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Helen McCloy

Page 15

by Minotaur Country


  “There’s one other thing,” said Carlos. “A last minute change in our itinerary. You can’t speak at Catclaw Falls this afternoon, because there was a flash flood there this morning. All the roads are under water now and there’s no airport. The railway doesn’t even go there. Shall we just spend the day loafing here and go on this evening to your last meeting at the jet port?”

  “Seems a pity to waste a whole day.” Jeremy frowned. “Why can’t we go to that place we had to cross off the itinerary for lack of time? The place you wrote me about where a river flows around mountain tops.”

  “It’s a bit late to organize a meeting for this afternoon,” said Carlos. “But I’ll get on the telephone and see what I can do.”

  He came back smiling.

  “All set. They were really pleased. We’re announcing the change of venue on television now so people who want to come to the meeting will have time to change their plans.”

  The road had been ascending steadily ever since they left the mountain inn. By noon they were in still higher country with mile after mile of evergreens along the road, pine and spruce, larch and fir. A carpet of dead needles made it impossible for undergrowth to flourish. This was the fairy-tale wood of a child’s dream, where you could see the woods for the trees. Slender trunks stood in serried ranks like soldiers at attention.

  The sun had just set, but it was not yet dark enough to turn on the headlights when they rounded a cliffside and came upon a crowd of several hundred people gathered at a crossroads. Beyond this small open space was an impossible view: a river, plunging, powerful and turbulent around a sharp bend in its course, forcing its way between two mountain tops where it had no business to be.

  “This is the place you wrote me about,” said Jeremy to Carlos. “Incredible! But that water’s noisy. Do I have to speak outdoors?”

  “No, there’s a clubhouse. We’re coming to it now.”

  It was a large building but primitive—simple board and batten walls with a shingled roof and a few steps leading up to the front door.

  Inside it was dark. The windows were narrow and the unshaded bulbs in fixtures along the walls could not disperse the dusk. Folding chairs were arranged in rows with an aisle in the middle. There was a dais for speakers at the farther end with a table and chairs and in one corner an old, upright piano. The table was furnished with two drinking glasses and a carafe of dusty looking water.

  It looked to Tash like a place used for Saturday night dances. She was not surprised when she learned later that it had been built to serve as a neighborhood boys’ clubhouse.

  “No microphone?” said Jeremy to Carlos.

  “Afraid not, but you’ve talked without them before.”

  The crowd from outside filled all the chairs, and there was an overflow of standees at the back of the hall. They were family groups, men, women, and children, all in working clothes, and there were even a few dogs—the working sheep dogs who are so intelligent and devoted.

  Carlos and Job, Hilary and Tash followed Jeremy onto the platform and found seats behind the speakers’ chairs. Most of the wire service men preferred to stay in the body of the hall, where they could listen to comments in the crowd. The press photographers climbed up to the high window sills where they could get shots of both speakers and audience.

  A burly man in work boots and jeans, plaid shirt and Stetson, was introduced to Jeremy by Carlos as Malcolm MacLain, a neighboring rancher, who was to preside at the meeting.

  Mr. MacLain was long-winded and repetitive. He addressed himself to the Governor rather than the audience, explaining that it was the first time a governor had ever visited this part of the state, and though it had taken all of them a great deal of time and trouble to get here this evening, they just couldn’t let him drive down their road without asking him to stop and say a few words.

  He praised Jeremy for everything he had done and several things he hadn’t done, and then, finally, he started winding up to his peroration like a pitcher warming up at the plate, and at long last let his ball go in a stentorian voice:

  “And so, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you His Excellency the Governor of this state, Jeremy Playfair.”

  Wild clapping, hooraying, and stamping from an audience which must have found any excuse for exercise a relief after sitting still for so long.

  Jeremy rose, smiling, looking slender and boyish beside the burly rancher, standing with an ease and grace peculiarly his own.

