Slam the Big Door

Five

At eleven o’clock Mike had been on the beach over an hour. One week ago, at about the same time, he had been looking down from the high aircraft at the tiny chalk-scrawls of surf along the Atlantic beaches. And this Monday was another blandly superb day. A transistor radio, six inches from his head, canceled out any possibility of consecutive thought. He had a Havana station. It pleased him not to be able to understand the words of the singing commercials.

The sun glared red through his eyelids. Sweat ran down his ribs and the sides of his throat. When he became too uncomfortable, he could go into the water again. And when he became famished, he would go back to the house and eat. The present moments were reduced to the ultimate of simplicity.

But, a few minutes after eleven, Troy joined him on the beach. He brought a small ice chest containing cans of beer. He wore faded blue swim trunks and dark glasses. He settled himself beside Mike and said, “Got to replace the fluid you’re losing, chief.”

Mike sat up and said, “I’ll recommend this hotel to all my friends.”

Troy opened two cans, handed one to Mike. The beer was icy cold. Mike watched Troy. The glasses obscured his eyes. His hands trembled. He was tanned, but it wasn’t a healthy color. There seemed to be a tinge of yellow-green in it. Though there was still a hint of heavy-boned power about his body, the muscles were ropy and slack, the belly soft.

“I thought you’d be over in your sales office,” Mike said.

“I phoned Marvin early and went back to sleep. He can handle it. Things are slow right now. If he has to take anybody around, he can lock up and leave a sign on the door. I’ve been going slowly nuts in that place lately. Hell with it. I guess I was the belle of the ball last night.”

“I didn’t see you wearing a lamp shade for a hat. You just quietly folded your tent.”

“Gosnell makes a wicked martini. My seams came un-glued. Mary is full of pregnant silences this morning.”

“How’d you get home?”

“It’s a dreary story, old buddy. I crawled aboard Bart Speeler’s Chris and went to sleep in the cockpit and the morning sun woke me up. I started wobbling up the beach and one of the Tomley kids picked me up in his beach buggy. Did you stay long?”

“We left a little before midnight.”

“Enjoy the party?”

“I think so.”

“Ah, we’re a gay mad lot here on the Key.” Troy finished his beer, scooped a hole in the sand and buried the empty can. He patted the sand down over it, smoothly, carefully, making a small and tidy grave. “Mike.”

“Right here, sir.”

“Yesterday, I was damn rude. I apologize.”

“I needled you.”

“Because I needed it.”

Mike knew that in those few moments the old relationship had been reestablished. No more withdrawal. No more defenses. It made Mike feel glad, and in another way it made him feel weary, because the regained closeness implied an obligation he was reluctant to accept.

“I needed it a long time ago too, Mike.”

“You were in bad shape then. Not like now.”

“Maybe I’m headed for the same place again.”

“That sounds jolly.”

“Honest to God, Mike. I don’t know. I can’t even be honest with myself.” He kept smoothing the beer-can grave. “Asking you down here. I said it was... for you. Good old Mike. My turn to help. Christ! But all the time I was thinking — somebody to steady me. And I didn’t want to think I needed that. That’s why I was so damn nasty yesterday.”

“So it was a call for help?”

“I don’t like to think so. How goddamn weak can I get?”

“How bad off is your project?”

Troy drew a fingernail cross on the beer-can grave. “It’s like this. We rented twenty boards. Fifty dollars a month apiece. Three-year contract. The sign company got the locations and put them up. A thousand-a-month advertising expense. They’re good boards. They show a picture of the place the way it should eventually look. Hell, I pointed one out to you. So we’re behind in the rent. In the contract, when you get behind, the whole amount becomes due and payable. So Signs of Ravenna has turned it over to their attorney. They want twenty-six thousand bucks I haven’t got. If I don’t come up with it soon, they’ll lease the boards to somebody else and I’ll still owe the money — the corporation will. We’ve had to stop the newspaper ads. We can’t give clear titles unless the customer pays cash so we can turn it over for release of mortgage, so I can’t cut pre-development prices down far enough to move the lots to replace working capital.”

“Bank loan?”

“They won’t loan on land, only on our signatures. And only with personal balance sheets. And we’ve put everything into the kitty.”

“Everything?”

“But the house, the boat, the cars and a little cash.”

“How did you get into such a jam?”

“Too optimistic. Thought I could have all the engineering done at the same time. It’s cheaper that way.”

“Couldn’t you develop one small part of it at a time?”

“With what, Mike? With what?”

“How much would it take to get into the clear?”

“Two hundred and seventy-five thousand. That would handle the costs of finishing the Westport Road section, three hundred lots, and the merchandising. The take from that, after mortgage payments, would cover the next section.”

Watching him carefully, Mike said, “Rob Raines told me last night you were going to lose your shirt, and if anybody went in with you they’d lose their shirt too. He said if you asked me for money, he’d set up a date with Corey somebody and they’d educate me.”

Troy’s head had snapped up, his hand motionless over the beer-can grave. “So Raines is in it, too!”

“In what?”

“Haas would like to steal the whole setup. I’m not asking you to put your money in, Mike. I’m not asking you for a thing.” His face changed, mouth going slack. “I don’t think I give a damn. I don’t think I give a hoot in hell what happens.”

“Like New York?”

