A Flash of Green

by John D. MacDonald

  “Didn’t you ask them?”

  “They expressed regrets. They are too busy. It will make no difference who asks them. The answer will be the same.”

  “But why?”

  “Let go, please. I am very hungry.”

  “You have to tell me why, Doris!”

  “They don’t care to associate themselves with me in any way. Maybe they’ll tell you why. I doubt it. It is easier to say they are too busy.”

  “Come on, Kat,” Wing said. Kat released Doris Rowell’s arm and stepped away. The hand lifted and then stopped. Doris Rowell was looking at Jimmy with placid speculation.

  “You could have done it,” she said, a flat statement rather than an accusation.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  She smiled to herself and nodded her head and poked the bread into her waiting mouth. Jimmy took Kat’s arm and led her out onto the porch and down the steps. Just as he released her, he felt her shudder.

  “That’s horrible, Jimmy. We have to do something.”

  “I’ll get Doctor Sloan out here. He’ll know what’s best.”

  “It’s some kind of a breakdown.”

  “He’ll know what to do about it.”

  As they walked through the side yard the wind shifted and a vile smell came from the direction of the long shed. He told Kat to go to the car. He went inside. He walked to the rear of the shed. The light was burning. The small pumps had stopped. All the striped fish floated, decaying, on top of the murky water in the two tanks.

  He suddenly realized he had been standing there for a long time. His fists were clenched so tightly his shoulders and arms had begun to ache. His jaw was clamped so strongly there was a ringing in his ears.

  He turned and walked swiftly back toward the rectangle of daylight. Kat was standing by the station wagon. “What were you doing?”

  “She’s let a lot of fish die in there. It’ll have to be cleaned up. There’s a billion flies in there.”

  “Damn them!” Kat whispered. “Damn all of them. Should I stay here with her until Doctor Sloan gets here?”

  “I see no need of that.”

  “We can phone from my house. And phone Tom too.”

  Sloan said he would see Mrs. Rowell within the hour, and arrange hospitalization if he felt she needed it. Jimmy said he would phone Sloan again and check. As he hung up, Kat handed him a cold beer, and said, “I wonder what she meant by saying you could have done it. Done what?”

  “I told her I didn’t know what she meant.”

  “She’s worked with those people for so long, I don’t see why they should turn her down now.”

  “Tom has the list, doesn’t he?”

  “Of the ones she thought would come here? Yes.”

  “Then he better make the calls and see how he can do.”

  She took her drink over to a chair and sat and studied him. “Is there something you don’t want to tell me, Jimmy?”

  “Nothing very special. Just that you can’t win, I guess.”

  “We know that. We know that all we can do at the public hearing is get our point of view on the record. People can’t stay this hopped up, you know. We’re working on the next step now, to force the trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund to hold another public hearing before they actually sell the bay bottom to Palmland. The things we can get into the record in both public hearings will serve as the basis for the lawsuits we’re going to bring against Palmland and Palm County and the State of Florida. Two years from now, when Palmland finally gets out from under the last injunction and gets slapped with a whole batch of new ones, let’s see how many people are going to be left around here throwing eggs and saying dirty words over the phone and giving women nervous breakdowns.”

  He looked down at her. “Kat, Kat, it’s a brave point of view. But they’ll just keep getting rougher.”

  “Good! Let ’em get real rough and real careless, and do something we can prove. Then they’ll have some fat damage suits to defend too.”

  “That’s Tom Jennings talking, not you.”

  “I’ve never been so angry, Jimmy. I’m too angry to be scared.” She stood up. “Tom will be wondering.” As she walked toward the phone it began to ring. She hesitated. When it had rung three times, she picked it up. She did not speak. She listened, making a wry face at Jimmy. “Thank you, dear,” she said into the phone. “You’re such a perfect lady.” She hung up and said, “There isn’t as much of that since I stopped answering. It spoils the fun when you don’t answer.” She picked the phone up, listened, dialed, waited a moment and hung up, and then dialed again. He heard her explain the Rowell situation to Tom, and could guess from her end of the conversation that Tom was agreeing to get in touch with the people Doris Rowell had thought would come to the hearing. Then he saw her face change as Tom kept talking. Her lips were compressed and her frown lines deepened. “I see,” she said. “I know you predicted it last night, but I’d hoped you were wrong. Sure, Tom. I know. As I keep telling myself, you can’t win ’em all. Yes, I’ll let you know. Goodbye.”

