“I guess so. Sort of.”
“At the Drowsy Lady. I made the arrangements both times. It’s like giving life to something. That bumbling shyness and all that fright is gone now. He can laugh at the way he was. He’s a man now, and he struts and smirks and looks so incredibly smug. He makes love joyously now. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t let me give you the idea it’s something I just endure. He’s learned how to make it good for me. Does it spoil the purity of the motive if I enjoy it?”
“Stop trying to hurt yourself, Natalie.”
The girl made a face. “Now, of course, he is certain it is love undying. He’s certain I’m not too old for him. He wants to come to school at Michigan. He’s sure we’ll get married. He has it all worked out. I don’t want that, of course. I don’t love him. He’s a sweet, intelligent boy. If I stopped right now, he might just be trading one obsession for another. I had the idea I’d let him have … so much of me, the charm of the idea would kind of fade away after I go back to school. Do you know what I keep thinking when I’m with him? I keep thinking there is some girl he hasn’t met yet, some girl I’ll probably never meet, who can be grateful to me later on. Jigger will be a good husband. This isn’t going to make him promiscuous. He’s learning that, too, how promiscuity is such a silly shallow thing. Well, somebody found out about it. And they’re using it.”
“Does Jigger know?”
“The people who talked to my father didn’t give him the name of the male involved. I refused to tell him. He’s absolutely furious with me. No, Jigger doesn’t know. I’m afraid of what it would do to him, and I’m afraid of what crazy thing he might try to do about it if he knew. If he knew somebody was trying to hurt me, he could be murderous. He … he hasn’t got the stability he’ll have later on, in a few more years. I don’t feel soiled and messy. If you place no value on something, what harm does it do to give it to somebody who needs it badly? He writes poetry about me. Some of it is really quite good. I’ve watched him asleep. He doesn’t look over twelve when he’s asleep. I’ve felt proud to hold him, Kat. He was on some terrible edge when I found him. And now he isn’t. Was I wrong? Is the whole thing dirty and cheap and wrong? Tell me, Kat. I trust you. I feel so defensive about it, too defensive, maybe.”
“It isn’t an easy question. There isn’t any easy answer. If you could have gotten him to go to someone for help …”
“I tried, but he wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Natalie, I understand. I really do. It was the combination of two kinds of unhappiness, actually. But I think there’s a part of it you don’t understand, or you’re trying to deny.”
“Such as?”
“A masochistic streak in you. You’re ashamed of last year. So you were willing to find some way to abuse yourself, if you could find a rationalization for it. You don’t hold yourself cheap. If you did, you wouldn’t be struggling so hard to justify the relationship with Jigger. You just wouldn’t give a damn, would you?”
“M-maybe not. I don’t know.”
“But you can be awfully certain, dear, that few people could ever understand it. Very few women, and almost no men. They wouldn’t comprehend the sacrificial flavor to it, and the kind of strange inverted motherhood. I’ve never liked that boy.”
“He’s never let anyone else know him. I didn’t like him either.”
“The world is going to turn it into filth, if it ever comes out.”
“I pleaded with my father. I begged him. I told him to let them do their damnedest. I told him it wouldn’t hurt me, and I didn’t tell him that I wouldn’t let it hurt Jigger. I despise the idea of anybody being able to get at him through me. But nobody can talk to him now. Claire is wandering around wondering what the hell happened. It’s up to him to tell her if he wants to.”
“Who found out about it?”
“I just can’t imagine.”
“There’s an obvious answer, isn’t there? Burt Lesser is anxious to have the bay fill go through. Di is tough opposition.”
“Jigger? Oh, no. I have absolute confidence in him. They could cut him in pieces and he wouldn’t tell. I told Dial I’d leave his house today. I’d pack and get out of there, and then he could tell them to pull anything they felt like. But he wouldn’t hear of it. I’m telling you, Kat, for a man who’s led the kind of emotional life he’s led, he’s a pretty primitive father. I’m supposed to be some kind of a golden princess or something. If he really believes that, I could tell him some things that would stagger him, charming little details of my great romance up in Michigan. I told Jigger a little bit. I didn’t dare tell him any more. He would have headed north to kill the guy. No, somebody saw us. Here’s the terrifying thing about it, Kat. We were there last night. That was the second time. They knew about that too. We took my little alarm clock with us, and set it for five, and creeped into our houses like mice this morning. Dial came and bellowed me out of bed as soon as he got the call.”
“Who called him?”
“He didn’t say, but I got the impression the other person didn’t give a name.”
“He said the rest of us were vulnerable and he wasn’t.”
“What?”
“Nothing important, dear. Jimmy Wing told me the other side might play dirtier this time. I didn’t really believe him. I can’t believe Burt Lesser would … approve of this sort of thing.”
“I bet he doesn’t know anything about it. It would be that oily Leroy Shannard, or that crude Buck Flake. Or maybe the rest of them, not Mr. Lesser, just hired somebody to raise hell with your committee any way they can.”
“It’s so stinking,” Kat said.
