One Fearful Yellow Eye (28 page)

That night we drank, we ate, we danced one dance at the hotel, and came walking back along the beach, hand-holding, shoes in the spare hand, walking in the wet where the tide had run out.

We sat on the fiberglass deck of the canted sailboat and looked at the stars. "What can scare you," she said, "when you squeak through, when you know how narrow the escape was, is all the crazy accidents and coincidences that got you to where you are. You let me out of a dark room.

I'd have stayed in there thinking it was just as dark every where. Son of a gun! If you hadn't found Gloria long ago and put her back together, if she hadn't gotten a job at that place where Daddy was staying... It can drive you out of your mind. There were so many choices and you don't know why, really, they went one way instead of another way. Even take something like Daddy not marrying Gretchen. It could have gone either way. Oh, how all the tongues would have flapped! But that wouldn't have bothered him. He was too busy to care what people thought."

I got up restlessly and walked about ten feet, sat on my heels, scooped up sand, and drifted it through my fingers.

Is something the matter?" "I don't know."

"Travis, for a week at least you've been going off somewhere. I have to repeat things I say. May I say something?"

"Why not?"

"If you're getting broody about this girl, don't waste yourself. I love you and I always will, in a special and private and personal way that is sort of... off to one side of what the rest of my life is.

going to be. One day this ends and I go back and I tear my painting all the way down to bedrock, and then I put it together again with some life and juice and fire in it, and I am going to look up and there is going to be some great guy there who wants the kind of life I want, and we are going to breed up some fat babies, and laugh a lot, and get old and say it was all great right up to the end."

"I wasn't worried about you turning into an albatross, kid. I'm worried about all the little things that didn't fit right. That Gorba thing is over and it isn't over. I got some answers. I got some salvage. I missed part of it. When you said that your father might have married Gretchen, I got a little resonance off that. Maybe she would have made him a good little wife. She got along with you and your brother. And she had her mama there to keep things to rights. Anna Ottlo had her widower employer in a great bind. But she worked out an alternate choice, the Kemmer boy.

Why?"

"Well, wouldn't you say it was just that sort of... humility of the Old-World German? Respect for the learned doctor?"

"But she was in the New World where things are not the same. And you always want a better deal for your kids than you got."

"She was very harsh with Gretchen."

"And damned indifferent to her own grandchildren. It doesn't fit that... kind of hearty; hausfrau cook-up-a-storm image. Flour on the elbows, goodies in the oven, house clean as a whistle."

"Maybe she knew Daddy would never stand still for it."

"That's not my image of him. I think he had quite a load of guilt out of pronging that girl-child while your mother was dying, and the pregnancy meant more guilt, and marriage would have cleared it all off the books."

"Does it really make any difference?"

"With no life of her own really, except through your father, who was a damned busy man, and probably used the house the way other men use a residential club, you'd think Anna would want to be closer to her own daughter and the grandbabies."

"Oh, I think she had something else going for her."

"What do you mean?"

"I hadn't thought of it in a long time. Roger was home from school on vacation. He went to some kind of a party and then he went to a place where people parked and smooched. When he left he turned his lights on too soon. That's bad form. Lo and behold, they shone into a car and right on Anna. He didn't see the man. The next day he tried to kid her about it. She took such a clout at him it scared him. He barely got his face out of the way. She had a grater in her hand and he told me it would have taken the hide and meat off right down to the bone. He said it scared her too. She cried and said it was because she was so insulted. She was a decent woman. She did not do things like that or go to such places. He told me he was positive it was Anna. But he didn't try to argue ,the point or kid her about it, not after that first time. She was very upset. We agreed that she'd probably been out there. It seemed pretty hilarious that she should have a boyfriend. I'm just telling this to show that... she could have had other emotional outlets. I know we weren't one. She kept us warm, clean, and fed, and that was it."

"She was apparently very fond of Gloria. But she didn't tell Gloria that Gretchen and Gorba had made it legal, and she didn't tell her that better relations had been established and that she was visiting the family almost every Sunday."

