Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

“Thirteen.”

“That means Betty was six. Sid had a good job. Al was still alive. The family seemed to be doing pretty well. She made me and Al promise we’d help you get an education. We would have anyway. You know that. Already we knew you were the brightest of the three of us. We helped as much as we could.”

“I know.”

“It’s like she knew things were going to go bad for all of us. Funny, isn’t it? Sometimes I have a dream, and it’s always the same. I’m having a picnic with Betty, in a beautiful place. And she has a little baby in her arms. There’s sunshine and sort of music and we’re laughing about something. Then we see Sid walking toward us, as if nothing had ever happened to him. Then I realize we’re all at the Cherry Valley. I wake up smiling and crying. I’ve never seen the Cherry Valley.”

“I drove through there once.”

“Don’t tell me about it, Jimmy. You want anything? Ice tea? Beer?”

“No thanks.”

“How’s Gloria?”

“About the same.”

“When did you see her last?”

“Last month,” he lied.

“You should go up there more often, Jimmy.”

“What’s the point in it? She doesn’t know me. She hasn’t known anybody for two years.”

“But maybe she knows more than she seems to.”

“Laura, don’t for God’s sake try to turn it into a soap opera. There’s been a progressive deterioration of the brain cells, a physiological decay. Now they’re willing to admit that possibly all those series of shock treatments may have made the process a little faster. It’s something that destroys the actual brain cells. They talk about some kind of chemical imbalance or deficiency.”

“Big words,” she said. “Lots of big words.”

“Do you have to have it in little words? She wears diapers. They feed her with tubes into her nose. Her eyes don’t focus. They say it’s interesting. They think they may be learning something from her.”

“The big words help you, don’t they? You don’t have to think of her as being Gloria. And you don’t have to go see her.”

He stared across at her in vast burlesque surprise. “Where’d all this concern come from? Aren’t you my loving sister, the woman who celebrated my pending marriage by telling me I was throwing myself away by marrying a little Ybor City slut named Mendez? I was impairing my social standing, or something. And when we had that first trouble, you were plugging for a fast divorce, weren’t you?”

“We didn’t know she was sick then, Jimmy. And I got to like her. She’s still your wife.”

“She’s nothing, Laura. She’s breathing meat.”

“You’re cold as a stone.”

“I went through all the kinds of feeling there are. I used up all there was. What the hell do you expect of me?”

“Nobody expects much of you, Jimmy. Nobody.”

“That’s nice.”

“Maybe you got things just the way you want them. Kind of a litle frog in a little pond. I saw you two months ago. Downtown, just going into the Bay Restaurant. You looked a little tight. You were laughing and you were with the McClure woman. I guess that’s the kind of thing you like.”

“Mitchie is an old friend.”

“You don’t pick your friends very careful.”

“I’ve got a thousand friends, Sis.”

She shrugged. “It’s none of my damn business anyhow, I guess. You’re grown. But I raised you, Jimmy. You remember that. Nothing is the way I dreamed it would be. I saw you, and I was on my way back here. I hadn’t seen you in months, and then I saw you with that woman, and I was coming back here. The days go by so slow for me. They go slow for Sid too. I guess they’re worse for Sid. I should be glad you came by tonight, instead of nagging you like this every minute.”

She looked at him with a forced smile. On an impulse he took his wallet out and took Elmo’s hundred dollars out of it. He had folded the two bills small and tucked them behind his credit cards. He unfolded them and took them over and put them in her hand.

She stared up at him blankly. “What’s this?”

“Will it help?”

“My God, yes, it will help. But you act funny. Where’d you get it?”

“For a favor for a friend.”

“What kind of a favor? Can it get you in trouble?”

“Do you want it or don’t you?”

“I want it. Thanks a lot.” She put it in the pocket of her robe. “Did you come here to give this to me?”

“Yes,” he lied.

“One thing I’m going to do with it, I guess you should know, I’m going to talk to Betty on the phone. I talked to her at Christmas, just three minutes.”

“It’s yours. Don’t ask for permission. Do anything you want with it. Maybe there’ll be more. I don’t know. I can’t promise it.”

“You don’t owe me anything. You know that.”

“I’ll help if I can. Okay?”

“If you want to, I think it’s very nice. You look awful tired, Jimmy.”

“I’m sort of jittery. It was an automobile thing, down near Everset. A bad one.”

“Oh, I heard it on the midnight news. Three people dead?”

“Yes.”

“I heard it just before you got here: I guess that... just being alive is something to be thankful for.”

“Sure. I’ll be going, Laura.”

She went to the door with him. She pecked him on the cheek, patted his shoulder and said, “Come back sooner next time, dear. You’re the only brother I’ve got. You should take better care of yourself. Come back in the daytime. Sid would love company.”

As Jimmy Wing drove toward his cottage on Cable Key, he felt better than he had all day. The nagging guilt about not having seen Laura in so many months was partially expiated. He could see her again soon. And, by giving her the money, he had somehow lightened his sense of obligation to Elmo. It made Elmo’s assignment more of a game than a necessity. Tomorrow he would talk to Kat, and tomorrow he would find out something about Dial Sinnat which would please Elmo. If the money, or a reasonable percentage of it, could go to Laura and Sid, the whole venture seemed considerably more respectable. It was good to think about her talking to Betty in California. A nice long talk, courtesy of Elmo Bliss.

Kat Hubble, in a plastic and aluminum pool-side chaise at the Sinnats, tilted her head back and looked up at countless stars. They did not veer in the sickening way they had the last time she had looked. They were comfortingly steady in the heavens. She had had only two drinks before the steak and salad, but they had been made by Di Sinnat, and had hit her harder than she had expected. She had always been circumspect about drinking, less out of conservation than out of a reluctance to impair her awareness of everything around her. In this past year she had been doubly careful, having learned that it took very little alcohol to relax her control over herself. Grief was an act of balance on a high thin wire. Balance improved with practice. You hoped that one day you could walk it as casually as though it were a city sidewalk, but in the meantime you avoided anything which might imperil the careful balance.

The Sinnat twins were in bed and Natalie had gone home with Roy and Alicia to put them to bed and stay there until Kat came home. The night was hot and still. Claire Sinnat was in the pool, floating nearby in a hammock-and-pontoon arrangement, her heels hooked on the overflow gutter. She was twenty-seven, a pretty, merry, untidy little woman, brown as peat, muscled like an acrobat, her abrupt hair calicoed by the sun. She enjoyed people and laughter and horseplay. She played with the children like another child. At times she seemed more daughter than wife to Di. Her voice was thin and penetrating, her laugh a deep bawdy bray. She had no patience with malice, and was fun to be around, except when she drank too much. Liquor fouled her language and made her venomously quarrelsome.