The Deep Blue Good-By (16 page)

Chook had brought her a pretty new robe.

With the nurse's permission, she moved from the bed into a wheel chair, and I pushed her to the sun room at the end of the corridor.

"Tomorrow I can go home," she said.

I moved a chair closer to her. Old bruises turn green and yellow. The old swelling kept her brown eyes pinched small. 'Maybe I'm going to catch up with him soon, Cathy."

"What are you going to do?"

"Play it by ear."

"I'd like it fine if you could kill him some way you wouldn't get into trouble about it."

"I didn't know you were so savage about it."

"Savage? I'm not savage about it at all. The way that man does you, he's better dead. I was plain foolish, Trav. Even after everything, I was still hoping. You know? He'd find out it was best he should be back with me. Now Wasn't that dumb? I couldn't even let myself know that was what I was wishing on. Then when he taken me and hammering me there in the dark, nobody to hear, not caring if he killed me dead, that killed it for good. I saw his face once when he'd spun me toward the palm tree lights, and he was smiling."

"Had he come looking for you?"

"He didn't say."

"Do you think he did?"

"I think it was just accident. There aren't so many places with a summer show, and a man roving around could come there and be as surprised as I was to see him. Trav, you be careful getting near him. He's mean as anything you like to find in a swamp."

"I'll be careful."

"I have the feeling he's not long for this world, and I don't want him taking you with him when he goes. I think when they had him locked away for five years, something went wrong with him.

Something stopped. Something other people have. And he's sly. He must have tricked my daddy, and my daddy was real sly hisself, they say." She stared thoughtfully at me. 'I- guess you have to be a sly man too. Your face doesn't show much. But go careful with him, like as if he's a snake." I got back to the Busted Flush at six-thirty.

The rain had washed the sunset time to a lambent beauty. A fine east wind had driven the bug life inland. Scores of little groups were cocktailing aboard their craft, lazy-talking, working themselves into Saturday night. Buddy Dow, hired skipper of a big lunker owned by an insurance company in Atlanta, had enlisted two recruits and was despairingly in need of more.

He tried to enlist me, and I paused for a moment to say no politely. He had them primed. A plain hello was a comedy line that set them all giggling. What Buddy calls the dog-ratio ran pleasantly low on this group. I had the feeling that if I got too close, greedy secretarial hands
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would haul me aboard, kicking and screaming. They all work toward a memorable vacation.

I went on along to my broad scow, and for a time it seemed as if she wasn't going to unlock it and let me inside. When she did, she went running to the couch and threw herself face down, rigid.

"What's the matter with you?"

An agony had blanched and dwindled her face. "He's here,' she whispered.

"Junior Allen?"

"He saw me."

She was too upset to be very coherent, but I got it all out of her. She had gone down to the marine supply place to look for some kind of a small present for me. Just to give me a present.

And she had wandered out onto the gas dock just beyond the offices and the tall control tower for the marina. And the Play Pen had been there, gassing up. Junior Allen had straightened up, stared at her, grinned at her, and she had fled.

"He didn't follow you?"

"No. I don't think so."

"Was he alone?"

. No."

"Who was with him?"

"I don't know. Young people. Three or four.

I don't know. All I could see was him."

"What time was all this?"

A-about quarter after five, I think."

WILLY LAZEER is an acquaintance. His teeth and his feet hurt. He hates the climate, the Power Squadron, t le government and his wi e.

The vast load of hate has left him numbed rather than bitter. In appearance, it is as though somebody bleached Sinatra, skinned him, and made Willy wear him.

I knew he was off at six, and I knew it took him an hour of beer to insulate him against going home, and I knew where he would be loading up. I sat beside him at the bar. He gave me a mild, dim glance of recognition. His hour was almost up. I prodded his memory.

"Play Pen. Play Pen. Sure, I seen that today..

"Forty-foot Stadel custom, white topsides, gray hull, blue line. Skippered by a rugged brown
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guy with white curly hair and small blue eyes and a big smile."

