Bright Orange for the Shroud Read Free Page B

condition of mild alcoholic euphoria, he swung between morose sobriety and wild, reckless, dangerous drunks. The permanent houseparty began to dwindle. It was Meyer who dug the reason out of him after finding the Tiger sitting lumpily on the beach at dawn with a loaded .38 tucked inside his shirt. And because he wanted a little help keeping an eye on him, Meyer told me the story.
    Wilma had secretly invited the Tiger over to headquarters at the hotel one morning. With a deftness, Meyer said, more common in the Far East than in our less ancient cultures, she had quickly learned how to turn him on and off, as if he were a construction kit she had wired herself. Then, with a dreadful control, she had taken him right to the edge and hung him up there, incapable of either release or retreat.
    “In his own deathless words,” Meyer said, “whooflin’ and shakin’ like an ol’ hawg hung on the charger wires. He honestlybegan to believe it was going to kill him. He could feel his heart beginning to burst. And she was laughing at him, he said, her face like a spook. Then suddenly, without release or warning, he felt dead. He heard her singing in her shower. After she was dressed, she kissed him on the forehead, patted his cheek and left. He thought of killing her as she bent over to kiss him, but even that seemed too unimportant for the effort involved. Suddenly he had become an old man. She had accepted the tension between them, the contest of wills, and had taken a little time out to whip him before leaving. It might interest you, McGee, to know that it happened last Thursday morning.”
    She had married Arthur Thursday afternoon.
    “There could be a little heart damage,” Meyer said. “There certainly seems to be plenty of emotional damage.”
    Monday night, late, I walked over to the Tiger’s big flush-deck Wheeler and from fifty feet away I decided, with that sense of loss you have when a legend ends, that the oldest permanent floating houseparty in the world had finally ended. One small light glowed. But from twenty feet I picked up the tempo of Hawaiian music on his record player system, turned very low. Approaching, I made out a girl-shape in the glow of dock-lights, dancing alone slowly on the after deck under the striped canvas canopy, highlights glinting on the glass in her hand as she turned.
    She saw me and angled her dance toward the rail, and I saw that it was one of the Ching sisters, Mary Li or Mary Lo, the identical twins who sing-and-dance at the Roundabout, closed Mondays. She was involved in a variant of the dance forms of her native Hawaii. It is impossible to tell the twins apart.Almost impossible. I had heard that Mary Lo is distinguished by a tiny vivid gem-like tattoo of a good luck ladybug, but so ultimately located that by the time one encounters it, any thought of choice has long since been obviated.
    Her hair swayed dark and heavy as she turned, and her smile was white in duskiness. “Hey you, McGee,” she said in a low tone. “Long as one little thing keeps swinging, Poppa Tiger’s bash is still alive. You haul aboard, make yourself a cup there.”
    As I made my drink she said, “We running a fox roster, man, the chicks who swung good here, keeping him braced up.”
    “How is he making it, Mary?”
    “Now he smiled some tonight, and he cried just a little time because he said he was done for good and all, but a little time back my sister came topside all tuckered and said he made out, and now they sacked out like death itself, and this here is the party, McGee man, down to just me. And now you, but Frannie coming by after she gets off work at two, bringing the bongo cat, and I say things pick up from here, pick up good. A swinger boat, with booze like a convention, you got to brace the management when he’s down.”
    “The only reason, Mary?”
    She stopped her dance eye to eye, a handspan away.
    “Like that dirty-mind cop wants to close us down, Poppa Tiger goes way upstairs and has