“It’s been six years, darling,” she said.
He sipped his ale, belched comfortably and said, “Six very wonderful years, little girl.”
“Thirty-three makes a pretty old little girl, Fer.”
“By God, you sure don’t show it a bit.”
“Thanks heaps, but the fact remains. Also the fact remains that I think about it. And I think about you being sixty-seven.”
“Mmmm. Let’s say I show it, but I don’t feel it.”
She went to him, sat crosslegged on the floor close to his chair, took his hand in both of hers and looked earnestly up at him. “Fer, I’m not going to bring out any violins and give you any crap about the best years of my life.”
“But?”
“I think the word is settlement. Some kind of a settlement. You are a tough old monkey and I think you are going to live forever, but I think you would feel better if you knew that if something did happen, you wouldn’t leave me behind cussing you up down and sideways for not setting up some kind of an arrangement to keep your little girl off the streets when the money runs out. Fair is fair.”
She waited in the silence while he thought it through. “Fair is fair, sure enough. It isn’t the easiest thing in the world to set up, Crissy. By God it isn’t. I can’t just go sticking you in my will. The wife and the kids and all the grand kids would rise right up and bust hell out of any codicil like that, especially if it was as big as what you’d need.”
“What do I need, Fer?”
“Pretty good piece.” He went inside to her desk and worked it out on scratch paper. He called her and she went and stood beside him, her hand resting on his shoulder. “Little girl, if you was to live exactly as good as now, with the upkeep to pay on everything and what you have to spend, and if it was set up so you’d live off investment income, it would take four hundred and fifty thousand dollars put away into a good balanced program.”
“Good Christ!”
“But that would mean you’d eventual leave behind a pretty fair estate, going to somebody I don’t owe spit. So it’s got to be worked out on a lifetime basis, so you live fat and die broke. Okay?”
“Sure, Fer.”
“Lump sum life annuity, I guess. And some way to transfer this house out of your name but giving you the right to live here as long as you live. That would pay some of the bite on the annuity. The thing to do is get ol’ Walker Waggoner scratching around seeing what he can come up with. Then the smart thing would be to get you started on it and me pay the gift tax or whatever, then there’d be no fuss from anybody after I’m gone. When I know what it will come to, then I can figure out the best way to scramble it together. Fair is fair, little girl. You said it true.”
Some months later she had to take a complete physical and sign insurance application papers. More months passed and when nothing happened she queried Ferris Fontaine.
It had irritated him. “Little girl, I am doing the damned well best I can, and it is going to get done when a lot of things that affect it one way and another get sorted out.”
Fifteen months ago he had come to stay with her on the middle days of a windy week in January. He complained of indigestion. She heard him get up in the middle of the night, and she could not tell how much later it was when she woke again, reached and found him still gone, and no body heat remaining in his side of the bed. She found the bathroom lights shining down upon him on the floor near the toilet, in the pale blue pyjamas she had once bought him. He had reached up and had unrolled an entire role of flowered toilet tissue, pulling it down upon him so that she had to brush it to the side to see his face and know that it was a dead face. He had told her once what she would have to do if he ever should become very sick at that house, or die. She did not think she could manage it. Then she remembered the loyalty of Bertha, the Swede. Bertha understood at once. The two women dressed the body, Bertha with silent tears running down her square pale face. Crissy packed his suitcase. They put the body in the front seat of the navy blue Continental, and the suitcase in the trunk.
Bertha got behind the wheel and Crissy followed at a cautious distance in her white sports car. They left the Lincoln on a dark street in downtown Miami. When no cars were coming, they tugged the body over behind the wheel. The motor was running, the windows down, the headlights on. Bertha tipped the Senator forward and as the horn began to blow, she trotted heavily to the sports car and climbed hastily in beside Crissy.
They did not speak all the way back. When they got out of the car Crissy said, “Thank you — for helping.”
Bertha said, “I’m giving you my notice now, M’am. I’ll stay thirty days if you haven’t found anybody by then, but then I’ll have to leave.”
“Suit yourself.”
“I came with him because he asked me to, only.”
“Don’t bother to explain.”
“But I am a decent woman.”
“Congratulations,” Crissy said and went into her house. She stripped the bed, remade it fresh, showered, made a stiff drink and went to bed and waited for tears. There weren’t any. She had liked him well enough. He had paid well for what he wanted from her. But the old floof had let her down where it counted most, maybe.
After the Senator had been buried by his family, with suitable fanfare and an attendance so large that it was rumored that half of them came not to mourn but to assure themselves he was dead, Crissy drove all over the state seeing in privacy those men who had been members of the inner clique, trying to use the leverage of her special knowledge to pry loose some promise of support.
But they seemed more amused than distressed, and she gave up quickly after one of them, eyes gentle as flint, alternately squeezing and stroking her shoulder, said that they sure didn’t want to upset anyone Fer had been fond of, but they’d have to rig up something to give her a nice long stay up to Chattahoochee to ponder it all out some. You had it right nice for a nice long time, considering...
So she had hurried back to the house, aware of having been a fool, of having attempted a dangerous game. She had to learn wariness all over again, after these past lush years. She knew it wouldn’t be difficult. The practice had started early, maybe way, way back when they took you from the grammaw-house to the Home, and you knew it was a terrible mistake and you were too little to explain it to them, but you knew somebody would remember you and fix the mistake. Then you gradually realized it wasn’t a mistake, and it wouldn’t be fixed.
You learned wariness when you were a child bride and the New Orleans cop bounced a slug off the pavement into the back of Johnny Harkinson’s curly head as he was racing off with a snatched purse. Wariness during the thousand nights Phil Kerna owned you, and you were his luck, sitting back out of the cone of light, watching the poker sessions. Owned you and then loaned you, when the markers came due. Wariness in New York, sharing the apartment with Midgie and Spook, the three of you modeling Frankal’s cheap wholesale imitations of high-fashion items, and hustling the buyers but giving them a fair and full return because Frankal didn’t want any repeat business ruined. New lessons in wariness when you pulled stakes and went down to Savannah with Midgie and used her contacts to get lined up with that Friendship Club, a telephone operation, hundred-a-week dues. Once they couldn’t come up with it and spent ninety days working in the prison laundry, ruining their hands and teaming up to fight off the old bull dykes. From then on you make certain you always have your dues.
Drifted to Atlanta, where it was closer control, a straight percentage action. Wariness in the slow realization that it had stopped being something you were doing for just a little while for kicks. You were a seasoned hooker, and you’d turned twenty-seven, and because your score on repeats was falling off because of competition from the kid stuff just breaking in, you had no more choice left on who, and damn little choice left on what. So, in your wariness, you knew that a really big score was the only way out. So when you got picked for the Key West duty, one of the six packages picked up by the company airplane, one of the steadier types, and the chance with the Senator opened up, you begged and bargained your way loose, using tears and money saved up.