Border Town Girl (10 page)

I was sorry to see Jeff and Stella leave so early, because I knew Linda would be gunning for me. This would be one of the big screaming brawls she could throw every so often, yapping at me in a shrill way that would make me dizzy.

But it didn’t work out that way at all. She was quiet after Jeff and Stella left. I helped clean up the place, waiting every minute for the explosion. It just didn’t come. We went on up to bed.

Right here, in order to tell how that night was, I guess I’ve got to explain a little about the physical side of our marriage.

I’d never been with a woman until we were married. I kind of resented her knowing more about it than I did, but in some ways I was glad she did because it made things a lot easier at first. She was always moody about it. By that I mean that sometimes she’d seem to want to and a lot of the time she wouldn’t. It was generally pretty quick the times she’d want to, and the times she didn’t she acted like she was bored and just wished it would be over.

Anyway, on this night after Jeff and Stella went home and we went up to bed with me waiting for the explosion, it didn’t come. She fooled around and I was in bed first. Finally, she came out of the bathroom and stood in the doorway with the light from the bathroom shining right through some sort of filmy thing I’d never seen on her before. I guessed later that she’d bought it for the trip to Florida, after I knew why she bought it.

She stood there for a long time. As I said, I’ve never seen a better figure on a woman in my life. She turned the light off, finally, and I could hear the rustling of her as she came toward me in the darkness, hear the rustling, and then smell a new kind of heavy perfume she had put on, and then feel her strong arms around me as she brought her lips down on mine there in our dark bedroom.

When it was all over, she lay in my arms and she said, “This is the way it should always be, darling. Now you know why I want us to go to Florida. I want a new start for our marriage. I want a second honeymoon, a proper honeymoon this time.”

Well, I knew I wanted it to happen again just that way, and if I had to go to Florida to guarantee it, then I would go to Florida. It was as though I hadn’t even been married before. She was like a stranger, and I fell in love with her all over again.

In the morning she called Stella Jeffries. I told Jeff down at the plant. And it was all set.

Rufus Stick, the director of purchasing, tried to dissuade me. He said that the fall was a bad time to leave. But when he saw that I really wanted that time, he went along with it. We both knew that he owed me a lot. I devised the new spot check control of our perpetual inventory system and installed it. It works like a charm. And I set up the statistical control of inspection of incoming materials and revamped our point-of-reorder control system so that production hasn’t been on our necks in over a year. Besides, Rufus Stick knew that I didn’t want his job. I couldn’t handle the contacts with the top brass of other sections. I also owed Rufus a lot. He let me do my work in my own way, and raised me when he could. It was a good working relationship. He knew he had a loyal man under him who knew his job, and I knew that Rufus would protect me in every way he could.

We settled on Friday, October 22, as my final working day and I would report back on Monday, November 15. As soon as that was arranged. I phoned Jeff from my office and he said he would get to work on it. He phoned me that evening at home and said he’d gotten approval to start his vacation on Wednesday, October 27, and he would have to be back at work on Thursday, November 17. It gave him only twenty-two days to my twenty-three, but that was because of starting in the middle of the week.

I guess that he didn’t have much trouble arranging it because, from what I could hear, he was the fair-haired boy in sales. They were using him more and more on contacts with the advertising agency in addition to his regular job, and the new campaign he had worked on was turning out to be very successful. Contact work like that demands a talent I just don’t have. I find it very hard to talk to strangers. Once when I was in grammar school I tried to sell soap from door to door in my own neighborhood. I would press my finger against the door frame beside the bell rather than press the bell.

It was about a week after that when Linda had the Jeffries and the Carbonellis over one night. Stu brought his 35 millimeter slides and a portable projector and we took down a picture so Stu could flash the slides on the wall. Stu kept moaning because he had to take his vacation in July this year, and kept telling us how he envied us. The slides were fine. He gave me a lot of information on the fishing and said he’d even bring some good snook plugs to the office and leave them with me. Betty gave the girls the pitch on the marketing and so on. They gave us the name of the man who owned the beach cottages and rented them himself. Jeff said he would write on a company letterhead and make the arrangements. The man’s name was Dooley. Stu said he was a retired construction worker who had built the two beach cottages himself. Stu said the only bad thing about their vacation had been that during the last week of it the other cottage had been rented to some South Carolina people with four noisy children, but if we wrote early enough and sewed up both cottages, we could avoid that.

