Authors: John D. MacDonald
The judge winked ponderously and said, “There’s a lot of fellas around here in their thirties and early forties that first learned what makes the world go round from Jenna. And the pride in any man says that if he’s once bedded
a woman he can do it again. And if it’s been a long time, he gets an itch to prove he’s the man he used to be. So while Jenna was being a lady, they were trying to edge in on her and getting no place at all. And when she stopped being a lady, they gathered around pawing the ground something fierce. It was like she stopped giving a damn. Find her in the Mack almost any night, sopping it up. Some army friend had drove their car down, a blue Olds, one of the small ones, and you could find it parked in front or out in that lot behind the place any time. Well, sir, after she got picked up for drunk driving, the colonel’s sister come down to take care of him, and I don’t guess Jenna and the sister got along so good. Buddy and Betty and Miz Larkin were trying to get Jenna straightened out again, but it was like the old days. She wouldn’t listen to nothing. She drove the car after they took away her license and she racked it up for fair. Chopped down a big old cabbage palm with it. Total loss. Then she took to disappearing two and three days at a stretch. Come back hung over to rest up and start all over again.
“Well, sir, that went on until last November on the twenty-first day, a Friday. Better to call it Saturday morning, I guess. She was in the Mack from maybe eight o’clock on. I stopped in and saw her. Just happened to see her. Bright yella slacks and a little white sweater, but both of them looking slept in, and her hair tangly, and no money so people were buying her drinks for her. There was always somebody around to buy Jenna a drink. They say Buddy came in about eleven to get her to go home. She didn’t have transportation. But she bad-mouthed him and he took off and left her there. But I guess you read all about it, son.”
“I can’t remember it so good.”
“Near as anybody can tell she left the place alone to walk back. It would be a mile, or a little better. And it would make easier walking on the beach than on that
sand road. She left a little after two, and the one found her on the beach at daybreak, halfway home, was that crazy old Darcey woman that goes shelling at dawn every day of her life no matter what weather it is. Jenna was there, on her back, her head up the beach slope and her feet in the water. No rape or anything like that. Somebody had busted her a dandy on the jaw. It had chipped her teeth. And then they’d took hold of her by the throat and held on. I tell you it made one hell of a sight for that Darcey woman to come up on. You know something. She hasn’t acted half as crazy since then, and she hasn’t been shelling one time.
“Well, sir, you never seen such a fuss as we had around here. Sheriff Roy Lawlor, he come over from Davis, and Parnell Lee, the State’s Attorney, he was here, and both of them acting like the one in charge. And there was some kind of special investigator down from Tallahassee. And we had reporters from as far off as Atlanta. More questions asked and picture-taking than you ever saw. For once the town was full up. They questioned the colonel’s sister and, when she finally let them, the colonel, but they’d both gone to bed early and anyway back then the colonel was still in no shape to go around killing anybody, even a little bit of a thing like Jenna. They questioned everybody lived on the beach which wasn’t many, and they locked up just about every customer the Mack had had that night. I guess it was all on account of that Colonel M’Gann being a sort of national figure and Jenna having been, in a manner of speaking, in show business. The papers really struggled keeping that story alive. Some smart fella with a long memory on a Miami paper, he dug around until he got hold of one of those art photography magazines from way back about forty-eight where dang near the whole issue was pictures of Jenna, naked as an egg. And there were a few of them you could just barely print in a family newspaper, like one of her holding a big black
cat to kind of cut off the view. So those wire service people picked those up and as you know I guess there wasn’t a man in the country didn’t find out Jenna was built pretty good. You know, son, back when that magazine came out, while Spence was still alive, somebody from here found a copy on a stand over in Orlando, and he bought all they had and he went around and bought a lot more copies from other stands, and for a time there this town was full up with copies of that magazine. Then somebody sneaked one onto Spence’s desk over to the boat yard and why he didn’t fall over with a stroke I’ll never know.
“Yes, sir, we had us a time last November. Cash registers ringing all over town. It’s a wonder the junior chamber didn’t try to set up a murder a week to keep things humming. The big shots just elbowed Donnie Capp out of the way. I don’t know if you remember him. He got himself a little shot up in the service and got doctored out in forty and three, and when he came back, Sheriff Roy Lawlor he made Donnie a deputy and he’s been that ever since. And Donnie takes care of this end of the county all by his own self. Knows every inch of it. He purely loves to beat heads. He had to sit way back while Lawlor and Lee were around here puffing out their chests.
