A Flash of Green (6 page)

Kat walked slowly home along the dark street. She could hear distant music over the tinny little speaker at the Pavilion, half lost in a soft sound of the waves against the beach. A meager breeze made false rain sounds in the palms. A whippoorwill, far away, made his sound of weary astonishment. A nearby mockingbird made repetitive improvisation, with a silvery clarity and an undertone of anxiety. Bugs skirred and grated in the unsold lots of Sandy Key Estates.

Frosty gathered up her books when Kat walked in.

“They didn’t make a sound,” Frosty said. “I had a Coke. Gee, thanks a lot, but I couldn’t take any money, Mrs. Hubble. I told my mother I wouldn’t. Anyhow, it’s hardly been more than a half hour. Well … thanks. Thanks a lot. Gee, any time you want me to sit for you …”

After the girl left, Kat went to the phone and called Colonel Thomas Lamson Jennings, A.U.S., Ret., the president of Save Our Bays, Inc. Colonel Jennings lived further north on the Key, on the bay side.

“Tom? Kat Hubble. I know it’s an odd time to phone, but I have to tell you this. That Grassy Bay thing is going to open up again.”

“Again? Are you kidding me?”

She quickly explained what she had learned and said, “I got it from Sally Ann Lesser, but that’s not for general distribution.”

“Katherine, I could have used you as a staff G-2 in a couple of wars. Those idiots obviously thought they were going to catch us off balance. Can you come here at five o’clock tomorrow?”

“Let me think. Yes, I can make it.”

“Good girl. I’ll see if I can track down some more information on it tomorrow. I’ll call a meeting of the Executive Committee. The big question now is to find out exactly when they’re going to make their first move, and then we’ll know how much time we have.”

“Maybe … we can’t stop it this time.”

“Why not?”

“These are local men, Tom. They’ll have things pretty much all their own way.”

“Don’t be such a defeatist, Katherine. Of
course
we’ll whip them, just as we did before. Last time we whipped them in the very first round, the public hearing. We’ll try to do the same thing this time, but if we don’t, there are a lot more things we can do. Remember? We’ll get it into the courts and we’ll stall them until they give it up as a bad job. All we’ll have to do is maintain a united front. I imagine there’ll be some new pressures on our membership this time, local in origin, so it’ll be up to us to keep the membership in line. I promise you one thing, Katherine, I’ll never look out this window at Grassy Bay and see dredges out there.”

After she had hung up it took almost a half hour for the hearty confidence of the colonel’s voice to lose its persuasion. She recalled Van’s sour comment on Tom Jennings. “That’s the type who’d lead the Light Brigade up the wrong ravine, yelling ‘Charge!’ and grinning like an idiot.”

But at the end Van had to admit Tom had organized it well.

It seemed a pity it had to be done all over again.

She finished her letter to her sister in Burlington, sealed it and put it where she would be certain to see it on her way out in the morning. She read two pages of a book and put it aside. She
turned the television set on and searched the channels and turned it off. She walked back and forth through the silence of the house in a restlessness all too familiar.

When she went into her bedroom the arrangement of her cosmetics on the top of her dressing table did not look quite right to her. She examined it more closely and saw that several jars and bottles were not as she had left them. It had been Frosty, of course. She examined a lipstick and found it worn down in a manner different from the way she had left it. Balled tissue stained with the same shade was in the bottom of her wastebasket. She was surprised at the extent of her own irritation, and tried to tell herself it was a perfectly normal thing for any fifteen-year-old girl to do.

But somehow having Frosty do it made it less palatable. She did not like Frosty, or Frosty’s seventeen-year-old brother, Jigger, or the twelve-year-old sister, Debbie Louise. They were all superbly healthy, beautifully coordinated children, pale blonds with dark-blue eyes. Toward all adults they exhibited a watchful, impenetrable politeness which somehow had a false flavor, as though it were a mask for a contemptuous amusement. More than any other teenagers she knew, they seemed to confirm the assumption of the marketing experts that this was a new and separate race, a special people with only limited contact with the adult world.

