"What is it?"
"Dr. Ramirez called it a mild tranquilizer."
I sat nearby. She spooned the soup up. Her hand trembled. Her nails were clean and broken. There was an old bruise, saffroned, on the side of her slender throat. She was too aware of my watching her and so I tried some mild chatter. Abstract theory by McGee. My tourist theory. Any Ohioan crossing the state line into Florida should be fitted with a metal box that rests against the small of the back. Every ninety seconds a bell rings and a dollar bill emerges part way from a slot in the top of the box. The nearest native removes it. That would take care of the tipping problem. At places where hundreds of them flock together, the ringing of bells would be continuous.
It was difficult to amuse her. She was too close to being broken. The best I could achieve was a very small quick smile. She managed two thirds of the soup and two bites of toast. I set them aside. She slid down a little and yawned.
"My drink?"
"In a little while."
She started to speak. Her eyes blurred and closed. In a few moments her mouth sagged open and she slept. In sleep the intense strain was gone and she looked younger. I turned the bedroom lights out. An hour later the phone rang. Someone wanted to sell us an attractive building lot at Marathon Heights.
As she slept I searched for the personal data. I finally found the traditional steel box behind books in the living room. It opened readily with a bent paper clip. Birth certificate, marriage license, divorce decree, keys to a safedeposit box, miscellany of family materials, income statements. I spread it out and pieced together her current status. She had accepted a settlement at the time of divorce three years ago. The house was a part of it. Her income was from a trust account in a bank in Hartford, Connecticut, a family trust setup whereby she received a little over seven hundred dollars a month and could not touch the princ.i.p.al amount. Her maiden name was Fairlea. There was an elder brother in New Haven.
D. Harper Fairlea. On her hall table was a great stack of unopened mail. I checked it over and found that people were clamoring to have their bills paid, and in the stack I found her trust income checks, unopened, for May June and July. Her personal checkbook was in the top drawer of the living-room desk, a built-in affair. She had not balanced it in some time, and I estimated she had a couple of hundred dollars in her account.
At nine-thirty I called D. Harper Fairlea in New Haven. They said he was ill and could not come to the phone. I asked to talk to his wife. She had a soft, pleasant voice.
"Mr. McGee, surely Lois could tell you that Harp had a severe heart attack some months ago. He"s been home a few weeks now, and it is going to be a long haul. Really I thought the very least she could do was come up here. He is her only blood relative, you know. And I have been wondering why we haven"t heard from her. If she is in some sort of trouble and needs help, about all we can say is that we hope things will work out for her. We really can"t give her any kind of a.s.sistance right now. We have three children in school, Mr. McGee. I don"t even want to tell Harp about this. I don"t want to give him something else to fret about. I"ve been inventing imaginary phone calls from Lois, inventing concern and telling him she is fine."
"I"ll know better in a few days how she is, and what will have to be done."
"I understood she has some nice friends down there."
"Not lately."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"I think she gave up her nice friends."
"Please have her phone me when she"s able. I"m going to worry about her. But there"s just nothing I can do. I can"t leave Harp now, and I just don"t see how I could take her in."
No help there. She hadn"t seemed very concerned about who I might be. I sensed that the two sisters-in-law had not gotten along too well. So it was no longer a case of waiting for somebody to come and take over. I was stuck, temporarily.
I made up a bed in the bedroom next to hers. I left my door and her door open. In the middle of the night I was awakened by the sound of gla.s.s breaking. I pulled my pants on and went looking. Her bed was empty. The nightgown and bed jacket were on the floor beside the bed. The nightgown was ripped.
I found her in the kitchen alcove, fumbling with the bottles. I turned on the white blaze of fluorescence and she squinted toward me, standing naked in spilled liquor and broken gla.s.s. She looked at me but I do not think she knew me. "Where is Fancha?" she yelled. "Where is that b.i.t.c.h? I hear her singing."
