Dead Low Tide (5 page)

I got to the name, which was Joy Kenney. Miss Joy Kenney—and I looked over the top of the paper at her, at arched brows, purposeful mouth, nose wide at the nostrils, sea-gray eyes, and an upper lip just a shade too long.

“You can smoke if you want to.”

“Thank you,” she said.

The education was public high school and some business college I never heard of. Age—23. Address—89 Taylor Street.

“Live with your folks?” I asked.

“In a furnished room. My parents are dead.”

“Brothers and sisters?”

“I have a brother.”

“Been in town long?”

“Six months.”

“What have you been doing?”

“It tells you on the form, near the end.”

“Oh, sorry.”

I read some more. Experience—A stenographic job in Tulsa, a secretarial job in Biloxi. And since she had been in our town she’d been a waitress at a restaurant on the north
side, one I knew by reputation as being a shade on the greasy-spoon side.

“Funny you didn’t stick to secretarial work, Miss Kenney.”

“Is it? I couldn’t find what I wanted when I came here. I’ve been listed with Mr. Fitch. He promised that he’d call me when the sort of job I asked for came along.”

“What did you ask for?”

“A position where I’d be the only girl in the office, and not a job with a professional man. Real estate, construction, advertising—one of those.”

“Why no other girls in the office?”

“Then they’re senior to you and they tell you what to do, and I like responsibility, taking orders from men, and being on my own.”

I watched the slim hand that lifted the cigarette slowly, too slowly, to her lips—making the gesture self-conscious and contrived. I knew she was trying to look calm. There was a tremor in her fingers, almost too fast and faint to be detected. I couldn’t figure it. John Long had undoubtedly set up the wages with Fitch, and I knew they weren’t going to be high enough to make anybody tremble. She had the same air about her as somebody putting their last ten bucks on the table and waiting for the dice. As though she had a hell of a lot at stake.

“Why are you so nervous?” I asked.

She shook her head quickly in a way that tossed the brown hair back. “I’m always nervous about a new job. I didn’t know it showed.”

“Relax, for God’s sake.”

“I’ll try to, Mr. McClintock.”

I found a ruled pad and gave her the pad and a pencil. “Here. Just a trial flight, Joy. Letter Henderson and Sons Lumber Company, Twelve-twelve Front Street, Tampa, Florida. Dear Sirs: In inspecting the cypress you shipped us on your shipping order sixteen eighty-nine C, we find that item eight, amounting to three thousand board feet, was not included, even though it appeared on your shipping order.”

She was quick and competent. I finished the letter and asked her to transcribe it. She made the old Underwood sound like radio tap dancers, and the letter came out crisp, perfect. I asked her some questions. She knew all the routines of withholding, social security, compensation. She clucked a bit at the condition of the files. She had some bookkeeping. She was willing to go to work right away, so I said O.K. We stood by the file cabinets while I explained the system. Her perfume was faint and pleasantly spiced, and we stood close enough so that I could detect the good clean smell of her hair, see the clean white scalp at the hair roots. It is almost a full-time project for a woman to stay dainty in September in Florida. She was managing.

When I told her she could go to work I was watching her closely, and it was a little like when you tell the butcher he just won the sweepstakes, and he wants to try to take it in stride. I had a hunch her knees were weak.

I phoned Fitch and told him, and then I got her to start calling me Andy. And she asked a few questions about hours, about how to answer the phone. I showed her the equipment ledger, and explained how we had three jobs going, and who was handling each one. We were going over the scheduling of orders when John Long came in at five-fifteen.

“Well,” he said, “I see you’ve got—” And he stopped suddenly
as Joy turned from the file cabinet and looked at him. I was watching John’s face and I saw something bleak and old and deadly happen to him. It lasted perhaps a full second and his face closed again and he went on, carefully casual, “A girl already.”

I wondered exactly what the hell was going on. “This is Miss Joy Kenney, John,” I said. “Joy, this is the boss, John Long.”

“How do you do, Mr. Long,” she said quietly. Her shoulders looked rigid.

“Nice to meet you, Miss Kenney.” The air in the office had that pre-thunder feeling, as though a spark would jump off your finger if you reached for a light switch.

