The Deep Blue Good-Bye

Catorce

WHAT DO you do when they turn all your lights out?

I guess you answer the questions. There were a lot of people and a lot of questions, because it was what they call an interesting problem of jurisdiction.

And though you do not really give a damn how much or how little you tell them, there is, after all, an instinctive caution which takes over and tends to simplify the answers you give. I had no idea where he had gotten his money. Cathy had no idea either. She just thought he might possibly be the same man who had beaten her up. I was her friend. I was just trying to check it out, and had gotten caught in the middle. And had had some luck.

Deeleen was as angry as a boiled squirrel for having slept through all the action. Patty made a resolute witness, precise, outraged and articulate.

I had a simple little story and told it forty times. Yes sir, I was pretty silly trying to find him in the dark out there in the ocean. He let me come aboard and then knocked me out. I was getting up when he was trying to climb into the other boat. I saw him lose his balance and fall in. I saw him swimming, trying to catch the other boat, but it was drifting as fast as he could swim. I was too weak and dizzy to do anything. I think I heard him call out once. I got the big boat started and I went looking for him, but when I found the other boat, it was empty.

I soon created a massive disinterest on the part of the reporters. I talked very freely and at great length. I could do twenty minutes on the characteristics of the Play Pen, and another twenty on the hull design of the Rut Cry. I could give an hour lecture on setting compensated compass courses, and what the weather had been like out there. They listened until their eyes glazed and their jaws creaked when they yawned. I did not tell them of my night visions of Junior Allen down there, his neck wedged into the anchor, his heels high, dancing slowly in vagrant currents.

There are some other things you do when they turn your lights out.

You learn how to use the darkness. Varieties of darkness. The darkness of hot sun on the beach, and intense physical effort. The small darkness of liquor. The small darkness of the Tiger’s girls. But these do not work in any lasting way. The body mends, but a part of it took its last breath behind that glassine barrier.

Once in a while they show up to ask some more questions, but you are amiable, slightly stupid, and very polite. The sister-in-law had come down and gathered up what was left of the lady and had taken the remains north, for suitable burial in the family plot.

One day I realized I was nearly broke. And I had gone into this thing for the money. It was to laugh. Somewhere behind my heart I thought I heard her small amusement, a faint melody. Who are we laughing at, darling, it said.

So I took some of the last of the funds and went up to New York and sat in a cheap hotel room and made contact with Harry. I showed him what I had. His eyes glistened even while he tried to tell me they were junk. I gave him the one that looked least valuable to me. We settled for seven per cent as his end. It took him a day and a half. He brought me back thirty-eight hundred and thirteen dollars. He got rid of two more the next day, one at a time, at a little over four thousand apiece for me. A full day for the next one. Five thousand and a bit.

When I turned over the last one, I had a hunch I would not see him again, so I told him I had been holding out the cream of the little crop. He wanted to see it. I told him he could see it when he came back with the money for the fifth one. It made a serious problem for him. He did not know just how to manage his own greed. So he came back, again with a little over five thousand.

He didn’t look sufficiently disappointed when I told him there wasn’t any more. So I knew he had covered all bets. I had covered mine too. Leaving Harry to batter his way out of the bathroom, I had the elevator boy, greased with a ten, take me to the basement where a slightly more expensive fellow, prearranged, let me out a back way into a narrow alley. Forty minutes later I was on a train to Philadelphia, and from there I arranged air transit to Florida.

On an afternoon in late September I had the brown-eyed, sad-eyed blonde come over to the Busted Flush. Draperies muted the light in the lounge. She wore a blue dress faded by many washings, and came shyly out of the blaze heat of the day into the coolness of the lounge, wearing her blue dress. and her humble company manners, moving well on those shapely, sinewy dancer’s legs.

“I call you and you trot right over, just like that, Cathy?”

“I guess so.”

“You’re a very humble gal, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know. I guess so. You tried to help out, Mister. I’m right sorry about that woman. I told you so before, I guess you remember. I’m sorry it had to come about that way.”

Her shy oblique glance caught me and moved away. She looked down at her hands. I guess she knew about drunken men. Maybe she could understand the reasons for the drinks I had taken. Maybe she had heard it all in my voice when I had called her to come over.

“Your sympathy touches my heart,” I said.

She sighed deeply. “You can talk ugly if it suits you. I don’t mind. Seems like nothing comes out right for any person any more these days.”

She was sitting on the yellow couch. I picked up a small table and took it over and put it down in front of her. I went and locked the door and then went into the master stateroom and came out with the money. As I had planned, I put it in three piles on the table. A big pile and two slender ones.

“During the fun and games,” I said, “Junior spilled the goodies. He got some back and went down with them. There was one time when I could have hauled him in, dead, and picked him clean, the wet money and what other stones he had, and let him sink again. I didn’t have the stomach for it. In fact, I didn’t even think of it. I got five stones. The rest went overboard. I sold them in New York. I got a total of twenty-two thousand six hundred and sixty-eight dollars for them. There’s sixteen hundred and sixty-eight dollars in this pile right here.”

