Dead Low Tide Read Free

up the window and the fans made some of the night air move in across our faces, so it wasn’t bad.
    Owner-manager-bartender waddled back and took her order for bourbon and water on the side, and mine for a bottle of Miller’s. As soon as he went away she dug in a small white purse and took out a ten and pushed it across at me.
    “I can handle it,” I said, maybe a bit on the stuffy side.
    “Please, Andy. Or I won’t enjoy my drink.”
    “Dutch, then.”
    She nodded. It was the first time I’d ever had a good chance to look at her face. Big bright black eyes, and just a shade too much in the tooth department, so she had a very faint look of coming out of one of Disney’s woodland dells. She had a little mesh of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and her underlip was about three times the thickness of the one on top. Her ears were little and they grew flat to her head. Her hands were small, with spidery fingers and sort of lumpy knuckles. But, all in all, I would say, an attractive item. First you saw the thin look, and then you saw that her breasts looked high and sharp, and as I have mentioned, there was a nice side to side wave of the seat of the blue denim as you happened to walk behind her. I guess I was giving it too close a study. It leaned back in the booth.
    “Andy—I went over everyone, thinking, and you’re the only …”
    The drinks came then and she shut up. They were on a pay-as-you-go deal, so he took the ten and brought the change back. By the time he got back with it, her shot of bourbon was gone, and so was one sip of the water, and she pushed the shot glass toward him. He picked it up and went off with it.
    The interruption had given her time to think that maybe there was a better way of edging up on the subject, but I was beginning to think I was a little too placid about the whole thing, and a little loss of balance wouldn’t hurt, so I said, “The only what?”
    “What? Oh—the only one who’s usually in the office.”
    You don’t call your boss’s wife a liar, even when she is. The new shot came and she was still holding it, rim-full, rock steady, when the change came back. She threw it down witha hard toss, and one ripple of her throat, and took a little sip of water. They do something to those little dark girls. Maybe it’s a special course at Sweet Briar. All night they can drink, and nothing happens. Plying them with same is bad technique, because whatever happens, it happens to you, and they take you home and in the morning your head rattles like a broken transmission.
    “What do you want, Mary Eleanor?”
    “I just plain don’t know how to ask you, Andy.”
    “Try English.”
    “All right. Will you find out something for me? Will you find out what’s wrong with John?”
    “Wrong? Offhand the only thing wrong with your husband is that he wears a size nineteen collar and he could probably run a hundred yards in eleven seconds with one of me tucked under each arm, and I weigh one eighty. Oh, yes, and you can’t pin him down. That I know. Ask him if tomorrow is Tuesday and he bangs you on the shoulder and asks you if you had a good old time last Sunday.”
    She smiled, and this was a smile not for the society section of our daily newspaper. It was more the sort of smile you wear to get your lips out of the way so you can examine a loose filling. “Oh, I know how hard it is to make him tell you anything, Andy. Whatever it is, it’s bad.”
    “What’s bad?”
    “Whatever it is that’s wrong. He sits and his eyes look right through things and he doesn’t hear me. He groans something awful in his sleep, and the other night there he was, sitting right up in bed and making a real high thin screaming sound like a woman. When I ask him what is wrong, he goes off someplace and closes the door real quiet.And he gets up in the night and walks around and around our house, and once I came home and I didn’t know he was there and I came in quiet like, and he was sitting there