“You see? You have proved your weakness beautifully with your own words. Is being a nonentity the only alternative to what you’re becoming? For heaven’s sake, can’t you exploit your own talents in your own way for your own good?”
I had stopped outside the screen door, and I was suddenly aware that I was deliberately listening. I was a little ashamed, but not much. In the interval of silence that now fell, I knocked quickly and was told by Jerome Quintin to come in. I opened the door and crossed the porch and went into the cottage and put the bag of cubes on a table.
“I hope these will hold you until your own have time to freeze,” I said.
“That’s more than enough,” Quintin said. “Thanks very much.”
Two bottles were sitting on the cabinet by the sink in the kitchen area. He took three glasses from a shelf above and put ice cubes in the glasses.
“You’ll have a drink with us, of course,” he said.
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’d better get back.”
“Nonsense. Surely you can take time for a drink. We’d be pleased to have you join us, wouldn’t we, Laura?”
“Yes, of course,” Laura Quintin said. “Please do.”
She said it promptly and nicely, but it obviously made no difference to her, one way or the other. The quality of anger was no longer in her voice, but it was cold and rigidly contained.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll have one with you.”
“Good. Bourbon or scotch?”
“Bourbon.”
“Straight?”
“A little tap water, please,” I answered.
He poured bourbon over ice in one of the glasses and added water. He repeated the operation with the other glasses, using scotch instead of bourbon. Afterward he distributed the drinks, and Laura took hers first and swallowed some of it instantly without ceremony. I lifted my own in a small salute to Quintin for his hospitality. It was a strong drink of good whisky.
“I think,” Laura said, “that I’ll drink a great many of these tonight. It seems to me like a good night to drink lots and lots of scotch.”
She drained her glass quickly, as if it were so much water, and got up immediately and began mixing another drink. Jerome Quintin laughed and shrugged it off lightly. I had a feeling that he was furious, but it was only a feeling without any evidence of expression in his face or voice.
“Laura doesn’t particularly care for fishing trips,” he said.
“He’s wrong,” Laura said. “It is only this particular fishing trip that I don’t care for.”
“Laura’s feeling sorry for herself at the moment,” Quintin said. “You must excuse her.”
“He’s wrong again,” she said. “It’s him I’m feeling sorry for.”
They were talking through me again, as they had before, and I didn’t like it. I took another swallow of my drink and thought I’d finish it quickly and get out of there.
“Will you tell me something, Mr. Laird?” Quintin said.
“If I can,” I said.
“Do you expect to become governor of this state?”
“No.”
“If you did become governor of this state, would you consider it an accomplishment of some merit?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it so happens that I do expect to become governor of this state, Mr. Laird. In a short while, as you’ll see, I shall become attorney general and in due time after that I shall become governor.”
“Congratulations.”
He had finished his drink and was fixing another. Watching the pair of them, Jerome and Laura Quintin in their queer cold conflict, I became aware of something that I’d missed before. They’d been working on the scotch warm, before the ice came. They were both already a little drunk, quietly and bitterly.
“Thank you, Mr. Laird,” he said. “It may interest you to know, however, that Laura does not share your feeling about the significance of being governor. Would you believe it? She seems to feel that it would somehow be degrading to be governor.”
“He’ll never be governor,” Laura said.
“Of course I’ll be governor. It’s all set, Mr. Laird. Long range planning, you know.”
“No. He’ll never be attorney general, and he’ll never be governor. Dan Grimes will be attorney general, and Dan Grimes will be governor. Jerome Quintin will be nothing.”
“She’s talking too much,” Quintin said. “You’ll please pardon her, Mr. Laird.”
She drank from her glass and looked at me levelly over the rim.
“Yes,” she said, “you’ll please pardon me, Mr. Laird. I’ve been attending a wake for a long time, and I’m a little drunk on scotch and grief. I’m in mourning for a man I knew once and loved. A young lawyer I helped put through law school. He was brilliant, and I thought he had integrity, and I admired him in addition to loving him, but he died. He died of corruption, and he’s dead, and he’ll be buried in the state capitol.”
Quintin stood looking into his glass until she’d finished. Then, without looking at her or me, he simply walked out of the room onto the porch and stood looking out through the screen and the gathering shadows beneath the trees to the darkening surface of the lake.
“I’d better go,” I said. “Thanks very much for the drink.”
“You’re quite welcome,” Laura Quintin said.
I set my glass carefully on the table and went out behind Quintin. He didn’t turn or speak as I opened the screen door quietly and left.
As I crossed in front of the Boniface cottage, Rita Boniface spoke to me from the shadows. I stopped and looked up and saw her dimly on the other side of the screen.
“Come in and have a drink with me,” she said.
“I just had a drink,” I said.
“Come in and have another.”
“If you don’t mind, I won’t.”
“I do mind, however. If you just had a drink, you must have had it with my dreary friends, the Quintins. I demand equal consideration.”
“As a paying guest,” I said, “I guess you’re entitled to it.”
I went up onto the porch. She was standing there in the shadows, but when I entered she turned and went inside, and I followed.
“You don’t sound as if you like the Quintins much,” I said.
“You’re wrong,” she said. “I don’t like them any. Not one bit.”
“To me,” I said, “they seem like a reasonably nice couple having a little reasonably normal trouble.”
“Do you think so?” she said. “How tolerant of you. Never mind, though. The bottle’s on the cabinet.”
