It Takes Two (13 page)

He fox-trotted better than Betty. When Tommy shifted into a tango medley, Bud picked up the beat. The man kept pulling surprises out of his pocket.

A bank vice-president named Herndon Milledge cut in on Bud and Betty. Getting into the game, Bud led Wanda onto the dance floor.

I watched him move, knowing the feeling of his hands on my sides. His elbows pumped in time to the music. Just for a moment, I imagined cutting in on Wanda, dancing away with Bud and licking his ear to the tune of “Some Enchanted Evening.”

But I figured that could wait for a much looser party in a private room upstairs. Instead, I asked Lucille Shepherd to dance. She was always quite a card.

“Hold me just a little closer,” she said, her off hand pressing against my back. “So I know you’re a man.”

“If we get too close,” I said, “you may not like the way I tell you.”

She wiggled her hips suggestively but moved back an inch or two. “I’ll let you know if I have any complaints in that department.”

“Geisha girls don’t dance,” I said. “So I’m out of practice.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem for you to
get your game back
around here,” she said, with triple emphasis on the phrase “get your game back.”

“Have to wait till I have some free time,” I answered. “Bruce didn’t hire me to dance. Only game I play is reading accounts and riding herd on staff.”

“Lem won’t dance,” she said, referring to her husband. “Won’t play golf either. Says any kind of exercise robs him of the energy he needs for his work.”

I replied that that must be a trial for her.

“Not at all,” she said. “He gives me a good allowance. I employ a maid who cooks his breakfast and dinner. He never complains if I play thirty-six holes with the girls. I don’t complain if he plays cards with the boys. I enjoy a little drink and a little music.”

The tune ended and the dancers applauded. As the clapping died, everybody in the club became aware of angry shouts just outside the metal doors. “You go to hell,” a man yelled. “Get out of my way.”

Brian’s voice, softer but equally determined, cut him off. “If you’ll just step out here, sir. Here! Sir!”

Tommy swung into the gallop theme from the “William Tell Overture.”

I asked Lucille to excuse me and went to investigate.

A stranger had tried to talk his way inside. Brian had checked the members list, the investors list, the VIP and temporary guests lists for a name similar to his. No dice. The man had then offered a ten dollar bribe. He became abusive when Brian asked him to leave.

After I introduced myself as the general manager, the man lowered his voice, shook my hand and gave me his business card. He explained that he lived in St. Petersburg and was engaged in the wholesale plumbing trade. A friend named Joe Smith, he said, had told him about the Caloosa Club. He asked me to make an exception and admit him—because he was in Myers on business and “just felt like having a little toot.”

I explained that the toot-toot-tootsie was for hotel guests and paid-up club members only. No exceptions could be made. “But,” I said, turning him around and heading him toward the dining room, “there’s no reason why you can’t apply for a membership, and no reason why you can’t fill out your application while you enjoy a steak dinner as our guest.”

He brightened up a bit, so I asked Brian to find him a good table, one over by the window, and to bring him a membership form and a pen.

A few days later, Carmen and I vetoed the application. People who don’t know how to be polite are not good club material.

Bud was standing outside the club when I finished with the troublemaker. “Time to head home for a little shut-eye,” he said.

So I walked him outside, expecting to find the Jeep parked near the door. But the Jeep was already in the shop for new glass. Bud would be walking back to the rooming house.

We shook hands and he turned away. Then we heard—and saw and felt at the same instant—a
puff-ha-ha!
and an eruption of flames rising from far end of the riverside parking lot east of the hotel. Two or three white-robed men standing in shadows beyond the explosion began to cheer and clap. At the river’s edge, a fiery cross lit up the night. Dancing and shifting in the soft winter air, the flames caught the light chop of the river and revealed a second clot of robed figures farther away.

“What the fuck?” I said. “Thought they only went after uppity colored people and school teachers.”

“Probably just some good citizen happened to tell some other good citizen about you and your race-mixing piano player in there,” Bud answered. “What was it you said about harmless fun?” My teeth suddenly started to chatter. “Th-th-thanks, Sarge,” I said. “Maybe I’d better go call the fire department now.”

