Travis McGee 13 - A Tan And Sandy Silence

“Jesus!”

“I know. Stroking Lisa’s forehead, drying Harry’s sweaty face, are imitations of emotion. We can imagine he spoke tender words to Mary because she was pleasing him, giving him release. He’s not a madman in any traditional sense. He cannot feel guilt or shame. If caught, he would feel fury and indignation at the game ending too soon. He’ll go to great lengths to stay free, unsuspected. His career is a lot less important to him than it used to be. My guess is he’ll be gone by the deadline, the tenth, a week from today.”

We rode in silence for a time. “Meyer? How did you get that Woodie Woodchuck to snap to attention?”

“By reminding him that he had informed me of the approximate value of the assets in one of his trust accounts without any authorization from the trust customer or the senior trust officer. Banks take all confidential relationships very seriously. He soon said he would be very happy to help me find out all about the three hundred thousand.”

“How did he find out Harry had forfeited his option?”

“I don’t know. Probably phoned a contact at SeaGate and asked what value, as collateral, Harry’s hundred-thousand-share block would have. The stuff is too closely held to have an OTC quote.”

“Couldn’t he have borrowed against the stock he was going to get?”

“Not if he had already done so.”

“Sick condominiums and a sick construction business. How about the seven hundred thousand he’s supposed to get back from SeaGate?”

“If it went into land improvements at the site, then I guess he’d have to wait until the public issue money comes back to SeaGate.”

“So that goes to pay off other debts, and then Harry’s business quietly fades away and dies?”

“Reasonable guess.”

“He had to take Harry somewhere and keep him there. Harry and Harry’s car. Transportation problems, Meyer. Logistics and tactics. If he took him to wherever he lives-”

“A cluster apartment complex at West Palm on the bay shore. Rental apartments. Not likely.”

“I suppose you have his phone number?”

“You asked me to check him out. Remember?”

“And your overall impression?”

“A very dull fellow, competent and humorless.”

“You know the name of the cluster apartments?”

“I’d rather not say it. Palm Vista Gardens. D-2.”

“The first phone booth after we get off the pike, please.”

He parked at a gas station by a shiny row of vending machines under a roof made of plastic thatch, incredibly green. I phoned from the hotbox provided by Gen Tel out on the cement wasteland. I hoped Palm Vista Gardens was big enough to have a rental and administration office on the premises. It was. The lady’s voice came right from the resonant bridge of her Indiana nose.

“Yes, maybe you can help me. Have you got any furnished one-bedroom vacancies?”

She was not a well-organized lady. She tended to ramble. She gave information and then with cries of dismay retracted it and called herself names, mostly “old fool.”

She finally discovered that one of their renters, “a nice young man” who had been on the special month-to-month basis with one month in advance (an arrangement they made with the “nice young people” from that new SeaGate company) had come in on the last day of April, just last Friday, and given his notice. He said he was vacating in a week. And that would make it… the eighth? No. The seventh. Yes. Next Friday. They could start showing it again the following Monday if there wasn’t too much to be done. That was number D-2, which meant apartment 2 in cluster D. Just stop at the office. But don’t wait too long. They go very quickly to nice young people, providing they don’t have any pets. Or any babies, of course. I wondered how they felt about noisy goldfish, the kind that do a lot of leaping and splashing and churning around.

I tried to blot out all rational thought with a lot of peripheral items. Goldfish. Lead-free gasoline. Diminishing aquifer. I walked to the car, realizing I had left the cheap camera on the backseat. An essential part of my tourist costume. Meyer stood beside the rental car, drinking a can of orange pop, and it suddenly seemed insane that Meyer wore no tourist disguise. Paul Dissat knew exactly who I was and where I lived. And if he had gone to Bahia Mar and poked around as such a thorough chap would, he would have learned that Meyer was associated with me in certain obscure but apparently profitable ventures. Though believing me safely drowned off Grenada’s lovely beaches, he might conclude that it was a very good chance my letter of self insurance had been sent to Meyer to stow in a safe place. And so, as a percentage play…

It worked on me to the point that Meyer stared at me and said, “What the hell is wrong, Trav?”

My mouth wasn’t going to work. Alarm is contagious. He trotted around and got behind the wheel, whipped us out into the traffic flow with a good imitation of teenage technique. At last I managed two words. “No hurry.”

I saved the rest of it for my rackety motel unit. I tried to smile at Meyer. “Pure chicken. Sorry. I just don’t know what the hell is…” Then I felt the sudden and humiliating sting of tears in my eyes and turned quickly to blink them away before Meyer could see them.

I stood with my back to him, staring out between the slats of the battered tin blinds at the side wall of a restaurant and a row of trash cans haloed with bluebottled buzzing. I spoke too fast and chuckled where there was no need, saying, “It’s the old bit of the brave and noble hunter, gliding silently through the jungle, following the track of the big black panther, and slowly beginning to realize that the panther is also a-hunting and maybe he’s flattened out on top of that thick limb up ahead or behind that bush over there or in the shadow of that fallen tree, with just the tip of his thick glossy black tail moving and the shoulder muscles rippling and tightening under that black hide. I’m spooked because I kept telling myself the son of a bitch would be gone by now, but he isn’t going until Friday, and-”

“Travis. Come on. Slow down.”

Can’t ever really fool ol‘ Meyer. I sat on the bed. We’re all children. We invent the adult facade and don it and try to keep the buttons and the medals polished. We’re all trying to give such a good imitation of being an adult that the real adults in the world won’t catch on. Each of us takes up those shticks that compose the adult image we seek. I’d gone the route of lazy, ironic bravado, of amiable, unaffiliated insouciance. Tinhorn knights of a stumbling Rosinante from Rent-A-Steed, maybe with one little area of the heart so pinched, so parched, I never dared let anything really lasting happen to me. Or dared admit the flaw. Maybe in some crazy way Paul Dissat was a fun-house mirror image of me, a warped McGee with backspin, reverse English.

The adult you pretend to be convinces himself that the risk is worth the game, the game worth the risk. Tells himself the choice of lifestyle could get him killed-on the Daytona track, in the bullring, falling from the raw steel framework forty stories up, catching a rodeo hoof in the side of the head.

Adult pretenses are never a perfect fit for the child underneath, artd when there is the presentiment of death, like a hard black light making panther eyes glow in the back of the cave, the cry is, “Mommy, mommy, mommy, it’s so dark out there, so dark and so forever.”

Cojones are such a cultural imperative, the man who feels suddenly deballed feels shame at reentering the childhood condition. Papa Hemingway will never take him fishing. George Patton will slap his face.

In all my approximately seventy-six inches of torn and mended flesh and hide, in all approximately fifteen-stone weight of meat, bone, and dismay, I sat on that damned bed and felt degraded. I was unmasked as a grotesque imitation of what I had believed myself to be.

