Джон Макдональд - Pale Gray for Guilt

When she ran out of the hank of thread, and clipped it off and took a fresh end from the spool and moistened it in her lips before threading the needle again, she looked up at me for a moment. It was a flat, dark look, and it made me think of old stories of how warriors dreaded being taken alive and turned over to the women.

At the end of day she wrested the anchor free when I ran the Flush up to it, and brought it aboard. We ran outside, creaking and rocking in the swell. I put it on automatic pilot at just enough speed to hold it quartering into the sea, and together we clumsied him up and out onto the side deck. She held the book and tilted it to catch the light from where the sun had gone down, and she read the words we thought would be appropriate to the situation.

She laid the book down and with my one arm and her two, we lifted the stiffened body upright, and as she held it propped against the rail, I bent and grasped the tarp at the feet and lifted and toppled it into the sea. It sank at once. And then I took the wheel and came about and headed for the buoy that marks the pass back into Biscayne Bay.

Once she accepted the need to stay by ourselves, to heal in order to avoid questions, a strange new placidity came over her. She had long times of silence, and I could guess that now that she knew what had happened, and how it had happened, part of it was over and the part about finding an acceptance of Tush’s death had begun.

She began to eat well and spend some of the sun hours basting and broiling herself to the deep tan her skin took readily, and she began sleeping long and deeply, gaining the weight that softened her bone-sharp face, that filled out the long concave line of the insides of her thighs, that made her fanny look a great deal less as if it had been slapped flat with a one by six.

I called Meyer from shoreside phones. I wore the arm out of the sling for longer periods each day, reslinging it when the knitting muscle structures began to ache.

She phoned Connie when the trip with the kids was over, and Connie accepted the notion that a little more time cruising would do her good. She talked to each of the boys. They were fine. They missed her. She missed them.

Meyer eased out of the last of her holdings in Fletcher on the Wednesday, the last day of January, at a good price, and when we talked again the following Monday evening — I had phoned him from Islamorada — he said with undisguised glee that Fletcher had gotten up to forty-six dollars a share at noon, and the Exchange had suspended trading in it fifteen minutes later, pending a full investigation of a tip that the earnings reports had been misstated, that a syndicate of speculators had been boosting the price, and that the company officers had been quietly unloading all their own holdings at these false and inflated values. The word on the Street was that it might be another Westec case, and it was rumored that a Florida-based speculator named Gary Santo was deeply involved in the artificial runup of the price.

“If they ever approve it for listing again,” Meyer said, “it will open at about six dollars, and even that is more than a realistic book value per share.”

The next morning the Flush was tied up at the marina dock at Islamorada, and after breakfast I had Jan peel the final dressing off the wound. The entrance wound was a pink dime-sized dimple, vivid in the middle of the surrounding tan. She made careful inspection of the exit area, held the back of her hand against it to check for any inner heat of infection and said, “This last little piece of scab is going to come off any day now. If we could have had it sewn up, there wouldn’t be so much scarring, Trav. It looks as if... somebody stabbed you with one of those wood rasp things.”

“I got through the whole day without the sling yesterday. And I can hold that smallest sledge out at arm’s length for fifteen seconds. And so I keep a shirt on till the scars bleach white and match the old ones.”

“You would make a very low-grade hide,” she said. “They might find three or four sections that would make nice little lampshades, but they’d have to throw the rest away.”

“Just accident-prone, I guess. And you pass inspection now, lady. Keep it combed that way and you’re fine.”

“You see, I was aboard this funny houseboat and it got rough and I lurched and took this great gouge out of my scalp on some kind of sharp thing sticking out.”

“We can head back so Meyer can help you count your money.”

Late that afternoon she went below and came up with two cold uncapped bottles of Tuborg and sat close beside me and said, “A sort of an announcement, Travis McGee. There won’t be another chance to talk, probably. I wish to announce that you are a dear, strange, ceremonious kind of guy, and I didn’t like you very much at all before Tush died and didn’t know why he liked you, and now I do, maybe.”

“Tell me. Maybe I can use it.”

“It made me jumpy to be alone with you, because the way I had you all figured out, you were going to comfort the little widow woman. Life goes on and all that. Let me bring you back to life, darling. A woman always knows when a man finds her physically attractive, and I am flattered that you so do.”

“I so do.”

“I expected some of the gooey rationalizations of the chronic stud, including how Tush would approve, and besides it’s so healthy. But you have been very stuffy and proper and dear. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Maybe I would have gone along with it, out of some kind of self-destructive impulse. I don’t know. I don’t know if I was a one-man gal. I sort of think so. Maybe that part of me — the privacy part — will come alive again. Anyway, I’m glad you didn’t give me a chance to make any choice. Physically I’m a lot better than I was. Better nerves. But I’m still half a person. And so damned lonely, and the world is so... flattened out.” She reached up and kissed me under the ear. “So thanks for not trying to be God’s gift to the bereaved, dear.”

“You’re welcome aboard anytime. You wear well.”

She smiled a bitter little twisty smile and, eyes wet, took my hand and clenched it tightly. So we were a couple of kids in an abandoned barn and the big storm was hammering down, and we held hands for comfort. Tush was her storm, and perhaps Puss was mine.

On another Wednesday, the day of the Valentine, Meyer came over at high noon and interrupted my project of cutting and laying some Nautilex that was a clever imitation of bleached teak on a portion of the afterdeck.

“So I am here and I have brought you a Valentine,” said he.

“Sometimes, Meyer, when you act like Porky, you make me feel like Pogo.”

“Read the card.”

I put down the knife I was cutting the vinyl with and thumbed his card open. Homemade. He had drawn a heart pierced by an arrow, with a dollar sign dangling from the end of the arrow. His verse said, “Roses are red; violets are blue. Unadulterated, unselfish, unrewarded efforts in behalf of even the grieving widow of an old and true friend are not like you.”

“It rhymes,” he said.

Inside the folded card was his personal check made out to me for twenty-five thousand dollars.

“What the hell is this?”

“Such gratitude! It hurt me to see you lose your professional standing, McGee. Like you were going soft and sentimental. So, through my own account, I put us into Fletcher and rode it up nicely and took us out, and split the bonus right down the middle. It’s short-term. It’s a check. Pay your taxes. Live a little. It’s a longer retirement this time. We can gather up a throng and go blundering around on this licentious craft and get the remorses for saying foolish things while in our cups. We had a salvage contract, idiot, and the fee is comparatively small but fair.”