A Flash of Green (29 page)

When he arrived at the paper he was alarmed to see that Brian Haas was not in the newsroom. But they said he had gone down the hall for a moment. Borklund had left, saying he would be back about ten-thirty. Haas looked gray and his eyes were dull, but he had kept up with the duties assigned him. Jimmy Wing
stepped into the situation and halved Brian’s work load, giving the scarred man a chance to breathe between tasks.

“It’s like housework,” Brian said dolefully. “You try to keep it cleaned up, but all the muddy kids keep galloping through.”

“And somebody keeps shaking the house.”

“Every man does the work of three, and Ben Killian seeks tax shelters. What about this grapefruit release?”

Jimmy scanned it. “Pure flack, but cute. Let’s run it.”

“This is a magazine? A throwaway sheet?”

“Don’t get the impression it’s a newspaper. They don’t have those any more. This is a write-cute outlet for wire services and syndicates, man. Fellow wants the news, he watches his TV and reads
Time
. If he wants think pieces, he buys
Playboy
.”

“Grapefruit is
good
for you,” Brian Haas said.

“Want to go eat?”

“I might not come back.”

At a little after ten most of Monday’s jigsaw was complete. The other departments were finished and gone. Pages one and two were the only ones still loose, with details on a TWA crash in Illinois still to come in, with fillers to piece it out if not enough came over the wire. And the page-one coverage of a meeting in Berlin could be readily truncated to insert a late box if anything came in worth it, wire or local. The press crew had come on, dour skeptical men who believed only in the rich full life of a tight union, despised the printed word and everybody who had anything to do with any other aspect of the business aside from feeding and operating the automatic presses.

Jimmy went to Vera’s and brought back a sandwich and coffee for Haas. Haas said, “I just called Nan. First chance I had. To tell her I think I’ll make it.”

“It’s a joke, isn’t it?” Jimmy said.

Brian looked at him, his expression suddenly cautious. “What does that mean?”

“It’s so jolly and boyish. Like in fraternities. Boy, was I ever hung! But I hit the biology exam for a C.”

“It seems like that to you?”

“Sometimes, Bri. Sometimes.”

“Then why try to help, you superior son of a bitch? So you can feel like an adult?”

“I almost never feel like an adult. I have my own little capsule dramas. Mine just aren’t quite as obvious.”

Haas picked up a pencil and put it down. He picked it up again and broke it, studied the pieces and dropped them into the wastebasket.

“You waited a long long time to give it to me, Jimmy.”

“What am I giving you?”

“I don’t know. I guess I don’t want to know too much about it. With you, I had to make a guess about what was underneath. Everybody does, with you. There aren’t many clues, you know. I made some bad guesses, maybe. You better get away from me for a while.”

“More drama?”

“Not for me, Jimmy. I lost the drama way back. These days I adjust. To the job, to Nan, to you. That’s all. Now I got to make a new adjustment to you, and it’s easier if you stay away for a while. Just say I’m immune to drama, but not to loss.”

“What have you lost?”

Haas smiled. “An imaginary something, boy. Something I invented. Necessity is the mother of invention? Thanks for getting me over the hump.”

“See you around,” Jimmy said and walked out. He had just gotten into his car when he saw Borklund drive into the parking
lot. He did not turn his lights on, because Borklund solved all awkwardness of salutation by giving you something to do.

He sat in his car, feeling naughty. It was the only word which seemed to fit. A childhood word, involved with spanking and tears.

“Listen, Bri. I just had to take a hack at the nearest thing, and I’m sorry it was you.…”

“Bri, I don’t feel that way about it at all. I mean I think you’re handling it as well as you can, and I just …”

“Bri, I haven’t got this much left that I can afford to lose …”

Friendships, like marriages, he thought, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable. Sometimes the unforgivable is the way something is said, rather than the words. He told himself he would have gone back in, if Borklund hadn’t arrived just then. He told himself that if he could have gone back in, he could have made things right again. So, in an obscure way, the blame could be divided between Borklund and Haas. Besides, Haas took it all wrong. It wasn’t meant the way he took it. In fact, he seemed very damned eager to take it wrong. That’s the way it goes. You sprain a gut for a friend, and it just makes him anxious to resent you. Do a favor and make an enemy. What did Brian want? An apology, because he’s too sensitive? What kind of a friendship is it, when you’ve got to watch every word you say? What’s this crap about a loss? Is that all the credit he gives me?

