A Flash of Green

Four

It was nine-thirty when Jimmy Wing arrived at the home of County Commissioner Elmo Bliss, three miles east of the city line, out on the Lemon Ridge Road. It was a huge old frame house, and Elmo had put a lot of money into modernization over the past few years. The house, and how he had acquired it, had become part of the legend, and had suffered distortions as had most other parts of the legend.

Jimmy Wing often caught himself in the act of exaggerating the man’s past. Elmo had that inexplicable capacity to seem just a little more thoroughly alive than anyone else. Now, in his early forties, he looked like a leaner and younger version of Jimmy Hoffa, but with a roan-brown brush cut, and that tough sallow cracker skin the sun can’t mark, and eyes of a clear pale dangerous gray. He had Hoffa’s abrupt charm, his uncomical arrogance, and the same air of absolute certainty, diluted not at all by the back-country drawl, a lazier way of moving. In the past few years Elmo had settled on the kind of clothing he would wear for all except the most formal occasions. He wore slacks and sports shirts in plain colors, in dull hues of gray, blue and green, all in an understated western cut, along with pale hats which were never quite ranch hats, but gave a subtle outdoor-man impression.

Jimmy Wing knew the bare outlines of the story, and it always pleased him to be able to add little incidents which had the flavor of truth. He came from a large clan noted over the years for the frequency of their trouble with the law, as well as a casual inbreeding which did the stock no good. Poachers, commercial fishermen, guides, ’gator hunters, brawlers. But Elmo was the one who became an All-State wingback, and picked the best deal out of all the scholarship offers and went on to Georgia. When Jimmy had begun senior high, Elmo had been gone three years, but the legends still circulated in the high school.

Elmo lasted two years at Georgia before he was thrown out. He came back with a big red convertible and money in his pocket. The sheriff at that time had been Pete Nambo, a solemn brutal man who believed that a Bliss was a Bliss, no matter how many times one of them had had his name on the sports page.

When Elmo didn’t have enough money left to pay his fine when Nambo arrested him the third time, the sentence was ninety days. Nambo put Bliss right onto one of the county road gangs, swinging a brush hook right through the heat of summer, living on beans, side meat and chicory coffee. And each evening, after the truck brought them back, if Nambo felt like it and had the energy, he’d have two deputies bring Elmo to him and he would work him over in an attempt to break him and make him beg. Nambo had learned he could break on the average of one out of every three Blisses he could give his personal attention to, and he had to find out which variety he had available this time. Not one of Elmo’s avid fans from the old days came to his rescue.

When Elmo was released it was an even-money bet around town as to whether he’d take off for some friendlier place, or stay around and get into more trouble. But he sold his red car and apparently tucked the money away, and went to work as a rough carpenter. He kept his mouth shut, stayed out of bars, and ceased to be an object of any public interest. It wasn’t long before he became construction foreman for old Will Maroney. Then he made some sort of complicated deal whereby he took a spec house off Will’s hands. After he dressed it up and sold it quickly, the little firm became Maroney and Bliss. They tackled a bigger job than Will had ever attempted alone, and when they had made out well on it, suddenly Elmo broke with Maroney and went ahead on his own, calling himself The Bliss Construction Company (“Live in a Home of Bliss”), and Will Maroney went around town cursing Elmo for having walked off with the four top men out of his work crew, men who had been with him for many years.

The wise businessmen of Palm City said that Elmo was going to fold any minute, and all his creditors were going to take a beating. They said he was moving too fast, buying too many vehicles and too much equipment, taking on too many jobs, expanding his work crews too fast, doing too much damn-fool advertising.

But he didn’t fold. As soon as it was obvious to him, as it would soon be obvious to the rest of the community, that he was over the hump and in the clear, he married one of the Boushant girls, Dellie, the next to the youngest. There were seven of them. Felicia, Margo, Ceil, Belle, Frannie, Dellie and Tish. They had all been born and raised in the big house out on Lemon Ridge Road. Their father had been a carnival concessionaire, their mother — until she got too heavy too young — a wire walker.

Not one of the seven girls could have been called a beauty, but they were uniformly attractive, all with vivacity, humor, their own brand of pride, and a good sense of style. They were affectionate, amorous, fun-loving, warm-blooded girls, and perhaps because there were so many of them, their reputation was a little more florid than their deeds warranted. Over the years of their girlhood, a thousand different cars must have turned in at that dusty driveway to pick one or the other of them up.

One by one, starting at the top, they eventually married, soundly but not advantageously, married sober, reliable electricians, delivery men, mechanics, and began at once to bear them healthy lively children.

In high school and during college vacations Elmo had dated several of the Boushant girls, and at the time of his marriage one of the sniggering jokes around town was that he had sampled every one of them and settled for the one with the most talent. Jimmy Wing suspected this was a partial truth. Elmo would have been too young for Felicia, and possibly too young for Margo. And too old for Tish. But a judicious weighing of all the factors of opportunity and inclination made it reasonable to assume Elmo Bliss had enjoyed three of his wife’s elder sisters. He had gone with Ceil for a little while when he was in high school, and been seen often with Belle during the first summer of college, and had been dating Frannie at the time Sheriff Pete Nambo locked him up.

Also, Jimmy could remember the tone and expression of awe with which a local rancher had once described to him the young manhood of Elmo Bliss: “There was three or four of them, Elmo the leader, roarin’ up and down this coast a hundred miles an hour any night of the week, all over Collier, Lee and Charlotte Counties, as well as Palm County, and inland to Hendry and Glades. I tried to run with them for a while there, but it like to wore me down. That Elmo, he’d do any damn thing come into his head. I’d say you could count on two fights a night anyway, and you could sure count on women because that’s what Elmo was mostly hunting for. Lord God, the women! I’m telling you, Jimmy, he could find them where they wasn’t. Schoolgirls, tourist ladies, waitresses, nurses, schoolteachers, all kind of shapes and sizes and ages, and we’d bundle them into the cars and go off, slamming down them little back roads, singin’, drinkin’, the girls squealin’, and it seemed like we couldn’t be anyplace in six counties where Elmo didn’t know someplace nearby where we could take them. Anything warm, breathing and with a skirt on, Elmo seemed to get it without anywhere near the amount of fuss you’d expect.”

So when Elmo married Dellie Boushant, and moved out to the big old house on the Lemon Ridge Road, the people decided he was settling for a smaller future than some had begun to predict for him. He would be just another of the men who had married Boushant girls. Many of the successful men in Palm County had, in times past, dated one or another of the Boushant girls, but successful men had not married them.

So Elmo had married Dellie and moved out into the old house, and she had begun the bearing of his children; there were six of them now, ranging from thirteen down to two. Nowadays people pointed to Elmo’s marriage to Dellie as part of his luck and part of his success. Either the times had changed, or Elmo had changed them to suit himself.

