John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 15 - The Turquoise Lament

by The Turquoise Lament(lit)

  "She fitted in the frame?"

  "Oh, sure. It takes in a lot. You hardly ever have to back off to get things in."

  "And this one?"

  "She hadn't seen me. Howie was asleep. I went back to the cockpit to see if we had moved too far off course. I'd put a loop over a spoke. It was okay, so I went back up the side deck on the starboard side and she had rolled over onto her face, so I got a little closer and took this one. See? The hatch is bigger. I was closer. I was thinking that I was getting real evidence. I wanted to get her face. I was thinking of yelling at her and taking it when she jumped up. It said 'eleven' through the little window, so I cranked it up to twelve, and that was the last one on the roll. As I was wondering what to do, she sat up and put the bikini top on. I backed off. When I looked again, she was standing at the rail. Right here. So I took the last picture of her. Her hair was blowing in the wind. She sensed it, I guess, because she turned and saw me before I could lower the camera. I ran from her. How about that? My boat and my camera and my marriage. And I ran."

  "And you took these first nine,on the roll?"

  "Sure. These are all at St. Croix, the dock area and the other boats and so on. That one was a real nice trimaran from Houston, the biggest I ever saw. I didn't know they made them that big. See? Howie is in these two. Yes, I took them all at St. Croix."

  "Then what about the film?"

  "I told you before that-"

  "More detail this time."

  "Jesus, you are a terrible person. You know that? All right, all right. I went below. Once you finish a roll, you just keep on winding and it all goes over into the other side and you see little lines through the window. Then you open it here and take it out. That's what I did. I hid it in a place nobody knows about but me."

  "You sound certain."

  "I am certain. In my music box. You think you are looking right through it where the little dancer turns around and around, but you're not. It's mirrors in there, at angles so you think you're looking through. It's `Lara's Theme,' and there's a certain place where I push the little nub to stop it. If anybody opened it when I wasn't there I would know because the music wouldn't start in my place, where I always stop it when I hide anything in there. Nobody got at that film, if that's what you mean. God, how I wish they had! After we were tied up at Fort-de-France, I took it out of the box and it wasn't out of my hand until I gave it to the man in the camera store."

  "By then you knew the girl wasn't on the boat."

  "I didn't know anything by then. I didn't know what to believe. When I got the film back and saw these three pictures and she... just wasn't in them, the whole world turned black. Black with little specks roaming around in it, and a roaring goIng on. Travis, I'm getting so tired of..."

  "Let's go back to the voices you heard."

  "Why? I heard voices. Everybody hears voices. All crazy people hear voices."

  "Always the same girl?"

  "Yes. Joy. I never could make out the words. The laugh was the same. It was Joy and Howie talking and laughing. Much more of this?"

  "Quite a lot, I think."

  "Then we need another drink."

  She brought the drinks back to the sofa in the living room. When she touched glasses, she touched a little too hard, spilling drinks from both our glasses. She giggled and mopped it up.

  She said, "To answer the question you haven't asked, Yes, the son of a bitch was trying to run right over me with the Trepid."

  "And you think he could see you?"

  "Why not? It wasn't black night yet. And I didn't have any trouble seeing him."

  "He handled the boat in such a way, he made you fall overboard?"

  "No doubt about it."

  "But he threw you a life ring."

  "I think he just didn't have the guts to do it. I think he knocked me overboard and then panicked and threw the ring. While he was working his way around and back, he got his courage up again and decided to run me down, and then at the last minute he veered off and threw me a line. Like the rifle."

  "He didn't mention that."

  "I can see why he didn't."

  "He said there was something else, and you should tell me about it."

  "It's the rifle my father bought for sharks. It goes in an aluminum case he bolted to the side of the instrument panel in the wheelhouse, sort of in the corner, barrel up. The case has pressure clips and a rubber lip. It would even float. Anyway, he taught me to use it when I went with him the first time. It's a Remington seven hundred. I forget what it shoots."

  "Probably three-oh-eight?"

  "Right! Sometimes they get funny about a gun and you have to let the customs people keep it for you while you're in port, but in a small boat usually it's okay. Which you already know. We were a week from Honolulu, dead flat calm, grinding along at about six knots, which is the best for stingy, on automatic pilot. I was sitting on the roof, forward, reading and drying my hair. BAM! Out of nowhere! I spun around and he was in back of me, not eight feet away. He had the rifle and he had a couple of empty cans in the other hand. He had a dazed look on his face. He said he thought he had unloaded it. He didn't know how it went off. Anyway, it was pointed almost straight up when it went off, he said. But I know how that thing sounds when it's straight up or out to the side or pointing away from you. It's more like whack. Or smack. Not like BAM. This ear still isn't right. It rings a lot. Trav, I think that slug was inches from my head."

  "How did he act?"

