Dead Low Tide Page 2

  Mary Eleanor went crisply down to the very last booth in sort of an alcove across from the door of the ladies’ room. I put up the window and the fans made some of the night air move in across our faces, so it wasn’t bad.

  Owner-manager-bartender waddled back and took her order for bourbon and water on the side, and mine for a bottle of Miller’s. As soon as he went away she dug in a small white purse and took out a ten and pushed it across at me.

  “I can handle it,” I said, maybe a bit on the stuffy side.

  “Please, Andy. Or I won’t enjoy my drink.”

  “Dutch, then.”

  She nodded. It was the first time I’d ever had a good chance to look at her face. Big bright black eyes, and just a shade too much in the tooth department, so she had a very faint look of coming out of one of Disney’s woodland dells. She had a little mesh of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and her underlip was about three times the thickness of the one on top. Her ears were little and they grew flat to her head. Her hands were small, with spidery fingers and sort of lumpy knuckles. But, all in all, I would say, an attractive item. First you saw the thin look, and then you saw that her breasts looked high and sharp, and as I have mentioned, there was a nice side to side wave of the seat of the blue denim as you happened to walk behind her. I guess I was giving it too close a study. It leaned back in the booth.

  “Andy—I went over everyone, thinking, and you’re the only …”

  The drinks came then and she shut up. They were on a pay-as-you-go deal, so he took the ten and brought the change back. By the time he got back with it, her shot of bourbon was gone, and so was one sip of the water, and she pushed the shot glass toward him. He picked it up and went off with it.

  The interruption had given her time to think that maybe there was a better way of edging up on the subject, but I was beginning to think I was a little too placid about the whole thing, and a little loss of balance wouldn’t hurt, so I said, “The only what?”

  “What? Oh—the only one who’s usually in the office.”

  You don’t call your boss’s wife a liar, even when she is. The new shot came and she was still holding it, rim-full, rock steady, when the change came back. She threw it down with a hard toss, and one ripple of her throat, and took a little sip of water. They do something to those little dark girls. Maybe it’s a special course at Sweet Briar. All night they can drink, and nothing happens. Plying them with same is bad technique, because whatever happens, it happens to you, and they take you home and in the morning your head rattles like a broken transmission.

  “What do you want, Mary Eleanor?”

  “I just plain don’t know how to ask you, Andy.”

  “Try English.”

  “All right. Will you find out something for me? Will you find out what’s wrong with John?”

  “Wrong? Offhand the only thing wrong with your husband is that he wears a size nineteen collar and he could probably run a hundred yards in eleven seconds with one of me tucked under each arm, and I weigh one eighty. Oh, yes, and you can’t pin him down. That I know. Ask him if tomorrow is Tuesday and he bangs you on the shoulder and asks you if you had a good old time last Sunday.”

  She smiled, and this was a smile not for the society section of our daily newspaper. It was more the sort of smile you wear to get your lips out of the way so you can examine a loose filling. “Oh, I know how hard it is to make him tell you anything, Andy. Whatever it is, it’s bad.”

  “What’s bad?”

  “Whatever it is that’s wrong. He sits and his eyes look right through things and he doesn’t hear me. He groans something awful in his sleep, and the other night there he was, sitting right up in bed and making a real high thin screaming sound like a woman. When I ask him what is wrong, he goes off someplace and closes the door real quiet. And he gets up in the night and walks around and around our house, and once I came home and I didn’t know he was there and I came in quiet like, and he was sitting there all by himself, crying without making any noise.”

  “I think I fell off a curve back there, Mrs. Long. You want me to snuffle around your husband?”

  “Oh, I could hire somebody, maybe, who does that for a living, you know, from Tampa or Miami or someplace, but that would be an outsider, and I thought somebody who was sort of—in the family. I mean you’re like—like the license on his car. He looks at it every day, but he doesn’t really see it.”

  “Thank you too much.”

  “You know I don’t mean it that way, Andy.”

