MY MOTEL windows were turning gray when I placed the overdue call to Chook. She was outraged, but when she calmed down she reported that Cathy lay listless on her hospital bed and answered questions in a small voice, in as few words as possible. And she liked Lois Atkinson. Very jumpy, sort of wild-eyed, but nice. They talked dance. Lois had studied ballet when she was little, but had grown too tall. And when was I coming back? That evening probably. Friday. The sun was visible from Florida, but it hadn"t gotten to me. She was trying a replacement, temporary, for Cathy. The d.a.m.ned girl was fair, but she kept getting so winded you could hear her gasping forty feet away. Hurry home, darling McGee.
I slept until ten, arranged afternoon airline connections, then phoned my questions to a sly elderly angle-player in New York, an old friend, a quaint hustler of the unwary marks, a sometime dealer in everything from faked Braque to union dues, from gossip column items to guest shots. I said he would hear from me again.
I checked out and had a quick breakfast and went to George Brell"s home. The pretty maid I had seen before had me wait inside the door while she checked with Mr. Brell. She came back and took me to him. He was propped up, reading the newspaper and drinking coffee. He was in a gigantic circular bed, with a pink canopy over it. In all the luxuriant femininity of that big bedroom, George looked shrunken and misplaced, like a dead worm in a birthday cake.
He threw the paper aside and said harshly, "Shut that door and pull that chair over here and sit down, McGee."
Pride quickly rebuilds the fallen walls. And refashions the past to fit its own requirements. He stared at me. "You"re very cute, boy. I"d done a lot of drinking, and I was upset about Angie, and I was exhausted from all the deals I"ve been making lately."
"I certainly took advantage of you, George."
"I did a h.e.l.l of a lot of talking, and some of it I can"t even remember. I"ve got some kind of a flu bug."
"And I was pretty rough, George."
"I want to know where we stand, McGee."
"In what way?"
"I"m warning you, boy, the worst mistake you can make is try to use anything against me. I"m not about to try to buy you off, if that"s what you"re after. I can get rough too. d.a.m.ned rough."
"Are you planning on getting rough anyway?"
"I"m thinking about it."
"I guess if those tax people knew exactly where to look, and what historical facts they could check out, they could come back at you with a little more ammunition, George."
He swallowed and fumbled a cigarette out of his pack and said, "You"re not scaring me. Not a bit."
"I think we ought to forgive and forget the whole thing, George."
He boggled at me. "You"re not here to clip me?"
"Frankly I don"t think you"ve got enough to be worth clipping, even if I went in for that line of work."
"I"m a rich man!" he said indignantly.
"George, you just live rich. Two years from now, if you"ve got a pot left, I"ll be astonished. All I wanted from you was information, and I had to be sure you weren"t being shifty. I"m after what Dave brought back. So far all that"s been found was what was left of the canteen. Not much, after eighteen years of tropical weather."
"Somebody got there first?"
"But they haven"t had much of a start, George."
He tried a frail smile. "And that"s all you wanted from me?"
"I tried to tell you that."
He sat up. "Any time you"re in the Valley Trav, this house is your house. You want to change your luck, I"ve got deals around here I just haven"t had the time to work on. In ten years this area is going to be the most..."
"Sure, George."
He called to me as I reached the hall. I came back into the room. He moistened his lips. "If there should be any kind of trouble, and you have to do a lot of explaining..."
"I guess you better wish me luck."
He did and fell back into the percale pillows. As I started to find my way out, I looked back through the terrace gla.s.s toward the outdoor pool. Gerry and Angie were out there, standing on the far ap.r.o.n of the pool, talking intently, taking the sun before the day became too hot. Angie wore a conservative swim suit, and her stepmother wore a bikini.
At that distance they looked of an age. After the promise of Gerry in clothing, her figure was a mild disappointment. She had high small b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and she was very long-waisted. The long limber torso widened into chunky hips and meaty thighs and short st.u.r.dy legs. As I watched them, Angie turned abruptly and started away. Gerry ran after her and caught her by the arm and stopped her. The girl stood in a sullen posture, her head lowered, as Gerry talked to her. Then she permitted herself to be led back to a sun cot. She stretched out, turning her face up toward the sun. The woman moved a white metal chair close and sat and talked down at the girl. Perhaps it was a trick of sunlight, but I thought I saw a silver gleam of moisture on the girl"s cheek as I turned away.
This family was a circus act, balanced on a small platform atop a swaying pole, as the crowd goes ahhhh, antic.i.p.ating disaster. A vain foolish man and a careless young wife and a tortured girl, swaying to the long drum roll. When it fell, the unmarked House Beautiful would sell readily, the Lincoln would be acquired by a Mexican dentist. Who would survive? George, perhaps, as he had the shortest distance to fall.
