Джон Макдональд - Pale Gray for Guilt

She rolled, rose up slowly, glowered indignantly at me and settled back down into her sleep, nestling onto her other side, a long, tangled tassel of red hair falling across her cheek and mouth, stirring with each breath.

I heard furtive galley sounds and found Barni Baker in a hip-length yellow robe, her hair in a kerchief, doing something to eggs. Her eyebrows went up when she saw me, and she whispered, “You too! What’s your excuse? Don’t answer. It’s rhetorical. It’s criminal to have to talk in the morning. I found this here good-looking roe and these here good-looking eggs, and what smells like good Herkimer County cheese, and if you want me to double the portion, just nod.”

I nodded. I poured us some juice. She had the water on. I dumped the Columbian fine grind into the Benz filter paper and slid into the booth. She stared at me as I tried the egg invention. The question was in the lift of a little blonde eyebrow. The response was the circle of thumb and forefinger. When she started to tidy up, I told her to leave it until later, and I carried our coffee seconds in the white porcelain pot topsides, and she brought along the mugs.

The morning was almost cold. I dug a blanket out of the forward locker for her to use as a lap robe over her bare legs, and I put on an old gray cardigan I’ve had for seven hundred years. It could now be classified as a missionary barrel reject.

“I think we could have practiced on the snare drum and tuba down there without bothering those two,” I said.

“Mick needs all the sleep he can get. We’ll have to leave by ten o’clock to make that flight. They’re going to work him to death when he gets to Spain. The picture is behind schedule.”

“When do you have to go back to work?”

“Tuesday noon.”

“So come back.”

“Thanks, but I don’t think so. I think I’ll turn the car in and hole up and try to do some thinking. You make damned good coffee, Trav. How good is your advice? Like to the lovelorn?”

“The best. But nobody ever takes it.”

“So here is a hypothetical case about two loners, about this little ball of fluff who is an airline stewardess who is twenty-seven all too soon, and likes to be where the action is, but lately she wonders if the action isn’t getting to be all alike. And there is this very special and talented guy who is a cinematographer, and who is a tough and skeptical thirty-two, who is gun-shy from a sour marriage, and who gets so hooked on his work he can’t remember the stewardess’s name, practically. And they are together maybe five times a year, maybe five days a time, and it is always the rightest of the right. The workingest of ever, even though they keep telling themselves and each other that it is going to wear off any minute now. So last time the camera guy wanted to marry the airline girl and she said hell no, so she thought about it a lot, and this time she brought it up and said okay and he said hell no, because he was hurt because she said no the last time. Can these two darling kids find happiness, McGee?”

“You get married when there is no other conceivable course of action, Barni-baby. You get married because you are both compelled to marry each other.”

“Indeed?”

“Don’t get frosty. I’m not putting down your romance. It will either get inevitable or it won’t. It won’t hang where it is. It will get bigger, or it will start to dry up, and either way it goes will be the right answer at that time. Don’t get pushy.”

After a long silence she said, “Anyway, the coffee is good.” She shrugged. “Change of subject. This Puss Killian of yours. I like her, Trav. I like her a lot. But there’s a funny thing about her. You think she’s telling you all about herself, and afterward you know she hasn’t really told you a thing. What about her, anyway?”

“I wouldn’t know. Don’t look at me like that. I’ve known her for four months. She goes away for a couple of days every few weeks. I could do some digging. But it’s up to her. When and if she wants to talk, she can talk. I know that she’s from Seattle, that she isn’t hurting for money, that she’s twenty-four or five, that she shed a husband not long before she showed up here, that I met her on the beach only because she stepped on a sea urchin and was cursing billy blue blazes and ordered me to come over and do something about it right now. I know she has enough energy for three stevedores, that she can eat three pounds of steak at a sitting, that she can hold her booze, and she would walk up and spit in a tiger’s eye if she thought it would liven up the idle hour. And I know that once in a while she goes absolutely dead silent, and all she wants is for you to pretend she isn’t there.”

“She has a very soft look for you, Travis. When you’re not looking at her.”

“Troublemaker!”

I tried again and couldn’t get an answer out of Tush. I had the long distance operator run a check on the phone up there, but it was reported in order. At a little after nine I thought I’d better see if Puss wanted to say her good-bye in person or let me relay it. I went in and sat gently on the bed. She was breathing faster. Her hand and arm were twitching as she dreamed, and she made a little whimpering sound. I gently thumbed the red hair back away from her face and saw a wetness of tears leaking out of the closed lids.

I put my hand on her bare shoulder and gave her a little shake. “Hey,” I said. “It’s not all that bad, is it?”

She opened wide blind eyes and snuffled and said in a little-girl voice, “But they keep saying...” She shook herself like a wet red setter. She focused on me, snuffled again, smiled and said, “Thanks, pal. They were about to cut me off at the pass. Whassa time?”

“Nine fifteen.”

“Hmmm. If I’m reading you, McGee, I admire your thinking. It’s very good. Stay right where you are while I go brush my teeth first.”

“Mick and Barni are taking off in a half hour. I wondered if you wanted to wave bye-bye.”

She gave a leonine stretching yawn. “Yes I do indeed. And if you had any sense at all, you big brown knuckly idiot, you’d have come smirking in here at quarter of, not quarter after. Haste makes waste, and what I have is not to be wasted, lad. So set your little clock for siesta time.”

“At siesta time we’re going to be up in Shawana County visiting some old friends of mine with a problem.”

“Really?” She sat up, holding the sheet to her breasts. “Hmm. Then hustle the lady some coffee while she showers. And set your clock ahead.”

“... on location like that,” Mick was saying, “it’s the time lag that drives you nuts, not getting to see rushes, and see how the color values stand up until you’re three days or four past that particular point.”

And from the giant shower stall, above the sound of sloshing like unto that which a small walrus herd might make, the three of us could hear Puss in good voice: “With ’er ’ead tooked oonderneath ’er arm, she ’awnts the bloody tow’r. With ’er ’ead tooked oonderneath ’er arm at the midnight hour.”

“So I turned around,” said Barni Baker, “and there was that sweet little old man yanking away at the lever on the cabin door thinking it was how you get into the men’s room, and we’re at twenty-eight thousand feet over the Amazon basin. So I got to him at a dead run and steered him gently where he wanted to go. Then he came out and stared at the cabin door and the big lever and rolled his eyes up and fainted dead away. A passenger helped me get him back to his seat and I gave him smelling salts and then I explained to him how the doors are designed so the pressurization clamps them shut so tightly ten men couldn’t open them. But he just kept shaking his head and saying O Dear God.”