  His light baritone voice was relaxed and informal, perfectly at home. It was not “raised”’ or “projected” yet it carried to every corner of the room.

  “What can I say after an introduction like that?”

  The smile and the two-edged meaning of the words won his audience immediately. As he saw he had their sympathy, he went on swiftly and happily with a glancing reference now and then to the planks in his official platform. He was halfway through that list, when he was interrupted.

  “What about the two guys killed during the dock strike? Why didn’t you settle it before anyone was killed?”

  There are only two ways of dealing with a heckler: You can ignore him and sweep on with your speech, hoping to carry the audience with you; or you can put him down with a stroke of wit so stunning that it stops his mouth long enough to give the audience a chance to laugh and forget him.

  Answering a heckler at length is as hopeless as a motorist arguing with a traffic cop or an author answering a book reviewer. In all combat the advantage is with the one who has the power to attack.

  Jeremy was known for his skill as a debater. Time and again in his political campaigns, he had been inspired with a quip so light and yet so lethal that it had disarmed a heckler, but tonight inspiration failed him. Was he just tired? Did he blame himself for the deaths of the two men who might have lived if he had been able to settle the strike sooner? Was he still suffering more than he himself had realized from the shock of the fire and the enigma of Vivian’s death?

  Whatever the reason, he chose to go on with his speech as if there had been no interruption.

  Sometimes it works. This time it didn’t.

  “We have the satisfaction now of improved relations with Barlovento—”

  “Commies, ain’t they? Friends of yours?”

  The same voice from the same part of the hall.

  Heads turned in that direction.

  Where Jeremy stood, he could not see the man, but he knew he had to answer now. A second interruption cannot be ignored.

  “Would anyone here have preferred a war in the Caribbean? That was the alternative to the decision we made.”

  “Sez you! You’re pro-Barlo. You’ve even got one of them working for you now.”

  “Mr. de Miranda is an American citizen.”

  “Any spy can take out papers!”

  Jeremy stepped to the front of the dais. “Why don’t you come down here in front where everyone can see you as well as hear you?”

  The reply was inaudible.

  Why didn’t Jeremy take advantage of that to go on with his speech? Apparently, he felt that the heckler’s insinuations were too serious to slide away from, for he said:

  “I can’t hear you.”

  The answer was clear enough: “Then I’ll come closer.”

  Now every pair of eyes in the room, including Jeremy’s were fixed on the little ripple in the crowd where someone unseen was trying to push his way through from the back.

  Tash, sitting on one side of the dais near the edge, had a clearer view of Jeremy and those in the front rows near him than anyone else. She caught her breath.

  Hilary, beside her, said, “What’s wrong?”

  Tash could only stare at the place where she had seen a figure pass under the light from one of the bulbs near the front and melt into the shadow beyond. The blindlooking eyes and elfin smile were unmistakable. Why was Freaky here, so far from his urban habitat?

  Others had marked his progress through the crowd.
Now, as he stepped beyond the first row and stood alone and conspicuous looking up at the dais, every eye was on him, watching to see what he would do next.

  The explosion was so unexpected in that context that no one identified it immediately.

  Hilary said, “That sounded like a shot, but it can’t be.”

  Job’s face was a mask of shock and terror: staring eyes, slack jaw, bloodless cheeks.

  Tash looked at Jeremy. He was still standing, but Carlos was holding him up, and his head had fallen forward.

  She had only the dimmest awareness of other people shouting and pushing as she forced her way to his side.

  His eyes were closed. There was only a little blood on his face. It was Carlos, unharmed and fully aware of what had happened, who looked like death.

  She took one of Jeremy’s hands. It lay in hers, inert and unfeeling.

  “We must get an ambulance!” shouted Wilkes.

  “There isn’t time,” said Carlos.

  “Then we must get him to a car, any car. Pulaski, clear a path to the door.”

  “But the man who fired the shot . . . ?”

  “Leave him to the others.”

