“Goddam death trap from Palm City to Everset. Same as Venice to Sarasota. I won’t let Myrt drive it. You following too close?”
“I can see past him, Stu. If anything looks hairy ahead, I’ll fade back.”
“You do that. You know what I like?”
“What do you like?”
“I’m a beauty contest man. And animals. Long legs and cute kittens. I take a hell of a picture, man. These tore-up folks, they put my stomach off. Aren’t you too goddam close!”
“Flash Kennicott, the fearless photographer. I have to move up so I can pass when he does, or I get nipped off.”
“They’ll still be there and they’ll still be dead.”
“Cheer up, Stu. If it’s a bad enough schmear, maybe you’ll get a wire-service pickup.”
Stu kept both feet on imaginary brakes. Soon Wing saw the flashing lights ahead and he stayed close behind the ambulance as it slowed. Troopers with flashlights were moving the traffic through. He saw a state patrol car parked in a field, heading out, so he bounced through a shallow ditch and parked beside it. They got out and walked over to the mess. The sedan was on the near side of the road, upright, the front end accordioned. The old panel delivery was on the far side, on its side, damaged in the same way. Tow trucks were waiting to hook on, as soon as the state police gave the word. In the floodlights a heavy woman in orange slacks lay bonelessly spilling out of the open door on the passenger side of the sedan, facedown, legs tucked under the dash.
Kennicott’s power-pack bulb began to flash. Tires yelped far to the north and south as cars braked for the slow passage by the accident. They gawped as they went by, and pulled off when they were beyond the officers and came walking back through the confusion of lights and through the tall grass to stand and stare some more.
Jimmy Wing saw Cal Chadwicks, a patrolman he knew well, talking to another officer and a truck driver. He went over to them and said, “Evening, Cal.”
Chadwicks turned, smiled, grimaced. “Hey, Jimmy.”
“Head on, it looks like. We going to know how they did it?”
Cal gestured toward the truck driver. “This-here boy saw good. He lost forty dollars of burned-off rubber staying to hell out of it.”
“Heading north,” the driver said with that wooden tone indicative of shock. “The car there, the Nebraska car, passed me and come in between me and the truck ahead. Then he swang out to take a look, but the panel truck was too close, coming fast, so he cut back too far, tripped hisself on where the shoulder drops off and got flang back out right bang into that panel truck and got knocked right back again right across the front end of me to where it’s sitting now. It was a hell of a noise. Seemed like it went on a hell of a long time.”
When another officer came to speak to Chadwicks, Jimmy got the truck driver’s name, and other pertinent information.
Kennicott came over to him and said, “I’ll get back with this right now, Jimmy, they can get it in. You going to phone it in?”
“Yes.”
“Then how about the lend of your car? Can you get a ride?”
Jimmy gave him the keys. “Leave it in the lot there. Put the keys under the mat on the driver side. Get anything?”
“What there is, I got. Who needs it?”
Kennicott left. Wing located Chadwicks again, over by the panel truck. It had Palm County plates. It was being rocked up onto its wheels. One ambulance was gone. “Who was in this one?” Wing asked.
“Claude Barnsong, from Everset.”
“Which Barnsong is that, Cal?”
“The one runs a charter boat out of Everset Marina. His license here says he was … thirty-four. He was alone and he was in a hurry. Got a half ton of marine engine in that thing and it came frontwards when he hit.” Wing borrowed the license and wrote down the RFD address. Chadwicks was able to lend him the identification on the other two deceased, a Mr. and Mrs. George Kylor, aged fifty-eight and fifty-six, with a street address in Grand Island, Nebraska, driving a 1960 Buick. They had lost control of it. There was ample evidence of the point of impact being in the southbound lane, all the fine scale and dust which is hammered loose from the underparts of cars in a head-on smash, the white powder of glass, burst of oil and spray of water, all captured on highway patrol cameras before traffic was permitted to roll over the place of impact. The police report would fix the blame on the Kylor car—and the insurance people would eventually settle. But who was responsible for a road too narrow for the traffic, or for shoulders scoured down by summer rains?
