Where Is Janice Gantry?

by John D. MacDonald

  Had I been alone, I could have paced myself and had no trouble. You swim until you feel as if your arms are turning to lead, and then you float for a while, and start off again, using a different stroke.

  There weren’t enough ways I could haul her along and make any kind of time. The best way was to have her behind me, holding onto my belt, floating along between my legs, adding her kicking to my lumbering crawl stroke. But I could not keep that up very long. We would rest and then shift so that I did a back stroke with Peggy clinging to one ankle, being towed along, helping us with her kicking. Our least effective method was when I hooked her clasped hands over my shoulder and did a side stroke.

  In water less warm and less buoyant, we could not have made it. And for a long time I doubted whether we could make it even under these most favorable conditions. Water is an alien element. It saps strength. It became a blind feat of endurance. Each time I tired more quickly.

  After a long, long time I realized she was speaking my name. I rolled onto my back, gasping, trying to will the tensions out of my muscles which made it difficult to float.

  “You go on and get help,” she said. “I can float around for days, happy as a clam, really.”

  When I could speak I said, “Nonsense. I’m enjoying every minute.”

  “My God, aren’t we bright and brittle and gay,” she said, her voice breaking. “We’ll make our crummy little quips right to the end, won’t we?”

  “Hey,” I said. “Don’t!”

  “Well, I’m sick of gallantry, Sam. I love you with all my heart. Leave me right here. Swim to shore.”

  “Quips or no quips, Peggy, I’ll never leave you. We’ll make it together or we won’t make it.”

  “Then we won’t make it, Sam. You were groaning with every breath.”

  “I’ll rest a little. Then I’ll be okay.”

  “How far are we from shore?”

  “Halfway, at least.”

  “If it ends like this, it’s such … a dirty cheat.”

  “It won’t. Believe me, it won’t!”

  “Don’t kid me, Sam. I’m a big girl.”

  We floated in the darkness and the silence. I added it all up, and there was only one way in the world I could make it come out right.

  “I better see what I can do with that knot again, honey.”

  “That’s the way I figured it out too. Darling?”

  “What?”

  “Good luck.”

  I found the knot in the darkness and the short ends of wire. My fingers had more feeling, but they were still clumsy. I was exhausted and the effort kept pushing me underwater. I pawed at the knot and gnawed it and suddenly I had to rest.

  “Are you getting anywhere?” she asked, too calm.

  “I’m pretty sure I am,” I lied.

  “If you can’t do it, I’ll make you leave me. I’ll move away from you, Sam. You won’t find me in the dark. I won’t answer you.”

  “Stop that! Stop that stupid goddam nonsense!”

  I tried again until I was exhausted, but I kept my hand on her wrist while I floated and rested. On the third attempt I went underwater, and got a dog tooth wedged in a loop of the knot, felt the edge of wire gash my gum, yanked my head like a wolf tearing meat, and felt the miraculous loosening.

  Moments later the wire was on the floor of the Gulf, and she was sobbing and laughing, glorious in that moonlight.

  Then she swam slowly around me, working the circulation back into her hands. She came to me, pressed salt lips against mine and said, “Race you to shore, mister?”

  “More quips?”

  “Now it’s different, darling. We can afford them.”

  “I have the feeling you’ll win.”

  “Tell me when you’re ready to start.”

  “Right now, but slow.”

  “Make the pace, Sam.”

  We swam side by side. She adjusted her pace to mine. I thought it would be a lot easier without her, but I soon learned I had expended almost everything in the account. There was very little left. If I didn’t husband it with great care, I would not make it.

  She was calling to me again and she came over and caught my arm, stopping me. I felt like crying childish tears because somebody had stopped me and I didn’t know if I could get going again, ever.

  “Sam,” she said. “Look, darling.”

  I looked. I saw the darkness of the shoreline.