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  She looked at him with a slightly startled expression, as though she had forgotten he was there. “We seem to be down to five little Indians.”

  “What happened?”

  “Wallace Lime quit. He turned over his stickers and posters and so-called contact files and scuttled away. We thought he would. He’s been getting awful jumpy the last two days. He tried to be fearless, I guess, but it was just like that mustache. It didn’t quite suit him. And we aren’t the same elegant civilized little group we were last time. We’re not worth enduring slashed tires, garbage, dirty phone calls. His wife was getting hysterical. I think it was the paint bomb that broke his heart, Jimmy.”

  “Paint bomb?”

  “They’ve got a little garden house. There’s a record player in there. There’s no way to lock it. Thursday night somebody sneaked in and plugged the record player in and put a record on as loud as it would go. Wally went charging out, and ran in the dark to turn it off. They’d put one of those spray cans of enamel in the middle of the record, so it was going around and around, with a big rubber band around it to keep the spray part going. If you look close, you can still see little flecks of bright green paint in Wally’s mustache.”

  “Dear Lord,” Jimmy said softly.

  “It would be very very funny if it wasn’t so very very sad. He wasn’t doing much good. He was losing every other client he had. None of his ideas were working. Public relations! Hah! The poor little man. He’d have an easier job convincing the public that Jimmy Hoffa teaches ballet. Tom says he was so apologetic he was practically in tears. The group is getting very cozy, Jimmy. Tom can’t get anybody to fill one vacancy on the committee, and now we have three. And he estimates we’re losing an average of twenty regular members a day. By the time of the public hearing, at that rate we’ll be past zero. We’ll be minus twenty-seven or something. There are so many people we thought we could depend on, who’ve had pressure put on them in some unexpected way.”

  “I guess you have to expect …”

  “Pressure through jobs, neighborhoods, clubs, even churches, Jimmy. It makes you feel so darn helpless.…” Her face twisted and she took one faltering step toward him. She stopped and straightened. “Whoa, girl,” she said. She shook her head and turned away, her eyes shiny.

  “Just eleven days to go,” he said.

  “I’ll make it,” she said. “I may never be the same, but I’ll make it.” The phone began to ring again. It rang fourteen times and stopped. “My public,” she said.

  He phoned her at the Sinnat house at eight that evening to tell her that Doctor Sloan had seen no reason to take Doris Rowell in for treatment. She seemed rational, even though her responses were sluggish. He had arranged for a woman to move in with her for a few days and clean the place up. He would stop again and see how she was coming along. He guessed that she would continue to follow the same pattern f
or a while, eating a great deal and sleeping a great deal. Some people responded to emotional shocks in that manner. She was, of course, overweight, but otherwise in reasonably good physical condition. She was dulling her mental responses by overworking her belly. In her own time she would begin to eat more moderately. Then she might be willing to talk about what was bothering her. But by then, of course, it would be of merely academic interest.

  Kat seemed relieved. She told Jimmy that when Tom had phoned her at seven, he had been able to reach but four of the people on Doris’ list. They had all been polite and evasive. They all pleaded other obligations, said it had really been very short notice, and had wished him the best of luck.

  He told her that Wallace Lime had stopped at the newspaper office with a statement, and Borklund was going to publish it. It announced that Wallace Lime Associates had severed its connections with Save Our Bays, Inc., due to previous professional commitments.

  “The louse!” Kat said.

  “If it wasn’t going in as a news item, he’d have put it in as an ad. Don’t be surprised if Borklund has somebody fatten it to the point where he can run it under a three-column head.”

  “It would be very difficult to surprise me with anything lately. Almost impossible, Jimmy.”

