The Empty Copper Sea (5 page)

She's no hooker.

"Nicky, she's about as close as you can get and not be. Jack had to tell Mishy not to come cruising this bar, remember? Come on, you guys. What's to get so edged up about?"

He gestured toward me. "People like McGoo here who know everything about everything, they gripe my ass, B.J."

"McGee," I said. "I think I know how you spell your last name."

"Hey, guys!" she said sharply. "You'll get me in trouble, dammit."

"Lawless didn't drown," he said to me, almost inaudibly.

"Nicky!" she said nervously.

"Shut up, B.J." He held up a big hand and ticked the items off on his fingers. "One. He sold off the trucks for cash, cheap. Two. He stopped paying all the accounts coming due, and at the very end he cleaned out the bank accounts. Three. That girl left town the next day."

"Girl?" I asked.

He hesitated and then sighed. "What am I doing? It isn't any business of yours anyway."

"Tell me one more thing, Noyes."

"What?"

"Do you believe in the tooth fairy, too?"

That did it. He got up very nimbly for a man that size, leaned his perfume close to me, gold trinkets a-dangle, and said, "Outside, McGoo. Now!" And he left.

"I shouldn't have even noticed he was here," she said dolefully.

"It's okay," I said.

"You're not going out there!"

"Why not?"

"Because it's childish, and because he's really mad enough to really kill you. I've never seen Nicky so worked up."

"Do you know if he was ever a fighter?"

"I don't think so. He's never said anything. He was Mr. Lawless's superintendent, building those houses on that ranchland south of Baygate Plaza Mall. Please don't go out there, McGee."

"It's been too long since I've been childish, I guess. Want to come watch?"

She responded with a certain unwholesome anticipatory delight that she tried to conceal.

Stripped down to essentials, it was a primitive situation. The two bull males and the nervous skittery female. He was in the parking area near the entrance to the lounge, standing near a blue Chevy pickup. It was a balmy night. He had shed his expensive guayabera, exposing an impressive mat of black hair. I told Billy Jean Bailey to stay where she was, under the palm trees, and I went on out to him, and he tried to finish it with one big looping right-hand lead. I got my left arm and shoulder up in time and moved a little bit inside it, but the inside of his wrist and forearm thumped the side of my head over the ear, enough so I knew he could hit. A lot of big men can't hit. A punch has to have snap in it, terminal whipping velocity; otherwise it is a big slow push.

I wanted him to be in a big hurry to finish it. I got my shoulders high and my arms high, and tucked my chin into my chest, bobbing under some of the roundhouse rights and lefts, taking others on my shoulders, elbows, forearms, moving in the direction of the punches to soften them as much I could. But they still hurt, laming my arms a little. He gave whistling grunts of
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effort with each swing. Canvas shoes squeaked and flapped on the asphalt. I wondered how the thumping and the thudding of the blows sounded to B.J. Bailey. When he began to tire, I encouraged him by backing away toward a pale car nearby. I encouraged him further by turning to my left and bending over so my back was toward him, my fists covering my ears, risking the chance he might know enough to take a really punishing shot at my right kidney. .

"Had enough?" he gasped. "Had enough, you son of a bitch?"

It was not much of a risk-I had guessed from his style what he would probably do. He would put his left hand on my right shoulder, spin me around to face him, and pop me with that big right hand.

I felt the grasp of the left hand, resisted it for a moment, then spun with it, feet and heels braced just right, using all the momentum of the turn to drive my very best left hand deep into the sweaty meat just below the V of the floating ribs. I covered my jaw with my right arm as I swung, chin tucked into my elbow. To make a blow truly effective, you have to hit through the target. I tried to hit so far through it I would feel the knuckles of his spine against the knuckles of my left hand.

It burst the air out of him, drove him back and dropped him. His right hand had hit me just over the left eye, lightly, as my punch landed. I felt the warmth run into my eye and down my cheek. Nicky rolled, groaning, onto his hands and knees and fell onto his side, hugging his middle.

B.J. came running to me, gasped, and cried, "You're all bleeding!"

