In the silence I tried to sort her out. Her twelve years on the track had coarsened her beyond any hope of salvage. Though I know it is the utmost folly to sentimentalize or romanticize a whore, I could respect a certain toughness of spirit Vangie possessed. She had not howled as she fell to her death. She had not flinched or murmured as we cut the hooks out of her leg. And she had bounced back from the edge of death by violence with remarkable buoyancy. The talking jag seemed the only symptom of how shaken she had been. I could think of few women I had known who could have taken such terror in stride.
I realized I felt proud of her. This reaction was so irrational it startled me. I tracked it down to its obvious source. It was the inevitable sense of ownership. I remember talking all night long to a damned fine surgeon. At one time during the night he spoke of the ones he had hauled back through those big gates when he had no right to expect it could be done. “They become your people,” he said. “Your kids. You want the good things for them because they get it on time you gave them. You want them to use life well. When they crap around, wasting what you gave them, you feel forlorn. When they use it well, you feel great. Maybe because it’s some kind of a ledger account, and they have to make up for what those others would have done, those ones you lost for no damn good reason.”
I knew that the risk I’d taken had been for the sake of putting another hooker back on the tiles. So I had to believe she had enough essential spirit and toughness to be able to make it some other way, and would.
Four
At three-thirty, after Vangie had sacked out, the wind changed, moving in our direction, making it so hot at the topside controls I had Meyer take the wheel while I strung a tarp for shade. Then we sat and talked about our passenger, agreeing that the talking jag was reaction hysteria.
“Also,” Meyer said, “she has to level with us. She can’t help adding trimmings, but it is essentially true. Maybe she didn’t want to tell a pair of civilians about her career. Maybe she wanted to pretend to be something else. But if she’d pretended to be something else, how would that work when we get to Miami? Say she was going back to the model agency? Back to the husband and kiddies? Back to the old secretarial desk? By leveling she’s asking for help and advice. How does she get out of the range of the people who’ll take another try at her?”
“But without leveling all the way.”
I had told him about that part of the conversation he hadn’t been there to catch. “Travis, she keeps walking around it, getting a little closer every time. I think she wants to tell us. I think she wants to get it off her chest. Whatever she’s been doing for the past two years, it makes her feel guilty. But she has a real dilemma. If she tells us enough so we can tip off the authorities, her girlfriends will suffer right along with the men in the group. Even so, if we stay receptive, I think she’ll get around to it, just in the forlorn hope we’ll be able to tell her what to do.”
“Got any guesses about what she’s been doing?” I asked.
Impatiently he said, “You listened to her, just as I did. Blackmail doesn’t upset her. Nor does conspiracy, nor theft, nor extortion, nor addiction, nor mayhem. Let’s say there aren’t many choices left.”
“At least it upset her.”
“Yes indeed. After two years, it began to make her edgy.”
Tarpon Bay seemed a reasonable halfway point, and after I had moved well off east of the channel, set the big hook in good bottom and killed the engines, she came stretching and yawning up into the sunset light to say that it looked as if we were in a lake, and why were we stopping, was it busted?
I explained that we didn’t want to overtax the captain by running all night, so parking was standard operating procedure.
As it was very still and very hot, I got the big auxiliary generator going, and we buttoned up the boat and put the air-conditioning on high. The fading day put an orange-gold light through the starboard windows of the lounge. I briefed her on the music machinery, and after she couldn’t find anything she liked among my tapes or records, I put the FM tuner into the circuit and she prowled the band from end to end until she settled for a Hollywood station whanging away at what Meyer terms beetle-bug mating chants. She boosted the bass and put the gain slightly below torture level. My big amplifier fed the rackety-bang into the big wall-mounted AR-2a stereo speakers, giving us all the resonances and overtones from twenty cycles all the way up to peaks no human ear can detect.
