“Good God, Leo, you gone out of your mind? Don’t talk to me. Talk to a psychiatrist. You pick a fake name like Rice, and make like the secret service sneaking up on that guy. What the hell do you expect to do?”
“I don’t know, Sam. I don’t want him to know who I am. I don’t want him to make the connection. I want to meet that animal face to face.”
“And then what?”
“There must be some way to put him out of the woman business.”
“You’re not thinking straight, Leo.” He stared at me. “Suppose you can’t fix his wagon for him. You going to kill him? I’m your lawyer. It’s a fair question.”
“I don’t know. I’ve thought of that. I might.”
“Thats just fine. That will be great for the boys. Give them a hell of a fine start in life, reading how their daddy was hung.”
“They’ll have the trust fund you’re setting up, Sam. And I’m not much good to them the way I am. I’m not much good to anybody. I’m not very damn interested in living. I didn’t know how much she meant. And she deserved better than what he gave her. Or I gave her. I have to see him, Sam. I want to see if I can get him to talk about her. I want to hear how he talks about her. I want to see what he is, what motivates him. I don’t want to have to kill him. I don’t even know if I could, given a fair chance. I’m not rational about this. I admit it. Maybe if I could beat hell out of him, it might be enough.”
He looked at the snap of Rigsby again. “This fellow looks pretty husky,” he said dubiously.
“I’ll be in shape by the time I meet him. I’ll give myself time for that.”
“As your attorney I—oh, the hell with it.”
I made the arrangements about communication with him. Then I left.
Getting in shape was torture, self-inflicted. Not a case of swimming and jogging up and down the beach, though I did that too. I shoveled sand until sweat blinded me, my back was like a toothache, my shoulders popped and creaked. At the limit of endurance I would think of him knocking her down while people watched, and I would keep on shoveling. I lived on steak and salad. I’d fall into bed and clamber out of it again in the morning, with monstrous effort. In the evenings, after I was able to stay awake, I read the books there had never been time for. In a month I was ready. I bought the boat and chugged south, looking for Rigsby.
Now he was thirty feet away. I couldn’t sleep. My mind kept racing and I couldn’t slow it down. I got up. I was stiff and sore from the beating I had taken. Western had handled me with ridiculous ease. Rigsby would probably find me no more difficult. I sat on the rail and put a cigarette between puffed lips. Tomorrow I would see him by daylight, look into the eyes which had looked at her, look at the hands and lips of the last man to touch her while she lived.
She hadn’t been bad or weak. Just restless and neglected. Particularly vulnerable. He had a fine eye for vulnerability. I wondered how many men had thought of killing him.
It gave me a feeling of hopelessness. I was just another one. I’d think of it, as others had, and go my way in bitterness. He would go on, cruel and blithe, all the world his harem. An unmarked animal.
I snapped my cigarette out into the black water and heard the soft hiss as it struck. I went to bed hoping I could sleep …
EIGHT
Anne Browder
… and sleep and never wake up, ever.
I sat cross-legged at dusk on a Wednesday night up on the foredeck of the Alrightee where no one could see me from the dock. I was celebrating a twelfth anniversary—twelve nights since I had indulged myself in fiasco with Joe Rykler.
The poor darling. No man has ever been so ill-used by a woman. I selected him in such a horribly cold-blooded way, adding up the advantages of him. He is amiable and amusing and sometimes sweet, and possibly slightly weak. He has been twice married. I have never heard him make one of those greasy little hints about a woman. He was interested in me. And I saw sensitivity in him, a capacity for understanding.
So I walked around him, kicking his tires, slamming his doors, peering under his hood—and took him for a demonstration ride.
Poor Joe. I was dead. I was a zombie. A few times I felt a dim flickering of a response, gone as soon as it was noticed, like striking damp matches in a rain. It all seemed endless, and it had a nightmare quality about it, as though I found myself engaged in some muscular and incomprehensible activity and, out of social timidity, did not dare ask, What on earth are we doing? My mind divorced itself primly from our barren, embarrassing efforts, and went skittering off into montages of trivia. Had I remembered to change Mrs. Milroyd’s appointment on the books? Will the cleaners get my gray skirt back by Saturday so I can wear it to work Monday? I wish Amy would stop wearing my blue robe when she goes up to take a shower, but how can I tell her in a nice way?
