Matecumbe

by James A. Michener

  “Were you a passenger on the boat that crashed, ma’am?” John Wayne asked her.

  “No,” Melissa countered. “I’m Melissa Tomlinson. I’m a guest at the Seascaper.”

  Officer Joe Carlton, as he’d soon introduced himself, docked the rescue boat and then drove Melissa to a medical center on the other side of town. She couldn’t help but notice the sparkling blue eyes of her rescuer when, in the emergency room, he smiled and said he’d wait for her while a doctor tended to her bruised elbow.

  A friendly, slightly overweight physician checked her X-rays and told Melissa that she had no broken bones.

  While she sat, feeling vulnerable, Melissa remembered her long-ago trips to doctors’ offices for treatment of her childhood asthma. On more than one occasion, Melissa’s mom would complain about a doctor being inattentive or in a hurry to finish a consultation.

  Her mother was always doing verbal battle with the doctors who cared for Melissa and her sisters. Melissa remembered that her mom even considered writing a book called PATIENT OR PERSON—“about doctors who don’t listen sympathetically because they’re in a hurry to receive their money.”

  After being treated and bandaged, and pronounced fit except for a few scratches, Melissa was back in Officer Carlton’s car, headed again for the Seascaper.

  The calming combination of her slowly ebbing fright and the commanding presence of her handsome rescuer left Melissa temporarily mute. As well, an occasional drone from the vehicle’s siren seemed to discourage conversation.

  “God, he’s good-looking,” she told herself. “He seems to be about my age, too.”

  Despite her misgivings about policemen, her initial attraction to Officer Carlton was so strong that Melissa found herself wishing she could suddenly transform herself into a pert, cheerful debutante—and shed the disheveled, physically drained image she no doubt projected.

  “When you rescued me, what made you ask if I were on the boat, Detective Carlton?” Melissa inquired, tentatively, addressing him with an incorrect title.

  “Marijuana,” he answered, in what seemed like an affected southern drawl. “But just call me Joe. Everyone in Islamorada calls me Joe.

  “By the way, I was just informed by police radio that the two fellows who were on that speedboat are dead. Their bodies were found a few minutes ago. Earlier, while you were being rescued, several bales of marijuana floated ashore. We assume that they flew out of the boat on impact. So, my original suspicion was that the impact also threw you—from the boat to the pier.

  “I guess you’d like to be left off at the Seascaper office, so you can pick up your key,” Joe continued.

  “Why, yes, but how did you . . .”

  “I talked with the Seascaper folks while you were in the X-ray room. They told me you didn’t check in yet. But you are Melissa Tomlinson, like you said you were, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. My Uncle Steve lives not far from Philly.”

  “Oh, where?”

  “Somerdale, New Jersey. Nice little town, but too cold for me this time of year.

  “I’ll check up on you tomorrow, to see how you are,” Joe nodded, as he turned off his cruiser’s flashing light long enough to say good-bye.

  “It probably won’t be easy for you, Ms. Tomlinson, but try to get some rest.”

  Chapter 2

  The oftentimes-boring job she held as a secretary at the electric company paid most of her bills, but Mary Ann had to fight hard to stretch every penny. A typical weekday lunch consisted of coffee and a package of crackers—followed by a window-shopping stroll through the center of Pottstown.

  At Christmas time one year, Mary Ann sold her ancient kitchen table (“It’s almost an antique,” she told the buyer) so she’d have enough money to buy presents that the girls asked for. After the holiday season, the cold of winter always seemed endless. She worried constantly about the heating bill and keeping her girls warm.

  Luckily, Mary Ann was good at finding money. By keeping her eyes focused downward whenever she walked on sidewalks or crossed streets, she was able to spot coins that had fallen from pockets or purses. She picked up pennies and nickels totaling about two or three dollars a month. Mary Ann even trained her girls to look for money in the coinreturn slots of public telephones and vending machines. The girls found quarters and dimes mostly, and this total hovered at about eight dollars a month.

