All These Condemned (6 page)

I was teamed up with Judy, Wallace Dorn, and Noel Hess, with Hayes, Mavis, Wilma, and Steve as the competition. Wallace, playing with bitter concentration, and Noel, with an unexpectedly good eye, kept up our end of the score. Judy clowned it, and I was getting too tight to be much good. There were ground rules. If you captured a ball you could hammer it into the lake. The person knocked into the lake had to chugalug a drink, retrieve the ball, replace it on the edge of the parking area. Whenever one team had gone the length of the course, everybody had a drink. It got pretty blurred for me. They kept knocking me into the lake. The voices started to sound funny, as though we
were all in a tunnel. The stripes on the wooden balls got brighter. The grass got greener. I remember Judy pleading on her knees, hands clasped, while Steve took a gigantic swing and, losing his footing, knocked both her ball and his own down the cliff into the lake. I don’t know who won. I think I had some lunch.

Then, in some mysterious way, I was in the living room, weaving, trying to focus my eyes, and Judy Jonah was supporting me.

“Come on, now,” she said. “One big fat foot after the other.”

“Where’s everybody?”

“Out being mad and gay. Banging around in the boats. Churning around in the water. Come on, lamb. Judy won’t let you fall on your head.”

There was another blank and then I was in bed, and Judy was looking down at me, shaking her head. She walked to the foot of the bed and took my shoes off. I was still in my swim trunks. She floated a blanket over me.

“Preciate it,” I said. “Preciate it.”

“Poor old bear,” she said. She leaned over me, kissed me lightly on the lips, and then she was gone, the door shutting softly behind her. The bed started to veer dangerously around a circular track. I grabbed hold of it and steered it carefully into sudden sleep.

When I woke up it was dark. I looked at the window. The outside floodlights were on. I heard laughter. Somebody was running water in our bathroom. The door opened, and through the dressing room I could see Mavis outlined
against the lighted bathroom as she turned in the doorway and clicked off the switch.

As she moved quietly through the room I spoke her name.

“So you aren’t really dead after all, dahling?”

“What time is it?”

“About nine. It’s quite warm. We’re all swimming. I imagine you feel dreadful, I hope.”

“Thanks so much.”

“You made a spectacle of yourself, you know. Stumbling around like that. I hope you feel stinking.” She swept out and banged the door shut.

I drifted off again. When I woke up I had a feeling it was much later. I felt a little better. I drank three glasses of water, put on a bathrobe, and went out into the living room. Two small lights burned. The music was FM unattended, some asinine disc jockey who said, “And it’s thirty seconds to Cinderella, cats, so I guess that winds up the ball game. Sorry, Eleanor, we didn’t get to spin that Julie platter for you, but …” I found the right knob and cut him off. I walked out on the terrace, to a warm night of a billion stars. Somebody came up the concrete steps with reckless speed. The hurrying figure rushed to the switch box and the banks of floodlights began to snap on, one section at a time, dimming the stars. I blinked at the lights and saw it was Steve. The others were down on the dock.

Steve grabbed my arm hard. “Paul, Wilma’s gone.”

I was fogged by long sleep. I stared stupidly at him. “Gone where?”

“We think she drowned.”

I KEPT THINKING
the whole situation could have used a better script. Heaven knows I’d become an expert on bad scripts during forty weeks of Judy-Time. That was the inane name the agency stuck on my half hour of frenzy.

It was so damnably disorganized, everybody running around and bleating, and Paul Dockerty the only one who made any sense. He got the phone calls placed as soon as he realized what had apparently happened. It was clear enough, all right. Her stuff on the end of the pier and all of us staring at the emptiest, blackest water there ever was. Sure, we’d been paddling around in it, very happy-time, floating and star watching and feeling that little thrill of danger that night swimming gives you. But after we knew what had gone on, I don’t think six strong men could have hurled me back into that water. Paul got Gil Hayes and Steve out there with him, diving in the area where we thought she had
been. Wallace and Randy couldn’t swim well enough. So Randy handled the boat and shone the big flashlight down into the murk of the water. It was very still. We’d hear them cough and gasp when they came up. That fool of a Mavis Dockerty sat near my feet as I stood watching them out there. She made an interminable messy bleating sound as though her insipid little heart would break right in two.

