Bright Orange for the Shroud (7 page)

“Was it all legal?”

“I don’t know. At least legal enough so that you’d probably have a three-year court fight to prove it wasn’t, and then it would be only a civil action to recover the funds. He can’t finance that. He couldn’t finance two cups of coffee.”

“Can you do anything?”

“I could try. If you can prop him up a little, I can try.”

She stood up and came over and gave me a quick hug, a kiss beside the eye, and told me I was a treasure. Long after she left, the treasure lifted a few score aches and sorenesses and went to bed.

Late Sunday afternoon, up on the sundeck, I got the rest of the account from Arthur Wilkinson. Chook had him heavily oiled against additional burn. She was using the sundeck rail as a torture rack, and I was pleased to turn so that I could not see her. I had taken so much punishment all day, it hurt to watch her. But over Arthur’s recital I could sometimes hear her little gasps of effort, a creak of a joint strained to the maximum, and even that was mildly upsetting.

Arthur had gotten absolutely no satisfaction from the young lawyer. He had offered to sell Watts his syndicate shares for twenty-five thousand. Crane Watts said he wasn’t interested. Next, in a kind of bemused desperation, he had tried to find Boone Waxwell, had learned that Waxwell had a place at Goodland on Marco Island. With the last of the small amount of money he had taken on the Sarasota trip, he had taken a bus to the turnoff to Marco, had hitched a ride to the island bridge,
and then had walked to Goodland. At a gas station they told him how to find Waxwell’s cottage. He got there at sunset. It was an isolated place at the end of a dirt road, more shack than cottage. A pale gray sedan was parked in the yard. Country music was so loud over the radio they didn’t hear him on the porch, and when he looked through the screen he saw Wilma sprawled naked, tousled and asleep on a couch, and with a particular vividness he remembered her pale blonde head resting on a souvenir pillow from Rock City. Boo Waxwell, in underwear shorts, sat slumped by the little radio, bottle on the floor between his feet, trying to play guitar chords along with the radio music. He saw Arthur and grinned at him, and came grinning to the screen door, opened it and pushed Arthur back, asking him what the hell he wanted. Arthur said he wanted to speak to Wilma. Waxwell said there wasn’t much point in that on account of Wilma had gotten herself a temporary divorce, country-style.

Wilma had then appeared in the doorway beside Waxwell, light of the sunset against her face, a small and delicate face puffy with sleep and satiation, eyes drained empty by bed and bottle, nestling in soiled housecoat into the hard curve of Boo Waxwell’s arm, looking out at him with a placid and almost bovine indifference, outlined in that end-of-day glow against the room darkening behind her.

He said it was strange how vivid the little things were, the precise design in faded blue of an eagle clutching a bomb, wavering as the muscles of Waxwell’s upper arm shifted under the tattoed hide. The irregular deep rose shade of a suckmark on the side of Wilma’s delicate throat. And tiny rainbow glintings from the diamonds of the watch on her wrist—the watch she had claimed she sold in Miami.

Then he knew that it had all been lies, all of it, with nothing left to believe. Like an anguished, oversized child, he had rushed at Waxwell to destroy him, had landed no blow, had been pummeled back, wedged into a corner of porch post and railing, felt all the grinding blows into gut and groin and, over Waxwell’s diligent shoulder had seen the woman small in the doorway, hugging herself and watching, underlip sagging away from the small even teeth. Then the railing gave way and he fell backward into the yard. He got up at once and slowly walked back the way he had come, hunched, both forearms clamped across his belly. He had the feeling that it was the only thing holding him together. His legs felt feathery, floating him along with no effort. Somewhere along the dirt road to the cottage he had fallen. He could not get up. He felt as if something was shifting and flowing inside him, the life moving warmly out of him. He would have slept, except for mosquitoes so thick he breathed them in, snuffing them from his nose, blowing them from his lips. He squirmed to a tree and pulled himself upright and went on, trying all the time to straighten himself up a little more. By the time he got to the bridge he was almost straight. There was a pink glow left in the west. He began the long walk back to the trail and for a time he was all right, and then he began falling. He said it was very strange. He would find himself way out by the center line, and then when he went over to the shoulder, a dark bush would seem to leap up at him and he would land heavily, gasping.

