Джон Макдональд - Pale Gray for Guilt

I had just been through the bit. My elderly Rolls pickup, Miss Agnes , was as agile as ever, which meant about 40 seconds from a dead stop to sixty miles an hour. And she had the same reluctance to come to a stop once she was humming along. So she and I were slowly becoming a highway hazard, the narrow shaves getting narrower. So I had gone shopping, test driving, and found they all had fantastic acceleration, and they’d all stop on dimes, and they all bored me to hell.

So I went looking for a boat I could use as a car. I would keep Miss Agnes for back roads and the Flush for open waters, and use the Muñequita for errands, and if I had to have a car, there was Mr. Hertz trying hard, and Mr. Avis trying harder, and Mr. National hoping they’d run each other into the ground. Anything in Lauderdale that I wanted to buy, and I could lift, if I couldn’t buy it right at Bahia Mar, I could go off in the Muñequita and buy it. And it was nice to poot along an urban waterway and hear the distant clashing of fenders, gnashing of bumpers, and the song of the ambulances.

Janine and I ate ham and cheese sandwiches at the breakfast bar, and every time Jimmy came stomping by, he got a couple of loving pats from his mother. I had forgotten the names of the older two boys and had to pick them up out of her conversation. Johnny and Joey. Joey was the big kid. Six. Johnny was four and a half.

I realized I hadn’t seen Tyler around, the Negro who had been working for them the other times I’d been there, a tall, stringy, cheerful, ageless man, dark saffron in color, and with a scholarly face, plus an uncanny knack of diagnosing the ailments of marine engines. I asked her if it was his day off.

“Oh, Tyler quit us... it must be eight months ago. Tush was very upset about it. You know how good he was around here. But now... it’s just as well, I guess, because we couldn’t afford to pay him anyway, the way things are.”

“On account of the road?”

“And a lot of other things.”

“Such as?”

“I think if Tush wants you to hear the tale of woe, he better be the one to tell you. But I’ll tell you one thing, Travis McGee!” Her eyes narrowed, and she thumped her fist on the formica counter top. “We are not going to be run off this place!”

“Is somebody trying?”

“You’d best talk to Tush about it.”

“Can you get a sitter for tonight?”

“Huh?”

“Wear your pretties and the three of us will go run-abouting into Broward Beach and track down some booze and some meat and come home late, singing all the way.”

Her narrow face lighted up. “I would love it!”

And when Tush got back with the other two towheads, he approved. The sitter was handy. Jan explained they had made a special rate on a houseboat rental to a couple. Young kids. About twenty-one years old. They were in the houseboat where the old yellow station wagon was parked. There was a retired couple in the one on the far end. Those were the only two rented at the moment.

“Arlie and Roger Denn, their names are,” Janine explained. “They’re a little on the weird side. Sort of untidy-looking. He makes little funny figurine things and he makes shell jewelry. She does handweaving and she paints these insipid little seascapes, and when they have enough, they fill up the station wagon and go around and sell them to gift shops. Sometimes it takes two days, and sometimes it takes a week.”

Arlie Denn arrived for sitter duty right on time, and I could agree about the untidy part. She was a soft, doughy, pallid girl with a long tangle of dark blonde hair, wide, empty, indifferent blue eyes, a little sing-song voice and a mouth that hung open. She wore a man’s white shirt, dirty. Pale blue denim walking shorts, ditto. Bare feet, also dirty. I could see why Janine had fed the kids before we left.

Once I had the little boat away from the dock, I turned it over to Tush. And with the sun lowering behind us, we skimmed down the long, broad curves of the Shawana River, past the mangrove and the white herons, and out into the big bay where, corny as any postcard, a ketch was moving northward up the Waterway, sun turning the sails orange, while a ragged flight of pelicans passed diagonally in front of her, heading for the rookery, pumping then soaring, taking the cue from the flight leader.

With his big paw on the twin throttles Tush raised a questioning eyebrow, and I made a shoving motion with the heel of my hand. Janine sat on a life cushion on the transom engine hatch, in her pretty yellow dress, her short black hair snapping in the wind, her face alight with the pleasure of speed and change and the rush of the soft evening air after the heat of the day.

At the city marina Tush slowed and we went up the channel and under the bridge, and along the bay side of the beaches. I took it into a place called Beach Marine, where the man said nobody would mess with it. We walked three blocks to a good place I knew. Thirty feet from the restaurant entrance Jan balanced herself with one hand on Tush’s big shoulder while she changed from the zoris to the high-heeled shoes she was carrying in her straw purse.

The drinks were good, the steaks were good, the evening was almost good. Every marriage at one time or another is going to run through some heavy weather. Heavy weather comes in all kinds of flavors. Slowly going broke, slowly losing the whole stake instead of making it like you thought you would — that can erode the happiest of hearts. With the two of them it wasn’t a continuous thing. It just kept cropping up now and again, and clouding the fun and games.

There was just enough said for me to see the shape of the running quarrel, or argument, or regret. Over a year ago, when they had a chance to pull out, when they had a buyer for the place, Jan had wanted to take the loss and get out. Only about a ten-percent loss on what they’d put into it, but that didn’t count all the hours of their brute labor. But he’d insisted it was just a run of bad luck. Nobody was really trying to stack the cards against them. Things would get better. Things always got better.

Except when they get worse.

Tush didn’t want to talk about it at all. To him it was like whining. He would let it go just so far, and then he would reach out, grab the conversational ball, and throw it the hell into center field.

But they seemed to have a good time, on average. Maybe a better time than in many months. It was overcast, and there was pink lightning on three sides of us when we went hurrying back across the bay. Tush picked up the markers for me with the hand-held spotlight, with its 45,000 candles and its narrow one-mile beam. We got the boat tied up and the first fat drops were speckling the dust as we made it to the motel. The rain roar was coming. The fat sitter went cantering and bobbling off to her rented houseboat.

Maybe three inches came down in the hour we sat at the Bannon’s breakfast bar and drank kitchen whisky and told lies.

Back in my borrowed motel unit, after starting to get ready for bed, I decided I’d better check the Muñequita and see if the automatic bilge pump had handled the heavy rain and turned off, as promised. The air was washed clean, and the hungry mosquitoes hadn’t begun to roam. The wind was rain-fresh, and from the west. The boat was fine, and, as I turned, the bulk of Tush Bannon standing in the night startled me.

“I miss the sound of that old hump-back bridge when the wind’s from upriver,” he said. “Not much traffic over it, but the timbers would rumble. You get so you don’t even hear a sound like that, and then you miss it after it’s gone.”

“They put a new one there?”

He sighed. “Not there. Three miles further upriver. That hurts. It lost me most of the business I was getting from the people that live on the other side. TTA wanted it taken out. They wanted the road to it officially abandoned. We went to the Public Hearing and made a lot of noise, but what TTA wants from this county, TTA gets.”