The Quick Red Fox (8 page)

“I wondered if … as long as she’s so nearby …”

“Right. We’ll go down there tomorrow. Cancel us out on the flight north, and don’t set it up again until after we’ve seen her.”

“You have a car?”

“In a manner of speaking. After you left yesterday I was wondering what you think of all this.”

“I thought I made that clear.”

“I mean what do you think of it as a woman.”

“Is that pertinent?”

“Perhaps. It might help me in talking to the Abbott girl.”

She thought for a moment. It was a long strong face, flat planes in the cheeks, very dark and vivid and lovely eyes, a prominent and forceful nose, broad firm mouth.

“I would say this, I guess. Lee isn’t a suggestible child, you know. She’s had four marriages. And other relationships, some of them not particularly wholesome. But she’s always been pretty cautious. She is very frankly and happily promiscuous, but the situation in those pictures I would say is not her natural
style. She was lulled into it somehow, and damned uncomfortable about it later on, and still is. I wouldn’t know how those other females reacted to it. But I don’t think it is accurate to think of Lee as just another woman getting involved in something messy.”

“What do you mean?”

“She is a property, Trav. She has few personal rights and privileges. She’s just worth too much money to too many people. They can’t afford a blemish on her. I’ve gotten used to thinking that way about her. So when I look at those pictures, I see them in terms of risk. Like watching a clown juggle priceless glassware. Those men were aware of it, of course. The unattainable goddess suddenly right there within reach, tired and drunk and sweaty and willing. They talk, you know. It spreads like ripples. It has had a lot of time. Little hints and rumors are coming back home to roost. She’s scared of that, too. She’ll be all right until one picture doesn’t pay off. Then there could be some reluctance. Why take a chance?”

“How will this picture do, this
Winds of Chance
?”

“Very well, I think. It’s the kind of part she always does well. Coffee?”

“Thanks.”

After she poured it she hesitated by the table, empty pot in hand. “You didn’t say anything about how you’d like me to dress, Trav. I thought.… I imagine women have stayed here with you. I’d be less conspicuous if I … stayed with resort clothes.”

“You do fine. Use your own judgment.”

On the way down to Bastion Key, Dana was delighted with my stately and ancient pickup truck. It is painted a hideous electric blue and called Miss Agnes by all who know her. It is one of the largest of the old Rolls breed, and some owner of long ago, perhaps after bashing her up, did a backyard job of converting her into a pickup truck. She is high and solid. It takes a long time to move her up through the gears, but when you have a chance to get her up to eighty, she will settle into it all day long in a rushing ghastly silence. She eats gas, but holds a little over forty gallons at a time.

I liked Dana’s delight. It reminded me of the way she reacted to Skeeter’s mouse. I knew I had to watch it, or I would be trapped into the hopeless project of trying to find ways to delight her, to bring out that little spark so deeply buried.

At Bastion Key you turn right off the highway beyond the town and follow a shell road out to a little short causeway that
leads over to Hope Island. It is not a luxurious retreat. Stan Burley is the Schweitzer of the gin bottle. The buildings are surplus barracks he barged in long ago. He and all of his small staff are reformed drunks. If he has room, he takes you, at whatever you can afford to pay. He has some theories. They work for him. If you took a seven-foot chimp and shaved every hair off and painted him pink, you’d have a recognizable version of Stan Burley. His graduates who stay dry send contributions regularly.

Before I could turn the motor off, Burley was striding toward us from his little screened office. It was warm and bright, eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning. The Florida bays were blue.

“Ho, McGee,” he said, hand outstretched toward me, looking with a keen expectation at Dana, doubtless thinking her a new guest.

I introduced them and said quickly, “We’ve come down to talk to one of your people, Stan. If possible. Nancy Abbott.”

The welcoming light went out of his face. He gnawed his lip. “Miss Holtzer, you go wait in my office a minute, and Jenny will give you a nice glass of iced tea.” She nodded and walked away. Burley led me over to a wooden bench in the shade.

“What’s it about, Trav?”

“She was involved in something a year and a half ago. I want to ask her some questions about it. Is she all right?”