  From the proceeds of her found money, Mary Ann would occasionally play a ten-cent “street number” with her neighborhood bookie. She never hit a jackpot.

  From fall until early spring, she’d send the girls out to look for firewood. They’d pack the tiny kindling, branches, and broken pieces into bundles and sell them to neighbors. Their best firewood customer, however, gave up on the Pienta family’s haphazard product when he moved and bought an impressive, 12-room house in the fashionable section of town.

  “I’ll just be using mahogany, oak, and white birch from now on,” he told Mary Ann’s children. “They look prettier on the woodpile, and they burn a lot longer in my fireplaces.”

  One of Mary Ann’s biggest frustrations was not being able to get any of the big credit cards, even though she’d applied for a number of them. She heard the refusal reasons numerous times. “Your earnings are too low, your expenses are too high, and your husband once filed for bankruptcy.”

  One Saturday she found an expensive brown leather wallet right outside the confessional at church. It had a name monogrammed in small gold letters: “Paul Reynolds.”

  She was the last person left in the church outside of the priest who was still in the confessional, so she quickly slipped it inside her purse and ran from the church. After she had reached home, she found over $200 in the wallet. There was even a crisp new $50 bill. She had never seen a $50 bill before. Mary Ann sat and stared at the wallet for hours.

  She knew she could use the money. Her work shoes were beyond resoling, and Melissa needed new medication for her asthma. From the quality of the wallet, it appeared that the owner certainly could afford to lose it and buy another one.

  Still, she knew she couldn’t keep it. Stray nickels and pennies were one thing, this was really stealing. She’d always made it through tough times before without resorting to dishonesty. There was no identification in the wallet other than the gold monogram, so, after exhaustive contemplation, she decided there was only one thing to do.

  She reached for her coat and took the wallet back to the church. The doors were now locked, so, instead, she knocked with painful hesitation at the next-door rectory, a small older building where the pastor resided. She felt her heart beating quickly as she stood there, hearing nothing inside. Her eyes wandered upward, resting on a small cupola above the roof of this stone, stately structure. Two birds chirped over her head, then danced on the eaves, seeming to add a touch of poetry to the façade.

  Pastor Stevens answered the door, and for a moment Mary Ann stood dumbfounded, unable to explain why she had rung the bell. Pastor Stevens saw her consternation, took her arm and said, “Come in, Mary Ann. What brings you out on such a cold night?”

  Mary Ann took the wallet from her purse sheepishly and handed it to Pastor Stevens.

  “I found this wallet earlier in the church, Father. And even though we can desperately use the money, I just can’t keep it. It would be stealing, and I could never live with myself knowing I was reduced to that.”

  Pastor Stevens thanked Mary Ann for her honesty, and promised he wouldn’t divulge her identity when he found the wallet’s rightful owner.

  Going to church was a Sunday morning ritual for Mary Ann and the girls. The wearing of hats, gloves, and innovative, homemade dresses always seemed extra special. After Mass one cool morning in early March, several weeks after the wallet episode, Mary Ann smiled politely as Father Stevens introduced her to a man named Paul Reynolds.

  “A bank executive, Mary Ann,” the priest emphasized. “Paul here might be able to help you get a credit card.” Mary Ann’s heart was pounding. She k
new that Father Stevens would not betray her, but what was he up to?

  Several minutes later, while Mary Ann and the girls were walking home, Paul Reynolds jogged up behind them, out of breath, to continue the earlier conversation.

  “How about,” he offered, “some coffee and a little brunch?”

  Simultaneously, the girls cheered. Despite her rattled psyche, Mary Ann could not bear to disappoint the girls. After all, they were only going to face a modest lunch of hot dogs and beans at home. So she reluctantly said yes.

  Afterwards, Mary Ann’s youngest spoke of Reynolds as “the man with the calico mustache, orange, black, and gray, just like a cat might be.”

  Melissa’s eyes popped open at about eight o’clock the next morning. And although her elbow did ache slightly from last night’s misadventure, the warm Florida air proved to be a soothing tonic—not only for her physical state of health but also for her recently savaged, but silent, mental condition.

