Cinnamon Skin (10 page)

We took the quarrel, unresolved, to bed, both of us secretly hoping that lovemaking would provide a solution somehow. It was a gentler interlude than ever before. There seemed in it elements of sadness, of regret and farewell. Afterward I kissed her moist eyes and tasted the salt, asked her why she wept. "For what might have been, I guess."

"Such as?"

"Had we been younger. I don't know. At my age with this pelvic structure, having a baby would be a very dangerous thing. And you're past changing, McGee. You're past having tots around. But even if I were younger and wanted to risk it, the thing I talked about before would make me wary."

"What was that?"

"The way you keep some important part of yourself hidden away. The reserve I can't break through. Maybe you were different a dozen years ago. Maybe then you could give all the way. With me, I get the feeling you are a user, not a giver."

"And you feel like someone who is only used?"

"No, dear. Not that harsh. I don't have the right words. What I do know is that I have more energies than you can waste. I can't use all of myself with you because neither you nor the years will let that happen. But I can use all of myself in my work. Believe me, I'm not motivated by trying to make a lot of money, or be important, or force people to respect me. I want to do what I do because it is tricky work, and when it goes well I feel a very intense satisfaction. Can you understand all that?"

"I can try."

She made a sound in the darkness almost like a laugh. "Oh, my darling, this has been good. I needed you. I needed more of you than you were willing to give, but it was damn good nonetheless. And now we've bitched it all up for fair."

"How so?"

"If they offer me the job, I'll take it. But if the rumor is wrong, and they don't offer it to me, and I stay here, I don't want this relationship with you to continue."

"Why not?"

"The fact you could ask that question is one of the reasons."

"Maybe I'm not very bright."

"Okay, you are a no-win situation for me. You unfocus my attention on my work. You create little problems with the hotel employees. Some of them think they can get a little smart-ass, as if they have something they can use against me in some way, and I have to smack them down. After you have been here, my bed is always too empty for night after night. Yet when I know you are on your way over, I feel a funny resentment. As if I'm some kind of chattel. You and my work overlap in a way that makes me irritable. Can you understand?"

"I think maybe I'm beginning to. Maybe we can leave it that you can come over to Lauderdale whenever."

"I don't think so. Thank you, but I don't think that would be wise. Besides, I really do expect to get the position in Hawaii."

She turned her head and looked at her bedside clock. Ten past three.

"Travis?"

I slipped my arms around her and pulled her closer.

"Travis, do me a favor."

"Sure."

"Just get up and get dressed and get in your little rented car and go home."

When I started to speak she pressed two fingers against my lips.

"Please, dear: I want to cry in peace. I want to cry for a long long time, and then sleep like death: Please go. Please don't say anything. We've said it all."

And so I dressed in darkness, picked up my gear, let myself out, making certain the door was locked. One of her alert security guards checked me, grunting recognition after putting his flashlight on my face.

And here is how it was for me, as I droned across Alligator Alley in the little tin car. I told myself there was no understanding women. I told myself she didn't understand what she was throwing away. I told myself I would probably read about her in the papers, years hence, a hard-bitten little gray-haired woman who had been made head of something or other.

I felt lost and lonesome and, in a curious way, unworthy. I still kept telling myself there was no understanding them.

But honesty cannot be indefinitely suppressed. Yes, I knew exactly what she meant. I knew exactly why she had made her decision, and I was forced to admit that no matter what I thought of it, it was the right decision for Anne Renzetti.

Then came the hard part. I had suffered loss. I had been rejected. I was the lover cast out I was alone. And when I tried to plumb the depths of my grief and my loss, I came finally upon a small ugly morsel way down in the bottom of my soul. It was a little round object, like a head with a grinning face. It said ugly things to me. It kept telling me I was relieved. I strained for the crocodile tears, but the little face grinned and grinned. It shamed me.

And as I unlocked my houseboat and got ready to go back to bed, I realized that Annie had perhaps suspected that the little ugly feeling of relief and release would be there. We are all, says Meyer, in one way or another, large or small, hidden or revealed, rotten at the core.

