Dead Low Tide, page 3
I kissed her beside the eye, and said, “God, you’re sticky!”
“Ray-pell,” she said. She tilted her mouth up and I kissed it. A light, good-night kiss, and I patted the seat of her snugly tailored shorts. We felt, in that dark hall, the little shifting changes of awareness, so we broke it up. We were aware of what could sneak up on us, and we were out of the market, so we broke it up a bit gingerly and carefully. The way a fat man on a diet will hide the temptation on the menu with his thumb while he orders Ry-Krisp.
She swung her long brown legs down my steps and out my short path to the road and she was gone before I heard her call back, “Thanks for the cheese, McClintock. It reeked.”
I went back in, stalked new arrivals with my bomb, cleaned up the kitchen, showered long and cold and well, folded down the light spread on my bed, climbed into it, covered one third of myself with the sheet, picked up my book, and read myself into semiconsciousness. With the light off, I thought for a little while about Mary Eleanor and remembered I could pick up my car before work and wondered what was eating John Long, and thought about Christy, two hundred feet away, across the night, doubtless covered, also, by a corner of a sheet.
Three
BY TEN-FIFTEEN the next morning, Thursday morning, I had the lady’s estimate reasonably neatly typed, and her ten-unit court was going to cost her fifty-six thousand dollars. I guessed she’d paid ten for the land. And it would cost her at least fourteen in equipment and extras. Eighty thousand on the hook, and I hoped the lady realized that eighty thousand, say at five per cent, brings in four thousand a year all by its little self, without aid and benefit of twenty beds a day to make during the season. I hoped she realized that first she had to make that four thousand, and then she had to make enough to cover running expenses and overhead and depreciation, and if she could make anything at all over that, it was found money. The second owner, who would probably get the whole works for fifty thousand, would probably be shrewd enough to know what he was doing. The lady had multiplied ten rooms by ten dollars a room and multiplied a hundred dollars a night by three hundred and sixty-five, and dreamed of Cadillacs and fast boats.
I was depressing myself, and it was a sticky day. Feeble excuse number one. Take the estimate out to John, I told myself. So I locked the office, got in the car, and went out to Key Estates.
Florida, particularly along the west coast, all the way from Cedar Keys to the careful monied smell of Naples, is constantly growing—not in the normal fashion of other places, with more houses going up on existing land, but the land itself is growing. Shaggy dredges park in the bay flats, snarling and wheezing as they suck up mud and guck and shells and small unwary fish. The debris is piled moistly and it stinks for a time, then whitens in the sun. It is leveled and stamped down and then houses go up on it so fast they seem to appear with a small clinking sound—the way Walt Disney grows flowers.
People who bought water-front land and admired their view of the bay find themselves three blocks inland. Incantations are said, in which strange words appear. Riparian rights is a good word. It sounds stentorian and nobody knows exactly what it means. It means turning water into land and putting houses on it. And standard procedure, along with the houses, is to stuff some palm trees into the made land. They have a nasty habit of taking a long time to die, so you can usually sell the house before the palm turns to a rich tobacco brown. Also, you have to have a sea wall, or the bay will reclaim its own. And you put about seven-eighths of an inch of topsoil on the shells and plant rye grass And a hedge of Australian pine that grows so fast you can hear it.
And you pray, every night, that the big one doesn’t come this year. A big one stomped and churned around Cedar Keys a couple of years back, and took a mild pass at Clearwater and huffed itself out. One year it is going to show up, walking out of the Gulf and up the coast, like a big red top walking across the schoolyard. And the wind isn’t going to mess things up too much, because people have learned what to do about the wind. But that water is going to have real fun with the made land, with the sea walls and packed shells and the thin topsoil. It’s going to be like taking a good kick at an anthill, and then the local segment of that peculiar aberration called the human race is going to pick itself up, whistle for the dredges, and start it all over again.
Our key, which is narrow and seven miles long, gives us plenty of bay, plenty of mullet, and two good fishing bridges. It’s called Horseshoe Key, and there are three schools of thought about the name. One group insists it comes from Horseshoe Crabs, and a second insists that one part of it once was shaped like a horseshoe, and the loudest segment of all insists on a myth concerning one Daddy Morgan who first lived on the key in a shack and got himself kicked to death.
