He could remember her so clearly on another beach. Mouth that he had kissed. Eyes and throat that he had kissed.
A drunken little lady in her yellow slacks treading an uncertain path back along the night beach to where the invalid husband slept. Singing her small drunken songs in the night. Saying “Lay di ah” and “Doe di ah” in the parts where she couldn’t remember the lyrics. Walking there, with someone coming along behind her, swiftly. Or waiting for her in the black pine shadows, perhaps hearing the drunky song first and then seeing the pallor of the sweater and slacks against the November night.
There was one other memory of Jenna that was especially vivid. There had been a beach picnic and swimming by moonlight, down near Windy Pass. And a big fire that burned down the coals. There was an improvised game, selecting weird, comic futures for each member of the group. Jenna sat in Buddha pose, a boy’s jacket around her shoulders, the fire glow red on her face. The game had become more serious, with each person stating what they wanted to be. When it was Jenna’s turn she had looked almost broodingly at the dying fire, a strangely quiet Jenna, all vivacity gone for the moment.
“I guess I just want to be. I don’t want a choice, and be just one thing, one kind of person. I want all the choices.” She had jumped up, thrown the jacket aside, shoved Willy Reiser over onto his back with her bare foot, then raced for the water, with Willy after her, yelling horrid threats.
Alex looked at the unmarked beach where they had found her, and suddenly he felt a queasy crawling of the skin at the nape of his neck and the backs of his hands. An atavistic warning. He looked up and down the beach, but it was empty. Only the tan crab watched him, wary and patient.
chapter FOUR
THE NEXT MORNING was sultry and misty, with an oily gray Gulf and a slow gentle swell that curled and slapped the packed sand. At dawn he had heard the rush and thrash of game fish striking bait just off the beach, and so later he had driven over into town to Bolley’s Hardware and bought a cheap spinning outfit, and some white and yellow nylon dudes.
He was waited on by Cal Bolley, the son of the owner. Alex remembered Clem Bolley, the father, as a fat, sullen man, driven and harried by a neurotic wife with social ambitions. And he remembered Cal as a fat, shy boy, butt of cruel jokes. The shyness had congealed to sullenness.
“Hello, Cal.”
“Hello, Doyle.” No smile or offer of hand or flicker of response.
“Glad somebody recognized me.”
“Heard you were back in town. Over on the beach.”
“How’s your father?”
“Had a stroke. Hasn’t been out of bed for three years.” For the first time there was a flick of expression on the doughy face, a faint shadow of satisfaction, of a smothered glee.
“Sorry to hear it. I want to get a spinning rod.”
“Over here. It’ll have to be cash, Doyle. I don’t run a credit business.”
“It will be cash.”
He picked out what he wanted. Bolley deftly ran monofilament onto the reel spool, dropped the lures and swivels and leader into a small paper sack. On the other side of the store a clerk was demonstrating a floor fan to an old lady.
As Alex paid and received his change, he said, “You sure as hell give me a big welcome, Cal. Thanks.”
Cal Bolley stared at him. “Want I should hire a band? I can’t keep you people out of the store. I’ll take your money when you’ve got any. I don’t have to stand around and carry on a big conversation.”
As Alex walked to the door he was conscious of Bolley standing there, watching him, the piggy little eyes remote and suspicious.
After he got behind the wheel, he knew that there was something he had to do, and the longer he delayed it the more difficult it would become. He forced himself to drive to Palm Street. The old house had been painted not long ago, but it was the same color, cream with dark brown trim. He glanced up at the window which had been the window to his room, and went onto the porch and pushed the bell, stood looking through the screen into the dim hallway. It could well be like the response he had gotten from Cal. But this time it would hurt.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” he heard her say, and she came down the hall in a faded print dress, wiping her hands on her apron, a little sparrow of a woman with white hair, sharp features, an air of timeless nervous energy.
