A Flash of Green

by John D. MacDonald

  “That’s a strange expression you’re wearing, sir.”

  “I feel strange.”

  “Do you feel ill?”

  “No. Nothing like that. You know what happens in color-plate work where the registration is a little bit off.”

  “What? Oh, the ghost people, like with three mouths, all different colors.”

  “That’s me.”

  “But you’ve got to expect to feel a little …”

  “Not just since I heard about Gloria. For longer than that. What if some time I want to talk to you?”

  “You can always talk to me.”

  “Really talk to you, Kat. Peel off the lid. Show you where the snakes live.”

  “I’d listen. You know all my snakes by their first names.”

  “It wouldn’t be that simple. All you’d have to do is listen to all of it, then give me no opinion, just let me go. I have all the opinions I can use.”

  “You know, you’re pretty silly.”

  “Am I?”

  “Of course you are. Everybody goes around killing people. Only the good ones know what they’re doing. That’s the penalty, I suppose.”

  “You’re a fantastic woman.”

  “Just how do you mean that?”

  “In the best of all possible ways. So goodnight before I open the wrong valve. To scramble the metaphors, dear Kat, I know the wheel is crooked, but I want to make my money last as long as I can.”

  She walked out to the car with him. For a time it looked as if the motor would not catch. But as the starter began to grind with an ominous slowness, it caught, ran raggedly and then smoothed out.

  He looked up at her out of the car window and said, “The hell of it is, I can want a Mercedes, but not very much. Or a flight to Paris, but not as if I ached for it. I’m in the lousy middle, you know? The world is for people who either ache for the shiny things so bad their teeth hurt, or who don’t want them at all at all. How about us slobs in the middle? Do I sound sorry for myself?”

  “Not enough to bother either of us.”

  “Before I get really maudlin, farewell.”

  “Will you work tomorrow?”

  “I’d rather than not.”

  “So I’ll see you for the coffee break, Jimmy.”

  After he drove away she stood out in the driveway and looked at the sky for a little while. The stars were bright and close. She saw a shooting star, and with the wry habit of this past year, said politely, “No thank you.” They were always giving you free wishes. Lately four-leaf clovers had become easy to find. But no thanks indeed. Not even for a flash of green, sir, if you should give me that notorious rarity. No flash of green, no monkey’s paw, no star light star bright. We tucked another one into the ground today. This one was Jimmy’s. And we’ll take our turns when the time comes. With or without clover.

  A car turned into the Estates, and as it went by, under a weak streetlight, she saw that it was Eloise in her little white car, alone.

  Kat went back into her house, kissed her sleeping children and went to bed.

  Twenty-one

  DURING THE FIRST PART of the week which remained before the date set for the public hearing, Jimmy Wing was intrigued and sometimes mildly alarmed by an apparently interrelated disruption of both his sense of time and the quality of his capacity to remember.

  For a long time he had fitted sensibly into the steady progress of his days and nights, knowing without any effort of consciousness where the minutes belonged on the clock and the days belonged on the calendar. Now the internal time-keeping device had stopped. Three hours could disappear between heartbeats, and ten minutes could appear to last all afternoon. It had the remembered flavor of childhood, when Saturday was always a vast glad surprise, and Monday was a generation away. The segments of each day were protracted and compressed without reason. He would find himself startled by the idea of being late for an appointment only to discover it was still three hours away.

  This disassociation seemed linked with a new vividness of memory, of fragments which came into his mind with such a force and color that he seemed to have to squint to look directly at these visions. The outside world was faded by comparison. These were all recent images, and they often had that ominous persuasive weight of dreams rather than reveries. He was absent-minded, forgetful. He sensed that people were being patient with him, and he smiled his gratitude. Sometimes, when his attention was on the person speaking to him, he seemed to hear the other’s words a fraction of a second before the words were said. This was a hypersensitivity which made his brain feel as if it had been stripped raw, made all comprehension an immediate and painful thing. At other times he would see the mouth moving and he would hear nothing. He would search for the range of the person’s voice, like moving a tuning dial, and suddenly he would hear him again.