  Tash followed. No one tried to stop her. She got into the back seat beside Jeremy and took his head in her lap. Carlos was driving. He was the only one who had been here before and knew the road. Wilkes and Pulaski crowded into the front seat beside him.

  Tash used a handkerchief to wipe away the blood on Jeremy’s face. She remembered that people in shock must be kept warm. Someone had left an overcoat on the floor of the car. She pulled it over him, and kissed his forehead. It was not cold. It was just without warmth the way inanimate things are.

  The hospital was on the outskirts of a small city. There was a red light over the emergency entrance and a young intern waiting there.

  “Someone telephoned us to be ready for a man who was shot. He said it was the Governor. But who would—”

  “Hurry!”

  Jeremy was put on a stretcher with wheels. Tash followed it into an elevator. On the fourth floor it was pushed down the corridor to a pre-surgery room.

  The intern looked at Tash. “You’ll have to wait here, ma’am.”

  She stood and watched them wheel the stretcher away. Doors closed after it.

  A nurse came out of another elevator. “Miss Perkins? There are some reporters downstairs—”

  “I’ll talk to them,” said Carlos.

  Tash found chairs at the other end of the hall and sat down.

  “Tea? Coffee?” said the nurse.

  She shook her head.

  The chair was uncomfortable. She looked down and saw blood had stained the robin’s egg blue of her skirt. So it really was happening. You couldn’t imagine bloodstains that real.

  She did not know how long she had waited when she heard a step and looked up to see Carlos again.

  “Any word?”

  She shook her head.

  He sat down beside her. “It was clever. The heckler to distract us so everybody was looking his way and no one saw who fired the shot.”

  “I know who the heckler was,” said Tash. “Freaky. He used the same trick when Halcon picked my pocket. Diversion, misdirection.”

  After a while Carlos persuaded Tash to lie down on a couch and close her eyes. She could almost feel time crawling by, second after second, minute after minute, the unendurable that had to be endured.

  Footsteps and a murmur of voices. She opened her eyes. One look at Carlos’ face told her everything.

  She whispered: “No . . .”

  A long time afterward, they were driving through a cold, gray dawn. The car had to stop when it came to a place in the road cordoned off by state police.

  “You might have taken her around another way.” The voice was Hilary’s.

  She heard Carlos answer. “There is no other way.”

  She looked beyond the little knot of state troopers and reporters and curiosity seekers to mountain peaks and a river flowing around a curve between two of them.

  She spoke to the trooper who was driving.

  “Does this place have a name?”

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s called Desolation Bend.”

  PART IV

  Cayo Siesta

  16

  INSHORE, THE SEA was Egyptian blue, brilliant as newly mined turquoise, a blue with green undertones. Out- shore, it was the deep, clear, acid-looking green of jewel jade. The roads were cut out of white coral rock, and the blocks dug out were used to build houses. The fine, white sand of the beaches was powdered coral tinged sometimes with the faintest blush of pink. When you saw a spray of pink oleander blossom against the improbable seascape, the first reaction was simply: I don’t believe it! How could Nature, so gray and circumspect in the north, cut loose with the exuberant vulgarity of a picture postcard the moment she came south?

  The hibiscus, carefully cultivated as a small pink flower in the gardens of Leafy Way, was a big splash of red growing wild along the ditches here.

  You didn’t go to a florist for gardenias here, or to a grocer for lemons. You picked both from your own bush or tree, where they flourished among passion flowers and night-blooming cereus, gold trees and orchids and bougainvillea.

  In your orchard were guavas and mangoes, persimmons and pomegranates, papaya and monstera deliciosa.

  It was not only the vegetable world that flourished. There were bold palm rats that could swim across an inlet and flying cockroaches that ate clothes. Spiders here were big as a man’s fist and might drop on your head or shoulder from the ceiling at any moment. There were coral snakes for whom anti-venin was kept in every house. There were fleas so prolific that if dogs brought them onto your wall-to-wall carpet you had to analyze their breeding cycle before you could get rid of them. There was heart worm that killed dogs without warning. There were virus diseases that struck you with an exuberant will to live at your expense, which no well behaved northern virus ever displayed.

