As long as I was drawing my pay, shrewd little Damon Caldwell had kept up his daughter’s hefty allowance. It was more than I was getting for having my brains clouted loose every Sunday. Hers all went for clothes, cars, fun and half the rent. Mine picked up the slack. But when they threw me out, the shrewd little bastard cut her off. Maybe he even smiled while doing it, if he was sure a smile wouldn’t fracture his teeth.
She clung to me and wept wildly and said the world couldn’t lick us. She would scrub floors, wait on tables, wear rags. Maybe if we’d had kids … but we’d agreed they were for later, because they’d cut down our fun life. A month later, after being restless, bitchy and violent, she packed and went home to Wilmington, claiming she would rejoin me after I got located. (I was still running doggedly through my list of fair weather friends.)
I got a sprawled, unpunctuated, confusing letter from her, averaging ten words to the page. I flew to Wilmington. In a frenzy of tears she told me she was no good, had no character, couldn’t love a poor man. I gathered she was either going to kill herself, go into a convent, take acting lessons, become a model, devote her life to good works, write a sensitive novel or take up nursing. But she made it clear that whatever she did, I wasn’t in the picture. She wept out her guilt and shame. She fled. The princess went back into the castle and they yanked up the drawbridge.
My next communication was from a Nevada lawyer. I knew then how completely they had whipped me, so I came home for good. It seems to be standard practice to do that. You make them stop the world and let you off, or you go home.
As the morning world was turning from gray to gold on Thursday morning, and a bank of mist was rising from the gun-metal water, I looked south along the beach and saw a distant manikin, limber and moving well, unmistakably female at even twice that range, walk down to the water and stand knee deep to make the final adjustment of a bright yellow swim cap, then wade and plunge and begin swimming straight out, in the sleek, slow, powerful cadence that can be achieved only through lessons and work and a desire for excellence.
So I began to make the motions of the shell collector, moving down the brittle windrow at the high tide line, dropping plausible items in the paper sack I was carrying, trying to move at the pace which would guarantee the stylized interception. She floated out there, and I knew that when she looked toward shore she could not fail to see me. There was a continual increase in the heat of the sun on my shoulders.
Soon I was within fifteen feet of the towel she had dropped. A bushy salmon-pink towel, a new pack of Viceroys, a narrow gold lighter, a pair of sunglasses with yellow plastic frames. I made like a sheller working a fruitful area. She started in. I did not resume forward movement until I heard the sloshing as she was wading out. I did not look at her.
I watched her bare tan feet as she crossed my bows, perhaps eight feet away. Nice feet. Tan and narrow with a high arch.
“Excuse me,” I said, standing up, reaching into my paper sack and fumbling for the Livona pica, and looking at all the rest of her.
There is one demon loose upon the world who spends all his infinite time and energy on the devising of all the vicious little coincidences which confound mankind. His specialty is to confront the unwary with coincidences so eerie, so obviously planned by a malevolent intelligence, that time itself comes to a full stop and his victim stands transfixed by a conviction of unreality, while in infra-space, the demon hugs his hairy belly, kicks his hooves in the air, rolling and gasping with silent laughter.
The busy demon had clad this woman in a strapless swim suit of lavender-blue, spangled with stars. It was a perfect copy of the one Judy was wearing in the color picture in the magazine. The morning sun touched the water droplets on her golden shoulders. I knew at once that this one was Judy’s height—to the half-inch—her weight to the quarter-pound. The build was the same, short-waisted, long-legged. It was a figure without that mammillary opulence which has become a fetish in the entertainment business. A fool, with a hasty glance, might get an impression of boyishness. But even a fool would have the compulsion to look once more and would see then all the tidy limber gifts, the structural intricacy.
The glutton can please himself with a hearty, simple dish; the gourmet requires a perfect blending of tastes, something to savor and remember, never totally identifiable. Man never becomes sated with mystery.