An old pickup truck stopped as he was trying to get up, and they came and put a bright flashlight beam on him, and from far away he heard a man and woman discussing in casual nasal tones how drunk he was and from what.

Summoning the last of energy, he said very distinctly, “I’m not drunk. I’ve been beaten.”

“Whar you want we should take you, mister?” the man asked.

“I’ve got no place to go.”

When things came back into focus, he was between the man and the woman on the front seat of the pickup. They took him home. East on the Trail to the turnoff to Everglades City, through Everglades and across the causeway to Chokoloskee Island, and over to the far shore, where these people named Sam and Leafy Dunning lived with their five kids in a trailer and attached cottage and prefab garage. He learned later they had spent a picnic day over on Marco Beach, and when they had picked him up, the five kids and the picnic gear and beach gear were in the bed of the old pickup.

Sam Dunning, in season, operated a charter boat out of the Rod and Gun Club over at Everglades City. It was out of season, and he was netting commercial with a partner, even shares, using an old bay skiff.

For three days Arthur could hobble about like an old man. All he could keep down were the soups she fixed for him. He slept a great deal, sensing it was in part an aftermath of the beating, and partly the emotional exhaustion of what had happened to him. He slept by day in a string hammock in the side yard, and by night on a mattress in the garage, waking often to find the children staring solemnly at him.

Leafy borrowed old clothes from a neighbor, big enough to fit him, while she washed and cleaned and mended what he’d been wearing. He thought that it was the fourth day before she asked him any questions at all, came out into the yard when he was walking around in the afternoon, feeling a little steadier
on his feet. There were pieces of old car and pieces of marine engine in the yard, coarse grass half hiding them. He sat in the shade of the live oak tree on an overturned dinghy, and Leafy leaned against the trunk, arms folded, head tilted, a wiry, faded, bright-eyed woman in khaki pants and a blue work shirt, visibly pregnant.

“Who did beat on you, Arthur?”

“Boone Waxwell.”

“All them Waxwells are pure mean as moccasin snakes. You got folks to go to someplace?”

“No.”

“What kind of work you do, mostly?”

“Well … in a store.”

“Get yourself fired?”

“I quit.”

“Clothes you had on were right good. Messed up, but good. And you talk nice, like you had good schooling, and you eat polite. Sam and me, we looked in your clothes, but you got no papers at all.”

“There should be a wallet, with a license and cards and so on.”

“And maybe a thousand dollars? If you had one, Arthur, you spilled it out falling all over that road. What we got to know, Sam and me, is if the police got some interest in you, because they can go hard on folks giving anybody house room.”

“I’m not wanted for anything. Not for questioning or anything else.”

She studied him and nodded to herself. “All right, then. What you got to have, I guess, is some kind of work to get some money to be on your way, and you can stay on here till
you got it, paying me board when you start drawing pay. I guess there’s some men got it in them to just roam. That’s all right for kids, Arthur, but a grown man, it turns into something different, and without a steady woman you can grow old into a bum. You think on that some.”

Sam had found him work on the maintenance crew readying the Rod and Gun Club for the season opening. He sent in the bureaucratic forms necessary to reassemble the paper affirmations of his identity, a replacement driver’s license, a duplicate social security card. When he was laid off at the Club, he found a job as common labor on a development housing project over near the airport.

Sam Dunning partitioned a small corner of the garage, and Leafy fixed it up with a cot, chair, lamp, and packing box storage disguised by a piece of cotton drapery material thumb-tacked to the top edge. He paid her twelve dollars a week for room and meals, after long earnest bargaining. She wanted ten. He wanted to give fifteen.

There on the sundeck, in a thoughtful voice, Arthur told us that it was a strange time in his life. He had never done manual labor. Until he acquired a few basic skills, the foreman came close to firing him several times for innate clumsiness. The skills pleased him—rough carpentry without owl eyes surrounding the nail heads, learning when the cement mix was the right consistency, learning how to trundle a wheelbarrow along a springy plank. He said it was as if he had turned half of himself off, settling into routine, speaking when spoken to, sitting with the Dunning kids when Sam and Leafy went out on Saturday nights. On days off he helped Sam with boat maintenance, and sometimes crewed for him on a charter. He felt as if he was in hiding from every familiar thing, and, in the
process, becoming someone else. He spent almost nothing, and accumulated money, without counting it. He could lay on his cot and keep his mind empty. When it would veer toward Wilma or toward the lost money, he would catch it quickly, return it to the comforting grayness, feeling only a swoop of dizziness at the narrowness of the escape. Sometimes he awoke from sleep to sense erotic dream-memories of Wilma fading quickly, leaving only some of the tastes of her on his mouth, textures of her on his hands.

