Paul Kavanagh - Such Men Are Dangerous

That night I hit a few bars until I found one with a colonel’s wife who was looking to get picked up. She was crowding forty and overly fleshed. She was drinking gin and coke. “A traditional drink down home,” she drawled. “If y’all spent any time in Nawlins, Ah wouldn’t have to tell y’all that.”

I had spent enough time in New Orleans to know that y’all is plural, so either the accent was artificial or she was seeing two of me. Or both. She was half in the bag when I got there and I kept her company through three more gin and cokes and they hit her pretty hard, tradition or no.

On the ride back to my room she unzipped my fly and told me how her husband was a bastard bird colonel who only got stationed where it was cold enough to freeze her blood. And by Gawd a girl had to do something to keep warm, didn’t she? Then she started giggling.

In bed she behaved wildly, out of passion or practice, and seemed to enjoy herself. God knows why. Afterward she lay back with her head on my pillow and a cigarette in her mouth. When her eyes closed I took the cigarette from her mouth and carried it into the bathroom and flushed it away. I came back and sat down next to her and watched her. Her mouth had fallen open and she was breathing noisily through it.

I studied her. Her hair needed reblonding. A full half inch of brown root showed. I touched her hair. It remained unruffled, artfully sprayed into place, and it felt like plastic.

Old acne scars showed dimly beneath her facial makeup. The rest of her skin was a washed-out white. I touched parts of her and she made grunting sounds in her sleep. She felt unhealthily soft, like cheap latex pillows.

I straddled her, leaned my weight on my elbows. I placed my hands on either side of her throat, thumbs together in front. I pressed, just a little.

She opened her eyes and said, “Darling...”

I made myself raise my thumbs, and then I crawled into my own head and walked around there for a moment, opening doors and looking inside, letting things sort themselves out.

Puzzled, “Darling?”

So I threw it to her a second time, a more symbolic and less permanent ritual of murder, and she heaved and bucked and perspired and moaned. I wouldn’t let her go back to sleep afterward. I made her get up and dressed, and I drove her to where her car was parked and helped her open the door and sag behind the wheel. She drove off, weaving all over the road, and I figured it was about even odds that she would kill herself on the way home.

The smell of her was all over the room. I opened doors and windows, stripped the sheet from the bed, then went and stood under the shower for a long time. When I came back the air was cold but cleaner. I put the sheet on the bed upside down and killed the light. I got into bed. The pillow reeked of her hair spray, so I tossed it across the room and slept without it.

There had been no pleasure in it, not in the anticipation or the execution or now, in the memory.

No women exc. whores if you have to.

She was not precisely a whore, and I hadn’t had to, so that did it. The slate was clean now. Since leaving the island I had broken all ten of my rules.

My final night on the island had been very inactive once Dattner avoided going down for the last time. I brought him over to the fire and wrapped him in blankets and poured corn into him. He filled in details in a flat monotone. He must have talked for half an hour. I heard it all in silence, and when he was done and the bottle close to empty I bedded him down in the shack and piled all the blankets on top of him. I stretched out on the beach, positive that it was going to be a sleepless night for me. But I was too well trained, and sleep came in less than ten minutes.

Two hours later, judging by the moon, I was awake again. My body was wet with perspiration and shook with chills. I could smell myself. I try to stay out of the water at night but now I waded in up to my knees and splashed myself clean. I toweled dry and sat down to think about things.

The operation wasn’t bad. It had every chance in the world of turning sour, but what didn’t? The real question was whether or not I wanted to get involved.

I could probably use the money, but that wasn’t the point, either.

Then I played with the question of whether or not my life on the island needed an occasional change of pace. I went to Clint’s every sixth day, and not solely because that was how long a dozen eggs lasted. I needed the human contact involved. Maybe I also needed periodic doses of another sort of contact and involvement. Or, on the other hand, maybe this was another temptation, another vestigial complication that had to be suppressed until it stopped making periodic noises.

I took a stick and sketched in the sand with it. I had a lot of lines furrowed before I realized I was roughing out a map of the Sprayhorn area. I started plotting movements on it, but that didn’t make sense because I had no real picture of the terrain or the installations or anything else. I smoothed out the sand and put the stick down.

The Army was shipping the gear south in four trucks. There were two rumors — that it would be retained in Tampa for fast delivery to good-guy guerrillas if that policy was ever adopted, or that it had already been adopted and Tampa was just a way-station. Either way, the goods would be en route somewhere between the 3rd and 12th of February.

That was all we really knew. The trucks might move out in a convoy or one by one. They could be almost any size, or different sizes. Each one would have a driver and a guard in the cab; there might be men in back, there might not. And there might be aerial reconnaissance scheduled, and there might be armored cars leading and backing up, and so on.

We would have me on the inside, finding out things, and George on the outside, setting things up. The odds sounded ridiculous but he was right, it was feasible. You couldn’t prove it with a computer. Not enough of the data was available, let alone suitable for programming.

But it could be done. That much I knew intuitively. It was the hows that took study. I ran a lot of the obvious variables through my mind and picked up some of the more likely problems and played at solving them. I was surprised how well my mind was handling the situation. I was thinking very clearly, getting a lot worked out. Of course it was all academic now, but I couldn’t go back to sleep, and—

By sunrise, with the orange sun sitting fat and happy on indigo water, I knew there was no decision to make. The decision had been long made for me. Because for hours now I had not thought at all about the whether, but only about the how. The decision made itself while I was looking the other way.

I made two cans of coffee and split the remaining shine between them. I gave George’s can the best of it, figuring he would need it. I carried his coffee to the shack, shook him awake. He was alert instantly, a good sign. I gave him his coffee, and while he gulped it I told him I was in.

We were off the island by noon.

We spent the hours until then talking. Good talk this time, crisp and clear, no interruptions, no cuteness, nothing in the way. We would make a part of a plan and fix it firmly and permanently in our minds, but at the same time we avoided getting married to any of our plans — whenever one of us spotted a hitch somewhere, we backed off and checked connections all the way down the line. Everything was loose and flexible and hypothetical, with more if-this-then-that then a twelve-horse parley. It had to be that way because of the glut of unknown factors. But at the same time these hours were more time than we would have together until the play was halfway home, and we had to get as much communicating out of the way now as possible.