John D MacDonald

by A Man of Affairs

  "I wish I could have brought my compressor and my air tanks," Tommy said wistfully. "I can stay down about two and a half minutes, but what good is that?

  We went into the little dock house. Rods rested on wall pegs. I picked out two spinning rods and reels that looked sturdy, piled some lures, swivels, leader wire, a pair of rusty pliers and a sharp but rusty knife in a battered aluminum box, and we headed up the beach. The beach was sandy, but the shallow water just off shore was full of dark rocks. A half mile from the little bay the sand ended and we had to walk over gray-black, water-eroded rocks. The rocky area became wider. It had a lost and fearsome look, like part of a destroyed planet. We had to keep looking ahead to pick out the flat places. There were windows of conch shells, tossed high on the rock by tide and winds. The sun had whitened them, and they were like the bones of the dead in a barren world

  Louise stopped and made a sweeping gesture with her arm and said, "Just look at it, Sam!" I saw what she meant. The scrub was vivid green on our right. The black-gray tortured rock was a fifty-yard strip between the green of the leaves and the streaked blue and tan and green and yellow of the water.

  I found us a place on a point where we stood six feet above the water. I rigged the rods and showed her how to handle spinning tackle. After three casts she had the knack of it and began to get the yellow feathered dude out to a respectable distance. There were no fish left in the world. There was not even a knock. Two vultures dipped to take a closer look at us, and then sailed away, rising effortlessly on the wind currents.

  I realized Louise had stopped casting. I looked at her and she was looking farther up the shoreline. What is it?"

  "Isn’t that Skylark up there?"

  I looked. The boy was two hundred yards away, kneeling on the rocks, looking down into the water. I saw him yank something small and silvery out of the water. We folded our futile tent and walked up to him. He grinned at us. The water right next to the rocks was black and roiled with a dense school of menhaden minnows. The school was twenty feet long and ten feet wide. Skylark was dangling a small bare bright hook in the school and rolling the line back and forth between thumb and finger to spin the hook. The minnows, three and four inches long, would bite at the bare hook and he would yank them out and drop them in a small tide pool behind him, He had over a dozen in the pool, scurrying around busily.

  "Do you eat those?" I asked him.

  "Oh, no. No, I will show you." He put the small hook and line aside and picked up a heavy line with a large hook. He hooked a live minnow through the back and swung it around his head several times and threw it out about forty feet. I swear it wasn’t out there ten seconds before something gulped it down. Skylark set his hook and brought the fish in, hand over hand. It was a five-pound yellowtail, and he carried it over and put it in a pool shaded by the rocks. There were two other yellowtails and about a ten-pound albacore in the pool.

  He told us to go ahead and use his minnows. We hesitated perhaps one hundredth of a second. Two hours never passed more quickly. My drag was set too tight, and the first stunning, breathtaking rush of a barracuda broke the line. At one point, after an hour of it, I was going after another minnow when I heard Louise yelp and I turned and looked at her. Her barracuda jumped and it was a big one, bigger than any I had hooked thus far. I watched her. She stood in that pink suit on a flat-topped rock with the blue water beyond her. She stood braced on her slim and perfect legs, her hair glossy in the sun. She fought the big fish and the smooth muscles bunched under the velvetiness of her back. The reel whined when he’d make a run, and when he’d try to rest for another run and another jump, she would work him and talk to him. She was brightly and intensely alive. "Oh, come along now, you monstrous darling. Come to Louise. Oh, be a good boy, be a honey pie. Whoa! No more of that, pretty baby. Come on, pretty baby. I won’t give you an inch, not an inch."

  And as she tired the fish, I looked at her and I knew that this was the way I wanted her to be. This was the way she had to be. To have her alive again made my eyes sting. That was the precise moment when I knew I loved her. I had known I wanted her. But I thought it was just wanting. But it was more. I could hide the wanting and never do anything about it. But this I knew that I would not be able to hide. This I knew I would do something about.

  The weary fish came in with docile reluctance. Ten feet from the rocks he made his last effort. He surged half out of the water and shook his frightful snaggled jaws, and made a short run of perhaps twenty feet. She walked carefully along the rocks to a flat place where a rock slanted down into the water at a shallow angle, rod bent sharply, tugging the fish along. I went down onto the rock and took hold of the brass swivel and, pulling on the leader, horsed the four and a half feet and about sixty pounds of him all the way out of the water. He had the true grin of the barracuda. He kept opening and closing his mouth. The snaggly teeth were monstrous. Louise came down beside me and put her hand on my arm and we looked at him. He was breathing heavily, like a tired and dying man.

  The barracuda is not a foulness. He is as clean and functional as a rapier. He is no scavenger. He eats nothing that is not trying to get away from those jaws in haste and terror. He can he like a spent torpedo in the water and, with one movement, he can be gone as though he had never been.

  "Do you want him, Skylark?" I asked the boy.

  "No. I will smash his head with a stone and get the hook."

  "No," Louise said. "Don’t do that."