He shrugged. “She’s dry, if that means very much. Has been since October. I shouldn’t tell you a damned thing about that one. But you worked so hard with me that time with Marianne. God help us, we fought hard, but we lost that one, boy. I’ll have to tell you, it’s on my conscience having her here, this Nancy. It isn’t the place for her, but no place is, not any more. Did her father send you?”

“No.”

“A retired policewoman delivered the child here in October. Sick drunk and down to ninety pounds. The D.T.’s and the spasms. Pitiful. I got a thousand then, and I get a thousand a month from a San Francisco bank. I write the bank a condition report once a month. After we began to bring her out of it, she puzzled me. I had a doctor friend look her over. Drunk is only part of it. But the thousand a month takes care of a lot of other ones. I’m an evil old man, Trav.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Physically she’s as healthy as an ox. She’s only twenty-four. She had nine years of drinking, the last five of them heavy, not long enough to damage her. Mentally, you name it, she’s got it.”

“She’s mad?”

“Boy, she isn’t sane. What they did, they got too eager with her long ago. Some people who thought shock treatments were the answer to all. A cure for anxiety and depressive symptoms. As far as I can figure, she had over twenty complete series. That and the alcoholic spasms, there’s degenerative damage. She doesn’t track too well. She can’t handle abstract concepts. She’s trapped in a manic-depressive cycle. You hit her at her best. She’s on her way up now, but not up too high yet. This is her happy time. She could manage in public pretty well if too much wasn’t demanded of her. Pretty soon she’ll get real wild. Violence, compulsive nymphomania, such a craving for drink she’d kill to get it. Then I put her under restraint. Then she falls all the way down to the bottom. She won’t speak for days. Then she starts to slowly build again.”

“How is her memory?”

“Sometimes good and sometimes gone.”

I looked at that tired simian face and remembered the way he had talked of Marianne. Of love and destruction.

“What did it to her, Stan?”

“Her? The father did it. The adored, talented, mighty father. It was an ugly marriage. The poor child was too much like her mother, so the father couldn’t help despising her. He rejected her. So because she couldn’t understand why—just like Marianne—she grew up with a conviction of her own worthlessness. Ah, that’s where the compulsions start, McGee. A person can
not
endure inexplicable worthlessness. So they establish the pattern of proving themselves worthless. For this child it was sex and drink. The guilts made her emotionally unstable. She was after destruction. The shock treatments and the spasms have done the job for her. She’s a destroyed personality. Where can she go? Nothing much can be done for her now. Here is as good as anywhere. Sometimes she is very sweet.”

“I don’t want to upset her.”

“What do you want to ask her?”

“If she can remember some names. If she can remember some pictures being taken.”

“Pictures?”

I opened the envelope, sorted out two of them and handed them to him. His face puckered with concern and sorrow. “The poor kid. See what she’s saying, in effect? Love me, love me. Rejection by the father, rejection by the young husband, a butchered abortion, a year in an institution when she was seventeen, for hit and run.”

“What would showing her these do?”

“Trav, nothing can do her much good or much harm.”

“Will she talk to me?”

“In this part of the cycle she’s very outgoing. She might get
agitated. It might strike her as funny. I don’t know. It might accelerate this phase of the cycle. I can’t see as that would do any harm.”

“Should you be there?”

“I think you’d get more out of her alone. When there’s two people or more she wants to be entertaining. She reacts too much. She talks better to one. My God, boy, those are some pictures! A year and a half ago? I guess she was bad off then, but it would take a trained man to see it. Now anybody can see it.”

“What’s the best attitude toward her, Stan?”

“Just natural, friendly. If she says nutty things, just steer her back to what you want to talk about. Don’t look shocked and don’t laugh. We’re used to Nancy around here, and every drunk in the world has heard everything there is to hear. Treat her as if she was … a bright, sweet, imaginative child.”

“Where is she?”

He took me over to the office and pointed. “Go around the dining hall and the path to the beach starts on the other side of it. I saw her heading that way about twenty minutes or so ago.”

I heard her before I saw her. It was a narrow beach, more shell than sand. It was a lovely contralto voice, very rich and full, singing, with maximum feeling, that cigarette commercial about filter, flavor, flip-top box. She was sitting on a palm log about a hundred feet up the bright beach from where the path exited. As I walked toward her, she heard my steps crunching the shell, stopped singing, turned and stared at me, and then stood up and came toward me with a warm and lovely smile of welcome, teeth very white in her sun-darkened face. “
Hello
there!” she said. “I’m Nancy. Are you one of the new ones?”

