The Deadlier Sex

by Striker, Randy

  She stood in the moonlight and said nothing.

  “Come over here. We can talk about it.”

  “No,” she said.

  She turned her back to me, and I thought she was leaving. Instead, she stripped the T-shirt up over her head in one smooth motion and let it drop to the floor. She had nothing on underneath.

  “No,” she said again. “Let’s not talk. Not now.”

  She came gliding through the soft light and shadows, her skin luminescent in the night. I lay motionless as she kissed me twice experimentally. She trembled, then pulled her lips hard down on mine, the violence of it sudden and surprising. My left hand moved up the curve of her buttocks and found her breast, firm and swollen.

  She jerked back. “Don’t,” she said. “Please . . . just let me try on my own. Please, Dusky. Can you lie still?”

  “I can’t speak for all of me,” I said softly.

  I heard her move away, heard her fumble with something on a shelf, and then the sound of a radio: strings and timpani, music loud and bold on a tender night. She came back and cradled my head against her chest, stroking my hair.

  “I’m frightened.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe I should just leave right now.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t care?”

  “I care very much. But it’s your decision.”

  She stayed for nearly an hour. It seemed like five minutes. She was like a blind child seeing a new room for the first time with her hands. She was gentle and unsure, kissing and exploring with lips and soft fingertips.

  “Is that . . . nice?”

  “Very.”

  “And this?”

  “Nicer.”

  Only once, much later, did she let herself give in; let me pull her to me in a passionate joining of lips, allow my hands to trace her body, to feel her warm and open and ready. And just as suddenly, she jerked away.

  “No, Dusky, please . . . I can’t.”

  “I think we both know that’s not true.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Then that’s enough for me.”

  I felt her relax, smile. “You don’t look as though it’s been nearly enough.”

  I took her hand and kissed it softly. “Believe me, whatever you want is enough for me.”

  “I can’t see how you can say that.”

  “I can say that because I mean it.”

  She got up and pulled the T-shirt down over her head, giving me one last moonlit-look at firm breasts, flat stomach, and the silken curl of pubic hair shadowing down into thighs.

  She came back and kissed me gently on the forehead. “Do I love you?”

  “That’s a tough one, Saxan.”

  She reached up and switched off the radio. “Yes,” she said. “It certainly is.”

  In the morning I got up, stretched, pulled on my cotton khaki fishing pants, threw my shirt away as a complete loss, then studied the swollen mess of gauze and tape that was my nose in the mirror.

  Self-evaluation: “You’ll never make it in the movies with an ugly map like that, MacMorgan.”

  I headed out the door, then stopped. Someone had brought up one of my extra shirts from Sniper: one of the short-sleeved blue ones that had been washed and worn until it was almost gray. I slid it on and read the little note:

  “Don’t want that scar to shock the other women. Thanks for the medicine. Barbara.”

  Dr. MacMorgan, always ready with a little medicinal affection. It made me feel sort of silly.

  O’Davis was down at the water’s edge putting on a casting demonstration, lecturing a half-dozen women in his best Irish brogue. Across from him, in a little clearing among the gumbo-limbos, a couple dozen other women formed a circle, making their own karate dojo. Within the ring, two women in rubber pads and helmets were putting on a demonstration in full-contact karate.

  At least I assumed it was a demonstration. The way they went at it, it looked like a death match.

  I recognized them both from Mahogany Key’s small squad of enforcers. One was a stocky brunette with hams for legs. The other was the tall woman with the short brown hair Westy and I had stumbled upon while fishing. She was striking enough with her clothes off. In the whirling flourish of full-combat karate, she was awesome.

  For all you hear about it, you rarely come across an honest to God natural-born athlete. But this lioness with the close-cropped hair was one. You had only to watch her move, to know it. There was no awkwardness, no wasted effort. As a dancer, she would have been unbelievable. As a martial-arts expert, she was devastating.

