A Flash of Green (3 page)

She moved slowly back toward the table. “When Van first brought me down here, I hated it. I missed the hills and the snow and the familiar seasons. One morning very early—it must have been nine years ago, because I was pregnant with Roy—we went to Hoyt’s Marina and went out in the boat. It was that old skiff we used to have, and he’d just bought it, used, and fixed it up a little. There was a heavy mist. The tide was going out of Grassy Bay, flowing out through Turk’s Pass. It was warm and still. He stopped the old engine and we drifted across the flats. It was a private little world, with the mist all around us. It was a time when if you wanted to say anything, you felt like whispering. I heard the sea grass brushing the bottom of the boat. Sometimes we’d catch and turn slowly and come free, or Van would push us off with the pole. I heard fish slap the water, and once we heard the snuffling of
porpoise over in the channel next to the mainland shore. It grew brighter in the mist. I looked over the side and watched the sand, the mud, the grass, and a million minnows. Van told me to look up. Directly overhead the morning mist was so thin I could see the blue of the sky through it, and just then a flight of white pelicans went over, much lower than you usually see them. I saw them through the mist, and I heard a hushed creaking of their wings. It was a magic time, Jimmy, and that was the moment when I began to love this place. The rest of the mist burned away, and we were out in the middle of the wide blue bay. Van started the engine and we went chug-chug down to Turk’s Island and spent the day.”

“But it didn’t add a dollar to the economy. Kat, I’ve told you what’s going on because I don’t want you to be hurt. I gave my word I wouldn’t tell anyone, and I’ve broken it.”

“I appreciate it, Jimmy. And I know what you’re trying to tell me.”

“But?”

“I just couldn’t let all the work Van did go to waste. You can understand that.”

He grinned. “I knew what the reaction had to be. But I had to make the attempt. At least you have some idea what you’re up against. I’ll be standing by, Kat. Use me for a rest camp, a first-aid station.” He stopped smiling. “But I’d rather you keep this to yourself.”

“I can’t even do that.”

“But, honey, if the leak is traced back to me, they’ll put lumps on my head.”

She thought for a few moments. “I was at my desk in the bank and I heard two men talking about Grassy Bay.”

“That isn’t likely. They’ve been very careful. I know Sally Ann Lesser is in on it, because Burt couldn’t have come up with some of the basic money otherwise. So can’t you pry it out of her?”

“Now that I know what I’m after, I can. Otherwise, I can’t tell when she’s lying.”

He looked at his watch and stood up. “Thanks for the beer.”

“And thank you for the advance information, Jimmy. I think I really need a project right about now.”

They walked through the house to the front door. He shook his head and said, “Believe me, honey, nobody needs what you’re thinking of taking on. It could break your heart.”

“Again? Maybe I’m sort of invulnerable.”

“They’ll try to find out. You take care, hear?” He stood there for a rare moment of awkwardness, then walked on out to his car. He backed out and waved to her as he drove off down the narrow asphalt of Pine Road, toward the exit gate of Sandy Key Estates.

Katherine walked through the living room. She stopped at a west window. Beyond the pepper hedge the last smoke of the dying brush fire rose in a hazy column, bending slightly toward her as an imperceptible breeze off the Gulf shifted it.

Too many things were moving through her mind simultaneously, immobilizing her so that she could not begin any one of them. But the considerations of strategy had to give way to the homely obligations. She went to the phone to call Claire Sinnat and tell her to shoo the kids home from the Sinnat pool, then decided to walk up the road and collect them. She fixed her lipstick, ran a hasty brush through her cropped red hair, and went outside.

At first she thought it as stunningly hot as before, but in a little while she realized the sting had gone from the sun’s heat as it moved closer to the Gulf horizon. But the big black salt-marsh mosquitoes were out early. They whined in her hair and tickled her long legs and needled the backs of her shoulders and the small of her back between her green halter and the waistband of her white shorts.

By the time she reached the Pavilion she was being driven out
of her mind by them. Gus Malta, the official caretaker, was hobbling around the Pavilion on his bad leg, fogging the ground, the shrubbery and the low branches of the trees with the rackety gasoline fogger he carried slung over his meaty shoulder. He stopped the motor and called to her in the sudden silence.

