The Turquoise Lament

by John D. MacDonald

  The trip was forever. The car had to be moving more slowly than ever before. Soon it would stop completely. At last it came to its pause just below the terminus, then was hoisted slowly up to come to rest inside the slot where it rested and waited.

  There was no one on the platform. The attendant turned and cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled up the slope, “Car ready! Car going!”

  I sprinted. I held the wrench in place with my right hand. I went around the left side of the television station on the walkway, leaped down all the steps at the end, stumbled and went to my knees, skinned the heel of my left hand, came up running. Three people were hurrying down the curved walkway between the pipe railings. I thrust past them. And old tourist hissed at me …

  Beyond the last upward curve, the little round pavilion came into full view. Big Howie was bending over something. He seemed to be alone. He looked like somebody bending over, tying a shoe.

  “Brindle!” I yelled from fifty feet away, coming on fast.

  He popped up and spun. Pidge was outside the pipe railing, on her stomach on the outer edge of the slope, legs hanging over. Her arms were wrapped around one of the vertical lengths of pipe that supported the railing. He had been taking her arms from around the pipe. Once they were free, she would have slipped over the edge, skidded down through shrubbery, started spinning, then bounced, sailed, bounced, sailed a longer distance, bounced, sailed out of sight over the lip of the final straight drop.

  I had to be a considerable shock to him. He had drowned me and had come back and looked at the body to be certain, had seen the mouth agape, the eyes half open, the motionlessness under the tub water. Even in shock, he managed to move sideways, to give a hard kick at her face with his heel. It snapped her head back but didn’t unfreeze her grip on the pipe. Complete terror turns on total strength.

  Winded and dripping, I stopped short of him, poised for whatever he might try. He had no chance of sucker-punching me into another case of sunstroke. He began to bounce and grin. It reminded me of his tireless, cat-quick performance playing volley ball on the Lauderdale beach. Big, rubbery, loose-jointed bounding.

  “Yay, McGee,” he said. “Come on, baby.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Pidge had pulled herself up and was crawling cautiously under the fence.

  “Run for the cable car!” I yelled at her.

  She sprang up and went off down the slope like a track-team captain, sturdy legs almost blurring with the frantic speed. I sensed he was going to try to go after her, regardless, and as he tried to dodge around the pavilion, I pulled the lug wrench free and angled in from the side and banged him over the ear hard enough to make the iron ring. Half thud, half bong. He ran four more strides on macaroni legs, fell the way you are supposed to fall, rolled up onto his feet, shaking his head, turned, and ducked under the second swing. I had not expected to miss. The momentum of the too-heavy wrench carried me halfway around, and he hit me with his fist just under the last rib, right on the side. They hit like that with a swinging log to knock down castle doors. It knocked me six feet back, and it knocked me down, and it knocked the wind out of me. I got up like a shrunken old man, sucking air with a croaking noise, certain I would never be able to straighten up again.

  He was almost to the television building, bounding along, white hair abounce, rubbery fat jiggling under the sweat-pasted fabrics. I ran half sideways, bent over and croaking, holding my right side together with my left hand, still clutching the lug wrench in my right.

  Once I got past the building, I took in what was happening. The red car was too far down the cable for Pidge to be aboard. She had not gone down to the level of the car, but had gone up to the enclosure where the pulley wheels, a yard in diameter, turned noisily under the weight and stress of the dark and rusty cables.

  She was on the far side of the enclosure, tense and waiting, knees slightly bent. Her face was intent. It was a schoolyard game. She hoped she was quick enough to stay away from him. The attendant was down on the platform, out of sight of anyone near the pulley station. He was probably watching the departing car. Or eating the rest of his lunch.

  Howie stopped at the four-foot wire fence, looked the situation over, put thick pink fingertips lightly atop the fence and vaulted over it, and moved around the machinery to vault out again and thus herd her away from anything she could use as a barrier. I was laboring closer. She read his intent and ran along the fencing toward the corner. Howie trotted along inside the fence and then vaulted up onto the corner, standing atop the railing. It was on the down-slope side. As soon as she committed herself again, he could jump and catch her.

