Bright Orange for the Shroud

by John D. MacDonald

  Leafy borrowed old clothes from a neighbor, big enough to fit him, while she washed and cleaned and mended what he’d been wearing. He thought that it was the fourth day before she asked him any questions at all, came out into the yard when he was walking around in the afternoon, feeling a little steadier on his feet. There were pieces of old car and pieces of marine engine in the yard, coarse grass half hiding them. He sat in the shade of the live oak tree on an overturned dinghy, and Leafy leaned against the trunk, arms folded, head tilted, a wiry, faded, bright-eyed woman in khaki pants and a blue work shirt, visibly pregnant.

  “Who did beat on you, Arthur?”

  “Boone Waxwell.”

  “All them Waxwells are pure mean as moccasin snakes. You got folks to go to someplace?”

  “No.”

  “What kind of work you do, mostly?”

  “Well … in a store.”

  “Get yourself fired?”

  “I quit.”

  “Clothes you had on were right good. Messed up, but good. And you talk nice, like you had good schooling, and you eat polite. Sam and me, we looked in your clothes, but you got no papers at all.”

  “There should be a wallet, with a license and cards and so on.”

  “And maybe a thousand dollars? If you had one, Arthur, you spilled it out falling all over that road. What we got to know, Sam and me, is if the police got some interest in you, because they can go hard on folks giving anybody house room.”

  “I’m not wanted for anything. Not for questioning or anything else.”

  She studied him and nodded to herself. “All right, then. What you got to have, I guess, is some kind of work to get some money to be on your way, and you can stay on here till you got it, paying me board when you start drawing pay. I guess there’s some men got it in them to just roam. That’s all right for kids, Arthur, but a grown man, it turns into something different, and without a steady woman you can grow old into a bum. You think on that some.”

  Sam had found him work on the maintenance crew readying the Rod and Gun Club for the season opening. He sent in the bureaucratic forms necessary to reassemble the paper affirmations of his identity, a replacement driver’s license, a duplicate social security card. When he was laid off at the Club, he found a job as common labor on a development housing project over near the airport.

  Sam Dunning partitioned a small corner of the garage, and Leafy fixed it up with a cot, chair, lamp, and packing box storage disguised by a piece of cotton drapery material thumb-tacked to the top edge. He paid her twelve dollars a week for room and meals, after long earnest bargaining. She wanted ten. He wanted to give fifteen.

  There on the sundeck, in a thoughtful voice, Arthur told us that it was a strange time in his life. He had never done manual labor. Until he acquired a few basic skills, the foreman came close to firing him several times for innate clumsiness. The skills pleased him—rough carpentry without owl eyes surrounding the nail heads, learning when the cement mix was the right consistency, learning how to trundle a wheelbarrow along a springy plank. He said it was as if he had turned half of himself off, settling into routine, speaking when spoken to, sitting with the Dunning kids when Sam and Leafy went out on Saturday nights. On days off he helped Sam with boat maintenance, and sometimes crewed for him on a charter. He felt as if he was in hiding from every familiar thing, and, in the process, becoming someone else. He spent almost nothing, and accumulated money, without counting it. He could lay on his cot and keep his mind empty. When it would veer toward Wilma or toward the lost money, he would catch it quickly, return it to the comforting grayness, feeling only a swoop of dizziness at the narrowness of the escape. Sometimes he awoke from sleep to sense erotic dream-memories of Wilma fading quickly, leaving only some of the tastes of her on his mouth, textures of her on his hands.

  Leafy had her child in January, her third boy. His present to her was an automatic washing machine, a used one in good condition. He and Sam got it tied into the water line and wired the day before Sam brought her home. She was ecstatic. Her attitude toward him warmed perceptibly, and soon, in the most obvious ways, she began to try to make a match between Arthur and a seventeen-year-old girl down the road named Christine Canfield. Christine had run off to Crystal River with a stone crab fisherman and had come home alone at Christmas, slightly pregnant. She was the youngest of three daughters, the older two married and moved away, one to Fort Myers, the other to Homestead. Christine was a placid, pleasant, slow-moving child who smiled often and laughed readily. She was husky, brown-blonde, pretty in a childlike way.