Goodbye, Annie girl. I loved you as much as I can love. And I will feel an aching need for you for a long time.

So what if I did put the Flush aboard a freighter as deck cargo and go out to the islands? New place. Cleaner skies. Hadn't I been saying sour things about all of Florida going down the drain under the polluting weight of an unending invasion of new residents?

Florida was second rate, flashy and cheap, tacky and noisy. The water supply was failing. The developers were moving in on the marshlands and estuaries, pleading new economic growth. The commercial fishermen were an endangered species. Miami was the world's murder capital. Phosphate and fruit trucks were pounding the tired old roads to rubble. Droughts of increasing severity were browning the landscape. Wary folks stayed off the unlighted beaches and dimly lighted streets at night, fearing the minority knife, the ethnic club, the bullet from the stolen gun.

And yet… and yet…

There would be a time again when I would canoe down the Withlacoochee, adrift in a slow current, seeing the morning mist rising at the base of the limestone buttes, seeing the sudden heartstopping dip and wheel of a flight of birds of incredible whiteness.

On an unknown day dawn the road ahead, I would see that slow slide of the gator down the mudbank into the pond, see his eye knobs watching me, see a dance cloud of a billion gnats in the ray of sun coming through Spanish moss.

And once again maybe I would be wading and spincasting a pass at dawn, in an intense, misty, windless silence, and suddenly hear the loud hissy gasp of a porpoise coming up for air just a few feet behind me, startling me out of my wits, and see his benign, enigmatic smile as he sounded again.

Wild orchids, gnarls of cypress knees, circlets of sun slanting down onto green marsh water, a half acre of-wind moving across the grass flats, fading and dying, throaty gossip of wild turkeys, fading life of a boated tarpon, angelfish-batting their eye lashes moving coy and elusive between the sea fans, the full, constant, mind-warping, roaring, whistling scream of full hurricane.

Tacky though it might be, its fate uncertain, too much of its destiny in the hands of men whose sole thought was grab the money and run, cheap little city politicians with blow-dried hair, ice-eyed old men from the North with devout claims about their duties to their shareholders, big-rumped good old boys from the cattle counties with their fingers in the till right up to their cologned armpits-it was still my place in the world. It is where I am and where I will stay, right up to the point where the Neptune Society sprinkles me into the dilute sewage off the Fun Coast.

It has too many magic moments that make up for all the rest of it. Too many flashes of a pure delight. I realized there was no point in trying to sleep. I dug out the tallest glass I owned, found four oranges in the cold locker that had no soft spots, made a tall mourner's breakfast of juice, cracked ice, and Boodles gin, and took it up to my fly bridge forward of the sun deck, swiveled my captain's chair, and put my heels on the starboard side of the control panel. The promise of dawn was a salmon thread over by the Bahamas.

I realized that Annie might never be aboard again, and there was a sudden sickening wrenching sense of loss, a kind of vivid despair. Loss with no dilution of relief.

When the drink was half gone my phone began ringing. I hurried on down, knowing who it was, hoping she wouldn't give up. She was still there. "Yes?"

"Look. Not like this."

I exhaled a long breath. "You're right. Not like this, Annie."

"Because, plus the rest, we were friends."

"Are friends," I said.

"And we keep the friends part."

"You let me know what they say in Chicago."

"I will."

"I hope they offer it and you take it and work your tail off."

"Thank you. But of course it will take some time to turn this over to somebody else. Properly. So…''

"We'll see each other again."

"So there'll be time to end this a little better thar we did tonight. I was rotten. I'm sorry."

"We're both sorry."

"How come two people can be more than the sum of the two individuals, and then so much les than the sum?"

"Comes of being some kind of human person Annie."

"Okay, I had to call. Good night or good mornin, or whatever. Were you asleep?"

"I was topside with a cold drink, thinking Iong sorry thoughts and watching for the dawn. You?"

"I went down and sat at the water's edge. Long sad thoughts. So I finally had to call."

