The Dreadful Lemon Sky Read online

“Jane, you go take a little walk for yourself. This is man talk. Give us fifteen minutes. McGee, come on in here, but don’t sit beside me. You can’t talk to a man sitting beside you, damn it. Open up that jump seat and sit facing me. That’s fine. Please don’t smoke.”

  “I had no intention of so doing.”

  He chuckled. “No intention of so doing. You ever read for the law? Can’t get the stink out of the upholstery.”

  He looked ludicrously like Harry Max Scorf. He looked as if somebody had taken Harry Max and inflated him until his skin was shiny-tight and then had spray-painted him pink. His round stomach rested on his round thighs. He wore khakis and a straw ranch hat. The motor purred almost soundlessly. The compressor for the air conditioning clicked on and off.

  “You’re one sizable son of a bitch, aren’t you?” he said. “That’s some goddamn pair of wrists on you. You go about two twenty-five?”

  “Few people guess it that close.”

  “I guess a lot of things close. It’s been a help over the years.”

  “Do you want to get to some kind of point?”

  “Saving us both time, eh? I have a protégé.”

  “Named Freddy Van Harn, who is engaged to be married to your niece, Jane Schermer. People think he has a political future. Then there could be those who don’t think he has any future at all.”

  “You are a quick one, all right. You surely are. Frederick and I discuss his future and his current problems from time to time. You came up as one of his current problems.”

  “Me?”

  “Pure bug-eyed astonishment, eh? Frederick is a lively young man. It’s entirely possible for a fellow like him to become involved in something foolish out of a sense of risk and adventure. At his age—he’s only twenty-nine—a single man can do some foolish things, never quite realizing that he might be destroying his whole future and destroying the dreams of the people depending on him. A man can have his sense of values warped by expediency sometimes, McGee. In Frederick’s case, he’s wanted to make money fast and make it big to wipe out the local memories of his father, a man who made a terrible mistake and took his life. Frederick became overextended, and he took a foolish risk in an effort to make some quick money. I’ve been very severe with him about that.”

  “What kind of risk?”

  “We don’t have to go into that here.”

  “Then let’s say he was flying in grass, dropping it to a friend in a power boat. That would be profitable and foolish enough, don’t you think?”

  “Out of the goodness of my heart, I would advise you not to get too smart-mouth and high-ass around me. It makes me irritable, and when I get irritable, I’m harder to deal with.”

  “I’m not after a deal.”

  “You might be sooner than you know.”

  “Whatever that might mean.”

  “Frederick Van Harn is a very talented attorney, and he has that special kind of charisma which means he can go far in public service. It’s past time that me and my little group had somebody in Tallahassee speaking up for this county and our special problems here. We’ve all he’ped him along ever’ way we could, ever since he got out of Stetson and set up practice here. Once he’s married to Janie he won’t have any more money problems to fret about and do foolish things trying to solve them. You get what I mean. Janie inherited ten thousand acres of the most profitable grove lands in this whole state.”

  “How nice for her.”

  “McGee, we’re talking about image here. We’re building an image people are going to trust. You ought to hear that boy give a speech. Make you tingle all over. What I wouldn’t want to happen, I wouldn’t want anybody to come here, some stranger, and try to make a big fuss based entirely on the word of some dead thieving slut.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “Especially when it would be bad timing for Frederick in his career. A man shouldn’t lose his whole future on account of one foolish act. It wouldn’t be fair, would it?”

  “To whom?”

  “To those of us working hard to see dreams come true.”

  I shook my head. “Judge, you picked the wrong protégé. You picked a bad one.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This Ready Freddy is kinky, Judge. He’s all twisted in the sex areas.”

  “By God, there’s nothing twisted about a man liking his pussy and going after it any danged place he can find it. When I was that boy’s age I was ranging three counties on the moonlight nights.”

  “He likes it to hurt them, Judge. He likes to force them. He likes to scare them. He likes to humiliate them. He leaves them with bad memories and a bad case of the shakes.”

