Gulf coast girl: original title, Scorpion reef

by Charles Williams

  “Bill Manning, isn’t it?” she asked. “That wouldn’t be William Stacey Manning, by any chance?”

  I glanced quickly around. “How did you know?” Then I remembered. “Oh. You read that wheeze about me in the paper?”

  It had appeared a few days ago, one of those interesting-character-around-the-water front sort of things, written by a rather intense girl who oozed her dedication to capital-J journalism all over the pier and was determined to pump me up into a glamorous figure for at least a column if it killed her. It had started over the fact I’d won a couple of races out at the yacht club, handling a friend’s boat for him. I wasn’t even a member; he was. But it had come out I’d deck-handed a couple of times on that run down to Bermuda and was a sailing nut; hence the story. Then she made the fact I’d gone to M.I.T. for three years before the war sound as if I were a South Seas beachcomber with a title. I didn’t get it myself. Maybe she thought divers ate with their feet. It was a good thing I hadn’t said anything about the four or five stories I’d sold. I’d have been Somerset Maugham, with flippers.

  Then an odd thought struck me. I hadn’t used my middle name in that interview. I hadn’t used it, in fact, since I’d left New England.

  She nodded. “Yes. I read it. And I was sure you must be the same Manning who’d written those sea stories. Why haven’t you done any more?”

  “I wasn’t a very successful writer,” I said.

  “But I thought they were awfully good.”

  “Thank you.”

  She was looking ahead at the road. “Are you married?”

  “I was,” I said. “Divorced. Three years ago.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. I mean, I didn’t intend to pry—”

  “It’s all right,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it.

  It was just a mess, but it was over and finished. A lot of it had been my fault, and knowing it didn’t help much. We’d fought until we wore it out, and it takes two to do that. I’d owned the boat before Catherine and I were married, and I insisted on hanging onto it in spite of the fact she cared nothing about sailing and the upkeep on it was too much for a married man on the salary I was making in the steamship office where I worked. She wanted to give parties, and play office politics. None of the office brass sailed; they all played golf. I should sell the boat and join a country club. The hell with that, I’d said; I didn’t care what the brass did. I spent my leisure time sailing, and trying to write. I didn’t have any ambition, and I was antisocial and pigheaded. Who the hell did I think I was? Conrad? It folded.

  We even fought over that, over money again. We sold the house and the boat at a big loss in an outburst of mutual savagery and split the whole thing up like two screaming kids in a tantrum. I had learned diving and salvage work in the Navy during the war, and after the wreckage settled I drifted back into it, moving around morosely from job to job and going farther south all the time. If you were going to dive you might as well do it in warm water. It was that aimless. I’d tried writing again, but nothing came out right any more and everything was rejected. I was 33 now with nothing much to look forward to and not much behind except an increasing list of “ex-’s”—ex-engineering student, ex-Navy lieutenant, ex-husband, and ex-aspiring writer.

  She slowed going through a small town, and when we were on the open highway again she looked around at me, her face thoughtful, and said, “I gathered you’ve had lots of experience with boats?”

  I nodded. “I was brought up around them. My father sailed, and belonged to a yacht club. I was sailing a dinghy by the time I started to school.”

  “How about big ones, out in the ocean—what do they call it?”

  “Offshore? Sure. After the war I did quite a bit of ocean yacht racing, as a crew member. And a friend and I cruised the Caribbean in an old yawl for about eight months in 1946.”

  “I see,” she said thoughtfully. “Do you know navigation?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Though I’m probably pretty rusty at it. I haven’t used it for a long time.”

  I had an odd impression she was pumping me, for some reason. It didn’t make much sense. Why all this interest in boats? I couldn’t see what blue-water sailing and celestial navigation had to do with finding a shotgun lost overboard in some piddling lake.