Jimmy knew the story of how Elmo had acquired the big house and the sixty acres around it, and he suspected it was true. After Elmo had been married to Dellie a little over two years — she was twenty then and he was eight years older — Mama Boushant had dropped dead in her own kitchen, willing equal shares in the house and land to her seven daughters. Elmo was overextended at the time, so nobody knew quite how he managed it. At the conference there were thirteen of them at the huge dining room table, six daughters, six husbands and Tish, the unmarried one. They say Elmo let the arguments run on for an hour before he took the money out of his pocket, ninety bills, one hundred dollars each. As he started counting it into six separate piles, fifteen bills in each pile, the angry talk died away and for most of the counting there was a complete silence. Elmo said, “You sign the release, and then you pick up the money, in that order. If there’s just one who won’t sign, the deal is off for the rest of you.”

Steve Lupak, Belle’s husband, put up the biggest argument, saying the land was worth an absolute minimum of two hundred an acre, which would bring it up to twelve thousand even without the house. That started the rest of them off. Elmo leaned back with his eyes half closed, almost smiling, refusing to answer any of them. They appealed to Dellie, trying to make her admit it was unfair. But she sat close beside Elmo, placid and loving and heavy with her second child, the one who would be named Annabelle. By eleven Belle and Felicia were the only holdouts. By midnight Belle and Steve still fought it. By half past midnight they too gave up, and it was Elmo’s house from then on.

Jimmy Wing had talked about that arrangement with Frannie Boushant a little over two years ago. Frannie Vernon, her name was at that time. It had come about in an unplanned way. He had known her in high school — she was two classes behind him — but had never dated her. He ran into her by accident in Miami. Borklund had sent him over to cover a Citrus Commission hearing. He had driven over, and when the hearing had been adjourned at four, he had phoned his story in and had been advised by Borklund that he might as well stay over and cover the session scheduled for the following day.

As he was walking toward his car he met Frannie on the sidewalk. It was a cool day. She wore a short cloth coat over a dark wool skirt and white angora sweater. There was such a family resemblance between the sisters, he did not know if she was Ceil, Belle or Frannie when she smiled warmly at him and greeted him by name. She detected his slight hesitation and said, “I’m Frannie, Jim.”

They moved out of the pedestrian traffic, over toward the store fronts to talk. Like all the Boushant girls, she was dark, with high cheekbones, a long oval face, pretty eyes of deep brown, a heavy mouth which smiled readily, prominent teeth, an immature chin.

“What are you doing over here, Frannie?”

“Working. Living. God, it’s a brute town, Jim. But I had to go somewhere. The Social Security was enough to get along on. It’s pretty good when you’ve got little kids. But I was just sort of dragging through every day, and so a couple of months ago I parked the kids on Ceil, bless her, and came over here.”

Suddenly he had remembered Dick Vernon had been killed six months previously. He had worked for General Telephone as a lineman. He’d gone out after tarpon with two friends on a Sunday morning in the small cabin cruiser one of them owned, and it had blown up in the Gulf a mile off Sanibel Island. The other two, with bad flesh burns, had made it to the beach. The boat had burned to the water line and sunk. Dick’s body had been recovered the following day.

“That was a terrible thing, about Dick,” he said.

Tears stood in her eyes and she laughed in a mirthless way. “Look at me. One kind word and I’m off. It’s taking a long time to really believe it, Jim. So here I am, in Miami, which I guess is as good as any other place would be at the moment. I’m waiting tables at that restaurant down the block there, on the other side. Gee, it’s good to see somebody from home.”

“I’m covering a meeting. I have to stay over, and I was about to find a place. Can I buy you a drink, Frannie? Dinner, maybe?”

She looked thoughtful, glanced at her watch. “Sure. I guess so. But I’d like a chance to get a bath and get fixed up. You work in that place, you smell like grease all over. How about you pick me up at six-thirty?”

She told him where it was and how to get there. He went over and checked into a motel on the north end of the beach. On the off chance, he rented better and larger accommodations than he had planned to, feeling sly and semiguilty as he did so. She was ready when he stopped for her, and she did not ask him in. She looked very good to him. She wore a sleeveless dress in a fuzzy pumpkin wool, and a beige wool coat and a pillbox hat in a paisley pattern. He took her to one of the big, quiet, shadowy restaurants on the beach, a place for food and talk. They spent a long time in the cocktail lounge. She was obviously pleased to be taken out and happy to be with him. After three drinks they talked about Dick and she wept. And after that, he told her about Gloria, about this last nightmare visit, and how, after he had taken her back, they had told him it was unlikely they would ever be able to give her visiting privileges again. He told Frannie he was looking for a buyer for their house, the home she would never see again, and did not know he was weeping until his voice clotted and he felt the tickle of tears on his face. Frannie reached out to him and closed her hand around his wrist with great strength.

“Please don’t, Jim, honey.”

He looked at her with a great earnestness. “But don’t you see, the terrible thing about it is the way it’s all so phony. I’m not crying about her, Frannie. I can’t seem to cry about it as a great loss. I’m... crying about me. I’m crying at the great phony tragic figure I’m making of myself. And I think I’m crying because I want to touch your heart.”

“Let’s eat now, Jimmy. We’ve had enough drinks. Let’s get a menu and order from here, please, and let them tell us when it’s ready, and not have any more drinks.”

At dinner they had talked of trivial things which would not trigger either of them. Over coffee, awkward as a schoolboy, he said, elaborately, “I... uh... found a pretty nice place to stay. We could have a nightcap there and I could show you my view of the pool.”

When she didn’t answer, he looked directly at her and saw her looking at him with an expression he could not read. Her head was tilted slightly. She looked sad, rueful, slightly ironic, but with an undertone of tenderness.

“Yes, Jimmy. Yes, I suppose we have to go look at the pool. There’s really nothing else we can do, is there?”

She was very quiet on the way out to the motel. They went in. He turned two subdued lights on. She threw her coat and purse on a chair, and they stood by the sliding doors and looked out at the pool. He put his hand on her waist and, after a little while, he turned her into his arms. After they had kissed with an increasing hunger, she backed away from him, sighed, smiled, took her purse and shut herself in the bathroom. He knew it would happen, and he knew it would not be very important or very good. He drew the draperies, turned out one of the lights, opened up one of the two double beds. The long fiasco of Gloria had made him jittery about all emotional relationships. He heard water running. He felt very tired. He wished he had not started it. He wished she had said no. He felt almost certain he would either be impotent, or it would all be over for him in a humiliatingly brief time. That was what had been happening to him lately.

