“I keep telling her she ought to raise the rate again.”
“Would you two mind telling me why you keep laughing?”
Mickey shoved her hair back, grinning. “Rupe and I just enjoy life, Mr. McGee.”
“She does a good trade with business meetings. Three or four or five busy, successful executives, usually fellows in their thirties or early forties, they come down to relax, get some fishing in, get a tan, do a little dickering and planning. You know.”
“Why is everybody laughing but me?” I asked.
“She takes male passengers only, Trav.”
I finally caught up. “I get it. Your crew is all female, Captain?”
“And,” said Rupe, “all nimble and quick and beautiful and strong as little bulls. They range from golden blond—a gal who has a masters in languages from the University of Dublin—to the color of coffee with hardly a dab of cream. Eight of them.”
“Seven, Rupe. Darn it. I had to dump Barbie. She was hustling a guest for extra the last time out. I’ve warned them and warned them. After I provision the Belle—the best booze and best food in the Windwards—I cut it down the middle, half for me and the boat, half for the gals. So on a five-day run, they make better than three hundred, Biwi. Everyone from golden Louise all the way to Hester, whose father is a bank official in Jamaica.”
“You need eight crew to work that thing, Mick?”
“I know. I know. We’re going out Monday for ten days. Four fellows from a television network. Nice guys. It’ll be their third cruise. Old friends. That means my gals will be topless before we clear Grand Mal Bay.”
“And bottomless before you get opposite Dragon Bay and Happy Hill.”
“Could be, dear. Louise flew up to Barbados today. She says she has a cute chum who loves sailing. It’s a way for a certain kind of girl to combine her favorite hobbies and make a nice living. I don’t take hard-case types. I like polite, happy girls from nice backgrounds. Then we have a happy ship.”
She got up and said, “A pleasure to meet any of Rupe’s old friends, Travis. Hope you’ll sail with us sometime. Rupe has.”
“Mickey invited four of us captains to a free five-day cruise last year.”
“I had a cancellation,” Mickey said, “and we were all wondering what to give the other captains for a Christmas present. Well, nice to meet you.”
After she was on the dock, she turned and waved and said, “Tell him our motto, Rupe.”
He chuckled. She walked lithely away. He said, “Mickey likes you. In her line of work she gets to tell the men from the boys in a hurry.”
“What’s the motto?”
“Oh. It’s on her letterhead. ‘Make a lot of lovely new chums every voyage.’ ”
“Enjoy the cruise?”
“Oh, hell yes. By God, it is different. There’s rules, and Mickey enforces them. None of her gals get slopped. Any and all balling is done in the privacy of your own bunk in your own stateroom, curtains drawn. No pairing off with any special gal, even for a whole day. If a gal is wearing pants, long or short, it means hands off. Otherwise, grab whatever is passing by whenever you feel like it. The gals don’t make the approach. The things you remember are like standing aft with a big rum punch in a fresh wind with Mickey at the wheel really sailing that thing, putting on all the sail it’ll take, and those eight great bareass gals scampering around, hauling on those lines, trimming sail. And like being anchored in a cove in the moonlight, the evening meal done, and those gals singing harmony so sweet it would break your heart right in two. Great food and great drinks and good fishing. Everybody laughs a lot aboard the Belle. Between all they got to do, those gals put in a day full of work for a day’s pay. I can’t understand that damned stupid Barbie. Why’d she want to try some private hustling? Her old man must own half the state of South Carolina. Barbie’s been a sailboat bum all her life. And she gets this chance to make a good living doing the two things in this world she does best and enjoys most, sailing and screwing, and she blows the whole deal. It’s hard to understand. Anyway, we were out five days, and it was like being gone a month, I swear. It’s … it’s something different. If you ever see the Belle coming in here or leaving, you wouldn’t figure it out. Those gals look like some kind of Olympic people training for a race. Nimble and slender and tough and … fresh faced. Scrubbed. You know?”
