The Deep Blue Good-Bye

Once

WILLY LAZEER is an acquaintance. His teeth and his feet hurt. He hates the climate, the Power Squadron, the government and his wife. The vast load of hate has left him numbed rather than bitter. In appearance, it is as though somebody bleached Sinatra, skinned him, and made Willy wear him.

I knew he was off at six, and I knew it took him an hour of beer to insulate him against going home, and I knew where he would be loading up. I sat beside him at the bar. He gave me a mild, dim glance of recognition. His hour was almost up. I prodded his memory.

“Play Pen. Play Pen. Sure, I seen that today.”

“Forty-foot Stadel custom, white topsides, sray hull, blue line. Skippered by a rugged brown guy with white curly hair and small blue eyes and a big smile.”

“So?”

“I was wondering where he’s docked.”

“How should I know, McGee? How the hell should I know?”

“But you do remember him?”

“He paid cash.”

“Stopped a little after five?”

“So?”

“What kind of people did he have aboard, Willy?”

“Smart-ass kids.”

“Tourists, college kids?”

He stared through me for a moment. “I knew one of them.”

“One of the kids?”

“What the hell are we talking about? One of the kids. Yes. You know over the bridge on the right there, past where they’re building is a place called Charlie Char-Broil.”

“I know the place.”

“I seen her there as a waitress. Young kid. They got their names on little badges. Hers is a funny one. Deeleen. I ain’t seen her there a couple months. How come I remember her, she got snotty with me one time, bringing me the wrong order.”

It was as far as he could go with it.

I went back to Lois. She had a glass of bourbon that looked like a glass of iced coffee. Her smile was loose and wet and her eyes didn’t track. I took it away from her and took her into her stateroom. She made little tired singing sounds and lurched heavily against me. I tipped her onto the bed and took her shoes off. In three minutes she was snoring.

I locked up and went off on a Deeleen hunt. Charlie Char-Broil smelled of burned grease, and she didn’t work there any more. But a friend named Marianne did, a pretty girl except for a rabbit mouth she couldn’t quite manage to close. Nineteen, I guessed. Once she was convinced I wasn’t a cop, she joined me in a back booth.

“ Dee, she got fired from here when they changed the manager. The way it was, she did anything she damn pleased, you know? The manager we had, he was all the time taking her back in the storeroom, and finely somebody told the company. I told her it was the wrong way to act. She had a couple other jobs and they didn’t last and I don’t see her much any more. I did see her. But, I don’t know, some things can get too rough, you know what I mean? Fun is fun, but it gets too rough. What I found out, on a blind date she got for me, geez, it was a guy like could be my father, you know? And there was a hell of a fight and I found out she took money from him for me to show up. I ask her what she thinks I am anyhow. I think she’s going to get in bad trouble, and I don’t want to be around, you know?”

“Where does she live?”

“Unless she’s moved-she moves a lot-she’s in the Citrus Inn. It’s up like opposite Deerfield Beach, kind of an apartment-hotel kind of thing, sort of old and cruddy. In 2A up there, with a girl named Corry, that’s where she was last I knew, getting her unemployment.”

That was all the time she could spend with me. She slid out of the booth, patting at the blue and white skirt of her nylon uniform. She seemed to hear the total effect of her own words, and looked a little disconcerted. She was a strong-bodied girl whose rather long neck and small head made her look more delicately constructed than she was. Her fine silky hair was a soft brown with bleached streaks.

“Don’t get me wrong about Deeleen,” she said. “I don’t want you should think I’m trine to cut her up. The thing is, she had an unhappy love affair when she was just a kid.”

“How old is she now?”

“Oh, she’s twenty now.” She hesitated. She was obligated to end our little chat with a stylized flourish. The way it’s done in serial television. So she wet her little bunny mouth, sleepied her eyes, widened her nostrils, patted her hair, arched her back, stood canted and hip-shot, huskied her voice and said, “See you aroun‘, huh?”

“Sure, Marianne. Sure.”

Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making out. Their futile, acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is competition for bag-boy jobs in the supermarkets.