“Yes?” she said and looked up at him through the screen, and quite suddenly her face, broke, a shattering of delicate ancient glass. And for the first time he realized how lovely a girl Myra Ducklin must have been. She fumbled the screen open and tugged at him and pulled him into the hallway, and hugged him and made broken sounds against his chest that finally turned into an endless saying of his name. She pushed him away and, holding his arms, looked up into his face, trying through tears to smile at him in an accusing and disciplinary way.
“You never wrote!” she said in a shaky voice. “You never did write me one letter, Alex!”
“I tried, Aunt Myra. Honest to God, I tried!”
“Now no cussin’ in front of a church lady.” She clung to his hands. “You turned into a man, Alex. I guess nobody could call you handsome and I guess you know that. But you’ve got a good face, Alex. It’s a good strong face. Come in the sitting room. Oh, it’s so good to see you! It’s been so long. So terrible long.”
They went into the small, immaculate, old-fashioned parlor. She sat beside him on the couch and held his hand tightly and said, “There’s a big box in the attic. I packed it all up. The old papers and things from your folks and the photographs and all. And your school records and those sports things you won, and the clothes you left behind. I put moth crystals in. Everything is safe, but I guess it wasn’t much point, saving the clothes. Joe, he was going to throw everything out he was that mad, but I knew that wouldn’t be a Christian act.”
“I… I didn’t have any idea you’d be so glad to see me, Aunt Myra. I guess Joe wouldn’t have. I’m sorry about Joe.”
“You just don’t have much sense, Alex Doyle. That little trouble you had doesn’t have anything to do with love, and you should know that. When there’s love, the least you can do is give folks a chance to forgive, and you never even gave me a chance to go through the motions. I prayed for so long you’d come back, come to the door just like you did, and then I thought it would never happen and I guess I gave up praying. But there hasn’t been a day in all that time I haven’t thought about you and where you were and what you were doing. I’ll tell you, I loved Joe Ducklin every day of my life, but the way he carried on about you and getting them to arrest you and all, it was pretty hard to keep on loving. Somehow… after that happened, it wasn’t really ever the same between us. It was almost the same, but there was a little something gone. And that somehow made it worse when he died, Alex. I don’t know why but it did.”
“You make me ashamed of myself, Aunt Myra.”
“Now let’s not get carrying on, boy. I can see how you were terrible hurt, the way Joe did you. And a wife has to share the way people think about her husband. You did a real foolish thing and it looked like it was a mean thing, but I knew better on account I knew there was no meanness in you. It was strong drink that did it, and bad company. There was a wild bunch of young folk back then, and I can tell you they seem to get wilder every year, so you don’t know what the world is coming to, and sometimes I think it will take one of those terrible bombs to make things clean again, but that is blasphemous talk. You just make it up now by telling me everything you’ve done in all the years you’ve been gone, Alex. I got to keep holding onto your hand to keep making sure you’re here.”
“Aunt Myra, I wasn’t going to tell you this. But now I guess I should.” She listened intently while he told her, just as he had told Betty Larkin, about the robbery.
When he was through she bobbed her head and she said, “Oh, if I could just be sure Joe Ducklin could know about this!”
“I tried to tell him, Aunt Myra, over in the jail in Davis, but he didn�
�t feel like listening.”
She looked surprisingly fierce for a moment. “He wouldn’t let me go with him. And he never said a word about that. Not even on his dying bed did he have the… common decency to tell me anything about that. All I knew was you said you did it, boy, and they let you pick the army instead of jail. Well, it’s all over now, but when you think on it, isn’t it a terrible waste, boy? The things folks do to one another. I didn’t even ask you if you’re married!”
“I’m not married, Aunt Myra.”
“That’s no kind of life, Alex. Bad hours and bad food, and you turn into a fussy old bachelor. There’s some nice girls right here in town.”
“Don’t go so fast!”
“Now you tell me what you’ve been doing.”
