The Scarlet Ruse (8 page)

"Momentito. Ayudame, por favor. Tengo mi tarjeta de sodo."

He hesitated, then took the bow line and made it fast. I swung it in and cut the engines and jumped out with the stern line. After I made it fast I went back aboard and opened the shallow drawer under the chart bin and found my card. I handed it to him.

He frowned and then smiled. "Ah. Especial. Bienvenido, Meester McGee."

I read his name on the pocket. "Thank you, Julio." I dropped the card back in the drawer. I told him I was looking for a tall, dark-haired lady who was to meet me at twelve-thirty. It was now twelve-forty-five. No, he had not seen such. Would I please come to the small house of the dockmaster and sign the boat register? It would be my pleasure. He hoped he had not offended me. I said that it pleased me to see such care and diligence.

A few years back the cloob had a very ugly problem, and a member had asked me to help them deal with it. I posed as a guest and with a little good management and a lot of good luck, solved it without confrontations or publicity. The Board of Governors wanted to give me some special token of appreciation. They knew I had as much chance of slipping through their Membership Committee as a hog of entering heaven. So at the next meeting they amended the bylaws to permit one special membership, without initiation fees or dues, to be awarded by the board. I was nominated, seconded, and voted in, and then they voted to rescind the amendment to the bylaws. I seldom use it and knew it was childish to use that way of impressing, or trying to impress, Mary Alice McDermit.

I walked up the steps from the dock area to the edge of the lawns that slant down toward the water and the seawalls. A walkway and avenue of coconut palms led up to the main buildings of the club. The old Moorish portion has two new wings attached, wings as stark and modern as anything by I. M. Pei. So all of it together looks like a wedding cake for the Arabian bride of a suitor from Stonehenge. I could walk up there to the lofty paneled wealth of the men's bar and order one of the finest Planter's Punches known to man and sign for it. The bill would come in due course, on thirty-pound parchment with an engraved logo. I could stand and drink my drink, looking out through high windows at a dancing pool full of wives and children and daughters and grandchildren.

At least half the tennis courts were being used by hot-weather maniacs, out there going… pung… ponk… pung… ponk, yelling insincerities at each other and screaming of love.

The yellow Toyota came past floral plantings and parked in landscaped palm shade. Julio appeared beside me and said, "Ess your she?" When she got out and stood erect, dwindling her auto with a lot of female stature, I said, "Yes. Ess." And Julio went bounding toward the parking area to help with her gear. A very obliging young man. Very earnest. Very dedicated and doubtless very ambitious. He was bounding proof of the fact that the Cuban colony in Miami has the most upwardly mobile young people and the lowest crime rate of any ethnic colony in the U.S. east of San Francisco's Chinatown.

My she wore a big floppy fabric hat in a big white and yellow check. She wore a yellow top and a short white skirt so slit that her stride revealed the matching yellow shorts. She wore huge glasses with lavender lenses. She had a big yellow Ratsey bag and a big white shoulder bag. Julio took the beach bag from her and went on a dead run to stow it aboard the Muсequita.

"I'm so sorry I'm late, Trav. Traffic and bad planning. But, my God, this is some place to wait, if you have to wait. Wow! I got stopped at the gates, and I had to sign a guest thing and write in the name of the member I was meeting. I was positive you'd just picked this as a handy place. But he looked on a list. You are a member, huh? This is really some kind of incredible. There must be an army of guys just to keep the flowers looking so great."

Maybe it was better than a pretense of total cool, all this happy, awed enthusiasm. But I found myself wishing her approval wasn't quite as total and quite as genuine.

My twenty-two-foot runabout gave her some more pleasant astonishment. "I thought you had some kind of outboard thing. Hey, this is more like they race to the Bahamas."

"Same hull design they used a few years ago, but they had a lot more muscle than the pair of one-twenty-fives this one is wearing."

She hopped aboard, very lithe and springy for the size of her. She stooped and looked forward, under the bow deck. "Say, you've got mattress things and a toilet! It's all so neat!"