She wore pale blue Bermudas, and a man’s white shirt with the tails knotted around her waist. Her dark hair was in braids. She was tall and lithe, and her eyes were a dark clear blue. After a mental hesitation, I realized she made me think of Jane in the very oldest Tarzan movies. She was barefoot, unwincing on the shells.

“I’m just visiting. My name is Trav.”

“Are you visiting Jackie? She doesn’t throw up as much. Maybe she can go home. Just to visit.”

“As a matter of fact, I’m here to visit you.”

All the warmth and light went out of her face. “He just sends people. Tell him I don’t give a damn. Not now. Not ever. Screw him. Tell him that.”

“Nobody sent me. I just know some people who know you. I was down this way. So I stopped in. That’s all, Nancy.”

“What people?”

“Carl Abelle. Vance and Patty M’Gruder.”

Scowling, she turned away from me and went back and sat on the log. I followed and stood near her. She squinted up at me. “I know that Carl. A strong back and a weak mind, believe me. He had that stupid idea. The perfect orgasm. Can you imagine? Maybe he thought it worked me up. Damned coward. Too scared to light a fire in that line shack. My God it was always cold in there, way up on that ridge, with Auntie thinking I was on the slopes all day. He stole a key from the office. Fifty dollars a day she was paying him for personal instruction. We’d pile everything on that bunk. What was he trying to get? Tell me that? You either come or you don’t. Right? And I almost always do, no matter how quick they are the first time. Last week or last year I was trying to remember Carl’s name. My God, he was beautiful on skis. When we’d leave that cabin he’d
push me down in the snow and rub snow on my face to get me all pink and outdoorsy-looking, and then guide me down the slopes, all the way to the lodge, half stoned on that brandy, like dreaming and floating. But he said some real dumb things. What was I then? He probably told you. Nineteen? I guess so. I’m remembering better. You ask Stan. He’ll tell you. But what good is it? I mean some of the things you remember. Sit by me. But please, I don’t want to talk about those puke M’Gruders. I don’t have to, do I?”

“No.”

“What have you got there?”

“Some pictures.”

“May I see them, please?”

She held them in her lap. She looked at them slowly and solemnly, one by one. I watched her face carefully. She sorted one onto the top. She stroked a thumb along the line of Sonny’s back. “Burned, burned, burned,” she said softly.

“Sunburned?”

“Oh no. He hit a wall. It was his supercharged Merc with special cams and like that. I wore the big red hat so he could spot me, and I sat on the wall by the pits that day. We towed that car all over everywhere, and it burned him up in Georgia. It bounced and bounced.” She stroked her thigh. “Sonny liked me in whore clothes. He bought them all. Tight short skirts and tight bright sweaters, and he said I had to swing it when I walked. Proud as a rooster, and mean as a snake, Sonny was.”

She ran her thumb across his image on the photograph. “This one right here. Sonny Catton. He took me along when the party pooped out. I was with him maybe two weeks, and he kept beating me up, for taking another drink, or somebody making a pass at me, or sometimes just from remembering
things from the party. Like this picture here, me with this one. What was his name? Cass? Cass something. He drew funny pictures of people. He gave me one of me and I lost it. You know, I’ve lost every single goddam thing I ever owned? I got sick of him hammering on me and I went home and what do you know, my fa-fa-f-f … the man who married my mother,
he
had pictures like this. He said tell my friends it was no sale. They could publish them in the
Chronicle
. Boy, what a smack across the face he gave me! His face was like a stone. I guess it bugged him to see pictures of his wife laying people. Wife! Did you hear that! I’m his d-d-daugh-daughter. Made it!”

My skin had the cold quivers, just below the nape of my neck. “What did you do then, Nancy?”

“Are you another doctor? For a thousand years I’ve been up to my hips in doctors. I was a woman when I was fourteen, and when I got caught doing it, that was when they sent me to the first one, and I could tell he would have liked it too, if he could get up the nerve. He used to get sweaty and clean his glasses and walk around. They all make a big thing out of stuttering when I try to say … ef aye tee aitch ee are. Are you going to give me tests?”