Bright Orange for the Shroud (31 page)

I backed clear, turned her, put her on pilot and a due west heading, and at very meager rpms, went scrambling down to the bilges to see how she was. And she was, astonishingly, bone dry sound. Apparently the hull shape had just pushed that springy mangrove aside.

I located our position with the radio loop, close enough for my purposes. I remembered the wrench and got it away from the pilot compass before I ran us aground again.

• • •

A Coast Guard chopper circled us a half hour after dawn, making that distinctive whappling noise. He hung off the stern while we all beamed and waved at him, and finally, after he had done everything but throw his hand phone at us, I gave a great gesture of comprehension and ran to my set. He moved a half mile away so I could hear and came in on the Coast Guard frequency. I was astonished we’d been so close to a maniac like Waxwell, yes indeed. Wow. It makes you think. When we broke off, he gave himself a little treat. He came over and took a long appreciative look at Chook. She had come out in a little flimsy shorty nightgown to wave at the pretty helicopter, and the flyer and his buddy up here swung craftily around to put the rising sun behind her. But the instant he was gone, we stopped grinning like maniacs.

“Is it right, Trav,” she said. “All those people hunting and hunting?”

“The tide was an hour past high when I snagged him onto the shore. There aren’t any branches over him. They ought to find him soon.”

I put her on radio watch, monitoring the Coast Guard frequency. At quarter of eight she came up to tell us they had the body and a positive identification. She looked wan and dreary, and we sent her back to bed. But before she went, she gave Arthur a rib-cracking hug, stared into his eyes with her head cocked, and said, “I just thought I’d tell you something. Frankie would not have done what you did. For me. For anyone. Except Frankie.”

After she sacked out, we went through Waxwell’s gear. We deep-sixed it, rifle and all. Except something we found in the box under his dehydrated rations. Carefully folded into saran
wrap. Ninety-one brand new hundred dollar bills in serial sequence.

Chook came up for air at three in the afternoon, all soft and blurred and dreamy.

“What do we do,” she said, “anchor for four or five or six days, like on the way over, huh?”

“Okay,” they said, simultaneously, and it was at that moment I decided the unexpected nine thousand was a wedding present, if my hunch paid off.

My hunch paid off, on the Fourth of July, with perhaps the only beach picnic reception of the season serving hamburgers and champagne to about two hundred types, from beach bums to a state senator, from waitresses to a legitimate, by blood, baroness.

And on the afternoon of the Fifth of July, as I was once again making the motions of assembling the delayed cruise over to the islands, a merry voice called me up from the engine room. And there, at my gangplank, slender and graceful as a young birch tree, dressed in a pale high fashion gray, five matched pieces of luggage standing beside her, cab driver hovering in the background, stood Miss Debra Brown, Calvin Stebber’s disciplined cigar-lighter and daiquiri mixer, her crystal mint eyes alight with mischief and promise.

“It’s all right, driver,” she said.

He turned to go and I said, “Hold it, driver.”

“But darling,” she said, “you don’t understand. There was this contest, three words or less, how and where and with whom would you most like to spend your vacation, and you
won
, darling McGee. And here I am!”

I slowly wiped my hands on the greasy rag I had brought up from below. “So Uncle Cal got it in his head I got a very nice piece of Wilma’s bundle, and you’ve cooked up something that might work.”

She pouted. “Darling, I hardly blame you. After all. But really, I have just been terribly terribly mopey ever since you visited us. You genuinely intrigued me, dear. And this is a very seldom thing with Debra, believe me. Poor Calvin, he finally got so weary of all my little sighs and hints that he told me to come over and get it out of my system before I came down with the vapors or something. I swear to you, dear McGee, this is an entirely personal affair, and has nothing whatever to do with … my professional career.”

It was a temptation. She was a convincing elegance. Headwaiters would unhook the velvet rope and bow you in. Elegance with the faintest oversweet odor of decay. Perhaps for any man there can be something very heady about a woman totally amoral, totally without mercy, shame or softness.

But I had to remember her, too vividly, lighting Stebber’s cigar.

