I closed my eyes at takeoff and opened them in the night sky over Los Angeles. I had about thirteen minutes to catch my flight to Miami. If I'd checked luggage through, it never would have made it. I hoped to go right back to sleep aboard the National DC-10, but the stirring around the Los Angeles airplane station, and a National stewardess who wanted to give me more service than I needed, left me bulge-eyed awake. The jets were yanking me back into my habitual time pattern, and it was as if scrambled brains were coming unscrambled. I thought back to the terribly cute words of the parting lovers in Hawaii. Keep me or marry me. All in a dizzy, guilty, quiverous condition, all in a lust that had not been quenched despite all the trying. A kid! The teenager who'd stowed away and been taken back to Daddy.
The farther the airplane took me away from her, the more incredible it seemed. I knew that I was going to leave that whole affair out of the record when I talked to Meyer. She had come looking, but that didn't mean she had to get what she sought.
I yawned until my jaw creaked. I fixed the pillow again. Five miles below me, sensible people were sleeping in beds. Take that young wife, McGee, and file her under TTF. Try to forget.
Six
I TUMBLED back into the strange pre-Christmas world of Fort Lauderdale and surrounding area. It is the same every year. The unaffiliated, unfamilied, uninvolved make the obligatory comments about Christmas being the Great Retailers' Conspiracy. Buy now. You don't owe a dime until February. The Postal Service gets their big chance to screw up the delivery of three billion cards. Urchins turn the stores into disaster areas. Counter clerks radiate an exhausted patience leavened with icy flashes of total hate. The energy crisis is accelerated by five billion little colored light bulbs, winking on and off in celebration. Amateur thieves join the swollen ranks of the professionals in ripping off parked cars loaded with presents, in picking pockets, prying sliding doors open, shoplifting and mugging the everpresent drunks. Bored Santas jingle their begging bells and the old hymns blur loudly through the low-fidelity speakers of department-store paging systems.
Unreality was compounded this year by a long stretch of unseasonably torrid weather, comingling sweat and jingle bells. And all the merchants and hotel managers and saloonkeepers immediately violated all the rules of business management by turning on all the giant compressors and pulling the interior temperatures down into the 65- to 68 degree range, never realizing they are the unknowing victims of a long-term conspiracy.
When a new structure is built, the air-conditioning experts are encouraged by the architect and the builder to overspecify the project. If they specify an $80,000 system instead of a $40,000 system, the architect and the contractor each, in most cases, pocket an extra $4000. Trade periodicals harp on how customer traffic flow is increased by keeping the thermostat low. In the densely urban areas, the heat output of all the overspecified systems so raises the ambient temperature that the big compressors have to kick in more often to keep the store at 67 degrees.
The knowledgeable general practitioner and the specialist in respiratory diseases will both tell you that it is a total idiocy to subject the human animal to abrupt temperature variations of more than 15 degrees. He gets sick. He has more virus infections. He takes more time off from work. He feels rotten.
Were there a Florida law stating that all thermostats would have to be blocked so as to prevent a lower interior temperature than 75 degrees in all public places, all stores, all homes, all hotels and motels, Florida Power and Light would be able to give up their huge smoking plans for new power plants. We would all be healthier. We would be able to dress more sensibly.
So it was a reversal of the Christmas temperatures of the remembered childhood in northern places. Lauderdale was steamy hot on the outside, achingly frigid on the inside. This invited to town the new flu mutation, which began dropping the folk right and left.
It was a curious and restless time. It seemed to me that I spent a lot of time getting in and out of automobiles, a lot of time traveling from places I did not care to be to places I didn't want to go, accompanied by batches of noisy people I did not know very well and did not care to know better. I heard, too often, the sound of my own voice going on and on, talking without saying anything and talking loudly to be heard over all the din, for reasons I could not remember. And there was a lot of getting in and out of boats, in and out of pools, and, in a daze of booze and indifference, getting in and out of beds, even though I had long since discovered that it is a habit which degrades the receptivity to sensation, coarsens selectivity, implies obligation, and turns off most useful introspection.
In that silly random season I found myself thinking of Lou Ellen, not in an orderly, consecutive, narrative way, but in very quick and vivid takes which were swept away as quickly as they appeared. She was just beneath the surface of my mind and was revealed in those moments when the light was just right.
Some very curious attrition was going on. Ruthie Meehan, one of the long-time waitresses, began to act strange and remote, drowned in the sea while swimming at night, was brought in through the Inlet by the tide, and was found floating in the bay shallows by an early fisherman. Some said she'd gone on sopors. There were rumors she'd left a note. People said we ought to do something, but there wasn't anything to do except go to the funeral, and nobody went because her sister in New Hampshire sent for the body.
Brud Silverman borrowed Lacey Davis's Charger and drove it out Route 84, destination unknown, and hit a big pine on the canal bank about a mile and a half west of Fern Crest. Estimated speed, a hundred and twenty. No sign of skid marks. A perfect hit, absolutely square. The car bounced back about seven feet from the tree, compacted to half its showroom length, and fried Silverman down to a child-size cinder.
