Last Resort (11 page)

“Great, isn’t it?” Gerry shouted.

Wilkie did not reply; it had become clear that if he showed any sign of drowning, Gerry would be close enough to officiously try to save him. For the first time in his life he felt the temptation to commit a capital crime other than suicide. Maybe I could take him with me, he thought. We’re far enough out now; there won’t be any witnesses. A quick choke hold from behind, and if I’m lucky we’ll both go under. Let him find that unity with nature he was gabbling about last night.

A cold surge of excitement lifted Wilkie higher than the oncoming wave, then dropped him. The plan was too risky. If it failed, Jenny might be faced not with a tragic accident, but with a half-drowned husband accused of attempted murder.

Gerry, splashing onward, showed no strain, but soon Wilkie’s breath was coming short; the waves felt icy as they slapped his head and arms. If he didn’t turn back now, he could be in trouble. He might even, ignominiously, find himself actually being rescued by this fuzzy-minded anthropoid ape.

A
T THE SO-CALLED KEY
West International Airport, on a cool, windy February evening, Perry Jackson (known locally as Jacko) was waiting for his mother’s plane. The shabby lime-green cinder-block structure, with its airline and car-rental counters and racks of tourist brochures, was crowded. Beside the travelers, and people meeting them or seeing them off, there were taxi and van drivers, airline and car-rental and coffee-shop and gift-shop and janitorial employees. There were also a number of unemployed and unemployable persons just hanging out.

Except for the passengers, everyone was dressed casually; most in shorts or jeans and T-shirts. The T-shirts of the natives tended to recommend various off-island commercial products. Several departing tourists, on the other hand, wore T-shirts advertising local businesses or promoting Key West as a vacation spot (New Moon Saloon, Waterfront Market, Island Paradise, etc.).

Jacko, in a faded red T-shirt with the logo of a well-known plant food, leaned against the wall by Gate 2, which was in fact the only gate at the little airport. He was chatting with two acquaintances and looking casually beautiful but preoccupied. Three days ago he had been discharged from the Key West hospital after a short but intensely unpleasant episode of viral pneumonia. Antibiotics had wiped it away in forty-eight hours, but though he felt okay physically, his mind was troubled. This virus, he suspected—no, knew—was the first signal from the other and more fatal virus he carried. A signal from disease, from death. He pictured a small, very ugly man all in black, his pale face marked with purple splotches, getting off a black plane and walking toward him, through Gate 2.

Trying not to think of this, Jacko turned his attention to an acquaintance whose problem was snails in his ferns.

“Beer,” he advised when the guy paused for breath. “You put out saucers of beer at night, and they crawl in and get drunk and drown. Blissfully.”

“Aw, you’re kidding me.”

Jacko shook his head. For a bad moment, he visualized the viruses in his bloodstream as sluggish, half-drunk snails.

“What kind of beer?” Jacko’s friend raised his voice to compete with a loudspeaker announcing the arrival of Jacko’s mother’s flight.

“It doesn’t matter. Van thinks they like Miller’s best, but mine’ll drink anything. Hey, I gotta go. See you later.”

As the passengers filed in they could be sorted into two distinct species. A few were local residents who had been away briefly: they were relaxed and healthy looking, lightly burdened with luggage and lightly dressed for Key West’s perpetual summer. The rest were tourists from the north, pale and weakened by months of cold and darkness and hours of air travel. They were weighed down with carry-on bags, and struggling under layers of heavy dark coats and jackets and sweaters and scarves. Already, in the unaccustomed heat, some were beginning to sweat and look faint. They reminded Jacko of the homeless, hopeless people he had seen in northern cities, dragging or pushing their possessions and wearing their entire wardrobes.

Smiling, he stepped forward to embrace one of these sad souls: a small, pretty but faded woman in her early sixties, with curly gray hair and a sweet, anxious expression.

“Mumsie! You made it.” In a traditional gesture, Jacko picked her up and swung her round—as he had first done, triumphantly, on his thirteenth birthday, when at last he was taller than his mother.

“Oh, Perry darling,” she gasped as he set her down gently. “I was so scared you wouldn’t be here.”

“Of course I’m here,” Jacko said, unruffled. His mother did not know that he was ill, or had been in the hospital, but sometimes she appeared to know things she had not been told. It was also characteristic of her to express small, senseless fears.