  The stocky girl held up well for a while, doing her best to stay inside, fighting it out with short jabs and shin stabs. But then the lioness took control, driving her kicks home with more and more certainty. The stocky one’s face was flushed, and her breathing came in labored, nasal whoofs that were the beginning of her defeat. Finally, she went down in a heap after a straight right hand to the head—not so much from the force of the blow, but because she knew it was time to throw in the towel.

  The tall one helped her to her feet. They embraced, then bowed. The tall one put her hands on her hips, barely puffing, and surveyed the audience. For some reason, her eyes caught on mine.

  “Want to try it?”

  She had a husky voice, slightly abrasive. I felt all eyes turn and lock on me.

  “I’d better not.” Actually, I did want to try it. Some demon of masculinity deep inside wanted me to prove the final physical superiority: combat.

  “Afraid I’ll hurt you?” She disguised it as an offhand, joking remark, but there was an edge to it. A couple of women in the circle laughed nervously. The rest looked on steely-eyed.

  I pointed to my nose. “I’m already hurt.”

  “Convenient,” she said.

  I heard her snicker as I turned and walked away.

  O’Davis was just finishing his casting demonstration. I waited while he went through a couple of basic fishing knots—recommending the uniknot for general purposes—then walked with him down to the docks.

  “Aren’t we lookin’ chipper this fine mornin’, lad.”

  “I slept well. By the way, where did you stay?”

  His elfin eyes glinted. “Until England gives us our wee isle back, all the world’s home to an Irishman.”

  “How you do go on.”

  “Me folk-singing friend offered me her billet for the night. It woulda been ignoble of me ta refuse, bein’ a fellow artist an’ all.”

  “I see.”

  He offered no details, and I asked for none. For all his grandiose ways, Westy O’Davis was not one of those men who feels obligated to go into graphic detail about his sexual exploits. I admired that.

  “I figure it’ll take us about an hour here to get Sniper cleaned up, and then we can jump in the Shamrock and pick up some wire and parts in Everglades City. Maybe stop and see my hermit friend at Dismal Key on the way.”

  “An’ tonight?”

  “Tonight I’d like to track down my tattooed friend and give him a few lessons in maritime courtesy—namely, you don’t go around setting other people’s boats on fire.”

  “Sounds delightful.”

  “And if you see that I get carried away and try to choke him to death, please pull me off. I don’t like jails.”

  “Oh, I will, Yank, I will—after a decent interval, o’ course. You need yer recreation, too.”

  We borrowed mops and buckets and went to work on Sniper. There was some smoke damage, and some melted wires, but other than that she was in fine shape. I was lucky Saxan and I had gone for our after-dinner walk.

  We were just about finished when Saxan came down to see me. She was brisk and businesslike—no sign of the woman who had come to me the night before. I noticed that she watched O’Davis for some bawdy exchange; some secretive look between us that would be evidence I had told all. When she saw none, she seemed to relax a little bit.

  “It certainly looks better,” she said
.

  “Once I get the parts I need, it’ll take me about twenty minutes to get her going. Of course, I’ll have to replace the pilot chair.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad.”

  She wore one of those terry-cloth tennis suits. The colors brought out her eyes. She wore her long auburn hair in braids. It made her look nineteen.

  “I guess you’ll be busy all day, huh?”

  She meaningfully held up the clipboard she carried. “I’m afraid so. I have a stack of these evaluation sheets to finish. And I’ve got some interviews to do. The term ends in two days.”

  “And then what?”

  “Some of the staff will stay around. But most of the women will go home—I hope, as more selfreliant people.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ll stay.”

  “Good,” I said. “Maybe we can get short-andugly here to cook for us again.”

  She smiled a distant, noncommittal smile. “That would be nice.”

  After assuring Saxan we would take loving care of SELF’s handsome Shamrock, Westy and I idled away from the docks. The 302 Ford engine burpled prettily.

  “Nice boat.”

  “Aye—an’ a wonderful name, too.”

