John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 20 - Cinnamon Skin

by Cinnamon Skin(lit)

  I parked beyond her mailbox and we got out and stood there, stunned by the profusion of junk that filled the yard from fence to fence. Car parts, refrigerators, cargo trailers without wheels, stovewood, rolls of roofing paper, bed frames, broken rocking chairs, broken deck furniture, piles of cinder block, piles of roof tiles, a stack of full sheets of plywood, moldering away. Glass bottles, plastic bottles, cans, fenders, old washing machines, fencing wire, window frames, 55-gallon drums rust red, an old horse-drawn sleigh, crates half full of empty soft drink bottles, and many other bulky objects which did not seem to have had any useful purpose ever. The scene stunned the mind. It was impossible to take it all in at once. In a strange way it had an almost artistic impact, a new art form devised in three dimensions to show the collapse of Western civilization. It made me think of an object I had seen in New York when a woman persuaded me to go with her to an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. That object was a realisticlooking plastic hamburger on a bun with an ooze of mustard, pickle, and catsup. It was ten feet in diameter and stood five feet high. This scene had that same total familiarity plus unreality.

  "Maybe she's in violation of the zoning laws," Meyer murmured.

  "If those are her own clothes hung out over there on the fence to dry, she is sizable."

  We walked in, past the big vehicle. She must have seen us through the window. She opened the nar row door of the trailer and stepped down onto the top step of the three that led to the door. The trailer was up on cinder blocks.

  "What are you looking for?"

  "Mrs. Helen June Fox?"

  "What do you want her for?"

  She was a fairly tall woman. Her brown hair hung stringy straight, unbrushed. Her enormous breasts stretched the damp fabric of a pink T-shirt, sagging toward the protruding belly that bulged over the belt that held up her knee-length khaki shorts. She wore ragged white deck shoes, and there were scars and scratches on her plump white legs from insect bites. Her features were strong, the jaw heavy, the eyes muddy, unfriendly, and unwavering. The mouth was a little crescent, a tight inverted smile, like a bulldog. She and her clothing were smudged and stained. She was an untidy mess, and yet she radiated such a forceful presence that in some strange way she was almost attractive. She held herself well. One could see that twentyfive years ago she had been one hell of a woman, and she remembered how it had been and had retained the pattern of responding to admiration.

  "Well?" she said. She finished the last of the beer from the can in her hand, crushed the aluminum, and flipped it out into the yard. It bounced behind a cinder block. "You government again? I told the last batch to get off my land and get off my ass or they'd be pickin' bird shot."

  Meyer solved the problem. "Boomer told us where to find you." To my surprise and admiration, he managed to put just a little bit of south Texas in his speech.

  Helen June grunted in surprise; came down the other two steps, and then sat heavily on the middle step. "That old fart still living?"

  "Looks fine," I said.

  "Always knew everything about everybody. I wonder who give him my address. Probably Auntie Minna. She always sends birthday money. She must be ninety by now."

  "He didn't know if you were divorced from Sonny."

  "He took off. I never bothered filing. Glad to get rid of the surly son of a bitch. What do you two want? You sure God aren't a matched set, are you. You look like some kind of bear, mister. A friendly bear. Cuddly. What's your name, dear?"

  "Meyer. And he is McGee."

  "We want to talk about your brother Cody," I, said. She got up and beckoned to us to follow her. We threaded our way through the tons of junk to an old picnic table with benches near the side fence, in the shade of a big spruce. We sat on one side and she sat facing us. She said, "We keep talking where we were, it could maybe wake up Jesse. He was out real late. He plays piano Friday nights. He gets ugly, you wake him up too soon. So what if I don't want to talk about my little brother? Did they catch him? Are you newspaper guys or cops?"

  "He hasn't been caught," I said.

  "Good. It wasn't his fault, any of it."

  "Whose, then?"

  "Boomer could have told you, you asked him. It was Coralita's fault, that little Eye-talian piece of ass. That was the worst mistake my daddy ever made in his whole life. He was a wonderful man. Everybody liked him. He was smart in business, but he was sure stupid about women. I was twenty when he married her. She was only five years older than me. She'd sure been busy. When I was in high school, the guys made jokes about her. Know what her nickname was? Gang-bang Cardamone. You don't get no nickname like that without making the effort. After Momma died, I spent two years trying to take her place around the house. I loved my daddy, and I did all the cooking and cleaning and dusting and bed-making and all. I studied recipe books. I kept everything shining for him. I was going to take care of him my whole life, and after two years he brought home that slut. He married her and brought her right into my house, right into my kitchen, right into his bed. I used to lie awake at night, and sometimes I could hear the two of them in there together, and I would think of the ways I could kill her without being caught. I had the feeling all the time that she knew exactly what I was thinking, and she was laughing at me. Most of the time she acted as if I wasn't there at all. But she certainly knew Cody was there. He was kind of an innocent kid. Younger really than his age. I tried to warn him about Coraiita. I was afraid of what could happen, and I didn't want to hang around and watch. I got out by marrying Sonny Fox. Never did love him. What I loved was getting out of there, away from Coralita. So she wasn't getting enough, and she didn't dare go hunt for it because somebody would tell my daddy, and there was Cody right in the same house, safe as could be, and he would be too scared to talk, so she nailed him. I bet it was as easy as clubbing a bunny. She waggled that fine ass at him until he couldn't think about anything else, then I think what she must have done was slip into his bed while he was asleep, so he'd wake up so close to doing it he wouldn't be able to stop himself. And that one time would be all it would take to make it permanent. I just don't think she could have gotten him into it any other way. I used to think about that a lot. But that was a Iorig time ago. Cody would never have been one to sneaky-cheat on his own daddy unless she worked him into it before he knew what was going on."