“It’s just that so much can go wrong, you know, with airplanes. Oh, thank you. Barbie’s got my little bag—” She gestured.

Jacko turned. Behind him stood a large, fair, sturdy young woman in an unbecoming powder pink quilted raincoat, whom he recognized with surprise and without pleasure as his cousin, Barbie Mumpson Hickock.

“Hi, Perry. Uh—I came too. Mom wanted me to kinda, you know, look after Aunt Dorrie. I mean, she thought—It was sorta a last-minute thing, see?”

“Yeah, I see.” Jacko hardly smiled. “Well, welcome to Key West.”

There was no point in protesting now, he thought as he led his relatives through the crowd to the baggage area, or asking why he hadn’t been informed earlier. His aunt Myra, his mother’s awful sister, had sent her daughter here deliberately. And not at the last minute either, whatever Barbie thought.

Again, as so often in the past, Aunt Myra had managed to off-load Jacko’s boring girl cousin on him. His childhood memories were full of such incidents: scenes in which Barbie Mumpson, two years younger than he and congenitally clumsy, had cluttered up his life. Stumbling after him and his friends on hikes; getting in everyone’s way in volleyball; and striking out on his team at family reunion baseball games. Through the years, her sad round face had been preserved at various ages in his mother’s photograph album: often streaked with tears, or marred by mosquito bites, poison ivy, or acne.

“Now, Perry, you look after your cousin Barbie.” That irritating command had echoed through the first ten years of his life, and the next ten were worse. As soon as he was in junior high Aunt Myra began demanding that Jacko partner Barbie at dancing school and take her to movies and the prom. Later he was pressured to invite his cousin to college basketball and football games and introduce her to eligible men from his fraternity.

“It’s not really much to ask, darling,” his mother (weakly parroting Aunt Myra) would say. “It’s not as if you had a steady girlfriend.”

Though Jacko liked or at least tolerated most people, this long forced association had turned him against Barbie Mumpson, especially after he began to suspect, in his last year of college, that Aunt Myra was scheming to marry them off. The idea terrified him, not least because he knew from experience that Aunt Myra usually got what she set her mind on. The dread of her somehow succeeding was one of the things that had driven him to leave Tulsa and move to Key West.

“So where are you staying?” Jacko asked Barbie as they waited by the baggage inlet.

“Gee, Perry, I d’know. Mom figured you could put both of us up in this house Aunt Dorrie says you’ve like inherited. I’m sorry.”

“Well, I’m sorry too,” Jacko lied. “I’m living in the gardener’s cottage, same as always. Alvin’s house is rented until April.”

“Aw, I didn’t know—” Barbie’s voice trailed off, or was drowned in the sound of baggage being thrown into the luggage trough. “Maybe I can find a room somewhere. I don’t need anything fancy; I can sleep on somebody’s sofa—”

You’re not going to sleep on my sofa, Jacko swore to himself as he carried his mother’s two small bags toward his truck, leaving Barbie to drag her big one across the parking lot. I’ve got to have some privacy, for Christ’s sake. Jacko’s cottage contained only one large room, with an open sleeping loft above the far end and a kitchenette and bath below. Though he never shared it with anyone for long, he had occasional overnight or weekend guests.

Okay, Jacko told himself. You’ll have to find someplace for Barbie to stay. Maybe Lee has a vacancy. His spirits sank as he contemplated the unlikelihood of this at the height of the season; the unlikelihood of finding a reasonable rental anywhere in Key West at eight-thirty on a weekend night. And if he couldn’t find any place, tomorrow he’d have to buy a bed and move it into the other dressing room of the pool house.

Could it be that after all this time Aunt Myra was still scheming to throw him and Barbie together? She had known for fifteen years that he was gay, but Myra Mumpson often refused to recognize facts that did not fit into her system. No, he remembered with a sigh of relief, Barbie was married now; she’d been married for at least two years to some politician. His mother sometimes sent him clippings from the Tulsa newspaper showing Barbie and her husband campaigning or at official functions.

But if not that, what? Aunt Myra hadn’t sent Barbie here just to look after his mother, for sure. Mumsie wasn’t as hideously efficient as her sister, but she was certainly capable of flying to Florida on her own. So what the hell was his cousin doing in Key West?