She came out of the bathroom with her dress over her arm. She gave him a broad, friendly almost casual smile and said, “Hello, there!” and went to the closet and hung her dress and coat on hangers. She was constructed like her sisters. Their long oval faces and the long slender necks, the narrow sloping shoulders, gave them a look of slenderness. Yet their legs were long and heavy, their hips wide, their lower torso fleshy. Frannie had a slightly sway-backed stance which made her buttocks look the more round, thrusting and muscular, yet her upper torso seemed almost too frail and narrow for the size and weight of the wide-spaced conical breasts.

She came to the bed in such a matter-of-fact way, he was more convinced that it would not be anything worth remembering for either of them.

But her skin had a silkier texture than he would have guessed, and, more importantly, she quickly proved that she was frankly and enthusiastically concerned with the pleasure she could get from it, enjoying her own sensations without pretense or artifice or coyness. She gasped her small instructions, and she gave little throaty chuckles of pleasure, and she made a running commentary on just how good everything was. Paradoxically, her apparent complete unconcern for him made it possible for him to lose all his anxiety about himself, and soon find himself sharing the same pleasures he was giving her, tasting them in ways he had not known for a long time. So when it had ended, and they lay in a sighing contentment, sharing a cigarette, their hearts slowing, their bodies worn and leaden, he felt both gratitude and a quiet pride bordering on smugness. Each time she sighed, there would be a little catch of her breath at the end of it, like a hiccup.

“So nice,” she breathed. “So fine and nice. I like the way we are, Jimmy darling. I like us a lot.” Her hair tickled the side of his throat as she turned her face toward him. “What are you laughing at?”

“Well, if at anything, at myself. There wasn’t any reason why anybody had to come over here to cover this hearing, you know. Borklund was trying to give me a change of scene. I was getting stale and jumpy and sour.”

She kissed his throat. “Have you had a change of scene, dear?”

“Yes indeed.”

“Are you still stale and jumpy and sour?”

“No ma’am.”

“Then I must be good for you. You’re good for me. You’re the first one since I got married. I feel all over like warm marshmallow pudding. Darling, call the desk and ask them to wake us up at six.” She rolled toward him and snuggled close to him. “Then we’ll have a nap.”

During the next two months he put a lot of mileage on his car. Every time he knew he would have enough time off, he would phone her and drive over. He stayed with her at her one-room efficiency. At first she didn’t want him there. She said the room was too full of weeping, but it turned out to be all right for them. During those two months she mended him. She rebuilt the pride which the Gloria situation had eroded. She made him a whole man. They seemed to sense, simultaneously, when it was time to end it, and so they ended it affectionately and well, before it had a chance to turn into quarrels and accusations.

Later, at about the time of Van Hubble’s death, Frannie met a man named Worley in Miami, married him and came back to Palm City with him. He got a job with the Palm County Highway Department. When Jimmy Wing would see her on the street he felt a faint retrospective stir of pleasure, and he felt glad it had happened just at the time it did, and in the manner it did. Once he bought her drugstore coffee. She was carrying her third child, the first child of the new marriage. She seemed very happy.

Whenever he thought of that two months and the fast narrow road across the Everglades, and her couch that unfolded into a double bed, and the warm sleeping weight of her leg across his hip, he would remember how they used to talk after they had made love — lie and smoke and talk in lazy intimacy of a hundred things.

He had asked her once about the way Elmo Bliss had bought the Lemon Ridge house from the rest of them so cheaply.

“Well, of course we resented it, Jimmy. But, later on, it seemed all right. Nobody even thinks about it any more. Now it seems as if... it’s just the way it should be.”

“How do you mean?”

“Elmo is sort of in charge of the family, so it seems right he should be in the home place with Dellie. Three of the brothers-in-law are older than he is, but he’s the one everybody goes to. Sickness, jobs, trouble with the kids, anything. And all of us are free to come and go just as if it was still our house. It’s sure crowded sometimes.”

“So the family approves of Elmo.”

“Gosh, not at first. Well, you know the reputation he had and all the trouble he was in all the time. We didn’t want Dellie marrying him. She was only eighteen. But we couldn’t stop her. Dellie is a strange one. She’s never had much to say, but she’s always had this idea that she was going to have a lush life, like a queen or something. She just knew it was going to be that way. We used to laugh at her. But the way it worked out, she’s certainly living a lot higher on the hog than anybody else in the family, I’m telling you. We never would have guessed she’d get that kind of a life by marrying Elmo. He’s real good to her. I mean if you don’t count keeping her pregnant most of the time. She’s due for number six any day now, but I’ll say this, she doesn’t seem to mind. She’s got all the help she can use with the house and the kids, and she’s never up before noon, and she certainly keeps her figure. I guess he’s sweet to her, but... you know Elmo. I don’t know if she knows about other women. Or if... she’d let herself know, or let herself wonder. Dellie is a realist.”

“So is Elmo, I guess.”

“I don’t know what Elmo is. He has that way of talking to you. When he talks to you, you feel as if you matter more to him than anybody else on earth. He really listens to you. Not very many people listen. He seems to really care about you. I guess that’s what makes him so good with women. When a girl is with Elmo, she feels... I don’t know, more alive. You know it’s an act, but you can’t help yourself. You don’t ever really know if he likes you. Nobody knows. We talk about him a lot, in the family. The way he helps us all, that seems to be kind of an act too.”

“When he sold off fifty of the sixty acres of the home place, Frannie, I guess he did pretty well.”

“I guess so,” she said indifferently. “But he sort of sold it to himself, didn’t he? One of those corporation things he keeps doing?” He remembered that she had turned toward him then and said, in a huskier tone, “Now, why are we wasting all this good time talking about my brother-in-law, darling?” She had reached her sturdy hand to him and said, with exaggerated petulance, “But it seems too early to change the subject, I guess. Isn’t it too early? Gosh, you know, maybe it isn’t. Now I’m sure it isn’t. We’re changing the subject, darling, aren’t we?”

He grinned at that memory of Frannie as he slowed for Elmo’s house. Eight or ten cars were parked in the field beside Elmo’s house, nosed up to the big redwood fence. He parked and got out of his car. He remembered the eagerness with which he had headed each time toward Miami two years ago. Yet no part of it had been as compelling as what he now felt toward Kat. It offended his sense of proportion that this should be so. It was a meager feat finding a woman who would come to his Cable Key cottage. He had tried to cure himself of what he privately called his severe case of Kat-fever by using himself up upon some amiable and competent women during the past year, but it had not diminished the fever by a fraction of a degree. He resented being the victim of what seemed an adolescent compulsion. As an adult male he knew that in the deeps of the bed the differences between women are less important than the similarities. So why should this particular hundredweight of flesh seem touched with magic? What could she do that others had not done?

