A big rural mailbox on the right-hand side with red stick-on letters spelling Arnstead. Sand driveway leading back to a pink cement-block house, a small place with a lot of unkempt Mexican flame vine climbing its walls. Cattle guard at the entrance to the drive. Outbuildings beyond the house, and some fenced pasture with a big pond. A dozen head of runty Angus grazed the green border of the pond. A small flock of Chinese Whites cruised the blue pond, and after I rumbled over the cattle guard and parked near the house and turned the engine off, I heard their goose-alarm, like a chorus of baritone kazoos. In an acre of marsh across the road, tree toads were beginning to tune up for evening. An inventive mockingbird swayed in the top of a punk tree, working some cardinal song into his repertoire.
A leathery little old woman was yanked out of the front door by a crossbreed dog the size of a bull calf, mottled black and brown, hair all ruffed up around his neck and standing erect down his spine. He made a rumbling in his throat, and showed me some very large white fangs. "Buttercup!" she yelled. "Hold! Hold!"
Buttercup stopped, all aquiver with anxiety to taste me. The old woman wore ancient blue jeans, a dark red pullover sweater, and blue canvas shoes. She clung with both hands to the hefty chain fastened to the studded dog collar. She was thin as one of the stick figures children draw.
"Hoped it was Lew," she said. "Or maybe Jase or Henry coming around finally to see I'm all right. But he's still growling. Who are you? They can't do my eyes till the cataracts get ripe, and I can tell you I'm sick and tired of waiting. Who are you?"
"My name is Travis McGee. I was looking for Lew."
"What for?"
"Just a little talk."
"You stand right still. I got to tell this here dog everything is all right. Buttercup! Okay! Okay! Hush your noise! Down!"
He sat. The rumbling stopped. Tongue lolled. But the amber eyes looked at me with an obvious skepticism.
"Now you come slow right toward him, Mr. McGee, right up to where he can snuff at you. Don't come sudden."
So I made the slow advance. He growled again and she scolded him. He sniffed at a pant leg. She told me to hold my hand out and he sniffed that. Then he stood again and the tail wagged. She said I could scratch behind his ears. He enjoyed it.
"Now he won't bother you. If you come in here and he was loose, he'd come at you running low and fast and quiet, but stand your ground and he'll get a snuff of you and he won't bother you none. I'd get edgy out here alone so much if I didn't have Buttercup."
"He must be a comfort to you. Do you know when Lew..."
"Before we get into that, would you kindly do me a favor. I been wondering if I should phone somebody to come help me. That black horse of Lew's has been bawling off and on since early morning, and I can't see enough to take care of whatever's bothering him. It's the near building, and he's in a stall that opens on the far side. Know anything about horses?"
"They're tall, have big teeth, give me a sweat rash, and they all hate me on sight."
"Well, what I think it is, Lew having so much on his mind, he could have forgot feed and water."
I walked out behind the house and found the stall, the top halves of the doors open and hooked back. There was a black horse in there, standing with his head hanging. His coat looked dull. The stall had not been cleaned out for too long. Flies buzzed in the heavy stench. Feed bin and water trough were empty. He snatched his head up and rolled wild eyes and tried to rear up, but his hooves slipped in the slime and he nearly went down. From the dried manure on his flanks, he had already been down a couple of times.
I went back to the house and told Mrs. Arnstead the situation and asked her if there was any reason he couldn't be let out.
"Lew was keeping him in the stall on account of he had a sore on his shoulder he had to put salve on, and it was too much trouble catching him. I guess you best let him out and hope he don't founder himself sucking the pond dry."
When I unlatched the bottom halves and swung the doors open and stepped well back to one side, he came out a lot more slowly than I expected. He walked frail, as if he didn't trust his legs, but slowly quickened his pace all the way across to the pond. He drank for a long time, stopped and drank again, then trudged away from the pond, visibly bigger in the belly, and went slowly down onto his knees and rolled over. I thought he had decided to die. But then he began rolling in the grass, squirming the filth off his black hide.
I looked around, saw rotten sprouting grain in an outdoor bin, saw trash and neglect.
Mrs. Arnstead sat in a cane chair on the shallow screened porch. She invited me in. I sat and Buttercup came over and shoved his big head against my knee, awaiting the scratching.
There was a golden light of dusk, a smell of flowers.
"I just don't know anymore," she said. "Shouldn't heap my burdens on a stranger. Lew is my youngest, the last one left to home. Did just fine in the Army and all. Came back and got took on as a deputy sheriff. Worked this place here and kept it up good, and he was going with the Willoughbee girl. Now being a mother doesn't mean I can't see things the way they are. Jason was my first and Henry was my second, and then it was sixteen long years before I had Lew. Lord God, Jason is forty-three now, married twenty-four years, and their first was a girl, and she married off at sixteen, so I've got a great-grandson near six years old. I know that Lew was always on the mean side. But he always worked hard and worked good, and cared for the stock. It's the last six months he turned into somebody else, somebody I don't hardly know. Broke off with Clara Willoughbee, took up again with a lot of cheap, bright-smelling, loud-voice women. Got meaner. Got so ugly with his brothers, they don't want to ever see him again. Neglects this place and me to go run with trash like them Perrises. Now he's done something, I don't know what, to get himself fired off his job, and he might even have to go to jail. I just don't know what's going to happen. This place is free and clear and it's in my name, but the little bit of money that comes in won't cover food, electric, taxes, and all that. Jase and Henry, they'd help out, but not with me staying out here this way. They got this idea I live six months with one and six with the other, like some kind of tourist woman all the rest of my days. What was it my boy did to get Mister Norm so upset he fired him? Do you know?"