  "What do you think happened that night Coralita was killed?" I asked.

  "I told the stupid cops what must have happened. My daddy would never have shot Cody no matter what he did. The bed lamp was on, okay? He shot her in the back of the head, near the neck, and she died in one second. Cody heard the loud shot and he came scrambling out from under the body. When my daddy saw who it was, he couldn't shoot and so he turned the gun on himself to kill himself. That's what he would have done. And Cody saw what was going to happen and leaped for the gun, and my daddy kept trying to shoot himself, and while they struggled there, the gun went off and he did shoot himself. Cody thought he was dead and he took the car keys and ran down and got in that car and took off like a crazy person. They've never caught him and they never will."

  "Why are you so sure that-" Meyer started to ask, but he was interrupted by a man yelling across the yard.

  "Goddamn you, how the hell am I supposed to get my sleep with all this yattering going on?" He came down the steps out of the trailer, zipping the fly on his jeans. He wore black pointy cowboy boots. He was naked and brown from the waist up. He was slat thin, with bad posture. His chest was caved in, his shoulders thrust forward. He looked to be in his mid-thirties. With every move there was a ripple of small wiry muscles in his arms, torso, and shoulders. He had a long lean head, hollow cheeks, a thrusting lantern jaw, eyes deep under a shelf of brow.

  "Who are these guys?" he demanded, coming across through the trash.

  "We were just talking about my brother, Jesse. That's all."

  "You woke me up!"

  "We moved way over here so we wouldn't."

  "You especially, Helen June, b
ig mouth. Going on and on and on. You two. Git!"

  She said in a nervous voice, "You better do like he says."

  "But we haven't-"

  "I mean it. I really mean it, McGee. You best leave." The man reached the table and as Meyer stood up, Jesse grabbed his ear and yanked him back over the bench. The bench went down and Meyer fell on his back. I took a long step to the side; to reasonably open ground, and waited to see what he had in mind. He feinted at me with a long swinging left, and as I ducked to the left to avoid it, he went up into the air into a strange scissoring kick, and one of those boots whistled toward my mouth. I have a lot of quick. It's nothing I've earned or worked for, it's just that the hookup between senses, nerves, and muscles works faster than most. And adrenaline makes it work even faster. I saw the sole and heel of that boot, parallel to the ground, floating toward my teeth. The feint had moved me into the kick, and I moved back almost quickly enough. Not quite. The toe of the boot ticked the outside edge of my left ear and made it feel for a moment as if it had been torn off. He was having a big day on ears. The miss left him slightly off balance, but he recovered in the air, twisting like a cat, landing lightly.

  One of those, I thought. Another one of those. They yell Hah! and try to chop you with the edge of the hand. About all I ever had of that came in basic training long ago. They want you to take your best shot, and then they use the momentum and leverage to fell you.

  He moved warily, and I saw him gathering himself for another kick. When it started I moved back, and when the boot came at my throat I knocked it sky high with my forearm. Jesse landed hard on the nape of his neck. He rolled to the left and came to his feet again, too close to Meyer, who took the twenty-inch piece of two-by-four he had picked up out of the rubble and, holding it in both hands, swung at the back of Jesse's head. It went ponk! and Jesse sighed and looked far beyond me and collapsed slowly into a fetal position. As I moved toward him, Helen June yelled, "Don't stomp him, please. Don't hurt his hands! You better go right now while you can. Please."

  She really meant it. I had begun to wonder how sane Jesse was. Or how sane either of them were. "When will he be gone so we can talk?"

  "Tomorrow evening."

  So we left. I looked back. She was kneeling beside him, smoothing his lank hair back from his forehead.

  After we had gone three miles back toward Cold Brook, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the red-and-white Bronco overtaking us, coming on at high speed. I made several guesses, all of them bad news as I floored the accelerator. The little car jumped out pretty good but, as I soon saw, not quite good enough. My speedometer said seventy-two on the flat, less uphill, more down. When he came up behind me and didn't smack into my rear end with his big steel bumper, I knew that he was waiting for enough clear vision ahead to come up beside me and edge me off the road. That gave me a better chance.

  When the road was clear ahead, he came on up alongside. I could see him, sitting high and grinning.

