Darker Than Amber

John D McDonald - Travis McGee 07 Darker Than Amber
Dedication
For Bonie and Bill
CHAPTER 1
We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.
They came to a yelping stop overhead, out of sight, dumped her over the bridge rail and took off.
It was a hot Monday night in June. With moon. It was past midnight and just past the tide change. A billion bugs were vectoring in on us as the wind began to die.
It seemed to be a very final way of busting up a romance. I was sitting there under the bridge in a skiff with my friend Meyer. We were under the end of the bridge nearest the town of Marathon, and it is the first highway bridge beyond Marathon on your way to Key West-if you are idiot enough to want to go to Key West.
My bachelor houseboat, The Busted Flush, was tied up at Thompson's Marina in Marathon. It had been there since Saturday afternoon. After I got in I phoned Meyer in Bahia Mar in Lauderdale, where he lives aboard his cabin cruiser. I'd been gone a little longer than I'd planned, and I had one small errand for him to do, and one small apology for him to make for me. I said that in return, if he wanted to come on down to Marathon by bus, I could put him into a good snook hole at the right time of year, tide and moon, and then he could come on back to Bahia Mar with me aboard the Flush, and we'd get in late Wednesday afternoon, probably--not that it mattered.
Meyer is the best of company, because he knows when talk is better than silence, and he tries to do more than his share of all the less interesting chores.
Until I asked him to join me, and heard him say yes, I had thought I wanted to be completely alone for a few days.
I'd just finished spending ten days aboard the Flush with an old friend named Virginia, known as Vidge. She had come rocketing down from Atlanta, in wretched shape emotionally, trying to find out who she used to be before three years of a sour marriage had turned her into somebody she didn't even like anymore. In the old days she'd never been skyrockets-just a quiet, pretty, decent gal with a nice oblique sense of fun and games, and the manifest destiny of being a good wife.
After three years of Charlie, she was gaunted, shrill, shaky, and couldn't tell you what time it was without her eyes filling with tears. So I took her cruising. You have to let them talk it out. She felt enormous guilt at not being able to make the marriage work. But the more she talked, the more I realized she hadn't had a chance. She was too passive, too permissive, too subdued for an emotional fascist like Charlie. He had leaned too hard. He had eroded her confidence in herself, in everything she thought she was able to do, from meeting people to cooking dinner to driving a car. Finally he had gone to work on her sexual capacities. Were the sexes reversed, you could call it emasculation. People like Charlie work toward total and perpetual domination. They feed on the mate. And Vidge didn't even realize that running away from him had been a form of self-preservation, a way of trying to hang fast to the last crumbs of identity and pride.
At first she talked endlessly, but she couldn't get all the way down to it. She kept saying what a great guy he was and how she had failed him in everything. The third evening, at anchor in a quiet corner of Florida Bay, I managed to get enough of Dr. Travis McGee's truth serum into her. Clean, pure Plymouth gin. By arguing with her, contradicting her, I edged her ever closer to the truth. And in the final half hour, before she passed out, she broke through the barrier and described how much she truly hated that destructive, domineering son of a bitch Charlie. It was very graphic, and she had no idea I was taping it. When she passed out I toted her to the guest stateroom and tucked her in. She slept a little better than around the clock, and was subdued and rueful the next day. That evening she started handing me the Charlie-myth again, and what a failure she was. I played her tape for her. She had hysterics which settled down into a good long hard cry. And after that she was famished enough to eat twenty ounces of rare steak. She slept the clock around again, and woke up feeling that maybe it would be pointless to give the marriage another big try.
Vidge and I had a private history of a small affair way back. It would have been better if we had both wanted the same things out of life. But we had kidded ourselves and each other for a time--before reality set in.
