A Tan & Sandy Silence (19 page)

Some yacht people. Some twosome guests had tried to get as far as possible from wherever they didn't care to be seen together. Some guests were ritualistic sun worshipers who had been there for many many weeks, using the intense tropic sun to add each day's tiny increment of pigmentation at the cost of blinding, suffocating, dazed hours and quarts of whatever oil they happened to believe in. Johnson's or coconut or ol ive. They were working toward that heady goal of becoming a living legend in Bronxville or Scranton or Des Moines.

"Tan? You think that's a tan? So you didn't see Barbie and Ken when they got back from Grenada that time. Dark? I swear to Christ, in a dark room all you could see were white teeth.

And Barbie's diamonds."

I took a cab into town, memorizing landmarks all the way. I negotiated the rental of an Austin Moke. A Moke is a shrunken jeep with a very attractive expression, if you look at the front of it and think of the headlights as eyes. It looks staunch, jaunty, and friendly. It is a simplified piece of machinery. Stick shift which, like the wheel on the right, you work with the left hand. The horn, a single-note, piercing beeeeep, is operated by pressing in on the turn indicator with the right hand. A quick whack with the heel of the hand is the approved method. Four speeds forward, small, air-cooled engine, pedals so tiny that if you try to operate one with your bare feet, it hurts like hell. Canvas top nobody ever folds down in the hot season, and all they have in Grenada are two hot seasons, one wet and one dry.

With the tourist season almost over, there were a lot of them in stock. I picked one with a lot of tread, and the rental man and I walked around it and tested lights, horn, directional signals, windshield wiper (singular). He wanted his total rental in advance, which is standard for the area.

While we dickered, I practiced getting in and out of the damned thing. I'd learned in Grand Cayman and Jamaica that with the length of my legs there is only one possible way. Stand beside vehicle on right side. Bend over at waist. Reach across body and grasp steering wheel with right hand, while simultaneously lifting left leg, inserting it into vehicle so that foot comes to rest on the floor well beyond pedal area. Swoop your behind onto the seat and pick up right leg and lift over high broad sill (which contains gas tank). In driving position both knees are bent sharply, spread wide apart. Steering wheel fits between knees, and lower part of legs must angle in to assure foot contact with pedals. Adjust to inevitability of frequently giving oneself a painful rap on the left leg while shifting.

We arrived at a mutually agreeable fee of five Yankee-ten Biwi-dollars a day for a one week
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rental or any period of less than a week. I buy the gas. I will phone him when I leave and tell him to pick it up at the Spice Island Inn. I promise not to leave it at the airport. I tell him I would not drive it over that road to the airport for a hundred dollars a mile. Can I drive safely on the left side of the road? I suggest that perhaps no one in Grenada can drive safely on any side of the road. But yes, I have so driven on other islands of this British persuasion.

We accomplish the red tape, he gives me a free map of St. George's and environs. I note that, as expected, there is at least one half-pint of gas in the five-gallon gas tank. I edge carefully into the tourney and immediately am nearly bowled over and over by a small pale bus with a name across the front of it. The name is: I AM NOTHING.

After I have bought petrol and felt my way back into the center of town, avoiding too intimate a contact with a large gaudy city bus called LET IT BE NIE, I park my Moke and wait until I am certain my legs will work. ("You will enjoy browsing in St. George's along the narrow, quaint streets.")

I changed another wad of Yankee dollars into Biwi at the Bank of Canada, picking that one from among all the shiny banks downtown, from Chase to Barclay's to the Bank of Nova Scotia, because there was a faint aroma of irony in the choice: The girl standing behind the money-changing counter was very dark, very thin, and totally antagonistic-so much so, there was no chance of ever making any kind of human contact with her unless you were her identical anthracite color.

I asked some questions and was directed to a big busy supermarket called EVERYBODY'S

FOR EVERYTHING.

As long as I had kitchen facilities and I could make my own ice cubes, it seemed useful to set up shop. Gin, rum, fruit juices from Trinidad, mixes, and a couple of large substantial drink glasses.

I am a fussy old party about glassware. Nothing takes the pleasure out of drinking like the tiny dim glasses supplied by hotels and motels. I always buy heavy glasses, always leave them behind.

