Chookie McCall introduces McGee to Cathy Kerr, dancer and victim.
She's not sure what Junion Allen, the smiling, brutal man took from
her and her family but she wants it back. Tavis has to track down
Allen as he leaves a swath of destruction and victims behind him.
- This is a complex culture... The more intricate our society gets,
the more semi-legal ways to steal.
-
... I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I
am wary of them. And I am wary of a lot of other things, such as
plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs,
retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks,
newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check
lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries,
television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants,
progress, and manifest destiny.
I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have
built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing
left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.
I am also wary of all earnestness.
- I listened for the roar of applause, fanfare of trumpets, for the
speech and the medal. I heard the lisping flap of water against the
hull, the soft mutter of the traffic on the smooth asphalt that
divides the big marina from the public beach, bits of music blending
into nonsense, boat laughter, the slurred harmony of alcohol, and a
mosquito song vectoring in on my neck.
... These are the playmate
years, and they are demonstrably fraudulent. The scene is reputed to
be acrawl with adorably amoral bunnies to whom sex is a pleasant
social favor. The new culture. And they are indeed present and
available, in exhausting quantity, but there is a curious
tastelessness about them. A woman who does not guard and treasure
herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else. They become a
pretty little convenience, like a guest towel. And the cute little
things they say, and their dainty little squeals of pleasure and
release are as contrived as the embroidered initials on the guest
towels. Only a woman of pride, complexity and emotional tension is
genuinely worth the act of love, and there are only two ways to get
yourself one of them. Either you lie, and stain the relationship with
your own sense of guile, or you accept the involvement, the emotional
responsibility, the permanence she must by nature crave. I love you
can be said only two ways.
- [She] stood there inside her smooth skin, warm and indolent,
mildly speculative. It is that flavor exuded by women who have
fashioned an earthy and simplified sexual adjustment to their
environment, borne their young, achieved an unthinking physical
confidence. They are often placidly unkempt, even grubby, taking no
interest in the niceties of posture. They have a slow relish for the
physical spectrum of food, sun, deep sleep, the needs of children, the
caresses of affection. There is a tiny magnificence about, them like
the sultry dignity of she-lions.
- It was one of those Florida houses I find unsympathetic, all
block, tile, glass, terrazzo, aluminum. They have a surgical
coldness. Each one seems to be merely some complex corridor
arrangement, a going-through place, an entrance built to some place of
a better warmth and privacy that was never constructed. When you
pause in these rooms, you have the feeling you are waiting. You feel
that a door will open and you will be summoned, and horrid things will
happen to you before they let you go. You can not mark these houses
with any homely flavor of living. When they are emptied after
occupancy, they have the look of places where the blood has recently
been washed away.
- I tried to look disarming. I am pretty good at that. I have one
of those useful faces. Tanned American. Bright eyes and white teeth
shining amid a broad brown reliable bony visage. The proper folk-hero
crinkle at the corners of the eyes, and the bashful appealing smile,
when needed. I have been told that when I have been aroused in volent
directions I can look like something from an unused corner of hell,
but I wouldn't know about that. My mirror consistently reflects that
folksy image of the young project engineer who flung the bridge across
the river in spite of overwhelming odds, up to and including the
poisoned arrow in his heroic shoulder.
So I looked disarming.
When they give you something to use, you use it. Many bank robbers
look extraordinarily reliable. So you use your face to make faces
with, play parts, pick up cues. In every contact with every other
human in every day of your life, you become what you sense they want
of you or, if you are motivated the other way, exactly what they do
not want. Were this not so, there would be no place left to
hide.
- Abstract theory by McGee. My tourist theory. Any Ohioan
crossing the state line into Florida should be fitted with a metal box
that rests against the small of the back. Every ninety seconds a bell
rings and a dollar bill emerges part way from a slot in the top of the
box. The nearest native removes it. That would take care of the
tipping problem. At places where hundreds of them flock together, the
ringing of the bells would be continuous.
- "Of course!" I said, springing to my feet and beginning to pace
back and forth through the lounge. "Why didn't I think of that! Here
I am, wasting the golden years on this lousy barge, getting all mixed
up with lame-duck women when I could be out there seeking and
striving. Who am I to keep from putting my shoulder to the wheel?
Why am I not thinking about an estate and how to protect it? Gad,
woman, I could be writing a million dollars a year in life insurance.
I should be pulling a big oar in the flagship of life. Maybe it isn't
too late yet! Find the little woman, and go for the whole bit.
Kiwanis, P.T.A, fund drives, cookouts, a clean desk, and vote the
straight ticket, yessiree bob. Then when I become a senior citizen, I
can look back upon..."
