A Flash of Green Read online

  He came back to the table. “You would have taken a whipping, Kat.”

  “I just didn’t think I could endure living here.”

  “We can always stand a little more than we think we can. One thing on my mind, Kat, I’ve got to drive up to Sarasota next Sunday. Borklund wants me to do a feature on their public beach program. I’ve got about everything I need, but there’s one fellow I want to talk to. And he won’t take up much time. So how about you and the kids coming along?”

  She studied him, wondering if it was coincidence, then saw his casualness was a little too elaborate. “Thank you, dear Jimmy. I know it’s going to be a rough day for me. I’ve been dreading it for weeks. But I’ll manage.”

  He shrugged. “But if coming along with me would make it any easier …”

  “It would. Indeed it would, and I’m grateful. But, you see, the neighbors have been conspiring to keep me distracted, and I’ve given so many polite refusals I wouldn’t feel right saying yes to you. Van died on July ninth. Once I’m past this one, it will be over a year. I can manage it. The kids and I are going on a beach picnic by ourselves. I’ll have a lot of July ninths to get over. This will only be the second worst. Jimmy, it’s nice to have you stop by. I like seeing you in the bank too, but that’s when I have to keep being the happy hostess. Ready for another beer?”

  “I’ll ride with this, thanks.” He frowned at his big, bony, freckled fist for a few moments, then looked at her with an odd expression. “I thought you’d come along on Sunday, and it would have given me a chance to talk to you about something.”

  “You act as if it’s something unpleasant.”

  “It is, and I better give it to you now. It’s off the record, honey. You’re still active in the S.O.B.’s, aren’t you?”

  “Recording secretary, but there hasn’t been anything to record. Save Our Bays, Inc., has sort of been resting on its laurels.”

  “It might be a very timely idea for you to resign.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “That project of filling in Grassy Bay is going to be opened up again soon.”

  “You can’t mean it, Jimmy! You can’t be serious. Two years ago we licked it. I never worked so darned hard in my life. And Van too. All those phone calls and petitions and ringing doorbells and going to public meetings and taking all that abuse. We whipped them. We mobilized all the conservation groups and we got a bulkhead line established in Palm County, and nobody can fill beyond that line. Nobody can touch Grassy Bay. We saved it! You must be joking.”

  His smile was bitter. “It’s going to astound a lot of other people too. Let’s say you saved it for two years. It’s a different deal this time. They’ve been setting it up quietly for almost a year. Last time, it was an outfit coming in from outside.”

  “Sea ’n Sun Development. From Lauderdale.”

  “This time it’s local.”

  “Local men?”

  “Don’t look so incredulous. And the fill project is a little bigger. Eight hundred acres. They have an option on a good big piece of upland to give them access to the bay. The financing has been arranged for. When the county commissioners set that wonderful bulkhead line, they reserved the right to change it.”

  “But they have to have a public hearing.”

  “I know. The new syndicate will petition for a change in the bulkhead line along the bay shore of Sandy Key, to swing the line out to enclose eight hundred acres of so-called unsightly mud flats, and request county permission to buy the bay bottom from the State Internal Improvement Fund. The commissioners will set a date for a public hearing, at which time prominent local businessmen will go to the microphone, one after the other, and say what a great boon this will be to the community, a shot in the arm for the construction business and the retail stores. Captive experts will get up and say the fill will have no effect on fish breeding grounds or bird life, and will not change the tide pattern so as to cause beach erosion. It will be nicely timed, because a lot of the militant bird-watchers and do-gooders will be north for the summer, and they won’t give the ones who are left here much time to organize the opposition. The commissioners will change the bulkhead line and approve the syndicate application to purchase. The trustees of the IIF will sell the bay bottom at an estimated three hundred and fifty dollars an acre, and then the drag lines and dredges will move in. It’s going to be a steamroller operation, Kat, and it’s going to run right over anybody who stands in the way.”