I had let her dig into the broad bin. She had left it open, of course, with a strew of discards on the floor nearby, just as she left any empty glass at the place where she finished it, hung the clothes she took off on the floor, left the bourbon bottle uncapped on the galley countertop, cluttered the head with toiletries, lipsticked the towels, left dark hairs in the basin. Though indifferent to all the spoor she left behind her, she spent all the time she was not talking, eating or sleeping in tidying herself. She put in a fantastic amount of mirror time, and was delighted to find a little kit in the broad bin which gave her the chance to work with great concentration on fingernails and toenails, filing the broken fingernails carefully. In the most unlikely event she was ever aboard for a longer cruise, I knew I would have to ration the showers she took. She would strain the capacity of even the oversize fresh water tanks aboard the Flush.
Digging through the broad bin she had come up with short brown shorts in a stretch fabric and a sleeveless orange blouse which she did not button, but had overlapped before tucking it into the shorts so that it fitted her torso very trimly. Barefoot, she danced alone on the lounge carpeting, half of a dark drink in her hand. The dance was mildly derivative of the frug-fish-watusi, moving to a new place, facing in a new direction from time to time. Meyer and I had dropped the desk panel and we sat on either side of it, playing one of those games of chess where, by cautious pawn play by both of us, the center squares had become intricately clogged as the pressure of the major pieces built up, and each move took lengthy analysis. While he pondered, I watched Vangie. She gave no impression of being on display. Her face was without expression, eyes partially closed. She rolled and twisted her body to the twang-ka-thump music, but in a controlled and moderate way. I could not tell if she was lost in the music or lost in thought. Nearly everyone over nineteen who tries the modern dances of the young looks so vulgar as to be almost obscene. And I would have expected Evangeline to be no exception.
But when she bowed her head, the wings of dark hair swung forward, and in the rhythmic turning of her upper body from side to side, in the roll and swing and cadence of her hips, she achieved that curious quality of innocence the young ones project, wherein body movements that are essentially sexual become merely symbolic sexual references, mild and somehow remote.
I knew she had no awareness of our watching her from time to time. I tried to identify the factors that enabled her to project that special flavor. The brief shorts enhanced the length and grace and elegance of her legs. The way she had overlapped the blouse made it loose across the bosom, blurring her contours. Part of the effect was due to the restraint of her movements. But in large measure it had to be the shape of her in waist, flanks, hips, thighs, buttocks. There was a look of fullness and ripeness, but all of it trimmed by the interwoven musculature under that thin subcutaneous fat layer that makes the softness of woman. There was no loose wobbling, no saddlebag pads of flesh above the hips, no softness of waist, no jounce of inner thigh or sag of belly. There was a tilt of that flatness just below the last knuckles of the spine, that flat place where there are two dimples in healthy flesh, and below that the buttocks swelled into a solid roundness, without droop or flaccidity. Then it was the tightness of the flesh of youth that must give these dances their curiously somber quality, a brooding, inward look to those earthy movements. When the flesh is taut, the dance becomes strangely ceremonial. It is a rite that celebrates the future, and it was eerie to see how accurately it could be imitated by a woman who had left any chance of love so far in the past.
When it was my move, I saw that Meyer had not, as I had expected, begun the disruption of the balance of power in the center squares. He had moved a bishop, bringing more force to bear. As I began to study it, he went away and came back bearing what he calls his tourist disguise, a huge black camera gadget bag. He put it down, bent over it and pawed around and selected a Nikon F body and a medium telephoto lens.
He turned the palm of his hand to catch the same light that was on her face, and took a meter reading from his palm. He set speed and aperture, went down onto one knee, focusing with the lens aimed upward toward her. The clack of the reflex mechanism was muffled by the music. He moved to a new angle, caught her again and again, unaware, until she turned in her solitary ritual and saw him and stopped and said, “Oh, come on!”
“Strictly amateur,” he called to her over the din of music. “Dead fish, broken sea shells, old stone walls, lovely faces.”
“But here’s what you want, Meyer, for God’s sake,” she said. She shook her dark hair back, turned at an angle to him, wet her lips, arched her back, then stood hipshot, head lowered, eyes hooded, lips apart, staring into the lens with stylized lustful invitation.
