The Beach Girls (20 page)

“Okay, okay, okay.” They took Captain Jimmy aboard his
Jimmy-Jan
and loaded him into a bunk.

Lew wondered about her insistence. He found out, by accident, an hour later, when he remembered a forgotten bottle of shine in the glove compartment of his old car and took a shortcut toward the parking lot. Captain Jimmy’s trailer was a home-made job on responsive rickety springs. It was in darkness. Lew, hearing the rock and clitter of the springs, stopped and stared at it until his eyes became used to the darkness and he could see the visible bounding of the boxlike structure and the half a dozen men loosely cued up by the door. The motion died away. A man came out and one went in. The motion began again. Lew estimated that the old springs would receive the equivalent of transcontinental milage before the night was over.

The man who had come out came swaggering over toward Lew. “That you, Lew?”

“Who is it?”

“Me. Pete.” It was the mechanic brother of the waitress
who had done the violent tap dance.

“You don’t much care what you do.”

“It ain’t that bad.”

“What’s she charging?”

“Well, it’s sort of five dollars.”

“What the hell you mean, sort of.”

“Come over by the light.” They walked over. Pete handed him a piece of white paper.

“What the hell is this?”

“You know Pig Wallace, the surveyor?”

“Sure.”

“Once we found out she was hustling, we didn’t have no five dollars apiece, and no friends to loan us. Pig had this kind of drawing paper in the car and some shears, and we used us the onliest one buck we had for a sample. We made a stack. Then I yanked the main electric on the trailer so she can’t check. Shut your eyes and feel it. Feels like money, don’t it?”

“Doesn’t she wonder if she isn’t getting a one instead of a five?”

“We been giving her five of them. You crumple them some first. Pig and me, we’re selling five of these for a buck, and we’re doing pretty good. You want five.”

“I tell you, I’d have no use for them, Pete. My God, she’s going to be one crazy-mad bitch come morning.”

“That’s too damn bad, Lew. I got to go round up some more business. Looks like maybe we’re going to have to cut up some more paper, this keeps up, Pig’s got a lot left, in big sheets.”

Shortly before eleven o’clock, Lew and Marty Urban had an opportunity to eject a paying customer. He was a local cab driver, a large sloppy man named Shed Stauffler, and a quickly assembled kangaroo court decided that his offense merited parabolic ejection. Shed agreed, with a certain solemnity and even cooperated in an uncoordinated fashion. He was ashamed of himself. He yearned for punishment.

He had been caught red-handed lumbering off into the darkness hugging the penultimate keg of beer to his chest. His explanation that it was just a nightcap seemed feeble.

Enough cars had left the parking lot to provide a clear
space. A group of experts watched the proceedings narrowly. Lew’s coordination was blurred by shine. He took the ankles and Marty took the wrists. They swung him three times and let go the fourth time. Their grunt of final effort mingled with Shed’s howl of alarm. He turned in the air and landed so thunderously on the seat of his baggy pants that it bounced him neatly back onto his feet. After his moment of surprise, he turned and bowed, and then walked with a certain dignity to his cab and went to sleep in the back seat. It was agreed that they had done exceptionally well with so large a man.

It was at about this time that Alice Stebbins went to bed. Unlike other years, she had no heart for the festivities. She was tired of having people tell her, with all the ponderous emotionality of alcohol, how sorry they were. The more volatile had dampened her blouse with their tears.

The bright lights on the docks made unfamiliar patterns on the ceiling. The sounds of party came through the window screens. The music was not as loud. There were unidentifiable yelps and whinnies. One dogged group was trying to sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” In spite of their most determined efforts to sing it as a round, they kept getting mixed up and finishing all together. Then there would be a loud, angry, vicious argument about whose fault it was before they started again.

A stranger, walking by below her window said, “… so she says you don’t like the way I gaffed your damn fish and I said no the way you did it I could have lost it and she said if that’s the way you want to be about it I quit and before I could grab her she throws overboard the gaff, the fish, the rod and reel, the mop, the boat hook and the Goddamn lunch and then she says take me home, for Chrissake, and starts crying …”

Suddenly she heard the familiar, ponderous creaking of the stairs, like a trained bear climbing a stepladder, and she smiled in the darkness. Gus fumbled his way into the apartment, and in a whisper like cracking a steam valve, said, “Alice! You here?