Jimmy Wing started the car, jammed it into gear, and yelped the tires as he swerved toward the parking-lot exit.

Fourteen

THE CABLE BANK AND TRUST COMPANY
had occupied the new building in 1957. Prior to that move, it had been on the corner of Center Street and Columbia Street, four blocks east of the causeway approach to City Bridge. An antique and idiotic law in Florida prohibits the establishment of branch banks. The new structure was on Center Street, a mile east of the old center of the city. It was an oblong of buff stone, aluminum and glass, set back twenty feet from the sidewalk, framed in grass and flowers. On one side of the building was the large parking area. On the other side were the drive-in windows.

Kat Hubble’s desk was on the central floor area thirty feet inside the front entrance, facing it at a slight angle so that she could also see over into the bull-pen area where the minor executive desks were arranged in a spacious geometry.

Jimmy Wing had bird-dogged the job for her. He had learned that Mrs. Whindler, who had held it previously, had suddenly astonished herself and her husband by becoming pregnant after
thirteen barren years of marriage. Jimmy had made Kat go directly to Martin Cable. Martin had been delighted to offer Kat the position. It had not occurred to him that his widowed neighbor would have to work.

The sign on her desk—lacy brass against white formica—said Information. But the job was considerably more complex than merely sitting there answering questions. She was expected to remember names and faces and greet the maximum possible number of customers by name. She was available for all manner of small miscellaneous errands inside the bank and in the neighborhood. She was assigned typing chores by departments which were temporarily overloaded.

It had been very difficult for her in the beginning. Her typing was rusty, her memory uncertain, and the clerical people assumed she was a spy for Martin Cable. But after three months she had learned the rhythms of her job and had gained the liking and the confidence of all the other employees. She worked from nine until three, five days a week. For the last hour and a half of each working day, the outside doors were locked, and the reception and information part of her day was over.

She had learned to like the special flavor and atmosphere of the main floor of the bank. There was a faint blue-green tint to the huge areas of glass, and as further protection against sun glare, there were outside false walls of pierced concrete. The patterned and tinted sunlight came into the coolness, into the spacious area where recorded music was just barely loud enough to cover the whir and chitter of the electric office equipment. Her desk area, with the aluminum railing around it, had become a pleasant and familiar place. She knew the jokes and the kidding and the personal troubles of the people with whom she worked.

On Monday morning, the tenth of July, she was troubled as she drove to work. The children had gone to the Sinnats. In her
dismay at Dial’s resignation from the committee, she had overlooked a more homely problem. If Dial and Claire went away, taking Esperanza and the twins, the pleasant summer arrangement would be no longer possible. Natalie could not be expected to hang around and watch the Hubble children. Floss could not be saddled with that responsibility. Any alternate arrangement would cost money, and she was operating on a very narrow margin as it was. During the school year, banking hours and school hours were so close to identical that the children were no problem.

At a few minutes after nine, Dennie McGowan, the elderly guard, moved over to her desk and said, “It’s a blue Monday surely when even the redhead can’t smile.”

“Does it show that much, darn it?”

“What can the McGowan do for the lady?”

“Nothing, thanks, Dennie. It’s just sort of a sitter problem. I have to work something out.”

There was a surprising amount of activity for a Monday morning in the summertime, and she had no time to think about her problem until a little after ten when Claire phoned her.

“I hear that Nat told you the sorry news last night, dear.”

“Yes, she said you were going …”

“He’s in one of his states. Nobody can do anything with him when he’s like this. He’s in town now, churning around about passports and travel bureaus. He’ll probably be in for a letter of credit or whatever he does when we go anyplace. We had one real howling match this morning, Kat, and I won one small concession. I love my children, but inasmuch as I’m being dragged away against my will, I absolutely refused to be a traveling den mother, with or without Esperanza. So my burdens will be staying here, and Nat will stay at the house, and your lambs will be as welcome here as ever. I thought you’d want to know that. I knew you must be worrying about it.”

