The Lonely Silver Rain

On Friday, the first day of February, it took a long time to get out of bed. I checked the morning and found we had gone back to chill, so I put on an old sky-blue-wool shirt, stretch denims, wool socks and the gray running shoes. I looked at myself in the mirror and said aloud, "Tell me the truth, old buddy. Are you getting old? Have you lost a lot more than a half step getting to second?"

When I stepped out onto the fantail, I found a stick figure of a cat made of old pipe cleaners on the mat looking up at me. If it was a message, the meaning eluded me. I picked it up to flip it into the trash tin, then changed my mind and brought it in and put the cat on a shelf with a raised lip near my bed. Someone was trying to tell me something, but the message wasn't clear.

I went to the hotel alone, and for breakfast I had USA Today, double fresh orange juice, three eggs scrambled with cheese and onion, crisp bacon, home fries, whole-wheat toast and two pots of coffee.

When I went back aboard my home, I went up onto the sun deck and came upon another cat, a purple one, staring at me from the flat place atop the instrument panel. I sat in the pilot seat, the cool wind on my face, and looked at the fool thing. Somebody was going to elaborate trouble to have a tiny bit of fun. If they were sending a message, they had forgotten to include the code. Maybe somewhere in the world there was some other Travis McGee who'd find the pipe-cleaner cats comprehensible and hilarious.

On Saturday morning, when I approached my blue truck at nine to head for Miami, I found a brown pipe-cleaner cat on the windshield, (continued on page 130) Lonely Silver Rain with one paw under the wiper so it could stare in at me. I put it in the ashtray.

I got home to find, in the last light of day, an orange cat on the mat. And so, with a pattern roughly predictable, I made preparations for bed, cut all the lights, put on dark slacks and turtleneck, eased out the forward hatch, crept around the side deck and settled down in the deep shadows, my back against the bulkhead, a navy-blue blanket over me.

Tipsy boatmen went past, guffawing their way back to their floating nightcaps.

"Let Marie take the wheel and she had it hard aground in ten minutes."

"You remember Charley. He found three bales of it floating off Naples and he got them aboard. Took it home and dried it out and he's got enough there to keep the whole yacht club airborne until the year Two Thousand."

"Should have had it surveyed, damn it. Dry rot down all one side of the transom."

And some harmony, ending when somebody used a bullhorn to tell them to knock it off, people were sleeping.

Slow hours. And then a swiftness of slender femininity, half seen in the glow from the distant dock lights. Creak of my small gangplank. She had learned not to step on the mat. She knelt, hair adangle, leaned far forward to put the pipe-cleaner cat on the door-side edge of the mat. I gathered myself. Lunged and snapped my hand down onto slender wrist. Yelp of fright and dismay. Then some real trouble when I dragged her aboard. Impression of tallness. She was all hard knees, elbows, fists. She butted and kicked and thrashed and almost got away once, until finally I caught her hand in a come-along grip, her hand bent down under, her elbow snug gainst my biceps.

"Ow!" she yelled. "Hey, ow! You're breaking it."

"Shut up or I will."

It settled her down. She made whimpering sounds, but she had become docile enough for me to fish out my keys and unlock the door and escort her into the lounge, turning on the lights as we entered. I shoved her into the middle of the lounge and she spun around, glaring at me, massaging her wrist. Just a kid, 16 or 17. A reddish-blonde kid, red with new burn over old tan, a kid wearing a short-sleeved white-cotton turtleneck and one of those skirts, in pink, that are cut like long shorts, surely the ugliest garment womankind has ever chosen to wear. But if anybody could ever look good in them, this one could. Tall girl. Good bones.

"You're brutal. You know that? Really brutal!"

"OK," I said wearily. "I'm brutal. What's all this with the cats, kid?"

In response, I got a wide, humorless grin. "Got to you, huh?"

"It has begun to annoy me. Puzzle me. That's all."

She stared at me. "You're serious? You're not having me on?"

"Kid, when somebody starts invading my privacy with pipe-cleaner cats, I would like to know what's going on. That's all."

She stared at me. "My God, you're even more opaque than I thought. You're an animal!"

"OK. The animal is asking you to sit down and the animal will buy you a Coke. Maybe you can stop emoting and make sense. What are you kids taking lately? It has warped your little head."

