A Flash of Green

by John D. MacDonald

  “I’ll wait’ll it lets up some,” she shouted. An almost simultaneous flash-click-bang of lightning and thunder made her start violently, and the fright made the backs of her hands and the back of her neck tingle. She thought he had said something about the lightning.

  “What did you say?”

  He turned toward her. “I had no idea so many people would come. Not here. Come to Shackley’s. I had no idea.”

  “You have a lot of friends. What’s so surprising?”

  “There weren’t enough seats.”

  The intensity of the rain lessened. She wiped the steam off the windshield and started the car. By the time she made the turn onto Mangrove Road, the rain had stopped. They rolled the windows down. She drove cautiously through temporary lakes, and steered around the larger palm fronds and branches littering the road.

  When they reached her house, he came in and took his jacket off and loosened his tie. “What would you like, Jimmy? Coffee? A drink?”

  “I want to thank you for everything. You must have other things to do.”

  “I have nothing to do except try to find out what you want.”

  “Oh. Well. If it doesn’t sound weird and it isn’t a lot of trouble, I’m hungry. I couldn’t eat today. What I’d like, if you have it, is eggs. Scrambled.”

  “About four eggs? Bacon? Toast? Coffee, tea or milk?”

  “Wonderful. Tea, I guess.”

  When she went back into the living room, he was at her desk, writing some sort of a list.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Oh. You can help, I guess. The people who were there. I’ve just been putting down last names. Killian, Borklund, Haas, Lesser, Jennings, Bliss, Halley, Shannard, Dayson, Sloan, Britt, Shilling, Cable, Tucker, Lime, Aigan, Lipe …”

  “But, dear! There was a book to sign, near the entrance. Vern will turn it over to you.”

  He looked blankly at her, then snapped his fingers. “He told me about it, and I forgot. And I have a bunch of cards to send out to the people who came and sent flowers. I haven’t got them yet. I ordered them. Now I know I didn’t order enough of them.”

  “I’ll take care of the cards for you. There’s no rush about it, you know.” She stood beside him and looked down at the list he had made. “Sort of a truce, wasn’t it?”

  “What? Oh, I see what you mean. Yes. The Palmland and the S.O.B.’s, all united in the common cause.”

  “I think you can come and sit down now, Jimmy.”

  She brought him the food. She sat with him and had tea and watched him eat with obvious hunger.

  “Good eggs. Where are the kids?”

  “At the Sinnats, as usual.”

  He finished and sighed. She refilled his cup. He smiled at her and the smile turned into an aching yawn.

  “You didn’t eat and you didn’t sleep.”

  “Not very much,” he admitted. “It’s a strange thing. I knew it was going to happen. But I had my own reaction figured out wrong, all the way. I feel what I shouldn’t be feeling, and I don’t feel what I should be feeling. Do you know?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ve felt all day like a dummy, a black stork. I was afraid I’d either cry and couldn’t stop, or laugh and not be able to stop, but I didn’t do either. And either way, it wouldn’t have been for her, somehow. It would have been for … for kind of the general idea of death. I can’t even be sure I’m human.”

  “You are, Jimmy. Completely. Every kind of grief is ambivalent, because it’s full of different kinds of emotion nobody can sustain. There isn’t anything consistent about it.”

  “But is it grief, even?”

  She put her hand on his wrist. “Jimmy, the most wonderful thing you did for me a year ago was let me talk and talk and talk. I said some very wild things, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, but …”

  “And I’ll listen to all the wild things you want to say, but not right now, because you’re dead on your feet. The guest room is cool and ready and waiting, clean sheets all turned down for you, private bath with towels laid out. Now scoot.”

  As she was rinsing the dishes and stowing them in the dishwasher, she heard the sound of the shower. About fifteen minutes later she tiptoed down the corridor. His room door was ajar. She said his name softly. There was no answer. She looked in. He was on his side, breathing deeply and heavily. She tiptoed into the room and closed the draperies. She stood in the shadows and looked down at him for a little while, then tiptoed out.

