Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

“But I couldn’t!” she said. “It’s something I believe in, Di. Gosh, you know how hard Van and I worked that last time.”

“I know, I know. But I have the feeling this one is going to be a little gamey. We fought outsiders last time. This time it’s a civil war, and that’s the kind which can get nasty. I’m going by instinct on this. I have the feeling I’d like to check Lady Eloise out and see if I could come up with something that would turn Martin against the whole scheme. Now, if I can think in those terms, the opposition can too. We’re so damn vulnerable it scares me.”

“Vulnerable? What do you mean, Di?”

“Take a look at our Executive Committee, honey. Pretend you’re an electrician’s wife, and the Grassy Bay deal will give your husband steady work for a long time. Who are the people trying to block it? First, most of them live down there on Sandy Key, so that makes them rich folks. Now look at the individuals who ramrod the S.O.B.’s. That name, by the way, is too sassy. This time it may hurt more than help. The Executive Committee is made up of two retired army officers, one man who retired too soon and got married too often, one dilettante advertising phony, one wife of a magazine artist, one widow of a young architect, one weird old lady amateur scientist, and one pansy gallery director. Who are those nuts to try to take the bread out of our children’s mouths? They just don’t want their view spoiled. They’re just a bunch of rich, nutty, degenerate Communists.”

“Di!”

“It can get that bad, kid, and we are a slightly strange group, you must admit. But I’d guess we’re probably typical of the strange groups all over the country who are fighting with absolute sincerity to protect the countryside from the uglifiers, from the spoilers, the asphalters, the sign merchants, the tree haters. But, God, how vulnerable we are! I just hope they concentrate on trying to make us look silly, the way the Lauderdale group tried. But I have a feeling they’ll use heavier weapons. Hell, it doesn’t matter to me. There’s no way they can touch me. But maybe you ought to make this one a spectator sport.”

“I’m not hiding anything. There’s no way they can hurt me either, Di.”

They were in front of her house. He stopped her and took hold of her hands. “If they find a way to hurt, Kat, just don’t get all choked up with valor. Get right out, will you?”

“But I don’t see how...”

“Then be cautious, honey. Don’t quack with strangers. Wear your life belt at all times, and be ready to abandon ship. The rest of us will understand, and Van would understand too.”

“I’ll be careful, Di, but I...”

“Let’s get this sitter off duty. Miss Natalie Sinnat, the sweet dreamer.”

“She’s a wonderful girl, Di.”

“Excuse me if I agree.”

Natalie looked up quickly as they walked in. She put her book aside and stood up. “So soon?” she said, smiling.

“Martin Cable passed out early,” Di said. “Fell right off his chair wearing a wide drunken smile. Eloise slung him over her shoulder and packed him off home.”

“Again?” Natalie said, shocked and solemn, her eyes sparkling. “The kids were utter lambs, Kat, as usual. No phone calls. I dipped into the Coke supply.”

Her father looked at the four empty bottles on the coffee table and said, “Don’t you mean you wallowed in it, child?”

She blushed visibly and immediately and said most casually, “Oh, Jigger saw me walk the kids home and he came with us and hung around for a while.”

“Indeed!” Di said. “Isn’t he a little young for you? A gloriously beautiful chunk of muscle, I grant you, but that Lesser boy can’t be over seventeen. I’ve made attempts to talk with him, but he seems to have the same shining emptiness as a brass spittoon, child.”

She picked up the empty bottles to take them to the kitchen and looked angrily at her father. “I know he’s young. And he has sort of a crush and I can’t help that. But he’s not empty! He’s just very defensive with adults. He’s a lonely, unhappy boy, and he’s really terribly sensitive, Father.”

“Excuse me!” Di said. “I wouldn’t deny him the chance to unburden his troubled heart to an understanding older woman.”

“You’re terribly amusing, Father,” she said tonelessly, and took the empty bottles to the kitchen. When she came back she said to Kat, “You don’t mind Jigger having been here, do you?”

“Of course not, dear.”

“He has to have somebody to talk to. If he didn’t have, I’m afraid he’d... get into some kind of crazy mess.”

“Like what?” Dial demanded.

“Let’s go, Father.”

After they were gone and Kat had looked at her children, she remembered that this time she had forgotten to even go through the motions of trying to pay Natalie. Maybe, she decided, it was easier to forget the ritual, and not make the attempt.

Natalie was a very poised and adult nineteen. She was a dusky, very slender brunette, with a small piquant face, wide-spaced brown eyes, with a good sense of style and color, and a pert, trim way of handling herself. She was a child of divorce, and this was the first complete summer she had been permitted to spend with her father. In the fall she would return to the University of Michigan where she was taking an undergraduate degree in fine arts. Three mornings a week she was teaching a children’s art class at the Palm County Art Center. She drove a little red Jaguar with a steely competence, sailed Claire’s tender Thistle in hard winds, swam, sunned, sketched and helped with the house, the twins, the entertaining.

As Kat got ready for bed, she had a feeling of loneliness more acute than on the ordinary evenings of her life. For a long time she had wondered why it should always be worse after being out, and thought it was because of coming back to an empty house. Then she had gradually realized that it was worse because there was nobody to tell things to. She would come back full of things to tell, little observations of humor and drama, of things said and done, and there was no one to listen and care. On the ordinary nights nothing happened and so there was no fund of things to relate, and emptiness did not seem as critical. Whenever they had spent an evening apart, Van had enjoyed listening to her. She had liked making him laugh.

There should be a service for widows, she thought. Good listeners who could be acquired by appointment. One of them would be here for the ritual Sanka, eagerly listening, making little exclamations, laughing in the right places.

There has to be somebody to listen to you, because of you, not what you say. Without them, you walk around with the weight of all the untold things. When something happens you say to yourself, I must remember this, so I can tell it just the way it happened. When there is no one to listen, all these things clot in your mind.

When she was in bed she thought that she might talk to Jimmy Wing about the meeting. She turned her bed lamp on again, dialed all but the last digit of his number, and then hung up, clicked the light off and lay back in darkness. It was too late to phone him.

In the bright sunlight of the Saturday mid-morning Jimmy Wing saw himself sidelong in a downtown shop window, sandy and listless, slowed by the heat, squinting into the chrome dazzle of Center Street. It struck him that he should look so unremarkable, that the blackmail mission should have worked no change upon him.

“Blackmail” was the word he had awakened with, so apt and harsh it soothed him to use it, depriving him of pretense. Yet it had overtones of melodrama which gave it a twist of comedy. It needed wax on the tips of the mustache, and hidden cameras, tape recordings, pilfered letters, a lock box. Then they would set a trap for him, and the slug would smash him against the wall. He would fall, twitch and die, as the music came up and the good guy embraced the lovely girl.