Cinnamon Skin

A man's life is dyed the color of his imagination.

–Marcus Aurelius

Every man can be broken when things happen to him in a certain order, with a momentum and an intensity that awaken ancient fears in the back of his mind. He knows what he must do, but suddenly the body will not obey the mind. Panic becomes like an unbearably shrill sound.

I was trying to explain this to Annie Renzetti, the trim, tidy, and loving person who had been an essential part of my life for many months. It was late June, summer season at the resort she manages, the Eden Beach near Naples, Florida. We were down on the beach, at the quiet end, beyond her personal cabana, sprawled on huge beach towels. It was difficult for me to carry on any kind of complex discussion and keep looking at her at the same time, especially when she was using a tiny white bikini to set off her golden-dark tan. I had never before been seriously involved with a short, slender, dark-haired woman. My taste had run to tall blondes with long long legs and good shoulders. Maybe in my ignorance I had thought the little ones too fragile. Found out they are not. At least this one wasn't.

"Did it ever happen to you?" she asked.

"Not really, but I have been so close I know that somewhere, sometime, it could happen. We have a lot of myths in our society, Annie."

"Please remember you are the only person in the world who is allowed to call me Annie."

"I will never forget. I think the myth that has humbled Meyer is one of the worst: the myth of the unbreakable hero. I told him some stories. I thought one would make the right impression on him.

"A long time ago, in one of the wars we didn't win, I had a company commander who was the best I ever saw. Quiet and competent and humane and tough. When bad orders came down, he'd find ways to sidestep them without getting himself or any of us jammed up. He took all the risks we took, and he tried to keep the risk factor down. He took damned good care of us, and when we lost people, it really hurt him.

"One day we had to go through a patch of Asian jungle which had a leech out at the tip end of almost every leaf and twig, swaying, waiting for something full of blood to walk underneath. The captain hadn't been in leech country before, but the company had. There are two good ways to get them off: touch them with a lighted end of a cigaret or slide a sliver of bamboo under one up to the head end and give a little flip and he'll come off. After you've flipped about ten of them off, you begin to get the hang of it. The thing I hated most about them was the way they would crawl through the eyelets on your boots and fasten onto you through your socks, swell up huge, and then get mashed by the pressure of the boot as you walked."

"Hey, look!" she said, and showed me the goose bumps on her upper arm.

"Where was I?"

"I won't even tell you."

"Oh. Anyway, it was really a heavy fall in there, and they were coming down faster than you could get them off. And if you tried pulling them off, of course you left the jaws embedded and they would fester. So we broke out of the column and looked up and ran to where there were open places in the trees overhead, where they couldn't fall down and you'd have time to get rid of the ones already on you. But the captain didn't know the routine. He stood there, pulling them off, faster and faster, thrashing around, and finally he began screaming and running, falling down and jumping up, screaming and running. He was a good brave man, but this little thing came at just the wrong time and place; maybe it resonated with something in his childhood. It broke him. Also, it destroyed his authority over the company. He began to make mistakes. And one of them got him killed about three weeks later."

"How awful!"

"A couple of days after the leech business, one of the company clowns did an imitation of the captain fighting off the leeches. I decked him."

"I'm glad."

"Strange thing, the clown got killed in the same weird skirmish that got the captain killed. The captain read the map wrong, and we went down the wrong trail."

"But you couldn't make Meyer understand what you were telling him."

"I told you how it was. We knew Grizzel was a dangerous psychopath with nothing to lose and that he was probably on his way to see us. Meyer had never seen me bring in outside help before. So when Grizzel came up behind Meyer, spun him around, jammed that derringer into his gut and announced that they were both going to come over to the Busted Flush and visit me-and it would be the last visit Meyer would ever make and I would ever get-Meyer said he looked back into that man's crazy eyes and saw something moving back in there, something without soul or mercy. He read his own death. He saw there was no hope. He turned into a robot, doing only what Grizzel ordered. He was broken and he knew it."

"But he saw Grizzel fall dead, Travis! Didn't that…?"

"Maybe it helped, but not much. It's been a year. We all miss the old Meyer. That's why we cooked up this Toronto lecture thing. We had to be careful. If he'd suspected it was a put-up job, he'd have refused the invitation to lecture up there. His old friend Aggie Sloane helped us arrange it, after she flew down and saw Meyer looking so dwindled and withdrawn. She has a lot of clout. She talked one of Meyer's friends, a man named Pricewater, into backing out of a speaking engagement up there in Canada and asking Meyer as a special favor to fill in for him. The man pled illness."