She hesitated and then sat on the edge of the yellow couch. "Thank you, I don't want a Coke. And I don't take anything. Aside from getting a little woozy on wine a couple of times. You sit down, too. Are you ready for a name?"

"I'm Travis McGee."

"I know that! Oh, don't I know that. I've made a study of your life and times, Mr. McGee. I can't think of anything more pathetic than an aging boat bum--beach bum--who won't or can't admit it or face it. You are a figure of fun, Mr. McGee. Your dear friends around here are misfits or burnouts, and I don't think there's one of them who gives a damn about you. You're a womanizer, and you make a living off squalid little adventures of one kind or another. You have that dumb-looking truck and this dumb-looking houseboat and nobody who cares if you live or die."

"Kid, you've got a good delivery and a pretty fair vocabulary."

"Stop patronizing me!"

"What's with the multicolored cats, kid?"

"My name is Jean Killian." It was almost shouted, like some kind of war cry.

And then I knew why she had reminded me of someone. I felt the tears behind my eyes. I got up and walked toward her and she got up, tall, to face me. In a rusty, shaky old voice, I said, "You're her kid sister."

Eyes so pale in her sun-dark face that they looked like the silver of old rare coins stared into mine. The strength of her emotions had narrowed her eyes. I could not remember anyone ever looking at me with such venomous concentration. There was hate in there. Contempt. But she spoke softly. "No, you stupid jerk. I'm Puss's daughter. And, God help me, I'm your bastard child. Look at me! People around here have asked me if I'm related to you. 'To him?' I said. 'Hell, no!"'

I really looked at her. The shoulders and the long arms. The level mouth, the shape of the jaw, the high cheekbones, the texture of the hair, with my coarseness and Puss's auburn.

"That's . . . what the cats were all about?"

"If you had any kind of conscience at all, Father dear, it would have hit you. Puss. Pussycat. But she didn't even mean enough to you so you'd get the connection." She sat down again and put her hands over her face. "A rotten, pointless idea."

"Why should I have a bad conscience about Puss?"

"Perhaps for men like you it is standard procedure. But I think it is cruel and wicked for a man to live with a woman and then, when she becomes ill and pregnant, kick her off his dumb houseboat and look for a new lady."

"Puss told you that?"

"My mother lived just long enough to have me, and she died the day afterward. Her sister brought me up. Her sister, my aunt Velma, told me all about you and where and how you live, and I've been planning this for three years. I wanted to make you feel so guilty you'd kill yourself. But you d-didn't even know what the c-cats meant."

"How old are you?"

"Seventeen in April. What's that got to do with anything?"

I moved over to the chair by the built-in desk, put my foot up on it, rested my forearms on my knee and studied her. She sat on the yellow couch, out on the edge of it, fists clenched, returning my inspection, meeting my gaze, showing me her contempt, her hate.

"I had the feeling there was something wrong with Puss. But I never realized she was sick."

"Or pregnant. Sure. You just never realized."

"Do you want me to try to tell you a little bit about this, kid, or do you want to step on everything I say?"

"There's nothing you can say."

"Do you want to know how I met her?"

"Not particularly, Mr. McGee."

I sighed. "Kid, I just wish you----"

"Stop calling me kid!"

"OK. Jean, then. I was running on the beach one morning. Puss had stepped on a sea urchin in shallow water. She came hobbling and hopping ashore, in obvious trouble. OK, so I got the spines out and brought her over here and got her heel fixed up. She was . . . a lot of fun."

"Lots of fun, huh? A great sport, huh?"

"Merry is the word. A big redhead who (continued on page 182) Lonely Silver Rain (continued from page 130) believed the world was mad. A loving person. Her mind and her speech went off at funny tangents. It made some people irritable. Not me."

"Oh, no. Certainly not you!"

"Kid. Jean. I am talking about your mother, and you never got to know her. Maybe you want to know a little bit about her."

"Not from you!"

"She was with me for a few months. She stayed aboard this houseboat with me. I was involved in something at the time. A friend of mine had been killed. Tush Bannon. Some people wanted his land. In the process of finding out who killed him and why, some other people got killed or got badly hurt. Puss was especially good with Janine, Tush's widow. Sometimes she would . . . go off somewhere inside herself, out of touch. It seemed odd. Meyer--he's my best friend----"

"I know."

