John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 15 - The Turquoise Lament

by The Turquoise Lament(lit)

  There were two cabs drowsing in the shade, apathetic about any chance of midday trade. I asked if a great big young man with long white hair had left while they were there. The second driver knew-a dollar refreshed his memory. He remembered that they had taken a taxi. Yes, it had turned left out at the end of the hotel driveway.

  The other driver shrugged, pointed a thumb skyward, and said, "Maybe the tram."

  It has happened before. It happens to everyone. That curious miracle inside the skull, when a hundred bits and pieces suddenly stop endless movement and become fixed in a pattern. This was the far end of the world, measuring from the United States. Any incident in a foreign country would receive police attention, professional inspection. This was still part of the United States, but due to the strange channel of authority, it was part of the impenetrable bureaucracy, lost. in committee structures within the Department of the Interior, left to the indifferent mercies of civil servants who have learned, soon after receiving their first rating, that survival depends on always giving the impression of taking action on controversial matters, while actually merely moving papers from desk to desk.

  There were doctors in Hawaii and a doctor in Samoa who would confirm mental problems, depression. People around the yacht basin in Honolulu would have been made aware of the problem. Tom Collier would verify, if necessary. There would be a very slow pickup by the news media here, and whenever news is stale, coverage is meager or nonexistent. Depressed heiress to treasure fortune jumps off a Polynesian mountain after prior suicide attempts.

  I laid a five-dollar bill upon the palm of the driver and asked him how quickly he could get me to the tram station on Solo Hill. He was under way as I pulled the door shut, saying that it would be no time at all. He was very good. Though he went sideways up a good part of the hill road, he did not lose momentum or traction. I was out of the taxi as the final shriek of brakes and rubber ended. The dark red car was not waiting in its slot. I stared along the down-dangle of cable and up toward the summit, and I did not see it in motion against the blue harbor or the far green slope.

  My larcenous acquaintance took my five-dollar bill and gave me two, and went through his nochange charade.

  "I think some friends of mine are up there."

  "Yes?"

  "A very big man. As tall as I am, but a lot heavier. A very brown face, bald in front, long blond hair. With a young woman."

  "Oh, yes. A big, happy man. Laughing."

  "Are they up there alone?"

  He looked at some kind of record on the inside wall of his cubicle. "Right now, I think, yes, there are nine. Your friends and seven more."

  I tried to exhale completely, to calm myself, but I could not empty the bottom third of my lungs. Too much adrenalin was making me shake and sweat. I knew that if they put the two of us out in the middle of a field, I might just be able to take him. But this was not a time for pride, for noble games, for a test of skills. I looked around and saw that my driver, evidently reluctant to give up a customer who was making a good day for him in a slow season, had parked in the shade in the turnoff. On request he unlocked his trunk. The lug wrench was the most suitable. It was an L with a short base, with the socket on the base. He looked at me with alarm and disfavor as I tried it on. It fitted down the right leg of the shorts, and with my shirt worn outside the shorts, the socket end, hooked over my belt, was concealed.

  "This is not a good thing," he said.

  "What thing?"

  "That wrench."

  "Wrench? I asked you to open the trunk so I could see how much luggage you can carry in there. Remember?"

  "How much luggage?"

  "And I handed you this ten-dollar bill for your trouble. Sorry! I didn't mean to drop it. I suppose that if a man wanted to steal a lug wrench, he could grab it and shove it out of sight while you were picking up that bill."

  The smile started slow and became vast. He bobbed his head. He slammed his trunk. "As you can see, it is a big trunk. Lot of suitcases."

  "Thanks for showing it to me." He had a merry smile. With filed teeth and blue tattoos, he could eat you, still smiling.

  I strode back to the platform. I could see the red speck of the returning car moving down the jungle green across the harbor.

  "How many aboard?"

  "Who could know?"

  "Can you ask the man up there?"

  He tapped the phone box on the wall beside him. "Not working. In the rainy time, it doesn't work."

  I had left the monocular in the room. I saw a battered old pair of binoculars on a crude shelf behind him. He gave them to me willingly. I looked at the trademark. Eight-power Bausch and Lomb. They were a long way from Rochester. They had been knocked just far enough out of true so that when you got them into sharp focus, they felt as if they were suction cups, pulling your eyes slowly out of the sockets.

  It seemed at first that the car was jammed with people, and my heart sank. But as it drew closer I was able to count heads, in silhouette, looking through the car from front to back. They were moving around, window to window I made it five for several counts and finally four. Leaving five at the summit the Brindles and three others.

  Two large, loud couples got off, speaking pure Texican. The attendant wanted to hold the car, waiting for more business. I must have given him a strange look. He backed away, shut the door, and sent me off.

  If the fates are kind, I thought, the three strangers who remained on top will be out near the little thatched shelter. It is near the steepest drop, facing the open sea. Due to the contour of the hilltop, it is out of the line of sight of the television studio. If the fates are in a sour mood, the strangers will be watching the educational film monitors, and already Howie Brindle will have come pounding in, roaring and weeping, pointing back up the path, trying to find the words to tell them what his poor sick wife had done to herself.

