“Hack’s two older boys are back in town,” I said. “They’re waiting for the sea to flatten out and one of these evenings, about seven thirty, all the charter boats will go out and they’ll drop a wreath on the water, and the Reverend Sam John Hallenbee of the First Seaside Baptist Church will give the memorial service on a bull horn, consigning to the deep and so on.”
“I’d like to have that done for Norma and Evan too. But all her friends are in Houston. I’ll have to go over there and see what shape her affairs are in. I would suppose I’d be her heir, but I’m not sure.”
“Want any breakfast?”
“Thanks. I don’t think I could keep it down yet.”
“Why don’t you get dressed and we’ll go talk to one or both or all of the Jenkins boys.”
“And Gloria,” Meyer said. “I have to face that. She’s going to feel bitter toward me. I asked Hack as a personal favor to take Norma and Evan out in the Keynes a few times. He said he was glad to do it. With the HooBoy laid up, he felt restless unless he could get out on the water once in a while.”
He went trudging off to put on some clothes. He didn’t have much choice. All his treasured old shirts and pants and jackets had blown up along with his boat.
Five
DAVE JENKINS was twenty-two, and he was a guide down in the Keys, an expert at fly-rod fishing for tarpon, at stalking the wily permit, at outsmarting bonefish. I had heard he was beginning to pick up a reputation after surviving the early attempts of the locals to run him off. They play rough down there. He had come up as soon as he heard. And Bud Jenkins, the twenty-year-old, had come down from Duke University. He was there on full scholarship.
Hack and Gloria lived in a two-bedroom frame bungalow on a county road a long way east of the city. They had an acre of flatland, two big banyan trees near the house, a pond with Chinese white geese, and an electrified fence around the pond area to keep the predators away from the geese. There were almost a dozen vehicles parked in the drive and in the yard, several of them the big glossy pickups that charterboat captains favor, with tricky paint jobs and all the extras. A gabble of small children was racing about in the mud. Miss Agnes, my ancient blue Rolls pickup, looked odd parked with the modern machines, like an old lady in a bonnet at a rock concert.
The small house was packed with people. I could see them through the windows, moving around. The intense competition of the fishing folk was dropped whenever tragedy struck.
There was a shallow front porch with a slanted roof, an obvious afterthought. Two steps led up to the porch level. As we approached the steps, the screen door burst open and Rowland Service; the T-man, our recent visitor, came out at a dead run, with big Dave Jenkins so close behind him it took me a half second to realize, as I was stepping back out of the way, that Dave was running him out, with one hand on the slack of the seat of the pants, the other on the nape of the neck. Service’s eyes and mouth were wide open. Dave gave him a final giant push and stopped at the edge of the steps. Service landed running, but leaning too far forward for balance. He made a good effort, though, and galloped about thirty feet from the steps before diving headlong into the wet grass.
Warner Housell, the staff person, came sidling out, carrying both dispatch cases and trying to look inconspicuous. An ingratiating smile came and went, over and over, very swiftly. Dave made a feint at him and stamped his feet. Housell made a bleating sound and sprang off the porch and trotted out to where Service was getting up, dabbing at the mud stains on his knees.
“Hey, Trav,” Dave Jenkins said. “Meyer.”
Housell and Service got into their economy rental. Service was apparently talking angrily and Housell was shaking his head no. They drove off. “What happened?” I asked.
“They came a couple minutes ago. The big one was trying to hush up the little one, but the little one, he asked my mom if maybe Daddy was blowed up on account of he was mixed up in some kind of drug action. He asked her a little bit mean and a little bit loud, and I got my hands on him before one of the other men tried to kill him. It broke her up some. Miserable little scut. Drugs! It took Daddy seven months to set aside enough for the engine work on the HooBoy, so he wouldn’t have to borrow at no high rate. Drugs? Daddy was dead against it. Remember, Trav? He came on those three bales of pot floating out there near Sherman Key over a year ago, and he picked them up and brought them in and turned them over to the narcotics guys. He had no charter aboard. Who was to know? Mom said he hadn’t even had a taste of booze since he got born again twenty years ago.”
“Is there any chance of talking to Gloria?” Meyer asked.
“This wouldn’t be too good of a time, not right now. She’s in the bedroom with a couple of her women friends, and they’re in there praying and crying and hugging.”
“Does she blame me?” Meyer asked.
Bud came out of the house in time to hear Meyer’s question. “I don’t think she’s thought of it that way. I suppose she could get around to it in time,” he said. He was the small-boned son, the one who was most like his mother physically, with delicate features and steel-rimmed glasses.
“Just tell her, when you get a chance, that it appears as if somebody was trying to make it look like a terrorist act,” Meyer said. “There would be no reason to go after me. And nobody has ever heard of the organization that claimed credit. It was a cover for something. We think that if they were in close enough touch to make the phone call so soon after the explosion, they must have known I wasn’t aboard. They were after somebody else. After one or both of the Lawrences, or after Hack.”
Both boys shook their head, and Dave said, “Nobody would up and kill my daddy. Maybe by accident if it come to a fight, something like that. He was sometimes mean. But not planned ahead. Not that way. Mom said he really liked that couple, liked showing them places along the Waterway, liked putting them into fish. But he kept saying what a terrible boat you had, Meyer, and how much work it needed.”
Bud said, “if they ever find out, I think they’ll discover that somebody came over from Texas, following that couple, and killed them, and it didn’t matter to them who else they killed in the process. Maybe it was somebody who didn’t like the idea of your niece marrying that man. Or maybe it was something to do with the oil business, something she knew that somebody wanted covered up for good. If you get any clue at all, me and Dave and Andy would be most grateful to know who did it. Dave and Andy and me wouldn’t like it to be one of those things where it takes three years to come to trial, and finally they call it second-degree, and then there’s a bunch of appeals and the guy gets out a couple of years later. We’d surely like the chance to save him the fuss of waiting around all that time for his trial.”
I looked at their eyes. Hack’s eyes looking out at me. The same amber brown with golden glints, one pair behind lenses, one pair squeezed by the wrinkled squint of a few thousand hours searching the sun riffles for fish sign. A fierce independence. “What we find out,” I said, “You’ll get to know.” There was a look of satisfaction diluting the intensity, and Bud said, “We’ll tell Mom it doesn’t look like it was anybody after you, Meyer.”
On the way back to Bahia Mar, Meyer said, “I never really got to know Norma. One summer I stayed out there in Santa Barbara with my sister, Glenna, for a couple of weeks, helping each other remember things, good and bad. I think Norma must have been about fourteen. She was in a school for exceptionally gifted children, and that summer she was going on some sort of series of field trips with a batch of kids. Overnights, with sleeping bags. She had a rock hammer and a closet full of labeled samples. Her eyes danced and shone with the pure excitement of learning things. Her world was four and a half billion years old, and she had a vocabulary newly full of strike-slip faults, cactoliths, andesite, and monzonite, and she made tilting slipping shapes with her hands to show us how the mountains came about. Strange the way how a bright young brain, exposed to a certain kind of knowledge at just the right time, bends in the direction of that knowledge, sops it up, relishes it. Glenna concealed her dismay at having her only child aimed toward a life of bounding from crag to crag with a lot of rough people, carrying a rock hammer, a sample bag, and a chemistry set. I thought I would get a chance to know her better, after Toronto. Did you see much of them?”