The Deep Blue Good-Bye

Seis

SHE TOOK a good breakfast in the morning and seemed well enough for me to leave her for a time. I went off in Miss Agnes and picked up the laundry and then I made a call on Jeff Bocka, the realtor whose sign stood in Lois Atkinson’s yard.

He had a face and head as round and pink as a beach ball. He had that total and almost obscene hairlessness that some diseases cause, a baldness of skull, brows and eyelids. He had amber eyes and small amber teeth.

“Of course I can move that house. I can move it if I can show it, buddy. But I can’t show it if that nutty broad screws it up. I made appointments. Twice. What happens? The place is a mess and she is a mess. The first time she is all right for ten minutes, then starts screaming at my clients. The second time she wouldn’t even let us in. She’s got the place free and clear. There’s a recent survey. No cloud on the title. A sound house in a good location. Waterfront. I can move it for forty-five tomorrow, but nobody buys a house if they can’t look at it, buddy.” He shook his head. “When I get around to it, I take my sign off that lawn.”

“When she moves out, if she still wants to sell, I’ll leave the keys with you.”

“How about the condition of it?”

“It will be okay.”

“What do you mean, if she wants to sell?”

“If, on second thought, she’s absolutely certain.”

“She better move away. She had some friends here. Nice people. Until that gas jockey moved in with her and she started hitting the bottle.”

“I guess that offends your sense of morality.”

He showed me his little teeth. “This is a decent place.”

“They all are, friend.”

I walked away and left him standing in the doorway of his cinderblock office, the sunshine making: silver highlights on his smooth pink skull.

Ramirez came in the afternoon and marveled at the improvement. She got dressed in the afternoon. She was very reserved. She looked sleepy and moved slowly. In the evening she had another bad spell. And again, in the darkness, she talked.

“I started to come back to life in spite of him, Trav. I seemed to realize that he was trying to destroy me, and I knew I would not be destroyed. I found a little quiet place way back inside myself, and no matter what he made me do, I could go back there and it didn’t seem to matter. I began to feel that he had done his worst, and I was in some sense stronger than he was, and I would survive him, and get over him, and get free of him. I began to be able to lift my head and to think of ways of ending it. But… he couldn’t let that happen, of course. He couldn’t let me escape.”

It was difficult for her to try to tell me how he had blocked all escape. It became incoherent. And there was much of it she could not remember, fortunately. He kept her drunk so she would be easier to manage, and lessen the chance of her going over the side when she was unguarded.

On that last cruise, Junior Allen had taken the boat over to Bimini. And there he had taken aboard a double-gaited little Haitian slut named Fancha, and from there they had gone to a remote bay in the Berry Islands and anchored and stayed there a week, and completed the corruption and destruction of Lois Atkinson. She remembered nothing of the trip back to Candle Key. And there, in June, he had left for good, at his option, knowing he had left that gentle woman with all the explosive images and fragmentary memories that would kill her.

I speculated about motive after Lois had drifted off into sleep. There are men in this world who are compelled to destroy the most fragile and valuable things they can find, the same way rowdy children will ravage a beautiful home. Look at me, they are saying.

Lois, shy, lovely, sensitive, a graceful and cultivated woman, merely by the fact of her existence offered a challenge to Junior Allen. And she had challenged him further by defying him. Even though it meant the stupidity of returning to Candle Key after finding and taking what Sergeant David Berry had hidden, he had to meet that challenge and totally subdue a more delicate morsel than Cathy Kerr could ever be.

The worst crimes of man against woman do not appear on the statutes. A smiling man, quick and handy as a cat, webbed with muscle, armored with money, now at liberty in an unsuspecting world, greedy as a weasel in a hen house. I knew the motive. The motive was murder. And this symbolic killing might easily be followed by the more literal act.

Sly and reckless, compulsive and bold. The goat-god, with hoof and smile and hairy ears, satyr at the helm of the Play Pen.

Love him, understand him, forgive him, lead him shyly to Freud, or Jesus.

Or else take the contemporarily untenable position that evil, undiluted by any hint of childhood trauma, does exist in the world, exists for its own precise sake, the pustular bequest from the beast, as inexplicable as Belsen.

I kissed her sweaty temple and tucked the blanket around her narrow shoulder. Symbol of weakness. Symbol of the beast. But I could find no symbol for myself. McGee as avenging angel was a little too much to swallow. I hoped to temper vengeance with greed. Or conversely. Either way, it does simplify the rationalizations.

She began to gorge like a wolf. The anticipated placidity came, bringing small sweet absent smiles, yawns and drowsiness. She dressed and we took walks, and as the edges of bone quickly softened with new flesh, the night talks dwindled. I was in charge of a vegetable woman, mildly amiable, unquestioning, softly remote, an eater and a sleeper, a slow walker. Ramirez was paid off, offering no thoughts for the future.