  I craned to study the docks momentarily.

  “Say, Westy—you were up before me, right?”

  “Aye. Me folk-singer friend wanted ta sing before sunrise.”

  “Did you notice the pontoon boat coming in?”

  He thought for a moment. “No. It was back when I got up.”

  “And it wasn’t back when those goons set Sniper on fire. And that was an hour after dark—about nine-thirty or ten.”

  “Hmm. The ladies musta come home real late.”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking. “Very late. Westy, at about three a.m., what were you and your folk-singer friend doing?”

  “Yank, the impropriety of yer question offends me.”

  “Were you singing?”

  “Aye, ya could say that, yes indeed. But why?”

  “Just want to make sure you’re getting enough practice in. That’s all.”

  11

  Tattoo and his seedy friends were camped on the southeastern bank of Panther Key.

  They had set up their tents among the palm trees and Australian pines in the same clearing where the legendary hermit Juan Gomez had lived and, supposedly, kept a cache of pirate treasure buried beneath the floor of his shack.

  The shack and the gold—if they ever existed—were long since gone: just the remnants of a foundation left.

  There were about a dozen of them. More than I thought there would be. They had their overpowered mullet skiffs tethered well offshore because of the strong spring tides. They sat in a big screened-in picnic tent drinking and laughing and telling graphic stories and jokes.

  When I heard the owl call—hoarse Irish lilt and all—I knew that we were ready. I also knew they wouldn’t be laughing for long.

  Earlier in the day we had motored the little Shamrock along the outskirts of the Ten Thousand Islands, past Round Key and Tiger Key, and then picked up the well-marked channel into Everglades City.

  It was a Saturday, and there were a few other boats out: private fishermen mostly, sticking to the channels so they wouldn’t get lost in the bowels of that wilderness.

  I hadn’t been to Everglades City in more than two years. In fact, it was the last real trip we had made before my wife, Janet, was murdered. And pulling into the mouth of the Barron River, past the graceful white clapboard Sunset Lodge, and then approaching the early-1900s elegance of the Rod and Gun Club, a wave of nostalgia hit me.

  Everglades City is an ideal place for nostalgia. It looks like a little New England village built, strangely, between the Everglades and the Ten Thousand Islands back country. Time has eroded its population, gave and then took away a bank and a courthouse, but it has not burdened the village with that concrete-poured-to-form malignancy the modern builders call “progress.”

  Its sturdy wooden houses, yards perfectly kept, lifted themselves on pilings at the water’s edge, and the old globular streetlights still dotted the tree-lined avenues.

  “Ah, lovely, Yank, jest lovely. I kin see by yer face that this is a special place.”

  “It was,” I said simply.

  “Yer wife’s special place?”

  “Yes.”

  I saw the dark sadness that seemed always just beyond the Irishman’s eyes come to the forefront. It made his bearded face solemn and prophet-like.

  “Me wife an’ I had sech a place too. A wee bit of a cottage on Cayman’s west end called Frank’s Sound. I canna bear to go there now. I know how ye feel, Yank.”

  It was the first time he had ever mentioned having a wife. And the pain it caused him was evidence why.

  There are some things a man just doesn’t want to talk about.

  I said nothing.

  I pulled the Shamrock up to the gas docks of the grand brick-and-clapboard Rod and Gun Club with its striped awnings, its palms, and long screened-in dining porch. There was an air of permanency about the place; an atmosphere of backcountry elegance. An old man came shuffling up, wheezing with some kind of respiratory problem. I told him to top off the tank of the Shamrock, and handed up the near-empty six-gallon can for the Whaler we had left behind.

  “Can we leave our boat here while we have lunch and do some shopping?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “Would you know if they might have some stone crab left over from the season?”

  “I’m not sure, sir. But we just got some fine pompano in.”

