I remembered one Saturday when I was working in the yard and she was in the small canvas pen sunbathing. I walked over and my footsteps were soundless on the grass. She lay on her back with little joined white plastic cups over her eyes. They made her face look most odd. I thought she was asleep, and then I saw that she had a cigarette between her fingers. She brought it slowly to her lips, inhaled, held the smoke in her lungs and then slowly blew it out. I wondered what she was thinking about. The plastic shielding over her eyes gave her such a secretive look. Sweat stood in tiny droplets on her brown skin. Her body was of such perfection, there under the sun, that it wasn’t like looking at a nude living woman. It was strangely like looking at statuary, at something very ancient and very perfect — something brought forward to this era out of a crueler past.
I had the odd feeling that I did not know her at all. It was much like the times in high school when I had stared, flushing, at the curve of her young breast, unable to look away, caught not by lust but by mystery. And throughout my nighttime imaginings of her during those young years I had thought deeply and forlornly that this special mystery would never be for me — that I would never content myself with lesser flesh and thus would go through life tragically alone.
I spoke her name and she removed the white plastic cups and squinted up at me and said, “What? What is it?”
She was Linda again and I went back to my yard work. I know now what she was thinking as I stood watching her, and I have come to believe that evil radiates its own special aura so that when you are receptive to it, you can feel a brush of coldness across your heart.
But that day I shrugged it off, not recognizing it for what it was. I was merely Paul Cowley, a mild man who grubbed away at the crab grass — a man of average height with a narrow introspective face, sloping shoulders, no-color hair that in the past year had thinned so much on top that under the fluorescent bathroom light I could see the gleam of my scalp under the sparse hair. I knew what I was. I was a worker, with a dogged analytical mind, and hands that were clever with both tools and figures. I had outgrown my boyhood dreams of triumph. I knew my place in my known world, with my work and my home and my restless and beautiful wife.
I now know that that Paul Cowley was a fool, and it is of such fools that you read in your tabloids. They believe they walk forward on a wide safe place, whereas in truth it is an incredibly narrow walkway, high over blackness.
The heat continued for two weeks after Labor Day. It turned cool then and the leaves began to change. I put my fishing tackle in order, bought traveler’s checks, bought the sort of beach clothing I thought I would need. I worked long hours at the office, determined that my desk would be absolutely clear on the day I left. I knew there would be enough of an accumulation by the time I returned.
The last days seemed to drag. At last it was Friday, the twenty-second. I said good-by to the people in the section and said good-by to Rufus. It seemed odd to be taking off after the summer was over. I left my address with Rufus — Route 1, Box 88, Hooker, Florida — so he could contact me if necessary. He said he hoped he wouldn’t have to.
On Friday evening Jeff and Stella brought the big car over. Their stuff was all packed in it, and ours was ready to load. Jeff brought our plane tickets for the trip back and I gave him a check. They would arrive at the Sarasota airport at seven-twenty on the evening of the twenty-seventh. We should arrive at the key on the twenty-fifth, and that would give us time to get settled before running up to Sarasota to get them. They took my car when they left, and my garage door key. They would use my car and leave it in my garage before they left.
Linda and I loaded the car and went to bed. In the morning we closed up the house, got an early start, had breakfast on the road. We arrived in Hooker on Monday evening at five o’clock. The trip was uneventful. The car drove easily. Linda was uncommonly quiet during the trip. We had no difficulty finding rooms at pleasant motels as there were not many people on the road at that time of year. We drove from the crisp bite of fall back into summer.
Hooker was a small sleepy town dotted with the crumbling Moorish palaces of the old boom of the twenties. Its streets fanned optimistically out into the palmetto scrub, tall weeds thrusting up through shattered asphalt. It was still and hot and there were a few dusty cars parked on the wide main street. I parked in front of Jethro’s Market and when I got out of the car two large black lethargic mosquitoes landed on my forearm.
Lottie Jethro was a vast faded young woman, with a cotton dress stretching tightly across her abundances. She gave me the keys and said, “You go right on out this road. It runs along the bay and then you come to a sign points west says Verano Key Beach. Get out onto the key and turn left, that’s south, and go about a mile and you come to a little sign says Cypress Cottages, and that’s it. You’ll have to try the keys because I don’t know which is which. But they’re both alike. The fuses on the electric is unscrewed. You got to screw them in. There’s fresh bottles of gas there for both, and just the one pump house, here’s the key. There’s a sign on the wall telling how you prime the pump.”
The screen door banged and Linda came in after me. She had changed to shorts for the last day’s travel. Some men in the back of the store stopped talking when she came in.
“I thought we might as well pick up some groceries now,” she said.
“We got a good line of frozen meats and groceries, lady,” Miss Jethro said.
I bought cigarettes and some magazines and some insect spray and repellent and looked over the fishing tackle while Linda completed her purchasing. I had to cash a traveler’s check to pay for everything. We drove about six miles south and found the sign and crossed a frail wooden bridge onto the key. The road down the key was a sand road, the hump in the middle so high that it brushed the differential. We passed two houses that looked closed. The sun was settling toward the steel blue Gulf. Sometimes the road would wind near enough so that we could see a wide expanse of pale beach and lazy waves that heaved up and slapped at the sand. Water birds ran busily along the water line, pecking at the sand.
“Pretty nice,” I said.
“Yes,” Linda said.
The two cottages were about a hundred feet apart. I asked her which one she wanted and she said it didn’t make any difference. I parked by the southerly one. I unlocked the door and we carried our things in. We unlocked the other one and looked it over. They were alike. The key was narrow there, and there was a long dock out into the bay at the back, and a rowboat overturned on the bank near the dock, above the high tide mark. The pump house was not far from the dock. Both cottages were of cypress, weathered gray. They each had two bedrooms, a living room with furniture upholstered in a vicious shade of green plastic, small gas heaters, gas stove, fireplace, refrigerator, tiny kitchen, a screened porch about ten by ten on the front looking across the sand road toward the Gulf.
I got the electricity going in each cottage, got the pump started, and then drove the car over to the other cottage and unloaded the Jeffries’ things, trying to put them where I thought they would want them. In addition to the usual luggage, they had packed a new badminton set and a gun case. I opened the gun case to see what Jeff had thought he would use. It was a Remington bolt action .22 with a four power scope. It looked new and it looked as though it would be fun for plinking at beer cans.