“Just like New York. I can always make three fast laps, but I fold on the clubhouse turn.”

“Self-pity.”

“Self-analysis, Mike.” He turned his head away. He dug his fingers into the sand, then squeezed until his knuckles went white. In a dull voice he said, “It’s like New York in another sense, Mike.”

“How?”

“Jerranna Rowley is in town.”

Mike felt as if he had been belted under the heart. “What did you say?”

“You heard me. I don’t know where she was. Out west someplace. There was an article about me in a building contractors’ magazine. Just a column. Small builder with new ideas. One of those things.” His voice was listless. “Just one of those things. She didn’t even see it until the article was a year old. She saw it about four months back, in a damn dentist’s office. So she got here in February. She’s in a place on Ravenna Key. Shelder’s Cottages. She phoned me at the office. I... I went to see her.”

“You damn fool! Have you been seeing her often?”

“I guess you could call it that. There’s a man with her. She calls him Birdy. Says he’s her cousin. Who can tell? I guess the shakedown is more his idea than hers.”

“Shakedown?”

“Nothing expensive. She’s into me for — I don’t know — six or seven hundred bucks.” He took the dark glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know, Mike. It’s about that time things started to go sour. When she got here. I was supposed to see her last night. That’s why I got drunk and didn’t. Defensive maneuver. It’s easier to get high than think about it.”

“Troy! Goddamn it, Troy!”

“I know. I didn’t want you to know about it. Pride, I guess. Right back in the same trap. Liquor, Jerranna and things going to hell.”

“How about Mary?”

“Why, I suppose she’ll get the same splendid deal Bunny got. Only it’s going to be a little rougher on her pocket-book.”

“Why wait for Halloween? You can soap dirty words on windows anytime. Be my guest.”

“Ready for a beer?”

“Thank you kindly. For God’s sake, Troy!”

Muscle bulged the corner of Troy’s jaw. “You think I’m enjoying it? You think I get a charge out of wondering if I’m losing my mind? And don’t think I don’t wonder. Often. Sometimes I think it’s as if...” His voice broke. He waited a few moments. “As if I wasn’t put together right. A sloppy assembly job. Some bolts and washers left out. I... don’t want to be what I am.”

“Easy, boy.”

“Isn’t beer for crying into?”

“Can you stay away from her?”

“I don’t know. I’m trying. I’ve tried before. I have the feeling this is my last try before I give up. That’s the sort of thing I should have married. I should have stayed away from ladies.”

“You told me a long time ago that if you ever saw her again, you might kill her.”

Troy shuddered in the hot sunlight. “I came close, Mike. I came damn close. She knew how close I was. I had her by the throat. She looked at me. She couldn’t talk. I could tell by her eyes she didn’t give a damn. She wasn’t scared. If she’d been scared, or fought, that would have done it. I was that close, believe me. I slung her away so hard she bounced off the wall and landed on her hands and knees and looked up at me with her hair falling down across her face and howled with laughter.”

“Does Mary suspect anything?”

“I don’t know. We don’t have much to say to each other. I was careful at first. Now I’m not so careful. It’s like I want to be caught, I guess.”

“I could go see the Rowley woman.”

“What the hell good would that do? What good did it do the last time?”

“Maybe she’s changed.”

“She’s changed. But not in any way that’ll help. Even if I want help.”

“Don’t you?”

“You must get awful damn sick of me, Mike.”

“I should be inspirational. You know. Be a man! Shoulders back! Eyes front!”

“I’m a man, Mike. In a limited sense.”

“There’s one thing about you. You get a compulsion to make a mess. Then you want to roll in it. Goddamn it, you enjoy it!”

Troy stood up. His glasses were back on. Mike could not read his face. He said flatly, “I’m enjoying every minute of it, every delicious wonderful minute of my life. I just couldn’t bear to have it end.” He walked away, his stride wooden.

When all of Ravenna Key was zoned in 1951, due to the dogged efforts of the Ravenna Key Association, every attempt was made to protect the future growth of the Key as a residential area. Based on estimates of future population, certain commercial areas were established which included most of the commercial enterprise on the Key so as to limit as much as possible the number of non-conforming businesses.

However one small business area, midway down the Key, on the bay side, suffered what the owners termed a cruel blow. They insisted that they were being deprived of their rights, that all zoning was socialism. Their particular area was zoned residential. That made the four little businesses non-conforming. Under the law a non-conforming business can continue to exist, but it cannot be enlarged. And, should it burn down, it cannot be rebuilt. It is obviously very difficult to sell such a business. And such a discrimination discourages even normal maintenance.

The four business enterprises, shoulder to shoulder, reading them from north to south, were Whitey’s Fish Camp, Shelder’s Cottages, Wilbur’s Sundries and Lunch, and Red’s B-29 Bar. Whitey’s Fish Camp consisted of a rickety shed where he sold bait, tackle, miscellaneous marine hardware and the random jug of ’shine. He had twenty ungainly scows, painted blue and white, an unpredictable number of five-horse outboards in running condition to be rented with the boats, a gas pump, a big compartmented concrete bait well for live shrimp and mutton minnows, a bewildering display of hand-painted signs, chronic arthritis, a vast moody sullen wife, four kids, an elderly pickup truck, and two ancient house trailers set on blocks near the shed. Whitey and his Rose Alice lived in one, and the kids in the other, and their septic-tank system filtered inevitably into the bay, where the blue and white boats were moored to sagging docks and tilted pilings.