  “Nobody’s in the place Cobb Canfield put up for his Lucy before Tommy got the good job in Fort Myers. You could fix it up right nice,” Leafy said.

  “Listen, she’s only seventeen years old!”

  “She’s carrying proof she’s a woman, and it hardly shows yet. She likes you fine, just fine, Arthur. She’s healthy and she’s a worker, and they’re good stock. And she got the wild run out of her, and Cobb’d be so grateful to get it worked out, he’d do you good, believe me. Christine’d make you a good steady woman, not like some her age on the island.”

  “I should have told you before, Leafy. I’m married.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she accepted this new problem. “You plan on taking up again with your wife, Arthur?”

  “No.”

  “She got cause to come looking for you?”

  “No.”

  She nodded to herself. “The law doesn’t pay it no mind unless somebody comes along to make a fuss. You just keep your mouth shut about that wife. Cobb is too proud to let her set up any common law thing with you, so all you have to do is keep your mouth shut and marry her, and who does that hurt? Nobody, and does you both good, and gives that bush kitten she’s carrying a daddy. Christine, she can make a garden bear the year round, and with a snitch hook she’s good as you’ll ever see, and it don’t make for bad living having a young wife grateful to you.”

  Chook completed her series of tortures and came and sat by us, breathing deeply, brown body gleaming with perspiration, hair damp. “Surprised we ever saw you again, Arthur.”

  “Maybe you wouldn’t have. I thought about it. She was as trusting and affectionate as a dog you bring in out of the rain. I could have stayed right there the rest of my life. But I kept remembering eight friends who had believed in me. Somehow that was worse than my money being gone, the way theirs went with it. I couldn’t hide from that the rest of my life. And the pressure from Leafy and Christine merely made me more aware of it. So I told them I had something personal to take care of, and I’d be back as soon as I could, maybe in a few weeks. That was two months ago. I went back to Naples thinking I could try to recover enough just to pay back my friends.”

  He had gone to the Citrus Blossom Motel and found that his possessions had long since been sold, leaving a deficit of nine dollars on the room. He paid it out of the seven hundred he’d saved. He found another room. He bought the clothing I’d thrown in the dockside trash can. He went to see Crane Watts. Watts got the file out. There had been one additional assessment. When attempts to contact Mr. Wilkinson had failed, his participation was eliminated according to the terms of the agreement. As they had been unable to acquire an option on the Kippler Tract after lengthy negotiations, the syndicate had been dissolved and all monies remaining in the account had been divided on the basis of final participation. Arthur had demanded the addresses of Stebber and Gisik, and Watts had said that if he wished to write them, the letters could be sent to Watts’ office for forwarding. Arthur told Watts, with some heat, that he felt he had been defrauded, and he was damned well going to stir up all the trouble he could for them, and if they wanted to settle, to avoid investigation, he would sign an unconditional release in return for a ten-thousand-dollar refund. Watts, Arthur told us, looked unkempt in beard stubble, soiled sports shirt and bourbon breath at eleven o’clock that morning. Heartened by Watts’ lack of assurance, Arthur had lied to him, saying that his attorney
was preparing a detailed complaint to be filed with the Attorney General of the State of Florida, with a certified copy to the Bar Association. Watts, angered, said it was nonsense. There had been no illegality.

  Arthur gave his temporary address, and said that somebody better get in touch with him, and damned soon, and bring the money.

  He got a phone call at five that evening. A girl with a brisk voice said she was phoning at Crane Watts’ request, to say that Calvin Stebber would like to have a drink with Mr. Wilkinson at the Piccadilly Pub on Fifth Avenue at six and discuss Mr. Wilkinson’s problem.

