"I don"t know. After I moved into the place I"m in now, a guy came around to hook up my phone. He got a thing about me, and when he has service calls in the neighborhood and he sees my car, he stops to find out if my phone is working. As if I wouldn"t report it if it wasn"t. He"s almost as big as you are. A little younger. I mean, if he tried to make me think he owned The Busted Flush The Busted Flush..."

"I won her in a poker game."

She hit me in the ribs with her elbow. "Oh sure. I bet bet you did. You"re funny, you know. I can"t tell what"s a joke and what isn"t. We can go fast now? How fast will this go anyway?" you did. You"re funny, you know. I can"t tell what"s a joke and what isn"t. We can go fast now? How fast will this go anyway?"

"It"s tuned right now, and the bottom is clean, and I put a new pair of wheels on her, so she should do very close to fifty, but I don"t like to hold her there more than a few minutes because I don"t like to buy new engines every year. Wait until we get past Dinner Key and I"ll show you."

When I got past an area of prams and sailfish and little cats, I pushed it to full, with both mills yelling in full-throated unison. She stood tall above the top of the windshield, the wind snapping her black hair. She was laughing, but I couldn"t hear her, and she had me just above the elbow in an impressive grasp. The reading was a full forty-four knots, which is a respectable fifty and a bit. I pulled it back down to cruising speed.

She roamed the walk-around and found the slalom ski stowed up under the gunwale overhang, zipcorded to bronze eyebolts. She wanted to know if we had far enough to go so she could ski. I said yes, if she didn"t keep falling off, and she said she was the kind of freak who does all the physical things well after a few tries, and she"d had more than a few tries at the skiing. She went under the foredeck and pulled the privacy curtain, taking her beach bag with her, and in a little while she came out in a plain, businesslike, off-white tank suit, her hair pulled tightly back and fixed there with a silver clamp. I had gotten the tow line out and clipped it to the ring bolt in the transom and held it clear of the slowly turning wheels.

She grinned, threw the ski over the side, and dived after it. When she had the ski and had worked her feet into the slots, I pulled the bar past her at dead slow, and she grabbed it and turned to the right angle and nodded. I pushed both throttles, and she popped up out of the water and the Muequita Muequita jumped up onto the step in perfect unison. After she made a few swings, I knew she was not going to have any trouble. She gave me the pumping sign for more speed and then the circle of thumb and finger when it was where she wanted it. It translated to thirty-two miles an hour. jumped up onto the step in perfect unison. After she made a few swings, I knew she was not going to have any trouble. She gave me the pumping sign for more speed and then the circle of thumb and finger when it was where she wanted it. It translated to thirty-two miles an hour.

She was not tricky. There were no embellishments. All she did was get into the swooping rhythm of cutting back and forth across the almost-flat wake, far out there in the expanse of Biscayne Bay, far from land, far from any other water craft. She edged the slalom ski as deeply as the men do, laying herself back at a steep angle, almost flat against the water, throwing a broad, thin, curved curtain of water at least ten feet into the air at the maximum point of strain. At that point before she came around and then came hurtling back across, ski flat, to go out onto the other wing, the strain would sag her mouth, wipe her face clean of expression, and pull all the musculature and tendons and tissues of her body so taut she looked like a blackboard drawing in medical school.

She took it each time to the edge of what she could endure. It was hypnotic and so determined that it had a slightly unpleasant undertaste, like watching a circus girl high under the canvas, going over and over and over, dislocating her shoulders with each spin, while the drums roll and the people count.

I put it into autopilot so I could watch her. From time to time I glanced forward to make certain no other boat was angling toward us. I knew she would have to tire soon. I tried to calculate her speed. She was going perhaps twenty-five feet outside the wake on one side and then the other. Call it fifty feet. I timed her from her portside turn back to her portside turn. Ten seconds. For a hundred feet. Miles per hour equals roughly two thirds of the feet per second. Ten feet per second. Add seven miles an hour then to the boat speed. Very close to forty miles an hour. At that speed, if she fell, the first bounce would feel like hitting concrete. Water is not compressible.

I heard a thick, flapping sound over the boat noise and looked up and saw a Coast Guard chopper angling across at about a thousand feet.

I saw us for a moment the way the fellow up there saw us. Gleaming boat. Deeply browned fellow in blue swim trunks running it at speed, watching the graceful girl swinging back and forth, girl in a white suit, with a light, very golden tan.

For all he could tell, the girl was eighteen, and the man was twenty, and somebody"s father had bought the boat.

