“Who do I see about arrangements to stay here?” he asked.
Billy spat into the dark water. “You plug in right here for electric. This is your meter. Better wrap your lines or you’ll chafe ’em. Connect your hose here. Garbage can in the dock box there. You want supplies or laundry or ice or anything, you see me and I’ll fix you up. The office is closed. You can check in in the morning. Dollar a day dockage, mister. Pay your own electric. No charge for water.”
Billy and I left him there and walked back along the dock to the group. Billy snagged a beer, uninvited, opened it and took it along with him back to his little room in the end of the storage shed.
“What’ve we got, Orbie?” Christy Yale asked in her funny, husky voice.
“A waterborn damn fool name of Leo Rice in an old crock of a Higgins he got stuck for in Jax. Didn’t change the name. It’s called Ruthless. Nice-spoken fella about forty, traveling alone. But he don’t know a winch from a wench.”
“Now that’s one thing I got a strong feeling about,” Lew Burgoyne said.
“You got strong feelings about everything,” Alice Stebbins said.
Lew ignored her. “Man has to have a license to drive a hundred-dollar car, but if he’s got enough money to buy thirty feet of boat, he can go right on out and drown himself free of charge. Like the time that big Chris ran the hell right into me and I find out the guy owned it three days. Came from Kansas. Never saw water before.”
We argued that back and forth. I started the charcoal going. We opened some more beers. It was full night. You could see the neon of the hotels over on the beach.
After a while they started kidding me, giving me a real ride about the next bunch of girls due in on Monday. It’s the one part of the job like to drive me out of my mind. I got to live around boats. I was born down in the Keys. I’m thirty-five. I pretty much go my own way. Spent my life on the water, with a stretch in the Navy. Tried marriage once and didn’t like it, and pulled out soon as I could. She remarried. Caught a rich tourist. Fine-looking woman.
Anyhow, I got this job five years ago, hired captain of the Lullaby, forty foot diesel Matthews, about all the boat one man wants to handle. I live in the next-door slip to the Lullaby, aboard my own houseboat named Mine. Bought her run down and fixed her up neat and pretty. The Lullaby is a corporation boat. Owned by the Bitty-Beddy Corporation up in Pennsylvania, biggest maker of cribs, highchairs and toidy seats in the world. It’s a handy place to keep the boat, right here at Stebbins’ Marina at Elihu Beach, Florida. You can run out the pass into the Atlantic in minutes. And the company also owns the Linda Lomas Motel, just four blocks from here, a block off Broward to the west.
It used to be the perfect job. I’d get a letter or a phone call or a wire, and some of the corporation boys and their guests would come down and we’d either use this as a base for fishing, or take a run down to the Keys or to Havana or over to Nassau. About a hundred days of work a year, not counting everyday maintenance.
Then last summer some smart guy up there in Pennsylvania decided that in the summer months they could run batches of women from the offices down here to stay two weeks in the motel and have the use of the boat. Real generous. It’s a mess. I got four batches last summer, and this summer it will be five. Six to eight females in each batch. Maybe they’re just fine up there, but they go crazy down here in the summer. They get drunk and they get seasick and they get sunburned so bad they get chills and fever. They run from twenty-five to fifty-five, and they aren’t hired for looks. You should hear them all squeal at once when somebody hooks a fish. The better-looking ones sometimes seem willing enough, but I know damn well that if word ever got back to Pennsylvania that Captain Derr messed around with one of them, good-by job. I did take a chance one time last summer, on a little gal in the last batch, when I was wore down by it all. Red-headed, with hair the exact same shade as mine. She was so scared about me ever saying a word about it, I figured it was safe enough. She snuck aboard Mine three times and it was fine. She wrote one long sloppy letter about how she was going to be married three days after the day I got the letter, but I didn’t answer it.
On Monday, the fourth, I was due for a new batch, the third of this season. The boys over in charterboat row think it’s funny as hell telling me how good I have it, and will I change jobs and all that. The hell of it is, I like things neat. And it would make you cry to see what one batch of them can do to the Lullaby in just one day of cruising. Women are mostly so damn untidy.