“I was worrying. It’s so nice of you to let me know.”

“Right now I’d be packing if the damn man would let me know where to pack for.”

“Claire, he’s coming through the door right now.”

“Honey, you nail him and tell him to call his poor confused wife and tell her where she’s being taken.”

Dial Sinnat gave Kat an absent-minded nod and walked by her desk, heading back toward the vice-president compound. Though she kept looking for him to come back, he came up to her unobserved, startling her.

“Can you take a break?”

She glanced at the clock, regretfully discarding her hope of taking her break with Jimmy Wing. One of the girls filled in for her. She walked across Center Street with Di and had coffee in a small booth at the rear of the new drugstore.

Dial Sinnat looked uncomfortable and slightly defiant. “I guess I can assume Tom phoned you.”

“Yes.”

“And Nat saved a lot of explanations, didn’t she? Sorry she had to inflict it on you.”

“I was glad she came to me with it, Di.”

“I told you those people were going to play rough.”

“Is this any answer, though, really? Going away?”

“It’s my answer. I want it known, beyond any possibility of misunderstanding, that I’m all the way out of the picture.”

“And I suppose it makes it easier for you.”

“That’s a low blow, but I guess I left myself open. Yes, it will make it easier. I thought of sending Nat back to her mother and leaving it up to the opposition to try something else. But I’m afraid they would, and I’m afraid it would work. They’ll leave Natalie alone when they find out I’ve left.”

“Who phoned you?”

“Two of them talked to me, and I haven’t the slightest idea who either of them were. The first one was very suave and indirect. The second one lost patience, I guess. He took the phone. He sounded like a mean ignorant man. He was very direct. He had a very dirty mouth.” Dial leaned forward and dropped his voice slightly. “I didn’t tell my daughter this. And I don’t want you to tell her. I’m telling you because … I don’t want you to have too bad an opinion of me, Kat. I want you to stand up for me, with the others, but without telling them what I’m going to tell you. What do you know about the Army of the Lord?”

She was startled. “Just what everybody knows, I guess. It’s sort of a crackpot sect down in the southern part of the county, with a sort of a church near Wister. And a strange man who seems to run it.”

“The so-called Reverend Darcy Harkness Coombs. Yes.” His voice was strange. “It’s quite a militant little group, Kat. They burn books. They preach on street corners. And they have … punished some evildoers.”

“Like that woman last year?”

“And some other women you didn’t hear about, and some drunks and some thieves. I can tell you almost the exact words the second man used. I’ve been hearing them ever since. ‘If’n you don’t unjoin that red Communist committee, Sinnat, we’ll one dark night snatch that black-hair daughter of yourn out from that whore automobile an’ run her off into the piny woods, strip her down, knot her up to a tree and flog the pretty hide off’n her back so as she’ll realize how decent folks treats loose women and fornicators.’ ”

“But … that’s horrible! They wouldn’t!”

“They’ve done it to some other people, Katherine. That man
sounded as if he’d enjoy it. You see, I can’t take a chance on it being a bluff.”

“She shouldn’t stay here!”

“She won’t consider leaving. I can’t force her. If I told her what they told me, there’d be no chance of her leaving. You know the spirit she has. And she’s too young to understand what a thing like that can do to any sensitive human being. And they could probably get away with it. There’s been no identification made the other times. He said she would be in absolutely no danger if I quit Save Our Bays, so I’m quitting as obviously and completely as I can. I couldn’t make her promise to stay away from whoever she’s having the affair with, but I have the hunch that if she doesn’t, she’ll at least be a lot more cunning about it. How did she get into such an idiotic thing?”

“Di, I don’t think it’s … anything she’s ashamed of.”

“Obviously,” he said with a bitter smile. “She’s of the most vulnerable breed in the world—an idealist. Somebody sold her some good reasons. I respect her too much to accuse her of having cheap motives. But she can get into a cheap situation from the best of motives, even as you and I, Katherine. And she wouldn’t be stable enough to take a public flogging. Who would? God knows what it would do to her.”