"So?"

"I was wondering where he's docked!

"How should I know, McGee? How the hell should I know?"

"But you do remember him?"

"He paid cash."

"Stopped a little after five?"

"So?"

"What kind of people did he have aboard, Willy?"

"Smart-ass kids."

"Tourists, college kids?"

He stared through me for a moment. 'I knew one of them."

"One of the kids?"

"What the hell are we talking about? One of the kids. Yes. You know over the bridge on the right there, past where they're building is a place called Charlie Char-Broil."

"I know the place."

"I seen her there as a waitress. Young kid.

They got their names on little badges. Hers is a funny one. Deeleen. I ain't seen her there a couple months. How come I remember her, she got snotly with me one time, bringing me the wrong order."

It was as far as he could go with it.

I went back to Lois. She had a glass of hour bon that looked like a glass of iced coffee. Her smile was loose and wet and her eyes didn't track. I took it away from her and took her into her stateroom. She made little tired singing sounds and lurched heavily against me. I tipped her onto the bed and took her shoes off. In three minutes she was snoring.

I locked up and went off on a Deeleen hunt.

Charlie Char-Broil smelled of burned grease, and she didn't work there any more.

But a friend named Marianne did, a pretty girl except for a rabbit mouth she couldn't quite manage to close. Nineteen, I guessed. Once she was convinced I wasn't a cop, she joined me in a back booth.

"Dee, she got fired from here when they changed the manager. The way it was, she did anything she damn pleased, you know? The manager we had, he was all the time taking her back in the storeroom, and finely somebody told the company. I told her it was the wrong way to act. She had a couple other jobs and they didn't last and I don't see her much any more. I did see her.

But, I don't know, some things can get too rough, you know what I mean? Fun is fun, but it gets too rough. What I found out, on a blind date she got for me, geez, it was a guy like could be my father, you know? And there was a hell of a fight and I found out she took money from him for me to show up. I ask her what she thinks I am anyhow. I think she's going to get in bad trouble, and I don't want to be around, you know."

"Where does she live?"

"Unless she's moved-she moves a lotshe's in the Citrus Inn. It's up like opposite Deerfield Beach, kind of an apartment-hotel kind of thing, sort of old and cruddy. In ZA up there, with a girl named Corry, that's where she was last I knew, getting her unemployment."

That was all the time she could spend with me. She slid out of the booth, patting at the blue and white skirt of her nylon uniform. She seemed to hear the total effect of her own words, and looked a little disconcerted. She was a strong-bodied girl whose rather long neck and small head made her look more delicately constructed than she was. Her fine silky hair was a soft brown with bleached streaks.

"Don't get me wrong about Deeleen,' she said.

"I don't want you should think I'm trine to cut her up. The thing is, she had an unhappy love affair when she was just a kid."

"How old is she now?"

"Oh, she's twenty now." She hesitated. She was obligated to end our little chat with a stylized flourish. The way it's done in serial television. So she wet her little bunny mouth, sleepied her eyes, widened her nostrils, patted her hair, arched her back, stood canted and hip-shot, huskied her voice and said, 'See you aroun', huh?"

"Sure, Marianne. Sure."

Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture.

They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making out. Their futile, acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is competition for bag-boy jobs in the supermarkets. They yearn for security, but all they can have is what they make for themselves, chattering little flocks of them in the restaurants and stores, talking of style and adornment, dreaming of the terribly sincere stranger who will come along and lift them out of the gypsy life of the two-bit tip and the unemployment, cut a tall cake with them, swell them up with sassy babies, and guide them master-fully into the shoal water of the electrified house where everybody brushes after every meal. But most of the wistful rabbits marry their unskilled men, and keep right on working. And discover the end of the dream. They have been taught that if you are sunny, cheery, sincere, group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours, including barbecue pits, charge plates, diaper service, percale sheets, friends for dinner, washer-dryer combinations, color slides of the kiddies on the home projector, and eternal whimsical romance-with crinkly smiles and Rock Hudson dialogue. So they all come smiling and confident and unskilled into a
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technician's world, and in a few years they learn that it is all going to be grinding and brutal and hateful and precarious. These are the slums of the heart. Bless the bunnies.