  We walked across the lawn of the Rod and Gun Club and along the empty summer streets to the town’s little general store. Two little blond boys in T-shirts and jeans sat outside on the steps, their upper lips purple with grape Nehi. The store had the few things I needed—minus the pilot’s chair, of course. I paid the nice lady and exchanged comments on the weather, and we walked back out into the gathering June heat.

  A stray setter went trotting by, and the smell of jasmine was heavy in the morning air. The juxtaposition of the two made me think, strangely, of Saxan. I wondered what she was doing at that moment; pictured her going over her reports, the core of vulnerability now well buried on that island without men. She had gotten to me. I couldn’t deny that—especially to myself. What had she said?: “Have you ever felt as if you know everything about someone, but really don’t know him at all?”

  It was as if she had spoken my own innermost thoughts.

  About her.

  We strolled down the middle of the empty streets, past the little playground, to General Telephone’s sterile and incongruous transmission outpost. For this blight, the village received in return a brace of pay phones. The first person I called was Norm Fizer in Washington, my own private link to the federal bureaucracy.

  He said that the wife and kids were fine, and that D.C. was sweltering and, no, he hadn’t done any fishing. The pleasantries thus out of the way, I asked him the few things I wanted to know.

  “Boats exploding?” He seemed surprised. “I may have heard something about it—but the Coast Guard is handling that, right? And by the way, what in the hell was that business about them arresting you? I had half a mind to let them haul you away.”

  “It’s a long story, Stormin’ Norm. I appreciated your help, though.”

  “So why the interest in these boats? Are you desperate for another assignment? Because, if you are . . .”

  “Hey, I’m on vacation, remember? Just a little natural curiosity, that’s all. Say, can you have your computers check out some people for me?”

  Westy was listening while I talked. He seemed especially surprised at one of the names I gave Fizer. After I had thanked Norm and promised to call him back in a day or two, I hung up. Westy was giving me a quizzical look.

  “Brother MacMorgan, you dunna possibly think that . . .”

  “Some things just don’t add up, Westy. It can’t hurt to check out everybody.” />
  I borrowed some more change from the Irishman and turned to the phone again. Barbara had said that SELF’s newest benefactor lived on Sanibel Island. Sanibel is one of the more popular vacation spots on Florida’s west coast because of its shells, and because the condominium maniacs haven’t been allowed to build their highrises any damn way they want—yet. The Florida builder has to possess one of the strangest of mentalities. He gauges his success by the sheer mass of excretions he drops within the communal nest; gleefully weighing his bankbook against the architectural putrescences with which he inexorably transforms and finally destroys his own homeland.

  They really are a strange breed. And Sanibel is one of the few places in Florida where they have been even slightly restrained.

  So I called a friend of mine on that crustacean-shaped island: Mack Hamby, who runs Tarpon Bay Marina there. Mack is an amazing guy. He gave up a top position in a massive banking corporation to spend his days dealing with the things he enjoys: shells, boats, fishing, and a select band of raving independents and humorists he employs.

  Mack collects paintings of clowns for his house. And he gives jobs to those who have never been painted.

  Mack is always trying to hire me.

  “MacMorgan! Have you finally gotten smart and decided to come and guide out of Tarpon Bay?”

  “Can’t, Mack. Business is too good in Key West.”

  “You’re always worrying about the little things, Dusky. It’s only money.” He chuckled sagaciously. Being an honest to God financial wizard, Mack likes to joke about money.

  “Look, Mack, I need some help.”

  “Tarpon Bay is open three hundred and sixty-five days a year just to serve, Dusky. What’s up?”

  ‘There’s a woman up there named Abhner. She’s supposed to be kind of a feminist.”

  “MacMorgan, my interest in feminists began to smolder when those ladies stopped burning their bras. Besides, my beautiful wife says I’m a hopeless chauvinist.”

  “And Eleanor is right as always. Look, Mack, this woman is supposed to be pretty active in causes. I’m told she wears lots of big hats and flowing dresses. I want to find out what I can about her. Have you ever seen her?”