Bright Orange for the Shroud Read online

  A big fellow, big as I am, but not the same physical type. Slow, awkward, uncoordinated—a mild and rather pedantic guy. I could remember coming across a few of the same breed way back in high school basketball days. Coaches would hustle them on the basis of size alone. They were very earnest, but they had no balance. You could catch them just right, with the hip, and they would go blundering and crashing off the court. For them, high school was the final experience in any body-contact sport.

  Arthur Wilkinson had been a member of the group for a few months. I met him when he was trying to decide whether or not to invest some money in a marina enterprise. He was going around, talking earnestly to boat people. He surveyed me at drinking time, and stayed, and came back other times—came back once too often, perhaps, that time somebody had brought Wilma around.

  He had told me about himself. Upstate New York boy. Little Falls. Department store family. Got a degree from Hamilton College. Went to work in the store. Became engaged to a doctor’s daughter. Didn’t particularly like or dislike the department store trade. Future all lined out, nailed down. Then it all fell apart, one piece at a time, beginning with the death of his widower father, then his girl marrying another guy, until, restless, irritable, unhappy, he had sold out his controlling interest to a chain, liquidated other properties and headed for Florida.

  He got along fine with the group. He was amiable and very decent. We felt protective about him. He had been schooled for survival in Little Falls, and might indeed have been formidably adapted to that environment, but away from it there was something displaced about him. He was perfectly frank about his problem. He had left, after taxes, almost a quarter of a million dollars. It was in good solid securities, bringing in, after personal income taxes, nearly nine thousand a year. But he felt it shameful to squat on it. He wanted to move it around, put some work with it, make it produce. Some of the genes of his great granddaddy kept prodding him.

  The group changes; the flavor remains the same. When he was in the pack, he was the gatherer of driftwood for the beach picnics, the one who drove drunks home, the one who didn’t forget the beer, the understanding listener who gets girl-tears on his beach coat, the pigeon good for the small loan, the patsy who comes calling and ends up painting the fence. All groups seem to have one. He had a fair complexion, blushed readily. He always looked scrubbed. He laughed at all the jokes, nearly always at the right place, even though he had heard them before. In short, a very nice guy, that Arthur Wilkinson. Part of the group, but nobody got really close to him. He had that little streak of reserve, of keeping the ultimate secrets. Liquor might have unlocked him except for one thing. When he took one over his limit, he fell smilingly, placidly, irrevocably asleep. And smiled in his sleep.

  I could remember that for a little while Arthur and Chookie McCall had something going. She had just finished a dancing engagement at the Bahama Room at the Mile O’Beach. She’s big, beautifully proportioned, vastly healthy, a dynamo brunette with a stern and striking face. Chook had fought with Frank Durkin and he had taken off and she was rebounding, and certainly Arthur was a better deal than Frank. Without a dime, Arthur would have been worth nine Frank Durkins. Why do so many great gals latch onto a Frank Durkin to mess up their lives? When she got a three-week gig up at Daytona Beach perhaps Arthur could have gone with her, but he didn’t make the right moves. Then Wilma Ferner moved in when Chook was away.…

  There are a lot more Arthur Wilkinsons in the world than there are Wilma Ferners. And this Wilma was a classic example of the type. Little, but with a bone structure so delicate she made a hundred and five pounds look like a lush abundance. Fine white-blonde hair always in that initial state of disarray which creates the urge to mess it up completely. Husky theatrical voice which covered about two octaves in what was, for her, normal coversation. Lots of anecdotes, in which she played every part, face as mobile as a clown’s, making lots of gestures, flinging herself around, the gestures seemingly awkward at times until one noticed that they kept that ripe little body in a constant state of animation and display, a project given a continuous assist by her wardrobe. There were little traces of accent in her normal speech, when she wasn’t imitating someone, but it seemed to vary from day to day. Hold a small clear wineglass of Harvey’s Bristol Milk up to the light and it is pretty close to the color of her eyes. And, once you got past all the crinkling and sparkling and winking, her eyes had just about as much expression as still wine.