At any rate, it is seven miles long and the gulf tides keep changing the sand shapes at the ends of it, and if you happen to own two hundred feet of it—extending from the central road down the middle of the key to the gulf beach—then you can be particularly content because your piece, two hundred by four hundred, is worth twenty-five thousand bucks at going rates. And if you bought it in ’34, you paid about two hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars for it, and that will make you very unhappy that you didn’t buy a thousand feet, but you can still sneer gently and happily at the dullards who neglected to buy any. Now, if your two-hundred-foot chunk should run from Horseshoe Drive east to the bay, you are not precisely as happy because in that event your land is only worth eleven thousand—but then, you could have picked that up for sixty dollars in ’34.
John Long bought his fifteen hundred feet of bay frontage running through to Horseshoe Drive for ten thousand dollars in 1943. I know because I looked it up at the courthouse. Which makes it worth, at going rates, eighty-two thousand, five hundred dollars.
Herewith, for the benefit of those who like to think about money, I present the mathematics of made land. John Long started with fifteen hundred feet of bay front worth fifty-five dollars a foot. He had riparian rights to fill out as far as the inland waterways channel some nine hundred feet out in the bay. So he had the dredge make him a long finger of land three hundred feet wide, stretching from his property out to the channel. That left him with just twelve hundred of his original fifteen hundred feet of land. But, measuring the shoreline of the finger he built, he got his three hundred right back, plus eighteen hundred more. So he not only ended up with thirty-three hundred feet of water front, worth a total of a hundred and eighty-one thousand, five hundred, but, in the process, the dredge mooched out a private channel very handy for the boats of the people who would live in the houses on the made land. Dredges and sea walls are expensive, but on a quantity operation like John Long’s he got more land value back than he put out.
Then, with a drag line setup, he ran the new channel right back into the heart of the original property. That made interior lots more desirable, and also provided a nice topping to spread over the new finger. Out on Horseshoe Drive an impressive arched entrance gate was erected. A road with a thin crust of blacktop was laid in contrived and gentle curves from said entrance gate out to the end of the finger. Two tributaries wandered around the rest of the property. Fifty-six building lots were surveyed and the corners were socked in. Power was run in. Artesian wells hit sulphurous water at a hundred and sixty-two feet, and they were capped, awaiting the houses. John started at the end of the finger, working back.
I drove through the arched entrance and down the winding asphalt. Out at the end of the finger two houses were already up. At the neck of the finger the foundations were sketched in. The houses in between were in various stages of completion on the new raw land. The day was overcast, and sticky as gym socks. From talking to Big Dake, I knew the plans. Two- and three-bedroom houses, CB construction, no two floor plans or exteriors exactly alike. Terazzo floors and cypress and weldwood paneling and pine kitchens and picture windows and window walls and big closets and storage walls and breezeways and terraces and a look of spaciousness. The price, per copy, including the land, of course, would be between thirty-six five to forty-eight thousand. And the construction cost per unit, exclusive of land and fill and dozing, would be such as to give an average profit of twelve thousand per house, which makes a gross of six hundred and seventy-two thousand, from which you must subtract the raw cost of making new land and protecting it with a sea wall.
It was the thing, I knew, that John Long had been preparing for. As I got out of my car and looked around, I could sense how it would be. Lawns and landscaping and sprinklers whirling and kids bicycling up to Horseshoe Drive to check the mailbox, and people sitting on terraces directly over where the trout had browsed through the weeds, where mullet had rippled the bay water, where the skimmers had gone back and forth at dusk, drawing their sharp beak lines on the gray water.
John had a big crew working. Nearly all the building trades were represented. Where the shell of the house was up, electric saws whined and there was hammering. The place smelled of wet cement and burned sawdust and the faint fish-flavor of new land. I went to where they were laying up blocks and asked an old man where Long was. He pointed down to the end houses with his thumb. The Cadillac was parked in the new road. I went down there and I heard his thick-chested voice at a pretty good decibel level. “You are, for God’s sake, not framing something by Picasso. You are framing a goddamn doorway so kindly extract digit.”