Nicky rolled to his pickup and managed to climb up the side of it, hand over hand, until he was on his feet and could lean against it. I took the wad of tissue B.J. handed me, wiped my eye with one, and pressed the rest against my eyebrow. I walked over to the pickup.

Nicky had his right forearm pressed across his middle. "I think you bust something inside," he said huskily.

"What's my name?" I asked him. The ritual of the achoolyard, the necessary childishness.

"McGee," he said, with no hesitation and no resistance. "I can't hardly breathe at all."

I opened the truck door, turned him, helped him hoist himself up to sit behind the wheel. He dug into his pocket slowly and found the keys, sighed, sorted the right one out and sighed again, and put it into the switch.

"I'm hurt real bad," he said.

"Go home and get some rest," I told him. He started the truck turned on the lights, and drove away.

"Do you have to call a doctor or anything?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"Jack isn't going to like it at all."

"Who's Jack?"

"The manager here. He doesn't like for there to be any kind of trouble."

"I don't think it's much. I think we could pull it together with some adhesive."

She had some in her cabana beyond the pool. We kept to the shadows. She babbled nervously in a semi-whisper. I gathered that Jack wouldn't care for this sort of thing, either. She said these cabanas had been designed to look out toward the beach, but then they had to put up the tennis courts and the locker rooms, and so her windows looked at the back of the locker rooms and you couldn't see much of anything at all, but then again it went with the territory, and beggars couldn't be choosers, and there you are.

She unlocked the door and let us in, and pulled the heavy draperies across the windows before turning on the lights. She was, as she had explained, clean but not neat. Her three-quarter bed had not been made back into a couch. There was a bright spill of lady-clothes on the available furniture, sliding stacks of Billboard and Variety and sheet music. She had a little Sony music center and a tumbled cupboard of records and tapes. She had show-biz glossies of a lot of people I'd never seen before Scotch-taped to the walls.

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She broke out some ice, and I wrapped some in a hand towel and got the bleeding slowed to where I could get a good look at the gash. It was an inch and a half long, quite shallow; close to the eyebrow, and slanting toward my left ear. The impact had evidently broken a little bleeder close to the surface. I had her cut a dozen very narrow strips of adhesive tape with her nail scissors. I sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held a hand mirror so I could instruct her in just how to pull the wound shut, lacing it with the narrow strips of tape in a series of X's. Then we placed a small gauze compress against it and taped that in place.

She said she knew how to get the dark dapplings of blood off the chest and shoulder of my pale blue shirt, and she took it into the tiny kitchen alcove and set it to soaking in something.

She told me she had thought he was giving me a terrible beating and it had made her start to cry.

She told me it had been a funny time for her lately, kind of bored and listless and lonesome, like waiting for something to happen. She said if I was to happen to her, it would be okay, no matter what she said earlier. She said she knew what she was doing. She wasn't any kid. In the right light she could pass for twenty-five because she'd had a real good Mexican lift, "but don't ask how old I really am because I always lie." She hung on me, and I took her to bed, but after a while she got up and put a yellow towel on a small lamp on the other side of the room and turned the other lights out and said she always slept with a night light on. She said she had some really good grass, and did I want to share a joint? I said I didn't, thanks, and she said she had some coke too, not very good because it was cut too far down, and maybe I'd like some. I said no thanks, and she said it really didn't mean anything to her one way or the other, except she didn't believe in the hard stuff, ever, but would I mind if she had just a little grass? because then she could be sure of getting it off. I said I didn't mind, so she got a saved butt out of a little box in the nightstand drawer, good for five deep drags, well spaced, then pressed it out and came back down to me with that sad, sweet, oriental tang on her breath.

Four

I AWOKE a little after four in the morning. I could look across her to her improvised night light. It made yellow highlights on the sprawl of her small lean naked back and small mound of buttocks. She had her face pressed against my ribs, and I felt the long, slow heat of each exhalation from the depths of her sleep. She had one leg linked over mine, her right arm across my middle. A frizzle of that kinked platinum hair tickled me just under the armpit with each breath I took. The night bugs made small whirring sounds, and a wind made a sudden rainsound in the palm fronds.

