“Up to Sanibel so we can look for shells.”
“The bugs will be fierce this time of year.”
“We’ll be plastered with goo.”
She went to the window and watched him back out and waved to him as he drove away. She walked thoughtfully to the kitchen and began to prepare dinner. She was aware of a little area of strangeness in her mind, elusive and unidentifiable. It was like trying to remember a name momentarily forgotten. There had been a strangeness at the Halleys, when the four of them had been on the back deck. She and Van had spent many hours there with Ross and Jackie. Today, for the first time, there had been four of them again, but the fourth person had been Jimmy instead of Van. She realized, with a merciless honesty, that the situation had made her resent Jimmy for being Jimmy rather than Van. There had been at least one time when there had been six of them on that deck on a night of cool moonlight, drinking wine and talking wonderful nonsense. Jimmy would have just as much right to resent her because she was not Gloria. There was one awkwardness on that clear evening long ago. Gloria had been recently released, and it was her first social evening since her release. It had made the conversation more guarded and selective than it might otherwise have been.
Now, of course, she was as remote, as unreachable as Van. Hers was a subtler form of death, but no less final. Which was easier, she wondered, the slow regression to that point where there was, at last, no communication at all, or the sudden brutal stunning departure? And she wondered if Jimmy had made this same comparison, and envied her.
Eleven
As Jimmy Wing crossed the causeway to the mainland there was a strange lemon light across the land. The rays of the setting sun were almost horizontal. Every surface facing the west was touched with this luminous glow in contrast with the blue shadows of dusk which lay against everything else. From time to time a fitful rain wind turned the leaves and died away.
On the car radio the seven-thirty newscaster said, “... three tenths of an inch recorded for Palm County, far below the normal rainfall for this time of year. The current temperature at County Airport is ninety degrees, relative humidity ninety-five percent, winds out of the southeast at three to five miles per hour...”
He turned the radio off so as to focus himself with no distraction upon a special textural memory of Kat. When he had turned back at her doorway, she was a step closer to him than he had expected, standing tall and near in the aquarium light of the living room, so close for an instant that the detected fragrance of her hair mingled with the imagined feel of it, sweet and harsh against his lips, and he had come all too close to reaching for her. Another collector’s item, he thought. Another image to file away.
He worked hard at his newsroom desk for an hour, and then walked down a dark block on Bayou Street to Vera’s Kitchen. He was starting to eat his sandwich when Bobby Nest came in and sat on a counter stool beside him. Bobby at eighteen concealed a fervent love for the newspaper business behind a pose of cynicism acquired from scores of movies and television shows. He had been the paper’s official correspondent at Riverway High School during the past year, and this summer Borklund, for very small money, had him doing routine sports, the city and county recreation program events, summer bowling and golf leagues, shuffle-board, tennis, pram races. In the fall Bobby would go away to school and Borklund would find another serf, equally eager. Bobby was a small wiry boy with big glasses and a surprisingly authoritative baritone voice. He wrote pounds of copy which was never printed.
“This girl’s old man is going to drive me nuts,” Bobby said.
“Teach you to mess with girls.”
“Who would mess with this one? She’s fourteen and she looks like a twenty-year-old Marine sergeant. I think she shaves, even. But she can belt a golf ball two hundred and forty yards. It’s her damn name, Jimmy. The Caroline is easy, but the last name is Smidt. S-m-i-d-t. I know how it’s spelled, for God’s sake. I print it in block letters. I put a note in the margin. But every time she wins something — not every time, but at least every other time — somebody decides it should be Smith or Schmidt or Smidth or some other goddam thing and then her old man calls up and chews out Jesus-Jesus and he chews me. There’s gremlins in that shop, Jimmy, honest to God.”
“Marry her and make her turn pro, Bobby. Nest is an easy name. And those gals make nice money.”
“Nest is the name but I’m not about to build one. I wish she’d pick up a bad slice or something, so I wouldn’t have to put her kook name in the paper.” He sighed. “She doesn’t seem to give a damn. It’s her old man. He taught her the game. And he can sure talk nasty. Just coffee and Danish, Mike, thanks.”
Jimmy Wing edited his next comment before he made it, then said, “Funny how unattractive most of those little girl athletes are. But some of them are worth staring at. Like that little water-skier, Burt Lesser’s daughter.”
“Frosty. Oh, sure. I think her real name is Frances Ann.”
“There’s the one for you, Bobby.”
“Not for me. She runs with a pack of rich kids. She’s only fifteen, I guess, but if you want her to look twice at you, you got to own a boat that will pull her all over the bay at forty miles an hour, and you’ve got to be seven feet tall and able to pick up the front end of a Buick.”
“Sounds like a description of her brother.”
“Jigger? I guess he could pick up the front end of a car. But he doesn’t run with the pack. He’s a year behind me at Riverway. He’s sort of a fink.”
“What does that mean?”
“He’s a loner. And he’s got a sarcastic way of speaking. He could make any team we’ve got, but he doesn’t go out for anything any more. He gets good grades. But he doesn’t mingle. You’re walking and he’s driving an empty car, he won’t even slow down. He isn’t the most popular kid around.”
“How does he make out with the girls?”
“That’s another thing. He doesn’t try. He’d have no trouble, but he doesn’t try. There’s some talk.”
“What kind?”
Bobby Nest looked uneasy. “I shouldn’t say anything because I don’t really know for sure. But you remember two years ago, the trouble at West Bay Junior High, the gay English teacher they had, and after one kid squealed, they found out there was a whole group of boys going over to the instructor’s place, you remember, Jimmy.”
“I remember. Was Jigger one of them?”
“He was there at the time. They tried to keep it quiet, the kids who got mixed up in that mess, their names. But that’s what they say about Jigger, that he was one of the group, and he’s a queer. This last spring two pretty husky guys tried to needle Jigger about it. They thought they could handle him, but they couldn’t. He cracked them up pretty good.”
“I guess the rumor must be wrong, Jimmy. This summer I’ve seen Jigger riding around with a pretty little dark-haired girl.”
“In the red Jag? I’ve seen him too. But I don’t know who she is. She looked pretty nice.” Bobby snickered. “I saw him twice with her, and the second time I saw him, he didn’t want me to. He slid way down in the seat, but he wasn’t quick enough.”
“Where was that?”
“You know that brand-new motel, set way back, where Bay Highway comes out onto the Tamiami Trail below Everset? The Drowsy Lady Motor House, very fancy?”
“Yes.”
“About a week and a half ago, when Jesse Gardner came down and gave the exhibition at Cabeza Knolls, he stayed there. He gave me a good interview, remember? Anyhow, he had to catch a real early flight so I agreed to go down there at dawn and pick him up and take him to the airport. I got there about twenty after five. He was in a unit in the building furthest back. You have to drive around behind it. Just as I went down the driveway to that building, the red Jag was coming out. It was just getting light. The girl was driving. Jigger didn’t duck quick enough. I guess he hasn’t got anything against girls.”