Frowning, I tried to explain it in halting fashion to Meyer. “You talked about… the reflexes slowing, the warning system not working, the instincts inaccurate when… the only reason Harry Broll didn’t kill me was because he lacked one more round in the clip. Then in Grenada I didn’t even think of being careful… didn’t sense his presence, got such a shot in the skull bone my head is still blurred. Meyer, people have been a few steps ahead of me other times. I’ve played pretty good catchup. This time I have this feeling that there’s no way. He’s going to stay out in front, and if I get too close, he’ll turn around and take care of the problem. Maybe I’ve gotten too close already, and I have ten more minutes or ten more hours.”

“Travis.”

“I know. I’m scared. It’s like being very very cold. I can’t move well, and I can’t think at all.”

“So I do the thinking?”

“I wish you would. Don’t go back to your boat. I have a very ugly hunch about your boat.”

“We have to talk to Dennis Waterbury in absolute privacy, and I have to make contact in such a way that he will trust us to the limited extent that rich and powerful people can trust anyone.”

“Can you do it?”

“I don’t know. I have to try to reach some people by phone. In Montreal and Toronto and Quebec.”

“Start trying.”

“If I can get through to someone he knows and trusts, who can tell him I am reputable, not a shakedown artist, then we are going to give him whatever lead time we can spare before I go to the law.”

“With what?”

“With enough. Woodrow Willow’s contact said Broil didn’t buy the stock. So there’s a missing three hundred thousand and a missing Harry Broll. If they dig around the seawall at Blue Heron Lane, they’ll find Mary’s body. Kathy Marcus and the other bank people could pick Paul Dissat out of a lineup. Maybe it will sink the SeaGate public issue without a trace. Even if Dissat never took a penny from the Waterbury enterprises, a breath of scandal can make the accounting firm and the underwriters back off.”

“So why don’t we go to the law? Why do we screw around with Waterbury if we’ve got all this?”

“Think about it, Travis. Think about it.”

I instinctively fingered the place on the back of my skull where I had been so soundly thumped. Meyer was right. SeaGate was a very large thing, and Dissat was an operating officer in the SeaGate power structure. The lower echelons of the law would never go cantering into battle on the say-so of an apparently unemployed beach bum and a semiretired and eccentric economist. It was a twocounty operation with both state and federal implications. Lower echelons would take the eccentric pair into skeptical custody and sweat them both.

Suppose you go to the top level, such as approaching the United States attorney in the area and suggesting he refer the problem to the FBI for investigation because of possible violations of the criminal code insofar as banking regulations are concerned. Then the approach would be made so tentatively-due to the SeaGate clout and the dubious source of the tip-that Dissat would be alerted, and he would disappear into his large countryside or ours.

First, you sell Dennis Waterbury on the idea that his boy Paul Dissat, has been a very very bad boy lately and any publicity given his activities can founder the SeaGate plans. You convince him and give him some facts he can quietly check. You speak to him in absolute privacy and secrecy. Then, when he picks up the phone and relays his unhappy suspicions to the highest level, Dissat will be pounced upon first and investigated later, giving Waterbury additional time to plug up the holes and protect the upcoming public issue from scandal.

I said, “Okay. Do you think I’ll ever be able to think things out for myself any more? Or will you have to be on permanent standby?”

“I think they start you on baskets and work up to needlepoint.”

“I am supposed to laugh. All right, Meyer. Ha ha ha. Make your phone calls. What if the bastard won’t listen even if we can get him alone?”

“Men who are rich have times when they don’t listen. Men who are quite bright have times when they don’t listen. Men who are both bright and rich always listen. That is how they got the money, and that is how they keep it.”

“Then do we go to Canada, or does he come here?”

“He’s here now. I found that out when I was learning all I could about Paul Dissat. Waterbury is in a guest cottage on a Palm Beach estate. The owners are in Maine now, but they left enough staff to take care of Waterbury. Pool, tennis courts, security system, private beach.”

He started making calls. He had to push the thermostat high enough to kill the compressor before he could hear. I lay a-doze, hearing his voice come from metallic distances, sounding like the voices of grown-ups when I had been a child half-asleep in a moving car or train.

Twenty-two

HE FOUND an old friend at last, a Professor Danielson in Toronto, who knew Waterbury well and was willing to try to set it up. Meyer gave Danielson the motel number and unit number and asked to have Waterbury phone him as soon as convenient. If Danielson found that Waterbury was unable or unwilling to phone Meyer for a secret meeting, Danielson would phone back.

Nothing to do but wait and try to digest a roast beef sandwich which lay in my stomach like a dead armadillo. The motel television was on the cable. We turned the sound off and watched the news on the electronic printer, going by at a pace for a retarded fifth grader, white on black printing with so many typos the spelling was more like third grade than fifth.

The woes of the world inched up the screen. Droughts and murders. Inflation and balance of payments. Drugs and demonstrations. Body counts and new juntas.

Spiro was dead wrong. The trouble with the news is that everybody knows everything too fast and too often and too many times. News has always been bad. The tiger that lives in the forest just ate your wife and kids, Joe. There are no fat grub worms under the rotten logs this year, Al. Those sickies in the village on the other side of the mountain are training hairy mammoths to stomp us flat, Pete. They nailed up two thieves and one crackpot, Mary. So devote wire service people and network people and syndication people to gathering up all the bad news they can possibly dredge and comb and scrape out of a news-tired world and have them spray it back at everybody in constant streams of electrons, and two things happen. First, we all stop listening, so they have to make it ever more horrendous to capture our attention. Secondly, we all become even more convinced that everything has gone rotten, and there is no hope at all, no hope at all. In a world of no hope the motto is semper fidelis, which means in translation, “Every week is screw-your-buddy week and his wife too, if he’s out of town.”

The phone rang, and Meyer sprang up and cut off the compressor and took the call. He made a circle of thumb and finger to tell me we had gotten through the corporate curtain. He listened for several minutes, nodded, and said, “Yes, thank you, we’ll be there.” Hung up.

“A Miss Caroline Stoddard, Mr. Waterbury’s private secretary. We’re to meet with him out at the site at SeaGate. We go through the main entrance and follow little orange arrows on sticks that will lead us to the storage and warehouse area. There are two small contracts going on now out there. Earth moving and paving. They stop work at four, and the crews leave. The area is patrolled at night, and the guard shift starts at eight at this time of year. Mr. Waterbury will meet with us at an office out there in the end of one of the warehouses behind the hurricane fencing near the vehicle park and the asphalt plant. We can find the place by looking for his car. If we meet him out there at five, we should have plenty of time for uninterrupted talk.”

We got to the area a little early, so we drove down A-1-A for a little way, and when we found a gap in the sour commercial honky-tonk, Meyer pulled over. Down the beach there was a cluster of fat-tire beach buggies, some people swimming. Meyer and I were walking and talking over our plans when a chunky trail bike came growling up behind us, passed us, and cut in and stopped, and a fellow with enough black beard to stuff a small pillow glowered at us and gunned the bike engine. He looked very fit and unfriendly.

“You’ve got a problem?” I asked.

“You are the guys with problems. How come there are so many of you characters so cramped up you got to come creeping around to stare at naked people?”