  “Look. I work for the guy. At the moment, quite frankly, I happen to be a little sore at him. He hasn’t come through on what he promised me originally. I’ll tell you that much. If he has business troubles, I don’t know what they are. If he has emotional problems, it would seem to me that’s your affair, not mine. You’re his wife. Ask him what’s bothering him.”

  “But I have! And he won’t tell me. Wouldn’t you say this is my duty, to find out what’s wrong so that I can help?”

  “Not through me, you don’t.”

  “I just don’t really see why you get so damn huffy about it. After all, I’m not asking you to steal anything.”

  “Maybe I just don’t have the conspiratorial temperament. Sorry.”

  The tears which I had been half expecting appeared. They swelled fat on the edge of the lower lids and broke over and ran down, and the one from the left eye got way down to the corner of her mouth before the quick sharp tongue-tip slanted over and caught it.

  “But I love him so much, Andy, and he’s in trouble and he won’t tell me what it is, and so how can I help him if I don’t know what it is. Please, Andy?”

  “Look, Mary Eleanor. It’s out of my line. Anyway, what could I do? He spends all his time now at Key Estates. That’s his baby. He’s riding it hard and hustling his own materials, and I have about as much reason to go barging out there as I have to take a fast look at the other side of the moon.”

  “You could make reasons.”

  “Feeble ones. No. I want to be friends, Mary Eleanor, and in some funny way maybe this flatters me a little, but no dice.”

  I watched her and saw her slowly accept the idea of the turndown. The noises she’d been making, like a small muffled butter churn, faded away. She blotted the tears, hitched her shoulders, looked out the window.

  “No hard feelings?” I asked.

  “I guess not, Andy. But it’s terrible not to know. I just can’t imagine. He’s changing so fast!” Under stress the magnolia accent really ripened. “Can’t” came out “kay-yunt” and “fast” turned into “fay-yust.”

  When they’re really magnolia they have a funny way of making me feel a little self-conscious and guilty about being a “noth-run bo-wee.” As if I had sharp edges. As if they all come from some isle where they talk to each other in those soft voices, and they live in a place where things are warmer and sweeter and tenderer, and they have a code that is so deep and so much a part of the way they act and behave that they don’t ever have to think about it as such. And that, I am afraid, is exactly the way it is with them. It makes you feel a bit cold, angular, displaced. She had lifted the edge of the code just enough so I could see in—see trouble and tears, and letting me look in was, in itself, a violation of the code.

  But, in my own way, I had a code of my own, and I could not see myself creepy-mousing around, trying to find out what gnawed the soul of my employer.

  “I guess I understand, Andy. But, please, promise me one thing. If you should happen—well, sort of by accident, to find out what it is, you’ll let me know.”

  “If it’s the sort of thing you should know. And if he isn’t telling you, he’s made that decision already, hasn’t he?”

  “You get so darn logical like, Andy.”

  But she managed a faint smile as she said it. Twenty minutes later I stood by my house and watched her horse the black MG off into the night. Funny about her. I hadn’t thought there was much to her. But be with her for a little while a
nd you had an idea of just what John Long had for himself. A hundred and three pounds of fire and intensity and aliveness. A little wife that would sing in your blood like chronic malaria. Something to hurry home to when the nights get cool. It is indeed a depressing line of thought for a bachelor. Like a man in a rowboat looking at a cabin cruiser and saying to himself, “By God, I could own one of those if I weren’t so damn lazy that I hate the thought of the upkeep.”

  And I heard the faint crunch of shells as somebody came walking down the road toward my place. I knew who it was. As Mary Eleanor had driven down the road her headlights had swung across a pair of bare brown legs belonging to a gal sitting on some dark steps.