  She came in on a big Huckins out of Savannah, amid boat guests in various conditions of disrepair, much of the damage evidently being accomplished by people beating people in the face with their fists. She moved into a hotel room ashore, in the Yankee Clipper, and after the cruiser took off without her, she somehow managed to affix herself to our group, saying that the lovely people on the Huckins were going to pick her up on their way back from Nassau, and she had begged off because she could not endure Nassau one more stinking time.

  In that venerable and useful show biz expression, she was always on. The gals seemed to have an instinctive wariness of her. The men were intrigued. She claimed to have been born in Calcutta, mentioned the tragic death of a father in the Australian diplomatic service, mentioned directly and obliquely her own careers as set designer in Italy, fashion coordinator in Brussels, photographer’s model in Johannesburg, society and fashion editor on a newspaper in Cairo, private secretary to the wife of one of the presidents of Guatemala. As she cooed, twisted, bounced, exclaimed, imitated, chuckled, I must admit that I had a few moments of very steamy curiosity. But there were too many warning flags up. The pointed nails curved too extremely over the soft tips of the little fingers. The poses and pauses were too carefully timed. And there was just a bit too much effervescence and charm. Perhaps if she had come along a few years earlier—before I had seen and learned all kinds of con, before I had found some of the sicknesses no clinic can identify …

  So we wondered who would nail it. Or vice versa. She was carrying a weapon at port arms, waiting for a target of opportunity.

  I remember a very late night when I sat alone with my hairy economist friend named Meyer in the cockpit of his small cruiser which he christened the John Maynard Keynes, after a beach time when Wilma had been so totally on she had sparkled like the moonlit surf.

  “Wonder how old she is?” I asked idly.

  “My friend, I have kept meticulous track of all pertinent incidents. To have done what she claims to have done, she is somewhere between one hundred and five and one hundred and seven. I added five more years tonight.”

  “Psychopathic liar, Meyer?”

  “An inexact science uses inexact terms. I spit on parlor expertise, Travis.”

  “Sure. I have one suspicion, though. There is so much merchandise in the showcase there’s nothing left back in the storeroom.”

  “I wouldn’t gamble on that either.”

  “What the hell would you gamble on, Meyer?”

  “A man with no trace of the feminine in him, with no duality at all, is a man without tenderness, sympathy, gentleness, kindness, responsiveness. He is brute-mean, a hammer, a fist. McGee, what is a woman with no trace of the masculine in her makeup?”

  “Mmm. Merciless in a different way?”

  “You show promise, McGee. The empathy of kindness is a result of the duality, not of the feminine trace. Our strange friend, the Alabama Tiger, is maneuvering the lady just right. And she resents it. He moves in with a forked stick, and he’ll pin her head to the ground and then pick her up in such a way she can’t get her fangs into him. Maybe women are the only things in the world he knows so well.”

  I told Meyer he was crazy, that anybody could see that the Alabama Tiger and Wilma Ferner had disliked each other on sight. Meyer wouldn’t argue it. On the adjoining deck, in a big rich Wheeler, the Alabama Tiger maintains what is by now the longest floating houseparty in the world. He is a huge, sloppy guy, once a murderous All-American tackle, who later made a pot of money and decided to spend it
on boats, booze and broads. He stays blandly, cheerfully tight during all waking hours. He has a face like crude stone sculpture, carved into a mild grin. In forty seconds he can make you feel as if you are the most interesting person he has ever met, and you will feel as if you never met anyone more understanding. He could charm tenement landlords, post office employees, circus dwarfs and tax assessors.

  When Wilma finally took aim, Arthur Wilkinson was the hapless target, and there was not one damn thing any of us could do about it. He had less chance than a lovely wench when the Goths came to town. His eyes glazed over. A broad fatuous grin was permanently in place. She was at his elbow, steering him, to keep him from walking into immovable objects. He thought her junebug cute, delicate and dear, infinitely valuable. He felt humble to be so favored, to be awarded this rare prize. Any hint that the junebug might be a scorpion didn’t offend him. He just couldn’t hear what was said to him. He laughed, thinking it some kind of a joke. After the minimum waiting time, they were married late one afternoon at the court house, and left in a new white Pontiac convertible, the back seat stacked with her matched luggage, her smile as brilliant as a brand new vermin trap ordered from Herter’s catalogue. I had kissed the dear little cheek of the junebug bride. She’d smelled soapy clean. She called me a dear boy. My present was a six pack—Metaxa, Fundador, Plymouth gin, Chivas Regal, Old Crow and a Piper Heidsieck ’59. For the expendable marriage, you give the expendable gift. She left a message for the yacht that wouldn’t be back to pick her up. And I knew the two of them would not come back to Lauderdale as long as she was in command. She had sensed the appraisal of the group, and would require a more gullible environment.