  The hot images in his mind were curiously static. A thing would come into his mind and last and finally fade, and when it was ended, then he would know whether it had been in bright focus for two seconds or an hour. The visions were random. One that came often was the image of Charity’s eye, far brighter than it had been in the motel room, suspended slightly above him, big as a basketball, wet, fixed, anatomically exact, the lashes thick as lead pencils, iris big as a saucer, pupil big as a cup, utterly still. He could not force continuity onto such images, re-creating what had come before or what came after. There were others which recurred. One was the bottom half of Elmo’s face, the hard, chunky, knowing grin. And the motionless tumble of the orange slacks of a dead tourist woman. Aunt Middy Britt’s leathery arthritic claw folded onto the arm of her rocker. Two flies, with the metallic sheenings of hummingbirds, feeding at a droplet of jam. Mitchie’s mouth, wrenched sideways in a frozen sneer of sexual effort. The wrinkled brown nape of Shannard’s neck beneath the feathery whiteness of his hair. The clean slant of Kat’s shoulder, her fair skin oiled and angry red.

  He would set out to drive to the courthouse and find himself at the entrance to his driveway. Once he sat on the side of his bed to change his shoes, and found himself in the bathroom, in pajamas, brushing his teeth at three in the afternoon. At times he was amused, but could not sustain amusement. At times he was alarmed. He knew he was doing his work reasonably well, but often when he would read his bylined work, he could not remember having done it. And at all times he felt as if he was braced for some huge horrid unimaginable noise that might come at any time. He had always awakened in the morning remembering dreams. Now there were none, and he was glad there were none because he did not like to think of what they might be like.

  Sometimes he thought of talking to Dr. Sloan, but he did not know what he could tell him, nor did he believe it could be of any significance to the man.

  On Monday afternoon, two days before the public hearing, he had a phone call from Morton Dermond. Dermond asked him if he could come over to the Art Center right away.

  Dermond was in his office. The Center was closed to the public. A good half of the clutter in the office was gone, and most of what remained had been dumped into a huge pile under the windows.

  Dermond sat at his desk, the brute in colors gay, all brawn and hair, but without an essential ferocity, like a bulldog with rabbit eyes. He sat tired and remote, with a small self-deprecatory smile, handed Jimmy a fuzzy carbon of a typed statement and said, “Sit down and read it, Jimmy.”

  It was a brief, formal resignation as director of the Palm County Art Center, giving health as the reason.

  “It has to be in tomorrow morning’s paper, Jimmy,” he said. “Please say that Mr. Oscar Grindle, chairman of the Board of Directors, will handle the Center until a replacement can be located. All activities will continue without interruption.”

  Jimmy made a note on his copy of the resignation. “Very sudden, isn’t it?”

  “Suddener than anyone could have guessed. My car is all loaded. My landlord has my key. Bobby is driving around doing some last errands. He’ll pick me up here in about twenty minutes. Young Pete
r Trent is being kind enough to crate the rest of my things and ship them north. Bobby and I should be out of the state tonight.”

  “Do I get the news in depth, Mortie? The story behind the story?”

  “Just for your own amusement, I guess. You can’t publish it, of course. You see, I knew something like this might happen. When I saw how vicious and unreasonable people were getting, I told Tom I should get out of it. I told the dear man I’d do the group more harm than good. But he made such an appeal to my loyalty, really. You see, Jimmy, we develop a sort of sixth sense about these things. We should never, never, never let ourselves get mixed up in public issues which get terribly emotional. I was lulled into a false sense of security, I guess, because nothing happened two years ago.”

  “What happened this time?”

  “Tell me something, Jimmy. I want to be sure I haven’t been living in a fool’s paradise. Have I ever been too terribly obvious about my personal private life? Have people been really sure about me?”

  “Not completely, Mortie. And I guess most of the people have had no idea at all.”