John went over to his desk and picked up the estimate, and said, “I phoned her. I’ll take this over after I clean up. But I don’t think we’ll go ahead.”

“Won’t Gordy be finishing up in about ten days?”

“And I’ll bring him and his crew onto Key Estates,” he said, heading for the door. I went on out with him to the Cadillac. He tossed the estimate in onto the seat. “That girl going to work out?” he asked, too casually.

“She’s damn good, as a matter of fact. Did you know her before?”

His eyes looked out of his closed face. “What gave you that ridiculous idea? I never saw her before in my life.”

“Sorry. I just had the impression when I introduced you that you had met before.”

“I knew someone who looks a lot like her.”

“Oh,” I said, and watched him drive away.

I went slowly back into the office. Sure, he knew someone who looked like her. And she used to know someone who
looked exactly like him. That’s why it meant so much to her to land the job. And I was a Lithuanian krull bird, the kind that hangs upside down from pepper trees.

It was most pleasant to have Joy in the office. I sat and tapped my front teeth with a pencil and watched her dredging around in the files. She was working on the bottom drawer, sitting on her heels, and she kept her back straight. I admired the way the narrow waist made a double concave line, like parentheses turned the wrong way—) (—and farther down the parentheses turned the right way ( ), and that, too, was very charming, and as I speculated upon it I heard the sound of my tooth-tapping get slower and slower, so I swiveled my chair around resolutely, wondering what was wrong with me. Good Lord, Andrew Hale McClintock, straighten up. Have you got to go around lusting after every female you see? Keep this up and they’ll come after you with nets. Keep this up and you’ll start following them on the street, mumbling and leering and wiping your chin on your sleeve. Go fishing, Andrew. Indulge in some fine open-air manly sport and take your little imaginings off this fine new secretary’s fine new frame.

At five-thirty, just as I was closing shop, Mary Eleanor phoned.

“Andy? Oh, I’m glad I caught you in. John just showered and went to talk to some woman about a motel.”

“I know.”

“Andy, you darling, he mentioned that you were out at Key Estates this morning, and I’m so glad you decided to help me.”

“Look, Mrs. Long, I didn’t—”

“I’m dying to talk to you again, but we’re going to the
Beach Club for dinner, and I think I can drive out to see you afterward. It will be late. About midnight, but please wait up for me. Andy, I’m so grateful.” The phone clicked. I said hello three times and hung up. I might have been able to break in and cancel the idea, had not Joy been standing waiting to be told to go home.

I offered her a lift and she said no, thanks, she had some errands. She said she was glad to be working here, and I said I was certainly glad to have her here, and we both smiled charming smiles and went our separate ways.

I went to Moger’s Wee Supermarket, picked up some groceries, and drove on back, put the stuff away, checked the tide, wind, and daylight, and decided there was enough daylight left to take a fast run out to Horseshoe Pass. I took the spinning outfit, loaded with six pound monofilament, and a plastic box of small plugs. I parked and went out to the end of the sand spit at a half gallop, knowing that daylight, tide, and wind were all conspiring to make some snook unwary. I had the place to myself for a change. There wasn’t much left of daylight. I dropped a plug out beyond the riffles and brought it back erratically. A ladyfish took it and I gave her enough slack so she could throw it. Another lady took it and threw it and the third strike was hard and heavy. This snook ran fast and close to the surface and stripped my line off against the drag. It seemed to be going too fast and too far, so I released pressure on the drag. In a strange way, that makes sense. Let up on the pressure and they stop their run. Continue it and they head for Mexico. I tightened up on him again and he ran down the shoreline and took a wide fat jump, splashing hard, and I saw that he was a fine fish indeed. He went deep and pouted, and finally came in, pooped. I got
his head on the sand and reached down cautiously and snatched him all the way out of his element and into mine. The mosquitoes were beginning to peel off by squadrons so I hurried on back to the car and drove home. He was just a hair over thirteen pounds. I cleaned him, wrapped him in the freezer paper Christy had given me, tossed his inedible parts in the creek, and carried him down to Christy’s. Twenty feet from her place, I could hear her singing. I winced. She couldn’t carry a tune in a bait bucket, but it was good to know she’d lost the blues.

