A Flash of Green (7 page)

So when Elmo married Dellie Boushant, and moved out to the big old house on the Lemon Ridge Road, the people decided he was settling for a smaller future than some had begun to predict for him. He would be just another of the men who had married Boushant girls. Many of the successful men in Palm County had, in times past, dated one or another of the Boushant girls, but successful men had not married them.

So Elmo had married Dellie and moved out into the old house, and she had begun the bearing of his children; there were six of them now, ranging from thirteen down to two. Nowadays people pointed to Elmo’s marriage to Dellie as part of his luck and part of his success. Either the times had changed, or Elmo had changed them to suit himself.

Jimmy knew the story of how Elmo had acquired the big house and the sixty acres around it, and he suspected it was true. After Elmo had been married to Dellie a little over two years—she was twenty then and he was eight years older—Mama Boushant had dropped dead in her own kitchen, willing equal shares in the house and land to her seven daughters. Elmo was overextended at the time, so nobody knew quite how he managed it. At the conference there were thirteen of them at the huge dining room table, six daughters, six husbands and Tish, the unmarried
one. They say Elmo let the arguments run on for an hour before he took the money out of his pocket, ninety bills, one hundred dollars each. As he started counting it into six separate piles, fifteen bills in each pile, the angry talk died away and for most of the counting there was a complete silence. Elmo said, “You sign the release, and then you pick up the money, in that order. If there’s just one who won’t sign, the deal is off for the rest of you.”

Steve Lupak, Belle’s husband, put up the biggest argument, saying the land was worth an absolute minimum of two hundred an acre, which would bring it up to twelve thousand even without the house. That started the rest of them off. Elmo leaned back with his eyes half closed, almost smiling, refusing to answer any of them. They appealed to Dellie, trying to make her admit it was unfair. But she sat close beside Elmo, placid and loving and heavy with her second child, the one who would be named Annabelle. By eleven Belle and Felicia were the only holdouts. By midnight Belle and Steve still fought it. By half past midnight they too gave up, and it was Elmo’s house from then on.

Jimmy Wing had talked about that arrangement with Frannie Boushant a little over two years ago. Frannie Vernon, her name was at that time. It had come about in an unplanned way. He had known her in high school—she was two classes behind him—but had never dated her. He ran into her by accident in Miami. Borklund had sent him over to cover a Citrus Commission hearing. He had driven over, and when the hearing had been adjourned at four, he had phoned his story in and had been advised by Borklund that he might as well stay over and cover the session scheduled for the following day.

As he was walking toward his car he met Frannie on the sidewalk. It was a cool day. She wore a short cloth coat over a dark wool skirt and white angora sweater. There was such a family
resemblance between the sisters, he did not know if she was Ceil, Belle or Frannie when she smiled warmly at him and greeted him by name. She detected his slight hesitation and said, “I’m Frannie, Jim.”

They moved out of the pedestrian traffic, over toward the store fronts to talk. Like all the Boushant girls, she was dark, with high cheekbones, a long oval face, pretty eyes of deep brown, a heavy mouth which smiled readily, prominent teeth, an immature chin.

“What are you doing over here, Frannie?”

“Working. Living. God, it’s a brute town, Jim. But I had to go somewhere. The Social Security was enough to get along on. It’s pretty good when you’ve got little kids. But I was just sort of dragging through every day, and so a couple of months ago I parked the kids on Ceil, bless her, and came over here.”

Suddenly he had remembered Dick Vernon had been killed six months previously. He had worked for General Telephone as a lineman. He’d gone out after tarpon with two friends on a Sunday morning in the small cabin cruiser one of them owned, and it had blown up in the Gulf a mile off Sanibel Island. The other two, with bad flesh burns, had made it to the beach. The boat had burned to the water line and sunk. Dick’s body had been recovered the following day.

“That was a terrible thing, about Dick,” he said.

Tears stood in her eyes and she laughed in a mirthless way. “Look at me. One kind word and I’m off. It’s taking a long time to really believe it, Jim. So here I am, in Miami, which I guess is as good as any other place would be at the moment. I’m waiting tables at that restaurant down the block there, on the other side. Gee, it’s good to see somebody from home.”

