A Man of Affairs Page 4

  He gave me an uneasy glance. “What kind of work?”

  “Start you off as a stock chaser. That’s the fastest way to learn. In about eighteen months you’d have a pretty good background.”

  He nodded dubiously and said something about getting another leg to stand on, and went back to Ricky’s department with his empty glass.

  “That wasn’t very kind, Sam,” Louise said.

  “I mean it seriously. If he’ll come in, I think it would be good for him.”

  “It must be nice to sit way up there and look down upon all of us and decide what’s good for us.”

  I felt my face get hot. “I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I just meant that …”

  “You meant that he does nothing and that makes you uneasy because everybody should be brisk and industrious like you.”

  “Damn it, Louise, you don’t …”

  She smiled in a tired way. “Sorry. Pay absolutely no attention.” She hitched her chair toward the window and began to look down at the green and misted earth below, and I knew I had been dismissed.

  Puss was across the way playing solitaire at a small table. After one venture into the whisky sour area, she was back to her normal brandy on the rocks. I went over and sat opposite her and said, “Black ten on the red jack.”

  “Oh, I know all about that, Sam. I’m saving it for when there isn’t anything else left to do. How about some gin?” Tommy was up front between the pilots, bending over them and talking. Warren had sat down in the rear of the plane and was looking at a magazine. Louise was looking out the window, and her look of holiday had faded.

  “For how much?” I asked Puss.

  She bit her lip. “Hmmm. How interesting do we want to make it? Dime a point?”

  “That’s too damn interesting. That would make my hands sweat. A nickel?”

  “Done. Cut for deal.”

  By the time Ricky served lunch, I was a hundred and eighty-eight dollars to the good and she was furious at me, at the cards and at herself. She is a girl with a highly developed competitive instinct. By the time we made the gas stop she had gotten forty dollars back and she was bored with the game. She scrawled a check on her Texas bank.

  We made West Palm on schedule, landing amid the heavy civilian and Air Force traffic on the joint base, and it took fifteen minutes to get clearance to West End.

  Warren had drunk himself into a semi-catatonic state, sleepily and massively out of touch with reality. The rest of us looked out the windows as we flew east over Palm Beach, over the big hotels and the random blue patchwork of swimming pools, out over the Atlantic surf line. In twenty-five minutes we began to see the islands of the Bahamas, the vividly streaked blue and tan and green of the shoal waters of the Bahama Flats.

  I saw a huge waterfront establishment which, except for an enormous swimming pool, looked from the air like some sort of military base. A narrow paved road ran along the shoreline to a ramshackle village about a mile away, and continued on through the village and down the coast. Except for the big establishment and the village, the rest of what I could see of the narrow island looked overgrown and uninhabited.

  We landed on a paved, eroded airstrip and taxied to the terminal building. It was a small frame building surrounded with dust. It had a stubby tower, and had at one time been painted gaily but the colors had faded. Across the taxi strip from the terminal several light planes were parked and lashed.

  As we went down the steps a man came toward the aircraft, walking briskly and smiling warmly. He seemed impervious to the grubby surroundings of the airport. At forty feet he radiated impressive charm and complete efficiency. He wore sand-colored walking shorts, a chocolate-brown sports shirt, a yachting cap, Allan Murray Space Shoes in a sandal design with tall dark-brown wool socks. His exposed knees were sturdy and dark brown, the hair on them bleached pale. He was tall, with solid shoulders and a handsome rather heavy face. He had a wide white smile and he was theatrically gray at the temples. As a television huckster he would have been termed true and valid. I had the uncomfortable feeling that you could be marooned on an island with this fellow for seven years and never get a clue as to what he was thinking. He would be inevitably and interminably polite and charming, and were he forced to kill you and eat you, he would be deft and slightly apologetic and quite noble about it. And he would know exactly which leaves and berries to boil with you to give you the right flavor.