Ma Shelder owned and rented out twenty box-like cottages, arranged in two rows of ten, with just enough space between the cottages in each row so that a car could be parked between them. They were a faded scabrous yellow, with peeling orange trim and green tarpaper roofing, and little screened porches in front. In keeping with the times, Ma called them efficiencies. This was, perhaps, apt, because it would take a high order of efficiency to live comfortably in one of them. There was a wide creaking dock that extended out into the bay so the tenants could sun themselves. Ma lived in a spare cottage, one larger than the others, and nearer the road. The total landscaping consisted of getting a man in to cut things down when the area got too overgrown. Ma, in her day, had danced on three continents and in forty of the forty-eight states. She had raised four children, all dead. At seventy she weighed two hundred pounds, despised mankind, spent most of her waking hours sneering at television, had over twenty-eight thousand dollars in her savings account and was implacably determined to live until she was ninety.

Wilbur’s Sundries and Lunch was a cinder block structure that looked as if it had started out to be a two-car garage. Wilbur’s slattern wife ran the lunch counter, listlessly scraping the grill between hamburg orders. Wilbur paced endlessly through the stink of grease, straightening magazines, dusting patent medicines, counting the packs of cigarettes, sighing heavily. Whenever a customer was spendthrift enough to leave a dime on the counter for the bedraggled blonde, Wilbur, despite his high-stomached bulk, would swoop from a far corner of the store like a questing hawk before the screen door had time to bang shut. On those few occasions when she reached the coin first, he would twist her wrist until she dropped it into his hand, and then, snuffling, she would run out the back door.

Red’s B-29 Bar was a frame structure next door to Wilbur’s. Red had only a beer-and-wine license. He opened at seven to dispense cold packs of beer to Whitey’s rental customers, and remained open until midnight every night. He had draught beer, potato chips, salt fish, pickled eggs, aspirin, punchboards, a jukebox, a bowling machine, a pinball machine, pay phones, a peanut machine, television, contraceptives, tout sheets, some crude pornography and endlessly boring accounts of his flyboy days when he was a C.F.C. gunner.

In spite of the overall grubbiness of the four little businesses, their sun-weathered look of defeat and decay, the community provided a reasonably pleasant refuge for low-income retireds. In fact, one elderly couple had been in one of Shelder’s Cottages for over seven years. The man had his own boat and motor and kept it at Whitey’s for a tiny dockage fee. Unless the weather was impossible, he fished all day every day. She stayed at the Cottages and filled her days with gossip and needlepoint. They ate some of the fish he caught and sold the rest. In the evening they would stroll to Red’s B-29 Bar and have a couple of draught beers, play two or three games on the bowling machine and walk back. Once a week they would drive their old Plymouth into town for a cautious shopping trip, picking up the bargains she had found in the local paper.

There was a certain pleasantness about it. Sun, and the blue bay waters, and idle talk — a fish flapping on the floorboards of the boat — a wind chattering in the palmettos — blue herons stalking the mudflats — the endless brilliance of the nighttime mockingbird, exhausting all the variations of his theme, while a dove talked of sorrow amid a whip-poor-will’s insistencies. Night wind creaked the hingings of the old metal signs, and the widow in Seven cried out in her dream. Rain puddled the dust and hushed the fronds and hurried across the roofs. The high sun swung by, and the years swung by, and spiders as big as teacups spun webs the size of doors. Every year the traffic was heavier on the Key Road, boats more numerous in the bay, fish smaller and fewer.

At three o’clock on Monday afternoon, Mike Rodenska, in the station wagon borrowed from Mary, parked near Ma Shelder’s Cottages. He got out and stood in the white glare of sun on bleached bay shell, then walked around and looked down the double row of cottages. The little porches were empty. Bugs droned the litany of siesta.

A spare old man in sagging shorts, his chest brown as raw coffee, came walking around one of the cottages.

“Pardon me, sir.”

“Eh?” He stopped and looked irritably at Mike.

“I’m looking for a woman named Rowley.”

“Don’t mean a thing to me.”

“She’s with a man called Birdy.”

“Oh, them. Sure.” He scratched the bleached fuzz on his chest. He turned and looked. “The car’s there. Number Five. So they’re in there, or they’re up to Red’s Bar. You the law?”

“No.”

“Hoping you were.”

“Why?”

“Friend of theirs?”

“No.”

The old man glanced toward number Five again, and lowered his voice. There was a New Hampshire flavor in his speech. “D’be no use pretending this is the Parker House. Ma doesn’t give a darn who she rents to long as she’s full up. That pair, they don’t even have the common decency to pretend to be married. T’aint like I’m a prude, young fella. I’ve been around the world nine times and seen things that’d make your blood turn to water, and for thirty-forty years I was wild as they come. Far as I care, they could do it right out here in the open, waving flags, and to me it wouldn’t matter no more’n if they were Airedale dogs. But there’s some folks here get upset easy, and those two, they don’t even care enough to pretend they’re legal. And him renting her out, pimpin’ for her, that doesn’t set too well. When I said that about the law I was thinking of two things, young fella. Either somebody complained loud enough and long enough so the law is looking into it, or I thought maybe the law was catching up. They got that look of people always on the run for one thing or another, and if you’re not the law and not a friend, I’m just thinking maybe you’ve come here as a customer, and if you did I’ve talked too damn much, but I can’t feel sorry.”

