Some Faces in the Crowd (20 page)

“Hello, mate,” he said. “You here for the same reason I am?”

“I don’t know—what are you here for?”

“I’m going back to active duty. I’ll be a three-striper this time, boy.”

Then he looked at me gravely and I saw the face I had first seen on the drill field of the training school, the little Napoleon, the leader of men, the man of action.

“Looks like we’re getting ready for another one.” He pressed his lips together into a hard line. “We’ve got to build the biggest, strongest navy in the world. I think every one of us navy veterans ought to come back in and start pulling his weight in the boat.”

“Weasel,” I said, “I guess the difference between you and me is that you’re just a natural-born military man.”

I could see him back in that training school, double-timing another batch of flabby civilians.

“But you’ve got to be patriotic,” he said, a little on the defensive.

“Sure, patriotic,” I said. But how could I tell him all the different colors and flavors and subtle variations of patriotism—all the way from shameless self-aggrandizement through the normal sense of self-protection to messianic self-sacrifice? How do you say those things to a little man like Weasel, ready with warlike exhortations and drill-instructor discipline to fight the war from desk to desk and from shore station to shore station, to the last rubber stamp, to the final endorsement?

P
AUL MAXWELL WAS STARING
out across the light-green sea. He was watching a small white outboard plowing up the water some hundred yards off the end of the pier. Skimming along behind in a golden blur was a water-skier. It was one of those things, Paul was thinking, for which you remember a vacation day when you’re back in the city grind, the color of the sea sparkling green as champagne, the busy sound of the little outboard motor and its foamy white wake, and behind, the little human figure balanced gracefully on water skis that seemed to be flying over the surface of the sea.

Paul rose, and leaned on the railing of the pier to watch the sport. Only then did the yellow-brown halter above the deep-tan midriff inform him of the sex of the skier. Suddenly the outboard skidded to a daring turn and seemed to head directly toward him. It raced for-ward until he was sure it was too late to turn away. But in a last-moment swing of the stick, the small boat veered to safety by inches. But the girl behind, flying toward the pier—how could
she
possibly veer in time? It didn’t seem real that anything so free, so perfect could come to such a brutal ending, but in his mind’s panic he was already diving in to grope under water for the broken body. Then, close enough to Paul for him to see the smile on her face—more than a smile, a look of exhilaration—she calmly leaned out from her skis, in the opposite direction from what Paul would have thought logical, and shot away from the pier, streaking around the boat in a sweeping arc before coming back into position behind it again.

Twice more the boat and the skier made passes at the pier that seemed to make collision inevitable. But Paul was not to be taken in again and watched in fascination instead of panic as boat and girl dared themselves to see how close to the pier they could come without crashing into it.

“That first time I really thought they had it, General,” Paul said to a little hard nut of a Cuban who looked as if he had been put in to bake and left too long. The General, who took care of renting boats and beach equipment, had won his rank in a now-forgotten South American war.

“Oh, that’s Gerry Lawford. She’s crazy.” He said it as if everybody already knew it.

“What kind of crazy?” Paul asked, as he always did about words that had lost their original cutting edge.

“Real crazy,” the General said. “Bats in the belfry crazy.”

Paul did not have to ask the Cuban to enlarge on this. In these two weeks he had come to know the General.

“Always doing crazy things. Like last year, she tried to sail a dinghy to Cuba all by herself. The Coast Guard had to fish her out of the drink about thirty miles out. That crazy enough for you?”

Paul liked the story. Not being an adventurer himself, he always felt drawn to those who were.

“Who is she? Where’d she come from?”

“Oh, Gerry’s been around Key West for years.” The General’s grin was an amiable slit in the burnt crust of his face. “Calls herself a fugitive from Palm Beach. Her folks have a big home up there. Real rich people, own a perfume business or something. ’Bout ten years ago they had her all set for one of those ritzy Palm Beach weddings. Supposed to marry a Prince Somebody-or-other. He’s still around there, married to an automobile heiress. But anyway, the afternoon of the wedding, Gerry showed up down here. Came into this bar where I was working at the time. It’s gone now. Just about all the old places are gone. Anyway, this girl Gerry, I’m telling you about. I can still remember what she said. ‘Let him marry one of my sisters. They go in for that stuff. And he doesn’t care which one it is as long as it comes equipped with a checkbook.’

