Where Is Janice Gantry? (3 page)

We were a couple of prominent misfits in Florence City, and we joined forces and talked out our problems to each other. She had to have a project, because it helped her keep her mind off her own problems, and she elected me. It was due to her prodding that I began to look seriously for some
kind of work that would suit me. Old Bert Shilder at the Central Bank and Trust, who had known my parents all their lives right up until they drowned in the Gulf in a storm fifteen years ago, put me onto this accident appraisal business and got me a job with a firm over in Miami. After four months I knew enough about the business to take the chance of starting up on my own in Florence City.

It was Sis Gantry who applauded the decision, reviewed my precarious finances, decided I should own a place rather than rent, and found the old cottage on the bay shore on one acre of overgrown land four miles south of the city line. She was working for Tom Earle by then, and she knew it was a steal and, after she had bullied me into it, she felt she had earned the right to help me fix it up. And it was Sis who wangled the desk space in Tom Earle’s beach office for me.

Up until about two weeks after I had moved into the cottage, sex had had no place in our relationship. We were friends and we’d both had a bad time, and we were able to relax with each other. Then one Sunday evening she brought over the kitchen curtains she had made. I put the fixtures up and she hung curtains. October thunder came banging down along the Keys, and then the rain came swamping down and the electricity went off. We made bad jokes about it. There were no candles back then, and no flashlight. We sat on the couch. I could see her in every blue-white flicker of lightning. I was reaching for the cigarettes when I happened to touch her hand. I closed my fingers around her waist. At the next flash of lightning I saw her face, inches from mine, eyes shadowy wide and lips apart. A few moments after the kiss began she was straining for a greater closeness, her mouth heated, her breath fast and shallow. She suffered herself to be led into the bedroom, docile as a child, and she turned this way and that way to aid me as, with hands made clumsy by a vast urgency, I undressed her there.

I had had no one since Judy, and she had had no one since
that madman who had put the dimpled scar in the side of her throat.

For the many weeks after that, through the end of that year and into the next year, it was a lopsidedly sexual relationship, and all of it took place in that cottage, screened from the road and the neighbors by the wildness of the untended brush. It was a strong, obsessive and joyous thing. There was no coyness, no teasing, no parlor games. It never seemed to take more than thirty seconds from the doorway to the bed, in unvarying readiness. We were both husky vital people, and there was always time for laughter and for bawdy foolish jokes about our capacities for this joyful, single-minded game. We padded about in a comfortable nudity, cooking and devouring huge meals. As she lived with her family, she felt she had to spend a portion of each night in her own bed. But more often than not I would be awakened in the morning by Sis, arriving, stripping, lunging into my bed to snuffle and giggle into my throat, with busy hands and busy lips.

I do not know exactly why it ended. I think it began partly because she wanted to cure me of Judy, as one more segment of her project to bring me back into the human race.

Perhaps it ended because she was not content to stop there. She wanted more. Maybe she wanted marriage. It was never mentioned. But she began to prod me. The first thing she wanted me to do was all too obvious. I was settling too snugly into a small occupation, and it was clear to her that I wanted to keep it small. I had long since given up the luxury of ambition. I wanted something that would support me and not make too many demands.

By luck I had found just what I wanted. A batch of major automobile insurance companies employed me on a fee basis. Insurance adjustors and lawyers would handle the liability aspects of each accident. It was my job to appraise the physical damage to the vehicles so that claims could be equitably adjusted. I had to keep the greedy claimant from
getting a complete body job out of one dented fender, but I also tried to make certain the insurance company involved paid for all the damage arising out of the particular accident where their policy holder was at fault. The more fair, impartial and objective I could be, the better I could do my job.

During each tourist season I worked long rugged hours. That was when the folks from Ohio and Indiana and Michigan were down, leaping at each other with a great clashing of tail fins and gnashing of grill work. I could pile up enough in those months to see me nicely through the reduced income and lazy hours of the rest of the year.

But Sis kept working on me. I should go out and dig for more business. Maybe I should get into more adjusting. Line up more client companies. Hire another man when it got to be more than I could handle. Expand, grow, become important. Pile up the profit and re-invest it in land.

As the bedroom extravagances began to slow to a less lurid pace, she became more insistent on guiding my Future. But I had exactly what I wanted, and all I wanted. I had food, shelter, clothing, tobacco and liquor sufficient to my needs. I had time off to catch snook, hunt wild turkey, walk on the beach. I was content to ride with just what I had for all the rest of the distance. I couldn’t make her see that.

The other thing she wanted was less obvious. I am not certain she could have put it into words. But she wanted more emotional response from me. She wanted the words and looks and actions of immortal love. And it just wasn’t there to give to anybody. I had given it once, to Judy. She had walked away with it. So I could only use Sis. I could take my pleasure in the ultimate use of that sturdy eager body, and find my rationalization in those gasps and archings and moanings that told me the pleasure I was giving equalled what I was taking, but I could not go beyond that specific and obvious act into my area or faked area of love undying,
even though I sensed that that was what she needed and wanted.

For a period of weeks I was able to endure the nagging, direct and indirect, for the sake of the bounty of having her in my bed, but after a time the balance shifted and it was no longer worth it. I made a few clumsy excuses and she stopped arriving unannounced. I asked her out to the cottage a few more times, and she came willingly, but something indefinable had gone out of it, some aspect of joy and freedom. We went through the motions and assured each other it was all just great, but it wasn’t.

