A year or so after she had stolidly, quietly put herself back together, she had started seeing Brian Haas, and they had married. It was, as Shannard had said, a mating of survivors, the way two travelers on a lonely journey might join together to share food, hardship and shelter. But any closeness which endures, no matter how guarded it may have been in the beginning, creates its own necessities, confirms its own new image, establishes its vulnerabilities.
Jimmy Wing knew he had become more of a friend of the marriage than a friend of either of them as individuals. He was a factor in the relationship, one measurable aspect of the balance they had achieved. From Bri, and with Jimmy’s help, she had learned the art and pleasure of good talk. And from Nan, Bri had learned of the aspects of life which need not be complicated by introspection — a long walk, a swim, a picnic beach, making love. She soothed him and he made her feel alive, and so convenience became slowly transmuted into necessity.
She was receptionist-bookkeeper for a dentist in one of the offices in the building in front of their apartment. On their combined salaries they lived quietly and comfortably. Their sole extravagance was The Itch, a stubby, shallow-draft Bahamian ketch of great antiquity and, except for a temperamental auxiliary engine, great reliability.
She brought him the coffee and sat on a bamboo hassock near the tiny fireplace and said, “It’s so damn airless tonight. Did you hear the thunder a while back? I could see the lightning out over the Gulf. It’s crazy not to have any rain this time of year.”
“What do you think started him off?”
“God knows, Jimmy. Anything or nothing. I’ve been going over the past week or so. I can’t think of anything specific. How has he been down at the newspaper?”
“Perfectly okay.”
“I just hope he didn’t drive out of town. I’m glad you stopped, Jimmy. I wouldn’t want anybody else here. I couldn’t talk about it to anybody else.” There was a look of wryness in her smile. “Whenever we need you, you seem to show up. I guess that’s the best kind of friend there is.”
“All I’m doing is drinking your coffee, Nan.”
“That’s all you have to do. If you came in here all terribly concerned and full of warmth and pity and so on, I think it would start me crying. Isn’t that a hell of a thing? And I’d cry because I’m more mad than anything else. I’m mad at him and I shouldn’t be. It’s like he can’t go very long having things be right. He has to spoil them.”
“Not on purpose.”
“No. But it’s as if it was on purpose. For the last year things have been pretty good.”
“I know.”
“Better than either of us deserve, I guess.”
“Could that be part of it, Nan? He spoils it because he thinks he doesn’t deserve it? Self-punishment for guilt.”
She shrugged. “Everybody feels guilty. It took me a long time to find that out. It doesn’t matter how big or how little the thing is they feel guilty about, the guilt seems to add up about the same. And not everybody is a drunk. So where does that leave you?”
He smiled at her. “Interesting proposition, woman. No matter what I do, I won’t feel any more or any less guilty?”
“You can’t do things you aren’t capable of doing.”
“What if my capacity changes?”
“Nobody’s ever does, really. Anyhow, that’s Bri’s theory. He says you can change your stripes in a lot of ways that don’t really count very much, but when it comes to sin, everybody has a built-in limitation.”
“So nobody can ever corrupt anybody?”
“Only if they’re ready. Or, I guess, terribly young, so young they don’t know what’s happening.”
He did not reply. Suddenly he did not care to follow that line of speculation any further. It was making him think about Gloria, and he did not know why. It was always easier not to think about Gloria. The wall-to-wall floor covering was of pale gray raffia squares. He put an imaginary knight on the square nearest his right foot and, using the knight’s eccentric move, marched it to the square nearest her bare feet, then over to the kitchen doorway, across to the foot of the narrow staircase, and back to the original square where it had begun.
“Jimmy.”
He looked at her and saw the tears standing in her eyes. “Yes?”
“I can’t afford to lose much more, you know. I can’t afford to lose this now.”
“You won’t.”
“It scares me. I didn’t want to ever have anything again I could give a damn about. I don’t really know how I got so far into this. I didn’t want to. Now, instead of thinking about him, I’m thinking about me, what I can stand, and what I can’t stand.”
“Now, Nan.”
“I just wanted to... to sort of watch, and not be a part of anything.” The tears began to spill.
Over the sound of the fan he heard a car outside. She got up quickly and hurried to the door. He followed her out.
“We got him,” a man said.
“Thank God!” Nan said.
“It’ll be easier getting him out this side, Joe.”
Jimmy Wing hurried to help the two men with him. Brian Haas was a big man. He was semiconscious, incapable of standing. They got him out of the car, supporting him on either side. The light from the apartment illuminated his face. It had a mindless slackness. The long scar down his left cheek seemed more apparent in that light. He smelled of whiskey and vomit and made a mumbling, droning sound. They got him into the house and up the narrow stairway.
“Where was he?” Nan asked. “Where’s our car?”
“He was down at the end of Sandy Key, down at Turk’s Pass,” one of the men said. “He drove into the sand and got stuck. He was lying in the sand beside the car. We’ll get it back to you.”
They offered to stay, but Nan told them she would manage. They arranged for someone to come and stay with him the next day while she was at work.
After the men had left, and Jimmy and Nan had gotten Brian to bed, he went into a deep sleep. She touched a red abrasion on his chin and said, “Somebody hit him or he fell. Can you cover for him tomorrow?”
“Sure. Can he make it back by Saturday, though?”
“He has Saturday off this week. He’ll feel like death tomorrow. But he’ll be able to make it all right by Sunday noon... if this is the end of it... if he’s gone as far as he has to. He’ll claim it’s all over. But I won’t know. I don’t think it will be over. It would be too quick.”
“I’ll stop by tomorrow, if you think it would be a good thing to do.”
“Call me first, Jimmy. I’ll be running over here every little while. I’ll know how things are. I wonder how much he had.”
She walked out to his car with him. “Thanks for letting me know. Thanks for stopping by. Maybe it will be all right. Maybe it’s just one little slip, Jimmy, this time.”
Six
On Friday at a few minutes after five, Colonel Thomas Lamson Jennings opened the meeting of the Executive Committee of Save Our Bays, Inc. The meeting was held in the large living room of Colonel Jennings’ bay-front home. The colonel was in his middle sixties, a lean, emphatic and totally bald man, whose height of forehead and steel-framed glasses gave him a scholarly look. But he was sun-blackened to the hue of an old copper coin, agile, tough and muscular. Kat had seen him in old swim trunks, stalking the mud flats with a throw net, tireless as any Calusa Indian who had stalked the same flats long ago. And she had seen him in the full heat of the midday sun, working with a peasant diligence in his garden beside his Chinese wife, Melissa.