“Well, the old checkbook wasn’t much good to Gerry after she landed here. Old man cut her off without a cent. But it didn’t seem to bother Gerry none. She just went on having one hell of a good time.”

“But what’d she do? How’d she get by?” Paul was interested in things like this. In the dark hours he always wondered how he’d manage if he suddenly lost his knack for commercial illustrating.

The General considered a moment. “Gerry did—well, she just sort of did things nobody else could get away with. For a while she was a mate on a charter boat. I know that’s a hell of a job for a girl, but somehow Gerry talked Red Merritt into it. Then she got on this WPA Artists’ Project they had down here when things got so bad the whole town hadda go on relief. She paints real good when she feels like it. Then she came into some money—a trust fund or something the old man couldn’t touch. She bought herself a sloop and just sailed around the islands until the money was gone. The kind of person Gerry is, you never have to worry about her and money. Last year she was a crew member in the yacht race to Havana. Her boat won and she stayed over in Havana with the millionaire and his wife who owned it. They staked her to five hundred dollars at the Casino and she came back here last fall with enough dough for the year.” The General chuckled. “Even a year for Gerry.”

Somebody had come up to rent a rowboat and the General was climbing agilely over the side to pull one toward the landing. While Paul had been listening to the General his eyes had been panning with the outboard and the tanned figure that soared in its wake. Now the boat was idling and Paul watched how the girl handed the skis up over the side and began swimming in toward the pier. She swam, as Paul had already come to expect her to, a capable Australian crawl, and he was fully prepared to believe that she had been a Woman’s AAU free-style champion, maybe even an Olympic winner. For even before he had looked into her face, Paul was ready to accept her as one of those special people who perform the most amazing feats without breaking stride and for whom the improbable is merely routine.

He was watching her intently, at the same time trying to disguise the directness of his stare by occasionally glancing past her toward the outboard driver who was easing the boat toward shore. She scampered up the ladder to the pier, swinging herself up over the edge acrobatically. As he watched her lift her arms to shake the water from her shining hair, the image struck vividly in his mind: the tall, glistening, honey-brown figure with its long, smooth muscular symmetry, and the wet, gleaming face with the surprising Asiatic cast to the eyes.

He studied her movements with a professional appraisal intensified by the challenge a man always feels when he comes unexpectedly into the presence of a woman who attracts him. But, a shy man in his manners, he would have let her go silently if she hadn’t looked up from shaking her head clear to grin at him. There was no flirtation in it, he could see, no hint of coyness. It was just the sudden
hello
one person flashes to another when they’re on the edge of the sea, when the sun is warming them and they’re both caught up in that sense of exquisite well-being of a tropical island’s winter day.

“How long have you been doing that?” he heard himself saying.

“The skiing?” Her voice was pitched low, charged with excess energy, and the water was still shining on her face. “I think I was born on those things. At least I can’t even remember learning how to do it.”

He knew everything she had done—all the crazy things—she had always done. She was one of those naturals.

“You make it look so easy.”

“It is, for some people. I’ve seen others try for a month and never even get up out of the water.”

She gave a little laugh that Paul would remember.

The driver of the outboard was climbing up onto the pier now and Paul was just wondering what he could say that would leave things open to further possibilities instead of closing them. But she solved his problem in the most casual way: “If you’re on the beach around ten tomorrow, come out and try it.” She paused, appraising him. “Are you good at things?”

“Well, what kind of … ?”

“Oh, you know, regular skiing, skating, diving,” and then she added for fun, “tightrope walking, high trapeze …”

“Oh, sure,” he replied. “Remember that fellow who crossed Niagara Falls on a high wire … ?”

She laughed, and her lips, still moistened with sea water, made him think of the blood-red bougainvillaea after a sudden shower.

