The Dreadful Lemon Sky

by John D. MacDonald

  The dimming brain works slowly and with difficulty. Clean blue tubing. An azure blue. The size used for a bicycle frame. And why was that fellow under it, under the dry dirt that had come from a hole too deep for all the recent rain to reach? There was a stupid rhyme in the fading brain: Jason Breen and his Azure Machine.

  The realization pierced the darkness that was closing in on me. What happened in my mind was not fright, not anger. It was an overwhelming dismay. A veritable crescendo of dismay, enough to galvanize my slackening body into a few moments of a terrible, terminal strength. I will never know how I was able to come to my feet with Van Harn plastered to my back. I took a single wobbly step and then fell toward the jeep, turning as I fell, so that I smashed him against the metal. I rebounded onto hands and knees, the stricture gone from my throat. I stretched out and breathed until the shadows lightened and the sun came out again. In sudden fright I pushed myself up and spun around. Freddy lay on his side.

  I had the feeling he was going to bound to his feet and we were going to have to do it all over again, as if he were some mythological creature which could not be slain.

  First I got the chain from the jeep. I rolled him onto his face, and chained his wrists together, tying a clumsy knot, and used the surplus to chain his ankles.

  Then I knelt by the hole and carefully pulled the dirt away until I could see a hand, and most of a forearm, and more of the tubing of the blue bicycle.

  From the angle, the rest of him was under the jeep, and under a foot of dirt. Somewhere under there could be found the stillness of the Jesus face, the wire glasses, the crushed guitar, the brown legs sturdy with the bicycle muscles. And somewhere in his head, lost forever in the death of the synapses, were the jellied memories of why he had come out here and what Van Harn had done to him. The idea had been splendid. Dig a big hole and bury the body under a horse. Who would ever look farther than the horse?

  I dragged Van Harn up the slope toward the back of the jeep and left him in the shade of the rear overhang. I felt his throat. The pulse was strong and regular. Except for the knot on his forehead, there wasn’t a mark on his face. The left side of my underlip felt like half a hot plum. When I opened my mouth to yawn width, experimentally, the hinges creaked. I had a dull headache behind my eyes. He could blow them in pretty good. His dark glasses were missing. I looked around and found them, stomped flat.

  Just as I climbed out of the hole I heard the oncoming drumbeat of a galloping horse. It was one great big dark brown horse, and she looked good in her cowgirl hat, yellow shirt, and twill britches. But when she pulled it up short and slid off, she turned back into Jane Schermer, with pudding face, minimal neck, and neuter body.

  “Smith said Frederick had to shoot …” She saw Freddy in the shade of the jeep. “What are you doing to him?”

  “Nothing, at the moment. But he’s kept me pretty busy.”

  “Get that chain off him at once!”

  “First come take a look at this.”

  She hesitated, then dropped down into the hole. She had let the reins hang free. The big horse made munching and ripping sounds in the stubbly grass. I pointed to the hole, big around as a bushel basket and half as deep, with the arm and hand and the portion of blue bike in the bottom of it.

  She stared and sprang back and turned quickly, making a shallow, gagging little coughing sound. “Who? What—”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s Jason Breen. He worked at Westway Harbor Marina.”

  “But did you …”

  “Did I? God’s sake! Sure, I came out here and sort of borrowed that backhoe, which I don’t know how to operate. Then I dug this big son of a bitch of a hole. Then I put Jason and all his gear at the bottom of said hole and covered him over good. Then I shot this horse and … look. Forget it.”

  “But Frederick couldn’t have done it.”

  “Lady Jane, I don’t think there’s anything in this world that you or I could think of that Freddy wouldn’t do, if he happened to feel like it.”

  She hustled over and knelt by Freddy. She felt his forehead with the back of her hand. She put her ear against his bare chest to hear his heart. She stood up and looked at the visible half of the horse. “Poor darling,” she said softly. “Poor Sultan. Poor beast. My Graciela foaled him. He grew up on my place. I gave him to Frederick.”

