I walked toward the main buildings feeling all that strange ambivalence of the conquering male. Goaty self-esteem, slight melancholy, a mildly pleasant and unfocused guilt, a tinsoldier strut.
But something more than that with her. A feeling of achieving and establishing identities, hers and mine.
There had been no dishonesties. And so, in all that total giving and taking, I had been aware of her as Dana, so vital and so enduring.
The slight physical strangeness of the very beginning of it had lasted but a very short time. Then she was all known and dear. As if we had been apart for a very long time and found each other again, quickly getting over the awkwardness of separation.
After that it was a knowing and re-knowing in a profound way which has no words. It became a symbolic dialogue. I give thee. I take thee. I prize thee.
And there was also the fatuous feeling of enormous luck. It is such a damned blind chance after all.
I worked my way through two bemused gin and bitters while they seared my steak. Over coffee I stopped marveling at myself and got a local paper and read the more detailed account of the murder of Patty M’Gruder.
Then I drove downtown and parked and wandered through that strange area of cut-rate stores, pastel marriage chapels, open-sided casinos bathed in a garish fluorescence. Spooks trudged amid the tourists, and the cops kept a close sharp watch. Old ladies yanked at the handles, playing their dimes out of paper cups. Music bashed across the dry night air, in conflict with itself, and in the noisier alcoves one could buy anything from a dream book to a plastic bird turd.
The Four Treys was a long bright narrow jungle of machinery. What happened to the old-fashioned slot machine? Now you can pull two handles, hit three space ships and an astronaut and get a moon-pot, which is one and a half jack pots. The change girls sat behind wire, popping open the paper cylinders of silver, dumping it into paper cups for the people. At regular intervals came the clash of money into the scoop, and a shrillness of joy.
I had just wanted a look. I needed no directions. Presently I got back behind the wheel of the luxury device afforded me by a famous movie star and drove off again through the neoned night.
Twelve
THE TRAILER park was called Desert Gate. I had to go down through town and out the far side to get to it. It was a little after ten o’clock when I got there. Some orderly soul had set it up with the requirement that all trailers be parked in herringbone array on either side of a broad strip of asphalt going nowhere. The entrance was an aluminum arch, tall and skinny, with a pink floodlight on it.
The trailers were large, all snugged down off their wheels, with little patios and screened porches added. About half of them were dark. Patricia had lived-and died in front of-the sixth one on the left. It was lighted. I parked and went to the porch door. As I raised a hand to bang on the aluminum frame, a big woman appeared, silhouetted in the inner doorway.
“Whatya want?”
“I want to talk to Martha Whippler.”
“Who are you?”
“The name is McGee. I was a friend of Patties.”
“Look, why don’t you go away? The kid has had a hard day. She’s pooped. Okay?”
“It’s all right, Bobby,” a frail voice said. “Let him in.”
As I went in, the big woman stood back out of the way. When I saw her in the light I realized she was younger than I had thought. She wore jeans and a blue work shirt, sleeves rolled high over brown heavy forearms. Her hair was brown and cropped short and she wore no makeup.
The interior was all pale plywood paneling, vinyl tile, glass curtains, plastic upholstery, stainless steel. A slight girl lay on a day bed, propped up on pillows, long coppery hair tousled around her sad wan face. Her eyes were red. Her lipstick was smeared. She had a drink in her hand. She wore a very frilly nylon robe. Though she was a lot slimmer, I knew her at once.
“Whippy!” I said, and then felt like a damn fool for not having figured it out.
It startled her. She stared at me with disapproval. “I don’t know you. I don’t remember you from anyplace. People call me Martha now. Pat wouldn’t let them call me by my old name.” There was something quite solemn and childlike about her. And vulnerable.
“I’m sorry. I’ll call you Martha.”
“What’s your name?”
“Travis McGee.”
“I never heard Pat say your name.”
“I didn’t know her well, Martha. I know a few other people you might know. Vance. Cass. Carl. Nancy Abbott. Harvey. Richie. Sonny.”
She sipped her drink, frowning at me over the rim of the glass. “Sonny is dead. I heard that. I heard that he burned up, and it didn’t mean a thing to me.”
“Nancy saw him burn.”
She looked incredulous. “How could that happen?”
“She was traveling with him then.”
She shook her head in slow wonder. “Her traveling with him. Oh boy. Who could imagine that. Me, sure. But her? Gee, it doesn’t seem possible, believe you me.”
“Martha, I want to talk to you alone.”
“I bet you do,” the big girl behind me said.
“Mr. McGee, this is my friend Bobby Blessing. Bobby, whyn’t you go away a while, okay?”
Bobby studied me. It is the traditional look they reserve for the authentic male, a challenging contempt, a bully-boy antagonism. There seem to be more of them around these days. Or perhaps they are merely bolder. The word is butch. Having not the penis nor the beard, they damn well try to have everything else.
One of the secondary sex characteristics they seem to be able to acquire is the ballsy manner, the taut-shouldered swagger, the roostery go-to-hell attitude. They have a menacing habit of running in packs lately. And the unwary chap who tries to make off with one of their brides can get himself a stomping that stevedores would admire.
These are a subculture, long extant, but recently emerged from hiding. In their new boldness they do a frightening job of recruiting, having their major successes among the vulnerable platoons of those meek girls who, like Martha Whippler, are abused by men, by the Catton-kind of man, used, abused, sickened, shared, frightened and… at last, driven into the camp of the butch.
“I’ll be where I can hear you call me,” Bobby said without taking her stony stare from my face. She went out, rolling her shoulders, hitching at her jeans.
I moved closer to Martha, and sat in a skeletal plastic chair half facing her. She looked down into her half of a drink and said, “You named the people that were there that time.”
“And left one out?”
“That movie actress,” she whispered.
“Have you told people about her being there?”
“Oh, nothing like that ever happened to me before. I couldn’t tell anybody about it. I mean I could talk to Pat about it sometimes. You know. I used to have nightmares. She took me back home with her from there. I knew… I always knew she would rather it was Nancy.”
She looked wistful. She had a cheap, empty, pretty little face, eyebrows plucked to fine lines, mouth made larger with lipstick.
“Did you ever get to see the pictures?” I asked her.
Even the most vapid ones have an urchin shrewdness about them, the wariness of the consistently defensive posture.
“What pictures?”
“The ones Vance had taken.”
“For hours and hours today they kept asking me questions, questions. How do I know you just aren’t another smart guy?”
“I can’t prove I’m not.” I hesitated. She was suggestible. I wanted the right approach, without fuss. Grief made an additional vulnerabil ity. Kindly ol‘ McGee seemed the best bet. I shook my head sadly. “I’m just a fellow who thinks Patricia got a very bad deal from Vance M’Gruder, very bad indeed.”
Tears welled. She snuffled into her fist. “Oh God. Oh God yes. That bastard. That total bastard!”
“Some of us have never understood why Pat didn’t fight it a little harder.”