  “I’d say you’ve been listening to some foolish woman with too many inhibitions to be any damn good in bed. I’d stake my life that boy is normal. And when he’s got a wife and career he’ll be too busy to go tomcatting.”

  “That sexy wife ought to keep him at home, all right.”

  “Watch yourself! You got a lot more mouth than you need.”

  “Judge, we have arrived at the end of our discussion. Weird as it may seem to you, I think your protégé is a murderous, spooky fellow. I think he has been going around killing people. I think he killed two friends of mine. Tell him that.”

  I reached behind me for the door handle. “Wait!” he said sharply. “What are you trying to pull? You can’t believe that shit!”

  “But I do!”

  We locked stares for ten long seconds. And then he looked down and away, lips pursed. “We couldn’t be that far wrong,” he said softly, wonderingly. He shook himself and glowered at me. “You want to raise the ante. All right. Here is your deal. Twenty-five thousand dollars cash to get out of this county and stay out.”

  “Not for ten times the offer, Judge.”

  “You are dead wrong about Frederick. Believe me.”

  “I’ll have to prove that to myself in my own way.”

  “Stop reaching back of you for that door handle. Set a minute. Everybody wants something bad. What is it you want?”

  “It isn’t nice to go around killing people.”

  “Frederick wouldn’t kill anybody. Have you got some romantical notion about getting even for Carrie Milligan? My God, McGee, these people that get into drugs, they’ve got the life expectancy of a mayfly. That girl probably didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. She walked into traffic.”

  “Like Joanna.”

  “A bomb? Frederick Van Harn fooling around with bombs? That’s ridiculous. What do you want? What are you after?”

  “Nothing you’d understand, Judge.”

  “I understand a lot of things. I understand the world is too full of people and half a billion of ’em are starving this year. I understand there’s a few million tons of phosphate under the ranchlands down in the southeast corner of this county, and the ecology freaks have kept National Minerals Industries from strip-mining it, and there’s a group of us thinks if we put Fred in the State Senate, that might get changed around and a lot of people might make out pretty good. I understand that we’re not going to stand for anybody coming in here and messing up our plans. People are starving because of the shortage of fertilizer. Phosphate is high priority, McGee. Now who’s going to do the most good in the world, Van Harn or you?”

  “It’s nice to know why you’re so interested in me.”

  “You know what I’m going to do for you? I’m going to set up a little session between you and Frederick, and I’ll let him tell you just what his involvement was.”

  “Are you sure you want to do that?”

  “What’s the matter? Afraid he’ll shoot your theories full of holes?”

  “I met him once. He didn’t impress me, Judge.”

  “You caught him at a bad time. He told me about it.”

  “Why should he tell you?”

  “I asked him if he’d ever met you.”

  “I’ll talk to him, sure. Send this car back with him in it, and I’ll talk to
him right here. Like this. Alone. If he’s willing.”

  “He’s willing to do what we want him to do.”

  “Let’s make it tomorrow. There isn’t enough of today left. I seem to get tired easily.”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  I got out. Jane Schermer was strolling slowly toward the limousine. When she saw me holding the door for her, she quickened her step. The Judge kicked the jump seat back into its niche. I handed her in and closed the door. The driver climbed in and chunked his door shut, and the car moved off through the late heat of the day, with a barely audible hum of gears and engine.

  Cindy was in the office. A man from Virginia was settling up, preparatory to leaving in the early morning on Monday. He was signing travelers’ checks. He wore red-white-and-blue shorts and a yellow shirt, funny shoes, and a funny hat. He had narrow little shoulders and a yard of rump. He was telling Cindy how great it had been, except when the bomb went off. She said she was sorry about that bomb. He said he didn’t know what people were thinking of these days. Like in Ireland.

  He went out with his receipt and with Cindy’s wishes for a good cruise back to Virginia. The door swung shut and she said, “You look practically gray. What is it, dear?”

  “The Judge wore me down. I’m going to go lie down.”

  “Before you fall down.”

  “I’m going to swim in that motel pool first.”

  “Should you?”

  “If I don’t get the dressing wet.”

  “Somebody ought to be with you.”

