suddenly. Her shoulders slumped and she turned slowly and came back to him with a small smile. She put her hand on his shoulder and kissed him on the mouth. “Enough old friends I haven’t got, Jaimie. Last night seemed sweet. Even the tears were sweet. If I had any luck left, I’d give it to you. You know it. I wish one of us was happy. It would seem like a better average.”

He smiled up at her. “You make horrible coffee.”

“It’s the only thing in the world I do badly, dear.”

He sat and heard the rackety motor of the Minx start, and heard it fade as she drove out to the highway. He put the dishes in the sink and went downtown to work.