  She was doing some stealthy varieties of housework when Natalie came over. “He’s having a nap,” Kat said in a low tone.

  “Oh. How about at the cemetery? Did the rain ruin it?”

  “Let’s go out on the patio and have a Coke or something. The rain held off just long enough.”

  Out on the screened part of the patio beyond the glass doors they could talk in normal tones. Natalie wore a swimsuit patterned in dull shades of orange and yellow, straw slippers with thick cork soles. She seemed much less guarded, less constrained and tense than when she had first arrived in Florida. She seemed cherished and content, her small face less drawn, her movements more fluid, her spare body a little more mature. That unmistakable look of being loved gave Kat a little antagonistic feeling which she immediately identified for what it was and discarded as being a most narrow and unworthy emotion.

  “Won’t the phone bother him?” Natalie asked.

  “I had it put on temporary disconnect yesterday, before I knew he was coming here.”

  “Jigger is child-watching. He’s really very reliable. He counts heads constantly. Kat, about Jigger and me …”

  “Don’t feel you have to tell me anything.”

  “Suppose I want to? Would you mind?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I dumped the whole thing in your lap, so you have a right to know. And the way my father went off, it sort of left everything entirely up to us. We spend every possible minute together. I guess you couldn’t help noticing that. Anyhow, what happened made it all kind of dirty and uncomfortable. We tried to tell each other it didn’t, but it did. So we’re being distinctly moral. I guess it’s sort of a tantalizing game, after … knowing each other, but it’s more than that, too. We slipped once, but we won’t again. I’m finding out how much of a man he is, and I think I’m more than half in love with him.” A blush darkened her small tanned face. “Isn’t it absurd? He’s seventeen years old! But I keep forgetting he is. He’s found a summer job, starting next Monday. We think it will be better for both of us for him to have a job too. I know it’s … really kind of egotistical for me to think you’d be interested when there’s so much going on for you and people are giving you such a hard time and all, but I thought maybe you’d like to know that one … pretty good thing has come out of all this bay-filling war.”

  “Nat, honey, I’m glad to know and I’m touched that you’ve told me. I hope everything works out for both of you.”

  Natalie frowned. “We’ll be apart when I go back to school. I can guess how these things usually work out. I feel sad when I think what will probably happen. But right now it’s so good to be halfway in love. Some of it is very young love. You know. Silly things. Jokes and games. And some of it is very adult, I think. Because we sort of started backwards. What we have now is what we should have had first, I guess. But we had the other part first, the six times that we were together like that, with it getting more tremendous every time, as close as two people can get. So now that it’s all a … younger kind of love, the things we already know about each other sort of shadow it, and make it more … I don’t know if any word fits … marriageable? But we can’t even think about that. I’ve got a terror complex about marriage. I’ve always promised myself I never would be. My father set such a dandy example.”

  “He and Claire are all right.”

  “Are they, Kat? They like the same things. A lot of people swarming around. And she gets the lush life she adores, and people to do the scut work fo
r her. And he gets the girl-wife for his declining years, which is sort of a public advertisement of his manhood. Is it a marriage or a sort of a truce?”

  “Most marriages are.”

  “Yours wasn’t. I know that.”

  “No. It wasn’t.”

  “What about Jimmy Wing’s? What was she like, really?”

  “Gloria was a very beautiful girl. Not a complex person. She had a lot of earthy vitality, and she was easy to be with before she got sick because she was essentially a merry person. I guess she was good for Jimmy because there’s sort of a dark, involved, tortured side to him, and he’d need a marriage that would … would simplify the world instead of complicate it. Everyone who knew her knew she was a totally loyal and faithful wife. That’s why it was so shocking and ugly and incomprehensible when she began to change. She seemed to coarsen. She seemed to stop giving a damn, about anything. Poor Jimmy thought it was something he had done. He thought he was inadequate or something. Then he tried to turn into the Biblical husband and wham the mischief out of her. So when they found out it was a physical thing, an illness she couldn’t help, the guilt over how he had been handling it nearly destroyed him.”

