Read Bright Orange for the Shroud for Free Online Page B

working in Miami Beach, in March. They got him in a few hours by rounding up known sex offenders. They’d thought this one harmless. He’d been tucked away a few times for short falls. Peeping, indecent exposure. His profession was fry cook. All the time he was working himself up to a big one, and Mary Lo had been in just the wrong place at the wrong time. He hadn’t been selective. Just the first one he could get to. They didn’t count the wounds. They just said “more than fifty.”
    The psychiatrists call it a sickness. The cops call it a hell of a problem. The sociologists call it a product of our culture, our puritanical tendency to consider sex a delicious nastiness. Some of them escalate to the big violence. Others stay with a small kick, peering into bedrooms. You can’t give a man life for that, nor even constructive psychiatric help during a short sentence. He cuts brush on the county gang, tormented by theother prisoners, driven further into his private madness. Then he comes out and cuts up Mary Lo, and at once everybody is an expert on how he should have been handled by the authorities, up to and including gelding the very first time he committed a nuisance in a public park.
    “Anybody know anything about Mary Li?” I asked.
    “Just that she went back to Hawaii.” Chook stepped back a pace and looked at me from ears to heels as if examining one of the metal sculptures in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. She shook her head sadly and said, “McGee, I swear, I never really noticed before how many times you’ve been torn up.”
    “This one here happened when I was three. My big brother threw a hammer up into a tree to knock some apples down. The hammer came down too.”
    “Do you
like
being in a crazy kind of business that gets you so close to being killed?”
    “I don’t like to hurt. Every little nick makes me that much more careful. Maybe I’ll get so careful I’ll have to find some other line of work.”
    “Seriously?”
    “Seriously. Miners get silicosis. Doctors get coronaries. Bankers get ulcers. Politicians get strokes. Remember about the alligators? Honey, if
nothing
happened to people, we’d all be ass-deep in people.”
    “And I should see what happened to the other guys. Okay, you can’t be serious.” She marched off, and went down the ladderway like a … a dancer going down a ladderway.
    I could be serious in that particular area, but not on her terms. I’d had enough stitches to make a quilt, and had enjoyed not one of them at all, at all. And most floor nurses have a topsergeant syndrome. I went below and packed the promised pipe. Chook was in the stainless steel galley, banging pots. I went through to the guest stateroom where I had quartered myself. Chook had made that decision while we were provisioning the boat, when she brought her gear aboard. She had declared flatly that she wasn’t going to mouse around. All three of us knew she’d slept with Arthur before his marriage, and the huge bed in the master stateroom—the bed that had been there when I’d won the boat—gave her a better chance to keep watch over him, and if he wanted to make something of it, then she was willing to be compliant on the basis of therapy, affection, old time’s sake, morale—call it whatever the hell you feel like calling it, McGee.
    I had told her I avoided putting names on things whenever possible, and I transferred my personal gear and went back to the hot greasy chore of smoothing out the port engine which, after too much idleness, was running hesitantly, fading when I gave it more throttle, complaining that it wanted its jets cleaned.
    By mid-evening, Arthur Wilkinson felt better. It was a soft night. We sat in three deck chairs on the afterdeck, facing the long path of silver moonlight on the black water.
    I overpowered his reluctance and made him go over some of the stuff he had already told me, interrupting him with questions to see if I could unlock other parts of his