A Tan and Sandy Silence

by John D. MacDonald

  “Then she must write down a column of figures. Suppose it is like … 71, 70, 72, 69, 71, 70, 69. Fine. Then it is 70, 69, 67, 68, 66, 67, 65 … right then the girl on duty finds me and finds you, and we get a seaplane alongside to take him to a hospital. They’ll have to open his skull and see if the clot is shallow enough so they can take it out and keep him alive.”

  “My hands?” I asked.

  “They’ll hurt like hell,” Valerie said. “Like living hell. But you’ll be fine. No nerve damage. No dead tissue. Good circulation, so that even something that tight couldn’t cut it all off.”

  The pain hit again as I was fading, but it just held me on the edge, and when it stopped, I went the rest of the way on down. Blurred memories of being carried, of choking on hot, pungent coffee, of hearing the hiss of water along the side of the hull. Then memories of it being night time, feeling that slow swing and turn of an anchored vessel, hearing faint music from topside, of moving in and out of sleep and seeing girls, sometimes the same one, sometimes a different one, solemnly and intently taking my pulse, lips moving, writing on a pad, then staring back and forth from my chest to a watch, counting respirations, writing it down. A Coleman lantern was hung from the overhead with an improvised shade which left the bunk in relative shadow and filled the rest of the small cabin in harsh brightness.

  I awoke to a gray morning light in the cabin. The lantern was out. A slender, dark-haired girl sat taking my pulse. She had a narrow, pretty face, sallow skin. Her forehead and the end of her nose were sunburned.

  “Where are we?”

  “I’m counting.”

  “Sorry. Tell me when you’re through.”

  “You made me get mixed up.”

  I let her count, write it down. “We’re at anchor in a cove by some pretty little islands north of Grenada. They’re called the Sisters. Now I have to count your breathing.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Joyce. I’m new. Hush, please.”

  “From Barbados, eh?”

  It startled her. “How’d you know that?”

  “I can even remember the words. You are Louise’s ‘cute little chum.’ She flew up and talked to you about the job.”

  She blushed. “Yes. Let me count, please.”

  “Dear girl, do your counting, and then I have to get up and use the head.”

  She wouldn’t let me without going and bringing Valerie back to check me over and give permission. I felt shaky and frail. When I came back from the nearby head, clutching at everything handy, Valerie was sitting on the bunk looking at the notebook tabulations, and Joyce was standing near her. They got out of my way, and I sighed as I got in and lay back.

  “Now we can take you off the continuous count, I think,” Valerie said. “Do you feel dizzy? Do your ears hum?”

  “No.”

  “I think we’ll take a count every fifteen minutes. Joyce, your hour will be up in … ten minutes. Stay another hour, okay? I’ll have Margot take over from you at seven thirty, and you can go help with breakfast then.”

  “You’re a good nurse,” I told Valerie. “Isn’t there a shortage of nurses around the islands?”

  She was so still for a moment her pretty face looked like a temple carving. Her Indian blood was more apparent. “Oh, yes. A shortage of nurses. And damn lots of patients. And not so many reasons for keeping them living, I think. The children die. The old ones come back, over and over, trying to die.”

  She spun and left quickly. I tried to smile at Joyce. Maybe I managed it convincingly enough. I think she smiled back as her face tilted and blurred and faded into gray-black. I had to say something to assure Joyce and myself I was not going sour on them.

  “What did you do in Barbados, dear?” My voice seemed to come from the bottom of a brass barrel.

  “Does it matter?” she said from the far end of a hundredyard corridor.

  “I’m interested. I’m curious. That’s all.”

