Where Is Janice Gantry? (25 page)

It started as a kind of love play, with both of us knowing that this was not the time or the place, both of us aware of a leaden weariness. For a little time our play seemed to have the innocence of children, little wrestlings and graspings and mock angers. But soon she was responding in drugged and humid ways. The shorts floated off in the black water. I took her, there, in the warm shallows, her drenched and shining head resting at that line where the ripples of the outgoing tide touched the beach, the greedy insects, ignored for a time,
feeding thick and fat on my back and shoulders and on the careless arch of her long legs, our joined bodies buoyant in that shallow edge of the tropic sea.

After it ended, the greedy keening of thousands of tiny wings sent us back into deeper water.

She clung to me with a desperate strength and with all of her wrapped around me, she whispered fiercely in my ear, “Don’t ever be sorry. Don’t ever be sorry we started just this way.”

“There couldn’t be any other way to start. You know that.”

“It was glorious! That’s a big word, but there it is. Glorious.”

“You don’t have to say it like a challenge.”

Soon she began to get a little sleepy and cross and wanted to know if she was expected to sleep in the darn water. I went up and felt the shirt and trousers for the third time and found them dry enough. I hastily scooped two long holes up in the clean, dry, warm sand. I had her come running and stretch out with her head on her sand pillow, and I covered her over with a layer of sand, then propped the sport shirt on four sticks so that it substituted for mosquito netting over her head. I was thoroughly bitten before I had made the same arrangements beside her, for myself, breathing through the propped-up mesh of the tropical weight slacks.

“Good night, my darling,” she said in a very crisp and matter-of-fact voice. A few minutes later when I asked her if she could get to sleep, there was no answer.

When the early sun woke me up I sat up to find her nest empty. It was a morning full of sparkle and glints of light, a west wind.

“Hoo!” she cried from a hundred yards out. “Hallooo!”

I stood up out of the sand. I walked down to the edge of the water. Every muscle was full of broken dishes and fish hooks. I was a hundred and nine years old. I swam slowly out to her.

“Good morning, my love,” she said. “My hair is a gummy horrible mess. I didn’t bring my lipstick. I’m red welts all over from bugs. I’ve got little gray balloons under my eyes, I think. Take a good look. And then, if you could bear it, kiss a girl good morning.”

I did. I said, “The looks are nifty. It’s the good cheer I can’t stand.”

“Come on and swim out a little further. I want to show you something.”

I churned along in her wake and then she turned and pointed back. I saw it too, a tall white water tower shining against the deepening blue of the morning sky.

“Civilization?” she asked.

“I don’t know how far south we are from Boca. This could be LaCosta Key, and that would be the tower on one of the islands in Pine Island Sound.”

“Darling, I know we should be grimly determined to get to a phone and confound the evil ones and all that, but I want to stay. Am I perverse? If there was any coffee, you couldn’t make me leave.”

“We’ll come back.”

“For sure? In the
Lesser Evil
? Is that a promise?”

“Solemn. Cross my …” I stopped as I saw her hand. I caught her wrist as she tried to snatch it away. I looked at the angry, puffy redness on the back of her hand, the places newly scabbed.

“What did this?”

“It doesn’t hurt now, really.”

“It’s what made you talk?”

“Yes.”

“Cigarettes?”

“That damned cigar.”

“Six places, Peggy. Six bad burns.”

“The box score goes like this, darling. I lasted through
four, somehow, fainted on the fifth, and talked like mad on the sixth.”

“And called yourself a coward?”

“For talking at all, Sam. My God, I didn’t wait for questions. I was volunteering information. I told them everything we’d guessed about them.”

I touched the back of her hand with my lips. And because I felt a warning sting in my eyes, I ducked her firmly and headed for shore at my very best pace, stretching the hot little wires interlaced through my muscles. The swim was loosening me up a little. Twenty feet from shore she started to boil past me, but she was too close, so I reached out and caught one arm, pulled her back and ducked her again, and got to shore first.

“You’re a lousy cheater!” she yelled. I turned and beamed at her. She lay in shallow water with her head out. “Bring me my shirt!”