  We went through another small town stacked along the highway in the hot sun. A few miles beyond she turned off the pavement onto a dirt road going up over a hill between some cotton fields. She was watching the mirror again. I looked back, but there was nobody behind us. Then I asked myself abruptly what I cared if there were. This was only a job, wasn’t it? What the hell, her husband had just lost his shotgun in a lake—

  Hadn’t he?

  We passed a few dilapidated farmhouses at first, but then they began to thin out. It was desolate country, mostly sand and scrub pine, and we met no one else at all. After about four miles we turned off this onto a private road which was only a pair of ruts running off through the trees. I got out to open the gate. There was a sign nailed to it which read: Posted. Keep Out. Another car had been through recently, probably within a day or two, breaking the crust in the ruts.

  I gathered it must be a private gun club her husband belonged to, but she didn’t say. We dropped on down the hill into swampy country where big oaks festooned with Spanish moss met above the road. I could see old mudholes here and there through the timber, the silt cracking into geometric patterns and curling as it dried. It was quiet and a little gloomy, the way you imagined a tropical jungle would be.

  We went on for about a mile and then the road ended abruptly. She stopped. “Here we are,” she said.

  It was a beautiful place, and almost ringingly silent the minute the car stopped. The houseboat was moored to a pier in the shade of big moss-draped trees at the water’s edge, and beyond it I could see the flat surface of the lake burning like a mirror in the sun. There was no whisper of breeze. I got out and closed the door, and the sound was almost startling in the hush.

  She unlocked the trunk and I took my gear out. “I have a key to the houseboat,” she said. “You can change in there.”

  It was a lot larger than I had expected, and looked as if it must have four or five rooms. It was moored broadside to the pier which ran along parallel to and just off the bank under the overhanging limbs of the trees. A narrow gangplank ran from the bank out to the pier, and another shorter one onto the deck of the scow.

  She led the way, disturbingly out of place in this wilderness with her smooth blond head and smart grooming, the slim spikes of her heels tapping against the planks. I noticed the pier ran on around the end of the scow at right angles and out into the lake.

  “I’ll take the gear on out there,” I said. “I’d like to have a look at it.”

  She came with me. We rounded the corner of the houseboat and I could see the whole arm of the lake. This section of the pier ran out into it about thirty feet, with two skiffs tied up at the end. They were about half full of water, and there were no oars in them. I put down the aqualung and mask and looked around.

  The lake was about a hundred yards wide, glassy and shining in the sun between its walls of trees, and some two hundred yards ahead it turned around a point.

  “The duckblind is just around that point, on the left,” she said.

  I looked at it appraisingly. “And he doesn’t have any idea at all where the gun fell out?”

  She shook her head. “No. It could have been anywhere between here and the point.”

  It still sounded odd, but I merely shrugged. “All right. I might as well get started.”

  She started to turn, and then froze. She was listening to something. Then I heard it, very faintly, over the immense hush all around. It was a car, somewhere a long way off. Her face grew very still and I could see the color go out of it. The sound of the car faded away; I couldn’t tell whether it had stopped somewhere or gone on.

  We were standing very close together on the end of the pier. Our eyes
met. “What’s the gag?” I asked roughly.

  “Gag?”

  “You’ve been looking for a car, or listening for one, ever since you picked me up. Is somebody following you?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “I hope not.”

  “Your husband?”

  Her face jerked up toward mine and I could see the ruffling of an Irish temper in the eyes. “My husband? And why would my husband be following me, Mr. Manning?”

  I was a mile off base, and realized it. “I’m sorry,” I said. It had been a stupid thing to say, and I wondered what there was about her that made me so uncomfortable and ready to jump down her throat at the slightest excuse. She wasn’t bothering me, was she? The hell she wasn’t bothering me.

  She smiled, a little shakily, and I knew she was still scared. “It’s all right,” she said. “You really didn’t mean it, anyway. You’re very nice, you know.”

  “Maybe we’d better get started looking for that shotgun,” I said.

