Bright Orange for the Shroud (4 page)

After I agreed, there was a last inch of the drink silence, and I knew I had to say something about Frank Durkin. Like being forced to discuss ointment with somebody with an incurable skin rash.

“Sorry to hear Frank took such a long count.”

She sprang to her feet and gave me a look Custer must have gotten very tired of before they chopped him up. “It wasn’t
fair
, goddam it! The guy was being very smartass, and Frankie didn’t owe him any fifty dollars. It was a mistake. When he followed him out into the parking lot, all Frankie was going to do was scare him. But he jumped the wrong way and Frankie ran over him. What they did, Travis, believe me, they judged him on the other times he’s been in trouble. And that’s unconstitutional, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.”

“He has that terrible temper. Right in court he tried to get his hands on the judge. Believe me, he’s his own worst enemy. But this isn’t fair at all.”

What could anyone tell her? To forget him? She’d swing from the floor and loosen your teeth. The only times she ever tried to forget him was after their savage quarrels. She was a
very fine woman, and Frankie Durkin was no damned good. Sponged off her. Kept her on the hook with promises of marriage. Fancied himself crafty and managed to outsmart himself in most deals. Then cursed his luck. I would have said his luck was excellent—because he would have long since been caged or fried as a murderer if, in several known instances, he’d achieved his heart’s desire. I saw him in his fury once. His pale blue eyes turned white as milk. His underprivileged face went slack as taffy. And, grunting with each breath, he began to try to kill a friend of mine. Could have made it if they’d been alone. As he wasn’t worth breaking any hand bones on, I took the billy I kill toothy fish with and bounced it off his skull. After three lumps he was still trying to crawl toward Mack’s throat, but the fourth one pacified him. When he woke up he seemed unfocused, like a man after a hard fever. And had no hard feelings at all.

“How is he taking it?”

“Real hard, Trav. He keeps telling me he can’t stand it, he’s got to do something.” She sighed. “But there’s nothing he can do. Maybe … when he gets out, he’ll be ready to settle down. Let’s get out of here.”

Miss Agnes drifted us silently over to the mainland, to the Open Range, a place disfigured by mass production Texas folk art, steer horns, branding irons, saddle hardware, coiled lariats and bullwhips. But the booths are deep and padded, the lights low, the steaks prime and huge. Chook ordered hers so raw I was grateful for the low candlepower of the booth lamp. I invested some additional ditch-Arthur money in a bottle of burgundy. I have seen Chook under other circumstances do the
social-eating routine. But with me she could follow her inclination and eat in the busy, dedicated, appreciative silence of a farmhand or roustabout, chugging her way deftly through tossed, baked and extra rare, and at last leaning back from the emptiness to give me an absent, dreamy smile, and stifle a generous belch.

Judging I was at the exact moment, I said, “Small favor?”

“Anything at all, Trav darling.”

“I’m cutting you in on a lame duck who showed up. In bad, bad shape. It would be sort of for old time’s sake for you.”

“Who?”

“Arthur Wilkinson.”

I thought I saw a momentary softness in her eyes before they turned fierce. She leaned forward. “I tell you what I am not. I am not a trash basket. I am no place you can dump the leavings from that pig.”

“Put your wheels down, Chookie. Who’s the most naïve little chick in your troupe?”

“Huh? Well … Mary Lou King.”

“She engaged?”

“Sort of. What is this, anyway?”

“Now suppose say … Rock Hudson came barreling in at her, all guns blazing. What would Mary Lou do?”

Chook giggled. “Gawd, she’d roll over like a dead bug.”

“I’m under a handicap. I never did find out what status you reached with Arthur. He’d never volunteer that sort of information, as you well know. It was my guess it got pretty humid.”

She studied her nails. “When Frankie took off that time, he busted my place up before he went. Everything. He even tore up my scrapbooks. He said I’d never lay eyes on him again as
long as I lived. And I don’t even know what it was we were fighting about. Okay, so I needed a gentle guy. Not for sex. I’m not cold—maybe I’m more the other way than I should be, but, hell, I can always put on old music and dig out old routines and a practice uniform, work hard for a few hours and sleep like a baby.” She gave me a quick dark glance. “I guess I should be honest. Mostly it was to have somebody close, but that’s no reason to knock the other part of it. And maybe I was trying to use him to tear loose from Frankie. At first I told him all my lousy troubles. And we took some walks. And then after one walk, we ended up in my bed. And if I left it entirely up to Arthur, we wouldn’t have. I had to make it easy for him without letting him catch on to what I was doing. You know me, Trav. I’m not a pig. I suppose … if I taught third grade in Webster Falls, I wouldn’t last too long. But in the business I’m in … I’m thought square. You know?”