Beside the bottle was the glass she’d been using. Two small pieces of ice were floating in the bottom in about a quarter of an inch of water. I emptied the glass in the sink and I rinsed it and made a fresh drink in it. I mixed another for myself in another glass, and then she came over to me, moving out of the light of a small lamp into the fringe shadows of the kitchen area. Taking her glass and drinking from it, she made a face and immediately poured some of the liquid into the sink. She filled the glass again from the bottle.
“You make a very poor drink, Mr. Laird,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Will you have a little more whisky in yours?”
“No, thanks. This suits me.”
“Really? I can’t understand how anyone can tolerate a weak drink. A good strong drink is what I like.”
“I see it is.”
“You needn’t look concerned, however. It’s perfectly all right. I have a remarkable capacity for alcohol.”
“I’m glad to know it.”
“It’s kind of a gift or something. Some people have a capacity for it, and some people don’t, and you’d be surprised who some of the people are who don’t. Do you realize that it’s practically impossible to judge a person’s capacity from his appearance?”
“I’ve never thought about it.”
“It is, I assure you. Take Dan Grimes, for instance. You wouldn’t think a man so big and strong and important as Dan would have practically no capacity at all for alcohol, but it’s true. That’s why he never drinks except when he’s with friends where it won’t make any difference. He always gets drunk almost immediately, and the next thing you know he’s getting sick and passing out. What I mean is, he’s susceptible. Are you susceptible, Mr. Laird?”
“I don’t drink much.”
“How unfortunate. It might make you more entertaining if you did. Are you susceptible to anything else in particular?”
She was standing very close to me, and I could smell the astringent sweetness of her perfume, and feel on my face as she talked the moist warmth of her breath. All at once she put an arm around my neck and put her lips on mine, kissing me slowly. There was a suggestion of a taunt in the way she took her time. I stood quietly with the glass in my right hand, the left hand empty behind her back and carefully not touching her, and after awhile she stepped back past the empty hand and leaned against the cabinet and began to laugh softly as if she were genuinely amused.
“You are also a very poor kisser, Mr. Laird,” she said. “You make a poor drink, and you kiss a poor kiss.”
“I guess I just have no talent,” I said.
“It’s possible. On the other hand, it’s possible that you’re merely undeveloped. You might improve with experience.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
From the lake came the strong, sweet sound of a motor-boat moving pretty fast. The sound moved from the main channel past the point and into the arm.
“It’s Ira and Dan,” Rita Boniface said.
“Sounds like it,” I said.
I finished my drink and set the glass on the table. Turning toward the door, I saw clearly in the light of the lamp something I had not seen before. It was a shoulder harness, complete with .38 automatic, and it was lying in a casual way across the foot of the bed like nothing more than a discarded shirt. I stopped and stared at it, feeling a cold and heavy congealing of the uneasiness that had been gathering inside me ever since the arrival of these odd people that I did not understand and did not like. I wished that they had not come, or that they would, having come, go away again at once.
“What a pretty toy,” I said.
“The gun? It’s Ira’s.”
“Is it part of his ordinary equipment?”
“It is when he goes anywhere with Dan Grimes, and he’s going somewhere with Dan practically all the time.”
“You mean he’s Grimes’s bodyguard?”
“That’s one of the things he is. Ira’s a number of things that might surprise you. He’s a capable guy.”
“I got that impression.”
“He’s a very capable guy, and he’s mine. Don’t be fooled because I try to entertain myself when I’m bored. Ira’s number one.”
“With you and Grimes both?”
“That’s right. With me and Dan and others too. As I said, where Dan goes, Ira usually goes.” She paused, and I could hear her breathing, the sound of it suddenly slow and deep and measured in the room. “Maybe soon,” she said softly, as if I were no longer there and she were speaking only to herself, “Dan will go somewhere without Ira, and there will only be Ira left.”
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said. “I was just thinking.”
The boat had pulled up to the dock, and I went outside and walked a few steps down the slope and waited. Dan Grimes and Ira Boniface came up the slope toward me. Grimes was walking a little in advance, and he was carrying a metal stringer with half a dozen bass hanging from it. He held the string up for me to see, and it was plain that he was feeling exhilarated by his luck.
“What do you think of these?” he said.
“They’re beauties,” I said.
They looked as if they’d weigh about three to five pounds each. There were two white bass and four black bass.
“You knew what you were talking about, all right,” he said. “The second cast I made, I got a good strike.”
“Did they give you a good fight?”
“Yes,” he said, “they fought hard.”
Rita Boniface had come after me out of the cottage. She lit a cigarette and stood looking at the bass without enthusiasm.
“I’m getting hungry,” she said.
“We’ll go get something to eat,” Grimes said. He turned back to me. “Where’s a good place to go, Laird? From now on, I’m taking your advice on everything.”
“There’s a place just where you turned off the highway onto the lake road,” I said. “They have good Kansas City steaks. Charcoal broiled.”
“Fine,” Grimes said. “How’s a KC charcoal broiled steak sound, Rita?”
“It sounds good,” Rita said. “Let’s go get it.”
She turned and started up the slope to the cottage, and Ira Boniface went after her.
“I’ll clean your bass and put them in the freezer,” I said.
“Will you do that?” Grimes handed me the string. “I’d appreciate it.”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Part of the service.”
“Next time anyone wants to know a good place to fish, I’ll know where to tell him.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” I said.
He went up the slope at an angle to his own cottage. There was a big stump of an oak on the slope between the cottage he was in and the one occupied by the Quintins. I used the stump for cleaning fish for guests, and now I got a knife and a scaler and cleaned the bass on the stump. I had just finished with the last bass when Grimes and the others came out of the cottages and drove away in the Chrysler wagon. It was almost as dark then as it would get, and there was a bright moon rising out of the lake.