The Beach Girls (12 page)

Of what use is my talent?

I got up slowly. My legs were cramped from staying so long in one position. I walked along the side deck toward the stern. This evening they were grouped near the stern of the
Lullaby
, a big group because five of Orbie’s current harem, the younger ones, are part of it. I heard the bassoon bray of Gus’s laughter. He is himself again. His daughter and her family left this morning, sooner than expected, probably because of what happened yesterday.

Christy told me about it. She heard it from Billy Looby. He was the only witness to the entire incident, though others saw some of the dramatic parts of it. Poor Jannifer Jean. Poor Moonbeam.

A little motor cruiser came in yesterday morning from Fort Myers. One man aboard, proud of making it in two days. When he arranged dockage, he told Helen Hass it would only be overnight. He’d brought the boat over through the canal and the lake. His wife and another couple were flying over, and they were going to go down to the Keys and around and up the west coast, back to Fort Myers. He hung around in a sort of restless way. In the early afternoon he went up to the office. Moonbeam was watching afternoon television. He watched it with her and talked with her—a feat beyond my understanding. And, inevitably, apparently asked her if she’d like to come look at his boat.

They were still aboard when the wife arrived, alone. Christy said Billy told her he thought Helen sent her right on out there to C Dock just to make trouble. Christy also said there is no sign that Billy didn’t enjoy the trouble when it came. He is a cackling, dirty, salacious old man, a voyeur, a tattletale and a sneak. But in some totally incomprehensible way, likeable.

Billy told Christy that not more than six seconds after the wife went aboard, Moonbeam came out of that little cruiser like a hooked tarpon. She had her tight pants in one hand and her shirt in the other. The wife was six feet behind her, making a noise like a factory whistle, and making slashing motions with something that glittered in the sunlight.

Billy said that Jannifer Jean, naked as a peeled egg and running for her life, was one of the most astonishing things he had ever been privileged to watch. The noise had alerted everybody within eyesight, and they all stood transfixed.

Moonbeam had more speed out of the gate than the wife, and when the gap had widened, the wife stopped. Moonbeam looked back and stopped too, and tried to get into the pants, hopping around on one leg. When the wife saw that, she came churning on again, and Moonbeam had to show her best speed.

They went through the same act again, but when Moonbeam loped off the third time, she veered out onto D Dock and leaped aboard Gus’s
Queen Bee
and dived below. She was apparently looking for refuge, Christy said, on the basis of instinct rather than reason. But it must have seemed most remarkable to Gus, his daughter, his son-in-law and his two grandchildren when Jannifer Jean made her informal entrance.

After a few words which withered the flowers in Alice’s flower boxes, the wife trudged back to the family cruiser. A minute later Moonbeam appeared again, clad in her own fashion, obviously wary. She sauntered up toward her trailer. And a minute after that, a subdued little group left Gus’s boat and filed toward the parking lot. Billy said Gus was waving his arms and making explanatory noises, his face the color of new bricks.

How simple it would be to be a Moonbeam. Or Joe’s Francie. How simple it would be to be almost anybody except me. Even little Judy Engly. But Christy said she saw Judy with Rex Rigsby over on the beach on Sunday in one of those open-air bars. Jack had a charter. Maybe Judy will not be finding it so easy to be Judy one of these days.

I walked up to the group. Lew asked me where I’d been hiding. Orbie introduced me to the two girls in the group I hadn’t met. Leo Rice was in the group. And Gus and Amy and Alice and Dave Harran, who is welcome even though his employer, Dink Western, isn’t. Dave got me a pillow off the stern deck of the
Mine
, and opened me a beer. He is a simple, gentle, decent, courtly man who served twelve years for murder.

It was only after I was seated that I noticed Rex Rigsby in the group. Usually we manage to chill him away from us. I decided that, because the presence of the five female employees of Bitty-Beddy, our normal coziness had already been fractured, and so it didn’t seem worthwhile denting Rex’s ego enough to make him leave. But it would make it more difficult to get rid of him the next time.

To Orbie’s obvious annoyance, Rex had hunched himself close to the best looking girl of the five, and was speaking directly into her ear in a voice inaudible to the rest of us. She sat with downcast eyes, plucking at the hem of her shorts. God only knows what he was saying to her.

