The Dreadful Lemon Sky

by John D. MacDonald

  She spun quickly and stuffed her hand under the mattress, looking for the purse.

  “It’s there,” I said. “I put it back.”

  She sat up, hauling the sheet up under her chin. She stared at me. “Jesus! You are jumpy.”

  “And alive. Be glad you are leaving your money at the right place, if you still want to leave it here.”

  “I still want to leave it. It could have been more.”

  “It’s a tidy sum. You are overpaying me.”

  “I’ll decide that. Look, don’t worry about the money. Okay? It isn’t marked or anything. It’s sort of … my share of some action. But somebody might grab it.” Suddenly she grinned. “Hey! Thanks for giving me back my pride.”

  “Any time. Want some steak and eggs?”

  She looked wistful but refused. She wanted to be on her way. She wore the borrowed clothes and carried her soiled ones in a brown paper bag. She waited for full dark before she left. She marched away under the dock lights, taking a roundabout route to her car. I expected her to look back, but she didn’t.

  There was a residual affection for her. The six years had aged her more than she could reasonably expect and had tested and toughened her. Her eyes were watchful, her merriment sardonic. There are too many of them in the world lately, the hopeful ladies who married grown-up boy children and soon lost all hope. They are the secretaries and nurses and switchboard people, the store clerks, schoolteachers, cab drivers, and Avon ladies. They lead the singles life. Lots of laughs and lots of barren mornings. Skilled sex, mod conversation, and all heartaches carefully concealed. They are not ardent libbers, yet at the same time they are not looking for some man to “take care.” God knows they are expert in taking care of themselves. They just want a grown-up man to share their life with, each of them taking care. But there are one hell of a lot more grown-up ladies than grown-up men.

  I wished her well. Lonely ladies can get into damned fool capers. I wished her very well indeed.

  Three

  So two weeks went by. A pair of lovely weeks in May. A steady breeze off the Atlantic kept the bright tacky strip of Florida seacoast reasonably free of smodge, fugg, and schlutch. Old parties tottered out of their condominiums and baked themselves black in the white high glare of the beaches, pleased that their eyes didn’t water and they could breathe without coughing.

  On the tube the local advertising for condominiums always shows the nifty communal features, such as swimming pool, putting green, sandy beach, being enjoyed by jolly hearty folk in their very early thirties. These are the same folk you see dancing in the moonlight aboard ship in the tour ads. These are the people who keep saying that if you’ve got your health, you don’t need anything else. But when the condominiums are finished and peopled, and the speculator has taken his maximum slice of the tax-related profits and moved on to crud up somebody else’s skyline, the inhabitants all seem to be on the frangible side of seventy, sitting in the sunlight, blinking like lizards, and wondering if these are indeed the golden years or if it is all a big sell, an inflation game that you have to play, wondering which you are going to run out of first, your money or your life. The developers leave enough to go wrong in each condominium apartment that it becomes an odds-on bet the money runs out first. Nursing homes are a big industry in sunny Florida.

  Anyway, it was Meyer who picked it up, a minor item on a back page, and brought it over to the Flush on the thirtieth day of May. It was early afternoon and I was topside, wrestling with too many yards of white nylon canvas, and with a borrowed gadget which, when properly operated, puts brass grommets into the fabric. I was irritated at how slowly my self-imposed chore was going. I was dripping sweat onto the grommet machine and the clean white nylon and the vinyl imitation-teak decking.

  “Now what?” I asked sourly.

  “This is what,” said Meyer, and handed me the clip he had torn out of the paper.

  PEDESTRIAN FATALITY

  The City of Bayside registered its fourth traffic fatality of the year when Mrs. Carolyn Milligan was struck and killed at 10:30 Wednesday night while walking on County Road 858 just inside the city limits. Roderick Webbel, driver of the farm truck which struck and killed the Milligan woman, claimed that he did not see her until the moment of impact when she apparently stepped from the shoulder of the road into the path of the vehicle. Mrs. Milligan, who lived alone at 1500 Seaway Boulevard, was employed by Superior Building Supplies, Junction Park, Bayside. Police are investigating the accident and no charges have been filed as yet.

