Twisting the Rope

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  It was a hummingbird. A pretty little hummingbird with its nose stuck down the tube of a honeysuckle floret blooming in the window box. Was that what was humming in his ears? Long felt a desperate, lonely affinity with the hummingbird, and with tremendous effort he pulled his attention back to Stoughie.

  The man sat up and his blue eyes opened wide. “Don’t try it, buddy,” he said, in the accents of a genre movie. “You couldn’t stand the heat.”

  Long stared at him, bemused. “Oh, I’ve never had any problems enduring heat, Mr. Stoughie. It’s this cold that has me down.”

  Both of the agent’s feet pressed with belligerent strength against the back of his desk, underneath. Mr. Long could see the panel before him bulging out, and he wondered what would happen if it broke. “Threatening a suit, eh? You know, musicians have tried that before, with me. You might ask them where it got them.”

  Long sighed, blew his nose, and watched the bulge move with the currents of Stoughie’s anger. “We spoke with Sister Sue Frye before scheduling last winter. She advised us strongly against doing business with a man who is so reliably underhanded.”

  “How dare—” The bulge shone under the fluorescent lamps.

  “But we—I—have a different hand dealt to me than Sister Sue did. I have an excellent and reputable lawyer, Mr. Stoughie, as well as the money to feed him indefinitely.”

  Long heard a crack, and watched a dark line appear along the walnut-toned plywood panels of the desk. Stoughie heard it, too, and his feet withdrew. He sat up. “Listen, Long. Landaman Hall is owned by a corporation. Do you think you can fight a corporation in court?”

  Long chuckled. “Fight a corporation? Of course. Probably I could buy your corporation. Most certainly I could buy your theater. But I wouldn’t want to—the feng shui is very bad.”

  “The what?”

  Long ignored his question. He was looking again at the hummingbird. “I have a suggestion, Mr. Stoughie. If you would really like to joust with me in the arena of the law, why don’t you pay the band its little bit of money? Both with suit and countersuit, it would strengthen your case tremendously.” So pleasing was the form and coloration of the little nectar drinker that Long smiled as he spoke.

  Stoughie was a picture of disbelief. “You’re putting me on, brother. I know what kind of small bucks a man makes, hauling harps around.”

  “So you were at the concert last night?” Long’s smile tightened. “A man hauls harps around for nothing, if that man is myself.”

  Very calmly Mr. Long stood up, and calmly he began to empty his pockets onto the table. “Here is my pocketwatch, Mr. Stoughie. It is not made of brass. The works are by Patek Philippe, but that doesn’t communicate anything to you, does it? That beside it is a manicure set I picked up in Belgium; I recommend it to you as leaving no unsightly lump in the jacket pocket. That flat case, also gold, is not for cigarettes, but credit cards. Allow me to show you my assortment; the airlines credit cards are not as impressive as the bank cards, are they? Rather too gaudy.”

  Stoughie glanced from one gold bauble to the next, hung between insult and fascination. Then Long emptied out the inner pocket hidden in his jacket lining. A flat, brown leather checkbook hit the desk, followed by another of green plastic. Long held the green one open in front of Stoughie’s nose. “Here you see more or less the finances of Macnamara’s Band. Not as bad as some. Solid, in fact, but perhaps in no state to’ engage in long-term legal jousting.” He dropped the book on the desk and held up the other. “This, on the other hand, is the balance of the personal account which I am using for my expenses on the trip.”

  Stougbie looked at the neat, tiny figures and then he looked again. His eyes dilated, perhaps involuntarily.

  “All of this could be faked, of course,” continued Long, scooping up his possessions. “By anyone who wanted to pretend to a financial state he did not have. But when the goal is to convince you that I am a worthy adversary in the civil battlefield …

  “Oh. Here’s one more little toy that might interest you.” From a pocket sewn into an unlikely place in his jacket pocket he produced a small square of green, which he tossed on the desk.

  It was a stack of folded greenbacks, held neatly as the pages in a book by a clip of simple design, which shone brightly except for the tarnished image of a Chinese dragon which wound in waves and spirals along the length of it. The eyes of the dragon were bright.

