The Deep Blue Good-Bye

Cuatro

CATHY Kerr sat primly beside me on the genuine leather of old Miss Agnes as we drifted swiftly down through Perrine and Naranja and Florida City, then through Key Largo, Rock Harbor, Tavernier and across another bridge onto Candle Key. Her eagerness to see her child was evident when she pointed out the side road to me and, a hundred yards down the side road, the rock columns marking the entrance to the narrow driveway that led back to the old frame bay-front house. It was of black cypress and hard pine, a sagging weathered old slattern leaning comfortably on her pilings, ready to endure the hurricane winds that would flatten glossier structures.

A gang of small brown children came roaring around the corner of a shed and charged us. When they had sorted themselves out, I saw there were but three, all with a towheaded family resemblance. Cathy kissed and hugged them all strenuously, and showed me which one was Davie. She handed out three red lollipops and they sped away, licking and yelping.

Christine came out of the house. She was darker and heavier than Cathy. She wore faded jeans hacked off above the knee, and a man’s white T shirt with a rip in the shoulder. She moved slowly toward us, patting at her hair. She did not carry herself with any of Cathy’s lithe dancer’s grace, but she was a curiously attractive woman, slow and brooding, with a sensuous and challenging look.

Cathy introduced us. Christine stood there inside her smooth skin, warm and indolent, mildly speculative. It is that flavor exuded by women who have fashioned an earthy and simplified sexual adjustment to their environment, borne their young, achieved an unthinking physical confidence. They are often placidly unkempt, even grubby, taking no interest in the niceties of posture. They have a slow relish for the physical spectrum of food, sun, deep sleep, the needs of children, the caresses of affection. There is a tiny magnificence about them, like the sultry dignity of she-lions.

She kissed her sister, scratched her bare arm, said she was glad to meet me and come on in, there was coffee made recent.

The house was untidy with tracked shell and broken toys, clothing and crumbs. There was a frayed grass rug in the living room, and gigantic Victorian furniture, the dark wood scarred, the upholstery stained and faded. She brought in coffee in white mugs, and it was dark, strong and delicious.

Christy sat on the couch with brown scratched legs curled under her and said, “What I was thinking, that Lauralee Hutz is looking for something, and she could be here days for twenty-five a week and I could maybe make forty-five waitress at the Caribbee, but it would mean getting there and back, and the garden is coming along good, and I got six dollars last week from Gus for crabs, so it don’t seem worth it all the way around, getting along the way we are with what you send down, but it’s lonely some days nobody to talk with but little kids.”

“Did you fix up that tax money?”

“I took it in person, and Mr. Olney he showed me how it figures out a half per cent a month from the time it was first due. I got the receipt out there in the breadbox, Sis.”

“Christine, you do how you feel about the job and all.”

She gave Cathy a small curious smile. “Max keeps stopping by-”

“You were going to run him off.”

“I haven’t rightly decided,” Christine said. She looked me over. “You work at the same place, Mr. McGee?”

“No. I met Cathy through Chookie McCall. I had an errand down this way, so I thought Cathy might like to ride down.”

Cathy said abruptly, “Daddy’s letters from in the Army, you throw them out going through Ma’s things?”

“I don’t think I did. What do you want them for?”

“Just to read over again.”

“Where they’d be if anyplace, is in the hump-top trunk in that back bedroom, maybe in the top drawer someplace.”

Cathy went off. I heard her quick step on the wooden stairs.

“You going around with her?” Christine asked.

“No.”

“You married?”

“No.”

“She’s still legal married to Kerr, but she could say desertion and get loose in six months. A man could do a lot worse. She’s strong and she’s pretty and she’s a worker. She’s saddened now, but anybody make her happy, they’d see a different woman. She’s a loving one, laughing and singing when she’s happy.”

“I guess Junior Allen saddened her.”

She looked surprised. “You know all about him?”

“Most of it, I guess.”

