Bright Orange for the Shroud (3 page)

When Wilma finally took aim, Arthur Wilkinson was the hapless target, and there was not one damn thing any of us could do about it. He had less chance than a lovely wench when the Goths came to town. His eyes glazed over. A broad fatuous grin was permanently in place. She was at his elbow, steering him, to keep him from walking into immovable objects. He thought her junebug cute, delicate and dear, infinitely valuable. He felt humble to be so favored, to be awarded this rare prize. Any hint that the junebug might be a scorpion didn’t offend him. He just couldn’t hear what was said to him. He laughed, thinking it some kind of a joke. After the minimum waiting time, they were married late one afternoon at the court house, and left in a new white Pontiac convertible, the back seat stacked with her matched luggage, her smile as brilliant as a brand new vermin trap ordered from Herter’s
catalogue. I had kissed the dear little cheek of the junebug bride. She’d smelled soapy clean. She called me a dear boy. My present was a six pack—Metaxa, Fundador, Plymouth gin, Chivas Regal, Old Crow and a Piper Heidsieck ’59. For the expendable marriage, you give the expendable gift. She left a message for the yacht that wouldn’t be back to pick her up. And I knew the two of them would not come back to Lauderdale as long as she was in command. She had sensed the appraisal of the group, and would require a more gullible environment.

Three days after they left, we all knew something was wrong with the Alabama Tiger. Instead of his benign and placid condition of mild alcoholic euphoria, he swung between morose sobriety and wild, reckless, dangerous drunks. The permanent houseparty began to dwindle. It was Meyer who dug the reason out of him after finding the Tiger sitting lumpily on the beach at dawn with a loaded .38 tucked inside his shirt. And because he wanted a little help keeping an eye on him, Meyer told me the story.

Wilma had secretly invited the Tiger over to headquarters at the hotel one morning. With a deftness, Meyer said, more common in the Far East than in our less ancient cultures, she had quickly learned how to turn him on and off, as if he were a construction kit she had wired herself. Then, with a dreadful control, she had taken him right to the edge and hung him up there, incapable of either release or retreat.

“In his own deathless words,” Meyer said, “whooflin’ and shakin’ like an ol’ hawg hung on the charger wires. He honestly
began to believe it was going to kill him. He could feel his heart beginning to burst. And she was laughing at him, he said, her face like a spook. Then suddenly, without release or warning, he felt dead. He heard her singing in her shower. After she was dressed, she kissed him on the forehead, patted his cheek and left. He thought of killing her as she bent over to kiss him, but even that seemed too unimportant for the effort involved. Suddenly he had become an old man. She had accepted the tension between them, the contest of wills, and had taken a little time out to whip him before leaving. It might interest you, McGee, to know that it happened last Thursday morning.”

She had married Arthur Thursday afternoon.

“There could be a little heart damage,” Meyer said. “There certainly seems to be plenty of emotional damage.”

Monday night, late, I walked over to the Tiger’s big flush-deck Wheeler and from fifty feet away I decided, with that sense of loss you have when a legend ends, that the oldest permanent floating houseparty in the world had finally ended. One small light glowed. But from twenty feet I picked up the tempo of Hawaiian music on his record player system, turned very low. Approaching, I made out a girl-shape in the glow of dock-lights, dancing alone slowly on the after deck under the striped canvas canopy, highlights glinting on the glass in her hand as she turned.

She saw me and angled her dance toward the rail, and I saw that it was one of the Ching sisters, Mary Li or Mary Lo, the identical twins who sing-and-dance at the Roundabout, closed Mondays. She was involved in a variant of the dance forms of her native Hawaii. It is impossible to tell the twins apart.
Almost impossible. I had heard that Mary Lo is distinguished by a tiny vivid gem-like tattoo of a good luck ladybug, but so ultimately located that by the time one encounters it, any thought of choice has long since been obviated.

Her hair swayed dark and heavy as she turned, and her smile was white in duskiness. “Hey you, McGee,” she said in a low tone. “Long as one little thing keeps swinging, Poppa Tiger’s bash is still alive. You haul aboard, make yourself a cup there.”

As I made my drink she said, “We running a fox roster, man, the chicks who swung good here, keeping him braced up.”

“How is he making it, Mary?”

