A Flash of Green

by John D. MacDonald

  But it was becoming ever more difficult for him to think of her as the same woman who had been married to Van Hubble, the same tense, skeptical Yankee bride Van had brought down with so much pride ten years ago. They had never liked each other.

  This was a new friendship, one year old. A new friend—as if Van’s wife had died with him. I keep arranging to see her because I like her.

  But there was a hyena cackle in the back of his mind, a sound of knowing derision. “You mean you’d like to maneuver her into the sack, Wing, on any basis at all, even as a return for past favors, you sick son of a bitch, and you keep sucking around waiting for a break, because you’re too gutless to clue her, too afraid she’ll say no in a very final way.”

  So is it so criminal to want a woman? She came into his mind so vividly it seemed to blur his view of the bright highway, and he quickly sought escape from the impact of his lust by forcing his mind up into shallow, fatuous levels and keeping it bobbing there, like a child’s balloon on random currents, turning his head rapidly from side to side and wearing a small strained smile as he inventoried the minutiae of reality—Ohio plates, a bird feeder, girl on a bike, gull on the wing, pink house, fat man, For Rent sign.

  When the seizure of his need was ended, he dared think of her again, resenting her because she had made so many of his assumptions about himself untenable. She had ruptured the structure of contentment and let the restlessness in. She had made him wish for some kind of great change in his days when he knew that no change could benefit him.

  Thus far he knew he had been objective enough to avoid the most obvious trap: the wishful belief that the very intensity of his awareness of her had somehow generated a reciprocal tension, and that he need only make the first hesitant move and she would fall sighing into his arms. It was a constant temptation to read too much into meaningless things, like the idiots who find codes and prophecies in Shakespeare. He knew well Kat’s relentless honesty, and knew she could not dissemble, knew she would immediately disclose any feeling she might have for him.

  A year ago he would have been hilariously incredulous had anyone tried to tell him he would become physically infatuated with Katherine Hubble. It had come about so very gradually.

  In the beginning he had helped her with all the routines, legalisms and barbarisms of sudden death. She had been stunned, heartsick and lost—her eyes dull, her hair lifeless, her skin drab, her movements slow, her voice hesitant and indistinct. Before she had the heart for any future plans, he had gone to Leroy Shannard to talk about Van’s estate, and learned that Van’s few good years had come too late, the tax had taken too much of it, and she would have to find work. He had seen her often, out of a sense of duty to Van, helping her in small ways to find her way back to reality. For a time he thought she might never recover, but then her pride and spirit began to show itself again.

  It all began in such a mild, unanticipated way. It seemed pleasant to be with her, a small triumph to make her smile, a great victory when he made her laugh aloud. He took a possessive interest in her recovery, and when he thought she was ready he scouted the town and found the job for her at the bank, and made her take it before she thought she was able, and saw it work out as he had hoped.

  It was during this time of reconstruction that he began to find pleasure in looking at her, at the shape of her hands, the line of her throat, the way she moved and turned, the bold configuration of her mouth. He had never found her as attractive while Van was alive. Perhaps then he had been more aware of flaws than of virtues, because that was the time when they had not liked each other particularly.

  The pleasure of looking at her changed, little by little, into an oddly humid speculation. Over the years he had noted small clues to the probability that she and Van had a devotedly lusty marriage, and he wondered just what she had been like with him.

  At first his conjecturing was a small game to play, but the game suddenly turned into compulsion and was out of control. He began to imagine her as the insatiable witch of all legend, and felt a revulsion toward himself that his imagination should have led him into such a pattern. It offended his own sense of personal dignity to have become a victim of such a fever. He told himself it was like a recurrence of adolescence. No woman could be so uniquely desirable. It was a delusion which would be vanquished were he ever to have her. He diagnosed it as a disease of immaturity, the imagination festering, and prescribed for himself dosages of some convenient and amiable women he knew who sought amusement as opposed to involvement, yet rose from these encounters with an undiminished thirst.

