The Empty Copper Sea

by John D. MacDonald

  Out behind the house, between the house and the long row of sand dunes, a woman stopped poking into a 55-gallon drum with a long stick and turned to look at us through the thicket of pilings supporting the house. She’d spent a lot of weeks in hot sun. She wore the bottom half of a string bikini, in redorange Day Glo. Without haste or emphasis, she turned and located the bikini top, slipped it on, hammocked herself into it, and tied it in back. She then peered into the drum and began prodding again with the stick.

  We walked around to where she was. There were two clotheslines hung with damp clothing. The drum was up on concrete blocks. There was a driftwood fire under it, flames almost too pale to see in the bright sunlight. Steam came off the soapy water in the drum. Bright clothing came into view and sank again as she prodded away.

  “If you are the guys from Maytag,” she said, “it is about time. This thing don’t cycle worth a hoot.”

  “How is it on spin dry?” Meyer asked.

  “Beyond belief.” As she spoke, water began to spill over the top of a second drum a dozen feet away. She sprinted to a small plywood shack and turned something off. A pump gasped and died. She came back and took the hose out of the newly filled drum. She was sweaty from working so near the fire. She was a big woman, middle twenties, tall, with solid bone structure, slender waist, great shoulders. Muscle rolled in her back as she dug into the drum with her thick piece of driftwood. She levered a sopping wad of clothing up and looked at it.

  “I can say,” she said, “without fear or favor, that all this stuff is cleaner than it was. Beyond that I will not go.”

  With a grunt of effort she levered the mass out of the drum and carried it to the other drum and dropped it in, and the displaced water sloshed out.

  “Have you come to take him away?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Which leaves me with mixed emotions.”

  The next wad of wet clothing was too heavy for her. I stepped in and carried it over to the rinse-water drum. She had brown hair, coarse with sun and salt, looking as if she had cropped it herself. She had a solid jaw, a broad mouth, dark brown eyes, and a jutting, high-bridged, no-nonsense nose.

  “But you’re looking for him?”

  “For a talk,” Meyer said.

  She fished the final garment out of the hot water and put it in the other drum, turned and stared at us, seemed to see something that reassured her, smiled, and put her hand out. “I’m Gretel Howard.”

  After introductions, Meyer explained that we were trying to get the title cleared up somehow on some of Hubbard Lawless’s holdings so that an offer could be made.

  She looked at him and then at me. “Real-estate people? Not really.”

  “Not really,” I said. “He’s doing a favor for a friend. I’m with him.”

  “You look like the sort of man who can fix an antique Kohler five-thousand-watt generator, McGee.”

  “I can look at it and make reassuring noises.”

  “Follow me.”

  We went to the plywood shed. It was a big brute. The gas was in a drum on a scaffolding arrangement behind the shed. Plenty of gas. I couldn’t check the condition of the batteries. It was rigged to start up at power demand. Turn on a hundred watts anywhere in the circuit and it would or should begin. A thin little metal leaf, like a spring, was supposed to be activated by the demand and bend over and touch a terminal. I pushed it over against the terminal, and with a great popping stuttering roar, the generator came to life.

  Gretel sprang backward and hit the back of her head against the frame of the low doorway into the shed. Meyer backed into the little gasoline water pump and burned the back of his ankle on the still-hot housing. They each made appropriately fevered statements in the silence after I had released the little contact leaf. I examined it carefully. The vibration of the generator had caused the setscrew to work loose. I tightened it with the edge of a dime until the leaf was a sixteenth of an inch from the contact. There was a light in the shed, a hanging bulb. I turned it on, and the generator roared into life. I turned it off, smiling, smug and happy.

  “My undying gratitude,” she said. “We’ll go find John. But first I have to churn my rinse a little.”

  As she churned, Meyer said, “You have heard of Laundromats?”

