Part 9 (1/2)
I said, ”Okay. As I push this throttle, the port engine is going to pick up speed, heading for the channel, heading for home. Let's say that is my intention. But the wheel is locked, so if the starboard throttle stays right where it is, all I am going to do is make one h.e.l.l of a big circle and end up aiming back into the yacht club.”
She didn't say anything. Her hand was slack on the throttle. I slowly pushed mine up. We went almost straight and then began to turn more and more easterly. I could see I was going to have some problems with water traffic if I waited too long for her. She took her hand off, and as I was about to accept that as her decision, she hit the throttle with the heel of her hand, banging it all the way forward. She sat in the copilot's chair. The maneuver gave me a couple of very busy seconds flipping the loop off, yanking the throttle back, turning the wheel.
I said, ”When you make up your mind, honey, you-”
”Shut up and drive,” she said.
I went outside, got on my heading, and put it on pilot. She did not want a beer. She did not want a drink. She did not want any conversation, thanks. So I took a beer back and sat on the engine hatch as we roared through the calm sea, tipping and lifting a little in the swell that was just beginning to build. She stood up and leaned her folded arms on the top of the winds.h.i.+eld, staring ahead for a long time, standing hipshot with ankles crossed. The light of the dying day was gold and orange. The sh.o.r.e was turning blue-gray, the sea to indigo.
I guessed that in another five minutes I would take it out of pilot and turn toward the sea buoy and the early lights of Lauderdale. She came striding back, losing her balance and catching it, looking angry, and said, ”Can you turn everything off and sort of just float out here? Please?”
Done. A sudden silence until ears can find the smaller sounds. Dip and pitch and roll, water slapping the hull, something rolling and thumping in a gear locker, water slos.h.i.+ng the cooler.
She went back and sat on the broad transom which was also the engine hatch, swiveled to hang her legs over the stern. I sat beside her, facing inboard.
”I don't talk about my husband,” she said.
”People have noticed.”
So she talked about him. She hopped back and forth in time and s.p.a.ce, with silences between. I didn't come in with questions. She had to set her own tempo of revelation. She had gone steady with a boy for several years. She'd caught the eye of an older man, one of the McDermit brothers who had a lot of food-service companies in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, catering airlines, operating coffee-break concessions and cafeterias in factories and offices, owning vending machines and warehousing facilities. He had big cars, phones in his cars, a duplex apartment with a staff, an executive jet.
She had played one against the other, in a girlish mischief. Then abruptly Tom, the boyfriend, had died in a one-car accident, lost control at high speed on the interstate. McDermit had been gentle, understanding, comforting. She had married him.
”Then it all turned so rotten,” she said. ”They owned race horses, those brothers. I was another thing, like a horse that costs so much to keep, you can do any d.a.m.n thing you want with it. He liked to hit. He liked to hurt. He couldn't really make it any other way. He was trying to break me. We had a big fight, and I told him Tom had been a man, and he wasn't a man. He said he had a specialist put a gadget inside the wheel cap on Tom's right front wheel, set so that at seventy it would push a weight against a spring thing and blow the lugs off. He said Tom was dead meat. I said he was never going to touch me again, and I was getting a divorce. He said n.o.body was ever going to touch me again, so I didn't need a divorce. He said to get out if I wanted to, but if I let anybody have me, he'd have both of us killed.”
She hadn't really believed him. She'd gone to a lawyer who accepted the divorce action eagerly, then suddenly cooled off. When she insisted on knowing why, he took her into a little conference room and closed the door. He was sweaty. He told her she should go back to her husband. He said the brothers were always involved in legal actions, and sometimes they were indicted, but nothing had ever gone any further than that. He told her he didn't want her business, she didn't owe him a dime, please leave.
She tried another town and another name, and McDermit had phoned her at work to say h.e.l.lo. He found her more quickly the second time. So she had come to Miami and gone back to her own name. ”His people check on me. Somebody comes around every couple of months. You get used to it. Five years, practically. It isn't all that rough, getting along without. It isn't that big a part of life.”
”Why now and why me, Mary Alice?”
