Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

“Is this the way you were acting when you walked in and busted Leroy in the mouth?”

“I was a lot calmer, I think.”

Elmo looked at him for a few moments. He finally sighed audibly, peeled a small cigar and took his time lighting it. “So what’s got you all riled, boy? Dermond?”

“If you can guess that good, guess the rest of it.”

“Sure will. When you come into this, the idea was how you were going to he’p me slow those Save Our Bay folks down. Knowing them the way you do, you could do it quiet and gentle. So all of a sudden you find you somebody else is in on it. And I guess you want to know why.”

“I very much want to know why.”

“Lots of reasons. You turned out to have a softer heart than I give you credit for. That doesn’t mean I got no use for you now and in the future. It just means little things will come up best done by others. You bleeding about how Dermond got handled? Like my daddy used to say, a man with a plate glass ass shouldn’t walk where it’s slick.”

“Leroy arranged the Dermond thing?”

“He found some fellas to take care of it. The thing was to run him out of town fast, him and his pretty boy, so as when the Reverend Darcy Harkness Coombs gives his little talk at the public hearing on Wednesday night, he can point to Dermond as being one of the bird lovers exposed and run out of the county by the forces of decency. You standing up for a goddam degenerate, boy?”

“Aren’t you trying to win too big, Elmo?”

“In this game, Jimmy boy, there’s no such thing. Then, you losing your wife, it kind of took your mind off all that’s going on. And we figure you’ve been doing us a lot of real good by writing up how wonderful Palmland Isles is going to be. We figured you’d be a lot happier if you don’t have to mess with the rougher parts of this thing. If you couldn’t stomach it when Leroy give that big girl a little cuffing around, it’s best we took some of the dirty work off your hands. Like how Dermond got convinced it was time to leave town.”

“I don’t care about Dermond, Elmo. I had to see you tonight to get something else straight. Jennings’ organization is pretty well gutted now. There’s four left on the committee, and about fifty members who haven’t been scared off. I assume Leroy’s little helpers are still on the job. I came here to tell you that nothing is going to happen to Kat Hubble. If anything is being set up, you better make sure it’s called off. If anything happens to her, I’m going to make you the sorriest man in south Florida, Commissioner.”

Elmo wore a tiger smile. “Big words. Maybe, as the years go by, Jimmy, and we get to know each other good, you’ll stop wondering if I’m a damn fool. Leroy still wonders, sometimes. Ever since you busted his lip he’s been especially nervous about you. But what he can’t understand yet is how I got a lock on you that you couldn’t bust out of if you tried. You’re the most loyal man I’ve got. Now don’t stare at me so bug-eyed, boy. Think it out. I’d say the one thing you value most is the good opinion and respect of that nice little redheaded woman who is the widow of your best friend. And every little thing you’ve done for me has give me a solider lock on you. But I don’t want to push you past the point where you’d lose your own respect for yourself. I could make you do things you wouldn’t want to think about. I could tell you that if you didn’t do like I told you, I’d make sure that little lady found out just how you’ve been helping us and hurting them. Leroy has no call to be nervous about you, no more than I have. And that redhead isn’t going to be hurt in any way. She’s going to stay sweet and loving toward you, because that’s how you want her to be, and you’ll work to keep her that way. Before I ever talked to you I looked it all over careful. She’s a spirited woman. She looks up to you. I knew you’d be awful careful not to let anybody know you have any deal with me, because she might find out. And I want you real careful, like you’ve been. You can’t cross me, Jimmy, any more than Leroy could, or Buck, or Doc, or Bill, or Burt. Any one of you would be hurting yourself worse than me. So have no fear about anything happening to that little woman.”

The office seemed slightly tilted, and Elmo Bliss looked half again life size. Jimmy moistened his dry lips and said, “It’s so strange. The best reason you gave me for joining your team was that if I didn’t, she might get hurt. That was the reason that meant the most to me. None of the reasons for it or against it seemed very important a few weeks ago. But that was... the one that counted.”

“It was the heaviest one I had,” Elmo admitted. “But why should you or anybody act like I’m a bad man? Chrissake, boy, we’ve been giving folks something to take their mind off the hot weather. What do they say? Bread and circuses. Dog packs need rabbits to chase. It angries up the blood and keeps folks young. I was going to get those two Army fellas pushed out of the picture too. We could have got to Jennings through his Chinaman wife, but then I got to thinking it would take the joy out of the public hearing if there was nobody to show up at all on the other side. They’ll need somebody to boo at, and it might as well be Jennings and Lipe, standing all alone against the multitude. If Jennings has any idea of taking the fight further after the clobbering we’ll give him, we can take his mind off it later on. And Lipe, without Jennings, isn’t worth cutting up for chum. So who’s been hurt too bad? Dermond, Mrs. Rowell, the Sinnat girl? They all blameless , boy? And look at the good that’ll be done to more folks than you can count. There’ll be fat pockets in this county.”

“You... you can understand why I got upset.”

“Because you didn’t think it through. But I’ll tell you one thing. I don’t know how you can do it. But you’d best keep Miz Hubble away from that public hearing. She’ll have no speeches to make. She’s done all she can. You keep her away. It’ll all die down fast afterwards. You’ll see. But folks will be heated up Wednesday night. People could get roughed up, even if no real harm is meant.”

For most of that Monday evening he had been without the bright static images in his mind. He sat at his desk in the newsroom and wrote about promotions and zoning appeals, meetings and resolutions, a Pigeon Town knifing, a drainage control project. He shrank himself into a little rubbery figure at a matchbox desk, running scrawled notes and short phone calls into rapidity-click, whappety-clack of pica black on yellow paper, bucked through rewrite, initialed at the desk, slugged, linotyped, copyread and locked up.

But later he was to remember that the image started before the phone call came. He did not know exactly what it was when it began. It was a shadowy something, and he could see the typed words well enough through it. Then it began to tower over him, a huge thing, ominous, silent. The words were gone and he was in a wild, still, lunar country. He stood in blackness at the foot of a bulge of mountain. There was some piercingly bright light beyond the mountain, shining on the long smooth concave curve of snow that led to the summit. To his right was a shadowy roundness where the light leaked around a wider portion of the great promontory. Suddenly perspective and proportion seemed to click into place, and he realized that it was a woman’s breast, his eye so close to the base of it that for a moment he listened for the velvety thud of her heartbeat against his ear. The concave line of snow was the whiteness of her skin against the light beyond.

At midnight, after the phone call, as he was driving to the hospital, the image was still there. The lights of the oncoming traffic shone through it. After he had parked and was walking toward the emergency entrance, the vision left him. It did not fade as the others had. It merely moved slowly upward until it was beyond the furthest upward tilt of his vision.