  “I know. You’re being ironic. Yes, love, and I could have bundled all this scrungy stuff into Brenda—that is little green Brenda over there, my dear lopsided auto—and gone Laundromating with a lot of gratitude for the benefits of civilization and so on. But I have this pioneer hang-up. I love doing things the hard way.”

  Making it evident we weren’t going to be given the reason.

  “I didn’t mean to pry,” Meyer said.

  “Of course you didn’t. I can wring this stuff out and hang it later, gentlemen. Let’s go up on the deck and see if we can spot John pursuing lunch.”

  We climbed the warped and weathered stairway to the deck, climbed from one world into another. From the deck one could see across the top of the dunes, out to the blue Gulf dotted with infrequent whitecaps in the morning breeze. To the south was a curve of beach and the continuing line of dunes. To the north, far away, were a few white towers of Timber Bay rising up out of the city smudge. To the east was the north-south wavery line of the old asphalt road, heat shimmering from it.

  She went into the house and came out with binoculars, and located him far up the beach. They were big old Navy ten-power, hard to hand-hold. She gave them to me, stood beside me. I was very conscious of her there, of a radiation of her body heat as we stood in the shade of the overhang, of the way the top of her brown head came higher than my eyes. Few women stand that tall in bare brown feet. I guessed her at a fraction of an inch over six feet.

  I focused on John Tuckerman. He was a mile away, standing to mid-thigh in the waves, casting out beyond where they were beginning to lift and break.

  “You can walk up there and talk to him,” she said. “But don’t … expect too much. He’s quite confused.”

  “How so?”

  “I thought when I got every last trace of alcohol out of his system, he would be like he used to be. Poor John. It’s a wonder I haven’t killed him, running him up and down that beach. I asked Dr. Sam Stuart about it and he said it was due to alcoholic spasm destroying brain tissue. He changed during the month after Hub disappeared. He was drinking so very heavily, I understand. He was … the way he is by the time I got here, by the time I could get here.”

  “Should we both go?” I asked her.

  “It might make him anxious to see two of you coming. Just you alone would be better, I think.”

  He noticed me when I was a hundred yards from him. He saw me when he had drawn back his arm to cast. He stayed frozen in that position for a few moments and then lowered the rod and stood waiting. He looked like a Clark Gable gone seriously to seed. His dark hair was tangled and long. His black mustache had grown down over his lip. He had a four-day stubble of beard. But the cheekbones were high and hard, the brow jutting, the eyes dark, deepset, and merry. He was bigger than I had expected, almost as tall as I am, and wider, but soft. Tan helped hide the softness, the sagging belly, the varicosities on the husky legs. He wore ragged shorts. There was a tackle box on the sand and a stringer staked close by, with the line leading into the wave wash.

  “Any luck?” I asked.

  “Not good today. Just some of those little suckers that taste like iodine. And a little shark I let go.”

  “What are you using, John?”

  “I got these tired pieces of cut bait. They’re beginning to smell. Say, how’d you know my name?”

  “Gretel pointed you out up the beach here and told me you’re fishing for lunch. She seems like a nice person.”

  “Oh, she’s a wonderful girl. Just wonderful. She’s taking real good care of me. I can’t remember the last time I had a drink. What’s your name?”

  “McGee. Travis McGee. I came out here with a friend of mine. His name is Meyer.
He’s back at the house with Gretel. We came to Timber Bay a few days ago to find out about buying Hub’s ranch and grove land. We wondered if you could help us.”

  “No, I couldn’t help you with anything like that. I was just a friend. That’s all. We grew up together and went to school together and stayed friends. Hub was the smart one.”

  “I thought you were a vice-president of those companies he had.”

  “Oh, I was, sure. I guess I still am, come to think of it. But it didn’t mean anything, not anything at all. He said it was so I could be expensed. I don’t know why what I got paid couldn’t have come out of just one of the businesses. I wasn’t getting a free ride, though. I did a lot of things for Hub. And for Julie and the kids too. Pretty important things, sometimes. Like making sure something would get delivered on time to the right person.”