  Arthur was prompt. The tap room was luxurious and exceedingly dark. He sat on a stool at the padded bar, and when his eyes had adjusted, he searched the long bar and nearby tables and did not see Smiling Calvin. Soon a young woman appeared at his elbow, a trim and tailored girl, severe and pretty, who said she was Miss Brown, sent by Mr. Stebber who would be a little late, and would he come over to the table. He carried his drink over. Miss Brown parried his questions about Stebber with secretarial skill. She took microsips of a dry sherry. He was paged, went to the phone, found that it was a mistake. Someone wanted a Mr. Wilkinson, sales representative for Florida Builders Supply. Back at the table, suddenly the room tilted and he sprawled over against Miss Brown. She giggled at him. Then, in foggy memory, Miss Brown and a man in a red coat were helping him out to Miss Brown’s car. He woke up in another county, in Palm County, in the drunk tank, without funds or identification, sick, weak and with a blinding headache. In the afternoon a sheriff’s deputy, with a massive indifference, told him the score. He’d been picked up, stumbling around on a public beach, stinking and incoherent, brought in and booked as John Doe. They had a film strip of him. Standard procedure. He could plead guilty and take a thirty-day knock right now, or plead not guilty and go loose on two hundred dollars bail and wait for circuit court which would be about forty days from now. And he could make one call.

  He could have called Leafy. Or Christine. He elected the thirty days for himself. After four days of lockup, he signed up for road work as the lesser of two evils, swung the brush hook in lazy tempo under the tolerant guards, always turned his face away from the glitter of the tourist cars staring their way by, wore road gang twill too small for him. Out of tension, or despair, or aftereffects of whatever Miss Brown had dolloped his drink with, or the greasy texture of the rice and beans, he could keep little in his stomach. Road gang work gave him a fifty cents a day credit. He bought milk and white bread, and sometimes he kept it down and sometimes he didn’t. Sun and effort dizzied him.

  One bush to be chopped was Stebber, and the next was Watts, then G. Harrison Gisik, Boo Waxwell, Wilma, Miss Brown. As he began to fit the issue work clothes, in afternoon delirium he recalled what Chook had told him about me. And he knew that he’d be a fool to try anything else on his own. Maybe a fool to even ask for help. They gave him back his clothes and let him go, with a dollar thirty left from his work credit. He tried to hitch his way across the peninsula, but something was wrong, somehow, with the way he looked. They would slow down, some of them, then change their minds, roar on into the pavement mirages. Sudden rains soaked him. He bought sandwiches, had to abandon them after the first bite. He got a few short rides, found dry corners to sleep in, remembered very little of the last few days of it, then had the vivid memory of coming aboard the Busted Flush, and the deck swinging up at him, slapping him in the face as he tried to fend it off …

  “Just enough to pay my friends back,” he said. “I understand you take the expenses off the top and divide what else you can recover. If it wasn’t for them, I’d give up, Trav. Maybe it’s hopeless anyway. I had all that money, and now it’s all unreal, as if I never really had it. My great grandfather barged a load of fabrics, furniture and hardware up from New York, rented a warehouse and sold the goods for enough to pay off the loan on the first load and buy a second free and clear. That’s where the money started. Eighteen fifty-one. By nineteen hundred there was a great deal of money. My father wasn’t good with money. It dwindled. I thought I was better. I thought I could make it grow. God!”

  Chook reached and gave his oily shoulder an affectionate, comforting pat. “Some very smart people get terribly cheated, Arthur. And usually it happens far from home.”

  “I just … don’t want to go back there,” he said. “I dream that I’m there and I’m dead. I see myself dead on the sidewalk and people walking around me as they go by, nodding as if they knew all along.”

  Chook took my wrist and turned it to look at my watch. “Time for you to choke down another eggnog, Arthur old buddy. Nicely spiked to give you a big appetite for dinner.”

  After she left, Arthur said, “I guess the biggest part of the expense is feeding me.”

  I laughed more than it was worth. After all, it was his first mild joke. Sign of improvement. Other signs too. Stubble shaved clean. Hair neatly cropped by Chookie McCall, an unexpected talent. Sun burning away the pasty look. Pounds coming back. And Chook had him on some mild exercises, just enough to begin to restore muscle tone.

  She came up with his eggnog and a list. Perishables were dwindling. Eggs, milk, butter, lettuce. Candle Key had a Handy-Dandy-Open-Nights-and-Sunday. The wind would make easy sailing in the dink. The little limey outboard runs like a gold watch. My shoulders felt as if they were webbed with hot wires. So, with an excess of character, I left sail and motor behind, climbed down into the dink, and headed across the two miles of bay, rowing with the miniature oars.