And from these diversions I would return suddenly to the bunk aboard Joe’s Ampersand, and be quite shocked to find myself in the midst of love, with a very small L. It reminded me of my first dancing class, when that horror of a Sherman boy used to come galloping over to me so he could push me about the floor like I were a wheelbarrow, and I would shut my eyes and pretend I was the only girl pitcher they let into the major leagues.
Not that Joe was a horror. He was determined and sensitive and knowing and adept. But he could have spent the same amount of time just as profitably trying to row D Dock out to sea with a popsickle stick, or is that illusion uncomfortably Freudian, my girl.
Were I younger, and had it been my first adventure in that ultimate art of being a woman, it would have terrified me. My frigidity would have appalled me. But, oh Brad, my darling, you know and I know that there is no danger of that. At times I almost frightened you, I know. And certainly shocked you. Then suddenly you were gone, and there was a spoiled, trivial little man, his mouth working, his forehead sweaty.
Poor little man, who had such a neat system for having his cake and eating it too that he was quite unprepared for ptomaine. It was as though all the time we were together I had been looking at your shadow on one wall of my heart, a shadow made large by the placement of the light. I thought the shadow was you, until with that movement of fright, you attracted my attention and I looked at you squarely and suddenly despised you, despised myself, and found our little apartment cloying and silly in its manufactured atmosphere of sensuousness.
However I have learned one thing of no value from Joe. Perhaps every woman at some time in her life has a little nibbling of curiosity about what it would be like, really, to be a whore, to give herself with automatic proficiency to any taker. That curiosity has been satisfied. I would be a dismal flop, Joe. They’d give me the worst room and the oldest bed and the most threadbare towels.
But why, Joe, oh why could you have let yourself think you have fallen in love with me? How is it possible, after that night twelve nights ago? Love can’t start that way. I chose you because I thought you would not become emotionally implicated. I could not bear to hurt anyone. Not after the way I’ve been hurt. I can’t love you. Or anyone. To even attempt to would be like an old fighter getting back in the ring. They beat my brains out, dear. I can’t take another punch.
So you follow me about with sad brown eyes now, and you say alarmingly poetic things to me. I never thought you would be vulnerable as a high-school boy.
Joe, you are in love with the idea of love, not me. That’s why you married twice. Take a better look at me, darling. I’m a special kind of walking wounded. They sent me back from the aid station. They said, This girl’s heart looks chewed, as though something ate half of it and bruised the rest of it black. Something emptied her eyes and disconnected certain primary sensory areas.
I messed us up, Joe, not out of mischief, but out of an instinct for self-preservation. I wished to manufacture a distraction, and was not at all distracted in the manner planned, as you surely noted.
And in twelve nights my remorse has not diminished. It is not the remorse one feels from having done something dirty wron
g. Remorse, rather, for involving another. Had I known the experiment would have been so resoundingly unsuccessful—which is, of course, specious nonsense—I would have chosen Orbie, that tough, sane, cynical, tidy redhead. No nuances there. It would have been a briefer interlude, with Orbie not particularly concerned whether I chose to be bystander or participant. But he would not have become involved, and I would not now feel toward him that uncomfortable responsibility I feel toward you, Joe Rykler.
It is a special torment to be unloved in a lovely place. Now the last dusk colors are gone, the water gray as tears, the high neon feeble against what is left of the light. The heavy air is laced with fish and tide, rope and varnish, sun-hot wood and airborn salt, along with an elusiveness of flowers and tropic growth. All my senses work sharply, in either loneliness or love. Brad said I had a special talent for being alive. Out in open water a boy in a snarly little boat is trying to dump a golden gawky girl off her water skis while she caws her derision.
Of what use is my talent?
