Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

Jimmy felt Kat move closer to him as he faced Doris Rowell. Her motions were slow, but steady and unending. She would spread a slice of bread with butter, drop a puddle of jam onto it, fold it once and lift it to her mouth. She consumed each slice in three spaced bites, shoving the last one in with her thumb. The sounds of breathing and mastication were audible. She seemed to look at them, but her eyes were so dull, her glance so devoid of any impact of awareness, he could not be certain she knew they were there.

“Mrs. Rowell, Tom wants to know about the people you’ve lined up. Mrs. Rowell!”

He asked twice. She did not answer. Suddenly Kat went swiftly to the woman’s side and grasped the heavy wrist, kept the sticky hand from lifting to the mouth. “Please, Doris!” she said.

“Numuny ummun.”

“What did you say?”

Doris Rowell swallowed. “Nobody is coming,” she said distinctly. “No one at all. You can tell the colonel that.” Her voice was without regret, without emotion of any kind. The hand tried to lift but Kat restrained it.

“Didn’t you ask them?”

“They expressed regrets. They are too busy. It will make no difference who asks them. The answer will be the same.”

“But why?”

“Let go, please. I am very hungry.”

“You have to tell me why, Doris!”

“They don’t care to associate themselves with me in any way. Maybe they’ll tell you why. I doubt it. It is easier to say they are too busy.”

“Come on, Kat,” Wing said. Kat released Doris Rowell’s arm and stepped away. The hand lifted and then stopped. Doris Rowell was looking at Jimmy with placid speculation.

“You could have done it,” she said, a flat statement rather than an accusation.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

She smiled to herself and nodded her head and poked the bread into her waiting mouth. Jimmy took Kat’s arm and led her out onto the porch and down the steps. Just as he released her, he felt her shudder.

“That’s horrible, Jimmy. We have to do something.”

“I’ll get Doctor Sloan out here. He’ll know what’s best.”

“It’s some kind of a breakdown.”

“He’ll know what to do about it.”

As they walked through the side yard the wind shifted and a vile smell came from the direction of the long shed. He told Kat to go to the car. He went inside. He walked to the rear of the shed. The light was burning. The small pumps had stopped. All the striped fish floated, decaying, on top of the murky water in the two tanks.

He suddenly realized he had been standing there for a long time. His fists were clenched so tightly his shoulders and arms had begun to ache. His jaw was clamped so strongly there was a ringing in his ears.

He turned and walked swiftly back toward the rectangle of daylight. Kat was standing by the station wagon. “What were you doing?”

“She’s let a lot of fish die in there. It’ll have to be cleaned up. There’s a billion flies in there.”

“ Damn them!” Kat whispered. “Damn all of them. Should I stay here with her until Doctor Sloan gets here?”

“I see no need of that.”

“We can phone from my house. And phone Tom too.”

Sloan said he would see Mrs. Rowell within the hour, and arrange hospitalization if he felt she needed it. Jimmy said he would phone Sloan again and check. As he hung up, Kat handed him a cold beer, and said, “I wonder what she meant by saying you could have done it. Done what?”

“I told her I didn’t know what she meant.”

“She’s worked with those people for so long, I don’t see why they should turn her down now.”

“Tom has the list, doesn’t he?”

“Of the ones she thought would come here? Yes.”

“Then he better make the calls and see how he can do.”

She took her drink over to a chair and sat and studied him. “Is there something you don’t want to tell me, Jimmy?”

“Nothing very special. Just that you can’t win, I guess.”

“We know that. We know that all we can do at the public hearing is get our point of view on the record. People can’t stay this hopped up, you know. We’re working on the next step now, to force the trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund to hold another public hearing before they actually sell the bay bottom to Palmland. The things we can get into the record in both public hearings will serve as the basis for the lawsuits we’re going to bring against Palmland and Palm County and the State of Florida. Two years from now, when Palmland finally gets out from under the last injunction and gets slapped with a whole batch of new ones, let’s see how many people are going to be left around here throwing eggs and saying dirty words over the phone and giving women nervous breakdowns.”

He looked down at her. “Kat, Kat, it’s a brave point of view. But they’ll just keep getting rougher.”

“Good! Let ’em get real rough and real careless, and do something we can prove. Then they’ll have some fat damage suits to defend too.”

“That’s Tom Jennings talking, not you.”

“I’ve never been so angry, Jimmy. I’m too angry to be scared.” She stood up. “Tom will be wondering.” As she walked toward the phone it began to ring. She hesitated. When it had rung three times, she picked it up. She did not speak. She listened, making a wry face at Jimmy. “Thank you, dear,” she said into the phone. “You’re such a perfect lady.” She hung up and said, “There isn’t as much of that since I stopped answering. It spoils the fun when you don’t answer.” She picked the phone up, listened, dialed, waited a moment and hung up, and then dialed again. He heard her explain the Rowell situation to Tom, and could guess from her end of the conversation that Tom was agreeing to get in touch with the people Doris Rowell had thought would come to the hearing. Then he saw her face change as Tom kept talking. Her lips were compressed and her frown lines deepened. “I see,” she said. “I know you predicted it last night, but I’d hoped you were wrong. Sure, Tom. I know. As I keep telling myself, you can’t win ’em all. Yes, I’ll let you know. Goodbye.”

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

She looked at him with a slightly startled expression, as though she had forgotten he was there. “We seem to be down to five little Indians.”

“What happened?”

“Wallace Lime quit. He turned over his stickers and posters and so-called contact files and scuttled away. We thought he would. He’s been getting awful jumpy the last two days. He tried to be fearless, I guess, but it was just like that mustache. It didn’t quite suit him. And we aren’t the same elegant civilized little group we were last time. We’re not worth enduring slashed tires, garbage, dirty phone calls. His wife was getting hysterical. I think it was the paint bomb that broke his heart, Jimmy.”

“Paint bomb?”

“They’ve got a little garden house. There’s a record player in there. There’s no way to lock it. Thursday night somebody sneaked in and plugged the record player in and put a record on as loud as it would go. Wally went charging out, and ran in the dark to turn it off. They’d put one of those spray cans of enamel in the middle of the record, so it was going around and around, with a big rubber band around it to keep the spray part going. If you look close, you can still see little flecks of bright green paint in Wally’s mustache.”

“Dear Lord,” Jimmy said softly.

“It would be very very funny if it wasn’t so very very sad. He wasn’t doing much good. He was losing every other client he had. None of his ideas were working. Public relations! Hah! The poor little man. He’d have an easier job convincing the public that Jimmy Hoffa teaches ballet. Tom says he was so apologetic he was practically in tears. The group is getting very cozy, Jimmy. Tom can’t get anybody to fill one vacancy on the committee, and now we have three. And he estimates we’re losing an average of twenty regular members a day. By the time of the public hearing, at that rate we’ll be past zero. We’ll be minus twenty-seven or something. There are so many people we thought we could depend on, who’ve had pressure put on them in some unexpected way.”