  “That’s nice.”

  She went to the front legs of the horse, lifted, and tested with strong hands. “Must be a hind leg,” she said. “Take that stupid chain off of Frederick right away!”

  “I don’t think it’s a hind leg either.”

  She stared at me. “What do you mean?”

  “I think Freddy needed a dead horse.”

  “He has other horses here. Sultan was valuable.”

  “He needed a dead horse that was so valuable and he liked so much that it made sense for him to send his ranch hands off on other work while he took care of it himself.”

  “What makes you think a hind leg isn’t broken?”

  “I watched him slide it up to the edge of the hole and roll it in. By then he didn’t care what I saw because he had already decided to put me in the hole next to Jason. Under the horse.”

  “You make him sound like a … Could you uncover those back legs? Please?”

  I walked over and got the spade and went to work. Once I got into the rhythm of it, it didn’t take long. Before I finished, her fool horse finally caught on to the fact there was a dead horse in the area. He came over and stared into the hole, then screamed and backed away, shaking his head, rolling his eyes, and clacking his teeth. Jane hustled and caught him and led him all the way to the trees and tied him to a branch and left him there, squealing and pawing at the ground.

  She hunkered down and checked each back leg in turn, then stood up and dusted her hands and climbed up out of the hole. I followed her. She looked thoughtfully down at Freddy, and she didn’t say anything about the chain.

  “I raised Sultan,” she said.

  “I better go to the house and use the phone.”

  “Phone?”

  “To report a body.”

  “Oh, of course. There’s one in the tack room, an extension. Are you going to leave Frederick … like this?”

  “I know. That chain looks as if I’m overacting. But I feel a lot better with it wrapped right where it is.”

  She looked at me and through me. Her eyes were small and of no particular color. Dull hazel, perhaps. “The things people said about him. I knew they were all lies. They were jealous.” She focused on me. “Is this all some kind of terrible trick? Did you shoot Sultan?”

  “I am not terribly fond of horses, but I’ve never shot one.”

  “I have to believe somebody.”

  “It might as well be me. Freddy tried to kill me. He made some good tries. He tried with the jeep. He tried with the spade. He tried manual strangulation. He is a very tough animal. He is about twice as strong as he looks.”

  “Jane?” Freddy said weakly. “Jane, dear?”

  “Yes?”

  “Help me, please.”

  “You shot Sultan because he broke his leg?”

  “No other choice, dear. Please help me. Unfasten the chain, please.”

  She moved closer, looking down at him. “I don’t think I can help you, darling. I don’t think anybody can help you. Just be patient. We’re going to make a phone call. You won’t have to stay there very long.”

  I was halfway to the stables and the tack room before I could no longer hear his voice calling her name. She cantered past me when I was almost there. I found the phone while she was shooing her horse into an empty box stall.

  Captain Scorf was not available, so I asked for someone to whom I could report a dead body, a murdered body. Then I gave a very simple report and explicit directions.

  Jane Schermer sat with her back against the box stall door, her knees hiked up. There was a broad overhang shading the walk which led by the stalls. I sat beside her.

  A
fter a long time she said, “They were telling the truth and he was telling the lies.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I’ve been going over things that troubled me, that I asked him about. I’ve been such a fool.”

  “That is a very convincing fellow when he wants to sell you.”

  “I was too easy to sell. I wanted to get married.”

  “So you’ll get married. But not to Freddy.”

  She turned and looked at me. “Men have never paid much attention to me. I know when it’s the money. A person can tell. I wondered about him. I was never sure.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t.”

  “You’re trying so hard to be kind, aren’t you? Why would he … spoil everything for himself?”

  “In big ways, and little ways too, people do that all the time to themselves. We can’t stand prosperity. We have to tinker with the machinery.”

  She looked out across the track at the distant scene, at the canted top half of the yellow jeep. She touched my arm suddenly. “Look!”

