“And you haven’t seen him since?”
“Haven’t seen him or heard from him. I guess he was a satisfied customer.”
“How old would you say he is?”
Joe True frowned. “It’s hard to say. If I had to guess, I’d say about thirty-eight. And in great shape. Very tough and quick. He jumped off that thing like a cat and he had the stern line and the spring line all rigged while I was making the bow line fast.”
I bought Joe his third drink and left him there with his dear friends. Junior Allen was beginning to take shape. And he was beginning to look a little more formidable.
He had left Candle Key in late February with something of value, and had gone to New York and managed to convert it into cash, all of it or some of it, whatever it was. Weeks later he had returned to Miami, bought himself a good hunk of marine hardware and gone back to Candle Key to visit the Atkinson woman. It had required considerable confidence to go back. Or recklessness.
A man with a criminal record shouldn’t flaunt money, particularly in an area where an angry woman might be likely to turn him in. Yet, actually, the boat procedure was pretty good. It gave him a place to live. With papers in order and a craft capable of passing Coast Guard inspection, he wasn’t likely to be asked too many embarrassing questions. People who build a transient life around a forty-foot cruiser are presumed innocent. I’d found the Busted Flush to be a most agreeable headquarters for the basically rebellious. You escape most of the crud, answer fewer questions, and you can leave on the next tide.
But there was one hitch, and perhaps Junior Allen wouldn’t be aware of it. The tax people take a hearty interest in all registered craft over twenty feet. They like to make sure they weren’t purchased with their money. A cash transaction like that one might intrigue some persistent little man up there in Jacksonville, and give him a heady desire to have a chat with Ambrose A. Allen, transient.
But first he would have to find him. I wondered if I would find him first.
I visited the Bayway Hotel. It was a mainland hotel, small, quiet and luxurious in an understated way. The little lobby was like the living room in a private home. A pale clerk listened to my question and drifted off into the shadows and was gone a long time.
He came back and said that A. A. Allen had stayed with them far five days last March and had left no forwarding address. He had given his address when registering as General Delivery, Candle Key. He had been in 301, one of their smallest suites. We smiled at each other. He smothered a yawn with a dainty fist and I walked out of his shadowy coolness into the damp noisy heat of the Miami afternoon.
The next question was multiple choice. I did not want to get too close to Junior Allen too soon. When you stalk game it is nice to know what it eats and where it drinks and where it beds down, and if it has any particularly nasty habits, like circling back and pursuing the pursuer.
I did not know all the questions I wanted to ask, but I knew where to look for answers. Cathy, her sister, Mrs. Atkinson, and perhaps some people out in Kansas. And it might be interesting to locate somebody who had served with Sergeant David Berry in that long ago war. Apparently the Sergeant had found himself a profitable war. It was past four o’clock, and I kept thinking of questions I wanted to ask Cathy, so I headed on back toward my barge. I parked Miss Agnes handy to home, because I would need her that evening to go see Cathy Kerr.
I stripped to swim trunks and did a full hour of topsides work on the Busted Flush, taking out a rotted section of canvas on the port side of the sun deck, replacing it with the nylon I’d had made to order, lacing the brass grommets to the railing and to the little deck cleats, while the sun blasted me and the sweat rolled off. One more section to go and I will have worked my way all around the damned thing, and then I am going to cover the whole sun deck area with that vinyl which is a clever imitation of teak decking. Maybe, after years of effort I will get it to the point where a mere forty hours a week will keep it in trim.
I acquired it in a private poker session in Palm Beach, a continuous thirty hours of intensive effort. At the end of ten hours I had been down to just what I had on the table, about twelve hundred. In a stud hand I stayed with deuces backed, deuce of clubs down, deuce of hearts up. My next three cards were the three, seven and ten of hearts.
