Gulf Coast Girl

One

23.50 North, 88.45 West

It was a hot, Gulf Coast morning in early June. The barge was moored out on the T-head of the old Parker Mill dock near the west end of the waterway. Carter had gone to New Orleans to bid on a salvage job and I was living on board alone. I was checking over some diving gear on the forward deck when a car rolled out of the end of the shed and stopped beside mine. It was a couple of tons of shining Cadillac, and there was a girl in it.

Or maybe a better way of putting it would be to say a girl came out of the shed, wearing a Cadillac. You’d see her first.

She got out and closed the door and walked over to the edge of the pier with the unhurried smoothness of poured honey. “Good morning,” she said. “You’re Mr. Manning, I hope? The watchman out at the gate—”

I straightened. “That’s right,” I said, wondering what she wanted. It might be possible to look more out of place on a water-front than she did, but it wouldn’t be easy.

She looked me over quite deliberately, and I had an odd impression she was trying to size me up for something. There wasn’t any basis for it really except that she took a little too long at it and didn’t look like a woman who normally went around staring at people. I was suddenly conscious of the beat-up old dungarees and my hairy and sunburned nakedness from the waist up, and was a little burned at the same time because I was conscious of it. What the hell? I was at work, wasn’t I? What was this, a State Department tea?

“What can I do for you?” I asked curtly.

“Oh.” She was a little flustered for a moment. “I—I’d like to talk to you. Could I come aboard?”

I glanced at the spike heels and then at the ladder leaning against the pier, and shook my head. “You’d break your neck. I’ll come up.”

I did, and the minute I was up there facing her I was struck by the size of her. She was a cathedral of a girl. In the high heels she must have been close to six feet. I’m six two, and I could barely see over the top of the smooth ash-blond head.

Her hair was gathered in a roll very low on the back of her neck and she was wearing a short-sleeved summery dress the color of cinnamon which intensified the fairness of her skin and did her no harm at all in the other departments. Maybe by some bean-pole standards she didn’t save enough ground on the turns, but not by mine. I’d never seen any reason women had to look like boys.

Her face was wide at the cheekbones in a way that was suggestively Scandinavian, and her complexion matched it perfectly. She had the smoothest, clearest skin I’d ever seen. The mouth was a little wide, too, and full-lipped. It wasn’t a classic face at all, but still lovely to look at and perhaps a little sexy. No, that wasn’t it exactly. Just intensely female, like the rest of her. The eyes were large and gray, and very nice. And scared, I thought. It didn’t make sense, but she was afraid of something.

It was hot in the sun, and quite still, and I was a little uncomfortable, aware I was too damned conscious of her and that I’d been doing the same thing I’d been angry at her about. Staring. Maybe we could just stand here the rest of the morning and look at each other like a couple of idiots.

“What can I do for you?” I asked again.

“Perhaps I’d better introduce myself,” she said. “I’m Mrs. Wayne. Shannon Wayne. I wanted to talk to you about a job.”

We walked over in the shadow of the shed by her car and she opened the door and sat down on the end of the seat with a hand on the window frame. She wore no jewelry except the engagement and wedding rings and a thin gold watch that looked fragile and useless enough to cost a young fortune. Her fingers tapped nervously against the metal.

“What kind of job?” I asked.

She glanced at my face, and then away. “Recovering a shotgun that was lost out of a boat.”

“Where?”

“In a lake, about a hundred miles north of here—”

I shook my head. “It would cost you more than it’s worth.”

“But,” she protested, the gray eyes very near to pleading, “you wouldn’t have to take a diving suit and air pump and all that stuff. I thought perhaps you had one of those aqualung outfits.”

“We do,” I said. “In fact, I’ve got one of my own. But it would still be cheaper to buy a new shotgun.”

“No,” ‘she said. “Perhaps I’d better explain. It’s quite an expensive one. A single-barreled trap gun with a lot of engraving and a custom stock. I think it cost around seven hundred dollars.”

I whistled. “How’d a gun like that ever fall in a lake?”

“My husband was going out to the duckblind one morning and accidentally knocked it out of the skiff.”