  Three days after they left, we all knew something was wrong with the Alabama Tiger. Instead of his benign and placid condition of mild alcoholic euphoria, he swung between morose sobriety and wild, reckless, dangerous drunks. The permanent houseparty began to dwindle. It was Meyer who dug the reason out of him after finding the Tiger sitting lumpily on the beach at dawn with a loaded .38 tucked inside his shirt. And because he wanted a little help keeping an eye on him, Meyer told me the story.

  Wilma had secretly invited the Tiger over to headquarters at the hotel one morning. With a deftness, Meyer said, more common in the Far East than in our less ancient cultures, she had quickly learned how to turn him on and off, as if he were a construction kit she had wired herself. Then, with a dreadful control, she had taken him right to the edge and hung him up there, incapable of either release or retreat.

  “In his own deathless words,” Meyer said, “whooflin’ and shakin’ like an ol’ hawg hung on the charger wires. He honestly began to believe it was going to kill him. He could feel his heart beginning to burst. And she was laughing at him, he said, her face like a spook. Then suddenly, without release or warning, he felt dead. He heard her singing in her shower. After she was dressed, she kissed him on the forehead, patted his cheek and left. He thought of killing her as she bent over to kiss him, but even that seemed too unimportant for the effort involved. Suddenly he had become an old man. She had accepted the tension between them, the contest of wills, and had taken a little time out to whip him before leaving. It might interest you, McGee, to know that it happened last Thursday morning.”

  She had married Arthur Thursday afternoon.

  “There could be a little heart damage,” Meyer said. “There certainly seems to be plenty of emotional damage.”

  Monday night, late, I walked over to the Tiger’s big flush-deck Wheeler and from fifty feet away I decided, with that sense of loss you have when a legend ends, that the oldest permanent floating houseparty in the world had finally ended. One small light glowed. But from twenty feet I picked up the tempo of Hawaiian music on his record player system, turned very low. Approaching, I made out a girl-shape in the glow of dock-lights, dancing alone slowly on the after deck under the striped canvas canopy, highlights glinting on the glass in her hand as she turned.

  She saw me and angled her dance toward the rail, and I saw that it was one of the Ching sisters, Mary Li or Mary Lo, the identical twins who sing-and-dance at the Roundabout, closed Mondays. She was involved in a variant of the dance forms of her native Hawaii. It is impossible to tell the twins apart. Almost impossible. I had heard that Mary Lo is distinguished by a tiny vivid gem-like tattoo of a good luck ladybug, but so ultimately located that by the time one encounters it, any thought of choice has long since been obviated.

  Her hair swayed dark and heavy as she turned, and her smile was white in duskiness. “Hey you, McGee,” she said in a low tone. “Long as one little thing keeps swinging, Poppa Tiger’s bash is still alive. You haul aboard, make yourself a cup there.”

  As I made my drink she said, “We running a fox roster, man, the chicks who swung good here, keeping him braced up.”

  “How is he making it, Mary?”

  “Now he smiled some tonight, and he cried just a little time because he said he was done for good and all, but a little time back my sister came topside all tuckered and said he made out, and now they sacked out like death itself, and this here is the party, McGee man, down to just me. And now you, but Frannie coming by after she gets off work at two, bringing the bongo cat, and I say things pick up from here, pick up good. A swinger boat, with booze like a convention, you got to brace the management when he’s down.”

  “The only reason, Mary?”

  She stopped her dance eye to eye, a handspan away.

  “Like that dirty-mind cop wants to close us down, Poppa Tiger goes way upstairs and has the clout to mend his ways. Like our nephew needed the school letter that time, Poppa Tiger writes pretty. I just want to keep the free booze coming man, and tap that locker full of prime beef, and get the boat kicks.”

  “I knew better. I thought it would be nice to hear you say it, Mary.”