Tiny glasses turn drinking from a pleasure rite to a quasialcoholic twitch.

The final purchase was on impulse at a shop I saw on the Carenage on the way home. A great big planter's hat of straw with a batik band. Put a man in a rental Moke with advertising painted on the side of it and put a funny hat on him, and he is a tourist. All tourists look alike. Regardless of age, sex, or the number of extra lenses for their cameras, they all look alike.

I found my way back out to Grand Anse to hotel row, and I found an overland way to get the Moke close to my cottage. I carried my box of stuff in. From the moment I had awakened until the moment I finished putting the stuff away and sat down, I had not let myself think about Mary, Lisa or the mechanics of impersonation.

It is a useful device. If you keep things in the front of your mind, you worry at them like a hound chomping a dead rabbit. Throw problems in the back cupboard and keep them there as long as you can. The act of stirring around seems to shuffle the elements of a problem into a new order, and when you take it out again, there are new ways to handle it.

I tossed my sweat-soaked shirt aside. The air conditioning felt good on my back and shoulders.

Okay. Mary is dead. I want Paul Dissat. I want him very badly. The money is the bait, and Lisa is the bait in another sense. I want very badly to convince Paul and Lisa and Harry Broll that, if given a choice, they would elect retroactive birth control. I want them so eager to be out of it they'd dig their own graves with a bent spoon and their fingernails.

Secondly, as a professional, as a salvage consultant in areas of considerable difficulty, I want to come out of this with a little salvage for myself. If I walk away without a dime, with only expenses I can't reasonably afford, then I lose all respect for myself as a con artist. I would have kicked the hell out of their little wagon just to avenge one hell of a woman, Mary Dillon. Pure emotionalism is bush league.

So? So I do not advise Mr. Willow not to make the loan on Mary's securities. They go to Harry eventually anyway. That is, if Harry happens to be still around. The money has to be loaned to Harry, and Harry has to pick up his block of stock in time and get himself in position to make a
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great deal of money when the public issue comes out. But that is a long long time for me to wait for my money. I shall use the leverage to extract a reasonable chunk from Paul, maybe from Harry, maybe from both, before I set them to work with those bent spoons.

It may be enough to have Harry and Lisa dig their graves deep with the sides and ends properly squared off and stand in them without the slightest morsel of hope left. Then I walk away and leave them standing there. But Paul is something else.

Program: Lisa must perform exactly as instructed, make her phone call to Harry, and send the cable to Mr. Willow at the bank. I want her to be desperately anxious to tell me all the details of any contact by Paul Dissat. Then I will prepare to greet him. Here. There. Somewhere.

I pulled on my salty swim trunks and put on my big tourist hat and went looking for the lady.

She was not in cottage 50. I trudged around, squinting into the hot glare, and found her on a sun cot at the top of the slope that led down to the beach proper. She was facedown. The bikini was yellow today. The top was undone, and she had rolled the fabric of the bottom so that it was about as big around as a yellow lead pencil where it cut across the tanned cheeks on her behind.

She was glossy with oil. Her towel was on the sand. I sat on it. Her face was turned away.

"You wanna buy nice coconut, Miss lady? Peanuts? Nice spices?"

She slowly turned her heat-stricken, slackmouthed face toward me. "I don't want any-" She shaded her eyes, squinted. "Oh. It's you."

"Me. Absolutely correct. Me, himself."

"Who needs you?"

She lay with her face turned toward me, eyes closed.

"You need me," I told her.

"Not any more. Thanks a lot. But not any more."

"I don't mean that kind of need, honey. I'm talking about financial need. Commercial necessities."

"Thanks loads. I think I'd better take my chances with Paul."

"That should be a lot of laughs for both of you. I wrote an interesting letter last night."

She forgot her top wasn't latched. She sat up fast. "What kind of a letter? Who to?"

"What's the local policy about the tits on tourists?"

She picked up the top and put it on. "I know what your policy is, friend. You ignore them. What kind of a letter?"

"Double envelope. A sealed letter along inside the sealed letter. If he doesn't hear from me on or before May tenth, he opens the second letter."