  She began to emerge out of the humming mists and the metallic distances. I saw her face again, shifting as if underwater, then firming up. “Are you all right?” she asked, frowning. I felt her fingertips moving on my wrists, seeking the pulse.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You looked different. Your eyes were funny. I work in a boutique in Bridgetown. My husband worked at the desk in a couple of the good hotels. We could live on what we made if we were careful. Maybe he got tired of being careful. He left over a year ago, and I have no idea where he is. What else do you want to know? I’m English and Portuguese mostly with a bit of colored. I make about two hundred and seventy-five to three hundred Biwi a month in the season and a lot less when the tourists are gone. I can’t quite live on it. I’ve sold the things Charles and I owned, like the music system we got on hire-purchase and was all paid for, and I let them come and take the things which weren’t paid for. The last thing I let go, the last thing worth selling, was my little sailboat my father built for me before he died when I was twelve.” Her words were coming faster and faster, and she had stopped searching for the pulse. Her thin fingers were wrapped around my lacerated wrist. “It was the only thing I could use to get away, to be someone else, and I took it out in a gale before I let it go, telling it to drown me, but it would not …”

  “Hey, now,” I said.

  Her eyes had filled. “I mean there is no end to it, Mr. McGee. I’ve been a decent woman. I have no family at all. A fat political gentleman wants to give me a cottage in a development he owns. There has been one girl every two years, I understand. He is quite old. They each end up with a cottage and some sort of small pension. I imagine a long street of them with the years marked on little signs in the little yards, with all of us sitting on our little porches …”

  “Joyce, honey. There, honey.”

  Kind words started the flood. She put her forehead down into the bend of my elbow, and the stifled sobs wracked her thin body. I stroked her hair and made soothing sounds. I identified my own feeling of guilt. I had not really wanted to know about her life and her problems. I had been talking in an effort to keep the brassy mists from sucking me under. But the words had opened her up, and it had come spilling out.

  She pushed herself away, stood with her back to me, blew her nose. “Why should you give a damn?” she said in a choked voice. “Why should anybody?”

  “Is this cruise what your friend Louise described?”

  She turned, snuffled, sat wearily in the chair. “Oh, yes. Louise didn’t lie. She called a spade a spade. It’s a ten-day trial, you might say. I will do deck duty, scut work, help with the food, drinks, laundry, scrubbing, and all that. But I don’t have to be … available unless I decide to be and tell Captain Laneer first. The men really seem quite nice. I can keep my clothes on, thank God. Louise said it took her three days to get used to pottering about the decks and below decks entirely starko. I think it would take me forever, and even then I couldn’t adjust. The girls are so much nicer than I imagined. But an entirely naked woman is not really erotic, do you think? Of course, in a cold wind or offshore insects or one’s time of the month or coming into port, clothes are definitely required.” She had a brooding look, frowning down at her knuckles. “It’s rather difficult for one to imagine being quite ready for it. I mean if one has taken a bucket of scraps aft after cleaning fish, it is so abrupt to be suddenly tweaked, then taken by the hand, and led below.” She roused herself and looked slightly startled. She had been voicing her internal monologue. “I go on, no?” She forced a wan smile. “At any rate, once the ten days are ended, I shall either go back to the boutique to stay or go back to quit my job and pack. I shall fret about it later, not now. Valerie told me that it would be good for you to get as much sleep as you can now. Can you sleep, dear?”

  I could. I slept and slept and slept. The dull ache in hands and feet and head did not inhibit it. In too many of the sleep periods Lisa was way down below the velvet black, waiting for me on the bright beach, the severed head propped on the delicate bones of
the jaw, smiling at me.

  It was another morning, and Mickey Laneer brought me a stone mug of coffee, nudged me awake, and put the coffee in my hand after I had hitched up, knuckled grainy eyes.

  “You are some kind of a sleeper,” she said.

  “A long swim with your hands and feet tied will do it every time. We moved again, didn’t we? Where are we, and what day is it?”

  “Anchored in the lee of Frigate Island at eight o’clock on the morning of Thursday, April twenty-ninth.”

  “Thursday! But couldn’t you get in touch with—”

  “He’ll be off to the west of here about opposite us at fourteen hundred. We’ll make a radio check on him an hour beforehand. No sweat. We’ll run out and intercept and put you aboard Dulcinea.”

  “I’ve been a lot of trouble to you and your crew, Mick.”

  Her smile was sour. “Better this kind than the kind you were going to lay on me if I ran you back in.”

  “Hard feelings, captain?”

