A Flash of Green

by John D. MacDonald

  “I think he just watches the game. I don’t think he makes any bets,” Jackie said.

  “And Martin Cable owns the table?”

  “We’ll have to play that game with everybody we know.”

  Jimmy came smiling up onto the deck. Ross brought the oysters up to the house. Jackie fixed four oyster cocktails. They all sat on the rear deck with drinks and generous servings of the oysters, their chairs placed so they looked past the twisted trunks of the water oaks toward the quiet bay, the competitive children. Jackie and Kat reported the meeting, and told Jimmy of their bad luck with the women they had phoned. Ross took no part in it.

  Jimmy said, “They’re handling it well. It’s the same doctrine we were up against last time. Growth, progress. Last time it was outsiders coming in, bearing gifts. This time it’s our own people, and it’s more persuasive. No absentee ownership. All the profits stay in town. Broader tax base. Nice new residents and so forth. I heard one of their battle cries today. Eight hundred families means sixteen million in new investment plus four million a year into the local economy. So they’ve been quietly lining up the local businesspeople, getting them all set to be boosters.”

  “But that misses the point of the whole thing!” Kat said. “That bay bottom out there is public land. It belongs to all the people, all the people who don’t have a prayer of ever owning a home there, or making any profit off it. It belongs to all the people now living in the state and all the future generations, and this takes it away from them forever, and turns it into eight hundred pieces of private land. It’s like stealing it from the public.”

  “I know that,” Jimmy said. “You know it and Jackie knows it and Ross knows it. The trustees are supposed to consider the health and welfare of the people of the State of Florida. But it’s going to be used for the health and welfare of the bank accounts of the businessmen of Palm County, and done with so many reasonable arguments it’ll be years before the public realizes what a polite screwing it took, here and all up and down this coast. Maybe what I’m saying is this, people. Nobody is going to listen to sweet reason. It’s going to be a very emotional squabble. The fighting is going to get dirtier than you can imagine. So I’d say get out of it right now. Just as I told you the day before yesterday, Kat. It isn’t the same thing it was last time. It won’t be a gallant battle and an honorable victory. So resign now.”

  “No,” Kat said in a small firm voice.

  “He’s right,” Ross said. “If you are lucky, they’ll ignore you. If you get too energetic, they’ll clobber you. It makes me damn uneasy.”

  “You’re always uneasy, dear,” Jackie said. “You’ve got the idea the world is full of monsters.”

  “But it is,” he said. He smiled at Jimmy Wing. “You see what we’ve got here? A pair of innocents. Their strength is as the strength of ten because their hearts are pure. Oh boy! I mind my own store. Back when I was sure I was going to be Van Gogh, I was full of social messages. I did a little marching and a little poster work and a little singing and carrying banners. I think I was coming out strong in favor of human decency. Three Chicago cops took me into an alley. They were real jocular. I told them fiercely I was an artist. I was ready to die for mankind, but I wasn’t ready for what they did to me. They held my hands against a brick wall and used a night stick on them. I couldn’t hold a brush or a pencil for eight months. Back in Dayton it cost my father twelve hundred bucks’ worth of corrective operations. And I can’t even remember why I was marching that day. I mind my own store. Messages are for Western Union. They always find a way to hurt you, some way you’re not expecting.”

  “How do you stand on decency now, killer?” Jackie asked in a deadly voice.

  He looked at her for a long moment, then stood up. “By now you shouldn’t have to ask the question. Excuse me. Couple of little things to do.” He went to his studio and closed the door.

  “Me and my mouth,” Jackie said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’d always wondered about his hands,” Kat said.

  “This is awkward as hell,” Jackie said. “I’m sorry. I’m no good at the game of pretending nothing happened. So I’m going to have to shoo you away and then go in there and tell him he’s a good man and I love him as he is, seeking no alterations in the merchandise.”

  “I was going to have to leave in minutes anyhow, Jackie.”

  “And we’ve got to pay those commercial fishermen out there,” Jackie said.