I got up slowly. My legs were cramped from staying so long in one position. I walked along the side deck toward the stern. This evening they were grouped near the stern of the Lullaby, a big group because five of Orbie’s current harem, the younger ones, are part of it. I heard the bassoon bray of Gus’s laughter. He is himself again. His daughter and her family left this morning, sooner than expected, probably because of what happened yesterday.
Christy told me about it. She heard it from Billy Looby. He was the only witness to the entire incident, though others saw some of the dramatic parts of it. Poor Jannifer Jean. Poor Moonbeam.
A little motor cruiser came in yesterday morning from Fort Myers. One man aboard, proud of making it in two days. When he arranged dockage, he told Helen Hass it would only be overnight. He’d brought the boat over through the canal and the lake. His wife and another couple were flying over, and they were going to go down to the Keys and around and up the west coast, back to Fort Myers. He hung around in a sort of restless way. In the early afternoon he went up to the office. Moonbeam was watching afternoon television. He watched it with her and talked with her—a feat beyond my understanding. And, inevitably, apparently asked her if she’d like to come look at his boat.
They were still aboard when the wife arrived, alone. Christy said Billy told her he thought Helen sent her right on out there to C Dock just to make trouble. Christy also said there is no sign that Billy didn’t enjoy the trouble when it came. He is a cackling, dirty, salacious old man, a voyeur, a tattletale and a sneak. But in some totally incomprehensible way, likeable.
Billy told Christy that not more than six seconds after the wife went aboard, Moonbeam came out of that little cruiser like a hooked tarpon. She had her tight pants in one hand and her shirt in the other. The wife was six feet behind her, making a noise like a factory whistle, and making slashing motions with something that glittered in the sunlight.
Billy said that Jannifer Jean, naked as a peeled egg and running for her life, was one of the most astonishing things he had ever been privileged to watch. The noise had alerted everybody within eyesight, and they all stood transfixed.
Moonbeam had more speed out of the gate than the wife, and when the gap had widened, the wife stopped. Moonbeam looked back and stopped too, and tried to get into the pants, hopping around on one leg. When the wife saw that, she came churning on again, and Moonbeam had to show her best speed.
They went through the same act again, but when Moonbeam loped off the third time, she veered out onto D Dock and leaped aboard Gus’s Queen Bee and dived below. She was apparently looking for refuge, Christy said, on the basis of instinct rather than reason. But it must have seemed most remarkable to Gus, his daughter, his son-in-law and his two grandchildren when Jannifer Jean made her informal entrance.
After a few words which withered the flowers in Alice’s flower boxes, the wife trudged back to the family cruiser. A minute later Moonbeam appeared again, clad in her own fashion, obviously wary. She sauntered up toward her trailer. And a minute after that, a subdued little group left Gus’s boat and filed toward the parking lot. Billy said Gus was waving his arms and making explanatory noises, his face the color of new bricks.
How simple it would be to be a Moonbeam. Or Joe’s Francie. How simple it would be to be almost anybody except me. Even little Judy Engly. But Christy said she saw Judy with Rex Rigsby over on the beach on Sunday in one of those open-air bars. Jack had a charter. Maybe Judy will not be finding it so easy to be Judy one of these days.
I walked up to the group. Lew asked me where I’d been hiding. Orbie introduced me to the two girls in the group I hadn’t met. Leo Rice was in the group. And Gus and Amy and Alice and Dave Harran, who is welcome even though his employer, Dink Western, isn’t. Dave got me a pillow off the stern deck of the Mine, and opened me a beer. He is a simple, gentle, decent, courtly man who served twelve years for murder.
It was only after I was seated that I noticed Rex Rigsby in the group. Usually we manage to chill him away from us. I decided that, because the presence of the five female employees of Bitty-Beddy, our normal coziness had already been fractured, and so it didn’t seem worthwhile denting Rex’s ego enough to make him leave. But it would make it more difficult to get rid of him the next time.
To Orbie’s obvious annoyance, Rex had hunched himself close to the best looking girl of the five, and was speaking directly into her ear in a voice inaudible to the rest of us. She sat with downcast eyes, plucking at the hem of her shorts. God only knows what he was saying to her.