“She must like you to tell you. Cathy is older than me but younger. She doesn’t see things about people. I wanted to run him off the place. All that laughing and smiling, and his eyes didn’t smile. Then he got to her, loving her up so she couldn’t think straight, and it was too late to run him off by then. Even too late to tell her he put his hands on me every chance he had, laughing at me when I called him names. I knew he was after something. I knew he was looking. But I didn’t know what for or where it could be. It was a wicked way he did her, Mr. McGee, getting her to need him so bad, then walking out. Better for her if he never come anywhere near here again, but he come back with our money and moved in on a rich woman, and not a damn thing in the world anybody could do about it.”

“Go to the police?”

“Why? Whatever he got was already stole one time. Police never did any favors for the Berry family. When you’ve got a daddy dies in prison, you don’t look friendly on the police!”

“When was the last time Allen was in the area?”

Suspicion changed her placid face, tightening it. “You wouldn’t be some kind of police?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

She waited out the fade of suspicion, gave a little nod. “He was coming and going, taking her off on that boat, staying there with her, and maybe a month ago, one day the boat was gone and she was there alone. There’s a sale sign on that house and she stays pretty much inside the house and they say she’d turned to drinking more, so perhaps Junior Allen is gone for good.”

“Perhaps that’s just as well, for Cathy’s sake. He shamed her. People knew what was going on. And they knew Kerr ran out on her. Junior Allen called her names and people heard it. They laugh about her. I clawed one face bone raw and they don’t do their laughing in front of me. What Cathy doesn’t need is any more trouble. You remember that. I don’t think she can take one more little bit of any kind of trouble.”

“I don’t plan to give her any”

“She looks pretty good now. All slim as a girl.” She sighed. “Me, I seem to keep right on widening out.”

Cathy came rattling down the stairs with a crushed white box fastened with rubber bands. “They were down in the bottom,” she said. “And there was this picture.” She showed it to Christine and then brought it over to me. It was a snapshot. A powerful man sat grinning on the top step of the porch of the old house. A placid pretty woman in a print dress sat beside him. The man had his arm around a squinting, towheaded girl of about five. She was leaning against him. A younger girl was in her mother’s lap, her fingers in her mouth.

“Old times,” Cathy said wistfully. “Suppose somebody came to us that day and told all of us how things would be. You wonder, would it have changed a thing?”

“I wish that somebody would come along right now,” Christine said. “I could use the information. We’re due for good luck, Sis. The both of us.”

I stood up. “I’ll go along and do my errand and stop back for you, Cathy.”

“Shall we wait lunch?” Christine asked.

“Better not. I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

The town of Candle Key was a wide place on a fast road. The key was narrow at that point. The town was near the southwest bridge off the key. It had taken a good scouring in 1960 and had a fresh new look, modern gas stations, waterfront motels, restaurants, gift shops, marine supplies, boat yards, post office.

I stopped at the big Esso station and found the station manager at the desk marking an inventory sheet. He was a hunched, seamed, cadaverous man with dusty-looking black hair and his name was Rollo Urthis. He greeted me with the wary regard salesmen grow accustomed to.

“Mr. Urthis, my name is McGee. I’m trying to get a line on the present whereabouts of one Ambrose Allen. Our records show that he worked for you for several months.”

“Junior Allen. Sure. He worked here. What’s it all about?”

“Just routine.” I took a piece of paper from my wallet, looked at it and put it back. “There’s an unpaid hotel bill of two hundred and twelve dollars and twenty cents. At the Bayway Hotel in Miami, back in March. They put it in the hands of the agency I work for, and he registered there as coming from Candle Key.”

His grin exposed a very bad set of teeth. “Now that must be just one of them little details that Mister Junior Allen overlooked. When you run across him, he’ll probably just pay you off out of the spare change he carries in his pocket and give you a big tip for your trouble, Mister.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, Mr. Urthis.”

“He quit me in February and got rich all of a sudden.”

“Did he inherit money?”

“I don’t know as that is just the right word. People got different ideas where he got it. He was away for nearly a month and came back on a big cruiser he bought himself, new clothes and a gold wristwatch no thicker than a silver dollar. I’d say he made a woman give it to him. He’s the kind can make women do things they might not want to do if he gave them time to think about it. He came here and moved right in with the Berry girls, big as life. Their ma was still alive then, last year. They had hard luck, both of them. Cathy is as nice a little woman as you’d want to know, but he got next to her pretty quick. When he got the money he dropped her and moved in on Mrs. Atkinson. She was a customer a long time, and I could have swore she wouldn’t stand for anything like that. But she did. Lost me a customer too. God knows where he’s at now. But maybe Mrs. Atkinson would know, if you could get her to talk to you about it. I hear she’s touchy on the subject. Nobody around here has seen Junior Allen in better than a month I’d say.”

