Where Is Janice Gantry? (12 page)

I suddenly realized that the local estimate of her age was considerably off—or else she was a marvelously youthful item for a woman in her early thirties as had been reported to me.

I could not have stood there like an idiot for more than a few seconds, but it was a few seconds too long. She managed to look both alarmed and amused.

“Excuse me,” I said again, and I took the
Livona pica
out of my brown paper bag and moved a step closer and held it out and said, “I wondered if you might know what this one is.”

She shook her head. “It’s a shell. That’s as far as I can go. Flashy, isn’t it?” It was a furry, husky little voice.

You could collect shells, I guessed, without knowing the names. Crows and pack rats collect shiny things without looking them up in catalogues. She dipped her face into the big towel.

“This is the first one of these I’ve found,” I said inanely.

“That’s nice,” she said with a total indifference, and I knew she was going to pick up bathing cap, sunglasses and cigarettes and walk away from me. Such a girl would have become expert in fending off the casual pass. I searched for something to say, but everything I could think of sounded like just another dull attempt to strike up a conversation.

“I thought you might have found one of these,” I said.

She made no answer. That makes it particularly difficult. She picked up the bathing cap, sunglasses and cigarettes. She started toward the path through the sea oats.

“I can wiggle my ears,” I said desperately.

She stopped and half turned to look at me over her shoulder. “What?”

“The shell didn’t work worth a damn. I can’t see where yelling fire would get me anywhere. You brought sunglasses and cigarettes, so you were going to spend a little while on the beach, but you ran into a pest with a paper bag full of shells so you changed your mind. Okay, so I’m a pest. But I really can wiggle my ears and twenty years ago it was my only social grace. I was a very rabbity looking child.”

She turned all the way back toward me, stifling a smile, marched three paces toward me and said, “It’s something I don’t see every day. Go ahead.”

“Which one?”

“Selective control, huh? The left one.”

I turned the left one toward her. I flexed the proper muscles.

“That’s pretty tricky,” she said.

“Want to see the right one now?”

“When you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”

“I am legitimately a pest, but I reacted in a way that couldn’t help driving you away. The way I stared at you. I’m not a cretin, really. You look so much like somebody I … used to know that I had a sort of temporary paralysis.”

“You boggled.”

“I’m sorry. I’m a legitimate resident of Florence City. I own my own business and my own bachelor cottage. Your neighbor just up the road, Dr. D. Ackley Bush, can tell you I am a reasonably respectable man with voting rights and so on. What I’m saying is you should give a pest a chance to function. Or he gets frustrated. You can pick your own topic of conversation. I could tell you, for example, about an albino raccoon who used to live back there where your house is nearly twenty years ago. You know, folklore, nature talks.”

She hesitated. “And you
do
collect shells?”

I dumped the contents of my paper bag back into the tidal windrow from which they had come. “Hardly,” I said. “I’ll keep this one because it is unusual. I think it’s a magpie shell. The shell routine was a ploy. But it was the best thing I could think of. Unless, of course, you’d like this one.”

She smiled and moved down to the flat tidal sand and spread the big towel. “You keep it. If you’d said you actually collect shells, I’d be across the road by now. Somehow you’re not the type.” She sat on her towel and put her sunglasses on and frowned up at me. “But wasn’t it a pretty labored kind of routine?”

“Walking up and saying hello is pretty arrogant. I think you should have
some
kind of stage management.” She offered me a cigarette. I sat on my heels and leaned forward to the guttering lighter flame in her cupped hand.

“Actually, the albino raccoon is much better bait. Tell me about him.”

“Her. And her name was Mrs. Lot, given to her by D. Ackley Bush.”

“Mrs. Lot? Oh. Lot’s wife, of course.”

“Ack was feeding them. He still does, but the raccoon population on the Key has gone way down since the Key had gotten so built up. Stupid people classify them as vermin and keep hollering about getting rid of them.”

“I love them dearly. Thieves in black masks.”

“They’re a bright and rewarding animal. A half-dozen or so used to appear on Ack’s back porch just after dark every night to be fed. If he wasn’t on the job they’d raise hell, rattling the door latches, climbing trees and peering in the windows complaining about his sudden neglect. She showed up with the group one night and became a steady customer.