  Finally I was able to put a name to what was so strange about him: it was his childlike quality. The amiable open manner, the pleasant eagerness were those of a manly child, eager for approval.

  “Deliveries can be very important,” I said.

  “You just bet they can!”

  I saw some action out beyond the waves and wondered if I could find him some better bait. I took off shoes and socks, rolled my pant legs up, went down to the edge of the water, and began digging in the soft wet sand. After a little while I dug up a sand flea, oyster-white, multilegged, and snatched him before he could burrow back into the wet sand. He was as big around as my thumb and half as long. I took him and impaled him on John Tuckerman’s hook.

  “That’s an ugly thing!” he said. “Where did you find it?”

  “There should be a lot of them along this beach. Cast out over in that direction and reel in fast.”

  “Fast? Okay.”

  In the first ten feet of retrieve he got a hard strike. He yelled with excitement and pleasure. He worked the fish expertly, but when we got a look at it, his shoulders sagged. “Oh, nuts. Another kind of trash fish. A darn jackfish.”

  He had a fish knife in his tackle box. I pulled the four-pound jack farther up the beach, slit its throat, and pulled it back into the water, holding it captive by the leader. It pumped strings and strands of dark blood into the water until it weakened and died. The sea had washed away all the pink blush of blood.

  “What did you do that for?” he demanded. He looked upset and disapproving.

  “Because it is second cousin to a pompano, and now the meat won’t be dark and heavy, and it makes a good panfish.”

  As the knife was sharp enough, I filleted the fish on the spot, washed the two slabs of meat in the sea, and threw the rest out beyond the surf, where the crabs would clean it up quickly.

  “You sure did that fast,” John Tuckerman said.

  “Lots of practice.”

  “Say, were you ever a guide? Did you do guiding out of Marathon, ever? You look like a fellow me and Hub hired down there a long time ago. No, you couldn’t be. That was maybe fifteen years ago. He’d be a lot older by now than you are.”

  “I’ve found fish for a lot of people, but not for hire.”

  “What did you say your name is?”

  “Travis McGee.”

  “Trav?”

  “Sure.”

  “I used to remember names real good. It is sort of a trick. You know. You find some way to match up the name to the way the people look. Like if there is a woman named Fowler with a big mouth and a real loud voice, you say to yourself, She is Fowler the Howler, and then you never forget. But I have stopped remembering somehow. I used to be able to tell ten thousand jokes. I was known for telling jokes. The other day I was fishing and I tried to remember one. Just one. And I couldn’t.”

  “If this fish is lunch, we ought to get it back to the house.”

  “Hey, you’re right!”

  We picked up our stuff and walked back along the beach toward the cottage. The roof gleamed white in the sunlight on the far side of the dune. I could see the dark shade on the veranda and a sudden glint, and knew she was taking a look at us through the binoculars.

  Trite and repetitive thoughts march endlessly through every mind. I cannot use or even think of binoculars without my memory banks making a printout of the overly familiar fact that in World War II the Israeli hero Dayan, serving with the British, lost his eye when a sniper slug hit the binoculars he was using. I do not need to know this all my life. I do not need my memory dredging it up. We have no way of turning these things off. Every brain, including those of Kissinger breadth and force, is cluttered with these bits and snippets, these everlasting echoes.

  “House been there long?” I asked him.

  “A long time. I don’t know how long. It was there when Hub bought the whole tract. That damn Kristin talked him into buying it. It was unique, she said. It sure is unique. It is too far from anything. Hub said I could use it as a beach house. I fixed it up a little. Got a new well dug. Put the generator in and did some wiring. But the generator won’t work now.”

  “I fixed it.”

  “You did? So quick!”

  “A setscrew had worked loose. It wasn’t much.”

  “Gee, Gretel and I are sure glad it’s fixed.”

  “And now you live out here?”

  “With no money coming in at all, I couldn’t keep the nice apartment I had at North Pass Vista. It was more like a whole house than an apartment.”