“Was he a satisfactory employee, Mr. Urthis?”

“If he wasn’t I wouldn’t have kept him. Sure, he was all right. A quick-moving man, real good when we had a rush, and good at fixing things. The trade liked him. He smiled all the time, and he could always find something that needed doing around here. Maybe he was just a little bit too friendly with the women customers, the good-looking ones. Kidding around a little, but nobody complained. Frankly, I was sorry when he quit. The people you get these days, they don’t want to work.”

“Was he reliable in money matters?”

“I’d say so. I don’t think he left owing anybody, and if he did, he sure was able to pay up when he got back. I think he got it off Mrs. Atkinson some way. If so, it would be up to her to complain, not me.”

“Where could I find her?”

“See that big real estate sign up the road? Turn right just beyond it and go straight down to the water and turn right again, and it’s the second house on the right, a long low white colored house.”

It was one of those Florida houses I find unsympathetic, all block tile, glass, terrazzo, aluminum. They have a surgical coldness. Each one seems to be merely some complex corridor arrangement, a going-through place, an entrance built to some place of a better warmth and privacy that was never constructed. When you pause in these rooms, you have the feeling you are waiting. You feel that a door will open and you will be summoned, and horrid things will happen to you before they let you go. You can not mark these houses with any homely flavor of living. When they are emptied after occupancy they have the look of places where the blood has recently been washed away.

The yard was scrubby with dry weeds. A dirty white Thunderbird rested in the double carport. A new red and white sign in the yard said that Jeff Bocka would be happy to sell this residence to anyone. I stood at the formal entrance, thumbed a plastic button and heard an inside dingle. I heard a faint swift approaching tickety-clack of sandals on tile, and the white door was flung open, and I discarded all preconceived visions of Mrs. Atkinson.

She was a tall and slender woman, possibly in her early thirties. Her skin had the extraordinary fineness of grain, and the translucence you see in small children and fashion models. In her fine long hands, delicacy of wrists, floating texture of dark hair, and in the mobility of the long narrow sensitive structuring of her face there was the look of something almost too well made, too highly bred, too finely drawn for all the natural crudities of human existence. Her eyes were large and very dark and tilted and set widely. She wore dark Bermuda shorts and sandals and a crisp blue and white blouse, no jewelry of any kind, a sparing touch of lipstick.

“Who are you? What do you want? Who are you?” Her voice was light and fast and intense and her mouth trembled. She seemed to be on the narrow edge of emotional disaster, holding herself in check with the greatest effort. And about her was a rich and heavy scent of brandy, and an unsteadiness, the eyes too swift and not exactly in focus.

“Mrs. Atkinson, my name is Travis McGee.”

“Yes? Yes? What do you want?”

I tried to look disarming. I am pretty good at that. I have one of those useful faces. Tanned American. Bright eyes and white teeth shining amid a broad brown reliable bony visage. The proper folk-hero crinkle at the corners of the eyes, and the bashful appealing smile, when needed. I have been told that when I have been aroused in violent directions I can look like something from an unused corner of hell, but I wouldn’t know about that. My mirror consistently reflects that folksy image of the young project engineer who flung the bridge across the river in spite of overwhelming odds, up to and including the poisoned arrow in his heroic shoulder.

So I looked disarming. When they give you something to use, you use it. Many bank robbers look extraordinarily reliable. So you use your face to make faces with, play parts, pick up cues. In every contact with every other human in every day of your life, you become what you sense they want of you or, if you are motivated the other way, exactly what they do not want. Were this not so, there would be no place left to hide.

“I just wanted to talk to you about…”

“I won’t show the house without an appointment. That was the arrangement. I’m sorry.” They learn that voice and that diction in those little schools they go to before they go on to Smith and Vassar and Wellesley.

“I want to talk to you about Junior Allen.”

