“So you broke them. You busted them down to a price you could afford. You didn’t have any other choice.”
“No other choice in the world, excepting to go broke myself. I swear, if it had been my own brother running that place, it would have had to be just the same. But let me tell you, I never did count on Bannon killing himself. That never entered my head one minute. We were having a late Sunday breakfast in the kitchen when I got a phone call telling me what he’d done, and after I hung up and thought about it, I went right in the bathroom and threw up. I swear, it made me sick. I was in bed most of the day. Suzy wanted to call the Doc, but I told her it was just probably something I ate at the hotel Saturday night, at the testimonial dinner for old Ben Linder, retiring from the law, looking like a little old gray ghost the way the cancer is eating him up.” He sighed. “You know, having you come out of noplace and snatch those ten acres away from me is like punishment for what Bannon did to himself. It’s like getting the word that nothing ever is going to work out right anymore for me, and things used to go so good there for a while.”
“Maybe Bannon didn’t kill himself.”
His sagging head snapped up. “What are you trying to do now? What kind of new game are you playing?”
“Just a thought. I suppose it was pretty well known who was putting the pressure on Bannon and why. Maybe somebody wanted you and Monk Hazzard to be appreciative. Maybe they roughed Bannon up just to prove a lot of real diligence and cooperation and went a little too far. And if Bannon just happened to die on them, it would be a pretty good way of fixing it so that nobody would ever be able to find out that Bannon took a bad beating.”
He chewed a crumb of skin off the corner of his thumb. “Suzy said if it was sure going to crush a man’s head anyway, he might as well be face down so he couldn’t see it falling…” He straightened and shook his head. “No. There’s nobody around who’d do a man that way. Nobody I know. Nobody Monk knows.”
I looked at my watch. “I’ll tell you exactly what you do, Press: I’ll be up there on Thursday the fourth. I’ll have somebody with me who can tell you something you might find interesting. But the only way you can get to talk to them is to have that forty thousand in cash or certified check all ready and waiting, and I’ll have a deed and closing statement and so on. Show me the money and then you can talk to the man I’ll bring along. Then you can decide whether you want to buy the Bannon place. Because that’s the only way you’re going to have any dish to eat out of.”
He stood up. “Otherwise?”
“Otherwise I just wait you out, and I wait until the Calitcon deal is dead, and then I make my own deal with Carbee, because he certainly isn’t going to renew that option with you, and then I see if my buyer can get along without your land and without the Santo land, and I think it’s quite possible that two hundred and ten acres might be enough.”
“You wouldn’t be running a bluff?”
“Prove you have forty thousand to get into the table stakes game, and we’ll give you a little peek at the hole card. Believe me, it’s the last and only chance you’ve got.”
From the dock he looked back toward me, standing on the afterdeck. He shook his head and said, “You know, damn it, McGee, it’s almost easier dealing with that son of a bitch Santo. At least you know more about what the hell is going on.”
I went back in and hollered to Puss that she could come out. I took a yellow cushion off the couch and lifted the little Sony 800 out of its nest and took it over to the desk. We’d used up two-thirds of the fiveinch reel of half-mil tape at three and three quarters ips. I unplugged the mike and plugged in the line cord to save the battery drain and rewound it to the beginning. I stretched out on the couch and Puss sat cross-legged on the floor and we listened to it all the way through. I got up just once and held the rewind key down a few moments, and replayed the account of the talk with Santo in Atlanta, and let it continue on from there.
At the end, Puss got up and punched it off and came over and hip-thumped herself a little room on the edge of the couch. “Is that what we’ve got for a villain, dear? That weak, scared, sly, sorry man? Just scrambling and hustling and trying to keep his stupid head above water? So his stomach hurts all the time, and he threw up.”
“Settle for Santo?”
“Maybe indifference is the greatest sin, darling. I’ll settle for Santo, until a new one comes along. McGee, tomorrow is New Year’s Eve.”
“So it is. So it is indeed.”
“How would you feel about no throngs, dear?”
“I was thinking about trying to prove two is a throng.”
“I think two people could purely lang the hell out of auld zyne if they put their minds to it. Is it zyne, or syne or what?”
“It is old acquaintance ne’er forgot.”
“New acquaintance ne’er forgot. What happens to people who start on Black Velvets and taper off on champagne?”
“They seldom remember their own names.”
“Let’s try for that.”
A slow gray rain came dawn all day long on the last day of the year. We kept the Flush buttoned up, the phone off, ignored the bing-bong of the regulars who were drifting from boat to boat, It was a private world, and she provided a throng of girls therein. Never had she released all that mad and wonderful vitality for so long. She had come all the way out of the shell she had been keeping herself in for the last few days. We peaked at that point where the wine held us in an unreal place, neither drunk nor sober, neither sane nor crazy, where the funny things were thrice funny, where all the games were inexhaustible, where tears were part of laughter or sadness, and every taste was sharpened, every odor pungent, every nerve branch incomparably sensitized. The ones who are half alive can reach that place, perhaps, with their trips and their acids and their freaking, but reality truly felt, awareness made totally aware, is a magic they can’t carry around in powdered form. She was a throng of girls and she filled the houseboat and filled the day and filled the long evening. Some of the girls were ten, and some were fifteen, and some were ten thousand years old. And, like Alice, I had to run as fast as I could to stay in the same place. HAPP-eee New Year, my love…
I awakened on Monday with the impression that I might have to get up and bang my head against the wall to get my heart started. The bedside clock was at seven after eleven. No hangover. Just that leaden heavy contentment of an expenditure so total the account was seriously overdrawn. I plodded my way into the vast shower stall, soaped and then stood swaying, eyes closed under the steaming roar, like a horse sleeping in the rain. Finally out of a sense of duty and character I fixed the heads to needle spray and switched it to cold. As I hopped and gasped, I thought dourly of how inaccurate are all the bridegroom jokes about window shades. A long and private holiday with a sizable, sturdy, vital, demanding and inventive lass leaves you with the impression that you had merely rowed a couple of tons of block across a lake, then ran them up to the top of a mountain with a dozen or so trips with a wheelbarrow, then rolled back down the mountain into the lake and drowned.
As with sad and reminiscent smile I was reaching for my toothbrush, I noticed that hers was gone. Okay. So she had packed early. But while brushing, I reached my free hand up and opened the other cupboard. It was bare. She had taken everything of hers, for the first time in all these months.
I rinsed and spat and wrapped the big damp towel around my waist and went in search of her. Of course there was nothing of hers left aboard. She was gone. She had scotch-taped a note to the side of the coffeepot. It was in her freehand printing, using red ballpoint.