  “The poor guy.”

  “She was put away for keeps over two years ago, and she’s been in what I guess you could call a coma for over a year. It’s supposed to be a very interesting case. Not very interesting for Jimmy.”

  “He’s an interesting-looking man, you know. When he interviewed me at the Center, I was looking at him carefully. Every feature he has is actually ugly, all by itself. Those pale eyes that slant the wrong way and that big nose, the long head and sandy hair, and the crooked mouth and big uneven teeth. But he has all that darn presence, and that strange kind of …”

  “Elegance?”

  “That’s the word. Lazy grace, I guess, plus complete confidence and that freshly scrubbed and polished look. Actually, I think he’s wonderfully attractive.”

  “I can’t think of him in just that way, Natalie. While Van was alive I didn’t care for Jimmy particularly, even though he was one of Van’s best friends. It wasn’t jealousy. I just thought he was … a sort of contrived person. Artificial and sort of superior-acting. I didn’t understand why Van was so fond of him. I found out this past year. He’s a valued friend. An old shoe. When I’m with him I feel comfortable and safe and understood. When things were the worst I walked a hundred miles with him, said all the crazy things that came into my head, cried a gallon of tears onto his shirt fronts. He’s seen me at my worst and still puts up with me. I love him dearly as a good friend.”

  “He could have other ideas, you know.”

  She stared at the girl. “Jimmy? Bless you, no. Not toward this raddled old redhead, honey. One man had the pleasant delusion I was a sexy exciting woman, and that was enough for one lifetime. Just because you’re in the midst of romance, dear, don’t turn those rosy glasses on the rest of us. Jimmy is racked up, and I am taking care, and if I ever made a pass at him, his little eyes would bulge with horror.”

  Natalie smiled and sighed. “I better get back to the younger set.” She stood up. “By the way, Mortie was in rare wild shape this morning. Things are a mess down at the Center, you know.”

  “Tom told me Morton was having the same kind of problems as the rest of us.”

  “There’s been a big membership petition asking him to either give up his S.O.B. activities or resign as director. My classes are down to about half what they were. Two of his people on the board have resigned in protest. People are canceling their pledges. All of a sudden his little empire has turned shaky, and Mortie is stomping on his hanky and dithering around all over the place. We’re getting a lot of crank calls at the Center, and some absolutely filthy mail. It’s such amazing reasoning, isn’t it? The reason why Mr. Dermond opposes the bay fill is because he is a Communistic homosexual pervert, and opposing the fill is part of his long program of foisting degenerate abstract art on the duped citizens of Palm County.”

  “Do you think he’ll knuckle under, Nat?”

  “I don’t think so. He’s much too furious. But I don’t think he’ll have time to do you much good. He’s too busy trying to mend the fences as fast as they’re falling down around him. He had to have his home phone changed to an unlisted number.”

  “I know.”

  “Anyhow, one week from today it will be over. And then maybe my classes will fill up again. It seems so asinine to deprive those kids of something they love just because Mortie, for aesthetic reasons, thinks the loveliest bay in the county shouldn’t be turned into a housing project.”

  They went out the terrace door into the side yard. Kat looked at her watch and saw it was almost five o’clock. “Send mine home soon, dear.”

  “Floss can feed them. Don’t worry about them, Kat. I’ll bring them on home later on, really.”

  “Well … they’d probably wake Jimmy up. If they won’t be any bother.”

  “They never are.”

  She watched Natalie walk out the driveway and turn toward her house. As she turned to go back in, a soft voice near at hand startled her. “Miz Hubble?”

  “Oh! Barnett, I didn’t see you there.”

