Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

“That’s probably it. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t mind it, Jimmy. It just seemed odd.”

She looked at him and looked away. The light was strange in the room. The draperies were blue, yet the light had a green tinge. His face was in shadow.

“I talked to Nat Sinnat today,” he said, and she was relieved that he had interrupted the odd and awkward silence.

“Oh, did you? What about?”

“A story on the children’s art classes she teaches. Mortie said she was the one to talk to, and he was right. She was articulate and she has good ideas. But she seemed a little... odd.”

“Odd?”

“That’s not a good word, I guess. A little tense maybe. Not the tension of being interviewed. A more chronic kind.”

“I guess there’s reasons. Her mother was Di’s second wife. And it wasn’t a friendly divorce. I think Nat was about five at the time. Her mother is a real pinwheeling neurotic, according to Di. She didn’t marry again. She’s done a lot of traveling. She and Nat lived in France for a while. Her mother was bitterly opposed to Nat’s coming down here this summer. There was a big stink about it. All in all, I think Nat is wonderfully well balanced, considering her background. But she isn’t what you’d call exactly a normal girl of nineteen. She’s independent, in more ways than financial. She’s what I guess you’d call unconventional. She doesn’t give a damn what anybody thinks, really. She goes her own way. But I guess she took some kind of emotional beating last year. Claire has hinted about it. That’s why she came down here.”

“She’s a pretty kid.”

“Unusual looking.”

“Apparently she’s dating some boy younger than she is, a high-school kid.”

“Dating? Oh, no! That’s Jigger. You know. Burt Lesser’s boy. I guess he’s got a crush on her. She says Jigger is a very unhappy boy. I would have guessed that. Anyhow, that would make two of them, misery loving company or something like that. Why do you ask?”

“I was just curious about her. Just making conversation, I guess.”

“If you can stay, I think I can feed you.”

“Thanks, Kat. But I’ve got some more work to do. The load is a little heavier the last couple of days. Brian Haas got taken drunk.”

“Oh, no! Really? But wasn’t it almost certain that Mr. Borklund would fire him the next time he...”

“We’re trying to cover it, and maybe we have. If he got it out of his system it may come out all right.”

“Nan must be terribly upset.”

“She’s handling it pretty well. I’m going to stop in later on and see how things are going. We have to get him back to work by noon tomorrow. It will be up to him to hide the shakes.”

Again there was the heavy silence. She felt she should make some listless effort to break it. Perhaps it will rain? It’s been a very warm day? She felt trapped within an almost unbearable slowness of the passing moments. Tomorrow — anniversary of death — would be the worst time, and then it would be over and the second year of it could start. A year from tomorrow would not be so bad a day.

He leaned forward, bringing his face into the unusual light. His forearms rested on his knees, his strong hands clasped. He looked at the floor, then raised his head slightly to look at her, his face almost without expression.

“Kat?” His voice was low and hoarse.

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

He smiled and stood up, with that lithe and utterly relaxed elegance of movement. “Matter? Nothing’s the matter. I have to go.”

She walked to the door with him. “I thought you were going to tell me some terrible thing. Isn’t that a crazy impression to have? Bad tidings. Now I’m chattering. Damn it, I hate chattering women.”

He paused at the door and said, “Kat... if tomorrow turns out to be rough, call me, will you?”

“Aren’t you going to be out of town?”

“I canceled.”

“Not because of me, Jimmy.”

“For several reasons. I should be handy to see how Brian makes it. Where are you going for your picnic?”

“Up to Sanibel so we can look for shells.”

“The bugs will be fierce this time of year.”

“We’ll be plastered with goo.”

She went to the window and watched him back out and waved to him as he drove away. She walked thoughtfully to the kitchen and began to prepare dinner. She was aware of a little area of strangeness in her mind, elusive and unidentifiable. It was like trying to remember a name momentarily forgotten. There had been a strangeness at the Halleys, when the four of them had been on the back deck. She and Van had spent many hours there with Ross and Jackie. Today, for the first time, there had been four of them again, but the fourth person had been Jimmy instead of Van. She realized, with a merciless honesty, that the situation had made her resent Jimmy for being Jimmy rather than Van. There had been at least one time when there had been six of them on that deck on a night of cool moonlight, drinking wine and talking wonderful nonsense. Jimmy would have just as much right to resent her because she was not Gloria. There was one awkwardness on that clear evening long ago. Gloria had been recently released, and it was her first social evening since her release. It had made the conversation more guarded and selective than it might otherwise have been.

Now, of course, she was as remote, as unreachable as Van. Hers was a subtler form of death, but no less final. Which was easier, she wondered, the slow regression to that point where there was, at last, no communication at all, or the sudden brutal stunning departure? And she wondered if Jimmy had made this same comparison, and envied her.

As Jimmy Wing crossed the causeway to the mainland there was a strange lemon light across the land. The rays of the setting sun were almost horizontal. Every surface facing the west was touched with this luminous glow in contrast with the blue shadows of dusk which lay against everything else. From time to time a fitful rain wind turned the leaves and died away.

On the car radio the seven-thirty newscaster said, “... three tenths of an inch recorded for Palm County, far below the normal rainfall for this time of year. The current temperature at County Airport is ninety degrees, relative humidity ninety-five percent, winds out of the southeast at three to five miles per hour...”

He turned the radio off so as to focus himself with no distraction upon a special textural memory of Kat. When he had turned back at her doorway, she was a step closer to him than he had expected, standing tall and near in the aquarium light of the living room, so close for an instant that the detected fragrance of her hair mingled with the imagined feel of it, sweet and harsh against his lips, and he had come all too close to reaching for her. Another collector’s item, he thought. Another image to file away.

He worked hard at his newsroom desk for an hour, and then walked down a dark block on Bayou Street to Vera’s Kitchen. He was starting to eat his sandwich when Bobby Nest came in and sat on a counter stool beside him. Bobby at eighteen concealed a fervent love for the newspaper business behind a pose of cynicism acquired from scores of movies and television shows. He had been the paper’s official correspondent at Riverway High School during the past year, and this summer Borklund, for very small money, had him doing routine sports, the city and county recreation program events, summer bowling and golf leagues, shuffle-board, tennis, pram races. In the fall Bobby would go away to school and Borklund would find another serf, equally eager. Bobby was a small wiry boy with big glasses and a surprisingly authoritative baritone voice. He wrote pounds of copy which was never printed.