They yearn for security, but all they can have is what they make for themselves, chittering little flocks of them in the restaurants and stores, talking of style and adornment, dreaming of the terribly sincere stranger who will come along and lift them out of the gypsy life of the two-bit tip and the unemployment, cut a tall cake with them, swell them up with sassy babies, and guide them masterfully into the shoal water of the electrified house where everybody brushes after every meal.

But most of the wistful rabbits marry their unskilled men, and keep right on working. And discover the end of the dream. They have been taught that if you are sunny, cheery, sincere, group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours, including barbecue pits, charge plates, diaper service, percale sheets, friends for dinner, washer-dryer combinations, color slides of the kiddies on the home projector, and eternal whimsical romance-with crinkly smiles and Rock Hudson dialogue.

So they all come smiling and confident and unskilled into a technician’s world, and in a few years they learn that it is all going to be grinding and brutal and hateful and precarious. These are the slums of the heart. Bless the bunnies.

These are the new people, and we are making no place for them. We hold the dream in front of them like a carrot, and finally say sorry you can’t have any. And the schools where we teach them non-survival are gloriously architectured. They will never live in places so fine, unless they contract something incurable.

I went north of the mainland route, past an endless wink and sputter of neon, through the perpetual leaf-fall and forest floor of asphalt, cellophane, candy wrappers, Kleenex, filter tips, ticket halves, Pliofilm and latex. One of Junior Allen’s women lay wounded and the other lay drunk, and I was looking for a third.

The Citrus Inn was an old place, a three-story cube of cracked and patched Moorish masonry, vintage 1925, with three entrances, three sets of staircases, three stacks of small apartments. It was on a short, dead-end street in a commercial area. It was across the street from a large truck depot, and bracketed on one side by a shoestring marina and on the other by a BEER-BAIT-BOATS operation which had a tavern specializing in fried fish sandwiches. There was a narrow canal behind the three structures, sea-walled, stagnant.

The Citrus Inn had its own eroding dock, parallel to the sea wall. I had parked in front. I walked around the unlighted side of the Citrus Inn. I stopped abruptly and moved off into deeper shadows. There were two darkened old hulks tied up to the Citrus Inn dock. The third craft was lighted inside, and a weak dock light shone against the starboard side of it and into the cockpit. It shone on the life ring. The Play Pen.

There were several of them in the cockpit. I couldn’t see them distinctly. They had music going, the hesitating rhythms of Bossa Nova. A girl moved to it. Another girl laughed in a slurred sour way. A man said, in a penetrating voice, “Dads, we are just about now out of beer and that is a hell of a note, Dads. Somebody has got to trek way the hell to Barney’s. You going to do us like this in the islands, Dads? You going to let us run out of the necessities of life once we get over there?”

Another man rumbled some kind of an answer, and a girl said something which the music obscured. In a few moments two of them came by me, heading for the tavern. I saw them distinctly when they clambered up onto the dock, a husky, sideburned boy with a dull fleshy face, and a leggy awkward girl in glasses.

As they passed me the girl said, “Shouldn’t you buy it one time anyway, Pete?”

“Shut up, Patty. It makes Dads happy to spring for it. Why spoil his fun?”

I had my first look at Junior Allen. It wasn’t much of a look. He was a shadowy bulk in the cockpit of the boat, a disembodied rumble of a voice. A single bark of laughter.

When I got back to the Busted Flush, Lois was still out. I sat her up. She whined at me, her head heavy, her eyes closed. I got her up and took her over to the beach and walked her until she had no breath for complaining. She trudged along, dutiful as a naughty child. I walked her without mercy, back and forth, until her head was clear, and then we sat on a public bench to give her time to catch her breath.

“I’ve got a ghastly headache,” she said in a humble voice.

“You earned it.”

“I’m sorry, Trav. Really. Seeing him scared me so.”

“Or gave you an excuse?”

“Don’t be hateful.”

“I just don’t like to see you spoil what you’re trying to do.”

“It won’t happen again.”

“Do you mean that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want it to happen again. But I keep thinking… he could come walking along this beach right now.”

“Not tonight. He’s busy.”

“What!”

I told her how and where I had found him. With a sideburned boy named Pete, and three girls named Deeleen, Patty and Corry.

“From the little I heard, he’s taking all of them or some of them on a cruise to the Bahamas. They think they’re working him. They think they’ve found a very soft touch. They call him Dads.”