I looked at her for a moment, not saying anything. There was something odd about it. What kind of fool would be silly enough to take a $700 trap gun into a duckblind? And even if he had money enough to buy them by the dozen, a single-barreled gun was a poor thing to hunt ducks with.

“How deep is the water?” I asked.

“Ten or twelve feet, I think.”

“Well, look. I’ll tell you how to get your gun back. Any neighborhood kid can do it, for five dollars. Get a pair of goggles, or a diving mask. You can buy them at any dime store. Go out and anchor your skiff where the gun went overboard and send the kid down to look for it. Take a piece of fishline to haul it up with when he locates it.”

“Don’t you want the job?” she asked. “Why?”

I wondered myself. I wasn’t doing anything, and I hated sitting around. It would be easy, and she didn’t mind paying for it, so why the reluctance?

I shrugged. “Well, it just seems silly to pay a professional diver all that travel time for something a kid could do in half an hour.”

“It’s not quite that simple,” she said. “You see, it’s about three hundred yards from the houseboat to where the duckblind is, and we’re not sure where it fell out.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It was early in the morning, and still dark.”

“Didn’t he hear it?”

“No. I think he said there was quite a wind blowing.”

It made a little more sense that way, but not much. I still hesitated. Maybe I only imagined it, but I could feel a tension inside her that she was trying to hide and it had to be caused by something more than a lost shotgun. And I was too damned aware of her. I could feel her, even when I wasn’t looking at her. I realized this was stupid, but it didn’t change the fact. Maybe I’d been living too long alone.

She turned her head a little then and I got those eyes full in the face. She said only one word. She said, “Please.”

If the shotgun had been under the Arctic ice pack it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. “When do you want to start?” I asked.

“Right now,” she said. “Unless you have another job.”

“No. I’m not doing anything.”

“That’s fine. We’ll go in my car, if it’s all right with you. Will your equipment fit in back?”

“Sure,” I said.

I went down the ladder to the barge and stowed away the gear I’d been working on, and got the aqualung and diving mask out of the storeroom. I set them on the dock and returned for some swimming trunks. While I was in my quarters I put on some lighter shoes and changed into white linen slacks and a sport shirt. I checked all the doors to be sure they were locked and went back up on the pier. She handed me the car keys and I put everything in the trunk.

“I think this is fun,” she said, smiling for the first time. “It’ll be fun watching you work.”

I shrugged, and said nothing. I wondered a little irritably if she really wanted that gun back, or if this was just her idea of a lark. After all, if it was lost during duck season it had been lying there for six months now. Maybe she had so much money and was so bored that hiring a diver came under the heading of entertainment, like ordering a clown for a children’s party.

Then I asked myself morosely why I was so intent on picking her to pieces. She hadn’t done anything, and so far as I knew there was no law against looking like a Norse goddess, even a slightly sexy one.

Norse? With a name like Shannon? It was odd, though, because she did look like a Swede.

I asked her to stop at the watchman’s shanty for a moment while I told him I’d be gone the rest of the day in case anybody called. The mill was abandoned now and the pier was seldom used for anything, but the place was still fenced and a bored watchman put in his hours reading in a little shack beside the gate.

As soon as we were out the gate she fumbled in her bag for a cigarette. I lit one for her, and another for myself. She drove well in traffic, but seemed to do an unnecessary amount of winding around to get out on the right highway. She kept checking the rearview mirror, too, but I didn’t pay much attention to that. I did it myself when I was driving. You never knew when some eager type might try to climb over your bumper.

When we were out on the highway at last she settled a little in the seat and unleashed a few more horses. We rolled smoothly along at 60. It was a fine machine, a 1954 hardtop convertible. I looked around the inside of it. She had beautiful legs. I looked back at the road.

“Bill Manning, isn’t it?” she asked. “That wouldn’t be William Stacey Manning, by any chance?”

I glanced quickly around. “How did you know?” Then I remembered. “Oh. You read that wheeze about me in the paper?”

