NativeTongue

Joe Winder said, "Why are you doing this for me?"

"I'm not sure. I'm really not." She tossed him the keys and asked him to get the raccoon costume from the trunk of the car.

Bud Schwartz and Da

Schwartz's hand still throbbed from the gunshot wound, but his fingers seemed to be functioning.

Da

"Indeed it is," said Molly. "Could you boys fix me some tea?"

Bud Schwartz looked hard at his partner. I'll do it," said Da

"He's not a bad young man," Molly McNamara said. "Neither of you are."

"Model citizens," said Bud Schwartz. "That's us."

He lowered himself into a walnut captain's chair but stood again quickly, as if the seat were hot. He'd forgotten about the damn thing in his pocket until it touched him in the right testicle. Irritably he removed it from his pants and placed it on an end table. He had wrapped it in a blue lace doily.

He said, "Can we do something with this, please?"

"There's a Mason jar in the cupboard over the stove," Molly said, "and some pickle juice in the refrigerator."

"You're kidding."

"This is important, Bud. It's evidence."

In the hall he passed Da

"What now?"

"She wants me to pickle the goddamn thing!"

Da

"Better than I look." She drank carefully, watching Da

"It wasn't just me. It was Bud, too."

"He's not a bad person," Molly McNamara allowed. "I suspect he's a man of principle, deep down."

Da

He said, "So what are you go

"To tell the truth, I'm not certain." She put down the teacup and dabbed her swollen lips with a napkin. "I've had some experts go over Kingsbury's files. Lawyers, accountants, people sympathetic to the cause. They made up a cash-flow chart, ran the numbers up and down and sideways. They say it's all very interesting, these foreign companies, but it would probably take months for the IRS and Customs to sort it out; another year for an indictment. We simply don't have that kind of time."

"Shoot," said Da

"I'm a little discouraged," she went on. "I guess I'd gotten my hopes up prematurely."

Da

He said, "There's nothing we can do? Just let him go ahead and murder off them butterflies and snails?" Molly had given him a magazine clipping about the rare tropical snails of Key Largo.

She said, "I didn't say we're giving up – "

"Because we should talk to Bud. He"ll think a something."

"Every day we lose precious time," Molly said. "Every day they're that much closer to pouring the concrete."

Da

Molly stopped rocking and raised a hand. "I heard something, didn't you?"

From the kitchen came muffled percussions of a struggle – men grunting, something heavy hitting a wall, a jar breaking.

Da

"Hand me the purse," Molly said. "I'll need my gun."

But Da

"Da

A block of orange appeared in the hallway. It was a tall man in a bright rainsuit and a moldy-looking shower cap. He had a damp silvery beard and black wraparound sunglasses and something red fastened to his neck. The man carried Bud Schwartz in a casual way, one arm around the midsection. Bud Schwartz was limp, gasping, flushed in the face.

Da

"Oh, it's you," Molly McNamara said. "Now be careful, don't hurt that young man."

The stranger dropped Bud Schwartz butt-first on the pine and said, "I caught him putting somebody's fingertip in a Mason jar."

"I'm the one who told him to," said Molly. "Now, Governor, you just settle down."

"What happened to you?" the stranger demanded. "Who did this to you, Miss McNamara?"

He took off the sunglasses and glared accusingly at Da

"Tell me a name," said the stranger.

"I don't know," said Molly McNamara, "but I got a good bite out of him."

"The finger," Bud Schwartz explained, still gathering his breath.

The stranger knelt beside the rocking chair and gently examined the raw-looking cuts and bruises on Molly's face. "This is...intolerable." He was whispering to himself and no one else. "This is barbarism."

Molly touched the visitor's arm and said, "I'll be all right. Really."

Bud Schwartz and Da

He turned to Bud Schwartz and said, "How about giving me that Cuban's nub."

"I dropped it on the floor." Bud Schwartz thought: Christ, he's not going to make me go pick it up, is he?

Da

"No," said the man in the orange rainsuit. "I'll grab it on the way out." He squeezed Molly's hands and stood up. "Will you be all right?"

"Yes, they're taking good care of me."

The stranger nodded at Bud Schwartz, who couldn't help but notice that one of the man's eyes was slipping out of the socket. The man calmly reinserted it.

"I didn't mean to hurt you," he said to Bud Schwartz. "Well, actually, I did mean to hurt you."

Molly explained: "He didn't know you fellows were my guests, that's all."

"I'll be in touch," said the stranger. He kissed Molly on the cheek and said he would check on her in a day or two. Then he was gone.

Bud Schwartz waited until he heard the door slam. Then he said: "What the hell was that?"

"A friend," Molly replied. They had known each other a long time. She had worked as a volunteer in his gubernatorial campaign, whipping up both the senior-citizen vote and the environmental coalitions. Later, when he quit office and vanished, Molly was one of the few who knew what happened, and one of the few who understood. Over the years he had kept in touch in his own peculiar way – sometimes a spectral glimpse, sometimes a sensational entrance; jarring cameos that were as hair-raising as they were poignant.