Where Is Janice Gantry? Read online

  “And do what?”

  “Prove it was all lies, everything she said to me.”

  “Who?”

  “Charity Weber. The hell with bringing you into all that, Sam. It’s my problem. I’ve got to do it my own way.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I want clothes and sleep and a chance to get clean. Nobody will ever know I was here, Sam. I swear I won’t tell anybody. I’m in terrible shape right now, but I’ll come back fast. They did one thing for me, Sam. They made me tough enough, mentally and physically, for what I’ve got to do. That guy you used to know, Sam. He doesn’t exist any more.”

  “This puts me in a hell of a spot.”

  “I know that. I didn’t tell you one of the reasons I came here. It’s because I’d do the same thing for you.”

  There is no good answer to that statement.

  After a long pause I said, “Okay, Charlie. But I wish I knew more about all this.”

  “All you have to know is I give you my word I’m not guilty. And the reason I said I was is because … if it would have helped her in any little way to stick my hand in a fire, I would have held it there and grinned while it roasted. I’d had a good big taste of her and I would have died for her—and she knew it and so did he—so five years seemed like a little favor, something I was anxious to do. I wasn’t … equipped to handle a woman like that.”

  His words brought Judy back into my mind, so vividly I knew she had been in my dreams in all the windy night.

  I had a commitment I did not want, and I could smell the trouble coming; but I told myself it would be entirely reasonable to let him get the rest he needed, so that when he was himself again, I could quietly talk him into letting me call Sheriff Pat Millhaus to come and get him.

  The bathroom light did not alarm him, so while he showered and used my razor, I put on pants and sneakers and carried the foul wad of his prison clothing and ruined shoes out behind the garage to a corner out of the wind, dug a hole in the loose, sandy soil, buried the stuff deep and stomped the soil flat. I tossed a pair of my pajamas into the bathroom. I was making up the spare bed in my bedroom when he came back out.

  There was a first gray of dawn in the room, just enough so that I could see him for the first time. He had been slender, with a round boyish face. He was leaned down to emaciation, his face drawn tight against sharp bones. Road work in the tropic sun had tanned him deeply. His face was scabbed, lumped, welted by the swamp insects that had bitten him during his flight, and his eyes were drowsy. He sat on the bed and said, “Made it. More than a hundred miles across that crazy empty country. Sloughs and hammocks and saw-grass.” He lay back and pulled the sheet and the single cotton blanket up, sighed deeply, and went to sleep.

  I tried to sleep but I knew there was no chance. I dressed and made coffee and drank it out on the screened porch. The wind was beginning to die, and suddenly it stopped entirely just as the sun was coming up. In the stillness, the muggy heat was like a stale blanket. I heard a sudden thrash of water down near my dock, and I snatched the spinner and trotted down the path and saw the swirl of some snook working twenty feet out. It was the middle of August, when they work the passes and the bays by moonlight, and these boys were on their way home, with room for a final snack. I dropped the white bucktail a dozen feet beyond them and began yanking it back through the swirls, and it banged hard just when I hoped it would be. Had he scooted under the dock, as too many of them have done, his only damage would have been a sore mouth. But he took off toward open water. I had six pound test, but a lot of it, so he finally turned, losing a little steam, and I walked forty feet down the narrow beach, bringing him back, watching him show twice in the golden slant of the early sun, checking his rushes, finally gentling him up onto the rough broken shell of the narrow bay beach, his gills working, his eyes big as dimes. I saw he would go around ten, maybe a little over. After I had clubbed him and picked him up and was sure of him, I realized that a wolf pack of mosquitoes had found me, and I remembered again that I was entertaining a house guest who was being hunted by every law officer in the state of Florida.

  After I had rinsed the rod, cleaned the fish and put him in the small refrigerator, and washed up, I did a few chores and wrote a note to leave for Charlie Haywood. “I’ve locked the place up. I’ve laid out clothes that should fit you. Look around and you’ll find orange juice, coffee, etc. There’s eggs, milk, bacon, fresh-caught snook in the ice box. Help yourself. Nobody is likely to come here during the day. I’ll make it back in the middle of the afternoon.”