Julio nearly fell in while freeing my lines, because he couldn't take his eyes off Mary Alice. He radiated a worshipful approval. She had about seven inches and thirty-five pounds on him, and he was doubtless imagining walking her through his neighborhood on Sunday morning, dressed in their best, as if Snow White had finally made up her mind and decided on one of the dwarfs.

As I chugged, dead slow, past the yachts looking like ponderous caprisoned elephants in gleaming outdoor stalls, Mary Alice moved close to me and hooked her left hand over my near shoulder and made a laughing sound of delight. Her hip bumped me. I had the feeling that exact place where she put her hand would turn into a raised, radiant welt showing the precise shape of fingers and palm.

"You know what?" she said.

"What?"

"I shouldn't even tell you. I figured that this time of year, what happened was the owner hired you to stay aboard The Busted Flush. I mean, a lot of guys want a woman to believe things. You never really said it was yours. I mean, from the dock it looks kind of lumpy and funny. But that great kitchen and that huge living room and that tub and the shower big enough for four people, practically, and that crazy bed in the main bedroom, like one I saw in a magazine, you know, why should I believe it, Trav?"

"But now you do."

"You just don't look as if you belong to great clubs and own great boats is all. Or act like you do."

"What do I act like, Mary Alice?"

"I don't know. After I moved into the place I'm in now, a guy came around to hook up my phone. He got a thing about me, and when he has service calls in the neighborhood and he sees my car, he stops to find out if my phone is working. As if I wouldn't report it if it wasn't. He's almost as big as you are. A little younger. I mean, if he tried to make me think he owned The Busted Flush…"

"I won her in a poker game."

She hit me in the ribs with her elbow. "Oh sure. I bet you did. You're funny, you know. I can't tell what's a joke and what isn't. We can go fast now? How fast will this go anyway?"

"It's tuned right now, and the bottom is clean, and I put a new pair of wheels on her, so she should do very close to fifty, but I don't like to hold her there more than a few minutes because I don't like to buy new engines every year. Wait until we get past Dinner Key and I'll show you."

When I got past an area of prams and sailfish and little cats, I pushed it to full, with both mills yelling in full-throated unison. She stood tall above the top of the windshield, the wind snapping her black hair. She was laughing, but I couldn't hear her, and she had me just above the elbow in an impressive grasp. The reading was a full forty-four knots, which is a respectable fifty and a bit. I pulled it back down to cruising speed.

She roamed the walk-around and found the slalom ski stowed up under the gunwale overhang, zipcorded to bronze eyebolts. She wanted to know if we had far enough to go so she could ski. I said yes, if she didn't keep falling off, and she said she was the kind of freak who does all the physical things well after a few tries, and she'd had more than a few tries at the skiing. She went under the foredeck and pulled the privacy curtain, taking her beach bag with her, and in a little while she came out in a plain, businesslike, off-white tank suit, her hair pulled tightly back and fixed there with a silver clamp. I had gotten the tow line out and clipped it to the ring bolt in the transom and held it clear of the slowly turning wheels.

She grinned, threw the ski over the side, and dived after it. When she had the ski and had worked her feet into the slots, I pulled the bar past her at dead slow, and she grabbed it and turned to the right angle and nodded. I pushed both throttles, and she popped up out of the water and the Muсequita jumped up onto the step in perfect unison. After she made a few swings, I knew she was not going to have any trouble. She gave me the pumping sign for more speed and then the circle of thumb and finger when it was where she wanted it. It translated to thirty-two miles an hour.

She was not tricky. There were no embellishments. All she did was get into the swooping rhythm of cutting back and forth across the almost-flat wake, far out there in the expanse of Biscayne Bay, far from land, far from any other water craft. She edged the slalom ski as deeply as the men do, laying herself back at a steep angle, almost flat against the water, throwing a broad, thin, curved curtain of water at least ten feet into the air at the maximum point of strain. At that point before she came around and then came hurtling back across, ski flat, to go out onto the other wing, the strain would sag her mouth, wipe her face clean of expression, and pull all the musculature and tendons and tissues of her body so taut she looked like a blackboard drawing in medical school.