"Then I don't understand about the niece."

"That was another plot to get Meyer out of his shell. We phoned her. I told her about Meyer: She was hurt that he hadn't come to her wedding in April and had just sent regrets and a check and the usual best wishes for happiness. And so she said she and her new husband would fly over as soon as she could take some time off. So of course Evan and Norma Lawrence arrived the day before Meyer had to fly up to Toronto for the two-week lecture series. So he insisted they live aboard his cruiser while he was in Canada. One of the captains from Charterboat Row is taking them out on day trips aboard the Keynes. We had two great schemes, and they just happened to overlap. Anyway, he'll be back here July sixth and they don't have to leave until the tenth. After that Aggie is going to send him off to cover something or other for her newspapers. She told me that any kind of depression can be cured if you move a person around enough."

"Let me see, I keep moving you back and forth between Lauderdale and Naples. Feel depressed?" "Let's move up to your place and see if there is anything wrong with me that needs fixing."

"Oh, no, you don't! I'm a career woman, and there is my career sitting right over there, all two hundred rooms of it, dying for lack of attention."

"Annie, we've been out here in the blazing sun, and we're going to have to take showers anyway. Florida has a serious water shortage. Why waste a good shower?"

"I have got to learn to start saying no to you."

"Why?"

She rolled onto her elbows and looked down into my eyes. She pursed her lips and raised her thick dark brows and said, "Now that is a very good question. A very good question indeed. Why should I start that?"

So we picked up our gear and climbed the steps to the shallow porch of the manager's cabana, up on pilings six feet tall. We had half a bottle of red wine left from the previous evening, and I mixed it half and half with club soda and lots of ice, for tall spritzers. She dimmed the daylight in the bedroom by pulling the draperies almost across. We sat on the bed and sipped the spritzers and grinned at each other. Finally we set them aside, and I took all of her out of her scraps of bikini, admired her every inch at close and loving range, and in due time, with knowing effort, set her to hooting and whimpering and finally sighing deeply and long.

I did not know the relationship was in any difficulty until after our showers, after we were dressed and I was ready to drive back to Lauderdale and she was ready to go back to work. It was a banquet night for some fraternal order and she wanted to watch it very closely, as it was their first arrangement at the Eden Beach.

I said, "When can I come back? When can you drive over? Seems to me I've asked before."

"It's pretty damn convenient for you, Travis." "I'm not sure how you mean that."

"I'm not really sure either. It just seems to me you're kind of a lucky chauvinist."

"Now hold on! We are pretty damn convenient for each other, if you want to put it that way. I wouldn't exactly call you unfulfilled, lady."

"Bragging about your work?"

"Jesus, Annie!"

"I'm sorry. I'm trying to hurt you, I guess, but I don't know why."

"I thought we got on together pretty well."

"We do, we do. Of course we do. Maybe it's some kind of chronic guilt. I used to have the guilts when I worked for Ellis and lived with him. Everybody is supposed to have the right to live as they please these days. Oh, hell, I know what it is, but I hate having to try to explain it to you."

"Please do."

"We've talked a lot, Travis. That's been such a big part of us, all the good talk. And you've told me about the loves you've had and the way you lost them. But… I sense a kind of reserve about you. You seem to be totally open with me, but some part of you is holding back. Some part of you doesn't really believe that you are not going to lose me also. So you cut down on the amount of loss by not getting as deeply involved as… as we could be involved. Do you understand?"

"I'm trying to. I'm not holding back. I don't think I am. I tell you I love you. Maybe oftener I should tell you?"

"It isn't words or deeds, dear. We're never part of each other. We are each of us on the outside of the other person."

"And this is no time for a bawdy comment."

"No, it is not!"

"Are you talking about marriage, for instance?"

"No, dammit! But I would like it if we lived closer together and saw each other oftener."

"Hell, I wish you'd pick up your life savings, separation pay and all that, and move aboard the Flush."