  I had laid out a brown knit sport shirt that had been too small for me from the day I bought it, and some khaki pants that had shrunk too small.

  After I locked the cottage behind me, I drove the four miles north into Florence City. It was Monday morning, August 15th, getting stickier and hotter every minute. After I got my mail out of my box at the post office, I drove on out across City Bridge to the commercial area adjacent to Orange Beach, parked my old Ford ranch wagon behind the office and walked across the street to Cy’s Lunch and Sundries for breakfast.

  “You early as can be, Sambo,” he said.

  “It’s Monday, Cyrus. New week. New start. Energy. Git up and go.”

  “Oh, sure,” he said sourly, busting my two eggs onto the grill.

  I found one small story on the Haywood escape on the lower half of the third page. They were still looking for him. They expected to recapture him any minute. There was a possibility he had stolen a car in Clewiston and abandoned it in Tampa.

  When I walked back to the office after breakfast, Sis Gantry had arrived and opened it up. The big rackety air conditioner was just beginning to make its chilly function felt. Actually the cinderblock structure is the place of business of Tom Earle, Realtor. It has one big room, with his private office and the washrooms and storage room behind it, in the rear. There are seven desks in the big room, with six of them used by his associates and his clerical help, and one of them rented to me. I am Automotive Appraisal Associates, which is an overly impressive name for a one-man firm. The monthly figure I pay him covers desk space, phone service (including phone answering service by his gals when I am out) and the right to have my name in small print, along with the name of my business, painted on the bottom half of the front door.

  Sis Gantry faked vast surprise and said, “I get it! That crummy shack of yours must have burned down.”

  “My good woman, I caught and cleaned a snook this morning before your alarm went off.”

  Her name is Janice, but she is never called anything except Sis. She is a local girl with eight brothers, four older and four younger, so it is a fate she could hardly escape. She is a big-boned brunette, full of life and bounce and sparkle, a truly warmhearted person. She has a wide hearty mouth, a strikingly good figure—firm, rounded and ample—and very dark blue eyes.

  Sis and I will never be at ease with each other. It started in the wrong way with us, and after a while it became obvious it should never have started at all. I met her nearly four years ago. They had whipped me and I had come back to my home town, knowing I should give a damn about what happened to the rest of my life, but finding it hard to care. I had been in town a month and I was doing rough carpentry work for one of the local builders when I met her. She was just getting over being whipped. She was twenty-five then, and I was a year older. She had made one of those impossible marriages, to a wild man—psychotic, alcoholic, vicious. A girl with less optimism and vitality than Sis would have gotten out of it in the first year. But she stuck it out for four childless, incredible years, until he shot her in the throat and himself in the roof of the mouth. She survived only because there was a very good man on the ambulance.

  We were a couple of prominent misfits in Florence City, and we joined forces and talked out our problems to each other. She had to have a project, because it helped her keep her mind off her own problems, and she elected me. It was due to her prodding that I began to look seriously for som
e kind of work that would suit me. Old Bert Shilder at the Central Bank and Trust, who had known my parents all their lives right up until they drowned in the Gulf in a storm fifteen years ago, put me onto this accident appraisal business and got me a job with a firm over in Miami. After four months I knew enough about the business to take the chance of starting up on my own in Florence City.

  It was Sis Gantry who applauded the decision, reviewed my precarious finances, decided I should own a place rather than rent, and found the old cottage on the bay shore on one acre of overgrown land four miles south of the city line. She was working for Tom Earle by then, and she knew it was a steal and, after she had bullied me into it, she felt she had earned the right to help me fix it up. And it was Sis who wangled the desk space in Tom Earle’s beach office for me.