“Where, where, where!” Meyer said, smiling. “If it’s required, I’ll stare. But as a rule, it’s dull. If you have some graceful young girls cavorting, that is an aesthetic pleasure for a certain amount of time. Doesn’t sand get into the working parts of that thing?”

Meyer is disarming. Maybe a completely frantic flip, stoned blind, could run a knife into him. Otherwise, the belligerent simmer down quickly

“It’s sealed so it doesn’t happen too bad. But you can mess it up if you try. I thought you were more guys with binoculars, like the last pair. See, if you walk down this way far enough, then you can see around the end of the buggy and see the girls.”

Meyer said, “Excuse me, but I was of the impression that the current belief is that the flaunting of the natural body cures the woes of society by blowing the minds of the repressed.”

“A lot of people think that way. But we’re opposed to the brazen display of the body and public sexuality. We’re here on a pilgrimage mission for the Church of Christ in the Highest. And we have permission to camp on this part of the beach while we’re bringing the word of God to the young people in this area.”

“Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to cover those girls up?” I asked him.

“Four of our sisters have got the crabs, sir, and they are using the salt water and the sunshine to cure them. The drugstore stuff didn’t work at all, hardly.”

Meyer said, “I have worked and studied in primitive countries; and I have caught about every kind of body louse a bountiful nature provides. And I have yet to contract a case that did not respond immediately to plain old vinegar. Have your girls soak their heads, armpits, and their private parts in vinegar. It kills the crabs and kills the eggs, and the itching stops almost immediately.”

“You wouldn’t kid me?” the beard asked.

“It is the most useful and generally unknown information in the modern world.”

“They’ve been going up the walls. Hey. Thanks. And God bless you guys.”

He roared away. I told Meyer he was fantastic. Meyer said that my continual adulation made him uncomfortable, and it was time to see The Man.

We turned around, and where A-1-A curved west, away from the Atlantic beach, Meyer drove straight, down a road that was all crushed shell, ruts, and potholes, and marked private: Soon we came to the entrance pillars, a huge billboard telling of the fantastic city of the future that, would rise upon the eleven square miles of sandy waste, where no child need cross a highway to get to school, where everything would be recycled (presumably vitiating any need for cemetery zoning), where clean industry would employ clean, smiling people, where nothing would rust, rot, or decay, where age would not wither nor custom stale the fixed, maniacal smiles on the plastic faces of the future multitude who here would dwell.

Once past the entrance pillars we were on a black velvet vehicle strip (trucks stay to right, off blacktop) which restored to the rental Ford the youth and ease it had lost during a few months, a few thousand miles of being warped, rocked, and crowded by the clozens of temporary owners.

We followed the small, plastic orange arrows and saw some yellow and green and blue arrows on yard-tall sticks marching in other directions, forming a routing code for workmen, planners, deliverypeople. A small sign in front of a wilderness of dwarf palmetto said starkly: SHOPPING PLAZA E 400,000 SQ. FT. ENCL. Yes, indeed. A multilevel, automated, air-controlled, musicated selling machine, where-to the violins of Mantovani and the chain gang shuffle of the housewife sandals-only those processed foods would be offered which the computer approved of as being saleable in billion-unit production runs.

We turned away from the sea and against the glare of the high western sun saw the construction headquarters, the belly and stack and hoppers of a portable asphalt plant, saw the trucks and spreaders, piles of aggregate, loader, and loading ramp. That area outside the warehouse and office compound enclosed by hurricane fencing was deserted, as if a flock of Seabees had slapped blacktop on it and been airlifted out. There was a big, vehicle gate in the hurricane fencing, and it stood wide open. In the fenced area were some above-ground fuel tanks and pumps for the vehicles, outdoor storage of some unidentifiable crated items, a generator building, and six small prefab steel warehouses backed up against a truck loading dock. A dark green Lincoln Continental limousine was parked by the next to the last warehouse.

Meyer parked nearby, and we got out. Meyer said in a low voice, “He’ll be tempted to think it’s some kind of a shakedown. Give us money, and we’ll keep quiet about Dissat and let the public issue go through. But Danielson says Waterbury is honest by choice, not as a matter of necessity or operating policy.”

There were three crude steps up to the cross braced plywood door. It stood a few inches ajar, the hasp folded back a thick padlock opened, hanging from the U-bolt in the door frame.

I gave the door a couple of thumps with the underside of my fist. It made a nice booming sound in the metal structure.

“Hello?” said a pleasantly feminine contralto voice, elusively familiar. “Are you the gentlemen who phoned? Come in, please.”

It was dim inside. There were no windows at the end where we entered, only at the far end. We were on an elevated area with a floor made of decking with steps leading down to the slab floor of the warehouse proper. The office was at the far end. The air was very thick and still and hot in the warehouse portion, but I could hear the whine of airconditioning in the enclosed office at the far end.

“I’m Caroline Stoddard,” she said. “So nice to see you again, Mr. McGee.”

I located her off to the left, standing down on the lower level. At first I thought she was one very big secretary in some kind of slacks outfit, and I blinked again, and my eyes adjusted, and it was Paul Dissat. That odd feeling of having heard the voice before was because of the slight residual accent.

“Be very nice,” he said in his normal voice, “and be very careful. This is a new automatic nailer. They use it to knock the forms together for footings and pilings and so on. That hose goes over there to that pressure tank, and the compressor is automatic, and the generator is on.”

It seemed heavy, the way he held it. He turned it to the side and triggered it. It made a hard, explosive, phutting sound, and nails zinged off the concrete and whanged the metal wall twenty feet away. He turned it toward us again.

“I’m a bad shot,” he said. “But these things spray. At more than six inches they begin to turn. They’d make a ghastly hamburger of your legs, I think. I don’t know why I’ve always been a poor shot. I’m well coordinated otherwise. Harry was a fantastic marksman. I guess it must be a natural gift.”

“Fantastic marksman?” I asked numbly.

“Didn’t you know? You could throw three cans in the air, and with that silly little popgun of his he could hit each one of them twice before they hit the ground without even seeming to aim, just pointing at them by some kind of instinct.”

“When he came to see me-”

“He was coming apart. I was having trouble keeping him quiet. He had to make some mock show of being terribly concerned about Mary so that later people could testify he was almost out of his mind with worry. He said you moved so quickly and startled him so badly, he nearly hit you in the foot.”

“Where is Mr. Waterbury?” Meyer asked in a tired and wistful tone.

“Playing tennis, I should imagine. This is his time of day for it. Cool of the evening. When word came this morning of the request for information from Mr. Willow, I called him back and after a little hesitation he told me one McGee and one Meyer had initiated the request. Don’t keep edging sideways, McGee! It was really a shock. I thought you dead. From drowning or brain damage. You pranced like a sick, ugly stork, and you went floating out at an incredible speed. You are very lucky and very hard to kill.”

“Where is Mr. Waterbury?” Meyer asked.

