I studied the face of the teenager she had been. She had had a lot more confidence in those days. The blue eyes were a combination of joy and expectation. On the other side of the frame was a reduced copy of her diploma. I was in the room of Stella Catharine Cross, who had graduated from Central High in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty-five.
So that put her in her mid-thirties. I wondered what had happened to Miss Cross between then and now; what had stolen the confidence from those lovely blue eyes and added lines and worry.
I didn’t have a chance to pursue it much further. I heard the water switch off in the bathroom, and I hustled back to the living room, grabbed my beer, and took a seat.
She came out dressed in a long blue bathrobe that set off her eyes. Her hair was wet, and she rubbed it with a towel. There was a growing nervousness about her, underlined with shyness. She reminded me of some small creature who, after deciding to venture out into sunlight, is suddenly frightened and unsure.
“I must look awful,” she said, trying to comb her hair with the towel.
“Not at all.”
“I dropped the soap and when I bent down to get it, my hair got soaked—so I just decided to go ahead and wash it.”
“I can smell the shampoo. It’s nice.”
She exhaled slightly, trying to relax, then found her drink.
“I hardly ever drink,” she explained as she toyed with the wedge of lime I had cut. “I guess it’s because I see so many drunks at work. But after tonight . . .” She rolled her eyes. “I feel like I could use one.”
“What did the police say?”
“They said they’d try to catch the guys on the road from Flamingo to Homestead. They said if they didn’t get them there it might take a while. They’re going to send someone here tomorrow to get a report from you and your friend.”
“We won’t be here tomorrow.”
“Oh,” she said in a small voice.
She sat in one of the chairs. I sat on the couch. Her body language told me much. She kept her legs pressed together beneath the robe, and she unconsciously crossed her arms across her breasts, sipping at her drink.
I could almost read her mind. She was wondering why in the hell she had invited some big blond stranger to her room. She was lonely, but had she sunk to the need of one-night stands? Maybe....
She worked more steadily at her drink now, hoping it would relax her. We made small talk; superficial conversation about Florida and the weather and our jobs.
Stella Catharine Cross was much like her apartment. There was a surface blandness to her that implied a good bit. It told me that beneath the surface was probably a complex and lonely human being who camouflaged her vulnerability with things sterile and plain and undecipherable.
When she was ready, I got up and made her another gin and tonic. She took it carefully, and didn’t bring it to her lips until I had taken my seat on the couch.
And then, suddenly, her eyes were bugging wide, and her face was bright red. She choked, gagged—then coughed an ice cube clear across the room.
She looked at me wide-eyed, terrified with embarrassment. For a moment I thought she was going to run and hide.
It was all so ridiculous—and so touching—that I found myself laughing.
Then roaring.
“God, I thought things like that only happened to me!” I said, still laughing.
“They do? They do?”
And then she actually started laughing herself. She suddenly seemed to feel better. She got to her feet to retrieve the ice cube, but when she bent down to pick it up, she clunked her forehead on the coffee table. And when she brought her hand up to touch her face, she knocked over a vase of sea oats.
And suddenly she was about to cry again. “My God,” she said. “I’m so . . . so awful.”
I stood and went to her. She eyed me fearfully for a moment, then allowed me to take her in my arms.
“You’re not awful.”
“Then why do I feel so awful!”
“Maybe it’s because you’re nervous. Maybe it’s because you think I’m going to try to hustle you into bed.”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“No. It’s nice just holding you like this.”
“I want to tell you something. When I invited you here, I was hoping you would take me to bed. You seemed so nice, like the kind of person you know you can trust.”
“So what happened?”
She put her face down, on my shoulder, as if we were dancing. She exhaled wearily. “I don’t know. I’m just such a mess lately. I came down here almost a year ago. I had had some . . . problems in my life. I came down here thinking that if I just got away everything would be all right.”
“A bad divorce.”
“Yes. But . . . but I don’t want to talk about that.”
I walked her across the carpet to the couch, then sat down beside her. She kept her face turned away, but she still clung lightly to me.
“You don’t want to talk with someone you’ll probably never see again, right?” I said.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I want.”
“As I told you, my reason for coming here wasn’t to take you to bed.”
She snorted. “Jesus, I don’t blame you.”
“Damn it, Stella, it’s not because you aren’t attractive. You’re very attractive.”
She rubbed her face against my shoulder. “Thank you. Thank you—even if you don’t mean it.” She was quiet for a time. I waited for her to speak, knowing she was deciding if a stranger could be trusted to share her burden. Finally she said, “I don’t know what’s happened to me. I’m thirty-four years old, but I feel like a scared little kid of eight. Can you understand that? It seems like every day I get smaller while the world just keeps on getting bigger and bigger. I’m scared all the time—but I don’t know why or of what. I look in the mirror and I see the wrinkles growing on my face, and I just feel so damn . . . alone.”
“If it makes you feel any better, everyone on earth feels like that from time to time. Presidents, waitresses, fishing guides—everyone.”
