A Flash of Green

by John D. MacDonald

  “That’s defeatist talk,” Harrison Lipe said sternly.

  Dermond smiled at him. “I’m a defeatist, Major. I’ll strain and strive, but as long as our society equates progress with quantity rather than quality, permit me my private dismals.”

  Jennings said, “If you feel you can do better with a fresh approach, Morton, please try to come up with one. Now, how about you, Mrs. Rowell?”

  Doris Rowell cleared her throat. She was an ample billowy woman in her sixties. She wore a faded cotton dress and sneakers. She wore her straight white hair in a Dutch bob. Her voice was a pugnacious baritone. “It should be no great task updating my materials, Thomas. A team from the University of Miami has been doing another shallow-water ecology study, and I was of some small assistance to them, so I see no problems in getting access to their findings. Just as soon as we know the date of the public hearing, I’ll make certain we have reputable marine biologists there to testify. And I’ll coordinate this with state and Federal conservation authorities. We’ll prove, as we did before, that filling Grassy Bay would have a disastrous effect on the local marine ecology, including, of course, game and food fish species. I can consider such a project no less than a criminal act.”

  “Thank you, Doris. By the way, Harry, add the commercial fishermen to your list, and use Doris’s findings as the persuader.”

  “Yessir,” said Major Lipe.

  “Let’s hear your appraisal of the situation, Wallace,” Jennings said.

  Wallace Lime stood up. He wore dark green walking shorts and a khaki shirt of vaguely military cut. Between the bottom of the legs of his shorts and the tops of his long dark wool socks, his bare knees were brown and sturdy, haloed with a curling crispness of sunbleached hair. He was in his early forties. He had a luxuriant mustache, reddish brown, carefully groomed. He wore glasses with heavy black frames. He used a pipe, lit or unlit, as a constant prop.

  Whenever Kat saw Wallace Lime, Van’s appraisal of the man came into her mind. Van had said, “Try to find the man behind the tricks, honey. Take away the glasses, the mustache, the mannerisms, the slight Limey accent, and take a good look. I know you can’t, because behind all that camouflage is a man so desperately ordinary that he’d be practically invisible. Bugs and animals have protective coloration. Wally has spent his whole life going in the other direction.”

  Wallace Lime waited a long thoughtful time and said, “You must think of my function as that of creating a general climate of approval for what we are trying to do. Ektually, a climate of desirability. If I am to be denied all access to the means of public communication, press, radio, television, the tahsk becomes rather more difficult. I shall attempt to plant our little banderillas in significant places, of course. Largely, however, I shall be forced to operate on a personal-contact level. As soon as this matter is opened up, I shall see to it that our county commissioners begin to receive letters from the more thoughtful and articulate citizens of the community. I shall see what social and political pressures can be developed at this time, to counteract the commercial pressures which are obviously at work. And, as before, I shall put out mimeographed bulletins stating our position and see to it that they are properly circulated. Fortunately we ordered far too many bumper stickers and posters the last time. I have them in storage, and I shall get them out immediately. Tom, I will have the final draft of an emergency bulletin ready by tomorrow noon for distribution to our membership.”

  “We’re going to get some drop-outs,” Jennings said, “so we’ll have to make every effort to increase the membership. And I plan to make an emergency assessment to build up our campaign fund. That brings us to the final staff mission. Jackie and I discussed it before the meeting. Jackie?”

  Jackie Halley stood up quickly. She was a tall, gawky, spirited, attractive blonde. “Kat Hubble and I are going to handle the phone brigade this time. I’ll have to blow the dust off the old card file and get organized. We’ll be able to use most of the same team of gals we used last time. I guess you all know the system. By the time of the public hearing, every woman in this county we can reach by phone will have heard our little spiel.”

  “How does it go?” Dial Sinnat asked.