  He went directly to Louise and took her hand in both of his and made like Gregory Peck being a young girl’s uncle and said, “I’m so glad you could make it, Louise. Mike sends his apologies. There’re other guests on the island and he couldn’t get away or he would have met you himself. Hello, Tommy.” The handshake was both manly and Ivy League.

  Louise introduced him to Puss, and then to Warren. Warren had a ponderous list and a bleared expression. And she said, “And Sam Glidden, Fletcher Bowman.”

  I got the manly handshake. He looked directly into my eyes, unwaveringly. It is an unnatural affectation and it always makes me feel uneasy. “Glad you could join the party, Sam. Mike is delighted. He’s been following your career, and we both feel you can make valid contributions to our little conference on the island.”

  “Uh. Thanks,” I said. I wished I could have been glib. I wished he’d let go of my hand. He made me feel as if I were wearing coveralls and chewing a kitchen match.

  “I’ll get your stuff hustled through customs,” he said. “And I’ve lined up three so-called taxis. Don’t be alarmed by them. They’ll get us to the Grand Bahama Club. It’s only three quarters of a mile away. Our boat is tied up at the club dock and we’ll have a fifty-minute run to Dubloon Cay. Suppose you all wait over there in the shade and we’ll hustle the baggage off.”

  When we were in the shade of the terminal building I looked back. He was talking to the crew and they were bobbing their heads. Two Bahama boys were helping Ricky get the luggage off. I had the same big old brown scuffed suitcase I had taken to college. There was a big case that I imagined belonged to Tommy. Both women seemed to have four matched pieces each.

  All the baggage went in one cab, and Fletcher Bowman split us, three and three, in the other two cabs. He managed to arrange it so he rode with Louise and me. I felt quite certain that he knew that we were the two to focus on.

  We got a brisk travelogue. “The airstrip belongs to the Grand Bahama Club. Chap named Butlin built the Grand Bahama Club after the war. A British syndicate operation. Put millions into it. But nobody had figured out how to get the people here to fill it. It went broke and sat empty until a few years ago and then another group took it over. They seem to be doing well enough. They put the income back into improvements. It’s really quite comfortable. See those buildings there. Completely empty. Moldering away. I doubt the hotel will ever get large enough to put them to use. But the plantings are nice, aren’t they? Here we are. This is the part they use now.”

  The part in use was huge. We went on into the lobby. It was airy and vast and pleasantly decorated. We could look out through glass walls at wide green lawns, brilliant flowers, stone walks, several acres of awning in wide blue and white stripes, the gigantic swimming pool, and the vivid waters of the Bahama Flats beyond the coconut palms.

  I saw Warren take his bearings, turn and head directly for the bar off the lobby.

  “If you like,” Bowman said, “you people can have a quick drink or take a quick look around. I’ll see to the luggage and meet you down there on the dock in ten minutes. That’s our boat, tied up on the left side, the green and white one.” He smiled and nodded and marched off.

  Tommy and Puss headed for the bar. “Look around?” I asked Louise. She was looking hesitantly toward the bar.

  She gave me a bright and completely artificial smile and said, “Let’s.”

  We walked out a door and by a large airy dining room with yellow tablecloths and headed for the swimming pool.

  “Your Mister Bowman is quite a production. Has Dean got many mo
re at home like him?”

  “He’s not my Mister Bowman and I wouldn’t know.”

  “Don’t snap at me. Louise.”

  “I’m sorry. I guess I just feel … sort of cross. Anyway, I think he’s very nice.”

  “Do you know anything about him?”

  “He said he’d been with Mike Dean for quite a long time.”

  “He’s a very plausible guy.”

  “Sam, will you look at that poor little mouse on the high board? She waited too long.”

  There was an awkward girl in that gangly hinterland between childhood and adolescence on the high board. She wore a brown swim suit. She stood pigeontoed, holding her nose, her left hand outstretched for balance. She was looking down at the water and she was frozen there. Her friends were yelling at her to jump. After a painful eternity, she turned and scampered back to the safety of the platform. A small boy jeered at her and ran out on the board and off the end and made running movements all the way down. The girl clung to the iron railing, shaking her head. I looked at Louise. She was looking up at the girl, her lips slightly parted, an odd expression on her face.