She was beautifully made, but far too thin. Her bones were sharp against the smoothness of her, her ribs visible. Except in the meagerness of hips and b.r.e.a.s.t.s, all the fatty tissue had been burned away, and her belly had the slight bloat that indicates starvation. I got her away from there. Miraculously, she had not cut her feet. She squirmed with surprising strength, whining, trying to scratch and bite. I got her back into her bed, and when she stopped fighting me, I got one of the other pills down her. Soon it began to take effect. I put the lights out. I sat by her. She held my wrist very tightly, and fought against the effects of the pill. She would start to slide away and then struggle back to semi-consciousness. I did not understand a lot of her mumbling. Sometimes she seemed to be talking to me, and at other times she was back in her immediate past.
Once, with great clarity, with a mature and stately indignation she said, "I will not do that!" Moments later she repeated it, but this time in the lisping narrow voice of a scared young child. "Oh, I will not do that!" The contrast came close to breaking my heart.
And then at last she slept. I cleaned up, hid the remaining liquor and went back to bed.
In the morning she was rational, and even a bit hungry. She ate eggs scrambled with b.u.t.ter and cream, and had a slice of toast. She napped for a little while, arid then she wanted to talk.
"It was such a stupid thing, in the beginning," she said. "You live here all year around, and you want the natives to like you. You try to be pleasant. It"s a small community, after all. He was at the gas station. And terribly cheerful and agreeable. And just a little bit fresh. If I"d stopped him right in the beginning... But I"m not very good about that sort of thing. I guess I"ve always been shy. I don"t like to complain about people. People who are very confident, I guess I don"t really know how to handle the situations as they come up. It was just things he said, and the way he looked at me, and then one time at the gas station, I had the top down, he stood by the door on the driver"s side and put his hand on my shoulder. n.o.body could see him doing it. He just held his hand there and I asked him please not to do that and he laughed and took his hand away. Then he got more fresh, after that. But I hadn"t reported him before, and I decided I would stop trading there, and I did. Then one day I was at the market and when I came out, he was sitting in my car and he asked me very politely if I could drop him off at the station. I said of course. I expected him to do something. I didn"t know what. And if he did anything, I was going to stop the car and order him to get out. After all, it was broad daylight. The moment I got in and shut the door and began to start the car, he just reached over and... put his hand on me. And he was grinning at me. It was such... such an unthinkable thing, Trav, so horrible and unexpected that it paralyzed me. I thought I would faint. People were walking by, but they couldn"t see. I couldn"t move or speak, or even think what I should do. People like me react too violently when they do react, I guess. I shoved him away and shouted at him and ordered him out of the car. He took his time getting out, never stopping his smile. Then he leaned into the car and said something about how I"d give him better treatment if he was rich. I told him there was not that much money in the world. You know, there is something sickening about that curly white hair and that brown face and those little blue eyes. He said that when he made his fortune he would come back and see how I reacted, something like that, some remark like that."
The orderliness of that portion of the account was an exception. For the rest of it, her mind was less disciplined, her account more random. But it was a good mind. It had insight. Once, as she was getting sleepy, she looked somberly at me and said, "I guess there are a lot of people like me. We react too soon or too late or not at all. We"re jumpy people, and we don"t seem to belong here. We"re victims, maybe. The Junior Allens are so sure of themselves and so sure of us. They know how to use us, how to take us further than we wish before we know what to do about it." She frowned. "And they seem to know by instinct exactly how to trade upon our concealed desire to accept that kind of domination. I wanted to make a life down here, Trav. I was lonely. I was trying to be friendly. I was trying to be a part of something."
Ramirez came in the early afternoon just after I had teased her into eating more than she thought she could. He checked her over.
He said to me, "Not so close to hysteria now. A complex and involved organism, McGee. All physical resource was gone. And just the nerves left, and those about played out. Maybe we can rest them a little now. You wouldn"t think it, but there"s an awesome vitality there."
I told him of my contact with the family, and of the wrestling match in the middle of the night.
"She may become agitated again, maybe not so much next time."
"How about a rest home?"
He shrugged. "If you"ve had enough, yes. But this is better for her. I think she can come back quicker this way. But she can become emotionally dependent upon you, particularly if she learns to talk it out, to you."
"She"s been talking."
He stared at me. "Strange you should do all this for her."
"Pity, I guess."
"One of the worst traps of all, McGee."
"What can I expect?"