  I looked out there and saw that Freddy had performed a feat I would have called impossible. With wrists chained behind him and ankles chained together, he had managed to worm his way out from under the back end of the jeep and get himself up out of the hole and onto his feet. He was on the far side of the hole, hopping up and down with terrible demonic energy, managing somehow to retain his balance, though without seeming to make any progress. He was springing high into the air. I thought I heard a distant shouting. Then we saw him fall, roll, and disappear back into the hole.

  We both got up. Jane said, “Something’s the matter with him.”

  “I could make you a list.”

  But she had started off at a flat-out run, too concerned to remember she could ride that big horse out to him. I loped along, feeling the lumpy pain in my thigh with each stride. When we got there she jumped down into the hole where he was flapping and churning around and yelled, “Fire ants! Fire ants! Help me with him.”

  I think he had five thousand ants on his face, arms, and torso, swarming and biting with that dedicated aggression peculiar to that innocent-looking little red-brown ant.

  I jumped down and grabbed him and wrestled him up out of the hole and half carried, half dragged him about forty feet and put him down on the grass. All this while he was moaning, cawing, and whimpering, and Jane was slapping and brushing at the ants. About a hundred turned their eager attentions to me, so after I dropped him I hopped and slapped and brushed until the frequency dropped to a random nip from time to time. They are called fire ants because the bite feels like a very tiny red-hot coal on the surface of your skin.

  She kept on getting rid of the ants while I quickly took the chain off ankles and wrists. He had stopped being a dangerous person. Though his gestures seemed weak and uncertain, he was of some help in removing the ants. The ones that were being brushed off were climbing back onto him, so I got him onto his feet and trundled him another fifty feet before he stumbled and fell.

  When he was down I pulled his shoes and socks off, undid the brass buckle, and pulled his khaki trousers off. The ants were thick on his legs, way up to the upper thigh and the groin. I pulled his underwear shorts off and wadded them up and used them to brush away the ants. I noted that, dimensionally, he more than lived up to the billing Joanna had given him. I rolled him over and over, away from the area where the brushed-off ants could get back on him.

  They are aggressive, these red ants, but they are certainly not the menace the farming fraternity and the petrochemical industry would have us believe. If you stand too near a nest, they will come out and climb up your shoes and sting your ankles. You know immediately, and you move away and knock them off. The bites make little white blisters which, if untended, are likely to fester. The easiest remedy is rubbing alcohol applied as soon as possible after being bitten. Vodka or gin will do.

  Ninety-nine out of a hundred fire-ant horror stories are false. Freddy was the one in a hundred. I had never heard of anybody being so completely bitten. We had him free of the ants at last. He made weak sounds as he rolled his head from side to side. He was gray and sweaty. I wedged him back into his pants and cinched the big brass buckle.

  I now knew why he had been so anxious to do me in. But it seemed idiotic to have killed Jason Breen.

  I leaned close to him and said, “Hey! Why did Jason come out here?”

  “Money,” he said in a dull voice. “Called me at four in the morning on the private line. I chained the dogs. Waited in the grove. Twenty thousand.”

  “Why?”

  “He’d snooped. Figured it all out. Saw the Christina come in without Jack. Told me he had killed Cal with a wire and he had to run, and unless I gave him money he’d claim I paid him to kill Cal. I said okay. He was very jumpy. Then he said he was going to beat up on me anyway, on account of what happened with the Dobrovsky girl. He hit me and I hit him. I caught him in the throat. It broke something. He grabbed his throat. Tried to breathe. Fell onto his knees. Made choking noises. Fell over dead in less than two minutes. By dawn light his face was black and his eyes bulged out. I dragged him down to the stables. Wheeled his bike down. Oh, Christ, everything is getting so … so far away.”

  He was looking worse by the moment, face bloating, tongue thickening. His lips were fat. He was close to blacking out.