Suddenly I felt bleak, oddly depressed. It took a moment for me to realize that one of Meyer"s recent lectures on international standards of living was all too well remembered.

"... so divide everything into two hundred million equal parts. Everything in this country that is fabricated. Steel mills, speedboats, cross-country power lines, scalpels, watch bands, fish rods, ski poles, plywood, storage batteries, everything. Break it down into basic raw materials and then compute the power requirements and the fossil fuels needed to make everybody"s share in this country. Know what happens if you apply that formula to all the peoples of all the other nations of the world?

"You come up against a bleak fact, Travis. There is not enough material on and in the planet to ever give them what we"re used to. The emerging nations are not going to emerge-not into our pattern at least. Not ever. We"ve hogged it all. Technology won"t come up with a way to crowd the Yangtze River with Muequitas Muequitas.

"It was okay, Travis, when the world couldn"t see us consuming and consuming. Or hear us. Or taste some of our wares. But communication by cinema, satellite, radio, television tape, these have been like a light coming on slowly, being turned up like on a rheostat control in a dark cellar where all of mankind used to live. Now it is blinding bright, cruelly bright. And they can all look over into our corner and see us gorging ourselves and playing with our bright pretty toys. And so they want theirs now. Just like ours, G.o.d help them. And what is the only thing we can say? "Sorry. You"re a little too late. We used it all up, all except what we need to keep our toys in repair and running and to replace them when they wear out. Sorry, but that"s the way it is." What comes after that? Barbarism, an interregnum, a new dark ages, and another start a thousand years from now with a few million people on the planet? Our myth has been that our standard of living would become available to all the peoples of the world. Myths wear thin. We have a visceral appreciation of the truth. That truth, which we don"t dare announce to the world, is what gives us the guilt and the shame and the despair. n.o.body in the world will ever live as well, materially, as we once did. And now, as our materialism begins to sicken us, it is precisely what the emerging nations want for themselves. And can never have. Brazil might might manage it. But no one else." manage it. But no one else."

Good old Meyer. He can put a fly into any kind of ointment, a mouse in every birthday cake, a cloud over every picnic. Not out of spite. Not out of contrition or messianic zeal. But out of a happy, single-minded pursuit of truth. He is not to blame that the truth seems to have the smell of decay and an acrid taste these days. He points out that forty thousand particles per cubic centimeter of air over Miami is now called a clear day. He is not complaining about particulate matter. He is merely bemused by the change in standards.

Now, as I watched the tireless lady zoom back and forth, he had made me feel like one of those regal jokers of olden times who could order up enough humming bird tongues for a banquet. What"s your message, Meyer? Enjoy?

She slid back to a straight track behind the stern. She smiled and rolled her shoulders. She c.o.c.ked her head and then tried some signals on me. First she held her left hand up, finger and thumb an inch apart. Then she pulled her hand across her throat, in the cut-power signal. Then as I started to turn toward the controls, she shook her head violently and held her hand out, palm toward me. I waited, puzzled, and she pointed toward the water off to the port side of the boat, and then she bent her knees and swung her f.a.n.n.y out to the right. So I had the message. I decided I"d better leave it on pilot but be close enough to take it out in a hurry.

She moved out to the side and gave me her signal and swung wider for speed. I pulled the throttles halfway back, and she tossed the line clear, into the wake, and came angling in too fast toward the port side, amidships. I moved quickly to grab her, but she yelled me off, turned parallel to the direction of the boat, slowing and just as the speeds were identical, she gave a little twisting hop which hoisted her rear onto the flat gunwale and would have been perfect except she was overbalanced. The slalom ski went up, and she fell over backward into the c.o.c.kpit. I wasn"t close enough to break her fall, and I heard the thump her head made against the deck and felt it through the soles of my bare feet. She scrambled up and went to the stern and brought the tow line in, and then I cut the power all the way back. In the semisilence I said, "You are totally mad. Miss the edge and you"d get swept right into the port wheel."

"That"s how come I jumped too far."

"Did you ever try that before?"

"Onto docks. It"s trickier because you have to get it just right, ending up at the dock just when you stop and start to sink. So this is easier. You can kind of adjust because it"s like the dock is moving too."

"And that makes it easier?"

"You"re cross because it scared you, Trav. Well, I"m a little scared too. I always get scared after after I try things." I try things."

"You thumped your head pretty good."

"All this hair worked like a cushion. It"s my elbow that hurts."