"Good luck to you, friend."

"Good luck to both of us," she said and hung up. I went back and nursed the rest of the drink, finishing it when the sun came up into the smutcl oozing red, bulging with the promise of angry burns on the young white hide of the visitors, and another deepening of the tan on the spare leather bodies of the lizardlike octogenarians on their retirement terraces. I went down and fell into sleep using it like a giant Band-aid. When the phone woke me at noon I felt an unlikely confusion, a sense of not knowing who I was or where.

"In a Holiday Inn in Austin. What I have to report – is nothing to report. Except eyestrain." He sounded tired and discouraged.

"You got my message?"

"About the name Jerry Tobin. Yes. My friend is on a sabbatical, but the graduate student who works for him had your letter here for me. I would say it helps confirm what we already suspected."

"I agree."

"Travis, I selected the seven most likely years, making the best possible estimate of the man's age. I found that the Office of the Director of Development and Endowment has a library facility, and they were kind enough to provide me with adequate space and access to their complete collection of yearbooks, from the university facility here and also from the branches in Arlington, Dallas, and El Paso. They also have yearbooks from every other facility in the state. So I can state that the man did not graduate from any division of the University of Texas, or from Texas Christian in Fort Worth, Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas Wesleyan in Fort Worth, Texas Southern in Houston, Texas Eastern in Tyler, Texas Lutheran in Seguin, Texas A and I at Kingsville, Texas A and M at College Station and Prairie View, East Texas Baptist at Marshall, East Texas State at Commerce, North Texas State at Denton, or West Texas State at Canyon. Or the University of Dallas at Irving."

"Did you-"

"Let me finish. I found lots of people named Lawrence and lots of people named Tobin. I could not match them up in any productive way. I made the assumption that he may have attended without graduating, so I have been poring over the group photographs in all the yearbooks, one hundred and twenty-five, to be precise. One from East Texas Baptist, an unlikely place and an unlikely year, was missing. If it is possible to wear out a rather large magnifying glass, I have done so. I have had the picture of the man at hand to constantly refresh my memory. Have you ever realized how much most young men look like one another? Just as we, I suppose, look rather alike to them. I have made some reference notes as to certain possibles. Such and such an institution, yearbook for such and such a year, page fifty-six, football squad, second row from rear, fifth fellow from the left. There are about fifteen possibles, and I want to go back to them once I have gotten some transparent plastic for overlays, and a grease pencil to add facial hair in the same pattern as the possibles. I don't expect to be able to eliminate them all. Whatever number is left out of the fifteen, I will assemble vital statistics for each."

"That sounds like a lot of drudgery."

"It is, it is. Research is part of my basic training. The accumulation of facts. One expects it to be dull. When enough facts are assembled, a conclusion can be drawn. That's the interesting part."

"Have we got a choice of conclusions?"

"I will find him, and we will learn who he really is, or was. I will not find him and we can conclude he did not graduate from a Texas institution and probably did not attend one or, if he did, was inactive in extracurricular activities."

"You find that exciting?"

"Interesting, I said. My impression of him was that he had some education. A smattering. About what you'd get if you graduated from a state university after attending on an athletic scholarship, or if you had gone to one of the technical schools."

"How soon will you be done?"

"I might finish up tomorrow. I would be done by now if they'd let me work evenings. But they close up at five, lock the doors, and set the alarms."

"Makes for long evenings."

"Travis, I have learned a very curious thing about television. The sponsors seem to be paying advertising agencies to create commercial spots which criticize competing products. The Lincoln is better than the Cadillac. California Cellars is better than Gallo or Inglenook or Almaden. Headache remedies, stomach acid remedies, deodorants-all of them are claiming to be better or stronger or more lasting."

"So?"

I heard the little sniffing sound he makes when he is impatient at not being understood. "Travis, as an economist with a reasonable grasp on reality, I can tell you that the manufacturers who permit such obvious nonsense are guilty of monumental stupidity. One expects a kind of fumbling inanity from advertising account executives, but not from the men who are paying the bills."