I did not want to ask where Joe was. There was no need to ask. He was beside me twenty seconds later, saying, “I leave for two minutes and the magic works. I rubbed the right lamp.”

“Joe,” I said.

He leaned so close to my ear I felt the warmth of his breath. “You’re beautiful, Annie.”

“Shush, Joe.”

The second best looking of the Bitty-Beddy girls, a bosomy little towhead with a rather long upper lip, said, across the circle, with telling petulance, “And I was saving your place and guarding your can of beer, Joey.”

“Hand it over, Cindy, please.” He stretched and got it. “Thanks.” She sniffed at him.

Lew started to tell one of his Navy lies. It gave us a little area of privacy. I slid the pillow back a little and said, “I interrupted something.”

“Nothing that wasn’t entirely her idea, honest.”

“Make it your idea too, Joe.”

“That’s a funny thing to say.”

“She looks clean and healthy and lonesome. She came down to have a mad gay time, and it hasn’t worked out that way and she only has three days left, and she’s getting nervous. Romance her, Joe. She can blame her indiscretion on the effects of the tropics,” I whispered to him.

“My God, Anne. My God! Line four of the most gorgeous creatures two on a side in a bed for five, and I’d lay sick in the middle, dreaming of you.”

“That’s little-boy talk. I feel sixty to your fourteen.
And we didn’t work at all, Joe. Remember?”

“I love you.”

“Francie was one answer. Cindy can be another.”

“It was different then. That was ten thousand years ago.”

“You’ve got to get over this.”

“I don’t want to.”

I turned and looked directly at him. “I might get you over it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I might do something that doesn’t fit your pretty little vision of me, Joe.”

“Like?”

I raised my shoulders, let them fall. “Like Rigsby.”

Even in that faintest of gray lights, I saw his face darken. “You couldn’t do that! You couldn’t!”

“Do you think I really, basically give a damn what I do?”

“Yes, Annie.”

“You’re wrong. And what would it mean, anyway. No more than with you. With him I’d feel afterward like taking a bath in Clorox, but if that’s what’s needed to put you off—”

“Are you trying to drive me out of my mind?”

“I’m trying to drive you back into your mind, Joe.”

“You could love me. Give it time. Don’t do anything that will bitch us up forever.”

“I’ve been bitched up.”

“But not by Rigsby.”

I looked across the circle. Just then Billy turned the feeble dock lights on. Rigsby was gone, as was the pretty girl he had been talking to. Deftly done. I hadn’t seen them leave and I doubted many others had. Cut neatly out of the herd with a clean loop over the horns and a masterful tug in the intended direction. A sour little something in my stomach turned over.

“All right,” I whispered to Joe. “Not Rigsby.”

“Not anyone.”

“I didn’t say that. I want to drive you away.”

“I want to marry you.”

“Go to your nearest department store. Buy a dummy out of a show window. Marry her, Joe. She’ll be as alive as I am.”

He clasped his fingers around my ankle, caressed the
back of my leg with his thumb. “Nothing?”

“Nothing at all.”

He took his hand away. “It’s a temporary thing. It’s a psychological thing, Annie. Result of emotional trauma.”

“It’s a forever thing.”

“If you don’t care what you do, put it to the proof again, Annie. If it doesn’t mean anything, what can you care?”

“I could drive our houseboat through the hole in that logic, my boy.”

“Then what do I do?” he asked helplessly.

“There’s Cindy over there, wondering if she’ll have to tell lies to her girl friends when she gets back to Pennsylvania.”

“Damn you, Anne. Damn you.”

“I am damned. I have been. It’s a good word.”

“And you enjoy feeling
so
sorry for yourself.”

“That’s a foul thing to say!”

“Think it over,” he said, and got up. He moved over by Leo and Cindy and started talking to them, as if I no longer existed. I started to feel a little hurt until suddenly I realized that was exactly what I wanted.

I looked over at Cindy. I could see her taking new heart. She got herself a beer and, with an epic casualness, turned it into a group of four. I watched them. She sat beside Joe, hugging her knees. Soon she was leaning her knees against him. When he made a joke she threw her head back and laughed hugely at the stars. Joe’s back was toward me. I got up and …

 … quietly walked away. I wonder why she did that. She has been acting strange lately. Maybe I should say she has been acting stranger than usual. More curious. She and Joe. Like lovers who have quarreled. But that is impossible, knowing Anne.

