David Alexander - Masters of Noir - Volume 2

Lynette McCaffrey, her legs crossed and one sandalled foot swinging, sat between Art Wallace and Hank Van Duser. She was smoking a cigarette against all the rules of the Wrinkle; while the engines were in motion, smoking was not even permitted on the upper deck, much less inside in the cabin. Blowing directly onto their backs and necks, a chill wind streamed into the open windows as the boat gathered speed, colder in a way, because nobody was dressed for it, than a winter wind — the kind of chill wind that blows across the water on a summer midnight. Some of the girls huddled against their partners’ shoulders, and the fellows put their arms around them. There was a great deal of laughter and lively talk, tossed back and forth among the passengers, but it all rang hollow and false in George Burton’s ear. Feeling out of it, wanting to be alone, he got up and turned toward the ladder-like steps that went up to the open deck above. Just as he began the climb, Lynette called out:

“Georgie! Don’t go up there, kid. You’re probably all sweaty after the dance and you’ll catch your death.”

“I’ll be all right,” he answered casually over his shoulder, and disappeared above.

He sat down on the bench in front of the pilot’s cabin and folded his arms. It was wonderful the way she had said “sweaty”; every single one of the silly girls he knew would have said “perspiration.” He was not a bit sweaty, of course, because he had not danced a single dance; but all the same, in a minute or two he began to be very cold. He sat there in the night wind shivering as if with a chill, and he thought of what Lynette had said about catching his death. He hoped he would. She had warned him, and he had ignored her warning. He hoped she would remember this, a few days from now, and remember, too, how he had gone up to the upper deck just the same, as if he just didn’t care...

The Wrinkle was out in the middle of the bay now, and he saw the lights on Garfield and Cedar Island far off on one side, and a few lights still showing in the long row of cottages that lined the narrow sand bar between the bay and Lake Ontario. The bar shone palely in the moonlight, outlined against the expanse of the lake beyond, bright and wide in the moonlight like the open sea; it was like a reef or magic atoll of the South Seas, and he murmured: “Yon palm-fringed incandescent coast...” The bar was only a piddling strip of gravelly sand strung with a lot of cheesy shacks that passed for cottages and a few moth-eaten cottonwood trees, but the effect was all right...

They’ll be sorry, he said to himself, a few days from now or next week, maybe, when he didn’t turn up at the dance — though of course the news would get around long before then. They’d remember a lot of things about him and tell each other that he was a pretty darn nice guy after all and wish they had paid more attention to him while they had the chance. At the end of the season Lynette McCaffrey would go home to her set in Cleveland and tell them all that though Parsons Point was just a dump where there was nothing to do at all, where you simply went crazy sitting around all day doing nothing, there was one of the most wonderful fellows there that she had ever known in her life and before she got a chance to know him very well, the most terrible thing happened — it had plunged the whole place into the most awful gloom... He gazed across the dark racing waters of the bay and thought: Next week all this will be the same, all this will be here, and I will not...

When the Wrinkle pulled in at the wharf below the Bluff and they all piled out, he waited till the last passenger had left the cabin before he climbed down the ladder and got off. In the moonlit dark he heard the cries of “So long” and “See you tomorrow” as the group broke up and the fellows took home their dates. Then he started up the steep path of the Bluff alone, careful to hang back so that he would not overtake those who were walking slowly on, arm linked in arm, ahead of him.

He came in through the back door of his parents’ cottage and reached overhead for the string of the kitchen light. By now he really was sweaty, his shirt was sticking to his back under the tweed jacket, and he was chilled through and through. On the white oilcloth of the table he found a note in pencil from his mother, written on one of those oblong cards found in Shredded Wheat packages and held down by a saltcellar so that it wouldn’t blow away in the breeze that came in strong through the screen door:

“Be sure and empty the ice pan and this time don’t forget!!!”

He smiled sadly to himself. What did his mother know — what did anybody know — of what had been happening to him this night, what he had been through and what he was feeling in his heart...

When he went out to his cot on the sleeping porch, which was open on three sides to the cold night breeze, he found that his mother had left his pajamas for him beside the pillow and turned the blankets down, ready for him to get in. An idea came to him. He stripped off the blankets and even the sheet, rolled them up in a great bundle and fired them into a corner of the porch; then he fired his pajamas after them. He would sleep raw tonight and really catch that death, just as Lynette McCaffrey had said he would. He started taking off his clothes.

But when he got down to his B.V.D.’s, it occurred to him that maybe it wasn’t nice to go to bed naked, not when he was in love. If it had been just any old tramp, that would have been a different thing; but if he was going to do this because of a girl like Lynette McCaffrey, it wouldn’t be quite decent for them to find him in the morning lying there without a stitch on. He got on the bed in his underwear and lay flat on his back with his arms folded under his head and gazed off into the freezing night. He made every effort to lie rigid and stiff as a ramrod but it was difficult, because his body was shaken again and again by shudders of chill. But he refused to accept his physical feelings; he recognized only feelings far different, deeper, and truer. He had heard about mind-over-matter and he concentrated intensely on his emotion and his thoughts. Now another line of poetry sprang unpremeditated into his head and with a melancholy satisfaction he thought it was the most wonderful thing that had ever been thought or said in the world — why, it was as if it had been written for him alone:

“Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain...”

Suddenly he was wakened out of a deep sleep by a violent shaking that was not of the cold. He rolled over and sat up, startled. His mother stood there beside the cot, her hand on his shoulder, scolding him unmercifully.

“George Burton, are you out of your mind! What’s the big idea of going to bed on a night like this without a blanket over you or even a sheet, for heaven’s sakes? And my stars, sleeping in your underwear — are you crazy?” Scolding away, she fished up the roll of blankets and sheet from the corner of the porch, shook them out and spread them over his cot, tucking him carefully in on all sides. He didn’t say a word to her but he was very grateful and surprised at himself all the same, as he was just about dying of the cold and he didn’t think he could stand it another minute.

“Goodness knows how long you’ve been lying there exposed to the world like that — do you realize it’s after two o’clock in the morning? Good thing for you, young man, that I got up to see if you were in! Really, George Burton, you’re simply not to be trusted at all...”

When she had gone back to her own room, he lay there with the blankets wrapped up tight and warm around his neck. He was asleep before he had time to think, almost before he had time to realize that above every other person on earth he hated Lynette McCaffrey...