"Then what?"

"He takes action."

"What action?*

"Oh, he just gets in touch with the right people at the SEC and says that it looks as if one Mr.

Harry Broll bought himself into SeaGate, Inc. with a final three hundred thou fraudulently obtained and that this fact might not be uncovered by the accounting firm preparing the material for the red herring and they should check with a Mr. Willow regarding evidence as to whether or not Mrs. Broll was alive at the time he released funds at her earlier request. My friend is an attorney. He knows all the steps in the new registration folk dance. Delicate, these new issues.

They can die of a head cold."

"Oh God! Why'd you think you couldn't trust me?"

"Who said anything about that?"

"Isn't that why you did it?"

"Lisa, Lisa, Lisa. What if we miss? Suppose your dear cousin nails us both, lays us to rest in a ceremonial boat, lights the pyre and sends us out to sea. The last few moments would be a lot more enjoyable knowing Cousin Paul would never make a profit on the deal."

She swallowed hard and looked unhappy. "Don't talk about things like that."

I knew that behind her sun squint her brain was ticking away, weighing and measuring
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advantages. I reached under the sun cot and retrieved her big sunglasses from the magazine on which they lay and handed them to her.

"Thanks, dear," she said, putting them on. "Sure. I see what you mean. And if he catches us sort of off base, it could maybe be handy to tell him about your lawyer friend."

"Yes. I think so. If he gives me a chance."

"Can't you see why I thought you did it on account of me?"

I thought it over. "Well, I suppose I can in a way. If you did decide he represents a better chance, you could tip him off about me and he could ... tidy up the situation."

She turned over and put her feet down on the sand near my legs. Her hairline was sweaty.

Trickles of sweat ran down her throat, and a little rivulet ran between her breasts and down across her belly to soak into the narrow yellow bikini. Her knees were apart, and the cot was so short-legged that her knees were on the same level as her breasts. Her eyes were even with the top of my head.

She leaned toward me, forearms on her knees, and said in a cooing voice, "You know, you act so weird about me, about us, that I'm afraid I'm going to keep on misinterpreting the things you say. We're going to keep on having misunderstandings. I waited a long time last night for you to come over to my place to say you were sorry."

I looked at her. Bright sunshine is as cruelly specific as lab lights and microscopes. There was a small double chin, caused by the angle of her head. There was a scar on her upper lip near the nostril. Her hands and feet were small, square and sturdy, nails carefully tended. Her posture made a narrow tan roll of fat across her trim belly. Her slender waist made a rich line that flowed in a double curve, concave, convex, into the ripe tan hip and thigh. She sat with her plump parts pouched into the yellow fabric, heavy and vital. Stray pubic hairs, longer than the others, curled over the top of the bikini and escaped at the sides of the crotch, hairs the color of dull copper.

Sweat, muscles, flesh, hair, closeness. So close the tightness of the yellow pouch revealed the cleavage of labia. This was the magic and mystery of a locker room, steam room, massage table, or of a coeducational volleyball game in a nudist colony. This was jockstrap sex, unadorned.

"Lisa, I guess we have to say things so carefully we won't have misunderstandings."

"Maybe I got the wrong impression yesterday. You wouldn't be queer, darling?"

"No more than any other true-blue American lad."

"Some kind of trouble? You can tell Lisa. Prostate, maybe? Or some kind of irritation?"

"I'm in glowing health."

"Honey, are you so strung out on some great broad that you just don't want to make it with another girl? I could understand that. I've been through that."

"Nobody I've met lately has gotten to me."

Her mouth firmed, and her throat turned darker. "Am I some kind of pig woman it would turn your stomach to-"

"Whoa! It's just a little rule of mine. Save the dessert until last."

Her mouth softened into a sudden smile. "Dessert? Darling, I am also homemade soup, meat and potatoes, hot rolls and butter, and your choice of beverages. I am mostly meat and potatoes."

"There's another reason for waiting, Lisa."

"Like?"

She was ready again, I decided. Like training a mule. A good, solid blow between the eyes, and I should have her total attention.

"It's kind of a sad story, dear."

"I love sad stories. I love to cry and cry."