He walked through the open redwood gate and down the winding gravel path toward the pool, remembering the first time he had come to Elmo’s house, three years and eight months ago, on election night, without invitation. He had come on a hunch...

After Elmo had been married about five years, and Bliss Construction had become one of the largest home construction outfits in the area, Elmo had begun to devote considerable time to civic functions and duties. He joined service clubs and fund-raising ventures, and proved himself reliable and persuasive and dedicated whenever appointed to a committee. He had begun making sizable contributions to the Democratic County Committee, and had begun to electioneer on the behalf of Democrats running for county offices. Four years ago the top brass in the county organization had decided to give Elmo his first taste of running for office, so they put him up against Elihu Kibby in the primary. Elihu Kibby, Brade Wellan and Sam Engster were the ones who picked Elmo and talked him into it. Kibby was running for re-election to the Board of County Commissioners. It was to be his fifth four-year term, and everybody knew that it was an automatic re-election. Kibby would win the primary over anybody who was put up, and he would whip Stan Freeberry, the Republican opposition, handily.

On the evening of the primaries Jimmy Wing went out to Elmo’s house at five o’clock. Elmo and a pack of friends and relatives were gathered in the big shed-type building beyond the swimming pool, the building Elmo called his workshop. It looked more like the main lounge in a rustic and expensive hunting lodge.

Elmo got him a drink and got him off into a corner and said, “Now, why in the world you killing time coming away out here for, Jimmy Wing? There isn’t much of a news story out here tonight. You should be down to headquarters where the winners are all gathered round, slapping each other on the back.”

“I’ve been thinking about you all day, Elmo, ever since I voted for you without really knowing why.”

“You wasted a vote there, Jimmy.”

“I wondered how many other people were doing the same thing. And then I thought about the big family you come from, and the big family you married into. I remembered how many people live in houses you’ve built, and how many people have worked for you over the past few years. I think it might all add up to a lot. It might just add up to enough.”

Elmo had cocked his head, squinted his pale dancing eyes and grinned at Jimmy Wing. “Now, don’t you start scaring me, boy. Anything like that would be a terrible embarrassment. Old Elihu asked me to run out of the goodness of his heart, so the voters could get a look at me in case I want to run for something later on, in a serious way. I haven’t been hustling, have I? I’ve just been clowning around a little. I haven’t said one unkind word about old Elihu.”

“You made a few jokes, Elmo. Like the one about Commissioner Kibby wanting more county commission meetings because the doctor told him that at his age he needed more sleep.”

“Just in fun, Jimmy.”

“I came because I think you might make it, and if you do, this is where the story is. If you make it, how will you feel?”

“Let me see now. In your story, the way I’ll feel will be humble, proud, deeply touched, surprised, and real dedicated. You’ve done some nice stories about me the last couple months, Jimmy.”

The returns were broadcast over local radio, WKPC. By six o’clock it was evident Elmo was the winner. After the initial furor began to die down, Elmo walked Jimmy out to his car.

“Humble, astonished and dedicated,” Jimmy said.

“Right. I’ll have to straighten old Elihu out. On the phone he was making out like I stabbed him when he wasn’t looking. Like I told him, Jimmy, I’ve got to lean heavy for advice on those wiser heads in the party for the next four years.” He took Jimmy Wing’s hand in a hard clasp and said, “You come back, hear? You make it a habit dropping by. There’ll be a lot of stories to write up in the next four years.”

“Write them your way?”

Elmo laughed. “Jimmy, let’s you and me write them our way, and see what happens. We’re going to get along better than ever.”

“Kibby could lick Stan Freeberry, but what if you can’t?”

He rocked back and forth, heel to toe, and cracked his fist into his palm. “Old Stanley? If I was ever to get really worried, I’d tell you all about a little ol’ Pigeon Town gal name of Darcy Miller, came and cooked and kept house for Stan about nine years ago, that time Miz Freeberry had to spend three months in California nursing her dying sister. I’d tell you about how this Darcy Miller has a slew of kids, and there’s a bright yellow eight-year-old one she calls Stanley and keeps dressed up fine on some money comes in a plain envelope every month, money sent local.”

Jimmy had stared at him. “That’s if you get worried.”

“If I get that worried. There’s other things before I’d have to use that. Just put it this way, Jimmy Wing. Tonight I’m over the worst hump. I’m not about to be stopped short by things easier to do than whipping Elihu Kibby.”

Jimmy Wing had other cause to remember that same night. After he had filed his stories, he went home to find that Gloria, after over a month of perfect behavior, had suddenly fallen back into her black private world. She had pulled down all the shades, turned on every light in the house, stripped, packed herself with pins, buttons, pencils and other small household objects, rubbed herself raw on the sharp edges of the furniture, and then had lapsed into a catatonic state more nearly complete than any he had seen. She sat on a footstool in a corner, her eyes open, snoring with every slow breath, bleeding, ropes of saliva dangling from her chin, gone so suddenly and completely away, unreachable, unknowing. That time it had been three months before she began to recognize him when he visited her, and six months before he could take her away from the hospital for short drives through the surrounding countryside.

By now he had been to the Lemon Ridge home of the county commissioner many times. He strolled through the humid night toward the lighted pool, hearing voices and laughter and music. There were always people around, friends, relatives, business associates, politicians. There was a protocol as rigid as any tribal ceremonial taboo behind the apparent casualness. Visitors were sorted into four categories. In the lowest group were the ones Elmo would talk to outdoors, usually by the pool, or, when the weather was foul, inside the “workshop” beyond the pool. The second category had access to the workshop in all weather. The third category were those whom Elmo would invite into his big study in the main house. The study had a separate outside entrance. Very close friends and relatives had the run of the house. Jimmy Wing was one of that group which could be invited into the study.

The gravel crackled underfoot. The night jasmine had opened, vulgar and sensuous as pink lace garters. When the path turned, just beyond a thickety patch of yucca and flame vine, he came in sight of the big screened pool. He stopped there in the darkness, thinking it looked so much like one of the color advertisements in magazines it was artificial and improbable.

The cage was so high the upper portion of it was in darkness. The screening had been recently extended to include the broad fan-shaped apron beyond the west end of the rectangular pool. The water was a brilliant, luminous green in the diffused radiance of the underwater floodlights. The pool lighting and the spotlights at the base of the plantings in the pool area made a reflected glow across the apron area where three men sat talking at an outdoor table. The double doors of the workshop were open, and the inside lights were on. He saw a couple inside the workshop, dancing to slow music, disappear and reappear. A big tanned girl in a white swimsuit made a lazy backstroke the length of the pool, her arms lifting, turning slowly. A Negro in a white shirt and dark trousers came from the workshop carrying a tall drink on a small tray. He bent over and placed the drink at the edge of the pool and said something to the girl. As he walked away, she rolled over out of her backstroke position and swam at an angle toward the drink.