It seemed too simple, somehow, to say they were spoiled. There had always been the pocket money in whatever quantity they seemed to need, and the use of the family charge accounts. Burt Lesser certainly imposed no disciplines on them. He was a big soft balding man with such mild indefinite features that he could be caricatured by drawing an egg and putting heavy black glasses frames on it. He dressed more formally than most of the
businessmen in Palm City. He had a loud methodical baritone laugh which he used either too soon or too late, and generally too often. Burt had obtained his realtor’s license soon after they had moved down from Wisconsin, fifteen years ago, the same year Sally Ann had received the final and most massive installment on her inheritance. Through a sweaty, earnest, fumbling diligence he had managed to do quite well at the trade. And Sally Ann had done well too, by buying in her own name those investment bargains which came up from time to time. Burt was an active workhorse member of a wide range of civic organizations.

There were those who said you just had to admire ol’ Burt for the way he gets out and digs when, as far as the money is concerned, he could lay right back and take it easy.

But one night, on the Lessers’ patio, while Van was still alive, Sally Ann, at one of the rare times when she was conspicuously in her cups, had given what was probably an accurate explanation. Somebody had been kidding Burt, asking him when he was going to retire. “Retire, for chrissake!” Sally Ann had roared. “As long as he can walk and talk, he’s going to have an office to go to. I told him when I married him he wasn’t going to clutter up the house all day long. That was the deal. It would drive me nuts having him around here trying to wait on me so he could feel useful.” Burt had laughed, but it had been a hollow effort.

On reflection it seemed to Kat that Burt Lesser was an unlikely person to be heading up this new Palmland Development Company. He did not seem sufficiently directed, or properly ruthless. But he was well known and his reputation was good.

She was in bed by eleven-thirty. After she turned her light out, she stared wide-eyed into the darkness and kept trying new positions, hoping to find one which would relax her. When it was quarter after twelve by her bedside clock she gave up and took
one of the green capsules Ray Coplon had prescribed for her. In a little while the familiar feeling of the drug began. The black world began to expand, moving out and back and away from her, leaving her smaller and smaller and smaller in an enormous bed—small and silky and dwindling away.

Four

IT WAS NINE-THIRTY
when Jimmy Wing arrived at the home of County Commissioner Elmo Bliss, three miles east of the city line, out on the Lemon Ridge Road. It was a huge old frame house, and Elmo had put a lot of money into modernization over the past few years. The house, and how he had acquired it, had become part of the legend, and had suffered distortions as had most other parts of the legend.

Jimmy Wing often caught himself in the act of exaggerating the man’s past. Elmo had that inexplicable capacity to seem just a little more thoroughly alive than anyone else. Now, in his early forties, he looked like a leaner and younger version of Jimmy Hoffa, but with a roan-brown brush cut, and that tough sallow cracker skin the sun can’t mark, and eyes of a clear pale dangerous gray. He had Hoffa’s abrupt charm, his uncomical arrogance, and the same air of absolute certainty, diluted not at all by the back-country drawl, a lazier way of moving. In the past few years Elmo had settled on the kind of clothing he would wear for all
except the most formal occasions. He wore slacks and sports shirts in plain colors, in dull hues of gray, blue and green, all in an understated western cut, along with pale hats which were never quite ranch hats, but gave a subtle outdoor-man impression.

Jimmy Wing knew the bare outlines of the story, and it always pleased him to be able to add little incidents which had the flavor of truth. He came from a large clan noted over the years for the frequency of their trouble with the law, as well as a casual inbreeding which did the stock no good. Poachers, commercial fishermen, guides, ’gator hunters, brawlers. But Elmo was the one who became an All-State wingback, and picked the best deal out of all the scholarship offers and went on to Georgia. When Jimmy had begun senior high, Elmo had been gone three years, but the legends still circulated in the high school.

Elmo lasted two years at Georgia before he was thrown out. He came back with a big red convertible and money in his pocket. The sheriff at that time had been Pete Nambo, a solemn brutal man who believed that a Bliss was a Bliss, no matter how many times one of them had had his name on the sports page.

