Bright Orange for the Shroud (9 page)

Shriek. Ka-swash. Then some coughing, and then some strident and bitter abuse from the dark water. I strolled back to the boarding ladder, bent and gave her a hand, hauled her up onto the after deck and told her to stay right there. I brought her a towel and a terry robe.

“After
all
!” she said in a cold and level voice. “Really!”

“Your language is improving.”

As she belted the robe, she said, “You’re all bastard, aren’t you?”

“Listen. Did it or did it not cure the hiccups?”

Suddenly we were laughing, and in laughing we were friends again, and went topsides to the big padded bench at the topside controls. I went and checked the anchor line, came back with cigarettes for her, a pipe for me. The running light dimmed the stars, but not entirely.

“You were absolutely right, of course,” she said. “And let me believe, damn it, that it cost you something too.”

“More than I care to think about.”

“So maybe failure finished him off. We don’t know that. But I damn well do know that I would have moved into your bed for the duration of the voyage, captain, and that certainly would finish him.”

“Like that little knife they use when the matador hasn’t been able to kill with the sword. Some stocky little guy, like a butcher, moves in and gives it to old bull right behind the ears. And he goes down as if he’d been dropped off a roof.”

“Then those damned mules pull him all the way around the ring instead of right on off stage. Why do they have to do that?”

“A tribute, maybe.”

“Trav, how in the
world
am I going to act toward Arthur tomorrow? He felt so … wretched about everything.”

“Open and obvious affection, Chook. All the little pats and smiles and kisses. Little hugs. Just as if it
had
worked.”

“But why in the world should … Oh, I think I get it. No penalty for failure. Encouragement to try again. No social disgrace. But if it ends up the same way, I don’t think I can endure it. Oh hell, I suppose I can always run out and jump overboard, screaming.”

“And hiccuping.”

“Honestly, and you have to believe me, I never got in such a state before in my life. It’s something about a boat, I guess. And the phase of the moon. And Frankie gone for years. And feeling … so
damned
sorry for Arthur. And, of course, being so bloody awful healthy. Poor lamb. He was
so
apologetic and crushed. Well, thanks for practically nothing, McGee. Night.”

I made the pipe last. I sat up there, bare feet braced on the wheel spokes, and wondered why Chook should bring out the
martyr in me. Twice now, with her, I had gone so noble it semi-sickened me. And such a glorious package. But was she? Maybe she was a little too much. She created a certain awe in the standard issue male. I had noted that fewer passes were made at her than she had a right to expect. All that robust, glowing, powerful vitality might actually have given me a subconscious block, a hidden suspicion that I might, in the long run, be unable to cope—an alarming prospect for male vanity, of which I was certain I had my share. When these dreary suspicions threatened to spoil a pretty night, I went forward, back down through the hatch and into my spartan bed.

Too restless to go to sleep quickly, I found another reason, perhaps just as ego-damaging, why I could resist intimate involvement with Chook. Except for her inexplicable bondage to Frank Durkin, she was uncommonly staunch and stable. Though shrewd, diligent and perceptive, she did not have any of those inner contradictions, complexities and vulnerabilities that are born of self-doubt. She was all of a piece, confident of her total survival, and—in that sense—utterly wholesome. Maybe I could be stirred only by the wounded ducklings. Maybe I could respond best to the cripples I cut out of the flock, the ones who, by contrast, could give me a sense of inner strength and unity. And a whole woman might, conversely, serve to give me a less fictional image of the inner McGee, showing the fracture lines and the clumsy ways I had pasted myself back together, and too many tricks with mirrors. When you have learned control over your own dear little neuroses, you can have empathy with the ones who are shaking themselves apart, and get your jollies out of teaching them how to dampen the vibrations. But a sound and solid one can
only make you aware of how frequently precarious your acquired controls can become. It could be that this wariness of the sound ones and the true ones was one of the hidden reasons why I had to be a roamer, a salvage expert, a gregarious loner, a seeker of a thousand tarnished grails, finding too many excuses for all the dragons along the way.

This kind of emotional introspection, this self-fondling, is strange medicine. A little bit, now and again, can accrete a small quotient of wisdom. But, like nitroglycerin for the weakened heart, too much of it at one time can blow your head off.

Maybe it was all a lot simpler than that. Physical attraction was strong, but without emotional attraction. Once begun, we would go the long route, and at the end of it there would be absolutely nothing, very probably not even the friendship. And that was good enough to warrant a knowing abstention.

