Bright Orange for the Shroud (2 page)

A knife blade grating along a rib bone is a sound so ugly and so personal it can come right into your sleep and wake you up ten nights running.

I got a good fit on the biggest piece, drilled it, and was setting the long bronze screws home when I heard a tentative and hollow call from dockside.

“Trav? Hey, Trav? Hey, McGee?”

I turned and walked to the aft end of my sun deck and looked down at the dock. A tall, frail, sallow-looking fellow in a wrinkled tan suit too large for him stared up at me with an anxious little smile that came and went—a mendicant smile, like dogs wear in the countries where they kick dogs.

“How are you, Trav?” he said.

And just as I was about to ask him who he was, I realized,
with considerable shock, that it was Arthur Wilkinson, dreadfully changed.

“Hello, Arthur.”

“Can I … may I come aboard?”

“Certainly. Why ask?”

The gangplank chain was down. He came across, stepped onto the afterdeck, tottered, tried to smile up at me, grabbed at emptiness and collapsed onto the teak deck with a knobbly thud. I got down there in two jumps, rolled him over. He’d abraded the unhealthy flesh under one eye in the fall. I felt the pulse in his throat. It was slow and steady. Two fat teenage girls came and stared from the dock, snickering. See the funny drunk, like on television.

I opened the aft door to the lounge, gathered Arthur up and toted him in. It was like picking up a sack of featherdry two-by-fours. He smelled stale. I took him all the way through and put him down on the bed in the guest stateroom. The air-conditioning was chill against my bare sweat. I felt Arthur’s head. He didn’t seem to have a fever. I had never seen a man so changed by one year of life.

His mouth worked, and he opened his eyes and tried to sit up. I pushed him back. “You sick, Arthur?”

“Just weak, I guess. I guess I just fainted. I’m sorry. I don’t want to be …”

“A burden? A nuisance? Skip the social graces, Arthur.”

I guess you always look for a little spirit, a little glint of the fang on even the most humble dog in town.

“I’m very polite,” he said listlessly. “You know that, Trav. A very polite man.” He looked away. “Even … even when he was killing me, I think I was probably very, very polite.”

He faded away then, like a puff of steam, quickly gone, his
eyes not quite closed. I put my fingertips against the side of his throat—the pulse was still there.

As I was wondering just what the hell to do next, he came floating back up, frowned at me. “I can’t cope with people like that. She must have known that. Right from the start she must have known about me.”

“Who tried to kill you?”

“I guess it really doesn’t matter very much. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been the next one, or the one after that. Let me rest a little while and then I’ll go. There wasn’t any point in coming to you. I should have known that too.”

Suddenly I recognized a part of that stale smell about him. It was a little bit like freshly baked bread, but not as pleasant. It’s the distinctive smell of starvation, the effluvium of the sweat ducts when the body has begun to feed on itself.

“Shut up, Arthur. When did you eat last?”

“I’m not real sure. I think … I don’t know.”

“Stay where you are,” I told him. I went to my stainless steel galley, looked in a locker, picked out a tin of clear, rich British broth, poured it into a pan and turned the burner on high. As it heated I looked in on him again. He gave me that reappearing nervous smile. He had a facial tic. His eyes filled with tears, and I went back to the broth. I poured it into a mug, hesitated, then tapped the liquor locker and added a fair jolt of Irish whiskey.

After I helped him get propped up, I saw he could hold it all right in both hands and sip it.

“Good.”

“Take it slow, Arthur. I’ll be right back.”

I sluiced the sawdust and sweat off in a fast shower in the
huge stall the original owner had built aboard the
Busted Flush
, put on denims and a T-shirt and checked him again. The mug was empty. He was slightly flushed. I opened the promised bottle of dark beer and went back in and sat on the foot of the bed.

“What the hell have you done to yourself, Arthur?” His voice blurred. “Too much, maybe.”

“Maybe I asked it the wrong way. What has Wilma done to you?”

Again the tears of weakness. “Oh Christ, Trav, I …”

“We’ll go into it later, boy. You get out of the clothes and into a hot shower. Then you eat some eggs. Then you sleep. Okay?”

“I don’t want to be a …”

“Arthur, you could begin to bore me. Shut up.”

