Dead Low Tide (2 page)

She sat down in a chair near my desk, sat down a bit heavy and tired. She had on a sort of blue denim play suit thing, and she slouched in the chair and crossed her thin brown legs and asked for a cigarette. Her face was in shadow, and when I held the light for her I saw her face looked sort of dulled. It
wasn’t alive, the way I had always seen it before, and there wasn’t much lilt in her voice.

She said, “I was driving around, going no place, and I saw the light. I sure hope I haven’t kept you from finishing something, Andy.” Always before, it had been Mr. McClintock. Maybe guys without shirts revert to first names.

“I just finished,” I lied. It didn’t seem in character for Mrs. John Long to be driving around doing nothing. According to the papers she couldn’t have too many free minutes in a day.

“Do you like working here, Andy?”

“I like it fine, Mrs. Long.”

“How did you happen to land here, Andy?”

I wondered if she was spending a hot evening improving employee morale, by getting the serf to talk about himself. “I answered an ad in the paper.”

“I mean before.”

“The whole history?”

“Andy, don’t you sound so all bristly now. I really want to know.”

The appearance of genuine interest always seems to soothe us. “Well, Mrs. Long, I graduated from Syracuse University three years ago. Business Administration.”

“Only three years out of college?”

“I was an old college boy. The class called me ‘Daddy.’ I’m twenty-eight now. A war got in the way of my education. Anyway, I went to work for a big corporation in Buffalo. I found out that made me nervous. It was just too big. It was like a special form of social security. All I had to do was keep my hair combed for thirty years and get myself retired. So I saved some money, took off like a bird, and came down here to the Land of Opportunity. The New Frontier.”

“Any girl, Andy?”

“You’re getting quite a dossier, Mrs. Long. They come and go. I cook pretty good, and I’m pure hell at pressing a pair of pants.”

“I’ve wondered about you.”

“Why, Mrs. Long?”

“You call me Mary Eleanor, hear? That Mrs. Long makes me feel awful old.”

“O.K., Mary Eleanor.” The southland seems to insist on giving the ladies two names. “Why were you wondering about me?”

“I don’t know, for certain. John has always had such little old dumb ugly people in the office. And you’re big and nice looking and smart. But he doesn’t pay much, I guess. So I—”

“Mrs.—Mary Eleanor, just what have you got on your mind? We’re having a nice visit, but what do you want?”

“It’s awful darn hot in here, Andy. If you’re finished up like you say, come on for a ride.”

The last thing I wanted to do was go for any rides with the boss’s wife. That’s frowned on in schools of business administration. Bosses’ daughters they approve of—not wives. Something was chewing on Mary Eleanor, and she didn’t want to come right out with it. I know now that if my heap, my old Chevy convertible, had been parked out in front instead of being incarcerated in Gadgkin’s Repair Garage for an overdue ring job, I would have pleaded a date. But it was a hot night, and I was carless, and perhaps careless. The vehicle would save me a hike to the bus stop, and another hike down my road. And, as another extenuating circumstance, I had my shirt off and I was getting fatly weary of John Long and unfulfilled promises, and what was this anyway—the Middle
Ages? Can’t the boss’s young wife give me a lift? And if something was chewing on her, wasn’t it a good deed?

“Tell you what, Mary Eleanor, I would dearly appreciate a lift home. Wait a minute while I do some sorting.”

She sat quietly while I shuffled the papers and put them in the desk drawer. I stood up and put on my shirt, reached over and snapped out the desk light. Streetlights came through the big front window. Day or night, that office is a goldfish bowl. Her little black MG was parked forty feet away, with the top down. She swung ahead of me and got behind the wheel and I got in beside her.

“I live at that Shady Grove Retreat place,” I said.

“I know.”

I’d seen her go by in that little jet car, but this new viewpoint was more distressing. Anything in the road ahead of her was a personal challenge. She went scooting up the trail. I opened my mouth when we were a quarter mile from the turnoff, but we were by it before I could even say “Hey.” I concentrated all my efforts on trying to act relaxed. We were five miles up the trail in something less than five minutes. She slowed for a patch of neon that was rushing at us, slewed into the parking area, skidded the back end, and parked with the hood shoved halfway into a flowering bush.

“I don’t live here, Mary Eleanor,” I said, only a bit faintly.