"She was never one for talking about herself. I remember when we were studying World War II and the rise of National Socialism I tried to get her to tell me about Germany when Hitler took over before the war started and she just wouldn't talk about it. She said it was too sad and terrible. She said that she and Gretchen had been in a camp, for a while and it was better to forget such things. Her husband and all her other relatives were dead and she wanted to forget it, not talk about it."

So I dropped it, admired the stars. We stacked our clothes on the sailboat and went skinnydipping, and then went into the dark cottage and rinsed off the salt in a shared shower,
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and scrambled into the hasty bed.

As I was bobbling along in that dark current toward sleep Heidi walked her fingers along my chest and said, "Mister? You awake?"

"Oh, come on!"

"Don't leap to conclusions, friend. You haven't got the strength. I just remembered something.

When we were helping get the house shaped up for Gloria to come back from the hospital, I was talking to Susan about the young kids, about relatives and so on. I asked about Freddy's grandmother Kemmer in Florida arid if she'd let her know that her ex-daughter-in-law had died.

And Susan said that Karl Kemmer's mother had died back in nineteen sixty or sixty-one. So I said I was positive that was who Anna had gone to visit in Florida, her old friend. Susan said it must have been some other Kemmer. I was going to ask Gloria about it if she seemed up to that kind of talk, and then I forgot it completely until now."

So I was awake. Awake a long time. She drifted off. She purred into my throat. Her arm twitched and she muttered something. When I made the decision, I fell asleep. I told her in the morning over second coffee. Her face fell, but she tried to whip up a gallant smile."

"No, dear girl. Just because we check out of here doesn't mean you're going to get away just yet.

I've got a shamefully neglected houseboat sitting up there in Fort Lauderdale, neglected mostly on account of you. You're going to earn your keep. You're going to learn how to chip and scrape and sand and paint, and when the Busted Flush looks brand-new, you can go back to Illinois."

The smile became real. "I work cheap. Board and bed."

"So okay. Start packing."

"You know, you keep saying that."

THIRTEEN

COMMUNICATION WAS far simpler back on the main land.

I phoned Glory from the lounge of the Flush on Sunday a little before noon. She sounded a little more like herself, but uncertain, subdued.

"But where are you, Trav?"

"Back aboard the Flush. Taking my ease. There's a tall exhausted blonde puttering around in the background scouring the copper pots and muttering about mildew on the cabin curtains."

"We've all enjoyed her crazy... postcards. Darn it, I have to keep reaching for words."

"Otherwise?"

"Not so bad. Some bad little spots. Like the other day I was looking in the bathroom mirror and my face just started to sort of melt and slide off. It's like... parts of nightmares happen in the daytime. Heidi sounds happy as a clam."

"I beat her when she gets out of line. I'll let you say hello in a minute. Look, what I called about, where did Anna go?"

"That's a strange thing, Travis. I just don't know. I had an address she left, care of Mrs. Hans Kemmer in Winter Haven, and I wrote there and it came back address unknown, and then Susan said that Mrs. Kemmer died years ago. It's weird, isn't it?"

"Very."

"I have a nightmare about her, over and over. She keeps clapping her hands in front of my face and telling me I'm burning up, that my skin is getting so hot I'm going to set fire to anything I get near."

"Maybe it was the fever you ran. How's your group there?"

"Great. Really great!"

I summoned Heidi onto the line. She took the phone and, talking, slid onto the long yellow couch and ended up in a teenage posture, on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, sheaf of pale hair obscuring the phone, upright calves slowly scissoring. She wore white work pants with old paint stains thereon. The soles of her bare feet were dusty. One of the two snaps were undone on the back of her bandana halter. She and Glory compared climates, and she told Glory that St. Croix was the absolute of all time. I sat and watched her and pondered the disappearance of Anna Ottlo: When I paid attention again, Heidi was talking to Susan. I looked at her slender brown back between halter and waistband, at the almost invisible sunwhitened fuzz along that graceful curve that deepened and then lifted to the bisected heartiness of the splendid bottom. I felt the inner wrench, the sideways slide, the feeling there was not quite enough air in the whole lounge to fill the lungs of McGee. I moved over and wedged beside her and she slid over to make room. I ran a. slow thumb down the crease of the strong back across the little knots of the vertebrae. Her breath caught and broke in the middle of a word and picked up again and when I rested my hand quietly upon her I felt that inner humming that had begun, like the inaudible idling of the great engine of the yellow car of long long back.