  I looked at the savage eye and knew what she meant. I bent and clipped the leader a cautious distance from those jaws. Using the rod butt I nudged him back into the water. He had been out of the water a long time. He rolled onto his back and completely over and onto his back again several times. He found equilibrium, hung poised a few inches under the surface, gill plates spreading widely each time he sucked water. And then he swam very slowly along the shore and through the minnow school. A lane opened for him as they fled in panic. And he turned out toward deep water and we could not see him any more. The hook in his jaw would corrode and separate.

  We went back from the water and sat on a rock and smoked and talked about the fish. I kept trying to keep that quality of excitement alive in her. Her hands were shaky from the long exertion, and she massaged her right wrist. But the glow was fading too quickly, and she was becoming muted and remote again.

  She looked at me and pressed her fingertip against my upper arm. It left a white impression against the burn that lasted a full second.

  "You’ve had enough."

  "I can take a little more."

  "I’ll just watch, I think. I don’t want to catch a littler fish than him. Not today anyway."

  She came down and watched. I lost a wildly leaping and gyrating needle fish, and I caught two more yellowtails to add to Skylark’s hoard, and then I got a better fish that felt like a yellowtail. He was struggling as I slowly brought him in, and then he went curiously slack. There was still something on the line, but it did not feel heavy. I brought in the head of a large yellowtail, gill plates still working.

  "Barracuda," Skylark said.

  Had it been whole it would have been the hugest yellowtail we had caught that day. It had been slashed in half, and so keen had been the teeth, so powerful the jaws, that I had felt no jerk or tug as eight to ten pounds of living fish had been cut free. I looked at it and then looked at Louise, Her eyes were round and she swallowed hard and said, "When I thought of them biting I didn’t . . ."

  "I know what you mean."

  And that was enough. It was after twelve. We threaded the fish on a stick. Skylark carried one end and I took the other. Louise carried the gear. After we took the fish to the kitchen, I went back to the dock and found that Louise had rinsed the gear and put it away. I went to my room and showered. My back and my legs felt hot. Just as I pulled on fresh shorts there was a knock at the door. I opened it and John hauled me a planter’s punch and said, "Mrs. Dodge said to bring this, sar."

  I thanked him. I sipp
ed at it as I finished dressing. It was cold, tart and good. I realized it had been a long time since I had been able to loaf. It shocked me that I had put all the problems of Harrison so firmly out of my mind. I had a hunch I was going to be a whirlwind when I got back.

  As I went onto the veranda, my sports shirt felt itchy against the burn on my back and shoulders. Warren was sitting in front of the lounge smoking a cigar. I could hear a table tennis game going. I could see a group out by the pool.

  "What’s the deal on lunch?" I asked Warren.

  "I wouldn’t know and I wouldn’t care. I just had breakfast, buddy." He was surly and he looked ill.

  "Tommy do any good with his spear?"

  "I wouldn’t know that either, buddy."

  I shrugged and walked away from him. Puss was by the pool. She said she and Tommy had taken a skiff out to a reef and Tommy had speared a couple of big grouper. I asked for a second punch. Louise joined us and I thanked her for sending the first one. Lunch was served by John and Booty at one-thirty, on the veranda or by the pool, take your choice. Bonny Carson still wasn’t up. Amparo, Tessy Crown, Lolly Crown and Elda Carry ate at the pool-side, a hen party for four. I didn’t need any more sun. I ate on the veranda with Guy Brainerd, Bridget, Tommy and Buss.

  I felt so drugged by the sun and drinks that right after lunch I went back to my room, stripped down to my shorts and lay on top of the spread. I left the room door to the veranda open for the sake of the breeze. I had noticed that it was hard to look through the screen into the dim room and see anybody. There was a flavor of siesta in the air. I guessed that most of the others had folded, too. I knew that Tommy and Puss and Louise had.

  I tried to anticipate how Mike Dean would handle it when he got around to it, and that kept me awake just long enough so that I was not quite asleep when I was disturbed by the small pinging noise of the spring on my screen door.

  I rocked up onto my elbow and squinted at Bridget silhouetted in the open doorway.

  "You decent?" she said in a half whisper.

  "Come on in."

  She shut the door quietly and came over and sat on the foot of the bed, facing me. I moved my legs to make room for her. She lighted two of her cigarettes and handed me one. She seemed to be intensely amused at something.

  "Oh, my God," she said.

  "What is it?"

  "Excuse me for barging in on you, but I wanted to tell this little nugget to somebody and I couldn’t wait and you are the one I thought of. Why is that? Do people always come and tell you stuff? Is it because you don’t do an awful lot of jabbering yourself? Or maybe people just get a feeling about you that you won’t blab.*

  "I’ve wondered myself," I said.

  "Don’t sound so grumpy. All you were going to do is sleep. Did you notice how grouchy sincere ole Guy Brainerd was at lunch?"

  "I guess I did."

