A Flash of Green (17 page)

“I drove through there once.”

“Don’t tell me about it, Jimmy. You want anything? Ice tea? Beer?”

“No thanks.”

“How’s Gloria?”

“About the same.”

“When did you see her last?”

“Last month,” he lied.

“You should go up there more often, Jimmy.”

“What’s the point in it? She doesn’t know me. She hasn’t known anybody for two years.”

“But maybe she knows more than she seems to.”

“Laura, don’t for God’s sake try to turn it into a soap opera. There’s been a progressive deterioration of the brain cells, a physiological decay. Now they’re willing to admit that possibly all those series of shock treatments may have made the process a little faster. It’s something that destroys the actual brain cells. They talk about some kind of chemical imbalance or deficiency.”

“Big words,” she said. “Lots of big words.”

“Do you have to have it in little words? She wears diapers. They feed her with tubes into her nose. Her eyes don’t focus. They say it’s interesting. They think they may be learning something from her.”

“The big words help you, don’t they? You don’t have to think of her as being Gloria. And you don’t have to go see her.”

He stared across at her in vast burlesque surprise. “Where’d all this concern come from? Aren’t you my loving sister, the woman who celebrated my pending marriage by telling me I was throwing myself away by marrying a little Ybor City slut named Mendez? I was impairing my social standing, or something. And when we had that first trouble, you were plugging for a fast divorce, weren’t you?”

“We didn’t know she was sick then, Jimmy. And I got to like her. She’s still your wife.”

“She’s nothing, Laura. She’s breathing meat.”

“You’re cold as a stone.”

“I went through all the kinds of feeling there are. I used up all there was. What the hell do you expect of me?”

“Nobody expects much of you, Jimmy. Nobody.”

“That’s nice.”

“Maybe you got things just the way you want them. Kind of a litle frog in a little pond. I saw you two months ago. Downtown, just going into the Bay Restaurant. You looked a little tight. You
were laughing and you were with the McClure woman. I guess that’s the kind of thing you like.”

“Mitchie is an old friend.”

“You don’t pick your friends very careful.”

“I’ve got a thousand friends, Sis.”

She shrugged. “It’s none of my damn business anyhow, I guess. You’re grown. But I raised you, Jimmy. You remember that. Nothing is the way I dreamed it would be. I saw you, and I was on my way back here. I hadn’t seen you in months, and then I saw you with that woman, and I was coming back here. The days go by so slow for me. They go slow for Sid too. I guess they’re worse for Sid. I should be glad you came by tonight, instead of nagging you like this every minute.”

She looked at him with a forced smile. On an impulse he took his wallet out and took Elmo’s hundred dollars out of it. He had folded the two bills small and tucked them behind his credit cards. He unfolded them and took them over and put them in her hand.

She stared up at him blankly. “What’s this?”

“Will it help?”

“My God, yes, it will help. But you act funny. Where’d you get it?”

“For a favor for a friend.”

“What kind of a favor? Can it get you in trouble?”

“Do you want it or don’t you?”

“I want it. Thanks a lot.” She put it in the pocket of her robe. “Did you come here to give this to me?”

“Yes,” he lied.

“One thing I’m going to do with it, I guess you should know, I’m going to talk to Betty on the phone. I talked to her at Christmas, just three minutes.”

“It’s yours. Don’t ask for permission. Do anything you want with it. Maybe there’ll be more. I don’t know. I can’t promise it.”

“You don’t owe me anything. You know that.”

“I’ll help if I can. Okay?”

“If you want to, I think it’s very nice. You look awful tired, Jimmy.”

“I’m sort of jittery. It was an automobile thing, down near Everset. A bad one.”

“Oh, I heard it on the midnight news. Three people dead?”

“Yes.”

“I heard it just before you got here: I guess that … just being alive is something to be thankful for.”

“Sure. I’ll be going, Laura.”

She went to the door with him. She pecked him on the cheek, patted his shoulder and said, “Come back sooner next time, dear. You’re the only brother I’ve got. You should take better care of yourself. Come back in the daytime. Sid would love company.”

