A Flash of Green (22 page)

“Not because of me, Jimmy.”

“For several reasons. I should be handy to see how Brian makes it. Where are you going for your picnic?”

“Up to Sanibel so we can look for shells.”

“The bugs will be fierce this time of year.”

“We’ll be plastered with goo.”

She went to the window and watched him back out and waved to him as he drove away. She walked thoughtfully to the kitchen and began to prepare dinner. She was aware of a little area of strangeness in her mind, elusive and unidentifiable. It was like trying to remember a name momentarily forgotten. There had been a strangeness at the Halleys, when the four of them had been on the back deck. She and Van had spent many hours there with Ross and Jackie. Today, for the first time, there had been four of them again, but the fourth person had been Jimmy instead of Van. She realized, with a merciless honesty, that the situation had made her resent Jimmy for being Jimmy rather than Van. There had been at least one time when there had been six of them on that deck on a night of cool moonlight, drinking wine and talking wonderful nonsense. Jimmy would have just as much right to resent her because she was not Gloria. There was one awkwardness on that clear evening long ago. Gloria had been recently
released, and it was her first social evening since her release. It had made the conversation more guarded and selective than it might otherwise have been.

Now, of course, she was as remote, as unreachable as Van. Hers was a subtler form of death, but no less final. Which was easier, she wondered, the slow regression to that point where there was, at last, no communication at all, or the sudden brutal stunning departure? And she wondered if Jimmy had made this same comparison, and envied her.

Eleven

AS JIMMY WING CROSSED THE CAUSEWAY
to the mainland there was a strange lemon light across the land. The rays of the setting sun were almost horizontal. Every surface facing the west was touched with this luminous glow in contrast with the blue shadows of dusk which lay against everything else. From time to time a fitful rain wind turned the leaves and died away.

On the car radio the seven-thirty newscaster said, “… three tenths of an inch recorded for Palm County, far below the normal rainfall for this time of year. The current temperature at County Airport is ninety degrees, relative humidity ninety-five percent, winds out of the southeast at three to five miles per hour.…”

He turned the radio off so as to focus himself with no distraction upon a special textural memory of Kat. When he had turned back at her doorway, she was a step closer to him than he had expected, standing tall and near in the aquarium light of the living
room, so close for an instant that the detected fragrance of her hair mingled with the imagined feel of it, sweet and harsh against his lips, and he had come all too close to reaching for her. Another collector’s item, he thought. Another image to file away.

He worked hard at his newsroom desk for an hour, and then walked down a dark block on Bayou Street to Vera’s Kitchen. He was starting to eat his sandwich when Bobby Nest came in and sat on a counter stool beside him. Bobby at eighteen concealed a fervent love for the newspaper business behind a pose of cynicism acquired from scores of movies and television shows. He had been the paper’s official correspondent at Riverway High School during the past year, and this summer Borklund, for very small money, had him doing routine sports, the city and county recreation program events, summer bowling and golf leagues, shuffle-board, tennis, pram races. In the fall Bobby would go away to school and Borklund would find another serf, equally eager. Bobby was a small wiry boy with big glasses and a surprisingly authoritative baritone voice. He wrote pounds of copy which was never printed.

“This girl’s old man is going to drive me nuts,” Bobby said.

“Teach you to mess with girls.”

“Who would mess with this one? She’s fourteen and she looks like a twenty-year-old Marine sergeant. I think she shaves, even. But she can belt a golf ball two hundred and forty yards. It’s her damn name, Jimmy. The Caroline is easy, but the last name is Smidt. S—m—i—d—t. I know how it’s spelled, for God’s sake. I print it in block letters. I put a note in the margin. But every time she wins something—not every time, but at least every other time—somebody decides it should be Smith or Schmidt or Smidth or some other goddam thing and then her old man calls up and chews out Jesus-Jesus and he chews me. There’s gremlins in that shop, Jimmy, honest to God.”

“Marry her and make her turn pro, Bobby. Nest is an easy name. And those gals make nice money.”

“Nest is the name but I’m not about to build one. I wish she’d pick up a bad slice or something, so I wouldn’t have to put her kook name in the paper.” He sighed. “She doesn’t seem to give a damn. It’s her old man. He taught her the game. And he can sure talk nasty. Just coffee and Danish, Mike, thanks.”