Stu and Betty had to leave early because of their sitter. We sat around and talked about the pictures and what we would take. We had a mild argument about which car we would take. It was mild because I certainly didn’t want to subject Jeff and Stella to driving back in our six-year-old sedan, not after the cars he was used to driving. Jeff was perceptive about it. He said, “Look, kids, I’ve got a new one on order for delivery next month. By October it will be nicely broken in, and there’ll be plenty of room in it for all our junk.” So we left it at that.

Jeff heard from Dooley ten days later, saying that we could rent both cottages for the full month of November, and he would let us take occupancy the last week in October. He wanted a hundred and fifty apiece for the cottages, plus four fifty for the Florida tax. It was twenty-five more than Stu and Betty had paid, but still reasonable. I gave Jeff my check for my share, and he mailed the full rental to Dooley. Dooley wrote back and said he would be away when we arrived, but we could pick up the keys to both places at Jethro’s Market in Hooker, and he said that before he left he’d make certain that everything was shipshape at the two cottages. He said he hoped we’d have a good vacation, and if there was any trouble about anything, any repairs to be made, we should please see Lottie Jethro at the market.

We had one of the hottest, stickiest summers on record. Even the baking city couldn’t subdue Linda’s enthusiasm for the trip. It seemed to mean an awful lot to her. It puzzled me a bit. I could understand how she could reach such a peak of enthusiasm if we were going to Paris or Rome or something, but she was brittle and nervous and quick, as though she expected the sandy expanses of Verano Key to contain the glamor and excitement of a royal court. I can see now how, in a special sense, that is what Linda went there to find.

Jeff’s car came and I drove it a couple of times that summer when the four of us went out together. It was low, long, pale gray and powerful. It had power brakes, power steering, power seats, power windows and startling acceleration. It rode so smoothly that it would be up to seventy before you were aware that you were speeding. When I went back to my own car after driving that monster I had the feeling that I was sitting nine feet off the ground and all the fenders were chattering. I must say that I looked forward to driving that thing all the way to Florida.

Actually, we did not see as much of the Jeffries that summer as I had thought we would. They belonged to the country club and we didn’t. On the hot days Jeff would go right to the club from the office, and Stella would be there by the pool waiting for him. I expected Linda to start her annual campaign to get me to join, but she didn’t. She was very easy to get along with that summer. She sang when she worked. She took sunbaths in our small back yard. I had made a frame for her and tacked striped canvas on it so she could have privacy. She sunbathed in the nude, oiling herself heavily so as not to harshen her skin, until she was the same even golden tan from head to toe.

I remembered one Saturday when I was working in the yard and she was in the small canvas pen sunbathing. I walked over and my footsteps were soundless on the grass. She lay on her back with little joined white plastic cups over her eyes. They made her face look most odd. I thought she was asleep, and then I saw that she had a cigarette between her fingers. She brought it slowly to her lips, inhaled, held the smoke in her lungs and then slowly blew it out. I wondered what she was thinking about. The plastic shielding over her eyes gave her such a secretive look. Sweat stood in tiny droplets on her brown skin. Her body was of such perfection, there under the sun, that it wasn’t like looking at a nude living woman. It was strangely like looking at statuary, at something very ancient and very perfect—something brought forward to this era out of a crueler past.

I had the odd feeling that I did not know her at all. It was much like the times in high school when I had stared, flushing, at the curve of her young breast, unable to look away, caught not by lust but by mystery. And throughout my nighttime imaginings of her during those young years I had thought deeply and forlornly that this special mystery would never be for me—that I would never content myself with lesser flesh and thus would go through life tragically alone.

I spoke her name and she removed the white plastic cups and squinted up at me and said, “What? What is it?”

She was Linda again and I went back to my yard work. I know now what she was thinking as I stood watching her, and I have come to believe that evil radiates its own special aura so that when you are receptive to it, you can feel a brush of coldness across your heart.