So I stood like a fool, gawking at her. It was not Judy’s face or her hair. But the textures of her and the way she stood and even her expression were so much like Judy that I had the grotesque conviction, for a few seconds, that it was all an elaborate joke. They had used makeup. They had trapped me. Now they would all come popping out of the bushes to laugh at me.
But it was not Judy. If Judy was flawed in any way, it was because there was a faint—a very faint suggestion of sharpness about her features. This girl was flawed in an opposed way—her features snubbed, subtly heavy—a broader mouth, heavier brows, higher, sturdier cheekbones, more roundness in her face. There was more boyishness in this girl’s face, more merriness perhaps. This girl’s eyes were a clear, pale, startling green. Her hair looked to be of coarser texture than Judy’s. It was an ashy silver, a color nature could hardly have accomplished, yet close enough to her own so that it did not look at all lifeless. It was a casual cut, fairly short, yet avoiding that skinned look the Italians have foisted on an unwary world. I remembered Gus’s comment about floozy hair, and knew he could have made it only because he had not seen this girl up close.
I suddenly realized that the local estimate of her age was considerably off—or else she was a marvelously youthful item for a woman in her early thirties as had been reported to me.
I could not have stood there like an idiot for more than a few seconds, but it was a few seconds too long. She managed to look both alarmed and amused.
“Excuse me,” I said again, and I took the Livona pica out of my brown paper bag and moved a step closer and held it out and said, “I wondered if you might know what this one is.”
She shook her head. “It’s a shell. That’s as far as I can go. Flashy, isn’t it?” It was a furry, husky little voice.
You could collect shells, I guessed, without knowing the names. Crows and pack rats collect shiny things without looking them up in catalogues. She dipped her face into the big towel.
“This is the first one of these I’ve found,” I said inanely.
“That’s nice,” she said with a total indifference, and I knew she was going to pick up bathing cap, sunglasses and cigarettes and walk away from me. Such a girl would have become expert in fending off the casual pass. I searched for something to say, but everything I could think of sounded like just another dull attempt to strike up a conversation.
“I thought you might have found one of these,” I said.
She made no answer. That makes it particularly difficult. She picked up the bathing cap, sunglasses and cigarettes. She started toward the path through the sea oats.
“I can wiggle my ears,” I said desperately.
She stopped and half turned to look at me over her shoulder. “What?”
“The shell didn’t work worth a damn. I can’t see where yelling fire would get me anywhere. You brought sunglasses and cigarettes, so you were going to spend a little while on the beach, but you ran into a pest with a paper bag full of shells so you changed your mind. Okay, so I’m a pest. But I really can wiggle my ears and twenty years ago it was my only social grace. I was a very rabbity looking child.”
She turned all the way back toward me, stifling a smile, marched three paces toward me and said, “It’s something I don’t see every day. Go ahead.”
“Which one?”
“Selective control, huh? The left one.”
I turned the left one toward her. I flexed the proper muscles.
“That’s pretty tricky,” she said.
“Want to see the right one now?”
“When you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”
“I
am legitimately a pest, but I reacted in a way that couldn’t help driving you away. The way I stared at you. I’m not a cretin, really. You look so much like somebody I … used to know that I had a sort of temporary paralysis.”
“You boggled.”
“I’m sorry. I’m a legitimate resident of Florence City. I own my own business and my own bachelor cottage. Your neighbor just up the road, Dr. D. Ackley Bush, can tell you I am a reasonably respectable man with voting rights and so on. What I’m saying is you should give a pest a chance to function. Or he gets frustrated. You can pick your own topic of conversation. I could tell you, for example, about an albino raccoon who used to live back there where your house is nearly twenty years ago. You know, folklore, nature talks.”
She hesitated. “And you do collect shells?”
I dumped the contents of my paper bag back into the tidal windrow from which they had come. “Hardly,” I said. “I’ll keep this one because it is unusual. I think it’s a magpie shell. The shell routine was a ploy. But it was the best thing I could think of. Unless, of course, you’d like this one.”