  The instant he started to move in toward my front corner, I warned Meyer and hit the brakes hard. Jesse went shooting on ahead. The moment I slid to a full stop, I put it in reverse and backed it on up to speed, then banged the brakes again, turning the wheel hard right as I did so. The front end slid around beautifully and we rocked up onto two wheels momentarily, bounced back down, and I had it in gear and gaining speed, leaving a teenage pattern of black rubber on the pavement behind us.

  I had come to my dead stop, and gone into reverse, right near the brink of that long upcurve to the left, that climbing curve a little way out of Cold Brook. Jesse had gone down the downhill curve to the right, out of sight. I kept looking back. No Jesse. Meyer said, "I heard something back there."

  "Such as."

  "Well... a thud. A kind of crunch-thud noise." At the end of a long straight stretch, I found an unmarked dirt lane. I turned in, went up a way, turned around, and came back to where I could park out of sight of the main road, yet see anything that sped past the leafy mouth of the lane. Nothing came from the south. A bread truck and a pickup passed by from the north. After ten long minutes, we started up and headed south, after them.

  From his tire marks and the location and condition of his vehicle, it was easy to see what had happened: an error of judgment. When I had out-smarted him again, it had made him very very angry. And in his rage he had tried to make a U-turn halfway down that slope. He probably knew his vehicle well enough so that, had he tried the same turn at the same speed on the flat, he would have had no problem. But on the slope, the inside wheels were at a slightly higher level, and about two thirds of the way around his U-turn, he lost it. The Bronco tipped over and rolled. It threw him out ahead of the roll, and rolled over him, and kept rolling until it wedged itself into a grove of small trees beyond the ditch.

  He lay face down amid bits of glass and twisted little pieces of tarnished trim. His back was bloody. We parked beyond the bread truck and walked up to the scene. He had tried to make his turn where the curving downslope had been widened to three lanes to accommodate cars turning left into a side road. He was stretched out on the shoulder, face down, only his head on the paving. As we neared him, it looked as though his face had sunk into the concrete road surface as if into a liquid. The pool of red around his head revealed the basis of this curious and sickening illusion. Some part of the vehicle, probably one of the big tires, had rolled across the back of his head, and under the pressure the facial bones had given way, leaving the back of the skull undamaged. A spectator who had been headed north brought a frayed old blanket from his car trunk and spread it over the upper half of the body.

  The pickup driver said to the bread-truck driver, "You know who it is, don't you?"

  "I know who it was, pal. Crazy Jesse that played piano weekends up to Heneman's Grill. Moved in with the Fox woman last year. I said he was going to kill himself sooner or later the way he drove that souped-up Bronco."

  There were seven of us standing there by now, and we all turned and looked down the hill slope to the southwest as we heard the distant keening of the ambulance siren, coming closer.

  "No need to hurry." Bread truck said.

  "Funny thing," Pickup said. "If they had put Jesse away for a couple of years for assaulting that Jamison kid, like they should have, instead of giving him probation, he wouldn't have been out getting himself killed today."

  The Dodge ambulance pulled up, and two attendants ran to the body, slowed when they saw the blanket. One lifted it up, felt for a pulse in the neck dropped it again, shrugged. The other strolled over to slide the body basket out of the back of the ambulance. A couple of northbound cars slowed for a look, then hurried on. A State Police sedan arrived. Meyer and I walked back to the rental. and got in.

  Meyer said, "If there is anything at all useful that she can tell us, we had better be the ones who tell her about Jesse."

  "I want to thank you for thumping him."

  "Not exactly a frontal assault. Not exactly meritorious. You would have taken care of the problem."

  "Don't be too sure. He was reaching to unsnap that little knife case on his belt when you turned off his lights."

  "I was too angry and too humiliated to stop to think about what I was doing. Look at my ear." He turned and looked to the rear so I could see his right ear. It was puffy and bright red.

  I had turned back north, leaving the little roadside scene behind. I said, "I think you'll be better at talking to her. Okay?"

  "If you wish."

  He was silent until we turned into the dirt driveway, to park where the red-and-white Bronco had been. Then he said, "Stay in the car." A direct order. Unusual and unexpected.

  She came out, trotting toward him when he was halfway to the trailer, her strong face vivid with the unasked question. The left side of her face was swollen and was turning dark. I heard her helpless cry. "I tried to stop him! I tried. I really tried!" Then I could hear the murmur of his voice, explaining. She seemed to become a smaller person, to collapse in upo
n herself. He touched her shoulder and she turned into his arms. He patted her, comforted her. They walked together to the steps, his arm around her thick waist. He lowered her to a sitting position on the middle step, and she put her face down on her knees.

  Meyer looked toward the car and made a small beckoning gesture. I got out and went to them. Her shoulders were shaking, but I could hear no audible sobbing. Finally she raised up and looked at both of us, tears running down her face, and tried to smile. "You'd miss even a lizard if you lived with it and fed it for over a year. He could be real sweet sometimes. I told him not to go after you and he knocked me down. Is the Bronco ruint?"

  "It isn't very pretty," I said, "but I think it's just damage to the body. Frame, engine, wheels, and radiator should be okay."

  "I'll have to see about getting it fixed up. I got to have a car, living way out here. I bought it for him. I traded my old car in on it, and it's in my name."