“I know.”

For just an instant I had a feeling of waste and loss. There was so much shrewdness, native intelligence, perception there. The awareness of self, undistorted, a virtue growing ever more rare in our times. It made you wonder what this creature of such vast vitality could have become if she had taken some other direction with her life. Too many of the good ones aren’t being used up all the way.

But a little personal resonance got to me. Because I’d never found the right way of using myself up. So I had settled for a variation of the lush life, bumming along the golden strand until funds sagged too low, then venturing forth to clip the clip artists, wresting the stolen meat—legally stolen usually—out of the bandit jowls, then splitting the salvage down the middle with the victim—who, without the services of
McGee, would have had to settle for nothing, which, as I have often pointed out, is considerably less than half.

It isn’t a very respectable dedication. So just say it’s a living. Sometimes I get a very faint echo of the knight errant psychosis. And try to make more out of it than is there. But everybody’s hall closet is full of lances and shields and other tourney gear. The guy who sells you insurance gets singed by his own secret kind of dragon breath. And his own Maid Marian yoo-hoos him back to the castle tower.

Maybe, somewhere along the line, I could have gone the other route. But you get a taste for the hunt. You keep wondering how close the next one is going to get to you. And you have to see. And nothing can slow the reflexes like the weight of mortgages, withholding, connubial contentment, estate program, regular checkups and puttering around your own lawn.

But now they are phasing out the hunters. Within this big complex culture, full of diodes, paperclips, account numbers, they are earnestly boarding up the holes, sealing the conduits, installing bugs and alarms in every corridor. In a few years there’ll be no room left for the likes of McGee. They’ll grab him, carry him away and adjust him to reality, and put him to work at something useful in one of the little cubicles in the giant structure.

So who are you to think of a fuller life for Miss Chookie McCall?

“Could it have worked out with Arthur?” I asked her.

She shrugged those strong shoulders. “He’s almost five years older, but he seemed kind of like a kid. I don’t know. So considerate and so … grateful. He was getting to be a better lover. It was like at first, getting him to think things were his
idea. Trav, honest to God, what was I supposed to do? Ask him to please come to Jacksonville with me? I mean there’s pride too. He wanted to. But he thought it wouldn’t be right. I wanted him there. Maybe it was like putting up a wall, a little at a time, shutting out the hurt from Frankie. Maybe we could have made the wall thick enough and tall enough. Maybe not. Maybe when Frankie came back, it would have been the same for me, Arthur or no Arthur, Frankie crooking his finger and I crawl to him. I won’t ever know, will I, because Arthur didn’t go up to Jax with me, and so we didn’t have that three weeks and we didn’t have the four months back here before Frankie came back, broke and sick and mean as a basket of snakes. I came back and Wilma had Arthur skinned and nailed to the bar, and the son of a bitch shook hands with me as if he couldn’t remember my name. Pride still counts with me. I am not going to be a damned rescue mission, Trav. Believe me. Go look for a little mother somewhere else. He made his lousy choice.”

“Okay. I see your point. But just stop by the boat and take a look at him.”

“No! You don’t get clever with me. Once in Akron the dressing room was alive with mice, and I set a trap. All it did was maim one little bastard, and three weeks later, after I got him back on his feet, I turned him loose. He’d lick peanut butter off my fingertip. Trav, I wouldn’t go anywhere near Arthur.”

When I got back to the
Busted Flush
with Chook, Arthur Wilkinson was as I had left him, the note still there. I put on the overhead light. I heard her suck air. Her strong cool fingers clamped on my hand. I looked at her thoughtful profile, saw her tanned forehead knotted into a frown, white teeth indenting her lower lip. I turned the light off and turned her, and we went back to the lounge, two closed doors between us and Arthur.

“You should get a doctor to look at him!” she said indignantly.

“Maybe. Later on. No fever. He passed out, as I told you, but he said he just felt faint. Malnutrition is my guess.”

“Maybe you got a license to practice? Trav, he looks so horrible! Like a skull, like he was dying instead of sleeping. How do you know?”

“That he’s sleeping? What else?”

“But what could have happened to him?”