  “Would it help if I went, too, in one of the boats?” she asked. “I’d like to watch. And I thought perhaps, if you had something to guide you—”

  I looked around. It would help, all right. The water was fairly clear and the visibility should be pretty good with the sun directly overhead, but still I’d have to come to the surface every few yards to get my bearings.

  “Sure,” I said. “But you can’t go out in a skiff the way you’re dressed. I can bail one out, but it’d still be dirty and wet.”

  “I think I’ve got an old swimsuit in the houseboat. I could change into that.”

  “All right,” I said. We went back around to the gangplank and walked aboard. She unlocked the door. It led into a big living-room which was well-furnished and even had a fireplace. There was a rug on the floor, a sofa, some overstuffed chairs, a bookcase, and two or three framed pictures along the walls. The windows were closed and curtained. It was in the center of the deckhouse structure, and two doors led off into other rooms at each end. The air was dead and still, and smelled faintly of dust.

  She nodded to one of the doors at the right end of the living-room. “You can change in there. I’ll see if I can find my swim-suit.”

  I went in. It was a bedroom. There was a double bed in it, and a dresser, and the floor was carpeted from wall to wall. So this was roughing it in a duck camp in the wilds. I took off my clothes and got into the swimming trunks. It was hot, and I was shiny with sweat. I wondered if she had found her suit, and then wished irritably I could quit thinking of her.

  I took a cigarette out of the shirt and lit it before I went out in the living-room again. The doors at the other end were closed, but I could hear her moving around in one of the rooms. It sounded as if she was changing clothes. I located a pair of oars and went down to the end of the pier.

  Hauling one of the skiffs up alongside, I began bailing with an old can. There was no shade here, and the sun beat down on my head. In a moment I heard the whispered padding of bare feet behind me and turned around.

  She could make your breath catch in your throat. The bathing suit was black, and she didn’t have a vestige of a tan; the clear, smooth blondness of her hit you almost physically. A few inches shorter with the same build and the same legs and she would have been downright voluptuous; as it was there was something regal about her. I looked down and went on bailing.

  I fitted the oarlocks and held the boat while she got in and sat down amidships. Setting the aqualung and mask in the stern, I shoved off.

  “Pull out about twenty yards,” I directed. The water was only about five feet deep around the pier and I could see the bottom from the surface. The gun was nowhere around there.

  “All right,” I said in a moment. “Hold it right there while I go over. Row very slowly toward the point, just as if you were going to the blind, but don’t get too far ahead of me. You’ll be able to tell where I am by the bubbles coming up. I’ll have to cover fifty or seventy-five feet on each side, because it was dark and he could have wandered that much off the course.”

  She nodded, and watched with intense interest while I slipped the straps of the outfit over my shoulders and put on the mask. I bit on the mouthpiece and slid over the stern. The water was only about ten feet deep and the visibility was good. I went down and brushed bottom. It was soft, and my hand raised a cloud of silt.

  That was the only thing I was afraid of. In all that time the gun might have sunk completely out of sight in the mud. But still it should leave a track, an outline, where it disappeared, as there were no currents to disturb the bottom and erase it. I looked up and could see the boat directly above me on the ground-glass screen of the surface. The oars dipped once, scattering bubbles. I swam to the right, just above the mud and not disturbing it, made a wide swing, and came back to cover the other side. Here and there an old log lay on the bottom. I searched carefully around them.

  She moved the boat slowly ahead. Time went by. I saw an empty bottle, two or three beer cans, and an underwater snag festooned with bass lures. Now and then bass and perch would stare at me goggle-eyed and slide away.

  We couldn’t have been over seventy-five yards off the pier when I found the gun. If I’d been looking ahead instead of staring so intently at the bottom I’d have seen it even sooner. It was slanting into the mud, barrel down, at about a 60-degree angle with the stock up in plain sight. I pulled it out and kicked to the surface. I was some twenty feet from the boat. She saw me and rowed over.

  I caught the gunwale and lifted the shotgun out of the water so she could see it. Her eyes went wide, and then she smiled. “That was fast, wasn’t it?” she said.