  "Really shocked. Like... almost too shocked. He cried. He threw up. That was later. He'd been going to ask me to throw the cans off the bow, out as far as I could. Then he was going to try to plink them from the stern as we went by."

  "And you decided right then to leave him as soon as you docked?"

  "Not right then. No."

  "Something else happened that last week?"

  "Oh, no. I mean I think I'd sort of decided even without the rifle part. Maybe without falling overboard, or the voices, or the girl who wasn't there."

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "Neither do I. Oh, God, Trav, I'm drunk. I can't say words right. I'm seeing two of things. You got me drunk."

  "You mean that it wasn't going so well, as a marriage."

  "Please let me sleep!"

  "Okay. You can have a nap. I'll wake you up."

  "I mean really go to bed. Please. And you go away, huh?"

  "Not until we get through all of it."

  "What in hell else can there be? You're turning me inside out on these things."

  "You said you had to find out something. We're trying to find out."

  "I've got to go wash my face and get out of these clothes. I get all sweaty thinking of how scared I got."

  "Make it fast."

  She came back in ten minutes with scrubbed face and brushed hair, wearing a shorae caftan in a big flower print. She was barefoot, and she was drugged and dazed by drink and weariness and strain.

  She plumped down on a stool, fists between her knees, and swayed, yawned, and said, "Honest to God. Really McGee. I just....",

  "Did Joy have moles?"

  "Huh? What?"

  "Moles, marks, visible scars, insect bites, any kind of flaw when you looked at her through the finder?"

  "N-no."

  "The laughter you heard. They were both laughing at you. Right?"

  "Yes. Yes, they were."

  "And you're no damned good in bed."

  She peered at me. "Huh? Whaddaya mean? I was pretty much okay with Scott. You could say I was a lot better than okay. Chee, you jump around so."

  I remembered Scott was the boyfriend who flunked out when her father was killed. "But nowhere near okay with Howie."

  She reached and got her glass. The ice was long melted, the drink still strong. She drank and made a face. She told it piecemeal, the first pieces the most difficult. Good old Uncle Travis.

  She had wanted every part of the marriage to be great. Howie was a strange person. You wanted to know him. He
was like a little house with a door in the front and a door in the back. One room. He'd let you in his house and it was fun. Chuckles and games. No pressure. So you wanted to know him better and so you went through the doorway into what was going to be the next room of his personal house, but you found yourself back out in the yard, and the little house looked just the same, back and front. One room.

  "Me, I'm a personal person," she said. She'd finished her drink. She leaned toward me and put her palms against the side of my face, cupping the sockets of the jaw. She slid forward off the stool, round knees bumping the rug; stood erect on her knees, and tugged at me until our noses were six inches apart, each of us well inside the other's living space, each breathing into the other's domain. "Look inside of me," she said.

  Well, so they were lady eyes, slightly inflamed, gray but so almost blue they would be blue at times, a tiny spangle of small pale tan dots in the left one, in the iris at seven and eight o'clock, close to the wet jet black of the pupil. They wobbled and then fixed full focus upon my eyes. They were lady eyes for ten heartbeats, and then something veered and dipped inside my head. There was a dizziness, then everything except her eyes seemed misted out of focus, and the eyes seemed larger. She became a special identity to me. Linda Lewellen Brindle? There had been a kid named Pidge who had a terrible crush. There had been a bride in white called Linda by the Man with the Book. She was an identity which had no name as yet, this new one. Pidge was a name suitable for the yacht-club porch at Bar Harbor, or doubles in Palm Springs.

  "Hey Lewellen," I said, changing the last-name tempo, turning it into a half-whispered name of a suthrun gal. Lou Ellen. Somehow right.

  It startled her. She sat back onto her heels and frowned up at me, shaking her hair back. "Who told you that? That was my grandpop's idea. They all said it was flaky. They all said you couldn't saddle a kid with such a weird name. Lou Ellen Lewellen. I didn't even know until I was maybe ten, and hated Pidge and hated Linda, and called myself Lou Ellen for... oh... a couple of years. I almost forgot until now."

  "It just seemed to fit."

  "Are you going to call me that?" The strangeness that had started working at six inches was now working just as well at a yard away.

  "Probably. Okay with you?"

  "Perfect with me. Travis. This eye thing. What I wanted to show you... well, you know. It works for us. For you and me. I'm a personal person. What I was trying to say about Howie, you could look into his eyes eight hours a day, eight days a week, and they're pretty brown glass. You bounce off. They look back at me the way my dollies used to."

  She was wiggling loose. Inquisition requires a kind of domination, a control of tempo and intensity. I pulled away from all the invisible strands she had looped around me so quickly.

  "And you know why the voices were laughing at you, right?"

  It jolted her back off balance. "I don't want to talk.... "

  "Talk about anything that might be your fault, think about anything that might be your fault. You want to be perfect."