  Two

  AT THE SOUTH EDGE of town there is a deep narrow creek which runs into the bay. It is a place where, in season, the snook gather and respond readily to a yellow buck-tail dude jerked past their undershot jaws. If you shill a grand-daddy snook into chomping on same, he will delight to sprain your wrist. It was there, on the jungly north bank of the creek that my landlady, Mrs. Elly Tickler, an elfin and fiftyish widow, built on the general lines of a silo, put up ten cabins prior to Florida’s current glass brick, wrought iron, and window wall era. They are little bastard-Spanish houses, with narrow windows, thick walls, and doodads around the top. They are scattered around the little jungly patch as though placed by some mystic who used a forked wand. The result is a pleasant privacy. We all have individual little terraces. There is no attempt at growing a lawn. We have our crop of sand spurs, sea grapes, castor bean plants, punk trees, and poison ivy, and we all like it fine.

  Elly gigglingly admits she is as lazy as a hog in August, and it makes her nervous with people moving in and moving out, so she is delighted to rent to us locals because she can leave us alone and we stay put, even if her income is thereby reduced. In September, particularly, we all experiment with evil-smelling sprays, lotions, and repellents, and Ardy Fowler will tell you, his blue carpenter’s eyes as solemn as a reading of the minutes, that it was on the eighth of September three years ago that a flock of mosquitoes carried him thirty feet out over the bay before they got wing-weary and dropped him on an oyster bar. And Andy will even roll up his pants leg and show you the scar where he hit the shells.

  So I heard Christy Hallowell come swinging down the road, and heard her stop and slap lustily.

  “Donating blood?” I asked her.

  She came up to me. “I was about to give you up, McClintock. Until one of your women brought you home. Smell me. This is new stuff and it’s working.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “There’s carbolic in it. And banana oil. And something else. Pretty elusive, though. Got it! Swamp water. Christy, you smell like an Arabian veterinary.”

  “Poo. I told you it works. It’s called Ray-pell. How was your date?”

  “Lush. That was the boss’s wife. And now I’ve got another date with a hunk of cheese. Have some?”

  Mosquitoes were clustered around my front door. We scampered in, flailing our arms. Nobody ever locks anything at Tickler Terrace—which is what we call it despite Elly’s sign proclaiming that this is Shady Grove Retreat. I got the lights on, gathered up my bug bomb, and disconcerted a few stilt-legged citizens perched on my walls, waiting for sleep and dark, and blood and me.

  Christy walked around with me and pointed out a few I had missed, and then she sat on my kitchen table and looked around, and said, “God, you’re neat! For a man, I mean. Dusty in spots, but neat.”

  “We old bachelors, you know. Everything in its place. System, order, efficiency.” I opened the refrigerator. “Cheese? Guaranteed to climb on the plate by itself.”

  “Delightful. Please. And with some of that beer I can see from here. In the can.”

  I opened her beer and gave it to her, halved the hunk of cheese, poured myself a glass of milk, and sat down at the kitchen table and stared disapprovingly at the round brown knees a foot from my milk. “You have those well greased, my love.”

  “You’re a delicate type, aren’t you? Ray-pell does not smell that bad.” She got up and walked around and sat down across from me.

  I approve of Christy. She’s a big brown slim-waisted blonde with a sturdy frame, extra-long legs, a face a bit too round for beauty, with the eyes being the best part. Eyes the shade of wine vinegar.

  She is a Midwest blonde and she is something they seem to be growing out there these last few years. Big girls who look smooth and tight and well fitted into their skin. Out there when three of them come down the sidewalk abreast there is something overpowering about them, and you feel that your masculine ego is being hemmed in by a thicket of long, long legs. And they all seem to have an odd, casual lack of any physical self-consciousness. Their splendid bodies are not something to be aware of. Just something they want to keep clean, tanned, and at the proper temperature. When Christy has a day off from Wilburt’s Book Nook (books, stationery, office supplies, art supplies, craft supplies, souvenirs, homemade candy and hand-painted neckties), and on the weekends, her approach to holiday is to relax thoroughly, and also she will put on very short shorts and make them shorter by rolling them. And she will put on a very narrow halter and make it narrower by folding in the top and bottom, presenting a disconcerting area of smooth tan hide. When Ardy Fowler sees her coming thusly attired, he will trot into his house and bang the door behind him, though he is quite avuncular when she is dressed. Christy told me solemnly a while back that she thinks Ardy is moody. Ardy told me that it is merely caution.