“You come over here,” he ordered. “You’ll get bit to death walking around like that tonight.”

She hesitated and went over toward him. She did not like the man. He adopted a pseudo-fatherly air toward all the younger matrons of Sandy Key Estates, and toward the daughters of the older ones, but his manner seemed to mask sly insinuations. He did yard work for some of the residents, maintained the shell roads, the community tennis court and the Pavilion. For his community efforts, he was paid out of the treasury of the Sandy Key Estates Association, replenished by the quarterly assessment levied against each resident, based on the size of his lot.

“Now you stand right there and I’ll put a cloud of this upwind from you, and it will drift onto you. You hold your breath and turn around slow while it’s going by.”

“But I don’t want to get that stuff in my hair.”

“Won’t hurt your hair,” he said and yanked the starter cord, and belched a cloud of bug fog toward the beach. As it enveloped her she held her breath and turned slowly, dutifully, vastly annoyed at herself. Now if he tells you to go roll in the sand, you’ll do that too, you darn ninny.

It drifted past her and she stopped turning and began breathing. “That’s better,” Gus said. “Now they won’t mess with you, and raise all them red lumps.” He grinned at her, exposing the ruin of his teeth. “You coming to the party?”

“I didn’t know there was one.”

“Now, when you see me fogging this place, you know somebody wants it for a party, Mrs. Hubble.”

He always seemed to know exactly how impertinent he dared be, and he altered it to fit the temperament of each target. She knew that if she acted angry, he would pretend to be hurt and bewildered.

The Pavilion was the only community structure. It was open on three sides, forty by twenty, with a slab floor, steel uprights, and a thatched roof. There was a bamboo bar against the single wall. On the beach side was a big barbecue pit, and there were picnic tables under the Australian pines and under the coconut palms. The Pavilion was in the center of the two hundred feet of Gulf beach open to all the landlocked residents of the Estates.

“Who is giving the party, Gus?” she asked evenly.

“It’s the Deegans and Mrs. McCall giving it, for about forty people, the way I heard it.”

“Thanks for the spray job,” she said and walked away from him, heading north on Gulf Lane toward the Sinnat house. The fogging machine did not start up. She resisted the impulse to look back, and knew she would see him standing there, watching her walk away. If she turned, he would grin placidly at her. It was a part of the mythology of the Estates that if a woman appeared in a swimsuit in the farthest corner of the area, within ten seconds Gus Malta would find some work to be done within ten feet of her. Eloise Cable swore that she had turned quickly one evening and seen his face just outside the screen of her open bathroom window. It was generally agreed that if he wanted to gamble his job by risking the Peeping Tom act, Eloise Cable was the logical candidate. In spite of his manner, and all the work he left half done, it was agreed that he was very good with the kids.

As she pushed open the Sinnats’ garden gate, she heard the concerted yapping of a dozen assorted children, and the sloshing and slapping of the water in their big pool.

Two

JAMES WARREN WING DROVE NORTH
along Mangrove Road, the main road which bisected Sandy Key. He wondered vaguely how many times, how many hundred times he had driven this same stretch of road, and how many hundred times he would drive it again.

Once again she had afflicted him with what he had begun to call, with a sense of irony and guilt, Kat-fever. It was a restlessness, a dissatisfaction with all the familiar comforting routines.

He wanted to return to his normal blandness of spirit, maintain an uninvolved equanimity, suppressing the little bulgings of guilt and barbs of conscience. He knew it would be so much easier for him if he could be less scrupulous with himself, less intent on definitions and emotional accuracy. Were a man able to use his own fictions and realities interchangeably, he could be much more at home in a muddied world. Introspection, he had decided, is being bred out of the race because it is not survival-oriented.

So much fuss, he thought, about wanting a woman who does not even know she is wanted. Van, good buddy, rest easy. I’ve just helped her in a few small ways, and that’s all there’s going to be.

But he could hear Van’s familiar response to that familiar protestation: But you keep seeing one hell of a lot of her, pal.

Because I like her. Is there a law?