“Isn’t it, though? And it’s such a darn … vulgar kind of melodrama. I didn’t want it to be anybody’s business but mine, what I did. I didn’t want it affecting anybody else. My father is an idiot to let it change his mind about anything. What could they do, really?”
“I don’t know, and I guess he doesn’t want to test it.”
“He isn’t going to give himself a chance to change his mind, or anybody else. Poor Claire. This afternoon he told her they’re taking a trip just as soon as he can get tickets. Her face fell. She loves it here in the summer. She loves the house and the pool and the beach. She asked where they were going, and he said he’d decide later. They’ll take the twins and Esperanza. She asked how long, and he said he’d decide that later too. They’ll leave Floss there and keep the house open. I can stay there or not, he said. It’s up to me.”
“He’s running away?”
“Kat, he’s going away. That’s what he’s done with most of the problems in his life, walk away from them. I know I’ll stay. I like teaching the kids. I can’t run too. I have to find some gentle way to make Jigger independent of me, the way he should be. If I let him sink or swim now, all the rest of it would mean less … to both of us.”
“Should I try to talk to Dial?”
“He’ll be very sweet and very polite and extremely evasive, Kat. You won’t get anywhere. I’ve seen him like this before.”
“I’ll have to tell Tom Jennings something. Natalie? Natalie, what is it?”
The girl was staring at her, her hand at her throat, her face stricken. “Oh, Kat, when will I ever get over being so darn young?”
“What’s the matter?”
“I came storming in here, loading you up with all my infantile goopy problems, completely, utterly forgetting this has been such a miserable day for you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter! I feel like an insect. You’ve been so sweet, listening to my silly mess.”
“Stop it! Stop it or I’m going to get angry, Natalie. You had to have somebody to come to. And I’m concerned. I’m not pretending. What kind of a monster do you think I am? Do you think I’m so all wound up in my own problems there isn’t any room to try to help anybody else?”
“But I should have remembered!”
“You just did. Now shut up about it, please. I think I asked you a question. I have to tell Tom Jennings something.”
“Tell him the whole thing.”
“Now you are being a silly little girl.”
“I know. Righteous defiance. I’m sorry. My trouble is I’m old for my years, but not as old as I think I am, I guess. I’m about seventy percent adult. The thirty percent keeps making me feel foolish. I guess you’ll have to hint.”
“I wish you knew who could have seen you. Was your car parked where anybody could see it?”
“It was way around in the back both times. The first time we went there was a week and a half ago. When we were driving out, a boy Jigger knows was driving in, but we were both sure he didn’t recognize Jigger. Both times I registered there was nobody there but the desk clerk. I’ve got Michigan plates, you know. And I certainly didn’t meech around acting furtive about anything. I got over all that kind of maidenly shyness last year. The only thing I can think of, Kat, is what my father said about the bay fill being in the planning stage for a long time. So they could have been following me ever since I got down here, just for luck, for the chance of something to use. But I haven’t felt as if I was being followed.”
“It’s so strange. All of a sudden it doesn’t seem as if it’s the same town. Do you think Dial will really go away?”
“Oh, yes. He’s got his pack-the-bags expression. Very bustly and fussy and efficient. Poor Claire hates traveling.” Natalie stood up. “Now I’m a little bit high, and very very tired, and very grateful to you.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“You could have made me feel like a degenerate.”
Kat walked her to the front door and went out into the night with her. Natalie turned quickly and kissed Kat on the cheek, made a small snuffling noise, and strode off down the road.
Kat went in and phoned Tom Jennings. It was quarter of midnight.
“It’s late to phone you, Tom.”
“I wasn’t going to be able to sleep until I heard from you. What did he say?”
“Tom, honestly, I don’t think there’s the slightest chance of his changing his mind. In fact, he’s going to go away for a while. He’s taking Claire and the twins.”
“That’s … very disappointing. But what happened? He was so determined to help us.…”
“Tom, somebody went to a great deal of trouble, somebody very sly and smart, and they dug up the names and dates and places, and phoned Di and said they would make a big juicy scandal of what they’d found out if he didn’t resign from Save Our Bays.”
“Claire? Is it something that Claire …”
“I can’t say any more than I’ve said already, Tom. Maybe Di is reacting a little more violently than he should. I don’t know. I’m sort of disappointed in him. You’d think it would make him mad enough to fight harder. But he’s getting out. It would make very choice gossip. And it would probably do us harm if he stayed on the team and it did get circulated. But it wouldn’t do us as much harm that way as this way. I’m going to try to talk to him tomorrow after he’s had a chance to sleep on it, but I don’t think it will do any good.” She waited a moment and then said, “Tom?”
She heard him sigh. “We’ll all have to work just that much harder. I can put in a little bit more money than I promised, but I promised just about all I can afford to begin with.”
“I can’t help out, I guess you know.”
