John D MacDonald Page 3

  "Not every time, Al. He misses plenty of times. But his press agents don’t mention those times. They want him to be a symbol of infallibility, so the opposition feels licked before the first round starts. I’m not worried yet, Al." I hoped my confident smile didn’t look too hollow. I knew that, in one sense, he had more at stake than I did. If Dean plowed up our pea patch, I could find another slot. It wouldn’t be easy for Al. It might be impossible. And if Dean wrecked the operation, there wouldn’t he anything left in the retirement account.

  I managed to prop Al Dolson up again, and realized I was getting tired of that particular ritual.

  Alice and I worked until midnight Monday night and until after ten on Tuesday night. I took a longer than usual lunch hour on Tuesday and picked up some "play clothes." I packed a bag Tuesday night and took a cab out to the airport on Wednesday morning. Dean’s ship was in when I got there, parked on the apron a hundred yards from the terminal.

  It was a C-46. On the rudder assembly was the CAA number and the name Culver Chemical Corporation. I remembered that several years ago Mike Dean had taken over the small corporation and, through stock transfers and mergers, had built it into a big outfit. He was still on the Board of Directors. A slim young man who looked oriental was standing on a wheeled platform loading the luggage into the compartment high on the ship just behind the cockpit The McGanns and the Dodges stood in the shadow of the wing, chatting with two young men who were evidently the pilot and co-pilot, or, as they like to call themselves, the captain and the pilot.

  I went and handed my bag up to the man doing the loading. He smiled his thanks, dogged the hatch, jumped down lightly and started toward the terminal building, pushing the wheeled cart. Louise greeted me warmly and introduced me to our crew. She had a bright look of holiday about her. Tommy Mc-Gann was equally cordial. Puss McCann was elaborately friendly. Warren Dodge gave me a half smile, a remote glance, a slack hand to shake for a half second.

  We went aboard. It was outfitted more like a lounge than an airliner. Wall to wall carpeting, wicker arm-chairs, tables, ash trays, magazines, a little kitchenette and bar. The steward came aboard and the drop door was pulled up and lugged shut.

  Moran, the pilot, said, "The weather looks clear and bright all the way, folks. Ricky will fix lunch en route. We’ll make a gas stop at Atlanta, and then stop at West Palm Beach Airport for clearance. From there it will be another half hour to West End on Grand Bahama Island. You’ll go the rest of the way by boat We should put you down on Grand Bahama at four o’clock, and that means you should be at Dubloon Cay in time for the cocktail hour. In the meanwhile, if you’d like an eye-opener to start the day, Ricky will be glad to fix you up."

  Warren Dodge waited until we were airborne before demanding a whisky sour, easy on the sugar, boy. Tom and Puss both thought that sounded fine. Louise said she’d wait a while. I asked if there was cold beer. There was; and it was imported and delicious.

  I was the guest who had invited himself, and I did not feel at ease. Perhaps, with that quartet, I wouldn’t have felt at ease under the very best of circumstances. I’d come from mill people. Three generations of Gliddens had worked at the Harrison Corporation. I had, in the last seven years, acquired a certain amount of ease and polish, but it was acquired. These people had grown up with the certain knowledge that if they wanted anything badly enough, it would be given to them. Spiritually, I was closer to Mike Dean If I wanted anything, I had to go get it.

  But the stratification wasn’t that simple. It could not be called the case of the noble working man versus the idle and decadent rich. Certainly damn little nobility in the working man at Harrison in the past few years. Not the way work standards were set. I am no bloated capitalistic exploiter, but some of the situations in our shop sickened me. The way standards were set, on some operations, a man could perform in two hours what we had to pay for on the basis of an eight-hour day. They were running bridge tournaments in the employee lounges. They saw all the afternoon ball games on television. And they were getting a wise-guy boot out of using union strength to screw management. It was a cynicism and a "me first" approach to life which was in its way just as destructive as Tommy and Warren’s complete idleness. The low productivity per employee was crippling us. A new union contract was coming up in November. I knew they were going to yelp for more money. I was going to go along with the demand for more money provided the union would play fair on work standards.

  "Deep black thoughts?" Louise asked over the sound of the airplane.

  "World on my shoulders," I said, grinning at her.

  Warren Dodge had taken the chair on the other side of me just in time to hear the last remark. "You like to give the impression of being all burdened down with big deals, don’t you, Glidden?"

  I turned and looked at the puffy, sullen and arrogant face. Warren Dodge is a big man. I think he is two years older than I am, but I like to believe he looks ten years older. His blond hair is thin. Liquor has puffed the big body, ravaged the school-boy face. But there is still a curiously collegiate flavor about him, the forlorn echoes of a valiant goal-line stand in the mud of a November afternoon. His people had been enormously wealthy, and had been almost completely wiped out in 1934 when Warren was about nine years old. There was one little trust fund that the creditors couldn’t get at. It put Warren through Choate and Princeton, and then there was nothing left. For a few years between preparatory school and Princeton, I believe, he was an enlisted marine, and received a medical discharge. After Princeton he played amateur tennis that was so close to being top

  flight he was able to live off it.

