John MacDonald - The Deep Blue Good-Bye

This family was a circus act, balanced on a small platform atop a swaying pole, as the crowd goes ahhhh, anticipating disaster. A vain foolish man and a careless young wife and a tortured girl, swaying to the long drum roll. When it fell, the unmarked House Beautiful would sell readily, the Lincoln would be acquired by a Mexican dentist. Who would survive? George, perhaps, as he had the shortest distance to fall.

On the long east-southeast slant of the Houston-Miami jet flight, high over the blue steel silence of the Gulf, I thought of dour David Berry in the night, lifting away the big slabs of stone, tucking the shiny fortune down at the base of the pillar and replacing the stones, then waiting for his family to wake and find him.

He had hoped for luck, stubbornly vowing to live and come back, knowing his women could not cope with the crafty problem of turning blue fire into money, knowing there was no one he could trust. Then Junior Allen had moved close to him, perhaps sensing a secret, chipping at it, prying.

Maybe, in his despair, David Berry had even considered trusting Junior Allen. But he had decided against it, or death came too quickly. But Allen knew it was there, and had lived there and thought and searched and finally found it.

A lump of wax like a huge blueberry muffin? All the rains and the heat and the salt damp had corroded the container away. And there would have been some bug with a taste for wax. Loose and gleaming probably, amid pale stalks and dirt, with Allen kneeling, his breath shallow and his heart thumping as he gathered them up.

Bugs would eat the wax. Chaw the old canvas. And one day there would be a mutation, and we will have new ones that can digest concrete, dissolve steel and suck up the acid puddles, fatten on magic plastics, lick their slow way through glass. Then the cities will tumble and man will be chased back into the sea from which he came…

The large yellowed headlamps of Miss Agnes peered through dusk as I turned into Bahia Mar and found a slot a reasonable distance from the Busted Flush. There were lights on in my craft, a curiously homey look. Welcome traveler. I bing-bonged to save her unnecessary alarm, then stepped over the chain and went aboard, startling her when she pulled open the door to the lounge.

She backed away, smiling. “Hello. Or welcome home. Or something like that, Trav.” Three days had made an astonishing difference. Dark blue stretch pants patterned with ridiculous little yellow tulips. A soft yellow blouse with three-quarter sleeves. Hair shorter, face, arms and throat red-gold with new tan.

“Tourist!” I said.

“I thought maybe I wouldn’t look so scrawny in this kind of…”

“Beach girl.”

She drew herself up. “You think so? You think that’s all there is to do?”

I had to be led around and I had to admire. Corridor walls scraped down and repainted a better color. New curtains in the head. A new set of stainless steel bowls for the galley. She said she would show me the topsides work by daylight when I could appreciate it.

I put my suitcase in my stateroom and came back into the lounge and told her she was a useful guest. We stood smiling at each other and then she leapt at me, clutched me, wailed once, and went away, snuffling, keeping her back toward me.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on now, Lois. What’s wrong?”

She pulled herself together quickly. “Does something have to be wrong? Maybe I’m glad to have you back. I don’t know.”

She had started to rebuild the woman things, the artifice, the indirection, the challenge. It was her pride at work. She was healing and I was glad to see it, and I did not want to nudge the structure too heavily. It was too new.

“I’ll fix your drink,” she said. “I sold the house.”

“Got the money?”

“Soon.”

“Sorry?”

“About the house? It’s just a house. I was hiding down there in that wretched little village because I thought I’d been a bad wife.” She brought me my drink and handed it to me.

“Aren’t you getting a little fat, dear?” I asked.

She beamed. “A hundred and seven this afternoon.”

“What’s right for you?”

“Oh, one eighteen, one twenty.” She patted her hip. “After one twenty it all goes here.”

“So if the hiding is over, what are you going to do?” It was a fool question, tangle-footed and unimaginative. And no way to take it back. It made her aware of obligation. She could handle day by day. If she kept her head down. I had rocked the fragile new structure. Those dark and pleasantly tilted eyes became haunted and she sucked at her lips and knotted her hands.

“Not right now,” I said, trying to mend it. “Some day.”

“I don’t know.”

“How was New York, Trav? New York was hot, Lois. How was Texas, Trav? Texas was hot, Lois. Did you have any fun, Trav? I wouldn’t call it fun, Lois. I wouldn’t know what to call it.”

She measured me out one half of a smile. “Oh, shut up.”

“Do I take you out tonight?”

“Oh, no! I cook, really.”

I looked at my watch. “I have a hospital visit to make. So schedule it after I get back. Say forty minutes after I get back. Time to shower and change when I get back.”

“Yes, master. Oh, I owe you six dollars and thirty cents on your phone bill.”

“Those pants are pretty sexy, Mrs. Atkinson.”

“I called Harp. I talked to Lucille. I didn’t tell her hardly anything. Just that I’d been sick and things were better now.”

“You’re blushing, Mrs. Atkinson.”

“Don’t talk about these pants then. I bought them today. I don’t feel very secure about them.”

Cathy was in a six-bed ward. I pulled a chair close, kissed her on the forehead and sat beside her. I hoped she hadn’t seen any dismay in my face. The sallow, thoughtful, rather pretty and fine-boned little face was gone. It was a stormy sunset, a ripe eggplant, a heavy mushroom. There was a single slit of brown eye to see with. Her left hand was splinted.

“Hello,” she said in a dead, fat-lipped voice. I stood up and yanked the curtains and sat down again and took her uninjured hand. It rested slack and warm and dry in mine.

“Junior Allen?” I said in a low voice.

“You don’t have to mind about me, Mr. McGee.”

“I thought it was Cathy and Trav… Why did he do it?”

There is no way to read the expression of bruised meat. She watched me, hiding away back in there behind pain and indignity. “This part of it has got nothing to do with you.”

“I want to know about it because you are my friend.”

The slit eye was closed so long I began to wonder if she’d fallen asleep. She opened it. “He come there to the bar at the Bahama Room, and I messed up a routine awful when l saw him watching us. I don’t know if it was an accident or he heard somehow or what. After, I hurried into my clothes and went out and he was gone. I went outside and saw him crossing the parking, and I ran after him. I caught him and said I wanted to talk with him. He said we didn’t have anything to talk about. I said we could talk about money. That made him wonder. We walked through to the beach. Then I said that if he could just give me a little money out of what he got, maybe even just a thousand dollars, then I wouldn’t make any trouble about any of the rest of it. He ask me what I would mean by trouble, and I said he found something that wasn’t his, didn’t he? He laughed once, short and nasty, and said I had no idea in the world what trouble was. So he reached quick and grappled holt of my neck with one hand, and pounded on my face with the other, and a couple of times he hit me in the belly. It all went dark while he was thumping on me, and I woke up in the ambulance. It… it doesn’t hurt much now.”