I went in. What, she had said, is wrong with my husband? Nothing, I thought, that a good sharp rap across the nape of the neck with a meat ax wouldn’t cure. He stood, his neck bowed, glaring down into the face of an elderly carpenter who stood there with the mild, tired, endless patience of the very old.
“You are framing doors and windows,” John said heavily, “and not making jewel boxes, please.”
“Sure,” the old man said. “Sure.”
John Long is five eleven, about an inch shorter than I. He looks as if he weighs a hard-boiled two hundred. He weighs two forty. He carries extra muscle and meat all over him, on jaw, temple, wrists, ankles. He wears his coarse black hair in a brush cut, and there’s a lot of gray in it. In repose his face has all the expression of a fractured cinder block. Yet he can turn on an astonishingly boyish and winning smile. Black hair, like wire, coils out of the top of his shirt and is matted thickly on the backs of his hands. He was dressed in khaki, and it was blackened by sweat at the armpits, across the small of his back, around his belt line.
Watching him gave me a few moments of self-evaluation. I had invented the reason for coming out. Now that I was here, it seemed feebler. It didn’t have anything to do with Mary Eleanor. I wanted to be noticed. I wanted him to see that Andrew Hale McClintock was still alive, and a shade disgruntled.
He saw me and turned. “Well, what do you want?”
“You’re not sore at me, remember? You’re sore at him. I just got here.” I handed him the estimate and he looked at it. “She phone or something? She in a rush?”
“No. I just thought. I’d bring it out.”
“So you brought it out. Now you can take it back and put it on my desk where it belongs.”
“I guess I wanted to see how things were coming along out here. Looks like a lot of progress.”
“Do your sight-seeing on your own time, McClintock.”
He turned his broad back to me and marched solidly toward the unfinished front doorway. I was supposed to leap into my heap and race back to my glass-fronted salt mine. A month before I might have taken it. But, as I have said, I was fed up with doing work that made no real demand on what I considered to be my abilities.
I went out the doorway ten feet behind him, and said sharply, “Hold it, John!”
That brought him up short. He turned around slowly and I walked up to him, just as slowly. “Just who the hell do you think you’re talking to, McClintock?” he asked me softly.
“I’m talking, I think, to the guy who pays me. I’m talking to a guy who apparently thinks I’m some stumblebum clerk, or some idiot child. I’m also talking to the guy who painted such a glorious picture of a great and golden future. Sight-seeing! You know, I went back after dinner and worked last night. That’s something you’re not buying with your lousy eighty bucks a week. So let’s both admit you’ve suckered me into doing a year’s work for you and paid me off in promises you had no intention of fulfilling. We’ll call it quits right now, but we won’t shake hands on it.”
He stood like iron in a sudden reappearance of the hot sun. In the back of my mind was the uneasy feeling he was going to hammer me one. And in the front of my mind was the thought, Let him just twitch and I’ll nail him for luck.
The stillness slowly went out of him; he forked a cigarette out of his shirt pocket with two fingers and popped the match on his thumbnail, never once taking his eyes off mine. His eyes were a curiously pale amber shade, with darker flecks near the pupils. You couldn’t see into them. Your look bounced right off.
“Let’s get in the shade,” he said.
I followed him over and he sat on some cinder blocks in the shade of a wall. His thighs, like chunks of phone pole, looked as if they’d split the faded khaki pants.
“You get pretty hot,” he said.
“It’s been a long time building up.”
“Now you’re making a hundred a week.”
“If I’m working for you.”
He didn’t answer that. He looked down the bay toward the distant bridge. It was up, and waiting cars winked in the heat shimmy, and a big cabin cruiser came through.
“Gordy Brogan can handle the men. Big Dake has the construction experience,” he said. “Can you handle the two of them?”
“I have to. I kid Gordy along. I ask Big Dake’s opinion on things and tell him how smart he is.”
“They can’t work together.”