It had appeared a few days ago, one of those interesting-character-around-the-water front sort of things, written by a rather intense girl who oozed her dedication to capital-J journalism all over the pier and was determined to pump me up into a glamorous figure for at least a column if it killed her. It had started over the fact I’d won a couple of races out at the yacht club, handling a friend’s boat for him. I wasn’t even a member; he was. But it had come out I’d deck-handed a couple of times on that run down to Bermuda and was a sailing nut; hence the story. Then she made the fact I’d gone to M.I.T. for three years before the war sound as if I were a South Seas beachcomber with a title. I didn’t get it myself. Maybe she thought divers ate with their feet. It was a good thing I hadn’t said anything about the four or five stories I’d sold. I’d have been Somerset Maugham, with flippers.

Then an odd thought struck me. I hadn’t used my middle name in that interview. I hadn’t used it, in fact, since I’d left New England.

She nodded. “Yes. I read it. And I was sure you must be the same Manning who’d written those sea stories. Why haven’t you done any more?”

“I wasn’t a very successful writer,” I said.

“But I thought they were awfully good.”

“Thank you.”

She was looking ahead at the road. “Are you married?”

“I was,” I said. “Divorced. Three years ago.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. I mean, I didn’t intend to pry—”

“It’s all right,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it.

It was just a mess, but it was over and finished. A lot of it had been my fault, and knowing it didn’t help much. We’d fought until we wore it out, and it takes two to do that. I’d owned the boat before Catherine and I were married, and I insisted on hanging onto it in spite of the fact she cared nothing about sailing and the upkeep on it was too much for a married man on the salary I was making in the steamship office where I worked. She wanted to give parties, and play office politics. None of the office brass sailed; they all played golf. I should sell the boat and join a country club. The hell with that, I’d said; I didn’t care what the brass did. I spent my leisure time sailing, and trying to write. I didn’t have any ambition, and I was antisocial and pigheaded. Who the hell did I think I was? Conrad? It folded.

We even fought over that, over money again. We sold the house and the boat at a big loss in an outburst of mutual savagery and split the whole thing up like two screaming kids in a tantrum. I had learned diving and salvage work in the Navy during the war, and after the wreckage settled I drifted back into it, moving around morosely from job to job and going farther south all the time. If you were going to dive you might as well do it in warm water. It was that aimless. I’d tried writing again, but nothing came out right any more and everything was rejected. I was 33 now with nothing much to look forward to and not much behind except an increasing list of “ex-’s”—ex-engineering student, ex-Navy lieutenant, ex-husband, and ex-aspiring writer.

She slowed going through a small town, and when we were on the open highway again she looked around at me, her face thoughtful, and said, “I gathered you’ve had lots of experience with boats?”

I nodded. “I was brought up around them. My father sailed, and belonged to a yacht club. I was sailing a dinghy by the time I started to school.”

“How about big ones, out in the ocean—what do they call it?”

“Offshore? Sure. After the war I did quite a bit of ocean yacht racing, as a crew member. And a friend and I cruised the Caribbean in an old yawl for about eight months in 1946.”

“I see,” she said thoughtfully. “Do you know navigation?”

“Yes,” I said. “Though I’m probably pretty rusty at it. I haven’t used it for a long time.”

I had an odd impression she was pumping me, for some reason. It didn’t make much sense. Why all this interest in boats? I couldn’t see what blue-water sailing and celestial navigation had to do with finding a shotgun lost overboard in some piddling lake.

We went through another small town stacked along the highway in the hot sun. A few miles beyond she turned off the pavement onto a dirt road going up over a hill between some cotton fields. She was watching the mirror again. I looked back, but there was nobody behind us. Then I asked myself abruptly what I cared if there were. This was only a job, wasn’t it? What the hell, her husband had just lost his shotgun in a lake—

Hadn’t he?

We passed a few dilapidated farmhouses at first, but then they began to thin out. It was desolate country, mostly sand and scrub pine, and we met no one else at all. After about four miles we turned off this onto a private road which was only a pair of ruts running off through the trees. I got out to open the gate. There was a sign nailed to it which read: Posted. Keep Out. Another car had been through recently, probably within a day or two, breaking the crust in the ruts.