She phoned her sister-in-law, proclaiming that everything was peachy. With me she talked over the segments of a happy childhood. But she did not like the house and did not want the house, or the car. I organized her financial matters, and she signed the deposit slip and all the small checks for the anxious. She wanted to be elsewhere, but did not worry about where, or want the effort of planning anything. We packed. There was not much she wanted. Miss Agnes’ half truck, accommodated it readily.

I took the keys to Bocka, with the address where she could be reached. She signed the title and I sold her car, deposited the cash in her account. She signed the post office change of address card. I made the arrangements about the utilities. I took a last look through the house. She sat out in the car. I checked all the windows, turned the air conditioning off, slammed the front door.

As we drove away, she did not look back. She sat with a dreaming smile, her hands folded in her lap.

Other people go down to the keys and bring back shell ashtrays or mounted fish or pottery flamingos. Travis McGee brings back a Lois Atkinson. The souvenir fervor is the mainstay of a tourist economy.

“You can stay aboard my houseboat until you find a place.”

“All right.”

“Maybe you’d like to go back to New Haven to be near your brother.”

“Maybe I would.”

“You should be feeling well enough to travel pretty soon.”

“I guess so.”

“Would you rather I found you a place of your own right away?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Which would you rather do?”

The effort of decision brought her out of torpor. She made fists and her lips tightened. “I guess I have to be with you.”

“For a little while.”

“I have to be with you.”

The patient becomes emotionally dependent upon the analyst. She said it without anxiety. She stated her fact, strangely confident I would accept that fact as completely as she did. In a little while she slumped over against the door and fell asleep. I felt indignant.

How could she be so damned certain she had not given herself over into the hands of a Junior Allen of another variety? Where did all this suffocating trust come from? Here was a mature woman who did not seem to know that the wide world is full of monsters, even after one vivid example. I had the feeling that if I told her I was takling her to the cannibal isles to sell her for stew meat, she would wear the same Mona Lisa smile of total acceptance.

I am just not that trustworthy.

Below decks the Busted Flush was very hot and very stale and offensively damp. A power failure had kicked the air conditioning off. I had set the thermostat at eighty when I left, minimum power expenditure, just enough to keep it from getting the way it was. I reset it for sixty-five. It would be an hour before it was comfortable. I took her to a place where we could get a good lunch, and brought her back. She came aboard. I toted her gear aboard. She looked around, mildly and placidly interested. I stowed her and her gear in the other stateroom. She took a shower and went to bed.

I found nine days of mail clogging my box. I weeded it down to a few bills, two personal letters. I phoned Chook. She wanted to know where the hell I’d been. It pleased me that Cathy hadn’t told her. I said I’d been staying with a sick friend. She gave me Cathy’s number. I phoned her. She sounded very guarded, but said she was alone and told me I could come and see her, and told me how to find it. It was over in town, the top floor of a cheap duplex behind one of the commercial strips along Route One. Pizza, Guaranteed Re-treads, Smitty’s Sheet Metal, Bonded Warehouse. She lived beyond neon and the windwhipped fragments of banners announcing forgotten sales.

It was stinking hot upstairs. All buff plaster and ragged wicker, straw and old bamboo. A big fan whizzed and whined by a window, blowing the warm air through. She wore sleazy shorts and a faded halter top. She explained that she shared the place with another dancer from the group and a girl who worked in the local television station. She had two card tables set up. She was stitching away on new costumes for the group. Extra money, she explained. She offered iced tea.

I sat in a wicker chair near the hot breath of the fan and told her about Mrs. Atkinson. Not all of it. She worked and listened. When I leaned back my shirt stuck to the wicker. It had become August while I wasn’t looking. She moved around the tables, nipping and stitching, bending and turning, and I was too aware of the modeling of those good sinewy legs, agleam with sweat, and the rock-solid roundness of the dancer butt. What I didn’t tell her about Lois, she seemed perfectly able to guess. She carried pins in her mouth. The material she worked with was gold and white.

“I thought you’d changed your mind,” she said.

“No.”

“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t, Trav.” The pins blurred enunciation.

“Were there names and addresses in the letters?”

She straightened. “The ones there were, I put them separate. I can get them for you.” She brought them to me. I read them while she worked. She had a little blue radio turned low, the music merging with the noise of the fan. CMCA, Havana. Voice of the land of peace and freedom and brotherhood. No commercials. Nothing left to sell.

V-Mail, from a long-ago war.