“Was unlock down there,” he whispered. “Not safe for you. Any dronk bum could come in, yes?”

In a little while he came into the bed beside her. It
dipped under his weight. He sighed heavily. When she was in his arms it took her a few moments to identify the odd little sounds he was making. She touched his eye-lids with her fingertips and said, “Why, you’re crying, you big boobie. Now … now you’ve got me doing it too.”

He held her, snuffled against her throat, “So damn lonesome all of a sudden,” he mumbled. “Is no good at all.”

At midnight, due to a serious underestimation of the amount of beer required, the tent bar was forced to close. Every scrap of food was gone. Those who had left bottles with the bartenders reclaimed them, some quarreling bitterly about the meager amount left. The rule about carrying bottles around on the person was relaxed to compensate for the new conditions.

Also at midnight, as Orbie was standing near the
Lullaby
talking to Sim and Gloria Gallowell, they heard a thin and frantic male voice yelling, “Help! Help!” It came from over by charterboat row. The yells were smothered by distant sounds of conflict.

Orbie said, “You know, that could be that fella that give Darlene Marie the boost with that buzz stick.”

“Could be at that,” Sim said. “Made himself unpopular with the boys, doing a thing like that. Funny they took so long to get him.”

“I heard a while back they were having a time getting him off Sid’s boat.”

“You’d better
do
something!” Gloria said. “He isn’t real strong looking. They could kill him over there.”

“I guess we’re just about to,” Sim said. “Aren’t we just about to, Orbie?”

“Let’s just amble on over there.”

“Don’t you start to fighting, honey,” Gloria said.

“You just wait right here where it’s nice and light. We’ll take care of this and then we’ll all go on home. Where’s Marty and Mary Lee.”

“I guess they’re still on that Texas boat, honey. That party is getting bigger and bigger. Hurry before they kill that poor man. Please hurry!”

Orbie and Sim headed toward the disturbance, walking without particular haste. When they were fifty feet away, somebody grabbed Orbie’s arm from behind and
whirled him so violently that Orbie came dangerously close to belting Jack Engly in the face.

“Where’s Judy?” Jack demanded. “You seen Judy?”

“No, I haven’t seen her for a long time.”

“Me either,” Sim said.

“I kinda dozed off sitting aboard my boat and she was there and then she wasn’t. You see her, you tell her I’m looking for her.”

The sound of battle had stopped. Sim and Orbie joined the group of half a dozen protectors of Southern womanhood. They were standing looking down at Lonnie Guy, one of them squatting beside him, holding a match. Lonnie was a mess. An argument was going on. Two men felt they hadn’t been given a chance at him. The others, honor satisfied, were worried about overdoing it.

“All right, all right,” Sim said. “Somebody go draw a bucket. Is he breathing, Mike?”

“A little bit, now and again, Sim.”

After the second slosh with a bucket of salt water, Lonnie groaned and rolled over. Sim and Orbie picked him up, each holding him by an arm, and walked him back toward the
Pieces of Seven
, followed for half the distance by two men pleading for just one little chop more. Lonnie’s chin bobbed on his chest. His nose lay neatly against his right cheek. His legs flapped loosely in his attempt to walk, and he dribbled a few tooth fragments.

“Sure messed him,” Sim said.

“Be a good idea to get a doctor. They can call. Sid’s got a phone strung onto that Chris of his.”

Gloria was where they had left her. She had been joined by Leo and Christy. Lonnie was walking a little better, but he didn’t look any better. “We’ll unload him and be right back, kids,” Orbie said.

They used the little portable ladderway on the port side of the
Pieces of Seven
to walk him aboard. Francesca Portoni came charging up to them, black hair whipping, black eyes flashing, cinematic bosom heaving. “What ees thees!”

“It’s a prominent figger in the entertainment world,” Orbie said. “Where’s Sid?”

She made a sweeping gesture that nearly tipped her off her bare feet. “Pass out. Everybody ees pass out, total. I
am so bore. Ees a big mess all over.” She paused and looked more closely at Lonnie Guy.
“Sangre de la Madonna!
” she said in an awed tone.

She told them where to put him. She was phoning a doctor when they left.

