Bright Orange for the Shroud (15 page)

“I’m grateful to you. How do I find his place?”

“Go out to the hardtop and go down that way to the end where it curves around to come back on itself, and on the curve two dirt roads slant off, and his is the one farthest from
the shore line, and he’s maybe a mile back there, little more than a mile and a half all told. Only place on that road.”

I didn’t see the cottage until I came around the last bend in the shell road, and then it was visible between the trees, a hundred and fifty feet away. Once it had been yellow with white trim, but now most of it was weathered gray, the boards warped and pulping loose. The shingled roof was swaybacked, the yard overgrown. But a shiny television antenna glinted high above it, outlined against the blue sky. A mockingbird sat atop it, rocking with effort as he created melodic patterns. A big Land Rover, new but caked with dried mud, was parked by a shed at the side. A large, handsome lapstrake inboard launch sat strapped on a heavy-duty boat trailer. Parked at an angle, and almost against the rungs of the sagging porch, was a white Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, top up, the current model, dusty, with a rear fender bashed, taillights broken on that side. The collection of hardware was as if a very large child had been giving himself a happy Christmas. The closer I got, the more signs of neglect I saw. I went and looked into the skiff. It was loaded with extras, including one of the better brands of transistorized ship-to-shore units. But birds had dappled the royal blue plastic of the seats, and there was enough dirty rainwater aboard to fill the bilge and be visible above the floorboards.

I couldn’t imagine Boo Waxwell having much of a credit rating. So I could estimate at least twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of toys in his yard. And guess there would be more in the house. Kids with lots of toys neglect them.

The mockingbird yelled, and insects shrilled, underlining the morning silence. I broke it up by facing the front door from thirty feet away, and yelling, “Waxwell! Yo! Boone Waxwell!”

In a few moments I heard some thumping around inside, saw a vague face through a dingy window. Then the door opened and a man came out onto the porch. He wore dirty khaki pants. He was barefoot, bare to the waist. Glossy black curly hair, dense black mat of hair on his chest. Blue eyes. Sallow face. Tattoo as Arthur had described it. But Arthur’s description hadn’t caught the essence of the man. Perhaps because Arthur wouldn’t know what to call it. Waxwell had good wads of muscle on his shoulders. His waist had thickened and was beginning to soften. In posture, expression, impact, he had that stud look, that curiously theatrical blend of brutality and irony. Bogart, Mitchum, Gable, Flynn—the same flavor was there, a seedy, indolent brutality, a wisdom of the flesh. Women, sensing exactly what he was, and knowing how casually they would be used, would yet accept him, saying yes on a basis so primitive they could neither identify it nor resist it.

He carried a shotgun as one might carry a pistol, barrel pointing at the porch boards a few feet ahead of his bare toes.

“Who the hell are you, buster boy?”

“I want to have a little talk with you, Waxwell.”

“Now int that right fine?” He lifted the muzzle slightly. “Git on off my land or I’ll blow a foot off you and tote you off.”

And unless I could come up with something to attract his attention, that was just as far as I was going to get. You have to take your chances without much time to think. I knew he
could check. But somehow I could not imagine Waxwell being very close to the lawyer. Or trusting him. Or trusting anyone.

“Crane Watts said maybe you could help me out, Boo.”

He stared at me with a mild, faked astonishment. “Now int he some lawyer fella over to Naples?”

“Oh, come off it, for crissake! I’m trying to line something up, and maybe there’s some room for you too, like the last time. The same kind of help. You understand. But this time, maybe nobody takes any of the money back to Tampa. We can use you, and we can use the same woman, I think. Watts said you’d know how to get in touch with her.”

Earnest bewilderment, “Mought be some other Waxwell you want. You makin’ no sense to me noways, buster boy. You stay right where you are, and I come back out and we talk on it some.”

He went into the house. I heard him talking to someone, then heard a faint female response. He came back smiling, buttoning his shirt, shoes on, and a straw hat in cowboy shape stuck on the back of his curly head. He had indeed a merry smile, and he stuck his hand out when he was six feet from me. As I took it, I saw the first flick of what the old man had warned me about, and I jumped to the side. The unexpected miss swung his heavy right shoe as high as a chorus girl kick, and at its apex, I chopped down across his throat with my left forearm, driving him down to hit the ground on his shoulders with a mighty, bone-rattling thud.