“That’s no secret, John.”
“I’ll get a girl down in the office,” he said. “And I’ll get somebody to chase materials.” I had the feeling he was talking to himself.
“Then what do I do?”
“Then you’ll come out here. Maybe I better fix it so you and Dake and Gordy could finish this thing off.”
“What’ll you be doing?”
“Yes, I think that might make some sense. And if it has to come out that way, Andy, I’ll set it up so there’ll be a damn fine bonus for you that nobody can cheat you out of.”
“I don’t—”
“But you’ll have to start out here soon as I can pick up those other people. I’m glad you popped off. I hadn’t thought of that. It’s an answer.” He stood up and hitched at his belt. He looked at me and through me. “By God, when you plan something for as long as I’ve planned this, you do it, even if you haven’t got as much reason as you thought you had.”
“Is something bothering you, John?”
He focused on me. “Bothering me? Nothing bothers me long. I was just thinking this wouldn’t get finished. Now I know it will, and I can think better.”
I said I better get back and he told me he’d locate a girl. I drove back to town slowly. I kept turning over what he had said, like a man hunting crabs around the rocks at low tide. I fitted a lot of kinds of trouble to what he had said, and came up with one answer that fitted everything. Suppose a doctor had told him he was on borrowed time. One of those things that will hit you in six days, six weeks, or six months.
“Even if you haven’t got as much reason as you thought you had.” No long life to enjoy the money he’d make.
“A bonus that nobody can cheat you out of.” After I’m dead.
“And if it has to come out that way.” Come out the way the doctor had said.
“Now I know it will, and I can think better.” My mind will be more at ease. I can plan things, and see that Mary Eleanor’s future is assured.
Truly, I thought, a hell of a thing. A man like that. Tough as mangrove roots. Some little damn thing that muscles couldn’t handle. That’s the way it went. A man sickly all his life can hit ninety because he takes such good care of himself. It had been almost too simple. I’d turned down Mary Eleanor, and then gone ahead and found out exactly what she wanted to know. And come out of it with a raise. Hell, if he was that sick, I could understand his not wanting to tell her. He’d be smart enough to go to the best doctors and demand the truth. Maybe it wasn’t the best policy in the world to keep the little woman in the dark, but it was his business, not mine.
Gordy Brogan called me a few minutes after I was back in the office, sore as hell about some copper tubing he had to have. I told him to hang by his thumbs while I checked. I called Fort Myers and Clearwater and Tampa and found out I could get everything in Tampa. I told them to load it on a truck that wouldn’t come down by way of Jacksonville, and called Gordy back and told him when he’d get it, and chided him a bit for not having it on his bill of materials. He blustered and fussed at me, and then calmed down and told me one of his corny Irish jokes and hung up. The sun finally melted the overcast for good instead of popping out for five minutes at a time, as it had out on the job. The hot sun filled the town with live steam. Steve Marinak, John’s legal talent, went by and waggled fat fingers at me. He had on one of his notorious shirts. This one was lemon-yellow with big red lobsters all over it. It made me wonder if John had made a will, how long Mary Eleanor would wear black.
I couldn’t settle down to the routine work until after I got back from lunch at Saddler’s Drugs. At three o’clock a man named Fitch phoned and said that Mr. Long had phoned him and had a girl he could send over right away, or in the morning, whichever was convenient, and he was certain I’d be more than satisfied with her.
Four
I GLANCED THROUGH the big plate-glass window at three-thirty and saw a girl coming diagonally across the street toward the place. From the way she was looking at the sign and resettling her shoulders and pulling her tummy in and walking briskly, I knew at once that this was the item from Fitch. She wore a fawn-colored skirt, sandals, and a white blouse like cake frosting. She had a big red bag slung over her shoulder and she kept a hand on it to keep it from banging her hip. She had brown hair with glints in it, and she was tall and somebody had told her how to walk, and she had remembered and perhaps improved on the original advice. She wasn’t carrying much meat on her bones, though giving in no way the slightly scrawny impression of Mary Eleanor. Still, I prefer the proportions of one Christy.