"He noticed it, too. We talked about it, and we decided it was probably something about her divorce."

"What divorce? She was never divorced."

"So I found out."

She stood up. "What's the point of all this? You'd lie to me. You lied to her. You'd lie to anybody, wouldn't you? After I watched you walk by me on the beach, I knew you were my father. I was hoping you weren't. I can't make you sorry, because you haven't got any conscience at all. And that is giving me some pretty wonderful thoughts about my heredity, Dad. Sorry I went to all the trouble. You aren't even worth that much. You are so smooth and plausible, you make me sick. You worked a scam on her, but it won't work on me."

"Hate is poison, Jean."

"It nourishes me."

"I have a farewell letter from your mother."

"So?"

"Do you hate her so much you don't even want to read it?"

"I never said I hated her!"

"What is your opinion of her?"

"OK, I guess she wasn't very smart about people. Why should I tell you my opinion of her?"

"I want to know why you are afraid to read her letter to me."

"Afraid? Bullshit! Let me see it."

"It's one of the few things in my life worth keeping in a safe-deposit box."

"I bet."

"The bank is closed. It will open Monday morning at ten. I don't want you to think I have any possible way of tricking you. I had no idea you existed, so I couldn't have faked a letter in expectation you'd show up someday." I wrote the name and address of the bank on a slip of paper. "Meet me there at ten in the morning."

"I don't want to meet you anywhere, ever."

I took the chance. "OK. Then don't bother. I'll be there in case you change your mind. In case you decide it might be nice to know something more about your mother than you do. It'll be a better check on your heredity, kid. Now get out. Tomorrow you may grow up a little, and when you do, then I'll want to talk to you. But not now, not the way you are now. Good night."

I matched her flat and level stare until she spun and left. I had detected no uncertainty in her. I felt that maybe the gamble had failed and I had lost her. I went out slowly and saw her, far down the pier, walking swiftly under the dock lights.

I wanted to tell Meyer, but not yet. Not now. I didn't want to tell anybody while I was still trying to comprehend what had happened to me. I saw the cat she had been trying to leave. It had been flattened in our little fracas. I straightened it out, went in and put it with the others.

I could recall every plane and texture of her face, recall the timbre of her voice, the style of her movements--all in sweetly excruciating detail. Some strange mechanism in my head was projecting color slides of all the familiar parts of my life. I seemed to hear the click as each slide fell into place. Everything familiar had assumed a different shape, sharper outlines, purer kind of color. It seemed very much to me like the strangeness that happens after you have spent weeks in a hospital, when you come back out again into the world, seeing everything fresh--a stop light, a brown dog, a yellow bus. Something has changed the world and washed it clean.

I paced the lounge and paced the sun deck half the night, thinking about her, wondering if she would be there. I knew she had to be there. If Puss and I had given her anything at all, it would be a sense of fairness.

When the hard winds of change blow through your life, they blow away a lot of structures you thought permanent, exposing what you thought was trivia, buried and forgotten. The sweet, soft taste of the side of the throat of Puss Killian. The rough and husky edge of her voice as her laughter stopped. The small things are lasting things.

Monday came in with a hard winter rain and a steady wind. I awoke with the conviction that I would never see Jean again. She was half real and half imagined. I was too restless to have anything but coffee, too edgy to keep my attention on any small manufactured boat chore. Wind tilted and creaked the houseboat again and again.

Finally, I put on foul-weather gear, a complete set, with hood, in the electric orange-red of the gloves and flags they wave at you at road-construction sites. It is useful when anyone falls overboard in heavy weather, to become the only dot of color in a steep, gray, surging world.

I started walking so early that I was at the bank by 9:15, and I knew that if I tried to just stand there and wait, I would be maniacal by ten o'clock. So I went striding past the bank and kept walking for a measured 23 minutes. A mile and something. Turned on the mark and went back, but got to the bank at five often. Had I found shelter in the entrance, I wouldn't have been able to see her coming. So I stood out in the rain. It made such a deafening clatter against the crisp plastic of the hood that I could not hear the traffic sounds. I kept turning my head like a man at a tennis match, because I did not know from which direction she would arrive.