"Yes. It isn't very pretty."
"It's like I've run out of pretty lately."
"A very pleasant and gentle and friendly man was picked up for questioning. He knew nothing about the matter under investigation. Your son gave him a savage beating for no apparent reason. The man is in the hospital in Fort Lauderdale."
She shook her head slowly. In that light, at that angle, I suddenly saw what she had looked like as a young girl. She had been very lovely.
"That's not Lew," she said. "Not at all. He was always some mean, but not that kind of mean. It isn't drinking, because since my eyes have been going bad my nose has got sharp as a hound's. It's something gone bad in his head. Acts funny. Sometimes not a word to me. Set at the table and eat half his supper and shove his chair back and go out and bang the door and drive off into the nighttime. And sometimes he'll get to talking. Lord God, he talks to me a mile a minute, words all tumbling to get out, and he keeps laughing and walking around and about, getting me to laughing, too."
"When was he here last, Mrs. Arnstead?"
"Let me think back. Not since noontime on Thursday. I keep fearing he went off for good. It was yesterday toward evening somebody told me on the phone about him getting fired off his job. I was wishing I could see good enough to... well, to look through his stuff and see if I could find something that'd tell me where he'd be. Hate to ask my other sons to come here. What did you say you wanted to talk to him about?"
"I guess I wanted to make sure he was Lew Arnstead, and then I was going to give him the best beating I could manage. That man in the hospital is the best friend I have ever had."
She stared in my direction with those old frosted blue eyes, then laughed well. A husky caw of total amusement. She caught her
breath and said, "Mr. McGee, I like you. You don't give me sweet lies and gentle talk. And you wouldn't be a man if you didn't come looking for him. But you got to be a lot of man to take my Lew. When I see your shape against the light, you looked sizable enough. But size isn't enough. You got to have some mean, too."
"Probably enough."
"Well, you want to find him and I want to know where he is, so you could maybe come to his room with me and tell me what you can find."
Work clothes and fancy clothes and uniforms. Barbells and hair oil and a gun rack with two rifles, two shotguns, a carbine, all well cared for. Police manuals and ranch journals and comic books. Desk with a file drawer. Farm accounts. Tax papers. She sat on the bed, head tilted, listening to me scuffle through drawers and file folders. Tried the pockets of the clothing in the closet. Found a note in the side pocket of a pair of slacks, wadded small. Penciled in a corner torn off a sheet of yellow paper, a childish, girlish, illiterate backhand.
"Lover, he taken off Wesday after work drivin to Tampa seen his moma. I will unhook the same screen windo and please be care you don't bunk into nothing waken the baby. I got the hots so awful I go dizy and sick thinken on it."
No signature.
"What'd you find?" the old woman asked.
"Just a love note from a woman. No signature. She wants to know why he hasn't come to see her."
"No help to us with no name on it. Keep looking." I kept looking. There wasn't enough. The man had to have keepsakes of some kind. So he hid them. Probably not with great care. Just enough to keep them out of sight. Easy to get at. But after a dozen bad guesses I was beginning to think that either he had used a lot of care, or threw everything away. Finally I found the hidey-hole. I had previously discovered that the drawer on the bedside stand was a fake. Just a drawer pull and a drawershaped rectangle grooved in the wood. But when I reached under, I found there was enough thickness for a good-sized drawer. I took the lamp and alarm clock off the table. The top had concealed hinges.
Plenty of room for dirty books, and for some vividly clinical love notes from female friends. Room for a few envelopes of Polaroid prints. Room for three chunky bottles of capsules. About one hundred per bottle. One was a third empty. All the same. Green and white, and inside the one I pulled open were hundreds of tiny spheres, half of them green and half of them white.
"What did you find now?" she asked.
"The stuff that changed your boy."
"You mean like some kind of drugs? My Lew wouldn't take drugs. Not ever."
"He's got about two hundred and seventy Dexamyl spansules hidden away in here. They're a mix of dexedrine and phenobarb. One of them keeps your motor racing for eight hours. It's what the kids call 'speed.' Super stayawakes. Take two or three for a real good buzz. You can hallucinate on an overdose."
"Speed?" she said. "They said that on the radio way last October. That was the name of some of the stuff they took out of the lockers at the high school. Mister Norm and my Lew and Billy Cable went in with a warrant and went through all the lockers. And that was... about when he started changing."
"At least we know that if he wasn't coming back, he would have taken this along."
"Thank the Lord for that, at least. Anything else in there?"
"A lot of letters."
"From those women of his I expect."