There were three of us left in the pot. By then they knew how I played, knew I had to be paired, or have an ace or king in the hole. I was looking at a pair of eights, and the other player had paired on the last card. Fours. Fours checked to the eights and I was in the middle, and bet the pot limit, six hundred. Pair of eights sat there and thought too long. He decided I wasn’t trying to buy one, because it would have been too clumsy and risky in view of my financial status.
He decided I was trying to look as if I was buying one, to get the big play against a flush, anchored by either the ace or king of hearts in the hole. Fortunately neither of those cards had showed up in that hand.
He folded. Pair of fours was actually two pair. He came to the same reluctant conclusion. I pulled the pot in, collapsed my winning hand and tossed it to the dealer, but that hole card somehow caught against my finger and flipped over. The black deuce. And I knew that from then on they would remember that busted flush and they would pay my price for my good hands.
And they did, for twenty more hours, and there were many many good hands, and there was a great weight of old time money in that little group. In the last few hours I loaned the big loser ten thousand against that houseboat, and when it was gone I loaned him ten more, and when that was gone I loaned him the final ten and the craft was mine. When he wanted another ten, with his little Brazilian mistress as security, his friends took him away and quieted him down and the game ended. And I named the houseboat in honor of the hand which had started my streak, and sold the old Prowler on which I had been living in cramped circumstances.
After the manual labor, I treated myself to a tepid tub and a chilly bottle of Dos Equis, that black Mexican beer beyond compare, and dressed for summer night life.
Just at dusk Molly Bea came a-calling, tall glass in hand, tiddly-sweet, pinked with sunburn, bringing along a dark lustrous giggler to show her my adorable little old boat. The giggler was named Conny, and she was from Gnaw-luns rather than Takes-us, but she was a similar piece, styled for romps and games, all a girlish prancing, giving me to believe-with glance and innuendo-that she had checked me out with Molly Bea, given her total approval, then matched for me and won. She was prepared to move in with me and send Molly Bea back to the Tiger.
After the inspection tour, I got rid of both of them, locked up and went off to a downtown place which sells tourist steaks at native prices and then went on out to the Mile O’Beach, to the Bahama Room, your host Joey Mirris, featuring for Our Big Summer Season, the haunting ballads of Sheilagh Morraine, and Chookie McCall and her Island Dancers. Closed Mondays.
Joey Mirris was a tasteless brassy purveyor of blue material and smutty sight gags. it was a pickup band, very loud and very bored. Sheilagh Morraine had a sweet, true, ordinary little voice, wooden gestures and expressions, and an astounding 42-25-38 figure she garbed in show gowns that seemed knitted of wet cob-webs.
But Chook and her six-pack were good. She planned the costumes, lighting, arrangements, routines, picked the girls carefully and trained them mercilessly. They were doing three a night, and the dancers were the ones bringing in the business, and Adam Teabolt, the owner-manager, knew it.
The room will take about two and a quarter, and they had about seventy for the eight o’clock show. I found a stool at the end of the raised bar, tried not to notice Mirris and Morraine, and then gave my full attention to the so-called island Dancers. The wardrobe for the entire seven could have been assembled in one derby hat.
Under the blue floods I saw Cathy Karr working in perfect cadence with the group, wearing a rather glassy little smile, her body trim and nimble, light and muscular and quick. There is no flab on good dancers. There is no room for it, and n
o time to acquire it. Effort coats the trained golden flesh with little moist highlights. As always, the bored band did its best for the Chook-troop, and part of the routine was a clever satire on all sea-island routines.
After the eight o’clock show I sent a note back to Cathy and then went to the hotel coffee shop. She joined me five minutes later, wearing a dreary little blouse, a cheap skirt and her heavy stage make-up. We had a corner table.
Through the glass wall I could see the lighted pool and the evening swimmers.
“I’m going to try to see if I can do anything, Cathy.”
The brown eyes searched my face. “I surely appreciate it, Mr. McGee.”
“Trav. Short for Travis.”
“Thank you, Trav. Do you think you can do anything?”
“I don’t know. But we have to make some kind of agreement.”
“Like what?”
