Bright Orange for the Shroud (8 page)

Arthur gave his temporary address, and said that somebody
better get in touch with him, and damned soon, and bring the money.

He got a phone call at five that evening. A girl with a brisk voice said she was phoning at Crane Watts’ request, to say that Calvin Stebber would like to have a drink with Mr. Wilkinson at the Piccadilly Pub on Fifth Avenue at six and discuss Mr. Wilkinson’s problem.

Arthur was prompt. The tap room was luxurious and exceedingly dark. He sat on a stool at the padded bar, and when his eyes had adjusted, he searched the long bar and nearby tables and did not see Smiling Calvin. Soon a young woman appeared at his elbow, a trim and tailored girl, severe and pretty, who said she was Miss Brown, sent by Mr. Stebber who would be a little late, and would he come over to the table. He carried his drink over. Miss Brown parried his questions about Stebber with secretarial skill. She took microsips of a dry sherry. He was paged, went to the phone, found that it was a mistake. Someone wanted a Mr. Wilkinson, sales representative for Florida Builders Supply. Back at the table, suddenly the room tilted and he sprawled over against Miss Brown. She giggled at him. Then, in foggy memory, Miss Brown and a man in a red coat were helping him out to Miss Brown’s car. He woke up in another county, in Palm County, in the drunk tank, without funds or identification, sick, weak and with a blinding headache. In the afternoon a sheriff’s deputy, with a massive indifference, told him the score. He’d been picked up, stumbling around on a public beach, stinking and incoherent, brought in and booked as John Doe. They had a film strip of him. Standard procedure. He could plead guilty and take a thirty-day knock right now, or plead not guilty and go loose
on two hundred dollars bail and wait for circuit court which would be about forty days from now. And he could make one call.

He could have called Leafy. Or Christine. He elected the thirty days for himself. After four days of lockup, he signed up for road work as the lesser of two evils, swung the brush hook in lazy tempo under the tolerant guards, always turned his face away from the glitter of the tourist cars staring their way by, wore road gang twill too small for him. Out of tension, or despair, or aftereffects of whatever Miss Brown had dolloped his drink with, or the greasy texture of the rice and beans, he could keep little in his stomach. Road gang work gave him a fifty cents a day credit. He bought milk and white bread, and sometimes he kept it down and sometimes he didn’t. Sun and effort dizzied him.

One bush to be chopped was Stebber, and the next was Watts, then G. Harrison Gisik, Boo Waxwell, Wilma, Miss Brown. As he began to fit the issue work clothes, in afternoon delirium he recalled what Chook had told him about me. And he knew that he’d be a fool to try anything else on his own. Maybe a fool to even ask for help. They gave him back his clothes and let him go, with a dollar thirty left from his work credit. He tried to hitch his way across the peninsula, but something was wrong, somehow, with the way he looked. They would slow down, some of them, then change their minds, roar on into the pavement mirages. Sudden rains soaked him. He bought sandwiches, had to abandon them after the first bite. He got a few short rides, found dry corners to sleep in, remembered very little of the last few days of it, then had the vivid memory of coming aboard the
Busted Flush
, and the
deck swinging up at him, slapping him in the face as he tried to fend it off …

“Just enough to pay my friends back,” he said. “I understand you take the expenses off the top and divide what else you can recover. If it wasn’t for them, I’d give up, Trav. Maybe it’s hopeless anyway. I had all that money, and now it’s all unreal, as if I never really had it. My great grandfather barged a load of fabrics, furniture and hardware up from New York, rented a warehouse and sold the goods for enough to pay off the loan on the first load and buy a second free and clear. That’s where the money started. Eighteen fifty-one. By nineteen hundred there was a great deal of money. My father wasn’t good with money. It dwindled. I thought I was better. I thought I could make it grow. God!”

Chook reached and gave his oily shoulder an affectionate, comforting pat. “Some very smart people get terribly cheated, Arthur. And usually it happens far from home.”

“I just … don’t want to go back there,” he said. “I dream that I’m there and I’m dead. I see myself dead on the sidewalk and people walking around me as they go by, nodding as if they knew all along.”

Chook took my wrist and turned it to look at my watch. “Time for you to choke down another eggnog, Arthur old buddy. Nicely spiked to give you a big appetite for dinner.”