  “It is only bronze, of course,” said Long modestly. “But I think the workmanship is clever.”

  Stoughie tore his gaze away from the denominations long enough to notice the workmanship. When Long put the clip back in his pocket, the agent sighed.

  “Mrs. Macnamara, like the businesslike woman she is, will not permit any transfer of funds from the brown account to the green account. She will, however, accept a certain deposit from you. Therefore it is necessary that you write a certain overdue check, to clear the books.”

  Don Stoughie found that he had taken out his own checkbook, which had an elk on it, superimposed on imitation denim cloth. He watched himself writing a check, under Long’s supervising eye.

  “Ah, Mr. Stoughie. It is a little matter, but you have mistaken the month. Undoubtedly the heat of the season has led you to think of July, instead of June.”

  Stoughie’s face had lost its mesmerized look. He shut his checkbook with a snap and he smiled. “Not really. I always pay at thirty days. Ask around, and consider yourself lucky you got it at all, after these shenanigans.”

  Now there was neither hummingbird nor pine tree in Mayland Longs’ cosmos, but only the shape of Don Stoughie on the other side of the desk. Still his voice was neutral as he said, “I needn’t ask any further than our letter of agreement which specified payment last night.”

  Stoughie, facing a slight Asian man with a wadded tissue in his hand, flashed a bit of temper. “I’m tired of you, Long, with your… your ostentation,” he said, putting the accent on the second syllable of the word. “And I’m doubly tired of irresponsible bands that are permitted to wreck my facilities, and that you can tell the Macnamara biddy.”

  The booking agent’s words caused Mr. Long’s face to pale and then darken again. The pupils of his eyes flashed like the throat of the hummingbird and in his ears came the same unearthly buzzing.

  Stoughie, sensitive to none of this, went on. “Look. By the time you could make trouble for me about the check or about the accident, more than a month will be passed. And then, I promise you, I will make it so difficult for the band to collect that your little green checkbook will turn red over the whole deal. This way, you just wait a silly month, like people do all the time—and they get their money. If it isn’t even a paying job with you, I don’t see why you’d care.”

  Long’s immobility encouraged the other to add, “So just admit to yourself that you don’t get things your way this once and—” His words were cut off suddenly as he was lifted off the ground and dragged, by the neck, halfway over his desk.

  Very close to his face hung the eyes of Long, bright gold and completely out of focus. A noise like a wind tunnel came out of Long’s throat.

  Stoughie felt a pen pressed into his hand. “Change the date. Change it or you’re dead…. Now initial it.

  “Now I want you to apologize for your language in reference to Mrs. Macnamara.”

  Stoughie uttered a croak, and was made to speak louder. All these things being done to Long’s satisfaction, he dropped the agent back into his chair.

  “My nose is bleeding,” said Stoughie. “Bleeding all over my shirt! My God, I’m going to put you in jail for this.”

  “Are you?” Long’s face showed no more than it had at any time since entering the room. “That will be very interesting, Mr. Stoughie. But not very profitable, I’m afraid.” He turned to go and then turned back. “Why don’t you just admit to yourself that you don’t get things your way for once?” He walked out of the office, closing the door behind him.

  And then L
ong ran, light and noiselessly, his style of darts and sudden changes of direction well suited to the crowded mall. He sprang up the stairs of the Bank of America, where there was no line, and very calmly he had the check put into Martha Macnamara’s business account. There was no difficulty about it.

  He was shaking. He leaned against the wall of the post office, coughing.

  He had had no control over himself. He might have killed the man, sending both Martha and himself into endless trouble, over a silly bit of money meaningless to him. A surge of anger from within tried to say it wasn’t the money, but he beat it down again. It hadn’t been the money, but instead pique, at a small businessman who thought it clever to inconvenience and insult people. Reaction far out of proportion to action.

  And last night? The episode with Marty. Could he trust his own senses about what had happened?

  No wonder human beings were so reluctant to believe things. They spent their lives going from one confusion to another, and in general did not die with any greater perception of the truth than that with which they’d been born. Poor Marty: what was in store for that little spirit, born into this condition? Poor Mayland Long. Poor Martha.