“I know that, Katherine dear, of course. I was just thinking. Once we know the timing of the thing, when the date will be set for the public hearing, maybe we can arrange some kind of a rally and raise money that way. I have a feeling our regular membership is going to be … somewhat disappointing. I’ve been making a small telephone survey, sampling the membership list. It seems as bad as the report I got from Jackie. It looks as if we can expect a fifty percent mortality in our old list. We’ll have to go after a lot of new members. Well, it’s a little late to be discussing organizational problems. And you have to work tomorrow. Thanks for what you’ve done, Katherine. I really appreciate it. It’s alarming, isn’t it, to realize they’d stoop so low.”
“Yes, it is.”
“We may have further losses. Depressing thought. Odd that our own neighbors should be so much more ruthless than those Lauderdale men were.”
As Kat went to bed she thought the sunburn and the worry combined would make sleep impossible. But she felt herself falling away as soon as the light was out.
Thirteen
ON THAT SUNDAY, Borklund put a heavy load on Brian Haas, and hovered so close Jimmy Wing could not help him with it. Whenever Jimmy tried to take a piece of it, J.J. would appear and put him onto something else. At two-thirty, when Jimmy went out to lunch, he phoned the newsroom and got hold of Brian.
“How are you doing, Bri?”
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, keeping his voice low. “The points are dirty and there’s water in the gas. I keep cutting out, and the son of a bitch keeps running me uphill. I’d say he’s got a strong suspicion.”
“Will you make it?”
“I’m not even going to think about guessing. I’m taking the day in ten-minute chunks, and getting through one at a time. Thanks for what you’ve been trying to do.”
“I’ll be back in a little while to try some more.”
“Bring me a big coffee, black.”
“You should eat.”
“I better not try. A quart container if you can manage it.”
“Two pints if I can’t. Okay.”
As soon as Wing returned with the coffee, Borklund sent him to cover a call on a drowning. It had just come in. The photographer was there when he got there. The resuscitator people had just given up, and the young mother had been given a shot but it hadn’t taken effect yet. The crowd could hear her shrieking in the small house. Wing got the facts from the neighbors. It seemed slightly grotesque to use a whole ambulance for such a small body.
On his way back into town from Lakeview Village he thought how this could be simplified by the use of a mimeographed form. “The (two-, three-, four-) year-old child was playing in the back yard of (his, her) home and apparently wandered away from (his, her) (mother, father, sister, brother, playmates) and fell unnoticed into a nearby (drainage ditch, pond, lake, stream, swimming pool) and was discovered approximately —— minutes later, floating face down. Efforts to revive the child were not successful and (he, she) was pronounced dead at —— o’clock by Dr. ——.”
The purposeless death of a child is a horrible thing, he thought. If I unlock the little box labeled Empathy, I can even manage to squeeze a little water out of my eyes. But I have to work at it. We run about eight a year, and I have covered a lot of them, and somehow it has come to be the same child being drowned over and over, and I keep the little box closed. We could take one master picture, and always run it. When the small bodies are covered, they always look alike. It is always the same stricken mother, the same ambulance, the same pointless horror. Grief for a child is always mixed up with speculation about what it might have become. Yet, according to the odds, its life would most probably have been dull, discontented and unsung. Once it is dead, nothing can be proven. All glorious speculation is valid. Had I drowned at age two, Sister Laura might sometimes look at the ruin of her own life and think of the small brother, thirty years gone, and say, “If he had only lived, life might have been different for all of us.” But I lived and nothing is different, and nothing is proven or disproven.
It was after five before he was able to give any attention to the problem of Mrs. Doris Rowell, she of the white Dutch bob, the academic baritone, the tennis shoes, the faded cotton dresses on the fat soft sexless body.
He reviewed what he knew about her. She had lived on Sandy Key, down near Turk’s Pass for at least twenty years. She’d bought an ugly old stucco house down there when houses and land were very cheap. She lived alone, had owned a succession of very old cars, was an amateur naturalist, a savage co
nservationist. When the paper had some special research problem involving marine animals or plant life, bird life, indigenous trees and plants, Doris Rowell was the logical one to ask. If she did not have the information, she knew where and how to find it. Usually she had the information.
He drove down to see her. When he parked beside the house she came to the entrance to the shed in the side yard and stared at him as he walked toward her. She wore vast faded khaki trousers, a man’s shirt, a baseball cap.
“From the paper,” she said. “What is it this time? I’m busy. You’ll have to talk while I’m finishing something, Mr. Wing.”
He followed her into the shed. It was stiflingly hot. Lights hung over two large fish tanks in the back end of the shed. The water exchange system was bubbling. There were fingerling sheepshead in both tanks, about twenty in each. She was mixing some kind of fluid on a work bench near the tanks.
“What are you doing, Mrs. Rowell?”
“Are you making polite sounds with your mouth or do you want to know?”
“I’m naturally nosy. It helps when you’re a reporter.”
“I suppose so. These are Archosargus probatocephalus. I’m checking the relation of salinity to growth rate. That’s the control tank on the right. I’ve got a control pen in the bay too. Proctor, of the University of Southern California, published a paper on the same experiment, using a somewhat similar fish, but a labroid fish, the Primelometopon pulchrum. I didn’t like his conclusions. This is in the second month, but now I see perhaps he was correct.”
A Flash of Green Page 21