  The trip was forever. The car had to be moving more slowly than ever before. Soon it would stop completely. At last it came to its pause just below the terminus, then was hoisted slowly up to come to rest inside the slot where it rested and waited.

  There was no one on the platform. The attendant turned and cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled up the slope, "Car ready! Car going!"

  I sprinted. I held the wrench in place with my right hand. I went around the left side of the television station on the walkway, leaped down all the steps at the end, stumbled and went to my knees, skinned the heel of my left hand, came up running. Three people were hurrying down the curved walkway between the pipe railings. I thrust past them. An old tourist hissed at me...

  Beyond the last upward curve, the little round pavilion came into full view. Big Howie was bending over something. He seemed to be alone. He looked like somebody bending over, tying a shoe.

  "Brindle!" I yelled from fifty feet away, coming on fast.

  He popped up and spun. Pidge was outside the pipe railing, on her stomach on the outer edge of the slope, legs hanging over. Her arms were wrapped around one of the vertical lengths of pipe that supported the railing. He had been taking her arms from around the pipe. Once they were free, she would have slipped over the edge, skidded down through shrubbery, started spinning then bounced, sailed, bounced, sailed a longer distance, bounced, sailed out of sight over the lip of the final straight drop.

  I had to be a considerable shock to him. He had drowned me and had come back and looked at the body to be certain, had seen the mouth agape, the eyes half open, the motionlessness under the tub water. Even in shock, he managed to move sideways, to give a hard kick at her face with his heel. It snapped her head back but didn't unfreeze her grip on the pipe. Complete terror turns on total strength.

  Winded and dripping, I stopped short of him, poised for whatever he might try. He had no chance of sucker-punching me into another case of sunstroke. He began to bounce and grin. It reminded me of his tireless, cat-quick performance playing volley ball on the Lauderdale beach. Big, rubbery, loose-jointed bounding.

&nbs
p; "Yay McGee," he said. "Come on, baby."

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Pidge had pulled herself up and was crawling cautiously under the fence.

  "Run for the cable car!" I yelled at her.

  She sprang up and went off down the slope like a track-team captain, sturdy legs almost blurring with the frantic speed. I sensed he was going to try to go after her, regardless, and as he tried to dodge around the pavilion, I pulled the lug wrench free and angled in from the side and banged him over the ear hard enough to make the iron ring. Half thud, half bong. He ran four more strides on macaroni legs, fell the way you are supposed to fall, rolled up onto his feet, shaking his head, turned, and ducked under the second swing. I had not expected to miss. The momentum of the too-heavy wrench carried me halfway around, and he hit me with his fist just under the last rib, right on the side. They hit like that with a swinging log to knock down castle doors. It knocked me six feet back, and it knocked me down, and it knocked the wind out of me. I got up like a shrunken old man, sucking air with a croaking noise, certain I would never be able to straighten up again.

  He was almost to the television building, bounding along, white hair abounce, rubbery fat jiggling under the sweat-pasted fabrics. I ran half sideways, bent over and croaking, holding my right side together with my left hand, still clutching the lug wrench in my right.

  Once I got past the building, I took in what was happening. The red car was too far down the cable for Pidge to be aboard. She had not gone down to the level of the car, but had gone up to the enclosure where the pulley wheels, a yard in diameter, turned noisily under the weight and stress of the dark and rusty cables.

  She was on the far side of the enclosure, tense and waiting, knees slightly bent: Her face was intent. It was a schoolyard game. She hoped she was quick enough to stay away from him. The attendant was down on the platform, out of sight of anyone near the pulley station. He was probably watching the departing car. Or eating the rest of his lunch.

  Howie stopped at the four-foot wire fence, looked the situation over, put thick pink fingertips lightly atop the fence and vaulted over it, and moved around the machinery to vault out again and thus herd her away from anything she could use as a barrier. I was laboring closer. She read his intent and ran along the fencing toward the corner. Howie trotted along inside the fence and then vaulted up onto the corner, standing atop the railing. It was on the down-slope side. As soon as she committed herself again, he could jump and catch her.

  I used my laboring run for improving the velocity of the projectile. I put the tool way back over my right shoulder and held my left hand straight out. And then I hurled the lug wrench at him so hard that it spilled me face down in the grass. I never saw it hit him. Pidge told me later that it hit him in the back just below the base of his thick neck. I sat up in time to see him leaning forward and waving his arms wildly. I saw the problem. He was too far off balance to be able to drop close enough outside the fence to grab it. He would land on a steep slope that ended in a drop to the cable-car slot, and he might very probably go over the outside edge of that, into a very damaging fall.

  I saw him glance upward and outward, and then, with a surpassing, astonishing agility, he leaped slightly to the side and caught the outgoing cable, about an inch and a half in diameter, in his two hands. He swung free of the slope and quickly shifted his hands, turning himself to face back toward the hill, and I saw what he figured to do. He could swing out and in again to drop and land in the car slot with no danger of going over the edge.