And Meyer keeled over.
He said he felt very strange. Far away. A nice fast walk on the beach, a swim, some exercises, a shower, a steak, and he'd be just fine, he said. But when we walked up the slope of the beach after swimming, he stopped and looked at me and said, "I think I..."
I waited for the rest of it. He smiled, rolled his eyes up, and pitched onto his face in the soiled sand above high tide. He is as broad as a bear and as hairy as a bear. You think of heart. You think of something going bad inside that big chest. I eased him over. He had sand in nose, mouth and eyes. I laid my right ear on his wet, hairy chest and heard the engine going. tuh-PUM, tuh-PUM, tuh-PUM. Too fast? But he'd been swimming hard. A fat, gentle woman filled a kid's sand pail with fresh water and cleaned the sand off Meyer's face while we waited for the ambulance. Ambulance service to the beach is very good. Four minutes this time. Resistance to my riding along, until I said I could tell the emergency room just how he had acted before he passed out and when he passed out.
Fast ride. Deft handling. Too damned cold in the emergency area. They got a blanket over him, steered me to the admissions desk, wheeled him away somewhere. I was a conspicuous figure, walking around in there in swim trunks. A tiny blond nurse, almost a midget, found me an XL robe before I froze. I upset several people in my search for Meyer by appearing in places I was not supposed to be. The medical industry is never ready for inquiry. They never used to like to answer questions. Now they have the excuse they could be sued. They overwork the excuse.
A saturnine, leathery doctor named Kwaliy was supervising the workup on Meyer. I answered the questions I thought he ought to be asking and had to assume he heard what I said.
He wrote something on a form and gave it to a gray-headed nurse. An orderly wheeled Meyer away, with the nurse keeping pace.
"Where is he going now?" I asked.
"What is your relationship to the patient?" Kwalty asked coldly.
"I'm his sister."
Kwalty pursed his lips and stared up at me. "If you start trying to muscle the staff, fellow, you won't find out one damn thing."
"Would you like to put a little money on that, Doctor?"
He tilted his head. "Maybe not. Your friend has a temperature of almost one hu
ndred and five degrees. And some fluid in the lungs already. It's a virus infection. He goes to Intensive Care. When the lab puts a name on the bug, we'll go the antibiotics with the best record against it. It can kill him, leave him in bad shape, or he can recover completely."
I took a cab home to the Busted Flush and got clothes and money and drove back in my blue Rolls pickup and parked her five blocks from the hospital. That was as close as I could get and legally leave it there for a long period.
I did not mind hanging around. I had nothing pressing to do. I was sick of going to the places I had been going to. The hidden compartment in the hull of the Flush was stocked with enough cash to afford six or more months of very good living. So the hospital was fine. It was a project. Infiltrate. Ingratiate. Learn the kind of protective coloring that gets you past the places where they stop the civilians, and learn the kind of behavior which keeps the staff from using their authority to toss you the hell out.
There is no reason why a person cannot buy and wear a white, long-sleeved shirt-jacket. It does not look at all like a medical smock. A person can keep things in the pocket, pencil flashlight, several pens. A person can carry an aluminum clipboard. The pace is important-steady and mildly purposeful. Smile and nod at every familiar face because that is the way you become a familiar face. Do little favors. Look up the nice folk who took such good care of you the last time you were in. And the time before.
By the time they let Meyer out of Intensive Care, after four rough days and nights, I had goodies all lined up. I had a fine private room assigned to him, 455, on Four South, ten easy paces from the nurses' station. And that was a most agreeable station indeed because, rarity of rarities, the nurses on all shifts were cheery, competent and funny, and half of them were pretty.
I had become friendly with Kwalty after our bad beginning. He said that if I wanted to throw away my money, a private nurse just for the span from eleven at night to seven in the morning might be helpful, as Meyer was still a sick and a weak man. The day-shift gals on Four South put their heads together and came up with Ella Marie Morse, RN, thirty-something, tall, dark, graceful, husky and highly skilled, a lady who had married a wealthy patient who had died in a plane crash on a business trip to Chicago, leaving her financially comfortable and bored.
They wheeled Meyer to 455 and eased him from bed to bed at four in the afternoon of the day after Christmas, Wednesday. I had looked in at him in Intensive Care several times. He looked worse at closer range. The infection had eaten him down. He looked shrunken in every dimension. His hair was dull, and his face looked amber and waxy. After they took pressure and temperature, and got his four o'clock medication into him, they left us alone. Meyer gave me a slow, thoughtful, heavy-lidded look.
"Christmas... is really gone?"
"So rumor has it."
"The medication... fogs my brain. I can't handle... word games."
"Yesterday was Christmas."
He kept his eyes closed for so long I thought he had gone to sleep. He opened his eyes. "How was it?"
"Christmas? Well... you know... it was Christmas."