“You can have a drink with me, can’t you?” she said as she got out. She walked toward the door of the place. It would be a bit fantastic, I decided, to sit out in the car and sulk. I began to realize why girls carry mad money. I untangled myself from the MG and followed along. As I walked behind her I became aware that in spite of her being a scrawny type, she wagged very pleasantly and cutely in the blue demin outfit,
giving me a sort of vague suicidal hope that this was one of those tabloid jobs where the boss’s young wife picks a playmate out of the office. I unloaded that notion quickly. Considering the size of the town, and what John Long measured around the forearms, if she started to nibble at me I was going right up a palm tree and squat in the top with the rats.

We got to the door at the same time, and I reached around her and pulled the screen open. I wondered who would be in the place, and I tried to figure out what kind of expression I ought to wear. Business-like, perhaps. A beer-joint conference on matters of great moment.

We went in. Some fans were humming. I gave a self-conscious, “Yo” to a couple of commercial fishermen I knew. There was a creepy blonde singing drunky music at the bar. The owner-manager-bartender seemed to recognize Mary Eleanor, as she got a large hello, but he took a half hitch in his eyebrow as he looked at me, which didn’t please me since I have paid him beer money as good as anybody’s. It then occurred to me that, nibble or no, just being seen with her wasn’t the happiest way to spend an evening.

Mary Eleanor went crisply down to the very last booth in sort of an alcove across from the door of the ladies’ room. I put up the window and the fans made some of the night air move in across our faces, so it wasn’t bad.

Owner-manager-bartender waddled back and took her order for bourbon and water on the side, and mine for a bottle of Miller’s. As soon as he went away she dug in a small white purse and took out a ten and pushed it across at me.

“I can handle it,” I said, maybe a bit on the stuffy side.

“Please, Andy. Or I won’t enjoy my drink.”

“Dutch, then.”

She nodded. It was the first time I’d ever had a good chance to look at her face. Big bright black eyes, and just a shade too much in the tooth department, so she had a very faint look of coming out of one of Disney’s woodland dells. She had a little mesh of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and her underlip was about three times the thickness of the one on top. Her ears were little and they grew flat to her head. Her hands were small, with spidery fingers and sort of lumpy knuckles. But, all in all, I would say, an attractive item. First you saw the thin look, and then you saw that her breasts looked high and sharp, and as I have mentioned, there was a nice side to side wave of the seat of the blue denim as you happened to walk behind her. I guess I was giving it too close a study. It leaned back in the booth.

“Andy—I went over everyone, thinking, and you’re the only …”

The drinks came then and she shut up. They were on a pay-as-you-go deal, so he took the ten and brought the change back. By the time he got back with it, her shot of bourbon was gone, and so was one sip of the water, and she pushed the shot glass toward him. He picked it up and went off with it.

The interruption had given her time to think that maybe there was a better way of edging up on the subject, but I was beginning to think I was a little too placid about the whole thing, and a little loss of balance wouldn’t hurt, so I said, “The only what?”

“What? Oh—the only one who’s usually in the office.”

You don’t call your boss’s wife a liar, even when she is. The new shot came and she was still holding it, rim-full, rock steady, when the change came back. She threw it down with
a hard toss, and one ripple of her throat, and took a little sip of water. They do something to those little dark girls. Maybe it’s a special course at Sweet Briar. All night they can drink, and nothing happens. Plying them with same is bad technique, because whatever happens, it happens to you, and they take you home and in the morning your head rattles like a broken transmission.

“What do you want, Mary Eleanor?”

“I just plain don’t know how to ask you, Andy.”

“Try English.”

“All right. Will you find out something for me? Will you find out what’s wrong with John?”

“Wrong? Offhand the only thing wrong with your husband is that he wears a size nineteen collar and he could probably run a hundred yards in eleven seconds with one of me tucked under each arm, and I weigh one eighty. Oh, yes, and you can’t pin him down. That I know. Ask him if tomorrow is Tuesday and he bangs you on the shoulder and asks you if you had a good old time last Sunday.”

She smiled, and this was a smile not for the society section of our daily newspaper. It was more the sort of smile you wear to get your lips out of the way so you can examine a loose filling. “Oh, I know how hard it is to make him tell you anything, Andy. Whatever it is, it’s bad.”

“What’s bad?”