“Not that either, friend.”

“I can tell looking at you, you ain’t going to tell me what business you got with those two no matter how I try to find out. So I’m wasting time, mine and yours... They not there, you try Red’s.”

Mike walked slowly to number Five, through the heat and silence of the afternoon. A five-year-old Mercury was parked beside the cottage. It had been altered to sit low on the rear wheels, snout in the air. The windshield was cracked, the body beginning to rust out. It had, at one time, been given a coat of green house paint. It had a look of long and dusty distances, of a hundred thousand miles of going nowhere in particular very fast.

He banged on the screen door of the small porch. The inner door was open. He could see into the cottage where an angle of sun struck a frayed grass rug, a soiled wadded pink towel, a Coke bottle on its side near the towel. He banged again. The place had the flavor of emptiness. He walked over and looked at the car. Torn upholstery. A plastic doll in a grass skirt hanging from the sun visor. Oklahoma plates. Bald tires. Comic books piled in the backseat.

He had a sudden odd feeling about the car. A presentiment of disaster. It seemed to him that he had seen the same car many times. He had covered accidents. He had seen this car before, warped and twisted into ruin, flame-seared and clotted with blood after the bodies were taken out. The wrecker would be looking for a solid place to plant the big hook. And the dangling doll would be there, and the peeling stickers from far places, and the welter of trash in the backseat and on the floor. These were the vagabond cars, the twenty-four-hour cars, dropping like bombs through the many dawns, heading inevitably toward that rendezvous with a pole, a tree, a truck, an abutment.

He walked back out to his car, saw that Red’s was so close there was no point in driving. He walked past the sundries store, where a bulky man with a pinched face was putting the evening newspapers in a rack, the Ravenna Journal-Record, the Sarasota News. BERLIN CONFERENCE STALLED... FIVE DIE IN ARCADIA SMASH... TORNADOS LASH KANSAS... VENICE BYPASS OPPOSED... YACHT AGROUND AT BIG PASS...

He pushed the door of the bar open and walked into a dark and noisy place. After the outside glare it took long seconds for his eyes to adjust. There was a clattering whine of an air conditioner, the drone of compressors in the coolers, the rattling and thudding of the bowling game, the hysterical braying of a television host giving away a twelve-dollar food mixer to a woman with a face like a shy pudding while thousands cheered.

The great tumult, after the silence outside, gave him the impression that he had stepped into a large, busy, jostling celebration. But as his eyes adjusted and his ears sorted and identified the sounds, he realized that there were only four other people in the place. There was a scrawny man with a rusty brush-cut and white eroded face behind the bar, leaning on his elbows, talking above the television din to a brutish-looking young man in a white T-shirt and khaki shorts who sat on a bar stool, bare brown powerful legs locked intricately around the legs of the chair. They both turned to look idly at Mike. The bartender’s eyes were a sun-bleached-denim blue. The young man had an inch of forehead under a towering pompadour of glossy, wavy blond hair, small deep-set simian eyes, a tender little rosebud mouth, and a jaw that bulged with bone and gristle. On his left biceps, across the cantaloupe bulge of his flexed arm, was the complicated tattoo of a faded pink rose in full bloom.

Jerranna Rowley was at the bowling machine, competing with a wide-bellied young man in gas-station khaki. Mike moved onto the stool nearest the door, ordered a draught beer, left the change from his dollar on the bartop. Red moved back to continue his idle conversation with the wavy blond. Mike half-turned to watch Jerranna. He saw her bend, and aim, and concentrate and roll a strike and give a snort of triumph.

When she turned and looked toward the television, awaiting her turn, he saw her face clearly. What was she now? Twenty-five? So little change. The same round face and oddly small head, and welter of mussed tan hair, and the pale gray eyes that bulged a little, the fatty contours of the mouth framing the large, ridged, yellow-white teeth, the long neck and the narrow shoulders. She wore knee-length tight red pants, a jersey T-shirt of narrow red and white horizontal stripes, with the red of the shirt the wrong red to wear with the red of the pants. She wore dusty black ballet slippers, and her bare ankles looked soiled.

He noted the changes, one minor, one major. The minor change was a puffiness around her eyes. The major change was in her figure. She had that same scrawniness, the loose, indolent, shambling, somehow arrogant way of handling herself. Her breasts, small, high, sharp, immature, widely separated, obviously unconfined under the jersey shirt, were unchanged. The change had occurred from lean waist to knee, and was accentuated by the red pants. There, in thighs and buttocks and lower belly, she had become heavy, rounded, bulging, meaty — a gross and almost obscene flowering. It was a startling contrast to the rest of her, as though she were the victim of a casual assembly of the major portions of two different women.

The game ended. She won. She thrust out a narrow palm and he heard her crow, “Pay me, boy!” The voice was rawer, huskier, more ribald in its overtones and nuances. The man paid her. She turned, grinning, and walked toward the bar, and he noticed something he had not observed before, that she was slightly knock-kneed. Halfway to the bar she turned and looked at Mike. And stopped abruptly, lost the grin. She looked puzzled. She nodded to herself and found a grin of slightly different shape, more mocking, and came directly toward him.

