Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

“You come over here,” he ordered. “You’ll get bit to death walking around like that tonight.”

She hesitated and went over toward him. She did not like the man. He adopted a pseudo-fatherly air toward all the younger matrons of Sandy Key Estates, and toward the daughters of the older ones, but his manner seemed to mask sly insinuations. He did yard work for some of the residents, maintained the shell roads, the community tennis court and the Pavilion. For his community efforts, he was paid out of the treasury of the Sandy Key Estates Association, replenished by the quarterly assessment levied against each resident, based on the size of his lot.

“Now you stand right there and I’ll put a cloud of this upwind from you, and it will drift onto you. You hold your breath and turn around slow while it’s going by.”

“But I don’t want to get that stuff in my hair.”

“Won’t hurt your hair,” he said and yanked the starter cord, and belched a cloud of bug fog toward the beach. As it enveloped her she held her breath and turned slowly, dutifully, vastly annoyed at herself. Now if he tells you to go roll in the sand, you’ll do that too, you darn ninny.

It drifted past her and she stopped turning and began breathing. “That’s better,” Gus said. “Now they won’t mess with you, and raise all them red lumps.” He grinned at her, exposing the ruin of his teeth. “You coming to the party?”

“I didn’t know there was one.”

“Now, when you see me fogging this place, you know somebody wants it for a party, Mrs. Hubble.”

He always seemed to know exactly how impertinent he dared be, and he altered it to fit the temperament of each target. She knew that if she acted angry, he would pretend to be hurt and bewildered.

The Pavilion was the only community structure. It was open on three sides, forty by twenty, with a slab floor, steel uprights, and a thatched roof. There was a bamboo bar against the single wall. On the beach side was a big barbecue pit, and there were picnic tables under the Australian pines and under the coconut palms. The Pavilion was in the center of the two hundred feet of Gulf beach open to all the landlocked residents of the Estates.

“Who is giving the party, Gus?” she asked evenly.

“It’s the Deegans and Mrs. McCall giving it, for about forty people, the way I heard it.”

“Thanks for the spray job,” she said and walked away from him, heading north on Gulf Lane toward the Sinnat house. The fogging machine did not start up. She resisted the impulse to look back, and knew she would see him standing there, watching her walk away. If she turned, he would grin placidly at her. It was a part of the mythology of the Estates that if a woman appeared in a swimsuit in the farthest corner of the area, within ten seconds Gus Malta would find some work to be done within ten feet of her. Eloise Cable swore that she had turned quickly one evening and seen his face just outside the screen of her open bathroom window. It was generally agreed that if he wanted to gamble his job by risking the Peeping Tom act, Eloise Cable was the logical candidate. In spite of his manner, and all the work he left half done, it was agreed that he was very good with the kids.

As she pushed open the Sinnats’ garden gate, she heard the concerted yapping of a dozen assorted children, and the sloshing and slapping of the water in their big pool.

James Warren wing drove north along Mangrove Road, the main road which bisected Sandy Key. He wondered vaguely how many times, how many hundred times he had driven this same stretch of road, and how many hundred times he would drive it again.

Once again she had afflicted him with what he had begun to call, with a sense of irony and guilt, Kat-fever. It was a restlessness, a dissatisfaction with all the familiar comforting routines.

He wanted to return to his normal blandness of spirit, maintain an uninvolved equanimity, suppressing the little bulgings of guilt and barbs of conscience. He knew it would be so much easier for him if he could be less scrupulous with himself, less intent on definitions and emotional accuracy. Were a man able to use his own fictions and realities interchangeably, he could be much more at home in a muddied world. Introspection, he had decided, is being bred out of the race because it is not survival-oriented.

So much fuss, he thought, about wanting a woman who does not even know she is wanted. Van, good buddy, rest easy. I’ve just helped her in a few small ways, and that’s all there’s going to be.

But he could hear Van’s familiar response to that familiar protestation: But you keep seeing one hell of a lot of her, pal.

Because I like her. Is there a law?

Is she so much? Just a spare, high-pockets redhead, boy, skimpy upstairs and flat across the behinder, with angular hips and knobbly shoulders, and eyes which aren’t either blue or gray, and monkey wrinkles across her forehead. She moves well and her skin is fine, but she’s a slapdash, helter-skelter woman, too smart, too ready to argue. She carried your kids, and loved you truly, boy, and there’s nothing there for ol’ Jimmy.

But it was becoming ever more difficult for him to think of her as the same woman who had been married to Van Hubble, the same tense, skeptical Yankee bride Van had brought down with so much pride ten years ago. They had never liked each other.

This was a new friendship, one year old. A new friend — as if Van’s wife had died with him. I keep arranging to see her because I like her.

But there was a hyena cackle in the back of his mind, a sound of knowing derision. “You mean you’d like to maneuver her into the sack, Wing, on any basis at all, even as a return for past favors, you sick son of a bitch, and you keep sucking around waiting for a break, because you’re too gutless to clue her, too afraid she’ll say no in a very final way.”

So is it so criminal to want a woman? She came into his mind so vividly it seemed to blur his view of the bright highway, and he quickly sought escape from the impact of his lust by forcing his mind up into shallow, fatuous levels and keeping it bobbing there, like a child’s balloon on random currents, turning his head rapidly from side to side and wearing a small strained smile as he inventoried the minutiae of reality — Ohio plates, a bird feeder, girl on a bike, gull on the wing, pink house, fat man, For Rent sign.

When the seizure of his need was ended, he dared think of her again, resenting her because she had made so many of his assumptions about himself untenable. She had ruptured the structure of contentment and let the restlessness in. She had made him wish for some kind of great change in his days when he knew that no change could benefit him.

Thus far he knew he had been objective enough to avoid the most obvious trap: the wishful belief that the very intensity of his awareness of her had somehow generated a reciprocal tension, and that he need only make the first hesitant move and she would fall sighing into his arms. It was a constant temptation to read too much into meaningless things, like the idiots who find codes and prophecies in Shakespeare. He knew well Kat’s relentless honesty, and knew she could not dissemble, knew she would immediately disclose any feeling she might have for him.

A year ago he would have been hilariously incredulous had anyone tried to tell him he would become physically infatuated with Katherine Hubble. It had come about so very gradually.

In the beginning he had helped her with all the routines, legalisms and barbarisms of sudden death. She had been stunned, heartsick and lost — her eyes dull, her hair lifeless, her skin drab, her movements slow, her voice hesitant and indistinct. Before she had the heart for any future plans, he had gone to Leroy Shannard to talk about Van’s estate, and learned that Van’s few good years had come too late, the tax had taken too much of it, and she would have to find work. He had seen her often, out of a sense of duty to Van, helping her in small ways to find her way back to reality. For a time he thought she might never recover, but then her pride and spirit began to show itself again.