“You are a bore,” Dissat told him. “I went to his eminence and told him I had confidential information that two sharpshooters were going to try to get a private audience with him and try to frighten him into parting with money. I gave him the names. He told me to handle the problem. I handle a lot of problems for the man. When the information came in from Toronto, he had me take the call. Don’t you think limousines allay all suspicions? They’re so symbolic. Sit on the floor slowly and carefully, Travis. That’s very good. Now, Meyer, make a wide circle around behind him and come down the steps. Fine. Walk over to that coil of wire on the floor next to the pliers and stretch out on your face with your head toward me. Very good. Now, Travis, you can come down and go around Meyer and kneel on the other side of him. Hold it. Now I want you to wire your friend’s wrists together and then his ankles. The better job you do, the better all three of us will get along.”

It was a heavy-gauge iron wire, quite soft and malleable. It was such dim light I felt I could do a fairly sloppy job. Dissat moved back to the wall, and an overhead bank of daylight fluorescent tubes winked on.

“You’re doing a lot more talking, Paul,” I said. “All keyed up, aren’t you? All nerves?”

“Pull that strand tight. There. That’s fine. Let’s say I’m more talkative because you’re more receptive. Would you like to know how the wave action affected Lisa’s body?”

“I bet it was fascinating.”

“It was. I sat and watched the whole thing. After the waves were breaking way in beyond where she was, the outgoing wash started to scoop the sand out from around her until she was almost uncovered. Finally she toppled over onto her left side. Then the waves began digging the sand out from under her, settling her lower and lower and flowing and forming around her as it began covering her. The very last thing I saw of her was her right shoulder, and it looked like a little, shiny brown bowl upside down on the smooth sand. And then that disappeared, too. I imagine that on all beaches the sea is a scavenger, burying the sad, dead things and the ugly litter every time the tide comes and goes. Now one more turn under the other wrist and then twist it and cut it. Good!”

I wished the pliers were heavier. I rehearsed the motions in my mind. Whip the arm up and hurl the pliers at his face, falling forward at the same time to give the throw more velocity and also shield. Meyer from the expected hail of nails. I could scramble forward and take the nails in the back and get to his ankles and yank his feet out from under him, provided no nail went head-deep into the spine. And provided he didn’t swing the muzzle down fast enough to drive a close pattern into my skull.

I hesitated, thinking how badly I had missed Harry with the ashtray, and while I hesitated, Dissat moved, making plier-throwing a much worse risk.

He shifted the heavy nailer, swinging the pneumatic hose out of the way, much as a singer manipulates the mike cable. In the bright fluorescence he looked almost theatrically handsome. He was like a color still shot for those strange ads Canadian Club used to use. (I never knew how challenging it would be to hold two men captive with an automatic nailing device until I tried it.)

“Talkative?” he said. “Perhaps. Relief, I suppose. I’ve made a decision and simplified the future. Harry’s money and mine make enough, you know. I’ve sent it to safe places. You two are the last loose ends. I’m taking sick leave. Actually, I’m retiring. Maintaining two identities compounds the risk factor. I told you in Grenada what I learned about myself from Mary Broll and poor Lisa. Now I shall have a chance to devote all my time to exploring it further. Very thoroughly. Very carefully. Mostly it’s a matter of selecting people who might logically disappear of their own accord. I suppose the challenge excites me. So I talk a great deal, don’t I? There’s nothing I can reveal you can’t guess, so it’s not a help to you, is it? We shall explore the matter of the letter you sent from Grenada. As a matter of form. It isn’t really important whether I learn about it or not, so I don’t have to be awfully careful, do I? To keep everything tidy, I might leave with a traveling companion. A certain Mrs. Booker. Betsy. Would you know about her? Never mind. His ankles are finished? Walk backward on your knees. Further. Further. Right there. Sit down there, please, and wire your own ankles together, leaving a length of wire between them, the same length as the nylon cord that day on the little beach.”

One uses any small frail idea. From handling the thick, soft wire I guessed that if one bent it back and forth enough times, it would snap. So I took a couple of turns around my ankles, tight enough to keep the wire from turning on my ankle. I made the binding turns, squeezed the wire knots with the plier jaws, nipped away what was left. With luck, management, and timing the wire might part at the squeezed place after enough steps.

He moved to stand over Meyer. He bent over and held the business end of the nailer almost touching the base of Meyer’s spine. “I have this on single fire, McGee. Or single nail. If you can wire your own wrists nicely, I’ll be so pleased with you, I’ll give up the pleasure of finding out just how he’d react to one nail right here. Use ingenuity, McGee. Do a nice job. After Grenada, I take no chances with you.”

I did a nice job. I was even able to nip off the extra wire by wedging the pliers between my forearm and the flooring. By holding my wrists together, exerting pressure, I could make it look as if there was no slack at all. Cheap little tricks never do any good at all, except to give the trickster false hope when he needs it.

Dissat came lithely over, bent, and inspected, kicked the pliers away with the edge of his foot. He grunted with satisfaction and walked over and put the nailer down beside the pressure tank, then swung and flexed his arms. “It got much too heavy,” he said. He picked up a short, thick piece of metal. I thought it was steel pipe with a dull, gleaming finish, but as he walked toward Meyer, flipping it and catching it, I guessed from the way he handled it that it had to be very light metal, probably aluminum bar stock. It spun and smacked neatly into the palm of his hand each time.

“I don’t even know what we use this for,” he said. “There’s a lot of it in the last warehouse. I’ve been taking an inventory personally, to check on pilferage of materials, small tools, and so on. That’s where I kept Harry, in that warehouse. This piece just happens to have perfect weight and balance. I picked it up by accident the first time. After that, every time I picked it up, old Harry would start rolling his eyes like a horse in the bullring.”

He bent suddenly and took a quick swing, very wristy, and hit Meyer on the back of the right leg, just above the knee. It made an impact sound halfway between smack and thud. Meyer bucked his heavy frame completely off the floor and roared.

“See?” Paul said. “Heavier stock would crush bone and tissue, and lighter stuff would merely sting. I experimented with Harry and went a little too far. I whacked him across his big belly once too often and possibly ruptured something in there, God knows what. For a time neither of us thought he could walk into the bank for the money.”

“I’ll trade Meyer for all you want to know about the letter.”

He looked at me owlishly. “All of Meyer? Alive and free? That’s naive, you know. Meyer is dead, and you are dead. There’s no choice now. I could trade you, say, the last fifteen minutes of Meyer’s life for information about the letter. He would approve a deal like that when the time comes. But what would be the point? I’m not that interested in your letter, really. I learned a little bit from Mary and more from Lisa and a little more from Harry. Now I can check what I learned and learn a little more. Why should I deprive myself?”

“Why indeed?” Meyer said in a husky voice.

“I like you both,” Paul said. “I really do. That’s part of it, of course. Remember, Travis, how Lisa became… just a thing, an object? It moved and made sounds, but Lisa was gone. I made the same mistake with Harry but not until the very end. The problem is to keep the person’s actual identity and awareness functioning right to the end. Now we have to get Meyer out of here. Get up and go bring that hand truck, Travis, please.”