  She grinned, punched me on the side of the thigh. “My four passengers haven’t made any complaints. Maybe because I run the only game in town. The gals have loved playing nurse. By doing it your way—with you having the grace not to die on me—I’ve kept my friendship with Rupe. And I put a high value on it. No, McGee. Except for having to give up my own cabin, no hard feelings. How do you feel anyway? Strong?”

  I checked and tested. “Better than I should.”

  “You look good. If you feel strong enough, I can send you down a little sample of our recreation program here aboard the Hell’s Belle. Courtesy of the management. Name your favorite nurse, man.”

  “Joyce?”

  The taut smile was gone. “Now you really are a smartass, you know that? I know damned well you know that girl’s arrangement aboard, because she told me about talking to you.”

  “I thought maybe she’d made her decision.”

  “And you were curious? I wouldn’t want you aboard long. You’d make too much mischief. Nobody puts any kind of pressure on that kid. She works it out for herself. She makes her own decisions.”

  “What will she decide?”

  Mickey Laneer stood up, looking weary and cynical. “She’ll decide that every other choice she has is worse. I’ll send your breakfast.”

  Teddie brought my breakfast. She was the big, creamy, Minnesota Swede who had learned her sailing on Lake Superior. She was the one who giggled. Her hair was sea-weathered to a harsh spill of pure white hemp. From the bulge of bland forehead down to the clench of prehensile toes, she was tanned to the shade of macaroons. She giggled as she presented the tray with the menu she had devised. Two giant rum sours. A stack of toast. A platter of flying fish, perfectly sautéed and browned, crisp and sweet. A big enameled coffee pot and two of the stone mugs. She latched the door, giggling, and we had breakfast. She took the tray over to the table and came back, giggling. In the moist hollow of her throat, from earlobe to collarbone and across the socket in front, around to the other earlobe, she smelled exactly like fresh cinnamon and Pears’ Soap.

  The rendezvous was made about fifteen minutes past two, an estimated seven miles due west of Frigate Island. I convinced Mickey that there was no need to use the tender to transfer me. It was a freshening breeze, the sea running sparkling high. I said that though I didn’t want to test my skull by diving, I could certainly swim a little. Rupe put the Dulcinea dead in the water, rocking in the trough, and hung the boarding ladder over. Mickey at the helm took the Belle across the Dulcinea’s stern, laying her over so that as I sat on the lee rail and swung my legs around to the outboard side, my feet were but inches from the water.

  I dropped and swam the fifty or sixty feet to the Dulcinea, bringing from the Belle no more than I had brought aboard—the swim trunks, leaving behind somewhere in the sea the scraps of nylon cord they had cut out of my flesh.

  There was no hand extended to help me when I clambered aboard the Dulcinea. Rupe and Artie stood staring at the Belle, jaws slack, leathery paws dangling. Mickey saw no need to change the uniform regulations for an old friend like Rupe. Mickey showed off by taking the Belle fifty yards past us, coming about smartly, working hell out of her girls, and then coming back aslant, waving as she angled across our bows on a northeast course not over forty feet away. The girls shouted, grinned, laughed, and waved.

  “Fool woman,” Rupe said. “All sailor, that fool woman. Artie. Artie? ARTIE!”

  “Huh? Me?”

  “Bring in that boarding ladder and stow it right this time.”

  “Boarding ladder?”

  “ARTIE!”

  “Oh. Sure. Yessir, Rupe. Right away.”

  Rupe put the diesels back in gear, opened them up to full cruise, checked the chart and gave Artie the compass course, and left him at the wheel. We went below.

  “Now what the hell is this all about, Trav?”

  “It’ll take some time.”

  “Time is what we’ve got the most of.”

  Twenty

  Rupe loaned me the money to get home, and Artie loaned me the clothes, a set of fresh khakis that fit better than I would have guessed from looking at him. I had to buy straw sandals at Kingstown on St. Vincent. Customs and immigration clearance was at San Juan, and I had an interesting time there. People are supposed to have papers and luggage, a wallet and a toothbrush.