  “Just for the hell of it, please don’t go anywhere alone after dark, Kat. Don’t open a door for anybody you don’t know. Okay?”

  “Where am I living, Jimmy? South Palm City, or East Berlin?”

  “Take care.”

  “Sure. Sure, Jimmy. Thanks.”

  That night he bought a bottle on the way home. He sat in his sling chair on his dark back porch with the bottle and a bowl of ice until the world was tilted at a sickening angle. But he still saw the red jam and the dead fish. It was raining hard when he blundered off the porch into the yard in his underwear shorts and clung to the rough trunk of a cabbage palm and threw up. He stayed out in the rain until his head began to ache, and then he dried himself off and went to bed, remembering how Charity had stood out on his porch in the rain, crying. There was something wrong with the memory. As he slowly took it apart to see what was wrong with it, he remembered that it had been Mitchie McClure who had made squeaking sounds in the rain, not Miss Charity Holmes of Las Vegas, and not one of the sisters-in-law of Commissioner Bliss, and not the white silent thing in the bed up at Oklawaha, with the tubes in it.

  The phone awakened him at seven. He had the feeling it had been ringing for a long time. He could not comprehend who was speaking to him for several moments, and then he realized it was Dr. Freese phoning from Oklawaha to tell him that Mrs. Wing had passed away at 5:25 A.M.

  “Are you there, Mr. Wing?”

  “Yes. I’m here.”

  “We have an autopsy permission in the file. We’d like to release the body to whomever you designate no sooner than tomorrow afternoon, say by four o’clock.”

  “What’s today?”

  “Sunday the sixteenth, Mr. Wing.”

  “Tomorrow, eh. Well. Okay. There’s stuff of hers there.”

  “It will be packed and ready, of course.”

  “I … I just can’t think of anything to ask you or tell you, Doctor.”

  “There isn’t much to say, actually.”

  “I should say thanks for all you’ve done for her.”

  “There wasn’t much anybody could do, Mr. Wing.”

  He sat by the phone in the early-morning living room for several minutes. He rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter and wrote: “Gloria Maria Mendez Wing—Born May 1, 1931—Married to James Warren Wing June 20, 1950. Died July 15, 1961, at Oklawaha State Hospital after a long illness. Mrs. Wing was born in Tampa and educated in the public schools of that city. She is survived by her husband, employed by the Palm City Record-Journal, and by her sister, Mrs. Andrew McGavern of Toronto, Canada. She was O God such a beauty at nineteen she could spin your heart with a glance.…”

  He went back and x’ed out the last sentence, left the paper in the machine and took a long cool shower, shaved, dressed, put coffee on and started making phone calls. To his sister, to the newsroom, to Toronto.

  Teresa, Gloria’s elder sister, understood at once. Grief thickened her voice. “Ah, the poor thing. The poor damn lost thing.”

  “Are you going to want to come down? I haven’t made any arrangements yet.”

  “Down? How could I get down there? Are you out of your mind?”

  “I had to ask you. I had to know.”

  “I said goodbye to my sister two years ago. She looked at me just once, and called me mama. I can’t come way down there.”

  “Teresa, there’s people in Ybor City who should know, aren’t there? I don’t know who they are. Can you let them know?”

  “I can do that, yes. But when I let them know, I should tell them about the burial. What do you plan?”

  “Should it be in Ybor City?”

  “For what? She can’t be buried from the church. You know that. She gave up the church for you. She gave up a lot of things for you, Jeemy.”

  “Look. Let’s not get into that kind of stuff.”

  “It doesn’t bother you. No. Nothing bothers you. The way you treated her when she was sick.”

  “Nobody knew she was sick then, damn it!”

  “Poor little thing. She didn’t know what was happening.”

  “Cut it out, Teresa!”

  “So bury her down there. Why not? What difference does it make? You have a place in a cemetery?”

  “Yes. Look, Teresa. I’ll phone you again about time and place and so on when I get things arranged.”

  “Yes, you do that, Jeemy. And you make me one promise. When you call me again, it’s the last time forever. Okay? I want to forget you’re alive on the same earth. Now she’s gone, you’re nothing to me. Claro?”