Jimmy Wing walked to the screen door and pushed it open. As was almost always the case, there were fewer people around than the number of cars would lead you to believe. It always seemed to him there must be some place on the property he had never been told about, some activity he could not share — but he knew this was not true.

The girl on the far side of the pool turned and stared at him. He did not know her. She had a young, blunt, sensual face, and the hair water-pasted to her head looked like a smooth silver cap.

“Now, there he is!” Elmo said, his voice lazy and welcoming.

Jimmy walked to the table where the three of them sat. He pulled a chair over from the other table and said, “Evening, Elmo, Leroy, Buck.”

Leroy Shannard, the lawyer, was in his late forties, a long, limber, indolent man, with the deep tan of golf course and offshore fishing. He had white hair cropped so short the tanned skull showed through the stubble. He had a harsh predatory face, so muted by his lethargic manner he looked like a sleepy eagle. Most of his practice was in real estate work and estate work. He was in partnership with Gil Stopely, a fat, bustling, humorless younger man who was a very keen tax attorney. Shannard was descended from one of the earliest settlers of Palm County. He lived with his mother in an old bay-front house three blocks from the center of the city. He had the reputation of being one of the most tireless and successful seducers of restless wives in all of south Florida, but he gave mild denial to any such accusation. It was said that his caution was in part responsible for his success.

Buck Flake was considerably more obvious. He was a relative newcomer to the area. He had been about twenty-five when he had come down from New Jersey ten years previously with some money he was supposed to have made in the scrap business. He had gone into some dangerous land speculation, saved his own skin with some tricky maneuvering, and finally traded himself into the huge tract which he had developed into Palm Highlands. He was loud, crude, huge and muscular, but now the muscles were softening rapidly as the belly expanded. His jaw was so wide and the space between his temples so narrow, he had an odd pinhead look. A good portion of his success had been gained at the expense of some of the unwary ones who had assumed Buck Flake was as stupid as he looked and acted.

With an awesome celerity, Major appeared at Jimmy’s side and placed a drink on the table in front of him, saying, to himself, “Kitchen whiskey and one cube for Mr. Wing.”

“Thank you, Major.” Major and Ardelia, his wife, worked full-time for the Bliss family. Their grown children helped out. The whole Major Thatcher family lived on a back acre Elmo had deeded them, in a frame house Elmo had bought when it was in the way of a new county highway, and had moved onto the land.

The girl was swimming again. Elmo gestured toward her and said, “Leroy here was just now telling Buck what a damn fool he is, but Buck won’t listen to advice from a real expert.”

“What’s all this about advice?” Buck demanded, obviously annoyed. “Why should I have advice? I told you the score. She works for me in the office. She’s been working for me a couple of weeks.”

“Listen to the protestations of utter innocence,” Shannard murmured. “That poor confused child bears the fabulous name — Charity Prindergast. Please understand, James, we have extracted this data from Buck a fragment at a time. She went down to Lauderdale from some midwestern university for the spring orgy, and apparently developed such a taste for gin she never quite managed to get back across the city line, until Buck went over to Lauderdale a few weeks ago and found her there, living in squalor and confusion on the pittance her dismayed parents were sending her. Out of the goodness of his great heart, he brought her back here and gave her honest work — at least honest to the degree that the Palm Highlands development can be considered honest.”

“We build a damn good house for the money,” Buck said.

“Our Mr. Flake claims that his employment of Miss Prindergast has nothing at all to do with the fact his sweet wife Elizabeth and their two sturdy sons are spending the summer on her parents’ farm in Pennsylvania. Yet, when questioned, Mr. Flake admits that though he writes his wife faithfully, he had made no mention of his charitable gesture.”

Buck scowled and then grinned. “All right, you bastards, so I shouldn’t have brought her over here.”

“You probably couldn’t help it, Buck,” Leroy said. “You tend to consume as conspicuously as possible. The brightest colors, the biggest tail fins, the table closest to the floor show. Miss Charity is a spectacular morsel, and you have a great talent for vulgarity, Buck.”

“Now hold it, you—”

“But you must face the fact you will pay a price for unseemly display. Even if you should send the nubile creature on her glazed way before Elizabeth returns, she will inevitably be told about her, due to your carelessness, and then, my dear fellow, that dear little wife of yours will flay you, salt you down, and hang your carcass in the sun. Your lies will not work, and finally you will be blubbering and whimpering for forgiveness. All you have to decide now is whether the lassie is worth it.”

“Get him the hell off me, Elmo,” Buck said.

“Consume conspicuously,” Elmo said. “That’s a nice way to put it, Leroy. I guess I do that too, in ways a little different from Buck here.” He stood up. “Come along, Jimmy. You boys excuse us and yell for Major when you need him.”

They went out through the door and up the path that branched toward the house. Elmo chuckled and said, “Leroy is teasing him, and Buck, he doesn’t want to get too mad about it on account he knows I don’t like him bringing that hard-drinking girl here to my house. Buck doesn’t use much sense about a lot of things. That’s the trouble with getting people together on anything, Jimmy. Everybody is a damn fool in his own way.”

Elmo led the way around the side of the house and up the steps into the air-conditioned silence of his study. The big pale desk was shaped like a boomerang. Elmo turned on a single brass lamp on the desk. The floor was cork, the walls burlap, the chairs and couch of dark leather. Elmo had patterned it after the private office of a bank president in Jacksonville, even to the gun rack and built-in television and high-fidelity music system.

Elmo sat in the deep chair behind the desk and put his feet up and looked across the desk at Jimmy Wing. “I should have brought it up right here in the first place, instead of at the courthouse this morning. Then you wouldn’t have spent all day wondering about the rest of it.”

“I’ve done some guessing.”

“Mostly what we need to go into is where we both are going to fit into this thing. Take me. I’ve made it plain I’m not running again. One term on the county commission is enough. I’ve told everybody I have to give more time to my building business. Do you have the idea I’m getting out of politics, Jim?”

“No. You took to it too well.”

“Do you think it’s been a good thing for Palm County, me being four years on the commission?”

“Elmo, that’s a strange question, and I don’t know where you’re heading with it. I know damn well you’re not fishing for compliments, so I’ll give you an honest answer. On the whole, I think you’ve been of more benefit than Elihu Kibby would have been. Will that do?”

Bliss made a soft sound of amusement. The lamplight was strong across his mouth and left his eyes in semishadow. His sports shirt was a soft shade of green-gray, with a tiny monogram on the breast pocket in black.

“Playtime is over, Jimmy,” Elmo said. “We’ve had the four years of fun.”