After he closed his eyes again, I gave him a chatty account of McGee's Christmas, about decorating the tree in the nurses' lounge on Christmas Eve, about bringing in a batch of presents for people on Christmas Day, about attending three different staff parties in the hospital Christmas afternoon and evening. When I was through I realized he was snoring softly, but I did not know when he had dropped off. I decided he had not missed anything of great moment.
Nurse Ella Morse arrived early, a little after ten. She was taller than I had pictured her, not quite as pretty as described, and had an unexpected-and attractive-flavor of shyness in her manner. It made her seem less mature than she obviously was. After she had checked her sleeping patient out and had greeted the girls on duty, she and I took coffee into the small visitors' lounge at the end of the corridor. She asked about Meyer. A semiretired economist living alone aboard his dumpy little cabin cruiser over at Bahia Mar. That doesn't cover it. Meyer is something else. She would find out. Meyer is a transcendent warmth, the listening ear of a total understanding and forgiveness, a humble wisdom.
I explained that Doctor Damon Kwalty had suggested that she be the judge of when Meyer could get along adequately without her help. With a trace of officiousness, she asked me how come I was able to remain in the hospital so long after visitors' hours. I said they had given up asking me to leave, probably because I was handy to have around. Maybe it has a certain emotional importance, or significance, that all this was on the night before I got Pidge Brindle's letter. Or perhaps I am straining at a gnat, or, once again looking for some way to make myself into a better person than I am.
At any rate I hung around until just before the shift change and then, following a lady's detailed instructions, walked down the corridor and around the corner and shoved the stairwell door open and, without going through it, let it hiss shut to the point where a folded piece of cardboard kept it from closing all the way and latching. Just beyond the doorway, I slipped into the treatment room through another door and pushed it almost shut. I sat on the treatment table and waited. The reflected glow of streetlights came into the room, glinting and glimmering on the glass and stainless steel of the medical equipment.
I could not tell exactly how long it would take her, because if someone went down with her on the elevator, then, instead of getting off at three and walking to the stairwell and climbing one flight, she would ride all the way down, fake a trip to the rest room, and climb the three flights back up to four.
I waited about five minutes before Marian Lewandowski, RN, pushed the door open silently, slipped into the treatment room and carefully closed the door. The latch clicked and the bolt made a tiny grating sound. She was a slender white shape in the darkness, a whisper of professional fabrics coming toward me, a barely audible "Hi, darling" as she came into the clandestine embrace, to be held and kissed in the stolen darkness.
She had little body tremors of nervousness, and her whisper-voice had little edges of anxiety, and she had a talking jag. On the afternoon before Christmas, she had come to the lounge three times for a few minutes each time, to make sour jokes about being stuck on the three-to-eleven on that day Christmas day and the day after. Lots of nurses were sick with the bug. A woman with a lovely, lively body, tons of energy, a face more worn than the body, blond hair tied tightly back, blue eyes a sixteenth of an inch too close together, lips a millimeter too thin.
She kissed and trembled and said, "You know, I figure we were both kidding, talking a good game, neither of us going to show up, but all the time it was happening, you know, like getting carried along. It's just kidding at first. Then it's like a game. Like playing chicken."
"I know."
"Well, I talk a good game, but the way it is with me, Norman is on pipeline work in Iran, no place I would want to take my two babies, and so here I am living with Norman's mother again, and I wouldn't really have to work except it would drive me out of my tree trying to live in her house with her, and that rotten old woman is holding a stopwatch on me right now, you can bet your life on it, figuring I'm late because I took time on the way home to get laid. When somebody bugs you and bugs you and bugs you all the time about something you haven't been doing, you end up doing it, right?"
"I guess you do."
"I wouldn't know about this being a good safe place except for Nita, she's on vacation, my best friend practically-she sneaks in here with a cardiologist she thinks is some day going to get a divorce and marry her, but it never happens."
"I guess it doesn't."
"Mostly what is wrong with me, McGee, it isn't just that Norman is away for such a long time and the old lady bugs me so, and if I know Norman he's set up a shack job for himself, what is wrong with me, I guess, is... somehow the work is different being a nurse now. There are so many old ones coming in, coming in and dying all the time. It makes you think about time going by you, like you're on a t
rain that never stops and you look out the window at things streaming by that you'll never see except that way. Dying isn't scary because they come in here and they are so confused and kind of dim they don't really know what is happening, and then all of a sudden they're in a coma and they got an IV going, and a catheter and a bag, and an oxygen clip on their nose, and they don't know a damn thing about living or dying anymore. That's going to be me and you sometime, bet on it."
"But not yet."
"Feel how I'm shaking? I don't know what's wrong with me. Nita says don't try to use the table, it's so high and narrow you could fall off and break somebody's back, she said there's a rollaway in here... there it is, I can just make it out, and the thing to do is open it a little ways and pull the mattress out and put it on the floor. Look, this is weird, the way I feel. I'm a nurse, damn it, and you know the reputation we got, and I like you a lot. I really like you, and I've been excited for hours thinking about you, but would it be a mean, rotten, dirty trick if-if I asked if we just skipped it? Would you get really sore?"
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 15 - The Turquoise Lament Page 8