As Jimmy Wing drove toward his cottage on Cable Key, he felt better than he had all day. The nagging guilt about not having seen Laura in so many months was partially expiated. He could see her again soon. And, by giving her the money, he had somehow lightened his sense of obligation to Elmo. It made Elmo’s assignment more of a game than a necessity. Tomorrow he would talk to Kat, and tomorrow he would find out something about Dial Sinnat which would please Elmo. If the money, or a reasonable percentage of it, could go to Laura and Sid, the whole venture seemed considerably more respectable. It was good to think about her talking to Betty in California. A nice long talk, courtesy of Elmo Bliss.

Eight

KAT HUBBLE
, in a plastic and aluminum pool-side chaise at the Sinnats, tilted her head back and looked up at countless stars. They did not veer in the sickening way they had the last time she had looked. They were comfortingly steady in the heavens. She had had only two drinks before the steak and salad, but they had been made by Di Sinnat, and had hit her harder than she had expected. She had always been circumspect about drinking, less out of conservation than out of a reluctance to impair her awareness of everything around her. In this past year she had been doubly careful, having learned that it took very little alcohol to relax her control over herself. Grief was an act of balance on a high thin wire. Balance improved with practice. You hoped that one day you could walk it as casually as though it were a city sidewalk, but in the meantime you avoided anything which might imperil the careful balance.

The Sinnat twins were in bed and Natalie had gone home with
Roy and Alicia to put them to bed and stay there until Kat came home. The night was hot and still. Claire Sinnat was in the pool, floating nearby in a hammock-and-pontoon arrangement, her heels hooked on the overflow gutter. She was twenty-seven, a pretty, merry, untidy little woman, brown as peat, muscled like an acrobat, her abrupt hair calicoed by the sun. She enjoyed people and laughter and horseplay. She played with the children like another child. At times she seemed more daughter than wife to Di. Her voice was thin and penetrating, her laugh a deep bawdy bray. She had no patience with malice, and was fun to be around, except when she drank too much. Liquor fouled her language and made her venomously quarrelsome.

Eloise Cable sat on the edge of the pool in her white swimsuit, dangling her legs in the water. Superficially, Eloise seemed a lustier, more obvious version of Carol Killian. They both had tall bodies, dark hair, and an air of brooding reserve. But there was a rather pallid and sickly flavor to Carol’s slenderness. Eloise had a fearful bursting health. Somehow she always looked freshly steamed, massaged and oiled. Her tan had a glowing depth. Her figure had a glossy ripeness which no style of dress could diminish or restrain. She had all the gleaming and somehow ludicrous overemphasis of a calendar girl. She seemed both smugly aware of and obscurely disconcerted by these awesome riches, and carried herself slowly and with great care, as if she carried herself on a tray over rough ground, full to the brim. Her walk was constricted and circumspect, and there was no flirtatiousness about her. In another and more basic way she was unlike Carol Killian. Carol had the nervous, irremediable stupidity of an inbred dog. Eloise, from a far more humble background, had a tough peasant shrewdness.

If it ever astonished Eloise that she had married Martin Cable,
the third, she did not show it. And it would have taken a very perceptive observer to detect that she had married better than her background warranted. Palm County had been astonished seven years before when Martin Cable, at the age of thirty-six, had suddenly married the nineteen-year-old daughter of a garage mechanic, a girl not long out of high school, then working as a file clerk in the installment loan department of the bank.

No one had expected Martin Cable to marry, probably because, at thirty-six, he had the bearing and mannerisms and fussy habit patterns of a bachelor of fifty. The first Martin Cable had been a St. Louis businessman who had come to Palm County to fish and hunt, had bought up large tracts of land, and had eventually settled permanently in the county after his retirement from business. The second Martin Cable had been a yachtsman, a drunk, a gambler, a lecher and an international boor, slain at fifty-one by a black Miura bull in a cobblestone street in Pamplona during a fiesta, spun on a dung-caked horn snugged into the lower bowel, dying in the middle of a scream nine days later. Despite cautious testamentary restrictions, he had worked a considerable diminishment of the involved estate the third Martin Cable inherited. The bank was the executor of the estate of the second Martin Cable, and Martin the third was executor of his mother’s estate.

Martin had been a somber child, a dim and diligent young man, and had grown to become a humorless and exacting adult, a bit too jowly to be adequately described as Lincolnesque, vague and thoughtful in manner, aware of the social and civic responsibilities of his name, humble, distant, self-effacing, as is the habit of the inheritors of wealth.