  The new fellow came in. Ritchie. A little older than Ollie and Jason, a lot less hairy. He said Jason was out on the docks and sure, he’d take the desk.

  I went to the Flush and got swim trunks. Meyer wasn’t aboard. I changed in the motel, and by the time I got to the pool Cindy was there, taking long sweeping strokes, a fast crawl from end to end, using kick turns. The dusk light was turning orange, making the world look odd, as though awaiting thunder. I sat on the edge of the pool and admired the smooth flexing of the muscles of her back and hips and thighs as she made those turns. Then I lowered myself into the pool and paddled lethargically around, keeping my head high. She wore a white suit, white swim cap.

  When I clambered out, refreshed and relaxed, she was still swimming hard, but she was beginning to labor, beginning that side to side roll of exhaustion. At last she came to the edge and clung, panting audibly. I went and took her wrists and hoisted her out. She stumbled against me and recoiled, turning away from me.

  “What was that all about?”

  “What was what all about?” She walked over to her towel and mopped her face, tugged the cap off, shook her dark hair out, and sat in an aluminum chaise and closed her eyes.

  I sat on the concrete beside the chaise and took hold of her hand. It was brown and boneless, without response. “What was the compulsive swimming all about?”

  “Exercise. That’s all.”

  “All?”

  “Well. I guess I was fighting us. Working off anger.”

  “Why?”

  “It just seems too pat. Just too damned easy, that’s all. Nothing comes for free. Everything costs. I walk around all day wanting to be in bed with you. Knowing I will be. But maybe I won’t be.”

  “Why not?”

  “Weren’t you listening? I said it was too easy for us.”

  “And that makes it bad? That makes it ugly?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Meyer is the one with the erudition. Meyer is the one with all the smarts. I can give you something secondhand from Meyer which might help. It comes from a smart tough old Greek by the name of Homer. I’ll tell you what he said … if you’ll use it.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “He said, ‘Dear to us ever is the banquet and the harp and the dance and changes of raiment and the warm bath and love and sleep.’ ”

  She kept her eyes closed and her face told me nothing. Finally she said, “Dear to us ever. Yes.” She turned her head toward me and opened her eyes and linked her fingers in mine. “Maybe that old Greek meant that a thing in and of itself is okay, without deadlines or promissory notes or anything. Just in and of itself alone.”

  “In and of itself together.”

  “Well, sure.”

  And so we went into the motel where there was a last pink tinge of sunlight dimly reflected on a far wall. Out of the wet suits our bodies were enclasped clammy cool, but swiftly heating. There was no constraint in her, only a merging and changing energy, quite swift and certain of itself, strong and searching.

  When I awoke she was gone. There was a rusty old projector in the back of my mind, showing underexposed film on a mildewed screen. The projection bulb kept burning out and the film kept jamming in the gate, but by watching closely I could make most of it out. Memory was healing itself, taking me from banyan shelter in the rain to Fifteen Hundred to my talk with the bald man. It was all of a piece, but with murky places which I hoped would become more clear to me as time went on.

  It was four in the morning. I was on the edge of sleep, beginning to hallucinate back into my dreams, when the creak of the interconnecting door brought me awake. I smelled her perfume. Her groping hand touched my shoulder. She whispered my name.

  I turned the sheet back for her and she came shivering in beside me, chattering her teeth. She wore something gauzy and hip-length.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I dreamed you were d-d-dead too, darling.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I just had to come in and hold you. That’s all I want.”

  “Everything is all right. It’s all right.”

  “I’ll be okay in a little wh-while.”

  I held her, close and safe. She felt restless for quite a long time, and then gradually her breathing slowed and deepened. I tried to visualize her face but could not, and at the edge of sleep I had the nightmare vision of face without features, of a rounded, tanned expanse of flesh, anonymous as the back of her shoulder.

  When I awoke at dawn she was still with me. I thought I was aboard the Flush, and for a time I did not know who she was. Her leg jumped twice and she made a whining sound before turning back into heavy sleep.