  “We tell them that the bay bottoms are owned by the State of Florida, and the Trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund are supposed to administer them for the health and welfare of all the people. We tell them they own the bays. And their children and their children’s children should own them too. But if we let the state sell that land to private enterprise, then it’s gone forever, and they and their children and their grandchildren can’t even go near it because it will be private property forever. We ask them not to let a few greedy men legally steal what belongs to them. It isn’t a set speech, Di. We have gals who can sort of feel their way, depending on the reaction.”

  “Thank you, Jackie,” Jennings said. “Kat, the last time we went to war, the newspaper was supposed to be neutral, but Jimmy Wing managed to slant things our way quite often, and I think it helped a lot. Do you think he’ll help us this time?”

  “I really don’t know,” Kat said. “He was Van’s best friend, and he knew how worried Van was, and he tried to help us out. Brian Haas did what he could, too. All I can do is see if he’ll be willing to help us this time. But if the paper comes out in favor of the fill, it might be impossible.”

  Dial Sinnat said, “Jimmy is a very bright operator, Kat. He doesn’t have to be obvious about it. Lots of men have torpedoed projects by coming out very strong for them, listing all the wrong reasons. It’s a standard device in politics. Tom, are we open for general comment? One thing I want to say to everybody: Last time we battled outsiders. Civil wars have a tendency to get nastier than the other kind. And men can do curious things when their pocketbooks are involved. I think we should all be ready for a game of dirty pool. I’m invulnerable. But there are others here who make their living out of the community, and the reprisals might get rough. How about you, Morton?”

  Morton Dermond said, “I couldn’t care less, Mr. Sinnat. I have a captive board of directors, a docile membership, and two years to go on my present contract. And, I might add, not the slightest interest in renewing it. How about your little bucket shop, Wally?”

  Wallace Lime spoke irritably. “If I’ve given you the impression, old boy, that I’m dependent on the revenues from Wallace Lime Associates, I apologize. I would hate to lose all my little advertising accounts, but even in that unlikely event, I should survive … comfortably.”

  “I happen to work for the Cable Bank and Trust Company,” Kat said, “and I can’t afford to lose the job, really.”

  “That puts you in the target area,” Dial said, “but I don’t think Martin Cable would be that small-minded. Don’t worry about it. I just wanted to say I think we can all expect some kind of pressure.”

  “I think you’re right, Di,” Jennings said. “We seem to be all set to go. I’ll coordinate all the staff functions, and all of you will be hearing from me frequently. One thing I want to make clear before we adjourn. This is just our first line of defense. We’ll fight like hell, of course, but if we lose this one, we’ll regroup and fight just as hard on all the other ways we have of keeping the sale from going through and, if it does, enjoining the dredges from beginning. Anyone have anything to say? Meeting adjourned. Cocktails on the patio, everyone.”

  After talking with several of the others, Kat found herself with Melissa Jennings. They were standing near a clump of dwarf banana trees, looking out through the screening, across the quiet expanse of Grassy Bay. The shoreline shadows were beginning to lengthen out across the water. Against the distant mainland shore two cabin cruisers were heading north up the marked channel.

  “Whether we looked out upon it or not,” Melissa said softly, “I should not want such a lovely bay spoiled. The people who would live out there would think they had waterfront, but the true waterfront would be gone, with nothing left but little canals for their boats, and a few narrow cha
nnels.”

  Kat looked surreptitiously at Melissa Soong Mei Wan Jennings, at the classic, luminous, Oriental beauty of her face in profile. She was Colonel Jennings’ second wife. His first wife had died several years before Tom had met Melissa in Chungking during the Second World War. She was almost twenty-five years younger than her husband, but the marriage seemed strong and close. Tom had grown children by his first wife. He and Melissa had three sturdy, popular boys, aged twelve, fourteen and seventeen. All the boys were away at summer camp. Melissa was tall for a Chinese woman, and it was only in these past few years, as she had reached forty, that her figure had lost its willowy, girlish configuration and had begun to thicken.

  “If it happens, would you move away?” Kat asked.