She showed me. She had knocked a flap of skin loose. I got out the kit and disinfected it and put a bandaid patch on it. She stretched and then squatted on her heels and bounced a few times and came up slowly. "You know, that"s really really a workout," she said. "I wish I could do that every day. I"d get hard as rocks. It would really firm me up." a workout," she said. "I wish I could do that every day. I"d get hard as rocks. It would really firm me up."

"I didn"t notice anything very loose."

"Then you weren"t looking."

"I"m pretty sure I was looking."

She gave me a quick sidelong glance, not at all flirtatious. It backed me off from whatever was about to come into my mind. She said, "Pretty soon I am going to start eating those life jackets."

I looked ahead and picked out the familiar island shapes. I established my location and knew the water I could trust. I said, "You"ll be eating in fifteen minutes, and you can start drinking right now, if you"re up to it. Look in the ice chest over there. I laid aboard some of those c.o.c.ktails in cans. Take your pick. Give me a vodka martini, please."

She picked a marguerita, pulled the tabs off the cans, and handed me mine, then clinked cans. I was glad to note I did not have to tell her why we don"t throw the shiny tabs overboard.

"I feel great," she said over the engine noise. "Everything is pulled loose, sort of. All stretched. I want to have two drinks, eat myself blind, go to sleep in the sun, and then have a swim, and then ski all the way home."

"So be it," I said. "Won"t you burn?"

She poked at her thigh. "My skin is thick and tough, like some kind of plastic. I don"t burn at all. After I get pink about nine thousand times, then I gradually turn the color I am now, and then nothing else happens, no matter what."

I read the shallows ahead and slowed down and eased up to them and then along the edge until I found a notch deep enough to get me close to sh.o.r.e. I cut everything and put a couple of hooks over and slung the boarding ladder.

Then we offloaded everything and, in two trips, carried it up over the dune and down to the little cove on the Atlantic side, dispossessing a pale and malevolent crab, when we spread the two giant beach towels in the semi-shade of a pair of wind-torn old casuarinas. We had more of the extravagantly convenient drinks-in-a-can. (Were the emerging nations targeting on this delight in their misty futures?) I went back and checked the hooks, reset one and trod it into better bottom, and brought back the battered and eroded old battery radio. It brought in the most useful Cuban station, playing, on this Sat.u.r.day afternoon, a concert of symphonic pieces for Spanish guitar. With very few commercials.

We had a short swim before lunch. The drinks were making the bright day faintly, tantalizingly unreal. I caught her looking stealthily at my ugliest and most impressive souvenir of old trauma, the long deep one down the top of the thigh. I told her it was surgical. A wound had become infected, and they had chopped around in there three times, planning to take the leg off if they had to schedule the fourth. She asked if it was something that happened in some war, and I said that no, it had been a civilian difference of opinion. There were some less impressive marks from one of those wars, and the rest of them were either bad luck or good luck or bad judgment. She swallowed and said she couldn"t stand the thought of being hurt. She simply couldn"t stand it. Oh, not the little bang and b.u.mps and sprains you get from athletics, or even a couple of busted ribs and a broken collarbone, which she got when she fell from the rings in a gym one time. She meant really really hurt, with st.i.tches and drains and operations and needles and all that. She swallowed again. She said she had never even been really sick, not ever.

Having seen her eat and knowing that outdoors improves appet.i.tes, I had ordered enough for four. Hunks of sharp cheddar, cuc.u.mber salad, giant roast-beef sandwiches on dark bread, corned beef sandwiches, big crisp kosher dills, a big thermos of iced coffee, two big pieces of tart, deep-dish apple pie. It was successful. She kept making little humming sounds and small chuckling sounds. Through the dark curtain of hair I saw the solid jaw muscles bulging and sliding under that golden hide as she chomped away. I warned her about the horseradish but she slathered it on the roast beef anyway, yelped when she got into it, and then finished the sandwich, eyes tearing, snuffing as though with a head cold.

She yawned and lay back on the big towel I had provided her. She put a forearm across her eyes. In the middle of a sentence her voice dwindled and blurred and stopped. I saw the deep, slow, diaphragmatic breathing of heavy sleep, lips apart, edge of white teeth showing. Her up-flung arm revealed the faint, sooty shadow of the shaven stubble. Her palm was turned to the sun, fingers curled. Her other hand, almost a fist, rested against the flattened, muscular belly. Tiny round beads of perspiration, the size of the heads of the pins they put in expensive shirts, clung to the pale fuzz of her upper lip.