She smiled and moved down to the flat tidal sand and spread the big towel. “You keep it. If you’d said you actually collect shells, I’d be across the road by now. Somehow you’re not the type.” She sat on her towel and put her sunglasses on and frowned up at me. “But wasn’t it a pretty labored kind of routine?”
“Walking up and saying hello is pretty arrogant. I think you should have some kind of stage management.” She offered me a cigarette. I sat on my heels and leaned forward to the guttering lighter flame in her cupped hand.
“Actually, the albino raccoon is much better bait. Tell me about him.”
“Her. And her name was Mrs. Lot, given to her by D. Ackley Bush.”
“Mrs. Lot? Oh. Lot’s wife, of course.”
“Ack was feeding them. He still does, but the raccoon population on the Key has gone way down since the Key had gotten so built up. Stupid people classify them as vermin and keep hollering about getting rid of them.”
“I love them dearly. Thieves in black masks.”
“They’re a bright and rewarding animal. A half-dozen or so used to appear on Ack’s back porch just after dark every night to be fed. If he wasn’t on the job they’d raise hell, rattling the door latches, climbing trees and peering in the windows complaining about his sudden neglect. She showed up with the group one night and became a steady customer.
“I was ten or eleven. He told my family about it and I used to come over on my bike to see her. They get very tame once they have confidence in you. Chicken skin is a special delicacy. She would take it out of my hand. Shy, dignified and fastidious. Not with her teeth. She’d reach out and take it with her hand.”
“How nice.”
“Then she changed her habits. She would grab the food and run, come back and get more and run, and finally return and eat the way she used to.”
“Babies?”
“That was Ack’s conclusion. She’d make a beeline south, and he estimated from the elapsed time that she lived in the big tangle of live oaks that stood where your house now stands. And finally one night she didn’t show up until the others had eaten and gone. She made such a racket on the back porch that Ack came out. She had two half-grown offspring with her, both of normal pigmentation. When they tried to run from Ack she gave them both a good thumping. She hung back while they ate, then she ate and took the kids back home.”
“Proud?”
“I saw her twice with the young ’uns. Not so much pride as a sort of complacency, a quiet air of self-satisfaction. And it wasn’t long before she had them taking their chances along with the whole group. No special protection. Suddenly she stopped appearing with the group. Ack was worried about her. One day, a little over a week later, he was walking along Center Street over in town and he found her. She was in the window of a tackle store over there. The owner, a pretty good amateur taxidermist had …”
“Oh, no!”
“Mrs. Lot was posed on a piece of limb glaring with glass eyes, showing her needle fangs in a snarl that, as Ack said, cast a slur on her disposition.”
The girl turned her head away from me just then and I could see her in profile, see, behind the sunglasses, the big tear shimmering on her lashes. Could this be a sinister person? Yet history records many sentimental murderers.
“The taxidermist was so proud of his job he had put it in his window until the customer came to pick it up. Ack learned that Mrs. Lot had been brought in by a commercial fisherman named Prail, and had been shot through the head with a small caliber gun. Ack told my father. My father remembered telling Prail about Mrs. Lot. My father was a large, silent, gentle man. But Prail was larger, and twelve years younger. My father went to see Prail. Prail admitted stalking and killing Mrs. Lot, in spite of the county ordinance against shooting at any wildlife on the Key. He hoped to be able to sell her to a tourist for a good price. My father solemnly and methodically whipped Wilbur Prail. He stopped a little bit this side of killing him. My father went to Prail’s shack and retrieved Mrs. Lot and left the taxidermy fee on the table, plus five cents for the bullet. He gave her back to Ack who pried her off the limb and buried her behind his house. When Prail got out of the hospital he tried to organize a little group to work my father over but by then everybody knew the story and Prail could find nobody with any enthusiasm for the project. It was something he did not wish to try all by himself.”
