Dead Low Tide Read Online Free PDF

rippled the bay water, where the skimmers had gone back and forth at dusk, drawing their sharp beak lines on the gray water.
    John had a big crew working. Nearly all the building trades were represented. Where the shell of the house was up, electric saws whined and there was hammering. The place smelled of wet cement and burned sawdust and the faint fish-flavor of new land. I went to where they were laying up blocks and asked an old man where Long was. He pointed down to the end houses with his thumb. The Cadillac was parked in the new road. I went down there and I heard his thick-chested voice at a pretty good decibel level. “You are, for God’s sake, not framing something by Picasso. You are framing a goddamn doorway so kindly extract digit.”
    I went in. What, she had said, is wrong with my husband? Nothing, I thought, that a good sharp rap across the nape of the neck with a meat ax wouldn’t cure. He stood, his neck bowed, glaring down into the face of an elderly carpenter who stood there with the mild, tired, endless patience of the very old.
    “You are framing doors and windows,” John said heavily, “and not making jewel boxes, please.”
    “Sure,” the old man said. “Sure.”
    John Long is five eleven, about an inch shorter than I. He looks as if he weighs a hard-boiled two hundred. He weighs two forty. He carries extra muscle and meat all over him, on jaw, temple, wrists, ankles. He wears his coarse black hair ina brush cut, and there’s a lot of gray in it. In repose his face has all the expression of a fractured cinder block. Yet he can turn on an astonishingly boyish and winning smile. Black hair, like wire, coils out of the top of his shirt and is matted thickly on the backs of his hands. He was dressed in khaki, and it was blackened by sweat at the armpits, across the small of his back, around his belt line.
    Watching him gave me a few moments of self-evaluation. I had invented the reason for coming out. Now that I was here, it seemed feebler. It didn’t have anything to do with Mary Eleanor. I wanted to be noticed. I wanted him to see that Andrew Hale McClintock was still alive, and a shade disgruntled.
    He saw me and turned. “Well, what do you want?”
    “You’re not sore at me, remember? You’re sore at him. I just got here.” I handed him the estimate and he looked at it. “She phone or something? She in a rush?”
    “No. I just thought. I’d bring it out.”
    “So you brought it out. Now you can take it back and put it on my desk where it belongs.”
    “I guess I wanted to see how things were coming along out here. Looks like a lot of progress.”
    “Do your sight-seeing on your own time, McClintock.”
    He turned his broad back to me and marched solidly toward the unfinished front doorway. I was supposed to leap into my heap and race back to my glass-fronted salt mine. A month before I might have taken it. But, as I have said, I was fed up with doing work that made no real demand on what I considered to be my abilities.
    I went out the doorway ten feet behind him, and said sharply, “Hold it, John!”
    That brought him up short. He turned around slowly and I walked up to him, just as slowly. “Just who the hell do you think you’re talking to, McClintock?” he asked me softly.
    “I’m talking, I think, to the guy who pays me. I’m talking to a guy who apparently thinks I’m some stumblebum clerk, or some idiot child. I’m also talking to the guy who painted such a glorious picture of a great and golden future. Sight-seeing! You know, I went back after dinner and worked last night. That’s something you’re not buying with your lousy eighty bucks a week. So let’s both admit you’ve suckered me into doing a year’s work for you and paid me off in promises you had no intention of fulfilling. We’ll call it quits right now, but we won’t shake hands on it.”
    He stood like iron in a sudden reappearance of the hot sun. In the back of my mind was the uneasy feeling he