  “Kristin lived there too?”

  “She lived in Melody unit. I was over in Symphony, nearer the beach. They’re named after music things. Concerto, Harmony, Opera, and so on. The wife of the guy that put them up was a harp player. There are four town houses in each unit. Like Symphony One, Symphony Two, and so on. Mine was Symphony Four. I put my stuff in storage. I didn’t want to bring it down here to the beach to this place. I don’t think I can keep up the payments on the storage. I’ll probably lose that too.”

  “Too?”

  “Like I lost the car. They say I ran it into a tree, but I don’t remember. I shouldn’t have been driving anyway because my license was suspended. The car was totaled and the insurance company wouldn’t pay a dime because I wasn’t a licensed driver any more. How do you like that? I was with them sixteen years! It was right about then that Gretel got here, thank God. Now that she’s here, everything will be okay.”

  “When we got here she was doing the laundry in those big drums. Are you two so hard up you can’t spare quarters for a coin laundry? We passed one back at the edge of town.”

  “Oh, we could afford that, but Gretel is stubborn. And she gets these ideas about things. She wants to see just how independent of everything we can be. No telephones or power companies. She’s trying to grow stuff in a garden she planted way the other side of the hard road, on the edge of the marsh, but the birds and rabbits are giving her a hard time. And the mosquitoes eat her when she goes over to work on it. But she won’t give up. Not on anything. Ever.”

  We came to the path that wound up to the crest of the dune and down the other side. Gretel and Meyer were on the deck. John Tuckerman held up the fillets of jack, and Gretel applauded him.

  She came down and got the fish. Once she had hefted it, she asked us to stay to lunch. Meyer sidestepped the question and left it up to me. I said we’d be delighted, and thanks very much for asking us.

  We tipped the soapy-water drum downslope, and she grilled the fish over the embers from the driftwood fire. While I had been with John Tuckerman, Gretel and Meyer had wrung out and hung up the clothes. We had lunch off chipped blue willowware plates at a table by the windows in the small bare living room of the beach cottage. We had the grilled fish, canned peas, and black coffee. The biggest object in the room was the fireplace. There was seashells on the windowsills and the mantel. Gretel put on a blue work shirt over her bikini before coming to the table. She glowed with strength and health and vitality. I envied John Tuckerman. There were golden flecks in the deep brown pigment of her eyes, near the pupils. The whites of her eyes were the blue-whit
e of peak physical condition. Through the meal we talked fishing, and over coffee I said, “Where were you before you came here, Gretel?”

  “I came out of the nowhere into the here.”

  “We don’t answer questions,” John said earnestly. “That’s one of the rules. She says I could get into real—”

  “Hey!” she said. “We don’t have to explain why we don’t answer questions.”

  “Okay,” he said grumpily. “But you sure are bossy.”

  “There are reasons,” she said. She smiled at Meyer. “We’ve had other visitors.”

  “Like Fletcher. Like that damned Fletcher.”

  “Hush, dear,” she said.

  “A deputy sheriff?” I asked. “Now in Mexico with the insurance investigator?”

  “He said they were going there,” John said.

  She glared at me, her face darkening in anger. She said, “I think it is pretty damned low to keep digging and digging away at somebody who … who …” She didn’t know how to say it in front of him.

  “You’re cute,” I said. “Both of you. You make a cute couple. Speaking about low. Sure, John Tuckerman. Keep your mouth shut. And deprive a very decent hard-luck man named Van Harder from making a living at his trade. There is a smell of money in the wind, lady, and you seem to turn toward it like some kind of weathervane. You came out of the nowhere into the here to brush up an old affair and get closer to the money.”

  She stared at me, aghast. “You think I’m his old lady?”

  “She’s his sister,” Meyer said. And as soon as it was said, I could see it. Bone structures, coloring.

  She thumped the table with her fist, making coffee dance in the cups. “I came here to help John any way I can, because there isn’t anybody else left in the world who will help him.”