  Even in the sea there were colonial organisms like the Portuguese man-of-war, which looked more like a gaudy plastic toy than anything alive, but whose sting could put you in the hospital for days. And in deep water there were always the sharks.

  In short, the eternal sun that so invigorated you and your species also invigorated all the other species that preyed on you and yours. What Nature gave with one hand, she took away with the other. The Miranda family had adapted to all this generations ago, minimizing the disadvantages and enjoying the advantages without any distortion of their ideals. Sun and rum might act like adrenalin on cruise tourists and tax evaders from the north, but over the rest of the island there still brooded the amiable spirit of Granada and Algeciras.

  Cayo Siesta was the largest island in the Sotavento group and shaped like a crescent. The Casa Miranda was on one tip of that crescent. If you wanted to go to town, your shortest route was to take a launch in a straight line across the bay instead of going the long way around the crescent by car.

  The house itself reflected a Spanish tradition that goes back to the days when Iberia was a Roman colony. It was built around a true patio with house walls on all four sides, a cloister along each inner wall, and a fountain in the middle of the patio.

  Outside, the house was like a fortress with barred windows and high double carriage doors of heavy mahogany.

  Inside, the patio was an outdoor room with only the sky for its ceiling, yet guarded from all observation by the walls of the house itself. Persian roses and Persian peaches grew along the walls. Carp swam in the basin around the fountain. Its plashing made a cool tinkle on the hottest day.

  What more could anyone want than this lotus-eating life? A plunge in cold surf before breakfast, a ride along the beach on a pure-bred Arab mare before luncheon, another swim and then a long afternoon in the sun reading and sipping a chilled rum drink while faint music came from the stereo in one of the cloisters.

  Why had Carlos left all this to get himself into the North American merry-go
-round?

  Carlos seemed to read her thoughts. “In time you get tired of it,” he said one afternoon.

  “Why?”

  A shrug. “Not enough conflict.”

  “That’s the very thing that appeals to me now.” Tash realized she was getting close to the things they didn’t talk about and veered away quickly. “Cay or cayo in Spanish and quai in French, but key in English. I wonder why?”

  “Because in the eighteenth century key was pronounced ‘kay’ in English, just as tea was pronounced ‘tay’ and still is in Ireland. It should be Kay West, not Key West.”

  Felipe, who ran the household here as efficiently as the chief usher had run Leafy Way, came across the patio to Tash with a cablegram.

  “Oh, dear! My mother and father will be here tonight.”

  “Why does that bother you? We have plenty of room.”

  “Your mother has been kindness itself, but. . . they’re divorced, you know.”

  “I’ve told her all about it. She is looking forward to meeting them, and so am I.”

  At the airport, it seemed to Tash that both her parents were wearing their “everything-is-going-to-be-all-right” masks.

  “Darling Tash!” Her mother’s mask did not slip, but it quivered, and for the first time Tash began to realize what anguish both her parents must have gone through when news flashed around the world that she had been so close to Jeremy Playfair when he was killed. She could so easily have died with him.

  “And this is Mr. de Miranda?” her father was saying. “How very kind of you to have us here. I don’t know if this is good or bad news, but you’ve got another guest coming whom we met on the plane, a Captain Wilkes.”

  “Ted!” Carlos called out as he saw Wilkes approaching “I hope you’ve come for a real vacation?”

  “Only twenty-four hours,” said Wilkes. “I have to go back tomorrow. And it’s not a vacation. I’ve been fired, or, at least, asked to resign by Governor Jackman.” Tash turned away from the others to hide her face. Governor Jackman. Of course. As lieutenant governor, Job would succeed Jeremy automatically, and his first act in office would be to ask for Wilkes’ resignation. Job would never forgive poor Wilkes for what had happened at Desolation Bend.

 

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