Dead Low Tide (3 page)

And I heard the faint crunch of shells as somebody came walking down the road toward my place. I knew who it was. As Mary Eleanor had driven down the road her headlights had swung across a pair of bare brown legs belonging to a gal sitting on some dark steps.

AT THE SOUTH EDGE
of town there is a deep narrow creek which runs into the bay. It is a place where, in season, the snook gather and respond readily to a yellow buck-tail dude jerked past their undershot jaws. If you shill a grand-daddy snook into chomping on same, he will delight to sprain your wrist. It was there, on the jungly north bank of the creek that my landlady, Mrs. Elly Tickler, an elfin and fiftyish widow, built on the general lines of a silo, put up ten cabins prior to Florida’s current glass brick, wrought iron, and window wall era. They are little bastard-Spanish houses, with narrow windows, thick walls, and doodads around the top. They are scattered around the little jungly patch as though placed by some mystic who used a forked wand. The result is a pleasant privacy. We all have individual little terraces. There is no attempt at growing a lawn. We have our
crop of sand spurs, sea grapes, castor bean plants, punk trees, and poison ivy, and we all like it fine.

Elly gigglingly admits she is as lazy as a hog in August, and it makes her nervous with people moving in and moving out, so she is delighted to rent to us locals because she can leave us alone and we stay put, even if her income is thereby reduced. In September, particularly, we all experiment with evil-smelling sprays, lotions, and repellents, and Ardy Fowler will tell you, his blue carpenter’s eyes as solemn as a reading of the minutes, that it was on the eighth of September three years ago that a flock of mosquitoes carried him thirty feet out over the bay before they got wing-weary and dropped him on an oyster bar. And Andy will even roll up his pants leg and show you the scar where he hit the shells.

So I heard Christy Hallowell come swinging down the road, and heard her stop and slap lustily.

“Donating blood?” I asked her.

She came up to me. “I was about to give you up, McClintock. Until one of your women brought you home. Smell me. This is new stuff and it’s working.”

“Hmm,” I said. “There’s carbolic in it. And banana oil. And something else. Pretty elusive, though. Got it! Swamp water. Christy, you smell like an Arabian veterinary.”

“Poo. I told you it works. It’s called Ray-pell. How was your date?”

“Lush. That was the boss’s wife. And now I’ve got another date with a hunk of cheese. Have some?”

Mosquitoes were clustered around my front door. We scampered in, flailing our arms. Nobody ever locks anything at Tickler Terrace—which is what we call it despite Elly’s sign proclaiming that this is Shady Grove Retreat. I got the
lights on, gathered up my bug bomb, and disconcerted a few stilt-legged citizens perched on my walls, waiting for sleep and dark, and blood and me.

Christy walked around with me and pointed out a few I had missed, and then she sat on my kitchen table and looked around, and said, “God, you’re neat! For a man, I mean. Dusty in spots, but neat.”

“We old bachelors, you know. Everything in its place. System, order, efficiency.” I opened the refrigerator. “Cheese? Guaranteed to climb on the plate by itself.”

“Delightful. Please. And with some of that beer I can see from here. In the can.”

I opened her beer and gave it to her, halved the hunk of cheese, poured myself a glass of milk, and sat down at the kitchen table and stared disapprovingly at the round brown knees a foot from my milk. “You have those well greased, my love.”

“You’re a delicate type, aren’t you? Ray-pell does not smell that bad.” She got up and walked around and sat down across from me.

I approve of Christy. She’s a big brown slim-waisted blonde with a sturdy frame, extra-long legs, a face a bit too round for beauty, with the eyes being the best part. Eyes the shade of wine vinegar.

