couldn’t get away from the casino, the least I could do was to try to safeguard my own neck,
and I wasn’t doing that by remaining in this out-of-the-way spot with this blonde who was
one jump lower than an animal.
“I guess not,” I said. “I’ve just remembered I’ve work to do. You wouldn’t like to drive me
back?”
The cute little smile went away as if wiped off by a sponge.
“I don’t get it,” she said, and her voice went shrill.
“Never mind: I’ll walk,” I said. “You go ahead and have your swim.”
I knew she’d take a swing at me, and she did. I gave her the satisfaction of landing on me.
It would have been easy enough to have slipped inside her flying hand, but I didn’t want her
to feel all that frustrated. For her size she carried a good slap. It made my cheek burn.
“So long,” I said, and walked away. I didn’t look back, and she didn’t yell after me.
Instead of keeping to the road I moved through the palmetto thicket, heading back the way I
had come, but not paying much attention to where I was going. After a while I realized I had
been walking for some time and I was still not within sight of the casino.
I paused to look around me. Over to my right I could see the blue, almost motionless ocean
through the trees. To my left was a forest of mangroves. I had no idea now if I were walking
away from the casino or towards it, and knowing I should get back there, I got worried.
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This stretch of beach was as lonely and as deserted as a pauper’s funeral, and I was in two
minds to turn back and make a fresh start when I heard a girl singing. She was singing
Temptation a song that had always given me a creepy sensation whenever I’d heard it.
She wasn’t tearing into it as most singers do, but singing it in an absent-minded kind of
way, as if her mind were only half concentrating on the song.
I moved forward cautiously, wanting to catch a glimpse of her before she saw me. From the
sound of her voice she’d be around the next clump of mangroves.
My shoes made no sound in the soft sand. I got behind a shrub and peered over it.
She was sitting on a camp-stool, an artist’s easel in front of her, and she was painting in
water-colours. I couldn’t see the painting, for she was facing me, and I wouldn’t have
bothered much if I could have seen it. I looked at her: she was the only picture I wanted to
look at.
She wore a blue, and white bolero jacket that left her midriff bare, a pair of white shorts,
and blue plastic and cork sandals. She was bare-headed, and her thick, short hair looked like
burnished copper in the strong sunlight. She was as different from the blonde curie as a Ming
vase is from a vase you win at a shooting-gallery, and lovely without being sensational. Her
eyes were big and blue and serious; her mouth, with just the right amount of lipstick, wide
and generous, and her figure neat, compact and curved where it should be curved.
I stood looking at her. The Scotch was still giving me a false sense of security. I seemed to
have stepped out of the darkness into the sunlight, and to have turned my back on something
that was as unreal as a bad dream. Just to look at this girl, singing to herself, unaware of me,
made Della and Reisner, and the immediate horrible future, go out of my mind the way dirty
water leaves a sink when you pull out the plug.
III
I stood for maybe a minute, listening to her song, and watching her sun-browned hand and
the paint-brush at work, wondering who she was and how she came to be in such an out-of-the-way place. Then suddenly she must have felt me watching her, for she looked up and saw
me. She gave a little start and dropped her brush.
I came out from behind the shrub.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. I heard you singing and wondered who it was.”
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