  “We can’t let it happen.”

  “We can’t stop it this time. Kat, there’s a fortune sitting out there in that bay. I figure total development cost at a max of three million against a total minimum gross sales of lots of six and a half million. Where else along this coast is there water that shallow so close to an urban area?”

  “But we must stop them, Jimmy!” She stared at him. “Why do you think I’d resign now?”

  He stood up. “Need another beer. Stay where you are.”

  She heard the refrigerator door slam. Barnett rapped at the patio door. She got his money from her purse and took it to him. He told her he’d cut the vine off close to the ground, and when he came next Tuesday he’d trim the big pepper hedge.

  She walked, frowning, back to the table where Jimmy Wing sat. “You should resign because it’ll be easier now than later. The new deal is called the Palmland Development Company. Your neighbor, Burton Lesser, is heading it up.”

  “Burt! But he was against …”

  “Against somebody else doing it. Leroy Shannard is in on it, handling the legal end. He handled Van’s estate, I know. And the uplands they took the option on is part of the Jerome Cable estate, and your neighbor and employer, Martin Cable, is the executor of that estate. A good piece of the financing has been worked out through the Cable Bank and Trust Company. And this time the newspaper isn’t going to be so scrupulously neutral.”

  “Ben Killian should have been on our side last time,” she said indignantly.

  “He won’t be this time. This is home industry, kid. It’s going to be patriotic to be for it, and like some unspeakable act to oppose it.”

  She leaned back in her chair and stared at him in dismay. “But all those men know better, Jimmy.”

  “And they know how much cash is sitting out there on those flats.”

  “Grassy Bay is one of the most unique and beautiful …”

  “You don’t have to sell me, honey.”

  “You helped us last time.”

  “Not this time.”

  “Are you scared to, Jimmy?”

  “I’m scared of a lot of things. This might as well be one of them. Katherine, you’d better take stock. There’s one hell of a difference between being Mrs. Vance Hubble, wife of an architect, and Mrs. Vance Hubble, the young widow who works at the bank.”

  “I should keep my head down?”

  “That’s my message. These are men you know, but they aren’t going to fool around. It could get dirty, honey.”

  She stood up and walked away from the table, turned and looked back toward him with a puzzled expression. “So I should give up on something Van believed in? Just like that?”

  “I know he took a certain risk in taking the stand he did. He lost some contracts. But he got some new ones to make up for it. So you could call it a calculated risk. I can tell you this, Kat. If he could see the way this one is set up, he wouldn’t mess into it.”

  “That’s a filthy thing to say!”

  “Why so? My God, the world is a practical place and Van was a pretty practical guy.”

  “But he fought for what he believed.”

  “Most men do, up to a point. But when they stand to lose too much, and gain too little, they think up reasons to stay out of it.”

  “Van wasn’t like that.”

  “It’s a point we can’t argue. I just don’t want you to get into any kind of … of a memorial campaign. The bay is gone.”

  She moved slowly back toward the table. “When Van
first brought me down here, I hated it. I missed the hills and the snow and the familiar seasons. One morning very early—it must have been nine years ago, because I was pregnant with Roy—we went to Hoyt’s Marina and went out in the boat. It was that old skiff we used to have, and he’d just bought it, used, and fixed it up a little. There was a heavy mist. The tide was going out of Grassy Bay, flowing out through Turk’s Pass. It was warm and still. He stopped the old engine and we drifted across the flats. It was a private little world, with the mist all around us. It was a time when if you wanted to say anything, you felt like whispering. I heard the sea grass brushing the bottom of the boat. Sometimes we’d catch and turn slowly and come free, or Van would push us off with the pole. I heard fish slap the water, and once we heard the snuffling of porpoise over in the channel next to the mainland shore. It grew brighter in the mist. I looked over the side and watched the sand, the mud, the grass, and a million minnows. Van told me to look up. Directly overhead the morning mist was so thin I could see the blue of the sky through it, and just then a flight of white pelicans went over, much lower than you usually see them. I saw them through the mist, and I heard a hushed creaking of their wings. It was a magic time, Jimmy, and that was the moment when I began to love this place. The rest of the mist burned away, and we were out in the middle of the wide blue bay. Van started the engine and we went chug-chug down to Turk’s Island and spent the day.”

