Puss, who loved you.
At first it had been a mechanical reading, but then she slowed. The words had almost too much meaning for her to handle. And for me to handle. I had closed my eyes for a little while pretending it was Puss. But that was too much for me, and I had to watch Jean as she read, watch the slow tears, listen to the breaking voice.
Without looking at me she folded it and put it back in the box and said, “Can we get out of here? Can we walk?”
We walked. She had the same good long stride Puss bequeathed her. We walked back to the beach, where the hard rain had pocked all the footprints out of the sand above high mean tide. The wind-driven waves curled and smacked. Kids were out there, vague in the rain curtain, surfing. Some G-stringed joggers passed us. No talk. I knew she would talk when she was ready.
Finally we sat on one of the small fat fences that keep the parked cars off the beach. The rain was easing.
“They did a caesarian in the eighth month when they knew she was slipping away. She was too far gone for labor. She died the next day. I … I just didn’t know all this!”
“She must have told her sister something about how she … about how it was like between us.”
She thought that over, frowning. “Maybe she did. I guess she probably did. Maybe she told her husband too. From what Velma said, he was really great to my mother after she came back. But he couldn’t handle having me. The arithmetic was all wrong. Child of unknown person. He fixed it with Velma to raise me with her batch. Look, I love Velma and all my half brothers and sisters. She didn’t treat me differently at all. Not in any way. She’s great. He sent money all the years, what he thought was fair. More as prices went up. I’ve never met him. I think he’s a fine person. I can understand him not wanting me as a kid. I wasn’t his kid.”
“I never knew she was pregnant. I never knew she was dying.”
“I know that now, McGee. I thought you knew all that stuff. I thought you just didn’t want to be involved. Let me tell you something I wish they’d never told me. No. Cross that out. I’m glad Velma told me. Puss hurt a lot. Some of the stuff they wanted to give her for pain would have hurt the baby inside her. Me. So she stiffed it out alone. For my sake. Loved me.”
She bent over, face against her knees. She made a small sound of grief, lost in the surf crashing and hissing.
Carefully, gently, I put my hand on her shoulder. “Maybe Velma lied about me because she didn’t want to lose you. She didn’t want you to get some kind of romantic image of your beach-bum father and come looking for me, ever. She know you’re here?”
She straightened and looked at me with reddened eyes. “Oh, no. She thinks I’m visiting a girlfriend in Santa Barbara.”
“Where is home?”
“Youngstown, Ohio. I graduated high school last June.”
“You graduated from high school.”
She gave me a crooked, tear-stained smile. “Old Dad takes over the grammar, huh?”
“Takes over whatever he can take over. Whatever you’ll let him take over. Have you been working?”
“At a Charming Shoppe. It’s a chain. I worked through Christmas and quit. Look, can I have a copy of that letter? To keep?”
“Why not? We’ll walk back and get a copy made at the bank.”
She looked at me, her head tilted, her expression puzzled. “You know. I feel as if I’ve just gotten over being sick, sick a long time. I used to dream about you dying. You were always fat and bald.”
“At times I have a fat bald disposition. Look, Jean. It’s just the same for me. That strange feeling.”
“How can it mean anything much to you? You never knew I was alive even.”
I reached for her and she put her hands in mine. “I don’t know if I can say this. It means more than I can say. It turns my life upside down. It changes a lot of things I thought I was. It’s some kind of a door opening for me. We’ve got lots of plans to make.”
“I said rotten things to you last night.”
“And enough of them were true.”
“No. Now I know what you’re really like. Puss is telling me in that letter what you’re like. She didn’t know she was telling her daughter anything, but she was.”
And we walked back slowly, talking all the way. There was a lifetime of good talk ahead of us. There was another feeling I had about myself more difficult to grasp. In the last few years I had been ever more uncomfortably aware that one day, somewhere, I would take one last breath and a great iron door would slam shut, leaving me in darkness on the wrong side of life. But now there was a window in that door. A promise of light. A way to continue.
It is May, early May, a lovely time of year in Florida. We have taken the Busted Flush north up the Waterway to a place where it opens into a broad bay. I have dropped the hooks at a calm anchorage well away from the channel and far enough from the mangrove coast to let the south breeze keep the spring bugs away.
We brought aboard pungent cauldrons of Meyer’s Special Incomparable Chili, and enough icy beer to make the chili less lethal. How many of us are there? Twenty? Thirty? Let’s say a lot. Jim Ames and Betsy. The Thorners, Teneros, Arthur and Chook Wilkinson, the Mick and Carlie Hooper, Junebug, Lew, Roxy, Sue Sampson, Sandy, Johnny Dow, Briney, Frank and Gretch Payne, Miguel, the Marchmans, Marilee, Sam Dandie with two nieces, and a leavening of beach folks, and two dogs and a cat, dutifully ignoring one another.