  Coming back against the wind was almost as much fun as a migraine, and it didn’t help a bit to have the wind die the instant I clambered aboard and made the dinghy fast. Chook came and took the groceries. As she did so, and with a dull red sun sitting on the horizon line, we were invaded by an advance guard of seven billion salt marsh mosquitoes. They are a strange kind. They don’t bite, but some ancestral memory tells them they should get in position to bite. They are large and black and fly slowly, and when you wipe a dozen off your arm, they leave black streaks like soot. They are inept at the mosquito profession, but come in such numbers they can rattle the most easygoing disposition. As you breathe them in, you find yourself asking in desperation—But what do they want?

  Chook and Arthur had showered and changed, and it was immediately obvious they had somehow made each other totally unhappy. Arthur was leaden and remote. Chook was brisk and remote. All they would exchange were the most formal politenesses. I showered amid the fading scent of Chook’s perfumed soap, in that absurd mirrored stall, big enough, almost, for a Volkswagen garage. It is a grotesque waste of space in a fifty-two-foot houseboat, even with a twenty-one-foot beam, almost as much of a waste as the semisunken pale blue tub, seven feet long and four feet wide. I imagine that the elderly Palm Beach party who lost the vessel to me over the poker table needed such visual stimulations to do right by his Brazilian mistress.

  In response to the unexplained drearies of my boat guests, I had a vicious attack of the jollies, regaling them with anecdote, absurdity and one-sided repartee, much like a solitary game of handball. Once in a while they would pull their lips away from their teeth and go heh-heh-heh. And then politely pass each other something that was within easy reach of everyone in the small booth adjoining the galley.

  I judged it a favorable development. People were choosing up new sides. Chook and I had been united in caring for the sick. Now any relationship, even a rancorous one, which shut me out, was proof that he was not entirely defeated. She had to pump some spirit into him or my chances of any salvage were frail indeed. And maybe this was a start.

  Five

  On Monday we pulled the hooks and droned in stately fashion down to a new anchorage off Long Key, charging the batteries and getting beyond the range of the sooty mosquitoes which were restricting us to the belowdecks areas. During the swimming that followed, I was heartened by a small triumph. The long contest was around a distant marker and back to the boarding ladder. Halfway back she pulled even a
nd moved a half length ahead. I knew from the pain in my side that in another hundred yards I would begin to wallow and roll and lose the stroke. Suddenly the reserves were there—missing so long it was like welcoming an old friend. It was as if a third lung had suddenly opened up. I settled into it until I was certain, then upped the tempo and went on by her in a long sprint finish, was clinging to the ladder when she arrived, and feeling less like a beached blowfish than on other days. “Well now!” she gasped, looking startled and owlish.

  “You had to let me win one of these.”

  “The hell I did! I was busting a gut trying to keep up.” She snapped her head back and gave me the first grin I had seen since rowing back with the groceries.

  “Come with me,” I said, and swam slowly away from the Flush, rolled and floated and, looking back, saw Arthur busy at the chore I had given him, putting new lacing in a section of the nylon fabric that is lashed to the rail around the sun deck. Chook made a surface dive and came up beside me, and blew like a porpoise.

  “I could put you two in the shower stall,” I said. “What you do, you each take a corner of a silk handkerchief in your teeth, left hands tied behind you, six-inch knife in the right hand.”

  “Skip it, McGee.”

  “It’s just that the way you two go around chuckling and laughing, it gets on my nerves. I keep wondering what could make two people so hilarious.”

  “Maybe you could guess. I’m a big girl. I’m a big healthy girl. And I’m leading a very healthy life. I’m sleeping with him, in that half acre bed of yours. And that’s the precise word, McGee. Sleeping. Just that. So I thought maybe he was well enough, and it was going to take you a long time to get back with the groceries. I showered first, and got into a sexy little thing made of black cobwebs, and dabbed a little Tigress here and there and yonder, and spread myself out like picturesque, with my girlish heart going bump bump bump. It’s not as if it had never happened with him before. And the son of a bitch acted as if I’d solicited him on a street corner. He was offended, for God’s sake. He made me feel sleazy.”