“I was ten or eleven. He told my family about it and I used to come over on my bike to see her. They get very tame once they have confidence in you. Chicken skin is a special delicacy. She would take it out of my hand. Shy, dignified and fastidious. Not with her teeth. She’d reach out and take it with her hand.”

“How nice.”

“Then she changed her habits. She would grab the food and run, come back and get more and run, and finally return and eat the way she used to.”

“Babies?”

“That was Ack’s conclusion. She’d make a beeline south, and he estimated from the elapsed time that she lived in the big tangle of live oaks that stood where your house now stands. And finally one night she didn’t show up until the others had eaten and gone. She made such a racket on the back porch that Ack came out. She had two half-grown offspring with her, both of normal pigmentation. When they tried to run from Ack she gave them both a good thumping. She hung back while they ate, then she ate and took the kids back home.”

“Proud?”

“I saw her twice with the young ’uns. Not so much pride as a sort of complacency, a quiet air of self-satisfaction. And it wasn’t long before she had them taking their chances along with the whole group. No special protection. Suddenly she stopped appearing with the group. Ack was worried about her. One day, a little over a week later, he was walking along Center Street over in town and he found her. She was in the window of a tackle store over there. The owner, a pretty good amateur taxidermist had …”

“Oh, no!”

“Mrs. Lot was posed on a piece of limb glaring with glass eyes, showing her needle fangs in a snarl that, as Ack said, cast a slur on her disposition.”

The girl turned her head away from me just then and I could see her in profile, see, behind the sunglasses, the big tear shimmering on her lashes. Could this be a sinister person? Yet history records many sentimental murderers.

“The taxidermist was so proud of his job he had put it in his window until the customer came to pick it up. Ack learned that Mrs. Lot had been brought in by a commercial fisherman named Prail, and had been shot through the head with a small caliber gun. Ack told my father. My father remembered telling Prail about Mrs. Lot. My father was a large, silent, gentle man. But Prail was larger, and twelve years younger. My father went to see Prail. Prail admitted stalking and killing Mrs. Lot, in spite of the county ordinance against shooting at any wildlife on the Key. He hoped to be able to sell her to a tourist for a good price. My father solemnly and methodically whipped Wilbur Prail. He stopped a little bit this side of killing him. My father went to Prail’s shack and retrieved Mrs. Lot and left the taxidermy fee on the table, plus five cents for the bullet. He gave her back to Ack who pried her off the limb and buried her behind his house. When Prail got out of the hospital he tried to organize a little group
to work my father over but by then everybody knew the story and Prail could find nobody with any enthusiasm for the project. It was something he did not wish to try all by himself.”

The girl shoved her cigarette into the sand. She said, with a small catch in her voice, “That’s a nice joyful story. Can you think of any more ways to depress me?”

“I should have invented a new ending, I guess.”

“No. This one is all right in some ways. I like paying for the bullet.”

“There isn’t any moral. Except, maybe, if you are too unusual, you may turn into a collector’s item.”

“When the Martians arrive I hope they go around collecting people and stuffing them.”

“It will serve them right.”

She smiled in a rueful way. “I guess I did sound pretty fierce. How can you sit like that so long?”

“It’s a local custom among us poorer folks. When you visit a man, you don’t go set in his house. You hunker in the yard and whittle.”

She stood up and pulled her rubber cap on. “I’ve got to swim away from that darn raccoon of yours.”

I went into the water when she was a hundred feet out. I lazed along, knowing exactly how bad I would look if I got into any sort of contest with her. I churn along without grace, style or speed. I can keep it up all day, but it will never win any medals. She had that competition look, the stroke that goes with those racing turns against the end of an Olympic pool.

I raised my head and saw her fifty feet further out loafing on her back. I went on out and rolled to float beside her.

“Darn it,” she said, “that white raccoon is going to haunt …” She gave a sudden gasp of pain and surprise. She had been utterly at home in the water, but suddenly she began to flounder and struggle.