  I found I could start my arms moving again. And after a long time my knee touched bottom. I staggered up onto my feet and fell forward, and tried to get up again and could not. I was crawling onto wet sand when she caught my arm and helped me up. I leaned too much of my weight on her as we plodded up to where the sand was dry and still warm with the lingering heat of the sun that was long gone. I slid down onto my knees and rolled over onto my back, chest heaving, heart laboring. She knelt beside me and sat back on her heels.

  After a long time I was able to look at her. She was mostly a shadow that blotted out the stars. But the moonlight made her hair bright, and it came down at an oblique angle, touching her here and there with a faint silver wash. It touched her cheek, the tip of her nose, her shoulder, half of one breast and the tip of the other, a faint curve of hip, a bold roundness of flexed thigh. The Gulf lapped at the sand, tame as a puppy.

  “Old hero type,” my girl said softly. “Stubborn, durable, and so forth.”

  “It ain’t often I take a moonlight swim with a naked gal.”

  “I’m being sweet to you because I’m actually after your shirt.” She moved to spread herself sweetly across my chest and kiss the side of my throat and nestle there. I ran my hand along the firm satin of her back.

  “Everything from now on,” she whispered, “is all profit.”

  “All for free, honey.”

  “How did you get loose?”

  “When you were screaming it turned out I was able to bust that wire. I think it broke where you weakened it with the file.”

  She shuddered against me. “They took that nasty sponge out of my mouth because that Marty one wanted me to scream. I was hoping to get a chance to bite him.”

  “Did he manage to …”

  “No, darling. But let’s just say that it couldn’t have been timed any closer. He’d clubbed me over the ear with his fist and I was fighting in a sort of daze. It wasn’t going to take him much longer. Hey, do you know that I loooove you?”

  “What you feel is gratitude, woman.”

  There was a small multiple whining that kept increasing in its ominous volume. My girl began to twitch. She sat up. “Sam, there’s a hundred billion mosquitoes here! We’re going to get eaten alive!”

  “Lucky thing a tourist like you has a native along.”

  I sent her out into the water. I stripped down to my shorts, wrung out the shirt and trousers and spread them on driftwood sticks stuck into the sand. And then I joined her in the shallows. When too many of them started to swarm around our faces, we would duck under and move away from them. As my strength returned there came with it a special urgency of desire for her. Any nearness of death seems to quicken the needs of the body. The warm and shallow water and the faint almost imperceptible swell and the moonlight, making the beach sand into snow, had aphrodisiac qualities, and she was creamy and supple beside me, with a gaiety that had a semi-hysterical quality about it, a gaiety marked by constant awareness of the narrow margin of our escape.

  It started as a kind of love play, with both of us knowing that this was not the time or the place, both of us aware of a leaden weariness. For a little time our play seemed to have the innocence of children, little wrestlings and graspings and mock angers. But soon she was responding in drugged and humid ways. The shorts floated off in the black water. I took her, there, in the warm shallows, her drenched and shining head resting at that line where the ripples of the outgoing tide touched the beach, the greedy insects, ignored for a time, feeding thick and fat on my back and shoulders and on the careless arch of her long legs, ou
r joined bodies buoyant in that shallow edge of the tropic sea.

  After it ended, the greedy keening of thousands of tiny wings sent us back into deeper water.

  She clung to me with a desperate strength and with all of her wrapped around me, she whispered fiercely in my ear, “Don’t ever be sorry. Don’t ever be sorry we started just this way.”

  “There couldn’t be any other way to start. You know that.”

  “It was glorious! That’s a big word, but there it is. Glorious.”

  “You don’t have to say it like a challenge.”

  Soon she began to get a little sleepy and cross and wanted to know if she was expected to sleep in the darn water. I went up and felt the shirt and trousers for the third time and found them dry enough. I hastily scooped two long holes up in the clean, dry, warm sand. I had her come running and stretch out with her head on her sand pillow, and I covered her over with a layer of sand, then propped the sport shirt on four sticks so that it substituted for mosquito netting over her head. I was thoroughly bitten before I had made the same arrangements beside her, for myself, breathing through the propped-up mesh of the tropical weight slacks.