  “I know you have, because you ran into Bobby and me that time in Key West. But I had the idea you didn’t go around smirking and gossiping, really.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I’m not an idiot, you know. And I’m certainly not a member of that pushy set, who go around demanding equal rights and so on. I’m living in a world which disapproves of my personal life, and I can’t change that, so what would I be trying to prove? I’ve kept my two worlds completely separate, Jimmy. I was down there three whole months before I sent for Bobby Serba to come down. He’s had that nice little job in the gift shop at Cable Beach, and we’ve been terribly discreet. Actually, even though I know who most of the locals are, and some of them might astonish even you, Jimmy, we’ve never mingled. And we’ve even maintained the precaution of Bobby’s having a little place of his own. I’ve liked my work here, and I know I’ve done a very good job, and I swear to you on my word of honor, Jimmy, that in all the time I’ve been down here, I’ve never made the smallest pass at anyone.”

  “I believe you, Mortie.”

  He gave Jimmy a look of despair, and suddenly there were tears in his eyes. His voice broke as he said, “What they did to me, Jimmy, they bugged my house. A dirty invasion of privacy. And what good would it do me to go to the police? It’s a shameful thing, Jimmy.”

  “Who did it?”

  “Two horrible men. Bobby came over on Saturday night. Saturday was his birthday. I made my famous paella in the big casuela I brought from Spain. You can’t get all the right ingredients here, but it was really very good. And we had quite a lot of Spanish wine. Yesterday morning, just before noon, we were lounging around the house, listening to music, and those men rang the doorbell and came muscling their way right in, grinning and laughing at us and talking dirty. They had this battered little tape recorder, and they set it up and made us listen to some of it. I don’t care what kind of a relationship you have, Jimmy, a recording of completely personal things sounds vulgar and nasty and horrible. Bobby got quite hysterical and went positively flying at them to turn it off, but they slammed him back against the wall and he hurt his head. I was going to punish them, but one of them took a gun out. Have you ever seen anybody aiming a gun at you in your own living room? It is really impossibly theatrical. It’s truly vulgar. That put Bobby in even worse condition, and I had to quiet him down. Then they told me I was resigning immediately and we were leaving town. No place for us in a decent community and so on. Just what you’d expect. If we didn’t leave, the recording would be played for some of the members of my board, and I’d be publicly accused of being a deviate at the public hearing on Wednesday, and their evidence would be turned over to the police. You see, there’s nothing I can do except what I’m doing, Jimmy. All we can do is run. If we stay here and brazen it out, not only will it be hurting a lot of people I’m fond of, but we could really be sent to prison. The laws down here are truly medieval.”

  “What were the men like?”

  “Oh, rather beefy fellows in their thirties, ignorant types, with meaty faces, dressed in cheap resort clothes. I’ve never seen them before. Their first names were Ray and Andy. They acted like cops. They had a southern accent, and a lot of dirty language, and they acted like it was all very very funny. They hadn’t done anything very tricky. They’d just fastened a microphone onto my window sill with a long wire running all the way to the driveway next door, where they sat in their car and listened and ran the tape recorder whenever they felt like it. They were in a dark green De Soto with Tampa plates. The house next door is empty for the summer. One of them must have sneaked over and put the microphone where he wanted it as soon as it got dark.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I made some phone calls yesterday afternoon. We’re going to borrow a friend’s cottage on Fire Island and spend some time forgetting there is such a place as Palm County. Then I’ll find something in New York. Jimmy, I know I’m imposing on you, but would you please tell Tom Jennings? I know I should phone him. I just can’t.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  Mortie Dermond walked into the lobby with Wing. “Say goodbye to the others, the few who mean anything to me. Jackie, Kat, you know the ones. Explain it a little, so I won’t look too bad.”

  “Sure, Mortie.”

  There were several huge raw-looking canvases hung in the lobby, predominantly black, red and white. The blacks were weighty and structural, like Kline. They were by a local young man named Sol Utica.

  Morton Dermond stopped by the largest painting. “Poor little Sol. He’s derivative, of course. But he’s finding where he wants to go, and he’ll have to have time. They’ll find somebody for my job who won’t give Sol gallery room. They’ll pack this place with the hobby people, beach scenes, waving palms, picturesque fishing nets. I can feel wistful about that, Jimmy.”