I went under fast to take a look at her. Sometimes we get a psychotic sand shark or nurse shark in Gulf waters. It is a very rare thing. They then confound the ichthyologists by chomping at anything that floats or moves. But the clear water was empty. I could see the pattern of sand ripples on the bottom some twelve feet down. Her right leg was bend sharply at the knee, with her foot curled and twisted, her calf muscles bulged and knotted.

I popped up beside her. She looked gray under her tan but I could see she wasn’t going to panic. She was trying to smile. “Cramp,” she said.

“And a real dandy. First class.”

“Golly! It hurts.” And the hurting wrenched the attempt at a smile off her face.

I towed her in. I towed her along on her back by my one hand cupped under her chin, sidestroking with my right arm and doing big froggy kicks. When I got her into the shallows she got up onto her good leg, but she couldn’t hop through knee-deep water. I swung her up and carried her up the incline of the beach and put her down on the big towel and said, “Roll onto the tummy.”

I knelt beside her right leg. “Now make a big effort to relax the muscles.”

“I never had anything hurt just like this,” she said in a small voice.

The calf was bunched and ugly, and like marble to the touch. Her foot was curled like a ballet dancer, and turned inward. I began to knead the hard ball of muscle exerting pressure to straighten her leg out as I did so. She whimpered once. In about sixty seconds I felt the first slackening of tension and I was able to get the leg down a little. Soon I had the leg flat. The calf muscles jumped and quivered as the cramp knots softened. The ugliness went away and once again the calf was as it should be, long, rounded, supple—a slim leg made for dancing and running and joy. As I had
expected, the foot had begun to look a lot better. I massaged it, working at the arch with my thumbs until the muscle hardness was gone.

She gave a long and comfortable sigh. “It feels so good when it goes away. Can I sit up now?”

“Now you stand up, and we walk off what’s left.”

She limped quite badly for the first twenty paces, and I walked slowly beside her on the packed sand. But as the limp diminished, she began to stride along in better form.

“I’ve had little leg cramps before. Never anything like that.”

“People think if you wait an hour after eating, no cramps. They’re right, about stomach cramps. But your leg can go any time. Or both of them. It’s sort of a rebellion of the nerves. So swimming alone is about like standing under a tall tree in a thunderstorm.”

“It would be a little exaggerated and phoney to thank you for saving my life. I could have gotten to shore.”

“I know you could. You’re so at home in the water you could have subdued any panic and backstroked your way in, not using your legs, floating when you got tired. But it was easier this way.”

“That’s for darn sure!”

“How does it feel now?”

“Just a little twinge every time my weight comes down on it, but even that is going away.”

“If you swim again today there’s the off-chance it’ll come back. But you’ll be okay tomorrow.”

“Is this far enough?” she asked. I nodded and we turned and headed back toward the bright spot of the towel far down the beach.

I was very conscious of her walking beside me, and I didn’t want to look at her. I’d had about all I could handle. I had kneaded that perfect golden texture of her, feeling the warmth and aliveness of the long flat muscles. It was all so
vividly reminiscent of Judy that I felt too close to doing some wildly improbable, unpredictable thing. I had wanted to kiss the tender hollow behind her knee. The memory of the weight of her in my arms was too specific. I hated Maurice Weber for his ownership of this precious entity.

“I would not care to drown, thank you,” she said.

I should have made some comment in the same casual, bright vein, and I intended to, but when I opened my mouth I heard myself say, “My parents drowned in the Gulf when I was fifteen.”

“How horrible!”

“It was a long time before I could believe it had really happened. But people saw it. They were in my dad’s twenty-two foot open skiff. It had a sixty-five horse gray marine. They had to run outside from Stump Pass up to the Venice Jetty. He’d handled boats all his life but he made a miscalculation that time. A squall came out of the west. He was making a run for the jetty, hoping to make it before the high tide change. But when he got off the jetty the tide was beginning to run out, and there was one hell of a chop right off the mouth of the jetty. He should have beached it. He tried to run in and took a wave aboard that swamped the engine. It swung sideways in the chop and broached. It probably clipped my mother when it went over. There were people on the jetty, watching. Apparently he was making no attempt to save himself. They say he kept diving and diving, looking for her, as the tide kept carrying him further and further out. By the time they got out there with boats, he was gone for good. They found her, but they never found him.”