  As his compulsion had become more established, he bemused himself with an ethical equation, analyzing every act to test its plausibility, to make certain he did nothing which could not be explained on some other basis than infatuation. Until this day all his relations with Kat had passed this test, but now he was at a new place in the relationship. He could not bend the requirements of plausibility far enough to permit him to have told Kat about the Grassy Bay plan. Elmo Bliss had told him to mention it to no one. But he had run with it to Kat, almost immediately, like the pebble placed at the feet of the she-penguin.

  Now that it was done, he could see clearly his own attempts at self-deceit. He had told himself it was his duty to warn her, but he had known all the time she would accept the challenge as an emotional obligation. What he had done was make yet another claim upon her gratitude, and had, at the same time, established a basis for their future proximity. He had, in effect, offered to be her spy in the enemy camp.

  He prided himself on having been able to avoid thus far that most despicable rationalization of all, that of terming it love, thus giving a noble reason for the most furtive acts.

  Love, he knew, was the ever-handy refuge of the scoundrel. And it did heavy duty as the lyrical justification for a million illicit scrabblings each night, on beaches, on backseats, under bushes and on the useful high-density foam rubber of forty thousand motels. Love was that jungly place reeking of Gloria, of death, of madness, with no escape except to the desert beyond the jungle, where, in relative peace, you could allow the bitter sun to bake your skull and toast your heart to an enduring little muffin. Not love, please.

  The other rationalization to be avoided most carefully was that philosophical devaluation which asks who will give a damn a hundred years from now. That is the good old kosmic view of kopulation. Tomorrow, baby, they drop the bomb, so live tonight. It is an empty wind sighing through an empty place, and it works equally well for rape, theft and murder.

  When he denied his motive the benefit of any ornamentation, it came down to a stark and almost Biblical lust. I want the woman. I want her in spite of all my sickly little requirements of maintaining my good opinion of myself. Unhampered by this tottering ethical structure, I could run faster and score sooner.

  He could not think of desire as being a part of any plan, any enduring program. He could not see beyond the first time of taking her. It was a primitive need and a primitive act, and should it ever happen, he did not know what the world would be like until he was beyond her and could see what it was like on that far side.

  For a long time he had comforted himself by telling himself that no matter how increasingly strong the compulsion might become, he was safely beyond those puppy years when he might have let it disrupt those other aspects of his life, those reassuring routines and relationships, which he had erected around himself like one of those insect towers of sand and spit which, in time, turn into protective stone.

  Yet he had blithely told her of the Grassy Bay project. And that was like kicking the stone to see how solid it had become.

  He drove by the small area of commercial development on Sandy Key adjacent to the causeway, and when he was beyond it he looked south along the blue reach of Grassy Bay. The bay was narrowest near the causeway, widening out toward the south. As he crossed the causeway he saw a small white cruiser setting out from Hoyt’s Marina, with a stocky brown woman on the bow, coiling a line. Further d
own the bay he saw a pattern of flashing white on the water and saw the birds circling and diving in agitation. Maybe mackerel, he thought, in from the Gulf. More likely a school of jacks chopping the bait fish. Two outboards were converging on the roiled area.

  When he came off the causeway he was stopped by the traffic light at the intersection of Mangrove Road and Bay Highway. After the May and June hiatus, the summer tourist season was gathering a rather shabby momentum. In the winter months the biggest contingent came from the central states, and there were so many of them that at last, to the residents of Palm County, they seemed to become but one elderly couple, endlessly repeated, driving a bulbous blue car with Ohio plates (at wandering unpredictable speeds), the man in Bermudas, the woman with a big straw purse, questing through all the towns of the shallow-water coast, bemused, slightly indignant, frequently bored, like people charged with some mission who had lost their sealed orders before they had a chance to open them.