Tuesday Chook seemed to be overdoing the whole routine. The response was perhaps as noticeable as she would have gotten from petting a dead dog. Pats and squeezes, kind words and quick kisses, and special little treats from the galley. Arthur seemed too deep in humble apathy to notice or care. But from time to time I saw him stare toward her with a mildly baffled expression. She laid it on so thick, I felt more comfortable at long range. I gave myself the most rigorous day yet. There is one which can match anything they thought up during the Inquisition.

Sit. Hook feet under something solid. Lace fingers behind neck. Lean slowly back until shoulders are approximately ten to twelve inches off the deck. Stop right there. And stay there until the sweat bursts and every muscle is jumping, and then stay there a little while longer, then come slowly, slowly back
up to the sitting position. Another: One-legged deep knee bends, taking about two seconds to go down and two seconds to come back up. Continue until body weight seems to approximate seventeen tons.

Alternate ten minute rest periods with fifty minute workouts all day long, then soak in a tub so hot you have to get into it by inches, then eat twenty ounces of rare beef, a peck of salad, stretch out topsides and look at the stars, and blunder off to bed.

I was awake for a little while in the first gray of the false dawn, and heard the lovers. It was a sound so faint it was not actually a sound, more a rhythm sensed. It is a bed rhythm, strangely akin to a heartbeat, though softer. Whum-fa, whum-fa, whum-fa. As eternal, clinical, inevitable as the slow gallop of the heart itself. And as basic to the race, reaching from percale back to the pallet of dried grasses in the cave corner. A sound clean and true, a nastiness only to all those unfortunates who carry through their narrow days their own little hidden pools of nastiness, ready to spill it upon anything so real it frightens them.

Heard even in its most shoddy context, as through the papery walls of a convention motel, this life-beat could be diminished not to evil but to a kind of pathos, because then it was an attempt at affirmation between strangers, a way to try to stop all the clocks, a way to try to say: I live.

The billions upon billions of lives which have come and gone, and that small fraction now walking the world, came of this life-pulse, and to deny it dignity would be to diminish the blood and need and purpose of the race, make us all bawdy
clowns, thrusting and bumping away in a ludicrous heat, shamed by our own instinct.

Hearing them I felt placidly avuncular. Enjoy. Find that one time that has no shred of self or loneliness. Seal it so that from now on McGee is the third wheel, all interrelationships solidly structured from now on. Celebrate the “nowness” of it, and subside into affections.

The almost inaudible pulse hastened, then slowed, and ended. I heard the faroff drone of a marine engine, fading into the distance, a commercial fisherman perhaps, heading for the grounds off East Cape. Ripples slapped the hull. What assurances, gratitudes, immediate memories were the lovers entwined whispering to each other? Did they listen to the slowing of their hearts? Were there little catches at the end of those long breaths that were deep as sighs? Was it beautiful for you too, darling?

When I awoke again it was with the sense of total well-being I had been aiming for. The pounds were gone. A few slight areas of muscle soreness were not enough to diminish that good feeling of resiliency and vitality.

The body, once you are old enough to stop taking it for granted, becomes like a separate entity. The way it will endure neglect makes you feel guilty. Having survived trauma, and being still willing to carry you around after healing itself, it deserves better. Cherishing it and toughening it is an act of appeasement for past omissions.

In my line of work, neglect was especially asinine. Like being a front-line type with a rusty rifle, or a neurosurgeon with a hangover. One half step, or one twentieth of a second
lag in reaction time can make the difference. Any violent necessity is usually the result of something having gone wrong, a probable error of judgment. But the probability is always there.

Now, with just minor versions of the total torture of the days past, it would hold its edge.

My shower serenade did not stir the drowsy lovers, nor did the banging of pots. After breakfast I broke out a small spinning rod, rigged it with a yellow jig, installed sail, rudder and centerboard on the dinghy, and went off to circle the edge of distant grass flats. I released a couple of small jacks, one weak-fish, and then, just as I was coming about, hooked into a stranger, a stray pompano who didn’t belong in that kind of area. He ran better than three pounds, and I had him split, buttered, and on foil under the broiler as the lovers came fumbling, blinking and yawning out into the daylight. Call the pompano a sacrifice on a special altar. They claimed nothing had ever tasted as good. They finished him, every crumb, while I stood smirking like a kindly old aunt in a TV commercial.

