Dead Low Tide (4 page)

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.

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.

She looked in at me and came through our door and up to the desk, and said, “Are you Mr. McClintock?” When I nodded
she gave me a mimeographed form from Mr. Fitch’s employment service, with the information filled in, and I asked her to sit down while I studied it.

The voice had put me off a bit. One of those dead, flat Katie Hepburn voices which you acquire because maybe you were sent to Mrs. Potts’ Seminary for Young Females, and from there to an Ivy League hunting preserve, and sometimes Daddy would come in the plane and pick you up and you’d shop while he went to board meetings in Manhattan.