John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 17 - The Empty Copper Sea

by The Empty Copper Sea(lit)

  "McGee. And this is Meyer. Ron Shermerhorn."

  "Pleased to meet you. I don't want to talk about Nicky too much, you know. He was always okay to me. I just didn't want you to think he was just another one of your ordinary crazies, is all."

  "He jumped me last night," I said. "In the parking lot outside the North Bay Resort lounge. I don't really know why. I walked out with the piano player, Billy Jean Bailey, and there he was, ready and waiting, shirt off, spitting on his hands."

  Ron was looking me over for signs of damage. "Talk him out of it?"

  "No, we went around a little, and then I helped him climb into his truck."

  "You've got to be pretty good."

  "I faked him out."

  He was still staring dubiously at me when a man on the other side of Meyer spun around so violently he knocked Meyer back against me. The man then went charging toward the men's room, back of his hand pressed to his mouth, and disappeared.

  "What's all that?" Meyer demanded indignantly.

  "Oh," Ron said, "that's just Fritz Plous. Works for the paper. He's in here a lot. Throws up a lot. It takes him sudden. It's what they call auto-auto-"

  "Autointoxication?" Meyer suggested.

  "That's it! The doctor has told him not to think about throwing up. But he sort of gets it on his mind and he can't get his mind off it and all of a sudden he has to make a run for it."

  "You have your share of unusual people here in Timber Bay," I said.

  "No more than anywhere," Ron said with a trace of indignation. He drained his glass and put it down. "See you guys," he said, and went on out into the evening.

  Meyer and I stood silently side by side. The man named Plous came back to the bar, gray and sweaty. We stood in a blur of ambient noise, of Muzak and laughter, tinkle and clatter, rumble and chatter, and tink of ice.

  Ever since Noyes had delivered his cryptic speech I had felt even more depressed than had been my usual quota lately. I was aware that Meyer was studying me thoughtfully, carefully.

  "What's with you?" I said in irritation.

  "Where has gone all that lazy mocking charm of yesteryear?" he asked. "Where is the beach wanderer, the amiable oaf I used to know?"

  "Knock it off. Okay?"

  "What the hell is making you so edgy!"

  I had to use a surprising amount of control to quell the impulse to yap at him again, like a cross dog. I forced the deep breath and said, "I don't know. Maybe I'm coming down with something. I'd like a bowl of hot chicken soup and a feather bed. An empty feather bed. I can't relate to this paragon, this splendid fellow who left with the money. I can't get used to all the leverage we have, Meyer. Everybody wants to be nice to us because we might represent new money in town. The Sheriff makes me very nervous. I met a lovely girl who hates her own teeth. All the way up from the Grenadines to the Virgins I had no one to, talk to but Duke Davis, and you know how he is. Two words a day does it. Then one hell of a three-day party at St. Croix, and more weeks of silence. I think I got used to it, Meyer. I am getting edgy talking to these people. I hate the sound of my own voice. And not too far from here, not far enough, there is a hundred pound piano player fixing to fasten onto me the way a King's Crown attaches itself to a clam, and I have to shake her off somehow."

  "I think you are coming down with something."

  "Julia Lawless is bitter and angry at the world. She's selling Hub's toyland. At a garage sale, for God's sake. You should see the Orvis rods and shotguns. Is there a name for what I'm coming down with?"

  "Some kind of culture shock. It manifests itself in an inability to see a reality untainted by temporary hangups."

  "And yesterday when I was waiting to cross the street near the bank, I could look into all the cars roaring by, and the people in them had kind of a dead look. As if they were hurrying so as not to be late for their own funerals. Is there any cure for my disease?"

  "When Harder comes waddling into the marina with the Flush, you'll perk up. Hermit crabs get very nervous when they have to scrounge around without their shell."

  "I can't wait that long. I feel as if some absolutely unimaginable catastrophe was getting itself ready to happen. And I feel as if, far no reason in the world, I was going to suddenly-for God's sake-start crying!"

  He looked at me then with a startled compassion, intently, somberly. "Hey," he said softly. "Hey, Travis."

  "Sorry."

  "I thought it was just a little everyday weltschmerz. We're not here on some great big thing, you know."

  "It's as big a thing as Harder can possibly think of."

  "Did you and Duke Davis stand watches all the way up?"

  "Yes, why? We decided it was best because the automatic pilot wasn't reliable in any kind of chop, and we were in shipping lanes most of the way. Besides, we didn't get any really long reaches on the way up. We fought wind all the way."

  "What did you think about all that time?"

  "Come on! I played all the games of What if. I counted the ladies I have known. I replayed the hard shots-given and taken. Remembered grief, remembered pleasure. I thought of all the choices made, the doors I've slammed shut, the seasons which have closed down on me, games called on account of pain. All that shit, Meyer. You know. A man's head goes round and about. Filth and glory. The whole schmear."

  "But mostly... Who am I? Where am I going?"

  "I guess."

  "And the answer?"