Leafy had her child in January, her third boy. His present to her was an automatic washing machine, a used one in good condition. He and Sam got it tied into the water line and wired the day before Sam brought her home. She was ecstatic. Her attitude toward him warmed perceptibly, and soon, in the most obvious ways, she began to try to make a match between Arthur and a seventeen-year-old girl down the road named Christine Canfield. Christine had run off to Crystal River with a stone crab fisherman and had come home alone at Christmas, slightly pregnant. She was the youngest of three daughters, the older two married and moved away, one to Fort Myers, the other to Homestead. Christine was a placid, pleasant, slow-moving child who smiled often and laughed readily. She was husky, brown-blonde, pretty in a childlike way.

“Nobody’s in the place Cobb Canfield put up for his Lucy before Tommy got the good job in Fort Myers. You could fix it up right nice,” Leafy said.

“Listen, she’s only seventeen years old!”

“She’s carrying proof she’s a woman, and it hardly shows yet. She likes you fine, just fine, Arthur. She’s healthy and she’s a worker, and they’re good stock. And she got the wild run out of her, and Cobb’d be so grateful to get it worked out, he’d
do you good, believe me. Christine’d make you a good steady woman, not like some her age on the island.”

“I should have told you before, Leafy. I’m married.”

Her eyes narrowed as she accepted this new problem. “You plan on taking up again with your wife, Arthur?”

“No.”

“She got cause to come looking for you?”

“No.”

She nodded to herself. “The law doesn’t pay it no mind unless somebody comes along to make a fuss. You just keep your mouth shut about that wife. Cobb is too proud to let her set up any common law thing with you, so all you have to do is keep your mouth shut and marry her, and who does that hurt? Nobody, and does you both good, and gives that bush kitten she’s carrying a daddy. Christine, she can make a garden bear the year round, and with a snitch hook she’s good as you’ll ever see, and it don’t make for bad living having a young wife grateful to you.”

Chook completed her series of tortures and came and sat by us, breathing deeply, brown body gleaming with perspiration, hair damp. “Surprised we ever saw you again, Arthur.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t have. I thought about it. She was as trusting and affectionate as a dog you bring in out of the rain. I could have stayed right there the rest of my life. But I kept remembering eight friends who had believed in me. Somehow that was worse than my money being gone, the way theirs went with it. I couldn’t hide from that the rest of my life. And the pressure from Leafy and Christine merely made me more aware of it. So I told them I had something personal to take care of, and I’d be back as soon as I could, maybe in a few weeks. That was two months ago. I went back to Naples
thinking I could try to recover enough just to pay back my friends.”

He had gone to the Citrus Blossom Motel and found that his possessions had long since been sold, leaving a deficit of nine dollars on the room. He paid it out of the seven hundred he’d saved. He found another room. He bought the clothing I’d thrown in the dockside trash can. He went to see Crane Watts. Watts got the file out. There had been one additional assessment. When attempts to contact Mr. Wilkinson had failed, his participation was eliminated according to the terms of the agreement. As they had been unable to acquire an option on the Kippler Tract after lengthy negotiations, the syndicate had been dissolved and all monies remaining in the account had been divided on the basis of final participation. Arthur had demanded the addresses of Stebber and Gisik, and Watts had said that if he wished to write them, the letters could be sent to Watts’ office for forwarding. Arthur told Watts, with some heat, that he felt he had been defrauded, and he was damned well going to stir up all the trouble he could for them, and if they wanted to settle, to avoid investigation, he would sign an unconditional release in return for a ten-thousand-dollar refund. Watts, Arthur told us, looked unkempt in beard stubble, soiled sports shirt and bourbon breath at eleven o’clock that morning. Heartened by Watts’ lack of assurance, Arthur had lied to him, saying that his attorney was preparing a detailed complaint to be filed with the Attorney General of the State of Florida, with a certified copy to the Bar Association. Watts, angered, said it was nonsense. There had been no illegality.