She struck three such poses and Meyer recorded them dutifully, but I knew he had no interest in that kind of record. When he thanked her and put the camera away, she went over and turned the volume down and said, “I posed for a lot of art model stuff, you probably saw it in girlie magazines, except I haven’t done any the last two years. I’ve got such a good body, the way it photographs, I got pretty good money, but let me tell you it’s harder work than you’d think. It worked out pretty good as something to keep some money coming in when we got the word to knock off for a couple of weeks, and another thing, when you tell the fuzz you’re a model, and you’ve got the glossies and the magazines to prove it, they better believe it.”
Meyer had returned to the chess game. She left the music turned down, went and built herself a new drink and came back and stared at the board as I made a pawn-takes-pawn move that would force a recapture and open up the middle squares.
“Maybe,” she said, “instead of that dumb game you boys could stake me twenty for a start and we could play three-way gin. Quarter of a cent? You’d get my marker for the twenty and I never faulted on a marker in my life, you can believe it.”
“Maybe later,” Meyer said.
“Excuse me all to hell,” Vangie said, turned up the music and went back to her dance, pausing to take her tiny sip of the drink from time to time.
That night I was back in an old dream, asleep on the yellow couch in the lounge, the air-conditioning off, the Flush unbuttoned, a faint coolness of night breeze moving through the screening of the open hatches forward and along the length of her and out the stern ports and doorway.
I always remember after awakening that I have dreamed the same dream many times, but in sleep it is always new. Back in that tumbledown shed on the hillside at night, in the stink of the leg wound that has gone bad, rifle braced on a broken crate, trying to push the illusions of the high fever out of my mind so that I wouldn’t get the crazies and imagine they were coming up the slope toward me through the patterns of moonlight, and fire at hallucinations and thus give them the chance to find me and finish it, then wait there and also kill the girl when she came in the morning with the medicines. Then something touched my shoulder and I knew they had sneaked around behind me.
I went in an instant from the dream to the reality of the touch in the darkness of the lounge, made a hard spasmed leap from that prone position that took me over the back of the couch, with, in the moment of take-off, my right hand snatching the little airweight Bodyguard, hammerless .38 special. I rolled noisily to the wall, and where shadows were deepest, moved swiftly and silently to the light switch near the desk. I could see a shadow moving away from the couch. Squinting in advance to avoid the dazzle of the lights, I came up into a crouch and hit the switch.
Vangie had been backing away. She stared at me, mouth sagging, eyes squinched against the sudden glare, and stopped there looking at me and at the deadly muzzle of the little short-barreled handgun. I let the nerves and muscles go loose, slipped the weapon temporarily into the desk drawer.
“Salvage business!” she said in a thin enraged tone. “Salvage? For chrissake!”
I yawned. “I didn’t mean to startle you. You startled me. There are some people around who don’t appreciate me at all.”
She was naked, her hair tousled by sleep. She moved back toward the couch, shaking her head. Nipple areas exceptionally large, dark, almost a plum red, making the breasts themselves look smaller than they were. Weaving of flat muscles over the curve of hip. Deep and powerful slope of the belly down to a pubic thatch like a patch of gunmetal-colored smoke through which gleamed the pale plump weight of the pudendum framed between the round and solid pallor of the thighs.
She sat on the couch and said, “Geez, my knees are like water. Touch you to wake you up and you blow up like a rocket or something.”
I leaned against the desk. “Did you have something on your mind?”
With the automatic exasperation of the person who has been startled she said, “What does it look like I had on my mind anyway? Maybe I came mousing in here in the dark so you could teach me chess, hah?”
She sighed and leaned back slightly, relaxing, sprawled and straddled, putting one hand behind her neck, elbow akimbo. Her body had too specific a look. It seemed too earthily illustrative of function, in the way that some of the larger flower blossoms have such a fleshy look of process one cannot see them from a purely aesthetic viewpoint.
I reached to the nearby chair, picked up my T-shirt and tossed it to her. She caught it and looked at me and said, “You’re giving me some kind of a message?” She shrugged. “Well, it wasn’t what anybody’d call a great start, buddy.” She pulled it on over her head, hitched herself up to snug it under her seat. It came to midthigh. She patted her tumbled hair and crossed elegant legs. “What I had in mind, McGee, I couldn’t get back to sleep once I woke up, and I had this lousy little impulse, maybe a way of saying hello, or saying thanks. Or a way to make it easier to get back to sleep. What you should know, I wasn’t going to peddle it.”