On the long east-southeast slant of the Houston-Miami jet flight, high over the blue steel silence of the Gulf, I thought of dour David Berry in the night, lifting away the big slabs of stone, tucking the shiny fortune down at the base of the pillar and replacing the stones, then waiting for his family to wake and find him.
He had hoped for luck, stubbornly vowing to live and come back, knowing his women could not cope with the crafty problem of turning blue fire into money, knowing there was no one he could trust. Then Junior Allen had moved close to him, perhaps sensing a secret, chipping at it, prying.
Maybe, in his despair, David Berry had even considered trusting Junior Allen. But he had decided against it, or death came too quickly. But Allen knew it was there, and had lived there and thought and searched and finally found it.
A lump of wax like a huge blueberry m.u.f.fin? All the rains and the heat and the salt damp had corroded the container away. And there would have been some bug with a taste for wax. Loose and gleaming probably, amid pale stalks and dirt, with Allen kneeling, his breath shallow and his heart thumping as he gathered them up.
Bugs would eat the wax. Chaw the old canvas. And one day there would be a mutation, and we will have new ones that can digest concrete, dissolve steel and suck up the acid puddles, fatten on magic plastics, lick their slow way through gla.s.s. Then the cities will tumble and man will be chased back into the sea from which he came...
The large yellowed headlamps of Miss Agnes peered through dusk as I turned into Bahia Mar and found a slot a reasonable distance from the Busted Flush. There were lights on in my craft, a curiously homey look. Welcome traveler. I bing-bonged to save her unnecessary alarm, then stepped over the chain and went aboard, startling her when she pulled open the door to the lounge.
She backed away, smiling. "h.e.l.lo. Or welcome home. Or something like that, Trav." Three days had made an astonishing difference. Dark blue stretch pants patterned with ridiculous little yellow tulips. A soft yellow blouse with three-quarter sleeves. Hair shorter, face, arms and throat red-gold with new tan.
"Tourist!" I said.
"I thought maybe I wouldn"t look so scrawny in this kind of..."
"Beach girl."
She drew herself up. "You think so? You think that"s all there is to do?"
I had to be led around and I had to admire. Corridor walls sc.r.a.ped down and repainted a better color. New curtains in the head. A new set of stainless steel bowls for the galley. She said she would show me the topsides work by daylight when I could appreciate it.
I put my suitcase in my stateroom and came back into the lounge and told her she was a useful guest. We stood smiling at each other and then she leapt at me, clutched me, wailed once, and went away, snuffling, keeping her back toward me.
"What"s wrong?"
"I don"t know."
"Come on now, Lois. What"s wrong?"
She pulled herself together quickly. "Does something have to be wrong? Maybe I"m glad to have you back. I don"t know."
She had started to rebuild the woman things, the artifice, the indirection, the challenge. It was her pride at work. She was healing and I was glad to see it, and I did not want to nudge the structure too heavily. It was too new.
"I"ll fix your drink," she said. "I sold the house."
"Got the money?"
"Soon."
"Sorry?"
"About the house? It"s just a house. I was hiding down there in that wretched little village because I thought I"d been a bad wife." She brought me my drink and handed it to me.
"Aren"t you getting a little fat, dear?" I asked.
She beamed. "A hundred and seven this afternoon."
"What"s right for you?"
"Oh, one eighteen, one twenty." She patted her hip. "After one twenty it all goes here."
"So if the hiding is over, what are you going to do?" It was a fool question, tangle-footed and unimaginative. And no way to take it back. It made her aware of obligation. She could handle day by day. If she kept her head down. I had rocked the fragile new structure. Those dark and pleasantly tilted eyes became haunted and she sucked at her lips and knotted her hands.
"Not right now," I said, trying to mend it. "Some day."
"I don"t know."
"How was New York, Trav? New York was hot, Lois. How was Texas, Trav? Texas was hot, Lois. Did you have any fun, Trav? I wouldn"t call it fun, Lois. I wouldn"t know what to call it."
She measured me out one half of a smile. "Oh, shut up."
"Do I take you out tonight?"
"Oh, no! I cook, really."
I looked at my watch. "I have a hospital visit to make. So schedule it after I get back. Say forty minutes after I get back. Time to shower and change when I get back."
"Yes, master. Oh, I owe you six dollars and thirty cents on your phone bill."
"Those pants are pretty s.e.xy, Mrs. Atkinson."