But that day I shrugged it off, not recognizing it for what it was. I was merely Paul Cowley, a mild man who grubbed away at the crab grass—a man of average height with a narrow introspective face, sloping shoulders, no-color hair that in the past year had thinned so much on top that under the fluorescent bathroom light I could see the gleam of my scalp under the sparse hair. I knew what I was. I was a worker, with a dogged analytical mind, and hands that were clever with both tools and figures. I had outgrown my boyhood dreams of triumph. I knew my place in my known world, with my work and my home and my restless and beautiful wife.

I now know that that Paul Cowley was a fool, and it is of such fools that you read in your tabloids. They believe they walk forward on a wide safe place, whereas in truth it is an incredibly narrow walkway, high over blackness.

THE HEAT CONTINUED FOR TWO WEEKS AFTER Labor Day. It turned cool then and the leaves began to change. I put my fishing tackle in order, bought traveler’s checks, bought the sort of beach clothing I thought I would need. I worked long hours at the office, determined that my desk would be absolutely clear on the day I left. I knew there would be enough of an accumulation by the time I returned.

The last days seemed to drag. At last it was Friday, the twenty-second. I said good-by to the people in the section and said good-by to Rufus. It seemed odd to be taking off after the summer was over. I left my address with Rufus—Route 1, Box 88, Hooker, Florida—so he could contact me if necessary. He said he hoped he wouldn’t have to.

On Friday evening Jeff and Stella brought the big car over. Their stuff was all packed in it, and ours was ready to load. Jeff brought our plane tickets for the trip back and I gave him a check. They would arrive at the Sarasota airport at seven-twenty on the evening of the twenty-seventh. We should arrive at the key on the twenty-fifth, and that would give us time to get settled before running up to Sarasota to get them. They took my car when they left, and my garage door key. They would use my car and leave it in my garage before they left.

Linda and I loaded the car and went to bed. In the morning we closed up the house, got an early start, had breakfast on the road. We arrived in Hooker on Monday evening at five o’clock. The trip was uneventful. The car drove easily. Linda was uncommonly quiet during the trip. We had no difficulty finding rooms at pleasant motels as there were not many people on the road at that time of year. We drove from the crisp bite of fall back into summer.

Hooker was a small sleepy town dotted with the crumbling Moorish palaces of the old boom of the twenties. Its streets fanned optimistically out into the palmetto scrub, tall weeds thrusting up through shattered asphalt. It was still and hot and there were a few dusty cars parked on the wide main street. I parked in front of Jethro’s Market and when I got out of the car two large black lethargic mosquitoes landed on my forearm.

Lottie Jethro was a vast faded young woman, with a cotton dress stretching tightly across her abundances. She gave me the keys and said, “You go right on out this road. It runs along the bay and then you come to a sign points west says Verano Key Beach. Get out onto the key and turn left, that’s south, and go about a mile and you come to a little sign says Cypress Cottages, and that’s it. You’ll have to try the keys because I don’t know which is which. But they’re both alike. The fuses on the electric is unscrewed. You got to screw them in. There’s fresh bottles of gas there for both, and just the one pump house, here’s the key. There’s a sign on the wall telling how you prime the pump.”

The screen door banged and Linda came in after me. She had changed to shorts for the last day’s travel. Some men in the back of the store stopped talking when she came in.

“I thought we might as well pick up some groceries now,” she said.

“We got a good line of frozen meats and groceries, lady,” Miss Jethro said.

I bought cigarettes and some magazines and some insect spray and repellent and looked over the fishing tackle while Linda completed her purchasing. I had to cash a traveler’s check to pay for everything. We drove about six miles south and found the sign and crossed a frail wooden bridge onto the key. The road down the key was a sand road, the hump in the middle so high that it brushed the differential. We passed two houses that looked closed. The sun was settling toward the steel blue Gulf. Sometimes the road would wind near enough so that we could see a wide expanse of pale beach and lazy waves that heaved up and slapped at the sand. Water birds ran busily along the water line, pecking at the sand.