Cinnamon Skin (2 page)

I had not heard him say this much since that bloody June day when Desmin Grizzel had so totally terrified him that he had, in his fear, violated his own image of himself. I did not make any response because I wanted him to keep talking. I was afraid that anything I might say would make him clamp shut again, like an endangered clam.

"I went through the long list of all the things I should have done and didn't do," he said. "Go to the wedding. Or at least pick out a present and send it instead of a check. She was my very last blood relative. It's like a superstitious fear, having no one left in the world directly related to you by blood. As if you had started somehow to disappear. She wasn't at all pretty, but being in love made her beautiful. I noticed that. And I haven't been noticing much lately, have I?"

"No. No, you haven't."

"In that sense, to that degree, Desmin Grizzel won after all. All my life, until this last year, I have always noticed everything. Noticed, analyzed, filed. I watched people, understood them, liked almost every one. If he killed that in me, then he killed me, because he killed that part of me that made me most alive. And I let it happen."

"No, Meyer. There wasn't any way-"

"Be still!" he said with a surprising vehemence. "I've been dwelling on my sorry image, how I sat on the floor like a dumb pudding, peeing in my trousers, while I watched a maniac start to kill the best friend I ever had. In some kind of inverted fashion I fell in love with that image of Meyer. Oh, the poor dear chap! Oh, what a pity!"

"But-"

"So today in that aircraft I took a longer steadier look at myself. I saw my face reflected in the window beside me. One can become weary of shame, self-revulsion, self-knowledge. I am an academic, damn it. I was not intended to become some sort of squatty superman, some soldier of misfortune. It was not intended that I should be unafraid of sudden death. Curiously, I am not afraid of the prospect of my own demise. Plainly I shall die, as will you and everyone we know, and I do not think that a fact worth my resentment. Life is unfair, clearly. One must hope that the final chapter will be without too much pain. It was his terrible eyes and those four barrels on that strange handgun he had. Something inside me broke into mush, into tears and pee and ineptitude. But it does not signify!"

"I tried to tell-"

"I did not listen. I was too enchanted with my humiliation, with how I had failed my adolescent dream of myself as hero. There was a child on the airplane, directly across the aisle. The seat beside me was empty. I smiled at her and did finger tricks, and she giggled and tried to stuff her head under her mother's arm in shyness. She finally came over and sat beside me, and I told her a story about a cowardly goblin who refused to go out on Halloween and scare people because he was too fat and too shy. Partway through the story I realized I was telling a story about Meyer the Economist. It made the ending easier. They had a meeting of the Goblin Council and called him in and told him not to worry. There had to be room in each pack of goblins for a cowardly goblin who stayed home in the cave. Otherwise, who would count all the others as they came back home after their adventures? So there is room for me: counting goblins, including my own."

"There always has been-"

"No, Travis. Not for the Meyer of the past year. No room for him at all. But for this Meyer? Why not? I am not the same as I was before the incident, I am less naive. Is that a good word?"

"I think so."

"You have always been less naive than most of us, Travis. You are a different sort of creature, in many ways. But you are my friend, and I don't want to lose you. I want you to help me. Somebody blew up my boat, and with it all the artifacts of my past and my last close relative. I want to find that person or those people. And kill them. Is that an unworthy goal?"

"It's understandable."

"You dodge the question."

"You want a moral judgment, go to Jerry Falwell. Anything you really want to do, I will help you do. And it is nice to have you back, even in slightly altered condition. Okay?"

I glanced over at him and saw in the angle of a streetlight that he was smiling. It was a fine thing to see. Utterly unanticipated. I had thought this would be the end of him. Instead, it shocked him out of it not all the way out, but far enough to lead one to hope.

"I keep remembering that Sunday evening aboard the Flush," he said. "They were really in love, weren't they?"

Evan asked Meyer a dozen questions about how he had made the meat sauce. tie asked me fifty questions about my houseboat. We went through several bottles of Chianti (aassir.o while we ate the ceviche I'd made and then had the spaghetti al dente with the meat sauce Meyor had brought.

In the warmth and relaxation after dinner, Evan told us how he had met Norma. "What I was doing, I was down there in Cancun, gone down to Yucatan to visit with my friend Willy, and I was putting in my time helping him sell off some time-sharing condos. He had some he couldn't move at what he needed to make out, which was one hundred big ones, so he'd taken to selling them off in one- and two-week pieces for three and six thousand, people buying those same weeks for life and Willy explaining how they had tied into the big vacation computer so the pigeons he was selling to could like exchange with some other patsies who'd bought the same two weeks on maybe the coast of Spain or Fort Myers, Florida. I had no work license, so when I sold stuff, Willy had to slip me the pesos in cash and keep it off the books. I can always sell. I'm a scuffler, and there are always things to sell and people to buy them, so I'm home anywhere. Good thing, the way they keep moving Norma around the shaggy places of the earth.