He told her about the two wars, and far places. A young Negro woman, slim and pretty in a white uniform, came to the doorway and said nervously, “Miz Ducklin, I don’t want to bust in, but that Miz Stimson, she don’t look right to me. She breathing awful funny.”
“Excuse me, Alex,” Myra Ducklin said. She trotted off and he saw her hurrying up the hall staircase. She came down in a few moments and he heard her on the phone, apparently talking to a Dr. Kearnie, a name Alex did not recognize. She went back upstairs and was gone about ten minutes. The door buzzer sounded and the Negro girl admitted a young man with a medical satchel and a bold, unkempt black mustache.
A little later the doctor came down and used the phone and left. Myra came back into the parlor, looking tired and subdued.
“She died right after Dr. Kearnie got here. Old Mrs. Stimson. Ninety-one, she was. I won’t be able to visit now, Alex. I got to phone the family, and then Jeffry Brothers will be sending over to pick her up. And then I’ll have to visit with the other people I’ve got and cheer them up. They get awful low when somebody passes on.”
“I don’t understand, Aunt Myra. Is this a nursing home?”
“Licensed and everything,” she said, and looked slightly ashamed. Ever since he had entered the house he had been subconsciously disturbed by the elusive and unfamiliar odor of medication and that sick sweet undertone of illness.
“When Joe passed on, if I’d had any sense, I’d have sold out the store right away. But I tried to run it myself and I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew. So by the time I’d put most of the other money Joe left into it, I ended up having to sell it for less than I could have got in the first place. I like to keep busy. You know that. I’ve got two full-time girls to help with the cleaning and cooking and all, and one practical nurse, but she’s off sick right now.” She sighed, lowered her voice. “I know when I look at it square they’re here to die, but sometimes it takes a lot of getting used to. Where are you staying, Alex? I can’t even offer you a room. I turned that storeroom off behind the pantry into my bedroom. You aren’t going to take off right soon again, are you?”
He told her he was out on the beach, and he was staying for a time. She kissed him and beamed upon him and patted his shoulder, her eyes shiny. “You came back, finally. I guess I knew you would all along. You’ll have to come get that box of your stuff, boy.”
Doyle drove slowly back out to the beach. Now that he had seen her, he wondered how he could have been so wrong in his thinking about her for so many years. It had been pride, perhaps, that corrosive disease, which had prevented him from seeing the truth his heart was trying to tell him.
He changed to trunks and assembled the rod and walked out onto the beach. Something was feeding noisily about two hundred feet out. He waded until the water was above his waist and, after a half dozen attempts, he was able to put the lure where he wanted it. It was a pearly day with a look of mystery, and he could feel the heat of the hidden sun. It was a school of four-pound jacks, wolfing the demoralized minnows. He beached four and released them before the school broke off feeding. The physical contest eased his emotional turmoil, his deep sense of guilt. It was nearly noon when, after a hundred glances north along the beach, he saw someone on the beach in front of the Proctor cottage. And, in what he hoped was a casual way, he began to move up the beach, casting aimlessly.
The woman squatted on the wet sand, right at the surf line. She had an aluminum pot and she seemed to be grubbing in the sand with her hands. He realized that she was digging up coquinas, those tiny brightly patterned clams that can be found an inch or so beneath the surface of the wet sand on nearly all the Gulf beaches.
She was very sun-browned, a trim-bodied, good-sized woman in a blue two-piece swim suit in batik pattern. She had hair that had grayed almost to white, cropped short. The muscles moved smoothly in her arms and shoulders as she searched for the coquinas, and she sat on her heels without strain.
She seemed to be unaware of him. He moved to within ten feet of her while retrieving a cast, and then said, “Pardon me, ma’am.”
She looked up at him with obvious irritation. Her brows were heavy and jet black, her face angular, handsome. “Yes?” The voice was deep and rather husky.
“If you want to get those easy, you get you a piece of screen like they use sifting aggregate for concrete. You get a frame and props for it, and a shovel. And then you shovel that soupy sand against it and you’ll get all the coquinas you can use.”