I sat astride the desk chair, forearm along the top of the back, chin on my forearm. “I didn’t think you were.”
She scowled. “But it could get confusing, because I am going to try to hit you for a loan. And you maybe wouldn’t understand it would be a loan, really and truly. Two hundred bucks?”
“Okay.”
She gave me a little of the expression she had used when posing for Meyer and deepened her voice. “So there’s two good reasons to say thanks, Trav.”
“Saying it is enough, Vangie.”
She studied me. “Listen, I know that there are a lot of guys who get chilled off if they know a girl’s been a hooker. But I wasn’t going to try to pay you back with some kind of faked-up trick, Trav, honest. I’d want to make out for real, and that’s something I’ve never peddled except sometimes by accident practically. Maybe it wouldn’t be the greatest blast in the world, but you won’t forget it in a hurry, and you can believe it.”
“Vangie, stop putting me on the spot, will you? You’re all girl, and I’m not a prude, and I appreciate the gesture, but you are not in my debt and …”
“And thanks but no thanks? Sure.” She yawned. “No hard feelings, Trav. I guess all these things, they depend on what you’re used to. For some little spook working behind a big desk the last twenty years, he’d think I was coming on with the greatest thing since the wheel, but I guess a man who looks like you and has a boat like this can score just about whenever and wherever he gets the wants.” She got up, winked at me, sauntered over to the table and lighted a cigarette, shook the match out. “We’re still friends, Mister. Maybe … I don’t know … better friends this way. Funny to have a man friend. Men are either trade or they’re in for a cut of the gross. You and Meyer. Funny, crazy bastards. I
get the feeling … oh skip it.”
“What feeling?”
She came closer, stood in front of my chair. “It’s silly. A feeling that you two like me. I was in that big bed thinking about that. You know all the garbage about me I told you. And you’re still nice.” Abruptly her amber eyes filled with tears. Her mouth twisted and she turned and walked away, keeping her back to me.
In a harsh half-whisper she said, “What I’ve been mixed up in, it’s a lot better all around if you weren’t parked under that bridge. And if they find me again, maybe that isn’t such a bad thing either. Awake in there I was thinking there’s no way you can stop being what you are. There’s no way to hide from what you know. And having anybody like me makes it tougher. Before I came creeping in here in the dark, I was getting screwy ideas, like paying off the world by going to work at a leper place if they still have them anymore these days. Miracle drugs, they probably got them all cured and it’s too late.”
I went to her and put my hand on her shoulder and turned her around. She kept her eyes downcast. “We like you even if you don’t do dishes, Vangie. And we’d like to help you if we knew more about it.”
For a little while I thought she would talk. She sighed and turned away. “Oh hell, Travis, it isn’t so much finking out as keeping you guys from knowing how lousy I really am.”
She braced up and assayed a crooked smile and said, “A year from now I’ll have forgotten the whole thing. I’ve had good practice forgetting stuff. Say, you think I ought to pay a little call on Meyer?”
“I think it would work out just about the same way.”
“So do I. Anyway, I think I can sleep now.” With a swift and sisterly kiss on my cheek, she left the lounge. I turned the light out and settled down again, the weapon back under the pillow where it belonged. I’d felt no slightest itch of desire for her, and knew why. It had been a white lie. I was a prude, in my own fashion. I had been emotionally involved a few times with women with enough of a record of promiscuity to make me vaguely uneasy. It is difficult to put much value on something the lady has distributed all too generously. I have the feeling there is some mysterious quota, which varies with each woman. And whether she gives herself or sells herself, once she reaches her own number, once X pairs of hungry hands have been clamped tightly upon her rounded undersides, she suffers a sea change wherein her juices alter from honey to acid, her eyes change to glass, her heart becomes a stone, and her mouth a windy cave from whence, with each moisturous gasping, comes a tiny stink of death.
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