"I'm not following."

"Merchants from the days of prehistory have known that the practice of knocking the product or service of the competition is self-defeating. When Jones, Smith, and Brown own stores on Main Street, and each tells customers that the other two merchants are thieves, within a reasonable period of time it will occur to the customers that all three are selling inferior goods and performing inferior services, and so their businesses will inevitably decline. And, on television, the average consumer pays so little attention to commercials, I would suspect that when a competing product is mentioned by name, it is lodged as firmly in the consciousness as the name being advertised. I am sorry to bring it up, but I am appalled at such expensive stupidity. It could only occur in a culture based upon administration by consensus, by committee. One can express resentment only by never buying a product which is held up as being better than another competing product. If enough of us would do that… Forgive the digression. What about Hack's boat?"

"I walked down and took a look. It isn't back in the slip yet. I asked around and they said it was still at the yard."

"How's Anne?"

"Just fine and dandy."

"Is something wrong?"

"I said fine and dandy. What's wrong with that?"

"A forced blitheness. A hollow cheer."

"She's going to be offered a better job, she thinks. Running a much bigger complex in Hawaii."

"And if it is offered, she'll take it."

"Yes."

"Hence the hollow cheer?"

"I guess so."

"I plan to catch a midday flight back to Houston Saturday. Would it be convenient for you to-"

"I'll be there in the afternoon, and see you at the apartment."

"Find out when your flight will be in and call me back, and we can probably meet at the airport."

By four o'clock on an almost bearable Saturday afternoon, we were back in the apartment. The interior air smelled hot, stale, and lifeless. Meyer turned on the air conditioning. The emptiness of the place was a further confirmation of the death of the niece. There was a collection of small pottery cats on a bookshelf, a closet still packed with her clothes.

Meyer had bought himself a shirt in Austin. Gray, in a western cut, with short sleeves and pearl buttons. His black pelt curled up out of the open neck. He sat and read the Xerox copy of the clipping about the death of Miss Doris Eagle.

"No doubt of its being the same man?" he asked.

"None. It really hit Eagle very hard."

"And so that man is out there somewhere," Meyer said, with an all-inclusive wave of his arm. "Eating, sleeping, washing his hands, thinking his thoughts, remembering his women. Let me show you what I've got."

He had narrowed it down to four faces and had photocopies of the groups in which they appeared. "I tried to get the original negatives," he said, "but because yearbooks are not reordered or reprinted, after the press run the artwork and photographic work and dummy pages are discarded. I've circled the possibles in red grease pencil. Look at them through the glass. You have to think of them as be mg Evan Lawrence, twenty years earlier. These seem to match the coloring, shape of the head, placement of the ears and eyes."

I looked at the four. A baseball squad, an intramural track team, members of the theatrical club, and the members of a fraternity. I looked up at Meyer standing over me. "These could all be the same person."

He handed me four file cards. Warren W Wyatt from Lubbock, Cody T. W Pittler from Eagle Pass, Coy Lee Rodefer from Corpus Christi, and B. J. Broome from Waco.

"Those were their addresses when they enrolled. Not one of these four got a degree from the universities they were attending when the photographs were taken. If the pictures were larger and clearer, maybe I could eliminate one, two, or all of them. Incidentally, all four went to the University of Texas-Wyatt at Austin, Pittler at El Paso, Rodefer at Austin, and Broome at Arlington. And there is no guarantee that the people in the pictures are correctly identified by name. The lists of names can be incorrect due to transpositions, deletions, and so forth. For example, in this fraternity picture there are thirty-two faces, thirty-three names."

"And maybe he didn't go there."

"I'm inclined to believe he did. Or at least had some connection with it. If I went around saying I went to the University of Heidelberg, sooner or later I would come upon someone who either went there or who knew the city well. It's easier to know than to lie. Dumb persons tell dumb lies. Evan Lawrence didn't strike me as being dumb."

"And he could be one of these four?"