  "And he ought to be happy as clams. He’s in the other wing and the jauntiest little fanny of the class of ‘48 at Wellesley is in the next door room, all handy like. Anyway, right after lunch dear Elda said she wanted to talk to me in private. She came to my room. I thought she despised me. Maybe she still does. Anyway, she-told me that she had thought I was sort of rattle-brained, but after knowing me she has realized how really wise and mature I am about people, and she wanted to know if I thought she was doing the right thing. I forgot just exactly what nauseous little euphemism she used, but she let it be known that she has been letting humble Guy enjoy the infinite pleasures of her incredibly desirable body for lo these many moons. She came damn close to simpering, which I honestly do not think I could have taken, So what is your problem, darling, I say. She beats her way around about eighteen bushes before I begin to get the message. It’s simply that she. wants to marry him and so far he won’t get off the dime and start the legal wheels whirling, so she is withdrawing her body fair until Guy jumps through her hoop. She told him that last night and it seems there was quite a scene, all in whispers, of course. And she wrenched herself away from him and locked herself in the bathroom and cried practically all night long. Do I think she is right?"

  "What did you tell her?"

  "I had to think fast. I have a hunch it might work, and I couldn’t let that happen. The present Mrs. Brainerd is a bitch, but at least she keeps her nose out of the office. This item would try to run our shop and I think I like it there, and I think she would run it into the ground. So I had to come up with something that would shake her. She wasn’t asking my advice. Her mind was made up. She was just staking out the limits of her own reservation and putting up the no shooting and trapping signs. So I came up with a doozey. I told her I thought it was a terrible mistake. I told her I wouldn’t mention any names, but there was another woman in Guy’s past, a woman to whom he was strongly drawn physically. I told her that she had saved him from that awful woman. She had given him the strength to break the ties of the flesh. And now, if she denied him, she would be driving him right back into the arms of the third woman.*

  "Very tricky," I said. "Appeal to the martyr in her."

  "And also scare hell out of her. Which it did. It worked." She laughed. Her eyes were dancing. "And so right now lady bountiful is probably in Guy’s bed, saving him from himself. She had that look when she loped off." And she laughed again, and all of a sudden she was crying.

  "Hey!" I said. "Hey, now!"

  She flung herself onto my chest and nuzzled her head into my throat and enough of the words were intelligible so I could piece it together: ". . . years older and bald-headed . . . so sincere and with that ridiculous chin. He’d never look at me. Never, never, never, no matter what I do. So damn foolish, all of it. Likes them slinky and bitchy and affected. Oh, damn it all."

  So, incredibly, Bridget was in love with Guy Brainerd, and she had just sent Elda Garry trotting off to Guy’s bed, and she had thought she could make a big scandalous joke about it, and laugh over it with a stranger, but it had cracked her up.

  "Always the wrong guy," she said. "Always." And a tear dropped like wax on the side of my throat and she snuffled. I had my arm around her waist. And pretty soon I found I had to send my mind winging away to some place else. I thought desperately of the barracuda and of how many shares of Harrison Mike Dean controlled, and how I was going to present my beef to the union officials, and then I tried to replay an old football game, and then I tried multiplying numbers by twelve, and then I tried to visualize4 a tall pitcher of ice water. But a bed is a bed is a bed. And an armful of girl in sunsuit is an armful of girl in sun suit and no matter how far away I threw my mind it came zooming back to the here and the now and the scent of the crisp fresh hair and the firm warmth against chest and against my arm. So as I was bracing myself to come surging up to a sitting position and put an abrupt end to all this dangerous nonsense, she turned her head a little and caught up a little bit of the hide on the side of my neck between her teeth and nibbled it very gently. It seemed as if her teeth made little holes and all good intentions and will power drained out through those little holes. I hitched her around and found her mouth with mine. In a little while she got up and went over and closed the door and came back, dropped her halter top and her sun shorts to the floor beside the bed, stood there for not more than two seconds and then stretched out beside me.

  She bent over the side of the bed and got her cigarettes out of the pocket of the sun shorts, lit two and gave me one and lay back in the circle of my am, huffed out a big cloud of smoke and said, "Cheap and silly. A blond bawd in bed. I despise myself, ole Sam. Why use you to try to get even with the game?"

  "It depends on how you look at it."

  "Nobody ever gets even. My God, I wish I could be like this. I wish I could be blithe and gay about it, and pay no attention to it, and indulge in it with big handsome strangers just for the sake of the pleasure, which, I might add, was considerable, and I do thank you, sir."

  "There isn’t much to the people who can toss it off like that and go on their way. Jaded little empty
people, Bridget."

  She sighed. "I wish I didn’t have to hurt so much and feel so cheap and bitchy and reckless, and hate myself. You see, it’s this damn active conscience I’ve got. The way I was brang up, I guess."

  "Don’t feel bad about it this time. You didn’t plan it."

  "I don’t even know if I did or I didn’t. With you it’s the dark one, Louise, isn’t it?"

  "How did you know?"

  "The way you look at her. And I saw you on the dock last night. It gave me a lump in the throat, kind of."

  "Yes, with me it’s that dark one."

  "I think she’s one of the two or three really beautiful women I’ve ever seen." She lifted her long and rounded left leg, the leg next to me, and locked her knee and pointed her toes at the ceiling.

  "Every five minutes my thighs get heavier. They’re getting all nasty and meaty. In one more year I’ll be round as a barrel."

  "Fishing?"