A Flash of Green

Five

The spanish mack was a cinderblock tavern east of Palm City, right at the city line, just over the highway bridge crossing Foley’s Creek. From there the creek wandered south and west, eventually emptying into Grassy Bay. It was a functional operation, without juke, pinball, bowling games or television. The habitual customer knew he would always find unobtrusive air conditioning, indirect lighting, comfortable chair or bar stool, enough soundproofing to keep conversations private, expert bartenders, local gossip, and package liquors at moderate prices.

Less than half the bar stools were occupied. They took two stools at the middle curve of the bar. Howie, the smaller bartender, greeted them by name and took their orders. As he placed Jimmy’s drink in front of him he said, “Friend of yours was in, Jimmy. Left about a half hour back. The guy with the scar.”

“Brian Haas?”

“That’s his name. I always forget it.”

“Drinking?”

“First he had tomato juice. Then two fast doubles. Bang, bang, and he slapped the money down. Don’t look at me like that, Jimmy. They ask for it and I sell it, unless they’re stoned coming in. The only reason I’m telling you, I remember it was a year ago, wasn’t it, you were hunting for him all the time.”

“Thanks, Howie,” Jimmy said. He excused himself and phoned Nan. He looked at his watch as the phone rang. It was five of one. When Nan answered he asked her if Bri had come home.

“No, and I was beginning to worry, Jimmy. Do you want him to call you when he gets in?”

“No. By accident I just found out he had some drinks about a half hour ago, at the Spanish Mack. He must have come here from the paper.”

He heard the long weary sound of her sighing exhalation. “Oh, damn it, damn it. God damn it, Jimmy. He’s been edgy. He’s had a lot of trouble sleeping. He didn’t go to the last couple of meetings. He made excuses.”

“I thought you ought to know, Nan. Is there anything I can do?”

“Thanks, no. I’ve got a number to call. They’ll get people out looking for him. Did he buy a bottle there?”

He asked her to wait a moment. He came back to the phone and said, “No. No bottle yet.”

“Well, here we go again,” Nan said, with a kind of desolated gallantry. “Thanks for phoning me, Jimmy. I better make that call right now.”

When Jimmy went back to his drink, Shannard said, “Trouble?”

“He’s been off it fourteen months. The last time he went three years. His wife’s alerting the AA’s to track him down. Maybe if they grab him soon enough, they can steer him off it.”

“I know Haas by sight, of course.”

“He’s been the route, Leroy. A sweet and brilliant guy. When he was in his twenties he was a top man in the business. Right after the war the drinking started. He drank his way through all the papers who’d take a chance on him, and drank his marriage away, and most of his health, drank himself right down into skid row. Then some kind of rehabilitation outfit got hold of him and picked up all the pieces they could find and put him back together, and scouted a job for him and sent him down here to Ben Killian. Ben tucked him under my wing. I never thought it would work at all. It was hard to communicate with him. He was like some kind of a refugee, like a man who managed to escape by some miracle when his homeland was blown to hell, so that nothing which can ever happen to him again will be very important. But when he started to do all right with routine assignments, he started to come back a little, and when he married Nan McMay about five years ago, he came out of it a lot more.”

“Nanette Melton McMay,” Shannard said. “I was in on that case.”

“Were you? I didn’t remember.”

“Why it didn’t destroy her, I’ll never know. So that makes them a pair of refugees, in a sense. At least she should be strong enough to cope with anything.”

“This is the third time she’s had to face it. The last time he fell off, we got him hooked up with the AA’s, and it seemed to work. Borklund wanted to let him go then. Ben Killian said he could have one more chance. If they don’t get him in time, if he blows it, I don’t know what will happen to him. He’s forty-five. He’s got no place to go, not from here.”

“Howie?” Shannard said. “Once again here. Where were we, James? Oh, we were discussing the infinite variety of the commissioner. Did you get a tidy news story out of him tonight?”

Jimmy Wing felt an immediate wariness. “Nothing I can use right off, Leroy. More like background material.”

“Over the last few years, Elmo has been the best source of any of the five commissioners, I’d imagine.”

“Well, you could say a practical politician on any level makes use of the press. Some of them have a feeling for it. Elmo does. Sometimes it’s a knack of saying nothing in such a way it comes out sounding like news.”

“Would you think Elmo’s knack is worth pursuing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Could he go further with it? Higher offices?”

“If he has the desire. But Elmo has the knack of making money too. Maybe that’s more important to him.”

“But you’re talking about alternate roads to the same thing, Jimmy. Aren’t you?”

“Power and importance? It would depend on what kind Elmo wants, and how much of it he wants.”

“Let’s assume his appetite is insatiable.”

“Where are you heading, Leroy?”

The eagle face creased into a sleepy, knowing grin. “Hell, I’m just talking. He’s an interesting man. I wanted to get your slant on him. He likes you, Jimmy. If you wanted, you could latch on and go along with him. That’s what I’ve been doing.”

