John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 20 - Cinnamon Skin

by Cinnamon Skin(lit)

  With the aid of some spit which I chewed into my dry mouth, I made a delayed bubbling moan. Barbara screamed and came running to me. I pushed her out of harm's way and whispered, "I just died."

  "You killed him!" she yelled dramatically. "You killed McGee!"

  I don't think it impressed Pittler, but it got to Meyer. "Cody Pittler!" he yelled. "Cody T. W Pittler, look at me! You killed Coralita and you killed your own father who loved you. You killed Bryce Pittler. Look at me!"

  There was the chunky little bam of the shotgun, and there were two snappy shots from Cody's handgun, and I saw the shotgun slide out of the brush at the top of the slope and fall through the sunlight, turning slowly, to clatter onto the rock below. My heart emptied. Poor Meyer. Friendship had brought him to the Busted Flush at just the right time for Dirty Bob to steal his pride and his sense of himself as a man. And now the fates and friendship had brought him to this sinkhole in the Yucatecan woodland to die at the hands of a madman-a very quick and able madman.

  Pittler scampered out of hiding, ran to the shotgun and snatched it up, and ran back, limping badly. I tried a shot and knew as I pulled the trigger that I had missed him. I reloaded.

  Pittler cursed, and I guessed he had discovered the limited possibilities of the new weapon. No possibilities at all, actually, except as a club. One used shell in the chamber.

  Pittler yelled, much louder than was necessary. "My old man lives in Eagle Pass, Texas. Nobody killed him. Hear me? He ain't dead, God damn it! Don't try stuff like that."

  "You've got your head all messed up, Cody!" I called. "You don't know who you are. You did that playacting in school and you forgot who you're supposed to be. You're crazy. Stick that gun in your mouth and save us the trouble."

  He made an unintelligible howling sound, a ululation of pain and rage. And my eye caught movement above him, way up at ground level. It was Meyer, moving slowly from right to left. It was a blundering walk, and he was grasping small trees to pull himself along. He turned toward me, and he wore the mask of the young people who do pantomime in the streets. One half of his face was white, the other red, in an almost even division. And he smiled a ghastly smile.

  I began talking loudly to Pittler to cover the sound Meyer had to be making, up there over his head. I told him he was a sick vulture, living on dead women. I told him lots of good things like that. And slowly, step by step, Meyer came out toward the lip of the overhang. Two small trees grew near the brink: Meyer grasped one in each hand, standing between them. And then, heavily, solemnly, he began to jump up and down. Three times. I ran to the mouth of the cave and aimed at the big boulders that hid Pittler, hoping to get him if he tried to run for it.

  Somebody belted me on the outside of my upper left arm, just below the point of the shoulder, with a tack hammer. The arm was suddenly very tired. It sagged and I kept aiming and holding the gun with my right hand. Right after Meyer's third jump there was a grating sound, and then the whole landscape up there tilted and came down, gaining speed. Tons of rock and dirt and trees and roots and bushes. A vast piece of layer cake. A chunk of eternity. Meyer held to the two trees and rode it down. It filled and obliterated the area where Pittler crouched. When it hit bottom, Meyer was at a forty-five-degree angle, leaning forward. The impact jolted him loose and flung him forward on his face, and the spill of loose earth then covered him to the waist. His face was in the slow creek.

  We ran to him. I had to work one-armed. Barbara Castillo was a marvel. She dug with both hands like a hasty dog, and together we pulled him out and dragged him past the creek and rolled him onto his back. The water had washed the blood off his face. It ran from a two inch groove over his right ear, persistently but not dangerously. He grunted and pushed us away and sat up. He stared at where Pittler had been. He did not try to talk. He merely pointed and raised his heavy eyebrows in question.

  "Yep," I said. "He's under there."

  There was a confusion of expressions on Meyer's face as he realized what he had done. There was awe, and concern, and a troubled wonderment. He is my friend. He is a man of peace and gentleness.

  But he'd had a very bad year, and even though the end of the strange man called Pittler had been sudden and ghastly, in the doing of it, Meyer had restored his own pride and identity.

  And finally the underlying emotion supplanted all the others, and his smile, a strangely sweet smile, won out, and spread slowly all over his face, proud and certain: the smile of a man who had suddenly been made whole again.

  "When you felt it start to go, there was time to scramble back off it," I said. "You could have killed yourself."