"I called Harp. I talked to Lucille. I didn"t tell her hardly anything. Just that I"d been sick and things were better now."
"You"re blushing, Mrs. Atkinson."
"Don"t talk about these pants then. I bought them today. I don"t feel very secure about them."
Cathy was in a six-bed ward. I pulled a chair close, kissed her on the forehead and sat beside her. I hoped she hadn"t seen any dismay in my face. The sallow, thoughtful, rather pretty and fine-boned little face was gone. It was a stormy sunset, a ripe eggplant, a heavy mushroom. There was a single slit of brown eye to see with. Her left hand was splinted.
"h.e.l.lo," she said in a dead, fat-lipped voice. I stood up and yanked the curtains and sat down again and took her uninjured hand. It rested slack and warm and dry in mine.
"Junior Allen?" I said in a low voice.
"You don"t have to mind about me, Mr. McGee."
"I thought it was Cathy and Trav... Why did he do it?"
There is no way to read the expression of bruised meat. She watched me, hiding away back in there behind pain and indignity. "This part of it has got nothing to do with you."
"I want to know about it because you are my friend."
The slit eye was closed so long I began to wonder if she"d fallen asleep. She opened it. "He come there to the bar at the Bahama Room, and I messed up a routine awful when l saw him watching us. I don"t know if it was an accident or he heard somehow or what. After, I hurried into my clothes and went out and he was gone. I went outside and saw him crossing the parking, and I ran after him. I caught him and said I wanted to talk with him. He said we didn"t have anything to talk about. I said we could talk about money. That made him wonder. We walked through to the beach. Then I said that if he could just give me a little money out of what he got, maybe even just a thousand dollars, then I wouldn"t make any trouble about any of the rest of it. He ask me what I would mean by trouble, and I said he found something that wasn"t his, didn"t he? He laughed once, short and nasty, and said I had no idea in the world what trouble was. So he reached quick and grappled holt of my neck with one hand, and pounded on my face with the other, and a couple of times he hit me in the belly. It all went dark while he was thumping on me, and I woke up in the ambulance. It... it doesn"t hurt much now."
"Cathy, why didn"t you tell the police?"
"I almost did."
"Why didn"t you?"
"Not because I"m afraid of him beating on me again. But the whole thing might come out. And then I"d for sure never get a nickel back. And... it would have messed up what you"re fixing to do, Trav. It could have messed you into a police thing."
What is there to do about one like that? I lifted her hand and kissed the roughened knuckles and said, "You are something, Cathy."
"I feel next door to nothing at all."
"Some good news anyway. There"s no way to find out who the money ever belonged to, and no way to get it back to them anyway."
"What was hid there?"
"We"ll talk when you get out of here."
"They won"t tell me when. But I was on my feet some today. Hunched up and dizzy, but walked all the way to the john holding onto a lady. So maybe it won"t be so long."
When I said good-by to her she said, "It was nice of you to come to visit me. Thank you very much."
I talked a long time with Lois that evening, giving her an edited version of my adventures. I went to bed. As I dropped off I could still hear her in the shower.
She came into my sleep and into my bed, awakening me with her mouth on mine, and strangely there was no shock or surprise in it. My subconscious had been aware that this would happen. A lady is a very special happening, so scented and delicate and breathless and totally immaculate. She wore a filmy something that tied at the throat and parted readily, presenting the warm length of her, the incredibly smooth texture of her, to my awakening embrace.
Her breath was shuddering, and she gave a hundred quick small kisses. Her caresses were quick and light, and her body turned and glowed and glided and changed in her luxurious presentation of self, her mouth saying darling and her hair sweet in darkness, a creature in endless movement, using all of herself the way a friendly cat will b.u.mp and twine and nudge and purr. I wanted to take her on her basis, readying her as graciously as she had made herself ready, with an unhurried homage to all her parts and purposes, an intimate minuet involving offer and response, demand and delay, until the time when it would all be affirmed and taken and done with what, for want of a better name, must be called a flavor of importance.
But suddenly it was not going well. She would fall away from sweet frenzy and then lift herself back up, but to a lesser peak. We were not yet joined. She was trying to hold onto all the wanting, but it kept receding, the waves of it growing smaller, her body becoming less responsive to each touch.
Finally she sobbed aloud and flung herself away, clenching her body into the foetal curl, posture of hiding, her back to me. I touched her. Her muscles were rigid.
"Lois, dear."
"Don"t touch me!"
"Please, honey, you just..."
"Rotten, rotten, rotten!" she said in a small leathery howling voice, dragging the vowel sounds out.