Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

“So nice,” she breathed. “So fine and nice. I like the way we are, Jimmy darling. I like us a lot.” Her hair tickled the side of his throat as she turned her face toward him. “What are you laughing at?”

“Well, if at anything, at myself. There wasn’t any reason why anybody had to come over here to cover this hearing, you know. Borklund was trying to give me a change of scene. I was getting stale and jumpy and sour.”

She kissed his throat. “Have you had a change of scene, dear?”

“Yes indeed.”

“Are you still stale and jumpy and sour?”

“No ma’am.”

“Then I must be good for you. You’re good for me. You’re the first one since I got married. I feel all over like warm marshmallow pudding. Darling, call the desk and ask them to wake us up at six.” She rolled toward him and snuggled close to him. “Then we’ll have a nap.”

During the next two months he put a lot of mileage on his car. Every time he knew he would have enough time off, he would phone her and drive over. He stayed with her at her one-room efficiency. At first she didn’t want him there. She said the room was too full of weeping, but it turned out to be all right for them. During those two months she mended him. She rebuilt the pride which the Gloria situation had eroded. She made him a whole man. They seemed to sense, simultaneously, when it was time to end it, and so they ended it affectionately and well, before it had a chance to turn into quarrels and accusations.

Later, at about the time of Van Hubble’s death, Frannie met a man named Worley in Miami, married him and came back to Palm City with him. He got a job with the Palm County Highway Department. When Jimmy Wing would see her on the street he felt a faint retrospective stir of pleasure, and he felt glad it had happened just at the time it did, and in the manner it did. Once he bought her drugstore coffee. She was carrying her third child, the first child of the new marriage. She seemed very happy.

Whenever he thought of that two months and the fast narrow road across the Everglades, and her couch that unfolded into a double bed, and the warm sleeping weight of her leg across his hip, he would remember how they used to talk after they had made love — lie and smoke and talk in lazy intimacy of a hundred things.

He had asked her once about the way Elmo Bliss had bought the Lemon Ridge house from the rest of them so cheaply.

“Well, of course we resented it, Jimmy. But, later on, it seemed all right. Nobody even thinks about it any more. Now it seems as if... it’s just the way it should be.”

“How do you mean?”

“Elmo is sort of in charge of the family, so it seems right he should be in the home place with Dellie. Three of the brothers-in-law are older than he is, but he’s the one everybody goes to. Sickness, jobs, trouble with the kids, anything. And all of us are free to come and go just as if it was still our house. It’s sure crowded sometimes.”

“So the family approves of Elmo.”

“Gosh, not at first. Well, you know the reputation he had and all the trouble he was in all the time. We didn’t want Dellie marrying him. She was only eighteen. But we couldn’t stop her. Dellie is a strange one. She’s never had much to say, but she’s always had this idea that she was going to have a lush life, like a queen or something. She just knew it was going to be that way. We used to laugh at her. But the way it worked out, she’s certainly living a lot higher on the hog than anybody else in the family, I’m telling you. We never would have guessed she’d get that kind of a life by marrying Elmo. He’s real good to her. I mean if you don’t count keeping her pregnant most of the time. She’s due for number six any day now, but I’ll say this, she doesn’t seem to mind. She’s got all the help she can use with the house and the kids, and she’s never up before noon, and she certainly keeps her figure. I guess he’s sweet to her, but... you know Elmo. I don’t know if she knows about other women. Or if... she’d let herself know, or let herself wonder. Dellie is a realist.”

“So is Elmo, I guess.”

“I don’t know what Elmo is. He has that way of talking to you. When he talks to you, you feel as if you matter more to him than anybody else on earth. He really listens to you. Not very many people listen. He seems to really care about you. I guess that’s what makes him so good with women. When a girl is with Elmo, she feels... I don’t know, more alive. You know it’s an act, but you can’t help yourself. You don’t ever really know if he likes you. Nobody knows. We talk about him a lot, in the family. The way he helps us all, that seems to be kind of an act too.”

“When he sold off fifty of the sixty acres of the home place, Frannie, I guess he did pretty well.”

“I guess so,” she said indifferently. “But he sort of sold it to himself, didn’t he? One of those corporation things he keeps doing?” He remembered that she had turned toward him then and said, in a huskier tone, “Now, why are we wasting all this good time talking about my brother-in-law, darling?” She had reached her sturdy hand to him and said, with exaggerated petulance, “But it seems too early to change the subject, I guess. Isn’t it too early? Gosh, you know, maybe it isn’t. Now I’m sure it isn’t. We’re changing the subject, darling, aren’t we?”

He grinned at that memory of Frannie as he slowed for Elmo’s house. Eight or ten cars were parked in the field beside Elmo’s house, nosed up to the big redwood fence. He parked and got out of his car. He remembered the eagerness with which he had headed each time toward Miami two years ago. Yet no part of it had been as compelling as what he now felt toward Kat. It offended his sense of proportion that this should be so. It was a meager feat finding a woman who would come to his Cable Key cottage. He had tried to cure himself of what he privately called his severe case of Kat-fever by using himself up upon some amiable and competent women during the past year, but it had not diminished the fever by a fraction of a degree. He resented being the victim of what seemed an adolescent compulsion. As an adult male he knew that in the deeps of the bed the differences between women are less important than the similarities. So why should this particular hundredweight of flesh seem touched with magic? What could she do that others had not done?

He walked through the open redwood gate and down the winding gravel path toward the pool, remembering the first time he had come to Elmo’s house, three years and eight months ago, on election night, without invitation. He had come on a hunch...

After Elmo had been married about five years, and Bliss Construction had become one of the largest home construction outfits in the area, Elmo had begun to devote considerable time to civic functions and duties. He joined service clubs and fund-raising ventures, and proved himself reliable and persuasive and dedicated whenever appointed to a committee. He had begun making sizable contributions to the Democratic County Committee, and had begun to electioneer on the behalf of Democrats running for county offices. Four years ago the top brass in the county organization had decided to give Elmo his first taste of running for office, so they put him up against Elihu Kibby in the primary. Elihu Kibby, Brade Wellan and Sam Engster were the ones who picked Elmo and talked him into it. Kibby was running for re-election to the Board of County Commissioners. It was to be his fifth four-year term, and everybody knew that it was an automatic re-election. Kibby would win the primary over anybody who was put up, and he would whip Stan Freeberry, the Republican opposition, handily.

On the evening of the primaries Jimmy Wing went out to Elmo’s house at five o’clock. Elmo and a pack of friends and relatives were gathered in the big shed-type building beyond the swimming pool, the building Elmo called his workshop. It looked more like the main lounge in a rustic and expensive hunting lodge.