After she left, Arthur said, “I guess the biggest part of the expense is feeding me.”

I laughed more than it was worth. After all, it was his first mild joke. Sign of improvement. Other signs too. Stubble shaved clean. Hair neatly cropped by Chookie McCall, an unexpected talent. Sun burning away the pasty look. Pounds
coming back. And Chook had him on some mild exercises, just enough to begin to restore muscle tone.

She came up with his eggnog and a list. Perishables were dwindling. Eggs, milk, butter, lettuce. Candle Key had a Handy-Dandy-Open-Nights-and-Sunday. The wind would make easy sailing in the dink. The little limey outboard runs like a gold watch. My shoulders felt as if they were webbed with hot wires. So, with an excess of character, I left sail and motor behind, climbed down into the dink, and headed across the two miles of bay, rowing with the miniature oars.

Coming back against the wind was almost as much fun as a migraine, and it didn’t help a bit to have the wind die the instant I clambered aboard and made the dinghy fast. Chook came and took the groceries. As she did so, and with a dull red sun sitting on the horizon line, we were invaded by an advance guard of seven billion salt marsh mosquitoes. They are a strange kind. They don’t bite, but some ancestral memory tells them they should get in position to bite. They are large and black and fly slowly, and when you wipe a dozen off your arm, they leave black streaks like soot. They are inept at the mosquito profession, but come in such numbers they can rattle the most easygoing disposition. As you breathe them in, you find yourself asking in desperation—But what do they
want
?

Chook and Arthur had showered and changed, and it was immediately obvious they had somehow made each other totally unhappy. Arthur was leaden and remote. Chook was brisk and remote. All they would exchange were the most formal politenesses. I showered amid the fading scent of Chook’s perfumed soap, in that absurd mirrored stall, big enough, almost, for a Volkswagen garage. It is a grotesque waste of space in a fifty-two-foot houseboat, even with a twenty-one-foot
beam, almost as much of a waste as the semisunken pale blue tub, seven feet long and four feet wide. I imagine that the elderly Palm Beach party who lost the vessel to me over the poker table needed such visual stimulations to do right by his Brazilian mistress.

In response to the unexplained drearies of my boat guests, I had a vicious attack of the jollies, regaling them with anecdote, absurdity and one-sided repartee, much like a solitary game of handball. Once in a while they would pull their lips away from their teeth and go heh-heh-heh. And then politely pass each other something that was within easy reach of everyone in the small booth adjoining the galley.

I judged it a favorable development. People were choosing up new sides. Chook and I had been united in caring for the sick. Now any relationship, even a rancorous one, which shut me out, was proof that he was not entirely defeated. She had to pump some spirit into him or my chances of any salvage were frail indeed. And maybe this was a start.

On Monday we pulled the hooks and droned in stately fashion down to a new anchorage off Long Key, charging the batteries and getting beyond the range of the sooty mosquitoes which were restricting us to the belowdecks areas. During the swimming that followed, I was heartened by a small triumph. The long contest was around a distant marker and back to the boarding ladder. Halfway back she pulled even and moved a half length ahead. I knew from the pain in my side that in another hundred yards I would begin to wallow and roll and lose the stroke. Suddenly the reserves were there—missing so long it was like welcoming an old friend. It was as if a third lung had suddenly opened up. I settled into it until I was certain, then upped the tempo and went on by her in a long sprint finish, was clinging to the ladder when she arrived, and feeling less like a beached blowfish than on other days. “Well now!” she gasped, looking startled and owlish.

“You had to let me win one of these.”

“The hell I did! I was busting a gut trying to keep up.” She snapped her head back and gave me the first grin I had seen since rowing back with the groceries.

“Come with me,” I said, and swam slowly away from the
Flush
, rolled and floated and, looking back, saw Arthur busy at the chore I had given him, putting new lacing in a section of the nylon fabric that is lashed to the rail around the sun deck. Chook made a surface dive and came up beside me, and blew like a porpoise.

“I could put you two in the shower stall,” I said. “What you do, you each take a corner of a silk handkerchief in your teeth, left hands tied behind you, six-inch knife in the right hand.”

“Skip it, McGee.”