  Melissa turned toward her, frowning slightly. “I think not. Some years ago, yes. But now it is too late. This is where I brought my boys when they were small, and where the last one was born. We have planted so many things and cared for them so long we love them too much. Those trees of gold there, and the silk oaks. The house suits us too well, Kat.” She smiled. “We’ll have to learn not to look at the bay so much. I’ll miss it. The light is always changing. Maybe all Chinese are peasants. This is my land, and it is more important than what it looks out upon.”

  “More talk of defeat,” Dial Sinnat said, joining them. “What’s the matter with all you people?” He stood close to Kat and put his arm around her casually, the hard warm weight of his hand against her waist. As always, his apparently unthinking touch created in her a strange indecision; a small despair. It made her feel like a fool, quite unable to cope with something so obviously innocent.

  When Di Sinnat was near her, he touched her. It was that simple. He did not paw. There was no innuendo. He was fond of her. And he was evidently a man who automatically sought the tactile gestures of affection. But each time it seemed to freeze her. She had never liked being touched in casual ways by casual people. And people seemed aware of this trait, instinctively respecting that apartness in a crowded world. Yet Di seemed oblivious of the tension he created. She never knew exactly how to handle it. When he put his brown paw on her waist, her shoulder or the nape of her neck, she breathed in a constricted way, and mentally rehearsed the moves she could make to get away from him, yet could not move freely or casually. She did not want to be touched, yet she did not want to hurt him or, more importantly, create any special awareness between them by making such a point of moving away. So usually she endured it until there was some plausible excuse, and felt relief when it was over. She had tried to talk herself into paying no attention to it, but she could not accustom herself to it. And she was always aware of how very good Di and Claire had been to her since Van had been killed.

  A few times she had even wondered if Di was deliberately sensitizing her to his touch, the way animals are trained by slowly acquainting them with the touch of their handler. But she had dismissed this as a paranoid idea which presupposed too much deviousness on the part of Di Sinnat. It was true that he knew women well, and that all of his wives had been beautiful, and that he was vividly male, but he did not seem to have the requisite subtlety to build toward seduction in such an unanswerable way. Somehow she had let pass her chance to stop him in the very beginning. She wished he would change the casual touch into a caress so that she could then stop him without loss of face.

  Yet she was wise enough about herself to know that even though it might be the furthest thing from Di’s mind, he was sensitizing her in a way that worried her. He was an attractive man. When he rested his hand upon her, it seemed at the time to have no sensual significance to her, yet twice in the last few months she had awakened abruptly from odd erotic dreams about him. In the last dream she had been alone on the beach down near the Pavilion, sunning herself, yet the beach had become so enormous that she was a tiny figure in a sandy waste, the Pavilion a tiny dot on one horizon, the Gulf a blue distant line opposite it. She saw an insect figure walking toward her from the Pavilion, taking a long time to approach across the sand. At last she recognized Di and was glad to see him because she had something important to say to him, but she could not remember what it was. He sat beside her on the blanket and began talking about Claire’s plans for a studio over the big carport for his daughter, Natalie. Then, still talking, smiling, nodding, he put his hands on her breasts. In the dream it was the same as when he touched her casually, affectionately, at a party. She did not feel she could move or protest. She felt she had to say the right things about the studio for Nat as he described it to her, pretending she did not notice that he had pushed her back, loosened her swimsuit, and was working it down off her hips, pulling it off entirely. Still talking, chuckling, he forced her thighs apart and his face was huge over hers, blotting out all the blue of the sky. She knew that if she could only remember what she was supposed to tell him, then she would be able to scream and make him stop and he would understand. She awoke, shuddering and sweaty, hearing the echo of her own night cry.

  Now the warmth and shape of his hand came through the frail material of her blouse, and though it gave her no pleasure, it seemed to muffle the sounds of the conversation on the Jennings patio and make the colors of the early evening less bright, as though all other senses had become subordinate to her complete awareness of that unwelcome weight.

