Dead Low Tide Read Free Page B

MG off into the night. Funny about her. I hadn’t thought there was much to her. But be with her for a little while and you had an idea of just what John Long had for himself. A hundred and three pounds of fire and intensity and aliveness. A little wife that would sing in your blood like chronic malaria. Something to hurry home to when the nights get cool. It is indeed a depressing line of thought for a bachelor. Like a man in a rowboat looking at a cabin cruiser and saying to himself, “By God, I could own one of those if I weren’t so damn lazy that I hate the thought of the upkeep.”
    And I heard the faint crunch of shells as somebody came walking down the road toward my place. I knew who it was. As Mary Eleanor had driven down the road her headlights had swung across a pair of bare brown legs belonging to a gal sitting on some dark steps.

Two
    AT THE SOUTH EDGE of town there is a deep narrow creek which runs into the bay. It is a place where, in season, the snook gather and respond readily to a yellow buck-tail dude jerked past their undershot jaws. If you shill a grand-daddy snook into chomping on same, he will delight to sprain your wrist. It was there, on the jungly north bank of the creek that my landlady, Mrs. Elly Tickler, an elfin and fiftyish widow, built on the general lines of a silo, put up ten cabins prior to Florida’s current glass brick, wrought iron, and window wall era. They are little bastard-Spanish houses, with narrow windows, thick walls, and doodads around the top. They are scattered around the little jungly patch as though placed by some mystic who used a forked wand. The result is a pleasant privacy. We all have individual little terraces. There is no attempt at growing a lawn. We have ourcrop of sand spurs, sea grapes, castor bean plants, punk trees, and poison ivy, and we all like it fine.
    Elly gigglingly admits she is as lazy as a hog in August, and it makes her nervous with people moving in and moving out, so she is delighted to rent to us locals because she can leave us alone and we stay put, even if her income is thereby reduced. In September, particularly, we all experiment with evil-smelling sprays, lotions, and repellents, and Ardy Fowler will tell you, his blue carpenter’s eyes as solemn as a reading of the minutes, that it was on the eighth of September three years ago that a flock of mosquitoes carried him thirty feet out over the bay before they got wing-weary and dropped him on an oyster bar. And Andy will even roll up his pants leg and show you the scar where he hit the shells.
    So I heard Christy Hallowell come swinging down the road, and heard her stop and slap lustily.
    “Donating blood?” I asked her.
    She came up to me. “I was about to give you up, McClintock. Until one of your women brought you home. Smell me. This is new stuff and it’s working.”
    “Hmm,” I said. “There’s carbolic in it. And banana oil. And something else. Pretty elusive, though. Got it! Swamp water. Christy, you smell like an Arabian veterinary.”
    “Poo. I told you it works. It’s called Ray-pell. How was your date?”
    “Lush. That was the boss’s wife. And now I’ve got another date with a hunk of cheese. Have some?”
    Mosquitoes were clustered around my front door. We scampered in, flailing our arms. Nobody ever locks anything at Tickler Terrace—which is what we call it despite Elly’s sign proclaiming that this is Shady Grove Retreat. I got thelights on, gathered up my bug bomb, and disconcerted a few stilt-legged citizens perched on my walls, waiting for sleep and dark, and blood and me.
    Christy walked around with me and pointed out a few I had missed, and then she sat on my kitchen table and looked around, and said, “God, you’re neat! For a man, I mean. Dusty in spots, but neat.”
    “We old bachelors, you know. Everything in its place. System, order, efficiency.” I opened the refrigerator. “Cheese? Guaranteed to climb on the plate by itself.”
    “Delightful.