“But they couldn’t find out a thing and so it all kind of dwindled away. Jenna is planted right beside Spence. Wonder sometimes if they’ve had a chance to make up. Before she run off there was an outside chance Spence could have turned into a human being. But that tore the rag off the bush.” He sighed. “You get an old man to talking, son, and you’ve got yourself an all-day listening job. What you been doing all the time you’ve been gone?”
“A couple of wars, Judge. And knocking around here and there. South America. Construction work. Decided
maybe I’d come back and look around. Might settle here.”
“Like I said, there’s no future here. Not in Ramona. The young folks leave fast as they can. Town gets older every year. The waters are about fished out. All the cypress has been logged out. The deer and the turkey are all gone. We got some retireds moving in. Folks that like it quiet and ain’t got much to do with. It’s quiet all right. Always had the idea I’d like to see some of the world. The furthest away place I ever did get to was Chicago, in nineteen and twenty-six when we made up a committee and went up to dicker with those Janson folks about the land. Scared hell out of me up there.”
“Judge, are you still in the real-estate business?”
“Not to strain me none. Got an office just around the corner on Gordon Street. Took a woman in with me, name of Myrtle Loveless. Got a lot of energy, Myrtle has. A Carolina woman that got her divorce down here and stayed on. She does most that has to be done.”
“I think I’d like to rent a beach cottage.”
“Good time to do it, son. Town folks don’t move out there until school’s over. Got a pretty good choice right now. You just go see Myrtle. Tell her you’re a friend of mine.”
“I … I guess people are going to remember what happened when I left.”
“Sure they’ll remember. There isn’t enough happens here to cloud up their minds. Most kids do fool things. Some folks will try to nasty things up for you. Do you care?”
“I guess so, Judge.”
“Nice to see you back home, son.”
As Alex left Ducklin’s, turning toward Gordon Street, he saw a young man walking toward him, a slouching, swaggering kid of about twenty-three or four with red hair worn too long, a pinched, insolent face boiled red by the sun, faded jeans patched at the knees, a soiled white
sport shirt. When the blue eyes stared at him in reckless, arrogant appraisal, Doyle felt his muscles tighten with ancient angers. And just as suddenly he realized that this could not be Gil Kemmer. He was too young to be Gil. But he was one of the Kemmers. One of the wild breed from Bucket Bay.
The young man stopped in front of Alex and said, “Know you, don’t I?” There was a sharp reek of raw corn.
“I used to know Gil pretty well. I’m Alex Doyle.”
“I’ll be damn. I’m Lee Kemmer. You and Gil used to pound on each other regular. You bust his wrist one time.”
“He tried to cut me.”
Lee Kemmer swayed in the sunlight, grinning in a knowing way. “Gil didn’t get the breaks they give you, Doyle. He drew four at Raiford. He’s been out a year, keeping his head down. He draws a little county time now and again on account of they pick on us Kemmers all the time. And need their damn road work done for free. This is a rough place for anybody likes a little fun. Let’s you and me go to the Mack and drink up some beer, Doyle.”
“Thanks. I’ve got things to do.”
“You still too good for the Kemmers?”
“It isn’t that.”
“If my brother couldn’t whip you, maybe I can. We’ll try that some time. I’ll tell Gil you’re back in town.”
Doyle shrugged and stepped around him. When he looked back, Lee was still standing there, grinning at him.
Alex walked to the real-estate office, a small place with a big window, a cluttered bulletin board, a wide hearty woman with black hair cut like a man’s sitting on the corner of a desk talking over the phone. She cupped her hand over the phone and said, “Have yourself a
chair. Be through here in a minute. Now, Emily Ann, you’re jus’ not bein’ realistic, honey. No, I certainly don’t want you to give the lot away, but after all, honey, you’ve had it on the market three years and this is the first firm offer that’s come in, and I think it’s better to take it than keep paying taxes on that little old lot. All right, I’ll see if he’ll come up just a little bitty bit more. And let you know. ’By, honey.”