  If you think about those girls they are growing out there in the Midwest, and think about the way they act, and think of how they give an impression of being unused and waiting for something, it can begin to worry you. If nature is planning on setting up a matriarchy, it is only reasonable that the first step is to start developing the shock troops. Any one of them could swing a mace.

  Anyway, she talks through her nose, and she made a real messy marriage, and she came to Florida by bus with three hundred dollars in her purse and earned herself a divorce. She hasn’t told me much about the guy. She has only mentioned him a couple of times. And each time she had to shut up, because she said that even thinking about him made her stomach swing the way it does when you look into an open wound. Having no special place to go back to, she kept her job at Wilburt’s, and though she looks with a frigid eye on the idea of another emotional entanglement, I suspect she will end up being an effective and heart-warming wife for some character who is wandering around not realizing how lucky he is going to be. A few months back, due probably to what April in Florida can do even to a statue in the park, and due to mutual loneliness, and the more functional aspects of need, and due to a niggling, drifting discontent, Christy and I had a brief and rather pointless affair which sneaked up on us when she changed the stinger receipt one blue Sunday dusk.

  It did not take us long to find that due to the rather limited emotional involvement we could attain, there was more profit to both of us in friendship than in love with a small l, and if we kept on, we would never get back to friendship. Fortunately we quit in time, and without complications. It was just something that had happened, and it wasn’t important only in that it probably had to happen, even if only out of curiosity, and we were done with it, and perhaps closer because of it. Closer without antagonism. And it left, me, at least, with one large good memory of lying in bed and sharing one cigarette between us, and laughing so hard about some damn fool thing I have forgotten that tears were running right down Christy’s round cheeks and she couldn’t catch her breath, and the slant of late afternoon sunlight across us made her look as though she had been fashioned of smooth warm molten gold.

  I knew from the way she acted, waiting for me, and coming to eat my cheese, that she had had one of those days, one of those moods. Some people, I’m told, can live alone and fold the walls around themselves and make a snug little box in which they can lie, furry and warm, and sing to themselves and tell stories to themselves about how sweet and wonderful i
t is to be utterly alone. But our walls are paper, and the sounds of life come through, and sometimes these sounds get Christy down, and sometimes they get me down, and then it is a fine thing to lean, just a little, on somebody who has the same disease, so you don’t have to answer questions about symptoms.

  We ate our cheese and drank our milk and beer, and I told her about my secret mission, and how I had turned it down. She was intrigued, as she had listened too often, perhaps, to my recent gripes about the job. And it seems as if there never was a woman who did not get pretty feverish about dark secrets. She made some excellent suggestions about how I could have taken the mission and planted a tape recorder in John’s hind pocket, and rented a bloodhound, and vacuumed his clothes for that telltale trace of talcum. I told her I didn’t know what I’d do without her. At least the subject had taken her out of her mood. She acted better.

  One of the florid September rains came along and began to make dice-box sounds in the palm fronds. She jumped up and ran for the front door, but by the time she got there the rain had started to come down like somebody emptying a bucket of fish. We stood and looked out at the wet dark noisy night, feeling the sudden pleasant coolness.

  “Off to my bed, McClintock,” she said.

  “In that? Listen.” I listened with her. The hard sound faded, left us in a dripping silence, and the rain roared off down the bay shore like a departing freight train.

  The world dripped. She gave me a slightly wry face, and I put my arm around her. She turned quietly, meekly, gratefully into my arms like a small girl, not like five-nine and a hundred and fifty pounds of the pride of the Midwest. She rubbed her forehead against my cheekbone and sighed. Comfort from friends.