“Coming, dear?” she said with an excessive primness, and just inside the door of the master stateroom I had to step over the wooly whiteness of the robe on the deck just beyond the sill.
***
The day had warmed up. The Munequita had run handsomely, with a deep drone speaking of a lot more power in reserve. When we had anchored for lunch in Fort Worth, well away from the channel, while we ate the thick roast beef and raw onion sandwiches and shared an icy bottle of dry red supermarket wine, I briefed her on Tush, on how long I had known him, and on Janine and what Tush had told me of his problems.
“No answer at all on the phone?”
“Not a thing.”
“Seems odd.”
“Seems very damned odd, Puss. The thing is, he isn’t a devious guy. And he’s caught in the middle in a very devious situation, with large money hanging on it, and old Tush may try to bull his way through, and he could get hurt twice as bad.”
When we went up the Shawana River, there was a faint, drifting acrid stink. Our eyes watered. When I came around the last bend, I was shocked at the deserted look of the place. The cheerful white houseboats were all gone. All but one storage rack on the in-and-out boat shelter were empty, and the remaining boat was, at a hundred feet, worth perhaps fifty dollars, outboard motor and all. The moored boats were gone, except for a skiff so full of water there were only inches of freeboard left, and an old cruiser hulk that had sunk in the shallows. The forklift truck was gone.
I tied up and we went ashore. Near the cities, all the old highways of America pass businesses that have gone broke. End of the dream. The spoor of a broken marriage can be kept in a couple of cartons on a shelf in the garage. Broken lives can be tucked neatly away in graves and jails and sanitariums. But the dead business in a sub-marginal commercial strip stays right there, ugly and- moldering away, the frantic advertising signs of the final convulsive effort fading and tattering over the weeds. For every one of them was the big dream, the gala opening, the last dusting and arranging before the doors opened. “We’re going to make it big, honey. Real big.” Then there is the slow slide into doubt, into confusion, and into the terminal despair. “So we were going to make it real big, were we? Ha!”
It was a silent place. The acrid river slid by. Dry fronds rattled in the breeze. A sign creaked.
Even the two marine gas pumps were gone. I went to the marina shed. The tools were gone. We asked each other questions in low, graveyard voices. There was a shiny new hasp and padlock on the marina building, along with a printed notification from the County Sheriff’s Department. There was another on the motel office. I could find no note fastened to anything that told how to get in touch with the Bannons.
“Now what?” Puss asked.
“There’s no neighbors, nobody here to ask. I suppose we could run upriver until we come to something.”
She stared around. “Gives me the spooks,” she said. We’d just reached the dock when I heard a car coming. We went back around in front and saw the phone company service truck lurching over the torn-up road. As I moved to wave him down, he turned in and stopped and got out and stared at us as we approached. He looked to be about fifty, a squatty, leathery man wearing silver-rimmed glasses.
“I’d like to find Mr. Bannon,” I said.
“Why?” It was a very flat and very abrupt question, and there was something about the flavor of it that made me wary. So I reached into the old bag of tired tricks and pulled out the one labeled Real Cordial.
“Well, it’s like this. Quite a while back, I can’t remember how many weeks, I had a bilge pump acting up, and I stopped in here and Bannon pulled it and stuck in a loaner, the idea being he’d fix it if he could or sell me the loaner if he couldn’t, but I didn’t get back as soon as I thought. Now it looks like he’s gone out of business or moved someplace else.”
“You could say that. Yes. It surely does. Let me make the disconnect and check in first, then maybe I can tell you what happened.”
He donned harness and spurs with practiced ease and walked up the pole. He made his service disconnect at the lead-in terminals, clipped his handset onto the wires and called in. We could hear his voice but not what he was saying. He came down fast, showing off a little. He took off his gear and tossed it into the truck.
“Well, sir,” he said, “you got here yesterday morning, you’d had some excitement for sure. You’da found Bannon right here. Promised myself I’d take a look and see where it was they found him. Maybe you’d like to come take a look mister. Maybe the young lady should kind of wait on us.”
But Puss tagged along. He went around in back and looked around, grunted and went over to a sturdy and rusty tripod made of heavy pipe, standing about fifteen feet tall. There was a manual winch with a crank, as rusty as the pipe, and a wire cable that went from the winch drum up through a pulley at the top of the tripod. A big, heavy old marine diesel, cannibalized down to little more than the ponderous block hung from the taut cable about five feet off the ground.
The phone man sat on his heels and shook his head and said, “Sure a terrible way for a man to do himself. Look there! There’s still hair and mess on the bottom side a that engine.”
I had thought the stain on the packed oily dirt was merely more oil. Puss went trotting busily away about fifty feet. She stopped and bent forward and coughed shallowly a few times, then straightened up and went over and sat on a sawhorse with her back to us.
“What Freddy said this Bannon done-Freddy is one of Sheriff Bunny Burgoon’s deputies and Freddy is the one that found him Sunday morning-this Bannon must have cranked that block up as high as he could get it, and then he fastened a piece of stove wire to that ratchet there on the side of the drum and lay out on his back right under that thing and give the wire a yank. The wire was still wound around his hand. Mashed him something terrible they say.” He stood up, spat. “Well, you got to say one thing. It was quick and it was for certain. And I guess the poor fella didn’t have much to live for.”
“Because he went broke?”
“Maybe I don’t have the straight of it. You know how people get to talking and every time they tell something, it comes out different. What I hear, he went off to try to raise some money fast to save the business. So when they come out here Friday with all the eviction papers and bankrupt papers and so on, just his missus is here with the youngest. She wanted them to hold off until Bannon got back but till the legal steps had been took care of in proper order, and there was just no choice about it. They waited about an hour for her to pack up personal Stuff and they helped her load the car. They say she was crying but she wasn’t carrying on. She was crying without making any noise about it. She picked up the other two kids from school, and she left off Bannon’s suitcase and a note from her to him with the Sherf, and she just took off. She must have had some travel money saved out, because they say that yesterday after they toted Bannon’s body back to Ingledine’s Funeral Home, Sherf Burgoon opened that note to see where he could get in touch with her to tell her about her husband, but all it said was she was going to go stay with some girl’s first name for a while, and Bannon would have known the whole name, but nobody else does.”
He spat again and started to move toward his truck. I walked slowly with him and said, “He seemed like a bright, pleasant guy. He didn’t seem like the kind who’d go broke. But you never can tell. Sometime it’s booze, or the dog track, or other women.”
He got into the truck and stared out at me. “Not this time. They run this boy off. He was in the way, and they run him off. But you didn’t hear me say that, mister.”