“Your father hid something and Junior Allen found it. If I find out what it is or was and where he got it, maybe there is somebody it should go back to.”
“I wouldn’t want anything that was stole.”
“If I can make recovery of anything, Cathy, I’ll take any expenses off the top and split what’s left with you, fifty fifty.”
She thought that over. “I guess that would be fair enough. This way, I’ve got nothing at all.”
“But you can’t tell anyone we have this arrangement. If anybody asks you anything about me, I’m just a friend.”
“I think maybe you are. But what about those expenses if you don’t get anything back?”
“That’s my risk.”
“So long as I don’t end up owing. Lord God, I owe enough here and there. Even some to Chookie.”
“I want to ask you a few questions.”
“You go right ahead, Trav. ”
“Do you know of anybody who served with your father in the Army?”
“No. The thing is, he wanted to fly. He enlisted to try to get to fly. But he was too old or not enough schooling or something. He enlisted in nineteen forty-two. I was six years old when he went away. He trained in Texas someplace, and finally he got into the… something about Air Transit or something.”
“ATC? Air Transport Command?”
“That was it! Sure. And he got to fly that way, not flying the airplanes, but having a regular airplane to fly on. A crew chief he got to be. Over in that CBI place. And he did good because we got the allotment and after he was over there, those hundred dollar money orders would come once in a while. Once there were three of them all at once. Ma saved what she could for when he got back, and the way it turned out, it was a good thing she did.”
“But you don’t know anybody he served with?”
She frowned thoughtfully. “There were names in the letters sometimes. He didn’t write much. My mother saved those letters. I don’t know if Christy threw them out when she died. Maybe they’re still down at the house. There were names in them sometimes.”
“Could you ride down there with me tomorrow and find out?”
“I guess so.”
“I want to meet your sister.”
“Why?”
“I want to hear what she has to say about Junior Allen.”
“She’ll say she told me so. She didn’t like him much. Can I tell my sister what you’re trying to do for us?”
“No. I’d rather you wouldn’t, Cathy. Tell her I’m just a friend. I’ll find some way to get her to talk about Allen.”
“What can she tell you?”
“Maybe nothing. Maybe some things you didn’t notice.”
“It’ll be good to see my Davie.”
“Why was Allen sent to prison?”
“He said it was a big misunderstanding. He went in the Army and he was making it his career. He was in the Quartermaster, in the part that they have boats, like the Navy. But little boats. Crash boats, they call the ones he was on. And then he got into the supply part of it, and in nineteen fifty-seven they got onto him for selling a lot of government stuff to some civilian company. He said he did a little of it, but not as much as they said. They blamed it all on him and gave him a dishonorable discharge and eight years at Leavenworth. But he got out in five. That’s where he was a cellmate of my daddy, and said he came to help us because my daddy would have wanted him to. That’s the lie he told us.”
“Where did he come from originally?”
“Near Biloxi. He grew up on boats, that’s how the Army put him into the boats. He said he had no folks left there.”
“And you fell in love with him.”
She gave me a strange and troubled look. “I don’t know as it was love. I didn’t want him to have me like that, right there at the home place with my mother still alive then, and Davie there, and Christine and her two. It was shameful, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. Looking back I can’t understand how it could be.
“Trav, I had a husband, and there was one other man beside my husband and Junior Allen, but my husband and the other man weren’t like Junior Allen. I don’t know how to say it to a stranger without shaming myself more. But maybe it could help somehow to know this about him. The first time or so, he forced me. He would be tender and loving, but afterward. Saying he was sorry. But he was at me like some kind of animal, and he was too rough and too often. He said it had always been like that with him, like he couldn’t help himself. And after a while he changed me, so that it didn’t seem too rough any more, and I didn’t care how many times he came at me or when.
“It was all turned into a dream I couldn’t quite wake up from, and I went around feeling all soft and dreamy and stupid, and not caring a damn about what anybody thought, only caring that he wanted me and I wanted him. He’s a powerful man, and all the time we were together he never did slack off.