  They wanted to take my citizenship away from me. I told them it was a little misfortune at sea. I told them we could make some collect phone calls. When I said a magic name they could call collect, they came to attention. They almost smiled. That was on Sunday, the second day of May. I pulled the home number, unlisted, out of the damaged recesses of memory and got his wife, then got him. He talked to the boss immigration fellow, and when they were through, the boss immigration type felt a compulsion to pump my hand and call me sir and ask me if there was any little thing he could do, anything at all.

  Before my flight left, I tried Meyer again, and this time he was aboard his boat, and when he heard and recognized my voice, he said in a shaky voice, “Thank God. Thank God.” I told him what I needed and what to do and not to be so sentimental, anyway.

  It was a bright, clear day to fly across the Bahamas and the incredible tones and shades of the Bahama flats. I wanted to think but not very much. I wasn’t very sure about being able to think things through. I wanted to depend on Meyer. The weather across my internal landscape wasn’t very good. Patches of gray, like drifting clouds, obscured things I wanted to see. And sometimes in a waking state I would have the same feeling, the same jolt as when you awaken from sleep. For a little while I would not know where I was or where the plane would land.

  I got off that flight and walked through the lower level and out to vehicle pickup, and there was Meyer, bless him, standing beside a dark blue rental Ford as ordered. A very anonymous car. I told him he had better do the driving, as I was not entirely sure of the circuitry in my head. He drove. I talked. We selected a ma-and-pa motel on the way into Lauderdale on Route 1, and he got me a room in the back with an air conditioner that sounded like an air hammer breaking up paving. I finished the story in the room.

  I unpacked the stuff Meyer had brought from the Flush, using that spare key I gave him, which he keeps hidden aboard the Keynes. He had packed some Plymouth, which seemed a kindly gesture. He went and got ice from the machine, and we drank from sleazy disposable glasses that looked as though they were about five-room-guests overdue for disposal.

  I sat on the bed, sipping the clean, cool taste of juniper. Meyer paced and paced. He would stop in front of me to ask questions. “I’m not clear on one point. You did write the whole thing to Lennie Sibelius, telling him to get moving, open the inner envelope if you hadn’t checked in by the end of May?”

  “I did. But I told Lisa the tenth of May. I wrote to Lennie later. And I did not tell her who I wrote to, of course.”

  “She believed you?”

  “She very definitely bought it. And she told Cousin P
aul everything he wanted to know. Assumption: he believed her the way she believed me. But by the time he found out about the letter, he’d gone too far with both of us to start making deals. His next step was to make me talk to him. And he could have. I’m stubborn, Meyer. Need I mention it? The pain threshold is high, as measured on the dolorimeter. But I could have gotten so anxious to talk I would have fallen all over myself. He scares me. What was your reading on him?”

  “Humble beginnings. Very bright, very reliable. Full scholarship to McGill. Went back to his village to work for the man who helped him. Worked for that man about three years, and then one of Waterbury’s companies acquired the benefactor’s business in a merger situation. Waterbury was impressed by Paul Dissat and took him into the Quebec headquarters. Dissat is thirty-six, single, conservative, devout Catholic. He doesn’t drink or smoke. He’s apparently managed his own savings very shrewdly. Handsome. Very fit. Superb skier and superior tennis player.”

  He paced and I sipped, and the air conditioner kept up its whangbangroaring, leaking condensation down the blue concrete-block wall.

  He stopped in front of me, using his lectern mannerisms. “He functions very well in a highly pragmatic profession. He is perfectly aware of cause and effect. He can weigh the degree of risk he is willing to take. He will assume that the man who gets your letter will be competent. Can his whole plan stand determined investigation? No. Even without a link as weak as Harry Broll enough could be learned to bring it before a grand jury. What would this sort of scandal do to the SeaGate stock offering? It would come out that a fraud had been committed to get funds from a bank to pay for a preoffering block of stock. Waterbury could not afford to proceed. Both Jensen, Baker, and Fairmont, Noyes would recommend the applications be withdrawn. This would all happen, if your letter exists, with or without Paul Dissat on stage. See where I’m going?”

  “I think so.”

  “With no public issue to raise money through the sale of stock, SeaGate comes to a shuddering halt. Harry’s indivisible block becomes worthless. I can think of a Dissat-like solution.”