Keep this one, I thought. It'll keep well. It has one hell of a shelf life: At the final good-bye, I popped the single snap with my thumbnail and the two halves of the halter slid away. She faked collapse, face down. "Nothing but work, work, work," she grumbled.

"Jeez!" Then rolled around grinning to reach out with both arms, and the phone bumped onto the rug and was tugged toward the desk by the coiled accordion phone wire.

Monday morning I phoned Dr. Hayes Wyatt and he phoned back in a half-hour and I found out he had not heard Glory's dream about Anna Ottlo. He said she was coming along nicely and if she could keep on coming back at the present rate, she should be quite herself by June. The dream interested him. I asked some questions.

"Yes, Mr. McGee, under any of the psychedelics the subject is extraordinarily suggestible. If she could be made to believe that her body heat was such that her clothes and the things around her were beginning to smolder, she might very well run out onto that winter beach, shedding her clothes."

"What about the hand clapping?"

"Yes. Acceptable technique to capture and hold the attention long enough for the suggestion to be made and accepted."

I looked down at my brown hand at the two pale little puncture marks, still visible, the scars from the bite of the terrified thing in the howl of wind on that beach. I explained the curious thing we had learned about Anna. I asked him if he could find out if Gloria could remember anything that could have happened the morning of that day or the evening of the day before which might have given Anna some cause. He said he would try, but if Gloria began to get agitated he would have, to wait for another time.

When the call came through at four o'clock, Heidi was over on the beach with a hairy friend of mine named Meyer. The wind had died and the Florida day had warmed up, but not enough for swimming. When Meyer had first seen her he had shaken his head slowly from side to side. He had clucked. He had sighed. He had said, "Now if Vogue only used a centerfold girl." He pointed a thumb at me, his eyes still on hers. "That one. He shouldn't have such luck. He shouldn't have such good taste. He brings you around and all of a sudden I am a bitter old man."

In resignation he had put his hand out, and she had laughed, moved in, kissed him a good hearty smack and said, "I hate shaking hands with bitter old men, Meyer. "

"I swoon," he had said. He offered his arm. "Come with me to a saloon. I need sustenance. Let this aging beach boy here stew in his own jealous venom." And off they had gone, laughing, the best of friends. Instant Meyer.

Dr. Hayes Wyatt called back and apologized about being tied up and not getting to me sooner.

"But I don't have much. It's all pretty shadowy in her memory: Seems she got up very early that morning. Much earlier than usual. And she found Mrs. Ottlo in Fort's study, sitting at his desk, just putting a handwritten letter and some kind of legal document into an envelope. As she was holding it, running her tongue along the flap, the envelope was toward the doorway, a pre-printed business address, quite gaudy. All she can remember is something like Mark Bay or Macko Bay, and a palm tree, and a row of airmail stamps. When she saw Gloria, she started violently and slapped the envelope face down onto the desk. She seemed agitated. "That's all.

I'm sorry"

"Not much to go on."

In the middle of the night something came sliding into my mind and slid right out again before I could grab hold of it. At breakfast I caught a glimpse of an edge of it in the back of my mind and caught it before it could get away and pulled it into sight.

Your retirement paradise! A planned community for the senior citizen. Live the golden years in the golden way. And it wasn't Mark or Macko, but she had been close. Marco Bay and Marco Bay Isles, between the mysterious Everglades and the glorious Gulf. Marco Bay Development Corporation.

"What's with you?" Heidi demanded. "Something wrong with the eggs, dammit?"

"They are beautiful eggs and you are a beautiful girl and I think I can lay a hand on Anna Ottlo.