  As was so solemnly and frequently stated by all public officials and all Chamber of Commerce executives, the winter flow of this endlessly duplicated couple was the backbone of the economy, and it often seemed that the supply was inexhaustible, yet Jimmy Wing had noted among the businessmen of Palm City an anxious and almost superstitious attitude toward the continuity of the flow. They heartened themselves with every evidence of repeat business, no matter how questionable the source of the statistics. They fretted about the accessibility of the Caribbean islands. But at the heart of their unrest was the never-spoken conviction that there was really nothing to keep them coming down. It was a fine place to live, and a poor place to visit. They could not quite see how any sane reasonable person would willingly permit himself to be “processed” through that long junk strip of Tamiami, exchanging his vacation money for overpriced lodgings, indifferent food, admission to fish tanks, snake farms and shell factories.

  So secretly disturbed were these businessmen about the proliferating shoddiness of the coast that they were constantly taking random and somewhat contradictory action. The more the beach eroded away, or disappeared into private ownership, the more bravely the huge highway signs proclaimed the availability of miles of white-sand beaches. As the shallow-water fishing decreased geometrically under the attrition of dredging, filling, sewage and too many outboard motors, they paid to have the superb fishing advertised, and backed contests which would further decimate the dwindling fish population. As the quiet and primitive mystery of the broad tidal bays disappeared, as the mangroves and the rookeries and the oak hammocks were uprooted with such industriousness the morning sound of construction equipment became more familiar than the sound of the mockingbird, the businessmen substituted the delights of pageants, parades and beauty contests. (See the Grandmaw America Contest, with evening gown, talent and bathing suit eliminations.)

  So quietly uneasy were the business interests that the few tourist attractions of any dignity or legitimacy whatsoever were pointed to with more pride than they merited. (Weeki Wachee, Bok Tower, Ringling Museums—and “The Last Supper” duplicated in genuine ceramic tile.)

  One motel operator on Cable Key had expressed the hidden fear to Jimmy Wing one quiet September afternoon. “Some season we’ll get all ready for them. We’ll fix up all the signs and raise the rates and hire all the waitresses and piano players and pick the trash off the beaches and clean the swimming pools and stock up on all the picture postcards and sunglasses and straw slippers and cement pelicans like we always have, and we’ll set back and wait, and they won’t show up. Not a single damn one.” He had peered at Jimmy in the air-conditioned gloom of the bar, and laughed with a quiet hysteria. “No one at all.”

  And this hidden fear, Jimmy realized, was one of the reasons—perhaps the most pertinent reason—for the Grassy Bay project. Once you had consistently eliminated most of the environmental features which had initially attracted a large tourist trade, the unalterable climate still made it a good place to live. New permanent residents would bolster the economy. And so, up and down the coast, the locals leaned over backward to make everything as easy and profitable as possible for the speculative land developers. Arvida went into Sarasota. General Development went into Port Charlotte. And a hundred other operators converged on the “sun coast,” platting the swamps and sloughs, clearing the palmetto scrub lands, laying out and constructing the suburban slums of the future.

  In the Palm City area it had not worked the way the downtown businessmen had hoped it would. Buck Flake had developed Palm Highlands, and Earl Ganson had set up Lakeview Village, and Pete Bender had made a good thing out of Lemon Ridge Estates, but just as fast as the population density in the newly developed areas warranted it, the big new shopping centers went in.

  Grassy Bay would be an entirely different kind of proposition. It was a lot closer to downtown than the scrub-land housing. The waterfront lots would be more expensive, the houses bigger, the future residents a little fatter in the purse than the retireds who bought their budget tract houses back in the piny flats where the cattle had once grazed.

  Ahead of Jimmy Wing as he waited for the light was a typical summer tourist vehicle, an old green Hudson from Tennessee, the fenders rusting, the backseat full of kids, a luggage rack on top piled high and covered with a frayed tarp. A car in the traffic headed out onto Sandy Key honked and somebody called his name, but he did not turn quickly enough to see who it was. Two cars later he recognized Eloise Cable alone in her white Karmann Ghia with the top down. The yellow scarf tied around her black hair made her face and shoulders look exceptionally brown. She grasped the wheel high and held her chin high, looking arrogant, impatient and behind schedule.