Dear Wife: I have been well and hopping you are the same and the girls too have bought a money order and sending it along later do not try to save all instead buy what you need. I have had a lot of flight time this pass two months but for me it is all cargo work and not dangarous so dont worry about it none. It rains a lot this time of year, more than home even. Since Sugarman got sent elsewhere, we have a new pilot his name is Wm Callowell from Troy New York, a first Lt. and a good safe flyer and he fits in okay with me and George so no worry on that acct. The food isn’t much but I am eating good and feeling fine. You tell Cathy I am glad she likes her teacher, and kiss her for me and Christy too and a kiss for yourself as always your loving husb. Dave.

There were other names in other letters. Casual references, less complete. Vern from Kerrville, Texas. Degan from California. I wrote down all the fragments.

She sat with the showgirl brevities in her lap and stitched neatly and quickly. “I didn’t know Mrs. Atkinson would be like that,” she said thoughtfully.

“It wasn’t anything she wanted to get involved in.”

“No more’n me. She’s beautiful.” The brown-eyed look was quick. “You keeping her right there on your boat?”

“Until she feels better.”

She crossed the room and put the costumes in a small suitcase and closed the lid. “Maybe she needs help more than I do.”

“She needs a different kind of help.”

“What are you going to do next?”

“Find out where your father got the money, if I can.”

“What time is it?”

“A little after five.”

“I’ve got to change and go out there.”

“Have you got a ride?”

“I take a bus mostly.”

“I can wait and take you on out.”

“I don’t like to be a trouble to you, Trav.”

I waited. She showered quickly and came out of the bedroom wearing a pink blouse and a white skirt. In moments the blouse was damp and beginning to cling. I drove her on out to Teabolt’s Mile O’Beach and went on back to Bahia Mar. My ward had arisen. She had slept so hard her eyes looked puffy, but she had acquainted herself with the equipment in my stainless steel galley, and she wore a pretty cotton dress, which hung just a little loosely on her, and she had taken two generous steaks out of the locker and set them out to thaw. She seemed a little more aware of the situation, shyly aware that she might be a nuisance.

“I could cook and clean laundry and things like that,and take care of and anything else you want me to do, Trav.”

“If you feel up to it.”

“I don’t want to be a dead weight.”

“Your job is to get well.”

I guess I wasn’t particularly gracious. Mine are bachelor ways, tending toward too much order and habit. Some affectionate little guest for a few days is one thing. A party cruise is another. But a lady in residence is potential irritation.

“I can pay my share,” she said in a small voice.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” I roared. She fled to her stateroom and silently closed the door.

In twenty minutes I felt sufficiently ashamed of myself to look in on her. She was diagonally across the big bed, sound asleep. I made a drink and carried it around until it was gone, and made another, and then went in and shook her awake.

“If you want to cook, it’s time to cook.”

“All right, Trav.”

“Medium rare.”

“Yes, dear.”

“Don’t be so damned humble!”

“I’ll try.”

After dinner, after she had cleaned up the galley, I brought her into the lounge and asked her if she felt well enough for questions. “What about?”

“Junior Allen.”

Her mouth twisted and she closed her eyes for a moment. She opened them and said, “You can ask questions.”

But first I had to brief her. I had to make her understand why I was asking and what I wanted to know. She had heard village gossip about Junior Allen and the sisters. I gave her all of the facts, as I knew them.

For once her new placidity was impaired.

She stared across at me through the lamplight. “He had a lot of cash with him When he came back. I didn’t give him anything. So everything, the boat and everything, came from what he took from that place where he was living?”

“That’s the only answer.”

“But what could it have been?”

“Something he had to go to New York to get rid of.”

“Travis, why are you so interested in all this?”

I tried to give her a reassuring smile, but from the look on her face it was not successful. “I am going to take it away from him,” I said, in a voice not quite my own.

“I don’t understand.”

“And keep some of it and give Cathy her share.”

“She’s important to you?”

“As important as you are.”

She thought that over. “Is… is this the sort of thing you do?”

“It’s in the general area of the sort of thing I do, when I happen to need the money.”

“But… he seems to be such a dangerous man. And maybe he’s spent it all by now. And if he hasn’t, how could you get anything away from him? I don’t think you could, without killing him.”

“I would think of that as a normal business risk, Lois.”

The color she had regained drained out of her face. “How can you say such a terrible thing? You… you’ve been so good to me.”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“But don’t you see that…”

“I see that you are a damned fool, Lois. You took me at face value. You decided what sort of a person I am. If I can’t match that image, it isn’t my fault.”

After a long silence she said, “Isn’t it a waste?”

“Waste of what?”

“Of you! It seems degrading. Forgive me for saying that. I’ve seen those African movies. The lion makes a kill and then clever animals come in and grab something and run. You’re so bright, Tray, and so intuitive about people. And you have… the gift of tenderness. And sympathy. You could be almost anything.”