  “He told me once a bee sting can make him real sick,” Jane said. “What’s keeping … them.”

  A moment later we both heard the distant hooting as the cruiser blew its way through the highway traffic. When in another minute it drove into sight around the stand of trees, I stood up and waved my arms at it. It came bounding across the track and the infield, stopped near us, and two deputies piled out, very smart in pale blue shirts, dark blue pants, and trooper hats. They were big, young and ruddy, creaking with equipment.

  “Hey, Miz Jane!” one of them said.

  “Why, hello, Harvey!”

  “Now just who is this here, Miz Jane?”

  “You know him! This is Frederick Van Harn.”

  Harvey stared. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said in an awed voice. “What in hell happened to him?”

  “He got into fire ants,” I said, “and he’s allergic. He’s going into shock. Can you get a radio patch through to hospital emergency?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “You better get on it and tell them you’re heading in there wide open. Tell them it’s shock from insect bites. They’ll know what to have ready. I think it’s called anaphylactic shock.”

  “But—”

  Jane stepped closer to him and said, “Maybe you want to explain to my Uncle Jake why you let Frederick die?”

  That is one of the interesting things about power. Everybody who really has it seems to know exactly how to use it. The ones who pretend to have it make the wrong moves.

  While he was on the radio, the other deputy and I lifted Freddy and put him in the back of the cruiser, on his back on the seat. The deputy said, “There’s supposed to be a body here?”

  “There is.”

  “Harv, I’ll stay here and look into what the call was about. You come back or have them send somebody, okay?”

  Jane had gotten in the back and she was kneeling on the floor, holding Freddy’s hand. Harvey made a tight circle and went bucketing out of there. We heard him hooting his way down the highway toward the city.

  The one left behind said, “Those far ants are mean.”

  I inspected the bites on the backs of my hands and between the fingers. “They’re very convincing.”

  He took out his notebook. “Who was it phoned in?”

  “Me. Travis McGee.”

  “My name is Simmons. Frank Simmons.” He almost started to shake hands and apparently decided it wasn’t professional.

  “Have you been a deputy long?”

  “Just over three weeks. Address, Mr. McGee?”

  He wrote the ID information down, slowly and carefully. “Now where’
d this dead body be?”

  “Over there in that hole.”

  “Is it a real old dead body? I mean dead long?”

  “Only since last night.”

  We walked to the hole. In a higher voice he said, “That there is a dead horse! You funnin’ me? What’s that jeep doing down in there?”

  “Frank, there’s a small hole I want you to look in, there by the front of the jeep.”

  He went over and looked down into the smaller hole. There were some flies on the brown arm. He swayed slightly, then whirled and took two big steps and threw up. When he was finished he straightened up slowly and said, “That didn’t give me a damn bit of warning. It just come on me all at once.”

  “It can happen that way.”

  “This is my first one on duty. Jesus! Look, don’t tell Harv about my barfin’, okay?”

  “I’d have no reason to.”

  “He rides me. He thinks I won’t make it. I’ll make it. Now, who discovered the body? You or Miz Schermer or Mr. Van Harn?”

  “I discovered it.”

  “Who put it there?”

  “Mr. Van Harn.”

  “The hell you say!” He bent and slapped at his ankles. “Far ants all over the place. Let’s get out of this here hole. You think there’s a water tap around here anyplace?”

  “Over there at the stables.”

  “Let’s us walk over there. Now, you got any idea who the deceased is?”

  “I think it is a fellow named Jason Breen.”

  “From Westway Harbor? With the beard?”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” he said softly and stopped long enough to write the name in his notebook.

  Seventeen

  Captain Harry Max Scorf questioned me at the scene. By the time he was through they had Jason and his bike and his smashed guitar and his duffel bags out of the ground. I followed Scorf over and took a look at the body. The eyes glared up at the sky. The beard was chalked with limestone dust, giving me a hint of what he would have looked like as an old man, had the world given him a chance to live that long.