The cross, two planks wrapped in oil-soaked rags, burned brighter and hotter, lighting the parked cars, the yard and the brick and masonry side of the hotel. Upstairs, I could see guests at their windows, peering out from behind curtains and shades. A rough, hissing purr and a ribbon of smoke rose from the flames. I could feel my ass clench and unclench. I took a breath. Suddenly, I wanted to vomit. For the first time since leaving the Navy I was scared.

Bud laughed darkly. He sounded tired but not alarmed. His voice was steady. “You tell the fire chief you got a cross burning over here,” he said. “And he’ll get right on it. He’ll ring the fire bell, saddle up his troops and tell ’em to go out for coffee. Might take all night to get a fire truck here.”

The Klansmen started moving toward the street. The robed man at the front of the line was carrying a rifle. Bud lifted his hand, held it flat out but close to his chest and pointed toward the robed men. “See that little fella taking up the rear? That’s the county clerk I mentioned, Leon Featherstone. Recognized him at that march on Saturday night. I think I ought to have a talk with him right soon. See what his thinking’ is.”

“Sounds like an idea,” I said. “If he’ll give you the time of day.”

“Oh, what with him bein’ a public servant and all, I think he’ll snitch to me.”

“You’re not worried about the Klan knowing you were here?” Bud leaned close. “The enemy’s the one I always figure is pissing down his own trouser leg. My shorts is dry, even if they really ain’t.” He touched my shoulder. “What you shaking for? You OK?”

Brian, Doc Shepherd and one of the card-playing physicians came up behind us in the dark. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” Brian declaimed, giving full rein to his Boston Irish accent. “He has loosed the crazy crackers with His terrible swift sword.”

“Ba-ba-bastards,” Doc cackled, “hadn’t quit their—ha ha!—monkey business after all.”

“Thought somebody in that shit-ass crowd would have had better sense,” the obstetrician said. “Especially during tourist season.”

Bud stepped back to give them room. The shadows and the crackling flames momentarily highlighted the rough scar below his ear. I shut my eyes.
A Jap sergeant’s bayonet rips through Bud’s neck and throat
.

“Go get buckets and an axe,” I said, opening my eyes and turning to Brian. “Douse that goddamn fire. Throw the fucking cross in the river.”

After the Jap torpedo ripped my ship’s heart out, I floated and dog-paddled through oil fires, blanketing smoke, limp bodies, ungodly debris, torn flesh and circling sharks.

The night the Klan torched an oil-soaked cross on the bank of the Caloosahatchee, I pitched and bobbed on another endless, evil sea. Fleeing into dreams, I found what I least sought, and was in the Pacific again, attacked by wrenching stomach cramps, vomiting up alcoholic guilt and sadness, kicking and back-stroking through oily water, always on the verge of giving up and going under, and never quite doing it.

Toward dawn, bells and terrified cries signaled all hope lost, abandon ship, run, dive, swim, hurry, Lieutenant, get out of the whirlpool, get clear of the whirlpool, the pool, the pool, the pool.

Tuesday morning arrived right on schedule, and in the usual way, through the cracked-open window of my second floor single. The steady splash of somebody swimming laps, the buzz-growl-pop of a lawn mower eating grass and pebbles, the rustle of palm fronds in the wind, and the aroma of hot coffee and bacon grease from the kitchen constituted a welcome sort of reveille.

Surfacing, holding my breath, I shoved back the damp covers, crossed to the window, sucked in humid river air, stretched stiff muscles, yawned and looked down.

A thin woman in a yellow bathing suit was kicking wakes up and down the sparking surface of the pool. A groundskeeper, sweaty-wet before eight in the morning, was trimming a green-velvet strip of St. Augustine grass.

Pulling on trunks, I unfurled my rubber exercise mat, spread it out on the polished oak floor and started with fifty slow sit-ups. After forty push-ups and forty pull-ups on a metal rod I’d installed in the bathroom doorway, I ran in place for ten minutes, then showered, shaved and put on my everyday manager’s uniform: starched khaki pants, webbed belt, white camp shirt, dark blazer and spit-shined black oxfords.

