A Man of Affairs

by John D. MacDonald

  “I’m agreeable to that.”

  “This isn’t anything like I thought it would be,” Louise went on. “It’s a little confusing. All these weird people. Did you hear the horrible fight in the night?”

  “I didn’t hear a thing.”

  “It was on the veranda. Men yelling at each other and a woman crying. Warren was snoring so loud I couldn’t understand what it was all about. But I think the woman was Bonny Carson and one of the men was Fletcher Bowman. It was about three o’clock. Then some doors slammed and it was over.”

  “There’re all the ingredients here for a lot of trouble.”

  “What are the plans for the day?”

  “First find out if Mike wants to talk business. If not, I want to try some fishing.”

  “Tommy is going to do some skin diving.”

  “Amid the barracuda?”

  “He says they won’t bother anybody.”

  “Is he sure they have the word?”

  “You know Tommy. He probably half hopes one will make a pass at him.”

  “How about fishing from the shore with me if we’re not required around here?”

  She hesitated for a moment and then agreed. I borrowed her sun lotion and used it liberally while she swam up and down the pool. There weren’t very many early risers in the group. It was nearly quarter of nine before Fletcher Bowman put in an appearance. He wore brief knit trunks and had a striped towel around his neck. He was well browned and impressively muscled. He wore his All-American smile, and I was certain the label in the trunks would be a good one.

  After he had sat with us and told us what a beautiful day it was, and how many gallons of water the pool held and how the purifying plant worked, he said, “I do hope you people weren’t upset in any way by the little disturbance we had in the wee hours.”

  “I heard it,” Louise said, “but Sam slept through it and so did Warren. I don’t know about the others. What was it about?”

  He looked uneasy for the first time since I had met him. “It was a little shabby, I’m afraid. Poor Bonny Carson was completely and soddenly drunk. I don’t think she knew where she was or what her name was. Let’s say she is at a … difficult transition place in her life. She and Mike have been friends for years. Now she wants Mike’s backing for a new musical. He doesn’t think she ought to try it. We don’t think much of the book or the songs, and he’s afraid of what a flop might do to her. But no decision has been made as yet. Anyway, that’s just background. That young Jack Buck got just tight enough to decide to take Bonny to her bed, probably so he could brag about it later. She certainly wasn’t in any condition to provide anything but acquiescence. Bundy took objection to the plan. Jack knocked him down. Bundy came and woke me up and we intercepted them outside Bonny’s room. By then she was having a crying jag. Jack was ugly about it, but I broke it up. If Port Crown wasn’t such a stubborn man, Jack Buck would be gone long ago. But Jack is the son of some old rancher buddy of Port’s who died broke, and Port thinks Jack is a fine virile young man. I think he’s a punk with a mean streak. Were I Port, I would no more travel with Jack and my wife and daughter than I’d stick my arm in a snake pit. After Jack went out last night to sleep aboard the Portess, I sat on the veranda for a half hour to make certain he wouldn’t try again. Enough of that. I hope we won’t have any more of that sort of thing. What are your plans for today?”

  “We’ve been waiting to see what Mr. Dean has in mind,” I said.

  He gave me a quick look of disapproval. “Mike and I have been going over a few things with Cam Duncan this morning. I asked him when we ought to have our little meeting about the Harrison Corporation and he said there was no rush about it. I gathered from that he doesn’t want to bring it up today. In fact, Mike and Port and Cam and I are going out in the Try Again at nine-thirty. We’re taking lunch with us and we’ll be back about four-thirty. I wish we could take more, but four is about the maximum for comfort and good fishing. I talked to Tommy last night. Tomorrow he and Puss are going out on the Try Again with Mike and Amparo. Warren wasn’t interested. Maybe the next day you and Sam could go, Louise?”

  There was a little needle in the offer, very subtle, but sharp enough. “Sam and I are going to do some fishing today,” she said.

  “From the shore,” I said. “How about tackle?”

  “There’s more than enough in the dock house. Just take what you think you need and rinse it in fresh water before you put it back. If you go east up the beach to where the rocky point is, there’s supposed to be good fishing there. Wear something on your feet. Those rocks are jagged.”