I yelled through the screen and went in. I unwrapped him on the kitchen table and he was admired, and she wrapped him up again and found room for him in her two-by-four deep freeze. I built us a drink and we discussed what we’d stuff the fish with, for baking. She was intent on oysters, so I finally agreed to go sloshing out on the flats Sunday morning and get a batch of them, provided she’d make the stuffing. We matched to see whose kitchen we’d mess up right now, and it came out mine, so she told me to go back and fix more drinks and she’d shower and be over with her share of the groceries. She came over wearing more clothes than usual and smelling soapy, with the ends of her hair curled and damp.

“I,” she said, “am dressed in this sedate fashion because movies are frigid on the inside, and that’s where you are taking me.”

I handed her a drink. “That suits me perfectly—on one condition. That we make it the late show and get back here well after midnight.”

She sat on the table. “Why?”

“An unwelcome guest is coming. Mrs. John Long.”

She stared at me. “Aha! Fatal charm. Serves you right.”

“No, look now. Seriously, Christy. It is something of a mess.” She listened while I went through the whole thing. How I had gone out there and stumbled right over the information she wanted to know. I went through all my reasoning, including why I wanted to be away when Mary Eleanor arrived.

“Andy, I’m going to borrow your car and go to the movies alone.”

“Do you
want
me to get in a jam? Do you
want
me to be here when she gets here?”

“I think it would be terribly, terribly rude not to be here. But there’s another thing. I think it’s wrong that John Long hasn’t told her. I think you ought to tell her.”

“That’s John Long’s business, isn’t it?”

“Men are so darn stupid, and they try to be so darn noble, Andy. Any wife wants to know a thing like that. Women are stronger than you men think. It isn’t fair of him to deny her the opportunity of helping him shoulder some of the—fear and the worry. So you’re going to hint what the trouble is.”

“Now, look, I’m not—”

“I’m starving. Fix another drink and let me cook.”

Once we were eating, we went at it again, but she was weakening my resolutions. Maybe I would be doing both John and Mary Eleanor a favor to let her know, at least by indirection. I used all my arguments, about how she might go to pieces, how it was none of my business, etc.

“Andy, you just hint around the edges, and if she starts to go to pieces, you be careful.”

“You can’t hint to a woman and then shut up.”

“Oh, just lie, then. That’s easy for you, you know.”

In despair, I moved over to the subject of Joy Kenney. I covered that topic.

“Hmm,” she said, getting up to get us more coffee.

“What’s with this
hmm
?”

“Pretty, you said. Very pretty, from that tone of lechery you used, describing her.”

“Lechery? Not McClintock.”

“Yes, McClintock. And why I should feel at all jealous, I’ll never know. Obviously, McClintock, he has been embroiled with that female.”

“Embroiled?”

“Think of a better word, and stop inanely repeating mine. A little passing affair. Ha! A typical male indoor sport. And now she has angled her way into the office, and he doesn’t dare do anything about it. Or maybe he doesn’t want to do anything about it.”

“Why do you have to go to the movies? You know all the plots by heart.”

She didn’t hear me. “Isn’t it typical, though. Just what a man would do. Be right on the verge of death, and try to forget his troubles by going out and seducing some helplessly stupid little girl.”

“Not helpless, and definitely not stupid.”

“Oh, she’s smart to let a thing like that happen to her?”

“Christy, you have a great deal of sexual antagonism. Men are just as nice as other people. Nicer, sometimes. You got a sour one once. So are they all sour?”

“Ninety-nine point nine per cent.”

“Including McClintock?”

“Including ninety-nine point nine per cent of McClintock.”

“Oh, come now, Hallowell!”

She patted my hand. “Don’t take it so hard, lamb. Come on. Let’s wash the dishes.”

She was in a movie mood and she refused to sit around and hold my hand to give me strength until the appearance of Mary Eleanor. At last she wheeled off to the late movie, riding my clutch and racing the motor mercilessly. I took off my shirt, dug out a book, and spread myself on the couch, bug bomb and cigarettes handy. My mind kept wandering off the edge of the page and making tight little circles around Mary Eleanor and Joy. My days seemed to be getting too full of women, all of a sudden. I still didn’t know how I’d handle Mary Eleanor’s visit. I forced my mind back to the novel and pretty soon I hit a place where the book took over and all I had to do was lie there and move my eyes.