“Come on up here and ask pleasantly and politely if you may borrow my shirt, woman, and I’ll decide whether to let you have it.”

“Sam!”

“Take your time, cutie.”

She scowled at me, and then finally stood up in the shallows. She tried to screen herself with arms and hands, and then said, “Oh, the heck with it.” She combed her soaked hair back with her fingers, squared her shoulders and came toward me, up the twenty-foot slant of beach, shyly at first and then with an increasing pride and boldness.

She walked in the brightness of the morning sun, with the sea bright and blue behind her, the droplets of water spangling her body, taut with grace and balance, her head a little to one side, her expression solemn, her eyes fixed on mine. She marched up to me, took a deep breath that lifted breasts that were small, tilted and perfect.

“What is entirely and forever yours, Sam, you have every
right to look at,” she said. “Anything less than that would be silly.”

Entirely and forever mine. It came thundering in upon me, this absolute and total emotional responsibility. I gladly accepted it. But I knew it was something that was happening to me for the very first time. Until that moment I had always been alone … even in the days of Judy. Even last night, with Peggy, I had been a little bit apart from her and from everyone else in the world. But with that special tone of voice and the look in her eyes she had pried open the last crypt, letting the stale cold air out, filling that final corner of me with a warmth I had never known before.

“Aren’t—you supposed to say something sort of nice?” she asked in a small voice.

“You are the most beautiful woman in the world.”

“Not
that
nice!”

“It’s all complete and total and forever.”

“Tell me that once a day for a long, long time, Sam. Please. And now maybe you’d let go of that shirt?”

She put it on and buttoned it. The shoulder seams drooped halfway to her elbows. Her wrists, like mine, were still grooved, bruised and swollen. The bottom of the sport shirt would have hung sedately to mid thigh, but the west wind kept plucking at it, lifting it.

She held it down and said, “This is more indecent than being bare, for goodness sake! Don’t bullfighters have capes with weights sewed in for windy days?”

“If you don’t like it, don’t wear it. Come on.”

We cut across the key in the general direction of the water tower. It was heavy going, full of swamp and roots, vines and bugs. There was no wind and it was sweaty work. I broke off leafy twigs for us to use as fly whisks. I watched carefully for what I suspected we might find. When I saw it, I stopped abruptly. She held my arm tightly and we watched the slow
fat coiling of a moccasin as it moved off into a tangle of black roots.

“Okay?” I asked her.

“I won’t bother them if they won’t bother me.”

“When it’s cold they get so sluggish you might step on one before you noticed it.”

“Isn’t it a
lovely
hot day, darling!”

At last I saw the green water of the bay through the trunks of the mangroves at the water’s edge. I stepped carefully down into the mud between the tough exposed roots of the mangroves. Shallow mud flats extended perhaps three hundred yards to land that could be an island or a projection of the Key we were on. Beyond it, across more water, I could see the south edge of the island where the water tower stood.

“Stay right behind me,” I told her. “We’ll walk across these flats. Scuff your feet with each step. If we come to an oyster bar, I’ll circle it.”

“Scuff my feet?”

“The sting rays sit on the mud and sand in shallow water in the hot months. If you should lift your foot and come down on one, he’d nail you.”

“So I should bump the edge of one?”

“And he’ll flap away, indignant, irritable, but without reprisal.”

“If I see one I’ll flap away too, like a seagull, buddy. Cawing.”

On the way across the flats I saw a few stirring in the mud ahead of me, and the roiled signs of flight. Once we were far enough out for the west wind to catch us, it was harder to see bottom and I went more slowly. An old granddaddy mullet sailed up out of the water ten feet to our left, making her gasp.

When we reached the south end of the first tip of land I looked ahead and saw that the water was deep enough for swimming.

“You’re going to get that nice shirt wet,” I told her.

“It might be more modest that way,” she said.

“I somehow doubt the hell out of that.”

“What do we aim for, boss?”

I studied the island. It was perhaps six hundred yards away. The water tower was definitely on that island, but I could see no break in the mangroves along the west or south shore line.

“We’ll head up the side of it there and swim around that point and see what we can see.”