“Probably see you tomorrow then,” she said, and he watched as she strode down the pier with another man. For that was the way it already seemed to him. Even though an unromantic little voice of reason told him this was just one of those vacation reveries. The other man was young, tall, handsomely made, tanned to a color that comes with years of moving in the sun rather than carefully exposing oneself to it for two or three weeks a year. With that sense of inferiority that city men have when confronted by the masculine great outdoors, Paul had to admit to himself that this bronzed Adonis, this sun god, was the perfect match for her. They were the two glorified figures in the cigarette ads, the bathing-suit displays. Good God, he should know them—for ten years he had made his living drawing them!

That evening, for the first time since he had come South, he put on his white linen suit, feeling a little foolish as he fussed with the bow an extra minute to get the ends even and checked the general effect in the full-length mirror of the bathroom door. Then he walked down to the Beach Club dance. His sense of foolishness, of a recapturing of college-prom excitement, increased as he saw the couples swaying slowly together in the open patio while the orchestra played what every orchestra seemed to be playing this season, “Because You’re Mine …”

Gerry Lawford, who came skimming out of the sun and across the sparkling sea, did she really exist? Paul wondered. Or was she merely a city bachelor’s sun-struck dream? And even if he were to find her here, what good would it do him if she were dancing in the arms of the sun god?

Then he saw her, all yellow gold, her hair swept up into a crown of jet topped by a single flaming hibiscus. Paul watched as the tired strains of a worn-out hit tune were finally abandoned for a samba. With her cigarette-ad partner, Gerry danced it as a professional would have, or, perhaps better, as an inspired amateur, with a wild enthusiasm that made all the other dancers on the floor appear to be not so much dancing as pushing each other around.

Paul wondered what it would feel like to dance with her, and whether cutting in was a breach of Club etiquette, and while he wondered the music stopped and Gerry and her cigarette ad were on their way from the patio to the parking lot. Paul had no idea how nakedly his eyes must have been following them until the General, now doubling as a buffet waiter, mumbled to him, “That’s the way she always is—comes in for one dance, maybe two, then she’s off again, always on the move.”

“Think they’ll be back, General?”

The General chuckled. Gerry and her restless ways obviously served him as entertainment. “A crazy one like that, who knows? Right now she’s probably on her way to the casino at the Casa Marina. Win a thousand, lose a thousand, who knows where she’ll wind up tonight? Maybe flying to Cuba. Maybe trolling around the Keys with a kicker.”

The General was amused. But Paul, with nothing to go on but a romantic imagination that was working overtime, knew he had to go on to the casino.

He walked around the tables until he found her at the craps layout. There were only a few people playing, so it was easy to edge in behind her. “Hi,” she said when she saw him, as if it were perfectly natural that he should be there, “bet with me. I’m hot.”

She had the dice and her point rolled ten. The odds were with the house, but she bet a hundred on herself and made the point on her third roll. Paul had backed her for five. She made three more passes, dragging all her winnings until she had run a hundred up to almost three thousand. Betting with her each time, but conservatively, Paul was around fifty ahead. The reckless way she played seemed to mock his conservatism and he felt suddenly depressed, as if this was a surer sign than any he had had before that this was a will o’ the wisp.

She was still running the game, the dice doing everything she asked of them, when she suddenly lost interest. “I’m going to cash these in. Let’s play roulette.”

At the roulette table Paul watched with an amazement lined with admiration as she plunged on hunches, betting the limit on single numbers, all or nothing, 35-1, while he was putting five on red or black or settling for the short odds on groups of numbers. The wheel wasn’t rolling for her and in less than ten minutes she had managed to throw away the big win she had taken from the other table. It hadn’t been money at all, just little colored chips to fling across a board.

“That’s tough luck,” Paul said. “You should have quit when you were out there in front.”

“Oh, what difference does it make?” Gerry said. “I’d just as soon lose it as win it.”

That was beyond him, that kind of recklessness, that kind of wildness. Maybe that’s why it attracted him so strongly. “Time for a drink,” she said, and she led him into the bar, full of laughter, full of hell, full of something Paul had never had to cope with before and he remembered the General’s answer, “What kind of crazy—bats in the belfry crazy.” Well, what kind was that? It came in all sizes, from you and me to the straitjacket and the chair.