We are here, and there is music and there are bad jokes, and so we are all a little bit longer in the tooth and have seen life go up, down and sideways without any rhyme or reason anyone can determine. We laugh at tired old jokes because they are old and tired and familiar, and it is good to laugh.
I am prone on a large sun pad on the bow, beside that incomparable bikinied, sun-lush figure of Briney, who’d been on loan to Willy Nucci until he breathed his last.
I am staring at four small freckles on the outside top of her left shoulder, four inches from my nose. Connect the dots and find the farmer’s cat. The freckles are brown against gold, and there is a fuzz of tiny white peach hairs, almost too fine to be visible.
“What are all these people doing in our home, sweetheart?” she asks drowsily.
“We invited them all, every one.”
“Oh?” she says. “That’s nice.”
“Figuring on staying a while?”
“Too long already, love. Gotta get back out to the big surf, ride the dark blue tunnel under the big white curl. Don’t let it get you. Bam, you’re out. Hey, two more weeks, then gone. No regrets.”
Somebody brings us two cold beers. Briney rolls up onto an elbow and drinks with her eyes closed. I lift my beer and say, “To Willy.”
She grins and says, “To the Nooch.”
In a little while she is asleep, beer half gone. I study the amount of tan on her smooth broad back and I peer at the angle of the sun and decide she’s in no danger of burning. In a momentary flash of panic I believe the gaudy boat, the noisy people, everything is dead and gone, imagined long ago and forgotten. It passes.
I get up and go ambling back through the folk. A great day. I find Meyer up on the sun deck leaning against the aft rail, alone for a change. He is now Uncle Meyer, a dispensation from my daughter Jean which pleased him immensely.
We talk about Jean, about her latest letter. “You two get talked out before she left?” he asks.
“There’s a couple of years of talk to make up,” I say. “We’ll have time. You get a chance to look over the trust agreement Frank sent you?”
“Good work,” he says. “As a trustee I can vote to invade the principal in case of emergency. Sound.”
“She got one hell of a score on her college boards.”
“Three times you’ve told me, Travis.”
“And she’s a horse bum. Imagine that? A horse bum from Youngstown who is going to go to a school of veterinary medicine eventually. Imagine me, fathering a horse bum from Youngstown?”
“Travis, she is handsome. She is
tough and good and staunch.”
I look at him. It strikes me that he has not been surly or hostile at any time. Lately I have been bringing out the worst in people. No more.
He seems to know what I am thinking. “How much went into the trust?” he asks.
“Everything!” I say.
He stares in consternation. “Everything? Everything?”
“Well, I saved out about four hundred bucks, and so I’ve got to scramble around and find some salvage work real soon.”
He puts his hand on my arm, beams at me and says, “Welcome to the world.”
For Jean and Walter Shine
BY JOHN D. MACDONALD
The Brass Cupcake
Murder for the Bride
Judge Me Not
Wine for the Dreamers
Ballroom of the Skies
The Damned
Dead Low Tide
The Neon Jungle
Cancel All Our Vows
All These Condemned
Area of Suspicion
Contrary Pleasure
A Bullet for Cinderella
Cry Hard, Cry Fast
You Live Once
April Evil
Border Town Girl
Murder in the Wind
Death Trap
The Price of Murder
The Empty Trap
A Man of Affairs
The Deceivers
Clemmie
Cape Fear (The Executioners)
Soft Touch
Deadly Welcome
Please Write for Details
The Crossroads
The Beach Girls
Slam the Big Door
The End of the Night
The Only Girl in the Game
Where Is Janice Gantry?
One Monday We Killed Them All
A Key to the Suite
A Flash of Green
The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything
On the Run
The Drowner
The House Guest
End of the Tiger and Other Stories
The Last One Left
S*E*V*E*N
Condominium
Other Times, Other Worlds
Nothing Can Go Wrong
The Good Old Stuff
One More Sunday
More Good Old Stuff
Barrier Island
A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald, 1967–1974
THE TRAVIS MCGEE SERIES
The Deep Blue Good-by
Nightmare in Pink
A Purple Place for Dying
The Quick Red Fox
A Deadly Shade of Gold
Bright Orange for the Shroud
Darker Than Amber
One Fearful Yellow Eye
Pale Gray for Guilt
The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper
Dress Her in Indigo
The Long Lavender Look
A Tan and Sandy Silence
The Scarlet Ruse
The Turquoise Lament
The Dreadful Lemon Sky
The Empty Copper Sea
The Green Ripper
Free Fall in Crimson
Cinnamon Skin
The Lonely Silver Rain
The Official Travis McGee Quizbook
About the Author
John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realise, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.
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