He got up from the stool. “Always manners,” she said. “I remember that. I know it’s Mike, but the rest of it is gone.”

“Rodenska,” he said, and briefly clasped the skinny chill of her outthrust hand, noticing the fading saffron hues of a great bruise that reached from the edge of her sleeve to her elbow.

“I thought about you a lot. You were so cute that time. Honest to God, you were so cute, Mike.”

“I was a doll.”

The beefy man had gotten off his stool. He came over to them, thumbs in his belt, his face dangerous in its utter stillness.

“What makes?” he asked, his voice high and thin, unsuitable for him.

“An old friend, Birdy. Birdy, this is Mike.”

“Hiya,” Birdy said. Muscles bunched the arm as he put his hand out. Mike braced himself for a childish display of strength that might be highly painful. But the hand in his was warm, dry, soft, so utterly boneless and flaccid it was like grasping a glove filled with fine loose sand.

“Where’d you know him?” Birdy asked.

“It was when I was in New York the first time, a long time ago. Five years maybe. He was buddy with Jamison. Like I told you he told me an old friend was coming down but that was all he said and I didn’t know it was Mike. This was the guy I told you, honey, tried to bust me and Troy up but he didn’t have the picture.”

“How about that!” Birdy said.

“It’s like they say, a small world,” Jerranna said. They both stood and smiled at him. Though the mouths and faces were in no way alike, there was a chilling similarity in the smiles. They looked at him with a kind of joyous malevolence, an innocent evil, like two small savage boys — one holding the cat and the other holding the kerosene.

“You just happened to drop in here?” Birdy said wonderingly.

“Not exactly.”

Birdy studied him. “Oh.” He turned to Jerranna. “Find out the pitch,” he said, and went slowly back to his stool, swinging his shoulders as he walked, lifting a slow hand to pat the fat glossy sheaf of hair over his ear.

“Two brews here, Red,” Jerranna called and got onto the stool beside Mike’s.

She turned on the stool, forked her hair back with spread fingers, and beamed at Mike. “It’s good to see you, cutie.” She touched a fingertip to her lips, reached out and touched the dampened tip of the finger to the top of his head. “You lost something up here, Mike. A fella told me once a perfect way to save your hair. Save it in a cigar box. How about that? In a cigar box.”

“You’ve changed a little.”

She slapped the hip pocket of the red pants. “Just call me Satch. Honest to God, nothing I do does any good. All kind of exercises. You’d die laughing watching me. You wanna hear a hell of a measurement? From top to bottom I’m twenty-six, twenty-two, thirty-seven. Isn’t that a hell of a thing? Birdy says I got me a low center of gravity. He says I’m one-third Miss America. Birdy’s got a real sense of humor.”

She gulped the beer with automatic greed, her long thin throat working. The years had coarsened her. He had detected a certain sensitivity, a capacity for imagination, in the girl in New York. But the years and the roads, the bars and the cars and the beds and the bottles — they all have flinty edges, and they are the cruel upholstery in the dark tunnel down which the soul rolls and tumbles until no more abrasion is possible, until the ultimate hardness is achieved. So here she sat, having achieved the bland defensive heartiness of a ten-dollar whore.

But there was more than that. She had retained that unique sexual magnetism which had no basis in either face or figure. It was a dark current generated in some unthinkably primitive source, a constant pressure which tugged the male mind into grubby yet shamefully enticing imaginings. In the back alley of the mind of every man there is a small, black, greasy pool of evil, an unawakened capacity for foulness, a place of guilt. She could walk through your house, past all your prides and glowing purposes, ignoring your display of awards for small victories, and take you out the back door and down the alley to the brink of the blackness you have learned to ignore, and point at it and smirk with an ancient wisdom and say, “See what we found?”

If all men are alcoholics, she is the bottle. If all men are compulsive gamblers, she is the gaming table. If all men are thieves, she is the open, unguarded safe. If all men are suicides, she is the knife, the rope, the bullet. In fair exchange for your soul she offers self-disgust and unavoidable repetition.

The tug of evil was, if anything, stronger than before.

“Who is Birdy?” he asked.

“Sort of a kissin’ cousin. We teamed up a long time ago, Mike. Over a year. We been all over hell and gone. When there’s a couple you get in less jams. And it’s easier to make out. What’s on your mind, Mike? You trying to be a blocking back for Jamison again?”

“I guess so.”

“He says he got in real bad shape after I took off. Drunk himself out of his big job and into a crazy house.”

“That’s right.”

“But he’s doing okay again, isn’t he?”

“Do you care?”

“Sure I care! He’s not a bad guy. But like I told you before, anything he does to himself isn’t my fault. If a guy goes overboard, he goes overboard.”

“Sure, Jerranna. Sure. And you came down here by accident and phoned him by accident.”

She frowned. “Well... I didn’t especially want to. But we weren’t making out so good and I saw that thing about him and tore it out of the magazine and showed it to Birdy and told him about New York and all. You know, you get older, you think of angles. I wasn’t high on coming here, but Birdy and me had never been in Florida together, and the other times I was here it was Miami and Jax only, and he kept at me until finally I said okay. And you know... hell... if you’ve had a guy on the ropes one time you want to find out if you still got that old black magic.”

“You found out you’ve got it.”