"I think as she gets further back from the edge she will become placid, listless, somnolent. And dependent."
"You said to get her away from here."
"I"ll take a look at her tomorrow."
The thunderheads built high that Thursday afternoon, and after a long hot silence, the winds came and the rain roared down. The sound of the rain terrified her. She could hear, in the sound of the rain, a hundred people all laughing and talking at once, as though a huge c.o.c.ktail party filled all the other rooms of the sterile house.
She became so agitated I had to give her the second one of the quieting pills. She awakened after dark, and she had soaked the sheets and mattress pad with sweat. She said she felt strong enough to take a shower while I changed the bed for her. I had found one last set of clean sheets. I heard her call me, her voice faint. She was crouched on the bathroom floor, wet and naked and sallow as death. I bundled her into a big yellow terry robe and rubbed her warm and dry and got her into bed. Her teeth chattered. I brought her warm milk. It took her a long time to get warm. Her breath had a sour odor of illness. She slept until eleven and then ate a little and then talked some more. She wanted the light out when she talked, and wanted her hand in mine. A closeness. A comfort.
I heard more of it then. A vague outline. She had thought Junior Allen gone forever, and he had come back in the shining cruiser, wearing his brand-new resort clothes, curiously humble and apologetic and anxious for her esteem. He had tied up at her dock, just across the road from the house.
She had told him to go away. She kept looking out the windows and saw him sitting disconsolate in his new boat in his new clothes, and at dusk she had gone out onto the dock, endured another profuse apology, then gone aboard for a tour of the cruiser.
Once he had her aboard, had her below decks, he was the smiler again, crude and forceful, and he had taken her. She fought him for a long time, but he had been patient. There was no one to hear her. Finally in a kind of terrorized lethargy, she had endured him, knowing he was not quite sane, and thinking this would be the end of it. But it was not. He had kept her aboard with him for two days and two nights, and when he had sensed that she was too dazed and too exhausted and too confused to make even a token resistance, he had moved into the house with her.
"I can"t really explain it," she whispered in the darkness. "There was just nothing that had gone before. The only past I knew was him. And he filled the present, and there wasn"t any future. I didn"t even feel revulsion toward him. Or think of him as a person. He was a force I had to accept. And somehow it began to be terribly important to please him-with the food I cooked for him, the drinks I made for him, the clothes I washed, the continual s.e.x. It was easier to stay a little bit drunk. If I kept him pleased, even that kind of life was endurable.
"He turned me into an anxious thing, watching him every minute to be certain I was doing what he wanted me to do. I guess that is a kind of physical response to him, not pleasure. A kind of horrid release, a breaking. He learned how to make that happen sometimes, and he"d laugh at me. Then he would go away on that boat and it would be the same, and come back here and it would be the same. I didn"t even think of it ever ending. I was too busy getting through each hour as it came along."
She slept then. I went out into the night. The tropical earth was steamy-fresh, bugs chirring and tree toads yelping, and the bay a moony mirror. I sat on the end of her dock and blew smoke at the mosquitoes and wondered why I should be so cynical about her.
It was true that she was a sensitive and introspective woman, and equally true that Junior Allen was a cruel crude b.a.s.t.a.r.d, but I could not quite comprehend how his use of her could have brought her to such a state. In the Victorian tradition, it was the fate worse than death, but she was an adult female, and regardless of the method of approach, he had become her lover and had, in time, induced sensuous response in her. I thought of the failure of her marriage and wondered if perhaps she was merely a neurotic headed for breakdown anyway, and Junior Allen had merely hastened the process.
I watched the running lights of a boat heading down the channel, and I heard the grotesque yammering of one of the night birds, and the faraway sobbing of a lovelorn cat.
I went in and checked her in her deep sleep, and went to bed in the neighboring room.
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 t.i.tle. A sound house in a good location. Waterfront. I can move it for forty-five tomorrow, but n.o.body 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 s.l.u.t named Fancha, and from there they had gone to a remote bay in the Berry Islands and anch.o.r.ed 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-G.o.d, 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 t.i.tle 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 sh.e.l.l 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 a.n.a.lyst. 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 d.a.m.ned 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 h.e.l.l 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.