“This is the product they keep plugging.”
“Darling?”
“Yes?”
“Mmmm. What is that sort of expensive kind of grinding noise?”
“Oh. We’ve drifted out of the channel. We’re just rubbing on an oyster bar.”
“Is that good?”
“Most people don’t like it at all.”
“I’ll fix it. I come with dowry, you know. Three grand, practically. All saved, but I didn’t know for what. I didn’t know it would be for boat repairs.”
“How quick can you get up there and get back with the money?”
“Crass greedy pig!”
I untangled myself and lifted her down and checked the depth off the stern with the boat hook. I sent her to the stern to change the weight distribution and backed off with care and moved back into the channel.
I moored the boat at my dock and we walked hand in hand to the cottage. “I could go up with you,” I said.
“I don’t want to go anywhere in the world that’s more than fifty feet from you, Sam. But I better go up first and kind of wind up the chapter entitled Richmond.”
“How long would that take?”
“Two or three weeks, because I do want to be considerate. Peter’s uncle has been so wonderful.”
“I guess you’d want to be married in Dayton?”
We were at the porch door. “I’d like that very much, Sam.”
“This is the slack season in my business, so when you leave here, why don’t we go direct to Dayton. I’ll meet your folks and do what has to be done about licenses in Ohio. Then you go to Richmond and I’ll come back here. Then when you’re ready to whistle, I’ll buzz back to Dayton.”
“Right!” she said briskly. She stuck her hand out. “Seeing as how we’re engaged, mister, let’s shake hands.”
We shook hands solemnly. “That hair is meant for moonlight,” I said.
“Let’s not stand out here, son. I feel like Apple Mary. Take me in.”
We went in and I dug into the back of a cupboard and found a bottle of Chablis. It seemed to be a time for wine. And no time to cool it, so we had it on the rocks. Peggy called it a very low way to drink wine.
We pulled the two porch chairs close together and held hands and drank wine and looked at the moonlight.
“It was the raccoon,” she said dreamily. “That white lady raccoon. That’s when I started to fall in love.”
“I’m a more basic type. I began to get the general idea while kneading a fine leg.”
“It hurt so much I didn’t have any room to think about how … darn undignified it was.”
“Just don’t be scared,” I told her. “That’s all. We’ve been off to stormy, thorny places, and now we’re back, and this is where life is.”
We sat in the silence of one A.M., and it was not a silence at all, not with the slap of mullet in the bay, a hot shrill frenzy of the night bugs, a compulsive self-adulation of mockingbirds.
My girl sighed and said, “I’m a lousy bad manager.”
“Indeed?”
“I have been toying with the idea of something cute. Like maybe going inside and then calling you to come find me in your bed, and me saying peekaboo or something equally girlish. Like an affirmation. Like saying to you, see how I trust you and I’m not scared. But things shouldn’t be shoved along too fast. Lordy, they go fast enough as is!”
“Peggy, you are a strain on my nerves.”
“Then, you see, I’d need to have you tell me that the whole routine wasn’t the least bit coarse, hasty, or sordid, that I was enchanting, and love justifies everything, and we’ve both been married, and so on. You know?”
“Go get ready and I’ll practice my lines.”
“I am not going to be elfin and nervous, which I couldn’t help being here and now.”
“And I’d probably bumble and stammer.”
“But—Sam, find a dandy motel, Sam.”
“Summer rates.”
“When I go north to change lives, I don’t want to be wondering about us in any way at all. Call it a seal of approval or something. And forgive me right now for being a conniving bitch instead of a spontaneous one. Okay?”
I set my glass down, caught her by the wrist and brought her over into my lap, kissed her until, when I released her, her breathing was long, deep, humid, audible. “Sam,” she whispered, “you’re making the pants too long.”
There is only one way to handle a remark like that. I stood her up, laid the heft of my hand smartly on the seat of the pretty slacks and took her, giggling, to the car and back to the Weber house.