  “But it didn’t add a dollar to the economy. Kat, I’ve told you what’s going on because I don’t want you to be hurt. I gave my word I wouldn’t tell anyone, and I’ve broken it.”

  “I appreciate it, Jimmy. And I know what you’re trying to tell me.”

  “But?”

  “I just couldn’t let all the work Van did go to waste. You can understand that.”

  He grinned. “I knew what the reaction had to be. But I had to make the attempt. At least you have some idea what you’re up against. I’ll be standing by, Kat. Use me for a rest camp, a first-aid station.” He stopped smiling. “But I’d rather you keep this to yourself.”

  “I can’t even do that.”

  “But, honey, if the leak is traced back to me, they’ll put lumps on my head.”

  She thought for a few moments. “I was at my desk in the bank and I heard two men talking about Grassy Bay.”

  “That isn’t likely. They’ve been very careful. I know Sally Ann Lesser is in on it, because Burt couldn’t have come up with some of the basic money otherwise. So can’t you pry it out of her?”

  “Now that I know what I’m after, I can. Otherwise, I can’t tell when she’s lying.”

  He looked at his watch and stood up. “Thanks for the beer.”

  “And thank you for the advance information, Jimmy. I think I really need a project right about now.”

  They walked through the house to the front door. He shook his head and said, “Believe me, honey, nobody needs what you’re thinking of taking on. It could break your heart.”

  “Again? Maybe I’m sort of invulnerable.”

  “They’ll try to find out. You take care, hear?” He stood there for a rare moment of awkwardness, then walked on out to his car. He backed out and waved to her as he drove off down the narrow asphalt of Pine Road, toward the exit gate of Sandy Key Estates.

  Katherine walked through the living room. She stopped at a west window. Beyond the pepper hedge the last smoke of the dying brush fire rose in a hazy column, bending slightly toward her as an imperceptible breeze off the Gulf shifted it.

  Too many things were moving through her mind simultaneously, immobilizing her so that she could not begin any one of them. But the considerations of strategy had to give way to the homely obligations. She went to the phone to call Claire Sinnat and tell her to shoo the kids home from the Sinnat pool, then decided to walk up the road and collect them. She fixed her lipstick, ran a hasty brush through her cropped red hair, and went outside.

  At first she thought it as stunningly hot as before, but in a little while she realized the sting had gone from the sun’s heat as it moved closer to the Gulf horizon. But the big black salt-marsh mosquitoes were out early. They whined in her hair and tickled her long legs and needled the backs of her shoulders and the small of her back between her green halter and the waistband of her white shorts.

  By the time she reached the Pavilion she was being driven out of her mind by them. Gus Malta, the official caretaker, was hobbling around the Pavilion on his bad leg, fogging the ground, the shrubbery and the low branches of the trees with the rackety gasoline fogger he carried slung over his meaty shoulder. He stopped the motor and called to her in the sudden silence.

  “You come over here,” he ordered. “You’ll get bit to death walking around like that tonight.”

  She hesitated and went over toward him. She did not like the man. He adopted a pseudo-fatherly air toward all the younger matrons of Sandy Key Estates, and toward the daughters of the older ones, but his manner seemed to mask sly insinuations. He did yard work for some of the residents, maintained the shell roads, the community tennis court and the Pavilion. For his community efforts, he was paid out of the treasury of the Sandy Key Estates Association, replenished by the quarterly assessment levied against each resident, based on the size of his lot.