  Two variables had to work in useful synchronization for him to land properly, the cadence of his back-and-forth swinging, and the outward velocity of the cable. He went backward faster than I expected. I heard a wild yell of astonishment from the attendant as the big man went by overhead, swinging. At the time he should have jumped, he was swinging outward. He was going to make his try as he swung back in, but when he did, he was just too far out.

  I stood up and moved over toward the edge to see him better. The oscillation stopped. Howie was trying to look back down, trying to pick a place where he could drop into the jungle slope into thick brush and not too much incline. Maybe he saw a place he liked a little further down as the cable curved outward, away from the hill. With that chance lost through a moment of indecision, soon he was a tiny figure, high over the long roofs of the cannery buildings.

  Pidge was standing beside me, shuddering and making a little rattling sound with each exhalation. I will always wonder what Howie was thinking. I don't think he was experiencing fear. I think he was just working it out. I saw him start swinging again, and then he doubled and hooked one leg and then another over the cable. He was too far away to see clearly, but I imagined he was hugging the cable to rest his hands. There was no decision he could make until he was at the lowest point in the slack. As long as he was able to rest his hands, there seemed no point in risking a possibly fatal drop into the harbor. He could stay with it all the way to Solo Hill and drop off just short of the cable station.

  The attendant came churning up to the pulley enclosure, his face clenched with awareness of duty and responsibility. I did not know what he was going to do, and I don't know if I could have stopped him, or if I would have wanted to. He didn't unlock his gate. He climbed over. He braced himself and yanked one big vertical lever in one direction and shoved the other lever forward.

  There was one hell of a shriek as the cable was yanked to a stop. I looked out there and saw the car swinging violently back and forth. An instant later I picked up the tiny shape of Howie Brindle, turning over and over, falling down toward the water. From that height, it would be the same as hitting stone. He hit about a hundred yards offshore from the canneries. He made a very small pockmark against the water. Pidge slid down onto the grass, then rolled up onto her hands and knees and threw up.

  The attendant looked at me with a knotted brow and an attempt to smile. He shuddered and said, "Oops, sir." He closed his eyes and swayed slightly, rubbing his mouth with the back of his hand, brow furrowing again in thought. He could find no words to explain an error so instinctive and so horrid. He looked at me and said, once again, "Oops, mister," and hauled away at his big levers. The cable began moving as before.

  Epilogue

  IT WAS A warm and windy Bahama night, and the Busted Flush lay at anchor in the lee of a tiny island in the Banks shaped like a crooked boomerang.

  I had Meyer crushed until he got cute and found a way to put me in perpetual check with a knight and a bishop. We turned off all the lights and all the servomechanisms that click and queak and we went up to the sun deck to enjoy the September night, enjoy a half moon roving through cloud layers, enjoy a smell of rain on the winds.

  The deck chair creaked under Meyer's weight. "Are you really going to go treasure hunting with Frank Hayes?" he asked me.

  He was giving me another opening. My friend, the doctor. Never too obvious. Therapy sessions delicately spaced. Any invasion of personal privacy still stung, however. Still hurt. I let all irritability fade away before I answered.

  "I'll have to tell Frank no thanks. It was an impulse. Change of life style. And maybe get lucky enough to drown."

  "Strange thing," he said, "the terrible contortions we all go through trying to climb out of our own skin."

  "As a way to stop hurting, to try to stop hurting." Okay. I had finally admitted it out loud. Chalk up one for Meyer, or for the poultice of time passing by, with infinite slowness.

  Maybe I could get far enough away from it to believe nothing much had happened at Pago Pago. A young wife responded to treatment for deep depression. A tall hotel guest recovered from a slight sunstroke. A big young man, clowning around, showing off for his wife, had died in a tragic accident. A man from Auckland had eventually flown over to Pago Pago and purchased a fine motor sailer at a most reasonable price. Pidge could not have forced herself to ever go aboard it again.

  Nothing much happened. We stayed there together, until all the knots
in the red tape were untangled and retied, and until she felt strong enough to fly home.

  Nothing much happened. I told her all about the life and times of Howie Brindle. We marveled together at there being such creatures in the world. We sighed, murmured all the words, made love in that concrete beehive, leased a little sailboat and found beaches without footprints and made love there too. We went to a fia fia, ate roast pig, listened to drums, locked eyes and laughed.

  The world requires that one accomplish the little housekeeping chores, so after we flew back and I moved her aboard the Flush, I had my long and interesting chat with Tom Collier, retrieved Professor Ted's papers and records, and then had the conferences with Frank Hayes about the financing, the timing, the percentages.

  "No big dramatic deal," I said to Meyer, breaking the long silence. "I thought it was some kind of crazy chemistry with that girl. Hangover from the time she stowed away and I took her back to Daddy. Or involved somehow with gratitude toward Ted for saving my life in Mexico. It was all too good there in Hawaii with her. Made me suspicious. Nothing is supposed to be that good. Ever. Tried to blur the impact with a few ladies."