She took it each time to the edge of what she could endure. It was hypnotic and so determined that it had a slightly unpleasant undertaste, like watching a circus girl high under the canvas, going over and over and over, dislocating her shoulders with each spin, while the drums roll and the people count.

I put it into autopilot so I could watch her. From time to time I glanced forward to make certain no other boat was angling toward us. I knew she would have to tire soon. I tried to calculate her speed. She was going perhaps twenty-five feet outside the wake on one side and then the other. Call it fifty feet. I timed her from her portside turn back to her portside turn. Ten seconds. For a hundred feet. Miles per hour equals roughly two thirds of the feet per second. Ten feet per second. Add seven miles an hour then to the boat speed. Very close to forty miles an hour. At that speed, if she fell, the first bounce would feel like hitting concrete. Water is not compressible.

I heard a thick, flapping sound over the boat noise and looked up and saw a Coast Guard chopper angling across at about a thousand feet.

I saw us for a moment the way the fellow up there saw us. Gleaming boat. Deeply browned fellow in blue swim trunks running it at speed, watching the graceful girl swinging back and forth, girl in a white suit, with a light, very golden tan.

For all he could tell, the girl was eighteen, and the man was twenty, and somebody's father had bought the boat.

Suddenly I felt bleak, oddly depressed. It took a moment for me to realize that one of Meyer's recent lectures on international standards of living was all too well remembered.

"… so divide everything into two hundred million equal parts. Everything in this country that is fabricated. Steel mills, speedboats, cross-country power lines, scalpels, watch bands, fish rods, ski poles, plywood, storage batteries, everything. Break it down into basic raw materials and then compute the power requirements and the fossil fuels needed to make everybody's share in this country. Know what happens if you apply that formula to all the peoples of all the other nations of the world?

"You come up against a bleak fact, Travis. There is not enough material on and in the planet to ever give them what we're used to. The emerging nations are not going to emerge-not into our pattern at least. Not ever. We've hogged it all. Technology won't come up with a way to crowd the Yangtze River with Muсequitas.

"It was okay, Travis, when the world couldn't see us consuming and consuming. Or hear us. Or taste some of our wares. But communication by cinema, satellite, radio, television tape, these have been like a light coming on slowly, being turned up like on a rheostat control in a dark cellar where all of mankind used to live. Now it is blinding bright, cruelly bright. And they can all look over into our corner and see us gorging ourselves and playing with our bright pretty toys. And so they want theirs now. Just like ours, God help them. And what is the only thing we can say? 'Sorry. You're a little too late. We used it all up, all except what we need to keep our toys in repair and running and to replace them when they wear out. Sorry, but that's the way it is.' What comes after that? Barbarism, an interregnum, a new dark ages, and another start a thousand years from now with a few million people on the planet? Our myth has been that our standard of living would become available to all the peoples of the world. Myths wear thin. We have a visceral appreciation of the truth. That truth, which we don't dare announce to the world, is what gives us the guilt and the shame and the despair. Nobody in the world will ever live as well, materially, as we once did. And now, as our materialism begins to sicken us, it is precisely what the emerging nations want for themselves. And can never have. Brazil might manage it. But no one else."

Good old Meyer. He can put a fly into any kind of ointment, a mouse in every birthday cake, a cloud over every picnic. Not out of spite. Not out of contrition or messianic zeal. But out of a happy, single-minded pursuit of truth. He is not to blame that the truth seems to have the smell of decay and an acrid taste these days. He points out that forty thousand particles per cubic centimeter of air over Miami is now called a clear day. He is not complaining about particulate matter. He is merely bemused by the change in standards.

Now, as I watched the tireless lady zoom back and forth, he had made me feel like one of those regal jokers of olden times who could order up enough humming bird tongues for a banquet. What's your message, Meyer? Enjoy?