I sighed in a kind of habitual dismay at my own involvements. This one had a locker-room drabness about it. Hey, guys, the first night I stayed there, I screwed the piano player.

How was it, fella?

Well, to tell the truth, not bad. A lot of little extra frills and trills and improvisations, just like her piano playing, but not much real intensity, you know.

The why and when of the inadvertent affair is never simply explained. I remembered a few years ago, Meyer pressing a book upon me by one L. Rust Hills, entitled How to Be Good. Mr. Hills was explaining to his peer group how one might retain a modicum of goodness in a sadly corrupt world. One chapter in particular seemed appropriate to the situation in which I now found myself. He described the awkward union which he terms "the charity fuck." This is when a person finds himself in a situation where he suddenly realizes that the other party is ready, willing, and eager to make love, and because the place is available and private, and the time is available, and both parties are reasonably healthy, the only possible reason for saying no thanks is because you find the other party physically unappealing. Any excuse at that time-not in the
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mood, have this little headache, and so on and so on-will be so feeble as to lead the spurned party to the inevitable conclusion that she is indeed sexually unappetizing. This is such an unthinkable blow to give to another person's ego and selfesteem, it is far more charitable to gird the old loins and hop to it.

So here she was in the sweet depths of her postcoital slumber, reassured once more of her sexuality and desirability. As I was wedged back against the wall, there was no hope of stealthy departure. I took hold of her shoulder and gave her a little shake.

"Whassawharra?" she said into my ribs.

"Got to leave, B.J."

She groaned and hoisted herself up onto her elbows and lifted a bleared face to stare at me.

"Whachawannago?"

"Daylight soon. Don't want old Jack watching me creep out of here, do you?"

"Shidno, swee."

I clambered over her and got into my clothes. "Shirdsonahanganashar."

"What? What?"

"When I got up before, I hung your shirt on a hanger in the shower, but it probally isn't dry."

"Oh."

It wasn't. Not quite. I pulled a sheet up to cover her. I kissed her lazy mouth and patted her rump, and she told me to make sure the door locked behind me. It did. I felt a dampness in the cool touch of the predawn air. My brow felt fine, but my arms were leaden and dulled, by the deep ache of the bruises from Nicky Noyes's big fists. Hell of a night, all told. Too much travel, too much to drink, a stupid brawl, and finally some romping with a small wiry tanned lady who was lonely enough to be potential trouble. By diligent effort I seemed to be prolonging my adolescence to total absurdity.

On impulse I turned away from the walk and found my way by starlight down to the beach, and out of my east-coast habit looked for that touch of light along the horizon which would warn of the new day. Then I realized it would come up behind me, over the land. I walked to a chaise and stretched out on the damp canvas.

Between love and sleep, she had given drowsy answers to my elaborately casual questions. What did Nicky mean about a girl leaving town the next day?

-Huh? Oh, her. She left town the next day. Who?

Who what?

-Who left town the next day?

Well, they said she and Hub Lawless had something going. Then there were other people said there was always talk about a woman like that, like Kristin Petersen, whoever she was working for, and they said Hub and Julie Lawless had too good a marriage. Then her leaving town the very next day while the Coast Guard and everybody was hunting Hub's body ...

Her voice had faded down into a muttering and then into slow, heavy breathing. A little bit more for Meyer's notebook. One Kristin Petersen, who had worked for Hubbard Lawless in some capacity as yet unknown and who was a natural target for gossip. A veritable battalion of women were thronging the Timber Bay scene: B. J. Bailey Felicia Ambar, Michele Burns, Julia Lawless, and now Kristin, who had departed.

There was beginning to be such a subtle additive of light that I could make out the ghostly shape of a marker off to my left, where North Pass entered Timber Bay, and beyond it some shadowy tree shapes on the outcroppings that sheltered the bay. The Gulf was quiet, with a gentle lap and slap of small waves on the packed wet sand. I heard a deep-throated diesel chugging through the wet noises of the sea and soon saw the outline of a ahrimper heading out. There was a pale yellow rectangle in the amidships area, with a man standing against the glow, and I saw him lift his arm and realized that he was lifting a cup of coffee to his lips. It was so vivid I could smell the coffee.