  We saw the Try Again off at nine-thirty, wished them luck and waved to them as they sped out of the bay. A sleepy Bridget walked down with Tommy and Puss to help us wave them off.

  “Hung?” I asked her.

  “Not too terribly. Something keeps going sort of bong bong right between my eyes. But I’ve got the remorses about running off at the mouth. To you and other people. Was I completely horrible?”

  “Just gay,” I said, grinning at her.

  “My God, you look bigger undressed than you do dressed. Sam the moose.”

  “Don’t hurt his feelings,” Puss said. “He’s very sensitive. Say, what are you kids going to do after breakfast?”

  “Me,” said Bridget, “me, I’m going to slob around in the sun and try to forget I should be inside at the good old Olivetti Studio 44, pecking out something deathless about our host for the lady editor.”

  “And I’m going to see if I can spear something,” Tommy said.

  “We’ve had breakfast and we’re going up the beach to fish,” Louise said. “You want to come along, Puss?”

  “Three’s a crowd,” she said. “Oops, that doesn’t sound right. Anyhow, Tommy makes me so nervous I have to watch the water and keep wringing my hands until he bobs up again.”

  “I wish I could have brought my compressor and my air tanks,” Tommy said wistfully. “I can stay down about two and a half minutes, but what good is that?”

  We went into the little dock house. Rods rested on wall pegs. I picked out two spinning rods and reels that looked sturdy, piled some lures, swivels, leader wire, a pair of rusty pliers and a sharp but rusty knife in a battered aluminum box, and we headed up the beach. The beach was sandy, but the shallow water just off shore was full of dark rocks. A half mile from the little bay the sand ended and we had to walk over gray-black, water-eroded rocks. The rocky area became wider. It had a lost and fearsome look, like part of a destroyed planet. We had to keep looking ahead to pick out the flat places. There were windows of conch shells, tossed high on the rock by tide and winds. The sun had whitened them, and they were like the bones of the dead in a barren world.

  Louise stopped and made a sweeping gesture with her arm and said, “Just look at it, Sam!” I saw what she meant. The scrub was vivid green on our right. The black-gray tortured rock was a fifty-yard strip between the green of the leaves and the streaked blue and tan and green and yellow of the water.

  I found us a place on a point where we stood six feet above the water. I rigged the rods and showed her how to handle spinning tackle. After three casts she had the knack of it and began to get the yellow feathered dude out to a respectable distance. There were no fish left in the world. There was not even a knock. Two vultures dipped to take a closer look at us, and then sailed away, rising effortlessly on the wind currents.

  I realized Louise had stopped casting. I looked at her and she was looking farther up the shoreline.

  “What is it?”

  “Isn’t that Skylark up there?”

  I looked. The boy was two hundred yards away, kneeling on the rocks, looking down into the water. I saw him yank something small and silvery out of the water. We folded our futile tent and walked up to him. He grinned at us. The water right next to the rocks was black and roiled with a dense school of menhaden minnows. The school was twenty feet long and ten feet wide. Skylark was dangling a small bare bright hook in the
school and rolling the line back and forth between thumb and finger to spin the hook. The minnows, three and four inches long, would bite at the bare hook and he would yank them out and drop them in a small tide pool behind him. He had over a dozen in the pool, scurrying around busily.

  “Do you eat those?” I asked him.

  “Oh, no. No, I will show you.” He put the small hook and line aside and picked up a heavy line with a large hook. He hooked a live minnow through the back and swung it around his head several times and threw it out about forty feet. I swear it wasn’t out there ten seconds before something gulped it down. Skylark set his hook and brought the fish in, hand over hand. It was a five-pound yellowtail, and he carried it over and put it in a pool shaded by the rocks. There were two other yellowtails and about a ten-pound albacore in the pool.

