The Dreadful Lemon Sky Read online

  “If you want to bring a small portable fire extinguisher, I’ll talk Meyer into cooking some of his renowned chili tonight.”

  “That would be nice,” she said, forcing it.

  “Anything wrong?”

  “Nothing at all, thank you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Certainly I’m sure!”

  There is no going past that point. All the roads are barricaded and all the bridges are blown. The fields are mined and the artillery has every sector zeroed in.

  So I went and moved my toothbrush and accessories out of the unit, went to the front, and paid a fat lady my accumulated charges. She asked me if I was feeling better, and I said I was feeling just great. She said, “It’s so nice that Mrs. Birdsong has a friend nearby in her time of need. Have you known her long?”

  “A very long time.”

  “He drank, you know.”

  “Yes. Cal drank.”

  “In a way, it’s a blessing.”

  “There are a lot of ways of looking at everything, I guess.” “Oh, yes, that’s so true.”

  A small fire fight, with no decision. Both sides retreated.

  When I got to the boat, the glass people had arrived. There were four of them, in white coveralls, with the pieces all cut to size, tempered glass for marine use. The foreman said they would be through by four at the latest. Jason and Meyer were celebrating the completion of the vinyl job on the sun deck by having a cold beer in the shade of the canopy over the topside control panel. I inspected the job and gave my approval.

  I am skeptical of all of the so-termed marvelous advances of science. And I am suspicious of anything which tries to look like something it isn’t. Thus it would seem that a coal-tar derivative patterned to look like bleached teak would turn me totally off. But it is so damned practical. If you should ever have an artery which can’t be repaired, it can be replaced with woven Dacron. And, wearing that in your gut, it would be unseemly to go about muttering about the plastic world full of plastic people.

  So I stand on my plastic deck and mutter whatever I please. When did I make any claim about being consistent? Or even reasonable?

  I went below and checked out my stereo set. I put on the new record, Ruby Braff and George Barnes. It is nice to have one that is just out and know that it is destined to become one of the great jazz classics. I knew I had lost one speaker. I suspected I had lost more. Delicate micro-circuitry cannot take that kind of explosive compression. When the noise came out, sounding like someone gargling a throatful of crickets, I snapped it off in haste.

  Back to the shop. No new components. Get the Marantz stuff fixed. I did not think I could placidly endure another gleaming salesman tell me that I had to have quadraphony sound, coming at me from all directions. I have never felt any urge to stand in the middle of a group of musicians. They belong over there, damn it, and I belong over here, listening to what they are doing over there. Music that enfolds you, coming from some undetectable set of sources, is gimmicky, unreal, and eminently forgettable.

  Jason went back to work his turn in the office. Meyer and I made some sardine sandwiches. He was glad to learn I was back aboard for good. We sat at the booth in the galley and ate. And compared notes and reports.

  “We are absolutely nowhere,” Meyer said.

  “A perfect summary.”

  “Are you sure you feel okay?”

  “Don’t I look okay?”

  “Glassy. You stare at me in a … goggly way.”

  “Come to think of it, I feel goggly and glassy.”

  “Just this minute. Or …”

  “Most of the time. The light seems too bright.”

  “When the windows are done—”

  “The ports.”

  “When the windows are done, we could go.”

  “Home?”

  “And forget this whole mess, Travis.”

  “Tempting. Who are we supposed to be, going around finding out who did what and why?”

  “That’s why they have police.”

  “Right!”

  We beamed at each other, but we both knew we were talking nonsense. The habit of involvement is not easily broken. It is even more pervasive than the habit of noninvolvement, the habit of walking away when the action starts.

  I told him we couldn’t leave because we had a guest coming for dinner. I told him he was cooking chili.

  Fourteen

  We three had sat with tears running down our cheeks and told each other in choked voices that the chili was truly delicious. She and Meyer had cleaned up, telling me that I was still on semi-invalid status.