We heard the sirens coming. It sounded as though they were riding across the black hills. Paul called in to me, asking me the time. I took my watch out of the pocket of my robe and held it so the bright lights were on the dial. “Nearly quarter to one,” I shouted.

I heard him say, “O.K. That’s enough. The experts are coming. It’s too late anyway, even if we had luck enough to find her. If it isn’t some kind of a stunt of hers, and if she isn’t sitting down the shoreline, laughing like hell, she’s as dead as that mackerel in the moonlight.”

His voice carried well over the water. “Don’t talk about her like that!” Mavis shrieked, and then started a more furious round of bleats.

There were two big young troopers in one car and a fat man with a dull, kindly face in the other. They came down and made a rough count of noses and stared out across the water. One of the troopers couldn’t seem to stop looking at me. It gave me an insane desire to burst into a routine for him.

Paul said, “I hear boats coming.”

The civilian was named Fish. He said, “I told the phone office to get the boys out of bed and have them come over here. They’ll drag for her.”

“She’s dead now,” Paul said. “Why don’t we wait until morning?”

“Well, we always start right out, soon as it happens. We always do. She couldn’t be playing one of those jokes now, could she?”

“I doubt it,” Paul said. “She would have heard the sirens and come in.”

I walked away from there and left them talking. I belted my robe a little tighter, lighted my last cigarette. I sat on the stone steps and looked out at the lake. Bugs beat their furry brains out against the nearby floodlights. I sat and thought of several ways I would have liked to hold Wilma under the surface, and started giving myself the creeps because I knew I couldn’t have.

Oh, she’d saved it and planned it, and even though I told myself I didn’t care, when she finally gave it to me, she had certainly done it in her own unique way. She made a habit of leaving you nothing. I decided I would stop thinking about it. It wasn’t any good to think about it. There wasn’t a hell of a lot that was good to think about.

I watched boats arrive, saw the grappling irons and hooks, looking like medieval torments, rigged under the lights while they split up the area. The officials were in a huddle at the end of the pier where Wilma had parked her things.

After a time Paul came slowly up the steps toward me. He stopped and shivered and said, “Stick around, Judy, while I get dry and get more cigarettes, will you? I want to talk to you.”

“Sure.”

He was back quickly and sat on the next step below mine,
rubbing his wet hair with a towel. He said, his voice muffled, “That deputy sheriff named Fish found that two-piece suit of hers in the pocket of her robe. What was going on? Was she wearing a different one?”

“Nope. We were being naughty. Practically a group bacchanal, unless you can think of a more clinical description. By starlight.”

He turned and frowned at me. “You too, Judy?” It struck me as odd that the first question hadn’t concerned the tepid Mavis.

I pulled the top of my robe apart. “You will note, kind sir, that I am still clad in my old blue serge swim togs, the ones with the shine on the seat. For me, cold lake water has a strange lack of aphrodisiac appeal. And if I am to be groped at by starlight, I want some firm footing underneath. You may mark me down as a spoilsport.”

“How about Mavis?”

“A lady would say she didn’t know. But your lady is remarkably nude under that lush robe of hers. And a remarkable figger of a woman, I might add. The other spoilsports were Randy, who doesn’t swim well enough, and Wallace Dorn, who possibly couldn’t bear the loss of dignity.”

He was still for a little while and then said, with shock in his voice, “Noel, too?”

“Consider us both nonplused, Paul pal. I lay it to brandy. Or to atavism. Or obscure revenge on hubby. Or urging by one Steve Winsan. In any case, I say to hell with it. I feel like this is a conversation we should have over a back fence while hanging out the wash. There was chatter about getting back to Mother Nature. Though I am used to appearing before the public without benefit of dignity, I’m still a shy girl at
heart. I draw lines. I get all crawly. I think about the decadence of modern society. See, I’m a thinker, said with no trace of a lisp.”

“Where were you when it happened, Judy?”

“I really don’t know, because no one seems to have any precise idea of when it did happen. Somebody started calling her. I think it was Mavis. Then we all listened. Then Gil Hayes started bellering her name so big it echoed off the other side of the lake. And we all listened. No Wilma. So Steve came roaring up to put on the lights, giving his playmates very little time to get decent. I heard the mad scrambling. Steve must have donned shorts while at a full gallop. You entered the scene at that point, from the wings, looking like something pried out from under a stone. And then your executive talent asserted itself. Order out of chaos.”