All her actions toward him that Wednesday were precisely as on the day before. But without the Charge Nurse flavor. She had a doe-eyed glow, a lazy smugness. The gestures were returned in kind. I was the outsider. Arthur had his chin up, for a change. And he risked a few of his mild, strained jokes—rewarded with girlish howls of glee. I tried to keep out of their way. But at times the
Busted Flush
can seem small. In midafternoon I invented an errand at Long Key, a replacement filter, and with an identical expression of repressed anticipation on their faces, they waved to me as I went putting off toward Long Key.

• • •

Friday morning I put the essential question to him. I brought the anchors in, and he helped me spread the lines at the bow to dry before stowing them. In the early gray, so silent and eerie it gave one a tendency to whisper, the
Flush
floated dead in the water at the high tide change, with the mist magnifying the sun image in the east to a gigantic ball, suitable to a science fiction movie.

Arthur was beginning to look fit. Scrawny, but fit.

“What about it?” I asked him.

Squatting, he stared at me. “About it?”

“You ready to help me go after the loot, Arthur?”

He stood up. “I … guess I’m ready now.”

I made an appraisal. He wasn’t the same fellow who’d been a part of our ever-changing group better than a year ago. He looked almost the same, though thinner. I guess it was the eyes. Before, he had been able to watch you with the same pleasant fixity of stare of a family beagle. Now the eyes came up, then fell away, came back, shifted away.

“Listen, Arthur. The attitude is not anger, nor indignation, nor hate. No heroics. No punishments. We go in cold and shrewd and savvy. And you stay out of contact. You are my intelligence officer. I bring you pieces of it and we work out how they fit. But if I need you for any contact, I want to know you’ll do it exactly as I say, whether you understand or agree. I want to know you won’t let it shake you up.”

“Trav … all I can do is promise to try.”

“How do you feel about it?”

He tried to smile. “Butterflies.”

“You can have butterflies, but you’ve got to have an operational
attitude too. We’re going to steal meat out from under the tiger’s paw. We’ll divert the animal’s attention. We’ll keep Chook out of it. And it starts right now.”

He moistened his lips and swallowed. “Where are we going?”

“On a hunch, I’m going to start at Marco.”

I took the
Flush
up to Flamingo, through Whitewater Bay, and out the mouth of the Shark River into the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf was flat calm, so I took her about six miles out, figured the course to take me just outside Cape Romano, and set the reliable old Metal Marine. It began turning the wheel back and forth in fussy little movements of a few inches at a time. I checked it to see that it was holding. Sun came hot through the slight overcast, and in the greasy calm the only breeze was from our stodgy cruising speed. At noon I got the marine forecast from the Miami Marine Operator. Fair for the next twenty-four hours, winds slight and variable. A tropical disturbance centered below the Yucatan Straits, moving north northeast at five to six knots.

Chookie brought lunch topside. They both seemed subdued. I realized uncertainty was bothering them. You have to
have an instinct about how much briefing the troops should have. Too little is as unsettling as too much.

“What we’re up against,” I said, “is the big con. It’s a quasi-legal variation of one of the little cons, the finding the wallet routine.”

“What does that mean?” Chook asked.

“Once they select a mark, the operator drops a wallet, a fat one, where he’ll spot it. The accomplice gets to it a fraction of a second ahead of the mark. They move into an alley. The accomplice counts the money, and the mark sees that there is, say nine hundred dollars. Then the operator moves in, a very plausible guy. An acquaintance of the accomplice, but the accomplice very respectfully calls him mister. Says he found it, alone. Operator takes the mark’s side, proclaims they both found it and should share equally. Accomplice agrees, grudgingly. No name or identification in wallet. Operator says the honest thing to do is watch the want ads for one week. If nothing appears, then it is their to split. Gets a brown envelope, seals wallet inside with tape, accomplice and mark initial the tape as a form of seal. Okay, who is to hold it? After argument, it is decided the mark can hold it, provided he gives the accomplice three hundred dollars to hang onto as a proof of good faith. Operator holds the envelope until mark can return with the three hundred. Addresses are exchanged. Mark watches want ads for a week, gleefully tears envelope open, finds ratty old wallet stuffed with newspaper. The switch was made while they waited for him to come back with the three hundred. Or, when the mark is smarter, they make the switch right in front of him, let him carry the envelope, and go to the bank with him. These things always depend on human greed. This option con, Arthur, was a more sophisticated version of
the same tired old thing, with Stebber as the operator, Wilma as the roper, Gisik, Waxwell and Watts as accomplices. When they make a hit, they go to the ground. But as this one was quasi-legal, some of them had to stay out in the open—Watts and Waxwell. I suspect they got small pieces. So what we have to do is put out some bait.”