I got the truck, and at Paul’s request I bent and clumsily wedged and tugged and lifted my old friend onto the bed of the truck. Meyer ended up on his right side. He squinted up at me and said, “I have this terrible pun I can’t seem to get out of my head, like one of those songs you can’t get rid of. Let’s hope his craft is ebbing.”

“How is your leg?” I asked him.

“Relatively shapely I think, but considered too hairy by some.”

“Are you trying to be amusing?” Paul asked.

Meyer said in his public speaking voice, “We often notice in clinical studies that sado-sociopathic faggots have a very limited sense of humor.”

Dissat moved to the side of the truck, took aim, and clubbed Meyer right on the point of the shoulder, and said, “Make more jokes, please.”

Meyer, having exhaled explosively through clenched teeth, said, “I hope I didn’t give the wrong impression, Dissat.”

“Are you frightened, Meyer?” Paul asked politely.

“I have a lump of ice in my belly you wouldn’t believe,” Meyer said.

Instructed by Paul, I rolled the hand truck along the warehouse flooring, turned it, and backed laboriously up a ramp, pulling it up. He unlatched a big metal door with overhead wheels and rolled it aside. The white sunlight had turned yellowish outside as the world moved toward evening, but it was still bright enough to sting the eyes. I wheeled the truck along the loading dock and down a steeper ramp where it almost got away from me.

I pushed the truck along the concrete roadway, the steel wheels grating and clinking. I became aware that with each stride I could feel less resistance to bending in the wire joining my ankles, and I was afraid it would snap before I wanted it to. I took shorter steps and changed my stride, feet wider apart to put less strain on the wire. We went through the big gates in the fence and over toward the asphalt plant. Dissat told me to stop. He put a foot against Meyer’s back and rolled him off the hand truck. We were in a truck loading area with a big overhead hopper. The concrete was scabbed thick, black, and uneven with dried spills of asphalt tar. Paul motioned me away from the hand truck and pushed it back out of the way. Above us was the hopper and a square, bulky tank that stood high on girder legs.

“Do you see that great big wad of wasted asphalt over there, Travis? Meyer is facing the wrong way to see it. Vandalism is always a problem. Last Thursday night some hippies apparently came over from the beach, and for no reason at all they dropped at least two tons out of the holding tank. That’s the big, square tank overhead. It’s insulated. Just before the shift ends, they run what’s left in the plant into the holding tank. It’s hot enough to stay liquid all night in this climate, and in the morning while the plant is being fired up and loaded, the trucks draw from the holding tank. But last Friday morning they couldn’t drive the trucks under the hopper until they got a small bulldozer over here to blade that solidified hunk of warm asphalt away from where I’m standing. It’s all cooled now, of course. And our old friend, Harry Broll, is curled right in the middle of that black wad, snug as nutmeat in the shell.”

I remembered being taken on a hunt when I was a child and how my uncle had packed partridge in clay and put the crude balls into the hot coals until they baked hard. When he had cracked them open, the feathers and skin had stuck to the clay, leaving the steaming meat. Acid came up into my throat and stayed, then went slowly back down.

I swallowed and said, “And the patrol checks here tonight and finds more vandalism?”

“You belabor the obvious, McGee. They’ll have to blade your hydrocarbon tomb, big enough for two, over next to Harry’s. It’s hotter now, of course, in the holding tank than it will be by morning.” He moved over to the side. “This is the lever the foreman uses. It’s a manual system. If I move it to the side… ”

He swung the lever over and pulled it back at once. A black glob about the size of your average Thanksgiving turkey came down the chute, banged the hanging baffle plate open, and fell-swopp-onto the stained concrete, making an ugly black pancake about four feet across, very thin at the perimeter, humped thick in the middle. A couple of dangling black strings fell into the pancake from overhead. A tendril of blue smoke arose from the pancake. Meyer made a very weary sound. Pain, anger, resignation. The pancake had formed too close to him, splattering a hot black thread across his chin, cheek, and ear. In the silence I heard the faraway flute call of a meadowlark and then the thunder rumble of a jet. I smelled that sweet, thick, childhood scent of hot tar.

When Meyer spoke, his voice was so controlled it revealed how close he was to breaking. “I can certify It comes out hot.”

“Hardly any aggregate in it,” Paul said. “It cools and hardens quickly. Travis, please turn Meyer around and put his feet in the middle of that circular spill, will you?”

I do not know what started the changes that were going on inside me. They had started before the meadowlark, but they seemed related somehow to the meadowlark. You used to be able to drive through Texas, and there would be meadowlarks so thick along the way, perched singing on so many fenceposts, that at times you could drive through the constant sound of them like sweet and molten silver. Now the land has been silenced. The larks eat bugs, feed bugs to nestlings. The bugs are gone, and the meadowlarks are gone, and the world is strange, becoming more strange, a world spawning Paul Dissats instead of larks.

So somehow there is less risk, because losing such a world means losing less. I knew my head was still bad. It was like a car engine that badly needs tuning. Tromp the gas and it chokes, falters, and dies. It has to be babied up to speed. I had a remote curiosity about how my head would work with enough stress going on. Curiosity was changing to an odd prickling pleasure that seemed to grow high and hot, building and bulging itself up out of the belly into the shoulders and neck and chest.

I knew that feeling. I had almost forgotten it. It had happened before, but only when I had turned the last card and knew the hand was lost, the game was lost, the lights were fading. I had been working my wrists steadily within the small slack I had given myself, bending a tiny piece of connecting wire back and forth, and the bending was suddenly easier as the wire began to part.

The hard, anticipatory joy comes not from thinking there is any real chance but from knowing you can use it all without really giving that final damn about winning or losing. By happenstance, he’d made a bad choice of wire. And maybe the twisted child was so eager to squash his mice, he might give one of them a chance to bite him.

The wrist wire broke as I put my hands on Meyer to move him. “Can you roll?” I asked in a voice too low for Paul to hear. Meyer nodded. “Roll on signal, to your left, fast and far.”

“What are you saying!” Paul Dissat demanded. “Don’t you dare say things I can’t hear!”

“Careful, darling,” I told him. “You’re going into a towering snit. Let’s not have any girlish tantrums.”

He quieted immediately. He picked up his chunk of aluminum. “That won’t do you any good, and it isn’t very bright of you to even try it. You disappoint me when you misjudge me. You take some of the pleasure out of being with you again.” I looked beyond him and then looked back at him very quickly. I couldn’t be obvious about it.

The instant he turned I broke the ankle wire with the first swinging stride. He heard me and spun back, but by the time he raised the aluminum club, I was inside the arc of it. I yelled to Meyer to roll clear.