The girl shoved her cigarette into the sand. She said, with a small catch in her voice, “That’s a nice joyful story. Can you think of any more ways to depress me?”
“I should have invented a new ending, I guess.”
“No. This one is all right in some ways. I like paying for the bullet.”
“There isn’t any moral. Except, maybe, if you are too unusual, you may turn into a collector’s item.”
“When the Martians arrive I hope they go around collecting people and stuffing them.”
“It will serve them right.”
She smiled in a rueful way. “I guess I did sound pretty fierce. How can you sit like that so long?”
“It’s a local custom among us poorer folks. When you visit a man, you don’t go set in his house. You hunker in the yard and whittle.”
She stood up and pulled her rubber cap on. “I’ve got to swim away from that darn raccoon of yours.”
I went into the water when she was a hundred feet out. I lazed along, knowing exactly how bad I would look if I got into any sort of contest with her. I churn along without grace, style or speed. I can keep it up all day, but it will never win any medals. She had that competition look, the stroke that goes with those racing turns against the end of an Olympic pool.
I raised my head and saw her fifty feet further out loafing on her back. I went on out and rolled to float beside her.
“Darn it,” she said, “that white raccoon is going to haunt …” She gave a sudden gasp of pain and surprise. She had been utterly at home in the water, but suddenly she began to flounder and struggle.
I went under fast to take a look at her. Sometimes we get a psychotic sand shark or nurse shark in Gulf waters. It is a very rare thing. They then confound the ichthyologists by chomping at anything that floats or moves. But the clear water was empty. I could see the pattern of sand ripples on the bottom some twelve feet down. Her right leg was bend sharply at the knee, with her foot curled and twisted, her calf muscles bulged and knotted.
I popped up beside her. She looked gray under her tan but I could see she wasn’t going to panic. She was trying to smile. “Cramp,” she said.
“And a real dandy. First class.”
“Golly! It hurts.” And the hurting wrenched the attempt at a smile off her face.
I towed her in. I towed her along on her back by my one hand cupped under her chin, sidestroking with my right arm and doing big froggy kicks. When I got her into the shallows she got up onto her good leg, but she couldn’t hop through kn
ee-deep water. I swung her up and carried her up the incline of the beach and put her down on the big towel and said, “Roll onto the tummy.”
I knelt beside her right leg. “Now make a big effort to relax the muscles.”
“I never had anything hurt just like this,” she said in a small voice.
The calf was bunched and ugly, and like marble to the touch. Her foot was curled like a ballet dancer, and turned inward. I began to knead the hard ball of muscle exerting pressure to straighten her leg out as I did so. She whimpered once. In about sixty seconds I felt the first slackening of tension and I was able to get the leg down a little. Soon I had the leg flat. The calf muscles jumped and quivered as the cramp knots softened. The ugliness went away and once again the calf was as it should be, long, rounded, supple—a slim leg made for dancing and running and joy. As I had expected, the foot had begun to look a lot better. I massaged it, working at the arch with my thumbs until the muscle hardness was gone.
She gave a long and comfortable sigh. “It feels so good when it goes away. Can I sit up now?”
“Now you stand up, and we walk off what’s left.”
She limped quite badly for the first twenty paces, and I walked slowly beside her on the packed sand. But as the limp diminished, she began to stride along in better form.
“I’ve had little leg cramps before. Never anything like that.”
“People think if you wait an hour after eating, no cramps. They’re right, about stomach cramps. But your leg can go any time. Or both of them. It’s sort of a rebellion of the nerves. So swimming alone is about like standing under a tall tree in a thunderstorm.”
“It would be a little exaggerated and phoney to thank you for saving my life. I could have gotten to shore.”
“I know you could. You’re so at home in the water you could have subdued any panic and backstroked your way in, not using your legs, floating when you got tired. But it was easier this way.”
“That’s for darn sure!”
“How does it feel now?”
Where Is Janice Gantry? Page 9