These are the new people, and we are making no place for them. We hold the dream in front of them like a carrot, and finally say sorry you can't have any. And the schools where we teach them non-survival are gloriously architectured. They will never live in places so fine, unless they contract something incurable.

I went north of the mainland route, past an endless wink and sputter of neon, through the perpetual leaf-fall and forest floor of asphalt, cellophane, candy wrappers, Kleenex, filter tips, ticket halves, Pliofilm and latex. one of Junior Allen's women lay wounded and the other lay drunk, and I was looking for a third.

The Citrus Inn was an old place, a threestory cube of cracked and patched Moorish masonry, vintage 1925, with three entrances, three sets of staircases, three stacks of small apartments. It was on a short, dead-end street in a commercial area. it was across the street from a large truck depot, and bracketed on one side by a shoestring marina and on the other by a BEER-BAIT-BOATS operation which had a tavern specializing in fried fish sandwiches. There was a narrow canal behind the three structures, sea-walled, stagnant.

The Citrus Inn had its own eroding dock, parallel to the sea wall. I had parked in front.

I walked around the unlighted side of the Citrus Inn. I stopped abruptly and moved off into deeper shadows. There were two darkened old hulks tied up to the Citrus Inn dock. The third craft was lighted inside, and a weak dock light shone against the starboard side of it and into the cockpit. it shone on the life ring. The Play Pen. There were several of them in the cockpit.

I couldn't see them distinctly. They had music going, the hesitating rhythms of Bossa Nova. A girl moved to it. Another girl laughed in a slurred sour way. A man said, in a penetrating voice,

'Dads, we are just about now out of beer and that is a hell of a note, Dads. Somebody has got to trek way the hell to Barney's. You going to do us like this in the islands, Dads?

You going to let us run out of the necessities of life once we get over there?"

Another man rumbled some kind of an answer, and a girl said something which the music obscured. In a few moments two of them came by me, heading for the tavern. I saw them distinctly when they clambered up onto the dock, a husky, sideburned boy with a dull fleshy face, and a leggy awkward girl in glasses.

As they passed me the girl said, 'Shouldn't you buy it one time anyway, Pete?"

"Shut up, Patty. it makes Dads happy to spring for it. Why spoil his fun?"

I had my first look at Junior Allen. it wasn't much of a look. He was a shadowy bulk in the cockpit of the boat, a disembodied rumble of a voice. A single bark of laughter.

When I got back to the Busted Flush, Lois was still out. I sat her up. She whined at me, her head heavy, her eyes closed. I got her up and took her over to the beach and walked her until she had no breath for complaining. She trudged along, dutiful as a naughty child. I walked her without mercy, back and forth, until her head was clear, and then we sat on a public bench to give her time to catch her breath.

"I've got a ghastly headache,' she said in a humble voice.

"You earned it."

"I'm sorry, Trav. Really. Seeing him...

scared me so."

"Or gave you an excuse?"

"Don't be hateful."

"I just don't like to see you spoil what you're trying to do."

"it won't happen again."

"Do you mean that?"

"I don't know. I don't want it to happen ii. But I keep thinking... he could come walking along this beach right now."

"Not tonight. He's busy."

"Whatt"

I told her how and where I had found him.

With a sideburned boy named Pete, and three girls named Deeleen, Patty and Corry.

"From the little I heard, he's taking all of them or some of them on a cruise to the Bahamas.

They think they're working him. They think they've found a very soft touch. They call him Dads."

"Can't those poor kids see what he is?"

"Cathy didn't. You didn't."

*What are you going to do?"

"Go see if I can make a date tomorrow afternoon."

"They might be gone."

"I think he'll wait until he gets the new generator installed."

"But what if he leaves with them in the morning?"