  No. There was nothing pitiful about Martha, not even—Long reflected carefully—when she had one shoe on and one shoe off. Not even with face cream. He leaned against the wall and thought about Martha until he felt well enough to walk back to the motel.

  Elen followed Pádraig along the shore, wondering why, amid the cold winds and the fog, she should continue to do so. Her poncho whipped across her face. She missed some of the words.

  “… it’s made of leather, and he made it on The Brendan herself, bobbing up and down in the Atlantic. He made a lot of them, I think, but this one he gave to me. I like it a lot.”

  “Which one was this?” she shouted into the wind. “Thor Heyerdahl?”

  Pádraig gave her a very disappointed glance. “Trondur Patursson. On the leather boat The Brendan. That left from Kerry to—”

  “Yes, I was listening. Just a confusion about the name,” she said, in a voice heavy with her guilt.

  “The Brendan itself is on display in a glass house. It seems to me a shame, you know? That it should only go out once.”

  Elen nodded vigorously. “Oh my, yes. A shame.”

  The stretch of wet sand was enormously wide here. The tongues of the waves lapped a hundred feet in from where the wave broke. Because the tide was out and the wind was strong, Pádraig had told her. Or maybe the opposite. Had the tide been in (or out), things would have been less interesting.

  To Pádraig. It took nothing more than a piece of a left-handed shell to put Pádraig up. As little as it took to discourage him. Elen remembered yesterday afternoon and the making of the rope, which had ended in a quick clutch and kiss. She herself had set the situation up for it, standing too close and looking carefully elsewhere as she wound the slack toward her. But the vehemence of the boy’s approach had startled her, and then he’d backed off in the face of that startlement. The end had been more awkward than the beginning.

  And then the horrible moment at the concert for him, when he had known himself so helplessly off. Elen felt an impulse of pure malice toward George St. Ives. Too bad that little joke with the door had caught the wrong man.

  And now the fine morning had gone cold enough to freeze Elen’s ears and here was Pádraig, rattling on about The Brendan and fourteen-foot-dinghy competitions. As though nothing of moment had happened during the whole tour.

  Elen wished herself elsewhere.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Glancing up guiltily, Elen admitted she had not. Pádraig’s hair was flattened by the wet air and droplets hung from the ends of it.

  He was smallish and baby-faced and she wondered (having lost the ability to decide) whether he was good-looking at all, or whether her reaction to him was only the result of eight weeks of propinquity.

  “I asked you how ‘many brothers’ and sisters you have.”

  “Did you?” His eyes were the same color as the water out there, mixed into cloud. A very sleepy color. Elen yawned. I don’t have any.”

  “Not any? Not one?” He stared distrustfully, until Elen laughed at him.

  “Not a one, sweetie. It’s not an unheard-of situation.”

  “Not a what? Not rare? I think it must have been rotten for you.” Pádraig had a wet slate in his hands. Waiting for the right moment, he skimmed it over a dying wave. It bounced four times before disappearing. “Here. You do it.” He handed her another.

  Without looking, she tossed it into the water, where it sank. “Most people I know spend all their time fighting with the sibl—with their brothers and sisters. How am I unlucky?”

  He shrugged in exaggerated fashion. “You have to hit on somebody, when you are a child.”

  Elen smiled grimly and thrust her hands into her poncho, “You might also be hit on, Pat. And I had my parents to fulfill all such needs.” She moved off along the strip of flotsam which marked the high-water line. The fog was so thick one couldn’t see the boardwalk fifty yards away. Now Pádraig was following her. “You don’t like your parents? I bet you ran away from home.”

  She turned in chilled shock. “He—who told you?”

  Pádraig stepped back, stumbling over his feet. He dropped the last shell he’d picked up. “Don’t be angry, Elen. Nobody told me. I was only ragging you.”

  She swayed away from him and toward the ocean, which had begun to soak into her shoes. It offered no comfort. “People don’t really want to be teased, lover. Or at least I don’t. But I did run away. I left home at the age of sixteen. I put myself through four years of music school. I can play Ravel, you know. I haven’t been back to Atlanta since I was a freshman.”