“Chook, that was a very nice guy, and I don’t think he had the survival drive you and I have. He’s the victim type. Wilma was his mousetrap, and nobody cared if he got maimed. No peanut butter. We had one in Korea. A big gentle kid fresh out of the Hill School. Everybody from my platoon sergeant on down tried to get the green off him before he got nailed. But one rainy afternoon he got suckered by the fake screaming we’d gotten used to, and he went to help and got stitched throat to groin with a machine pistol. I heard about it and went over as they were sticking the litter onto a jeep. He died right then, and the look on his face was not pain or anger or regret. He just looked very puzzled, as if he was trying to fit this little incident into what he’d been taught at home and couldn’t quite make it. It’s the way some earnest people take a practical joke.”

“Shouldn’t we see if Arthur is really all right?”

“Let him get his sleep. Fix you a stinger?”

“I don’t know. No. I mean yes. I’m going to take another look at him.”

Five minutes later I tiptoed into the companionway beyond the head. The guest stateroom door was closed. I heard the tone of her voice, not the words. Gentleness. He coughed and answered her and coughed again.

Back in the lounge I locked the big tuner into WAEZ-FM, and fed it into the smaller speakers at low volume, too low to drive my big AR-3’s. I stretched out on the curve of the big yellow couch, took small bites of the gin stinger, listened to a string quartet fit together the Chinese puzzle pieces of some
ice-cold Bach, and smiled a fatuous eggsucking smile at my prime solution to the Arthur problem.

In about twenty minutes she joined me, eyes red, smile shy, walking with less assurance than her custom. She sat on the end of the couch beyond my feet and said, “I fixed him some warm milk and he went right to sleep again.”

“That’s nice.”

“I guess it’s just being exhausted and half starved and heartsick, Trav.”

“That was my guess.”

“The poor dumb bastard.”

“Outclassed.”

I got her stinger out of the freezer and brought it to her. She sipped it. “There isn’t anything else you can do, of course,” she said.

“Beg your pardon?”

She looked at me and opened her eyes very wide. “Get it back, of course. They cleaned him clean. That’s why he came to you.”

I got up and went over to the tuner and killed Mr. Bach. I stood in front of Chook. “Now just one minute there, woman. Hold it. There’s no …”

“For God’s sake, stop looking as if you’re going to bray like a wounded moose, McGee. We talked about you once.”

“Make some sense.”

“He wondered about you. You know. What you
do
. So I sort of told him.”

“You sort of told him.”

“Just how you step in when people get the wrong end of the stick, and you keep half of what you can recover. McGee,
why in the world do you think he came right to you! Could anything be more obvious? Why do you think that poor whipped creature crawled across the state and fell on your doorstep? You can’t
possibly
turn him down.”

“I can give it a very good try, honey.”

Silence. She finished the drink. She clacked the empty glass down. She came up off the couch, moved close, stood tall, fixed me with a poisonous stare, upslanted, fists on hips. “Did I do you a favor coming here?” she said in almost a whisper. “Do you owe me for that, and for one or two other small things I could name? Do you want me to go after them myself? I will, you know. I’m calling you on this one, you big ugly lazy jerk. They smashed him. They gutted him. And there’s no other place he can turn.” Giving emphasis to each word by rapping my chest with a hard knuckle, she said, “You-are-going-to-help-that-man.”

“Now listen …”

“And I want a piece of the action, Travis.”

“I have no intention of …”

“The first thing we have to do is get him on his feet, and pry every living piece of information out of him.”

“How about that weekly television thing you …”

“I’m two tapes ahead, and I can go down there and do three more in one day. Trav, they didn’t leave him a
dime
! It was some kind of land development thing. Over near Naples.”

“Maybe by fall …”

“Travis!”

By the following Saturday afternoon the
Busted Flush
was swinging on two hooks in Florida Bay, two miles off Candle
Key, all larders stocked, five hundred gallons in the fresh water tanks. With alterations from time to time, I’ve tried to make the old barge-type houseboat ever more independent of shore-side services. Except when home at Bahia Mar, I like to avoid the boat basin togetherness. Under one hatch I have a whole area paved with husky batteries, enough of them so that I can stay at anchor and draw on them for four days before they begin to get a little feeble. When they’re down, I can use them to start up an electric trickle-feed generator which can bring them back up in six hours. If I ever get careless enough to run them all the way down, I can break out the big 10 kw gasoline generator and use it to get the electric one started. At anchor I switch everything over to 32 V. I can’t run the air-conditioning off the batteries, but I can run it off the gas generator. Then it is a decision as to which will be the most annoying, the heat or the noise.