  When the light changed he turned left on Bay Boulevard and drove on into the middle of the city, turned left on Center Street and drove out over City Bridge onto Cable Key. He drove a mile and a half south, past all the motels and the beach shops, the bars and the concession stands, and turned right into the long narrow sand driveway that led to his rented cottage on the bay side of Cable Key.

  It was an old frame cottage of cypress and hard pine, with one bedroom, a small screened porch facing the bay. The neighbors on either side were close, but he had let the brush grow up so thickly along the property line he could not see them.

  The interior of the cottage was orderly, in a cheerless, barren way. Except for a shelf of books and a rack of records, it looked as if it had been put in order to be inspected by a prospective tenant, in a semifurnished category. When the infrequent guest would comment on how it looked as if no one lived there, Jimmy Wing would be mildly surprised, but he would look around and see the justice of the accusation. When he had sold the house in town and moved out to the cottage on Cable Key two years ago, the habits he had established had been, perhaps, a reaction to the dirt, clutter and endless confusion and turmoil of those last few years of Gloria. But once he had satisfied his need for a severe order around him, the pattern had been fixed, and he had no particular reason to change it.

  Breakfast was the only meal he ate at home. He was usually out of the house by ten in the morning. The four housekeeping cottages were owned by Joe Parmitter, who also owned the Princess Motel over on the Gulf side, across Ocean Road from the cottages. One of the motel maids, Loella, had a spare key to Jimmy’s cottage, and every morning after finishing up the motel rooms, she would come over and clean the cottage and make the bed.

  Jimmy Wing had been for several years a reporter on the Palm City Record-Journal, the morning newspaper Ben Killian had inherited. He covered the courthouse and the city hall, the police beat, special news breaks, and did feature stories of his own devising rather than on assignment. Nearly all his work was by-lined, and his copy was clean enough and safe enough to escape rewrite. He had a desk assigned to him in the newsroom, but he did not use it very often, preferring to hammer out his copy on the old standard Underwood on the table by a living room window in the cottage. The paper went to bed at midnight, and it was the only paper in town, so the p
ressure was seldom noticeable.

  He had learned long ago that if he spent too much time in the newspaper offices in the old pseudo-Moorish building on Bayou Street, J. J. Borklund, Ben Killian’s managing editor, would rope him into any kind of dog work available, from obits to Little League. Borklund had a double-entry approach to journalism. You squeeze every dime out of advertising and circulation, and you put the minimum back into wire services, syndicated features and operating staff. And you take an editorial stand in favor of the flag, motherhood, education, liberty and tourism, offending no one. And so the Record-Journal, on a county-wide circulation of 23,000, returned a pleasant and substantial profit each year.

  Borklund had long since given up trying to make Jimmy Wing conform to his idea of proper diligence. He had given up after two disastrous weeks during which Jimmy, in order to prove his point, had reported to the newsroom every day at nine and quit at five, and had done exactly what Borklund had told him to do.

  Jimmy Wing knew that the paper could not hope to acquire a man as perfectly suited to the job as he was. He had grown up in Palm City. He had an encyclopedic memory for past relationships and pertinent detail. He could transpose rough notes into solid and entertaining copy with a speed which dismayed the other reporters. When anything had to be ferreted out, he knew exactly whom to talk to. And he was able to report about 20 percent of what he learned.

  But, as Jimmy Wing knew, and Ben Killian knew, and presumably J. J. Borklund knew, it wasn’t the way he had planned it. For a time it had gone according to plan. He had worked for the paper during the summers while he was at Gainesville. After graduation he went onto the paper full-time, knowing he could use two or three years of that highly practical experience before moving along to a bigger city, a bigger paper. Gloria had agreed. And during those first two years he had begun to place minor articles with secondary magazines. That, too, was part of the master plan.