  “It’s always been so easy for me to relax in warmer weather,” she told herself. “I have no doubt that these balmy breezes can wash away some of the pain from my divorce. I’ll just forget the boat collision from last night and get on with my vacation. Who knows? Maybe some handsome stranger awaits me this week, among the smiling music of tiki bars and the controlled merriment of singles fun in the sun.”

  Melissa possessed scores of memories that had been evoked by warm weather. She and Brady had spent two weeks in sunny Athens a few years ago with a side excursion to see the ancient ruins and intricate mazes near Iráklion on the island of Crete. And the August prior, they had vacationed on the beaches of southern France. Memories always seemed richer and longer lasting when the experiences occurred in soothing summery weather, where she could commune much easier with nature.

  Melissa flitted about her beachfront motel room at the Seascaper for over an hour—unpacking suitcases and organizing her wardrobe for the week—while dressed only in a sheer lace nightgown with matching panties—part of the entire new wardrobe of lingerie she had afforded herself when the final divorce papers were signed.

  As she puttered, the sun outside was already warming the sand and the clear blue waters of the Gulf. When Melissa peeked through the curtains on the patio side of her room, she could see the scene of last night’s tragedy. The remains of the speedboat had been removed, but the pier had been roped off from public access. A huge, fire-scarred gap sat between the two separated sections of the pier.

  Apparently, the fire had continued to burn toward the far end, almost to the point where Melissa had been rescued. Seagulls and pelicans were now congregating on the abbreviated edge, wondering, perhaps, what had happened to the pier’s fishermen, with whom they would usually share the morning catch.

  After slipping into a pair of pink and blue slacks and a matching pink tee shirt, and applying just a trace of lipstick for some much needed color in her face, Melissa started to walk along the mile-and-one-half of adjacent beach. As she strolled past a group of date palm trees, she stopped to say hello to an egret, a tall, pure-white bird the size of a small flamingo. With their spindly, toothpick legs and long, retractable necks, these slow-walking birds appear to be vulnerable and flighty. Yet the egrets in Islamorada, Melissa remembered, were not so easily spooked. Most of the time they were so friendly that they’d walk right up to seaside sunbathers and seem to stand guard like faithful family dogs.

  She promised “Snowy,” as she called the bird, that she would be back later that afternoon with a tasty handout. Fish, preferably.

  During her walk, Melissa snapped off a wild purple hibiscus, the stem of which she had tied onto a lock of her short, brown hair. Then, before long, she made her way over to the Seascaper’s restaurant.

  Fresh fruit, fresh orange juice, and the most delicious, honey-dipped biscuits she had ever tasted were what she recalled about breakfasts at the Seascaper. The mere act of thinking about food again whetted her appetite even more. The last meal she’d eaten had featured a dull, warmed over chunk of chicken breast—courtesy of yesterday afternoon’s southbound airline.

  At the Seascaper, Melissa was all ears as her waitress described how an island-wide power outage the night before had knocked out the lights on the pier. The speedboat smugglers then failed to see the structure in the resulting darkness.

  “And I heard,” the waitress continued, as Melissa listened, with a straight face, “that one of our guests was rescued from the edge of the pier—pulled into a police boat with her bikini on fire!”

  Melissa also discovered, with a bit more reliability, that the desk clerk, who was supposed to be on duty when she had tried to check in, was forced to go hungry. Reportedly, he had caught a dinner-sized fish, just as his hand-written sign had prophesied, but he was unable to cook it once the power failure had rendered his electric stove inoperative. Undoubtedly, this clerk was no lover of sushi.

  Soon, after sharing a polite laugh with the waitress and while waiting for her food to be served, Melissa started thinking about Joe—and whether he would, indeed, “check up” on her as he’d promised.

  “It would be nice,” she told herself, “if he would take more than a cop-talks-to-suspect interest in me.”