“Now he smiled some tonight, and he cried just a little time because he said he was done for good and all, but a little time back my sister came topside all tuckered and said he made out, and now they sacked out like death itself, and this here is the party, McGee man, down to just me. And now you, but Frannie coming by after she gets off work at two, bringing the bongo cat, and I say things pick up from here, pick up good. A swinger boat, with booze like a convention, you got to brace the management when he’s down.”

“The only reason, Mary?”

She stopped her dance eye to eye, a handspan away.

“Like that dirty-mind cop wants to close us down, Poppa Tiger goes way upstairs and has the clout to mend his ways. Like our nephew needed the school letter that time, Poppa Tiger writes pretty. I just want to keep the free booze coming man, and tap that locker full of prime beef, and get the boat kicks.”

“I knew better. I thought it would be nice to hear you say it, Mary.”

“Brace up this dead drink for me, on the house. It’s fat vodka, one cube and a smitch from the little cranberry juice can.”

“Gah.”

“Don’t drink it, just make it.”

We had some drinks, and I watched her dance, and we had some laughs because the old bear was on the mend. Frannie brought along some other kids from the club she was working. And as an unexpected by-product of celebration, I learned beyond any chance of confusion that the night dancer had been Mary Lo. Selections from the Tiger pack are not my usual type, as it tends to be too casual and mechanical for the ornamented romanticism of the McGee, who always wants a scarf in token to tie to the crest of the cut-rate helmet, wants the soul-torn glance, the tremors of the heart, the sense—or the illusion—of both choice and importance. But Mary Lo left no bad taste. She made it like a game for kids, chuckling and crooning her pleasures, and it did indeed pleasantly blur the use Wilma made of the same game. After they have strangled the king with boiling wine, it is therapeutic to get a little tipsy on a more palatable brand.

Arthur fell back into my life on that Tuesday afternoon. Acquaintance rather than friend. The dividing line is communication, I think. A friend is someone to whom you can say any jackass thing that enters your mind. With acquaintances, you are forever aware of their slightly unreal image of you, and to keep them content, you edit yourself to fit. Many marriages are between acquaintances. You can be with a person for three hours of your life and have a friend. Another one will remain an acquaintance for thirty years.

While he slept I dug into the more remote lockers in the bow section until I found the small ragged suitcase I remembered. Girl-bought clothes for a version of McGee of long ago, when I hid out and they hunted me, and I was afraid the stink of my rotting leg would clue them in. Killed the two of them while in delirium. No memory of how she got me to the hospital. Heard later how she managed to keep them from taking
the leg off. Now there is that crooked pale arroyo, long down the right thigh, deep into muscle tissue. Function unimpaired. But a chancy time, deep there in fevers, seeing the pearly gleam of the gates, talking to the dead brother, sometimes looking up out of a well at the professional faces bending over the bed.

These were the clothes she brought me, the clothes in which I was wheeled out into the vivid unreal world, clothes in which I first tottered about, ten feet tall and two inches wide, certain that if I fell off the crutches I would break like a glass stork. They would fit Arthur nicely in his dwindled condition and were only slightly musty from long storage. In a housewifely mood, I hung them out to air, thinking of the money the dead ones had stolen, quite legally, from the dead brother and how, quite illegally, the girl and I had stolen it back, cut it down the middle.

While Arthur slept, I wondered how the hell to get rid of him. That was the extent of my Christian charity. I could accept being an aid station but not a convalescent clinic. I went over the composition of the group as Arthur had known it, looking for a substitute pigeon. I had my slob summer all planned. Immediately after the dry rot surgery and a few other maintenance matters, I wanted to take the
Busted Flush
down to Dinner Key, get her hauled and get the bottom scraped and painted, and then chug at my stately 6+ knots—with a six-hundred-mile range on the two 58 hp Hercules Diesels—over to the Bahamas on a dead calm day. The 52-foot barge-type houseboat can take pretty rough weather if forced to, but she rolls so badly she tends to bust up the little servomechanisms aboard which make life lush. I had been mentally composing a guest list, limited to those random salty souls who can get
away, hold their liquor, endure sunshine, make good talk, swim the reefs, navigate, handle the lines, slay food fish and appreciate the therapeutic value of silence. It is the McGee version of being a loner—merely having some people about to whom you don’t have to constantly react. Arthur did not fit that specification closely enough.