  “Good night, my darling,” she said in a very crisp and matter-of-fact voice. A few minutes later when I asked her if she could get to sleep, there was no answer.

  When the early sun woke me up I sat up to find her nest empty. It was a morning full of sparkle and glints of light, a west wind.

  “Hoo!” she cried from a hundred yards out. “Hallooo!”

  I stood up out of the sand. I walked down to the edge of the water. Every muscle was full of broken dishes and fish hooks. I was a hundred and nine years old. I swam slowly out to her.

  “Good morning, my love,” she said. “My hair is a gummy horrible mess. I didn’t bring my lipstick. I’m red welts all over from bugs. I’ve got little gray balloons under my eyes, I think. Take a good look. And then, if you could bear it, kiss a girl good morning.”

  I did. I said, “The looks are nifty. It’s the good cheer I can’t stand.”

  “Come on and swim out a little further. I want to show you something.”

  I churned along in her wake and then she turned and pointed back. I saw it too, a tall white water tower shining against the deepening blue of the morning sky.

  “Civilization?” she asked.

  “I don’t know how far south we are from Boca. This could be LaCosta Key, and that would be the tower on one of the islands in Pine Island Sound.”

  “Darling, I know we should be grimly determined to get to a phone and confound the evil ones and all that, but I want to stay. Am I perverse? If there was any coffee, you couldn’t make me leave.”

  “We’ll come back.”

  “For sure? In the Lesser Evil? Is that a promise?”

  “Solemn. Cross my …” I stopped as I saw her hand. I caught her wrist as she tried to snatch it away. I looked at the angry, puffy redness on the back of her hand, the places newly scabbed.

  “What did this?”

  “It doesn’t hurt now, really.”

  “It’s what made you talk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cigarettes?”

  “That damned cigar.”

  “Six places, Peggy. Six bad burns.”

  “The box score goes like this, darling. I lasted through four, somehow, fainted on the fifth, and talked like mad on the sixth.”

  “And called yourself a coward?”

  “For talking at all, Sam. My God, I didn’t wait for questions. I was volunteering information. I told them everything we’d guessed about them.”

  I touched the back of her hand with my lips. And because I felt a warning sting in my eyes, I ducked her firmly and headed for shore at my very best pace, stretching the hot little wires interlaced through my muscles. The swim was loosening me up a little. Twenty feet from shore she started to boil past me, but she was too close, so I reached out and caught one arm, pulled her back and ducked her again, and got to shore first.

  “You’re a lousy cheater!” she yelled. I turned and beamed at her. She lay in shallow water with her head out. “Bring me my shirt!”

  “Come on up here and ask pleasantly and politely if you may borrow my shirt, woman, and I’ll decide whether to let you have it.”

  “Sam!”

  “Take your time, cutie.”

  She scowled at me, and then finally stood up in the shallows. She tried to screen herself with arms and hands, and then said, “Oh, the heck with it.” She combed her soaked hair back with her fingers, squared her shoulders and came toward me, up the twenty-foot slant of beach, shyly at first and then with an increasing pride and boldness.

  She walked in the brightness of the morning sun, with the sea bright and blue behind her, the droplets of water spangling her body, taut with grace and balance, her head a little to one side, her expression solemn, her eyes fixed on mine. She marched up to me, took a deep breath that lifted breasts that were small, tilted and perfect.

  “What is entirely and forever yours, Sam, you have every right to look at,” she said. “Anything less than that would be silly.”

  Entirely and forever mine. It came thundering in upon me, this absolute and total emotional responsibility. I gladly accepted it. But I knew it was something that was happening to me for the very first time. Until that moment I had always been alone … even in the days of Judy. Even last night, with Peggy, I had been a little bit apart from her and from everyone else in the world. But with that special tone of voice and the look in her eyes she had pried open the last crypt, letting the stale cold air out, filling that final corner of me with a warmth I had never known before.