I could have listed maybe fifty possible reactions without coming close to the one I got. Her eyes dulled and her narrow nostrils flared wide and her mouth fell into sickness. She lost her posture and stood in an ugly way. “That’s it, I suppose,” she said in a dragging tone. “Certainly. Am I a gift? Or was there a fee?” She whirled and hurried away.

She skidded and nearly fell when she turned left at the end of the foyer. I heard an unseen door bang. I stood there in the silence. Then I heard a muffled sound of retching, tiny and far off and agonizing. The noon sun blasted down upon whiteness. I stepped into the relative darkness of the house, into the cool breath of air conditioning. I closed the formal door.

She was still being sick. I went swiftly and quietly through the house. It was as littered as Christine’s house, but a different sort of litter. Glasses, dirty ashtrays, food untouched, clothing, things broken in violence. But you could not mark that cold house. In thirty seconds with a fire hose you could have it dripping and absolutely clean. There was no one else there. She was living in this big house like a sick frail animal in a cave.

I could hear water running. I rapped on the closed door.

“Are you all right?”

I heard a murmur I could not interpret. It had a vague sound of reassurance. I roamed around. The place offended me. There was a giant dishwasher in the kitchen. I found a big tray and went through the house collecting the glasses and plates and cups. It took three trips. I scraped stale food into the disposer. Housewife McGee. After I set the dishwasher to churning, I felt a little better.

I went back and listened at the door. There was no sound.

“Are you all right in there?”

The door opened and she came out and leaned against the wall just outside the bathroom door. She had a ghastly pallor and the rings around her eyes looked more smudged. “Are you moving in?” she asked tonelessly.

“I just came here to…”

“This morning I looked at myself, and I thought maybe the process had to start somewhere, so I got terribly clean. I washed my hair and scrubbed and scrubbed, and stripped down the bed and even found a drawer with clean cIothing in it, for a wonder. So you’re in luck, aren’t you? Excellent timing, provided you wish to start clean.”

“Mrs. Atkinson, I don’t think you…”

She looked at me with a horrid parody of sensuality, a sick bright leer. “I suppose you know all of my specialties, dear.”

“Will you listen to me!”

“I’m sure you don’t mind if I have a drink first. I’m really much better after I have some drinks.”

“I’ve never seen Junior Allen in my life!”

“I hope he told you I’ve gotten terribly scrawny and…” She stopped the hideous parody of enticement and stared at me. “What did you say?”

“I’ve never seen Junior Allen in my life.”

She rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand. “Why did you come to me?”

“I want to help you.”

“Help me what?”

“You said it yourself. The process has to start somewhere.”

She stared at me without comprehension, and then with a savage doubt, and finally, slowly, with belief. She turned, sagging, and, before I could catch her, she fell to her knees, bare knees making a painful sound of bone against terrazzo. She hunched down against the baseboard and rubbed her face back and forth and began her howling, whooping sobs and coughings. I gathered her up. She shuddered violently at my touch. She was far too light.

I took her to her bedroom. When I stretched her out on her freshly made bed, the sobbing stopped abruptly. She became as rigid as dry sticks, her eyes staring at me with glassy enormity, her bloodless lips sucked in. I took her sandals off and covered her with the spread. I fixed the blinds to darken the room, as those helpless eyes followed me. I brought a stool over and put it beside her bed and sat down and took her long frail cold hand and said, “I meant it. What’s your name?”

“Lois.”

“All right, Lois. Cry. Cry the hell out of it. Rip it all open. Let it go.”

“I can’t,” she whispered. And suddenly she began to cry again. She yanked her hand free, rolled over, rolled her face into the pillow and began the harsh sobbing.

I had to make a guess about what would be right and what would be wrong for her. I had to take a risk. I based the risk on what I know of loneliness, of the need of closeness in loneliness. I stroked her, totally impersonal, the way you soothe a terrified animal. At first she would leap and buck at the slightest touch. After a while there was only a tremor when I touched her, and finally that too was gone. She hiccuped and at last fell down into sleep, curled and spent.

I searched the house until I found her keys. I locked up and left her in the darkened room. I checked the bus schedules and went and got Cathy and took her to where she could catch the bus which would get her home in time. I told her a little of it. There was no question in her mind about my obligation to stay.