A Flash of Green (38 page)

“It depends on where you want to go, I guess.”

“I’d like to look at what they have, and pick one out.”

“Dayton?”

“Sweetie, if that’s the only one they have, you can bring me back here for the new hairdo. I wore that place out.” As she reached for the last light switch, she gave him an urchin grin, a bawdy wink.

“Shouldn’t we do some phoning first, Charity?”

“That would be planning ahead, Jimmy. Makes for a dreary case of the dulls. Let’s just roll the dice.”

He carried the two big bags out and put them in the wagon. She brought the smaller ones. As he backed out of the driveway she said, “Maybe I kept you from phoning the little woman, eh?”

“No little woman. There is one, but she isn’t taking calls.”

“Separated?”

“That’s a good enough word. Where do you want to fly to?”

“Let’s see what they got first. Where’s the nearest place with the biggest choice?”

“Tampa. But we can stop at Sarasota and see what they’ve got.”

“Wing, sweetie, you’re ugly in a kinda nice classy way. I usually
don’t like sandy men. They look as if they’d go fat and pink and start snorting.”

“Thanks so much.”

She carefully folded her white cardigan and placed it on his right thigh. She hitched around until she could lie on her side, using the cardigan as a pillow. The seat was as far back as it would go. The bottom curve of the steering wheel was within an inch of her forehead.

“Mind?” she said.

“Not at all.”

“I’m a big girl. I need a lot of room. Wake me at the ticket counter.” She breathed deeply a few times, and was asleep sooner than he would have believed possible. He was very conscious of the solid weight of her head against his thigh. When he slowed for a stop sign, there was a scent of her in the car, gin, and a soapy fresh smell of her hair and a faint fragrance of perfume.

It was a little after four when he stopped in front of the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport Terminal. She had stirred slightly in her sleep a few times. His leg was tired and numb from having held it in the same position so long. She sat up, rubbed her eyes with her fists, shook her glossy hair back, and then looked at him and said, “Oho! You again! Are you following me?”

“Want to wait while I check?”

“No. I’ll go in too. You can check while I use the biffy.” She got out and limped around in a little circle, stamping her foot. “Pins and needles,” she said. She took the smallest suitcase out of the wagon and carried it in with her.

She came out in fifteen minutes, hair brushed, mouth fixed, looking incomparably fresh and rested. She came tocking toward him on her high heels, a big, gaudy, smiling young girl. She stood eye to eye with him, making him feel dwindled.

“Four hour and fifteen minute wait,” he said.

“Where does it go?”

“It’s Eastern, and it hops here and there and ends up in Idlewild in the later afternoon. There’s room on it.”

“On to Tampa, Wingy sweetie.”

“After some coffee.”

“Sure. But I could drive and you could sleep, you know. Show me a map. I’m damn fine about maps, man. I’m sober and I’ve got dandy reactions and I love to drive right into the dawn.”

After slight hesitation, he skipped the coffee. He moved into the rear seat. She gave him her sweater for a pillow. He sat up until he saw that she handled a car with precision and competence. He stretched out. Moments later she was leaning in, shaking him. It was gray dawn. He sat up. They were in a parking area at Tampa International.

She handed him the parking tag. “Come on, sweetie. Wake up with the sun. I got lost once, but we still made pretty good time. You need a motor job. Let’s leave the bags here until we know which lucky airline gets them. How do you lock this thing? How do you feel?”

“Wretched.”

“You look worse than that. Come on. Get the blood moving. You didn’t stir a muscle when I bought gas. You owe me five sixty, sweetie.”

He stood beside the car and stretched, then locked it and followed her into the terminal. Every man within a hundred feet, sitting and standing, straightened up and stared at her. She went from counter to counter, airline to airline, standing at each long enough to read the dispatch board.

“Now the coffee,” she said, and he followed her to the coffee shop. They sat at the counter. She ordered a large orange juice, cereal, hot cakes with sausage and a pot of coffee. He ordered juice and coffee.

“If you’d eat, you wouldn’t get so tired, Wingy. This is like a new day. Fortify yourself. Now let me get straight. I name the place, you buy the ticket.”

“Up to a hundred dollars.”

She glared at him. “The hell with that! If I’m run off, I want the first-class treatment. You can get it back from all those dear old pals of Buckie’s. How much have you got on you?”