Jimmy Wing edited his next comment before he made it, then said, “Funny how unattractive most of those little girl athletes are. But some of them are worth staring at. Like that little water-skier, Burt Lesser’s daughter.”

“Frosty. Oh, sure. I think her real name is Frances Ann.”

“There’s the one for you, Bobby.”

“Not for me. She runs with a pack of rich kids. She’s only fifteen, I guess, but if you want her to look twice at you, you got to own a boat that will pull her all over the bay at forty miles an hour, and you’ve got to be seven feet tall and able to pick up the front end of a Buick.”

“Sounds like a description of her brother.”

“Jigger? I guess he could pick up the front end of a car. But he doesn’t run with the pack. He’s a year behind me at Riverway. He’s sort of a fink.”

“What does that mean?”

“He’s a loner. And he’s got a sarcastic way of speaking. He could make any team we’ve got, but he doesn’t go out for anything any more. He gets good grades. But he doesn’t mingle. You’re walking and he’s driving an empty car, he won’t even slow down. He isn’t the most popular kid around.”

“How does he make out with the girls?”

“That’s another thing. He doesn’t try. He’d have no trouble, but he doesn’t try. There’s some talk.”

“What kind?”

Bobby Nest looked uneasy. “I shouldn’t say anything because I don’t really know for sure. But you remember two years ago, the trouble at West Bay Junior High, the gay English teacher they had, and after one kid squealed, they found out there was a whole group of boys going over to the instructor’s place, you remember, Jimmy.”

“I remember. Was Jigger one of them?”

“He was there at the time. They tried to keep it quiet, the kids who got mixed up in that mess, their names. But that’s what they say about Jigger, that he was one of the group, and he’s a queer. This last spring two pretty husky guys tried to needle Jigger about it. They thought they could handle him, but they couldn’t. He cracked them up pretty good.”

“I guess the rumor must be wrong, Jimmy. This summer I’ve seen Jigger riding around with a pretty little dark-haired girl.”

“In the red Jag? I’ve seen him too. But I don’t know who she is. She looked pretty nice.” Bobby snickered. “I saw him twice with her, and the second time I saw him, he didn’t want me to. He slid way down in the seat, but he wasn’t quick enough.”

“Where was that?”

“You know that brand-new motel, set way back, where Bay Highway comes out onto the Tamiami Trail below Everset? The Drowsy Lady Motor House, very fancy?”

“Yes.”

“About a week and a half ago, when Jesse Gardner came down and gave the exhibition at Cabeza Knolls, he stayed there. He gave me a good interview, remember? Anyhow, he had to catch a real early flight so I agreed to go down there at dawn and pick him up and take him to the airport. I got there about twenty after five. He was in a unit in the building furthest back. You have to drive around behind it. Just as I went down the driveway to that building, the red Jag was coming out. It was just getting light.
The girl was driving. Jigger didn’t duck quick enough. I guess he hasn’t got anything against girls.”

Wing was tempted to ask more questions, but instead he finished his coffee and said, “We won’t worry about him, then. We’ll worry about you, Bobby, and how you’re going to get friendly with Miss Frosty.”

“No thanks. If I had the time and the money to have a steady girl, I wouldn’t want one who could snap my spine in her bare hands. And I wouldn’t want any sexpot pushover anyways.”

“At fifteen?”

“Since thirteen, Jimmy. It’s no secret. And she isn’t the only one in West Bay Junior High. There’s a whole crowd of them in that school, and, I don’t know, they make me nervous. The way they look at you, you know they just don’t give a damn. They don’t even go steady. They just go around in a rat pack and do any damn thing. They know how to keep from getting in trouble, but it just doesn’t seem right. I know I’m only eighteen, but those kids make me feel as middle-aged as you are.”

“Thanks so much.”

“Aw, you know how I mean it, Jimmy. Say! Why couldn’t we do a story on it together? I could get the facts.”

“Much as I hate to deprive you of the chance to do creative research, Bobby, we don’t work for a crusading paper. Too many of our advertisers have probably fathered those little sluts. Borklund would drop in a dead faint if I suggested it.”