  I used my laboring run for improving the velocity of the projectile. I put the tool way back over my right shoulder and held my left hand straight out. And then I hurled the lug wrench at him so hard that it spilled me facedown in the grass. I never saw it hit him. Pidge told me later that it hit him in the back, just below the base of his thick neck. I sat up in time to see him leaning forward and waving his arms wildly. I saw the problem. He was too far off balance to be able to drop close enough outside the fence to grab it. He would land on a steep slope that ended in a drop to the cable-car slot, and he might very probably go over the outside edge of that, into a very damaging fall.

  I saw him glance upward and outward, and then, with a surpassing, astonishing agility, he leaped slightly to the side and caught the outgoing cable, about an inch and a half in diameter, in his two hands. He swung free of the slope and quickly shifted his hands, turning himself to face back toward the hill, and I saw what he figured to do. He could swing out and in again to drop and land in the car slot with no danger of going over the edge.

  Two variables had to work in useful synchronization for him to land properly, the cadence of his back-and-forth swinging, and the outward velocity of the cable. He went backward faster than I expected. I heard a wild yell of astonishment from the attendant as the big man went by overhead, swinging. At the time he should have jumped, he was swinging outward. He was going to make his try as he swung back in, but when he did, he was just too far out.

  I stood up and moved over toward the edge to see him better. The oscillation stopped. Howie was trying to look back down, trying to pick a place where he could drop into the jungle slope into thick brush and not too much incline. Maybe he saw a place he liked a little further down as the cable curved outward, away from the hill. With that chance lost through a moment of indecision, soon he was a tiny figure, high over the long roofs of the cannery buildings.

  Pidge was standing beside me, shuddering and making a little rattling sound with each exhalation. I will always wonder what Howie was thinking. I don’t think he was experiencing fear. I think he was just working it out. I saw him start swinging again, and then he doubled and hooked one leg and then another over the cable. He was too far away to see clearly, but I imagined he was hugging the cable to rest his hands. There was no decision he could make until he was at the lowest point in the slack. As long as he was able to rest his hands, there seemed no point in risking a possibly fatal drop into the harbor. He could stay with it all the way to Solo Hill and drop off just short of the cable station.

  The attendant came churning up to the pulley enclosure, his face clenched with awareness of duty and responsibility. I did not know what he was going to do, and I don’t know if I could have stopped him, or if I would have wanted to. He didn’t unlock his gate. He climbed over. He braced himself and yanked one big vertical lever in one direction and shoved the other lever forward.

  There was one hell of a shriek as the cable was yanked to a stop. I looked out there and saw the car swinging violently back and forth. An instant later I picked up the tiny shape of Howie Brindle, turning over and over, falling down toward the water. From that height, it would be the same as hitting stone. He hit about a hundred yards offshore from the canneries. He made a very small pockmark against the water. Pidge slid down onto the grass, then rolled up onto her hands and knees and
threw up.

  The attendant looked at me with a knotted brow and an attempt to smile. He shuddered and said, “Oops, sir.” He closed his eyes and swayed slightly, rubbing his mouth with the back of his hand, brow furrowing again in thought. He could find no words to explain an error so instinctive and so horrid. He looked at me and said, once again, “Oops, mister,” and hauled away at his big levers. The cable began moving as before.

  Epilogue

  It was a warm and windy Bahama night, and the Busted Flush lay at anchor in the lee of a tiny island in the Banks shaped like a crooked boomerang.

  I had Meyer crushed until he got cute and found a way to put me in perpetual check with a knight and a bishop. We turned off all the lights and all the servomechanisms that click and queak and we went up to the sun deck to enjoy the September night, enjoy a half moon roving through cloud layers, enjoy a smell of rain on the winds.

  The deck chair creaked under Meyer’s weight. “Are you really going to go treasure hunting with Frank Hayes?” he asked me.