“I’m covering a meeting. I have to stay over, and I was about to find a place. Can I buy you a drink, Frannie? Dinner, maybe?”

She looked thoughtful, glanced at her watch. “Sure. I guess so. But I’d like a chance to get a bath and get fixed up. You work in that place, you smell like grease all over. How about you pick me up at six-thirty?”

She told him where it was and how to get there. He went over and checked into a motel on the north end of the beach. On the off chance, he rented better and larger accommodations than he had planned to, feeling sly and semiguilty as he did so. She was ready when he stopped for her, and she did not ask him in. She looked very good to him. She wore a sleeveless dress in a fuzzy pumpkin wool, and a beige wool coat and a pillbox hat in a paisley pattern. He took her to one of the big, quiet, shadowy restaurants on the beach, a place for food and talk. They spent a long time in the cocktail lounge. She was obviously pleased to be taken out and happy to be with him. After three drinks they talked about Dick and she wept. And after that, he told her about Gloria, about this last nightmare visit, and how, after he had taken her back, they had told him it was unlikely they would ever be able to give her visiting privileges again. He told Frannie he was looking for a buyer for their house, the home she would never see again, and did not know he was weeping until his voice clotted and he felt the tickle of tears on his face. Frannie reached out to him and closed her hand around his wrist with great strength.

“Please don’t, Jim, honey.”

He looked at her with a great earnestness. “But don’t you see, the terrible thing about it is the way it’s all so phony. I’m not crying about her, Frannie. I can’t seem to cry about it as a great loss. I’m … crying about me. I’m crying at the great phony tragic figure I’m making of myself. And I think I’m crying because I want to touch your heart.”

“Let’s eat now, Jimmy. We’ve had enough drinks. Let’s get a
menu and order from here, please, and let them tell us when it’s ready, and not have any more drinks.”

At dinner they had talked of trivial things which would not trigger either of them. Over coffee, awkward as a schoolboy, he said, elaborately, “I … uh … found a pretty nice place to stay. We could have a nightcap there and I could show you my view of the pool.”

When she didn’t answer, he looked directly at her and saw her looking at him with an expression he could not read. Her head was tilted slightly. She looked sad, rueful, slightly ironic, but with an undertone of tenderness.

“Yes, Jimmy. Yes, I suppose we have to go look at the pool. There’s really nothing else we can do, is there?”

She was very quiet on the way out to the motel. They went in. He turned two subdued lights on. She threw her coat and purse on a chair, and they stood by the sliding doors and looked out at the pool. He put his hand on her waist and, after a little while, he turned her into his arms. After they had kissed with an increasing hunger, she backed away from him, sighed, smiled, took her purse and shut herself in the bathroom. He knew it would happen, and he knew it would not be very important or very good. He drew the draperies, turned out one of the lights, opened up one of the two double beds. The long fiasco of Gloria had made him jittery about all emotional relationships. He heard water running. He felt very tired. He wished he had not started it. He wished she had said no. He felt almost certain he would either be impotent, or it would all be over for him in a humiliatingly brief time. That was what had been happening to him lately.

She came out of the bathroom with her dress over her arm. She gave him a broad, friendly almost casual smile and said, “Hello, there!” and went to the closet and hung her dress and
coat on hangers. She was constructed like her sisters. Their long oval faces and the long slender necks, the narrow sloping shoulders, gave them a look of slenderness. Yet their legs were long and heavy, their hips wide, their lower torso fleshy. Frannie had a slightly sway-backed stance which made her buttocks look the more round, thrusting and muscular, yet her upper torso seemed almost too frail and narrow for the size and weight of the wide-spaced conical breasts.

She came to the bed in such a matter-of-fact way, he was more convinced that it would not be anything worth remembering for either of them.

But her skin had a silkier texture than he would have guessed, and, more importantly, she quickly proved that she was frankly and enthusiastically concerned with the pleasure she could get from it, enjoying her own sensations without pretense or artifice or coyness. She gasped her small instructions, and she gave little throaty chuckles of pleasure, and she made a running commentary on just how good everything was. Paradoxically, her apparent complete unconcern for him made it possible for him to lose all his anxiety about himself, and soon find himself sharing the same pleasures he was giving her, tasting them in ways he had not known for a long time. So when it had ended, and they lay in a sighing contentment, sharing a cigarette, their hearts slowing, their bodies worn and leaden, he felt both gratitude and a quiet pride bordering on smugness. Each time she sighed, there would be a little catch of her breath at the end of it, like a hiccup.