“Can’t those poor kids see what he is?”

“Cathy didn’t. You didn’t.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Go see if I can make a date tomorrow afternoon.”

“They might be gone.”

“I think he’ll wait until he gets the new generator installed.”

“But what if he leaves with them in the morning?”

“If that seems too dreadful to you, Lois, you can always get drunk.”

“You don’t have to be so cruel.”

“You disappointed me.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“How’s your head now?”

“A little better, I think. Trav?“

“Yes, honey.”

“Trav, I’m so hungry I could eat this bench.”

When I took a look at the outdoors Sunday morning I knew they weren’t going anywhere. It was a sparkling day. The wind had swung around and it was coming out of the northeast, hard and steady. A wind like that builds too much of a chop out in the Stream for anything the size of Junior Allen’s cruiser. It would be running seven or eight feet out there, and very dirty.

I waited until noon and then drove up to the Citrus Inn. Apartment 2A was in the center section on the second floor, I wore a courting costume, summer version. T shirt, khaki slacks, baseball cap, straw shoes, an eager smile, and a bottle of good bourbon in a brown paper bag. I rapped on the scarred and ornate old wooden door, and rapped again, and a girl-voice yelled in an exasperated tone, “Just a minute!”

The Inch rattled. The door opened an inch and a half, and I saw a tousle of dark hair and a segment of tan face and a cold green unfriendly eye. “Whaddya want?”

“I’m looking for Deeleen.”

“She’s not here.”

“Are you Corry?“

“Who the hell are you?”

“A friend of a friend.”

“Like who?”

“Marianne, works at Charlie Char-Broil.”

“That silty bitch hasn’t got any friends.” Had I done any pleading or begging, she would have slammed the door. So I stood easy, mildly smiling. It’s a relaxed area. There is a code for all the transients. if you are presentable, unhurried, vaguely indifferent, it is a challenge. I was having better luck with this than I expected, up to this point. I wanted it to continue. If you push against hostility and suspicion, you merely increase it. In a few moments I saw a little less animosity

“What’s with this Marianne and you looking for Deeleen? I don’t get it.”

“I don’t want to confuse you, Corry.”

“There’s some facts of life I should know?”

“I used to see Deeleen around there and never got to know her, and then she left and I was wondering about her, if she’d left town, and I asked around and Marianne said maybe she was still here. So this was an empty day, and I had this jug, so I thought I would come see. But if she’s as friendly as you are, I guess it wasn’t much of an idea.”

She examined me for at least twenty silent seconds. “Stick around a minute,” she said, and closed the door. It was ten minutes before she came out. She had stiffened her dark hair somehow until it looked like a Japanese wig. She wore a swim suit and an open cabana coat. The swim suit was a black and white sheath, the black faded and the white slightly grubby. Though flawed by a bulldog jaw and a little too much meat across the hips, she was reasonably presentable. She closed the door and smiled up at me and said, “You’re practically a giant, huh? You got a name?”

“Trav.”

“There’s a kid in the apartment sleeping it off. She was whoopsing half the night from beer. Come on, I’ll show you something.”

I followed her down the short corridor to a back window overlooking the dock. A girl in a very brief bikini lay on a pad on the cabin roof of the Play Pen. I looked down at her over Corry’s shoulder.

She looked up at me quizzically. “I don’t blame you at all to come looking, she’s built so cute, huh?”

“Tasty.”

“But if she’s absolutely the only idea you came up here with, honey, you can save your self the trouble. She’s all set up with the guy owns the boat.”

“It’s a lot of boat. Whose is it?”

“An old guy named Allen. We call him Dads. We’re going to go far and wide on that boat, man. We’re going to the Bahamas on that boat. Would you believe it, he says it’s hard to find people to go cruising with you? Isn’t that a crazy problem. But the way things are, honey, she won’t play. It could screw up the boat ride.” She turned toward me from the window with just the slightest hint of the stylized posture of the model, the small mechanics of display, seeking approval. “So?”

She had invited inspection and I gave it, then said, “You have to know when to change your ideas. You have to stay loose.”

“The thing is,” she said, “I wouldn’t want you should have any terrible disappointment. I mean on account of Dee.”

