A Flash of Green Read Online Free PDF Page B

the cattle had once grazed.
    Ahead of Jimmy Wing as he waited for the light was a typical summer tourist vehicle, an old green Hudson from Tennessee, the fenders rusting, the backseat full of kids, a luggage rack ontop piled high and covered with a frayed tarp. A car in the traffic headed out onto Sandy Key honked and somebody called his name, but he did not turn quickly enough to see who it was. Two cars later he recognized Eloise Cable alone in her white Karmann Ghia with the top down. The yellow scarf tied around her black hair made her face and shoulders look exceptionally brown. She grasped the wheel high and held her chin high, looking arrogant, impatient and behind schedule.
    When the light changed he turned left on Bay Boulevard and drove on into the middle of the city, turned left on Center Street and drove out over City Bridge onto Cable Key. He drove a mile and a half south, past all the motels and the beach shops, the bars and the concession stands, and turned right into the long narrow sand driveway that led to his rented cottage on the bay side of Cable Key.
    It was an old frame cottage of cypress and hard pine, with one bedroom, a small screened porch facing the bay. The neighbors on either side were close, but he had let the brush grow up so thickly along the property line he could not see them.
    The interior of the cottage was orderly, in a cheerless, barren way. Except for a shelf of books and a rack of records, it looked as if it had been put in order to be inspected by a prospective tenant, in a semifurnished category. When the infrequent guest would comment on how it looked as if no one lived there, Jimmy Wing would be mildly surprised, but he would look around and see the justice of the accusation. When he had sold the house in town and moved out to the cottage on Cable Key two years ago, the habits he had established had been, perhaps, a reaction to the dirt, clutter and endless confusion and turmoil of those last few years of Gloria. But once he had satisfied his need for a severe order around him, the pattern had been fixed, and he had no particular reason to change it.
    Breakfast was the only meal he ate at home. He was usually out of the house by ten in the morning. The four housekeeping cottages were owned by Joe Parmitter, who also owned the Princess Motel over on the Gulf side, across Ocean Road from the cottages. One of the motel maids, Loella, had a spare key to Jimmy’s cottage, and every morning after finishing up the motel rooms, she would come over and clean the cottage and make the bed.
    Jimmy Wing had been for several years a reporter on the Palm City Record-Journal , the morning newspaper Ben Killian had inherited. He covered the courthouse and the city hall, the police beat, special news breaks, and did feature stories of his own devising rather than on assignment. Nearly all his work was by-lined, and his copy was clean enough and safe enough to escape rewrite. He had a desk assigned to him in the newsroom, but he did not use it very often, preferring to hammer out his copy on the old standard Underwood on the table by a living room window in the cottage. The paper went to bed at midnight, and it was the only paper in town, so the pressure was seldom noticeable.
    He had learned long ago that if he spent too much time in the newspaper offices in the old pseudo-Moorish building on Bayou Street, J. J. Borklund, Ben Killian’s managing editor, would rope him into any kind of dog work available, from obits to Little League. Borklund had a double-entry approach to journalism. You squeeze every dime out of advertising and circulation, and you put the minimum back into wire services, syndicated features and operating staff. And you take an editorial stand in favor of the flag, motherhood, education, liberty and tourism, offending no one. And so the Record-Journal , on a county-wide circulation of 23,000, returned a pleasant and substantial profit each year.
    Borklund had long since given up