Late the following morning Barbie Mumpson wandered out of the guest room of Molly Hopkins’s Victorian gingerbread house in Key West, looking blurred and untidy, but better than she had the night before when Molly had taken her in. The weather had turned damp and drizzly, and the accompanying humidity had already given Barbie’s blonde curls more bounce; her face, scrubbed of its chalky foundation, was agreeably freckled. Instead of the hideous beige polyester suit and spectator pumps in which she had arrived, she wore a plain pink gingham dress and sandals. Why, she’s really quite pretty, Molly thought.

“Oh, hello. I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I guess I overslept.”

“That’s quite all right.” Molly suppressed a sigh that was almost a yawn. She was tired and painfully stiff this morning—the result, no doubt, of having stayed up past her usual bedtime to wait for Jacko and Barbie. At her age, loss of sleep told on one. “Would you like breakfast?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, if it’s no trouble.”

“It won’t be any trouble,” Molly said. “You can make it yourself. I’ll show you where things are.”

“I’m sorry.” Barbie trailed after her into the kitchen. “All I need really is a cup of coffee. And maybe some cornflakes or something?”

“There are no cornflakes,” said Molly, who detested dry cereals of all types. “But there’s coffee already made, and bread for toast in the fridge, here.”

“Oh, thank you. I’m sorry, I’m so stupid. I meant to get up earlier, honestly.”

“Why?” Molly asked, wishing her guest would stop apologizing. “You’re here on vacation, aren’t you?”

“Yeah—No—” Barbie took a loaf of raisin bread and a butter dish out of the refrigerator. “Well, I guess I am, sorta. But really I’m supposed to be thinking things over.”

“Ah.” Molly recalled what Jacko had said over the phone last night: “Hey, it’s really great that you can put her up. But listen, I should warn you: Cousin Barbie can be a real drag. My whole life, till I got out of Tulsa, she was following me around whining. Everything always goes wrong for her, and if you give her the slightest encouragement she’ll tell you all about it.”

“It’s, well, my marriage,” Barbie continued without further prompting.

“Ah.” In spite, or perhaps because of Jacko’s warning, Molly felt a flicker of interest. “Would you like some juice?”

“Oh yeah. Thank you.” Barbie poured, spilling a little, and drank, leaving an orange rim around her soft, rather large mouth.

“Here.” Molly held out a paper napkin.

“Oh, thanks. I’m sorry. I’m not usually this helpless, really. It’s just that I’m kinda in a state about Bob and everything. I mean, like Mom says, it’s a serious responsibility.”

“Marriage can be difficult,” Molly remarked neutrally, though she had not found it so; rather, she and her husband had regarded it as a happy alliance against the world.

“Yeah—No—I mean, sure, I guess it is for everybody. But for me it’s a public responsibility too. I mean, my husband is Bob Hickock.” She paused, obviously waiting for recognition. “Wild Bob Hickock, they call him.”

Molly frowned. A country-rock star? A sports figure?

“Wild Bob Hickock the congressman,” Barbie explained. “He’s only in his first term in Washington, but he’s already making a big name for himself. I kinda thought everybody—”

“I don’t really follow politics these days,” Molly said, suppressing the additional phrase
Thank God.
Not having to read the
Times
seven days a week, with emphasis on the editorial and op-ed pages, was for her one of the very few (perhaps the only) positive results of Howard’s death.

“See, Bob’s going on to big things. That’s what Mom says, and she knows, ’cause her family has been in politics for like forever. Bob could go real far, she says. He’s a natural. When he gets in front of an audience, they just about love him to death.”

“Really.”

“Everybody. Businessmen, or Boy Scouts, or old folks in a nursing home, or whatever.” Barbie, who was still holding two pieces of raisin bread, looked round dimly.

“The toaster’s over there.”

“Oh, thanks.” She fumbled with the controls. “See, the thing about Bob is, he’s really good looking. Six-five, and he’s got this great deep voice. And real curly hair and these sexy eyebrows, sorta like two blond caterpillars. That sounds dumb. I mean, caterpillars aren’t sexy, but you know, on Bob they are, believe me.”

“I believe you,” Molly said, though unconvinced.

“Mom told him she thought he should get them trimmed before he went on television, but Bob wouldn’t. He really loves his eyebrows. Sometimes he kinda pets them, like this.” As she demonstrated, Molly observed that Barbie’s own blonde eyebrows were more or less vestigial.

“Well, it must be nice to be married to someone like that,” Molly said, thinking how little she herself would have enjoyed it.