“Whatever it is that’s wrong. He sits and his eyes look right through things and he doesn’t hear me. He groans something awful in his sleep, and the other night there he was, sitting right up in bed and making a real high thin screaming sound like a woman. When I ask him what is wrong, he goes off someplace and closes the door real quiet.
And he gets up in the night and walks around and around our house, and once I came home and I didn’t know he was there and I came in quiet like, and he was sitting there all by himself, crying without making any noise.”

“I think I fell off a curve back there, Mrs. Long. You want
me
to snuffle around your husband?”

“Oh, I could hire somebody, maybe, who does that for a living, you know, from Tampa or Miami or someplace, but that would be an outsider, and I thought somebody who was sort of—in the family. I mean you’re like—like the license on his car. He looks at it every day, but he doesn’t really see it.”

“Thank you too much.”

“You know I don’t mean it that way, Andy.”

“Look. I work for the guy. At the moment, quite frankly, I happen to be a little sore at him. He hasn’t come through on what he promised me originally. I’ll tell you that much. If he has business troubles, I don’t know what they are. If he has emotional problems, it would seem to me that’s your affair, not mine. You’re his wife. Ask him what’s bothering him.”

“But I have! And he won’t tell me. Wouldn’t you say this is my duty, to find out what’s wrong so that I can help?”

“Not through me, you don’t.”

“I just don’t really see why you get so damn huffy about it. After all, I’m not asking you to steal anything.”

“Maybe I just don’t have the conspiratorial temperament. Sorry.”

The tears which I had been half expecting appeared. They swelled fat on the edge of the lower lids and broke over and ran down, and the one from the left eye got way down to the corner of her mouth before the quick sharp tongue-tip slanted over and caught it.

“But I love him so much, Andy, and he’s in trouble and he won’t tell me what it is, and so how can I help him if I don’t know what it is. Please, Andy?”

“Look, Mary Eleanor. It’s out of my line. Anyway, what could I do? He spends all his time now at Key Estates. That’s his baby. He’s riding it hard and hustling his own materials, and I have about as much reason to go barging out there as I have to take a fast look at the other side of the moon.”

“You could
make
reasons.”

“Feeble ones. No. I want to be friends, Mary Eleanor, and in some funny way maybe this flatters me a little, but no dice.”

I watched her and saw her slowly accept the idea of the turndown. The noises she’d been making, like a small muffled butter churn, faded away. She blotted the tears, hitched her shoulders, looked out the window.

“No hard feelings?” I asked.

“I guess not, Andy. But it’s terrible not to
know
. I just can’t
imagine
. He’s changing so fast!” Under stress the magnolia accent really ripened. “Can’t” came out “kay-yunt” and “fast” turned into “fay-yust.”

When they’re really magnolia they have a funny way of making me feel a little self-conscious and guilty about being a “noth-run bo-wee.” As if I had sharp edges. As if they all come from some isle where they talk to each other in those soft voices, and they live in a place where things are warmer and sweeter and tenderer, and they have a code that is so deep and so much a part of the way they act and behave that they don’t ever have to think about it as such. And that, I am afraid, is exactly the way it is with them. It makes you feel a bit cold, angular, displaced. She had lifted the edge of the
code just enough so I could see in—see trouble and tears, and letting me look in was, in itself, a violation of the code.

But, in my own way, I had a code of my own, and I could not see myself creepy-mousing around, trying to find out what gnawed the soul of my employer.

“I guess I understand, Andy. But, please, promise me one thing. If you should happen—well, sort of by accident, to find out what it is, you’ll let me know.”

“If it’s the sort of thing you should know. And if he isn’t telling you, he’s made that decision already, hasn’t he?”

“You get so darn logical like, Andy.”

But she managed a faint smile as she said it. Twenty minutes later I stood by my house and watched her horse the black MG off into the night. Funny about her. I hadn’t thought there was much to her. But be with her for a little while and you had an idea of just what John Long had for himself. A hundred and three pounds of fire and intensity and aliveness. A little wife that would sing in your blood like chronic malaria. Something to hurry home to when the nights get cool. It is indeed a depressing line of thought for a bachelor. Like a man in a rowboat looking at a cabin cruiser and saying to himself, “By God, I could own one of those if I weren’t so damn lazy that I hate the thought of the upkeep.”