Joe Rykler had heard the sounds of combat, and though they were nearby, they seemed vastly unimportant to him. He was more concerned with listening to himself and trying to figure out what he was saying. He was on his back on something that had a rubbery softness. He was looking up at the stars. There was a woman in the curve of his right arm. Just beyond her, a sonorous, carefully articulated male voice said, “Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire.”

Joe stopped listening to his own sad fuzzy voice and hiked himself up just long enough to orient himself before the woman yanked him back down. He was over in charterboat row, on some kind of big bulbous rubberized air mattress on the bow deck of the
Fleetermouse
.

“Whassamarra, honey?” the woman said.

“Who are you?”

“There you go again,” she said petulantly. “Can’t you keep track. Alla time you gotta be clued. You muss be drunk. I’m Beezie, baby. Ole Beezie Hooper.”

“Oh.”

“New Jersey, New Mexico, New York,” the man just beyond her said. She lay between them.

“Who’s
that
?”

“I tole you ninety times, Joey. Sa house guest me and Stan. Peter. He says the states to make sure he’s not stinking. Then the pres’dents, and finally the atomic table, but he never gets all the way through. Talk sad some more. I wanna cry some more.” She rolled against him and began to chomp at the lower half of his face like a person trying to eat an apple. Joe found it unpleasant.

“North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio,” the man said.

Joe pushed her away and said, “Where’s Stan?”

“Piffle on him. Sour, dirry ole louse. It’s you and me against all of ’um. Make me cry.”

“Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania.” He could hear a dull mumbling of voices from the cockpit of the boat, identified
it as a semi-comprehensible political argument.

Then a voice was calling. “Joe! Joe Rykler!” He sensed urgency in the voice. He recognized Amy Penworthy’s voice. He sat up. Beezie yanked him down so hard he bounced. He pushed her away and scrambled up, lost his footing and nearly pitched overboard.

“Come back here, you moron!” Beezie yelled.

He went gingerly down the side deck, stepped over onto the narrow access dock and walked ashore. His legs felt unreliable.

“Amy?”

She came up to him and said in a low voice, “I’ve been looking all over. Are you drunk?”

“You’ve been looking for me to ask me that?”

“You don’t seem too bad, I guess. It’s Anne.”

Something went on in his head, like rolling up a gauze screen that separated the audience from the action on the stage.

“What about Anne?”

“You’re hurting my arm. About half an hour ago I went aboard the
Alrightee
. She was packing a bag. She was tight and she was crying. I asked her what she was doing. She said she was going on a cruise on that Texas boat. They invited her, she said. She said she’d be gone for weeks and weeks. I couldn’t do anything with her. I asked her why she was doing such a crazy thing and she said so you could stop being in love with her, and she said she wasn’t any damn good and it was time to prove it. I don’t know what to do, and I thought …”

Then he was taking long strides, and Amy was trotting along behind him. He was consciously taking deep breaths in an effort to clear his head completely.

Suddenly a tall figure blocked his path. “You seen Judy?” Jack Engly demanded.

“Get out of the way!”

“I want to know, you seen Judy.”

“No. No, I haven’t seen Judy.”

He walked on. Behind him he heard Jack asking Amy. He walked by a group near the
Lullaby
—Leo, Christy, Orbie, Sim, Gloria. They spoke but he did not answer.

One long narrow gangplank stretched from the T of D Dock to the forward weather deck of the
Do Tell
. It was unguarded. Calypso was coming over the yacht’s speaker
system. A sweaty clot of enthusiasts were accompanying it with improvised percussion instruments, clanging and banging while couples danced with more abandon than taste on the shadowy decks.

He prowled the decks and did not find Anne. He went below. There was an incongruous game of dominos in the main lounge, and one man in pajamas calmly reading a paper with a steaming mug of coffee beside him. A huge brown man was trundling around and around on his hands and knees, giving, from time to time, a realistic whinny. A dainty little blonde rode on his back, a look of happy ecstasy on her face, saying, “Gidyap, gidyap, horsie-horsie.”

Joe paused to let them go by and went to the man reading the paper. “I’m looking for Miss Browder.”

He put the paper down and frowned. “Who?”

“Miss Browder. A tall blonde girl. Her name is Anne. Somebody invited her to come on your cruise with you.”