  After the emptiness and the desolation of the first few months without Van, she had begun to wonder about herself and the need for sex, if need there was. Van was the only man who had ever known her. For the first year of marriage she had thought herself to be so cool as to be able to find only meager pleasures in the act, but in order not to be a disappointment to Van she had pretended the eagerness she thought would please him, and had doggedly and strenuously acted out the completions as she had read of them in various novels. But in time it became only half false, and at last it became entirely true, and like nothing she could have guessed—a gloriously sweet madness, inexhaustible.

  The world seemed to believe that a woman so conditioned by a good marriage would be either unwilling or unable to accept a young-widow continence. She examined her own reactions with somber concern. Sometimes, in the empty night, her body would so yearn for Van’s embrace it was as though ten thousand minute arrows pierced her flesh, poisoning her and sickening her. But it would always go away. She thought of all the men she knew, and imagined them, one by one, giving and receiving the pleasures she and Van had known, but instead of any fragment of curiosity, any crumb of desire, she felt a rising, curdling nausea.

  On a previous February evening, Sammy Deegan had confirmed her suspicion. Other men had made oily little hintings, dropping little clues as to how well they could keep any secret, but Sammy, full of vodka confidence, had made the direct approach. His wife and his sister were out of town. He claimed he had seen her light. The kids were in bed. Thirty seconds after he was inside the house, he was fumbling at her, nuzzling her, murmuring to her, frightening her with his clumsy drunken strength. When she had wrestled loose and he had chased her into the kitchen, she had snatched a tack hammer from the countertop where she had left it after fixing a nail in her sandal, spun and chopped him squarely in the middle of the forehead with it. It made a deep gash and burst a vein. The alarming jet of blood sobered him and terrified her. He had lowered himself to the kitchen floor in a gingerly way, stared wall-eyed at her through the running mask of blood and said in a hushed voice, “Good Christ, Kat, where is there to put a tourniquet? Around my neck?” By some miracle she had managed to avoid hysterics. She took him to the bathroom. She found a place where she could press with her thumb and stop the regular pulsing. She made him hold his thumb on the place while she cleaned the gash, cut small strips of tape and crisscrossed them to pull it together. It stopped the bleeding. He was so full of guilt and shame he cried, but he tried to cry without moving his face very much, so it would not start up again. He walked off into the night with extraordinary care, as if he had a wineglass balanced on his head. After she had cleane
d up the blood she went to the bathroom and vomited again and again. It was not the blood which had sickened her, or the fright. It was the memory of his wet wanting grin, and the rough fumbling of his hands, and the blunt, questing bulge of his sex against her when he had held her close. Sammy had answered the next-to-the-last question for her.

  The last question was still there. Would another man ever have her? It would have to be with love. It would have to be like the way she had felt toward Van. But there might be no man in the world who could awaken that.

  Wallace Lime had come over to talk to the three of them. Di took his hand away to light a cigarette. She smiled at them and murmured something about having to talk to Jackie, and went across the patio to where Jackie stood talking to Morton Dermond.

  Morton said, “I was just telling Jackie she really does have the figure for one of those little sleeveless dresses, high at the throat, not fitted, no belt. I’d love to see you in one, Jackie. One of those fabrics that look like raw silk. They’re truly horrid on meaty women, dear, but you have a nice colty look.”

  “He doesn’t know Ross,” Jackie said. “I dress for Ross, Morty. He doesn’t like the merchandise hidden under the counter. I’ve got to make the most of what I’ve got. Stretch pants and plenty of uplift.”

  Dermond looked pained. “But it’s so obvious, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes indeed!” Jackie said, with a broad dirty grin.

  Dermond looked at his watch and said, “I do have to run. I’ll send you our current membership list so you can check it against your files, Jackie.” He walked away from them, taking curiously short steps for a man of his size.

  Jackie giggled. “I shouldn’t tease the poor brute. He yearns for pretty dresses, but he hasn’t got the build. He always wants to dress me, and it gives me the horrid feeling his taste is better than mine, so I strike back. He’s really one of the nicer ones. He’s not too obvious, and he has the good sense not to try to mix up the two worlds he lives in. When can we have our own little organization meeting, Katty?”