  He was giving me another opening. My friend, the doctor. Never too obvious. Therapy sessions delicately spaced. Any invasion of personal privacy still stung, however. Still hurt. I let all irritability fade away before I answered.

  “I’ll have to tell Frank no thanks. It was an impulse. Change of life style. And maybe get lucky enough to drown.”

  “Strange thing,” he said, “the terrible contortions we all go through trying to climb out of our own skin.”

  “As a way to stop hurting, to try to stop hurting.”

  Okay. I had finally admitted it out loud, Chalk up one for Meyer, or for the poultice of time passing by, with infinite slowness.

  Maybe I could get far enough away from it to believe nothing much had happened at Pago Pago. A young wife responded to treatment for deep depression. A tall hotel guest recovered from a slight sunstroke. A big young man, clowning around, showing off for his wife, had died in a tragic accident. A man from Auckland had eventually flown over to Pago Pago and purchased a fine motor sailer at a most reasonable price. Pidge could not have forced herself to ever go aboard it again.

  Nothing much happened. We stayed there together, until all the knots in the red tape were untangled and retied, and until she felt strong enough to fly home.

  Nothing much happened. I told her all about the life and times of Howie Brindle. We marveled together at there being such creatures in the world. We sighed, murmured all the words, made love in that concrete beehive, leased a little sailboat and found beaches without footprints and made love there too. We went to a fia fia, ate roast pig, listened to drums, locked eyes and laughed.

  The world requires that one accomplish the little housekeeping chores, so after we flew back and I moved her aboard the Flush, I had my long and interesting chat with Tom Collier, retrieved Professor Ted’s papers and records, and then had the conferences with Frank Hayes about the financing, the timing, the percentages.

  “No big dramatic deal,” I said to Meyer, breaking the long silence. “I thought it was some kind of crazy chemistry with that girl. Hangover from the time she stowed away and I took her back to Daddy. Or involved somehow with gratitude toward Ted for saving my life in Mexico. It was all too good there in Hawaii with her. Made me suspicious. Nothing is supposed to be that good. Ever. Tried to blur the impact with a few ladies.”

  “I couldn’t help but notice.”

  “And comment. I remember. Then I think the worst time in my life up until then was when I knew she was alone in the empty Pacific with a monstrous … nonperson with no motivation except boredom and impulse. I never ached so badly. I knew he was going to kill her, and I felt as if that was exactly what I deserved.”

  “Can I say something?”

  “Why ask?”

  “Because you have a very low boiling point lately and I don’t want you to hit me in the head first and apologize second. Try this for size. You have this Calvinist concept the fates should kill her to punish you for all the rotten things you have done in your life. Of course you are not exceptionally rotten. Just average rotten, like everybody. Okay, so maybe the fates decided that killing her was clumsy and simplistic. Maybe the fates have a sense of … irony.”

  He was right. My first impulse was to strike out. Even at Meyer.

  One tries it for size, hoping it won’t fit. Together, aboard the Flush, it had been so absolutely perfect we had a superstitious awe toward it. We made bad jokes about the horrid adjustment problems of having a wife too young and too rich. We made bad jokes about her adjustment problems—about the three afternoon hours a week she had to spend in group therapy, trying to get down to the places Howie had broken and attempting to mend them.

  Two people, totally, blissfully, blindly in love. And gradually it became apparent that there was only one person in love, and the other one was merely repeating lines which had once been spontaneous, going through the motions which used to be bliss. Excuses have a hollow sound. Lies have an earnest tacky melody.

  Because of my size and visibility, I have had to become adept at following people. It was all too easy to follow Pidge, and be acidly amused at her amateur precautions. It took four of those therapeutic afternoons to track her to the grubby little singles lounge, to the booth where he waited for her. My first impulse was to say to myself that it could not be true. Only in television, in the worst of daytime television, does the handsome young psychiatrist fall in love with the lovely young patient. Never in real life. Please make it never. Don’t let her fall in love with him. By a simple device I tuned in on that fateful line, that timeworn line as she said, “But I can’t ever leave him, darling. I owe him my life.”