This was the small smoky game of appraisal and acceptance, offer and counter-offer. She had narrowed it down to that one response necessary to her esteem. So I responded as she wished. “If that was you down there in the sun, Corry, and Dee up here with me, then I could feel disappointed.”

She smirked and beamed and preened, then linked my arm and took me down onto the dock. “Hey!” she said. Deeleen sat up, owlish in huge black glasses. “Where is everybody?” Corry asked as I helped her aboard.

“Dads took off someplace in Pete’s car. Pete went down to see Mitch about if he’s got the motor back on the little boat yet. Patty okay?”

“She’s still sacked out up there.”

Deeleen got up and came clambering slowly and cautiously down into the cockpit. At a thirty-foot distance she was a very attractive, ripe-bodied young girl. At close range the coarseness, and the sleaziness of the materials used in construction were all too evident. Her tanned hide had a coarse and grainy look. Her crinkle of putty-colored hair looked lifeless as a Dynel wig. The strictures of the bottom half of the bikini cut into the belly-softness of too many beers and shakes, hamburger rolls and french fries. The meat of her thighs had a sedentary looseness. Her throat and her ankles and the underside of her wrists were faintly shadowed with grime. There was a coppery stubble in her armpits, and a bristle of unshaven hair on her legs, cracked red enamel on her toenails. The breast band of the bikini was just enough askew to reveal a brown newmoon segment of the nipple of her right breast.

“Deeleen, I want you should meet Trav,” Corry said.

“Hi,” Deeleen said, looking me over. She had a broad mouth and a pink stain of lipstick on one front tooth. She was obviously awaiting further identification.

“That Marianne works at the Char-Broil, she told him one time we were out this way, and he came around. I was telling him about going on the cruise with Dads.” It was very casual, but totally explicit. He came looking for you, but I told him the score and he settled for me.

Deeleen gave a little shrug of acceptance and slumped into a canvas chair, spraddled and hot. There was a little roll of fat around her waist. She hitched the bikini top up. High against the meat of the insides of her thighs a fringe of pubic hair escaped the scanty fabric which encased the plump and obvious pudendum. A few years ago she would have been breathtakingly ripe, and even now, in night light, with drinks and laughter, there would be all the illusions of freshness and youth and desirability.

But in this cruelty of sunlight, in this, her twentieth year, she was a record of everything she had let them do to her. Too many trips to too many storerooms had worn the bloom away. The freshness had been romped out in sweat and excess. The body reflects the casual abrasions of the spirit, so that now she could slump in her meaty indifference, as immunized to tenderness as a whore at a clinic.

“What’s with squirrel-face Marianne?” she asked indifferently.

“Nothing new.”

Corry shed her cabana coat, put canvas cushions on the wide transom and stretched out. They had stopped surveying me. I had passed inspection.

“Even with that wind it’s almost too goddamn hot,” Corry said. “Anybody figured out what we’re going to do?”

“I’ll wait’n see what Dads wants.”

Corry turned more toward Dee, closing me out of the conversation. “Was it the way you figured?” she asked.

Dee gave a flat, mirthless laugh. “Only more so.”

“Anybody want a drink?”

They both stared at me as though startled to find I was still there.

“Sure,” Deeleen said. “What is it?”

“Bourbon.”

“Okay.” Corry said.

“But he locked it when he took off,” Dee said. “You can’t get down where the ice and glasses and stuff is. Corry, you want to bring stuff down from upstairs?”

“It’s after one,” Corry said. “He can get some stuff from Barney, can’t he?”

“Ask to buy some of the big paper cups,” Dee, told me. “And get a six-pack of Coke, huh?”

Barney’s service was slow, and he overcharged me for the cups, Coke and ice. By the time I returned to the Play Pen, the girls had shuffled me and dealt me. Corry informed me of their approval and of the choice that had been made. She did it by rubbing the back of my neck while I fixed her drink.

We moved back under the overhang, out of the direct weight of the sun. With the breeze, it was comfortable. As they began to get a little high, they included me more naturally in their conversation. We talked about the cruise. Pete arrived. He had a dead handshake, like a canvas glove full of hot sand. Corry gave him a key to 2A and he went up to see how Patty was. There was discussion about whether she would go on the cruise. She would have to lie to her folks.