After he was asleep, I took a good look at his arms. Big H could pull a man down quickly. No needle marks. But it didn’t have to mean anything. Only the eyedropper group, the ones who pick the big vein open with a pin, acquire scars. Any tidy soul with a decent hypo and enough sense to use an alcohol swab afterward can go unmarked indefinitely, as any urban cop can tell you. He was still a little grimy. It was going to take more than one shower, or two. The beard stubble didn’t help either. I checked through his clothes. They had been cheap originally. The labels were from Naples, Florida. He had a flat cigarette package with three one-inch butts carefully stowed therein. He had a match folder from Red’s Diner in Homestead. He had two pennies and some lint. I rolled his shoes up
in the clothing, carried the bundle out at arm’s length and dropped it into the trash bin on the dock. Then washed my hands.

The sun was going down. I went topside. The cockpit cocktail hour, with music and girl-laughter from neighbor cruisers. As I drove the remaining screws home without working up a sweat, I kept thinking of Arthur Wilkinson as I had seen him last, over a year ago.

A big fellow, big as I am, but not the same physical type. Slow, awkward, uncoordinated—a mild and rather pedantic guy. I could remember coming across a few of the same breed way back in high school basketball days. Coaches would hustle them on the basis of size alone. They were very earnest, but they had no balance. You could catch them just right, with the hip, and they would go blundering and crashing off the court. For them, high school was the final experience in any body-contact sport.

Arthur Wilkinson had been a member of the group for a few months. I met him when he was trying to decide whether or not to invest some money in a marina enterprise. He was going around, talking earnestly to boat people. He surveyed me at drinking time, and stayed, and came back other times—came back once too often, perhaps, that time somebody had brought Wilma around.

He had told me about himself. Upstate New York boy. Little Falls. Department store family. Got a degree from Hamilton College. Went to work in the store. Became engaged to a doctor’s daughter. Didn’t particularly like or dislike the department store trade. Future all lined out, nailed down. Then it all fell apart, one piece at a time, beginning with the death of his widower father, then his girl marrying another guy, until,
restless, irritable, unhappy, he had sold out his controlling interest to a chain, liquidated other properties and headed for Florida.

He got along fine with the group. He was amiable and very decent. We felt protective about him. He had been schooled for survival in Little Falls, and might indeed have been formidably adapted to that environment, but away from it there was something displaced about him. He was perfectly frank about his problem. He had left, after taxes, almost a quarter of a million dollars. It was in good solid securities, bringing in, after personal income taxes, nearly nine thousand a year. But he felt it shameful to squat on it. He wanted to move it around, put some work with it, make it produce. Some of the genes of his great granddaddy kept prodding him.

The group changes; the flavor remains the same. When he was in the pack, he was the gatherer of driftwood for the beach picnics, the one who drove drunks home, the one who didn’t forget the beer, the understanding listener who gets girl-tears on his beach coat, the pigeon good for the small loan, the patsy who comes calling and ends up painting the fence. All groups seem to have one. He had a fair complexion, blushed readily. He always looked scrubbed. He laughed at all the jokes, nearly always at the right place, even though he had heard them before. In short, a very nice guy, that Arthur Wilkinson. Part of the group, but nobody got really close to him. He had that little streak of reserve, of keeping the ultimate secrets. Liquor might have unlocked him except for one thing. When he took one over his limit, he fell smilingly, placidly, irrevocably asleep. And smiled in his sleep.

I could remember that for a little while Arthur and Chookie McCall had something going. She had just finished a dancing
engagement at the Bahama Room at the Mile O’Beach. She’s big, beautifully proportioned, vastly healthy, a dynamo brunette with a stern and striking face. Chook had fought with Frank Durkin and he had taken off and she was rebounding, and certainly Arthur was a better deal than Frank. Without a dime, Arthur would have been worth nine Frank Durkins. Why do so many great gals latch onto a Frank Durkin to mess up their lives? When she got a three-week gig up at Daytona Beach perhaps Arthur could have gone with her, but he didn’t make the right moves. Then Wilma Ferner moved in when Chook was away.…