I was transiting—going from mindset to mindset, using a jockstrapper’s trick that dated from shore-leave days, running my brain in neutral and my body in high gear, consciously shifting my thoughts away from Ku Klux Klanner clerks and fiery crosses and half-baked sex with a drunken detective, and back to the game of managing a hotel.

Dropping down the service stairs, I cut through the kitchen, waved to the cooks, entered the dining room and settled onto a banquette near the glass doors facing the water. Outside, a man was practicing swan dives off the low board. The yellow-suited woman had finished her swim and was sipping coffee at a pool-side table.

Homer Meadows, the experienced black waiter on the morning shift, almost immediately appeared bearing a pot of coffee, a pitcher of cream, a basket of rolls and a menu.

The menu was dog-eared and stained. I handed it back, asking him to check every menu in the bins, toss out the soiled ones and find a fresh set.

Emma Mae Bellweather crossed from the dock and came inside five minutes later. Pouring coffee for herself and buttering a honey-pecan roll, she scattered a handful of crumbs down the front of her bleached-out fishing jacket before she said a word. After she shook the crumbs onto the deck and removed the Washington Senators baseball cap she’d shoved far back on her Dutchboy bob, she asked how I’d slept and if I’d enjoyed the fish the Maysons caught on Sunday.

When I tepidly praised the sea bass and inquired, “Was it, by any chance, caught by Lou Salmi?” she got the joke right away.

“You mean oily and bony,” she said, putting her hand to her mouth and giggling. “You ought to’ve gone out with us yourself. Ought to seen that rascal rubbing his nasty self up against Mrs. Mayson, just like a tom cat lickin’ ripe pussy. And Mr. Mayson— get this, please. He rubbed suntan oil on both of their backs.”

“So maybe it was Coppertone I was tasting, instead of Lou’s hair pomade.”

“I didn’t say it,” she squealed. “I sure didn’t say it.”

Her Caloosahatchee accent and quirky vocabulary were much like Bud’s. Hearing her laugh, I might have been eaves-dropping on a less-inhibited Bud the High School Baseball Player or Cowboy Bud the Rancher. I shook my head and poured more coffee. I had to work.

“Anything unusual happening in your department?”

“Well,” she drawled, fingering a donut. “Nothing too much. Except I talked to your boss, the admiral.”

Pasting a pleased smile across my uncertain face, I said, “Oh, good. He’s coming in tonight, right?”

Emma Mae patted my hand sympathetically. “Got here last night, real late. Was looking around after he got here. Wandered by the dock. Said he hoped to get in a little fishing. Desk clerk fixed him up with one of the keeper suites on 7. Surprised somebody didn’t tell you already.”

Not only had I failed to welcome the boss, I’d forgotten what night he was due to arrive. “Goddamn son-of-a-bitch,” I muttered. “Piss up a rope.”

“Don’t you worry about a fucking thing, Dan. The admiral was informed that our Caloosa bossman had put in a full day of work and was taking his well-deserved rest. Nobody told him you was fox-trotting up a storm in the club room earlier.”

“Presume nobody told him about the visit by the Klan either?”

“Desk clerks and me, we agreed you’d want to brief him on that particular matter. Presuming you think the visit by those human turds had anything to do with the Caloosa. Is worth his notice, I mean.”

Homer returned with a tray of food. Emma Mae began rearranging napkins and plates. “Hope you didn’t mind me ordering for both of us, Dan.”

“How could I forget a thing like the boss coming in?” I said. “Must be some kind of delayed shell shock. Wonder if there’s a pill I could take, or something I could eat, like how carrots help your eyes. What vegetable improves memory?”

“This here is bacon and eggs and grits,” she countered, charitably ignoring my run-on embarrassment. “They always give me strength. Desk clerk told me the admiral sent word he wants you to stop by his quarters first thing.”

“No loose lips around this hotel,” I replied, digging a fork into the steaming grits. “It was maybe two dances.”