The Bamboo Blonde. Dorothy B. Hughes

      COPYRIGHT, 1941, BY DOROTHY B. HUGHES

      TO BOY

      HIS BOOK

      { 1 }

      CON was bored. If he hadn’t been he wouldn’t have prowled around the living room of their beach cottage, making more noise than the incensed roar of the waves. Below the fogged windows they shattered with nerve-jumping regularity against the sea wall. She liked the pound of the water at high tide. But she didn’t like it tonight. Not with Con bumping against chairs, shaking the floor with his tread, pretending to fix the rented radio. He was bored and she didn’t like it. He had said this would be a second honeymoon. It wasn’t. It was exactly like the first.

      “We’re going to Long Beach.”

      He had announced that before they were two days in Hollywood, with parties scheduled for every party hour, and Griselda wanting to show him off to all of her friends and perhaps-friends.

      When she protested, “But, Con, nobody goes there!” he told her, “You’re nuts. Thousands of people go there. I can prove it by the Chamber of Commerce. The Navy’s there.”

      The Navy wasn’t; a part of the fleet was in the Far East, a part on the Atlantic, fending danger from America. Yet, surprisingly, there was a scattering of gray-towered battleships on the horizon. The papers didn’t tell you that but there was.

      They had come to Long Beach. And he was bored. He was acting as if she were to blame that they were boxed in this old-fashioned wooden beach cottage instead of in the beautiful Malibu home Oppy had urged upon them. Con had been exuberant when they arrived; Barjon Garth was also in Long Beach. She hadn’t liked Garth being there. She knew that there was good reason for his presence; foreign agents had been concentrating on the West Coast. It was to be expected in these times that the head of the X division, highest governmental secret service, would be on hand a part of the time. It was absurd to be uneasy about Con when Garth was in the neighborhood simply because he had once helped out the X chief. That was in the to-be-forgotten past. He had returned to his job on the air waves months ago with no hankering to continue the precarious sideline. Nevertheless, she had been relieved when she heard that the X chief was leaving. She didn’t know then how Con would react.

      Garth had sailed this morning on someone’s exquisite and expensive yacht for a fishing trip in southerly waters and Con was left behind. It was a man’s trip and this was a second honeymoon. He had to stay with her. But he was bored and Griselda was angry, sitting there trying to read, her nerves jumping with every crash of the waves and of Con. If she hadn’t been angry she wouldn’t have gone out with him and she wouldn’t have seen Shelley Huffaker pick him up in the Bamboo Bar.

      It was eight exactly by the rented clock with the bright blue ocean painted on its face. Con said, “Think I’ll go out and buy a drink.”

      She hadn’t spoken to him since seven o’clock, when he had ejaculated for the twenty-third time that day, “God, what I’d give to be with Garth right now!” She hadn’t trusted herself to speak; the anger she’d been suppressing since she began to count the ejaculations was about ready to spill. At that point she was surer than ever that this was only the echo of the first honeymoon; then he’d kept wishing all over Bermuda that he were back at Tony’s on Minetta.

      She spoke now, spoke acidly so that he wouldn’t know there was hurt as well as anger in her. “Don’t tell me all those bottles are empty.”

      “My God,” he said, “you don’t think a bottle’s an artesian well, do you, baby?”

      He laughed and she was more furious. Drinks and fishing, that was all he cared about! But the fury vanquished the hurt with lucky immediacy. He was walking past her chair and he lifted her pale horn-rimmed glasses off her nose, bent his leggy length down to kiss her. She turned her cheekbone to him. She said, “I’ll go with you.” He didn’t act as if he cared one way or the other.

      She went into the one bedroom, slid her white polo coat from a hanger. The ancient cretonne of the wardrobe curtains couldn’t have been any more attractive when new. It looked like pink fish climbing over faded black spots. At that, the cretonne was fully as pleasant as the other things in the house. She put the coat over her baby-blue slacks, took a quick glance in the mirror smoothing down the pale gold of her hair. Her eyes didn’t look as watery as they felt. She returned to her husband.

      “Let’s go,” she said.

      He locked the door with the key. There really wasn’t much sense in locking the cottage, a bent hairpin could have opened any door or window. As they started down the steps to the sidewalk garage she said, “Better let me have it, I may not last as long as you.”

      He laughed again, just as if he didn’t know she was angry and could find out why by asking. But she was thankful he didn’t ask. If he had, she might have capitulated against his blue shirt, and she didn’t want to do that. She was too annoyed.

      He handed her the key. “Oke, baby.”

      There was no reason for garage doors to scream like loons when they were opened. Even rust couldn’t account for such ear-splitting disturbance. It was a part of the poltergeist atmosphere of the whole cottage.

      The headlights of a car stopped where they spotted Con, not her standing in the mist shadows at the foot of the wooden steps.

      It was a girl who caroled, “Con.”

      Griselda couldn’t see her; she could only hear the voice. It didn’t help matters that it was a voice that belonged with beauty; it had the poeticized sea-quality of softness, of lullaby.

      Con turned. “What are you doing here, Kathie?” He sounded surprised and a little amused. He moved over to lean against the door of the open car.

      The girl said, “I thought Walker might be with you.”

      “Didn’t know he was on shore.”

      The gentle voice said, “Yes. I wasn’t at the hotel when he came in. He left a note. I thought maybe he’d dropped in to see you. You’re going out. I won’t keep you.”

      “Just to the Bamboo for a drink. Won’t you come along?” He didn’t speak of a wife inconveniently in the background.

      The girl said, “No thank you, Con. I’d better go back and wait for Walker. I don’t want to miss him again.” The car drove away and Griselda came forward. “Who was that?”

      “Kathie Travis.”

      “And who is Kathie Travis?” She tried not to sound like a wife; she wasn’t very successful.

      “Mrs. Walker Travis. He’s Navy. Lieutenant aboard the Antarctica.”

      She didn’t say any more. He didn’t mention that Kathie Travis was beautiful but doubtless she was. Con’s bar acquaintances in women ran to beauty. If this one weren’t bar, he wouldn’t have mentioned the Bamboo so casually.

      She had never asked him where he located the ramshackle coupe. It was keyed to a high-school sophomore’s purse and choice, noisy and as disreputable, with its peeling black coat and red wire wheels. They could have had a choice of the cars in Oppy’s garages at Malibu.

      Disappointment blurred her eyes but she rubbed it away, pretending it was the night mist now dense on the windshield. He drove the five short blocks to the main street of Belmont Shores, parked the car directly in front of his pet, the Bamboo Bar. She hadn’t been in it before. There was something ridiculously sinister in its look, like the opium-den sets in early movies. She cared even less for the interior; the greenish amber lights were too dim for seeing, especially without her glasses, and they made the color of flesh as ghastly as something photographed under water at sundown.