He checked, his fingers slow and fumbling. With the money Elmo had given him yesterday morning, he had two hundred and fifty-six dollars.

“Of which five sixty is mine anyhow,” she said. “No airlines credit card?”

“Not on my salary.”

“Well, give me two-forty of it, and if it’s more, I’ll have to chip in.”

“Damn decent of you. Where are you going?”

“Las Vegas. There’s a couple of ways to get there. Any objection?”

“Nothing I can think of. Except the cost.”

She had been eating with a considerable fervor. She finished and said, “Stand guard over my coffee. Give with the money. I’ll get the ticket.”

“Go see if you can get on a flight and then we’ll go buy the ticket.”

“Such trust,” she said. She was back in ten minutes. She handed him a small package. “All for you, sweetie.” He looked into the bag. It was a plastic kit containing comb, toothbrush, toothpaste, razor and shaving cream. “You don’t owe me,” she said. “It will improve your outlook.” She patted his shoulder. “Run along and burnish.”

When he came back to the counter she saluted him. “In a sense, you look human, Wingy.”

“In a sense, I feel better. I was shaving and thinking about you. You’re better organized than you look. Maybe Las Vegas makes some sense too.”

“There was a spooky little bartender in Lauderdale. His brothers are all wedged into a thing out there, the Sahara, and they’d made a niche for him and he was on his way, wanting me to come along and share driving, saying I could make out, because there’s so many ways out there. So he’s there and he’d make some motions around and about but I could drop anyplace and land dancing, so it isn’t a sweat. About my little airplane, dear, let’s go buy it. But it isn’t until three-oh-five, a jet thing, and the best I could do, except sprawling around Chicago for half my life.”

“I’m supposed to be a working man.”

“But you are working, aren’t you? I didn’t get the idea this was a pleasure trip.”

They bought her ticket and checked the luggage through, except for the smallest suitcase. The sun was up and there was an early-morning fragrance, and a promise of heat and rain.

She stood in the terminal and looked at him with a great earnestness and said, “I really and truly, honest and truly, will get onto that thing and be gone, sweetie. I’ve got the ticket and the urge. So you can paddle back to Palmville and say you stoned me out of town. Okay?”

“All right, Charity. Sure.”

She looked at the terminal clock. “But I am not going to stand around here like some kind of a nut for nine hours, rebuffing the chatty types. I saw nearby motels. You can drop me, and I’ll leave a call and taxi back. One thing I can always do is sleep.”

He drove her to a cluster of competing motels and she picked the one she liked. She strode in and registered and came out with a key, and he drove her back to a unit at the end of the court beyond a ludicrously small swimming pool. “She promised no
maids clashing and bellowing around, and a taxi hooting for me at two-fifteen.”

He carried the small suitcase in. The room was small, shadowy and chilly, with one bed and a giant television set and a faint institutional odor of antiseptic.

He put the suitcase on the luggage rack. She moved close to him and looked at him with a strange expression. “Well?” she asked.

“I was wondering …”

“Yes?”

“I guess it’s none of my business. And you seem a lot more competent at twenty than I was. But that’s a very hard town, Charity. I know you don’t want anybody being protective. But there’s a guy I know out there, works on the paper for Greenspun, I could give you a note to him you could hold onto and use if you have to, if things get rough for you somehow.”

She shook her head slowly, her expression wry. “Here I stand, itching for the pass. Oh boy, did I ever have one for you! I was going to give it the swivel and a lot of back. I was going to give you one to make the pair I was given look like pattycake pattycake. So you don’t pick up a single clue. Instead you keep on being a very nice sweetie guy.”

“Do you want the note or don’t you?”

“Now he’s bugged. Yes, I want the note, don’t I. Pretty please.”

There was stationery in a drawer. He sat and addressed the note, and wrote, “This will introduce Miss Charity Prinderg …”

“Hold it!” she said. She was standing behind him, a hand on his shoulder. She reached over and crumpled the note and said, “This is a bigger departure than most, so I need a new name. For more reasons than you could guess. You give me one, sweetie.”

“Is the Charity part okay?”

“It’s even a character trait. Let’s keep it.”

He thought for a few moments. “How about Charity Holmes?”