“I guess he would. When I get out of college, I’m going to work for a paper with some guts. Why do you hang around this crummy town, Jimmy? You’re good enough to get on a better paper.”

“Thanks again.”

“I mean it. Why do you stay here?”

“I left once, and it didn’t work out.”

“Oh.”

“And I always get lost driving around a strange city. I haven’t got much sense of direction.”

“Don’t talk down to me, Jimmy.”

Wing stood up and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Okay. I won’t. I’ll tell you one of the great truths I’ve learned. Every place in the world is exactly like every other place.”

Bobby, looking up at him, shook his head slowly. “I can’t believe that. I wouldn’t want to let myself try to believe that. If that’s true … there wouldn’t be much point in anything.”

“It’s just something you don’t want to find out too soon,” Jimmy Wing said, and walked out and back to the newsroom. He checked the files for the previous week and found that Gardner had given his exhibition of golf on a Wednesday afternoon at Cabeza Knolls.

It took him a half hour to drive to the Drowsy Lady. He arrived a little before ten-thirty. On the way out he had time to plan his approach.

Floodlights blazed against the lobby entrance to the Drowsy Lady. As Wing turned in he remembered, fondly, Van Hubble’s explosive reaction to motel architecture. Van had been a mild man, until something offended his sense of taste and decency.

“They cantilever a great big goddam hunk of roof at a quote daring unquote angle and hang big vulgar sheets of glass off it and light it up like an appendectomy. You can’t tell a bowling alley from a superburger drive-in from a motel from a goddam bank, Jimmy. They all turn people into bugs crawling across aseptic plastic. It’s all tail-fin modern, boy. It’s cheap, jazzy and sterile. It isn’t architecture. There’s nothing indigenous about it. It’s all over the country, all the same, like a red itch, like junk toys dumped out of a sack. And it’s so stinking patronizing.”

A huge sign displayed a single heavy-lidded feminine eye, the trademark of the establishment, repeated on highway signs thirty miles in every direction.

He parked and went into the tall lobby. The restaurant had closed at ten. A desk clerk placed a registration card in front of him with a hospitable flourish.

“Is the manager around?”

“What would you like to see him about? Maybe I can help you.”

“I’m not selling anything, if that’s what’s worrying you. Is he around?”

“He’s in the cocktail lounge, watching the fights. I could get him now, if it’s that important.…”

“I’ll go watch the fights too. What’s his name?”

“Mr. Frank Durley. He’s a heavy-set man, bald.”

The cocktail lounge was very dark. Some lens spots shone directly down onto the bar, and there was a light behind the bottle racks. So much crowd noise came over the television set Wing got the impression there were a lot of people in the room. After he felt his way to the bar his vision adjusted and he saw there were but five people in addition to the bartender. A couple in a corner were leaning toward each other, ignoring the television set. Three men sat at the bar, watching it. The bald man sat alone. The other two were together.

Wing ordered a beer. He had taken a first sip when the fight was stopped in the seventh round. The bartender went to the set and turned it off, turned on some kind of background-music system, and increased the intensity of the light over the bar.

Durley got off the bar stool and said, “So you make another half buck off me, Harry.”

“A pleasure,” the bartender said.

As the manager started to leave, Jimmy Wing stopped him, introduced himself. When he said it was private, Durley led the way over to a table in the corner near the door.

“This is a delicate matter,” Jimmy said. “I’m a reporter for the
Record-Journal
, but this isn’t newspaper business. It’s more a favor for a friend.”

“That’s how come the name struck a bell. James Wing. I’ve seen it in the paper. I’ve seen you before too. Out here?”

“I came out to your opening in April. I don’t remember meeting you then. I met two of the owners.”

“I’m one of the owners too, fella. And manager. What’s this delicate matter you got on your mind?”

“A couple of kids. They’ve checked in here at least once, I think. Both the girl’s parents and the boy’s parents are friends of mine. I want to nail it down, prove it, so the parents can straighten those two out and get them off this kick.”

Durley had a fleshy, unrevealing face, a casual voice. “You want to nail it down.”

“I suppose the registration card would be the best way.”

“You got any kind of writ or warrant to check my books?”

“Mr. Durley, that isn’t a very cooperative attitude.”