9
I slept late on Sunday, and woke to a blazing day. I made myself an ornate breakfast, and I kept catching myself humming, whistling and smiling in a broad and fatuous way. It was noon before I got around to prying J. B. loose from his bachelor shack in the piney woods and taking him to Jimson’s. He didn’t know what I had in mind, but he was willing to go along with it, after expressing what he felt was sufficient irritation.
Once we were there it took about twenty minutes to locate the scrapped fragments of the rail off’ the Sea Queen.
“How did the damage look when you saw it, J. B.?”
“I looked it over, Sammy, and I figured there was only one way it could have happened. The stern swung under a dock, and there was a swell, and as whoever was running it tried to swing the stern back out, fast, the swell brought it up against the underside of the dock.”
“So that the rail was broken away from the boat?”
“Hell, you can see that from this junk here, Sammy. This here tube bronze was the upright supports, and they was bent outwards all to hell, this-a-way.”
I went over the bent metal inch by inch in the bright sunlight. I found the abrasion, with black enamel ground into it.
“I want to take this piece along, J. B.”
“I don’t guess old Jimson will ever miss the scrap value onto it. Why the hell do you want it, Sammy?”
“If it ever comes up, J. B., will you testify that this piece came off the Sea Queen?”
“It better not come up on account of I don’t like court stuff. Is this some part of your insurance job, Sammy?”
“Sort of.”
I put the twisted section of tubing in the wagon. I no longer had any doubt but what a spectroscopic analysis would prove the black shear was paint off a Renault. I tried to keep my attitude objective. I knew that if my imagination started working, I was going to feel very, very sick.
I took J. B. back to his place, and then drove down to Maria’s Bar in Bayside. It is a shabby joint patronized almost exclusively by commercial fishermen. There is no group more clannish, more violent or more callously exploited. As it was well after one o’clock, the place was beginning to fill up with the Sunday afternoon trade. I had known some of these men all my life. And even though, as a kid, I had endured the backbreak of the gill nets, working on shares, I was still an outsider, and I knew I had to move slowly and carefully. I could not hope to start a conversation.
After I had made two beers last the best part of an hour, a man named Jaimie France moved over to stand beside me. I had known him in high school. We made small talk, and I slipped with no conscious effort into the slow, easy diction of long ago.
“You know that Sea Queen?” I asked him. “Big Matthews from the south end of Horseshoe.”
“I know that one. Bettern fifty foot. Fella name of Chase operates it.”
“Jaimie, do you think I could find anybody that’d know if she went out the pass there last Monday night?”
He waited for me to give a reason for wanting to know, and when I gave no reason, he asked for none. That, too, is part of the code of behavior.
“Any special time Monday night?” he asked.
“Around ten, maybe, but it could’ve been sooner or later.”
“Would depend if anybody was off the pass that night, Sam. Let me check around some.”
He sauntered awa
y and it was ten minutes before he came back to the end of the bar with a tall gnarled old man whose weathered face was familiar to me, but whose name I could not remember.
“You know Sam Brice, Luke,” Jaimie said.
“Knew his daddy,” the old man said.
“This here is Luke Johnson,” Jaimie said. I shook a hand that was like stones wrapped in leather. “Says he saw her Monday night.”
“Can I buy you a drink, Mr. Johnson?”
“Don’t mind if I do.” After it was ordered, the old man said, “Me and the boys was a quarter-mile off the pass, just south a ways, pootling along slow outside that big bar, looking for to net moonlight mackerel if we could find a school surfacing good when my youngest, he said, ‘Now what the hell do you figure he’s doing over there, Pa?’ We all looked and it was a big one coming out the pass without a speck of light showing on her no place, going along damn near wide open. Now you know the way that pass is silting, you got one way to go out straight or you can feel your way along the swash, but if you draw up to three feet and more, you can mess yourself up good, and it looked like he was going right for that bar on the north. We stood a-looking at him and we kinda sucked in, the way you do when you figure somebody’s going to hit, but it was coming on high tide and he had damn fool luck and got over where there couldn’ta been more’n one inch of water under the hull.
