John D McDonald – Travis McGee 07 Darker Than Amber

Her brothers had been blown up while playing on a Hawaiian beach, had dug up something that went off. After the war her mother had brought the six-year-old Vangie to the States. Her mother had come to track down the Navy officer who had promised to divorce his wife and marry Vangie’s mother. The officer brushed her off. Her mother found waitress work, acquired a brutal boyfriend. By the time Vangie was ten she was unmanageable in school. When they threatened to send her to an institution for delinquent children she called their bluff by becoming so shamelessly delinquent they had to send her away. After she had been in the institution two years, a truck crushed her mother to death against the back wall of the restaurant where she worked. At thirteen, looking almost eighteen, she seduced the resident director of the institution and blackmailed him into taking her off all menial work and giving her special food and privileges. Over a year later somebody reported the situation to the state attorney general’s office, and the director, to save his own neck, smuggled her out and turned her over to a vice ring working the Virginia Beach area. They beat all rebellion out of her. She was transferred to other stations on the national circuit, and by the time she was twenty-four she was working for a call circuit in Jacksonville and making the top dollar in the area. Two years ago she had been recruited into the dangerous game she would not describe.

Certainly the breaks had gone against her. Circumstance had turned her into an emotional basket case. You could bleed a little for the Hawaiian child who couldn’t comprehend what had happened to the big brother who had carried her around on his shoulders.

The Busted Flush droned roughly east by northeast up the channel in the midday glare. I’d pulled my T-shirt off and I was slumped back in the big topside pilot seat, squinting to pick up the familiar markers, steering by means of bare toes braced against a top spoke of the wheel. Swathed against the sun, shadowed by the huge hat, Miss Vangie talked on and on in that creamy contralto, Meyer braced nearby, beaming and nodding, a devoted audience. She lunged back and forth through time, with side trips into obvious fantasy and self-delusion, her mode of speech changing from imitation duchess elegance to clinical crudity. All the basic patterns emerged, the way a design will appear after the etcher has made his ten thousand tiny engravings on the copper plate. Perhaps some social psychologist would have given his chance of an honorary degree to have the whole recital on tape.

It was interesting at the beginning I guess any normal person has curiosity about the inner structure of organized prostitution, the dangers to avoid, the payoffs, the mechanics of solicitation, the ways of extracting extra bounty when they get hold of a live one. But after a time it was repetitious and dull. Too much detail about the furnishings of darling apartments, about the accumulation of darling wardrobes. The life of a sandhog tunneling under a river can be fascinating until you have to listen to a play-by-play of every shovel load of muck. And so when Meyer went below to fix lunch, and she decided she was maybe getting too much sun through reflection off the water and followed him down, the silence was welcome.

In the silence I wanted to sort her out. Her twelve years on the track had coarsened her beyond any hope of salvage. Though I know it is the utmost folly to sentimentalize or romanticize a whore, I could respect a certain toughness of spirit Vangie possessed. She had not howled as she fell to her death. She had not flinched or murmured as we cut the hooks out of her leg. And she had bounced back from the edge of death by violence with remarkable buoyancy. The talking jag seemed the only symptom of how shaken she had been. I could think of few women I had known who could have taken such terror in stride.

I realized I felt proud of her. This reaction was so irrational it startled me. I tracked it down to its obvious source. It was the inevitable sense of ownership. I remember talking all night long to a damned fine surgeon. At one time during the night he spoke of the ones he had hauled back through those big gates when he had no right to expect it could be done. “They become your people,” he said. “Your kids. You want the good things for them because they get it on time you gave them. You want them to use life well. When they crap around, wasting what you gave them, you feel forlorn. When they use it well, you feel great. Maybe because it’s some kind of a ledger account, and they have to make up for what those others would have done, those ones you lost for no damn good reason.”

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