Is she so much? Just a spare, high-pockets redhead, boy, skimpy upstairs and flat across the behinder, with angular hips and knobbly shoulders, and eyes which aren’t either blue or gray, and monkey wrinkles across her forehead. She moves well and her skin is fine, but she’s a slapdash, helter-skelter woman, too smart, too ready to argue. She carried your kids, and loved you truly, boy, and there’s nothing there for ol’ Jimmy.

But it was becoming ever more difficult for him to think of her as the same woman who had been married to Van Hubble, the same tense, skeptical Yankee bride Van had brought down with so much pride ten years ago. They had never liked each other.

This was a new friendship, one year old. A new friend—as if Van’s wife had died with him. I keep arranging to see her because I like her.

But there was a hyena cackle in the back of his mind, a sound of knowing derision. “You mean you’d like to maneuver her into the sack, Wing, on any basis at all, even as a return for past favors, you sick son of a bitch, and you keep sucking around waiting for a break, because you’re too gutless to clue her, too afraid she’ll say no in a very final way.”

So is it so criminal to want a woman? She came into his mind so vividly it seemed to blur his view of the bright highway, and he quickly sought escape from the impact of his lust by forcing his mind up into shallow, fatuous levels and keeping it bobbing
there, like a child’s balloon on random currents, turning his head rapidly from side to side and wearing a small strained smile as he inventoried the minutiae of reality—Ohio plates, a bird feeder, girl on a bike, gull on the wing, pink house, fat man, For Rent sign.

When the seizure of his need was ended, he dared think of her again, resenting her because she had made so many of his assumptions about himself untenable. She had ruptured the structure of contentment and let the restlessness in. She had made him wish for some kind of great change in his days when he knew that no change could benefit him.

Thus far he knew he had been objective enough to avoid the most obvious trap: the wishful belief that the very intensity of his awareness of her had somehow generated a reciprocal tension, and that he need only make the first hesitant move and she would fall sighing into his arms. It was a constant temptation to read too much into meaningless things, like the idiots who find codes and prophecies in Shakespeare. He knew well Kat’s relentless honesty, and knew she could not dissemble, knew she would immediately disclose any feeling she might have for him.

A year ago he would have been hilariously incredulous had anyone tried to tell him he would become physically infatuated with Katherine Hubble. It had come about so very gradually.

In the beginning he had helped her with all the routines, legalisms and barbarisms of sudden death. She had been stunned, heartsick and lost—her eyes dull, her hair lifeless, her skin drab, her movements slow, her voice hesitant and indistinct. Before she had the heart for any future plans, he had gone to Leroy Shannard to talk about Van’s estate, and learned that Van’s few good years had come too late, the tax had taken too much of it, and she would have to find work. He had seen her often, out of a sense of
duty to Van, helping her in small ways to find her way back to reality. For a time he thought she might never recover, but then her pride and spirit began to show itself again.

It all began in such a mild, unanticipated way. It seemed pleasant to be with her, a small triumph to make her smile, a great victory when he made her laugh aloud. He took a possessive interest in her recovery, and when he thought she was ready he scouted the town and found the job for her at the bank, and made her take it before she thought she was able, and saw it work out as he had hoped.

It was during this time of reconstruction that he began to find pleasure in looking at her, at the shape of her hands, the line of her throat, the way she moved and turned, the bold configuration of her mouth. He had never found her as attractive while Van was alive. Perhaps then he had been more aware of flaws than of virtues, because that was the time when they had not liked each other particularly.

The pleasure of looking at her changed, little by little, into an oddly humid speculation. Over the years he had noted small clues to the probability that she and Van had a devotedly lusty marriage, and he wondered just what she had been like with him.

At first his conjecturing was a small game to play, but the game suddenly turned into compulsion and was out of control. He began to imagine her as the insatiable witch of all legend, and felt a revulsion toward himself that his imagination should have led him into such a pattern. It offended his own sense of personal dignity to have become a victim of such a fever. He told himself it was like a recurrence of adolescence. No woman could be so uniquely desirable. It was a delusion which would be vanquished were he ever to have her. He diagnosed it as a disease of immaturity, the imagination festering, and prescribed for himself dosages
of some convenient and amiable women he knew who sought amusement as opposed to involvement, yet rose from these encounters with an undiminished thirst.