"You know better than that. I really really love it here. I'm doing one hell of a job. It shows in the figures I send in, and in the appreciation they're giving me. I'm just about the best manager in the chain. I like working with people, finding the way to approach each one to make him or her do a better job, to motivate them. Because of me this resort hotel is clean and profitable and fun."

"Okay, already. Why can't you just settle for what we have? I think it's a little better than what most people settle for."

She sighed and leaned against me, then reached up to kiss the side of my chin. "Okay McGee. I'll try, but something about us hasn't quite meshed yet. Maybe it never will. Who can say? Run along. Drive carefully. Phone often."

By ten in the morning, the rain had diminished to a misty drizzle and Meyer's stubby little cruiser, The John Maynard Keynes, had left the gas dock at Pier 66, Fort Lauderdale, proceeded under the bridge, past the cruise ships tied up at Port Everglades, out the main channel and past the sea buoy, and had headed on an east-southeast course, the blunt bow lifting with the chop, mashing out small sheets of spray each time it fell back.

An old man in a condominium apartment facing the sea was looking out his sixth-floor window at the time of the explosion and was able to fix the time of it at precisely 10:41 Eastern Daylight Time.

A cabin cruiser was inbound from Nassau, heading for the channel and wallowing a little in the following sea. It was the Brandy-Gal out of Venice, Florida, owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Simmons Davis. Mrs. Davis was in one of the two fishing chairs, the one on the starboard side, and her husband was at the wheel up on the fly bridge. They both testified that when the two cruisers passed each other, a slender dark-haired woman in an orange string bikini had waved and Mrs. Davis had waved back. They had both seen a bulky man at the wheel and a blond man in the cockpit, coiling and stowing a line.

Mrs. Davis said she remembered being amused at the unusual name on the cruiser, The John Maynard Keynes; she knew that any mention of Keynesian economic theory tended to make her husband very cross. And she remembered thinking that the chunky little cruiser did not take the chop,very well, and that if it were hers she would head back to the Inland Waterway. Also, she thought it seemed to ride too low in the water.

She estimated that it was two hundred and fifty to three hundred feet from the Brandy-Gal when it blew up. It was there, and then suddenly the only visible thing was a white bright glare, larger than the cruiser, with small objects arching up out of it. There was a sound she described as being both sharp and heavy, a kind of cracking whump that made her ears ring, and she felt heat on her face. Simmons Davis wheeled the Brandy-Gal about and went back in a hopeless search for survivors. He knew he was in eighty to a hundred feet of water. He rigged a small spare anchor to an orange float with ample braided nylon line and flipped it overboard. Then he and his wife, using scoop nets, picked up the few floating bits of debris. Half a scorched life ring. A soiled white cap with a blue bill, part of it still smoldering. The lid from an ice chest.

He called the Coast Guard on his radio and reported the incident and then headed in, with his wife, Brandy, vomiting over the side.

An anonymous call was made to the Fort Lauderdale police a few minutes after the explosion. The call was recorded. It was a muffled male voice, heavy and deep, with an accent which could have been Spanish or Portuguese.

"The Liberation Army of the Chilean peoples bass executed the pig dog Doctor Meyer. Death to all who geev help to the fascist military dictatorship."

I knew nothing about it until I got back to Bahia Mar a little after six that Monday evening. I was walking from the parking area over to Slip F-18 where my houseboat, the Busted Flush, is tied up, when Captain Johnny Dow came trotting up to fall in step with me and say, "Hey, they got Meyer."

I stopped and stared at him. "What do you mean?"

"Hell, they blew him up."

"In Toronto?"

"What do you mean, Toronto? In that stupidlooking little cruiser of his. Out past the sea buoy, this morning. They blew him up and took the credit."

"Who is they?"

"One of those bunches of terrorists. You know. The red army of liberation, truth, and justice. One of those."

Suddenly I felt hollow and sick. "Johnny, don't you know who was aboard the Keynes?"

"How should I know? I just got back from Key West."

I explained it to him patiently. "Meyer is doing a series of lectures at a seminar in international banking at Queen's College in Toronto. His niece and her husband were on vacation. They were living aboard for the two weeks he'd be gone. And Meyer had arranged with Hack Jenkins to take them out fishing or cruising if they wanted to go, because neither of them could operate a boat. Hack was free because his boat is having the engines replaced."