  "I had enough left to jump three times and that was it. Scramble back? Couldn't. You know, you think of weird things when you don't have anything left. I thought that if I was only wearing the right costume, you know, like a cape, I could spread my arms and fly out of here."

  Barbara got a knife and cut up her spare shirt and bound his head, tightly enough to stop the bleeding. She used the rest of it on my upper arm. On her way back with the cloth she had squatted by Jorge and learned he was just as dead as he looked. The wound was at the base of the skull.

  Juan reappeared. He looked sallow. He sat by Jorge, his lips moving. Then Barbara and Juan carried Jorge into the shelter of the cave, out of the sunlight. She talked with Juan and then told us it had been decided that some of his people would come out and get the body, and that we were leaving the supplies and stores for Jorge's family: There would be no fuss made about it, she said. Ram¢n would learn that Senor Hoffmann was never coming back from this trip. He would tell the others. Little by little inconspicuously, they would strip the great house of everything they wanted. It might take months. And then they would disappear back into the jungle villages. Eventually the authorities would notice he was gone, the house empty and decaying. But nobody would really care very much.

  Meyer said, "It offends my sense of neatness. Shouldn't we go to the house? Look for... I don't know. Proof? Money?"

  "You couldn't go there, either of you. The servants wouldn't let you in. I could go there. Ram¢n would let me in. I could look around, I suppose."

  "Maybe we should tell the authorities where he is," Meyer said.

  She stared at him. "Shot in the leg and buried alive? Both of you wounded? Do you want to spend two or three years here answering questions, living on tortillas and beans?"

  "No," I said. "No Way."

  "Nor I," she said, with her habitual little air of formality.

  Right at that moment I began to feel uncommonly hot and strangely remote. All colors were too bright. The sun hurt my eyes. I didn't start having the chills until we were halfway out of the jungle. Meyer had to drive.

  Meyer headed back three days later, very nervous over taking back into the States the items Barbara had collected in Pittler-Hoffmann's house: a few thousand in U.S. currency, a stack of Mexican old fifty-peso pieces, several diamond rings, and two expensive wristwatches. We had agreed among ourselves they should be sent to Helen June in upstate New York. No need to include any kind of a note. We believed she would understand from the contents that there would probably never be any more packages from her brother.

  I thought I was recovering and would soon be well enough to travel, but the day after Meyer left the illness came back. Barbara Castillo moved me to her place, the better to look after me.

  She had found no proof in the Hoffmann house. She had found no clue to where the rest of the money might be.

  We didn't need the money, and we didn't need any more proof than we had.

  Twenty-six

  ANNIE RENZETTI phoned me from Hawaii at two o'clock on Sunday, September nineteenth.

  "Isn't it pretty early there, kid?" I said.

  "Sort of about eight. Morning on Sunday is my best office time. Catch up on stuff. Who was that who answered yesterday when I phoned?"

  "Kind of a Maya princess type."

  "A what?"

  "A nice person. Barbara is a nice pe
rson. She's up here from Mexico on sort of a vacation. I keep talking her into making it a little bit longer."

  "I'm glad you have a nice new friend, Travis."

  "I'm glad you're glad. Neat weekend we are having the great Meyer chili festival. On an empty sandspit way down Biscayne Bay."

  "Gee, I wish I could make it."

  "Wish you could too."

  "How is Meyer?"

  "In the very best of form. He has enlisted the services of a troop of young handsome women. They follow him around, helping him carry the provisions back to his new boat. Which, by the way, is a dandy. The Veblen. Built-in bookshelves, and his colleagues are helping him replace the library he lost."

  "Did you really stop looking for Evan Lawrence?"

  "Meyer and I had a moment of mature consideration when we wondered what we would do if we caught up with him. So we gave it up."

  "That doesn't sound like either of you!"

  "We're learning discretion late in life."

  "Travis, there was a little paragraph in the Advertiser about the HooBoy sinking. Wasn't that the name of Hack's boat? What happened?"

  "Dave Jenkins waited until one of the people who had contacted him finally showed up to claim the boat. They'd paid a lot of money to have it made much faster, and they'd had a verbal contract with Hack about what they would pay for it when it was done. Dave thought it might be something like that. He'd alerted the Coast Guard and their friends, and they came and put an automatic beacon in the hull that would broadcast for a long long time. So the men came and claimed it, paid off Dave, and arranged the title transfer, and three weeks later they caught it loaded with pot, hash, and coke. They had to make a hole in the hull before it stopped. And after they saw the load, they took the men off and let it go down."