  I shrugged. "Answer shmanser. In the immortal words of Popeye, I yam what I yam. I know my patterns and limitations, needs and hang-ups. So I go on. Right? I endure. I enjoy what I can. There aren't any more forks in the road to take. Keep walking."

  "You have felt that horrid rotten exhalation, Travis, that breath from the grave, that terminal sigh. You've been singing laments for yourself. Laments, regrets, remorses."

  "Light the pyre. Float me out on my boat. Come on, Meyer. I've always been perfectly willing to accept the risks as they come along. If I make it, I make it. And if I don't, I had one hell of a time trying."

  "And what you do, the services you render, are important."

  `Are they?"

  "Aren't they?" he asked.

  "If you get somebody out of one bad screw-up, haul them out, brush them off, and send them on their way, they will head. right back into some other kind of screw-up."

  "Ah-hah!"

  "What's with this Ah-hah?"

  "You question the validity of the mission. Thus you question the validity of the missionary. A loss of faith. That is corrosive. At that point you question existence itself, the meaning of it. A common human condition. Those with no imagination never really feel despair. Congratulations!"

  "Good God, Meyer!"

  "I'll phone my new friend, and we shall have Boodles and beef at the Captain's Galley."

  "Everybody has to be somewhere, I guess." Meyer learned that there would be a table. We walked back to the lot and got the rental and drove on out to the Galley.

  Meyer was turning something around and around in his mind. He had that look. One does not make conversation when Meyer has that look. At the table he finally sighed and smiled and gave it a try.

  "Travis, I've mentioned to you the second law of thermodynamics."

  "Which is?"

  "That all organized systems tend to slide slowly into chaos and disorder. Energy tends to run down. The universe itself heads inevitably toward darkness and stasis."

  "Cheering thought."

  "Prigogine altered this concept with his idea of dissipative structures."

  "Who?"

  "Ilya Prigogine, the Belgian mathematician."

  "Oh."

  "He used the analogy of a walled city and an open city. The walled city, isolated from its surroundings, will run down, decay, and die. The open city will have an exchange of material and energy with its surroundings and will become larger and more complex, capable of dissipating energy even as it grows. I have been thinking that it would not warp the analogy too badly to extend it t
o a single individual."

  "The walled person versus the open person?"

  "The walled person would decline, fade, decay."

  "Meyer, dammit, I have a lot more interchange of material and energy with my environment than most."

  "In a physical sense, but you are not decaying in any physical sense. Great Scott, look at you. You look as if you could get up and run right through that wall."

  "The decay is emotional?"

  "And you are walled, in an emotional sense. There is no genuine give-and-take. There is no real involvement, lately. You are going through the motions. As with the piano player. As with Nick Noyes. You are vaguely predatory lately. And irritable. And listless. You are getting no emotional feedback."

  "Where do I go looking for some?"

  "That's the catch. You can't. It isn't that mechanical. You merely have to be receptive and hope it comes along."

  "Meanwhile, I am being ground down by the second law of thermodynamics?"

  "In a sense, yes."

  "Thank you so much. I never would have known."

  "Like I said. Irritable."

  Nine

  AT TEN o'clock on Saturday morning, I took a chance on some strong black coffee. My throat clenched and my stomach worked and leaped, but settled down slowly. I felt of my face carefully. "What's the matter?" Meyer asked.

  "My face feels as if it had been sliced off, Cuisinarted, chilled, and slapped back on. If I turn my head too fast, it will slide off. Is there a pile driver working nearby?"

  "That's tennis you hear."

  "How was I?"

  "I would say you weren't listless. And you were audible. Lord, yes! You were audible."

  "I thought I had long since outgrown that kind of thing."

  "You had enough screwdrivers to empty your average orange tree. I lost count."

  "What happened to me?"

  "You had a large wish to stop thinking, to turn your head off. You were not happy with yourself, so you decided to dim your lights. And you did. You became someone else. Completely."

  "Anybody we know?"

  "McGee, you were loud, amiable, patriotic, and on key. You let me drive. We seemed to accumulate quite a group of new friends. We stopped at the Cove and picked up one blond Mishy Burns and we brought the whole pack here to the Resort. B.J. Bailey did not approve of you at all. Jack the Manager did not approve of the group. We were deprived of the chance of a midnight swim in the pool, but there was no way he could close the beach. You passed out on one of those canvas chaises. The piano player came after you at about quarter past one. There was some serious contention between the piano player and Miss Burns over your recumbent body, though I must say you seemed of very little value to anyone. There were some brisk face-slappings, some pungent dialogue, and then some yanking of hair, at which point they fell to the sand and went rolling over and over down the slope of the beach, yelping and biting. I chose that opportunity to yank you to your feet and walk you away. You began singing again, but not loudly. It was another rendition of 'Ragged but Right.' You had favored us with an estimated twenty renditions."

  "What did I do to deserve all this? No, don't tell me. The question was rhetorical. God, Meyer, my hair aches and my skin doesn't fit and all my teeth feel loose."