The other ambulance was gone. The panel truck had been hauled away. The burst and scattered luggage had been collected and shoved back into the Kylor vehicle. Patrolmen halted traffic while the wrecker turned out onto the highway with it. As Wing walked over toward the patrol cars to beg a ride back to the city, he kicked something in the grass and it rolled into the light. It was a carved coconut, with a bright clown face and a mailing tag. He squatted and used his lighter and saw the tag was blank. He straightened up and kicked it into the shallow ditch where some child might find it the next day.
A county deputy gave him a ride back into town. He turned his copy in, for the page-one space which had been cleared for it. After he had retrieved the hidden keys and gotten behind the wheel of the station wagon, he sat there in the dark parking lot for a little while without turning on the lights or the motor. There was always a carnival flavor about roadside death in the hot months. Flashing lights, the distant melodies of car radios, the abrupt nervous laughter at macabre jokes, the hot gaseous stink of engines mingling with the trampled fragrance of the grass, recognitions, greetings and farewells in the night, sirens coming and going, the holiday awareness of knowing strangers were dead, not you.
It had drained him, yet made him wonder that it could not touch him more deeply. The coconut mask was a sickly bathos. The fat orange slacks were clownish. He could believe that in these past few years of his life a crust had formed across some middle portion of his mind. He could perceive the relationships of his existence, yet he seemed to be required to explain them to himself in a search for reaction which was so studied that the whole procedure became meaningless. Sometimes he felt as if he had forgotten the first language he had learned to speak, and his acquired tongue had no meaningful words in it. It was not a cynicism. It seemed more of a process of a progressive deadening, depriving him of the internal dialogue he had previously enjoyed, that interplay of query and response which made awareness more acute. He had lost some textural, essential appreciation of reality, and felt himself to be in a dream of boredom, unresponsive to all cheap solutions, jeering at himself in a halfhearted way. And ready for Elmo’s offer, ready for almost any change, just to see what it would do—thinking of himself as a small creature in a maze which it has learned too well, and now needs the stimuli of experimental complications.
A mosquito whined to a thirsty silence against his throat. He slapped it, started the car and drove slowly to Tamarinda Street. It was midnight. Number 27 was lighted. He parked several houses beyond it, and walked quietly back to it. He tried to remember the last time he had seen his sister, Laura, and could not recall. Eight months at least. She was his only blood relative left in the state, and she was seventeen years older than he. They had been close, a long time ago. But the relationship had not survived the loss of what she had wanted for herself and for him.
Laura lived with her invalid husband in a shabby little frame house. He went up onto the porch and looked through the living room window. She sat staring without expression at television turned so low he could barely hear the sound of it through the screen.
“Laura,” he said.
She gave a violent start and put her hand to her throat and stared round-eyed at the window.
“It’s Jimmy,” he said in the same tone.
She pushed herself up out of the chair, turned the set off, and let him in. She wore a green housecoat belted around her thick body. Her hair was sandy gray. She had his long na
rrow head, beaked fleshy nose, pale blue eyes. But her mouth was tiny, pinched, set in a mesh of lines radiating from it.
“What’s wrong?” she demanded in a low voice.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. I drove by to see if there was a light on. I just wondered how you are.”
She shrugged and went back to her chair. He sat on a lumpy daybed. The small room smelled of fly spray, boiled food and sickness.
“How do you think I am?” she asked. “I’m queen of the May. Tomorrow I’m going to the south of France in my private yacht.”
“How’s Sid?”
She shrugged again, gesturing toward the back of the house by tilting her head. “Sometimes bad and sometimes worse. But he had a pretty good day today. He ate good. But he gets terrible depressed. It’s eleven years now, and he was an active man. He’s getting so heavy lately, it’s almost more than I can do, getting him into the chair and back into bed.”
“You ought to have some help.”
“I don’t like to bother all the servants with little things like that. On the pension I keep so big a staff I can’t keep track.”