“Thank you so much for your advice. I am not terribly interested in efficiency or speed. I prefer doing it this way.”
“Okay, ma’am. Sorry. They sure make a wonderful broth, you just simmer ’em long enough. Me, I like it best real cold with a little Worcestershire and tabasco.”
She returned to her task and did not answer. He cast again and retrieved the lure. “You must be staying here in the Proctor place, ma’am. Used to come here years back for Sunday school picnics. Miz Proctor, she was in charge of the whole Sunday school.”
She looked up at him with exasperation. “That’s all mildly interesting, I suppose, but I really don’t feel… chatty.”
“Just being neighborly. I’m two cottages down. Moved in yesterday. Name is Doyle. Alexander Doyle. Alex. Used to live here and I just came on back to see how the old place looks. Got homesick, I guess. First time in the States in three years. Down in Venezuela on construction jobs.”
Her face darkened under the tan. “You don’t seem to take a hint, Mr. Doyle. I understand that I can’t order you off this beach, at least that area below the high-tide line. I would if I could. I do not feel like talking to you. I do not feel like giving you the opportunity to work the conversation around to the point where you can indulge your idle curiosity by asking dull questions about the colonel.”
“Excuse me, ma’am, but I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. What colonel? I’m not curious about anything. I wasn’t working around to anything. I was just being friendly.”
She stood up, facing him. From her face he guessed she was in the middle forties. She had the body of a far younger woman. “This cottage is where Colonel M’Gann lives. I am his sister. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“Why, sure! It does now. I knew Jenna Larkin in high school. I missed the papers, being out of the country like I was, but folks here have told me about it. Honest, I didn’t know you people were in the Proctor place.”
“In that case, Mr. Doyle, I want you to accept my apology for being rude. We have both had a… bellyful of magazine people and would-be writers and amateur detectives and plain curiosity seekers. So we have become rather… antisocial. The traffic has dropped off considerably, but we still get a few—one tiresome little man just last week who had the gall to want to see the colonel to ask him if he could ghost write a book for my brother. I chased him away and he became quite abusive. Horrible teenagers have walked here on the beach, pretending to choke each other and fall dead.”
“Then if I was you, I’d move away. You’re just renting the place, aren’t you? Or did you buy it?”
“We’re renting it, and your suggestion is most valid. I would dearly love to move away from here. But the colonel insists on staying.�
�
“I’m not curious. Well, to be honest, I guess I am, a little. Anybody would be, naturally. But I don’t care enough about it to come around asking questions. I guess it was a bad thing for you people but the way I look at it, unless that Jenna Larkin changed a hell of a lot since when I knew her, I guess she wasn’t what you’d call a big loss. Hope I haven’t said the wrong thing.”
“You haven’t, Mr. Doyle. Indeed you haven’t! If any human being could be classified as worthless, Jenna could. And it is a terrible waste for my brother to keep on brooding about her. I hope I wasn’t too rude to you.”
“I don’t mind. I understand how you’d feel about people trying to strike up a conversation. As long as I’ll be a neighbor for a while, I just won’t talk about it to you at all.”
“That will be splendid, Mr. Doyle. You’re one of the few sympathetic people I’ve found in this… truly dreadful community. They seem more like animals down here than people, really. I don’t mean to offend you, of course.”
“I guess it’s because there isn’t much goes on here, and when something does, they like to make a big thing about it.”
Suddenly the gray surface of the water was torn and boiled just fifty feet away, and the small bait fish leaped in panic from predatory jaws. He cast beyond the area, yanked the dude into it, and felt the strike. He brought in a Spanish mackerel of about two and a half pounds. He tossed it up on the beach and caught two more of the same size before the disturbance was over.
“Welcome to two of those if you can use ’em,” Alex said. “One will do me. Mackerel. Good eating. They don’t so often work in this close.”
“You got them so quickly!”
“When they’re working, you get them quick.”
Deadly Welcome Page 5