  Melissa wondered, though, exactly how she should react if Joe decided to pursue her romantically. She’d certainly need to get over her aversion to southern policemen. Besides, she had been removed from the dating game for such a long time now that she was uncertain of her woman-meets-man social skills.

  Her mind skipped briefly to concerns about his marital status. Melissa was silently convincing herself that he wasn’t married. The only positive hint in this direction was the absence of any wedding ring—which Melissa noticed last night. She knew, though, that married men do not always wear the rings. Some, especially those with roving eyes, choose not to bear the burden of such branding.

  Being so far from her Philadelphia home, Melissa felt fairly secure that she couldn’t embarrass herself either professionally or with her ultra-liberal, trendy acquaintances if she condescended, class-wise, to date a “Cop Named Joe.” The value she always placed on “what other people think,” however, made her uneasy.

  Melissa had heard stories of well-educated women like herself who would vacation yearly in the Caribbean without their husbands. They would spend a lust-filled week playing in the sun with the young, native men before returning home as “faithful” wives. She knew that her staunch morals wouldn’t permit her to go to that extreme, and she was thankful.

  She finally convinced herself that although dating a policeman back home in Philadelphia might make her look sex-starved to her college educated co-workers, no harm would come of such a liaison over a thousand miles from her Philadelphia library and from her Philadelphia circle of friends.

  There did remain one other problem, though.

  “Damn it,” she scowled, as she sipped her freshly squeezed orange juice. “I should have talked more at length with Cammie about the new wave sexual etiquette. If he’s an eligible man, am I expected to make love to him right away, just because we’re both unattached, or will my chances of catching him be better if I play hard to get? Has the long-established standard of no kiss until the third date turned into a mandatory third date in bed? Or do men just disappear now after only one or two celibate get-togethers? And what about AIDS? What am I supposed to do about that? Are women always supposed to be prepared with condoms? Does that make me look easy or smart?”

  Melissa had little time to contemplate any answers to this quandary, for as soon as her papaya slices and biscuits arrived, so did Joe.

  “Hi, there. Can I sit with you and buy us both some coffee?” he asked.

  As soon as Melissa answered quickly in the affirmative, she smiled, almost blushing. And although Joe’s sudden appearance came too close on the heels of thoughts she did not yet want to share with him, Melissa was immediately turned on by his presence.

  In the daylight, he looked to be a slightly different pers
on. Still handsome, with the same bedroom eyes, he seemed more normal without his “Smoky” hat. He was once again wearing a policeman’s uniform, but Melissa could see his hair now, a curly brown with light strands of gray on the sideburns. He seemed more vigorous and less stilted than he had last night. She wondered what he would be like when not on duty, as if any policeman, married to the structure and discipline of his job, could ever be away from duty.

  Melissa felt a strange comfort in sharing her table with this powerfullooking man whose smile radiated all the good things that a man could be. Seeing him again caused her whole body to glow. It was like walking into a warm room after an outdoor stroll on an icy evening.

  Melissa told him that she felt just fine now and was hoping she could put last night behind her and complete her plans to stay in Islamorada for a week of sun and relaxation.

  “How long will it take them to fix the pier?” she began.

  “When I talked to Larry Basson, the owner of the Seascaper, early this morning,” Joe related, “he told me he intended to hire a crew as soon as possible. He said he’d pay them whatever it takes to get the pier fixed in time for January and February, the heart of the winter season. It’ll cost plenty to repair it in just two or three weeks, but the pier is one of the reasons that the Seascaper is so popular.”

  “I guess,” Melissa informed, “that you know already what the waitress told me. The power outage last night knocked out the lights on the pier, and that’s why the boat crashed into it.”

  “Oh, yes, and the lack of lights might result in an insurance payment delay for the Seascaper. Seems there’s some question as to whether the electric company has some liability. But Basson said he’ll fix the pier anyway and worry about insurance later.”

  Melissa felt relieved that “her” pier would once again be in operation, even though she wouldn’t be able to walk on it any more during her current vacation.

  Joe had already begun his second cup of coffee before he hit Melissa with the big news of the morning.