  He told us to go ahead and use his minnows. We hesitated perhaps one hundredth of a second. Two hours never passed more quickly. My drag was set too tight, and the first stunning, breathtaking rush of a barracuda broke the line. At one point, after an hour of it, I was going after another minnow when I heard Louise yelp and I turned and looked at her. Her barracuda jumped and it was a big one, bigger than any I had hooked thus far. I watched her. She stood in that pink suit on a flat-topped rock with the blue water beyond her. She stood braced on her slim and perfect legs, her hair glossy in the sun. She fought the big fish and the smooth muscles bunched under the velvetiness of her back. The reel whined when he’d make a run, and when he’d try to rest for another run and another jump, she would work him and talk to him. She was brightly and intensely alive. “Oh, come along now, you monstrous darling. Come to Louise. Oh, be a good boy, be a honey pie. Whoa! No more of that, pretty baby. Come on, pretty baby. I won’t give you an inch, not an inch.”

  And as she tired the fish, I looked at her and I knew that this was the way I wanted her to be. This was the way she had to be. To have her alive again made my eyes sting. That was the precise moment when I knew I loved her. I had known I wanted her. But I thought it was just wanting. But it was more. I could hide the wanting and never do anything about it. But this I knew that I would not be able to hide. This I knew I would do something about.

  The weary fish came in with docile reluctance. Ten feet from the rocks he made his last effort. He surged half out of the water and shook his frightful snaggled jaws, and made a short run of perhaps twenty feet. She walked carefully along the rocks to a flat place where a rock slanted down into the water at a shallow angle, rod bent sharply, tugging the fish along. I went down onto the rock and took hold of the brass swivel and, pulling on the leader, horsed the four and a half feet and about sixty pounds of him all the way out of the water. He had the true grin of the barracuda. He kept opening and closing his mouth. The snaggly teeth were monstrous. Louise came down beside me and put her hand on my arm and we looked at him. He was breathing heavily, like a tired and dying man.

  The barracuda is not a foulness. He is as clean and functional as a rapier. He is no scavenger. He eats nothing that is not trying to get away from those jaws in haste and terror. He can lie like a spent torpedo in the water and, with one movement, he can be gone as though he had never been.

  “Do you want him, Skylark?” I asked the boy.

  “No. I will smash his head with a stone and get the hook.”

  “No,” Louise said. “Don’t do that.”

  I looked at the savage eye and knew what she meant. I bent and clipped the leader a cautious distance from those jaws. Using the rod butt I nudged him back into the water. He had been out of the water a long time. He rolled onto his back and completely over and onto his back again several times. He found equilibrium, hung poised a few inches under the surface, gill plates spreading widely each time he sucked water. And then he swam very slowly along the shore and through the minnow school. A lane opened for him as they fled in panic. And he turned out toward deep water and we could not see him any more. The hook in his jaw would corrode and separate.

  We went back from the water and sat on a rock and smoked and talked about the fish. I kept trying to keep that quality of excitement alive in her. Her hands were shaky from the long exertion and she massaged her right wrist. But the glow was fading too quickly, and she was becoming muted and remote again.

  She looked at me and pressed her fingertip against my upper arm. It left a white impression against the burn that lasted a full second.

  “You’ve had enough.”

  “I can take a little more.”

  “I’ll just watch, I think. I don’t want to catch a littler fish than him. Not today anyway.”

  She came down and watched. I lost a wildly leaping and gyrating needle fish, and I caught two more yellowtails to add to Skylark’s hoard, and then I got a better fish that felt like a yellowtail. He was struggling as I slowly brought him in, and then he went curiously slack. There was still something on the line, but it did not feel heavy. I brought in the head of a large yellowtail, gill plates still working.

  “Barracuda,” Skylark said.

  Had it been whole it would have been the largest yellowtail we had caught that day. It had been slashed in half, and so keen had been the teeth, so powerful the jaws, that I had felt no jerk or tug as eight to ten pounds of living fish had been cut free. I looked at it and then looked at Louise. Her eyes were round and she swallowed hard and said, “When I thought of them biting I didn’t …”

  “I know what you mean.”