“Me and the boys, we talked it over who it coulda been and it looked like that Sea Queen Matthews you been asking Jaimie about, but we decided it was maybe some stranger on account of Chase knows that pass real good, and my middle boy said the above decks looked wrong somehow when he caught her in silhouette in the moonlight, and my middle boy has a good eye.”
“Did he say what looked wrong about it, Mr. Johnson?”
“Said it looked like it had a little fantail cabin stuck onto it.”
“What did it do?”
“Went right on straight out, clean outa sight. We worked our way north and come onto mackerel maybe a mile north of the pass. We were busy on the nets and it was maybe forty minutes later my oldest pointed out something coming back into the pass with the running lights on, big enough to be that Matthews again, but going a lot slower than coming out.”
He could add nothing else. I thanked him, and he thanked me, with decorum and dignity, for his drink, and went back to his friends.
“One time way back,” Jaimie said, “some folks at Boca that had a hired captain got drunk and took a big Chris out at night, and damn if they didn’t run it right up into the mangrove on LaCosta Key, wide open, half killing a couple that was up on the bow making love at the time.”
I didn’t rise to that bait, and I left as soon as I could do so without offending Jaimie France.
As I drove back toward town I knew I had enough to take to the law. It all fitted together too neatly. No matter what Pat Millhaus thought of me personally, he would have to move on the basis of the evidence I would give him. But first I had to go get my girl.
I would get her and take her to Captain’s Cove and rent one of those properly secluded cabanas for my girl. I felt the sweet twist of desire for her, and it was good. But this was for more than that alone, for more than the old pulse and tangle of flesh, the usage of bodies. There would be that, yes. I knew we both sensed how fine that would be, and both wanted it and soon. But it would be icing on our cake. This was a walking girl, for hot beaches and rainy streets; a talking girl, for private times and quiet places; a loving girl to do things for, who would return all small favors and affections in a hundred ways; a warm and healthy girl, eager to become heavy with child.
I parked in the mouth of the Weber driveway and touched the horn ring, then got out and walked to the front door. I pressed the bell button and looked at my watch. Twenty after five. I had heard no sound inside the house. I pressed it again.
Charity Weber opened the door halfway. “Well now!” she said in her whispery growl of a voice. “Howdy,” she said. She made a few small muscular adjustments to her figure, and gave me all the show biz projection, with a garrulity of eyebrows.
“Hi. I want to see Peggy.”
“Come on in and I’ll call her,” she said. She was not very convincing. She seemed to be under great stress, so that her attempts to be super-charming seemed like an automatic afterthought.
She stepped back and I went in. I sensed somebody at my left. I started to turn my head. Something made a very small sound. Whish. My head was blown off. Fragments of it soared back through my childhood, arching and fizzing. The rest of me went down a long greased slide, naked and bellydown, down into blackness …
.
.
.
. . . . a kitten trapped under
the house, mewling, homesick, lost. A faint sad sound reaching down into my sleep. I wanted it to go away. I would not come up out of my good sleep. And in its whinings, the kitten formed my name. “Oh, Sam!” it said. “Oh, darling.” In the illogic of dreams I could accept that … almost. Certainly kittens can talk, I told myself. Do not be excited about it. But logic festered in small ways, and I began to come up out of the black comfort, up to a sick sweat, pain, a gray world.
I was on my back, my head turned toward the right. I opened my eyes and saw a cinderblock wall inches away, in that faint gray light that can be dawn or dusk. The whole left side of my head felt ballooned by pain, so that I could imagine my ear was a dozen inches beyond where it should have been. I wanted to touch the area with great care, great concern. But my hands were numb and clumsy clubs, bound together. It took great effort to raise them to where I could look at them. They were puffed and darkened, pressed hard together in a parody of prayer, bound together by that kind of plastic-covered wire used for extension cords. I raised my hands until I could touch the left side of my head with the back of my right hand. The hand was numb. The pain became more bright and harsh.