  "W-why do you get so-so damned mean? What made you say that about being no good in bed?"

  "Because it was a funny wedding, honey. No musk, no steam, no itch. A wedding of good buddies. A wedding of brother and sister. Remember the kiss after the pronouncement? The kind of quick peck the long-married get at airports."

  So she got down to the clinical details. She said at first it was all her fault, not being able to respond. And as she explained her incapacity to respond, the picture of the sensuality of Howie Brindle emerged. Beef and sweat, quickly stimulated, quickly satisfied. Some days early in the voyage, an almost insatiable gluttony, a dozen episodes a day, in a dozen places on the boat. Apparently very little tenderness, emotion, romance.

  "Like those damned chocolate bars," she said.

  "Like what?"

  "He keeps a locker practically full. He says he's a chocoholic. Right in the middle of plotting a course, or working out a position from the tables, or fixing the trolling lines, he'll pop up and go peel a chocolate bar and chonk, chonk, chonk, it's gone. Wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, lick his fingers, wipe his hand on his pants, smack his lips, and back to whatever he was doing. When it was happening often enough, and I was trying hard, I could stay far enough up sometimes, in between times, to make it, but when you have to be worried about not making it, it isn't all that good when you do. And when you don't and you have to ask somebody to help you afterward, it's another kind of turnoff."

  And by the time they had reached the Virgins, the edge was off his appetite to the point where he would take her at those times when he was awakening her to take the watch, or she went below to shake him awake. But it was not ritual. It was now and again.

  "My father was gone and Scott turned out to be a terrible mistake, and when I finally could lift my head and look around, there was Howie, taking care of things, taking charge. And it seemed as if that might be a good way for life to be. Sort of safe and steady."

  "You began to have, very bad dreams?"

  She cocked her head. "How'd you know that? Very foul and very vivid. They'd cling in my mind for days. Something wrong with me, usually. Like in one I looked down and there were two smooth holes in my chest. Somehow I'd gotten my breasts on backwards and the nipples were way inside there someplace. I was frantic to keep people from knowing it. It was so shameful. I kept hunting for round things I could hold there with my bra, but they'd fall out."

  "Numb places on your hands?"

  "You know, you're a weird person, Travis? Right along here, on the edges of my hands and around the base of my thumb. And I would get numb around my mouth sometimes too."

  "And diarrhea?"

  "Where'd you graduate from, Doctor? Constantly!"

  "Now think back. Was there ever a time in your life when you felt as if you were utterly without any value at all, completely worthless and contemptible?"

  "Yes. After my mom died. It didn't make any sense, but I had the feeling it was my fault somehow, that if I hadn't been such a total nothing of a person, she wouldn't have gotten sick and died and left me. I sort of went down and down and down. I slept all the time, practically. Food tasted vile. I didn't want to leave the house. Daddy took me to a clinic, some kind of diagnostic thing, and they gave me every test known to man. Then they recommended some kind of special school. But my father got a prescription from them for something that made me feel edgy and jumpy. We had some terrible scenes. He yelled at me that I was letting him down, and I, by God, was going to learn navigation, small boat handling, marine engines, map reading, scuba diving. When he wasn't yelling at me, he was telling me what a wonderful person I was, how special I was. How smart and pretty and outgoing and all. And... I began to work hard, and I came out of it, and by the time we got to Florida, I was pretty much okay again."

  "I've got one last question, Lou Ellen."

  "Oh, it better be the last. My head is trying to fall asleep and my stomach is trying to throw up."

  "Do you like yourself?"

  "What the hell kind of a question is that?"

  "Do you, Linda Lewellen Brindle, like Linda Lewellen Brindle as a person."

  "How can people like themselves anyway?"

  "Do you like yourself?"

  She shuddered. "You mean really?"

  "Really"

  "Oh, God. No. I just don't think about myself if I can help it. I'm such a wormy kind of sneak. I'm a nothing, pretending to be something. Can't you see me? Fat thighs and dumb lumpy breasts and nothing-colored hair and weird-looking teeth. People are always talking about things I don't understand. I like real square dumb things. I got through school, almost. I just can't... respond to life because I don't know what is really going on most of the time. Why are you doing this to me? I'm practically dead!"

  "I'm no doctor. I can't shoot you with sodium Pentothal. I shot you with booze. This is a small group for group therapy. I've been pushing you. Lou Ellen, dear, you are, I think, an anxiety type. Sometimes I de
tect a whiff of it in myself. What is that bit about the neurotic? The psychotic says two and two are five and the neurotic knows two and two are four, and hates it."

  "But I-"

  "Listen for just a minute. Some of the classic symptoms of anxiety neurosis. The numbness, vivid and ugly dreams of something being wrong with your body, diarrhea, depression, self-contempt. There are others. Double vision, incontinence, and being always too hot or too cold, night sweats...."