  The kids had caught twenty-six bait fish, eleven by Alicia and fifteen by Roy. Jackie paid them the agreed rate to the penny, wise enough to know that any careless generosity at that time would have spoiled the game for them. As they walked out to the cars, Jackie and the children lagging behind, Kat said, “Can you come to my place, Jimmy? I didn’t get a chance to tell you about last night.”

  He nodded. Just then Ross came out. “I didn’t know you people were going to run off so soon.”

  “I tried to keep them around,” Jackie said.

  As Kat turned around to drive out she saw Ross move close to Jackie and, with a slight defiant awkwardness, put his arm around her slender waist and hold her close.

  When she arrived home, Kat had a slight problem convincing Roy and Alicia it was too late to go up to the Sinnats for a swim. She took their minds off it by reminding them of tomorrow’s picnic, and they went off to play in Roy’s room. She made herself a rum drink and opened a beer for Jimmy. They sat in the coolness of the living room, the draperies closed against the glare of the western sun.

  “That’s the first time I ever saw any flaw in that united front,” Kat said.

  “I admire the guy for the way he came out to say goodbye. She hit him a dandy. It’s easier to sulk.”

  “You think it’s dramatic, and later you realize you were only being silly. It’s pride, I guess. The wrong kind. Last night was strange, Jimmy. I didn’t open my mouth. I just listened.”

  She told him the conversation Martin, Eloise, Dial and Claire had, and then spoke of how Dial had reacted to it afterward. “He seems to think there’s somebody else behind it, Jimmy, somebody smarter than those five men we know about.”

  “Where would he get that idea?”

  “I don’t know. He’s a strange man. He’s big and hearty and sort of obvious, but there’s something … almost feline about him too. Intuition or something. And you’re never quite sure whether he’s laughing at you. And he’s also got the idea that somebody has been coaching Eloise, teaching her how to work on Martin, or Martin would never have gotten into this thing as deeply as he has.”

  “They need Martin,” Jimmy admitted. “They need the access, and they’ll need the line of credit to develop the land once they get it.”

  “If they get it. But they won’t.”

  “That’s going to be a matter of considerable opinion around this town for a while, Katherine.”

  “Why did you call me Katherine then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s probably because you heard Van do it. Whenever he said anything to me like that, sort of dry and skeptical, when he thought I was getting a little too carried away, he’d call me Katherine.”

  “That’s probably it. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t mind it, Jimmy. It just seemed odd.”

  She looked at him and looked away. The light was strange in the room. The draperies were blue, yet the light had a green tinge. His face was in shadow.

  “I talked to Nat Sinnat today,” he said, and she was relieved that he had interrupted the odd and awkward silence.

  “Oh, did you? What about?”

  “A story on the children’s art classes she teaches. Mortie said she was the one to talk to, and he was right. She was articulate and she has good ideas. But she seemed a little … odd.”

  “Odd?”

  “That’s not a good word, I guess. A little tense maybe. Not the tension of being interviewed. A more chronic kind.”

  “I guess there’s reasons. Her mother was Di�
�s second wife. And it wasn’t a friendly divorce. I think Nat was about five at the time. Her mother is a real pinwheeling neurotic, according to Di. She didn’t marry again. She’s done a lot of traveling. She and Nat lived in France for a while. Her mother was bitterly opposed to Nat’s coming down here this summer. There was a big stink about it. All in all, I think Nat is wonderfully well balanced, considering her background. But she isn’t what you’d call exactly a normal girl of nineteen. She’s independent, in more ways than financial. She’s what I guess you’d call unconventional. She doesn’t give a damn what anybody thinks, really. She goes her own way. But I guess she took some kind of emotional beating last year. Claire has hinted about it. That’s why she came down here.”

  “She’s a pretty kid.”

  “Unusual looking.”

  “Apparently she’s dating some boy younger than she is, a high-school kid.”

  “Dating? Oh, no! That’s Jigger. You know. Burt Lesser’s boy. I guess he’s got a crush on her. She says Jigger is a very unhappy boy. I would have guessed that. Anyhow, that would make two of them, misery loving company or something like that. Why do you ask?”