When she first came, Joe vectored in on her like a one-man air force. He put on all his acts. He tried everything short of clubbing her over the head and dragging her away, but nothing worked. You could tell when he gave up, regretfully.

But this is not like that. Before, he had all the cheery optimism of a small boy chinning himself for a new girl in the neighborhood. Now he’s jumpy and sour and moody. And she does not seem to be so carefully controlled. Ever since that night they went out together, surprising all of us, and probably Joe most of all.

Could it be possible that they …

Christy, my girl, you are all nose lately. Don’t fuss with other people’s problems. Content yourself—as somebody said—with the terrible geometry of your own.

And why should I think of Leo when I think of my own areas of concern? Possessive little wench.

But he’s been so good to talk to and be with. And what in the foolish hell have we talked about these evenings we’ve been together? The right kinds of bait, and how birthdays were when you were little, and how far away the stars are, and why are cars so big, and how firm should we be with Russia, and what is a white lie, and
why the sack went out, and why waterfront should cost so much.

I don’t clown for him, or when he’s around, and I don’t get the same bang out of my little acts when he isn’t around. I feel guilty, somehow. And—pathetic as it may seem—I am getting terribly girlish these days, trying to do something human about my hair, and pondering what to wear as though it was something crucial. I respond to him, because he’s so damnably nice.

Not a word said yet about why he’s here. But I know it has something to do with our Rex.

I don’t think anybody else suspects Leo isn’t exactly what he seems to be, a businessman taking a vacation for the sake of his health. But when he clued me that something was up, I was alert. That nose again. Such a pathetic little button of a nose, too.

First I had suspicions, and then I got the confirmation last Monday night, when I got my hand held and he didn’t even know he was holding it. He nearly mushed it like stepping on a cookie, too.

Like this. I’d heard he’d buddied up to Rex. Apparently nobody had given him the message about that louse. And I was going to make it my business. Leo crewed half a-day for Lew on Monday. I had to work late at the old C of C, so late that I ate in town, and it was dark when I got home to D Dock. Helen, for once, was home aboard the
Shifless
, but no company because she was studying her Spanish idioms. It was either get out or wind up holding the book and prompting her. I changed to shorts and a blouse and went out. Went ashore, if you’re a nautical type. I wandered out toward the
Ruthless
. Casual little old me. Not really a pursuit, like the Tiger Lady looking for meat. Damn it, I like to be with the guy, and it seems reciprocal.

No lights on the
Ruthless
. The end of the dock has no light at all. Hasn’t for months. Billy hasn’t gotten around to putting in a new bulb.

Just as I turned sadly back, he said, “Hey, you!” He was sitting out on the fish box, scene of Rex’s humiliation that time. With an enormous effort of will, I kept myself from jumping in the air and clicking my heels.

I went and sat beside him and said, “Am I pursuing you, sir?”

He laughed softly. “Haven’t seen you batting your eyelashes.”

“You know, Leo, when I first started reading everything I was big enough to pick up, that phrase, batting her eyelashes, worried me half to death. I used to wonder if genuine sirens carried a little stick they used. And I learned some mighty big words. Chaos was one I learned. Only in my mind I pronounced it chowse. So one day I showed off in history class. ‘Europe is in a state of chowse,’ I said. ‘Chowse?’ the teacher said. ‘Complete chowse,’ I said firmly. So she made me spell it. Then she practically had to be helped from the room. It was mighty humiliating, I can tell you true.”

“I remember putting my mother into a state of semihysterics with the word bedraggled. I told her one morning at breakfast she looked a little bedraggled. Only I pronounced it bed-raggled.”

“Oh my gosh! There was another one I—”

Just then Rex came up onto the dock off the
Angel
and stood and fired up his pipe. He smokes a pipe as though he were posing for a picture of the author on the back of a novel.

“Hi, Rex,” Leo said.

“Oh, hello there, Leo,” Rex said with that patronizing joviality of his that makes me want to spit. He strolled out toward us. When he got close enough to recognize me, he dug his heels in. He wants no part of me.