“So nice,” she breathed. “So fine and nice. I like the way we are, Jimmy darling. I like us a lot.” Her hair tickled the side of his throat as she turned her face toward him. “What are you laughing at?”

“Well, if at anything, at myself. There wasn’t any reason why anybody had to come over here to cover this hearing, you know.
Borklund was trying to give me a change of scene. I was getting stale and jumpy and sour.”

She kissed his throat. “Have you had a change of scene, dear?”

“Yes indeed.”

“Are you still stale and jumpy and sour?”

“No ma’am.”

“Then I must be good for you. You’re good for me. You’re the first one since I got married. I feel all over like warm marshmallow pudding. Darling, call the desk and ask them to wake us up at six.” She rolled toward him and snuggled close to him. “Then we’ll have a nap.”

During the next two months he put a lot of mileage on his car. Every time he knew he would have enough time off, he would phone her and drive over. He stayed with her at her one-room efficiency. At first she didn’t want him there. She said the room was too full of weeping, but it turned out to be all right for them. During those two months she mended him. She rebuilt the pride which the Gloria situation had eroded. She made him a whole man. They seemed to sense, simultaneously, when it was time to end it, and so they ended it affectionately and well, before it had a chance to turn into quarrels and accusations.

Later, at about the time of Van Hubble’s death, Frannie met a man named Worley in Miami, married him and came back to Palm City with him. He got a job with the Palm County Highway Department. When Jimmy Wing would see her on the street he felt a faint retrospective stir of pleasure, and he felt glad it had happened just at the time it did, and in the manner it did. Once he bought her drugstore coffee. She was carrying her third child, the first child of the new marriage. She seemed very happy.

Whenever he thought of that two months and the fast narrow road across the Everglades, and her couch that unfolded into a double bed, and the warm sleeping weight of her leg across his
hip, he would remember how they used to talk after they had made love—lie and smoke and talk in lazy intimacy of a hundred things.

He had asked her once about the way Elmo Bliss had bought the Lemon Ridge house from the rest of them so cheaply.

“Well, of course we resented it, Jimmy. But, later on, it seemed all right. Nobody even thinks about it any more. Now it seems as if … it’s just the way it should be.”

“How do you mean?”

“Elmo is sort of in charge of the family, so it seems right he should be in the home place with Dellie. Three of the brothers-in-law are older than he is, but he’s the one everybody goes to. Sickness, jobs, trouble with the kids, anything. And all of us are free to come and go just as if it was still our house. It’s sure crowded sometimes.”

“So the family approves of Elmo.”

“Gosh, not at first. Well, you know the reputation he had and all the trouble he was in all the time. We didn’t want Dellie marrying him. She was only eighteen. But we couldn’t stop her. Dellie is a strange one. She’s never had much to say, but she’s always had this idea that she was going to have a lush life, like a queen or something. She just knew it was going to be that way. We used to laugh at her. But the way it worked out, she’s certainly living a lot higher on the hog than anybody else in the family, I’m telling you. We never would have guessed she’d get that kind of a life by marrying Elmo. He’s real good to her. I mean if you don’t count keeping her pregnant most of the time. She’s due for number six any day now, but I’ll say this, she doesn’t seem to mind. She’s got all the help she can use with the house and the kids, and she’s never up before noon, and she certainly keeps her figure. I guess he’s sweet to her, but … you know Elmo. I don’t know if she
knows about other women. Or if … she’d let herself know, or let herself wonder. Dellie is a realist.”

“So is Elmo, I guess.”

“I don’t know what Elmo is. He has that way of talking to you. When he talks to you, you feel as if you matter more to him than anybody else on earth. He really listens to you. Not very many people listen. He seems to really care about you. I guess that’s what makes him so good with women. When a girl is with Elmo, she feels … I don’t know, more alive. You know it’s an act, but you can’t help yourself. You don’t ever really know if he likes you. Nobody knows. We talk about him a lot, in the family. The way he helps us all, that seems to be kind of an act too.”