Ten o'clock. Five after. Ten after. And I knew it had been a bad gamble. From the two of us she would have gotten an unforgiving stubbornness, stronger than the sense of fair play. The rain was heavier. It bounced high off the asphalt, an eight-inch curtain fringe of lonely silver rain. I could stand there until it ended and nothing would change.

She came moments later at a hard run, with a transparent raincoat over her sweater and jeans, her hair tucked into a shower cap. Her face looked set and pallid, her lips almost colorless. We went in and stood over at one side, dripping onto the bank's giant rug. I pushed my hood back and she pulled her shower cap off and shook her hair out.

"So we play your game, Mr. McGee, whatever it is."

"I was beginning to think you wouldn't show."

"I nearly didn't."

"Where are you staying?"

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"I guess it was social conversation."

"Don't waste it on me."

So she walked with me back to the vault area, where I signed the card and gave the tall black attendant my key. She buzzed the gate open and we followed her back to the aisle where my box was. I pulled it out and took it to one of the little rooms where people clip their coupons and closed the door. There were two chairs in front of the countertop, a lamp with a green shade, scissors on a chain.

Before I opened the box, I took off the rain jacket and pushed my sleeves up. I showed her that my hands were empty, then opened the box lid and reached in and took out the letters, took Puss's from the thin stack and handed it to her. Then I told her to wait a moment. I took some other things out of the box and said, as I showed them to her, "This is a picture of your paternal grandfather standing beside his automobile long ago. It is an Essex. This is a picture of your paternal grandmother sitting on the steps of a vacation cottage on a lake you never heard of. This is your uncle, who died young. And this is a picture of your mother."

She had been feigning indifference until I showed her Puss's picture. She took it from me and read the inscription aloud, "Chocolate peanut-butter love." She looked at me questioningly.

"A private joke."

"She was lovely, really lovely!"

"Now, if you wouldn't mind reading the letter aloud? Careful unfolding it. The paper has cracked in a couple of places."

"Why should I read it aloud?"

"Because your voice quality is a lot like hers."

She shrugged, unfolded it, began reading.

Old dear darling, I said one time that I would write it down to get it straight for you, and so I have and even had the eerie idea you might be able to read all the words between the words. The name was right. I lied about that. But the town wasn't, and Chicago isn't the town, either. And there was no divorce. And I love Paul very dearly and have all along, and love you, too, but not quite as much.

