“I got a little buzz from that big knock of brandy. On account of I guess nothing to eat since breakfast maybe.”
“No trouble to fix you something, Jane Doe,” I said. She frowned. “I don’t know about solid food. I got a feeling maybe I wouldn’t hang onto it so long. Maybe some warm milk and a coupla aspirin, Mr…. I forgot your name.”
“Travis McGee. The hairy one is Meyer. How about a big warm eggnog with no stick, vanilla, nutmeg on top?”
She looked wistful. “Gee, when I was a little kid. sometimes… that would be nice, honest.” She glanced toward the chair where the clothing was. “There’s a girl on board?”
Sometimes when you think you can be casual, it doesn’t work at all. You think something is healed, but then when you least expect it you learn all over again that some things never heal. My voice gave me away when I said, “The girl who owned those clothes is dead.”
The normal automatic response would have been to say something about being sorry, but she said, “Then they ought to fit fine. In that big crazy blue tub I was wondering if I was dead, and if you dream things more real-like when you’re dead. I guess when I wake up tomorrow I’ll know for sure.”
“In the morning,” Meyer said, “when you feel better, you can tell the whole thing to the police.”
Again I was aware of that utter emptiness behind those dark eyes, and of something else back there, a cold and bitter humor, the kind of humor which can make a joke when the hangman adjusts the noose.
“What’s to tell?” she said. “I tried to kill myself and it didn’t work.”
I said, “You tucked that cement block under your arm and hopped over the bridge rail.”
“It wasn’t easy. You forgot all about the eggnog maybe?” In an absolutely casual and offhand way, Meyer said something that seemed to be all L’s and vowel sounds.
She said, “No I… ” She stopped, stared at him with narrow eyes and lips sucked bloodless. “Damn sneaky,” she said.
Meyer smiled happily. “Jane Doe from Main Street, Honolulu. Forgive me. I heard just that faintest breath of Island accent in your voice. And you do have that very unique loveliness of the Hawaiian mix, my dear.”
“Yah. I’m a dream walking.” I have never heard a woman speak of herself with quite that much bitterness.
Meyer turned to me. “Macronesian strains, and add Irish and French and some Japanese and what all, stir for a few generations in a tropical climate and the results can refute the foes of mongrelization.” He beamed at the girl. “I’m an economist, my dear. I did a survey of the Islands a few years before statehood, a tax-structure prediction.”
You can watch the Meyer Magic at work and not know how it’s done. He has the size and pelt of the average Adirondack black bear. He can walk a beach, go into any bar, cross any playground, and acquire people the way blue serge picks up lint, and the new friends believe they have known him forever. Perhaps it is because he actually listens, and actually cares, and can make you feel as if his day would have been worthless, an absolute nothing, had he not had the miraculous good fortune of meeting you. He asks you the questions you want to be asked, so you can let go with the answers that take the tensions out of your inner gears and springs. It is not an artifice. He could have been one of the great con artists of all time. Or one of the great psychiatrists. Or the founder of a new religion. Meyerism.
Once upon a time when Lauderdale was the place where the college mob came in force, I came across Meyer sitting on the beach. He had a half circle of at least forty kids sitting, facing him. Their faces were alive with delight. Every few minutes there was a big yelp of their laughter. And they were the cold kids, the ones who look at and through all adults exactly the way adults stare at motel art without seeing it. And Meyer was, miraculously, part of that group. When I drifted closer, forty pairs of eyes froze me, and Meyer turned and winked, and I moved along. A kid was playing slow chords on a guitar. Between chords, Meyer would recite. Later I asked him what in the world he’d been doing. He said they were a wonderful bunch of kids. A lovely sense of the absurd. He had been inventing a parody of Ginsberg, entitled “Snarl,” making it up as he went along, and he had also made up a monologue of a Barnyard girl trying to instill the concept of social significance into the mind of the white slaver who was flying her to Iraq, and he titled that one “The Two Dollar Misunderstanding.” Then he had assigned parts to them and brought them into the act, setting the scene up as Richard Burton and Liz Taylor at a White House garden party in honor of culture.