It had been Christy’s turn to buy the groceries, so when it was time she walked up to girl’s town—Joe Rykler had named it that. It’s just two houseboats moored side by side on the shore side of Rex Rigsby’s ketch. Christy lives aboard the Shifless with Helen Hass, the sour little brunette job who runs the office and books for Alice Stebbins, and goes out to classes every night improving herself. Just beyond the Shifless is the twin houseboat, the Alrightee, where Anne Browder lives with Amy Penworthy.
Christy brought the food back and she and I unwrapped it under one of the feeble dock lights and then started the hamburgers cooking. Meat spitting over the fire, and that pfisst sound when a beer can is opened, and quiet talk there in the night.
Old Gus Andorian told us some funny steel mill stories we hadn’t heard before. He’s lived in an old motorless scow tied to D Dock for the past four years. He must be getting close to seventy, but he’s big and thick and solid as a tree. He worked all his life in the mills. His wife died five years ago. From what he tells, she was a little bit of a thing, and she had strong ideas about drinking, swearing, spitting and gambling. She kept the lid on Gus. They raised six daughters, all married, and their first names all begin with A. Proper like their ma, I guess. Every one of them wants Gus to come live with them. And every once in a while one of them will make a trip down to talk him into living on shore. They don’t have any idea how good a time Gus is having. He is making up for the sober years.
And there’s one thing that every one of us regulars knows about, but never hints about. Gus and Alice. Alice Stebbins was Jess Stebbins’ third wife. He buried the other two. He married Alice ten years ago, when she was about forty, I’d say. She’d come down on the insurance money from her husband, killed on a construction job in Ohio. And stayed, like so many do. Married Jess and buried him three years later. Was going to get the marina all fixed up but somehow never got around to it.
So she’s fifty, and you never see her in anything but jeans and a man’s shirt, and she’s big without being soft. But the way she moves, soft and light like a lion, the way she can look at you, you know she’s all woman, more woman than plenty of them half her age. She and Gus bad-mouth each other in public a lot, but there’s a warmth under it. And everybody knows that every so often Gus will sneak up into that cramped old apartment over the marina office, clumsy and sneaky as a bear stealing a picnic, and climb into the big noisy old brass bed. It does no harm. When she had the bad flu last year, Gus took care of her, gentle as a woman.
“Is coming down now that damned Annabelle,” Gus rumbled. “Maybe next week. I got a card. Husband and kids too. ‘Papa, please come live with us.’ What they want—a baby sitter. Yah.”
We polished off all the groceries and went back to the beer. The ice was all gone and you had to paw around in the ice water to find one of the few cans left. Bud and Ginny Linder were sitting close, as usual. They don’t paw each other in public. But they sure sit close. They live aboard the Free and Fancy, a big custom schooner under maybe its fifth ownership. They started out from Maryland to sail her around the world, but about six miles off Elihu Beach, a year and a half ago, a little tornado on a clear day ripped the sticks out of her and smashed everything topside. Bud jury-rigged a spare jib and got her in. They’re good kids. Bud now manages a gas station and Ginny works in an office-supply store. They’ve put every dime and every minute back into the Free and Fancy. But now Ginny is a little bit pregnant, so maybe they won’t go around the world the way they stil
l claim they will.
Along came one of those silences, and right in the middle of it, Judy Engly cut loose over across the way in charterboat row. She’s sort of a plump, sulky-looking little girl. Been married now to Jack Engly nearly three years. No kids. Jack skippers his own boat named Judy’s Luck. They live aboard. When there’s women in the charter party Judy crews for him. Otherwise he picks up one of the boys hanging around looking for a day of crewing.
Even when you know just what it is, it isn’t so damn easy to take. I’ve seen tourists go right up in the air and land with their mouth open and their eyes bugged out. She starts low, like moaning, and goes on up until she’s yelling at the top of her lungs. Then it goes up into a long screech like somebody’s killing her and fades down like a siren into a sort of gurgle and some more moanings. And finally silence.