  "And you had nothing to do with that?"

  "Annie, I don't want to have anything to do with anything like that. Boats sinking. People getting hurt. It's all behind me. Meyer is delighted that now we're both sedentary."

  "Sedentary? You?"

  "We're settling down a little, that's all."

  "I don't think I like it."

  "Well, Annie, you are out there in Hawaii earning your battle ribbons, and I am here admiring this year's crop of beach bunnies and dipping into a little Boodles on the rocks from time to time. Everybody seems in good form. We have a few laughs."

  "You're going to make me homesick."

  "How is it out there?"

  "Same as last time. There's an awful lot of work. It isn't as much fun as it was in Naples. But... it's a bigger challenge. There are some chauvinists in the company who are hoping I'll fall on my face. I won't give them that little satisfaction, dammit. I just wanted to hear your voice, dear."

  Barbara came in from the beach and came striding across the lounge to give me a quick kiss beside the eye before heading for her shower.

  The conversation with Annie was soon over. It might be the last one, I thought as I hung up. There was a little edge of loss, but it had softened. It no longer bit.

  I got up and stretched and wandered into the head, where Barbara was in the giant shower, singing. She has a nice voice but absolutely no sense of pitch or rhythm. Consequently whatever she sings sounds like "Home on the Range."

  "Good swim?" I called.

  "Just beautiful! Say, did you turn off the oven at the right time like I told you?"

  "Of course."

  "Who was that on the phone? The woman from yesterday?"

  "Same one."

  "I don't think I like her calling you. Her voice is too pretty. Is she as pretty as her voice?"

  "She is in Hawaii, Bobs."

  "Then okay. She can be pretty if she wants."

  She had the shower turned high. I kicked off my sandals, dropped my shorts, peered cautiously around the curtain, then slid in behind her and grabbed her around the middle. She squealed and fought in a very satisfying way. So we had some good old scrubbing and soaping fun, and then some good old rinsing fun, and then outside the shower some great big towel fun before I picked her up and carried her off to bed, giving her head a slight thump on the doorframe in passing.

  And once again, after love, I had the marvelous pleasure of burying my snout in the soft and fragrant texture of the side of her throat. In dusty tan tint and in taste and fragrance it reminded me of something, always had, ever since that night when in her apartment at La Vista del Caribe, my great shuddering and gasping and chattering of teeth had awakened her and she had come in from her bed nest on the couch to put more blankets on me. She called it a little jungle fever. I do not ever want to have a big jungle fever. When all other warming efforts failed, she had slipped in there with me, under all the blankets, to hold me tightly until all that kind of fever went away and an entirely different one began, over her dwindling objections. I did not mind when, later, after her breath had caught several times during one long audible inhalation, she cried "Weeeeleee." I did not mind being his surrogate that night, or having called him back to life for her for that one instant on the edge of release. But it never happened again. She never called his name again.

  So suddenly I knew what was at the back of memory as I snuffed at her throat, eyes open to see the odd dusky-dark coloring.

  "Cinnamon!" I said.

  "What?"

  "You smell like cinnamon and you have the right color. Cinnamon skin."

  "My God, McGee, can't you come up with something more original?"

  "I thought it was."

  She laughed. "It's a song, you idiot. Piel Canela: Cinnamon Skin. They sing it all over Mexico. A love ballad, quite tender. You can ask any group of mariachis, and they will play it and sing it for you. Like this."

  She sang it softly to me, but it sounded like "Home on the Range."

  She dropped off to sleep and came awake with a start. "Oh!" she said. "I dreamed about that man again."

  "Bad?"

  "Not too bad this time. All that dirt and stone that came falling down, it made a pyramid, a perfect little pyramid, with him under it. Which makes sense."

  "Sense?"

  "Of course, McGee. That pyramid we climbed at Coba? It is all a big tomb. There is somebody buried in there, maybe more than one. But they may never get to excavating, to looking inside."

  "Why not?"

  "For the same reason the Spanish left us all alone in Yucatan, why they didn't care to conquer us and civilize us and turn us into little brown Christians."

  "Which is?"

  "McGee, lovemaking must dim your wits. Because the Maya had no gold!"

  The End