• • •
On Sunday Lisa agreed without much argument to arrange her call so that I could hear both ends of the conversation. She placed it from the cottage. We had to wait a long time before the desk called back and said they had her party on the line. I sat close beside her, and she turned the phone slightly so we could both hear, my right ear and her left.
It was Harry’s nervous, lying voice. “Mary, honey? Is that you, Mary darling?”
“Yes, dear. Can you hear me?”
“Talk loud. You sound a million miles away, honey. Where are you? I’ve about gone out of my head with worry.”
I hoped he sounded more convincing to his secretary than he did to me. Lisa followed her prepared script, telling Harry to let Holly Dressner know she was all right and that she had phoned. She said she was afraid he’d find the travel agency she’d used. The Seven Seas. Down in Hallandale. Mrs. DeAngela had been very nice and helpful.
“Are you going to come home? To stay?”
“I think so, Harry. I think that’s best, really.”
“So do I. When, honey? When will you be home?”
“I’ve got reservations out of here May third. But don’t try to meet me. I don’t know when I’ll get in. And I’ll have my car. By the way, you don’t have to worry about the money. Not any more. I’m going to cable Mr. Willow tomorrow to activate the loan and put the money in your account, dear.”
“I’ve been getting pretty nervous.”
“I can imagine. I guess I wanted you to sweat a little.”
And on and on and finally it was over, and she hung up. She gave me a strange look and then wiped beads of sweat from her upper lip and throat.
“It spooked me.”
“I know.”
“If I’d been Mary, I certainly wouldn’t arrange a loan for that son of a bitch. I don’t see much point in that phone call, really. There’s enough without that.”
“His secretary will make a good witness. Mary Broll is alive and well and in Grenada. She’ll be home May third. She can say she was there when Mrs. Broll called her husband. Probably Harry will have his secretary get Mrs. Dressner on the phone and make sure his secretary hears him give her Mary’s message.”
“I don’t have to send her any more cards. If I was supposed to, Paul would have told me. He thinks everything out.”
“It’s a good way to be, if you like to kill people.”
“It’s weird. You know? I’ve thought and thought about what you said, Gav. The smart thing for him to do would be to kill me. Get word for me to meet him on the way back. Some other island. Arrange something. But I just can’t believe he would. We’re from the same town. We’re family. I keep having this dream about him. He’s standing watching me sleep, and I sneak my eyes open and find out he isn’t really looking at me. He’s looking the other way, and he has a mask just like his face that he wears on the back of his head. He’s pretending to watch me, but he’s looking at something else I can’t see. When the dream wakes me up, I’m cold all over.”
“We won’t have long to wait, Lisa. After you send the cable to Willow tomorrow, you’re no use to him.”
“Stay close to me, huh?”
I reassured her. I wouldn’t let the bad man get her. She’d be safe.
Sure.
Eighteen
I was up very early on Monday morning when the sun was still behind the green mountains. I swam. The tide was low and getting lower, still running out. I went back to take my shower before dressing for breakfast.
By then, of course, he had talked with Lisa long enough to discover I was one of his priorities. He had immobilized her an
d come after me. Usually I am pretty good at surprises. Some sense I cannot describe gives me a few microseconds of lead time, and when I get that kind of warning, the reaction time seems to be at its best. Perhaps it is hearing or the sense of smell at subliminal levels.
I don’t know where he hid. There were good places in the garden. He could have crouched behind the bar in the service area or behind some of the bigger pieces of furniture in the living room. He worked it out well. He saw me go swimming, and he nipped over the wall unobserved. I’d locked the gate but not the sliding door. He could assume I would come inside to take my shower, and I would have no reason to close the bathroom door. Standard procedure is to reach in and turn the handles until you get the roaring water to the right temperature, and then you step in. It is a moment of helplessness, and there is a useful curtain of sound.
I remember that when I got the water temperature the way I wanted it, I straightened to strip the swim trunks off. The whole back of my head blew up, and I went spinning and fluttering down through torrents of white, blinding light.
I know what he probably used. I made things easy for him. I had picked up the piece of driftwood in the surf a few days before. It was iron hard, less than a yard long, a stick an inch and a half in diameter with a sea-polished clump of root structure at the end of it the size of a large clenched fist.
