Yet I was quite certain that it had not been a situation she had planned. It had arisen through two sets of rationalizations, hers and mine, and the truth of it was perhaps something quite different from what we suspected. For her perhaps it was the affirmation of being still alive after the intense emotional focus of her life was gone forever. Maybe it had been something the body had created in the mind, just for its own survival, because with her perhaps a sexual continence would have been a progressive thing, parching and drying her, month by month, until all need would have been prematurely ended. My own supercilious little rationalization had been, in the beginning of it, that it would have been both cruel and stuffy to have failed to respond when she began her tentative invitations, to have let her know through my lack of response that the age differential did indeed put me off, and that I felt both clumsy and self-conscious in the role of the available younger man in a kind of floating bedroom farce. The least I could do would be to respond with as much forced enthusiasm as I could manage. But a sweet and immediate reality of the flesh had erased the reasons and the rationalizations. She was all limber girl in the half-light, slenderly, elegantly voluptuous, so consistently determined to never take more pleasure than she was able to give that she made a few intervening women seem dreary indeed.
At last I was able to dim the vivid qualities of the memory and slide away into the earned sleep…
Sunday, October sixth, was still and gray and breathlessly muggy. Bobby Guthrie’s wife came for him at ten in the morning and they gave Joe Palacio a ride back into Miami. Monday they would get the Merrill-Stevens appraisals and estimates, based on detailed inspections. Meyer and I got the Flush out into the channel and headed north for Lauderdale at about eleven, with the Mu¤equita in tow and a pale sun beginning to burn through the overcast. The Busted Flush was still burdened with the gear and goop of Floatation Associates. Meyer assured me that as soon as the partnership had turned the `Bama Gal into money, they would move their stuff over onto the work boat Bobby had located, which they could buy at the right price.
“Bobby will build special chemical tanks right into the work boat and rig up some automatic pumps with flow-meters so that one man can handle the flow of the stuff down to the job.”
“That’s nice.”
“After another good piece of salvage, we’re going to install the same kind of a setup, but smaller, on a truck, and put a good winch on it. It will make it easy to pick automobiles out of the canals.”
“That’s nice.”
“Am I boring you or something, McGee?”
“If I was all hot to get tangled up in a nice profitable little business with three nice people, I’d probably be chuckling and dancing and singing. Lots of luck, Meyer.”
He stared at me, shrugged, and went below to start taking the cameras and reels apart to see if the rinsing in fresh water had made them salvageable. He was in one of his mother-hen periods, but this time he was taking care of Guthrie and Palacio instead of McGee. They were in good hands. But Meyer was going to be a bore until the little business was safely launched.
I had no plans. I felt mildly restless. I decided I would help the trio get their work boat set up and then maybe I would round up a batch of amiable folk and cruise on up the waterway, maybe as far as Jax. In another month or so I would have to start looking for a client so whipped-down he would snap at my kind of salvage, at my fifty-percent fee. Meanwhile, some fun and games, a little action, some laughs.
There was a note in my post office box about something I had to sign for, so I didn’t get Helena’s letter until Monday, a little before noon.
First there was a crisp white envelope with the return address in raised black letters: folmer, hardahee, and kranz, attorneys at law. There was a cashier’s check for $25,000 paperclipped to the letter signed by one D. Wintin Hardahee in tiny little purple script. The letter was dated Sept 28th, and the check was dated Sept 27th.