There are a lot more Arthur Wilkinsons in the world than there are Wilma Ferners. And this Wilma was a classic example of the type. Little, but with a bone structure so delicate she made a hundred and five pounds look like a lush abundance. Fine white-blonde hair always in that initial state of disarray which creates the urge to mess it up completely. Husky theatrical voice which covered about two octaves in what was, for her, normal coversation. Lots of anecdotes, in which she played every part, face as mobile as a clown’s, making lots of gestures, flinging herself around, the gestures seemingly awkward at times until one noticed that they kept that ripe little body in a constant state of animation and display, a project given a continuous assist by her wardrobe. There were little traces of accent in her normal speech, when she wasn’t imitating someone, but it seemed to vary from day to day. Hold a small clear wineglass of Harvey’s Bristol Milk up to the light and it is pretty close to the color of her eyes. And, once you
got past all the crinkling and sparkling and winking, her eyes had just about as much expression as still wine.

She came in on a big Huckins out of Savannah, amid boat guests in various conditions of disrepair, much of the damage evidently being accomplished by people beating people in the face with their fists. She moved into a hotel room ashore, in the Yankee Clipper, and after the cruiser took off without her, she somehow managed to affix herself to our group, saying that the lovely people on the Huckins were going to pick her up on their way back from Nassau, and she had begged off because she could not
endure
Nassau one more
stinking
time.

In that venerable and useful show biz expression, she was always on. The gals seemed to have an instinctive wariness of her. The men were intrigued. She claimed to have been born in Calcutta, mentioned the tragic death of a father in the Australian diplomatic service, mentioned directly and obliquely her own careers as set designer in Italy, fashion coordinator in Brussels, photographer’s model in Johannesburg, society and fashion editor on a newspaper in Cairo, private secretary to the wife of one of the presidents of Guatemala. As she cooed, twisted, bounced, exclaimed, imitated, chuckled, I must admit that I had a few moments of very steamy curiosity. But there were too many warning flags up. The pointed nails curved too extremely over the soft tips of the little fingers. The poses and pauses were too carefully timed. And there was just a bit too much effervescence and charm. Perhaps if she had come along a few years earlier—before I had seen and learned all kinds of con, before I had found some of the sicknesses no clinic can identify …

So we wondered who would nail it. Or vice versa. She was
carrying a weapon at port arms, waiting for a target of opportunity.

I remember a very late night when I sat alone with my hairy economist friend named Meyer in the cockpit of his small cruiser which he christened the
John Maynard Keynes
, after a beach time when Wilma had been so totally on she had sparkled like the moonlit surf.

“Wonder how old she is?” I asked idly.

“My friend, I have kept meticulous track of all pertinent incidents. To have done what she claims to have done, she is somewhere between one hundred and five and one hundred and seven. I added five more years tonight.”

“Psychopathic liar, Meyer?”

“An inexact science uses inexact terms. I spit on parlor expertise, Travis.”

“Sure. I have one suspicion, though. There is so much merchandise in the showcase there’s nothing left back in the storeroom.”

“I wouldn’t gamble on that either.”

“What the hell would you gamble on, Meyer?”

“A man with no trace of the feminine in him, with no duality at all, is a man without tenderness, sympathy, gentleness, kindness, responsiveness. He is brute-mean, a hammer, a fist. McGee, what is a woman with no trace of the masculine in her makeup?”

“Mmm. Merciless in a different way?”

“You show promise, McGee. The empathy of kindness is a result of the duality, not of the feminine trace. Our strange friend, the Alabama Tiger, is maneuvering the lady just right. And she resents it. He moves in with a forked stick, and he’ll pin her head to the ground and then pick her up in such a way
she can’t get her fangs into him. Maybe women are the only things in the world he knows so well.”

I told Meyer he was crazy, that anybody could see that the Alabama Tiger and Wilma Ferner had disliked each other on sight. Meyer wouldn’t argue it. On the adjoining deck, in a big rich Wheeler, the Alabama Tiger maintains what is by now the longest floating houseparty in the world. He is a huge, sloppy guy, once a murderous All-American tackle, who later made a pot of money and decided to spend it on boats, booze and broads. He stays blandly, cheerfully tight during all waking hours. He has a face like crude stone sculpture, carved into a mild grin. In forty seconds he can make you feel as if you are the most interesting person he has ever met, and you will feel as if you never met anyone more understanding. He could charm tenement landlords, post office employees, circus dwarfs and tax assessors.