Because he did not give a particular damn whether he killed me or not, he waited for the water roar, then came prowling into the bathroom with the club cocked, poising like a laborer to sledge a stake into hard ground.
The brain is a tender, gray jelly wrapped in membrane, threaded and fed with miles of blood tubes down to the diameter of thread. The gray jelly is a few billion cells which build up and discharge very small amounts of electric impulses. The whole wet, complex ball is encased in this bone, covered with a rubbery layer of scalp and a hair thatch which performs some small shock-absorbing service. Like the rest of the body, the brain is designed to include its own spare parts system. Brain cells are always dying at a rate dependent on how you live but are never replaced. There are supposed to be enough to last you. If a stroke should kill all the cells in the right hemisphere involved with communication—hearing and speaking, reading and writing—there is a fair chance of dormant cells in the left hemisphere being awakened and trained and plugged into the other parts of the system. Researchers can run a very thin electrode into an animal brain and hit a pleasure center and offer a chimp two levers—push one, and he gets a little electrical charge that makes him feel intense pleasure; push the other, and he gets a banana. The chimp will happily starve to death, pushing the pleasure lever. They can make a rabbit dangerously savage, a cat afraid of mice. They can put electrodes against your skull and trace pictures of your brain waves. If you have nice big steep alpha waves, you learn quickly and well. People who smoke a lot have stunted alpha waves. People who live in an area with a high index of air pollution—New York, Los Angeles, Birmingham—have rotten little alpha waves that are so tiny they are hard to find. No one knows yet why this is so. It may be a big fat waste of everybody’s money, time, and energy sending kids to school in Los Angeles, Chicago, and lately, Phoenix.
Anyway, if you take a club to all this miraculous gray tapioca with a good full swing and bash the back of the skull a little to the right of center where a right-hander is likely to hit it, it is not going to function at all for a while, and then it is going to function in some partial manner for a varying period of time, which could be for as long as it lives. If you have any blood leaking in there and building pressure between the bone and the jelly, then it is not going to live very long at all.
Even if there is a perfect, unlikely, one-hundred-percent recovery, it is going to take a long time to gather up the scattered pieces of memory of the time just prior to the blow and the time just subsequent to the recovery of partial consciousness. The memories will never be complete and perfect. Drop one of those big Seeburg jukes off the back of a pickup truck, and you are not going to get any music at all, and even if it can be fixed, the stereo might not ever work too well.
Forget the crap about the television series hard guy who gets slugged and shoved out of a fast moving car, wakes up in the ambulance, and immediately deduces that the kidnapper was a left-handed albino because Little Milly left her pill bottle on the second piling from the end of the pier. If hard case happens to wake up in the ambulance, he is going to be busy trying to remember his own name and wondering why he has double vision and what that loud noise is and why he keeps throwing up.
Assembling the bits of memory into some kind of proper order is a good trick, too.
Here’s one fragment. On my left side, curled up in a cramped, tilting, bouncing place where things dug into me. Very hot. Some fabric pasted to me with sweat. Head in a small place full of blue light. Something abrasive under my left cheek. Arms immovable, hands dead. Motor grinding. A woman making a keening sound somewhere near, a thin long gassy cry, over and over, not in fear, in pain, in sorrow—but as if she were practicing, trying to imitate something, like a broken valve in a steam plant. Blackout.
Another: being jounced and joggled, hanging head down, bent over something hard digging into my belly. Thighs clasped. By an arm? One brute son of a bitch to carry me that way in a walk, but this one was jogging! Begin shallow coughing that announces imminent vomit. Immediately dropped heavily into sand. Gag, choke, and drift back into the gray void.
There were others, more vague. Some were real, and some were dreams. The brain was trying to sort out the world and it took bits of input and built dreams. On patrol, clenching myself motionless against stony ground while the flare floated down, swinging a little, moving over to burn out against the shoulder of the hill that closed off the end of the valley they were using. A brilliantly vivid fragment of old nightmare of Junior Allen surfacing behind the cruiser, tough jowls wedged into the gap of the Danforth anchor.