She looked at it and looked up at me, eyes as attentive and obedient as a learning child.

“It will cover my expenses,” I said. “I spent about that much. This pile is one thousand dollars. I’m taking it as a fee. That leaves twenty thousand in this pile. Yours.”

“You said it would be half for you.”

“Cathy, I’m not going to argue with you. It was a lousy recovery. It was peanuts. The fee is for self-respect. It’s yours.”

“I never could touch that much all at once in my lifetime. You should take half.”

“Listen, you idiot woman! How do you know you’re not being taken? Maybe I got it all from him. Why should you take my word about anything?”

“You did good. I didn’t even know you got a thing. You keep half like we said.”

I reached and grabbed her purse. I crammed the money into it and managed to fasten the catch.

“I got all I want!”

“There’s no call to yell. You want me to have it, I’ll take it. And I thank you kindly. Travis.”

I kicked the table out of the way and slumped onto the couch beside her. The damned humble, docile, forgiving woman. I wanted to beat her. I wanted to do some ugly thing that would destroy that mute earnestness, that anxiety to please me. I hooked a hand around her neck and pulled her over to me, stroked her body and kissed her roughly. I released her and she sagged back and moistened her lips and stared at me with a little frown between her brows.

“Well?” I said.

“If’n you’re telling me you want me, and waiting that I should say yes or no, I guess it would be yes, if it would comfort you some, if you think it’s what you want off me. I made bad trouble for you… and there isn’t much I can do one way or another.”

I got up and caught her wrist and pulled her along. She came willingly. I pushed her into the stateroom ahead of me. She looked around the room. I stumbled and sat on the bed. She undid a side zipper on that blue dress and gave me a quick and earnest look as she did so, teeth biting into her underlip, a boyish tousle of blonde hair falling across her forehead, her worried little frown still in place. She pulled the dress off over her head and hung it over the back of a chair. She balanced herself and slipped her shoes off. She wore very plain white nylon underthings, trim panties and a functional-looking bra.

“My God, Cathy,” I said, “you’re not under any compulsion.” She looked blank. “You’re not obligated.”

“You’re hurting, ain’t you?” she said, and reached her arms behind her and unhooked the bra.

“Get dressed!”

“What?”

“It was a lousy idea. Get dressed and go.”

I saw the tears come then, spilling, but not changing the expression of her face. “You got to know what you want,” she said. “I’m not so much. I guess you know that. But drinking and all, you got to know or have somebody tell you.”

I stretched out with my back to her. “I’m sorry” I said. “Just take off, will you?”

I listened for some sound. I guess she was standing there staring at me. Then she came around the bed and crawled on from the other side, came crawling into my arms, in just her little white pants, tugging and fitting my arms around her, hitching up so she could pull my face into the soft hollow of her throat. She smelled soapy-clean, and faintly of some flower perfume.

“Cathy, I didn’t mean…”

“Hush up,” she said. “It don’t have to be that, I know. What you want to do, you want to smash and kick and fight. I know about that, honey. I know about. something else too. You got to let go. It’s hard to let go. God love you, I know that. A woman can cry it off some. But you listen. I’m just somebody close right now, for you to hold to, and that he’ps too. It don’t matter what you want or don’t want, or do or don’t do. You just hang on close, and you try to let her go. She’s gone. You got to let her go the rest of the way, with no blaming yourself. I’m here with you. Just somebody to be with. You can use me just to hang onto, or love me or whip me or cry some if you could. Or talk about her or anything. I’ll be with you now. I’m off tonight. Now you think for a minute and say go or stay.”

“I guess… stay”

“Sure, honey”

With her free hand, with strong fingers, she worked at the tension in the nape of my neck, in the muscles of my shoulders. I did not realize how tense I had been until from time to time I sighed and at each long exhalation I seemed to settle and soften against her.

In the last of daylight I took her hand and looked at it, at the weathered back of it, the little blue veins, the country knuckles. It seemed a very dear hand indeed. I kissed her, and felt the little ridge where they’d stitched my mouth. Her brown eyes glinted in the last of the light, and in a little while her breathing quickened. It was all strange and deep and sweet and unemphatic, as though it was an inescapable extension of that comforting closeness, as natural as all the rest of it.

In darkness she said in a murmurous voice, “With that money, I should be near my boy. It will last good and long down to Candle Key. I could spell Christine, watching over the kids. She wants a waitress job again, tired of being alone there. I can give notice. Honey, what you should do, you should come on down there in this boat and tie on up to our old dock down there. Put you to work, on handyman stuff that’s piled up. With the other kids in school, we could maybe take Davie fishing in the skiff sometimes. What we could be… I guess is a comfort to one another for a time down there, just sweet and close like this was, and we would know when it was time for you to leave. It wouldn’t be no obligation to you, Travis.”

And so we did. And I was mended as much as I could ever expect. And left finally, wondering if I was not perhaps the world’s fool for not settling for that, for keeps.

On the late November day when I left, she grinned away tears, made our jokes which had become familiar to us, and stood on the dock holding the kid’s hand, waving until I was past the island and out of sight.