“It’s just that the way you two go around chuckling and laughing, it gets on my nerves. I keep wondering what could make two people so hilarious.”

“Maybe you could guess. I’m a big girl. I’m a big healthy girl. And I’m leading a very healthy life. I’m sleeping with him, in that half acre bed of yours. And that’s the precise word, McGee. Sleeping. Just that. So I thought maybe he was well enough, and it was going to take you a long time to get back with the groceries. I showered first, and got into a sexy little thing made of black cobwebs, and dabbed a little Tigress here and there and yonder, and spread myself out like picturesque, with my girlish heart going bump bump bump. It’s not as if it had never happened with him before. And the son of a bitch acted as if I’d solicited him on a street corner. He was offended, for God’s sake. He made me feel sleazy.”

“Maybe you’re putting the wrong interpretation on it.”

“There comes a point when I stop being understanding,
friend. And that was it. It’s his move. And unless he makes one, there’s an invisible wall right down the middle of that bed. It’s made of ice cubes. All he’ll get from me is some practical nursing care.”

In the night I was awakened by the creak of the lines as the
Flush
was trying to go around on the tide change, swinging further each time until pushed back by the breeze, I always rig two bow hooks in such a way that she shifts her weight from hook to hook when she changes end for end. As this was the first night at the new anchorage, I wanted to check and see that she wasn’t working loose with all the swinging, and that she would swing the way I had guessed. As a rule of thumb they will always swing with the bow toward the nearest shallows. But the wind can make a difference, and there can be a tide current you didn’t read.

So, as the easiest way out, I went forward and up through the hatch. I pulled the line she was still on and found it firm. I have a reflector plate under my riding light, and it keeps the decks in relative shadow, but just enough gets past the plate so you can check lines when your eyes are used to the darkness. From the relation of the way she was swinging to the lights along the keys, I could tell she was going to go around the right way. I decided to wait until she was around and then check the other anchor line. I had a lot of scope, big Danforths and a good bottom, so it was a thousand to one I was fine. But there are a lot of dead sailors who took things for granted. On a boat things go bad in sets of threes. When you pull a hook and then go hustle to get the wheels turning, something will short out on you so that you go drifting, dead in the water.
And that is the time when, without lights, you drift right out into the ship channel, see running lights a city block apart coming down at you, run to get your big flashlight, fumble it and drop it over the side. A boat is something that never has just one thing wrong with it.

As I sat on the corner of the bow hatch, waiting, I felt a little faraway thud. I felt it through the soles of my bare feet, wondered what the hell, then realized it was the dink tied astern, swinging in the wind, nudging mother. I padded back along the side deck, put another line on its little stern cleat and snubbed it up against the two fenders hanging over the transom. I’d gone aft on the port side, and went forward on the starboard side, and came suddenly on a pale ghost that nearly made me leap over the rail. It startled her too, and then she made a miserable snorting sound and came into my arms for comfort. She had on a skimpy white hip-length nightie. She clung, snorting again. Her body heat was high, her breath hot and humid. She had that flat-sweet unmistakable scent of female sexual effort. Her nipples were hard as little pebbles against my bare chest.

“Oh God, God!” she whispered. “He can’t do it. He tried and tried and tried. I helped and helped and helped. Then he was no damn good at all, and he started crying, and I had to get out of there. Oh God, Trav, my nerves are shot, shot, shot.”

“Steady, girl.”

“That damn bitch might just as well have cut them off,” she said, and sobbed again, and got the hiccups. She hicked and gasped and ground her face into my throat, held me in an iron grip, and, with each hick, gave me a little thud with those powerful hips. I was not unresponsive. Hell, a bronze statue
three thousand years old would have made its reaction as evident to her as I did.

“God, darling—hic—be a dear—hic—and take me off—hic—the hook.”

“And you know it wouldn’t stop there, and wouldn’t that do Arthur a lot of good, though? Wouldn’t that brighten his hours, improve his morale?”

“But you—hic—want me, darling. Please—hic—”

“Okay, Chook.”

“Bless you!” she said. “I love you so. Hic.”

“I’ll help you out,” I said. I bent to get one arm behind her knees. She went loose, thinking, perhaps, I was going to tote her topsides to the sun pads on the upper deck. I swung her up and out and over the rail and let go.