There was no scene, no wild and bitter ending. It just sort of dwindled away. We saw each other nearly every working day. It didn’t hurt to lose her—it just left me with a gnaw of discontent, a feeling of mild guilt and inadequacy. It had all been over for two years, but I could not be at ease with her and I sensed it was the same with her, and always would be. Our bodies were too meaningful to each other. We shared too many lusty memories. The end of love is sadness. This had not been love, but it left a sadness nevertheless.

The desk space I rent is in the rear of the office. I sat at my desk and looked at Sis for a few moments. She sat with her back toward me, typing industriously, sitting very erect in the posture chair. She wore a pale green skirt and a white blouse and sat with her ankles crossed. I looked at the concave curvings where her neat and narrow waist blossomed down to the convexity of her round and solid hips, and I felt that faint visceral shift and stirring of desire for her. I knew it would never be completely dead. But two years had passed and I knew I would never do anything about it. We had been too good together for it to be forgotten. I knew she was dating a lawyer, a widower, but I suspected that if I asked her to come out to the cottage with me, she would look startled, then smile in a remembered, greedy way, and nod her head. But I would not ask her. When something has ended, you
can’t start it all over from the beginning. It was the beginning of the affair that I missed—that perhaps we both missed—but all we could do would be to start it up once more at the end, and thus end it again.

As I was opening my mail she rolled halfway around on the chair casters and said, “Did they wake you up early with a mess of sirens, Sam?”

“Sirens?”

“I heard it on my car radio this morning. Some old duck is supposed to have spotted that Charlie Haywood down your way at about two in the morning. He reported seeing him in his car lights, ducking back into the brush down near Cass Road. That’s not much more than a mile south of you.”

“Did they take him seriously?”

“The radio said state and county police are searching the area.”

“I think it would be pretty stupid for that fella to head back here, don’t you?”

“I don’t really know, Sam. I guess I’m pulling for him to get away. Does that mean I’ve got a criminal mind?”

“Probably,” I said, and forced a grin. “I got up early because I went to bed early.”

“That lousy wind kept waking me up all night. I never sleep right when it’s windy. You know Charlie, don’t you?”

I shrugged, casually. “I know most of the boys in the automobile agencies in the area. I had a few beers with Charlie Haywood. Pleasant kid, I thought.”

“Not a safebreaker, or safecracker or whatever they call them.”

“Thief is an easy word.”

“Okay, not a thief, Sam.”

“But he admitted it.”

“I
know
he did, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find it hard to believe.”

Just then Jennie Benjamin came in, croaking loud greetings.

A round, florid woman, she crossed to her desk and banged her straw purse down upon it. She had parlayed a real estate license and a cheerfully abusive personality into a good living by skillfully bullying the indecisive into renting or buying property they did not particularly like. I gave Sis my best guess as to when I would be back. I had two calls to make. I drove up to Venice and checked some rear end damage to a Porsche which had been smacked at a stop sign. The company adjustor had told me the estimate seemed too high, and he had mailed me a photostat of it from Tampa. I got the foreign car parts book out of my wagon and checked the rear bumper segments and bumper guards and the allowable labor costs of replacement. The woman who owned it told me at least four times how come she had been smacked in the rear end at a stop sign. I soon found what had hiked the repair estimate. The left bumper brace had been thrust forward, not only dimpling the shell below the motor compartment, but also bowing a section of the motor compartment upward. It would have to be allowed, but I did find one bumper segment listed for replacement that did not have to be replaced, thus cutting down the repair close to twenty dollars. I told her she would get her check from Aetna in a few days and she could go ahead now and have her baby fixed up.

I continued on north to Sarasota to check out a toughie. A kid named Hosslar had parked his classic car, a completely restored 1935 Ford Phaeton in the big lot at the South Gate Shopping Center. A semi-senile old foof from Kentucky in all the Chrysler you can buy had hit the gas instead of the brake and leapt all his wide span of tail fins backward into the Ford, knocking it sixty feet and rolling it completely over once, right before the eyes of the horrified youngster who was returning to his beauty after making a small purchase.

Technically it was a total loss, and the procedure would have been to pay the kid the appraised value, take over the car in the name of the insurance company and apply any
salvage against the loss. But how do you appraise a classic car representing hundreds of hours of painstaking restoration and God knows how many layers of carefully rubbed paint? We went around and around, arguing in the hot sun. I stretched my authority just as far as I could, and it still wasn’t fair to the kid, but he finally believed me and trusted me and agreed to it.

It certainly wasn’t any total loss to him. It was like a girlfriend with a pair of black eyes and a broken arm.

I finished with the kid in time to drive to Anderson Ford and check out a 1960 convertible that had lost an argument with a palm tree. The detailed estimate was two pages long but it was still two hundred bucks under a total loss. I had lunch with Mary Sirus, the sales manager, and we told each other some lies about how well we were bowling lately, and he told me about the Sunday pigeons he plucks on the golf course. I drove back down through Venice to Florence City, debated stopping at the office, but figured it would be best to go right home.

As I slowed to turn into my shell drive, between the two big pepper trees, I wondered if the police, checking the area, had looked my place over. If they had found Charlie there, it might put me in a spot I’d have trouble talking my way out of, but it might work out for the best. If they hadn’t found him, I hoped he was willing, ready and able to leave.

2

I
parked by the porch and as I walked toward the door to the living room it opened for me and Charlie Haywood backed away to let me in. He held my .38 revolver in his right hand, aimed down at the floor.