  Louise met him when she was twenty-four at a house party when she went to visit, in Philadelphia, the girl who had been her roommate at Wellesley. Tom McGann, her father, was violently opposed to her marrying a tennis bum. He’d given up hope of Tommy ever coming into the firm, and he had hoped she would marry somebody whom he could take in. But she was twenty-four and she had an income, mostly from Harrison dividends, of about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. It had made a nice soft berth for Warren because his drinking had begun to soften his tennis game. And he was nearly thirty. She had married him the second week she knew him, and they had been in Italy three months on their honeymoon when Tom’s death called them back. And it had turned out not to be such a soft berth for Warren. She couldn’t support him in the way he expected to be supported.

  Warren Dodge was spoiling for a quarrel. Even though alcohol had softened him up, I wasn’t anxious to go around and around with him. He’d had some police trouble in Portston. He was known as a fast, vicious and merciless brawler.

  "A big deal every day, Warren," I said.

  He took a gulp of his drink. "Tell Mike Dean about all your big deals. Don’t try to tell me. Maybe Mike will tell you what a big deal is."

  "Don’t be tiresome, dear," Louise said.

  "Tiresome! Ho, ho! Glidden is the tiresome one, honey. He’s been taking you in with all this crap about backing up the dear old family corporation. So you say: okay, no dividends. So they give each other unlimited expense accounts and pay raises and God knows what all. I’m sick of your being a sucker, honey."

  "Knock it off, knock it off!" Tommy McGann said, standing and swaying with the slight movement of the plane, grinning down at Warren out of his broken face. "What the hell do you know about big finance? I wouldn’t let you make change of a dollar, you Princeton phony."

  All the marks of anger went out of Warren’s face and he beamed up at Tommy. "Just a crazy flyboy," he said. I have never been able to understand why the two brothers-in-law get along so well. It could be their mutual idleness, but that does not have the same flavor. Tommy makes a brisk business of doing nothing. And there is something sour and destructive about Warren Dodge’s inertia.

  Tommy had said only a few words to Warren, but they had taken the edge of his belligerence away.

  "Be good," Tommy said. "Be good to our Sam Glidden. He is a member of the fami
ly. I shall now go forward and trade lies with my fellow intrepid bird-men and beg a chance to hand-fly this raunchy old craft."

  After Tommy had gone forward, Warren turned back toward me, and I could guess from his expression that he was going to be sincere and earnest.

  "It’s like this, Sam. I figure this is our chance for Harrison to go big time. If we get under Mike Dean’s wing, it’s going to help us a lot. If we go big time, we could have an executive airplane like this one."

  "And that would be handy, I suppose."

  "Certainly. Louise and I have a big enough block of stock so I don’t understand, Sam, why I haven’t been put on the Board. I don’t see why Walt Burgeson should be voting our stock."

  His childish picture of himself was all too vivid. Warren Dodge, member of the Board of Directors of the Harrison Corporation, flew to Chicago yesterday to attend an industry conference.

  But it was a little too late for Warren Dodge.

  It was too late for him by the time he got out of Princeton, because by then he had learned what he could procure with nothing but a boyish grin and the bulge of tennis muscles.

  "It might be a good idea for you to be on the Board Warren," I said. "Al Dolson and I are responsible to the Board, and so are the other corporate officers. We like to have people on the Board who understand the special problems we’re facing. When we get back I’d be glad to arrange it so that you can come in and work in the various divisions of the company and get the whole picture."

  He gave me an uneasy glance. "What kind of work?"

  "Start you off as a stock chaser. That’s the fastest way to learn. In about eighteen months you’d have a pretty good background."

  He nodded dubiously and said something about getting another leg to stand on, and went back to Ricky’s department with his empty glass.

  "That wasn’t very kind, Sam," Louise said.

  "I mean it seriously; If he’ll come in, I think it would be good for him."

  "It must be nice to sit way up there and look down upon all of us and decide what’s good for us."

  I felt my face get hot. "I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I just meant that . . ."

  "You meant that he does nothing and that makes you uneasy because everybody should be brisk and industrious like you."

  "Damn it, Louise, you don’t . . ."

  She smiled in a tired way. "Sorry. Pay absolutely no attention." She hitched her chair toward the window and began to look down at the green and misted earth below, and I knew I had been dismissed.

  Puss was across the way playing solitaire at a small table. After one venture into the whisky sour area, she was back to her normal brandy on the rocks. I went over and sat opposite her and said, "Black ten on the red jack."

  "Oh, I know all about that, Sam. I’m saving it for when there isn’t anything else left to do, How about some gin?" Tommy was up front between the pilots, bending over them and talking. Warren had sat down in the rear of the plane and was looking at a magazine. Louise was looking out the window, and her look of holiday had faded.

  "For how much?" I asked Puss.

  She bit her lip. "Hmmm. How interesting do we want to make it? Dime a point?"

  "That’s too damn interesting. That would make my hands sweat. A nickel?*

  "Done. Cut for deal."