  “Now you stand right there and I’ll put a cloud of this upwind from you, and it will drift onto you. You hold your breath and turn around slow while it’s going by.”

  “But I don’t want to get that stuff in my hair.”

  “Won’t hurt your hair,” he said and yanked the starter cord, and belched a cloud of bug fog toward the beach. As it enveloped her she held her breath and turned slowly, dutifully, vastly annoyed at herself. Now if he tells you to go roll in the sand, you’ll do that too, you darn ninny.

  It drifted past her and she stopped turning and began breathing. “That’s better,” Gus said. “Now they won’t mess with you, and raise all them red lumps.” He grinned at her, exposing the ruin of his teeth. “You coming to the party?”

  “I didn’t know there was one.”

  “Now, when you see me fogging this place, you know somebody wants it for a party, Mrs. Hubble.”

  He always seemed to know exactly how impertinent he dared be, and he altered it to fit the temperament of each target. She knew that if she acted angry, he would pretend to be hurt and bewildered.

  The Pavilion was the only community structure. It was open on three sides, forty by twenty, with a slab floor, steel uprights, and a thatched roof. There was a bamboo bar against the single wall. On the beach side was a big barbecue pit, and there were picnic tables under the Australian pines and under the coconut palms. The Pavilion was in the center of the two hundred feet of Gulf beach open to all the landlocked residents of the Estates.

  “Who is giving the party, Gus?” she asked evenly.

  “It’s the Deegans and Mrs. McCall giving it, for about forty people, the way I heard it.”

  “Thanks for the spray job,” she said and walked away from him, heading north on Gulf Lane toward the Sinnat house. The fogging machine did not start up. She resisted the impulse to look back, and knew she would see him standing there, watching her walk away. If she turned, he would grin placidly at her. It was a part of the mythology of the Estates that if a woman appeared in a swimsuit in the farthest corner of the area, within ten seconds Gus Malta would find some work to be done within ten feet of her. Eloise Cable swore that she had turned quickly one evening and seen his face just outside the screen of her open bathroom window. It was generally agreed that if he wanted to gamble his job by risking the Peeping Tom act, Eloise Cable was the logical candidate. In spite of his manner, and all the work he left half done, it was agreed that he was very good with the kids.

  As she pushed open the Sinnats’ garden gate, she heard the concerted yapping of a dozen assorted children, and the sloshing and slapping of the water in their big pool.

  Two

  JAMES WARREN WING DROVE NORTH along Mang
rove Road, the main road which bisected Sandy Key. He wondered vaguely how many times, how many hundred times he had driven this same stretch of road, and how many hundred times he would drive it again.

  Once again she had afflicted him with what he had begun to call, with a sense of irony and guilt, Kat-fever. It was a restlessness, a dissatisfaction with all the familiar comforting routines.

  He wanted to return to his normal blandness of spirit, maintain an uninvolved equanimity, suppressing the little bulgings of guilt and barbs of conscience. He knew it would be so much easier for him if he could be less scrupulous with himself, less intent on definitions and emotional accuracy. Were a man able to use his own fictions and realities interchangeably, he could be much more at home in a muddied world. Introspection, he had decided, is being bred out of the race because it is not survival-oriented.

  So much fuss, he thought, about wanting a woman who does not even know she is wanted. Van, good buddy, rest easy. I’ve just helped her in a few small ways, and that’s all there’s going to be.

  But he could hear Van’s familiar response to that familiar protestation: But you keep seeing one hell of a lot of her, pal.

  Because I like her. Is there a law?

  Is she so much? Just a spare, high-pockets redhead, boy, skimpy upstairs and flat across the behinder, with angular hips and knobbly shoulders, and eyes which aren’t either blue or gray, and monkey wrinkles across her forehead. She moves well and her skin is fine, but she’s a slapdash, helter-skelter woman, too smart, too ready to argue. She carried your kids, and loved you truly, boy, and there’s nothing there for ol’ Jimmy.