“These kind of men,” Bobby said, “are the kind who push into your lives without any reason. That’s the kind they are. If you get angry at them, you only hurt yourself. Anger is a terrible vice.”
“I know it,” Tannenbaum said. “But I don’t like being pushed around for no reason.” He looked across the room and said, louder so that Harry would be certain to hear him, “I don’t like being pushed around for no reason.”
“Lower your voice, doc,” Harry said. “Clyde here is trying to get some sleep.”
Clyde laughed. His eyes were closed, but he wasn’t sleeping. He laughed and then wet his lips. He laughed at everything Harry said. Bobby wondered if he really thought everything Harry said was so funny.
“What they said, you know...”
“What?” Tannenbaum asked, glaring at Harry, and then turning again to Bobby.
“What they said, it isn’t true,” Bobby said.
“What’s that?”
“About my being a drunk.”
“Oh,” Tannenbaum said.
Bobby’s hands were clenched in tight anger behind the crate upon which he sat.
“I drink a little,” he said to Tannenbaum, “but that doesn’t make me a drunk.”
“Argh, they’re crazy,” Tannenbaum said. “What do you listen to them for?”
“I’m not,” Bobby said. “I’m not listening to them, Dr. Tannenbaum. It’s just we’ve got a little community here, and I don’t want my neighbors to get the idea I’m a drunk just on their say-so, do you know what I mean, doctor?”
“Sure, sure, don’t worry. You think we’d pay attention to what a bunch of hoodlums have to say? Don’t worry.”
“Look, I said I want it quiet in here,” Harry said, “and I mean quiet.”
Bobby glanced at him quickly. Behind him, his hands were still clenched.
The men who had invaded Ocho Puertos, the men who had broken into his shack this morning and pulled him out of bed, had deprived Bobby of an early-morning half tumbler of bourbon and the reassuring knowledge that more was in the back room whenever he wanted it. He was not in the back room now, and his isolation from the bottles made him angry, as did the intrusion of these men who were seriously threatening Bobby’s concept of what a drunk was or wasn’t. You weren’t a drunk if you got drunk in private, if you clung to whatever dignity a human being possessed. These men had invaded his privacy and cut him off from the source of his supply, and this made him angry, and his anger intensified his need for a drink. He could only remember one other Sunday like this, last year, around September it was, when he’d run short and had driven over to Big Pine forgetting it was a Sunday and had found the liquor stores closed. He had come back to town wondering what to do and had gone over to the paint shop where Luke was working on the hull of a small outboard, and had flatly asked Luke for something to drink. Luke had only a pint bottle of Scotch, half full, which was light and smooth and delicious and gone in four seconds flat.
A man is not a drunk, Bobby told himself, if he gets drunk in private and clings to his dignity.
He had waited until Luke left the shop, and then had gone to the shelves near the overhead doors. He had taken a bottle of paint thinner from one of the shelves, and carried it back to his room. In his room he strained the liquid through his handkerchief into an empty can. He had no vanilla extract with which to disguise the taste, so he drank the filtered alcohol neat and hard, and was drunk within the quarter hour. It was not a good drunk; paint thinner had never been a particular favorite of his.
A narrow smile touched Bobby’s mouth now.
He scratched his jaw and looked across the room to the shelves just left of where Marvin Tannenbaum was sitting.
The man was squatting opposite her when she regained consciousness.
Ginny saw first the branches of the pine tree overhead and the sun blinking through in a radiating dazzle. She propped herself on one elbow and saw the bloodstains on the breast of her uniform, and then raised her eyes and saw the man across from her.
She drew her breath in sharply, surprised by his immediacy and surprised too by the rifle in his lap. She remembered then, and all surprise fled, leaving only a cautious fear. He had looked older when she had watched him through the palmettos. She had seen him just as she was about to step into the road, and had immediately turned back into the thicket, but not before the rifle had registered on her mind. She had stopped to study him, crouching behind a thick pine, and had dropped to her knees to hide. When he had yelled “Who’s there?” she had begun crawling through the thicket toward the main highway, anxious to get to the nearest telephone, sure now that something was terribly wrong; a man didn’t carry a rifle in broad daylight unless
“You must’ve hit your head on that big branch up there,” he said.
“What do you want here?” she asked immediately.
“Where, lady?”
“In Ocho Puertos.”
“Oh. I thought you meant here in the woods with you.” The man grinned. “That’s what I thought you meant.”
She followed his gaze, a knowledgeable lowering of his eyes to her exposed legs, and suddenly became aware of her skirt, and lifted herself quickly and pulled the skirt down over her knees. She noticed her tom nylons at the same moment, and thought, Oh, goddamnit, as if the tom stockings were somehow more serious than this young man who sat opposite her with a rifle, more important than whatever was happening in the town of Ocho Puertos.
“What’s your name?” the young man asked.
“What’s yours?” she answered.
“Willy.”
“My name is Ginny McNeil. I work in the diner.” She paused. “What’s going on?” she said.
“You always come to work through the woods, Ginny?”
“No.”
“Then how come you did this morning?”
“Because there’s a barricade up on the road.” She paused again. “I couldn’t bring the car in. So I parked it and decided to walk down, that’s all.”
“Oh?” he said.
She felt immediately that she had told him the wrong thing, that if only she had said the right thing to him he would have let her go. She could see him frowning as he thought it over. He nodded, and then suddenly smiled.
“You brought a car to work, huh?”
“Yes. It’s a 1959—”
“Where’d you leave it?”
“Up there,” she said, and made a vague gesture with her head. She had decided to be very careful about what she told him. She had not liked the way he had studied her legs; well, she had good legs but that didn’t mean some young kid could look at them that way. And she didn’t like the way he was smiling now, which was somehow more frightening than when he had been frowning and thinking.
“Where up there?” he asked, and made the same vague gesture in imitation.
“Off the road.”
“Where?”
“I parked it in the Westerfield driveway.”
“Where’s that?”
“Across U.S. 1.”
“Anyone apt to see it there?”
“Well...”
“Yes or no?”
“It’s about ten feet off the road, I guess.”
“Mmm,” he said.
“I’ll go move it if you like,” she said.
He gave a short mirthless chuckle and then got to his feet, holding the rifle in one hand and dusting off the seat of his dungaree trousers with the other. “We’ll both go move it,” he said. “Get up.”