“Sweetie,” I said, “you are a penny from heaven. And you probably know lots and lots of tricks. But every one would remind me that you are a pro, from Wilma’s old stable of club fighters. Call me a sentimentalist. The bloom is too far off the rose, sweetie. I’d probably keep leaving money on the bureau. You better peddle it. Thanks but no thanks.”

The lips curled back and her face went so tight, I saw what
a pretty and delicate little skull she’d make, picked clean, as Wilma’s now was, in the dark bottom of Chevelier Bay. Without a word she whirled and went off toward the distant cab. The driver looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. He managed three bags on the first trip, and came after the others at a trot, looking whipped with a salty lash.

I don’t know what it is that makes that difference. I don’t know now, and maybe I never will. Maybe the people who fit have some forlorn fancy about perfecting themselves in their own image, about living up to some damned thing always a little out of reach. But you try. You reach and slip and fall and get up, and you reach some more.

I went below, slapped a wrench on a nut, put my back into it, and took the hide off the top of three knuckles. I sat down there in the hot gloom like a big petulant baby, sucking on my knuckles, remembering the shape and sway of her in gray, walking away, and thinking some of the blackest thoughts I own.

Read on for an excerpt from
Darker Than Amber

We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.

They came to a yelping stop overhead, out of sight, dumped her over the bridge right and took off.

It was a hot Monday night in June. With moon. It was past midnight and just past the tide change. A billion bugs were vectoring in on us as the wind began to die.

It seemed to be a very final way of busting up a romance.

I was sitting there under the bridge in a skiff with my friend Meyer. We were under the end of the bridge nearest the town of Marathon, and it is the first highway bridge beyond Marathon on your way to Key West—if you are idiot enough to
want
to go to Key West.

My bachelor houseboat,
The Busted Flush
, was tied up at Thompson’s Marina in Marathon. It had been there since Saturday afternoon. After I got in I phoned Meyer at Bahia Mar
in Lauderdale, where he lives aboard his cabin cruiser. I’d been gone a little longer than I’d planned, and I had one small errand for him to do, and one small apology for him to make for me. I said that in return, if he wanted to come on down to Marathon by bus, I could put him into a good snook hole at the right time of year, tide and moon, and then he could come on back to Bahia Mar with me aboard the
Flush
, and we’d get in late Wednesday afternoon, probably—not that it mattered.

Meyer is the best of company, because he knows when talk is better than silence, and he tries to do more than his share of all the less interesting chores.

Until I asked him to join me, and heard him say yes, I had thought I wanted to be completely alone for a few days.

I’d just finished spending ten days aboard the
Flush
with an old friend named Virginia, known as Vidge. She had come rocketing down from Atlanta, in wretched shape emotionally, trying to find out who she used to be before three years of a sour marriage had turned her into somebody she didn’t even like anymore. In the old days she’d never been skyrockets—just a quiet, pretty, decent gal with a nice oblique sense of fun and games, and the manifest destiny of being a good wife.

After three years of Charlie, she was gaunted, shrill, shaky, and couldn’t tell you what time it was without her eyes filling with tears. So I took her cruising. You have to let them talk it out. She felt enormous guilt at not being able to make the marriage work. But the more she talked, the more I realized she hadn’t had a chance. She was too passive, too permissive, too subdued for an emotional fascist like Charlie. He had leaned too hard. He had eroded her confidence in herself, in everything she thought she was able to do, from meeting people to cooking dinner to driving a car. Finally he had gone to
work on her sexual capacities. Were the sexes reversed, you could call it emasculation. People like Charlie work toward total and perpetual domination. They feed on the mate. And Vidge didn’t even realize that running away from him had been a form of self-preservation, a way of trying to hang fast to the last crumbs of identity and pride.

