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.They said it was a miracle half a dozen or more people weren't killed, instead of just one man seriously injured, a local bank executive.T.Harlan Bowie had to be pry-barred and torchcut out of his squashed Buick, and there was so much blood the rescue people were in a big hurry.As it turned out, they would have done a lot better taking it slow and easy rather than turning him and twisting him and working him in muscular style out of the metal carapace.Nobody could prove anything afterward.The lacerations were superficial.But there was a fracture of the spine, and between the second and third lumbar vertebrae the unprotected cord had been pinched, ground, bruised, torn, and all but severed.Nobody could ever say whether the accident had done it, or the rescue efforts.And it killed him-from the fracture point on down to his toes.Meanwhile the fates were laughing dirtily in the wings at another aspect of the treatment they were giving the poor, sad, sorry son of a bitch.T.Harlan Bowie had always been both shrewd and lucky with what Liz used to call "Harlie's funny little stocks." He liked to put his eggs in a couple of baskets and watch the baskets like an eagle.The day they told him they wanted to take the top of Liz's skull off, he stopped watching the baskets.They were a couple of little technology companies.He had about an eighty thousand investment in them, evenly split.It was not savings, because bank officers don't make enough to save money like that after taxes.It was the pyramided gains of a dozen years of those funny little stocks.His personal broker would call once in a while and try to report what was going on, but Harl didn't want to talk about it or hear about it or even know about it.After Liz died, he was too upset about being so damned alone, and about Bix, to have even the slightest stir of curiosity about his two little dog stocks.Then, of course, there were the weeks in the hospital, and by early July they moved him from the hospital to an elegant place that was a combination rest home and therapy center.When he found out that the tab was running seventy-five a day plus extras, it stimulated the money-nerve and he began to check things out.An old and good friend had emptied out the house on Cricket Bayou, the redwood and coquina stone house Liz had loved so, had stored Harl's personal stuff, and had gotten a very good price for the house the day after it was listed.The personal accident and disability and major disaster insurance was paying off handsomely.His attorney had negotiated a surprisingly fat settlement from the company which handled the trucker's liability insurance.The premature retirement benefit and the bank insurance disability income clause were spewing more money diligently.So he called his broker finally and heard the awed, hushed and respectful tone, and finally comprehended that the two funny little technology stocks had both come out with a couple of earnings quarters of a fantastic richness, that they had valuable patents in areas Harl had never even heard of, that one was listed on the big board and the other one had applied, and the stock of both of them had been generously split a couple of times.So in one of them, what had cost him six dollars was worth two hundred and fifty, and the laggard had gone only from eight dollars to a hundred and twenty.So there was upwards of two million two, or an aftertax one million six.He laughed after he found that out; he laughed himself sick.He had his broker arrange a negotiated sale through the floor specialists, and he put the tax money aside in treasury bills, and he stuffed the rest of it into tax-free municipals, and there he was all of a sudden with a tax-free income coming in on the basis of like two hundred and forty dollars a day forever, and it was money he didn't have to touch because what was coming in from all other sources was more than sufficient to his needs, even in Garden Suite Number Five in Tropicana Grove Retreat.His lawyers had been trying to locate Bix in Mexico to tell her that daddy had been badly injured.But the last plate had to smash and did so when a man with a polite and careful voice tracked T.Harlan Bowie down by long distance from the State Department to tell him that Miss Beatrice Tracy Bowie had been killed near Oaxaca when the vehicle in which she had been riding had gone off a mountain road, and the Mexican authorities wanted to know where the body was to be shipped and who would arrange and pay for the shipment.Poor sick sorry rich and sad son of a bitch.All you can say is: Well, that's the way it goes sometimes.It goes very bad sometimes because they give you the bad in great big indigestible wads.As if they want to write you off in a hurry.As if the idea is to tear down your whole scene and sow the area with salt and acid, and be off looking for the next fellow who happens to be standing and smiling and thinking that life is pretty good lately.So only-daughter was airfreighted back to eternal rest beside mother Liz in one of those happyvale places where the markers are flush with the ground level, the walks and gates have names, and stereotaped organ music comes wafting out of the pole-mounted guaranteed weatherproof highcompliance speaker systems.Nobody knew whether she had enjoyed Mexico.So three days ago T.Harlan Bowie got Meyer on the phone and they had a long talk, and then Meyer said I should accompany him to Miami and talk to a friend of his.I said I did not want to talk to anybody about anything, because it had been a very nice cruise and I wanted to slob around and savor it in full measure.Meyer then reminded me that I had met Bix Bowie, and that last year, a week or so after her mother's funeral, he had brought her around and we had gone with her and some other people on the Flush up the waterway, and the girl had seemed to have a good time, but it was hard to tell.He explained that he had been a sort of unofficial godfather to the girl when she was smaller, before she had gone away to school.It stirred my memory, but I could not get a clear image of the girl herself.The world seems overful of quiet pretty blondes lately, and the trouble is that when they are silent and withdrawn one no longer knows whether it is shyness, total disinterest, or a concealed and contemptuous churlishness [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]