- The unemployed merit not credit cards. But I had a guarantor, a
man for whom I had done a sticky and dangerous favor, a man whose name
makes bank presidents spring to attention and hold their shallow
breaths. The cards are handy, but I hate to use them. I always feel
like a Thoreau armored with a Leica and a bird book. They are little
fingers of reality, reaching for your throat. A man with a credit
card is in hock to his own image of himself.
But these are the
last remaining years of choice. In the stainless nurseries of the
future, the feds will work their way through all the squalling
pinkness tattooing a combination tax number and credit number on one
wrist, followed closely by the I.T. and T. team putting the permanent
phone number, visaphone doubtless, on the other wrist. Die and your
number goes back in the bank. It will be the first provable
immortability the world has ever known.
- I checked myself in a full-length mirror. I smiled at Mr. Travis
McGee. A very deep tan is a tricky thing. If the clothing is the
least bit too sharp, you look like an out-of-season ball player selling
twenty pay life. If it is too continental, you look like a kept ski
instructor. My summer city suit was Rotarian conservative, dark,
nine-ounce orlon looking somewhat but not too much like silk.
Conservative collar on the white shirt. Rep tie. A gloss on the
shoes. Get out there and sell. Gleam those teeth. Look them square
in the eye. You get out of it what you put into it. A smile will
take you a long way. Shake hands as if you meat it. Remember
names.
- The mild misty blue eyes watched me and the mouth smiled and she
waited for my move. You can run into the Tiger's Perpetual Floating
House Party almost anywhere. At 28,000 feet, and at the same 800 fps
muzzle velocity of a .45 caliber service pistol. Nobody leaves marks
on anybody. You meet indirectly, cling for a moment and glance off.
Then she would be that hostess in Houston and I would be that tanned
one from Florida, a small memory of chlorinated pool water, fruit
juice and gin, steak raw in the middle, and hearty rhythms in the
draperied twilight of the tomb-cool motel cubicle, riding the grounded
flesh of the jetstream Valkyrie. A harmless pleasure. For harmless
plastic people, scuffproof, who can create the delusion of
romance.
But it is a common rudeness to refuse the appetizer
without at least saying it looks delicious.
"I'd setting
Houston," I said with a manufactured wistfulness. "But I'm ticketed
through to Harlingen."
- I am tall, and I gangle. I look like a loose-jointed, clumsy
hundred and eighty. The man who takes a better look at the size of my
wrists can make a more accurate guess. When I get up to two twelve I
get nervous and hack it back on down to two oh five. As far as
clumsiness and reflexes go, I have never had to use a flyswatter in my
life. My combat expression is one of apologetic anxiety. I like them
confident. My stance is mostly composed of elbows.
- He was a semi-ridiculous bant rooster of a man, vain, cocky,
running as hard he could to say in the same place, but he had a
dignity of existence which I had violated. A bird, a horse, a dog, a
man, a girl or a cat -- you knock them about and diminish yourself
because all you do is prove yourself equally vulnerable. All his
anxieties lay there locked in his sleeping skull, his system adjusting
itself to sudden shock, keeping him alive. He had pulled at the
breast, done homework, dreamed of knighthood, written poems to a girl.
One day they would tumble him in and cash his insurance. In the
meanwhile it did all human dignity a disservice for him to be used as
a puppet by a stranger.
- Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the
displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for
romance, yet settle for what they call making out. Their futile,
acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited
with unskilled labor there is a competition for bag-boy jobs in the
supermarkets. They yearn for security, but all they can have is what
they make for themselves, chittering little flocks of them in the
restaurants and stores, talking of style and adornment, dreaming of
the terribly sincere stranger who will come along and lift them out of
the gypsy life of the two-bit tip and the unemployment, cut a tall
cake with them, swell them up with sassy babies, and guide them
masterfully into the shoal water of the electrified house where
everybody brushes after every meal. But most of the wistful rabbits
marry their unskilled men, and keep right on working. And discover
the end of the dream. They have been taught that if you are sunny,
cheery, sincere, group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours,
including barbecue pits, charge plates, diaper service, percale
sheets, friends for dinner, washer-dryer combinations, color slides of
the kiddies on the home projector, and the eternal whimsical romance
-- with crinkly smiles and Rock Hudson dialogue. So they all come
smiling and confident and unskilled into a technician's world, and in
a few years they learn that is is all going to be grinding and brutal
and hateful and precarious. These are the slums of the heart. Bless
the bunnies. These are the new people, and we are making no place for
them. We hold the dream in front of them like a carrot, and finally
say sorry you can't have any. And the schools were we teach them
non-survival are gloriously architectured. They will never live in
places so fine, unless the contract something incurable.