When Elmo didn’t have enough money left to pay his fine when Nambo arrested him the third time, the sentence was ninety days. Nambo put Bliss right onto one of the county road gangs, swinging a brush hook right through the heat of summer, living on beans, side meat and chicory coffee. And each evening, after the truck brought them back, if Nambo felt like it and had the energy, he’d have two deputies bring Elmo to him and he would work him over in an attempt to break him and make him beg. Nambo had learned he could break on the average of one out of every three Blisses he could give his personal attention to, and he had to find out which variety he had available this time. Not one of Elmo’s avid fans from the old days came to his rescue.

When Elmo was released it was an even-money bet around
town as to whether he’d take off for some friendlier place, or stay around and get into more trouble. But he sold his red car and apparently tucked the money away, and went to work as a rough carpenter. He kept his mouth shut, stayed out of bars, and ceased to be an object of any public interest. It wasn’t long before he became construction foreman for old Will Maroney. Then he made some sort of complicated deal whereby he took a spec house off Will’s hands. After he dressed it up and sold it quickly, the little firm became Maroney and Bliss. They tackled a bigger job than Will had ever attempted alone, and when they had made out well on it, suddenly Elmo broke with Maroney and went ahead on his own, calling himself The Bliss Construction Company (“Live in a Home of Bliss”), and Will Maroney went around town cursing Elmo for having walked off with the four top men out of his work crew, men who had been with him for many years.

The wise businessmen of Palm City said that Elmo was going to fold any minute, and all his creditors were going to take a beating. They said he was moving too fast, buying too many vehicles and too much equipment, taking on too many jobs, expanding his work crews too fast, doing too much damn-fool advertising.

But he didn’t fold. As soon as it was obvious to him, as it would soon be obvious to the rest of the community, that he was over the hump and in the clear, he married one of the Boushant girls, Dellie, the next to the youngest. There were seven of them. Felicia, Margo, Ceil, Belle, Frannie, Dellie and Tish. They had all been born and raised in the big house out on Lemon Ridge Road. Their father had been a carnival concessionaire, their mother—until she got too heavy too young—a wire walker.

Not one of the seven girls could have been called a beauty, but they were uniformly attractive, all with vivacity, humor, their own brand of pride, and a good sense of style. They were affectionate,
amorous, fun-loving, warm-blooded girls, and perhaps because there were so many of them, their reputation was a little more florid than their deeds warranted. Over the years of their girlhood, a thousand different cars must have turned in at that dusty driveway to pick one or the other of them up.

One by one, starting at the top, they eventually married, soundly but not advantageously, married sober, reliable electricians, delivery men, mechanics, and began at once to bear them healthy lively children.

In high school and during college vacations Elmo had dated several of the Boushant girls, and at the time of his marriage one of the sniggering jokes around town was that he had sampled every one of them and settled for the one with the most talent. Jimmy Wing suspected this was a partial truth. Elmo would have been too young for Felicia, and possibly too young for Margo. And too old for Tish. But a judicious weighing of all the factors of opportunity and inclination made it reasonable to assume Elmo Bliss had enjoyed three of his wife’s elder sisters. He had gone with Ceil for a little while when he was in high school, and been seen often with Belle during the first summer of college, and had been dating Frannie at the time Sheriff Pete Nambo locked him up.

Also, Jimmy could remember the tone and expression of awe with which a local rancher had once described to him the young manhood of Elmo Bliss: “There was three or four of them, Elmo the leader, roarin’ up and down this coast a hundred miles an hour any night of the week, all over Collier, Lee and Charlotte Counties, as well as Palm County, and inland to Hendry and Glades. I tried to run with them for a while there, but it like to wore me down. That Elmo, he’d do any damn thing come into his head. I’d say you could count on two fights a night anyway, and you could sure count on women because that’s what Elmo
was mostly hunting for. Lord God, the women! I’m telling you, Jimmy, he could find them where they wasn’t. Schoolgirls, tourist ladies, waitresses, nurses, schoolteachers, all kind of shapes and sizes and ages, and we’d bundle them into the cars and go off, slamming down them little back roads, singin’, drinkin’, the girls squealin’, and it seemed like we couldn’t be anyplace in six counties where Elmo didn’t know someplace nearby where we could take them. Anything warm, breathing and with a skirt on, Elmo seemed to get it without anywhere near the amount of fuss you’d expect.”