  Up until about two weeks after I had moved into the cottage, sex had had no place in our relationship. We were friends and we’d both had a bad time, and we were able to relax with each other. Then one Sunday evening she brought over the kitchen curtains she had made. I put the fixtures up and she hung curtains. October thunder came banging down along the Keys, and then the rain came swamping down and the electricity went off. We made bad jokes about it. There were no candles back then, and no flashlight. We sat on the couch. I could see her in every blue-white flicker of lightning. I was reaching for the cigarettes when I happened to touch her hand. I closed my fingers around her waist. At the next flash of lightning I saw her face, inches from mine, eyes shadowy wide and lips apart. A few moments after the kiss began she was straining for a greater closeness, her mouth heated, her breath fast and shallow. She suffered herself to be led into the bedroom, docile as a child, and she turned this way and that way to aid me as, with hands made clumsy by a vast urgency, I undressed her there.

  I had had no one since Judy, and she had had no one since that madman who had put the dimpled scar in the side of her throat.

  For the many weeks after that, through the end of that year and into the next year, it was a lopsidedly sexual relationship, and all of it took place in that cottage, screened from the road and the neighbors by the wildness of the untended brush. It was a strong, obsessive and joyous thing. There was no coyness, no teasing, no parlor games. It never seemed to take more than thirty seconds from the doorway to the bed, in unvarying readiness. We were both husky vital people, and there was always time for laughter and for bawdy foolish jokes about our capacities for this joyful, single-minded game. We padded about in a comfortable nudity, cooking and devouring huge meals. As she lived with her family, she felt she had to spend a portion of each night in her own bed. But more often than not I would be awakened in the morning by Sis, arriving, stripping, lunging into my bed to snuffle and giggle into my throat, with busy hands and busy lips.

  I do not know exactly why it ended. I think it began partly because she wanted to cure me of Judy, as one more segment of her project to bring me back into the human race.

  Perhaps it ended because she was not content to stop there. She wanted more. Maybe she wanted marriage. It was never mentioned. But she began to prod me. The first thing she wanted me to do was all too obvious. I was settling too snugly into a small occupation, and it was clear to her that I wanted to keep it small. I had long since given up the luxury of ambition. I wanted something that would support me and not make too many demands.

  By luck I had found just what I wanted. A batch of major automobile insurance companies employed me on a fee basis. Insurance adjustors and lawyers would handle the liability aspects of each accident. It was my job to appraise the physical damage to the vehicles so that claims could be equitably adjusted. I had to keep the greedy claimant from getting a complete body job out of one dented fender, but I also tried to make certain the insurance company involved paid for all the damage arising out of the particular accident where their policy holder was at fault. The more fair, impartial and objective I could be, the better I could do my job.

  During each tourist season I worked long rugged hours. That was when the folks from Ohio and Indiana and Michigan were down, leaping at each other with a great clashing of tail fins and gnashing of grill work. I could pile up enough in those months to see me nicely through the reduced income and lazy hours of the rest of the year.

  But Sis kept working on me. I should go out and dig for more business. Maybe I should get into more adjusting. Line up more client companies. Hire another man when it got to be more than I could handle. Expand, grow, become important. Pile up the profit and re-invest it in land.

  As the bedroom extravagances began to slow to a less lurid pace, she became more insistent on guiding my Future. But I had exactly what I wanted, and all I wanted. I had food, shelter, clothing, tobacco and liquor sufficient to my needs. I had time off to catch snook, hunt wild turkey, walk on the beach. I was content to ride with just what I had for all the rest of the distance. I couldn’t make her see that.

  The other thing she wanted was less obvious. I am not certain she could have put it into words. But she wanted more emotional response from me. She wanted the words and looks and actions of immortal love. And it just wasn’t there to give to anybody. I had given it once, to Judy. She had walked away with it. So I could only use Sis. I could take my pleasure in the ultimate use of that sturdy eager body, and find my rationalization in those gasps and archings and moanings that told me the pleasure I was giving equalled what I was taking, but I could not go beyond that specific and obvious act into my area or faked area of love undying, even though I sensed that that was what she needed and wanted.