  And that was enough. It was after twelve. We threaded the fish on a stick. Skylark carried one end and I took the other. Louise carried the gear. After we took the fish to the kitchen, I went back to the dock and found that Louise had rinsed the gear and put it away. I went to my room and showered. My back and my legs felt hot. Just as I pulled on fresh shorts there was a knock at the door. I opened it and John handed me a planter’s punch and said, “Mrs. Dodge said to bring this, sar.”

  I thanked him. I sipped at it as I finished dressing. It was cold, tart and good. I realized it had been a long time since I had been able to loaf. It shocked me that I had put all the problems of Harrison so firmly out of my mind. I had a hunch I was going to be a whirlwind when I got back.

  As I went onto the veranda, my sports shirt felt itchy against the burn on my back and shoulders. Warren was sitting in front of the lounge smoking a cigar. I could hear a table tennis game going. I could see a group out by the pool.

  “What’s the deal on lunch?” I asked Warren.

  “I wouldn’t know and I wouldn’t care. I just had breakfast, buddy.” He was surly and he looked ill.

  “Tommy do any good with his spear?”

  “I wouldn’t know that either, buddy.”

  I shrugged and walked away from him. Puss was by the pool. She said she and Tommy had taken a skiff out to a reef and Tommy had speared a couple of big grouper. I asked for a second punch. Louise joined us and I thanked her for sending the first one. Lunch was served by John and Booty at one-thirty, on the veranda or by the pool, take your choice. Bonny Carson still wasn’t up. Amparo, Tessy Crown, Lolly Crown and Elda Garry ate at the pool-side, a hen party for four. I didn’t need any more sun. I ate on the veranda with Guy Brainerd, Bridget, Tommy and Puss.

  I felt so drugged by the sun and drinks that right after lunch I went back to my room, stripped down to my shorts and lay on top of the spread. I left the room door to the veranda open for the sake of the breeze. I had noticed that it was hard to look through the screen into the dim room and see anybody. There was a flavor of siesta in the air. I guessed that most of the others had folded, too. I knew that Tommy and Puss and Louise had.

  I tried to anticipate how Mike Dean would handle it when he got around to it, and that kept me awake just long enough so that I was not quite asleep when I was disturbed by the small pinging noise of the spring on my screen door.

  I rocked up onto my elbow and squinted at Bridget silhouetted in the open doorway.

  “You decent?” she said in a half whisper.r />
  “Come on in.”

  She shut the door quietly and came over and sat on the foot of the bed, facing me. I moved my legs to make room for her. She lighted two of her cigarettes and handed me one. She seemed to be intensely amused at something.

  “Oh, my God,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “Excuse me for barging in on you, but I wanted to tell this little nugget to somebody and I couldn’t wait and you are the one I thought of. Why is that? Do people always come and tell you stuff? Is it because you don’t do an awful lot of jabbering yourself? Or maybe people just get a feeling about you that you won’t blab.”

  “I’ve wondered myself,” I said.

  “Don’t sound so grumpy. All you were going to do is sleep. Did you notice how grouchy sincere ole Guy Brainerd was at lunch?”

  “I guess I did.”

  “And he ought to be happy as clams. He’s in the other wing and the jauntiest little fanny of the class of ’48 at Wellesley is in the next door room, all handy like. Anyway, right after lunch dear Elda said she wanted to talk to me in private. She came to my room. I thought she despised me. Maybe she still does. Anyway, she told me that she had thought I was sort of rattle-brained, but after knowing me she has realized how really wise and mature I am about people, and she wanted to know if I thought she was doing the right thing. I forgot just exactly what nauseous little euphemism she used, but she let it be known that she has been letting humble Guy enjoy the infinite pleasures of her incredibly desirable body for lo these many moons. She came damn close to simpering, which I honestly do not think I could have taken. So what is your problem, darling, I say. She beats her way around about eighteen bushes before I begin to get the message. It’s simply that she wants to marry him and so far he won’t get off the dime and start the legal wheels whirling, so she is withdrawing her body fair until Guy jumps through her hoop. She told him that last night and it seems there was quite a scene, all in whispers, of course. And she wrenched herself away from him and locked herself in the bathroom and cried practically all night long. Do I think she is right?”