“I’d have to wait for him to ask me, Leroy. I’d have to know where he was headed. You see, I can’t think of anything I want very much that I haven’t got.”

Shannard put the money down and got off the stool. Jimmy thanked him and they walked out to their cars.

“I guess I was too obvious about it, Jimmy,” Shannard said.

“Too obvious about what?”

“He said you’d know how to handle it, but I had to check it out myself.”

“I just don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Shannard got into the Thunderbird and grinned up at him. “You’re perfectly right, you know. Elmo should clear it first. But welcome aboard anyway. Night, James.”

By the time Jimmy drove out of the parking area beside the Spanish Mack, Shannard’s car was out of sight. Three carloads of teenagers passed him, cutting from lane to lane, yelling at each other. The stoplights were off, blinking yellow down the length of Center Street through the middle of town toward City Bridge. The lift of the drinks was gone. He felt stale and sleepy.

A block before the bridge he changed his mind about going straight home. He turned right and cut back to Brian Haas’s place. Brian and Nan lived in a garage apartment. The big house had been torn down and replaced by a row of connected one-story shops and small offices erected close to the sidewalk with parking area in the rear. The garage apartment was just beyond the asphalted area. It had a small walled garden at the side, shaded by an enormous banyan tree.

When Jimmy Wing parked by the garden wall and turned his lights off, Nan Haas came hurrying out.

“Just me,” he said. “Anything new?”

“Not yet, Jimmy. They’re looking for him. Come in and help me wait. Isn’t this a hell of a thing?” Her voice was casual, but he could sense the strain behind it. He followed her into the tiny ground-floor living room. She wore white shorts and a dark blue sleeveless blouse. She was barefoot, and her hair was short, curly, brown-blond. Nan was a short, plump woman, ripely curved, light on her feet, firm in her skin, with a round, placid, pretty face and the beginning of a double chin.

“Coffee?” she asked.

“If you have some made.”

“In this house, always.”

He sat in a wicker chair. A big fan by a narrow window turned slowly back and forth, hesitating at the end of each arc, stirring the moist night air. He thought of what Shannard had said about Nan, marveling that what had happened to her hadn’t destroyed her. She had been the exceedingly pretty daughter of a Palm City couple. Her father had been a city fireman. Nan McMay had started winning beauty contests when she was fifteen. She had been a frivolous, vain, uncomplicated child. At eighteen, after placing third in the Miss Florida competition, she had run away to New York with a photographer, planning to become a model. After two grubby years in New York she had the good fortune to meet a very decent boy who wanted to marry her. After she met the boy she broke up with a strange unsettled man with whom she had been having an affair. She and the boy came down to Palm City to be married. The man she had walked out on had been annoying her. He followed her to Florida. On the eve of the wedding he broke into her parents’ home, shot and killed her parents, the boy she was going to marry, a younger sister, a younger brother and himself. Nan was not expected to live either. The bullet he had fired into her had done extensive abdominal damage before lodging against the spine.

Five murders and a suicide would have been given national news coverage in any case, but because the unbalanced man had termed himself a poet, and because Nan had been a winner of beauty contests, and because the suicide note they found on his body made it plain they had lived together, it was given exceptionally lurid and breathless coverage, spiced by her old publicity shots and by his “poetry.”

After she recovered, guilt should have destroyed her. Heartbreak should have destroyed her. Public disapproval should have destroyed her. She should have killed herself, or gone mad, or disappeared. But she instead suffered the homely miracle of becoming an adult. She could never become a whole person. Torture had burned away all trivial things, but had also seared what was left. The radical surgery necessary to save her life had obviated any chance of children.

A year or so after she had stolidly, quietly put herself back together, she had started seeing Brian Haas, and they had married. It was, as Shannard had said, a mating of survivors, the way two travelers on a lonely journey might join together to share food, hardship and shelter. But any closeness which endures, no matter how guarded it may have been in the beginning, creates its own necessities, confirms its own new image, establishes its vulnerabilities.

Jimmy Wing knew he had become more of a friend of the marriage than a friend of either of them as individuals. He was a factor in the relationship, one measurable aspect of the balance they had achieved. From Bri, and with Jimmy’s help, she had learned the art and pleasure of good talk. And from Nan, Bri had learned of the aspects of life which need not be complicated by introspection — a long walk, a swim, a picnic beach, making love. She soothed him and he made her feel alive, and so convenience became slowly transmuted into necessity.

She was receptionist-bookkeeper for a dentist in one of the offices in the building in front of their apartment. On their combined salaries they lived quietly and comfortably. Their sole extravagance was The Itch, a stubby, shallow-draft Bahamian ketch of great antiquity and, except for a temperamental auxiliary engine, great reliability.