Suddenly Junior Allen swung aboard, leaped, landed lightly. He was immaculate in white sport shirt, white slacks, pale blue yachting cap. I guessed he was nearing forty. I had not been prepared for him to look so powerful and so fit. He was broad, with shoulders so packed and corded with muscle they gave him a slightly simian posture, the impression enhanced by the extra-long weight and heft of brown tattooed arms, and the short legs, slightly bowed. He had a brown, seamed, knotty face, broad, smiling broadly, the smile squinching the small blue eyes. It was a friendly grin. It was a likable grin. it did not change in any way as he looked at me.

“Hello, kids,” he said. His voice was a brassy rumble. He rumpled Dee ’s lifeless hair with a big brown paw. “Who we got aboard, little sweetheart?”

She was transformed. She was elfin, lisping, adoring; his ripe, dumpy little child. “This is Trav, darling. He’s with Corry. Trav, this is Dads Allen. He’s the one owns this boat. Hasn’t it got a cute name?”

“It’s a very cute name,“ I said.

He was quick. He caught my hand in exactly the way I didn’t want him to catch it, and watched my mouth as he ground my knuckle bones.

“Glad you like it,” he said. “Welcome aboard.” He took his keys out and unlocked the hatchway to the cabins. He pulled Dee to her feet slapped her bare rump and said, “Little sweetheart, you go bring up some decent glasses and the vodka.”

Little sweetheart snickered and arched and went below dutifully. Junior Allen sat where she had been, and patted Corry’s bare knee and said, “What’s your line of work, Trav?”

“Whatever I happen to find. A little charter boat work in season. Take boats north and south for the winter folks. Fry cook. Half-ass marine mechanic. You name it.”

After little sweetheart brought his bottle and the glasses, he fixed himself a drink. He beamed at me.

“These kids tell you about the trip? I’m going to take four of ‘em over and show them the islands. Hell, I’ve. got the boat, the time and the money. It’s the least I can do.”

Had I not known the history, I would have readily bought the image he was projecting. Fatuous, expansive idiot, hooked by the tired flesh of little sweetheart, taking her and three of her friends on the romantic tropic tour.

“Passenger list still open?” I asked, smiling back.

That changed his eyes but not his grin. “If Pete and I sleep in the two bunks forward, that leaves the main cabin for the gals. I can sleep six, but they got to be very good close friends.” He roared with laughter. “Sorry we can’t sign you on, buddy.”

“I get to be the fifth wheel,” Corry said bitterly.

“How so, girl?”

She stared coldly at him. “What’s so complicated, Dads. You and Dee, Pete and Patty. And good old Corry. Hell, sign him on. I’ll need somebody to talk to. Maybe you’ll need somebody to run your boat.”

“I never need any help with a boat,” he said, smiling. “Or anything else, little sweetheart.”

“I’m Corry. She’s little sweetheart, Dads.” He patted her knee again and beamed at her. “You’ll have fun. Don’t you worry about it a minute.”

“Always bitching about something,” Dee said. “Always.”

Pete and Patty came aboard. And within minutes I knew what Junior Allen was after. At first glance Patty was unattractive, an impression derived from the gawkiness and the glasses. They kidded her coarsely about getting sick, and she responded by clowning. The clowning was her defense. Her breasts were high and immature and sharp against the fabric of her blouse. Her legs were long and pale and lovely. There was a colt grace about her, a loveliness of gray eyes behind the heavy lenses, a ripe warm sensitivity of mouth.

She was Lois, years ago, and in a different social strata. She was wasted on the lout dullness of sideburned Pete. She was fresh and fragile and vulnerable. She was the obvious victim, and once he had the quartet where they could not escape him, it would require no great effort to turn the other three into accomplices. They were coarsened already. They would help Junior Allen teach their funny clown-girl the facts of life, help him take her down into a nightmare where, finally, her clowning would do her no good at all.

We drank. His young pals called him Dads and patronized him. He grinned and grinned. Deeleen teased him. Corry kidded him. Pete ignored him. Junior Allen grinned and grinned and grinned. But some instinct made him wary of me. I would look toward him and see those little blue eyes studying me over that wide smile. He was a big old tom watching benignly as the mice cavorted. He didn’t want another cat at the party. There wasn’t enough for two.