  By the time they were through, there was a large dark night outside, wide as a country, high as the stars, and hot with the night winds of June.

  We killed the lights and went topside to a shadowed part of the sun deck, out of the reach of dock lights. The sky was pink orange over Bayside, all its outdoor advertising glowing against a mist made of hydrocarbon fartings of trucks and other vehicles. We aligned deck chairs on the newly repaired decking so as to look out at the stars over the Atlantic. We were into the rainy season now. The night of June tenth. Bulbous black lay low to the southeast, sullenly flickering an unseen artillery of lightning.

  She on my left, Meyer on my right, the night air stirring across us and then fluttering back to stillness. Her hand had crept over to my thigh, stealthily, nudged a welcome, and was enclosed by my hand, unseen by Meyer, as if we were children in church. With my thumb I rubbed the thick warm pads at the base of her fingers. I wondered if she had been told or had guessed that her husband had not died of natural causes. They would have to tell her, sooner or later, no matter how pessimistic the law felt about catching whoever had done it. Harry Max Scorf had indicated quite plainly that she was on his list of suspects. Though I knew her very well in certain limited ways, I knew her not at all in many aspects. But I could not imagine her killing in that stealthy way, jabbing a wire into the great chest while the king slept.

  Harry Max Scorf, in a dogged and plodding pattern, would have long since established the identity of every person who could have gotten close to Cal Birdsong long enough to do him in.

  “It always seems such a waste when it rains way out there,” she said. “Sort of badly managed, to rain into the sea.”

  “It’s moving this way,” Meyer said. “But your average thunderstorm has a total life span of fifty-five minutes.”

  She sat up and looked across me at Meyer. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Believe him,” I said.

  “When the conditions are right a pod will be forming in the area as the older pod is dissipating its energies. Thus we get the impression of one single storm lasting for hours. Not so.”

  She settled back and made a small sound of mirth and wryness. “The rest of my life,” she said, “I’ll see a thunderstorm and say to myself they only last fifty-five minutes.”

  Her hand still rested on mine, her hand warm and dry. I thought of lies and polygraphs and biofeedback. One type of biofeedback machine requires strapping a pair of electrodes to the palm of your hand. When you are tense and nervous, your palm is moist and cool and the conductivity of your skin is increased. The machine has a dial and a little electronic tone, thin and insectile. As you make yourself more calm your hand becomes more dry, the dial needle swings slowly downward, and the electronic note moves down the scale. By giving you the visible and audible results of different mental and emotional postures, in time you learn, without the machine, how to impose a great calm upon yourself, an alpha state, if you will.

  Soon she would be told her husband had been murdered. The required Grand Jury hearing could not be delayed indefinitely. I rubbed my thumb back and forth across the pads of the palm of her hand, and tried to think of how to word my trick remark, and felt disgusted with myself. A rotten game to play with this woman.

  Suddenly, without a word being said, I felt her palm go cold and wet. She tugged her hand away and got up and moved over
to the rail and turned to lean against it, her arms folded, her shoulders hunched forward.

  “What’s wrong, Cindy?”

  “I guess somebody walked over my grave.”

  She was silhouetted against the intermittent glow of distant lightning. “Did you think of something that upset you?”

  “I think I’ll go home now,” she said.

  “I’ll walk you.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “No trouble.”

  I tried to make conversation as we walked to the motel, but she gave one-word responses. She unlocked the door and pushed it open and turned to me. I took her in my arms. Her lips were cool and firm. There was no response in lips or body, and then there was a lot. A hungry lot.

  We went in and the door clicked shut. “No lights,” she said. “Don’t let me think about anything. Don’t give me time to think about anything. Please.”

