Джон Макдональд: A Flash of Green

It all began in such a mild, unanticipated way. It seemed pleasant to be with her, a small triumph to make her smile, a great victory when he made her laugh aloud. He took a possessive interest in her recovery, and when he thought she was ready he scouted the town and found the job for her at the bank, and made her take it before she thought she was able, and saw it work out as he had hoped.

It was during this time of reconstruction that he began to find pleasure in looking at her, at the shape of her hands, the line of her throat, the way she moved and turned, the bold configuration of her mouth. He had never found her as attractive while Van was alive. Perhaps then he had been more aware of flaws than of virtues, because that was the time when they had not liked each other particularly.

The pleasure of looking at her changed, little by little, into an oddly humid speculation. Over the years he had noted small clues to the probability that she and Van had a devotedly lusty marriage, and he wondered just what she had been like with him.

At first his conjecturing was a small game to play, but the game suddenly turned into compulsion and was out of control. He began to imagine her as the insatiable witch of all legend, and felt a revulsion toward himself that his imagination should have led him into such a pattern. It offended his own sense of personal dignity to have become a victim of such a fever. He told himself it was like a recurrence of adolescence. No woman could be so uniquely desirable. It was a delusion which would be vanquished were he ever to have her. He diagnosed it as a disease of immaturity, the imagination festering, and prescribed for himself dosages of some convenient and amiable women he knew who sought amusement as opposed to involvement, yet rose from these encounters with an undiminished thirst.

As his compulsion had become more established, he bemused himself with an ethical equation, analyzing every act to test its plausibility, to make certain he did nothing which could not be explained on some other basis than infatuation. Until this day all his relations with Kat had passed this test, but now he was at a new place in the relationship. He could not bend the requirements of plausibility far enough to permit him to have told Kat about the Grassy Bay plan. Elmo Bliss had told him to mention it to no one. But he had run with it to Kat, almost immediately, like the pebble placed at the feet of the she-penguin.

Now that it was done, he could see clearly his own attempts at self-deceit. He had told himself it was his duty to warn her, but he had known all the time she would accept the challenge as an emotional obligation. What he had done was make yet another claim upon her gratitude, and had, at the same time, established a basis for their future proximity. He had, in effect, offered to be her spy in the enemy camp.

He prided himself on having been able to avoid thus far that most despicable rationalization of all, that of terming it love, thus giving a noble reason for the most furtive acts.

Love, he knew, was the ever-handy refuge of the scoundrel. And it did heavy duty as the lyrical justification for a million illicit scrabblings each night, on beaches, on backseats, under bushes and on the useful high-density foam rubber of forty thousand motels. Love was that jungly place reeking of Gloria, of death, of madness, with no escape except to the desert beyond the jungle, where, in relative peace, you could allow the bitter sun to bake your skull and toast your heart to an enduring little muffin. Not love, please.

The other rationalization to be avoided most carefully was that philosophical devaluation which asks who will give a damn a hundred years from now. That is the good old kosmic view of kopulation. Tomorrow, baby, they drop the bomb, so live tonight. It is an empty wind sighing through an empty place, and it works equally well for rape, theft and murder.

When he denied his motive the benefit of any ornamentation, it came down to a stark and almost Biblical lust. I want the woman. I want her in spite of all my sickly little requirements of maintaining my good opinion of myself. Unhampered by this tottering ethical structure, I could run faster and score sooner.

He could not think of desire as being a part of any plan, any enduring program. He could not see beyond the first time of taking her. It was a primitive need and a primitive act, and should it ever happen, he did not know what the world would be like until he was beyond her and could see what it was like on that far side.

For a long time he had comforted himself by telling himself that no matter how increasingly strong the compulsion might become, he was safely beyond those puppy years when he might have let it disrupt those other aspects of his life, those reassuring routines and relationships, which he had erected around himself like one of those insect towers of sand and spit which, in time, turn into protective stone.

Yet he had blithely told her of the Grassy Bay project. And that was like kicking the stone to see how solid it had become.

He drove by the small area of commercial development on Sandy Key adjacent to the causeway, and when he was beyond it he looked south along the blue reach of Grassy Bay. The bay was narrowest near the causeway, widening out toward the south. As he crossed the causeway he saw a small white cruiser setting out from Hoyt’s Marina, with a stocky brown woman on the bow, coiling a line. Further down the bay he saw a pattern of flashing white on the water and saw the birds circling and diving in agitation. Maybe mackerel, he thought, in from the Gulf. More likely a school of jacks chopping the bait fish. Two outboards were converging on the roiled area.

When he came off the causeway he was stopped by the traffic light at the intersection of Mangrove Road and Bay Highway. After the May and June hiatus, the summer tourist season was gathering a rather shabby momentum. In the winter months the biggest contingent came from the central states, and there were so many of them that at last, to the residents of Palm County, they seemed to become but one elderly couple, endlessly repeated, driving a bulbous blue car with Ohio plates (at wandering unpredictable speeds), the man in Bermudas, the woman with a big straw purse, questing through all the towns of the shallow-water coast, bemused, slightly indignant, frequently bored, like people charged with some mission who had lost their sealed orders before they had a chance to open them.

As was so solemnly and frequently stated by all public officials and all Chamber of Commerce executives, the winter flow of this endlessly duplicated couple was the backbone of the economy, and it often seemed that the supply was inexhaustible, yet Jimmy Wing had noted among the businessmen of Palm City an anxious and almost superstitious attitude toward the continuity of the flow. They heartened themselves with every evidence of repeat business, no matter how questionable the source of the statistics. They fretted about the accessibility of the Caribbean islands. But at the heart of their unrest was the never-spoken conviction that there was really nothing to keep them coming down. It was a fine place to live, and a poor place to visit. They could not quite see how any sane reasonable person would willingly permit himself to be “processed” through that long junk strip of Tamiami, exchanging his vacation money for overpriced lodgings, indifferent food, admission to fish tanks, snake farms and shell factories.

So secretly disturbed were these businessmen about the proliferating shoddiness of the coast that they were constantly taking random and somewhat contradictory action. The more the beach eroded away, or disappeared into private ownership, the more bravely the huge highway signs proclaimed the availability of miles of white-sand beaches. As the shallow-water fishing decreased geometrically under the attrition of dredging, filling, sewage and too many outboard motors, they paid to have the superb fishing advertised, and backed contests which would further decimate the dwindling fish population. As the quiet and primitive mystery of the broad tidal bays disappeared, as the mangroves and the rookeries and the oak hammocks were uprooted with such industriousness the morning sound of construction equipment became more familiar than the sound of the mockingbird, the businessmen substituted the delights of pageants, parades and beauty contests. (See the Grandmaw America Contest, with evening gown, talent and bathing suit eliminations.)