“Can’t Betty help out at all?”
She gave him a look of sad disgust. “Pregnant with her sixth? Three thousand miles away? A sixth grandchild I’ll never get to see. Except the pictures she sends. She looks so little and tired in the pictures, Jimmy. How can she help out? You knew what he was when she run off with him. We all did, and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do. He’s a factory hand out there. A big car and big cigars, six kids and time payments and broke by Wednesday every week. I’ll never see her again. They’ll never get far enough ahead to come this far, and I can’t leave Sid. What’s the matter with you? How do you expect her to help out?”
“Don’t get sore. I was just wondering.”
After a long silence she said, “Do you remember how everything used to be, Jimmy?”
“Yes.”
“I think a lot about how things went wrong for everybody, and I wonder why it had to be this way. I keep thinking of what Mom kept saying before she died. In those last weeks she got homesick for New York State, for the Cherry Valley, even though she hadn’t ever been back since the day she and Dad left, when she was a young girl. And she kept saying that things had gone wrong because they’d come down here. You know, nothing seemed wrong then. Nothing at all, except her having to die that way, hurting. How old were you when she died?”
“Thirteen.”
“That means Betty was six. Sid had a good job. Al was still alive. The family seemed to be doing pretty well. She made me and Al promise we’d help you get an education. We would have anyway. You know that. Already we knew you were the brightest of the three of us. We helped as much as we could.”
“I know.”
“It’s like she knew things were going to go bad for all of us. Funny, isn’t it? Sometimes I have a dream, and it’s always the same. I’m having a picnic with Betty, in a beautiful place. And she has a little baby in her arms. There’s sunshine and sort of music and we’re laughing about something. Then we see Sid walking toward us, as if nothing had ever happened to him. Then I realize we’re all at the Cherry Valley. I wake up smiling and crying. I’ve never seen the Cherry Valley.”
“I drove through there once.”
“Don’t tell me about it, Jimmy. You want anything? Ice tea? Beer?”
“No thanks.”
“How’s Gloria?”
“About the same.”
“When did you see her last?”
“Last month,” he lied.
“You should go up there more often, Jimmy.”
“What’s the point in it? She doesn’t know me. She hasn’t known anybody for two years.”
“But maybe she knows more than she seems to.”
“Laura, don’t for God’s sake try to turn it into a soap opera. There’s been a progressive deterioration of the brain cells, a physiological decay. Now they’re willing to admit that possibly all those series of shock treatments may have made the process a little faster. It’s something that destroys the actual brain cells. They talk about some kind of chemical imbalance or deficiency.”
“Big words,” she said. “Lots of big words.”
“Do you have to have it in little words? She wears diapers. They feed her with tubes into her nose. Her eyes don’t focus. They say it’s interesting. They think they may be learning something from her.”
“The big words help you, don’t they? You don’t have to think of her as being Gloria. And you don’t have to go see her.”
He stared across at her in vast burlesque surprise. “Where’d all this concern come from? Aren’t you my loving sister, the woman who celebrated my pending marriage by telling me I was throwing myself away by marrying a little Ybor City slut named Mendez? I was impairing my social standing, or something. And when we had that first trouble, you were plugging for a fast divorce, weren’t you?”
“We didn’t know she was sick then, Jimmy. And I got to like her. She’s still your wife.”
“She’s nothing, Laura. She’s breathing meat.”
“You’re cold as a stone.”
“I went through all the kinds of feeling there are. I used up all there was. What the hell do you expect of me?”
“Nobody expects much of you, Jimmy. Nobody.”
“That’s nice.”
“Maybe you got things just the way you want them. Kind of a litle frog in a little pond. I saw you two months ago. Downtown, just going into the Bay Restaurant. You looked a little tight. You were laughing and you were with the McClure woman. I guess that’s the kind of thing you like.”
“Mitchie is an old friend.”
“You don’t pick your friends very careful.”
“I’ve got a thousand friends, Sis.”