Johnny Dow looked stricken. "I knew about the work he was having done on the HooBoy. Jesus! What they say, it was one hell of a big explosion. Anybody aboard got blown to little tiny bits. Jesus! I better go see Hack's wife. This is terrible, Trav."

He went trotting off through the light rain. I unlocked the Flush, checked out my alarm system, and heard the phone ringing as I went in.

"Did he get back early?" Annie asked. "Tell me he didn't come back early, please."

"No, dear. He's due to give the last lecture tomorrow, and he's booked on a flight that gets into Miami tomorrow night at eight."

"They said on the news that a woman on another boat saw three people aboard Meyer's boat before it blew up. And I thought-"

"No, the third person was a captain from Charterboat Row here. A friend of both of us. I think you met him once over here. Hacksaw Jenkins. Hack."

"Oh, yesl That big rubbery guy that looked like a Japanese wrestler. With the very nice little wife. How terrible! Didn't you hear any of it on the news on the way back?"

"I avoid news whenever possible. I was playing tapes all the way across."

"Have you got a phone number for Meyer?"

"I know what hotel he's in. I could call him, but I don't know what to say. It's very sad and very ironic, Annie, after all the trouble we went to, trying to get Meyer out of the dumps."

"Look, let me know how it goes. Let me know how he reacts. I love that funny old bear."

"I'll be in touch."

I didn't have to phone Meyer. As I was unpacking toilet articles, he called me.

"Travis? A reporter from the Miami Herald tracked me down: Is it true? They're dead?"

"I didn't know a thing about it until about fifteen minutes ago. Johnny Dow told me. He thought you were aboard."

"Would that I had been," he said. It was not dramatics. He meant it.

"What can I do here?" I asked.

"I don't know. I can't think. What is there to do anyway? Where have they taken the bodies?" "Meyer, from what I hear it was a very big explosion. Very violent. Out past the sea buoy. Out in the open ocean. Who handles your insurance?"

"I can't think. You know him. Tall."

"Sure. Walter. So he probably knows about it by now."

"Before I phoned you, I checked with the travel desk here at the hotel, and I can't get out any earlier than the flight I'm already booked on tomorrow."

"I'll pick you up. Ten after eight. Anybody I should let know about it?"

"There's an address book in the… oh, dear God, that's gone too, of course. Anyway, under Amdex Petroleum Exploration in Houston I had the name of her immediate superior. Hatcher, Thatcher, Fletcher… one of those names. Travis, what I don't understand is this grotesque nonsense about Chile. I was in Santiago for one week, three years ago. It was a small conference. Yes, we were invited to make recommendations to the military government about controlling inflation. And they took the recommendations, and their inflation is under control, unlike the situation in Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. It was a small international conference; Britain, France, Canada, the U.S.-a dozen of us. I didn't write the final report or any part of it."

"Meyer, listen. It's a crazy world. You were there. You got on somebody's hit list."

"And so Norma and Evan and Hack die. Can you find whoever did it?"

"There are going to be lots of very competent people trying to find whoever did it."

"They never seem to find terrorists." His voice was lifeless, dulled by loss.

At ten o'clock the next morning, local time, I got through to a brisk switchboard person at Amdex in Houston.

"You had a woman working there, a geologist named Norma Lawrence."

"Sorry. There's no one here by that name, sir."

"Look, I know she worked for Amdex. She was on vacation."

"Oh, you mean Norma Greene! Miss Greene."

"Okay. Sure. I want to talk to her boss."

"That would be Mr. Batcher. Sorry, but he's out of the country, sir. If you want to leave a message, we expect him Friday."

I sighed with moderate exasperation. "Who on your team there, besides Mr. Batcher, would be interested in being informed that Norma Lawrence, your Miss Greene, is dead?"

"Oh, God! No! To whom am I speaking?"

"My name is McGee. Travis McGee. An acquaintance. Her uncle suggested I inform her employer. That's what I'm doing."

"Mr. Dexter will want to know the details. He should be in any minute now. Where can he reach you, Mr. McGee?"

I gave her the area code and the number. She said she was sorry about the whole thing, and I said I was too.

"Automobile accident?" she asked.

"Explosion on a boat."

I heard her gasp. "Geez, you know I heard that on the news this morning and didn't make the connection. I mean I didn't listen to the name, you know? Her and her new husband and a fishing guide? The news said it was maybe some kind of Cuban terrorists. Why would they-oh, Mr. Dexter just came in. Shall I ring him now?"

