Bright Orange For The Shroud
John D. MacDonald
Travis McGee #6 Bright Orange For The Shroud
John D. MacDonald
One
ANOTHER SEASON was ending. The mid-May sun had a tropic sting against my bare shoulders. Sweat ran into my eyes. I had discovered an ugly little pocket of dry rot in the windshield corner of the panel of the topside controls on my houseboat, and after trying not to think about it for a week, I had dug out the tools, picked up some pieces of prime mahogany, and excised the area of infection with a saber saw.
Cutting and sanding the new pieces to fit was a finicky chore. Sawdust stuck to my sweaty chest and arms. I was sustained by an awareness of the cool dark bottles of Dos Equis beer in the stainless steel box below, and by the anticipation of trudging from Bahia Mar over to the public beach where a mild wind from the east was capping the deep blue swells with white.
Also I was sustained by the determination that this would be a slob summer for McGee. It wouldn’t be a gaudy summer. There wasn’t enough bread for that. But a careful husbanding of funds would see me through, leaving the emergency fund untapped, ready to finance some kind of an operation in the fall.
I needed a slob summer. The machine was abused. Softness at the waist. Tremor of the hands. Bad tastes in the morning. A heaviness of muscle and bone, a tendency to sigh. Each time you wonder, Can you get it back? The good toughness and bounce and tirelessness, the weight down to a rawhide two oh five, a nasty tendency to sing during the morning shower, the conviction each day will contain wondrous things?
And I wanted it to be a loner summer. There’d been too much damned yat-a-ta yak, fervid conversations, midnight plots, and dirty little violences for which I had been all too unprepared. The pink weal six inches below my armpit was a reminder of luck. If my foot hadn’t slipped exactly when it did…
A knife blade grating along a rib bone is a sound so ugly and so personal it can come right into your sleep and wake you up ten nights running.
I got a good fit on the biggest piece, drilled it, and was setting the long bronze screws home when I heard a tentative and hollow call from dockside.
“Trav? Hey, Trav? Hey McGee?”
I turned and walked to the aft end of my sundeck and looked down at the dock. A tall, frail, sallow-looking fellow in a wrinkled tan suit too large for him stared up at me with an anxious little smile that came and went-a mendicant smile, like dogs wear in the countries where they kick dogs.
“How are you, Trav?” he said.
And just as I was about to ask him who he was, I realized, with considerable shock, that it was Arthur Wilkinson, dreadfully changed.
“Hello, Arthur.”
“Can I… may I come aboard?”
“Certainly. Why ask?”
The gangplank chain was down. He came across, stepped onto the afterdeck, tottered, tried to smile up at me, grabbed at emptiness and collapsed onto the teak deck with a knobbly thud. I got down there in two jumps, rolled him over. He’d abraded the unhealthy flesh under one eye in the fall. I felt the pulse in his throat. It was slow and steady. Two fat teenage girls came and stared from the dock, snickering. See the funny drunk, like on television.
I opened the aft door to the lounge, gathered Arthur up and toted him in. It was like picking up a sack of feather dry two-by-fours. He smelled stale. I took him all the way through and put him down on the bed in the guest stateroom. The air conditioning was chill against my bare sweat. I felt Arthur’s head. He didn’t seem to have a fever. I had never seen a man so changed by one year of life.
His mouth worked, and he opened his eyes and tried to sit up. I pushed him back. “You sick, Arthur?”
“Just weak, I guess. I guess I just fainted. I’m sorry. I don’t want to be…”
“A burden? A nuisance? Skip the social graces, Arthur.”
I guess you always look for a little spirit, a little glint of the fang on even the most humble dog in town.
“I’m very polite,” he said listlessly. “You know that, Trav. A very polite man.” He looked away. “Even… even when he was killing me, I think I was probably very, very polite.”
He faded away then, like a puff of steam, quickly gone, his eyes not quite closed. I put my fingertips against the side of his throat-the pulse was still there.
As I was wondering just what the hell to do next, he came floating back up, frowned at me. “I can’t cope with people like that. She must have known that. Right from the start she must have known about me.”
“Who tried to kill you?”
“I guess it really doesn’t matter very much. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been the next one, or the one after that. Let me rest a little while and then I’ll go. There wasn’t any point in coming to you. I should have known that too.”
Suddenly I recognized a part of that stale smell about him. It was a little bit like freshly baked bread, but not as pleasant. It’s the distinctive smell of starvation, the effluvium of the sweat ducts when the body has begun to feed on itself.
“Shut up, Arthur. When did you eat last?”
“I’m not real sure. I think… I don’t know.”
“Stay where you are,” I told him. I went to my stainless steel galley, looked in a locker, picked out a tin of clear, rich British broth, poured it into a pan and turned the burner on high. As it heated I looked in on him again. He gave me that reappearing nervous smile. He had a facial tic. His eyes filled with tears, and I went back to the broth. I poured it into a mug, hesitated, then tapped the liquor locker and added a fair jolt of Irish whiskey.
After I helped him get propped up, I saw he could hold it all right in both hands and sip it.
“Good.”
“Take it slow, Arthur. I’ll be right back.”
I sluiced the sawdust and sweat off in a fast shower in the huge stall the original owner had built aboard the Busted Flush, put on denims and a T-shirt and checked him again. The mug was empty. He was slightly flushed. I opened the promised bottle of dark beer and went back in and sat on the foot of the bed.
“What the hell have you done to yourself, Arthur?”
His voice blurred. “Too much, maybe.”
“Maybe I asked it the wrong way. What has Wilma done to you?”
Again the tears of weakness. “Oh Christ, Trav, I… ”
“We’ll go into it later, boy. You get out of the clothes and into a hot shower. Then you eat some eggs. Then you sleep. Okay?”
“I don’t want to be a…”
“Arthur, you could begin to bore me. Shut up.”
After he was asleep, I took a good look at his arms. Big H could pull a man down quickly. No needle marks. But it didn’t have to mean anything. Only the eyedropper group, the ones who pick the big vein open with a pin, acquire scars. Any tidy soul with a decent hypo and enough sense to use an alcohol swab afterward can go unmarked indefinitely, as any urban cop can tell you. He was still a little grimy. It was going to take more than one shower, or two. The beard stubble didn’t help either. I checked through his clothes. They had been cheap originally. The labels were from Naples, Florida. He had a flat cigarette package with three one-inch butts carefully stowed therein. He had a match folder from Red’s Diner in Homestead. He had two pennies and some lint. I rolled his shoes up in the clothing, carried the bundle out at arm’s length and dropped it into the trash bin on the dock. Then washed my hands.
The sun was going down. I went topside. The cockpit cocktail hour, with music and girl laughter from neighbor cruisers. As I drove the remaining screws home without working up a sweat, I kept thinking of Arthur Wilkinson as I had seen him last, over a year ago.
A big fellow, big as I am, but not the same physical type. Slow, awkward, uncoordinated-a mild and rather pedantic guy. I could remember coming across a few of the same breed way back in high school basketball days. Coaches would hustle them on the basis of size alone. They were very earnest, but they had no balance. You could catch them just right, with the hip, and they would go blundering and crashing off the court. For them, high school was the final experience in any body-contact sport.