Jimmy Wing knew he had been invited into another room in that structure which was Elmo Bliss. Another door had been opened — another degree of intimacy. He could look back at all the other lighted rooms, at the connecting doors which stood wide open, and remember the time when each had been opened for him. Now here was another degree of closeness, yet with the inference there were still other rooms beyond. He felt a degree of excitement and alarm which he could not rationalize. Somehow closeness was in ratio to menace, as though, in the ultimate room, the door would slam shut and there would be darkness and a knife. He told himself that the suggestion of menace came merely from the awareness that it was contrived — that Bliss opened the doors for his own purposes when the time was right, that Bliss was using him.

“Four years of many things,” Jimmy said, smiling, stalling.

“And four more years to come, and four after that, and God knows where we’ll be by then, boy. Depends on the size bite I can take. I learned in a lot of hard ways that the way you set your teeth, and the timing of it, they’re the only things that count. Bite too big and you strangle on it. Bite too small and you starve.”

“Is that all there is to it, Elmo? The jungle approach?”

Elmo took a long time in unwrapping a slim cigar, lighting it. “I play a game, Jim. Nobody knows I’m playing it. What I do, I make out I’m the man I’m talking to. I add up all I know about him and I try to become him and look out of him at Elmo Bliss and see what he sees. You’ve got simple ideas about me, I think. You think I’m some kind of animal. Now when I look at you, maybe I see some kind of animal too, but sort of a sorry animal.”

“Thanks a lot, Elmo.”

“Because you got a weak connection between your teeth and your head. You worry so much about what you should want, you lose track of what you really want. You’re a mixed-up animal, like a vegetarian dog. But that’s the way most people are, Jimmy.”

“Maybe my wants are small.”

“Maybe it pleasures you to think they’re small. Up in Georgia we had a school catalogue with the snap courses marked, so we wouldn’t have to put too big a strain on our football brains. I took a marked one in philosophy. Ethics it was called, a lecture course by a man named Hoosin. Now don’t bug your eyes at me like that, boy, it’s downright impolite. The lessons didn’t take hold on me. I listened good, but I thought it was a lot of crap. Those lessons didn’t jell until my time on the road gang, with Pete Nambo beating on me of an evening, whistling between his teeth and grunting when he wound up for a good one. I came up with my own ethic right about then. I want satisfaction, Jimmy. And I want to know when I’m having it, and keep track of what it costs. I want the most people possible saying ‘Here comes Elmo’ and ‘There goes Elmo.’ I want people anxious to make sure I’m comfortable. I want all the pretty things — like people writing down what I say, and motorcycle escorts, sirens, steaks, secretaries, dollar cigars, mahogany boats, clothes tailored to fit, my name in books, little girls fussing to pleasure me. To get it all, and keep it coming, I have to take the right-size bite at the right time.”

He leaned into the light and banged his fist on the desk with a force which startled Jimmy Wing. “I want the world knowing I’m here, and I want it excited about Elmo Bliss, and a little nervous wondering what comes next. Because I know what comes next for everybody, boy, and that’s a black hole in the ground, and of all the people who have lived and died in this world, maybe one tenth of one percent even got a name on top of the hole they’re in.”

He leaned back. After a long silence Jimmy said, “You’re uncomplicated in a complicated way, Elmo. How about good and evil?”

“I’ll keep doing enough good to make it no problem living with the bad, and let somebody else keep score. This is my time to be here, and I want the meat in my mouth and room to taste the juice. There’s getting to be so many people crowding the earth, it makes it easier.”

Jimmy was startled by the concept. “Easier?”

“Everybody fights hard to be ordinary and inconspicuous, just one of the group. Fifty years ago there were so many unusual fellas around, you had to be hell on wheels to get any attention at all. Nowadays the people of the world are so hungry for somebody different that a lot of half-bright men stand out. Watch the news. Every month or so some little pissant will get up on his hind legs and say something stupid and startling and find out he’s a public figure.”

“Maybe it isn’t that simple.”

“We’ll have a chance to find out, Jimmy. Right now I’m not running again. I don’t have to. I’ve got the county. Old Elihu is being eat up by the cancer; and the heart has gone out of Sam Engster, so when two new commissioners go on this fall, they’ll be the ones I put there, Brade Wellan and Willy Bry. In four years I’ve put a lock on this county nobody can shake off in a hurry, and I’ve made a lot of grateful friends in five other counties and in Tallahassee. I haven’t been either so greedy or so pure I’ve made the boys nervous. I built up and run a successful business. I’m a family man. I’ve worked hard for the party. I come over real good on television. I’ve been on the right side of the issues that have come up. Four years from now, when I’m ready to make my move, I’ll be forty-four. Now you tell me the size of the bite I’m thinking about.”

Jimmy Wing considered it carefully. The nape of his neck felt cool. “Senator?”

“Not my style, boy, but you’re moving in the right direction. I don’t want to try to get elected to a club where you wait twelve years before you’ve got any weight or voice. Governor, Jimmy. Governor of the Sunshine State.” He got up abruptly and went over to a cabinet, brought back a bottle and two glasses, poured drinks. “Twelve-dollar brandy, Jim. And right now we drink to setting up the machine that’s going to do it. Right now that machine is just you and me. And years from now, boy, we’ll both remember how we started it together.”

Jimmy Wing sipped the brandy. “Forgive me, Elmo, but... it seems a little fantastic.”

“With a whole four damn years to set it up?” He reached into a lower drawer of one of the desk pedestals, fumbled and came up with two fifty-dollar bills. He slapped them on the desk in front of Jimmy.

“And here’s the first investment in the campaign, Jim. Go ahead. Pick it up. Don’t look so worried. You’ll keep right on at the paper until things get so hot and heavy you’ll have to come over with me full-time. But I sure want you to have regular expense money for the little things you’ll be doing for me. It isn’t salary, Jim. It’s for expenses. I’ll be accounting for it, so you don’t have to worry about it. You’ll get that every week, and when you quit the paper, I’ll triple it. Pick it up, boy!”

“What will I be doing for you?”

“Gathering information. Writing speeches. Giving out news items. Sort of a public-relations job, I guess you’d call it, and eventually you’ll be a personal aide and press representative. You’ll be my Salinger. There won’t be anything you won’t know about, and you’ll be in on the strategy. You rate yourself too small, Jimmy. You’ve got a hell of a lot on the ball. It’s time you got stirred up.”

Jimmy picked the two bills up, put them in his wallet and noted a slight tremble in his hands. He hesitated as he started to return the wallet to his hip pocket. “Elmo, this isn’t buying you any immunity in the work I do for the paper.”

“If it did, Jimmy, I wouldn’t have any use for you.”

“I suppose the next question is, what do you want me to do first?”

