Deadly Welcome

Chapter Eleven

Doyle, on the first day of May, walked out of the Davis General Hospital with Betty Larkin. He had driven her over to see Buddy. Buddy had been in a wheel chair on the sun porch, his smashed shoulder in a curious and complicated cast. And he had been restless and in a vile mood, convinced that everything at the yard was going to hell.

They walked across to the parking lot. Betty wore a beige dress with aqua buttons on the pockets. She wore a scarf over her head to hide the place where her hair had been shaved away so that the wound made by Donnie’s club could be stitched.

She was subdued, thoughtful.

After he had turned onto the road to Ramona, she said, “So you’re all packed.”

“Just about. Not much to pack.”

“And you’ve got your reservation.”

“Tomorrow at ten out of Tampa. I’ll have to get a darn early start to unload this heap before I have to be at the airport.”

“I could drive up with you, Alex. You could make the title over to me and I could sell it and send you the money.”

“I wouldn’t want to ask you to go to all that trouble.”

“After what you did for us? Good Lord, Alex! And you won’t even let us give you a dime of the money.”

“What’s the word on that, anyway?”

“Oh, you know those fruit jars where the rubber had rotted and water had got in, and the money was just a mass of glop? The lawyer says it will go to Washington where experts work on it, and he thinks we may get an almost hundred per cent recovery. We have no idea how much there is in those jars. And he says that the tax people are prepared to be reasonable. We may be able to keep quite a lot.”

“I hope so.”

“It would be nice to be out of hock on all the improvements we made. Poor John Geer. He said so many times that when we finally paid off the bank, he was going to get drunk.”

“Are you still sore at me for lying to you in the beginning about why I came down?”

“No. I was sort of irritated. But I understand. If you remember, my friend, there were flaws in your performance. And I noticed them, too.”

“So you did. Smart gal.”

“It’s nice to see you relaxed, Alex. You were so strained and nervous-acting.”

“Because I was back here, mostly. I didn’t want to come back. I felt this place had a hex on me.”

“Boy leaves in disgrace. Man comes back and becomes big hero. Gets in all the papers. Becomes public figure.”

“All right. I enjoy it, damn it. I enjoy walking down Bay Street and getting the big glad hand from end to end of it.”

“You won’t take any of the money?”

“How many times are you going to ask? No! Thanks.”

She turned sideways in the seat. “I want to tell you something. When I went to the bank and looked at all that money there on that table, something happened to me. Maybe I lost a hex. I’d thought of Daddy as something larger than life. I never saw him in perspective, the way you are supposed to see your parents after you grow up. He kept on being a big, cold, watchful eye looking down at me from up in the clouds somewhere. Making me feel clumsy and guilty and ashamed. And then I saw the money. And I thought of him sneaking away in the skiff and squirreling that money away in fruit jars in the ground, scared to death somebody would follow him or catch him at it. Something sort of went click. He wasn’t big and cold and frightening any more. He was just a scared, greedy, twisted little man. The only thing that really mattered in that shriveled little soul was the money. Not Jenna. She was a pretty toy. And the hex faded. I feel sorry for him. I’m trying to understand him, Alex. He had so very little to start with. And it hurt him. But why should it hurt him? You had almost as little. You’ve done well. And you aren’t all... withered up inside the way he was.”

“Maybe I am, in some other way.”

“Nonsense!”

“I mean it. I avoid emotions. I avoid emotional responsibilities, Betty. They scare me. That’s part of why I had to be forced, or I would never have come back.” She did not answer.

“Drop you at home?” he asked.

“Please. And if you don’t mind, I’ll jeep over later for a swim and get the spare key back, and see you haven’t left anything around, such as a toothbrush.”

She came out and swam, and she seemed particularly gay, joyous in a rather high-keyed way. After they had changed and were having a sunset drink on the porch, she went out to the jeep and came back with a package for him. He opened it, with protests.

“It’s from Mom and Buddy and me, but I picked it out. It’s the dangdest one I ever saw. It tells time, I think, if you can find the right hands to look at. But see all these little levers and things? With this you can do anything. But you better read the instructions.”

“It’s very handsome, and I thank you. Please thank your mother and Buddy for me.” He put it on.

“What will you do with this old one?”

“Throw it away, I guess.”

She put it in the pocket of her skirt. “I think I’ll keep it. I’m a sentimental type. I’ll put it with that old diary where you’re featured so strongly. Mind?”

“If you want it. I don’t know why you should want it. All it does is tell time, and it doesn’t do that very well.”

“Which I had noticed and which I remembered.” She put her glass on the railing. “Want me to drive up with you tomorrow?”

“I’ll manage, thanks.”

“So walk me out to the jeep and say good-by, Alex.”

They walked around the cottage to the blue jeep waiting in patience in the heavy dusk.

“You will come back, won’t you? Sometime?”

He looked at her standing there. And the need to say things was strong inside him, trying to break free. I will come back, to see you. Because I don’t think I can go very long from here on without seeing you once in a while.

But he heard himself say, too casually, “I suppose I’ll be back to look at the town. I don’t know when, Betty.”

“Oh, Alex!” she said in a choked voice, and he looked quickly at her and saw that there was just enough light to make the tear tracks on her cheeks gleam. She held her arms out toward him shyly, tentatively.

He took her in his arms strongly, with a sound in his throat like a sob, and then he could say the words. Something how he felt when he thought her dead. How he would come back often, and only to be with her for a little while.

And then he kissed her. He felt again the resistance, her fright, the dead stiffness of mouth. And just as he was about to release her in despair, her taut body began to relax, and there was a stir and a change in the texture of her mouth. She reached to put her arm awkwardly around his neck. She kissed him back meagerly, and then more firmly, and then suddenly with a great strong overwhelming joy. She pushed away from him and stared at him with her eyes wide and streaming, her lips tremulous.

“Pow!” she said softly, ludicrously. And came back strenuously for more. And backed away again, taking a quick step to regain her balance and said, “I feel dizzy. And I don’t feel the least dang bit scared. Or crawly. Or anything like that. I feel like I’d all of a sudden turned into a big pile of warm raspberry Jello.”

“I love you.”

“Don’t be silly! What else could feel like this? I love you too. More, please.”

With the next kiss, her warm brown arms were strong, and she made a guttural purring sound deep in her throat, and she bruised her mouth and his. And so she went home and she came back, and they walked and talked, with pauses for kisses, until dawn. There was lots of time coming for more than kisses, and this was the time to catch up on all of those that she had missed. She drove to Tampa with him, because he had to go back, at least this time. And by then it had been agreed that because she was a marriageable girl with perhaps plenty of money, he’d be very smart to marry her. He would go up and check on the next assignment and wangle something where a wife could be taken along, and also get enough time off to come down and marry her and take her back with him. And in the meantime she would have a chance to find a very bright girl for the office so Buddy wouldn’t miss her too much. Then after she had her taste of far places, and probably enough kids to make traveling a major problem, he would have his twenty years in and they would come back to Ramona and buy on the beach and build there and drive Buddy nuts helping him run the Larkin-Doyle Boat Yard and Marina.

It seemed remarkably easy to organize the rest of your life. No trick at all.

He waved from the top of the ramp as he got onto the plane.

At first when the stewardess walked down the aisle toward him, she smiled broadly. By the time they were over Georgia he thought she was looking at him rather strangely.

And it was then that he discovered that he was still wearing a big, broad, idiotic smile, fringed with lipstick.