  Ó Súilleabháin walked along beside her, gazing with a sort of awed curiosity. “At home that doesn’t happen much—that a girl will leave home and then go to the university. It would be rare. You must have known yourself very clearly from the beginning.”

  Her laughter was bleak. “No such luck. If I had years to do over…” Then she laughed again, more naturally. “I still wouldn’t go back home. I’m much better off as I am. Even after eight weeks on the road.”

  “Of course,” said Pádraig, and he hit her on the shoulder lightly. “On the road there’s me.”

  He sniggered. She sighed. “What about children, Elen?” asked Páddraig, with no shade of teasing in his voice. “Doesn’t a woman want to have children?”

  She gaped at him in real alarm, which soon dissolved into giggles. “Don’t worry, Pat. You don’t get babies by kissing.” Then she ran into the empty fog, kicking wet sand behind her.

  Pádraig went after, but the fog was so thick he missed where she turned off toward land. He stood and called. “Elen! Elen, stop fooling now. The fog is dangerous. Elen!”

  “Here,” she replied, coming to stand close to him. She touched a hand to his lips. “Stop talking. Listen.”

  He did so. There was the rush of the sea coming in and the growl of the pebbles. There were many bird cries.

  “Someone’s crying,” Elen whispered. Pádraig opened his mouth to tell her it was a bird, but he changed his mind. Together they stepped forward, to the very edge of the ocean.

  There was neither shore nor sea horizon. They held on to each other and Elen’s ears started to ache from the cold. She shivered. Pádraig put his arm around her without self-consciousness. “It’s very dark, for fog,” she whispered. “Maybe it’s dirty weather coming.”

  “No, it isn’t. Be quiet, if you please.” The crying was close now, and the cold bit into Elen’s face. She could scarcely see Pádraig, next to her. His breath was steaming and his fog-colored eyes moving restlessly. “Where are you?” he shouted into the waves. Elen gasped as a voice answered him, a small, thin, very uncomfortable voice.

  “Here I am.”

  She knelt down on the wet sand, and Pádraig knelt down beside her. “God and Mary with you, Marty! How did you get here?
”

  Marty was wearing her yellow trousers and no shirt, nor shoes. Her face was blotched with tears but when Pádraig picked her up she was warm. “Looking for Judy,” she said, and all the way back, that was all they could get out of her.

  As they turned toward the boardwalk, a blast of warmish wind blew the fog into rags, and they came to the motel under sunshine.

  “If he’s sick, I’ll wish him better”

  Martha had her hands full of horsehair. Her fingers were slightly sticky from the heat and the long tail hairs were not behaving as they ought. She freed one hand and almost dropped the bow she was restringing. As she floundered after it, it came up and struck her smartly on the chin. Tears sprang up in her eyes, half from the smarting and half from self-pity, and then Pádraig and Elen came in. He was carrying Marty.

  Martha, who had seated herself under the window with her back facing the doors of the room, looked over her shoulder before returning to her frustrating work. A moment later she looked again, more sharply. “Are you taking Marty out?”

  “We are taking her in,” answered Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin, and Elen added, “We found her at the beach by the boardwalk.”

  Martha stood up slowly. She dropped the bow, unclosed, on the windowsill. Birdlike, she tilted her head one way and then the other. “No. No, there must be some mistake. She’s been in the other bedroom, with her crayons for the last…” She took a deep breath then, and shook herself all over.

  “On the beach, you say? Alone? Dressed like that?”

  Pádraig looked sideward at the carpet, as though it were he who was being found at fault. Marty herself wiggled down from his arms and, with a dubious glance at her grandmother, tried to fade from sight into the next room: the room with the unrumpled bed and the crayons.

  Martha caught her, not harshly, in the doorway. “Marty, hon, did you go to the beach? By yourself?”

  Marty’s flaxen hair took the light of the window like Martha’s own graying curls. She shrugged her small shoulders exactly as Elizabeth, her mother, might have.