Elmo poured two more shots of the fine brandy, took his glass and went over to the couch on the other side of the room. “I’ll have to have backing, of course. But I don’t want to go to Tallahassee as somebody’s hired hand. And that means coming up with some money, a good piece of clean money I haven’t got. I think three or four hundred thousand would do it just fine. And that means a capital gains. I’ve been hunting a good one for a year now. Once I’m out of office, I think those boys who’ve started this Palmland Development Company will let me buy in. Burt Lesser, Leroy Shannard, Buck Flake, Bill Gormin, Doc Aigan. I’ve got reason to believe those five old boys would each let loose of a piece of their piece in return for my personal note.”

Jimmy Wing had turned his chair around to face Bliss. Though he could feel the tension in the room, he kept his voice as casual as Elmo’s. “For those shares to be worth anything, the county commission would have to approve changing the bulkhead line. When anybody runs for governor, the opposition takes a good close look. Somebody could make quite a thing out of it, a man voting himself into a piece of money.”

“Now, I wouldn’t want to do a thing like that, Jimmy. Look at the record and you’ll find I was the one had most to do with getting that bulkhead line established in the first place. I believe in preservation of natural beauty. I believe in it so much that the record after the public hearing is going to show I voted against the Grassy Bay fill.”

“But you vote next to last.”

“Now, I would guess that DeRose Bassette and Horace Lander, being in favor of growth and progress and so on, would vote for it. Then Stan Dayson, being our only Republican right now, and against everything Horace and Stan are for, he’ll vote against it and so will I. Then it’ll be up to the chairman, Gus Makelder, to cast the deciding vote. So as long as it goes through in spite of my vote, I’d be a damn fool not to buy into it after my term is over, given the chance.”

“So that’s the agreement, is it, Elmo? You promise to deliver Makelder, Lander and Bassette in return for a good price to buy in at.”

“I wouldn’t want anybody to think there was a deal like that.”

“Even me? I’m the guy who is supposed to know everything that’s going on. Remember?”

“There is a sort of agreement, Jimmy. Just casual like. Nothing in writing. No options or anything like that. Gus, Horace and DeRose will be happy to vote for something that’ll mean so much to the whole area. I’ll buy syndicate shares, and when Leroy turns it into a corporation, I’ll just sell off the shares I get, pay off my notes, pay the capital gains tax and put the money into something where I can get it out fast and easy when we come to needing it. See any holes in that?”

“Well... just one, Elmo. Voting to move the bulkhead line and voting to recommend the sale of the bay bottom by the IIF doesn’t mean it will go through without a hitch.”

“You keep proving to me what a good idea I had when I decided to make you the first member of the team, Jimmy. I watched you close two years ago when those outsiders tried to move in on us. Ben Killian tried to keep the paper neutral, but you got your licks in. You worked close with those Save Our Bays people, and you helped them a lot.”

“Van Hubble talked me into it. He was a good friend.”

“Jimmy, the way it stands right now, I’m pretty sure the bay fill group will win out over that Sandy Key crowd and all the damn fish lovers. But winning locally isn’t enough. They’ll want to take the fight right to Tallahassee and then into the courts. That’ll take money, organization, enthusiasm. So what we’ve got to do right in the first round is take the heart right out of them. We’ve got to win it so big they’ll have no stomach for carrying it any further. We’ve got to demoralize that bunch, Jimmy. So I want you to get just as close to them as you can. You know a hell of a lot about the people in this town. And there are some weird types on that executive committee. With enough private information, the kind they wouldn’t put in public speeches, we can cut the head right off that organization by clobbering their executive committee.”

“I’m supposed to spy on my friends?”

“First off, that’s the ugliest way you could have put it. Second, nobody is about to know it, unless you tell them. Third, if you don’t do it, Leroy will bring somebody in from outside who’ll maybe do a nastier job on them than would happen if you handle it yourself. I hear you show up at the bank pretty regular to take that redhead Hubble woman out for her coffee break. If all of a sudden it should get gossiped around that she’s took to screwing her dead husband’s best friend, who’s got a wife in the asylum—”

“God damn it, Elmo, I—”

“Easy, now. I didn’t say you were. But somebody else could make it sound that way, and it could hurt hell out of that nice little woman. True or false, it would take her mind off Grassy Bay real quick. I figure if those people are your friends, you can do a good job of coming up with stuff that’ll sink that executive committee without hurting the people too much. You’re in the best position to do that job, aren’t you?”

“I suppose so, but...”

“Jimmy, boy, when I was thinking about this little talk with you, I confess I started thinking about it all wrong. You see, I need you so bad and I respect you so much, I was thinking of ways to force you to join in with me. Hell, I thought of a lot of crazy things. I’ve got some wild kin who’d lay for you, grab you, run you way back up some slough and make you pray you could die. Then you’d jump fast every time I raised a finger, just to save yourself another trip up the slough, but once you do a man that way, it takes something out of him he never gets back, and he just isn’t worth as much to you or himself from then on.”

“I don’t scare, Elmo.”

“Now that’s a damn fool thing to say! Are you all the man Pete Nambo was? After Wade Illigan beat him out for Sheriff, some of my cousins kept him back in the swamp for eleven days, and since then nobody’s touched Pete all the six years he’s been driving a transit mix truck for me, but his voice still gets squeaky when I say good morning to him. I don’t bluff, Jimmy. I just decided I don’t want to do that to you. It was a bad idea. Then I thought about your wife. It was out of pure friendship I got her put into that state special-care program up near Oklawaha. That was three years ago, Jimmy. And it would have cost you five hundred a month to buy her that much private care. I was going to bring it up to you, and ask you if you don’t owe me something. But I wouldn’t like myself if I took advantage of that poor girl’s sickness that way. I even thought of hinting how easy I could work Killian around to firing you off the paper, but I guess you don’t give that much of a damn about the job. Finally I came around to right where we are now. You got the facts, I’m leaving it up to you. You can put that money on the desk and walk out. But your walking out won’t change any of the things that are going to happen. You’re thirty-three damn years old, boy, and you’ve been telling yourself too long you like to live small and quiet. You sit back inside yourself and sneer at how crazy the world is, and you like to think you don’t give a damn about anything. Okay, so here’s your chance to prove you don’t give a damn. Come aboard for the ride. Watch the animals. If you have to make excuses to yourself, you can tell yourself you’re researching a book. You’ve got your world shrunk down too small, Jimmy.”

Elmo stood up and came over to him and punched him lightly on the shoulder. The grin squeezed Elmo’s eyes to bright gray slits and bulged the knots of muscle at the corners of his jaw. “Come on, boy!” he said in a half whisper. “Let’s you and me stir things up. Ever since Havana that time, I knew you were going to fit somewhere. I need you, and what the hell have you got to lose?”