When darkness came, I took the aired clothes below and put them on a chair in the guest stateroom. He was snoring in a muted way. I closed his door, fixed myself a Plymouth gin on the rocks, closed the lounge curtains, looked up Chookie McCall’s number. No answer. I hadn’t seen her or heard anything about her in two months. I tried Hal, the bartender at the Mile O’Beach who keeps good track of our gypsy contingent of entertainers. Hal said she’d been working at Bernie’s East up to May first when they closed the Brimstone Room, and as far as he knew all she was doing was a Saturday morning one-hour show of dance instruction on KLAK-TV. But he had it on good authority she was all set to regroup her six pack and open back at the Mile O’Beach in the Bahama Room come November 15th.

“Hal, is Frank Durkin back yet?”

“Back yet! Don’t sit on your hands until he gets back. Dint you hear what they got him on?”

“Only that he took a fall.”

“It was assault with intent to kill, or felonious assault or whatever the hell they call it. Three to five up in Raiford, and you can bet Frankie will get smartass with those screws up there and they will keep him for the five. Chook goes up to see him once a month. She’ll be making a lot of trips. All that woman could find something better, McGee, and you know it. She don’t get any younger.”

“Younger? Hell, she’s only twenty-five at the most.”

“Ten years in the entertainment business, and thirty when they turn Frankie Durkin loose. It adds up, Trav. If I was trying to locate her tonight, I think maybe Muriel Hess would be a good bet. She’s in the book. They’ve been working together on material for when she starts up here in the fall.”

I thanked him and tried the number. Chook was there. “What’s on your mind, stranger?”

“Buying a steak for the dancing girl.”

“Plural?”

“Not if you can help it.”

There was a long palm-over-the-mouthpiece silence, and then she said, “What kind of a place, Trav?”

“The Open Range?”

“Yum! I’ll have to go back to my place and change. How about coming over for a drink? Forty minutes?”

I shaved and changed, and left a note for Arthur in case he woke up. Because of all the boat errands, I had Miss Agnes parked nearby, my electric blue Rolls pickup truck, an amateur conversion accomplished by some desperate idiot during her checkered past. She is not yet old enough to vote. But almost. She started with a touch, and I went along the beach to where Miss McCall lives in the back end of a motel so elderly it has long since been converted from transient to permanent residence. She’s in what used to be two units. Wrapped in a robe, smelling of steam and soap, she gave me a sisterly kiss, told me to fix her a bourbon and water. I handed it in to her.

In a reasonably short time she came out in high heels and a pale green-gray dress. “McGee, I think I say yes because how many guys I go out with can I wear heels with?” She inspected me. “You’re too heavy.”

“Thanks. I feel too heavy.”

“Are you going to do anything about it?”

“I’ve started.”

“With booze in your hand?”

“I’m starting a little slow, but I’m one of those who lose it with exercise. Not enough lately. But a lot more coming up. Chook, you are
not
too heavy.”

“Because I work at it
all
the time.”

She was indeed something, All that woman, as Hal had said. Five ten, maybe 136 pounds, maybe 39-25-39, and every inch glossy, firm, pneumatic—intensely alive, perfectly conditioned as are only the dedicated professional dancers, circus flyers, tumblers, and combat rangers. Close up you can hear their motors humming. Heart beat in repose is in the fifties. Lung capacity extraordinary. Whites of the eyes a blue-white.

Not a pretty woman. Features too vital and heavy. Brows heavy. Hair harsh and black and glossy, like a racing mare. Indian-black eyes, bold nose, big broad mouth. A handsome, striking human being. When she was five years old they had started her on ballet. When she was twelve she had grown too big to be accepted in any company. When she was fifteen, claiming nineteen, she was in the chorus of a Broadway musical.

While I freshened the drinks she told me what she was working out with Muriel, a New Nations theme, researching the music and rhythms. She said it would give them some exotic stuff and some darling costumes and some sexy choreography. We sat to finish the drink. She said Wassener, the new manager, was considering a no-bra policy for the little troupe next season, and was sounding out the authorities to see how bad a beef he might get. She said she hoped it wouldn’t work
out, as it would mean either canceling out two good girls she already had lined up, or talking them into wax jobs. “Posing and blackouts and that stuff,” she said, “it’s a different thing. You just keep your chin up and you arch your back a little and tighten your shoulders back, but I’ve been trying to tell Mr. Wassener dancing is something else. MiGod, a time step in fast tempo, and all of a sudden it could look like a comedy routine, you know what I mean. If he thinks it’ll draw, what he should get is a couple of big dumb ponies and just let them stand upstage on pedestals maybe, in baby spots and turn slow.”