Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

“Okay.”

“You’re not sore?”

“No. I’ll even change the subject. The Save Our Bays people are back in action. Emergency session right about now. There’s a new move coming up to turn Grassy Bay into suburbia.”

Brian Haas closed his eyes. It was a full minute before he opened them again and turned his head toward Jimmy Wing. “That’s a good subject. Keep going.”

He told Brian no more than Brian would reasonably expect him to know. As he finished he heard Nan coming up the stairs. She came in and said, “Howdy, Jimmy. My God, you got the uglies, Haas!”

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” Brian said.

She sat on the foot of his bed, patted his leg and said, “How goes the remorses?”

“Same old ones. Familiar faces. Like abandoned children who finally tracked Daddy down.”

“How are these shots working?”

“They’re pretty good, Nan. Too good, maybe. I should be praying for death right now. I should be shaking the bed and gagging.”

“I know. Do you miss it?”

“In a funny way. It’s always been like paying my way. Maybe I’ve enjoyed the dramatics in some inverted way. It doesn’t seem right to feel no worse than a flu case.”

“He’ll be here at six to give you the last one. Could you eat?”

“They’re good, but they’re not that good.”

Jimmy stood up. “I’m off. You want to set up the board, I can give you one hour tomorrow, starting at high noon. Give me white, and I’ll give you another crack at the queen’s gambit.”

“If I can see the board. Right now there’s four of you. It’s a side effect, I guess. How do you think we’ll go on this Grassy Bay thing this time?”

“The paper? We’ll come out for progress. Ben listens to J.J., who is no idiot.”

“Can we bore from within, like last time?”

“We’ll have to wait and see, Bri.”

He went down to his car and drove to the newspaper offices. To the old yellow-tan Florida-Moorish building on Bayou Street, all courts and arches, dusty ivy and vivid, unkempt flower beds. He parked quite close to the circulation shed where, in another life, when he was nine years old, he had come in the first gray of morning to pick up the papers for his route. He went in through the side door of the main building, took some notes out of his box, and went back to his desk in a relatively quiet, windowless corner. One note asked him to call a number he recognized as the number for Bliss Construction. He called. A girl switched the call to Elmo.

“I’m going to be working late here, it looks like,” Elmo said. “So why don’t you stop on by when you get a chance?”

“It won’t be until about eight.”

“I’ll be right here.”

He went to work on his accumulated notes. “At a special luncheon meeting of the Chamber of Commerce, County Planning Director Edison Kroot announced that fallout shelter builders will get full cooperation from county zoning and building authorities...”

“Five science courses in Palm County high schools will become part of a Federally subsidized teacher-testing study this coming fall, according to Dr. Wilde Sumnor, Superintendent of Public Instruction...”

“The El-Ray Snack House was burglarized Thursday night...”

“... went through the stop sign at the intersection of North Street and Palm Way...”

“... remains in critical condition in...”

“... resigns post as...”

The copy girl took the yellow sheets to the news desk. The evening tempo of work was increasing. Wire service material was being fitted into the makeup, along with the ads and syndicated materials already positioned. Except for late sports, the back pages were being locked up, one by one, working forward to page one, which would be held open until half past midnight. Borklund stopped by his desk, inquired about Brian Haas, and tried to load some phone work on Wing, but he avoided it by saying there were still a couple of things he had to go out and get. The teletypes chattered, phones rang, linotypes clucked steadily, and the Saturday edition began to take on form and pattern. It was a kind of work which, for many years, had given him satisfaction. But in this past year it had seemed to become smaller and less meaningful. The wire service reporting was leaden and clumsy. Each local story he wrote seemed to have been written before. Only the date had been changed. He could not know if his restlessness and sense of boredom was due to Gloria’s final escape into her nonworld, or to the limits of all the demands made upon him, or to his increasingly obsessional relationship with Kat. But he knew that now it was all changed, and would all be different.

He welcomed the new and not yet known things that would happen, but at the same time he was alarmed, uneasy. You walk into a new room, close the door and pull a lever. Then you begin to wish you hadn’t. But the lever has also locked the door.

When he had awakened, he had taken the two fifty-dollar bills from his wallet and turned them over and over in his hands. The money had looked theatrical, implausible. He had been offered all the usual things in the past, the junkets and free rides, the Christmas whiskey and the unofficial due bills, the lighters and cigarette cases and desk sets. And, sometimes, cash. He had used a flexible judgment based less on morality than on convenience. He took what it had seemed plausible to take, measuring himself against what he believed others would take and did take, seeking that comfortable level where he could be labeled neither prude nor rascal, and avoiding those gifts which implied too direct an obligation for future favors. But he had returned the rare gifts of currency. Gift certificates had been the nearest thing to cash he had accepted.

But this money was not, of course, a gift or bribe. Elmo had made that clear. It was specific pay for specific employment. He had become a moonlighter. And, should the job itself become distasteful, or should the fact of having two jobs become burdensome, he would tell Elmo his acceptance had been a little too hasty. Elmo, of course, would take it gracefully. There would be no instructive visit to one of the back-country sloughs, not for a mildly recalcitrant member of the press.

But Ulysses S. Grant looked out from the money with a brooding, dubious expression. Hadn’t he had some money trouble himself?

Now there was a summons from Elmo, and the money had given it a different flavor than had been apparent in the summonses of past years. His response to it had been altered also, in just as subtle a way. He wondered how many more there were who now played the same game, who had become a part of the expanding universe of Elmo Bliss, willingly or unwillingly — even knowingly or unknowingly. Frannie had said that he made her feel alive. Maybe that was the most effectively deadly subversion of all. All the children felt gloriously alive, marching away from Hamlin.

The offices of Bliss Construction were in a small one-story building in a commercial area on Bay Highway, south of the city, just over the city line, about a mile and a half north of the light where Mangrove Road turned toward Grassy Key. Behind the office structure, and enclosed by hurricane fence, were the storage buildings, a workshop and the vehicle park. His transit-mix cement plant and his hot-mix asphalt plant were in a heavy-industry zone north of Palm City. Though Elmo had expanded with startling speed throughout the fifties, he had the curious ability to give each new venture the flavor of having been his from the very beginning. His expansion no longer seemed as brash and reckless as it had been. He had adjusted so readily to being one of the city’s most influential businessmen that it was easy to believe he always had been. The tales of his early wildnesses were told with that same fond nostalgia usually reserved for incidents of a prior century. Jimmy Wing had wondered why this could be true, and had finally realized that Elmo would have been unable to achieve this quality of acceptance in a more static community. Palm County growth had been dramatic. Total county population had been a little over twenty-five thousand when Elmo had been swinging a brush hook on a county road gang. Now it was over seventy-five thousand, and most of the newcomers had arrived after Bliss Construction was an established firm. To them, the Elmo Bliss of the wild years had the quality of myth.