  The bed was by big windows. The draperies were open. The storm moved closer. The lightning flashes were vivid. Each one made a still picture of her in black and white. Black eyes and lips and hair and nipples and groin. White, white, white all the rest of her. The lightning arrested movement. It caught her in a fluid turning, mouth agape with harsh breath and effort. It froze a leg, lifting. It stopped her, astride, arms braced, halting the elliptical swing of hips, turning her into a pen and ink drawing of greatest clarity. I kept her for a long time within the prison of her own tensions, though she escaped to partial release from time to time. Each lightning stroke seemed to be brighter, each stroke bringing the thunder closer and sharper. At last the lightning made a ticking sound, filled the room with a strange hard blue light, and the great following bang of thunder made her gasp and leap. The ensuing crashing downpour of the rain was like a signal to us.

  We lay damp and slack in a close and sweaty embrace, content, heavy-breathing, detumescent. The storm air moved across us, cooling our bodies. The intensity of the downpour began to slacken, but it was still a heavy tropic rain.

  “Ruthie took those pills,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You didn’t know her. It was a long time ago. Bud—he was her husband—ran off a curve and hit a big tree. They gave her pills to make it easier. God, she took so many pills you couldn’t talk to her, hardly. Huh? She’d say. Huh? Wha’? And sleep? She’d sleep twenty hours a day. Toby—you didn’t know him either—his wife went back to see her sick mother and the airplane fell out of the sky. For Toby it was booze. After a year they had to put him away and dry him out. People use things, don’t they? I’m using sex. I want it to be more and more, every time with you. It was more this time than ever. When it’s so much, I can’t think about anything else. The thing about me is, I’m not like this. Not really. I told you Cal hadn’t touched me in ever so long. But it didn’t make me feel … deprived. I mean it was okay. I guess I’m the way I am now, with you, because I try so hard to get my mind turned off. I try so hard, I get way way into the sex thing, like I couldn’t before. I always felt a little odd about it. Ashamed, almost. I mean being so big and strong and healthy and looking … as if I would like it.”

  “You need never feel odd again.”

  “I won’t. I won’t.”

  “And you’ve got a talking jag.”

  “I know. And you have to listen, don’t you? We don’t really know each other. It’s strange. I guess the way men think about these things, without me sounding like an egomaniac, what you did was luck out. You came along at the time when any presentable and sympathetic guy would be right where you are right now, doing what you were doing.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere.”

  “Trav, please don’t make flip little remarks. What our relationship is, it’s backassward. It started at the end, and I want to find our beginnings. I want to know you as a person, not just want you terrible for the way you can turn my head off. It’s a genuine compulsion, really.”

  “Okay. No flip remarks. No bedroom comedy. I saw the vulnerability and I took advantage. So that makes it seem unreal to me too. But it’s more than pure physical hunger.”

  “What else is it?”

  “Liking you. Wanting things to be right for you. Wanting the world to be a special place for you. Also, there’s guilt.”

  “About what?”

  “About knowing that Cal was murdered. Harry Max Scorf told me. I don’t know if he knew I’d tell you.”

  She sat up, with sharp hissing exhalation. “How?” she whispered.

  I told her. She made a sick sound and closed her fingers around my arm with impressive force.

  “Jason,” she whispered.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I can’t prove anything. Once … after things had been very bad—Cal was drunk and he beat me—Jason came to me and said that there were ways Cal could be killed that nobody would ever know. I made him be still. I knew he was going to say he’d do it for me. And he would have. He’s a strange boy. He can’t stand any kind of cruelty. He was a battered child. He nearly died of it. And he has been … a little bit in love with me, I think.”

  “It showed, after Cal knocked you out.”

  She settled slowly back down again, cheek against my chest, arm heavy across me. “I thought I saw him at the hospital the evening Cal died. I was going out to eat. I thought I saw Jason riding his bike toward the hospital at the far end of the parking lot. I didn’t think any more about it until now. When I came back from eating, all those people were working on Cal so frantically. What it probably was was a piece of stiff leader wire. Cal was in one of those security rooms, single rooms, but he wasn’t guarded. But I don’t really know. So I don’t have to go and tell anyone, do I?”

