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strange word, darling? This fellow seems to have some sort of in-group syndrome."
    "Fuzz," the boy said thoughtfully. "Wasn't there some sort of quip about that we never understood, Della?" Boston accent.
    "I don't recall at the moment, dear."
    He put on a minstrel show, end-man accent, doing the Sambo thing very badly. "Hey, you all hear 'bout what happen to Jemima?"
    "No!" she said. "Whut happen to ol' Jemima?"
    "Got herself picked up by the fuzz."
    "Lordy me! That sure musta stung."
    "Hyuck, hyuck, hyuck," I said, unsmiling.
    "Just go away," Della said. "Be cooperative. Go back to your friend."
    "If you had to make a guess, why would you say I came over here?"
    They glanced at each other. The boy shrugged. "I guess the most likely thing would be one of those little speeches about tolerance and miscegenation and all that, so that you can pretend to be so terribly understanding and get some queasy little kick out of it, and get some barroom conversational gambits back wherever you come from, and also, let's see, delude yourself into believing that there is something so awfully swinging about you that you can bridge the communications gap."
    I laughed. I couldn't help it. He was bright. He was so damned right and so damned wrong, all at once. I rocked the chair back and laughed. They looked startled, then angry, then they fought the temptation to smile, and then they were laughing. He had a piercing giggle, and he had a deep, rhythmic bray. We were being stared at. Finally, when I could get my breath, I said, "My name is Travis McGee. Fort Lauderdale, Florida."
    "Della Davis," he said. "I'm Mike Barrington." His was a large, hard, muscular hand.
    "Equal time?" I asked. He nodded. She had the hiccups. "I'm loaded with a lot of kinds of tolerance and intolerance, and the only time I get defensive is when I identify some kind of tolerance or intolerance I didn't know I had, or thought was something else. The only people who need queasy kicks are the ones with the sex hangups, and I think I was a little hung up when I was twelve years old, but not lately. I don't need a new supply of small talk. And if I did, I wouldn't look for the raw material on a hotel veranda. Anybody who gives it any thought knows that there has always been a communication gap between everybody. If any two people could ever really get inside each other's head, it would scare the pee out of both of them. I don't want Page 17

    to share your hopes and dreams, Mike. I just want to communicate in a very limited way, politely, with no stress on anybody."
    "I guess they aren't with the mining company after all," Della said to him. She turned to me. "We noticed you two and decided you weren't tourists. There's a mine up in the hills northeast of the city. Okay, Mister McGee, let's communicate in our limited fashion."
    "If you two haven't been here a month, communication ends."
    "We got here... the second of something. May or June, dear?" she asked.
    "May," said Mike, "and I change my guess. You're looking for somebody's baby darling, so in your nice, personable, reasonable way you can talk baby darling into coming back home to daddy. Or maybe that's daddy you were sitting with over there. And you locate her-or him-and lay on the tickets, the kind you can't cash in."
    "Closer. But that isn't daddy over there. Daddy is back in Florida because he got nearly, but not quite, torn in half. And baby darling went home already. From here. In a box, early this month."
    "Oh sure. The one with the country-day-school nickname. What was it they called her, Del?"
    "Hmmm. Dox? Nax? Bax?... Bix!"
    I put one of the prints on the table, facing Della Davis. She pulled it closer.
    "That one?" I asked.
    " 'Tis she," said Della. "We saw her around. You know. Stay here a while and you see everybody.
    Nod and smile. Didn't socialize. The group she was in, or better the groups she ran with, we don't make those scenes. I've got nothing for or against, you understand. Freedom is being left