“How can you lose?” LaFrance said. “There’s no way you can lose.”
“No thanks,” I said. “What shape does that leave you in, buddy?”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I just plain can’t afford to get left in the kind of shape I’d be in. Why I would be worse off than dead broke. I would be a mile underground, boys. I would be attached and garnisheed the rest of my natural life. I would never have dime one to call my own the rest of my days.”
“Now you know how it feels, Press.”
“How what feels?”
“How some of the people felt who got in your way. Like Bannon.”
He peered at me. “You bleeding for Bannon? That was straight-out business. He was squattin‘ right in the way of progress, and he was so dumb it took him a long time to catch on, is all.”
“It would have helped him a lot if he’d had a brother-in-law on the County Commission.”
“What in the wide world is eating on you, McGee? My God, there’s a whole world full of Tush Bannons stumbling around, and they get et up left and right, and that’s what makes the world go ‘round. I put Monk onto some good things and he owed me a favor.”
“And you and Monk let Freddy Hazzard know you’d appreciate him leaning a little hard on Bannon any chance he had?”
“Now, we never meant anything like that!” He smiled. “You’re just trying to sweat me up a little. Isn’t that right? Look boys, it won’t improve the deal any. Twenty more on top of the sixty is the best I can do.”
He was such a weak miserable, unsatisfying target. He still thought he was one of the good guys. I tried to reach him, just a little.
“If you could bring in a thousand-percent profit a day, LaFrance, I wouldn’t throw pocket change on the deck there in front of you. If I was on fire, I wouldn’t buy water from you. I came prowling for you, LaFrance. If the thing you cared most about in the world was that face you wear, I would have changed it permanently, little by little. If your most precious possession was a beautiful wife, she’d be right down there below in the master stateroom waiting for you to leave so I could get back to her. If you juggled for a living, friend, you’d now have broken wrists and broken elbows.”
“What the hell is the matter with you?”
“Get off the boat. Go ashore. Tush Bannon was one of the best friends I ever had. All you give a damn about is money, so that’s where I hit you.”
“Best… friend?” he whispered.
And I watched the gray appear. That gray like a wet stone. Gray for fright. Gray for guilt. Gray for despair. His mouth worked. “You… rooned me, all right. Ever’thing I worked all my life for is gone. You finished me off, McGee.”
“Wait a minute,” Meyer said. “Maybe I’ve got an idea.”
LaFrance came to point like a good bird dog. “Yes? Yes? What?”
Meyer smiled at him benignly. “The answer was staring us right in the face all the time. It’s so simplel What you do is kill yourself!”
LaFrance stared at him, tried to comprehend the joke, tried even to smile, but the smile fell away. Meyer’s smile stayed put. But not one gleam of hunior touched Meyer’s little bright blue eyes. And I do not know many people who could have stared into that smile for very long. Certainly LaFrance couldn’t. In the same soft persuasion a lover might use, Meyer said, “Do yourself a favor. Go kill yourself. Then you won’t even know or care if you’re broke. Maybe it hurts a little, but just for a split second. Use a gun or a rope, or go jump off something high. Go ahead. Die a little.”
It is a kind of rat-frenzy I suppose, that dreadful and murderous fury of the weak ones when the door of the trap slams shut. With a mindless squalling he plunged at Meyer, long yellowed ridged thumbnails going for the meat of the eyes, knees jacking at belly and groin. The squalling and flailing and gouging lasted perhaps two and a half seconds before I clamped my forearm across his throat. I pulled him back away from Meyer, spun him and let go. He ended up against the far rail.
Obscenities are tiresome. He kept repeating himself. I cuffed him quiet and he went down the ladderway and I helped him along the way and onto the dock.
He stayed there perhaps three minutes. He was going to come back with a gun. He was going to bring friends. He was going to have my boat blown up. He was going to have it burned to the waterline. He was going to hire some boys from back in the swamps to come with their knives some dark night and turn us into sopranos. We were going to be awful sorry we’d ever messed with Preston LaFrance and you can by God believe it.
His eyes bulged and his voice had hoarsened and the saliva shone on his chin. And finally he hitched up his pants and walked away. His walk was that of a man wearing new bifocals and not being very sure of how far away the ground might be. Meyer was able to stand up straight without much discomfort, and I dabbed iodine on the thumbnail gouge under his left eye. He seemed troubled, thoughtful, far away. I told him LaFrance wouldn’t make any trouble. I asked him what was bothering him.
Meyer, scowling, pinched the bridge of his nose. “Me? Did you hear me? On the sidewalk if there is a bug, I change my step and miss him. For me the business of the hooks almost spoils fishing. Me! I don’t understand it. Such a rotten anger I had, Travis! Thick in the throat like a sickness. Oh, he won’t kill himself. Not that one. He’ll live on and on so he can whine. But it was like changing your step to squash the bug, not flat, just a little squash so he can crawl a little bit, slow, leaking his juices. McGee, my friend, I am ashamed of that kind of anger. I am ashamed of being able to do something like that. I said to myself when I first got into your line of… endeavor, I said forgive me for saying this to you-I said I will go only so far into it. There are things McGee does that somehow hurt McGee, hurt him in the way he thinks of himself. I talked to Muggsie. This business of the pretty little woman who just somehow happened to go off with Hero, that wasn’t pretty, and you were punishing something in yourself. Now I find myself a little bit less in my own eyes. Maybe this is a bad business you’re in, Travis. Is there this kind of ugly anger in a man that waits for some kind of virtuous excuse? Was it there in me, waiting for a reason only? Travis, my friend, is this the little demonstration of how half the evil in the world is done in the name of honor?”
He wanted help I couldn’t give him. One does not pat a Meyer on the head and give him a lollypop. He had overturned one of the personal stones in my garden too, and I could watch leggedy things scuttling away into comforting darkness.
I said, “You still didn’t figure out why I moved my bishop.”
He sat down and fixed a total concentration on the board. He gave a little nod at last and pushed a pawn one space forward, spoiling the sequence I was planning. He pinched at the bridge of his nose again, then smiled across at me, a hairy Meyer-smile, and said, “You know, I think I must have taken some sort of a dislike to that fellow.”
Two days later, Friday afternoon, Meyer came aboard the Flush at four thirty, just after I got back from the beach. A mass of that arctic air that Canada sends down free of charge had begun to change the day a little before noon. It had come down so swiftly I knew the grove people would be worried. There were frost bulletins on all the broadcasts. An edge in the crisp northeast breeze had cleaned the long beaches of everybody except diehard Yankees and one masochistic beach bum named Travis McGee. I had been taking out all the kinks, in the muscles in both body and brain, of too many sedentary days, swimming parallel to shore, in and out of the surf line, for all the distance, endurance and occasional speed sprints I could manage. It had been hard work to even stay warm, and I had ground away at it, breaststroke, backstroke, crawl, until on my chattering lope back to the Flush I felt as if I had pulled most of the long muscles loose from the joints and sockets and hinges they were supposed to control.