I looked at the angle of the sun and got my watch out of the side pocket of the canvas bag I had brought from the boat. A straight shot to the Royal Biscayne would take forty minutes. And I wanted to be coming into Lauderdale past the sea buoy no later than eight-fifteen. So, to have some of the day left for more swimming, more skiing, I wouldn"t want to sleep more than about a half-hour. I set the alarm. Meyer had given the watch to me because it amused him. It does not make a sound. At the specified time, a semisharp little metal nub starts popping out of a little hole in the underside of it, stabbing you in the wrist.

Chapter Nine.

On Sunday morning after ten o"clock I got around to hosing down the Muequita Muequita with fresh water from the dockside connection at Slip F-18. After I wiped the water-spots off the brightwork, I checked the batteries, oil level in the engines, used a dip stick to check the level in the two tanks against the fuel gauges, greased the linkage in the power lift, and carried the picnic items aboard with fresh water from the dockside connection at Slip F-18. After I wiped the water-spots off the brightwork, I checked the batteries, oil level in the engines, used a dip stick to check the level in the two tanks against the fuel gauges, greased the linkage in the power lift, and carried the picnic items aboard The Busted Flush The Busted Flush. By then the c.o.c.kpit deck had dried, so I did a better job of making her white rubber fenders fast in the right places before I snapped the big custom cover in place all the way around. As I clambered up onto the Flush Flush, I heard Meyer calling my name. He was coming along the dock at an unaccustomed briskness, and I went ash.o.r.e and met him with a suggestion he buy me some coffee aboard his boat, mine having run out.

"And what was the big hurry?" I asked him.

As we strolled back toward his dumpy cruiser he said, "There"s something I never thought of before. When you want to deliver surprising news, your first impulse is to do it in a hurry. If it"s good news, the second decision is to slow down, take your time, savor the pleasure of delivering it. But with bad news, you keep hurrying. You want to get it off your hands. Share it."

"Which means yours is bad?"

"Bad. Sad. It"s nothing I want to hang onto for the pure relish of it. Jane Lawson was killed yesterday."

I stopped. He kept going for three strides and turned and looked at me and said, "I know. She was more alive than most."

"Vehicle?"

"No. From what I understand from Hirsh, somebody trashed her house. The police think it was high school kids. The younger daughter runs with a batch of kids who have been feuding with other gangs of girls. They think it was revenge of some kind. The girl"s possessions were pretty much destroyed, and it looks as if perhaps Jane came back while the damage was happening. She would have run into her place and tried to stop them, of course."

"If it was a gang of girls, yes. I"d buy that."

"It doesn"t look intentional. It looks as if she could have been grappling with someone, trying to restrain them, and someone else grabbed her from behind by the hair to pull her away and broke her neck."

"Jesus G.o.d!"

"When she went down, they got out of there in a hurry. The other daughter came home and found her late yesterday afternoon. Hirsh woke me up at eleven-thirty last night, phoning me to tell me about it. For a while I could hardly understand him."

"Do they have a time of death?"

"They say between one-thirty and three, preliminary. The electric clock in the younger daughter"s room stopped at two-fifteen when somebody threw it against the wall."

"Do they have the younger daughter, Judy, in custody?"

"Maybe. Hirsh said they were still looking for her at ten last night. Apparently neighbors are no help in that place. It"s designed for a kind of privacy, so it is difficult to see people come and go. There are no community areas or activities. People are moving in and moving out frequently. With all the window air conditioners on and the televisions and radios and all the children in that development, n.o.body hears anything. And if there was some suspicion of something unpleasant going on, the neighborhood reaction would be to turn up the volume on the set and not check the time. Otherwise one might become involved. If you get involved, you can spend untold hours sitting around, waiting to be called into court."

"Meyer?" I said.

He gave a little start. "Sorry. I got sidetracked. Come along. I do have coffee made. I"ll have to suggest a study of why people become involved and why they don"t."

"Like the forward pa.s.s."

"You lost me, Travis."

"When you pa.s.s the ball, six possible things can happen, and five of them are bad."

He was silent until he handed me the mug of black coffee, reaching out over the stern quarter to hand it to me where I sat on the dock. "Five things can go wrong?" he asked.

"One, incomplete. Two, intercepted. Three, caught and fumbled. Four, penalized for offensive pa.s.s interference. Five, caught for no gain or for a loss."

"I forgot about the penalty."

"Also, they can smear your quarterback just as he unloads and put him out for the rest of the season. That makes six bad things out of seven chances. Why are we doing this, Meyer?"