Jimmy Wing felt a sardonic amusement at how deftly Bliss was maneuvering him. Elmo had spread the possible rationalizations out in plain sight, inviting Jimmy to select the one which would make him the most cozy. Maybe, he thought, it isn’t so reprehensible to be maneuvered when you can see just how it’s being done, when you can see the foot on the pedal which controls the wheel.

“Suppose I want to say yes, but I’m afraid it might get too ripe for me later on?”

Elmo punched him again. “What the hell you think I’m operating here, boy? Bolita? Any time you want out, get out.”

“Knowing, as you said, everything there is to know?”

“Ah, but you wouldn’t use it! I use anything I can lift. But I’ve never crossed a friend. Or broke my word to a man living. You see, I don’t ask for your word, Jimmy, because I don’t have to.”

Jimmy Wing sighed and stood up and put his hand out. Elmo’s clasp was brief, dry and very strong. “We’ll have some laughs.”

“There better be some, Elmo. There haven’t been too many lately.”

They went out into the hot soft air of night, and for Jimmy Wing it was much like the transition from the unreality of a movie back to the ordinary casual world. He wanted to ask Elmo how he was to report what he learned, but he stifled the question as impossibly theatrical now that they were back in the summer night, crunching the gravel underfoot, strolling back toward the lights at the bottom of the lawn.

They went back down to the apron of the pool. Flake’s girl had changed to a checked cotton dress. She sat on a cedar tub which had been turned upside down. Flake stood behind her, drying her silver hair with a big cherry-colored towel. The towel obscured her face. She sat with her legs braced, her hands in her lap, so bonelessly relaxed that Buck Flake’s vigorous efforts rippled her body inside the snug dress.

As they approached, Elmo was slightly behind Jimmy. Jimmy saw Leroy Shannard give Elmo a quick, searching look, and he could not doubt but what Elmo returned a nod of affirmation. I shall have to be alert for these little things, he thought. I’ll never know all of what’s going on. I’ll have to guess at a lot of it.

The dancers were gone, the music silent, the workshop lights out. “For chrissake, Buck!” Elmo said irritably.

Flake stopped immediately and backed away from the girl, leaving the towel draped half across her face.

“I’m not dry, Buckey!” she said in a sweet, complaining, little-girl voice. “Dry me more.”

“It’ll dry good in the car, Princess, with the top down. Come on. We’re going.”

She stuffed the towel into her beach bag, combed her hair back with her fingers and stood up, arching her back, taking a deep breath, smiling at all of them. “Thanks for the sweetie drinks and the sweetie swim, people.”

Shannard said, “You were a joy to watch, child.”

“Now cut it out, Leroy!” Buck said.

“What’s he doing he should cut out, Buckey? Jeepers, you’re getting so nobody can say a sweetie word to me any more!”

“Come on!” Buck ordered and marched her away.

They heard her thin sweet voice receding, and the angry gunning of Buck’s big car as he backed it out, and at last the dwindling whine of it on the midnight highway.

“Where is he keeping her?” Elmo asked.

“He’s got her stashed out there in one of his sweetie display houses,” Leroy said. “He took the sweetie sign down. She seems to stroll over to the office once a day and type one letter, with two sweetie fingers.”

“She’s sure-God built,” Elmo said.

“She’ll weigh in at one-fifty,” Leroy said, “without a half ounce of fat on her. Buck should age visibly this summer.”

“Won’t you help him out?”

Shannard smiled into the distance. “Elmo, old friend, you should know me well enough by now to realize that my libido operates in inverse ratio to the availability of the merchandise. That girl is without the old-fashioned restraint I’m accustomed to. She would accommodate me as merely a sociable gesture, like a healthy handshake, or remembering my name. I’m too old to think of sex as merely sensible hygiene. Mine has to be sharpened by the sense of sin and guilt. And it has to be difficult to arrange, so as to provide the stimulation of anticipation. If Buck’s college girl could sunbathe, swim, drink gin and make love simultaneously, that’s what she’d do every day, just because they all make her feel so peachy fine. No thanks, Elmo. Buck can struggle with this one all by himself. The hell with the new freedom. Give me a troubled, anxious, guilty woman every time. They think they’re giving away something of value, at least. So they don’t give it so often they tax me too much.”

“Laziest lawyer in town,” Elmo said. “But I like to listen to him talk. He belts me with fees that would take your appetite away.”

“But I didn’t charge him a thing the first time he came to me, James,” Leroy said. “He was in coveralls, wearing a carpenter hat, and he bulled his way in and dumped his records on top of my desk. He stared at me as though he was thinking about hitting me in the mouth. Then he said, ‘The net worth is maybe four thousand. I owe eleven. I can take on a contract that’ll make me twenty before taxes. I need ten thousand by tomorrow noon at the latest. Find it for me and you do my law work from now on. But find it as a loan, because I’m not selling any piece of my company.’ On any average day, I’d have sent him right back out. But I was feeling euphoric. I had him sit in the outer office. I made a couple of phone calls to find out about him. Then I found him the money, right in my own bank account.”

“At fifteen percent for three months. Just a little old sixty percent a year.”

“Secured by a chattel mortgage on everything including the fillings in his teeth.”

They grinned at each other. “Now I support you,” Elmo said. “I should claim you as an exemption.”

“Don’t you?” Shannard asked. He hoisted his long body out of the chair. “You heading back to town too, James?”

They said goodnight to Elmo and went along the path together. When they reached the open gate in the redwood fence, the pool lights and garden spots flicked out. Only one car was left in addition to Shannard’s Thunderbird and Jimmy’s old blue station wagon, and it was an elderly Chevy with Collier County tags.

Shannard stopped in the darkness and said, “Being around Elmo is consistently interesting. He’s never ceased to surprise me. He’s impossible to predict, yet all the apparently meaningless things eventually fall into a pattern. Have you noticed that?”

“Maybe I haven’t known him that well or that long.”

“Let’s stop at the Spanish Mack for a nightcap.”

As he followed the multiple taillights of Shannard’s car toward town, Jimmy Wing had the feeling he was the victim of some vastly complicated practical joke, the point of which would be made evident to him later on. Charity Prindergast was a bit player. He carried prop money. Elmo had learned his lines.

But he knew that Elmo Bliss had probed for and found his special weakness, which was his understanding of his own role as an observer. Nothing could seriously touch him who watched. No blame could accrue to him who sat on the shady knoll and watched the armies at war. If you were offered a higher knoll, a better vantage point, why not accept? The invulnerable armor of the combat correspondent was the dry smile, the mental note, the clinical observation of self in relation to the furies observed. So all the breasts were wax, all the cries were recorded, all the blood was red enamel.