I gathered it must be a private gun club her husband belonged to, but she didn’t say. We dropped on down the hill into swampy country where big oaks festooned with Spanish moss met above the road. I could see old mudholes here and there through the timber, the silt cracking into geometric patterns and curling as it dried. It was quiet and a little gloomy, the way you imagined a tropical jungle would be.

We went on for about a mile and then the road ended abruptly. She stopped. “Here we are,” she said.

It was a beautiful place, and almost ringingly silent the minute the car stopped. The houseboat was moored to a pier in the shade of big moss-draped trees at the water’s edge, and beyond it I could see the flat surface of the lake burning like a mirror in the sun. There was no whisper of breeze. I got out and closed the door, and the sound was almost startling in the hush.

She unlocked the trunk and I took my gear out. “I have a key to the houseboat,” she said. “You can change in there.”

It was a lot larger than I had expected, and looked as if it must have four or five rooms. It was moored broadside to the pier which ran along parallel to and just off the bank under the overhanging limbs of the trees. A narrow gangplank ran from the bank out to the pier, and another shorter one onto the deck of the scow.

She led the way, disturbingly out of place in this wilderness with her smooth blond head and smart grooming, the slim spikes of her heels tapping against the planks. I noticed the pier ran on around the end of the scow at right angles and out into the lake.

“I’ll take the gear on out there,” I said. “I’d like to have a look at it.”

She came with me. We rounded the corner of the houseboat and I could see the whole arm of the lake. This section of the pier ran out into it about thirty feet, with two skiffs tied up at the end. They were about half full of water, and there were no oars in them. I put down the aqualung and mask and looked around.

The lake was about a hundred yards wide, glassy and shining in the sun between its walls of trees, and some two hundred yards ahead it turned around a point.

“The duckblind is just around that point, on the left,” she said.

I looked at it appraisingly. “And he doesn’t have any idea at all where the gun fell out?”

She shook her head. “No. It could have been anywhere between here and the point.”

It still sounded odd, but I merely shrugged. “All right. I might as well get started.”

She started to turn, and then froze. She was listening to something. Then I heard it, very faintly, over the immense hush all around. It was a car, somewhere a long way off. Her face grew very still and I could see the color go out of it. The sound of the car faded away; I couldn’t tell whether it had stopped somewhere or gone on.

We were standing very close together on the end of the pier. Our eyes met. “What’s the gag?” I asked roughly.

“Gag?”

“You’ve been looking for a car, or listening for one, ever since you picked me up. Is somebody following you?”

She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “I hope not.”

“Your husband?”

Her face jerked up toward mine and I could see the ruffling of an Irish temper in the eyes. “My husband? And why would my husband be following me, Mr. Manning?”

I was a mile off base, and realized it. “I’m sorry,” I said. It had been a stupid thing to say, and I wondered what there was about her that made me so uncomfortable and ready to jump down her throat at the slightest excuse. She wasn’t bothering me, was she? The hell she wasn’t bothering me.

She smiled, a little shakily, and I knew she was still scared. “It’s all right,” she said. “You really didn’t mean it, anyway. You’re very nice, you know.”

“Maybe we’d better get started looking for that shotgun,” I said.

“Would it help if I went, too, in one of the boats?” she asked. “I’d like to watch. And I thought perhaps, if you had something to guide you—”

I looked around. It would help, all right. The water was fairly clear and the visibility should be pretty good with the sun directly overhead, but still I’d have to come to the surface every few yards to get my bearings.

“Sure,” I said. “But you can’t go out in a skiff the way you’re dressed. I can bail one out, but it’d still be dirty and wet.”

“I think I’ve got an old swimsuit in the houseboat. I could change into that.”

“All right,” I said. We went back around to the gangplank and walked aboard. She unlocked the door. It led into a big living-room which was well-furnished and even had a fireplace. There was a rug on the floor, a sofa, some overstuffed chairs, a bookcase, and two or three framed pictures along the walls. The windows were closed and curtained. It was in the center of the deckhouse structure, and two doors led off into other rooms at each end. The air was dead and still, and smelled faintly of dust.