  A fat drop of sweat fell from the tip of my nose and made a dark pattern of a sloppy star on the newsprint, the same color as the sweat smudge from my fingers. Meyer followed me into the shade of the canopy over the topside controls.

  I leaned my rear against the instrument panel and propped one bare foot on the pilot’s chair. The breeze began to cool me off.

  “Accident?” Meyer asked. When I stared at him he said hastily, “Rhetorical question, of course.”

  “Of course. And who the hell knows? Damn it, anyway!”

  I am cursed by an imagination which turns vivid when I wish it would turn itself off. She had been sturdy bone and sinew, sweet flesh and quick blood. She had been scents and secrets. Then a great bewildering bash, a tiny light in the back of the brain flickering out, as spoiled flesh, crushed bone, ripped connective tissue went slamming off into the roadside brush, spraying blood as it spun.

  “Meyer, she gave me the orders. Just get the money to my sister, she said. That’s all, she said. She said that if she couldn’t come back and get the money, she wouldn’t give much of a damn who kept her from it.”

  “And,” Meyer said, “she paid you to do just what she said.”

  “I know.”

  “But?”

  “I look at it this way. Two thousand would have been more than fair. It would have paid my way to Nutley and back, with a nice hunk left over. So she’s got eight thousand worth of service coming.”

  “Posthumous service?”

  “Which she didn’t want.” I doubled my right fist and gave myself a heavy thump on the top of the thigh. Painful. “It is the merry month of May, Meyer, and the lady is going to be dead for a very long time. I would be doing what she wanted. Giving the money to the sister. And making certain there are no strings attached, nobody following the scent, nobody mashing the sister too.”

  “I admire your talent for instant rationalization.”

  “This is not romanticism, dammit.”

  “Did I say it was?”

  “By the expression on your face. Patronizing, amused, superior.”

  “You are reading it wrong. The face is just some skin and fat and muscle stretched over bone. I was actually looking apprehensive.”

  “About what?”

  “About what you might be getting me into.”

  “You can stay right here and work on your treatise.”

  “I’m at a stopping point, waiting for translations of some Swedish journals to arrive. I could struggle through them myself, but …” He shrugged and went over and picked up some of the canvas, inspected a grommet. “Is this crooked?”

  “Very.”

  “Then it won’t look very good, will it?”

  “No. It won’t.”

  “Travis, do we know anybody at all in Bayside?”

  “I keep thinking there was somebody.”

  So we went below, and while I checked out the book in the desk, Meyer opened a pair of cold Tuborgs. No friends in Bayside. None. Meyer blew across the top of the Tuborg bottle, a foghorn note far away. “So why are we up there fussing around?” he asked.

  “A question which will be asked.”

  “Insurance?”

  “Possibly, but it doesn’t feel right.”

  “Good old united Beneficient Casualty and Life. Those are such beautiful blank policies. I can type in all the—”

  “I know. I know. But it could be a dead end. Accidental death, fellows. And these days you get
checked out too often. It just doesn’t feel right. I think that when she was here two weeks ago I borrowed some money from her. Maybe I gave her a promissory note. I’m in shape to pay it back, but I’d just as soon not pay it back to her heirs and assigns, not if I can get my hands on the note I signed.”

  “And you take some cash along. For credibility.”

  “Right! Maybe we both borrowed it and both signed. We’re a pair of real-estate gunslingers trying to cheat the little dead lady’s estate. We’ll pay up if we have to. But we’d rather not.”

  Meyer closed his eyes and thought long and hard, taking a deep draft on the Tuborg as he did so. He nodded. “I like it.”

  “We’ll take all the cash along,” I said.

  He looked startled. “All?”

  “We’ll operate from this gallant watercraft. In comfort. Even in certain vulgar luxury. Go pack your toothbrush, my friend.”

  After he left I checked my Waterway Guide and picked out what looked like the best of Bayside’s several marinas. It was called Westway Harbor, operated by Cal and Cindy Birdsong. I phoned and got a young man in the office named Oliver. Yes, he had a nice slot for the Busted Flush, one that would take up to a sixty-footer, one with water, electric, and phone hook-up and about a hundred feet from the facilities. I said we’d check in on Friday, probably around noon. The fee sounded a little bit on the high side. Oliver wanted to know how long we would be with them, and I said it was hard to say, very hard to say. He told me to look for a high round water tower north of the center of town, and when I was opposite it, I was to look for their private channel markers and they would lead me right in, and he would be there to direct me to the slip. “You can’t miss it,” he said.