She hung up and said, “Her husband’s been dead twenty years and he bought that lot for forty dollars and now she doesn’t want to sell it for twelve hundred. I’m Myrtle Loveless. Can I help you?”
“Alex Doyle. The Judge says to see you about renting a beach cottage.”
“I’ve got listings, but they’re kinda on the primitive side, Mr. Doyle. They …”
“I used to live here. I know what they’re like. I’d want one for a month.”
She opened a big key rack. A half hour later he paid her eighty dollars for a one-month rental, picked up groceries at the supermarket without seeing anyone he knew, and drove back on out to the Carney cottage on the beach. It was of weatherbeaten cypress and sat two feet off the ground on thick piers. There was a small living room with rattan furniture and a grass rug, a bedroom, a small and primitive kitchen in the rear with a very noisy refrigerator, an inside bath with tub, and an outside cold-water shower. On the front was a small screened porch with two chairs of corroded aluminum tubing and plastic webbing. The front porch was fifty feet from the high-tide line. He stowed his supplies, took a long swim and a cold shower, and then sat on the screened porch with a cheese sandwich and a bottle of milk, squinting through the white glare of the sand toward the deep blue of the early afternoon Gulf.
The cottage on his left, visible beyond the trees, was empty. Myrtle had told him that the next cottage to
the north was also empty. He could not see that one. Beyond that one was the Proctor cottage where Colonel Crawford M’Gann lived with his sister.
He realized that somehow the world had reverted to the dimensions of childhood. This was the known place. So well known. He and Jody Burch had gone gigging along this beach line in Jody’s old scow, with a homemade tin reflector around the Coleman lantern, taking turns with the gig. Not two hundred yards from where he sat, but twenty years ago, he had helped work the nets when that unforgettable school of mullet had appeared, a mile and more of mullet, a hundred yards wide and five feet deep, almost solid enough to walk on. Hundreds upon hundreds of tons of fish, so that every boat had been out. And he had taken them out of the gill net until his arms had been like lead. But it hadn’t done anybody any good. They’d been getting seven cents a pound, but it dropped to five and then three and then a penny, and then you couldn’t get rid of them. And they had been buried under fruit trees and rose bushes all over town.
The Sunday school picnics had nearly always been at the Proctor cottage where the colonel was now living. And you showed off by swimming out as far as you dared, pretending not to hear the Reverend Mountainberry bellowing at you to come back.
Up the beach a little farther was where you and Ed Torrance set out all those stone crab traps that year and did so well. And the stone crabs bought that American Flyer bicycle, and Joe Ducklin got so sore because he thought the money should have gone for clothes.
A vivid world, every inch of it known. And now, as in childhood, the rest of the world did not exist, except as colored maps and faraway names. He had been out into a lot of that world, but now it did not seem real. It was like something he had made up. This was the home place, and the bright borders of it were those
farthest places you had been when you were a kid. Beyond the borders was a hazy nothingness.
The Gulf was flat calm, the day strangely still—without thrash of bait fish, or tilting yawp of terns or the busy-legged sandpipers.
He heard, in the stillness, a distant rumbling of the timbers of the old wooden bridge, and the sound of a rough automotive engine, coming closer, running along the sand and shell road between the cottages and the bay shore. He heard it stop directly behind the cottage. He got up and walked back to the kitchen door and looked out through the screen and saw a battered blue jeep parked next to his old gray Dodge. A sign on the side of the jeep said,
The Larkin Boat Yard and Marina—Ramona, Florida
.
A girl had gotten out of the jeep. She stood for a moment, looking toward the cottage, and then came toward the back door.
She was a girl of good size and considerable prettiness, and she came swinging toward him, moving well in her blue-jean shorts and a sleeveless red blouse with narrow white vertical stripes and battered blue canvas topsiders. She had been endowed with a hefty wilderness of coarse blond-red hair, now sun-streaked. She was magnificently tanned, but it was the tan of unthinking habitual exposure rather than a pool-side contrivance of oils and careful estimates of basting time.
She stopped at the foot of the two wooden steps and looked up at him through the screen, and smiled in a polite and distant way. There was, he thought, an interesting
suggestion of the lioness about her face, the pale eyes spaced wide, a sloping heaviness of cheek structure, a wide and minutely savage mouth.