I was awake for a little while in the first gray of the false dawn, and heard the lovers. It was a sound so faint it was not actually a sound, more a rhythm sensed. It is a bed rhythm, strangely akin to a heartbeat, though softer. Whum-fa, whum-fa, whum-fa. As eternal, clinical, inevitable as the slow gallop of the heart itself. And as basic to the race, reaching from percale back to the pallet of dried grasses in the cave corner. A sound clean and true, a nastiness only to all those unfortunates who carry through their narrow days their own little hidden pools of nastiness, ready to spill it upon anything so real it frightens them.
Heard even in its most shoddy context, as through the papery walls of a convention motel, this life-beat could be diminished not to evil but to a kind of pathos, because then it was an attempt at affirmation between strangers, a way to try to stop all the clocks, a way to try to say: I live.
The billions upon billions of lives which have come and gone, and that small fraction now walking the world, came of this life-pulse, and to deny it dignity would be to diminish the blood and need and purpose of the race, make us all bawdy clowns, thrusting and bumping away in a ludicrous heat, shamed by our own instinct.
Hearing them I felt placidly avuncular. Enjoy. Find that one time that has no shred of self or loneliness. Seal it so that from now on McGee is the third wheel, all interrelationships solidly structured from now on. Celebrate the “nowness” of it, and subside into affections.
The almost inaudible pulse hastened, then slowed, and ended. I heard the far off drone of a marine engine, fading into the distance, a commercial fisherman perhaps, heading for the grounds off East Cape. Ripples slapped the hull. What assurances, gratitudes, immediate memories were the lovers entwined whispering to each other? Did they listen to the slowing of their hearts? Were there little catches at the end of those long breaths that were deep as sighs? Was it beautiful for you too, darling?
When I awoke again it was with the sense of total well-being I had been aiming for. The pounds were gone. A few slight areas of muscle soreness were not enough to diminish that good feeling of resiliency and vitality.
The body, once you are old enough to stop taking it for granted, becomes like a separate entity. The way it will endure neglect makes you feel guilty. Having survived trauma, and being still willing to carry you around after healing itself, it deserves better. Cherishing it and toughening it is an act of appeasement for past omissions.
In my line of work, neglect was especially asinine. Like being a front-line type with a rusty rifle, or a neurosurgeon with a hangover. One half step, or one twentieth of a second lag in reaction time can make the difference. Any violent necessity is usually the result of something having gone wrong, a probable error of judgment. But the probability is always there.
Now, with just minor versions of the total torture of the days past, it would hold its edge.
My shower serenade did not stir the drowsy lovers, nor did the banging of pots. After breakfast I broke out a small spinning rod, rigged it with a yellow jig, installed sail, rudder and centerboard on the dinghy, and went off to circle the edge of distant grass flats. I released a couple of small jacks, one weakfish, and then, just as I was coming about, hooked into a stranger, a stray pompano who didn’t belong in that kind of area.
He ran better than three pounds, and I had him split, buttered, and on foil under the broiler as the lovers came fumbling, blinking and yawning out into the daylight. Call the pompano a sacrifice on a special altar. They claimed nothing had ever tasted as good. They finished him, every crumb, while I stood smirking like a kindly old aunt in a TV commercial.
All her actions toward him that Wednesday were precisely as on the day before. But without the Charge Nurse flavor. She had a doe-eyed glow, a lazy smugness. The gestures were returned in kind. I was the outsider. Arthur had his chin up, for a change. And he risked a few of his mild, strained jokes-rewarded with girlish howls of glee. I tried to keep out of their way. But at times the Busted Flush can seem small. In midafternoon I invented an errand at Long Key, a replacement filter, and with an identical expression of repressed anticipation on their faces, they waved to me as I went putting off toward Long Key.
Friday morning I put the essential question to him. I brought the anchors in, and he helped me spread the lines at the bow to dry before stowing them. In the early gray, so silent and eerie it gave one a tendency to whisper, the Flush floated dead in the water at the high tide change, with the mist magnifying the sun image in the east to a gigantic ball, suitable to a science fiction movie.
Arthur was beginning to look fit. Scrawny, but fit.
“What about it?” I asked him.
Squatting, he stared at me. “About it?”
“You ready to help me go after the loot, Arthur?”
He stood up. “I…guess I’m ready now.”
I made an appraisal. He wasn’t the same fellow who’d been a part of our ever-changing group better than a year ago. He looked almost the same, though thinner. I guess it was the eyes. Before, he had been able to watch you with the same pleasant fixity of stare of a family beagle. Now the eyes came up, then fell away, came back, shifted away.
“Listen, Arthur. The attitude is not anger, nor indignation, nor hate. No heroics. No punishments. We go in cold and shrewd and savvy. And you stay out of contact. You are my intelligence officer. I bring you pieces of it and we work out how they fit. But if I need you for any contact, I want to know you’ll do it exactly as I say, whether you understand or agree. I want to know you won’t let it shake you up.”
“Trav… all I can do is promise to try.”
“How do you feel about it?”
He tried to smile. “Butterflies.”
“You can have butterflies, but you’ve got to have an operational attitude too. We’re going to steal meat out from under the tiger’s paw. We’ll divert the animal’s attention. We’ll keep Chook out of it. And it starts right now.”
He moistened his lips and swallowed. “Where are we going?”
“On a hunch, I’m going to start at Marco.”
Six
TOOK the Flush up to Flamingo, through Whitewater Bay, and out the mouth of the Shark River into the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf was flat calm, so I took her about six miles out, figured the course to take me just outside Cape Romano, and set the reliable old Metal Marine. It began turning the wheel back and forth in fussy little movements of a few inches at a time. I checked it to see that it was holding. Sun came hot through the slight overcast, and in the greasy calm the only breeze was from our stodgy cruising speed.
At noon I got the marine forecast from the Miami Marine Operator. Fair for the next twenty-four hours, winds slight and variable. A tropical disturbance centered below the Yucatan Straits, moving north northeast at five to six knots. Chookie brought lunch topside. They both seemed subdued. I realized uncertainty was bothering them. You have to have an instinct about how much briefing the troops should have. Too little is as unsettling as too much.
“What we’re up against,” I said, “is the big con. It’s a quasi-legal variation of one of the little cons, the finding the wallet routine.”
“What does that mean?” Chook asked.
“Once they select a mark, the operator drops a wallet, a fat one, where he’ll spot it. The accomplice gets to it a fraction of a second ahead of the mark. They move into an alley. The accomplice counts the money, and the mark sees that there is, say nine hundred dollars. Then the operator moves in, a very plausible guy. An acquaintance of the accomplice, but the accomplice very respectfully calls him mister. Says he found it, alone. Operator takes the mark’s side, proclaims they both found it and should share equally. Accomplice agrees, grudgingly. No name or identification in wallet. Operator says the honest thing to do is watch the want ads for one week. If nothing appears, then it is theirs to split. Gets a brown envelope, seals wallet inside with tape, accomplice and mark initial the tape as a form of seal. Okay, who is to hold it? After argument, it is decided the mark can hold it, provided he gives the accomplice three hundred dollars to hang onto as a proof of good faith. Operator holds the envelope until mark can return with the three hundred. Addresses are exchanged. Mark watches want ads for a week, gleefully tears envelope open, finds ratty old wallet stuffed with newspaper. The switch was made while they waited for him to come back with the three hundred.