The attempt to relive that pleasant nostalgia was a clumsy failure. Charlie had so thoroughly insulted her womanhood she was far too nervous and anxious to be reached. She was certain she had become frigid. I attempted another of Dr. McGee's famous nostrums. I roused her early, and I gave her a full day of swimming, fishing, beachcombing, skindiving and maintenance and housekeeping chores aboard the Flush. I gave her a day that would have reminded any marine of boot camp. That night, with the waxing moon at the half, and a good breeze keeping the mosquitoes away from the sun deck, she was too sodden with exhaustion to think of being nervous or anxious or apprehensive when I moved over onto her sun mattress and gently shucked her out of her shorts. She made small purring sounds, half contentment and half sleepy objection. When the sudden awareness that it was working for her brought her wide awake she was too far along to choke herself off with all those anxieties Charlie had built, and when it was done she was happy enough and confident enough to keep chuckling now and again until her breath deepened into sleep.
I lugged her dead weight down to my master stateroom, where, many hours later, in the orange-gold light of the morning sun coming through the curtained portholes, she proved to herself it hadn't been a fluke.
When I put her ashore in Flamingo, she looked two years younger. Her tan was good. She had started to fill out again. Her hands were steady and her voice had lost the edge of shrillness. She smiled to herself quite often. I had gotten her sister on the ship-to-shore through the Miami Marine Operator, and the sister had driven down to Flamingo to pick her up there. I managed to get the sister aside and tell her that if Vidge weakened and went back to Charlie, he might well destroy her completely. The sister, in a calm, dry, unexcited tone, said that if Vidge showed the slightest hint of going back to that monster, she, personally, would giftwrap Vidge and send her back to me in Lauderdale, prepaid. I guess she noticed my alarm at that prospect.
Sure, there had been some pleasure in the missionary work, but dealing at close range with a batch of acquired neuroses can make your ears ring for weeks. She was a good enough memory to set up a gentle nostalgia, but not so great that I would have gone looking for her. Most of all, I think that my nerves were frayed by having to edit everything I said to the lady for the ten days. I was trying to build back some morale and independence, and the wrong comment at the wrong time would have send Vidge tumbling back down.
You can be at ease only with those people to whom you can say any damn fool thing that comes into your head, knowing they will respond in kind, and knowing that any misunderstandings will be thrashed out right now, rather than buried deep and given a chance to fester.
Vidge, like so many other mild nice people, was a natural-born victim. Life had treated her so agreeably during her first twenty years she'd never had to plant her feet and swing at anything just to maintain her identity. She was loving and giving. And she would have made a delightful permanent package for some guy able to appreciate it. Lots of Vidges never have to find out they're victims. They land with the right people. But when one of them has the bad luck to mate with a Charlie, she gets gobbled up. You see them in the later years, those vague, translucent, silent women who stand over at the edge of life, with the nervous smile that comes and goes, and the infrequent and apologetic cough. Charlie is the squat florid one with the loud laugh and the bright neckties and the scatological jokes and the incipient coronary accident.
Chugging away from Flamingo at low cruise after dropping my passenger, I had the dreary feeling Charlie was going to snare her again and extract double penalties for the little attempt to escape. I was getting oil pressure fluctuation on the starboard diesel and had a friend in Marathon who would take a look at it without trying to find some plausible 1' way to pick my pocket, so I aimed her in that direction.
My pockets were reasonably hefty. Enough to give me a chance to enjoy another installment of my sporadic retirement. By the end of the year I'd have to dig up a new prospect, somebody so anxious to recover what was legally his that he'd give me half its value for getting it back, half being decidedly better than nothing.
The repair was a minor job, one I could have done myself if I'd been able to diagnose it. I heard the word on the snook hole, remembered the way Meyer would talk a good one up to the side of the boat, and that was how we happened to be under the bridge in a rented skiff Monday midnight, casting the active surface plugs into a splendid snook hole, with the skiff tied to one of the bridge pilings. In the current boil of the incoming tide they had been feeding nicely. I'd had good results with a Wounded Spook with a lot of spinning clattering hardware on it to fuss up the water and irritate them. We'd hooked into at least ten good ones, lost seven amid the pilings, boated three in the eight to twelve-pound range. But we were down to that just-one-more cast.
