The Beach Girls (7 page)

It ended, as it always does, and I lay spent and, in some measure, content. With a ghost of a sob once in a while, like a remote hiccup. Heard the night sounds. Whispery hum of traffic. Lap of water. High whee of a jet. Music somewhere nearby. A man laughing.

You can’t hardly get good armor any more. The kind you can get, it dents easy. And rusts in damp weather. And the joints squeak. And if you try to chunk your lance into a windmill, the seams split on you.

I wonder if Anne’s armor is better than mine.

And what brand is Leo Rice wearing?

I have the feeling that something is ending around here. An era. The end of a piece of my life. It’s a restless feeling of change, and with a smell of violence about it. As if the fight tonight was just a sample. I don’t like fights …

 … but somehow I have to watch them, even though they make me sick to my stomach. How many have I seen here since I married Jess ten years ago? More than a dozen scary ones, like tonight. I don’t count the tourist fights, when they get to scrapping about their women. They get drunk, take a few wild punches, then grab each other and roll around until they run out of wind.

I mean the man-fights, like tonight. Mike used to love a fight. He said it was a good hobby for a construction man. He’d come home all banged up and happy as a clam, win or lose. Twenty-two good years with Mike, from when I was seventeen to when I was thirty-nine. Had the one boy and lost him when he was eleven, and from then on the years weren’t quite as good. But good enough. Until a cable snapped and whipped and cut him into two pieces. Even if I think of that a thousand more times, it will make my stomach turn over every time. But you could never tell it, looking at him in the coffin.

That first outfit he was with, they built a new highway across the farm. The day the job ended, when they all tossed their hats into the last slab poured, I ran off with him, so crazy in love I didn’t care if he married me or not. But he did.

It’s a crazy world, how a farm girl from west of Columbus can end up owning a boat yard. Always wanted to see Florida. After Mike was gone, nobody was more alone. In construction you never settle long enough in one place to put down roots.

I got permission to fish off the end of B Dock. Ten years
ago you could catch fish in the basin. Not any more. Restful to sit and fish. Jess got into the habit of wandering out every day for a little chat. It took me a while before I could understand everything he said. He would stay a little longer every day. I told him about the farm and Mike and the boy and the accident, and all the places we’d lived. He told me about working on the trawlers when he was a boy, and how his three brothers drowned in a hurricane, and how he came to buy fifteen acres of land for a boat yard. He told me about his two wives and what they died of and when, and how his son got killed in a plane crash in the early part of the war and how his daughter died of leukemia.

I remember the day I told him it was my fortieth birthday. There’s this about a birthday. Even when you know it doesn’t mean a thing, you feel as if you have to tell somebody. So I told him. When I was leaving late that afternoon, he called to me and asked me in, and that was when I first climbed those narrow stairs up to this apartment. He had a store-bought cake he’d gone out and gotten, with Alice written on it in green goo, and four little blue candles. Being so alone after never being alone your whole life, you get edgy. All of a sudden I couldn’t stop bawling. He was walking back and forth, wringing his hands, and practically bawling himself. He’d stop every little bit and pat me on the shoulder real timid.

After I got over it the candles had burned down and out. I cooked up some fish and hash-brown potatoes and we ate, and he put new candles on the cake and I blew them out. We ate some of the cake and then talked until about midnight.

Four days later he asked me up again. He was acting solemn and nervous. He had something on his mind, but he couldn’t seem to get it out. He kept telling me I was a young woman. That was a laugh. I felt as young as Grandma Moses. And then, after some fumbling, he showed me a piece of paper he’d written a list on. The old sweetie had listed his assets, the marina free and clear, government bonds and so on. He told me he was sixty-two. I found out later he was really sixty-four. I finally realized he was asking me to marry him. Thank God I neither laughed nor cried. I said I’d think it over. We were both
so alone. That was the worst part. Being so alone. I wondered what Mike would think if he could see me thinking about marrying Jess Stebbins, a knotty little old guy with that big ruff of white hair and those washed-out blue eyes in a face sun-dark as a saddle. I’ve always been a big horse. I stood eye to eye with Jess and outweighed him fifteen pounds. Mike would roar that big laugh, but he’d understand. No one should ever be completely alone.