  “Si, seguro. Muchissima’ gracia’.”

  The good connection faded suddenly. Her voice was frail and remote. “But I want the pin. You hear me? I want the pin with the pearls. It was never yours. You hear me?”

  He hung up. It was eight-thirty. The coffee was tepid. He poured it back into the pot. He looked up the number for the Shackley Funeral Home and asked for Vern, Junior. The man said young Vern was at home, but he might not be up yet. Wing decided there was no special rush. He could phone later. He drank more coffee. He began to pace the length of the cottage, from the front door to the back. He tried to think of all the tender touching things he could remember of his marriage, feeling an obligation for tears, but he could not find anything to bring them on. He went out and got the Sunday paper and tried to look at it. He dropped it and began pacing again. He had the curious feeling his skin might split. He could feel exactly where it would split, down the insides of his arms, down the backs of his legs, and from the crown of his head all the way down the crease of his back, coming open with a gritty noise and peeling back, dry, ready to step out of. As he paced he kept thinking he could hear music and voices, but when he stopped, all he could hear was a slap and suck of water around the pilings of the old dock. He checked the radio to make sure it was turned off. He found he was carrying his head a little bit to the side, and realized he was tensed for some very loud and unexpected noise. He had no idea what it would be. The faint hallucinations of a hangover seemed mingled with the jittery results of too much strong coffee.

  Or, he thought, I’m losing my mind. He had an impulse to turn that thought into a solitary joke. He made bulging, grotesque faces and went into a wild prancing dance, stamping his feet hard, and on the final whirl, hit his forehead against the front door jamb. He leaned against it, his eyes closed, saying in a small random voice, “Yippee-i-ay, yippee-i-ay.” Then he could not remember or decide whether the faces and the dance were something he had willed himself to do, or something he could not help. A complete terror stopped his breath and soaked his body. He went feebly to a chair and sat down. He looked out the window and saw a dark red dog trot diagonally across his small yard, an exceptional l
ength of wet pink tongue dangling. He felt an almost tearful gratitude toward the dog. The dog was like a hand on his shoulder, stirring him awake from a dream.

  He called Vern at his home. Vern was having breakfast. His voice deepened slightly and slowed to a careful professional cadence as soon as he realized what Jimmy was calling him about.

  A time was decided. Two o’clock Wednesday at the funeral home. Form to be filled out. Freese would have certificate. Sister Laura had suggested Reverend Kennan Blue, said she was sure he would do it. Notice in paper. Arrange to select casket. Calling hours? No, and best to have closed casket. Pickup Monday between four and five, Oklawaha, right. Bearers? No, it isn’t required. Committal service at grave. Limousines? Decide later.

  He sent Teresa a wire containing the information she had requested.

  Twenty

  ALL THROUGH THE SHORT SERVICE at the graveside, Kat had been certain it would rain. More than half the sky had gone black and the thunder obscured the rather nasal voice of Reverend Blue. Jimmy looked so odd standing on the grass in the daylight in a dark suit. Beyond a row of pines she could see the pastel colors of the traffic on the Bay Highway.

  There was that awkward pause when it was over, when nobody was entirely certain it actually was over. And then they began to move quietly to their cars. Engines began to start, doors chunked shut, the first cars began to move away. Jimmy moved back a little way. A few people spoke to him in low tones. To each he responded with a small stiff smile, a quick nod of his head.

  At last there was no one left but Vern and some of his people. She hesitated, and then walked over to where Jimmy stood talking to Vern.

  “Glad that rain held off,” Vern said. “But it looks like that’s it coming right now.” They turned and saw the grayness slanting toward them, blotting out the distant trees and traffic and the buildings on Bay Highway.

  “Come on,” she said to Jimmy. He looked blankly at her. “Your car’s at my house. Remember?” They ran to her Volkswagen and climbed in as the first fat drops began to fall. She sat behind the wheel and took her hat off. They rolled the windows up. The windshield steamed on the inside. The rain was a thousand small hammers on tin, roaring, surging and fading as gusts of wind rocked the car.