  By the time I’d notified the office we were taking off, exchanged a few lies with Irv Diebert, picked up the laundry, arranged with Johnny Dow to take the mail out of the box and hold it, unplugged the shoreside connections, topped the tanks, and tied the Muñequita well off in the slip, tarped and snug, it was after four o’clock. We chugged out to the channel and turned north.

  At drinking time I left Meyer at the wheel and went below and broke out the very last bottle of the Plymouth gin which had been bottled in the United Kingdom. All the others were bottled in the U.S. Gin People, it isn’t the same. It’s still a pretty good gin but it is not a superb, stingingly dry, and lovely gin. The sailor on the label no longer looks staunch and forthright, but merely hokey. There is something self-destructive about Western technology and distribution. Whenever any consumer object is so excellent that it attracts a devoted following, some of the slide rule and computer types come in on their twinkle toes and take over the store, and in a trice they figure out just how far they can cut quality and still increase the market penetration. Their reasoning is that it is idiotic to make and sell a hundred thousand units of something and make a profit of thirty cents a unit, when you can increase the advertising, sell five million units, and make a nickel profit a unit. Thus the very good things of the world go down the drain, from honest turkey to honest eggs to honest tomatoes. And gin.

  I put cracked ice in two sturdy glass mugs, dumped in some sherry and dumped it out again, filled with Plymouth gin, rubbed peel around the rims of mugs, squeezed oil onto surface of gin, threw peel away, and carried mugs up to the topside controls, where Meyer was using his best twelve-syllable words on a yuk who had pounded by us, lifting a nine-foot wash behind him. I saw it coming and had time to prepare. I did some twinkle toes myself: three to port, three to starboard, never spilling a drop.

  We clinked glasses, took the testing sip, then the deep single swallow. Delicious. The birds were circling, the sun needles were dancing off the water, and the Flush was lumbering along, slowed imperceptibly by a fouled bottom. It is unseemly to feel festive about checking out the death of a dead friend. But there is something heartening about having a sense of mission. A clean purpose. A noble intent, no matter how foolish. Behind us, a couple of slow hours back of us, the 17,000 resident boats and the thirteen big marinas of Lauderdale, where 150,000 people grow ever more furious in the traffic tangles. Ahead, some murky mystery locked in the broken skull of a dead lady. The knight errant, earning his own self-esteem, holding the palms cupped to make a dragon trap. Peer inside. S’right, by God, a dragon! But what color, fella?

  Before nightfall I found the anchorage I had used before, a sheltered slot between two small mangrove islands. Fortunately nobody had yet built a causeway to either island, or erected thereon one of those glassy monuments to the herd instinct. I nestled the houseboat into the slot and went over the side and made four lines fast to the tough twisted trunks of mangroves, at ten, two, four, and eight o’clock. The night air was full of bugs homing on my earlobes, screaming their hunger, so we buttoned the Flush up, testing night breezes and screens until it was comfortable in the lounge.

  While Meyer was broiling a very large number of very small lamb chops, a skiff went churning across the flats, heading out toward the channel. The people aboard were yelping like maniacs, making wolf yelps, panther screams, rebel yells. I heard the crazed laughter of a woman. And then there was a sharp authoritative barking. Thrice. Bam, bam, bam. Tinkle of glass inside the lounge. Sharp knock against paneling. The skiff picked up speed. The woman laughed in that same crazy way. I stopped rolling and got up onto one knee, then raced topside and yanked the shark rifle out of its greasy nest. No point in firing at one small light far away, the sound fading.

  “Why?” Meyer said, beside me.

  I didn’t answer until we were below again, out of the bugs’ hungry clasp. “For kicks. For nothing. For self-expression. Good ol’ Charlie shows those rich bastards they don’t own the whole goddamn world. It was a handgun and it was a long way off, and having one hit us was pure luck.”

  “It could have been between the eyes. Pure luck.”