I decided to say yes the next day, and waited three more days before telling Jess. The mayor, one of his old buddies, married us in his office in City Hall. Jess and I moved my stuff into this apartment. We had to have half a truckload of junk carried away to make room.

About the physical part of it, I didn’t know what to expect. After the ceremony he kissed me quick and timid. I knew I didn’t feel any more response to him than I would to your granddaddy, but if he figured that was part of the bargain, I wasn’t going to hold out on him. I needn’t have worried about him. By the end of the first week I had some pretty strong suspicions of what had killed off his first two wives. And my responses were all in order. I wasn’t complaining a bit. After twenty-two years with a man like Mike, you build up fires that never go out. Jess loved to have me joke him about his virility, expressing awe and alarm. He’d stick his chest out and swagger up and down. After our first couple of weeks he slowed down to the pace of a sailor on leave.

It was a good three years, all but the last three months. Except in that one department, he was the laziest man alive. Anybody can see how this marina grew into a pretty fair business. It grew like a mushroom patch. Nothing matches. Everything needs paint. Everything is about to fall down.

After he took sick, it took him three months to die, and he died hard. I don’t think the body weighed sixty pounds. I nursed him twenty hours a day, and slept for a week after the funeral. He left me everything, with cash for taxes.

Maybe it’s the climate, or maybe it’s being on the water. I don’t know. I had big plans to do all the fixing up and enlarging Jess never got around to. I put it off and put it off. Now I’m as no-account as he ever was, I
guess. But I have roots. And friends. And Gus Andorian.

He’s a lot more like Mike than Jess was. And now that I’m fifty, Gus doesn’t seem as old as Jess did when I was forty. It started between us nearly three years ago, in a damn fool way. I woke up about two one morning and thought I smelled smoke. I’m scared to death of fire around this place. I put a robe on and went down to look around. I couldn’t find anything. It was a moon-lit night, but I didn’t see a six-inch chunk of two-by-four until I stepped on it. I twisted my ankle and fell on my face. I used some of the language I had learned from Mike as I was getting up. When I put my weight on the ankle I went down again and said some of the words I had overlooked the first time.

I’d made it on my hands and knees to within ten feet of the office door when Gus loomed up in the moonlight, full of beer and curiosity, on his way back to his old scow, the
Queen Bee
.

“What the hell are you doing?” he rumbled at me.

I told him in several dozen well chosen words. In spite of my alarmed protests, he picked up the solid hundred and fifty pounds with impressive ease and carried me upstairs. I sustained further injuries in transit. He thumped my head on one door frame and my good ankle on another.

He plumped me down on the bed so hard I bounced. He knelt and fingered the puffed ankle with great gentleness and murmured sympathy. He made me work my foot until he was satisfied I hadn’t broken anything. I told him which cupboard to look in for sheeting. He tore some long strips and did a professional-looking job of binding it and tying the ends.

He knelt, admiring his handiwork, and then looked up at me. There was a sort of a click you could almost hear. And in the next second he sprang like a lion. I fought for maybe two whole seconds. Afterwards he wept, bashed his deep chest with his fist, demanding I call the police and have him locked up forever. He shouldn’t be free to assault innocent ladies. Finally I got it through his thick skull that the lady didn’t mind a bit. His whole craggy face turned into one vast mask of surprise.

“Yah?” he said.

“Yah.”

So he came back to bed. After a few months I learned not to ask him to make an honest woman of me. I meant it, too. But much as he loved the little dictator who kept him in line for so many years, marriage is not a good word to him. He was kept on short rations, I think. He is a big kid. This is like stealing apples. It gives him a delicious feeling of guilt. When he tiptoes, carrying his shoes, he lifts his knees so high he looks like a football player in slow motion. When he goes, Ssssh, half the night drivers on the Boulevard wonder if they’re getting a flat tire. He feels romantic and devilish.

I feel guilt too. And sometimes I feel ridiculous. Yet, again, we are two lonely people. Who are we hurting? But guilt is there.

I sat in the apartment by the window that looks out toward the basin. It was after ten. I saw Helen Hass walking out toward the
Shifless
. The little nightly beer picnic on D Dock had ended. Boat lights made tracks across black water.