She brought him the coffee and sat on a bamboo hassock near the tiny fireplace and said, “It’s so damn airless tonight. Did you hear the thunder a while back? I could see the lightning out over the Gulf. It’s crazy not to have any rain this time of year.”

“What do you think started him off?”

“God knows, Jimmy. Anything or nothing. I’ve been going over the past week or so. I can’t think of anything specific. How has he been down at the newspaper?”

“Perfectly okay.”

“I just hope he didn’t drive out of town. I’m glad you stopped, Jimmy. I wouldn’t want anybody else here. I couldn’t talk about it to anybody else.” There was a look of wryness in her smile. “Whenever we need you, you seem to show up. I guess that’s the best kind of friend there is.”

“All I’m doing is drinking your coffee, Nan.”

“That’s all you have to do. If you came in here all terribly concerned and full of warmth and pity and so on, I think it would start me crying. Isn’t that a hell of a thing? And I’d cry because I’m more mad than anything else. I’m mad at him and I shouldn’t be. It’s like he can’t go very long having things be right. He has to spoil them.”

“Not on purpose.”

“No. But it’s as if it was on purpose. For the last year things have been pretty good.”

“I know.”

“Better than either of us deserve, I guess.”

“Could that be part of it, Nan? He spoils it because he thinks he doesn’t deserve it? Self-punishment for guilt.”

She shrugged. “Everybody feels guilty. It took me a long time to find that out. It doesn’t matter how big or how little the thing is they feel guilty about, the guilt seems to add up about the same. And not everybody is a drunk. So where does that leave you?”

He smiled at her. “Interesting proposition, woman. No matter what I do, I won’t feel any more or any less guilty?”

“You can’t do things you aren’t capable of doing.”

“What if my capacity changes?”

“Nobody’s ever does, really. Anyhow, that’s Bri’s theory. He says you can change your stripes in a lot of ways that don’t really count very much, but when it comes to sin, everybody has a built-in limitation.”

“So nobody can ever corrupt anybody?”

“Only if they’re ready. Or, I guess, terribly young, so young they don’t know what’s happening.”

He did not reply. Suddenly he did not care to follow that line of speculation any further. It was making him think about Gloria, and he did not know why. It was always easier not to think about Gloria. The wall-to-wall floor covering was of pale gray raffia squares. He put an imaginary knight on the square nearest his right foot and, using the knight’s eccentric move, marched it to the square nearest her bare feet, then over to the kitchen doorway, across to the foot of the narrow staircase, and back to the original square where it had begun.

“Jimmy.”

He looked at her and saw the tears standing in her eyes. “Yes?”

“I can’t afford to lose much more, you know. I can’t afford to lose this now.”

“You won’t.”

“It scares me. I didn’t want to ever have anything again I could give a damn about. I don’t really know how I got so far into this. I didn’t want to. Now, instead of thinking about him, I’m thinking about me, what I can stand, and what I can’t stand.”

“Now, Nan.”

“I just wanted to... to sort of watch, and not be a part of anything.” The tears began to spill.

Over the sound of the fan he heard a car outside. She got up quickly and hurried to the door. He followed her out.

“We got him,” a man said.

“Thank God!” Nan said.

“It’ll be easier getting him out this side, Joe.”

Jimmy Wing hurried to help the two men with him. Brian Haas was a big man. He was semiconscious, incapable of standing. They got him out of the car, supporting him on either side. The light from the apartment illuminated his face. It had a mindless slackness. The long scar down his left cheek seemed more apparent in that light. He smelled of whiskey and vomit and made a mumbling, droning sound. They got him into the house and up the narrow stairway.

“Where was he?” Nan asked. “Where’s our car?”

“He was down at the end of Sandy Key, down at Turk’s Pass,” one of the men said. “He drove into the sand and got stuck. He was lying in the sand beside the car. We’ll get it back to you.”

They offered to stay, but Nan told them she would manage. They arranged for someone to come and stay with him the next day while she was at work.

After the men had left, and Jimmy and Nan had gotten Brian to bed, he went into a deep sleep. She touched a red abrasion on his chin and said, “Somebody hit him or he fell. Can you cover for him tomorrow?”

“Sure. Can he make it back by Saturday, though?”

“He has Saturday off this week. He’ll feel like death tomorrow. But he’ll be able to make it all right by Sunday noon... if this is the end of it... if he’s gone as far as he has to. He’ll claim it’s all over. But I won’t know. I don’t think it will be over. It would be too quick.”

“I’ll stop by tomorrow, if you think it would be a good thing to do.”

“Call me first, Jimmy. I’ll be running over here every little while. I’ll know how things are. I wonder how much he had.”

She walked out to his car with him. “Thanks for letting me know. Thanks for stopping by. Maybe it will be all right. Maybe it’s just one little slip, Jimmy, this time.”