“Do what? Buy you a drink in Nassau?”
We had a large interested audience. “Honey, please! You tricked me into writing the confession. My God, tell them how it was, darling! You made promises! You were going to take me to Jersey.”
“Wish I could help out, girlie. But I don’t know what your angle is. It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t have a twin brother, and the last time I ever saw you, until right now, was in the ship’s dining room. I don’t see how it can do you any good trying to bring me into this. Either you did what you wrote down or you didn’t.”
“So it’s going to be like that, you bastard?”
“It’s going to be what happened, that’s all.”
First she made a pretty fair attempt to get her thumbs into my eyes, but the matrons caught her and held her in restraint. As they took her out, that fatty little mouth opened into a round horror-hole. In a candy.sweet chant she said words and phrases that seemed to fume and smoke in the jail air, to give off a tangible aroma of rot. She ejected that last few over her shoulder as they dragged her out, and when the sound had faded, some very professional officers of the law took out handkerchiefs and mopped their faces.
On the Fourth of July I got Meyer to take ten thousand of what I had found in Vangie’s kitchen ceiling. At first he would have no part of it, but then after frowning into space for half a minute, he suddenly agreed.
The next day he showed me a copy of something he had pecked out on his typewriter, titled Meyer Manifesto. It was a stately mass of whereas, wherefore, and be it resolved, nd after I had sifted out the meat of it, I discovered that he was putting the ten thousand into a four and a half percent interest account, and that each year he would draw out four hundred fifty dollars and use it to finance the Meyer Festival on July Fourth and such subsequent days as the Festival might continue unabated. Invitations would be issued to convivial and compatible persons, both of the permanent group and the transient group, and it would be held upon a beach area to be designated each year, the only stipulation being that it would be a deserted beach accessible only by boat. The theme of the Festival would be Booze, Broads, Beer, Bonhomie, Bach, Blues and Rhythm, Bombast, Blarney and Behavioral Psychology.
I guess he saw that I had to fake my pleasurable approval. Things were getting flat and wistfully sour.
The smart money had it all figured out about the Drowners. The best odds were that the State would hold a cook-in for Terry and Loyal, and that Jane Adele Strusslund and Delilah Delberta Barntree would get life, as would Macklin. And Emil “Nogs” Berga would get twenty to life.
Somehow, I couldn’t haul myself back up out of the sours. I kept slipping further in. When that happens to you, there is no continuity of self-awareness, no frequent appraisals… just a little flash of uncomfortable illumination from time to time, and you turn it off quickly because you don’t like the bright light.
I would see my hand pouring a Cup of Plymouth over ice, and I’d take a sup of it, spilling a little, and in wiping my chin feel that it had been a little too long between shaves.
And then one morning I went beach walking at three o’clock and looked up just in time to see one hell of a shooting star. It really whipped across there, fast, hot and bright. I admired it. An old chunk of iron, after noodling around out there for half a billion years, had come in hot and fast at eight miles a second, and had gladdened the mind of a dreary pygmy on a starlit beach.
Suddenly I felt disgusted with myself. What the hell was the use of taking my retirement in segments whenever I could afford one if I was going to slop around and groan and finger the sad textures of my immortal soul? As opposed to the psychotic, the neurotic knows two and two make four, but he can’t stand it. I admired the patience of my friends for putting up with me the last few weeks. Vidge had soured me a little, and Vangie had dropped off the bridge and accelerated the process, and then I had really put the lid on it by trapping that dumb empty punchboard into a life sentence.