Elmo lasted two years at Georgia before he was thrown out. He came back with a big red convertible and money in his pocket. The sheriff at that time had been Pete Nambo, a solemn brutal man who believed that a Bliss was a Bliss, no matter how many times one of them had had his name on the sports page.
When Elmo didn’t have enough money left to pay his fine when Nambo arrested him the third time, the sentence was ninety days. Nambo put Bliss right onto one of the county road gangs, swinging a brush hook right through the heat of summer, living on beans, side meat and chicory coffee. And each evening, after the truck brought them back, if Nambo felt like it and had the energy, he’d have two deputies bring Elmo to him and he would work him over in an attempt to break him and make him beg. Nambo had learned he could break on the average of one out of every three Blisses he could give his personal attention to, and he had to find out which variety he had available this time. Not one of Elmo’s avid fans from the old days came to his rescue.
When Elmo was released it was an even-money bet around town as to whether he’d take off for some friendlier place, or stay around and get into more trouble. But he sold his red car and apparently tucked the money away, and went to work as a rough carpenter. He kept his mouth shut, stayed out of bars, and ceased to be an object of any public interest. It wasn’t long before he became construction foreman for old Will Maroney. Then he made some sort of complicated deal whereby he took a spec house off Will’s hands. After he dressed it up and sold it quickly, the little firm became Maroney and Bliss. They tackled a bigger job than Will had ever attempted alone, and when they had made out well on it, suddenly Elmo broke with Maroney and went ahead on his own, calling himself The Bliss Construction Company (“Live in a Home of Bliss”), and Will Maroney went around town cursing Elmo for having walked off with the four top men out of his work crew, men who had been with him for many years.
The wise businessmen of Palm City said that Elmo was going to fold any minute, and all his creditors were going to take a beating. They said he was moving too fast, buying too many vehicles and too much equipment, taking on too many jobs, expanding his work crews too fast, doing too much damn-fool advertising.
But he didn’t fold. As soon as it was obvious to him, as it would soon be obvious to the rest of the community, that he was over the hump and in the clear, he married one of the Boushant girls, Dellie, the next to the youngest. There were seven of them. Felicia, Margo, Ceil, Belle, Frannie, Dellie and Tish. They had all been born and raised in the big house out on Lemon Ridge Road. Their father had been a carnival concessionaire, their mother — until she got too heavy too young — a wire walker.
Not one of the seven girls could have been called a beauty, but they were uniformly attractive, all with vivacity, humor, their own brand of pride, and a good sense of style. They were affectionate, amorous, fun-loving, warm-blooded girls, and perhaps because there were so many of them, their reputation was a little more florid than their deeds warranted. Over the years of their girlhood, a thousand different cars must have turned in at that dusty driveway to pick one or the other of them up.
One by one, starting at the top, they eventually married, soundly but not advantageously, married sober, reliable electricians, delivery men, mechanics, and began at once to bear them healthy lively children.
In high school and during college vacations Elmo had dated several of the Boushant girls, and at the time of his marriage one of the sniggering jokes around town was that he had sampled every one of them and settled for the one with the most talent. Jimmy Wing suspected this was a partial truth. Elmo would have been too young for Felicia, and possibly too young for Margo. And too old for Tish. But a judicious weighing of all the factors of opportunity and inclination made it reasonable to assume Elmo Bliss had enjoyed three of his wife’s elder sisters. He had gone with Ceil for a little while when he was in high school, and been seen often with Belle during the first summer of college, and had been dating Frannie at the time Sheriff Pete Nambo locked him up.
Also, Jimmy could remember the tone and expression of awe with which a local rancher had once described to him the young manhood of Elmo Bliss: “There was three or four of them, Elmo the leader, roarin’ up and down this coast a hundred miles an hour any night of the week, all over Collier, Lee and Charlotte Counties, as well as Palm County, and inland to Hendry and Glades. I tried to run with them for a while there, but it like to wore me down. That Elmo, he’d do any damn thing come into his head. I’d say you could count on two fights a night anyway, and you could sure count on women because that’s what Elmo was mostly hunting for. Lord God, the women! I’m telling you, Jimmy, he could find them where they wasn’t. Schoolgirls, tourist ladies, waitresses, nurses, schoolteachers, all kind of shapes and sizes and ages, and we’d bundle them into the cars and go off, slamming down them little back roads, singin’, drinkin’, the girls squealin’, and it seemed like we couldn’t be anyplace in six counties where Elmo didn’t know someplace nearby where we could take them. Anything warm, breathing and with a skirt on, Elmo seemed to get it without anywhere near the amount of fuss you’d expect.”
So when Elmo married Dellie Boushant, and moved out to the big old house on the Lemon Ridge Road, the people decided he was settling for a smaller future than some had begun to predict for him. He would be just another of the men who had married Boushant girls. Many of the successful men in Palm County had, in times past, dated one or another of the Boushant girls, but successful men had not married them.
So Elmo had married Dellie and moved out into the old house, and she had begun the bearing of his children; there were six of them now, ranging from thirteen down to two. Nowadays people pointed to Elmo’s marriage to Dellie as part of his luck and part of his success. Either the times had changed, or Elmo had changed them to suit himself.
Jimmy knew the story of how Elmo had acquired the big house and the sixty acres around it, and he suspected it was true. After Elmo had been married to Dellie a little over two years — she was twenty then and he was eight years older — Mama Boushant had dropped dead in her own kitchen, willing equal shares in the house and land to her seven daughters. Elmo was overextended at the time, so nobody knew quite how he managed it. At the conference there were thirteen of them at the huge dining room table, six daughters, six husbands and Tish, the unmarried one. They say Elmo let the arguments run on for an hour before he took the money out of his pocket, ninety bills, one hundred dollars each. As he started counting it into six separate piles, fifteen bills in each pile, the angry talk died away and for most of the counting there was a complete silence. Elmo said, “You sign the release, and then you pick up the money, in that order. If there’s just one who won’t sign, the deal is off for the rest of you.”
Steve Lupak, Belle’s husband, put up the biggest argument, saying the land was worth an absolute minimum of two hundred an acre, which would bring it up to twelve thousand even without the house. That started the rest of them off. Elmo leaned back with his eyes half closed, almost smiling, refusing to answer any of them. They appealed to Dellie, trying to make her admit it was unfair. But she sat close beside Elmo, placid and loving and heavy with her second child, the one who would be named Annabelle. By eleven Belle and Felicia were the only holdouts. By midnight Belle and Steve still fought it. By half past midnight they too gave up, and it was Elmo’s house from then on.
Jimmy Wing had talked about that arrangement with Frannie Boushant a little over two years ago. Frannie Vernon, her name was at that time. It had come about in an unplanned way. He had known her in high school — she was two classes behind him — but had never dated her. He ran into her by accident in Miami. Borklund had sent him over to cover a Citrus Commission hearing. He had driven over, and when the hearing had been adjourned at four, he had phoned his story in and had been advised by Borklund that he might as well stay over and cover the session scheduled for the following day.