  “Stoned and smashed. Beer and booze and too much sun. Uppers and downers, hash and smack, all spaced out. Take any guess.”

  Meyer went quietly back to his broiling. He seemed moody during the meal, working things out his own way inside that gentle, thoughtful skull. The misshapen slug had dented the paneling but had penetrated so shallowly I had been able to pry it loose with a thumbnail. It was on the table beside my cup, a small metallic turd dropped by a dwarf robot. I had stuck Saran Wrap across the starred hole in the glass port.

  “Let me give it a try,” he said.

  “You think you can explain why? Come on!”

  “When I was twelve years old I received on my birthday a single-shot twenty-two rifle chambered for shorts. It was a magical adventure to have a gun. It made a thin and wicked cracking sound, and an exotic smell of burned powder and oil. A tin can would leap into the air at some distance when I had merely moved my index finger a fraction of an inch.”

  “Meyer, the killer.”

  He smiled. “You anticipate me. There were good birds and bad birds. One of the bad birds was a grackle. Of the family Icteridae, genus Quiscalus. I do not recall why it was in such bad repute. Possibly it eats the eggs of other birds. At any rate, it seemed to be acceptable to shoot one, whereas shooting a robin would have been unthinkable. I had watched grackles through my mother’s binoculars. A fantastic color scheme, an iridescence over black, as if there were a thin sheen of oil atop a pool of india ink. I had shown enough reliability with the rifle to be allowed to take it into the woodlands behind our place, provided I followed all the rules. There was no rule about grackles. I went out one Saturday afternoon after a rain. A grackle took a busy splashing bath in a puddle and flew up to a limb. I aimed and fired, and it fell right back down into the same puddle and did some frantic thrashing and then was still. I went and looked at it. Its beak was opening and closing, just under the surface of the water. I picked it up with some vague idea of keeping it from drowning. It made a terminal tremorous spasm in my hand and then it was still. Unforgettably, unbearably still. As still as a stone, as a dead branch, as a fence post. I want to say
all of this very carefully, Travis. See this scar on the edge of my thumb? I was using a jack-knife to make a hole in a shingle boat for a mast, and the blade of the knife closed. This bled a good deal, and because it sliced into the thumbnail, it hurt. It hurt as much as anything had ever hurt me up until that time. And that had happened about two months before I murdered the grackle. The grackle lay in my hand, and all that fabulous iridescence was gone. It had a dirty look, the feathers all scruffed and wet. I put it down hastily on the damp grass. I could not have endured dropping it. I put it down gently, and there was blood left on my hand. Bird blood. As red as mine. And the pain had been like mine, I knew. Bright and hot and savage.”

  He was silent so long I said, “You mean that …”

  “I’m looking for the right way to express the relationships. Travis, the gun was an abstraction, the bullet an abstraction. Death was an abstraction. A tiny movement of a finger. A cracking sound. A smell. I could not comprehend a gun, a bullet, and a death until the bird died. It became all too specific and too concrete. I had engineered this death, and it was dirty. I had given pain. I had blood on my hand. I did not know what to do with myself. I did not know how to escape from myself, to go back to what I had been before I had slain the bird. I wanted to get outside the new experience of being me. I was, in all truth, in all solemnity, filled with horror at the nature of reality. I have never killed another bird, nor will I ever, unless I should come upon one in some kind of hopeless agony. Now here is the meat of my analogy. Those young people in that boat have never killed their grackle. They have not been bloodied by reality. They have shed the make-believe blood of a West that never existed. They have gawped at the gore of the Godfather. They have seen the slow terminal dance of Bonnie and Clyde. They have seen the stain on the front of the shirt of the man who has fallen gracefully into the dust of Marshal Dillon’s main street. It is as if … I had walked into those woods and seen a picture of a dead grackle. They do not yet know the nature of reality. They do not yet know, and may never learn, what a death is like. What an ugly thing it is. The sphincters let go and there is a rich sickening stink of fecal matter and urine. There is that ugly stillness, black blood caking and clotting and stinking. To them, that gun somebody took out of his fish box is an abstraction. They find no relationship between the movement of the index finger and the first stinking step into eternity. It is emotional poverty, with cause and effect in a taste of disassociation. And they …”