  For a period of weeks I was able to endure the nagging, direct and indirect, for the sake of the bounty of having her in my bed, but after a time the balance shifted and it was no longer worth it. I made a few clumsy excuses and she stopped arriving unannounced. I asked her out to the cottage a few more times, and she came willingly, but something indefinable had gone out of it, some aspect of joy and freedom. We went through the motions and assured each other it was all just great, but it wasn’t.

  There was no scene, no wild and bitter ending. It just sort of dwindled away. We saw each other nearly every working day. It didn’t hurt to lose her—it just left me with a gnaw of discontent, a feeling of mild guilt and inadequacy. It had all been over for two years, but I could not be at ease with her and I sensed it was the same with her, and always would be. Our bodies were too meaningful to each other. We shared too many lusty memories. The end of love is sadness. This had not been love, but it left a sadness nevertheless.

  The desk space I rent is in the rear of the office. I sat at my desk and looked at Sis for a few moments. She sat with her back toward me, typing industriously, sitting very erect in the posture chair. She wore a pale green skirt and a white blouse and sat with her ankles crossed. I looked at the concave curvings where her neat and narrow waist blossomed down to the convexity of her round and solid hips, and I felt that faint visceral shift and stirring of desire for her. I knew it would never be completely dead. But two years had passed and I knew I would never do anything about it. We had been too good together for it to be forgotten. I knew she was dating a lawyer, a widower, but I suspected that if I asked her to come out to the cottage with me, she would look startled, then smile in a remembered, greedy way, and nod her head. But I would not ask her. When something has ended, you can’t start it all over from the beginning. It was the beginning of the affair that I missed—that perhaps we both missed—but all we could do would be to start it up once more at the end, and thus end it again.

  As I was opening my mail she rolled halfway around on the chair casters and said, “Did they wake you up early with a mess of sirens, Sam?”

  “Sirens?”

  “I heard it on my car radio this morning. Some old duck is supposed to have spotted that Charlie Haywood down your way at about two in the morning. He reported seeing him in his car lights, ducking back into the brush down near Cass Road. That’s not much more than a mile south of you.”

  �
�Did they take him seriously?”

  “The radio said state and county police are searching the area.”

  “I think it would be pretty stupid for that fella to head back here, don’t you?”

  “I don’t really know, Sam. I guess I’m pulling for him to get away. Does that mean I’ve got a criminal mind?”

  “Probably,” I said, and forced a grin. “I got up early because I went to bed early.”

  “That lousy wind kept waking me up all night. I never sleep right when it’s windy. You know Charlie, don’t you?”

  I shrugged, casually. “I know most of the boys in the automobile agencies in the area. I had a few beers with Charlie Haywood. Pleasant kid, I thought.”

  “Not a safebreaker, or safecracker or whatever they call them.”

  “Thief is an easy word.”

  “Okay, not a thief, Sam.”

  “But he admitted it.”

  “I know he did, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find it hard to believe.”

  Just then Jennie Benjamin came in, croaking loud greetings.

  A round, florid woman, she crossed to her desk and banged her straw purse down upon it. She had parlayed a real estate license and a cheerfully abusive personality into a good living by skillfully bullying the indecisive into renting or buying property they did not particularly like. I gave Sis my best guess as to when I would be back. I had two calls to make. I drove up to Venice and checked some rear end damage to a Porsche which had been smacked at a stop sign. The company adjustor had told me the estimate seemed too high, and he had mailed me a photostat of it from Tampa. I got the foreign car parts book out of my wagon and checked the rear bumper segments and bumper guards and the allowable labor costs of replacement. The woman who owned it told me at least four times how come she had been smacked in the rear end at a stop sign. I soon found what had hiked the repair estimate. The left bumper brace had been thrust forward, not only dimpling the shell below the motor compartment, but also bowing a section of the motor compartment upward. It would have to be allowed, but I did find one bumper segment listed for replacement that did not have to be replaced, thus cutting down the repair close to twenty dollars. I told her she would get her check from Aetna in a few days and she could go ahead now and have her baby fixed up.