"One day what I was doing, I was taking the pickup to Merida to get some things that had come in that Willy had ordered way back, and ten miles from anywhere I came onto this beat old Dodge pulled way over on the shoulder and this tall pretty girl trying to open the hood. So I pulled over and walked back and I said in my best Texican, her hair being so black, 'їTiene una problema, Senorita?' She just spun around and give me the glare and said, 'Problema? Me? No, I just enjoy standing out here in the hot sun breaking my fingernails on this son of a bitching hood latch.' And right there it was love at first sight, on my part, not on hers.

"Opened the hood for her and looked in and right there looking back at me is a granddaddy rat, biggest damn thing I ever saw, big as a full-growed possum. We both jumped back, and he ducked down and hid someplace under the engine. I looked around, real careful, and I see he had chewed on the insulation on the wiring to the starter motor. So I had Norma get in and start it while I jumped the contacts with a screwdriver. When it caught and roared, old mister rat he went charging off into the brush. What had happened, she'd stopped to walk over to a formation that looked interesting, and chunked at it with that hammer she's got at all times, and came back and the car wouldn't start. Just a click when she turned the key. I led her into town to a garage I'd been before, and we went down the street and sat at a sidewalk place and drank cold Carta Blanca for the half hour it took them to rewire where old rat had chewed. I didn't find out for a long time how important she was down there, being borrowed by the Mexican government."

"Hey, it wasn't all that big and great!" she said. "I had a Mexican friend at Cal Tech, Manny Mateo, and he became an engineer with Pemex, the government oil company. They thought they had a new discovery field just west of Maxcanu, way to the north of the Bay of Campeche, and from the initial geophysical survey work it looked as if it might be a particular kind of formation I've had a lot of luck with. So Pemex arranged with Am Dexter to borrow me, and I went down there and we ran two more sets of computer tests and I finally picked a site for the test well, crossed my fingers, and went back to Houston. It took about nine weeks."

"Did they make a well?" Meyer asked.

She shrugged. "Just barely. It's a long way from their big fields and their refineries. It's a discovery well and a new field, but the porosity is bad. It makes the MER pretty low when you are so far from… excuse me, MER is Maximum Efficiency Recovery rate, and they figure it at seventy barrels a day, which would be a two-thousand-dollar-a-day delight in Louisiana but isn't so great down there. They'll try again a thousand meters to the north where, according to the core samples, they should hit the formation higher."

"She talks like that a lot!" Evan said proudly. "Isn't she something else entire?"

Norma flushed. "All geologists talk funny."

"I kept after her," Evan said. "She finished up and went back, so did I. Every time she'd look around, there I was. So along sometime in March she gave up, and we got married in April. Meyer, we sure wish you could have come to the wedding. That was a handsome check you laid on us, but you being there would have been a better present."

"It would, really," Norma Lawrence said. "People in this family are always missing ceremonies." She sounded wistful, and her eyes filled with tears.

Meyer touched her lightly on the arm and said to me, "Remember three years ago when we were in the islands, and I came back and found a threeweek-old telegram about my sister's funeral?"

"And I was with a crew up in western Canada and didn't know either, until a week later," Norma said. "Her friends in Santa Barbara said the church was almost full. She had a lot of love from a lot of people. And gave a lot of love. And she was so damn proud of me."

She got up abruptly and went over to the window ports and looked out at the marina in the dusk of the year's second longest daytime. Evan went and put a thick arm around her slender waist, murmuring to her. She leaned her cheek an his shoulder, and soon they both came back to the table.

He poured her some wine and touched glasses with her and said, "Here's to your never having another gloomy day, Miz Norma."

We all drank to that. And Evan Lawrence began telling stories of things he'd done. They were disaster stories, all funny, all nicely told. There was the time he had tried out for the University of Texas football squad "as a teeny tiny hundred-and-sixtyfive-pound offensive right tackle, fourth string, and next to those semi-pro freshmen they had on there, I was five foot nothing. Big old boy across from me, looked forty years old, kept 'slapping my helmet and I kept getting up, thinking, Well, this wasn't too bad, and then all of a sudden there were voices yelling at me and I came to and I was standing in the shower with my gear on, shoes and all, and everybody mad at me."

And then there was the time he "got a job with a crazy old rancher just north of Harlingen. Old Mr. Guffey had tried to buy a Japanese stone lantern for his wife's flower garden and they wanted a hundred dollars for one. Made him so mad he got an import license and imported thirty tons of them. Nine hundred of the forty-pound type and four hundred sixty-pounders. I slept in a shed on his place, and they'd wake me up before dawn to eat a couple pounds of eggs, load lanterns into the pickup, and take off by first sunlight going up and down those crazy little roads, selling stone lanterns. Living expenses plus a ten-dollar commission, payable when the last one was gone. They's never going to need another Japanese stone garden lantern down in that end of Texas. I got bent over with muscle from lifting them fool things in and out of the pickup. Finished finally and got paid off, went into Brownsville to get the first beer in three months, woke up behind the place with my head in a cardboard box, no money, no boots, no watch. I lay there thinking it was a funny place for a fellow with a B.S. in Business Administration with a major in marketing and a minor in female companionship to spend a rainy night."