"That's right."
"Well, don't you be shy about reading them. But you don't need to read them to me. Just see if you can find out where he might be."
No need to tell her I was looking for some clue as to who he had entertained in the shed when he was supposed to be guarding the Baither place.
Few of them were dated. But I came across one with a mid-March date that was more literate and less torrid than the others, and interested me mightily.
Dear Lew,
I ran into Frannie in the Suprex yesterday and she was trying to stick the needle in, like always, and she told me she saw you twice with Lito. Now you can tell me it's none of my business because the thing we had going is over and done, and you know why we had to quit for good. But this is like old times sake, because for a while before it got sour, I really and truly loved you, and I guess you know that. I have never really forgiven you for beating me up for no reason and I guess I never will, but I couldn't stand for you to get in some kind of stupid trouble. LEAVE LILO ALONE!!!! She is bad news for one and all. I know all about her because for a while she and a girl I know well were friends. The reason she went with her mother after her the divorce was on account of her father knew he couldn't handle her. He had custody of both kids, but he let Lilo go. Her mother and her stepfather couldn't control her either, and not many people know this, but when she was seventeen, like a year after she dropped high school, she was fooling around with Frank Baither, and he's old enough to be her father, and they say he's getting out soon, and if he wants her back, you better not be in the way. Now I'll tell you something else I happen to know, and I hope it turns your stomach. I'm not making it up because I haven't got the kind of sick mind that can make up something ugly. It happened on a Sunday afternoon last December. Roddy Barramore broke down on Route 112 down by where Shell Ridge Road turns off. A water hose busted, and he decided the best thing to do was walk into Shell Ridge Road to the Perris place, figuring Mr. Perris would have some hose and clamps or at least some tape. It was a warm Sunday and when he got near the house he could hear through the screen in the open windows that Mr. Perris had the football pro game on turned up loud. So he thought instead of ringing the door, he'd go holler in the window, and he had his mouth open to holler and then he saw Lilo and Mr. Perris on the couch, making out like mad, all their clothes in a pile on the floor. Roddy scrunched down quick before they seen him, and walked back and first he told Rhoda there was nobody home, and she said he was quiet for a while and then he told her what really happened. What do you think of a girl who'll make out with her stepfather knowing her own mother is there helpless in the bedroom maybe fifteen feet away, unable to speak or move much since she had the stroke over two years ago which some say was the judgment of God, but I say we aren't to judge because we don't really know what reasons she had for breaking up her own marriage the way she did. Rhoda told me about it, it made me want to throw up. I hope it does the same for you. I don't care that you aren't seeing me anymore, really. I wish the best for you always, Lew, but you won't have anything but heartache and bad trouble if you run around with Lilo. Always your friend, Betsy
I went through the Polaroid prints. Amateur nude studies. Thirty-two different poses. Many different girls. A lean blonde with an insipid leer and huge meaty breasts figured in ten of them, prone, supine, standing, reaching, kneeling. Five were of a woman with a superb body, a body good enough to overcome the incompetence of the photographer. In each she kept the lens from seeing her face.
Then there were thirteen different females, which I suppose could be thought of as trophy shots, all head-on, naked, some taken by flash, rome by available light, some indoors, some outdoors. Estimated ages, eighteen to thirty-two. A variety of expression, from timorous uncertain smile to dazed glaze of sexuality, from broad grin to startled glance of herself surprised, to theatrical scowl. The sameness of the pose removed all erotic possibility. They became record shots, and could have been taken in the anteroom of the gas chamber after a short ride in a cattle car.
It was the remaining four shots which gave me a prickling sensation on the backs of hands and neck.
Solid, shapely, dark-haired, suntanned chunk of girl. Evenly and deeply tanned everywhere, except for the surprisingly white bikini-band, low slung around the functional swelling of the sturdy hips. One of those pretty, engaging, amusing little toughy faces. An easy-laugher. A face for fun and joy, games and excursions. Not at all complicated unless you looked more closely, carefully. Then you could see something out of focus. A contradiction. There was a harsh sensuality in that face which was at odds with the merry expression. There was a clamp-jawed resolve co
ntradicting that look of amiable readiness for fun and games.
I had seen that face, for a micro-instant, several busy seconds before Miss Agnes squashed into the canal. I felt sure of it. And this chance for a more careful examination confirmed the fleeting feeling that my young volunteer mechanic, Ron Hatch, had to be related to her by blood. Though his face was long instead of round, doleful rather than merry, the curves of the mouth, the set of the eyes, the breadth and slant of forehead were much alike. "Must be a lot of letters," the old woman said.
I put everything back except the most explicit picture of the dark-haired girl, closed the lid, put the lamp and clock back in position.
"Nothing that helps much. But I want to ask some questions, if you don't mind, Mrs. Arnstead."
"Don't mind a bit. Talked too much already, so I might just as soon keep right on. That's what happens when you're old and alone. Talk the ear off anybody that wants to stop by and listen. But let's go back to the porch. Lew could come roaring in, and he'd get mean about a stranger being in his room."
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 12 - The Long Lavender Look Page 8