My head went partly bad. I knew I had turned him back into a kind of corner where the girder legs of the holding tank were crossbraced. I was in gray murk expending huge efforts. It was a stage. Somebody was working the strings of the big doll, making it bounce and flap. At times its doll chin bounced on my shoulder. It flailed and flapped its sawdust arms. I stood flatfooted, knees slightly bent, swaying from left to right and back with the cadence of effort, getting calves, thighs, rump, back, and shoulder into each hook, trying to power the fist through the sawdust and into the gristle and membrane beyond.

Pretty doll with the graceful, powerful, hairless legs, with the long lashes, red mouth, and hero profile. Sawdust creaked out of its throat, and Raggedy Andy shoebutton eyes swung loose on the slackening threads.

Soon a blow would burst it, and it would die as only a doll can die, in torn fabric and disrepair. I had never killed a doll-thing with my hands before.

Somebody was shouting my name. There was urgency in the voice. I slowed and stopped, and the gray lifted the way a steamed windshield clears when the defroster is turned on. I backed away and saw Paul Dissat slumped against a crossbrace, one arm hooked over it. There was not a mark on his face.

I backed away. I imagine that what happened next happened because he did not realize what punishment to the body will do to the legs. He was conscious. I imagine that from belly to heart he felt as if he had been twisted in half.

The shapely, powerful legs with their long muscle structure had carried him through the slalom gates down the long tricky slopes. They had kept their spring and bounce through the long sets of tennis. So perhaps he believed that all he had to do was force himself up onto those legs and run away on them.

He tried.

When his weight came onto them, they went slack and rubbery He fought for balance. He was like a drunk in a comedy routine. He flailed with both arms, and his left arm hit the load lever, and he staggered helplessly toward the thick, gouting torrent of asphalt from the overhead hopper. He tried to claw and fight back away from it, screaming as I once heard a horse scream, yet with an upward sliding note that went out of audible range, like a dog whistle. But it entrapped, ensnared those superb and nearly useless legs and brought him down in sticky agony. I ran to try to grab him, yank him out of that black, smoking jelly but got a steaming smear of it across the back of my hand and forearm. I turned then and did what I should have done in the first place, went for the lever and swung it back to the closed position. The last sight I had before I turned, was of Dissat buried halfway up his rib cage, hands braced against the concrete slab, elbows locked, head up, eyes half out of the sockets, mouth agape, cords standing out in his throat, as the black stuff piled higher behind him, higher than his head.

I yanked the lever back and spun, and he was gone. A part of the blackness seemed to bulge slightly and sag back. The last strings of it solidified and fell. It was heaped as high as my waist and as big as a grand piano.

I remembered Meyer and looked over and saw him. He had wiggled into a sitting position, his back against a girder. I took a staggering step and caught myself.

“Pliers,” Meyer said. “Hang on, Travis. For God’s sake, hang on.”

Pliers. I knew there wasn’t time for pliers. The gray was coming in from every side, misting the windshield as before. I found my way toward him, fell, then crawled, and reached his wrists. I bent the wire, turning it, freeing it. I saw a sharp end bite into the ball of my thumb, saw blood run, felt nothing. Just one more turn and then he could…

Twenty-three

I WAS NOT entirely asleep and not yet awake, and I could not remember ever having been so completely, perfectly, deliciously relaxed. The girl voices brought me further across the line into being awake.

Rupe had said how very sweet their voices were, how touching, how heartbreaking, aboard the Belle. Their harmony was simple, their voices true and small.

“What a friend we have in Jeeeeee-zusss. All our sins and griefs to baaaaaaaare.”

I wondered why the extraordinary crew of the Hell’s Belle should select a number like that. Yet there was the tidy warmth of Teddie’s thigh under the nape of my neck, a sweet, firm fit. Fabric over the thigh. I opened my eyes, and it was night. Light came slanting and touched the girl faces, touching their long, hanging hair. I realized I was on a blanket, and there was the unmistakable feel and consistency of dry sand under the blanket. Teddie’s face was in shadow. I lifted a lazy, contented arm and put my hand over the young breast under thin fabric so close above my face. It had a sweet, rubbery firmness.

She took my wrist and pushed my hand down and said, “No, brother.” They had stopped singing the words of the song. They were humming the melody. “He has awakened,” the girl said. It was not Teddie’s voice. They stopped singing.

A man’s voice said, “How do you feel, brother?” I raised my head. There were five or six of them in a glow of firelight. Bearded, biblical men wrapped in coarse cloth. I had been hurled out of my historical time and my place.

I sat up too quickly. I felt faint and bent forward to lower my head down between my knees.

A hand touched my shoulder. Meyer said, “I was trying to get you to a doctor and ran off into the sand. This one here is their healer, and he-”

“I was a third year medical student when I heard the call. I’m the healer for the tribe on this pilgrimage mission.”

I straightened and looked into a young bearded face. He nodded and took my pulse and nodded again. “We got that tar off your arm and hand with a solvent, brother, and treated your burn and dressed it.”

My arm was wrapped with gauze. There was a bandage on my thumb. I turned my head and saw the beach buggies and several campers. A baby was crying in one of the campers.

I lay back very carefully. The thigh was there, cozy as before. The face leaned over me and looked down. “I will comfort you, brother, but no more grabbing me, huh?”

“No more, sister. I thought I was somewhere else with someone else. A… different group of girls.”

“On a pilgrimage, too?”

“In a certain sense of the word, yes.”

“There is only one sense, brother, when you give your heart and your soul and your worldly goods and all the days of your years to the service of almighty God.”

“Did your… healer put vinegar on my burns?”

She giggled. “That’s me you smell, brother. Blessed providence sent you and your friend to us this afternoon before I flipped right out of my tree. If it isn’t sacrilege, my sisters and I are enjoying a peace that- passeth understanding ever since.”

I tried sitting up again, and there was no dizziness. One of the sisters brought me a cup of hot clam broth. She wore a garment like an aba, made out of some kind of homespun. She too smelled of vinegar. There was a crude cross around her neck with green stones worked into it. The automatic slide projector in my head showed me a slide entitled “The Last Known Sight of Paul Dissat in This World.” A small gold cross hung free around his straining throat.

After I drank the broth, I tried standing, and it worked reasonably well. They were not paying any special attention to me or to Meyer. We were welcome to be with them. Feel free to ignore and be ignored. Listen to the sweet singing, taste the broth, and praise the Lord.

I found the vinegar girl and gave her back her cup with thanks. Meyer and I moved away from the fire and from the lights in the campers.

“I panicked,” Meyer said. “I got the rest of the wire off me and threw you in the damned car and drove like a maniac.”

“Where is the car?”

“Up there on the shoulder. It was in deep. They pulled it out with a beach buggy.”

“What about that limousine?”

“Good question. Joshua and I went back in there on his trail bike. The keys to it were on the desk in the office. We put the trail bike into the trunk. I locked everything in sight, and we were out of there before seven-thirty. I took the long way around, and we left it at the West Palm airport, keys in the ash tray. Call it a Dissat solution. By the way, I made a contribution to the pilgrimage mission collection plate in both our names.”

“That’s nice.”