He stared up at me in purest astonishment, and then he began to laugh. It was an infectious laugh, full of delight. “Man, man,” he gasped, “you as rough and quick as the business end of an alligator gar. Taught ol’ Boo a Sunday school
lesson.” He started to get up, and his face twisted. He groaned. “Think you bust somethin’. He’p me up.” He put his hand up. I took it. He swung his heels up into my belly and kicked me back over his head, and I had enough sense, at least, not to hang on and let the leverage slam me into the ground. I hit rolling, and kept rolling, and even so his heel stomped the ground an inch from my ear before I rolled under his trailered boat. As I straightened up on the far side, he came running at me around the stern of the boat. He was a very cat-quick and deadly fellow, and he bulled me back against the lapstrake hull, screwed his heels into the ground, and began throwing big hooks with each fist, just as fast as he could swing. When they do that, it is best to try to ride it out. It is better than being bold and catching one. My defensive attitude gave him confidence. And, at best, I do not impress. I am a rawboned gangler, with a look of elbows and awkwardness. But the left shoulder is curled comfortingly around the jaw, and the right forearm stays high enough. And the best way to catch the rhythm is to keep an unfocussed stare on the other man’s belly. Then you can roll and ride with it, and still be prepared to turn a thigh into the optimistic knee. He hammered away at my arms, elbows, shoulders, and my swaying crouch kept me within easy range. He got in one dandy under the short ribs, and one over the left ear that rang woodland bells. He matched each effort with a hard explosive snuff, and finally as they began to come in with less snap and at a slower pace, he seemed to realize he was doing very little damage. So he tried to change his style from alley to club fighter, moving back a little, trying the unfamiliar jab, hoping to cross with the right. But I took him down a little alley of my own. Queensberry, even when it is by way of Graziano, is bad on the knuckle bones.
And that is what makes the TV gladiators so hilarious. Just one of those wild smacks in the jawbones would have the hero nestling his splintered paw between his thighs, and making little damp cries of anguish. So, half-turning, crouching, I slumped a little to make him think he’d worn me down. It suckered him into pulling in again. I came down hard on his instep and, with my hands locked, brought my right elbow up under his chops. In a continuation of the same motion, unlocking my hands, I turned toward him, whipping him across the eyes with an open backhand. Unexpected agonies in unexpected places in very rapid sequence can give a man the demoralizing feeling he has stumbled into a milling machine. I thumbed him in the throat socket, gave him a homemade thunderclap with an open slap on the ear, hooked him deeply just under the belt buckle—the only traditional blow in my brief routine, and as he bent, I clapped onto his wrist, turned it up between his shoulder blades, and ran him two steps into the side of the boat. His head boomed it like a jungle drum and he dropped loose, made an instinctive effort to come up, then went loose again and stayed down, sleepy cheek on the damp earth by a trailer wheel.

As I fingered tender areas, appraising damage, and feeling pleasantly loose and limber and fit, I heard high heels on the porch. I turned and saw a girl put a giant white purse and a white cardigan on the top step, then come across the scruffy dooryard, tilting along on the high heels of soiled white shoes. She wore a sheer pale yellow blouse, her bra visible through it, and a tight green skirt in a very vivid and unpleasant shade. She looked like a recruit from that drugstore group. Fifteen, I imagined. Certainly not over sixteen. Still padded with baby fat. Wide soft spread of hips, premature heft of breasts, little
fat roll around the top of the waist-tight skirt. A round dumpling face, child-pretty, and a puffy little mouth, freshly reddened. She stared steadily at Waxwell as she approached, and she continued combing her flaxen hair with a bright red comb, guiding the strokes with her other hand. She stopped close to me, looking down at him. Her child-skin was so incredibly fine that even at close range in the morning light I could see no texture or grain. I could hear the whispery crackle as she pulled the comb down through that straight, healthy blond hair.

“Done me a favor if’n you kilt him,” she said in a thin childish voice.