“Sure thing. I set it up with him and he came over to the cottage and I’d sent Birdy the hell away, and for about fifteen minutes I’d thought I’d had it. He spent fifteen minutes marching back and forth, calling me everything in the book, yelling at me, acting like he was working up to beating me up. Those old poops that live there must’ve got a real earful that night. Then he made a big jump at me. Scared hell out of me. And the next thing I know he’s hanging on to me and bawling into my neck and telling me how much he missed me.”

“What’s this shakedown angle?”

She stared at him. “Would you kindly explain that, please?”

“Shakedown. How do you explain it? Money. He’s given you money. There must be a reason. To keep you from going to his wife?”

She gave him a look of complete disgust, followed by a short explosive laugh. “Good Christ! Shakedown! I tell him we’re running broke so we got to go over to the east coast and get jobs, so he gives me a hundred or one-fifty and we stay.”

“It’s a living.”

“Mike, don’t get it in your head we’d stay in this stinking place the rest of my stinking life. One day maybe soon it’ll be me or Birdy getting up and looking around and saying, ‘Let’s roll it.’ And in twenty minutes we’ll be packed and gone, and it may be noon or midnight when we take off. That’s the way we are. That’s the way we want to be. It’s the only way to ball it, cutie, the only way to keep the moss off the rock.”

“So it’s just like it was last time, Jerranna?”

She bit the corner off her thumbnail. “Just about. Hey, you know what you can buy now? Safety belts for bar stools. Isn’t that a jazz?”

“Hilarious.”

“You want to try to beat me a game?”

“No thanks.”

“Where was Troy last night? I hung around because he said he’d show but he didn’t.”

“He fell over a martini.”

“It figures. He just can’t handle it good. He ought to let it alone.”

“Think of the reasons he has to drink.”

“Look at how I’m bleeding, Mike. You’re still cute. Say, you know you got a real good tan? Birdy tans good, but I just get all over freckles. Buy me another brew. Hey, Red!” She turned on the stool to face him more squarely. “You know, you walked out on me one time. You going to do it again? I know what you’re thinking. I always can tell when somebody is thinking the way you are.”

“You told me that the last time. Do you have to get approval from Cuz?”

“No. It’s like this, Mike. I do what I want. He does what he wants. And he doesn’t care because it isn’t his main kick anyway. He’s a real seldom man.”

“With or without approval... no thanks.”

“Still scared of your wife, I bet.”

“That’s it. That’s my trouble. I’m chicken.”

“Too bad, Mike. Real too bad.”

“Suppose I could dig up a thousand dollars. That would take you two a long way.”

“Why would you do that? You Jamison’s brother?”

“Would you take it and go?”

“What if we were about to go anyway?”

“Then I made a thousand-dollar mistake.”

“You wouldn’t have it on you.”

“Not exactly.”

She studied him, chin on her fist. “We should trade in that bucket. It’s got a high-speed shimmy. Drives Birdy nuts. I’m interested, Mike. But he gets funny sometimes about the money thing. If he gets the idea anybody is trying to buy him, he flips. So let me put it to him easy. He’s got a lot of pride. You know. And I can let you know. You got a phone?”

“I better stop by.”

“This is Monday. Come by Thursday with the money. It should be in tens and twenties, Mike, on account of it’s hard for us to change bigger money. They always want to know where we got it. Somehow I’ve never given much of a damn about money. Funny, isn’t it? There’s a skinny old poop in one of the cottages came creeping up offered me fifty dollars. He’s maybe a hundred and nine — age and weight both. Saved it up out of his Social Security, I betcha. Maybe one day I got to go that route, but I’m not ready yet. Anyhow, it woulda killed him. You going someplace? Aren’t you even going to finish the brew? I can if you can’t. See you Thursday, boy scout.”

The door swung shut behind him. The sun, low over the Gulf, glared into his eyes. A red truck went by, stirring up a small whirlwind that pasted a piece of newspaper against his leg. The air smelled like hot asphalt and dead fish. He took a deep breath and said a filthy word and walked slowly to the station wagon.

He drove into Ravenna, wired his bank for money, and got back to the Jamison house at dusk. Debbie Ann and Shirley McGuire were walking slowly from the beach toward the house, laden with gear, gleaming with sun oil.

He met them after he had parked the car and gotten out.

“I’m a hundred and nine,” he said. “I’ve saved a fortune out of my Social Security. The three of us could go to Ceylon, swim at Mount Lavinia, have tall frosty ones at the Galle Face, dine at the Silver Faun, wander through the botanical gardens at Kandy, and be back here in a week. All set?”

“My goodness!” Debbie Ann said. “Could you survive it?”

“It will probably kill me. That’s what I’m counting on. Incidentally you both look sweet, fresh, pretty and decent. It’s a sort of contrast I won’t explain at the moment.”

“Have you been out in the sun all day without a hat?” Shirley asked.

“Oh, this is just senility in action. It’s a kick I’m on.”

“Go sit by the pool, Ancient One,” Debbie Ann said, “and pretty soon we’ll be slave maidens and bring you something tall, cool and delicious.”

He had noticed the other cars were gone. “Where is everybody?”

“Troy is probably working. Mother Mary borrowed my little bug to go to some kind of committee meeting. Durelda went home early with a toothache. We’re on our own, buddy.”