And later on, he said, "Good old friend of mine, he said there was good money to be had traveling with the rodeo. SW a lot of new places, pretty girls, people clapping hands for you and all that. He said I should do the bull riding, because I didn't have any roping skills or such. First time I stayed on more than three seconds and got me any prize money, the bull he tore up my left hind leg so bad, I was on crutches a month, but they let me take tickets. Prettiest girl I saw there looked like John Chancellor in drag, and she borrowed my old car, totaled it, and walked away without a scratch."

"Didn't you ever have a good job, Evan?" she asked him.

"You mean like making lots of money? Oh, hell yes, sweetie. I worked better than a full year in Dallas, selling empty lots and lots with tract houses on them, out in the subdivisions, working for Eagle Realty. Had me a hundred forty thousand in savings, after taxes and living expenses, and this fellow told me that what I had to have, I was making so much, was a shelter. So he sheltered me. What he sold me was a hundred twenty-five thousand Bibles at one dollar each. He was to hold onto them in a warehouse for a year, then start giving twenty-five thousand of them Bibles away to religious and charitable organizations, and on the inside of the Bible it said, plain as day, Retail value seven fifty. What that meant was each year I'd be giving away a hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars' worth of Bibles, and half that would come off my tax as a charity deduction. He said it was all legal and I'd be doing a good work. After he was long gone there was a piece in the paper about him. What he was was a Bible salesman, selling fifty-cent Bibles for a dollar each. I went to find the warehouse and look at my Bibles, but the address for the warehouse was pastureland. Honey I made lots of money several times here and there, and what I needed and didn't have was one smart wife to help me hold onto it long enough to get it spent wisely."

There was a lull in the storm when we got back to Bahia Mar. I parked and locked the station wagon, took Meyer to my place, then took the car keys back to Wendy aboard the 'Bama Gal.

"Stay with Meyer," she told me. "Stay close to him. Don't let him be by himself too much."

When I got back to the Flush I found Meyer fixing himself a very stiff arrangement of Boodles gin and ice. "Sleep insurance," he said. I fixed one half that size for myself, and we went up to the topside controls, under the shelter of the overhead there. He swiveled the starboard chair around and stared through the night toward the place where, for years, The John Maynard Keynes had been berthed. He hoisted his glass in a half salute. "Damn boat," he said. "Bad lines. Cranky. Not enough freeboard."

So we drank to the damn boat.

In a little while, in a very gravelly voice, Meyer said, "I feel gutted. Everything was aboard her. All my files and records. Copies of all the papers I've had published. All the speeches I've given, except the ones I updated and took to Toronto. Letters from the long dead. From my father. From old friends. Photographs. My professional library. Unanswered letters. My address book. I feel as if, on some strange level, I've ceased to exist. I've lost so many proofs of my existence."

"Safety deposit box?"

"Yes. A few things there. Passport, birth certificate, bearer bonds." He swiveled the chair back around so the dock light angled across the right side of his face. "It's so damned senseless! I had nothing to do with the overthrow of Allende. What is that word used by the agencies? Destabilization. When I was in Santiago, the military was busy returning to private ownership the hundreds of companies nationalized by Allende and badly run by Allende's people. Who is most hurt by hyperinflation? The old, the poor. So I helped them as much as I could. We devised and recommended the controls, enough controls to put a leaky lid on inflation without stifling initiative. Nobody in Toronto had ever heard of that group. What do they call themselves?"

"The Liberation Army of the Chilean People. Two men will be here to talk to you in the morning. They were here this afternoon. I couldn't give them much help."

"Who has jurisdiction?"

"Hard to say. State of Florida. Coast Guard. Federal agencies. The State Attorney's people are investigating, but they aren't what you'd call eager." "Can we find out, Travis, the two of us?"

I tried not to show reluctance as I said, "I promised you we'd give it a try."

He was still there when I went to bed. He'd made a fresh drink. He knew how to lock up. After I turned the bed lamp off, I kept thinking about Meyer. The fates were trying to grind him down. And almost doing the job.

The hard rains had begun again. Soon I heard water running in the head, saw a light under the door. Then it went out. I knew he'd sleep.

I reconstructed from memory the bilge of The John Maynard Keynes, the twin engines, the shafts and gas tanks-gasoline, not diesel. I marked the mental spot where I would place the heavy charge, right where the heat of it would turn the two gas tanks into additional explosive force, going up simultaneously with the charge, blowing the boat to junk and splinters. Perhaps it had been detonated by a timer. But how could whoever planted it be certain the boat would be out in relatively deep water when the timed instant arrived?

Had it blown at the dock with that much force, it would have taken the neighbor vessels as well, and a lot more than three lives. People who have tried to put bombs on airliners have used timers or fuses that worked on reduced atmospheric pressure. A bomb aboard a little pleasure boat couldn't reasonably be hooked up to the depth finder.

Interesting problem. What does a boat do out in deep water that it doesn't do at the dock? Answer: It pitches and tosses. Very good, McGee. So you use a battery and you get a very stiff piece of wire or leaf spring and you solder a weight to the end of it. It will not bend down to touch the contact, closing the circuit, firing the cap that fires the charge, until it has started oscillating in rough water. That would be efficient, because the whole device could be selfcontained and would take only a moment to place below decks. It could have been placed there while they were gassing up at Pier 66.