“My God, I wish Mavis would shut up.”

There was no answer to that. I wished she would too. I looked at the back of his head. I liked the funny boyish way his uncombed hair grew in a sort of swirly thing on the crown of his head. Poor bear. Great big guy with an integrity you could sense. Maybe his claws and teeth were sharp enough in the world of business, but in a setup like this he was a toddler. Types like Steve and Wallace Dorn and Randy and Wilma and—go ahead, admit it—Judy the Jonah could disembowel him with a flick of the wrist. I guess this is the difference: We learn, maybe too early, that the deadliest battlegrounds are the cocktail parties, the dinner parties, the theatre parties, the quick drink before lunch. For a man like Paul Dockerty such things are supposed to be relaxation. So here he was in the midst of wolves, burdened with that silly wife who has—I should say
had
—that severe
crush on Wilma, that silly wife without enough experience of the world to even sense the subconscious reason for that crush, though Wilma certainly knew the score. And, had she lived, I wouldn’t have put it past her to lead Mavis just far enough so the girl would one day get a pretty godawful look at herself and her motivations.

Poor bear. Poor decent bear. Nice guy with a rugged face, bewildered by his lady, and more than half disgusted with her. Judy, my girl, it is a luxury you can’t afford, but oh, how nice it would be to take off the mask once more and hold the big bear in your arms, hold him safe and sweet, because it’s a long, long time between loves.

“They seem to know what they’re doing down there,” Paul said.

There did seem to be a sort of orderliness about it, in the sweep of the boats back and forth, up and down. The wind began to come up and it was unexpectedly chilly. My robe began to feel thin.

“I’m going to go put clothes on,” I said.

“Good idea. They aren’t going to find her in a hurry. They keep getting hung up. It must be a rock bottom.”

“Do they go … right to the bottom?”

“I understand they do. Then, if they don’t find her, after a few days decomposition creates enough gas to bring the body to the surface. They used to fire off cannon to bring the body up. I’ll be damned if I know why.”

It made me shudder so hard my teeth chattered and I got up hurriedly. Noel and Randy had the next room. I heard his voice, harsh and high-pitched with strain, saying over and over, “Omigod, omigod, omigod.” Then I would hear
her voice, softer and lower, quieting him. There was a boy with a problem. A juicy one. Nor did I envy Noel.

My suit was still sodden. I peeled it down and stepped out of it, took one of the big thick luxurious towels, and rubbed until Judy glowed. It made me feel so good that I heard myself humming a little thing in time to the toweling. Like a damn pussycat, I thought. Everything gone thoroughly to pot and all of a sudden you feel just dandy. Pot made me think of pot, so I sucked in my midriff as far as it would go and turned in profile to the mirror. It made me stick out upstairs and protrude in the cellar, but tummy was nonexistent. Hell, I could hum, couldn’t I, if I had my health? Twenty-nine, and I took off on my first road trip at fifteen. One more year of it and it would be half my life. At fifteen I’d looked eighteen. At twenty-four I’d looked eighteen. I got a good many good years out of that eighteen. A stupid lovesick fifteen, lying about her age, traipsing off to sing with a real tired band just so she could be near Mose, who could tear such sweet notes out of that battered horn.

Whooo! All the years of fried food and riding the bus all night, and the well-cockroached hotels, and the booking agents with one fat hand on your knee. Golly! Those prom stands, and the big-wheel collitch lads, and Mose finally marrying me, and stepping up from tea to horse, keeping it quiet, cutting his throat in Scranton after Mitch dropped him, leaving me the legacy of one battered horn and three songs he couldn’t get published. That weird winter in Chicago on a sustaining show, and that crumby room shared with that Janet character. Came back and found her in jail for fishing out the window, for God’s sake. A borrowed rod
and scraps for bait, and hauling the yowling alley cats up to the window, three flights up, selling them for two bits apiece to the medical school. Baby, baby, you were ’way, ’way down before you started up, before Dandy Adams, bless his black soul, saw the capacity for comedy and started you on those first good routines. A long way down there, and, knocked off the top, you can’t fall that far, can you?