But Mary returned before the girls had finished changing. They all had a drink by the pool as dusk turned to night. Shirley agreed to stay for dinner if she could help. She phoned her aunt and explained. Her call to her aunt emphasized in everyone’s mind that Troy hadn’t arrived and hadn’t phoned, but no one spoke of it. They delayed dinner and finally ate, and after the women had cleaned up, they played bridge.

Shirley was Mike’s partner. It was almost immediately obvious that Mary and Debbie Ann were the superior players, and could have won handily if Mary had been able to keep her attention on the game. She alternated between brilliant play and gross error.

The talk was aimless, a bright and meaningless thread woven through the dark fabric of tensions. There was the click and whisper of the cards, the bright cones of light, the idiot faces of kings and queens, the perfume of the women and the gleam of their hair — their light voices and the small formalities of their smiles.

The rites and codes of the game had, in time, a strangely hypnotic effect on him, leading him into a fantasy that at first amused and then disturbed him. He slumped, heavy-lidded, and looked at the quick oval glintings of their fingernails and thought, This is a deceptive plastic, almost natural. Their eyes are made of finest tinted glass rolling realistically in a special lubricant. Debbie Ann’s brow took a long time to make, inserting the delicate copper-gold wire into the delicate plastic, warmed by the mesh of the invisible heating system.

And he thought that he was utterly alone in the world, easing his emptiness with these clever toys, able to pretend, for a little while, that they were real. But in time he would tire of the game and get up and go to each of them in turn and expose the little control panel set into the small of each tender back, and press the proper silvery stud. As he did so, each face in turn would go utterly blank and dead and they would get up in a wooden way and walk off one at a time to a closet where they belonged and line up, glassy and motionless in the darkness. Should he want one of them to cook for him or sing for him or swim with him, he had only to make his selection, press the proper stud, clearly marked, and the programmed behavior pattern, a card with a printed circuit, would drop into place. This is what we have had to do since all the women left. And if there is need for love, there is a stud for that, a choice to make, programmed after the patterns of the great courtesans, nimble, tender, delicately avid, quite realistic, utterly without significance.

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I am alone, he cried, crouching and howling back in the desolated ballroom of his mind, his anguish echoing amid the bedraggled crêpe paper and soggy balloons of the party that was forever ended. So damned awful alone. No kiss for the bruise. No apron to hide in....

“I’ve had enough,” Mary said. “How about you people?”

“Golly, it’s nearly midnight,” Shirley said. “I didn’t realize.”

“Nightcap before I drive you home?” Debbie Ann asked.

“No thanks, honey.”

After they left, Mary went to the edge of the living room and stood looking out at the patio. There was a rigidity in her stance. She stood with her head slightly tilted, as though she were listening to something very faint and far away.

His empathy for the little signs of agony made him feel ham-handed, dull, awkward. “Mary?”

She turned slowly, rubbed the back of her hand against dampness under her eyes, smiled in a crooked way and said, “Stupid, I guess.”

“Is it?”

“It’s... wondering what I’m doing wrong. Not knowing the right way to handle it.”

“Believe me, you’re not doing anything wrong.”

“I’ve tried so many things some of them must be wrong. Scenes. He walks out. Indifference. He doesn’t seem to care. Where did he go, Mike? Oh, I don’t mean now, tonight. He went somewhere, inside himself. I love him. I can’t find him. It’s so damn difficult trying to be an adult. When he... shames me.”

“It’s a kind of sickness, maybe.”

“He’s never told me very much about... what happened to him in New York, before he came down here. It was pretty bad, wasn’t it?”

“Pretty bad.”

“Mike... if I knew all about it... if you could tell me, if it wouldn’t be a kind of disloyalty for you to tell me... it might help me understand. We used to have such... fun.”

He sat down with her, sat close beside her on the couch, and told her. When they heard Debbie Ann drive back in he stopped, but she went to her room without coming in. At one point she took his hand and clung to it tightly, and he did not believe she was consciously aware of doing so. He tried to make it as factual as the ten thousand news stories he had written.

“This,” she said blankly, her eyes very round, “is the very same woman?”

“But you shouldn’t get the idea this is... you know, a fatal fascination. I don’t know how to explain what I feel. It’s like a symbol of something. Of a flaw. Somehow he hates himself. She’s a club he beats himself with. I know him, Mary. He’s a good man. That’s the hell of it. From the time the war ended until that mess in New York it was like he was pulling something inside himself tauter and tauter, straining at something, and then it snapped, and, like a compulsion, he destroyed everything that meant anything to him. Bunny is a fine woman. You’re a fine woman too, Mary. You fell in love with the goodness in the guy. It’s a sickness. And I think there’s a pattern. He’ll try to destroy everything this time, too.”

“I won’t let him, Mike. I won’t let him do that to himself. Why should he — despise himself?”

“I don’t know. He had a little psychiatric treatment last time. Not much. The doctor said he didn’t respond well to the treatment, wouldn’t cooperate. He had the idea it all went back to a thing during the war. He got that out of him with sodium pentothal.”

“What happened?”