I did not want to ask where Joe was. There was no need to ask. He was beside me twenty seconds later, saying, “I leave for two minutes and the magic works. I rubbed the right lamp.”
“Joe,” I said.
He leaned so close to my ear I felt the warmth of his breath. “You’re beautiful, Annie.”
“Shush, Joe.”
The second best looking of the Bitty-Beddy girls, a bosomy little towhead with a rather long upper lip, said, across the circle, with telling petulance, “And I was saving your place and guarding your can of beer, Joey.”
“Hand it over, Cindy, please.” He stretched and got it. “Thanks.” She sniffed at him.
Lew started to tell one of his Navy lies. It gave us a little area of privacy. I slid the pillow back a little and said, “I interrupted something.”
“Nothing that wasn’t entirely her idea, honest.”
“Make it your idea too, Joe.”
“That’s a funny thing to say.”
“She looks clean and healthy and lonesome. She came down to have a mad gay time, and it hasn’t worked out that way and she only has three days left, and she’s getting nervous. Romance her, Joe. She can blame her indiscretion on the effects of the tropics,” I whispered to him.
“My God, Anne. My God! Line four of the most gorgeous creatures two on a side in a bed for five, and I’d lay sick in the middle, dreaming of you.”
“That’s little-boy talk. I feel sixty to your fourteen. And we didn’t work at all, Joe. Remember?”
“I love you.”
“Francie was one answer. Cindy can be another.”
“It was different then. That was ten thousand years ago.”
“You’ve got to get over this.”
“I don’t want to.”
I turned and looked directly at him. “I might get you over it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I might do something that doesn’t fit your pretty little vision of me, Joe.”
“Like?”
I raised my shoulders, let them fall. “Like Rigsby.”
Even in that faintest of gray lights, I saw his face darken. “You couldn’t do that! You couldn’t!”
“Do you think I really, basically give a damn what I do?”
“Yes, Annie.”
“You’re wrong. And what would it mean, anyway. No more than with you. With him I’d feel afterward like taking a bath in Clorox, but if that’s
what’s needed to put you off—”
“Are you trying to drive me out of my mind?”
“I’m trying to drive you back into your mind, Joe.”
“You could love me. Give it time. Don’t do anything that will bitch us up forever.”
“I’ve been bitched up.”
“But not by Rigsby.”
I looked across the circle. Just then Billy turned the feeble dock lights on. Rigsby was gone, as was the pretty girl he had been talking to. Deftly done. I hadn’t seen them leave and I doubted many others had. Cut neatly out of the herd with a clean loop over the horns and a masterful tug in the intended direction. A sour little something in my stomach turned over.
“All right,” I whispered to Joe. “Not Rigsby.”
“Not anyone.”
“I didn’t say that. I want to drive you away.”
“I want to marry you.”
“Go to your nearest department store. Buy a dummy out of a show window. Marry her, Joe. She’ll be as alive as I am.”
He clasped his fingers around my ankle, caressed the back of my leg with his thumb. “Nothing?”
“Nothing at all.”
He took his hand away. “It’s a temporary thing. It’s a psychological thing, Annie. Result of emotional trauma.”
“It’s a forever thing.”
“If you don’t care what you do, put it to the proof again, Annie. If it doesn’t mean anything, what can you care?”
“I could drive our houseboat through the hole in that logic, my boy.”
“Then what do I do?” he asked helplessly.
“There’s Cindy over there, wondering if she’ll have to tell lies to her girl friends when she gets back to Pennsylvania.”
“Damn you, Anne. Damn you.”
“I am damned. I have been. It’s a good word.”
“And you enjoy feeling so sorry for yourself.”
“That’s a foul thing to say!”
“Think it over,” he said, and got up. He moved over by Leo and Cindy and started talking to them, as if I no longer existed. I started to feel a little hurt until suddenly I realized that was exactly what I wanted.
The Beach Girls Page 9