  “People like to object to what they don’t understand, Mortie.”

  “It’s more than that. There’s something we can’t say to the public because it sounds so arrogant it makes people screamingly angry. Work like this is like mirrors. Cruel mirrors. They can’t reflect a substance which doesn’t exist. A person who is nothing will look at these and see nothing. They’ll be baffled, angry, indignant. They’ll think they’re being had. They say a child could have done it, or a monkey. They’ll think the whole world of modern art is some vast conspiracy. We tell them to make an effort to understand. That’s nonsense, actually. They can’t suddenly become actual people through an effort of will. This is a world they can’t enter, so they claim it doesn’t really exist. But it is more real than anything they can ever know. Dear God, if a man looks at a meadow and sees only a drainage problem, or something he thinks he can kill, why should he think he should be able to look at a painting? That’s what angers them, Jimmy. They sense their limitations, and defend themselves by accusing the rest of us of fraud.” He smiled. “My final lecture as director, my friend. I guess you are a reasonably sensitive man, but I shouldn’t expect too much empathy from you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re adequately tolerant, I suppose. But the prejudice is still there, isn’t it? ‘Some of my best friends are a little queer. Some of them are real nice guys.’ But I disgust you a little, don’t I?”

  “What’s the point of talking like this, Mortie?”

  “Turning the knife in the self-inflicted wound. Or maybe it’s luxurious self-expression, my friend. Once you’ve burned a bridge, you can turn and yell anything you want. You see, you dreadfully viable types have a conviction of righteousness and decency which offends me. So the prejudice, like all prejudice in the world, works both ways.”

  “Is this doing any good?”

  “It probably isn’t even very good therapy, dear man. Out of pure reaction, I’ll probably get progressively queeny as time goes by. Goodbye, Jimmy, and thanks for some small favors. No, I’d rather
not shake hands, because at the moment it strikes me as a sort of gesture of tolerance.”

  Jimmy shrugged and walked out. Mortie’s new red Falcon station wagon was parked near the entrance, down on its haunches with the weight of the luggage inside and on the roof rack. Bobby Serba was checking and tightening the lines which held the tarp. He was a willowy man, with an abundance of glossy dark hair and a minimum of chin. He gave Jimmy a slow glance as Jimmy walked by. He had long almond eyes, and in the glance was that same wary, remote, inhuman speculation he had seen in the eyes of penned cattle.

  It was a little after six o’clock when he parked at Elmo’s office. Elmo’s pickup and Sandra Straplin’s little car were there. The street door was locked. He pressed the bell but could not hear it ring because of the traffic sounds behind him. He alternately hammered on the door and pressed the bell button. After a long time he saw Sandra walking toward him, her heavy breasts bouncing, her eyes narrow, her mouth ugly with annoyance.

  She unlocked the door and swung it open and said, “When you phoned, Jimmy, I told you he was too busy to see you. What’s the matter with you anyhow?”

  “I want to see him for a minute.”

  “Come on. You’ll see him, all right. You got him in a dandy mood now.”

  Elmo was standing beside his desk. He dropped the papers he was looking at and stared at Jimmy as he came in. Muscles bulged and flexed along the hard angle of the jaw.

  “Get out and shut the door, Sandra.” As soon as the door closed he said, “You getting uppity, boy. You want to talk to me, you phone. She told you tomorrow. Not tonight. Tomorrow.”

  “Don’t I have special privileges? As a member of the team?”

  “You say that pretty snotty. Who all the hell you think you’re getting to be?”

  Jimmy went over and sat on the couch and looked at him. “I’m good old Jimmy Wing. That’s all. I do odd jobs. Like at the Drowsy Lady Motor House. Like carting Buck’s wench to Tampa. Like sidelining Doris Rowell. Like telling you every move old Tom Jennings plans before he makes it. When we get to Tallahassee, Elmo, will I have my own office? And a state car? I worry about things like that.”