“Okay. I see your point. But just stop by the boat and take a look at him.”
“No! You don’t get clever with me. Once in Akron the dressing room was alive with mice, and I set a trap. All it did was maim one little bastard, and three weeks later, after I got him back on his feet, I turned him loose. He’d lick peanut butter off my fingertip. Trav, I wouldn’t go anywhere near Arthur.”
Three
WHEN I got back to the Busted Flush with Chook, Arthur Wilkinson was as I had left him, the note still there. I put on the overhead light. I heard her suck air. Her strong cool fingers clamped on my hand. I looked at her thoughtful profile, saw her tanned forehead knotted into a frown, white teeth indenting her lower lip. I turned the light off and turned her, and we went back to the lounge, two closed doors between us and Arthur.
“You should get a doctor to look at him!” she said indignantly.
“Maybe. Later on. No fever. He passed out, as I told you, but he said he just felt faint. Malnutrition is my guess.”
“Maybe you got a license to practice? Trav, he looks so horrible! Like a skull, like he was dying instead of sleeping. How do you know?”
“That he’s sleeping? What else?”
“But what could have happened to him?”
“Chook, that was a very nice guy, and I don’t think he had the survival drive you and I have. He’s the victim type. Wilma was his mousetrap, and nobody cared if he got maimed. No peanut butter. We had one in Korea. A big gentle kid fresh out of the Hill School. Everybody from my platoon sergeant on down tried to get the green off him before he got nailed. But one rainy afternoon he got suckered by the fake screaming we’d gotten used to, and he went to help and got stitched throat to groin with a machine pistol. I heard about it and went over as they were sticking the litter onto a jeep. He died right then, and the look on his face was not pain or anger or regret. He just looked very puzzled, as if he was trying to fit this little incident into what he’d been taught at home and couldn’t quite make it. It’s the way some earnest people take a practical joke.”
“Shouldn’t we see if Arthur is really all right?”
“Let him get his sleep. Fix you a stinger?”
“I don’t know. No. I mean yes. I’m going to take another look at him.”
Five minutes later I tiptoed into the companionway beyond the head. The guest stateroom door was closed. I heard the tone of her voice, not the words. Gentleness. He coughed and answered her and coughed again.
Back in the lounge I locked the big tuner into WAEZ-FM, and fed it into the smaller speakers at low volume, too low to drive my big AR-3’s. I stretched out on the curve of the big yellow couch, took small bites of the gin stinger, listened to a string quartet fit together the Chinese puzzle pieces of some ice-cold Bach, and smiled a fatuous eggsucking smile at my prime solution to the Arthur problem.
In about twenty minutes she joined me, eyes red, smile shy, walking with less assurance than her custom. She sat on the end of the couch beyond my feet and said, “I fixed him some warm milk and he went right to sleep again.”
“That’s nice.”
“I guess it’s just being exhausted and half starved and heartsick, Trav.”
“That was my guess.”
“The poor dumb bastard.”
“Outclassed.”
I got her stinger out of the freezer and brought it to her. She sipped it.
“There isn’t anything else you can do, of course,” she said.
“Beg your pardon?”
She looked at me and opened her eyes very wide. “Get it back, of course. They cleaned him clean. That’s why he came to you.”
I got up and went over to the tuner and killed Mr. Bach. I stood in front of Chook.
“Now just one minute there, woman. Hold it. There’s no…”
“For God’s sake, stop looking as if you’re going to bray like a wounded moose, McGee. We talked about you once.”
“Make some sense.”
“He wondered about you. You know. What you do. So I sort of told him.”
“You sort of told him.”
“Just how you step in when people get the wrong end of the stick, and you keep half of what you can recover. McGee, why in the world do you think he came right to you! Could anything be more obvious? Why do you think that poor whipped creature crawled across the state and fell on your doorstep? You can’t possibly turn him down.”
“I can give it a very good try, honey.”
Silence. She finished the drink. She clacked the empty glass down. She came up off the couch, moved close, stood tall, fixed me with a poisonous stare, upslanted, fists on hips.
“Did I do you a favor coming here?” she said in almost a whisper. “Do you owe me for that, and for one or two other small things I could name? Do you want me to go after them myself? I will, you know. I’m calling you on this one, you big ugly lazy jerk. They smashed him. They gutted him. And there’s no other place he can turn.” Giving emphasis to each word by rapping my chest with a hard knuckle, she said, “You-are-going-to-help-that-man.”
“Now listen… ”
“And I want a piece of the action, Travis!”
“I have no intention of… ”
“The first thing we have to do is get him on his feet, and pry every living piece of information out of him.”
“How about that weekly television thing you… ”
‘I’m two tapes ahead, and I can go down there and do three more in one day. Trav, they didn’t leave him a dime! It was some kind of land development thing. Over near Naples.“
“Maybe by fall…”
“Travis!”
By the following Saturday afternoon the Busted Flush was swinging on two hooks in Florida Bay, two miles off Candle Key, all larders stocked, five hundred gallons in the fresh water tanks With alterations from time to time, I’ve tried to make the old barge-type houseboat ever more independent of shoreside services. Except when home at Bahia Mar, I like to avoid the boat basin togetherness. Under one hatch I have a whole area paved with husky batteries, enough of them so that I can stay at anchor and draw on them for four days before they begin to get a little feeble. When they’re down, I can use them to start up an electric trickle-feed generator which can bring them back up in six hours. If I ever get careless enough to run them all the way down, I can break out the big 10 kw gasoline generator and use it to get the electric one started. At anchor I switch everything over to 32 V. I can’t run the airconditioning off the batteries, but I can run it off the gas generator. Then it is a decision as to which will be the most annoying, the heat or the noise.
The sun was heading for Hawaii. Just enough breeze for a pattycake sound against the hull. I was stretched out on the sun deck. A line of pelicans creaked by beating and coasting, heading home to the rookery. What I had learned so far from Arthur didn’t sound promising. But I comforted myself with thinking that while we were getting him in shape, I was doing myself some promised good. I was on cheese, meat and salad. No booze. No cigarettes. Just one big old pot pipe packed with Black Watch for the sunset hour. Due any time now.
Every muscle felt stretched, bruised and sore. We’d anchored at mid-morning. I’d spent a couple of hours in mask and fins, knocking and gouging some of the grass beards and corruption off the hull. After lunch I’d lain on the sundeck with my toes hooked under the rail and done about ten sets of situps. Chook had caught me at it and talked me into some of the exercises she prescribed for her dance group. One exercise was a bitch. She could do it effortlessly. You lift your left leg, grab the ankle with your right hand, and play one-legged jump rope with it, over and back. Then switch hands and ankles and jump on the other leg. After that we swam. I could win the sprints. In our distance events, she had a nasty habit of slowly drawing even, and then slowly pulling away, and an even nastier habit of smiling placidly at me while I wheezed and gasped.