"So as not to discuss Jane Lawson."

"Let"s let her wait in the wings while I tell you about Dave Davis and Harry Harris."

He listened and had no comment until I requested one. And his comment was a pa.s.s. He said it needed thought. The alternate a.s.sumptions put it into the province of symbolic logic.

I said, "Jack does the family marketing whenever it rains in the afternoon, if it is not one of Jill"s bridge days, provided it is not one of the Tuesdays or Fridays when Jack rides to work with Ben."

"Scoff, if it amuses you."

I gave him back his empty mug and stood up. "I have the feeling that nothing is going to be able to give me much amus.e.m.e.nt for quite a while."

When I was two steps away, he said, "You had your phone turned off last night?"

"I do believe I did."

I went back home and sat in the lounge and thought about Jane Lawson for a little while and looked at my watch. Twenty-five minutes before noon. I went to the master stateroom and opened the door. Mary Alice had shifted position since I had crept out. There was a faint breath of coolness in the air conditioning-she did not like it turned high-and she lay face down, diagonally asprawl across the big bed, sheet down to her bare waist, one hand under her cheek, the other fist clenched close under her chin. One tangle of black hair was sheafed across her sleeping eyes, and shining strands hung down over the side of the bed.

I eased myself stealthily onto the bed to sit and look down at her. There was her own mix of scents in the cabin air, a smell of sleep and girl and Mary Alice, a sort of smoky smell, pungently sweet, with an undertaste of tart, like a wine just turning.

I had not believed she would be in my bed. Not after I had defied Jane"s warning about her. When the watch had stabbed me awake on the beach, I had leaned and propped my arms on either side of her and bent to her lips and kissed her awake. Her lips rolled softly open, and then she pushed me away and stared at me, pulled me back down very strongly for about a low four count, then shoved violently and rolled away, rolled up onto knuckles and haunches and stared at me through dark hair. I reached out and caught her arm and said, "What is it with you?"

She tossed her hair back, yanked her arm free. "I don"t want to get into that anymore. I really don"t."

"Never?"

"Never," she said and stood up.

I got up too and said, "It"s... an unusual decision."

"Now you can tell me it"s ruining my health. Anybody can look at me and see I"m a wreck."

"Mary Alice, it"s your body and your decision to make. I"m not going to argue and pressure you. I didn"t mean to upset you. I"m sorry."

"Why should you be sorry?" she said. "I"m... going for a walk, okay?"

She went down the little stretch of beach. She went as far as she could go without swimming, which was about a hundred feet. She picked up a handful of small sh.e.l.ls from the tide line and stood plunking them out into the sea, I found a piece of driftwood, a flat board off somebody"s dock or beach steps, and used it as a shovel and dug a hole deep enough to bury our debris above the tide line, with about eighteen inches of sand stomped down on top of it. When I looked at her again, she was sitting on the little slope of beach, arms around her legs, chin on a knee, staring toward Africa. I could tell that it was a time of thought for her, a time of decision. When at last she came back, she was determinedly merry and carefree. I could not read her at all.

There was time for another swim. We swam around to the bay side, and I got two sets of masks, snorkels, and swim fins out of the locker. We swam to a place where boats had anch.o.r.ed, and we found rare and unusual treasure on the bottom. Genesee and Blatz and Pauli Girl. Coors and Utica Club and Hockstein brewed in Rollie, Alabama. Vintage aluminum. Rare brands brought from afar.

Her forced jolliness seemed to become genuine later on. We frolicked and raced and startled some small fish. Then it was time to pack up and run for it, with no time for skiing on the way back to the Royal Biscayne.

Then she stopped me as I was slowing to make the turn between the club channel markers. She wanted me to wait a minute, right there. So I got myself opposite the tide and held it in place with just the port engine turning softly in gear. She stood in balance, her back to me, and then turned and came over and stood close in quarter profile.

"Would they mind my leaving my car there?" I had to lean close and make her repeat it.

"No. They wouldn"t mind. Is it what you want?"

She turned her face further away. "I don"t know what I want. I"m stuck. Right in the middle. Dammit, when I want want somebody to hustle me..." somebody to hustle me..."

I pulled her chin around and uptilted it, but she would not look at me. Her glance slid down and away, off to the side. I put the starboard engine in gear. I turned the boat until she was headed northeast, toward the channel. I took Mary Alice"s hand and put it on the starboard throttle. I took hold of the port. I put the loop of line over the spoke to lock the wheel.