It’s a good place. I’ll miss it.

The sound of the television in the little lounge just off the office came up through the floor. I knew who was down there. That damn Jannifer Jean, that swamp-pussy poor crickety old Jimmy Meirs brought back from Georgia three months ago. She’s maybe twenty to his fifty, but who am I to talk? Buys pretties for her. Cooks for her. Makes a damn fool of himself. If he’d ever married before, maybe he’d be smarter. He found himself a sweet chunk of trash for sure. Probably her last chance to get out of the swamps and she grabbed it. Just about smart enough to find her mouth with a fork. And from the look of her you can just tell that she got started off at twelve or thirteen and hasn’t stopped for breath since.

She hadn’t been here a week before that damn Dink Western got to her while Jimmy was off on charter. About the only streak of decency in her is not taking anybody into the trailer. Maybe she knows if I caught her at that I’d throw her off the place, Jimmy or no Captain Jimmy. She can move around from bunk to bunk.

Came near throwing her off the place that day last month when she went aboard that boat over at B Dock. Those three hotshots from Miami were aboard. Went
aboard in the afternoon and didn’t come off until nine, with Captain Jimmy, in off his charter, about to lose his mind about her. Came off half drunk and smeary-looking and told Jimmy a batch of lies he swallowed. Next morning the boat pulled out, and that afternoon Jannifer Jean went into town and came back with a whole new batch of those tight pants and tight shirts in bright colors. So I know she hustled those Miami boys, but I don’t know how she explained to Jimmy where the money came from.

Damn if I can understand men sometimes, how any one of them’d want to touch her. That long tangly black hair, and that long white face the sun won’t touch, and those big dull-looking black eyes, and that big bloody-looking mouth. Maybe it’s what’s under those tight shirts, great huge soft white things, so big there’s something disgusting about them, at least to me. She’s slim enough around the middle, and then comes those pulpy hips and those long lardy legs. Those thighs have a loose quiver when she walks. And it’s some walk. I won’t ever forget Christy Yale staring at her one day as she walked away from us and saying, in a sort of reverent voice, “Alice, when Moonbeam walks on the level, she looks like a sack of melons rolling downstairs.”

And she never looks clean. Her feet are grubby as a small boy’s hands. I keep wanting to get yellow soap and a stiff brush and scrub her neck for her.

Right in front of her, Captain Jimmy said proudly to me, “Alice, don’t she look exactly like Jane Russell?”

Jannifer Jean gave me a sappy smile. I swallowed hard and said, “Exactly, Jimmy.” God help me.

I’m pretty certain even Rex Rigsby put her through her paces one time. I can’t understand it. Rigsby certainly has no trouble finding better material. Poor Captain Jimmy. He must have heard the way Moonbeam screamed at Dink Western to get up.

So Jimmy is asleep in the trailer and she’s down there now. The bad thing is that Judy Engly may be with her. Jack ought to keep Judy away from her. They’ve been going over to the beach together. A bad thing. Jack can make her sound like a sack of cats, but still she’s acting restless. Meant to have kids.

So now I’ve talked myself into putting my shoes on and going down there and, if Judy is there, busting it up.

I went down the narrow stairs and into the dark office. I walked to the doorway to the little lounge and looked in. Jannifer Jean sat sloppy on the rattan couch, all alone, one white leg folded under her. She had a box of popcorn. She was chewing slowly, eyes on the screen. Every once in a while she would dip her hand in the box, shove more into her mouth, and then lick the tip of each finger.

I went in and turned the volume down to where it belonged. On the screen they were about to hang a cowboy.

“You deaf?” I asked her.

She looked at me with those dull eyes, chewing like a sleepy cow. “Lahk it loud,” she said.

“Keep it turned down, hear?”

“Show thing, Miz Stebbins.” She was watching the screen again.

“And lock the outside door when you leave. It was unlocked yesterday morning.”

“Show.”

I sighed. They hung the cowboy. I turned to go back upstairs. A voice in the dark on the other side of the screen door said, “Alice?”

“Who is it?”

“George Haley.” He opened the screen door and came in.