“Darling,” the small voice said.
I turned my head slowly, experimentally. I saw her on the floor, six feet away, facing me, trussed, foetal, wearing the pinched face of despair. I could see one window spilling that pale light onto the cement floor. Beyond her I could see garden tools, a pump, pressure tanks. To the right of the tanks, between the tanks and the closed door, a man was sprawled face down in deeper shadow, his legs stretched toward me.
“Are—you—all—right?” I asked her in an ancient voice. I spoke from the bottom of a well. Her hair was the palest thing in the room. She wore some sort of dark blue-sun suit. Her tender flesh rested against the roughness of the cement floor. The air smelled of damp and rust.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said and began to cry.
“Where are we?”
“I’m such a damn, damn coward,” she whimpered.
“Can you move closer?”
“Yes—I didn’t want to. I was afraid I’d … find out you were dead.” She hitched herself over, writhing, using her heels and elbows. She held herself precariously balanced long enough to kiss me, then burrowed her face into my neck. I felt the heat of her tears on my flesh.
“I found the tracks,” she whispered. “Some branches on the bushes were broken. He caught me. Oh, he caught me, Sam.”
“Maurice?”
“I’m such a coward. I was going to be full of bright lies and I was going to laugh at him and all that. But he hurt me. God, how he hurt me, Sam! I fainted, and then he hurt me again, terribly, and I couldn’t talk fast enough, Sam, telling him all about us. The words just tumbled out, about everything we, we’d guessed. He knows everything now, Sam. I’m so ashamed!”
“Don’t be, Peggy. Please don’t be. Who is that, over there?”
“Captain Chase. He … he’s dead, Sam.”
“What happened?”
“He … he heard me, I think. When I was screaming. I don’t think Maurice knew I could scream so loud. He came and … there was an argument and they shot him.”
“They?”
“There’s two more men here n
ow, Sam. I think they’re the same ones.”
“Where are the Mahlers?”
“They sent them away, Sam. In the big car. I don’t know where or why.”
“It’s getting darker. Where is Charity?”
“I haven’t seen her since about eleven o’clock this morning. She was drunk then, as bad as I’ve seen her at that time of day.”
“Where is this place … in relation to the house?”
“Sort of between the garage and the kitchen.”
“How long have we been here?”
“I’ve been here since … about three o’clock. They brought you in a couple of hours later, Sam. Those two men. They didn’t put you down. They just sort of dropped you. It was ugly and horrible.”
“Has anybody been in here since then?”
“About a half hour ago the smaller one of the two men came in. I heard the other one call him Marty. He smokes cigars all the time. He was humming to himself, that first part of that old song Love in Bloom over and over. He squatted over there and went through Captain Chase’s pockets, and then he went over and went through your pockets too. He was a little bit drunk, I think. I asked him if you were dead. All he did was sort of chuckle. Then he came over to me and he … put his hands on me. He said filthy things to me and chuckled some more and then he went away. I was crying after he left and calling your name, and moving closer to you little by little and you … woke up.”
The light was going too quickly. I lifted my hands and looked at the wire on my wrists. It was knotted where I couldn’t see the knot. I had her move to a position where she could get her fingers onto the wire around my wrists. I felt the soft weak movements of her fingers.
“Sam, I … I can’t. There isn’t any life in my fingers. It’s like when you were little and your hands were half frozen and you couldn’t undo buttons.”
“Hitch up higher and let me try to use my teeth on yours, honey.”
I managed to turn toward her. When I could reach the small hard knot with my mouth, I tried to catch one coil of the knot with my teeth and yank it loose. It would not work.
Where Is Janice Gantry? Page 16