  “Aren’t—you supposed to say something sort of nice?” she asked in a small voice.

  “You are the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  “Not that nice!”

  “It’s all complete and total and forever.”

  “Tell me that once a day for a long, long time, Sam. Please. And now maybe you’d let go of that shirt?”

  She put it on and buttoned it. The shoulder seams drooped halfway to her elbows. Her wrists, like mine, were still grooved, bruised and swollen. The bottom of the sport shirt would have hung sedately to mid thigh, but the west wind kept plucking at it, lifting it.

  She held it down and said, “This is more indecent than being bare, for goodness sake! Don’t bullfighters have capes with weights sewed in for windy days?”

  “If you don’t like it, don’t wear it. Come on.”

  We cut across the key in the general direction of the water tower. It was heavy going, full of swamp and roots, vines and bugs. There was no wind and it was sweaty work. I broke off leafy twigs for us to use as fly whisks. I watched carefully for what I suspected we might find. When I saw it, I stopped abruptly. She held my arm tightly and we watched the slow fat coiling of a moccasin as it moved off into a tangle of black roots.

  “Okay?” I asked her.

  “I won’t bother them if they won’t bother me.”

  “When it’s cold they get so sluggish you might step on one before you noticed it.”

  “Isn’t it a lovely hot day, darling!”

  At last I saw the green water of the bay through the trunks of the mangroves at the water’s edge. I stepped carefully down into the mud between the tough exposed roots of the mangroves. Shallow mud flats extended perhaps three hundred yards to land that could be an island or a projection of the Key we were on. Beyond it, across more water, I could see the south edge of the island where the water tower stood.

  “Stay right behind me,” I told her. “We’ll walk across these flats. Scuff your feet with each step. If we come to an oyster bar, I’ll circle it.”

  “Scuff my feet?”

  “The sting rays sit on the mud and sand in shallow water in the hot months. If you should lift your foot and come down on one, he’d nail you.”

  “So I should bump the edge of one?”

  “And he’ll flap away, indi
gnant, irritable, but without reprisal.”

  “If I see one I’ll flap away too, like a seagull, buddy. Cawing.”

  On the way across the flats I saw a few stirring in the mud ahead of me, and the roiled signs of flight. Once we were far enough out for the west wind to catch us, it was harder to see bottom and I went more slowly. An old granddaddy mullet sailed up out of the water ten feet to our left, making her gasp.

  When we reached the south end of the first tip of land I looked ahead and saw that the water was deep enough for swimming.

  “You’re going to get that nice shirt wet,” I told her.

  “It might be more modest that way,” she said.

  “I somehow doubt the hell out of that.”

  “What do we aim for, boss?”

  I studied the island. It was perhaps six hundred yards away. The water tower was definitely on that island, but I could see no break in the mangroves along the west or south shore line.

  “We’ll head up the side of it there and swim around that point and see what we can see.”

  We waded in carefully, shuffling our feet, and began swimming as soon as the water reached my waist. We had to buck a slow tidal current. The only unpleasant thing about it was its tendency to paste a long green slimy strand of seaweed across your face from time to time. The water was warm. I could feel more of the tension and pain being worked out of my muscles. I felt a slight weakness that came, I suspected, from hunger. After a long and steady pull I veered over to an area that looked shallow and tested it. It was up to my armpits. I could stand there by leaning into the steady current. I held her by the nape of the neck as she floated on her back, resting.

  I looked down the length of her fondly. “Nothing modest about that shirt, girl.”

  “Hush now!”

  “About the same effect as a coat of primer.”

  Six pelicans sailed by, twenty feet away, their wing tips a quarter-inch from the surface of the water. They ignored us. I explained to Peggy that they had been around before mankind had appeared to mess up the fishing, and they had several fairly good reasons to expect to be around after we had become history. She said they hadn’t looked because they were too courteous to stare, which was more than she could say for the man of her choice.