"Please."

In a few moments he said, "Mr. McGee? What can I do for you."

"Hardly anything. Mrs. Lawrence's uncle suggested that I call her employer and say that she was killed yesterday in an explosion aboard a boat off Fort Lauderdale, along with her husband and a local charterboat captain."

"Lawrence? Norma Greene Lawrence?"

"That's right." There was a silence that lasted so long I said, "Are you there? Hello?"

"Excuse me. That's a terrible shock."

"I was trying to get hold of Mr. Batcher. I didn't think you'd know her."

"Mr. McGee, this is a small company. A little over two hundred people. The smartest thing we ever did was take on Norma Lawrence when she'd been out of Cal Tech a year. We hired her away from Conoco. She's… she was going to be one of the best geologists in the business."

He said something else, but a sudden rumble of thunder drowned him out.

"Didn't hear you. Sorry."

"I was saying what a loss it is. What happened?"

"It looks as if somebody put a bomb aboard, some nut trying to kill her uncle. But he was in Toronto. They were going to dive at the site this morning, but the weather is very bad: eight- to ten-foot waves out there, lots of white water. There was a marker buoy at the site dropped off by a pleasure boat, but it was washed loose during the night."

"I don't know what to say. Maybe her uncle would know what her personal estate arrangements are. We have an insurance program, of course. And there would be other funds payable to her, or her estate."

"I'll have him get in touch. What's your whole name?"

"D. Amsbary Dexter," he said. Hence, I supposed, the Amdex. His company. I wrote down his addresses and phone numbers, and he thanked me for calling him. He said it was a terrible thing, and I said it certainly was. He had one of those thin fast Texas voices. Not a good-old-boy voice, a hustler voice. Hurrying to sell you.

By nine o'clock Tuesday night, in the very last of the watery daylight, I was heading back toward Lauderdale from the airport in the Mercedes station wagon I'd borrowed from the Alabama Tiger's highest-ranking girlfriend, the one who has charge of his floating playpen while he is back in Guadalajara having his big old face lifted again. Wind gusts whacked the occasional rain against the right-hand windows. Meyer sat damp and dumpy beside me, radiating bleakness, speaking only when spoken to.

"Were they annoyed you didn't give the final lecture?"

"I was there. I'd taken their round-trip ticket, hotel room, and food. I gave the talk. Only because it was easier than not giving the talk."

"The weather has been rotten."

"Um."

"The tropical storm has moved closer and picked up a little. But they don't think it will reach hurricane force."

"Uh huh."

Conversation wasn't working, so I tried silence. After fifteen minutes he said, "These last few months I've gotten into the habit of watching television."

"Meyer!"

"I know, I know. A laxative for the mind. Thinking makes lumps in the mind. Bad memories make lumps. Television flushes them away. At five o'clock, alone there aboard my boat, I've been able to get a rerun of M*A*S*H on one channel and then switch to another rerun on another. Old ones. Trapper, Hawkeye, Radar, Hot Lips. You know, the introduction has stayed almost exactly the same. The helicopters come around the side of the mountain. Then you get a shot from on high of the hospital complex. Then an ambulance, a closer shot of the choppers, and then people running up a hill toward the camera. In the left center of the screen a young woman runs toward you, slightly ahead of the others. You see her for four and a half running strides. Dark hair. Face showing the strain of running and her concern for the wounded. A pretty woman, maybe even beautiful, with a strong, lithe, handsome body. She is in uniform. A gleam of dog tags at the opening of her shirt. I've thought about her often, Travis. That shot of her was taken years ago. She's probably in her thirties now. Or even forty. I wonder about her. When they filmed that introduction she had no way of knowing that she would be frozen there in time, anxious and running. Does she ever think about how strange that is? Multiply viewers times original episodes and the countless reruns on hundreds of stations, and you can see she has been looked at a billion times. What do you pay a person to be looked at a billion times? How many thousand miles has she run? It's the fly-in-amber idea, plus a paradox of time and space. Maybe she never thinks of it these days. Or yawns when she sees, herself. Last night I saw her again, late, in a Toronto hotel room. And she became Norma: dark hair and vitality. Now she is caught in some eternal time lock. Death is an unending rerun until the last person with any memory of you is also dead."