But I did find out what I wanted to know. Pete said, in answer to a question by Patty, that they would leave as soon as Junior Allen had some work done on the boat. They would move their gear aboard and go down to Miami where the work was to be done, and cross over to Bimini from there. The cruise would last a week or ten days. Dads was paying all expenses. Dads was a live one. Patty would tell her people she was visiting a friend, a girl who lived in Jacksonville. Dads said they’d probably be leaving Tuesday or Wednesday. Don’t bring along a lot of stuff. We’ll be roughing it, kids.

We ate Barney’s fish sandwiches. We switched to beer. In the late afternoon the group split up. Pete took Patty home. Dads and Dee stayed aboard. I went up to the apartment with Corry. They were dingy rooms, small, high-ceilinged, too many layers of paint on the walls, the rugs dusty, the cheap furniture stained and scarred, the utilities primitive. She had spent the last hour back in the sun. She was dazed with sun and beer. She opened us two fresh beers and then went off to take a shower. She gave me a book to look at. It was a thick portfolio of eight-by-ten glamor shots of her, girlie shots, nude and semi-nude studies, with tricky lighting effects.

She had been a couple of years younger, I suspected, when they had been taken. Some were quite attractive, some were remarkably tasteless, and the balance were perfectly standard-the tawny back-lighted bulge of breasts and buttocks, and the standardized glowing wet-mouthed smile of enticement. She said the photographer friend had sold quite a lot of them to magazines. I could believe her.

The figure was standard adequate and so was the photographic technique. After I had finished the book and long after the shower had stopped, I heard her calling me in a small voice. I went to the bedroom. She had pulled the yellow shades down, making a dim golden light in the shabby room. She lay naked on the bed with a black towel across her loins. “Hello there, darling,” she said. She wore the same smile as in the photographs, but drowsier.

“Hello yourself.”

Wrestler’s jaw, sleepy green eyes, huge smooth brown thighs. She yawned and said, “Less have a li’l love and a li’l nap, sweetie.”

“Let me borrow a shower first.”

“Sure. Sure, you go ‘head. But hurry it up. I’m in such a wonnerful mood, lover.”

I went into the bathroom. It was a morass of stale towels and sour swim suits, fetid and perfume-sweet, soapy and damp. It astonished me not to find moss on the walls, mushrooms in the corners, ferns behind the john. The stream of water was feeble and tepid. I made the shower last a long long time. I used the least damp towel I could find. I opened the bathroom door with great care, and as I had hoped and expected, she was making a regular little snare-drum snore, saying “Paah” with each exhalation.

I dressed stealthily, tiptoed to the bed, removed the black towel and tossed it into the bathroom. I put my empty beer can on the floor next to hers. In the living room I found a post card and a pencil stub. I wrote, “Corry, sweet: Even when you’re half asleep, you’re marvelous. I’ll be in touch, honey.” I put it on the bed on the far side of her and tiptoed out, grinning like an idiot. Or like Dads.

But the grin had the feel of a suture. These are the little losers in the bunny derby, but they lose on a different route than the Mariannes, or the ones you see in the supermarket on the nights when they double the green stamps, coming in junk cars, plodding the bright aisles, snarling at their cross sleepy kids. Deeleen and Corry save wistfulness for thoughts of the key clubs. They could be the centerfold in anybody’s sex book. You have to stay with the kicks. Age twenty and age twenty-one. The cats always show up. The phone always rings. Friends have friends. It isn’t like anything was going to wear out, man. It isn’t like they were going to stop having conventions.

And you get a little tired or a little smashed or a little bored, so you throw a big fast busy fake and it is over in nothing at all. And learn the ways to work them for the little gifts here and there. Like maybe a cruise. Or the rent. Or a couple beach outfits by Cole. Friendship gifts. Not like you were really working at it. The ones work at it, there is always some character taking the money, and there can be police trouble and all that. You work waitress once in a while. The rest of it is dates, really. One date at a time. And some laughs, and if you’re short, he can loan you. And other numbers to call when there’s a whole bunch of guys.