“One of the wrapped stacks of hundreds from the Southern National. Initialed. Unbroken. There were four stacks in a brown paper bag on the desk in the warehouse office.”

“What did Joshua say?”

“Thanks.”

“No questions about the kind of help you asked of him?”

“Just one. He said that before he took the name of Joshua, he had clouted cars to feed his habit. He said all he wanted to know was whether, if we had committed a sin, we repented of it. I said that even though I didn’t think of it as a sin, I was going to pray for forgiveness. That’s when he nodded and said thanks and riffled the stack with his thumb and shoved it into the saddlebag on the trail bike. I walked out of the airport parking lot, and he drove the bike out and waited for me down the road from the airport. Long way around coming back here, too. I had the idea you’d be dead when I got here.”

“Meyer?”

“Yes?”

“Get me home. Get me back to the Flush. Please.”

“Let’s say goodnight to the tribe.”

I did a lot of sleeping. I was getting to be very good at it. I could get up at noon, shower, work up a big breakfast, and be ready for my nap at three. The gray fog rolled way back into the furthest corners of my mind. People left me alone. Meyer made certain of that. He passed the word. McGee has pulled the hole in after him. And he bites.

Meyer would come over during that part of each day when I was likely to be up and about.

We’d walk over and swim. We would come back and play chess. I did not want to be among people. Not yet. So he would cook, or I would cook, or he would go out and bring something back.

The longer we delayed the decision, the easier it was to make. The random parts fell together in a pattern we could find no reason to contradict. Harry Broll had grabbed his three-hundred-thousand loan in cash and fled with Lisa, the girlfriend he had promised to give up. Except for some irate creditors nobody was looking for him diligently. Harry’s wife had been reported missing in the Windward Islands, presumed drowned while swimming alone. Paul Dissat was missing too possibly by drowning, but in his case it would more likely be suicide, emotional depression, and anxiety over some kind of disease of the blood. He had requested sick leave.

Jillian had been astoundingly sweet and helpful and had even lived up to her promise to ask no questions. She had flown down to Grenada and stayed a few days and with the knowing assistance of an attorney friend had obtained my packet from the hotel safe and my other possessions from their storage room.

The favor was, of course, Jilly’s concession to apology, to regret. When she and her new friend got back from Grenada, she came over with him to give me back my belongings. They had a drink with us, and they did not stay long. Meyer arrived before they left.

“I keep forgetting his name,” Meyer said later. “Foster Cramond. Still a close personal friend of both his ex-wives.”

“Rich ex-wives.”

“Of course.”

“Likable,” Meyer said judiciously. “Good manners. No harm in him. Good at games, what? Court tennis, polo, sailing. Splendid reflexes. Did you notice the fast draw with that solid gold lighter? Twelfth of a second. Interesting phenomenon when they looked at each other.”

“What? Oh, you mean the visible steam that came out of her ears? And the way he went from a sixteen collar to an eighteen? Yes. I noticed.”

“Travis, what was your reaction when you met her new friend?”

“Relief at not running into some big fuss about breaking my word to visit her for a week. And… some indignation, I guess. In all honesty, some indignation.”

“And you wished you could change your mind again?”

I let his question hang in the air for a long time, for three moves, one involving tightening my defense against his queen’s bishop. I found a response that created a new problem for him. While he was studying it, I leaned back.

“About changing my mind. No. My instincts hadn’t turned bad when Harry came here. He had no intention of shooting me. So let’s suppose I’m slower by a half a step or a full step. Maybe I’m old enough and wise enough to move into positions where I don’t need the speed. The only thing I know is that I am going to run out of luck in the future, just as I have in the past. And when I run out, I am going to have to make myself some luck. I know that what counts is the feeling I get when I make my own luck. The way I feel then is totally alive. In every dimension. In every possible way. It wouldn’t have to be Jillian. I could lay back, watch the traffic, select a rich lady, and retire myself to stud. But that would be half-life. I have an addiction. I’m hooked on the smell, taste, and feel of the nearness of death and on the way I feel when I make my move to keep it from happening. If I knew I could keep it from happening, there’d be no taste to it at all.”

Meyer gave that a lot of thought, and then he gave the game a lot of thought. Finally he said, “When in doubt, castle.” He moved his king into the short corner, the rook standing guard. “Travis, I am very very glad that you were able to make us some luck. I am glad to be here. But…”

“But?”

“Something else is wrong with you.”

“I dream some rotten things. I’ve got my memory almost all straightened out. Picked up nearly all the cards off the floor and put them back in the right order. But I have real rotten dreams. Last night I was buying a shirt. The girl said it was made in the islands, and they weren’t sized correctly and I should try it on. When I put it on and came out, I realized that it was exactly the same print that Lisa had worn that first night I knew her. A dashiki. As I started to tell the girl that I didn’t want it, she came up to me quickly, and she reached out, and she snapped something onto the front of the shirt - it made a clack. It was a big, round, white thing, too heavy for the front of a shirt. I turned it around, and I saw that the sound had been the lower jaw of a skull being closed with the fabric caught between the teeth. It was a very white, polished, delicate skull, and at first it looked feral, some predator’s skull. Then I knew it was Lisa’s skull. I tried to get the girl to take it off, but she said it went with that particular shirt. No other shirt. Just that one. And I woke up.”

“Good Christ,” Meyer whispered softly.

“But usually I don’t dream at all.”

“Be thankful. Travis. Is something else wrong?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have the words for it yet?”

“I think it’s getting to the point where there will be words for it. When there are words, I’ll try them on you.”

“Are you going to check me with that knight? Go ahead. See what happens if you do.”

On the following Sunday afternoon, a Sunday late in May Meyer and I were over on the beach. When the wind died, it got uncomfortably hot in the sun, so we moved to a bench in the shade. I watched two lovely ladies approaching along the beach, consciously keeping shoulders back and tummies in as they strode along, laughing and talking. Elegant lassies. Total strangers. They were walking across the edge of my life and right back out of it, and I would never know them or touch them nor two million nor ten million of their graceful sisters.

“Maybe I can put that problem into words now. But it’s just a try. Maybe you can be patient?”

“How often do you see me impatient?”

“This starts with a word Rupe Darby used down in Grenada. A phrase, not a word. It designates a condition. Womaned out. He meant it in the physical sense. Total sexual depletion to the point where you think you never want to see another woman. I think I’m womaned out in a different way. All my love life is pre-Grenada, and that was a lifetime ago.

“So. Womaned out but not in a physical sense. God, no. Those two who just went by created the intended reaction. And I keep remembering how neat and warm the thigh of the little Jesus singer felt under the nape of my neck. Physical capacity is just dandy. No, Meyer. I feel foundered and wind broke in some other dimension of myself. I feel sick of myself, as if the prospect of me in action would turn me off, way off.”

“How?”