“Of course!” I said, springing to my feet and beginning to pace back and forth through the lounge. “Why didn’t I think of that! Here I am, wasting the golden years on this lousy barge, getting all mixed up with lame-duck women when I could be out there seeking and striving. Who am I to keep from putting my shoulder to the wheel? Why am I not thinking about an estata and how to protect it? Gad, woman, I could be writing a million dollars a year in life insurance. I should be pulling a big oar in the flagship of life. Maybe it isn’t too late yet! Find the little woman, and go for the whole bit. Kiwanis, P.T.A., fund drives, cookouts, a clean desk, and vote the straight ticket, yessiree bob. Then when I become a senior citizen, I can look back upon…”

I stopped when I heard the small sound she was making. She sat with her head bowed. I went over and put my fingertips under her chin. I tilted her head up and looked down into her streaming eyes.

“Please, don’t,” she whispered.

“You’re beginning to bring out the worst in me, woman.”

“It was none of my business.”

“I will not dispute you.”

“But… who did this to you?”

“I’ll never know you well enough to try to tell you, Lois.”

She tried to smile. “I guess it can’t be any plainer than that.”

“And I’m not a tragic figure, no matter how hard you try to make me into one. I’m delighted with myself, woman.”

“And you wouldn’t say it that way if you were.”

“Spare me the cute insights.”

She shivered and pulled herself together. “I’m grateful to you. I’ll try to answer questions.”

“What did he say about money?”

She tried. She sat as trim and obedient as a bright girl in class. He said he had all the money he would ever need. Yes, he had repeated that in different ways at different times. And said he would never have to use any of it to buy a woman. There was some hiding place aboard where he kept cash.

“And maybe something else,” she said in an odd voice.

“What?”

“Let me think,” she said. Her face was very still. She had that listening look people wear when they dig into small vague memories. “A crooked blue marble,” she said. “It was such a hot day. Sickeningly hot because there was no wind at all. And all that glare off the water. I’d drunk too much. I was trying not to be sick. Their voices were a blur. They were always arguing about something, shouting at each other. He was showing her something, and it fell to the deck, a blue marble, and it rolled toward her across the teak. It rolled crooked.

“She pounced on it and popped it into her mouth, like a child. I guess she wasn’t over eighteen, but she was as old as all the evil in the world. He was murderously angry and he went at her and she ran, laughing at him. He chased her all over the boat and when he had her cornered, she dived over the side. She floated, laughing and squealing at him. She was naked. She looked very dark in the water, and I could see her shadow shimmering on the white sand bottom. He ran and got a gun.

“It surprised me that it made such a small snapping noise, but the bullets spit the water up, close to her, and she came quickly to the boarding ladder and climbed aboard. He took her by the nape of the neck and she spat the blue marble into his hand. Then, still holding her, he beat her with his fist until she spent most of the rest of the day down in one of the bunks, whimpering.

“The marble was a very deep blue. He kept thinking about it and getting mad all over again. He would yell down there, cursing her. He went down once or maybe twice and struck her again.” She stared at me with dead eyes and said, “I think I remember it because that was the longest time that they left me alone. Afterwards I kept thinking of the gun. I tried to find it, but I couldn’t. When he caught me looking for it, he guessed, and he gave me to her and watched her beat me.

“She made it look as if she was beating me harder than she was. She wasn’t sorry for me. She just didn’t want to hurt me so badly I’d be of no use to her. She was terribly hard and chunky and strong. Her legs and thighs were like thick polished mahogany, and she laughed at nothing and she sang all the time in a hard screeching voice, in very bad French. In my empty house, before you came to me, Trav, I kept hearing her singing, as loudly as if she was in the next room.”

Some of the old mad light came back into her eyes. “Do you want to hear me sing like Fancha?”

“Take it easy, honey”

“Would you like me to laugh and dance like Fancha?”

She had begun to tremble violently. I hurried to get the pills and brought her one of the strong ones. She didn’t try to fight it. She was in bed and asleep in fifteen minutes.

After I had chased the ghastliness of Fancha out of my mind, I settled down to some planning. A trip out to Leavenworth had a deceptive plausibility. It is bad practice to try to question prison people. They live by the book. They need documentation and identification and proper authority. When you can’t present it, they immediately wonder if you are there to try to help somebody slip out. I decided that was the last resort. I would chase down, every other lead, and if they all dwindled to absolutely nothing, then I would go out there to Kansas and get the feel of it and try to con somebody.

Before I went to bed, I took a look at my ward. In the faint light she looked no more than nineteen, gentle, and unmarked by any ugliness.