She turned her face toward me, and I saw that she had begun to cry. “But Dusky, I feel like I’m going crazy. I feel like I’m losing . . . my mind.”
“Maybe you are.”
“Thanks!”
“What I’m saying, Stella, is not to let it frighten you to the point where it does drive you crazy. When I’m scared of something, I’ve got a trick that always makes me feel a whole lot better.”
“I bet.”
“No, I mean it. I think carefully about the thing that is scaring me. And then, very honestly and very methodically, I decide what the very worst thing that can happen really is. I don’t sugarcoat it; I don’t lie to myself—but even so, the ultimate reality of the fear is never as bad as the fear itself.”
“Sounds like great fun.”
“It’s not. But it works.”
She was quiet for a long moment. And very still. Slowly, she turned her head to face me. There was a look of mild surprise in her blue eyes. “You know,” she said, “you’re right. It does work. Just for a moment, the briefest moment, I could see the very worst thing that could happen to me. It was real, and it wasn’t very nice—but the moment it seemed real, it was no longer frightening.” She smiled. “Are you sure you’re just a fishing guide?”
“I’m sure—and sometimes I’m not even very good at that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But my fee for advice remains the same. One cold beer. In advance.”
She wiped at her eyes and stood up. “God,” she said, “I must look a mess.”
“And the other part of the fee is that you stop knocking yourself.”
“Because I’m very attractive, right?”
“You can bank on it.”
Subtly, her face was changing. The confusion was gone, replaced by a look that was unmistakable. It was the soft-eyed, arched-thigh bedroom look. Somehow, through a combination
of the fight and my dimestore psychoanalysis, I had slipped through her guard. I had made my way past the sterile perimeter of this stranger, Stella Catharine Cross, and was being offered the intimacy of her body in the same way she had offered me her fears.
There were no words exchanged.
No words were necessary.
Between all men and all women there is an endless exchange of communication going on that is far more complex than our surface exchange of vowels and verbs and adjectives.
We are so accustomed to it that we are rarely even aware it is going on.
But it is.
We never meet the eye of a stranger without the minimum question-and-answer session: “I might be interested; I’m definitely not interested; maybe, if things were different . . .”
Those are the basic answers to the most basic of questions.
And now, this lady was saying yes; saying yes not in an obvious way, but in a way unmistakable nonetheless.
I watched her move to the kitchen to get my beer. I hadn’t been lying—she was attractive. Very attractive. Her face held its share of pain and wear, and her breasts were no longer the gravity-free breasts of the cheerleader. But, strangely, that seemed to make her all the more desirable.
So why did I feel the urge to make my excuses and get the hell out of there?
Maybe it was because I was thinking of the lovely April Yarbrough; or maybe it was because I don’t subscribe to the convenient Playboy philosophy that all sex is good sex—however desperate, however brief, however empty.
Maybe hell. It was neither of those things, and I knew it.
This lady, Stella Catharine Cross, was one of the injured ones; one of life’s cripples, and sitting there waiting to sweep her off her feet and into bed made me feel just a tad too much like a cat waiting for the fledglings to try their wings.
And thinking that made me feel like the pompous, pious son of a bitch that I occasionally am.
I did have the urge to leave. But I wouldn’t.
The fact was, I hadn’t been with a woman for almost a month. It’s called H-O-R-N-Y. And it’s also called H-U-M-A-N.
You couldn’t have blasted me out of there with plastic explosives. For all my virtuous slavering, I was going to grab the opportunity and run.
No matter how much we lie to ourselves, there’s a little bit of Hefner in us all.
She brought me the beer, eyes locked into mine. There was that brief vacuous moment before the first kiss. Her lips were soft and shy.
She moaned low as my hands slid down the curve of her back to her buttocks.
“I lied to you, Stell. I do want to hustle you into bed.”
She moaned again, her mouth opening, her tongue tracing the tip of my tongue. “Well, you’ve certainly taken your damn sweet time about it.”
“Sometimes I think I was a Baptist preacher in another life.”
“You’ve already been a white knight and a psychiatrist. Now I’d just like it if . . . if you were a man. I think that might be half my problem. A man hasn’t had me in so long. I feel like there’s a dam in me that needs to be burst. And I want it to burst again and again and again and again. . . .”
“Let’s not get carried away, lady.”
She turned her face up to me sleepily. There was a light smile on her face, and her lips were wet and swollen with kissing. “Let’s do,” she said. “Let’s do get carried away. . . .”
I lifted her in my arms and carried her into the little bedroom. I positioned her belly first on the bed and found a little bottle of body oil on the nightstand. She stretched and moaned like a cat while I stripped the terry-cloth robe away and poured drops of oil down her back.
“A back rub?” she purred.
“For now.”
“Does that mean I can return the favor?”
“It does.”
“Ummm . . . that feels nice.”
“And how does that feel?”
“Oh God . . . that feels wonderful . . . oh, don’t stop!”
“I thought I was rubbing your back.”
Quickly, she rolled over and began pulling at my buttons and belt feverishly. Her breasts flattened against her chest beneath their own weight, and the fine feminine curve of her hips veed into long silken curls which testified that she was indeed a natural blonde.