She sighed. ”I hope you can find your way in off this ocean in the dark.”
”No problem.”
”Look at all the stars! You can see them better out here.”
”Evading the question?”
”No man in his right mind is going to take a chance on getting killed, just to get one specific piece of a.s.s out of all the a.s.s there is floating around. And besides, I'm not all that great in bed. I'm a big healthy girl, but I'm just sort of average s.e.xy, like you'd find anywhere.”
”Question still pending, lady.”
”I'm saying it isn't isn't now and it now and it isn't isn't you, because it could have been if I decided, but instead I've told you why it shouldn't happen. It would be stupid of you. And it would be stupid of me to let myself get into it. I've had it all pushed down out of sight, and I'm okay. I get along fine.” you, because it could have been if I decided, but instead I've told you why it shouldn't happen. It would be stupid of you. And it would be stupid of me to let myself get into it. I've had it all pushed down out of sight, and I'm okay. I get along fine.”
”Then let me ask it a different way. Why did you almost almost decide on now and on me?” decide on now and on me?”
”Not because you are so absolutely irresistible, believe me. If I was inventing a guy to... break my fast with, he would sort of be like Michael Landon, only a foot taller.”
”Like who?”
”If you don't know, never mind. I think that the way it started, I had the idea that if I ever got the nerve to take the risk, it should be with somebody who'd be awfully d.a.m.ned hard to kill, and then maybe he could keep me alive too. It was just... what is the word when you think of things you aren't going to do?”
”Conjecture?”
”Right! I conjectured about us. Then I woke up on the beach, and you were asleep, and I looked at you and kind of wanted you. Still conjecture. Then you kissed me, and I was having a dream it fitted into. Then I went down the beach and thought about it, and then I began playing some kind of fool game about it, but you have to come to the end of games, right? Something to get killed over? Who needs it? Come on, dear. You better start aiming me toward home. I'm sorry. I really am.”
”And you don't play quicky games, do you?”
She snapped her head around. ”You better not be asking me to.”
”I'm not.”
”If I wanted to sneak it, I could have had all a girl could need.”
”I know.”
”It would have to be something that starts and keeps going until somebody finally says whoa. Out in the open. People would know just by seeing me look at the guy.”
And now, in the shadows of the curtained master stateroom, I wanted to see that look. I slowly ran the ball of my thumb down the crease of her back, from shoulder-blades to the little k.n.o.bs in the small of her back. She sighed and moved slowly and made a small murmur of complaint. Then suddenly she stiffened, sprang up and back and away from me, eyes wide and blank in terror, as she grasped the sheet and pulled it up across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.
She expelled the frightened in-suck of breath in a long grateful sigh, hooked her hair back out of the way with curled fingers, gave me a small and uncertain smile and said, ”Talk about having a heart attack, darling.”
”Bad dreams?”
”Mmmm. Hold me, huh?”
I stretched out beside her, atop the sheet, and put my arms around her. She put her face in my throat. She chuckled.
”What's funny?”
”A dirty joke a girl told me where I have lunch. It sort of fits. You know. I'll mess it up if I try to tell it.”
”Try.”
It was the one about the doctor with the gorgeous girl patient who comes in with a hangnail and has to strip for the complete physical, and it ends with the tag line, ”Don't be silly, Miss Jones. I shouldn't even be doing this this!”
And she didn't tell it very well.
”Darling?” she said.
”Wha'?”
”Tell me exactly what you promised and exactly what you are going to do.”
”Hmm. Let's see. I am going to put extra drums of fuel aboard this here vessel. I am going to equip her and provision her for a voyage of uncertain duration. And at the first hint that your freak husband is after us, whenever you say go, we go, taking the Muequita Muequita in tow. If the weather is good enough, we see if we have enough good luck and good management to get over to the islands. If not, we lay at anchor somewhere down Biscayne Bay or in Florida Bay until we get the right weather.” in tow. If the weather is good enough, we see if we have enough good luck and good management to get over to the islands. If not, we lay at anchor somewhere down Biscayne Bay or in Florida Bay until we get the right weather.”