“Everything I thought I believed about making love to a woman sounds very stale. I hear myself talking to too many of them. There has to be affection, dear. Respect for each other. We must not hurt each other or anyone else, darling. There has to be giving on both sides and taking on both sides, honeybunch. Oh Meyer, God help me, it all sounds like a glossy sales talk. I was kidding them, and I was kidding myself. Look. I was holding out a package deal. And on the bottom of the package in small print was the guaran-goddamn-tee. Mary Dillon picked up the package. I didn’t force it on her. I just left it around where she’d see it. She picked it up, enjoyed the product, and then married Harry Broll, and now she’s buried in a washout behind a seawall under transitmix concrete. So something is wrong with the small print or the service contract or the damned sales force, Meyer. I just can’t… I can’t stand the thought of ever again hearing my own sincere, manly, loving, crap-eating voice saying those stale words about how I won’t ever hurt you, baby, I just want to screw you and make you a more sincere and emotionally healthy woman.”

“Travis, Travis, Travis.”

“I know. But that’s what’s wrong.”

“Maybe there is some new kind of industrial waste in the air we breathe.”

“Fractionated honesty?”

“Don’t suffer all over me, McGee. You are a good man. There is no man alive who is not partially jackass. When we detect some area of jackassery within ourselves, we feel discontent. Our image suffers.”

“What should I do?”

“How do I know what you should do? Don’t make me an uncle. Go get lost in the Out Islands and fish for a couple months. Go hire onto a tug and work yourself into a stupor. Take five thousand of what was in that brown bag and lease the Hell’s Belle all by yourself for ten days. Take cold showers. Study Hindustani.”

“Why are you getting sore?”

He bounded off the bench, whirled, bent over, yelled into my face, “Who’s getting sore? I’m not getting sore!” And he ran down to the water, bouncing hairily along, and plopped in and swam out.

Everyone was not acting like himself. Maybe there was some new kind of guck in the air lately. By the time we had finished our swim, Meyer had gotten over his unusual tizzy. We walked slowly back across the bridge, and as we neared the Flush, I could see a figure aboard her in the shade of the sundeck overhang, sitting on the shallow little afterdeck.

I did not recognize her until we were within thirty feet. She lay asleep in the deck chair with a tidy, boneless look of a resting cat. There was a big red suitcase beside the chair and a matching red train case, both well scuffed by travel. She wore a little denim dress with white stitching. Her white sandals were on the deck under the chair. Her sleeping arm clamped her white purse against her.

Suddenly her eyes opened wide. There was no sleep-stunned transition. She leapt back into life and up onto her feet in the same instant, all smiling vitality. “Hey! McGee! It’s me. Jeannie. Jeannie Dolan. I should have looked over on the beach, huh?”

I introduced them. Meyer said he had heard nice things about her. He seemed to approve of the lively mop of red-brown hair and the quick glinting of the gray-green eyes.

I unlocked the Flush, and we went in. She said, “Leave my stuff right there, unless you’ve got thieves. Hey, can I look around? Say, this is a great kind of boat, Trav! Look, is the timing bad? Am I in the way or anything? If you guys have something all lined up…”

“Nothing,” Meyer said. “Nothing at all.”

“Wow, what a great kitchen.”

“Galley.” I said.

She looked at me blankly. “Galley? They row those with big oars. And a man walking around with a whip. Do you row this thing, for God’s sake?”

“Okay, Jeannie. It’s a kitchen,” I said.

“Does it have engines in it? I mean, it will cruise around and so forth?”

“And so forth,” Meyer said, looking happier.

“Wow, would I ever like to go someplace on a boat like this.”

“Where’s your friend?” I asked her.

“Betsy? We got tossed out of that Casa de Playa by the bank that took over. Not we, just me. Because she was gone by then. She went back to cleaning teeth. For a widower dentist in North Miami.”

“Vodka tonic for you?” I asked her.

“Exactly right! It’s wonderful when people remember things, isn’t it? What I’m going to do, I’m on my way back to Columbus. No, not back to Charlie, that creep. But I called my old job, and I can make enough money so I can save enough to fly to the Dominican Republic and get a quickie divorce, instead of beating my brains out down here.”

“Won’t you sit down, Jeannie?” I asked her.

“I’m too nervous and jumpy, dear. Whenever I impose on people, I get like this. I’ve got the bus schedule and all, and then I thought, oh, what the hell, I wanted to see that McGee guy again and never did. A girl sometimes has to be brassy or settle for nothing, right?”

I looked at Meyer. He was wearing a very strange expression. I handed Jeannie her drink and said, “Sometimes a girl gets brassy at just exactly the right time, and she gets invited on a private cruise. What would you say to that?”

“Aboard this wonderful shipl Wow! I’d say yes so fast-”

“HOLD IT!” Meyer roared, startling her. He trotted over to her and with raised finger backed her over to a chair. She sat down on command, staring up at him with her mouth open.

“I am going to ask you some very personal questions, Mrs. Dolan.”

“What’s the matter with you, huh?”

“Have you been in a lot of emotional turmoil lately?”

“Me? Turmoil? Like what?”

“Are you at a crisis point in your life?”

“Crisis? I’m just trying to get myself a plain, ordinary, divorce-type divorce.”

“Mrs. Dolan, do you feel like a pathetic little bird with a busted wing who has fluttered aboard, looking for patience, understanding, and gentleness and love which will make you well and whole again?”

She looked at me with wide, round eyes. “Does he get like this a lot, Travis?”

“Pay attention!” Meyer ordered. “How do you relate to your analyst?”

“Analyst? Shrink? What do I need one for? Chee! You need one, maybe.”

“Are you in love?” he asked.

“This minute? Hmmm. I guess not. But I sort of usually am. And pretty often, I guess. I’m not a real serious kind of person. I’m just sort of dumb and happy.”

“One more question, and I must ask you both this one.”

“You answer him, honey,” Jeannie said to me.

“Would either of you two happy people mind too much if I spend the next few weeks in Seneca Falls, New York?”

“Speaking for the two of us, Meyer, I can’t think of a serious objection, really.”

He trotted to the doorway to the rear deck and opened it. He picked up the two pieces of red luggage and set them inside the door, gave us a maniacal smile, and slammed the door and was gone.

Jeannie stood up and sipped frowningly at her drink. Then she looked at me. “McGee?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Everybody I know is acting weirder all the time. Have you noticed that too?”

“Yes, I have. Meyer isn’t often like that.”

“It’s pretty weird and pushy for me to barge in on you like this. I’m not like this, really.”

“It does have engines.”

“That’s nice. But do you feel like you’ve been maneuvered into something you’d just as soon not do, huh?”

“The more I think about it, the better I like it.”

She put her drink down and came over and gave me one quick, thorough, and enthusiastic kiss. “There! Now it’s just a case of getting acquainted, huh? Want to start by helping me unpack?”

We carried the luggage back to the master stateroom. She asked me what Meyer had meant about her having a broken wing. I said he was one of the last of the great romantics. I said there used to be two. But now there was just one left. The hairy one.

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Travis McGee #13 A Tan And Sandy SilenceJohn D. MacDonaldNOW SHOWING.UP WITH LIFE.PROCEED WITH LOAN