After midnight on a Monday in June, traffic is exceedingly sparse. The concrete bridge span was about twenty feet above the water. We were in the shadows under the bridge. I heard a car coming; it seemed to be slowing down. There was a sudden screech of brakes overhead. And, moments later, the girl came down. She came down through the orange glow of bridge lights and the white pallor of moonlight. Feet first. Pale skirt fluttered upward baring the long legs. Just one glimpse of that, and she chunked into the water five feet off the bow of the skiff, splashing us, disappearing. Motor roared, tires squealed, car rocketed off.
It was a forty-foot drop for her. Twenty feet of air, twenty feet of depth. I would have expected her to bob up but for one thing. She hit my line. The surface plug was a few feet beyond where she hit. And she took it right on down to the bottom, and there the plug stopped taking out line against the drag.
I had 10-pound mono on that reel. I pulled at it, and it held firm. I tossed my wallet into the bottom of the skiff, shoved my rod at Meyer and asked him to keep the line tight. I yanked my boat shoes off, went over the side, took a deep breath and let half of it out, and pulled myself down the monofilament, hand over hand, sliding my hands along it, grasping it between thumbs and fingerpads. Soon, in the blackness, I reached and touched the hair afloat, dug my fingers into it, got a good hold to try to lift her. Two hands, with that extraordinary gentleness of the last margin of consciousness, closed softly around my wrist. I pulled my way down her body, down to the ankles to find why I couldn't lift her off the bottom. I felt the double ridges of wire biting into the slenderness, leading down and through one of the three oval holes in a hefty cement block. I felt swiftly for the place where itßwas fastened, felt the hard twist of wire close to the block. I knew that if I had to go up for more air and come back... no girl. And my lungs were beginning to try to pump the air in, so that I had to use an effort of will to keep my throat closed against the blind effort. It had been done with pliers. Heavy wire. I knew which way it had to twist. It tore the pads of my thumb and fingers. I hooked fingers into the pocket of my shirt, ripped it off, wrapped it around the wicked ends of the wire, then untwisted as hard as I could. The world was getting a little dreamy. Just slightly vague. But the wire began to unwrap, and the free ends made it easier by giving me more leverage. I wanted to stretch out, yawn, sing some old sad songs, and float on out to sea in the delicious softness of the tide. The wires were free. I yanked them through the hole in the cement block. I kicked hard against the bottom and came slowly up, smiling perhaps, nodding a little, loosely hugging the hips of the drowning girl. I was thrust rudely out of sleepy-bye into the ugliness of coughing and spewing and retching in the fractured moonlight, then trying to hold her so her face was out of the water. That was when I saw Meyer, standing in the skiff, outlined against the lights, carefully playing us two big blundering fish and trying to work us toward the boat. Soon I could help. He knelt and got hold of the girl and worked her aboard over the flat stern, and as I hung on, waiting for strength to climb aboard, I saw him tumble her roughly face down over one of the seats, stand straddling her, reach his hands under her, and pull up slowly, then let her drop and shift his hands and push downward against her back just above the waist.
My feet were beginning to trail outward in the increasing strength of the outgoing tide. Had she been dropped five minutes later I wouldn't have been able to get down to her against that tide run.
I wormed up over the transom, sat there gasping. "While you were down there," Meyer said, his voice distorted by effort, "I went over to town and had a couple of beers."
"She was alive when I got there, buddy. She grabbed my wrist. So I had to unwire her from her anchor on the first trip."
"Some tenderhearted guy," Meyer said, "didn't have the heart to tell her they were all through. Easier to kill them than hurt their feelings."
"Is that the best way to do that?"
"Shut up. It's my way. And I think it's working." I fumbled in the tray of the tackle box and found my small flashlight. I'd recently put new batteries in it. Her soaked skirt was bunched, covering her from mid-thigh upward. Quite a pity, I thought, to discard such a long and lovely pair of legs. I rested the flashlight where it shone upon her ankles and hunched down with the fish pliers and nipped the wire. Freed of that stricture the legs moved a little apart, bare feet both turned inward. Bent over in that position, I saw a glitter under the edge of the bunched skirt, reached and lifted it slightly and saw my Wounded Spook against the back of her left thigh, the rear set of gang hooks set deeply. I clipped the leader off it right at the front eyelet, and just as I did so she gave a shallow, hacking cough and spewed water into the bilge, then gagged and moaned.