  “That’s me,” she said softly.

  “What?”

  She turned quickly and the mood was lost. “I … I don’t know what I meant. I didn’t mean anything.” So the muted and competent Louise Dodge felt somehow that she was on a high place and afraid to jump. Maybe she felt she had waited too long. And I wondered if, also, she felt she were in some area of transition, some awkward area between two kinds of existences.

  We walked to the far end of the big pool.

  “Look,” I said.

  The girl had gone out to the end of the board again. Her friends were counting aloud, chanting a count. Shrill voices saying, “Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten—GO!”

  She wavered and could not. She started to turn and lost her balance. She waved her arms wildly and screamed and fell, and grabbed her nose when she was half way down. We watched her swim to the side, race up the ladders, run out to the end of the board and go off almost without hesitation.

  “After the first time, it’s easy,” I said.

  “That’s what they say,” Louise said.

  Somehow we had started talking on two levels. It made me feel clumsy with her, and yet curiously excited. I could not deny the strength of the attraction I felt toward her. I could not look at her without thinking how it would be to touch her. But it was something I was going to have to sublimate. I knew that. And this funny sort of talk made it more difficult to thrust desire out of my mind. I did not want to think of desire, because then I thought of Warren Dodge, and my mind would make ugly, sick little pictures of the two of them together, of his grossness defiling her lucently ivory body. Somebody had written the wrong story book about Louise and Sam. We didn’t meet when we should have met. When we were both ready to meet. A time like that goes by and you can’t get it back. You can howl or you can whine, but you can’t go back to any of those forks in your own road and try the other turn instead of the one you took.

  Anyway, this wasn’t the girl with the braid and the blue dress. This was a woman and she was twenty-seven, and you could look at her eyes and the shape of her mouth and make a fair guess as to how often and how badly she had been hurt.

  When we saw the others down on the dock we headed that way. The boat was called the Try Again, and it was a twenty-six-foot sports fisherman with out-riggers, twin screws, two swivel fishing chairs bolted to the deck, a broad beam and an oversized cockpit. The crew was a knotted charcoal-colored little man in khakis named Romeo. When we were aboard some boys on the dock tossed our lines aboard. Romeo eased it out and then opened it up and it really got up and went. There was a northeast wind and enough of a chop so that the Try Again spanked white spray out fifteen yards on each side of the bow, but it ran steady and dry.

  Bowman, braced easily against the movement of the boat, gave us all more of the travelogue, speaking above the sound of the gutty engines.

  “This is one of the great fishing areas of the world,” he said. “You have the flats for dolphin, albacore, king, tarpon, barracuda, amberjack, Spanish mackerel and so on. Then, down toward Bimini, which isn’t much of a run from here in the Try Again, you get marlin, tuna, sail, mako, the big stuff. Mike doesn’t get as much time to fish as he’d like to have. He’s a real bug on it. The day before yesterday he got an eighty-seven-pound barracuda on thirty-pound test line. Ugly devil.”

  I couldn’t resist it. “I thought you were in New York the day before yesterday, Mr. Bowman.”

  It didn’t cause a ripple. “Please call me Fletcher, Sam. I got down yesterday. Amparo showed me a picture of it she took with one of those Polaroid cameras. That’s Amparo Blakely. She’s Mike’s indispensable girl Friday. Last year Mike brought a four-hundred-and-thirty-pound marlin to gaff on sixty-pound test line. The fight lasted over three hours.”

  Tommy had been listening avidly. He moved in on Bowman with what sounded like highly technical questions. Bowman seemed to give informed answers. It gave me the uneasy feeling that there would be damn few subjects that could come up that Bowman wouldn’t have the inside pitch on, and couldn’t discuss with mellow confidence and self-effacing charm. He had a white scar in one thick black eyebrow and I wondered who had had the pleasure of putting it there. The sun was hot and the three male tourists, Tommy first, shed jackets and ties and rolled up shirt sleeves. The air seemed to be reviving Warren. He asked Bowman if there was a drink aboard. Bowman was apologetic and dreadfully sorry that there was not. But we would be at Dubloon Cay in half an hour now. It was just thirty miles northeast of Grand Bahama.