She is a Midwest blonde and she is something they seem to be growing out there these last few years. Big girls who look smooth and tight and well fitted into their skin. Out there when three of them come down the sidewalk abreast there is something overpowering about them, and you feel that your masculine ego is being hemmed in by a thicket of long, long legs. And they all seem to have an odd, casual lack of any
physical self-consciousness. Their splendid bodies are not something to be aware of. Just something they want to keep clean, tanned, and at the proper temperature. When Christy has a day off from Wilburt’s Book Nook (books, stationery, office supplies, art supplies, craft supplies, souvenirs, homemade candy and hand-painted neckties), and on the weekends, her approach to holiday is to relax thoroughly, and also she will put on very short shorts and make them shorter by rolling them. And she will put on a very narrow halter and make it narrower by folding in the top and bottom, presenting a disconcerting area of smooth tan hide. When Ardy Fowler sees her coming thusly attired, he will trot into his house and bang the door behind him, though he is quite avuncular when she is dressed. Christy told me solemnly a while back that she thinks Ardy is moody. Ardy told me that it is merely caution.

If you think about those girls they are growing out there in the Midwest, and think about the way they act, and think of how they give an impression of being unused and waiting for something, it can begin to worry you. If nature is planning on setting up a matriarchy, it is only reasonable that the first step is to start developing the shock troops. Any one of them could swing a mace.

Anyway, she talks through her nose, and she made a real messy marriage, and she came to Florida by bus with three hundred dollars in her purse and earned herself a divorce. She hasn’t told me much about the guy. She has only mentioned him a couple of times. And each time she had to shut up, because she said that even thinking about him made her stomach swing the way it does when you look into an open wound. Having no special place to go back to, she kept her
job at Wilburt’s, and though she looks with a frigid eye on the idea of another emotional entanglement, I suspect she will end up being an effective and heart-warming wife for some character who is wandering around not realizing how lucky he is going to be. A few months back, due probably to what April in Florida can do even to a statue in the park, and due to mutual loneliness, and the more functional aspects of need, and due to a niggling, drifting discontent, Christy and I had a brief and rather pointless affair which sneaked up on us when she changed the stinger receipt one blue Sunday dusk.

It did not take us long to find that due to the rather limited emotional involvement we could attain, there was more profit to both of us in friendship than in love with a small
l
, and if we kept on, we would never get back to friendship. Fortunately we quit in time, and without complications. It was just something that had happened, and it wasn’t important only in that it probably had to happen, even if only out of curiosity, and we were done with it, and perhaps closer because of it. Closer without antagonism. And it left, me, at least, with one large good memory of lying in bed and sharing one cigarette between us, and laughing so hard about some damn fool thing I have forgotten that tears were running right down Christy’s round cheeks and she couldn’t catch her breath, and the slant of late afternoon sunlight across us made her look as though she had been fashioned of smooth warm molten gold.

I knew from the way she acted, waiting for me, and coming to eat my cheese, that she had had one of those days, one of those moods. Some people, I’m told, can live alone and fold the walls around themselves and make a snug little box
in which they can lie, furry and warm, and sing to themselves and tell stories to themselves about how sweet and wonderful it is to be utterly alone. But our walls are paper, and the sounds of life come through, and sometimes these sounds get Christy down, and sometimes they get me down, and then it is a fine thing to lean, just a little, on somebody who has the same disease, so you don’t have to answer questions about symptoms.

We ate our cheese and drank our milk and beer, and I told her about my secret mission, and how I had turned it down. She was intrigued, as she had listened too often, perhaps, to my recent gripes about the job. And it seems as if there never was a woman who did not get pretty feverish about dark secrets. She made some excellent suggestions about how I could have taken the mission and planted a tape recorder in John’s hind pocket, and rented a bloodhound, and vacuumed his clothes for that telltale trace of talcum. I told her I didn’t know what I’d do without her. At least the subject had taken her out of her mood. She acted better.

One of the florid September rains came along and began to make dice-box sounds in the palm fronds. She jumped up and ran for the front door, but by the time she got there the rain had started to come down like somebody emptying a bucket of fish. We stood and looked out at the wet dark noisy night, feeling the sudden pleasant coolness.

“Off to my bed, McClintock,” she said.

“In that? Listen.” I listened with her. The hard sound faded, left us in a dripping silence, and the rain roared off down the bay shore like a departing freight train.

The world dripped. She gave me a slightly wry face, and I put my arm around her. She turned quietly, meekly, gratefully
into my arms like a small girl, not like five-nine and a hundred and fifty pounds of the pride of the Midwest. She rubbed her forehead against my cheekbone and sighed. Comfort from friends.

I kissed her beside the eye, and said, “God, you’re sticky!”