“There he is. Finish the job.” Still combing, shifting to the other side, she looked up at me, head tilted. I had expected girl-eyes as vulnerable as the rest of her. These hazel eyes were old and cold, and with a little twist of recognition I remembered the wise old eyes of the urchins of Pusan, the eyes which remained unchanged by the appealing, begging, belly-empty smiles they gave the G.I.’s.

“Could might do jus that some time,” she said. “Or somebody will. Onliest way I could get stopped from coming on over here. Hah! He jus three month from my Pa’s age. But you don’t kill off Waxwells. It comes out the other way around.”

Boone Waxwell grunted and slowly worked himself into a sitting position, head between his knees, hands tenderly holding the top of his head. He peered up at us through lashes I had not noticed before, dense and black and girlishly long.

“Look, I’m going to be going along now, hear?” the girl said.

“So you go long, Cindy.” She stared down at him, shrugged, started back toward her purse and sweater.

She stopped halfway and called back to me. “Mister, he’ll be thinkin on some way to bust you up when you least expeck.”

“Ain’t going to work on this old boy. Get on home, girl,” he said.

Waxwell pulled himself up, leaning against the boat. He shook his head, put a finger in his ear and wiggled it. “You deefed me up on this side, like a little waterfall inside. And husked up my voice box. Some kind of that judo?”

“The home study course from Monkey Ward, Boo.”

Cindy creaked the shed door open and went in and wheeled out a red and white Vespa scooter. She rested it on the brace, opened the package box, put her big purse and sweater inside, took out a white scarf and carefully turbanned her hair. She did not look toward us. She took the white shoes off and put them in the compartment. She jacked down on the starter and, with it running in neutral, tucked the brace up, hitched the green skirt halfway up the heavy white meat of her thighs, pushed it off and slid aboard, shifting into forward. She wobbled a little, then straightened as it increased its snoring sound, and went off through the sunshine down the shell road, the drone hanging in the air after she was gone, then fading out.

“Little young for you, isn’t she?”

“The man says they big enough, they old enough. I give her the loan of that scooter bug. Cindy, she’s my nearby girl this year. A nearby girl is when it’s too damn much trouble to go after anything else. She lives just over this end of Marco Village. I can swing by that shacky old place and give a long, a short and a long on the car horn, and have me time to come back home here and get settled down, and then I hear that scooter bug like a hornet coming through the night, and she says she won’t never again come when I honk for her, but ever
time she comes on in pantin and blowin like she run the whole way stead of ridin.”

“Why don’t her folks stop her?”

He gave me that warm engaging grin, and a broad wink. “Maybe ten years ago it was, Cindy’s daddy, Clete Ingerfeldt, him and me had a little talk about Clete’s missus, and I pure liked to whip the ass clear off him. He got such a strong memory of it, I even say hello to him, his chin gets all spitty. I tell you, fat stuff got the hang of it a lot better than her old lady ever did.” He gave me a stare of amazed innocence. “You come way out here to find out about my love life?”

“I came out here to talk about making some money. Like the money you made off Arthur Wilkinson.”

“Now I don’t recall we made a dime. If that deal went through, we were fixing to make out good. But all we ever got back was the money we put in, less the expense money that come off the top.”

“All of a sudden, Boo, your diction improves.”

He grinned. “Sometimes I had to go away for a spell. Got me exposed to the high and mighty. Got me some college women to learn me.”

“If you give me another chance, I’ll learn you too. It’s a promise. If you get tricky one more time, I’m going to give you a strong memory like you gave Cindy’s father. You’re going to totter around like a very old man for a very long time.”

He studied me carefully. “Lord God, you got a size on you. I shoulda looked more careful to start. From those wrists, you’ll go twenty pound more than I guessed. First time I been whipped in four years. But I ain’t Clete Ingerfeldt. You could bust half the bones I got, and I’d put my mind on mending up
and coming after you, and you better remember it, and knowing I couldn’t take you even, I’d take you any ways seems safe, take you way up Lostman’s River and stuff you under the red mangrove roots for crab food, and it wouldn’t be the first time I took care of some little problem that way.” There was no bluff in it. It was an absolutely cold and factual statement.

“Then I’ll put it another way, Boo. If you try something, and it doesn’t work, I’ll make sure you never get well enough to even get in and out of a boat.”