She shrugged. “It’s none of my damn business anyhow, I guess. You’re grown. But I raised you, Jimmy. You remember that. Nothing is the way I dreamed it would be. I saw you, and I was on my way back here. I hadn’t seen you in months, and then I saw you with that woman, and I was coming back here. The days go by so slow for me. They go slow for Sid too. I guess they’re worse for Sid. I should be glad you came by tonight, instead of nagging you like this every minute.”
She looked at him with a forced smile. On an impulse he took his wallet out and took Elmo’s hundred dollars out of it. He had folded the two bills small and tucked them behind his credit cards. He unfolded them and took them over and put them in her hand.
She stared up at him blankly. “What’s this?”
“Will it help?”
“My God, yes, it will help. But you act funny. Where’d you get it?”
“For a favor for a friend.”
“What kind of a favor? Can it get you in trouble?”
“Do you want it or don’t you?”
“I want it. Thanks a lot.” She put it in the pocket of her robe. “Did you come here to give this to me?”
“Yes,” he lied.
“One thing I’m going to do with it, I guess you should know, I’m going to talk to Betty on the phone. I talked to her at Christmas, just three minutes.”
“It’s yours. Don’t ask for permission. Do anything you want with it. Maybe there’ll be more. I don’t know. I can’t promise it.”
“You don’t owe me anything. You know that.”
“I’ll help if I can. Okay?”
“If you want to, I think it’s very nice. You look awful tired, Jimmy.”
“I’m sort of jittery. It was an automobile thing, down near Everset. A bad one.”
“Oh, I heard it on the midnight news. Three people dead?”
“Yes.”
“I heard it just before you got here: I guess that … just being alive is something to be thankful for.”
“Sure. I’ll be going, Laura.”
She went to the door with him. She pecked him on the cheek, patted his shoulder and said, “Come back sooner next time, dear. You’re the only brother I’ve
got. You should take better care of yourself. Come back in the daytime. Sid would love company.”
As Jimmy Wing drove toward his cottage on Cable Key, he felt better than he had all day. The nagging guilt about not having seen Laura in so many months was partially expiated. He could see her again soon. And, by giving her the money, he had somehow lightened his sense of obligation to Elmo. It made Elmo’s assignment more of a game than a necessity. Tomorrow he would talk to Kat, and tomorrow he would find out something about Dial Sinnat which would please Elmo. If the money, or a reasonable percentage of it, could go to Laura and Sid, the whole venture seemed considerably more respectable. It was good to think about her talking to Betty in California. A nice long talk, courtesy of Elmo Bliss.
Eight
KAT HUBBLE, in a plastic and aluminum pool-side chaise at the Sinnats, tilted her head back and looked up at countless stars. They did not veer in the sickening way they had the last time she had looked. They were comfortingly steady in the heavens. She had had only two drinks before the steak and salad, but they had been made by Di Sinnat, and had hit her harder than she had expected. She had always been circumspect about drinking, less out of conservation than out of a reluctance to impair her awareness of everything around her. In this past year she had been doubly careful, having learned that it took very little alcohol to relax her control over herself. Grief was an act of balance on a high thin wire. Balance improved with practice. You hoped that one day you could walk it as casually as though it were a city sidewalk, but in the meantime you avoided anything which might imperil the careful balance.
The Sinnat twins were in bed and Natalie had gone home with Roy and Alicia to put them to bed and stay there until Kat came home. The night was hot and still. Claire Sinnat was in the pool, floating nearby in a hammock-and-pontoon arrangement, her heels hooked on the overflow gutter. She was twenty-seven, a pretty, merry, untidy little woman, brown as peat, muscled like an acrobat, her abrupt hair calicoed by the sun. She enjoyed people and laughter and horseplay. She played with the children like another child. At times she seemed more daughter than wife to Di. Her voice was thin and penetrating, her laugh a deep bawdy bray. She had no patience with malice, and was fun to be around, except when she drank too much. Liquor fouled her language and made her venomously quarrelsome.
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