Read Online Bright Orange for the Shroud by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online

to leap up at him and he would land heavily, gasping.
    An old pickup truck stopped as he was trying to get up, and they came and put a bright flashlight beam on him, and from far away he heard a man and woman discussing in casual nasal tones how drunk he was and from what.
    Summoning the last of energy, he said very distinctly, “I’m not drunk. I’ve been beaten.”
    “Whar you want we should take you, mister?” the man asked.
    “I’ve got no place to go.”
    When things came back into focus, he was between the man and the woman on the front seat of the pickup. They took him home. East on the Trail to the turnoff to Everglades City, through Everglades and across the causeway to Chokoloskee Island, and over to the far shore, where these people named Sam and Leafy Dunning lived with their five kids in a trailer and attached cottage and prefab garage. He learned later they had spent a picnic day over on Marco Beach, and when they had picked him up, the five kids and the picnic gear and beach gear were in the bed of the old pickup.
    Sam Dunning, in season, operated a charter boat out of the Rod and Gun Club over at Everglades City. It was out of season, and he was netting commercial with a partner, even shares, using an old bay skiff.
    For three days Arthur could hobble about like an old man. All he could keep down were the soups she fixed for him. He slept a great deal, sensing it was in part an aftermath of the beating, and partly the emotional exhaustion of what had happened to him. He slept by day in a string hammock in the side yard, and by night on a mattress in the garage, waking often to find the children staring solemnly at him.
    Leafy borrowed old clothes from a neighbor, big enough to fit him, while she washed and cleaned and mended what he’d been wearing. He thought that it was the fourth day before she asked him any questions at all, came out into the yard when he was walking around in the afternoon, feeling a little steadieron his feet. There were pieces of old car and pieces of marine engine in the yard, coarse grass half hiding them. He sat in the shade of the live oak tree on an overturned dinghy, and Leafy leaned against the trunk, arms folded, head tilted, a wiry, faded, bright-eyed woman in khaki pants and a blue work shirt, visibly pregnant.
    “Who did beat on you, Arthur?”
    “Boone Waxwell.”
    “All them Waxwells are pure mean as moccasin snakes. You got folks to go to someplace?”
    “No.”
    “What kind of work you do, mostly?”
    “Well … in a store.”
    “Get yourself fired?”
    “I quit.”
    “Clothes you had on were right good. Messed up, but good. And you talk nice, like you had good schooling, and you eat polite. Sam and me, we looked in your clothes, but you got no papers at all.”
    “There should be a wallet, with a license and cards and so on.”
    “And maybe a thousand dollars? If you had one, Arthur, you spilled it out falling all over that road. What we got to know, Sam and me, is if the police got some interest in you, because they can go hard on folks giving anybody house room.”
    “I’m not wanted for anything. Not for questioning or anything else.”
    She studied him and nodded to herself. “All right, then. What you got to have, I guess, is some kind of work to get some money to be on your way, and you can stay on here tillyou got it, paying me board when you start drawing pay. I guess there’s some men got it in them to just roam. That’s all right for kids, Arthur, but a grown man, it turns into something different, and without a steady woman you can grow old into a bum. You think on that some.”
    Sam had found him work on the maintenance crew readying the Rod and Gun Club for the season opening. He sent in the bureaucratic forms necessary to reassemble the paper affirmations of his identity, a replacement driver’s license, a duplicate social security card. When he was laid off at the Club, he found a job as common labor on a development housing