At first she talked endlessly, but she couldn’t get all the way down to it. She kept saying what a great guy he was and how she had failed him in everything. The third evening, at anchor in a quiet corner of Florida Bay, I managed to get enough of Dr. Travis McGee’s truth serum into her. Clean, pure Plymouth gin. By arguing with her, contradicting her, I edged her ever closer to the truth. And in the final half hour, before she passed out, she broke through the barrier and described how much she truly hated that destructive, domineering son of a bitch Charlie. It was very graphic, and she had no idea I was taping it. When she passed out I toted her to the guest stateroom and tucked her in. She slept a little better than around the clock, and was subdued and rueful the next day. That evening she started handing me the Charlie-myth again, and what a failure she was. I played her tape for her. She had hysterics which settled down into a good long hard cry. And after that she was famished enough to eat twenty ounces of rare steak. She slept the clock around again, and woke up feeling that maybe it would be pointless to give the marriage another big try. Vidge and I had a private history of a small affair way back. It would have been better if we had both wanted the same things out of life. But we had kidded ourselves and each other for a time—before reality set in.

The attempt to relive that pleasant nostalgia was a clumsy failure. Charlie had so thoroughly insulted her womanhood
she was far too nervous and anxious to be reached. She was certain she had become frigid. I attempted another of Dr. McGee’s famous nostrums. I roused her early, and I gave her a full day of swimming, fishing, beachcombing, skindiving and maintenance and housekeeping chores aboard the
Flush
. I gave her a day that would have reminded any marine of boot camp. That night, with the waxing moon at the half, and a good breeze keeping the mosquitoes away from the sun deck, she was too sodden with exhaustion to think of being nervous or anxious or apprehensive when I moved over onto her sun mattress and gently shucked her out of her shorts. She made small purring sounds, half contentment and half sleepy objection. When the sudden awareness that it was working for her brought her wide awake she was too far along to choke herself off with all those anxieties Charlie had built, and when it was done she was happy enough and confident enough to keep chuckling now and again until her breath deepened into sleep.

I lugged her dead weight down to my master stateroom where, many hours later, in the orange-gold light of the morning sun coming through the curtained portholes, she proved to herself it hadn’t been a fluke.

When I put her ashore in Flamingo, she looked two years younger. Her tan was good. She had started to fill out again. Her hands were steady and her voice had lost the edge of shrillness. She smiled to herself quite often. I had gotten her sister on the ship-to-shore through the Miami Marine Operator, and the sister had driven down to Flamingo to pick her up there. I managed to get the sister aside and tell her that if Vidge weakened and went back to Charlie, he might well destroy her completely. The sister, in a calm, dry, unexcited tone, said that if Vidge showed the slightest hint of going back to that monster,
she, personally, would giftwrap Vidge and send her back to me in Lauderdale, prepaid. I guess she noticed my alarm at that prospect.

Sure, there had been some pleasure in the missionary work, but dealing at close range with a batch of acquired neuroses can make your ears ring for weeks. She was a good enough memory to set up a gentle nostalgia, but not so great that I would have gone looking for her. Most of all, I think that my nerves were frayed by having to edit everything I said to the lady for the ten days. I was trying to build back some morale and independence, and the wrong comment at the wrong time would have sent Vidge tumbling back down.

You can be at ease only with those people to whom you can say any damn fool thing that comes into your head, knowing they will respond in kind, and knowing that any misunderstandings will be thrashed out right now, rather than buried deep and given a chance to fester.

Vidge, like so many other mild nice people, was a natural-born victim. Life had treated her so agreeably during her first twenty years she’d never had to plant her feet and swing at anything just to maintain her identity. She was loving and giving. And she would have made a delightful permanent package for some guy able to appreciate it. Lots of Vidges never have to find out they’re victims. They land with the right people. But when one of them has the bad luck to mate with a Charlie, she gets gobbled up. You see them in the later years, those vague, translucent, silent women who stand over at the edge of life, with the nervous smile that comes and goes, and the infrequent and apologetic cough. Charlie is the squat florid one with the loud laugh and the bright neckties and the scatological jokes and the incipient coronary accident.

Chugging away from Flamingo at low cruise after dropping my passenger, I had the dreary feeling Charlie was going to snare her again and extract double penalties for the little attempt to escape. I was getting oil pressure fluctuation on the starboard diesel, and had a friend in Marathon who would take a look at it without trying to find some plausible way to pick my pocket, so I aimed her in that direction.