“Ray-pell,” she said. She tilted her mouth up and I kissed it. A light, good-night kiss, and I patted the seat of her snugly tailored shorts. We felt, in that dark hall, the little shifting changes of awareness, so we broke it up. We were aware of what could sneak up on us, and we were out of the market, so we broke it up a bit gingerly and carefully. The way a fat man on a diet will hide the temptation on the menu with his thumb while he orders Ry-Krisp.

She swung her long brown legs down my steps and out my short path to the road and she was gone before I heard her call back, “Thanks for the cheese, McClintock. It reeked.”

I went back in, stalked new arrivals with my bomb, cleaned up the kitchen, showered long and cold and well, folded down the light spread on my bed, climbed into it, covered one third of myself with the sheet, picked up my book, and read myself into semiconsciousness. With the light off, I thought for a little while about Mary Eleanor and remembered I could pick up my car before work and wondered what was eating John Long, and thought about Christy, two hundred feet away, across the night, doubtless covered, also, by a corner of a sheet.

BY TEN-FIFTEEN
the next morning, Thursday morning, I had the lady’s estimate reasonably neatly typed, and her ten-unit court was going to cost her fifty-six thousand dollars. I guessed she’d paid ten for the land. And it would cost her at least fourteen in equipment and extras. Eighty thousand on the hook, and I hoped the lady realized that eighty thousand, say at five per cent, brings in four thousand a year all by its little self, without aid and benefit of twenty beds a day to make during the season. I hoped she realized that first she had to make that four thousand, and then she had to make enough to cover running expenses and overhead and depreciation, and if she could make anything at all over that, it was found money. The second owner, who would probably get the whole works for fifty thousand, would probably be shrewd enough to know what he was doing. The lady had multiplied ten rooms by ten dollars a room and multiplied a hundred
dollars a night by three hundred and sixty-five, and dreamed of Cadillacs and fast boats.

I was depressing myself, and it was a sticky day. Feeble excuse number one. Take the estimate out to John, I told myself. So I locked the office, got in the car, and went out to Key Estates.

Florida, particularly along the west coast, all the way from Cedar Keys to the careful monied smell of Naples, is constantly growing—not in the normal fashion of other places, with more houses going up on existing land, but the land itself is growing. Shaggy dredges park in the bay flats, snarling and wheezing as they suck up mud and guck and shells and small unwary fish. The debris is piled moistly and it stinks for a time, then whitens in the sun. It is leveled and stamped down and then houses go up on it so fast they seem to appear with a small clinking sound—the way Walt Disney grows flowers.

People who bought water-front land and admired their view of the bay find themselves three blocks inland. Incantations are said, in which strange words appear. Riparian rights is a good word. It sounds stentorian and nobody knows exactly what it means. It means turning water into land and putting houses on it. And standard procedure, along with the houses, is to stuff some palm trees into the made land. They have a nasty habit of taking a long time to die, so you can usually sell the house before the palm turns to a rich tobacco brown. Also, you have to have a sea wall, or the bay will reclaim its own. And you put about seven-eighths of an inch of topsoil on the shells and plant rye grass And a hedge of Australian pine that grows so fast you can hear it.

And you pray, every night, that the big one doesn’t come
this year. A big one stomped and churned around Cedar Keys a couple of years back, and took a mild pass at Clearwater and huffed itself out. One year it is going to show up, walking out of the Gulf and up the coast, like a big red top walking across the schoolyard. And the wind isn’t going to mess things up too much, because people have learned what to do about the wind. But that water is going to have real fun with the made land, with the sea walls and packed shells and the thin topsoil. It’s going to be like taking a good kick at an anthill, and then the local segment of that peculiar aberration called the human race is going to pick itself up, whistle for the dredges, and start it all over again.

Our key, which is narrow and seven miles long, gives us plenty of bay, plenty of mullet, and two good fishing bridges. It’s called Horseshoe Key, and there are three schools of thought about the name. One group insists it comes from Horseshoe Crabs, and a second insists that one part of it once was shaped like a horseshoe, and the loudest segment of all insists on a myth concerning one Daddy Morgan who first lived on the key in a shack and got himself kicked to death.