We sat it out. When it was over Anne Browder laughed in a nervous kind of way. Joe Rykler did a little soft cussing. Lew Burgoyne said, “God damn it, it ain’t decent! Afore Jack ever lays a hand on that little ole girl he ought to pack up her mouth with a towel. And there ain’t no woman in the world ever enjoyed it that much. She’s just bragging on him. I wisht to Christ they’d move off someplace into a shack in the middle of a piney woods.”
“The guy it’s toughest on is Rigsby,” Joe Rykler said. “It about kills him to hear the proof that somebody else is getting something he can’t—”
“Now, Joe,” Anne Browder said.
“Am I saying something out of line?” he protested.
Alice cleared her throat. “I’ll tell you all one thing. Jack Engly is a big, sweet, shy guy. But I’ve seen the way he can horse a two-hundred-pound fish onto the dock. And if he ever catches that damn Rigsby snuffling around Judy, Rigsby is going to be just as sorry about the whole thing as a man can get.”
Judy’s standard demonstration had taken the edge off the evening. It seemed to make people sort of restless. Joe wanted to go over to one of the joints on the beach. Christy said she was too tired. Lew wanted to go down into town and I decided I’d go along with him. In the end it was only Joe and Anne Browder who went over to the beach, taking off in that little blue Volkswagen that Anne and Amy Penworthy own jointly and call Herman. This was an unusual thing as it is the first time I can think of that Anne went off alone with any one of us, or any man for that matter.
I’d tried to line Anne up a couple of times but …
TWO
Joe Rykler
… I had about given up on Anne. That’s why it practically caught me off guard when I suddenly realized she was, in effect, accepting a date with me.
That was our first date, the same night Leo Rice arrived. I drove the little Volks out of the marina lot and went south on Broward, then turned left onto the approach to Beach Bridge with Anne Browder sitting demure and fragrant beside me.
“Any special place?” I asked her. I’d borrowed the Volks enough times so that I was familiar with the shift.
“Any place at all, Joe. But nothing fancy, the way I’m dressed.”
She was in short shorts in a sort of nubby pink fabric, and wearing a sleeveless white blouse with her initials embroidered in pink over the pocket. One thing about D Dock, there are no anatomical secrets. When the gals in residence come back from work during the summer they waste no time changing into as little as the law allows.
Anne Browder is the newest resident of D Dock. She moved in with Amy Penworthy last December, two months after she had moved from New York to Elihu Beach. Amy’s previous roommate, or houseboat mate, had gotten married and moved out. Amy works in the Elihu Beach Bank and Trust Company at the information desk. She is a jolly hearty gal of about thirty with pale brown hair, four million freckles and a sturdy figure. She originally came to Florida from Omaha to divorce a stinker named Milton. She and I have had a lot of good clean fun swapping horror stories about her Milton and my two expensive marital mistakes. We both have some dandy anecdotes. I don’t recall how Amy met Anne Browder, but at the time she met her, Anne had found a job in the office of a Doctor Harrison Blalock, and she was glad to move out of a furnished room onto the Alrightee.
It was agreed that Anne improved the scenery at the Stebbins’ Marina. Her hair is dark blonde and she wears it in a perfectly suitable coronet braid. She is tallish, with a fine though unremarkable figure, but with superb, un-forgettable legs—great long legs of particularly flawless texture, so perfect that they seemed to have a whole new range of little tender curvatures and ripenesses that you never notice on ordinary legs. As a confirmed voluptuary, may I merely say that they seemed to have more special places to kiss. Let me tell you those legs have walked through a lot of my frustrated dreams.
Anne arrived after I’d had the Ampersand tied up at D Dock for just about a year. I zeroed in on her right away and got nowhere. It wasn’t a case of not getting to first base. I couldn’t even catch a ride to the ball park. I noticed one thing about her. She smiled briefly and infrequently. She had very little to say. Her every move was curiously controlled. She could make a five-second production out of lifting a cigarette or a glass to her lips. It gave her personality such a flavor of remoteness and coldness that all other hopefuls were chilled off. But I knew it wasn’t remoteness or coldness. I had seen it before. You see it in a special kind of female, the ones who are always on the borderline of hysteria. The ones with the fires well banked, but plenty hot.
