Then we went back to work. He would put a negative in the enlarger and focus it on the base, and I would tell him what I wanted. Then he would go to work. He would cut a piece of masking paper to fit Lysa Dean’s projected face. He would use sufficient exposure time to give him opportunity to dodge and burn in so that the face of someone else was emphasized. I ended up with fourteen useful prints, on double-weight paper. Some of those that took in more people were duplicated, altered slightly to highlight one and then another.
Somewhere in the processing they ceased to have any fleshy impact. They became problems in light and shade and emphasis. He put them in his high-speed dryer, and after he had flattened them in a bonding press, I studied them under the bright lights. Lysa Dean’s features were white censored patches. Gabe was careful to give me the negatives as well as the test prints which hadn’t worked out. We argued price, with me trying to increase it, and agreed on a hundred dollars. Doris had gone to bed.
He crutched his way to the door with me, and came out with me into the cold windy night.
“Taking a little trip, I suppose,” he said.
“Yes.”
“None of my business. I suppose somebody got too greedy.”
“That’s usually the way.”
“You watch yourself, Trav. A little animal like that, if she’d see a way out by pushing you over the edge, she’d take it. That’s an interesting little face, but it isn’t a good face.”
The taxi slowed, putting his spotlight on the numbers. He turned into the drive. When I looked back I saw Gabe still standing there.
Four
WHEN I got back to the Busted Flush I saw my lights still on. It was a little past eleven. The lounge door was locked. I went in and found Skeeter sound asleep, face down on the yellow couch in her baggy gray coveralls, one frail long-fingered hand trailing on the floor. Drawings of Quimby were propped everywhere. They were wise and funny and good. I admired them. In the middle of the floor was a big stamped brown envelope and a note to me:
This LOUSY mouse. I am pooped out of my mind. PLEASE would you stuff him in this envelope. He is all weighed in and everything, and PLEASE would you seal him and run him to the P.O. He’s an airmail-SPECIAL mouse. Honestly, I had to sleep or DIE!!!
I looked down at her. It was typical. God knows how long she’d gone without sleep or when last she had thought of eating. Perfectionists who meet deadlines are usually pretty whipped out.
I went through to the bow of the Flush and put my dirty pictures in the hidden safe. It might not take an expert all night to open it, but he’d sure raise hell finding it first. I assembled Quimby and sealed him and turned off one of the lights.
She stirred and raised a sleep-bleared Raggedy Ann face, shoe-button eyes peering, cobweb hair afloat. “Whumya timezit?” she mumbled.
I squatted beside the couch. “You eat anything?”
“Huh? Eat? Uh… no.”
I knew the problems. I had lived with them. I went into the galley, picked cream of mushroom soup, opened the can, heated it, poured it steaming into a big two-handled mug. She was gone again. I sat her upright and fitted the mug into her hands. When I was sure she was going to keep on sipping at it, I left and took Quimby to the post office and dropped him into an airmail slot.
By the time I got back, the empty mug was on the floor, and she had sagged off to sleep again. I picked her up. The fool girl seemed to have no substance at all. My guest stateroom would have to serve. I carried her in there and then, instead of dropping her into the bed and covering her over, on a strange and lonely impulse I sat on the bed still holding her in my arms. A faintness of marina lights came through the ports. Water slapped and licked at the curve of the barge hull. Mooring lines creaked.
She put her arm around my neck and said, “I thought we gave up on this.”
“We did. I thought you were asleep. Go back to sleep.”
“I was asleep, damn it. What’s this brooding sorrow bit anyway? It’s the tenderness keeping me awake.”
“I guess I wanted to hold onto you. That’s all. Go to sleep.”
“Why should you want to hold me? My God, Travis, we ripped each other up pretty good and got over it a long time ago.”
“Why do you have to know everything? That’s one of your problems.”
“I have to know because I can’t go back to sleep, that’s why.”
“Okay. I don’t have too many illusions. I just ran into something rotten, that’s all. I don’t feel shocked. Just sad.”
“It was a rotten girl?”
“I don’t know. It’s a kind of waste, I guess. Go to sleep.”
She settled herself more snugly into my lap, arm around me, face in my neck. In a little while she drifted off, and the arm fell away. Her breathing turned deep.
I guess it can be touching. A special kind of trust. Something warm to hold. The way a kitten will drowse in your lap, totally confident.
Holding something alive, warm, sleeping is like handling fresh moist soil under the sun’s heat. Restorative.
After a little while I had the idea that it would be an act of good fellowship to peel her out of those coveralls and slip her into the bed. A nice gesture. Sure. This is how McGee kids McGee.
I gave a little shake like a hound coming out of water. During that little time when it had been good, before we had started sawing chunks off each other, I had discovered that narrow little body to be amazingly strong, curiously luxurious. And I had the lonelies.
So I stood her on her feet and held her until she could stand up. “What the hell!” she said. I stood up and kissed her, gave her a swat on the fanny and told her to sleep tight. I heard the coverall zipper before I got the door entirely closed behind me.
I showered with the strange feeling I was washing off the sweat and sunoil I had acquired on a bright terrace three thousand and more miles away.
I put on a robe and went topside for a nightcap pipe, a load of Irish aromatic in a battered old large apple Comoy. I perched a haunch on the sundeck rail. The wind had died, but the surf still made that endless freight-train sound on the beach. Across the way the Alabama Tiger’s perpetual floating house party was muted down to a few girlish squeals and somebody playing bad bongo. Meyer’s craft was dark.
Go mention it in the locker room, McGee. There you were with Lysa Dean, and she had on these skin-tight pants, fellas, and there was that big damn bed over there, and her hanging on me, sighing. Go on, McGee. Go on, man!
Boys, once when I was riding my bicycle no hands, I hit a stone and removed about one-half a square foot of hide from assorted painful places. And once upon a time I won free dancing lessons from Arthur Murray because I knew, right off, what happened in 1776.
When I got up in the morning Skeeter was gone, leaving the bed unmade and no coffee in the pot. But she left a drawing on the sink in the head. A rangy mouse who looked extraordinarily like me sat holding a Skeeter-like girl mouse asleep in his arms. The caption said, “Notorious mouse spares innocent prey. Vitamin deficiency suspected.”
After breakfast I phoned her. She said her apartment was smelling much better, thank you.
“McGee,” she said. “We might be turning into friends. That’s pretty good, don’t you think?”
“You’re too dangerous on any other basis. What’s with this vitamin gag?”
“I guess I was just sort of asleep. You started breathing hard. Then pow! On your feet, girl. And you went off like you used starting blocks.”
“Friends play fair, Skeet.”
“Well, hell. I don’t know. I hadn’t decided. You were blue. I practically had a Band-Aid complex. Woman’s work or something. I passed the buck by sort of sleeping. Anyway I was terribly tired.”
“Quimby is a fine mouse.”
“Trav, dear, I am going to sleep for three days, and then you can take me fishing.”