  "Last night we agreed the next thing we should do is go see John Tuckerman. I know how to find his place. It's about nine miles down the coast. Feel well enough to leave?"

  "I am going to feel absolutely rotten wherever I happen to be, so I might as well be in the car as out of it. You drive."

  I sat lumpily beside him, feeling squalid and faintly nauseated as he headed south, making the big half circle around the bay front, past the marinas and commercial docks and fish houses. Two blocks before we came to the end of Bay Street, Meyer turned right. We went through a couple of blocks of waterfront enterprise, ship's chandlers, old rooming houses, saloons, and sundries stores, and soon the street had turned into two-lane rough country asphalt, past trailer parks and junkyards, running between shallow ditches where coarse weeds and grasses grew high. By the time we were in empty country, the road was much worse. The potholes were deep. In places the wind had drifted sand across the road. The occasional hawk sat atop a phone pole, watching the clumps of marsh grass.

  An armadillo trundled across the road, delicate little head upraised, full of false security, trusting too much in its body armor.

  To keep my attention off wondering how soon I was going to be sick, I said, briskly conversational, "In Texas they scoop those out and make baskets out of them and sell them in roadside stands."

  After a few moments of silence, Meyer said, "It is to be hoped that on some planet far beyond our galaxy a race of sentient armadillos is busy scooping out Texans and selling them at roadside stands, possibly as Lister bags."

  That did it. "Whoa," I said in a small chastened voice. He whoaed and I sprang out and made it to the ditch, there paying one of the more ordinary penalties of abuse. I went back to the car and looked in at him. "How much farther?"

  "I'd say three miles."

  "Please drive straight ahead two miles, park, and wait for me."

  The road curved. Two miles took him out of sight. The May sun was hot on my shoulders. I swung along, taking big strides but feeling clammy. And unwell. With a monstrous effort I kicked myself into a trot. For a little while I thought I would pass out, but suddenly I began to sweat properly. I stopped gasping and began to breathe properly. I stopped landing on my heels, jarring myself, and got up onto the balls of my feet. At the end of an estimated mile I began to get that good feeling of having all the parts of the machine working, thighs lifting properly, lungs filling deeply, arms swinging in cadence, lots of muscles flexing and relaxing.

  "You'll live," Meyer said when I got to the car.

  "I'm beginning to feel as if I might want to."

  "We have to look for a sand road that turns off to the right at a shallow angle. With a yellow mailbox at the corner."

  The yellow mailbox had an aluminum sign on top of it, the kind of sign where you buy the letters and slide them into a groove. The letters said TUCKERM.

  The sand road wound between big bushes, angling toward the beach. We came upon a large faded sign which announced to nobody in particular, "Future Site of Pepperfish Village. A Planned Condominium Community. 1500 Units. Complete Recreation Facilities. Private Beach. Yacht Club. Golf Course. Shopping Plaza. A Hub-Law Development. Planning and Design by Kristin Petersen, AIA. Construction by Hula Construction, Inc. Occupation of first phase by-" Somebody had obliterated the rest of it with a big broad slap of red paint.

  "So ends the dream," Meyer said.

  "They could have built a better mousetrap."

  "The world is beating a path down to this improbable peninsula, mousetraps or no. But it does seem to be a strange location."

  Soon we came upon Tuckerman's place, off to the right of the road. It was atop spindly pilings ten feet high. The house was about thirty feet square. A veranda deck extended ten feet beyond it all the way around. The peaked roof was of galvanized sheet metal, weathered to a powdery white. The house and deck were of native pine, slapped up green and now weathered to gray, warped and twisted, with long-ago paint scoured off by the wind-driven sand. There was an old Fiat parked under the deck, square and green, sagging in the off right haunch with some kind of sprained underpinning.

  Out behind the house, between the house and the long row of sand dunes, a woman stopped poking into a 55-gallon drum with a long stick and turned to look at us through the thicket of pilings supporting the house. She'd spent a lot of weeks in hot sun. She wore the bottom half of a string bikini, in red-orange Day Glo. Without haste or emphasis, she turned and located the bikini top, slipped it on, hammocked herself into it, and tied it in back. She then peered into the drum and began prodding again with the stick.

  We walked around to where she was. There were two clotheslines hung with damp clothing. The drum was up on concrete blocks.
There was a driftwood fire under it, flames almost too pale to see in the bright sunlight. Steam came off the soapy water in the drum. Bright clothing came into view and sank again as she prodded away.

  "If you are the guys from Maytag," she said, "it is about time. This thing don't-cycle worth a hoot."

  "How is it on spin dry?" Meyer asked.

  "Beyond belief." As she spoke, water began to spill over the top of a second drum a dozen feet away. She sprinted to a small plywood shack and turned something off. A pump gasped and died. She came back and took the hose out of the newly filled drum. She was sweaty from working so near the fire. She was a big woman, middle twenties, tall, with solid bone structure, slender waist, great shoulders. Muscle rolled in her back as she dug into the drum with her thick piece of driftwood. She levered a sopping wad of clothing up and looked at it.