  By the time Ricky served lunch, I was a hundred and eighty-eight dollars to the good and she was furious at me, at the cards and at herself. She is a girl with a highly developed competitive instinct. By the time we made the gas stop she had gotten forty dollars back and she was bored with the game. She scrawled a check on her Texas bank.

  We made West Palm on schedule, landing amid the heavy civilian and Air Force traffic on the joint base, and it took fifteen minutes to get clearance to West End.

  Warren had drunk himself into a semi-catatonic state, sleepily and massively out of touch with reality. The rest of us looked out the windows as we flew east over Palm Beach, over the big hotels and the random blue patchwork of swimming pools, out over the Atlantic surf line. In twenty-five minutes we began to see the islands of the Bahamas, the vividly streaked blue and tan and green of the shoal waters of the Bahama Flats.

  I saw a huge waterfront establishment which, except for an enormous swimming pool, looked from the air like some sort of military base. A narrow paved road ran along the shoreline to a ramshackle village about a mile away, and continued on through the village and down the coast. Except for the big establishment and the village, the rest of what I could see of the narrow island looked overgrown and uninhabited

  We landed on a paved, eroded airstrip and taxied to the terminal building. It was a small frame building surrounded with dust. It had a stubby tower, and had at one time been painted gaily but the colors had faded. Across the taxi strip from the terminal several light planes were parked and lashed.

  As we went down the steps a man came toward the aircraft, walking briskly and smiling warmly. At forty feet he radiated impressive charm and complete efficiency. He wore sand-colored walking shorts, a chocolate-brown sports shirt, a yachting cap, Allan Murray Space Shoes in a sandal design with tall dark-brown wool socks. He was tall, with solid shoulders and a handsome rather heavy face. He had a wide white smile and he was theatrically gray at the temples. As a television huckster he would have been termed true and valid. I had the uncomfortable feeling that you could be marooned on an island with this fellow for seven years and never get a clue as to what he was thinking. He would be inevitably and interminably polite and charming, and were he forced to kill you and eat you, he would be deft and slightly apologetic and quite noble about it. And he would know exactly which leaves and berries to boil with you to give you the right flavor.

  He went directly to Louise and took her hand in both of his and made like Gregory Peck being a young girl’s uncle and said, "I’m so glad you could make it, Louise. Mike sends his apologies. There’re other guests on the island and he couldn’t get away or he would have met you himself. Hello, Tommy."

  The handshake was both manly and Ivy League. Louise introduced him to Puss, and then to Warren. Warren had a ponderous list and a bleared expression. And she said, "And Sam Glidden, Fletcher Bowman."

  I got the manly handshake. He looked directly into my eyes, unwaveringly. It is an unnatural affectation and it always makes me feel uneasy. "Glad you could join the party, Sam. Mike is delighted. He’s been following your career, and we both feel you can make valid contributions to our little conference on the island."

  "Uh. Thanks," I said. I wished I could have been glib. I wished he’d let go of my hand. He made me feel if I were wearing coveralls and chewing a kitchen match.

  "I’ll get your stuff hustled through customs," he said. "And I’ve lined up three so-called taxis. Don’t be alarmed by them. They’ll get us to the Grand Bahama Club. It’s only three quarters of a mile away. Our boat is tied up at the club dock and we’ll have to run to Dubloon Cay. Suppose you all there in the shade and we’ll hustle the baggage off."

  When we were in the shade of the terminal building I looked back. He was talking to the crew and they were bobbing their heads. Two Bahama boys were helping Ricky get the luggage off. I had the same big old brown stuffed suitcase I had taken to college. There was a big case that I imagined belonged to Tommy. Both women seemed to have four matched cases each.

  All the baggage went in one cab, and Fletcher Bowman split us, three and three, in the other two cabs. He managed to arrange it so he rode with Louise and me. I felt quite certain that he knew that we were the two to focus on.

  We got a brisk travelogue. "The airstrip belongs to the Grand Bahama Club. Chap named Butlin built the Grand Bahama Club after the war. A British syndicate operation. Put millions into it. But nobody had figured out how to get the people here to fill it. It went broke and sat empty until a few years ago and then another group took it over. They seem to be doing well enough. They put the income back into improvements. It’s really quite comfortable. See tho
se buildings there. Completely empty. Moldering away. I doubt the hotel will ever get large enough to put them use. But the plantings are nice, aren’t they? Here we are. This is the part they use now."

  The part in use was huge. We went on into the lobby. It was airy and vast and pleasantly decorated. We could look out through glass walls at wide green lawns, brilliant flowers, stone walks, several acres Of awning in wide blue and white stripes, the gigantic swimming pool, and the vivid waters of the Bahama Flats beyond the coconut palms.

  I saw Warren take his bearings, turn and head directly for the bar off the lobby.

  "If you like," Bowman said, "You people can have a quick drink or take a quick look around. I’ll see to the luggage and meet you down there on the dock in ten minutes. That’s our boat, tied up on the left side, the green and white one." He smiled and nodded and marched off.

  Tommy and Puss headed for the bar. "Look around?" I asked Louise. She was looking hesitantly toward the bar.