Then along came a more detailed one that continued so long the brain was able to go to work on it, sorting out evidences of reality, comparing them to evidences of fantasy. I awoke slowly. I was sitting on sand, leaning back against something that felt like the trunk of a tree. My arms were fastened around behind me, painfully cramped. I tried to move them and could not. I tried to move my hands, wiggle my fingers, and I could feel nothing.
I stared down at familiar swim trunks and down the brown length of my very own legs with the curled hair sun-bleached to pure white against the brown hide. A quarter-inch-in-diameter nylon cord had been tied to both ankles. It had been pulled so tight it bit into the skin. My feet were puffed. There was a two-foot length of cord from ankle to ankle. My legs spraddled. A sea grape tree grew up out of the sand in the middle of the triangle formed by my spread legs and the ankle-to-ankle cord.
It took time to work it out. It was unlikely I had been there so long the tree had happened to grow there. Do trees grow slowly? Yes. Very slowly. Okay, could I have been fitted over the tree somehow? Long, careful thought. No. Too big. The ankles had been tied after they had been placed on either side of the tree. By me? No, the cord was too tight. My feet were swollen and blood dark. By somebody else then. Untie the cord? Not with arms I couldn’t move and hands I couldn’t feel. Remove tree? No way. I was supposed to stay there. No choice about it. I turned my head to the left, slowly, slowly. I was in shade. Out there the sand blazed under a high sun. Blue waves, small ones, moved in toward the sand and lifted, crested white, slapped and ran up the sandslant and back into the next wave. I turned my head the other way as slowly and looked to my right.
A man was sitting there. He was sitting on a small, inflatable blue raft I had seen afloat in Lisa’s pool. He had a weathered brown basket made of strips of woven palm frond, and he was pressing it back into shape and working new green strips of frond into it. He sat cross-legged, intent on his task. He had a trim cap of dark curls. He had dark eyes and long lashes. He had a plump red mouth. He wore white boxer shorts. He wore a gold cro
ss on a chain around his neck. He wore a wristwatch with a stainless steel band and a complicated dial. That was all.
As he tugged and pulled at the stubborn fronds, a lot of useful-looking muscles bulged and writhed and slid around under the smooth skin of arms and shoulders. He rose effortlessly to a standing position and turned the basket this way and that. It was crude. Conical. Half-bushel size. His legs were slender, but the long muscles looked springy and powerful.
A name tugged at the edge of my mind until finally I could fit my sour mouth around it. An articulated croak. “Paul.”
He looked at me. There is a way you look at people, and there is a way you look at objects. There is a difference in the way you look at objects. You do not look at your morning coffee cup, at a runover toad in your driveway, or at a flat tire the same way you look at people. This was the way a man might look at a flat tire that he was going to have to attend to in a little while. Not like the owner of the car but like a service station attendant. Damage appraisal, estimate of time required.
I managed another word. “Untie.” I was becoming a chatterbox. He looked back down at his basket repair job. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t talk to me. Then gray mists came rolling in from some swamp in the back of my head, and the world faded away …
I was being shaken awake. I was going to be late for school. I was picked up and placed on my feet. I squinted into a dazzling world and saw Paul looking at me. I was leaning back against a palm bole, weak and dizzy. I looked down and saw the familiar length of cord from ankle to ankle. Where could my sea grape tree have gone? I could not imagine.
Paul pulled me away from the tree and turned me to face the sea. He walked me carefully, holding onto my upper arm with both hands, helping me with my balance. I had to take short steps. There was very little feeling in my feet. He guided me at an angle down the beach, the trees at my left, the sea at my right. We were out in the hot glare, away from the shade of the trees. He stopped me and said, “Sit.” He helped me ease down onto the sea-damp brown sand, facing the basket I had seen him repairing. It was upside down on the sand, like a crude clown’s hat. A wave slid up the sand and took a light lick at the edge of the basket and at my right foot.
A Tan and Sandy Silence Page 18