  He came forward, away from the screen of shrubbery, moving slowly, turning a stained old cloth cap in his thick dark hands. “I didn’ get to this yard, yesterday,” he said, staring beyond her.

  “I know. I wondered where you were.”

  “Can’t get onto it tomorra neither, Miz Hubble.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Truth is, this time of year and all, I got me so loaded up on work, there’s some I has to let drop off. That’s the way it goes.”

  “Do you mean you can’t work for me any more, Barnett?”

  “Yassum,” he said.

  “I know it doesn’t amount to very much money, and if you say you can’t, I guess you can’t. But I want you to see if you can find me somebody who can do it for me.”

  “I kin surely try, Miz Hubble. But I jus doan know who.”

  There was something very strange about him, the way he was standing, not even looking toward her, turning the cap around and around. Suddenly she understood.

  “Who’s making you quit?” she demanded angrily.

  “It’s just I got more than I …”

  “Nonsense! Don’t you dare lie to me!”

  His glance drifted toward her, apprehensive, uncomfortable, and slid away again. He swallowed, licked his lips. “Maybe I could fit this yard back in a little later on.”

  “Who scared you?”

  He looked directly at her. He straightened slightly and his voice had more dignity. “I’m not scared, m’am. I lived my whole life the way I got to live it. You have your head in the lion’s mouth, you do like my daddy told me. You lie quiet. A man said words to me on my telephone. And there’s other folks working for other white folks got the same words said. There’s no colored cops in Pigeon Town, m’am. Not yet there isn’t. Mister Van, he would have knowed how it is, without having to say anybody scared me. I’ll do the most I can.”

  “I’m sorry, Barnett. It’s just that … they don’t seem to overlook anything.…” She realized that for the first time since it had all begun she was close to uncontrollable tears. She made herself smile. “I was angry for a moment.”

  He looked down into the cloth cap. “And it could be a lie about not being scared none. Decent colored people can always have their house fired by some boughten nigger.” He looked around. “I got things pretty good here. If’n you could do a little and that Mister Gus would do some of the heavy things, I could be back soon as it looks all right. This isn’t a lastin’ kind of thing.”

  She had the television set on at ten o’clock, the sound turned low, so she did not hear Jimmy Wing getting up until he walked out with his jacket over his arm, startling her.

  “Well! How did you sleep?” she said, turning the set off.

  “So hard I had a hell of a time figuring out
where I was when I woke up.”

  “I was afraid the kids would wake you. I made them be quiet going to bed, but when they whisper they sound like steam engines.”

  He sat on the couch and lit a cigarette. “Everything that happened today is a little blurred.”

  “That’s the way it should be.”

  “What did I get? About six hours. And when I get back to the cottage, I’ll want eight or ten more.”

  “You could have stayed right where you were.”

  “Makes a bad impression on the neighbors. And everything you do these days has to be above reproach, friend.”

  “Or I won’t get any yard work done? Move to Palm County, the best of tropical living among friendly people. Brother!”

  “What about yard work?”

  She repeated the conversation with Barnett Mayberry, and said, “Two hours a week, for heaven’s sake! I’m unclean. I’m not fit to work for.”

  “It’ll be the same at the Jennings’ and the Lipes’s and the Halleys’. Part of the pattern. Make all you people as uncomfortable as possible, and keep you too busy to fight the bay fill. If Barnett ignored the suggestion, maybe nothing at all would happen. But why should he take the chance? You must be a trial to him, dear. You missed all your cues. You were supposed to understand just how things are, and go right along with his story about being too busy to work on your yard, and accept the fiction he’d try to find somebody else. Then a month from now he’d stop by and say things had eased up and he could come back to work if you hadn’t gotten somebody else.”

  “I’m no damn good at your native folk dances, Jimmy, and I have no intention of learning them.”

  “Barnett will put up with you.”

  “Jimmy, you look a little better.”

  “Thanks to you. And thanks for helping me through all the red tape, too. Laura’s got all she can do taking care of Sid. Kat?”