  I found myself looking at Louise. She was standing by the rail, holding onto one vertical support for the Navy top. The wind snapped her glossy black hair against her cheek and molded her dress tightly against her high breasts and against her thighs. I just looked at her and when I turned and looked at Bowman he was still talking to Tommy, but he was looking over Tommy’s shoulder at me. He held my glance for a quarter beat and then looked away, but I had the feeling he had gotten the message.

  THREE

  Bowman pointed out Dubloon Cay and it didn’t look as though there was anything on it. It was low and about three miles long. Then we went around a point and we could see the small tidy bay, the long T-shaped dock, a wide expanse of lawn that sloped up to a long low building of weathered wood, with many porches and verandas. As we came closer I could see a pool to the left of the house, with umbrellas and people lying around in the sun, and a tiny figure of somebody in a white coat carrying a tray of drinks. To the right of the main house, back in the pines, were several smaller structures. There was a cruiser about forty-five feet long moored to the dock, as well as several skiffs with outboard motors. A hundred yards to the left of the dock, along the semicircle of sand beach, a small float plane was pulled up against the sand and moored with long lines tied to palms. There was a low sea wall between the lawn and the sand beach. The layout looked like a small and efficient hotel, fashionable and comfortable. God knows Mike Dean could afford it.

  Romeo reversed the engines at the last possible moment and Bowman fended the boat off the dock until Romeo had the fenders in place and the lines secured. Two Bahamian boys in white jackets trotted down and got the luggage onto the dock. We each identified our own luggage, and Bowman told the boys what rooms we were to be put in, and told us that the best thing to do would be follow the boys and unpack and change into something comfortable and join the party out by the pool. He said it was a little too late for sun clothing as the bugs would be out in another hour to drive us all indoors.

  We were all in the right wing of the building. The McGanns were beside me and the Dodges beyond them. My room was clean and rather bare and very small. A room for sleeping only. There was a small tiled bath. One door opened onto the corridor and the other door onto the long front veranda with its view of the bay and the open sea beyond, and twin islands in the dista
nce. I unpacked, changed to gray slacks and a dark blue sports shirt, and walked out onto the veranda at about five-thirty. The sun was getting lower, but there was still a lot of heat in it. I had no intention of heading for the pool by myself.

  Fifty feet along the screened veranda a screen door hissed. I looked up from lighting my cigarette and saw a blond girl come in, walking from sunlight into shade. She wore a knit shirt in a narrow red and white stripe, red shorts that were very short indeed. She was a round-faced leggedy blonde, toffee-tan, barefoot, humming a something song, swinging her legs in the song’s rhythm, carrying a half drink in her hand. She saw me and lifted the drink as though in a toast and said, “Hello now,” and turned into a room two doors from mine. She left me with memories of legs and smile, and a sense of the whole island being brought into better focus. I sat in a deep canvas chair and put my legs on a low round wooden table, and in a few minutes Tommy and Puss came out. We decided to wait for the others and it was not a long wait, and then we went on out to the pool where everybody was, and where the drinks were.

  I had seen plenty of pictures of Michael Davis Dean, and I had heard a lot of talk about him. I knew what he would look like. A big head with heavy features of that spuriously noble design that makes you think of togas and Cicero. A shock of prematurely white hair, unkempt in the contrived way of a second-rate poet. Nobody seemed to know very much about his past. His father had been well off. Mike had never gone to college. He got his first national publicity back in 1934 when he was thirty. In the big receivership tangle over the Geiss Roller Bearing empire, it was Mike who popped up out of no place, holding aces back to back. He had never married. I had heard a lot of words about him. Crafty, unscrupulous, power-mad, egomaniac. And also, charming, able, generous, genius.