Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

She raised his hand to her lips for a moment, then said, “He won’t be like us, Wingy, sweetie. All scabs and sores and busted feathers. We’re the half-people, you know. It’s the wise bastards who keep shoving us out into the traffic.” She smiled at him, her blunt features oddly leonine in that light. “Nobody will push my President of the World around. He’ll be solid and sound, scaled big enough so it’ll take all day to walk around his heart. What, or maybe who, has bitched you up, dear?”

“I have no idea.”

“So it’s either something you are doing or something you’re not doing. No fee for that analysis. And now if I should say make way for love, will you start flipping again?”

“Not this time, Miss Holmes.”

She grinned and jumped up and pulled the orange dress off over her head. She held it by the shoulders and turned it to one side and then the other and said, “This little nothing in pumpkin is sadly rrrrrumped out, darn it. And I’m the gal who can do it. Sweetie, I think I’ll take a shower first, with this little number hanging in there and see if it’ll hang out some.” She put the dress over her arm and went to her suitcase and dug around in it, taking things out. She smiled at him and said, “Feel free to stare your little pink eyes out, Wingy. A boy told me once I’m like Mickey Mantle — the more I take off, the bigger I look. Imagine a thirteen-year-old kid suddenly carting all this around? I went up through four bra sizes in three months. Why don’t you pounce into the hay and have a little snooze? You’ll have the time for it. I take long, long showers, dear.” She got a hanger for her dress and went into the bathroom, humming in a small off-key voice.

He left the motel at a little after ten. She fell asleep while he was dressing. He bent over and kissed her on the temple before he left. She did not stir. A heavy tassel of the silver hair lay across her eyes.

As he drove by the airport a prop jet coming in startled him. It annoyed him to be startled. He did not wish to be roused out of a state which was neither trance nor lethargy, but an oddly quiet plateau, a place a little bit off to one side of reality.

After a dozen miles he recalled what it reminded him of. In his final year of high school he had been a third-string end, diligent enough and fast enough, but too brittle for the hazards of the game. They went into one of the last games of the season with three ends more useful than he out of action. He was sent into the game in the second quarter, and came hobbling out after the fourth play, with a sprained ankle. During the half, the trainer injected novocaine into his ankle and instep in three places, and bound it so tightly the flesh bulged over the tape. Within minutes he could put all his weight on it without pain. It felt like a hard rubber foot and ankle, springy enough, but not a part of him. He started the third quarter. In the middle of the final quarter he misjudged a tackle and broke the middle finger of his left hand against a flying heel and came out for good. All that evening he felt strange. The bloated ankle had been cut free and retaped, but it did not hurt. They told him it would hurt, later on. He had this same strange quiet feeling then as now.

He had awakened in the middle of the night, bathed in sweat. The pain of the splinted finger was nothing. The ankle felt monstrous. It bulged with every heartbeat. It felt like a balloon packed full of hot splintered glass. After he was off crutches he had limped for nearly a year, and it still ached when the weather changed.

So my sudden tears, he thought, were the sign of injury, and Charity was the novocaine. It will hurt later, when I try to laugh.

He had waited in the bed for her, wondering what she would be like. After a long time she had come to him, sweet and steamy from her long shower, friendly, talkative, busy, utterly without artifice. She brought to the bed a flavor of healthy, absentminded innocence. It was strange and casual, as though they had met at a party and were dancing together for the first time, taking turns leading, interrupting their conversation when the steps became tricky, apologizing for any small miscues, attempting more ambitious twirls and dips as they became more accustomed to each other, then dancing some simple placid step when they wished to talk. “So I found this stuff that doesn’t make my hair brittle and crack,” she said. “A kookie name though. Silva-Brite.” “I like it,” he said, “and I like the way you wear it.” At last her voice grew blurred and she said, in question, “Well, here we go?”

It was ended. She kissed the tip of his nose. “Sweet,” she said. “Very sweet and nice. I’ll sleep like stones now. Poor Wingy. You have to stagger up and churn back south. Poor dear man.”

“You’re quite a girl, Charity.”

She yawned. “I don’t like that tone of voice. You’re trying to patronize me. I’m just a girl sort of girl, bigger than most, friendlier maybe, who likes you well enough for a little chummy kind of love. I thought I could loosen some of those knots in your heart, that made you cry. So don’t quite-a-girl me. It wasn’t that big a scene.”

He was beside her, facing her from such close range her eye looked enormous. She stuck her underlip out and blew a fringe of silver hair back off her forehead.

“You made it exactly right,” he said.

“Good! I wanted you to have something good to go with the weeps.”

“That’s never happened to me before.”

“Hell, sweetie, neither have I, so at least you aren’t in a rut. Kiss goodbye. There. Now you can get up and scoot back and tell them the big pig has been shooed out of Buckie’s precious little life.” She winked that enormous eye. “Don’t tell them I was beginning to think about leaving several days ago.”

By the time he was twenty miles below Tampa, she had begun to seem unreal. He told himself he had merely reacted in the fashion of a normal male. He had taken a successful hack at a promiscuous, restless, rootless twenty-year-old girl. They passed out no medals for that. He told himself it was a pleasant, vulgar, meaningless little episode. But it kept being more than that. It was finding contact with someone in a place where all you usually touched were mirrors. She had a mangled wisdom of her own, suited to the lonely places. She made him wish he were fool enough to pack and drive to Vegas and try to be President of the World.

The novocaine was thinning, and pain was just a little way underneath it. The car roared down through the Gulf towns, toward the heat of the middle of the day. He sat and steered and was carried along, feeling disembodied, fragile, a husk-man, fashioned of cardboard and spit, dried in a hot wind.

The girl asked him if he had an appointment, and when he said he didn’t, she checked with Leroy, and said Mr. Shannard could see him in about ten minutes if he cared to wait. He sat and turned the pages of an old magazine. The minutes ticked on toward two o’clock.

“Come in, James!” Leroy said with the sweet-sad welcome smile which crinkled the eagle eyes.

He went into the paneled office. Leroy closed the door and went around behind his desk.

“You got our problem lady off without mishap?”

“Off and winging.”

“I didn’t think she’d present much of a problem, somehow. Where did she elect?”

“Las Vegas. I had to put another hundred and forty into the kitty.”

“She worked you over very nicely, didn’t she?”

“Who reimburses me?”

“I guess that would be Elmo. And it won’t make him terribly happy.”

“She was going to be a problem otherwise. It seemed best to handle it quietly.”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong. I approve. But Elmo is our leader. And he will fret a little. By the way, our Mr. Flake is adjusting rapidly. He’s sore as hell, but for the wrong reasons. He stayed at Elmo’s place last night. This morning he learned he had been rude to her last night and she took off with some happy stranger for parts unknown, leaving him an unprintable verbal message. The switch in the story cost me eighty dollars, which somehow amuses the hell out of Elmo.”