She nodded to one of the doors at the right end of the living-room. “You can change in there. I’ll see if I can find my swim-suit.”

I went in. It was a bedroom. There was a double bed in it, and a dresser, and the floor was carpeted from wall to wall. So this was roughing it in a duck camp in the wilds. I took off my clothes and got into the swimming trunks. It was hot, and I was shiny with sweat. I wondered if she had found her suit, and then wished irritably I could quit thinking of her.

I took a cigarette out of the shirt and lit it before I went out in the living-room again. The doors at the other end were closed, but I could hear her moving around in one of the rooms. It sounded as if she was changing clothes. I located a pair of oars and went down to the end of the pier.

Hauling one of the skiffs up alongside, I began bailing with an old can. There was no shade here, and the sun beat down on my head. In a moment I heard the whispered padding of bare feet behind me and turned around.

She could make your breath catch in your throat. The bathing suit was black, and she didn’t have a vestige of a tan; the clear, smooth blondness of her hit you almost physically. A few inches shorter with the same build and the same legs and she would have been downright voluptuous; as it was there was something regal about her. I looked down and went on bailing.

I fitted the oarlocks and held the boat while she got in and sat down amidships. Setting the aqualung and mask in the stern, I shoved off.

“Pull out about twenty yards,” I directed. The water was only about five feet deep around the pier and I could see the bottom from the surface. The gun was nowhere around there.

“All right,” I said in a moment. “Hold it right there while I go over. Row very slowly toward the point, just as if you were going to the blind, but don’t get too far ahead of me. You’ll be able to tell where I am by the bubbles coming up. I’ll have to cover fifty or seventy-five feet on each side, because it was dark and he could have wandered that much off the course.”

She nodded, and watched with intense interest while I slipped the straps of the outfit over my shoulders and put on the mask. I bit on the mouthpiece and slid over the stern. The water was only about ten feet deep and the visibility was good. I went down and brushed bottom. It was soft, and my hand raised a cloud of silt.

That was the only thing I was afraid of. In all that time the gun might have sunk completely out of sight in the mud. But still it should leave a track, an outline, where it disappeared, as there were no currents to disturb the bottom and erase it. I looked up and could see the boat directly above me on the ground-glass screen of the surface. The oars dipped once, scattering bubbles. I swam to the right, just above the mud and not disturbing it, made a wide swing, and came back to cover the other side. Here and there an old log lay on the bottom. I searched carefully around them.

She moved the boat slowly ahead. Time went by. I saw an empty bottle, two or three beer cans, and an underwater snag festooned with bass lures. Now and then bass and perch would stare at me goggle-eyed and slide away.

We couldn’t have been over seventy-five yards off the pier when I found the gun. If I’d been looking ahead instead of staring so intently at the bottom I’d have seen it even sooner. It was slanting into the mud, barrel down, at about a 60-degree angle with the stock up in plain sight. I pulled it out and kicked to the surface. I was some twenty feet from the boat. She saw me and rowed over.

I caught the gunwale and lifted the shotgun out of the water so she could see it. Her eyes went wide, and then she smiled. “That was fast, wasn’t it?” she said.

I set it in the bottom of the boat, stripped off the diving gear, and heaved that in, too. “Nothing to it,” I said. “It was sticking up in plain sight.”

She watched me quietly as I pulled myself in over the stern and sat down. I picked up the gun. It was a beauty, all right, a trap model with ventilated sighting ramp and a lot of engraving. I broke it and held it over the side, swishing it back and forth to get the mud out of the barrel and from under the ramp. Then I held it up and looked at it. She was still watching me.

“It’s a pretty gun, isn’t it?” she said self-consciously.

I stared at it again, and then back at her, feeling the silence lengthen out. It was the stock that gave it away, the stock and she herself. She was a lousy actress.

The barrel could conceivably have stayed free of rust for a long time, stuck in the mud like that where there was little or no oxygen, but the wood was something else. It should have been waterlogged. It wasn’t. Water still stood up on it in drops, the way it does on a freshly waxed car. It hadn’t been in the water 24 hours.

I thought of that other set of car tracks, and wondered how bored and how cheap you could get.