  I set it in the bottom of the boat, stripped off the diving gear, and heaved that in, too. “Nothing to it,” I said. “It was sticking up in plain sight.”

  She watched me quietly as I pulled myself in over the stern and sat down. I picked up the gun. It was a beauty, all right, a trap model with ventilated sighting ramp and a lot of engraving. I broke it and held it over the side, swishing it back and forth to get the mud out of the barrel and from under the ramp. Then I held it up and looked at it. She was still watching me.

  “It’s a pretty gun, isn’t it?” she said self-consciously.

  I stared at it again, and then back at her, feeling the silence lengthen out. It was the stock that gave it away, the stock and she herself. She was a lousy actress.

  The barrel could conceivably have stayed free of rust for a long time, stuck in the mud like that where there was little or no oxygen, but the wood was something else. It should have been waterlogged. It wasn’t. Water still stood up on it in drops, the way it does on a freshly waxed car. It hadn’t been in the water 24 hours.

  I thought of that other set of car tracks, and wondered how bored and how cheap you could get.

  Two

  She pulled us back to the pier. I made the skiff fast and followed her silently back to the car, carrying the diving gear and the gun. The trunk was still open. I put the stuff in, slammed the lid, and gave her the key.

  Why not, I thought savagely. When had I become such a priss? I couldn’t understand myself at all. If this was good clean fun in her crowd, what did I have to kick about? Maybe the commercial approach made the whole thing a little greasy, like an old deck of cards, and maybe she could have been a little less cynical about waving that wedding ring in your face while she beat you over the head with the advertising matter that stuck out of her bathing suit in every direction, but still it was nothing to blow your top about, was it? I didn’t have to tear her head off.

  I didn’t know. All I was sure of was that I was sick of the whole lousy thing and of her most of all. Maybe it was just the sheer magnificence of her, paradoxically, that made it seem even junkier than it was. She didn’t have any right to look like that and work the other side of the street at the same time.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” she said, the gray eyes faintly puzzled.

  This was the goddess again. She wa
s cute.

  “Am I?” I asked.

  We walked back to the pier and went into the living-room of the houseboat. She stopped in front of the fireplace and stood facing me a little awkwardly, as if I still puzzled her.

  She smiled tentatively. “You really found it quickly, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. I was standing right in front of her. Our eyes met. “If you’d gone farther up the lake before you threw it in it might have taken a little longer.”

  She gasped.

  The storm warnings were going up the halyards, but I was too angry to see them. Angry at myself, I think. I went right ahead and reeled my neck out another foot.

  “Things must be pretty tough when a woman with your looks has to go this far into left field—”

  It rocked me, and my eyes stung; a solid hundred and fifty pounds of flaming, outraged girl was leaning on the other end of the arm. I turned around, leaving her standing there, and walked into the bedroom before she decided to pull my head off and hand it to me. She was big enough and angry enough.

  I was shaking. I choked with anger, and I choked thinking of her, and at the same time I told myself contemptuously I was acting like the heroine in a silent movie and that I ought to lean against the closed door with my hand on my chest. Why didn’t I call a cop, or faint?

  I stripped off the wet swimming trunks and slammed them on the bed and began furiously dressing. I was buttoning the shirt when it finally occurred to me to ask myself the same question I’d implied to her. Why? Even if she did like her extra-marital affairs rough, ready, and casual, she didn’t have to chase them this far. With the equipment she had—even with that wedding ring showing—all she had to do was stumble. But what other explanation was there? She’d deliberately thrown the gun in the lake. I gave up.

  I was reaching for a cigarette when I suddenly heard footsteps outside on the pier. I held still and listened. They couldn’t be hers. She was barefoot. Or even if she’d already changed and put her shoes on, this wasn’t the clicking of a woman’s high heels. It was a man. Or men, I thought. It sounded as if there were two of them. They came aboard and into the living-room, the scraping of their shoes loud and distinct in the hush. I stiffened, hardly breathing now.