  Okay, the fates are ironic. The biter bit. If it fits, wear it. If you wear it, you have to laugh. Maybe it will go away if you laugh.

  So I tried to laugh. For Meyer. For myself. For all young psychiatrists in love. God only knows how ghastly that sound of laughter could have become had not Meyer raised his hand and hissed at me. “Shhhh!”

  Then I heard it too. That great rush of fish escaping a predator in the moonlight. With the stealth of burglars, we got the rigged rods and went over the side and waded into the moon pattern. I could still taste the laughter in my throat, exactly like vomit. On the third cast, something hit like a cupboard full of dishes and went arrowing off across the flats making the reel yell in an unaccustomed agony.

  It was a long long time before I thought about Pidge again. Very long, for me. Almost a half hour, I think.

  Read on for an excerpt from The Dreadful Lemon Sky

  One

  I was in deep sleep, alone aboard my houseboat, alone in the half acre of bed, alone in a sweaty dream of chase, fear, and monstrous predators. A shot rang off steel bars. Another. I came bursting up out of sleep to hear the secretive sound of the little bell which rings at my bedside when anyone steps aboard the Busted Flush. It was almost four in the morning.

  It could be some kid prowling the decks for a forgotten camera, portable radio, or bottle of Scotch. Or a friendly drunk. Or a drunken friend. Or trouble. I could not know how long I had slept past the first ting of the bell. I pulled on a pair of shorts and went padding through the blackness, past the head and the galley, through into the lounge to the locked doorway that opens onto the sheltered deck aft. The handgun which I had slipped from its handy recess before I was totally awake felt cold in my grasp.

  I heard a small knocking sound, secret and tentative. “Trav?” A husky, half-whispering girl voice. “Trav McGee? Trav, honey?”

  I moved over to where I could see through the glass at an angle, just enough to make out the girl shape of the small figure huddled close to the door, out of the brightness of the dock lights. She seemed to be quite alone.

  I called through the closed door, “Who are you?”

  “Trav? Don’t turn on any lights, huh? Please!”

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me! It’s Carrie. Carrie Milligan.”

  I hesit
ated, then sheathed the revolver under the waistband of the shorts, cold against belly flesh. I unlocked and let her in and locked the door again.

  She hooked one arm around me and hugged her small self tightly against me and let out a long breath. “Hey, hello,” she said. “No lights. Okay? I don’t want to get you involved.”

  “Lights will get me involved?”

  “You know what I mean. If somebody was close, if they knew I came over toward this way and they watched and saw lights go on here, then they’d want to find out.”

  “So I can black out the captain’s quarters.”

  “Sure. It’ll be easier to talk.”

  I took her by the hand and led her back through the darkness. Just enough light came in so that the lounge furniture made bulky shapes to the left and right. When we reached my stateroom I released her and pulled both thicknesses of draperies across the ports. Then I turned on a light, the reading lamp over the bed which makes a bright round pattern on a book and leaves the rest of the room in darkness. It shone on the wrinkled sheets of recent dreams and bounced off, illuminating her in soft light.

  She had hugged me with one arm because she held a package and her purse in the other. The package was the shape of a shoe box, wrapped in brown paper, tied with cord.

  “I know, I know,” she said, backing away from the light. “I’m not wearing very damn well. I’m not lasting so good. What’s it been? Six years. So I was twenty-four, right? And now I look forty.”

  “How’s Ben?”

  “I wouldn’t have the faintest idea.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, it’s like that. I haven’t lived with him in … over three years. I threw him the hell out.”

  “Oh.”

  “Stop saying ‘Oh.’ You know, I felt a little pinch when I saw this great old boat. I really did. I didn’t know I could feel anything like that, related to Ben. I thought it was all gone. But we were happy aboard this crock. It was the only really happy time, I think. Shiny new marriage, and not a dime in the world, but a great boat to have a honeymoon aboard.” She sat in the chair in the corner by the locker, out of the light. In a different voice she said, “I should have settled for you.”