“Do a woman that way and I think she goes off into a kind of a daze, because really it’s too much, but there was no way of stopping him, and finally I didn’t want to, because you get used to living in that dazy way. Then when he come back and moved in with that Mrs. Atkinson… I couldn’t stop thinking how…”
She shook herself like a wet puppy and gave me a shamefaced smile and said, “How to get to be a damn fool in one easy lesson. I was just something real handy for him while he was looking for what my daddy hid away. And all the time I thought it was me pleasing him.” She looked at the coffee-shop clock. “I have to be going to get ready for the next show. What time do you want to go in the morning?”
“Suppose I pick you up about nine-thirty?”
“I’d rather I come to your boat about then, if that’s okay with you.”
“It’s fine with me, Cathy.”
She started to stand up and then sat back again and touched the back of my hand swiftly and lightly and pulled her fingers away. “Don’t hurt him.”
“What?”
“I wouldn’t want to think I set anybody onto him that hurt him. My head knows that he’s an evil man deserving any bad thing that can happen to him, but my heart says for you not to hurt him.”
“Not unless I have to.”
“Try not to have to.”
“I can promise that much.”
“That’s all I wanted.” She cocked her head. “I think maybe you’re clever. But he’s sly. He’s animal-sly. You know the difference?”
“Yes.”
She touched my hand again. “You be careful.
Cuatro
CATHY Kerr sat primly beside me on the genuine leather of old Miss Agnes as we drifted swiftly down through Perrine and Naranja and Florida City, then through Key Largo, Rock Harbor, Tavernier and across another bridge onto Candle Key. Her eagerness to see her child was evident when she pointed out the side road to me and, a hundred yards down the side road, the rock columns marking the entrance to the narrow driveway that led back to the old frame bay-front house. It was of black cypress and hard pine, a sagging weathered old slattern leaning comfortably on her pilings, ready to endure the hurricane winds that would flatten glossier struc
tures.
A gang of small brown children came roaring around the corner of a shed and charged us. When they had sorted themselves out, I saw there were but three, all with a towheaded family resemblance. Cathy kissed and hugged them all strenuously, and showed me which one was Davie. She handed out three red lollipops and they sped away, licking and yelping.
Christine came out of the house. She was darker and heavier than Cathy. She wore faded jeans hacked off above the knee, and a man’s white T shirt with a rip in the shoulder. She moved slowly toward us, patting at her hair. She did not carry herself with any of Cathy’s lithe dancer’s grace, but she was a curiously attractive woman, slow and brooding, with a sensuous and challenging look.
Cathy introduced us. Christine stood there inside her smooth skin, warm and indolent, mildly speculative. It is that flavor exuded by women who have fashioned an earthy and simplified sexual adjustment to their environment, borne their young, achieved an unthinking physical confidence. They are often placidly unkempt, even grubby, taking no interest in the niceties of posture. They have a slow relish for the physical spectrum of food, sun, deep sleep, the needs of children, the caresses of affection. There is a tiny magnificence about them, like the sultry dignity of she-lions.
She kissed her sister, scratched her bare arm, said she was glad to meet me and come on in, there was coffee made recent.
The house was untidy with tracked shell and broken toys, clothing and crumbs. There was a frayed grass rug in the living room, and gigantic Victorian furniture, the dark wood scarred, the upholstery stained and faded. She brought in coffee in white mugs, and it was dark, strong and delicious.
Christy sat on the couch with brown scratched legs curled under her and said, “What I was thinking, that Lauralee Hutz is looking for something, and she could be here days for twenty-five a week and I could maybe make forty-five waitress at the Caribbee, but it would mean getting there and back, and the garden is coming along good, and I got six dollars last week from Gus for crabs, so it don’t seem worth it all the way around, getting along the way we are with what you send down, but it’s lonely some days nobody to talk with but little kids.”
The Deep Blue Good-Bye Page 3