“First you got to understand this was a decent kid from a decent home, bright and sensitive and essentially kind. We had to turn a lot of those kids into killers, fast. It didn’t leave any mark on the louts. It never does. But it can be a hell of a thing to do to an imaginative kid. He volunteered himself into the Corps on December eighth when the lines were long. They did their best to brutalize him in boot camp. He’s got ability. He can do a hell of a lot of things well. They pushed him up fast. We were learning how to fight a war, and making mistakes that would sicken you. As a sergeant, a platoon leader, after forty days of nightmare, he got sent a stupid, pointless patrol in command of ten men. Later on, when he’d gotten smarter, he would have gone far enough to be out of sight, dug in, and come back at dawn and faked a report. He made the patrol. It didn’t accomplish anything. He was ambushed and lost six men and managed to get clear with the other four. They were cut off. They had to make a big circle. They crawled. A snake got one in the throat and he died in ten seconds. They got separated from another one somehow in the darkness. He was never seen again. Three left. Once a big Jap patrol walked by, close enough to touch. They didn’t know where the hell they were. Later a sniper got one of them through the head, and the other in the belly. He dragged the wounded one away. A two-hundred-pound man. He finally got back to the lines, fourteen hours overdue, carrying the wounded man on his back. But by then the wounded man had been dead, they estimated, for three or four hours. Once we got drunk in Melbourne. He told me about it, telling it as if it was a long funny story, grinning. He laughed when he was through and then he started to cry. I never heard a man cry like that. I hope never to hear it again. He felt it was his fault, losing them like that. The ambush, the snake, getting lost... all his fault. Ten guys he knew well. Ten guys who believed he could take them out and bring them back. It’s a good bet nobody could have. Maybe something snapped right there. Maybe that’s when they should have taken him out. But they left him in and he made them a good officer and later a good company commander. Before that patrol, maybe it had all been sort of brave and glorious adventure to him. After that it was just dirty, bloody work. And he learned his trade.”

“My God,” she said softly. “Oh, my God.”

“I don’t know, Mary, but I think that’s as close to the reason as anybody is ever going to get.”

“And that woman is just... I’d like to see her.”

“I think it would be better if you didn’t. I think it would just make it harder to understand, seeing her.”

“Could we get him to a doctor?”

“I could try. I could try to do that.”

“You think she’ll leave?”

“I’m sure she will. But I don’t know when. Maybe Thursday when I give her the money.”

“I’ll pay you back for that.”

“No point in that. It’s hard to get used to the idea a thousand bucks isn’t important money. But it isn’t. And... you might get cleaned out, Mary. I guess you know that.”

“I know it. Yes.”

“It scare you?”

“A little, I guess. Yes, it does. But... what is happening to Troy is more important. I don’t... need all this. I didn’t earn it. We could live on what he was making before, as a builder. Debbie Ann has her own money. It would just be the two of us.”

“I want to poke around a little. I want to look into that land deal. There’s something funny about it.”

“Poor Mike. You came down for a rest. We’re all leaning on you. It isn’t fair. Tell me what you think I should do. How should I... react?”

“You won’t like this, Mary.”

“Try me.”

“I think you should get the hell out for a while.”

“Go away when he...”

“You’re one of the things he wants to destroy. Like I said, sort of a symbol of self-destruction. Going away takes some of the pressure off him, the need to hurt you and keep hurting you.”

“I... I guess I understand.”

“You ought to pack and leave in the morning. Tell him you want to go away and think things over. Don’t be emotional about it. Pick a spot and tell me, so I can be in touch with you. It got rough after she took off the last time. It might get just as rough again. I’ll do what I can. The land deal, the doctor, the woman.”

“Mike. Mike, I’m so...”

“Where will you go?”

“I... don’t think I want to visit anybody... and I don’t want anything fancy. I think I’ll drive over and stay in the Clewiston Inn. No. That would be too far. I wouldn’t feel right about it.”

“Why don’t you just drive up to Sarasota and check into a motel and give me a ring when you’re settled?”

“All right. I’ll have Debbie Ann drive me up so you’ll have a car here. She can tell you where I am. I can come back by cab if there’s an emergency, and she can come get me if there isn’t. I... don’t know why I should feel better. All I’m doing is leaning on you.”

Her eyes were wet. He kissed her good night, an impulse which surprised him but which she took gratefully and naturally, clinging to him for a short shuddering moment.

After he was in bed he spoke to himself harshly. The big mister fixit. Self-appointed. What do they matter to you? What does anybody matter to you? Just the boys. What thanks did you get last time? Did they strike off a medal?

He wanted, dolefully, desperately, to be back in the house in West Hudson. When you were in one room, it was if she was in the next room. The little sounds of housekeeping. That wild little yelp of exasperation when she broke something or burned something — a sound that was almost, but not quite, a dirty word. The quick fragrance. The things around her that she touched and loved.

So lie in this strange bed and go over all the times you were cross and cruel, the times you made her cry, and all the gestures of affection you never made, the presents you never brought to her, the days that had gone by without an avowal of love.

But there had been that one thing denied to so many others, the chance to say good-by. “It’s like I’m running out on you,” she had said. “No time to pack. No time to sort things. No chance to clean the closets. You’ll have to love our grandchildren enough for both of us.” He had promised her he would be duly doting.

He lay in the three o’clock darkness. A car went down the Key. A night heron flapped by, hooting with maniacal derision. Tears, heavy as oil, ran out of his eyes. His hands were fists. His throat felt rusty. He heard an airliner.