That lousy Meyer and his lousy law. Get a pretty girl to kiss Old Ugly and tell him he was absolutely right. You see, my dear, about six months before you met me on the beach with that living pincushion stuck into the sole of my foot, they took a little monster out of my head, maybe as big as an English walnut, almost, and with three stumpy little legs, like a spider. Half a spider. And the men in white dug around in my head to try to find every little morsel of the beast, because he turned out to be the bad kind. So . . . I got over confusions and got my memory all straightened out again, and my hair grew back, and I pinned an old buddy of mine to the wall of his office and he leveled, because he has known me long enough to know I have enough sawdust to keep me solid. His guess was one chance out of 50. No treatments possible. Just go off and get checked every so often, bright lights in the eyes, stand and touch the tip of your nose with your finger tip while keeping the eyes closed. That stuff. And pens drawing lines on little electric charts. I could accept it, my dear, because life is very iffy and I have busied up my years in good ways. But I could not accept the kind of life that went with the waiting. Dear as Paul is, he is a sentimental Kraut type, and we had the awareness of the damned time bomb every waking moment. So life became like a practice funeral, with too many of our friends knowing it and everybody trying to be so bloody sweet and compassionate during a long farewell party. I began to think that if I lucked out, I'd be letting them down. So I finally told Paul that if it was the end of my life, it was getting terribly damned dreary and full of violin music, and I am a random jolly type who does not care to be stared at by people with their eyes filling with tears. So I cashed in the bonds for the education of the children I'll never have, and I came ahunting and I found you. Was I too eager to clamber into the sack? Too greedy to fill every day with as much life as would fit into it? Darling, I am the grasshopper sort, and so are you, and, bless you, there were dozens of times every day I would completely forget to sort of listen to what might be happening inside my redheaded skull. Be glad you jollied and romped the redheaded lady as she was coming around the clubhouse turn, heading for the tape. She loved it. And you. And how good we were together, in a way that was not a disloyalty to Paul! He is one of the dogged and steadfast ones. Can you imagine being married, dear, to Janine, great as she is, and having her know you could be fatally ill? She would mother you out of your mind until you ran. As I ran. But there was a little nagging feeling I was having it all too good. I kept telling myself, Hell, girl, you deserve it. And then hairy old Meyer and his damned law about the hard thing to do if the right thing to do. I suppose you have been wondering about me and maybe hating me a little. I had to run from you exactly when I did and how I did, or I couldn't have left at all. You see, the dying have a special obligation, too, my dear. To keep it from being too selfish. I was depriving Paul of his chance of being with me, because it is all he is going to have of me--all he did have of me--and I was forgetting that I had to leave him enough to last him long enough to get him past the worst of it at least. The darling has not done the interrogation bit, and if he thinks or doesn't think there was a man in the scene, I couldn't really say. You would like each other. Anyway, the female of the species is the eternal matchmaker, and I have written the longest letter of my life to Janine, all full of girl talk and about living and dying, and I have, I hope, conned her into spinning a big, fancy pack of lies about the Strange Vacation of Puss Killian, because I am leaving her name and address with Paul, saying that she could tell him how I was and what happened among people who didn't know. It is a devious plot, mostly because they would work well. He is a research chemist and perhaps the kindest man alive. Anyway, last week, all of a sudden, the pupil of my big, gorgeous left eye got twice as big as it should, and they have been checking and testing and giving me glassy smiles, and I am mailing this en route to the place where they are going to open a trap door and take another look. So they may clap the lid back on and say the hell with it. Or they may go in there and, without meaning to, speed me on my journey, or they may turn me back into me for another time, shorter or longer. But from the talk around the store, the odds on the last deal make the old odds seem like a sure-thing bet. Do you understand now? I'm scared. Of course I'm scared. It's real black out there, and it lasts a long time. But I have no remorse, no regrets, because I left when I had to, and Meyer got me back in good season. Don't do any brooding, because if I can try to be a grownup, you ought to be able to take a stab at it. Here's what you do, Trav my darling. Find yourself a gaudy, random, gorgeous grasshopper wench, and lay aboard the Plymouth and the provisions, and go funtiming and suntiming up and down the lovely bays. Find one of good appetite and no thought of it being for keeps, and romp the lassie sweetly and completely, and now and again, when she is asleep and you are awake, and your arms are around her and you are sleeping like spoons, with her head tucked under your ugly chin, pretend it is . . . Puss, who loved you.

At first it had been a mechanical reading, but then she slowed. The words had almost too much meaning for her to handle. And for me to handle. I had closed my eyes for a little while, pretending it was Puss. But that was too much for me, and I had to watch Jean as she read, watch the slow tears, listen to the breaking voice.

Without looking at me, she folded it and put it back into the box and said, "Can we get out of here? Can we walk?"

We walked. She had the good, long stride Puss had bequeathed her. We walked back to the beach, where the hard rain had pocked all the footprints out of the sand above high mean tide. The winddriven waves curled and smacked. Kids were out there, vague in the rain curtain, surfing. Some G-stringed joggers passed us. No talk. I knew she would talk when she was ready.

Finally, we sat on one of the small fat fences that keep the parked cars off the beach. The rain was easing.

"They did a Caesarean in the eighth month, when they knew she was slipping away. She was too far gone for labor. She died the next day. I . . . I just didn't know all this!"

"She must have told her sister something about how she . . . about what it was like between us."

She thought that over, frowning. "Maybe she did. I guess she probably did. Maybe she told her husband, too. From what Velma said, he was really great to my mother after she came back. But he couldn't handle having me. The arithmetic was all wrong. Child of unknown person. He fixed it with Velma to raise me with her batch. Look, I love Velma and all my foster brothers and sisters. She didn't treat me differently at all. Not in any way. She's great. He sent money all the years, what he thought was fair. More as prices went up. I've never met him. I think he's a fine person. I can understand him not wanting me as a kid. I wasn't his kid."

"I never knew she was pregnant. I never knew she was dying."