  “Brace up this dead drink for me, on the house. It’s fat vodka, one cube and a smitch from the little cranberry juice can.”

  “Gah.”

  “Don’t drink it, just make it.”

  We had some drinks, and I watched her dance, and we had some laughs because the old bear was on the mend. Frannie brought along some other kids from the club she was working. And as an unexpected by-product of celebration, I learned beyond any chance of confusion that the night dancer had been Mary Lo. Selections from the Tiger pack are not my usual type, as it tends to be too casual and mechanical for the ornamented romanticism of the McGee, who always wants a scarf in token to tie to the crest of the cut-rate helmet, wants the soul-torn glance, the tremors of the heart, the sense—or the illusion—of both choice and importance. But Mary Lo left no bad taste. She made it like a game for kids, chuckling and crooning her pleasures, and it did indeed pleasantly blur the use Wilma made of the same game. After they have strangled the king with boiling wine, it is therapeutic to get a little tipsy on a more palatable brand.

  Two

  Arthur fell back into my life on that Tuesday afternoon. Acquaintance rather than friend. The dividing line is communication, I think. A friend is someone to whom you can say any jackass thing that enters your mind. With acquaintances, you are forever aware of their slightly unreal image of you, and to keep them content, you edit yourself to fit. Many marriages are between acquaintances. You can be with a person for three hours of your life and have a friend. Another one will remain an acquaintance for thirty years.

  While he slept I dug into the more remote lockers in the bow section until I found the small ragged suitcase I remembered. Girl-bought clothes for a version of McGee of long ago, when I hid out and they hunted me, and I was afraid the stink of my rotting leg would clue them in. Killed the two of them while in delirium. No memory of how she got me to the hospital. Heard later how she managed to keep them from taking the leg off. Now there is that crooked pale arroyo, long down the right thigh, deep into muscle tissue. Function unimpaired. But a chancy time, deep there in fevers, seeing the pearly gleam of the gates, talking to the dead brother, sometimes loo
king up out of a well at the professional faces bending over the bed.

  These were the clothes she brought me, the clothes in which I was wheeled out into the vivid unreal world, clothes in which I first tottered about, ten feet tall and two inches wide, certain that if I fell off the crutches I would break like a glass stork. They would fit Arthur nicely in his dwindled condition and were only slightly musty from long storage. In a housewifely mood, I hung them out to air, thinking of the money the dead ones had stolen, quite legally, from the dead brother and how, quite illegally, the girl and I had stolen it back, cut it down the middle.

  While Arthur slept, I wondered how the hell to get rid of him. That was the extent of my Christian charity. I could accept being an aid station but not a convalescent clinic. I went over the composition of the group as Arthur had known it, looking for a substitute pigeon. I had my slob summer all planned. Immediately after the dry rot surgery and a few other maintenance matters, I wanted to take the Busted Flush down to Dinner Key, get her hauled and get the bottom scraped and painted, and then chug at my stately 6+ knots—with a six-hundred-mile range on the two 58 hp Hercules Diesels—over to the Bahamas on a dead calm day. The 52-foot barge-type houseboat can take pretty rough weather if forced to, but she rolls so badly she tends to bust up the little servomechanisms aboard which make life lush. I had been mentally composing a guest list, limited to those random salty souls who can get away, hold their liquor, endure sunshine, make good talk, swim the reefs, navigate, handle the lines, slay food fish and appreciate the therapeutic value of silence. It is the McGee version of being a loner—merely having some people about to whom you don’t have to constantly react. Arthur did not fit that specification closely enough.

  When darkness came, I took the aired clothes below and put them on a chair in the guest stateroom. He was snoring in a muted way. I closed his door, fixed myself a Plymouth gin on the rocks, closed the lounge curtains, looked up Chookie McCall’s number. No answer. I hadn’t seen her or heard anything about her in two months. I tried Hal, the bartender at the Mile O’Beach who keeps good track of our gypsy contingent of entertainers. Hal said she’d been working at Bernie’s East up to May first when they closed the Brimstone Room, and as far as he knew all she was doing was a Saturday morning one-hour show of dance instruction on KLAK-TV. But he had it on good authority she was all set to regroup her six pack and open back at the Mile O’Beach in the Bahama Room come November 15th.