  “I was just curious about her. Just making conversation, I guess.”

  “If you can stay, I think I can feed you.”

  “Thanks, Kat. But I’ve got some more work to do. The load is a little heavier the last couple of days. Brian Haas got taken drunk.”

  “Oh, no! Really? But wasn’t it almost certain that Mr. Borklund would fire him the next time he …”

  “We’re trying to cover it, and maybe we have. If he got it out of his system it may come out all right.”

  “Nan must be terribly upset.”

  “She’s handling it pretty well. I’m going to stop in later on and see how things are going. We have to get him back to work by noon tomorrow. It will be up to him to hide the shakes.”

  Again there was the heavy silence. She felt she should make some listless effort to break it. Perhaps it will rain? It’s been a very warm day? She felt trapped within an almost unbearable slowness of the passing moments. Tomorrow—anniversary of death—would be the worst time, and then it would be over and the second year of it could start. A year from tomorrow would not be so bad a day.

  He leaned forward, bringing his face into the unusual light. His forearms rested on his knees, his strong hands clasped. He looked at the floor, then raised his head slightly to look at her, his face almost without expression.

  “Kat?” His voice was low and hoarse.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  He smiled and stood up, with that lithe and utterly relaxed elegance of movement. “Matter? Nothing’s the matter. I have to go.”

  She walked to the door with him. “I thought you were going to tell me some terrible thing. Isn’t that a crazy impression to have? Bad tidings. Now I’m chattering. Damn it, I hate chattering women.”

  He paused at the door and said, “Kat … if tomorrow turns out to be rough, call me, will you?”

  “Aren’t you going to be out of town?”

  “I canceled.”

  “Not because of me, Jimmy.”

  “For several reasons. I should be handy to see how Brian makes it. Where are you going for your picnic?”

  “Up to Sanibel so we can look for shells.”

  “The bugs will be fierce this time of year.”

  “We’ll be plastered with goo.”

  She went to the window and watched him back out and waved to him as he drove away. She walked thoughtfully to the kitchen and began to prepare dinner. She was aware of a little area of strangeness in her mind, elusive and unidentifiable. It was like trying to remember a name momentarily forgotten. There had been a strangeness at the Halleys, when the four of them had been on the back deck. She and Van had spent many hours there with Ross and Jackie. Today, for the first time, there had been four of them again, but the fourth person had been Jimmy instead of Van. She realized, with a merciless honesty, that the situation had made her resent Jimmy for being Jimmy rather than Van. There had been at least one time when there had been six of them on that deck on a night of cool moonlight, drinking wine and talking wonderful nonsense. Jimmy would have just as much right to resent her because she was not Gloria. There was one awkwardness on that clear evening long ago. Gloria had been recently released, and it was her first social evening since her release. It had made the conversation more guarded and selective than it might otherwise have been.

  Now, of course, she was as remote, as unreachable as Van. Hers was a subtler form of death, but no less final. Which was easier, she wondered, the slow regression to that point where there was, at last, no communication at all, or the sudden brutal stunning departure? And she wondered if Jimmy had made this same comparison, and envied her.

  Eleven

  AS JIMMY WING CROSSED THE CAUSEWAY to the mainland there was a strange lemon light across the land. The rays of the setting sun were almost horizontal. Every surface facing the west was touched with this luminous glow in contrast with the blue shadows of dusk which lay against everything else. From time to time a fitful rain wind turned the leaves and died away.

  On the car radio the seven-thirty newscaster said, “… three tenths of an inch recorded for Palm County, far below the normal rainfall for this time of year. The current temperature at County Airport is ninety degrees, relative humidity ninety-five percent, winds out of the southeast at three to five miles per hour.…”

  He turned the radio off so as to focus himself with no distraction upon a special textural memory of Kat. When he had turned back at her doorway, she was a step closer to him than he had expected, standing tall and near in the aquarium light of the living room, so close for an instant that the detected fragrance of her hair mingled with the imagined feel of it, sweet and harsh against his lips, and he had come all too close to reaching for her. Another collector’s item, he thought. Another image to file away.