We waded in carefully, shuffling our feet, and began swimming as soon as the water reached my waist. We had to buck a slow tidal current. The only unpleasant thing about it was its tendency to paste a long green slimy strand of seaweed across your face from time to time. The water was warm. I could feel more of the tension and pain being worked out of my muscles. I felt a slight weakness that came, I suspected, from hunger. After a long and steady pull I veered over to an area that looked shallow and tested it. It was up to my armpits. I could stand there by leaning into the steady current. I held her by the nape of the neck as she floated on her back, resting.

I looked down the length of her fondly. “Nothing modest about that shirt, girl.”

“Hush now!”

“About the same effect as a coat of primer.”

Six pelicans sailed by, twenty feet away, their wing tips a quarter-inch from the surface of the water. They ignored us. I explained to Peggy that they had been around before mankind had appeared to mess up the fishing, and they had several fairly good reasons to expect to be around after we had become history. She said they hadn’t looked because they were too courteous to stare, which was more than she could say for the man of her choice.

We returned to the business of swimming. We rounded the point and I saw some hefty channel markers ahead. We
swam along, parallel to the north shore of the island, and a big boathouse slowly came into view, with a big open boat visible within the white open framework and some skiffs tied alongside.

“There’s a low platform thing on the far side of the boathouse,” I told her.

“I see it.”

As we swam to the low dock attached to the east side of the boathouse I read the name on the transom of the big open boat. The
Sandspur.
It rang a remote bell. I hoisted myself up out of the water and stood up. I saw a lovely quiet sweep of green lawn that went up a hill to the big old frame house that stood on the crest. Coconut palms stood tall and twisted by the wind. I saw frame cottages along the shore line. When I saw the sign hanging from the archway beyond the boathouse, I knew exactly where I was. Cabbage Key, the sign said.

I turned to give Peggy a hand up and she rejected it firmly. “I step right out of this water into a robe or a blanket, friend. Unless you can prove there aren’t any people here.”

A man in khakis and a T-shirt came walking through the archway and onto the dock, wearing a look of inquiry. He was a trim sunbrown man in his middle years. He wore glasses with metal frames, and his expression was full of a mild good humor.

“Thought I heard somebody talking,” he said. He looked across the water in all directions, obviously looking for a boat. “You folks anchored around the corner?”

“We didn’t exactly come by boat,” I said. “I’m from Florence City. My name is Sam Brice. This is Peggy Varden. I guess you know Dr. Joe Arlington. He’s talked about this place often.”

He stepped down and shook hands with me. “I’m Larry Stultz,” he said. “Joe is an old friend and customer.” He stared with curiosity at Peggy who had lowered herself until
only her eyes showed over the edge of the dock. “Won’t you come ashore, Miss Varden?”

“She … she’s not dressed for swimming, Mr. Stultz.”

“If you’ve got anything I could cover myself with, I would certainly …”

“Of course! Of course!” he said, and went scurrying off. He went into the structure that adjoined the boathouse and came back in moments with a faded blue seersucker robe. He turned and stood with his back to us. I leaned down and gave Peggy a hand. She climbed up, wiggled out of the shirt and dropped it onto the dock with a sodden sound and gratefully hustled herself into the robe and belted it.”

“Now I’m decent,” she said.

When Larry turned with a polite smile of welcome, I said, “We had to leave a boat in a big hurry last night, about four miles out in the Gulf off LaCosta. We swam to shore and this morning we came across LaCosta and waded and swam here.”

“Boat catch fire?” he asked mildly.

“No. It was just going to be … too unpleasant if we stayed aboard.”

“Four miles is a good swim.”

“There wasn’t much choice, Mr. Stultz.”

“Glad you made it all right,” he said.

Peggy was frowning slightly as she stared at him. “My goodness, people arrive swimming and you act as if it happened every day, Mr. Stultz.”

He grinned at her. “I used to be in the advertising business in Chicago. My wife, Jan, and I have run this place as a vacation hideaway for ten years. After those two ways of making a living, Peggy, if there’s anything left in this world that can startle me very much, I can’t think right now what it could be. Let’s go up to the house.”