Immediately after his marriage Martin took his bride on a three-month honeymoon, the only vacation of his adult life. Upon their return even the hastiest glance at his wife confirmed
the gossip which had attended their departure. Yet even in the obviousness of pregnancy, the change in the girl was total and evident—Ellie Mikersy, the gum smacker, full of prance and halloo, snickerings and bobblings and hot blue glances, was gone forever, to be replaced by Eloise, wife of Martin, a woman who, with a ruthless and astonishing success, immediately patronized those who sought to patronize her. It was a seven-and-a-half-month baby, reportedly premature, but those few who saw it during its first few days were eager to report that the birth weight had been understated by a good five pounds.

A single mystery remained. How and where had the entrapment been consummated? How had such a total wariness been overcome? Yet most of the men of the community found it understandable. Eloise could induce a mild sweat at fifty yards. It was agreed that she had made the optimum use of her natural endowments within her hunting area, and when the baby, Martin IV, matured sufficiently to disclose the unmistakable Cable features, all agreed she had met the minimum ethical standards of the pursuit. Martin IV was now six years old, and his sister, Cooky, was three. They were beautiful children, completely out of control, sweet, active and savage as weasels.

Kat’s chaise was angled toward the pool. Martin and Dial Sinnat sat at a table to her left. Eloise sat on the edge of the pool beyond her feet, with Claire afloat just beyond Eloise. The pool lights had been turned off to lower the bug count. Three flares burned atop tall metal stakes, the orange flames guttering and smoking when the night breeze stirred them, emitting a fragrance of aromatic repellent. The flames made patterns on the dark water of the pool, and on the naked glossy back of Eloise, tapered, smoothly muscled, with an ample breadth across the shoulders to carry the richness of the invisible breasts.

They had been talking, the four of them, carrying on two simultaneous
conversations, and Kat had not been listening until Di said, “You keep side-stepping, Martin. By God, I’m going to nail you down.”

The two conversations became one as Claire said, “I didn’t marry a very subtle fellow, Martin.”

“Let me try the question a new way,” Di said. “Two years ago, Martin, you didn’t get down in the mud and help us slug it out, but you were sympathetic when we were fighting that Lauderdale group. That big broad beautiful bay gives this town class. It’s distinctive. For long-run business reasons, it’s a good thing to have, particularly with the other west coast communities filling their own bays up as fast as they can so they all look alike. Now we find out you’re going along with this new group, this Palmland Development outfit. I think we’ve known each other long enough for you to stop hedging and give me some reasons.”

Martin said, vaguely, “I can’t really give you a simple answer.”

“So give me a complicated answer then. If I can’t understand it I’ll stop you.”

“Well … my responsibilities as executor of my mother’s estate come ahead of any personal feelings I might have, Dial. I’m accountable to the probate court. I’d have a certain amount of difficulty explaining why I turned down the best offer ever made for that land. Almost seven hundred feet of bay frontage at three hundred dollars a foot. It comes to more than two hundred thousand dollars. The estate retains the land to the south of that piece, and it will become much more valuable when the development is completed.”

“Is the estate hurting for cash? Are there unpaid obligations?”

“Oh, no! If that was the case, that land would have been sold off long ago. Actually, I’ve been in the position of waiting for a good offer.”

“So you could wait longer?”

“It isn’t that simple. I’d have to justify waiting, on some kind of financial basis.”

“But you have to exercise demonstrable bad judgment before the probate court gets agitated, don’t you?”

Eloise spoke then. “But Martin has other responsibilities too, Di. Responsibilities to the community, as president of the bank.”

“How did you get into this?” Di asked, astonished.

“Don’t be rude, dear,” Claire said.

“Eloise has been taking an interest in this,” Martin said proudly. “She really has had some very sound thoughts about it. Tell Di what you told me, dear.”

Eloise had turned toward the two men. “I told Martin a banker has to do more than just loan money and so forth. He ought to help get things started where a lot of people make money, like a farmer planting things. I mean it’s sort of a responsibility to the community for Martin to do something to help such a big project get started, even though we all might rather have it stay the way it is. It would be different if he was in your position, Di. But a banker has to think of the economic health of the community.”