Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

During the bad years he had resigned himself to this smaller and less demanding arena than the one he had trained himself for. When the necessity to stay had been ended, he had remained. The strain of the bad years had somehow leached away his eagerness for a greater challenge. Now he could adjust his effort to the extent that it filled his days, amiably enough, with enough mild pressure to keep him from thinking about anything which might make him feel uneasy.

He went into the cottage, took the wad of folded copy paper out of his hip pocket and tossed it onto the table beside the typewriter as he walked through the living room. He took off his shirt and slacks, threw them on the bed, went to the kitchen and took the last cold beer out of the refrigerator. He scrawled “beer” on his shopping list, carried the cold can out onto the screened porch off the kitchen and sat in a canvas sling chair. A blue heron stalked through the shallows near his narrow crooked dock with attentive caution. Forty feet beyond the end of the dock a mullet made its three leaps.

He sipped the beer and looked out across the bay and thought about Kat, drifting from reality to erotic fantasy until finally he felt disgusted with himself. He went in and phoned the paper and asked for the city desk extension. Borklund had gone home. He would be back in at ten. Brian Haas was on the desk.

“What’ll you break down and give us, lover?” Brian asked. “As always, old Jumping J. Jesus wants me to make it up so he can tear it down and make it up his way.”

“Let me see. About twelve inches on the Zoning Board of Appeals turning thumbs down on Ganson’s trailer park.”

“Boxed on page one?”

“Depends on what else you’ve got.”

“What else I’ve got is practically nothing so far.”

“And I won’t be much help. I’ll puff what I’ve got. So make it six inches on the Sheriff’s car thief being wanted by Pennsylvania, six inches on the FHA squabble over Lakeview Village, four inches on opening the new parking lot behind Plummer Park and... one, two, three... five little filler-inners, five bits of lint from the public navel. Don’t forget I left off all the County Commission stuff at two o’clock, Bri. Am I supposed to fill the whole sheet?”

“But your prose style has such an aching beauty, Wingo.”

“I know. It sings.” He looked at his watch. “You’ll have this stuff by eight.”

After he hung up, he turned the floor fan on, got his cigarettes and lighter, rolled paper into the machine, spread his notes out beside him on the scarred table and hammered the news stories out with four-finger efficiency, pausing very rarely to hunt for word or phrase, taking a familiar excusable pride in his competence.

When he was showering, his phone rang. It was Elmo Bliss.

“Jim boy, we got ourselves interrupted this morning before I finished all I had to say.”

“I got most of the message, Elmo.”

“But I never did get around to telling you where you fit in so good.”

“Or where you fit in, Elmo.”

There was a momentary silence on the line. Jimmy felt a quick apprehension, and was annoyed at himself for feeling alarm. He had a continuing compulsion to irritate Elmo Bliss, like a small boy’s urge to stand too close to the lion cage. Though he could think of no ways in which Elmo could do him any serious harm, there was a flavor of wildness under control about the man which could cause alarm on a visceral rather than a rational basis.

Bliss chuckled. “You say things right out, Jim boy. Better you should wait until you know, and then say nothing. You come on out here to the place this evening, and we can finish talking. There’ll be some folks around like always, but a better place to talk than the courthouse.”

“I can’t promise any particular time, Elmo.”

“This will keep going until you get here, boy.”

After Katherine Hubble brought her two waterlogged children home from the Sinnat pool, she let them change into pajamas while she fixed the evening meal for the three of them. They ate at the round table on the enclosed part of the patio. Roy was eight and Alicia was seven. They had Van’s coloring, and already they had a deep tan which she could never achieve.

In one sense it seemed the bitterest blow of all that Van should have lost the chance to watch them grow up. But sometimes she caught herself feeling a ridiculously unfair indignation toward Van, as if he had purposely run out and left her with all the problems of discipline, health, education and love.

And, as always when she was alone with them, she found herself fretting about whether she was handling it all properly.

Van’s death had stunned the children. They had become irritable, whiny, quarrelsome and disobedient. And at just the time when she could feel that they were beginning to make a good adjustment, they had to turn the house over to the Brandts and move down to that small apartment on one of the back streets behind the main post office. Though they seemed to understand why it had to be done, in many ways it seemed a more severe emotional shock to them than the loss of their father. It destroyed the security of the known place. Roy, in particular, was a disciplinary problem during the first weeks of the new school year.

By spring they had begun to handle it better, and when they could at last move back to the Sandy Key house they knew so well, they ran and yelped and grinned the whole day long.

She tried to maintain as many of the ceremonies of being a family as possible, and she was grateful for the shortness of her work week, but it was still an abnormal situation to have them looked after by someone else during the weekdays.

She knew she could have found no situation more ideal than the one Claire Sinnat had volunteered. Claire had the twin boys, four years old, the big beach house and the pool and the grounds, a full-time cook-housekeeper, and a full-time girl — a Mexican girl named Esperanza — to look after her kids. Esperanza was chunky, cheerful and devoted to children. On her afternoon off, either Claire filled in or Natalie Sinnat took over. Nat was spending the summer with them. She was nineteen, Dial Sinnat’s daughter by one of his previous marriages.

“My God, sweetie,” Claire had said. “Shoo them up here every day, or I’ll think you aren’t being neighborly. The place is crawling with urchins all the time, and Di and I couldn’t care less, really. Your two are sweethearts, and Floss will stuff a lunch into them on schedule, and Esperanza will keep them safe. In bad weather we’ve got that huge indestructible playroom.”

After much argument, Claire had agreed to let her pay Floss and Esperanza an additional five dollars a week for the work and the responsibility. Roy and Alicia had begun to think of the Sinnat place as a second home. It was good not to have to worry about them. Van had had both of them swimming by the time they had learned to walk.

The kids were subdued at dinner, their brown faces drowsy, their voices slowed by the exhaustions of the long hot day. Their objections at being told to go to bed were halfhearted.

After they were asleep and the dishes done, Kat hesitated for some time, inventing and discarding plausible excuses, then phoned Sally Ann Lesser.

“I thought you might be at the Deegans’ party,” Kat said.

“Oh hell, no,” Sally Ann said. “Sammy and Wilma go further afield for their weird guests. They find people nobody ever saw before.” Her voice was slightly slurred. “Kat, honey, why don’t you come on down here and help Carol and me destroy reputations? I’ll send my idiot daughter up. She can do her summer-school homework just as well there as here. And don’t let her shill you into a sitter fee this time.”