“Let’s just take him on out,” somebody said in a complaining tone. The others hushed him.
Jimmy Wing could feel no effect from his drinks. At times his throat would feel constricted and the back of his neck would feel icy. But it would go away, and he would feel capable of making bad jokes. He would manage something very flashy, agile, gallant. He would flee the lumbering pack, wearing the sparkling, infectious grin of the hero, disappearing like magic into the hot dark night, leaving an echo of his jeering laugh.
He picked up his change with great care. He left a tip for Harry. He turned slowly on the bar stool and looked at them. Several faces were familiar. He smiled at them all and nodded his head several times.
“Elmo Bliss is a monster,” he said, articulating loudly and distinctly. There was no answer. “He is a smiler. He is a thief. He does cheap favors for meatballs like you, so you vote for him and pack his pockets with money. It’s a good thing you love him so dearly, boys. I fixed his wagon. He’s going to be your neighbor for the rest of his life.”
He made a sudden dash for the door. He felt as if he was running in slow motion. They were coming after him, but it did not feel like pursuit. It felt as if he were leading them. Just beyond the door his arms were grabbed. There was a man on each side of him. The power of their grip made him gasp. It took the strength out of him. He felt as if he were a ridiculous rag doll.
Then they were trotting him along, around the side of the building and down a narrow dark area. He heard the sounds of their feet, and heard them panting as they jogged along with him. They were in grass, and then on boards, and then up against the back wall of something that stank of fish.
“Now make him last,” somebody said softly, “or there’ll be some people getting no turn at all.”
The world slipped abruptly, and hammered his face. He was lifted and jounced, he was danced and dandled as the thuds landed, the sky burst and rocked, as his mouth swung loose and his heart flapped free. He bounced to their gruntings and tried to laugh, but they gave him no time, and the world turned gray and slowly moved away from him, like a holiday ship leaving a small broken wharf.
Twenty-five
By January, as the new tourist season began to approach its peak, the Grassy Bay fill was beginning to take shape. The drag lines waddled above the shallows, atop the dikes they built as they moved. The big dredges worked around the clock. By the outlets of the big pipes, where the dredges spewed their black foam of water and bay bottom, the gulls and the children herded, to snatch the living shells and the small fish.
The value of all property in the area zoned commercial went up in anticipation of the new community which would be built upon the marl.
On a cold day in late January, Jimmy Wing walked out of the hospital into the tug and bluster of a northwest wind. He carried a small canvas airlines bag. As he started walking slowly toward the corner where he could catch a bus, somebody called his name. He turned and saw Elmo Bliss in a pickup truck. Wing hesitated and then went to the truck. Elmo leaned across and shoved the door open for him.
“Get on in here, Jim.”
He got in out of the wind and pulled the door shut. Elmo gave him a cigarette.
“You waiting for somebody?” Jimmy asked.
“Waiting for you. I heard you were getting out today. They didn’t keep you long this time, boy.”
“Not so much damage this time.”
“Turn so I can see you better. Damn if you haven’t got your face messed up for good. Jimmy, God damn you, what are you trying to do to me?”
“I’m not trying to do anything to you, Elmo.”
“You trying to prove something?”
“I don’t really know.”
“What you’re doing isn’t making any sense to anybody. You should know by now you go down to Everset and bad-mouth me down there, you’re going to get the ass knocked right off you ever’ time. Twice you went down there and twice you got half killed and put in the hospital. Then you went to Jacksonville and I thought we were shut of you. But you have to come back and go down there again and get whipped again. Why didn’t you stay in Jacksonville?”
“I got homesick, Elmo.”
“You can’t get no suitable kind of work here.”
“Why are you worried about me, Elmo?”
“Don’t you know I could have had you killed, you silly bastard?”
Jimmy Wing shrugged and sighed. “A lot of people knew that, Elmo, knowing how I cut you down to county size before you got a really good start. And so a lot of people were watching to see if I turned up missing. Then they’d have known I was on the bottom of the Gulf or down on the floor of some swamp. But if you let me walk around loose, the idea could get around that I’d done you no real harm. People would begin to say I’d made the whole thing up.”
Elmo’s voice went up a half octave. “But I was fixing to let you walk around loose, Jim boy! But you keep going down to Everset where they vote strong for me, and people are thinking it’s me getting you beat half to death every once in a while.”
“Then you’re not really worried about me, Elmo. You just don’t want me keeping the memory green.”
“What the hell do you want, Jim? I got Darse Coombs run out of the area. People are forgetting fast. I want they should have a chance to forget the whole damn thing. What the hell do you want me to do?”
Jimmy Wing turned his battered face toward Elmo. He laughed abruptly and harshly. “This is pretty funny, Commissioner, or whatever the title is these days. You’re a big man. A good business, a big family, big house, lots of weight and muscle. And I haven’t got a car, a house or a job. Why should a big man like you have to ask me anything? People like me, you can buy us or scare us, can’t you?”
“You wouldn’t stay bought, boy.”
“Think you can scare me?”
Elmo studied him for a moment. “I think I could have, last summer maybe. But now I got an idea it can’t be done. A man has something he can’t stand the thought of losing, that man you can scare. What I want to know is, are you going to go look for any more trouble?”
“I just don’t know, Elmo. I just couldn’t say right now. It may happen like this. I’ll get another little job like the last one I had. Rough carpenter work, or kitchen help, so I can give my sister something toward my room and board. And some night I may go home and sit and start thinking about just how much of a cold-hearted son of a bitch you are, and then I might get the urge to get on a bus and go down to Wister or Everset and give a few speeches around about you.”
“But you don’t really know?”
“Not at the moment, Elmo.”
“A thousand dollars cash money would take you a long way from here.”
“I tried going away and I didn’t like it.”
“You want a foreman job? I can break you in on foundations, forms and finishing and block work.”
“I tried working for you one time, remember.”
Elmo banged his fist against the steering wheel. “Damn you, Jimmy Wing, you force my hand. I can’t let this go on. You got folks laughing at me. There’s other people trying to talk too much just because you get away with it. Now, you know I can’t stand for that. I thought of two ways to stop it. One way, I spread the word nobody touches you, no matter what you say. But I thought that over, and I don’t like it. You’d keep right on talking.”
“Probably.”
“So I got to do something that actual turns my stomach to think on it. But you’re forcing me into it. I know you have nothing to do any more with the people you were close to. But they must mean some little thing to you. The very next time you get yourself put in the hospital making a fool out of me, you just take a look around and you’ll see some familiar faces under them bandages. For a starter it will be Haas and his wife and the Hubble woman, and maybe Mitchie McClure. And if you don’t learn from that, the list will be longer the next time.”