I spread the oil across her stomach and thighs as she worked to strip away my clothes. Beneath the touch of my fingers, I felt her nipples rouse and elongate.
“Stand up,” she said softly. “Please . . . stand up and turn on the light. I want to see you. I want to look at you.”
So I did the lady’s bidding—but kept my good side toward her so the scar from a long-ago shark attack would not turn her attention from the matters at hand.
Her hands traced the outline of her own body as she looked at me. “God,” she said, “you look so good.”
“And you’re not so bad yourself, Stell.”
“Really? Do you really mean that?”
“If you’re done looking, slide over and I’ll prove it to you.”
She touched herself harder now, massaging her own body. “Yes, Dusky. Now. Prove it to me right now. Prove it to me and be as rough and as fast as you like the first time. We’ll have time later for gentleness. I’ll give you all the time you want . . . and everything you need. . . .”
9
By the fresh light of a September morning, the mangrove trees were eighty feet tall, cliffing abruptly at the water’s edge, and the current of the Shark River pressed us onward toward the open Gulf.
The water of the river was deep and dark—but clear. Birds chattered from the depths of the swamp, raccoons foraged in the shallows, and there was the oppressive silence of a wilderness never conquered.
In the depths of that eerie quiet, with no other boats or towns around, it seemed as if the Shark River had transported us through space and time to some South American tributary hellhole that was as beautiful as it was ominous.
That morning I had left Stella Cross asleep, her legs curled against her stomach like a sleeping child.
Lying there in the predawn darkness, she looked confident and unburdened.
And contented.
God knows I had done everything I could do to make her feel content. And it hadn’t been easy.
Stella had spent a long lonely year in Flamingo, and we had loved the night away—she trying to make up for lost time, I just trying to survive.
All her uncertainty had fallen away with her terry-cloth bathrobe, and in the soft bedroom light she had become a tigress. I couldn’t release her enough. And she couldn’t get enough of me.
After our first three times together, she had cradled my head on her naked breasts, stroking my temple gently.
“Poor Dusky. You didn’t know what you were getting yourself into, did you?” she mused.
“No. Guess I’m just lucky.”
“And tired?”
“About half and half.”
“Can I guess which half?”
“If you can find it.”
And she had pressed her lips against my chest, then maneuvered herself over me so that she could trace the line of my stomach and abdomen with her tongue.
“I’m searching,” she had said dreamily.
“So I see. Like a needle in a haystack.”
And she had laughed. “More like a crowbar in the grass.”
And when her mouth found me, she said, “Am I getting warm?”
“One of us is.”
“I thought you were tired.”
“Maybe this will be my last stand.”
“Oh no,” she had giggled. “I don’t think so. You’re so easily . . . discovered. I think you’ve only just begun to fight. . . .”
And that’s the way the whole night went. We had explored and measured and discovered, getting each other’s wants and rhythms down until, for a time, it seemed as if we two strangers were one; a joining of all lovers, past, present, and future.
And
at long last, when she had finally spent herself, she had drifted off into sleep. Tired as I was, I had studied her face by the soft glow of the nightstand light, trying to fix the particulars of her in my mind. Maybe it was a form of penitence, but I wanted her to stand out in memory as a living, breathing human being rather than just a one-night bout of climax.
In sleep, the lines disappeared from her face, and she looked very young again. There was a tiny fragment of scar by her left eye—maybe she had been hit by a ball or something when she was a kid. Her lips were a pale brown, thinner than they felt, and her soft white breasts showed a network of blue veins beneath the tissue-paper skin.
How many men had touched those breasts?
How many men had been with this woman?
Too few, that was for sure. And those that had been with her, it seemed, had come only to rob rather than bear gifts.
I had slipped away from her just before dawn, dressed, and written her a note.
I left the note on the pillow beside her:
“Stell, I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again. But I hope I do. I mean that. Dusky.”
So I had walked back to Sniper through the sleeping government settlement of Flamingo. White egrets and spoonbills—an Easter-egg pink—hunted the mangrove flats beyond the motel on the low tide. Tree rats rattled in the palms, mosquitoes still swarmed, and Florida Bay was a sheen of micacolored light in the secret morning darkness.
Surprisingly, Hervey was awake when I arrived.
The cabin of my sportfisherman smelled of coffee and bacon.
“Got plenty of sleep last night, I hope,” Hervey had said, giving me an evil grin.
“Don’t I look like I got plenty of sleep?”
“Oh, sure, sure. Plenty of sleep in a washing machine, maybe.”
So we had gotten an early start, cruising through the dawn stillness of Flamingo Canal to Coot Bay, then through the twisting, turning tributary that we followed to the expanse of Whitewater Bay, where bottlenosed dolphin played before the boat in the shallow water.
In that wilderness maze at the base of Florida, humans and our frail history seem temporary and unimportant. There is a sinister light about the mangrove swamps, as if they are patiently waiting to claim again cities and roads and homes when we have finally blown ourselves into oblivion.
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