  “Are you angry at Jason?”

  “I don’t know. Cal was killing himself in any case. They’d told him his liver was going bad and he shouldn’t drink at all. I can understand why Jason did it. If he did it. Trav, help me.”

  “Captain Scorf will ask questions of you, sooner or later. It would look better if you went to him. Ask him if your husband died of natural causes. If he levels with you, register shock and then tell your suspicions. It will have to be your choice as to whether you tell Jason you’re going to see Scorf and, if Jason runs, how much lead time you give him.”

  “Okay. I’ll do it that way. But I wish you hadn’t told me anything, dear.”

  “Why did you get upset tonight when we were looking at the stars and the storm?”

  “Upset? Oh, I just remembered a nightmare Cal had, about a week before he died. He woke up roaring. I couldn’t seem to make him wake up. I looked up at the dark sky and remembered. He had a nightmare about something falling toward him out of the sky that was going to kill him, that was going to land on him and kill him, and he couldn’t get out from underneath it. He was so really terrified that I guess it left a mark on me. Half nightmare and half delirium, I guess it was. His mind had gone all warped and nasty from the drinking. Then he didn’t want me to tell anybody about his nightmare! As if anybody in the world would give a damn! Tonight I remembered, and it made me feel weird and crawly.”

  The rain stopped. Another pod formed and came grumbling toward us through the night. She talked in a slumbrous, murmurous voice, and then the voice ended and her breathing changed, slow, deep, and warm against my throat. I watched the flashes against the window and against the ceiling. The new storm moved closer, and at last the thunder became loud enough to awaken her. She started, then settled back. “I was dreaming,” she said.

  “Pleasant dreams?”

  “Not really. I was in front of a judge’s bench. It was very high, so high I couldn’t see him at all. They wouldn’t let me move back to where I could see him, and it made me angry. I knew he would never believe me unless I could see him and he could see me. I was accused of something about Jason, doing something wrong.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I was guilty of something, all right. I mean when somebody is attracted to you, you kno
w about it. And it feels good to be admired that way. So you … respond to it. Do you know what I mean? It changes the way you look at the other person, and the way you walk when you walk away from them, and it changes the pitch of your voice when you laugh. So I guess … those little things would add up, and maybe that’s why he did what he did. If he did it.”

  “Don’t go around looking for guilt.”

  “I miss Cal. I miss him every single day of my life. It had gotten to be a rotten marriage, and I miss him terribly.”

  “Involvement doesn’t have to be good or bad. It just is. It exists. And when it stops, it leaves emptiness.”

  “Something happens, and I think how I’ll have to tell Cal about that. Then I know I can’t. Oh, hell.”

  She began to weep, without particular emphasis. Gentle tears for a rainy night. When they subsided she began an imitation of need, a faking of desire. But the textures of her mouth were unconvincing. The storm time had worn us both out. I was glad she did not persist, as male pride would have made the responsive effort obligatory. The second storm was upon us, the wet wind blowing across weary bodies. I covered us with the sheet. The lightning once again took still pictures of the room, of her head on the pillow beside me. After the crashing downpour turned to a diminishing rain, she slept. When the rain stopped I slipped out of the bed, closed the draperies, groped my way into my clothes, and left without awakening her, testing the door to be sure it had locked behind me.

  The storm had knocked the power out. There were stars in half the sky. My eyes were accustomed to darkness. I found the path without difficulty and walked between the black shapes of shrubbery, down the slope past the office, and out onto the dock.

  Meyer had locked the Flush and gone to bed. I found the right key by touch. In the darkness of the lounge I gave my left shin a nasty rap against the new coffee table. I limped to the head and, by darkness, took a long hot sudsy shower. The great bed swallowed me up like a toad flicking a fly into the black belly.

  Fifteen

  By the time I came out to fix my breakfast, Meyer was having his second cup of coffee.