"Say at twenty-to-one odds. Or more. But what were the odds against your learning that he probably was not aboard the Keynes? What were the odds against that woman from Venice coming along with her camera and taking a picture which happened to show with sufficient clarity Pogo's left hand? Odds such as that are beyond calculation. Except for coincidence, we would have believed him blown to bits, even after finding out about Norma emptying out her trust. What do we do next, Travis? You're better at this sort of thing than I am. Do we start checking these people out?"

"I think I'd rather see about those Japanese stone lanterns. He said he worked for a man named Guffey who had a place north of Harlingen. He gave the impression it was after he got out of school, but a lot longer ago than when he worked for Eagle Realty. Remember, he said that they won't be needing any Japanese stone lanterns down in that end of Texas for a long time."

"Look for the lanterns?" he said, eyebrows high. "They're conspicuous. A ranch wife would probably put one in her flower garden. Coarse gray stone, and they usually come in three parts. The four legs, and then the middle part where the candle or light bulb goes-it usually has four openings, about fist size-and then an ornate cap on top, like a pagoda roof, too heavy for anything but a hurricane to blow off. They'd still be at the places where he sold them. Harlingen sounds likely enough; I'll assume Guffey was a name he made up at the moment. But if we go poking around the back roads, we want to try to be a little less conspicuous. What's her van look like? Roger Windham said it was old."

And it was. A heavy-duty GM originally painted a dark blue. Where the paint hadn't been knocked off by the stones of rough roads and the branches of overgrown trails, it was a faded patchy blue. Where it had been knocked off, it was rust. Big steel-belted Michelins, eight ply. I rolled the door up and tried it. The battery was weak, and I didn't think it would ever catch, but it finally did, ragged at first, and then with a healthy roar. The speedometer said five thousand and something, and, guessing it at ten or eleven years old, I didn't know whether it had been all the way around once or twice. It had a dual battery system, a cot, a DC icebox, heavy-duty air conditioning, and a wooden crate of tools. It had an empty water tank, a tiny sink, and a Porta Potti.

We went out while the motor was still running and took it ten miles west and ten miles back to give the alternator a chance to pick the batteries up. It was almost full of gas in both tanks, and the oil was up to the line, and the batteries needed no water. But it was loud and rough, with a slight tendency to wander.

After we got back, Meyer said we probably should ask Windham if it was all right to use it, to take it down past Victoria and Corpus Christi into the valley. The papers on it were in the side pocket. The owner was Norma Greene, not Norma Lawrence. He said he had the lawyer's home number.

He caught Windham just as he was heading out for a cocktail party. Windham told Meyer that it was his truck to do with as he pleased, but there might be a question of insurance. The insured was deceased. And insurance companies, in the event of accident, leap upon any excuse to refuse to accept a claim. Just drive very very carefully until Monday afternoon or, better yet, not at all, and by that time he'd have it covered.

Meyer said it would probably be better not to drive it at all. He was tired. His eyes were tired. His mind felt fatigued. He said he felt older than usual. There was little daylight left. He fell asleep in a chair. I thought of going out and getting something to eat, but realized I would set off the alarm system if I went out without knowing the right numbers to punch into the control panel. I went foraging through the cupboards and icebox. I found some wine and some vodka under the sink, a can of chili in the cupboard, and a wrapped slab of rat cheese in the refrigerator. Had a vodka on the rocks, heated the chili with a lot of thin slices of cheese. Roused Meyer and we ate same, in silence. He trudged up to bed. I cleaned up, looking around, and found a paperback by Stephen King about a big weird dog. Took it to bed and read a lot longer than I'd planned to. Very scary dog. Very scary writer. Wondered if he would be able to guess what kind of person Evan Lawrence was: as scary as King's dog, but in a different way.

I kept trying not to think about Anne Renzetti, but the instant I turned the light out, there she was. The thought that kept flashing on and off right in the front of my mind was YOU BLEW IT. YOU BLEW IT. Later on there was another sign, farther back and not as bright, which kept saying YOU'LL NEVER GET A BETTER SHOT AT IT.