  As once again she became restless, I tried to find the answer to my feeling that I could not seem to get truly close to her. I did not know enough about her. Had she fallen out of apple trees, ridden a red bike, built castles in a sandbox, scabbed her knees, worshiped her daddy, sung in a choir, written poetry, walked in the rain? She did not tell me enough. I wanted to know all of the complex of experience which had finally brought her to this place and time, to this moment with her dark hair fragrant and pressed against the edge of my chin. A widow, now indulging herself in the delights of the flesh, so long denied by the hulking drunken husband, and feeling guilt for such indulgence. I was being used, and wanted a deeper and truer contact. I wondered if I wanted her to be in love with me, as a sop to my ego, perhaps.

  There was a change in the feel of her, in the textures of her, that told me she was now awake. Gently, gently, she disengaged herself as I feigned sleep. She sat on the edge of the bed and groped for the short nightgown, then stood and put it on. Through slitted eyes I saw her put a fist in front of a wide yawn, a yawn so huge it made her shudder. She moved silently across the room and slipped through the interconnecting door. I heard the soft click of the latch and the second metallic sound that meant she had locked the door behind her. A gesture for the motel maid? A disavowal? Or the end of the episode?

  Thirteen

  Frederick Van Harn sat in the same rear corner of the limousine as had the Judge. The black chauffeur sat upon a different bench because the shade patterns were different at ten o’clock on that Monday morning. The engine ran as quietly as before, the compressor clicking on and off.

  I sat on the same jump seat, turned to face him. I wore boat pants, sandals, a faded old shirt from Guatemala. He wore a beige business suit, white shirt, tie of dark gree
n silk, dark brown loafers polished to satin gloss. As he looked directly at me I saw that his sideburns were precisely even. The sideburn hair was long, brushed back to cover the ears. Neat little ears, I imagined. Maybe a bit pointed on the top. Olive skin, delicate features, long dark eyelashes, brown liquid eyes.

  I had been an annoyance to him when we had met at Jack Omaha’s house. He studied me quietly, very much at ease, not the least bit uncomfortable. His hands were long and sinewy, and he clasped his fingers around a slightly upraised knee.

  “Mr. McGee, you got under my skin pretty good when we met at Chris’s place.”

  “You went into a massive tizzy.”

  He smiled. “Are you trying to do it again?”

  “I don’t know. What are you trying to do?”

  It was an engaging smile. Very direct. “I’m trying to get you off my back. Uncle Jake thinks you could hurt me.”

  “Don’t you?”

  The smile faded. He looked earnest. “I really don’t see how. Oh, if you were politically inclined you could give me some static by bringing up the dumb-ass bit about flying marijuana in, but you’d have no proof of that, and I think I could deny it convincingly. Besides, I don’t think people are as dead set against it as they used to be. The use of it is too prevalent. I hear that a long time ago the rumrunners were folk heroes along this coast. It’s getting to be much the same with grass. I’m not sure you could hurt me.”

  “What if somebody got notarized statements from Betty Joller and Susan Dobrovsky? Do you think your kinky love life could hurt you any if it came out?”

  He colored but recovered quickly. “People must find it remarkably easy to talk to you, McGee. I don’t think there’s anything kinky about enjoying the hard sell. Reluctance stimulates me. Maybe in retrospect they see it differently than it was. But in both those cases there were plenty of squeals of girlish joy.”

  “Joanna thought you were tiresome.”

  “Please stop trying to bait me. Let’s try to get along at least a little bit. Try to understand each other.”

  “What do you want me to understand?”

  He shrugged. “How I was such a damned fool. I’d flown to most of the islands. I’m a good pilot. I’ve got a good airplane and I keep it in first-class condition. As lawyer for Superior Building Supplies, I knew Jack and Harry were in bad shape and things were getting worse. I think it was Jack who brought it up, like a joke. I had said something about falling behind on the ranch payments and trying to get an extension on the loan. He said we ought to work out a way to bring grass in. He said he could find a nice outlet for us. We met again and planned how we could do it, still treating it as a joke. Finally I went down and lined up a source in Jamaica and then we … went ahead. We couldn’t afford much the first time. But it all worked out okay.”