“Mmm. As in Sherlock, eh? If it doesn’t sound too much like a housing project for the aged. Charity Holmes. It swings a little. Charity begins at home. You know, I like it. I like it a lot.” She kissed his ear. “I’m christened. On with the note. I’m ticketed as Prindergast. When I walk off the ramp I turn into Miss Holmes.”

He wrote the note and gave it to her. She read it over, nodded, and put it in her purse. When he stood up, she put her arms around his waist and leaned back slightly and looked up at him. She had stepped out of her shoes, stepped down to a height where she seemed younger, smaller, more manageable.

“Poor old Wingy,” she said. “The hard types using him for a handy man. Let’s take ourselves a little lovin’, just for luck.”

“I just … thanks but I … I mean I really …”

She looked at him in a puzzled way. “You pledged, or something? Sick? Queer? Or you don’t like great big girls? Sweetie, I may give it away, but I don’t throw it around. There just aren’t that many I need.”

It was his intention to give her a friendly smile, a kiss, a perfectly polite and orderly and face-saving refusal of favors offered. But to his utter disbelief and consternation, the mild words clotted in his throat, he felt his face twisting into a sob, and the tears began to run out of his eyes. Through the distorting prism of tears he saw the sudden warm concern on her face. He tried desperately to laugh at himself, but it came out as a huge coughing sob. She led him over to the bed. He sat on the edge of the bed, slumped with his face in his hands. She knelt on the floor beside him, pressed against his leg, one hand on his knee, the other gentle at the nape of his neck. She made small tender sounds of comfort.

“I … I don’t know … what the hell … is wrong with me,” he managed to say.

“Sweetie, you’re on the dirty ragged edge. Something chews your heart, Jimmy. It’s a people-trouble. It can only happen to people, you know. Vegetables never get churned up.”

“This … is so damn silly, for God’s sake.”

“It ain’t manly, you mean?”

He struggled for control. “Today … yesterday, I mean, I felt good without knowing why. Now this. I’m cracking up.”

“Darn you anyhow, James Wing. I don’t want to know people can be racked up. Not elderly types like you. I had my little turn at it. It’s a scene I don’t want to make again. You coming out of it? Go wash your face, sweetie.”

He delayed in the bathroom for long minutes, staring at his puffy red eyes in the mirror because he felt ashamed to face her. When he came out, she was sitting on the bed. She patted the spread beside her. “Come sit and listen,” she ordered. She took his hand. “This is the story of a girl bitched by biology, sir. When I was thirteen I looked exactly like I look right now, almost. My face was a little thinner and my hair was mousy brown, but all the rest was as you see it. One minute I was in my happy little world of scabby knees, hopscotch and bicycling, and the next minute I came bursting up out of my girl-scout uniform and discovered, to my alarm, I’d turned into a big freak. And freaks, my dear man, either hide or turn into clowns. So I went into my clowning era. The marks of it are still with me. It didn’t last too long. It lasted like until I found out that what was freaky to other little girls was just nifty for little boys. I was getting no appreciation at home, for some dingy reasons I won’t dwell on, so I gloried in all the approval I was getting, and was too damn careless, and got into a scandal bit which got nastied up by the police coming into
it, and I had to change schools. Then began my sneaky era, where I still got cheers, but kept it out of the papers. Then I fell in love. I was true as blue. I trotted after him like a big dog, all happy and panting. It lasted into college, my love era. I couldn’t see he was really a filthy little prig, I’d trusted him and told all, so when he was ready, he bounced me out of his life on the grounds I was a loose woman, all of which had happened before I met him. Then I had the bad time, Jimmy. The tears that come for no reason, and a kind of reckless joy that comes for no reason. It’s a pendulum thing, like something came loose and starts swinging around in your head. I wasn’t mourning a lost love. By then I despised the cruddy little stinker. I’d just gone raggedy. But I came out of it, and soon thereafter I went to Lauderdale. Now are you all right?”

“How about your people?”

“Really and truly they couldn’t care less, and never have.”

“What do you think is going to happen to you?”

“I’m going to dally around, finding coffee and cakes, until the President of the World finds me, sweetie. He’s going to fit the word ‘man’ as if it was invented for him. When he laughs, they’ll have landslides in the Andes. And he’ll be after a big, durable, true-as-blue girl, with so much ready waiting love to give he’ll be the only one who can take the pressure. And every one of my kids will have the living be-Jesus appreciated out of him. I’ll kiss them and applaud them all day long.”