Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

“Fine, Bri. Thanks. How does that retraction read?”

“It makes you look like a thug, a liar and a person of unsound mind. Other than that, you’ll love it. Borklund keeps staring at me the way the house cat watches the parakeet. He hates the news end. It complicates the money machine. I think he’s wondering how he can cover the local scene without using human beings. You want to stop by and use our crying towels? You sound down.”

“Thanks, no. And thanks for the report.”

Jimmy hung up and turned the phone light out. The fresh drink was tall and strong. Mitchie had reversed the stack of records. She sat at one end of the couch, wedged some of the cushions behind her, and had Jimmy stretch out. He made small changes in his position until the nape of his neck was perfectly fitted to a curve of her bare strong thigh. Her fingers were gentle, smoothing his eyebrows, stroking his hair.

“How did Brian get that terrible scar? In a war?” she asked.

“In a saloon in Kansas, from a broken bottle. No fracas. He fell on it.”

“Are they happy?”

“Huh? Nan and Bri? I guess so. Sure.”

“Jimmy?”

“I’m right here.”

“You know what the worst thing of all is? Really the worst thing of all? It’s when you do some idiot damn thing, drunk or not, and later there’s nobody you can go to and say you’re sorry. It’s when you can’t disappoint anybody. Oh, the hell with having somebody to please. The worst is having nobody to be cross with you because you let them down. If they didn’t have anything else, they’d have that.”

“I guess so.”

“Jaimie, it’s like that old problem of the tree falling in the middle of the forest. If nobody heard it, did it make any noise? If you do a wicked, evil thing, is it really wicked and evil if nobody gives a damn? Or does it just happen in a vacuum?”

“Mitch, honey, I’m not exactly up to philosophical speculation.”

“But this is heading someplace.”

“Is it?”

“It might get roundabout, but if you don’t fall asleep, you might find out how it comes out. My little girl was ten years old a week ago Tuesday.”

“Uh... Carol?”

“Thank you for remembering her name.” She leaned down and kissed him, then leaned back again. “When you’re emotionally upset, you can do yourself a hell of a bad turn, you know? I really think my lawyer was playing footsie with his lawyer. I got careless, you know. When the dust blew away, there I was with my clothes and my car, a sixteen-thousand-dollar settlement, and two hundred a month until the moment I remarry. But he had complete custody of the kid. I told myself I didn’t give a damn. He has the kid, and I am costing him less than seven dollars a day. For God’s sake, our phone bill used to run more than that! But because I got careless — because I’d stopped giving a damn — they had me in a bind, and it was sort of take the offer, or nothing. I took it and came home. I can’t see her, but they let me write to her. I write to her care of a lawyer. I guess they get together and fumigate the letter. Once a month is often enough, they’ve told me. I get formal, dutiful, polite little letters back from her. She sounds like a bright kid. When she gets to be eighteen, I guess she can decide whether to meet me face-to-face.”

“That’s a sad sort of...”

“Hold the sympathy, Jaimie,” she said, touching his lips. “I’m making no appeal on that basis. I’m just buzzed enough to be terribly stark about all this. I make an appeal on a different basis. It goes like this. I’m not happy. I accept that. I don’t expect to be. But I’m not having much fun.”

“I thought you were.”

“Now let’s get to the stark part, and take the cold appraising look at Mitchie McClure. First for the deficits. I’m a party broad, Jaimie. I’m not on call, but I’m in scads of little black books. Buster, old buddy, if you get to Palm City on this trip, I want you to look up a pal of mine named Mitchie McClure. Here’s her address. Tell her you’re my friend. She’s a lot of laughs and she’ll show you the town, and whether or not she puts out depends on you, old buddy. She’s no bum. Got the picture? Right. So there are the drinks and the dinners and the little gifties that piece out the budget. Sometimes a gift of money, tucked in a shoe or a drawer or a purse. The first few times that happened, it made me feel crawly. But we’re talking deficits, aren’t we? Okay. The girl is in the semipro league, and she drinks much too much, and she’s letting herself get too heavy.

“Now for the assets, and leave us not indulge in any vulgar puns. She is selective, which I suppose is the dreary excuse and justification of all the semipros. She is reasonably pretty, and she is getting very bored with drinking these days, and even more bored with being horizontal, resort-type recreation for good old Buster and Charlie and Jack. She’s clean, and reasonably intelligent, and she could hoe fifteen pounds of meat off those hips in a month or so, if she had reason to give a damn. And I think she has a capacity for loyalty which has never had a proper workout.”

“Where are you heading with this?”

“Shut up. Jaimie, tell me true, does it mean anything to you that you were my first and I was your first? Can you feel any... tenderness toward those two love-dazed clumsy kids, the you and me of a long long time ago, full of dreams?”

“You know it means something.”

“You know, I’m this here woman, this party broad, and I’m also the fifteen-year-old girl you used to take up into the storeroom over Getland’s boathouse, both of us breathing so hard we sounded like marathon runners. We told each other it wasn’t wrong, because we were going to spend our whole lives together.”

“We squirreled the money up there behind a beam.”

“Eighty-seven dollars it got to be. Runaway money, but Willy decided not to loan us the car. Jaimie, do you still love that girl a little bit?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want you to love me. That would be a hell of a thing. Sooner or later you’d get awfully damned bitter about Buster and Charlie and Jack. But it wouldn’t hurt to love that boathouse girl. She can’t hurt either of us. You see, it was the sweetest part of my life. We invented how to make love. Nobody had ever done it before. We discovered it, and the rest of the human race couldn’t know what they were missing. Oh, Jaimie, bless you, what happened to us?”

“Sundry things, here and there. But where is this taking us?”

“Don’t be dull, hon. I’m proposing, of course. Stay right where you are! Don’t get tense. We both know you’re going to have to leave here, for the ordinary dreary reason you can’t make a living here. No. Let me finish. If I list this place at eighteen, I can move it within two days. I’ll go on the wagon. We’ll trade in our two exhausted little cars on something big and new and sexy, winnow our belongings down to the minimum, and take off and keep going until we find a place to try new things in. A trial escape, Jaimie. Not a marriage. My two hundred will keep coming in. So you won’t have to make a lot to keep us. Suppose we do get along. Then we can play it by ear. If we should decide we could live up to having kids, then we could see if we could start one, and then chop off my two hundred a month. You see, hon, what we’d have would be somebody to try to please, and somebody to say ‘I’m sorry’ to, and somebody to hold tight to when the nights are too black. And we start with that... that residue of tenderness from a long time ago. I think we know each other pretty well, and I think we’re both gentleman enough not to prod the other guy where it might hurt. I would try very hard to be good for you, and keep things light and fun and unpossessive, and I know you’d be good for me. And I have just one last thing to say. This didn’t just suddenly occur to me. It happened a couple of weeks ago, after I cried in the rain and came back to bed and you were gentle with me. I started thinking about it then. Since then, Gloria died and you’ve lost any reason to stay here. Jaimie, what do you think?”