"I know that now, McGee. I thought you knew all that stuff. I thought you just didn't want to be involved. Let me tell you something--I wish they'd never told me. No. Cross that out. I'm glad Velma told me. Puss hurt a lot. Some of the stuff they wanted to give her for pain would have hurt the baby inside her. Me. So she stiffed it out alone. For my sake. Loved me."

She bent over, face against her knees. She made a small sound of grief, lost in the surf crashing and hissing.

Carefully, gently, I put my hand on her shoulder. "Maybe Velma lied about me because she didn't want to lose you. She didn't want you to get some kind of romantic image of your beach-bum father and come looking for me, ever. She know you're here?"

She straightened and looked at me with reddened eyes. "Oh, no. She thinks I'm visiting a girlfriend in Santa Barbara."

"Where is home?"

"Youngstown, Ohio. I graduated high school last June."

"You graduated from high school."

She gave me a crooked, tear-stained smile. "Old Dad takes over the grammar, huh?"

"Takes over whatever he can take over. Whatever you'll let him take over. Have you been working?"

"At a Charming Shoppe. It's a chain. I worked through Christmas and quit. Look, can I have a copy of that letter? To keep?"

"Why not? We'll walk back and get a copy made at the bank."

She looked at me, her head tilted, her expression puzzled.

"You know, I feel as if I've just gotten over being sick, sick a long time. I used to dream about you dying. You were always fat and bald."

"At times I have a fat, bald disposition. Look, Jean. It's just the same for me. That strange feeling."

"How can it mean anything much to you? You never knew I was alive, even."

I reached for her and she put her hands in mine. "I don't know if I can say this. It means more than I can say. It turns my life upside down. It changes a lot of things I thought I was. It's some kind of door opening for me. We've got lots of plans to make."

"I said rotten things to you."

"And enough of them were true."

"No. Now I know what you're really like. Puss is telling me in that letter what you're like. She didn't know she was telling her daughter anything, but she was."

And we walked back slowly, talking all the way. There was a lifetime of good talk ahead of us. There was another feeling I had about myself, more difficult to grasp. In the past few years, I had been ever more uncomfortably aware that one day, somewhere, I would take one last breath and a great iron door would slam shut, leaving me in darkness on the wrong side of life. But now there was a window in that door. A promise of light. A way to continue.

•

It is May, early May, a lovely time of year in Florida. We have taken the Busted Flush north up the waterway to a place where it opens into a broad bay. I have dropped the hooks at a calm anchorage well away from the channel and far enough from the mangrove coast to let the south breeze keep the spring bugs away.

We have brought aboard pungent caldrons of Meyer's special incomparable chili and enough icy beer to make the chili less lethal. How many of us are there? Twenty? Thirty? Let's say a lot.

We are here, and there is music and there are bad jokes, and so we are all a little bit longer in the tooth and have seen life go up, down and sideways without any rhyme or reason anyone can determine. We laugh at tired old jokes because they are old and tired and familiar, and it is good to laugh.

I get up and go ambling back through the folk. A great day. I find Meyer up on the sun deck, leaning against the aft rail, alone for a change. He is now Uncle Meyer, a dispensation from my daughter Jean, that pleased him immensely.

We talked about Jean, about her latest letter. "You two get talked out before she left?"he asks.

"There's a couple of years of talk to make up," I say. "We'll have time. You get a chance to look over the trust agreement Frank sent you?"

"Good work," he says. "As a trustee, I can vote to invade the principal in case of emergency. Sound."

"She got one hell of a score on her college boards."

"Three times you've told me, Travis."

"And she's a horse bum. Imagine that. A horse bum from Youngstown who is going to go to a school of veterinary medicine eventually. Imagine me fathering a horse bum from Youngstown."

"Travis, she is handsome. She is tough and good and staunch."

I look at him. It strikes me that he has not been surly or hostile at any time. Lately I have been bringing out the worst in people. No more.

He seems to know what I am thinking. "How much went into the trust?" he asks.

"Everything!" I say.

He stares in consternation. "Everything? Everything?"

"Well, I saved out about four hundred bucks, and so I've got to scramble around and find some salvage work real soon."

He puts his hand on my arm, beams at me and says, "Welcome to the world."

"I've been planning this for three years. I wanted to make you feel so guilty you'd kill yourself."'

"I had detected no uncertainty in her. I felt that maybe the gamble had failed and I had lost her."