This is the queasy shadowland, and they don’t even work hard at that because they have never learned to work at anything. They turn sloppy, and when the youngness is gone, there isn’t much left. Just the dead eyes and the small meaty skills and the feeling their luck went bad sometime, when they weren’t watching. Fifteen to twenty-five is the span, and they age quickly and badly. These are the bunnies who never find a burrow.

I got back to Lois in the hot blue dusk and she was extraordinarily docile. She wore a little navy blue dress with a starched white collar, and she had her dark hair flattened to severity. She gave the impression she was dedicating her life to sobriety and good works.

I forgave her all indiscretions, and her dark eyes glowed.

After dinner I told her about the cruise. I told her what I planned to do. We went over the plans, amending them, tightening them here and there. We did not talk of the end of it, even though the end was implicit in the things that had to happen before the end.

She kissed me a good night with quick cool lips, a dark glance that swiveled demurely away.

In my bed I thought of the brutal leathery hands of Junior Allen. Behind the agreeable grin he was as uncompromising as a hammer. Beast in his grin-mask. A clever, twisted thing, hunting for that perversion of innocence, the horrification of gentleness which would feed his own emptiness.

And I began thinking of that gentleness nearby. I computed the distance with care. Twenty-one feet, perhaps, from bed corner to bed corner. Would it not be good for her spirit, her morale, to be desired? Left alone, would she become dubious of her own time of a gentle aggression? And would not her fastidious litheness take away the heavy taste of the fleshy girls in the Citrus Inn? McGee, the Perfidious. Rationalizer. Womanizer. Gonadal argumentation. Go to sleep.

Was she on her left side? Her right We? Was she wakeful too? Were her eyes open in the same darkness, listening to the same whispery drone of the air conditioning? Was she wondering why I did not desire her?

Go to sleep, McGee, for God’s sake. You want a permanent dependent?

I sat up. My heart was bumping and my breath was shallow. I went in there moving as silently as a drift of smoke. She would be sleeping. I would turn right around and glide away from there.

I moved close to the bed, barely making out the dark spill of the pillowed hair, holding my breath to try to hear the cadence of her breathing. She made a small throaty sound of total contentment, of a perfect gladness, and reached and found my wrist and drew me to her. Ripping the sheet and blanket aside, presenting herself so totally, guiding us with such an artful ease, that as I lay with her we were joined, her readiness and her long exultant shudder a confession of what her night thoughts had been.

After a few moments she stilled us, so sweetly enclasped, saying, as she turned us, “Wait, darling. Please. The way we talked tonight. I could not really look at you. You couldn’t really look at me. Because we couldn’t say anything about the end of it. And that’s a shadow. You know it is.”

“There isn’t any other choice.”

“You know there is. I can charge him with rape. It’s true enough, you know. I can testify. They can put him away.”

“It won’t look very good for you. Stayng with him.”

“Look good to whom? I care about my opinion of myself and your opinion of me. No one eIse. He terrorized me. I’m articulate. I can make anyone see how it was. And I can talk to Cathy and she will identify him as the man who beat her. Between the two of us, darling, we can make certain he’ll be put away for a long time. Get the first part of it done, and before he can retaliate, we’ll go to the police, Cathy and I.”

“I don’t think that’s the way to…”

“I want it that way. Promise.”

“But… ”

She had her fingers laced at the nape of my neck. She gave me a hearty tug. “Promise!”

“You have me at a disadvantage.”

“Ah, I have you at an advantage, McGee. Promise!”

“… All right.”

She pulled strongly. She rocked her wide mouth against my shoulder in a dainty, exacting, continuing, irresistible demand. And at last murmurously curled herself into sleep, the small love words falling away into heavy slumber. Once she was gone I had a little time to think of the promise. I looked at it coldly. It was a tactical stupidity. Junior Allen, once he was trapped, would spoil everything he could reach. He would try to make deals. And he would have the knowledge of Sergeant David Berry’s fortune to bargain with, stolen, restolen, and stolen once again… if all went well for me.

Yet I knew I would keep the promise. Try to salvage something. She moaned in her sleep. Her long legs twitched. She was running from an old horror. I stroked her hair and kissed her eyes and she came half awake and sighed and settled back again.

If it all went wrong, would anyone ever be able to comfort Patty Devlan?