I went through my gamut, like they say, from A to B. She is about twenty-six. I am thirty-one. I am big, dark-haired and look slightly unkempt at all times. This awakens the mother in them. They want to sew on buttons and cook for me. I have brown eyes and I can look very hurt. I have various lines of patter and chatter that have proved out well. Also, I am a romantic figure. I am a writer who lives and works on his boat. They are inclined to sympathize with my creative urge to write a big novel. They are saddened that I must waste my substance by writing do-it-yourself books in order to support myself and my two ex-wives.
I did all my tricks for Anne Browder and she looked right through me and out the other side, wistful and, damn it, bored. She used the brush like an expert. I did some spy work, trying to dig useful information out of my old pal Amy. But apparently Anne did not indulge herself in girl talk. Amy admitted she had done some prying, but all she could learn was that Anne had quit her job in the North because of some kind of emotional involvement with somebody in the same outfit. The only sop to my pride was that she wasn’t dating anybody else either.
By April I was in a frenzy. She had me wringing my hands. In May I made a serious effort to get her out of my system. I stalked the public beach until I found a cute, bright little vacationing stenographer from Atlanta, and I took her on a cruise down to Marathon. That little adventure quieted me down and I was able to finish the current do-it-yourself work briskly after I got back.
And all of a sudden, with no warning, here was Anne, legs and all, in the seat beside me. I turned north along the beach, having decided on a place called Melody Beach, where the booths are deep and dark and there is a live trio on Fridays and Saturdays, soft music in a romantic mood. It was ten o’clock and the place was half full when we went in. When those legs went by, male heads snapped around.
We got a booth. The waiter lit our candle. We decided we’d done all that could be done about beer, and so we switched, me to an Irish mist and the lady to a light rum on the rocks, with lemon twist, please.
I looked across at her. “Well!” I said. And there’s a great line. It has sparkle. Somehow she could give me stage fright, make me feel as if I were sixteen again, in a rented tux.
“It’s pleasant here,” she said.
“Let’s set up a schedule. I’m misspending my middle years. I know fun places all the way up and down the coast. I’ll make out a list for us.”
“Thanks, but I don’t really like to go out very much, Joe.”
Our drinks came. I tried to be charming. I got a few smiles, meager and polite. So I said to myse
lf, the hell with it, and I grabbed her hand. She tried to pull it away. She couldn’t get it back without making a scene she apparently didn’t want to make, so she let her hand rest flaccid in mine and looked at me with great coolness.
“Please let me go.”
“First you listen, Anne Browder. Who are you? What are you? I want to know. Girl inside a wall a mile high. Me with no ladder. You’re hurting about something. That’s obvious. You need to spill it. I listen just fine. And I don’t tell what I hear. Somebody clobbered you. So you’re scared of everybody. I’m a harmless type. Just old Joe Rykler, friend of the working girl.”
She didn’t answer me. I released her hand cautiously. She yanked it back, hoisted her glass and drained it in one gulp. It was the first hasty careless motion I had seen her make. It was encouraging.
“What do you want from me?”
“I guess I want to be your friend.”
“Joe! Do me the courtesy of being honest.”
I leaned back. “All right. I want to hustle you into the sack. Is that a criminal urge?”
“What good would that do?”
“My God, I don’t know! Does it have to be constructive? What harm would it do?”
She was looking at me intently. She moistened her lips. “It’s all so pointless. It’s—a compulsion.”
“Who clobbered you?”
“May I have another drink, please? I clobbered myself, Joe. You see, I thought it would be a very shrewd idea to become pregnant. So he would leave his horrible wife. But when I told him, he was terrified. It turned out she was also pregnant, about four months. He hadn’t mentioned it. Suddenly he was a scared little man, no longer my hero. A three-year affair ended right there, Joe, in our little hideaway full of the treasures we’d both bought for it. He knew a man who knew a man. Very reliable. It was done in Philadelphia, and they had a room where, afterward, I rested all day, counting the bricks in the wall opposite my window. I imagine the … result of love was given over to the municipal sewage system. They say it’s very efficient.”
The Beach Girls Page 2