  He worked hard at his newsroom desk for an hour, and then walked down a dark block on Bayou Street to Vera’s Kitchen. He was starting to eat his sandwich when Bobby Nest came in and sat on a counter stool beside him. Bobby at eighteen concealed a fervent love for the newspaper business behind a pose of cynicism acquired from scores of movies and television shows. He had been the paper’s official correspondent at Riverway High School during the past year, and this summer Borklund, for very small money, had him doing routine sports, the city and county recreation program events, summer bowling and golf leagues, shuffle-board, tennis, pram races. In the fall Bobby would go away to school and Borklund would find another serf, equally eager. Bobby was a small wiry boy with big glasses and a surprisingly authoritative baritone voice. He wrote pounds of copy which was never printed.

  “This girl’s old man is going to drive me nuts,” Bobby said.

  “Teach you to mess with girls.”

  “Who would mess with this one? She’s fourteen and she looks like a twenty-year-old Marine sergeant. I think she shaves, even. But she can belt a golf ball two hundred and forty yards. It’s her damn name, Jimmy. The Caroline is easy, but the last name is Smidt. S—m—i—d—t. I know how it’s spelled, for God’s sake. I print it in block letters. I put a note in the margin. But every time she wins something—not every time, but at least every other time—somebody decides it should be Smith or Schmidt or Smidth or some other goddam thing and then her old man calls up and chews out Jesus-Jesus and he chews me. There’s gremlins in that shop, Jimmy, honest to God.”

  “Marry her and make her turn pro, Bobby. Nest is an easy name. And those gals make nice money.”

  “Nest is the name but I’m not about to build one. I wish she’d pick up a bad slice or something, so I wouldn’t have to put her kook name in the paper.” He sighed. “She doesn’t seem to give a damn. It’s her old man. He taught her the game. And he can sure talk nasty. Just coffee and Danish, Mike, thanks.”

  Jimmy Wing edited his next comment before he made it, then said
, “Funny how unattractive most of those little girl athletes are. But some of them are worth staring at. Like that little water-skier, Burt Lesser’s daughter.”

  “Frosty. Oh, sure. I think her real name is Frances Ann.”

  “There’s the one for you, Bobby.”

  “Not for me. She runs with a pack of rich kids. She’s only fifteen, I guess, but if you want her to look twice at you, you got to own a boat that will pull her all over the bay at forty miles an hour, and you’ve got to be seven feet tall and able to pick up the front end of a Buick.”

  “Sounds like a description of her brother.”

  “Jigger? I guess he could pick up the front end of a car. But he doesn’t run with the pack. He’s a year behind me at Riverway. He’s sort of a fink.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’s a loner. And he’s got a sarcastic way of speaking. He could make any team we’ve got, but he doesn’t go out for anything any more. He gets good grades. But he doesn’t mingle. You’re walking and he’s driving an empty car, he won’t even slow down. He isn’t the most popular kid around.”

  “How does he make out with the girls?”

  “That’s another thing. He doesn’t try. He’d have no trouble, but he doesn’t try. There’s some talk.”

  “What kind?”

  Bobby Nest looked uneasy. “I shouldn’t say anything because I don’t really know for sure. But you remember two years ago, the trouble at West Bay Junior High, the gay English teacher they had, and after one kid squealed, they found out there was a whole group of boys going over to the instructor’s place, you remember, Jimmy.”

  “I remember. Was Jigger one of them?”

  “He was there at the time. They tried to keep it quiet, the kids who got mixed up in that mess, their names. But that’s what they say about Jigger, that he was one of the group, and he’s a queer. This last spring two pretty husky guys tried to needle Jigger about it. They thought they could handle him, but they couldn’t. He cracked them up pretty good.”

  “I guess the rumor must be wrong, Jimmy. This summer I’ve seen Jigger riding around with a pretty little dark-haired girl.”