The Last One Left

Chapter Five

Cristen Harkinson crawled forward in the little Dutchman, feeling the sailboat right itself as the boy, Oliver, pulled the last of the mainsail down out of the push of the wind off Biscayne Bay. He had managed it, as always, at precisely the right moment, so that the momentum carried them through the slot and into the protected private boat basin south of Crissy’s house, just around the point on which the house had been built, where the basin was sheltered from winds out of any northerly quarter.

With the last of its momentum, it glided at an angle toward the dock. She stood, reached, caught the sun-warm planking, fended the boat to a stop near a mooring cleat, pulled the dock line down and made it fast to the bow ring. Oliver pulled the stern in and made it fast. He had another half hour of work, hosing her down, stowing the gear, buttoning the sailboat up, then mooring her across the angle of the dock where she would ride without rubbing.

Crissy climped up onto the dock and turned and looked down at the nineteen-year-old boy. He had begun his work, keeping his solemn face turned away from her. With each motion he made, the big muscles bunched and slid under the hide of his broad back. The hair on his long brown legs was sunbleached to a powder white, making a strange halo against the orange light of the evening sun.

Standing there, Crissy had a sense of how they would look from the proper dramatic angle. The elegant figure of the tall woman on the dock, hair tousled, salty, bleached several shades of blonde white by all the sailing. Pale blue bikini. Black-hued wraparound sun glasses. Ratsey bag, red and white, swinging from a crooked finger. The body, youthful and taut enough for the bikini, sunned to a gold tinged now with the bronze red of the day on the water, contrasting with the leather brown of the pale-eyed, white-toothed, sailboat boy.

She stood well, remembering the lessons. Grass green, thinking the lessons would aim you right at the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, but you ended up doing your turns and pirouettes in those schlock outfits, pirated designs, in front of the buyers who’d stroke the fabric and call you Crissy-baby, and ordered in hundred dozen lots for little chains nobody ever heard of. At a hundred yards, old buddies, the figure is still twenty years old. But put a hard-focus closeup on the face in the cruel sunlight and it will read thirty, which is just as much a triumph because that is still a half dozen and better years off the truth.

“Oliver?”

“M’am?”

He still did not look up at her standing there above him on the dock. “Now don’t you go running off, hear? I owe you for the last two days, so you come to the house when you’re through here.”

“Yes m’am.”

She went slowly and lazily up the long curve of the stone stairway — wide shallow steps hewn out of coquina rock and set into the slope of the lawn. Halfway up she made a mental wager with herself, turned her head quickly and caught him motionless, hunkered there, sail cover in hand, staring at her. He looked down quickly. Smiling to herself she climbed the last step and crossed the patio to the roofed terrace, walked to the far end of it, rolled the glass door back and went into her bedroom. It was a few minutes before six. She opened the panel in the wall of the lounge portion of the bedroom and turned the television set on. Local news at six on Saturday night.

She opened the door to the bedroom wing corridor and bawled, “Francisca! Francisca, damn it!”

In moments her little Cuban housemaid came scurrying in, eyes wide in mock alarm.

“Damn it, you had to see us come in!”

“I’m not watch. Honest to Jesus, Miss Creesy.”

Local news had begun. “Hold it a minute,” Crissy said. She moved over to the television set.

After a report of a drowning and a bloody automobile accident on the Tamiami Trail and an averted strike, he said, “As yet the large-scale air and sea search in the Bahamas for the missing yacht, the Mu—”

Crissy clicked it off and said, “Did they come and fix that damned pump?”

“Si! Yes. What was in it?” The girl frowned, wrinkling most of her delicate face. She held forefingers a few inches apart. “Una lagartija. Eh?”

“A what?”

“How is it a snake, but has feets?”

“A lizard. You mean a lizard got into the pump?”

Francisca’s smile was full of joy. “Damn well told.” She wore a bright red skirt, white blouse, gold sandals.

“Got a guest, have you?”

“Some friend only I think.”

Crissy stripped off the two bikini halfs, balled them, tossed them to the girl. “Now for once in your life get your mind off your friend and see if you can do three things right. I’m only going to tell you once.”

Francisca gave her deft imitation of nervous, humble fright. We’re trapped in this act of ours, Crissy thought, the cruel mistress and the terrorized servant. But an act makes it easier. You know where you are.

“First, go get that green ice bucket, fill it halfway with ice and bring it here and put it on the bar over there. Next, hang around the terrace until the sailboat boy comes after his money, and then bring him here — not through the place, but by way of the terrace. Third thing, I’ll be going out to eat. So go do as you please until you bring me my coffee tomorrow morning.”

Her cowed repetition of the orders was marred by the little knowledgeable gleam in her chocolate eyes.

As she hurried out, Crissy stared after her, thinking: Better you don’t laugh, you sexy little spook. Don’t tell your friend any funnies about Mees Creesy and the sailboat muchacho. Don’t smirk a smirk, sweetie, because everything has to add up just so, just exactly so, in a game where you don’t dare take a single chance.

She went into her gold and white bath and took a very quick shower. Her body radiated the sun-heat of the sailing day, prickling to the spray of the water. She toweled her cropped hair with muscular energy, brushed it semi-dry, painted her mouth, touched her body with perfume, pulled on a Lilly Pulitzer shift, a coarse, heavy weave in a vertical pattern of wide orange and white stripes, lined with silk. It was short, almost to mid-thigh. At the shoe rack she hesitated, decided to stay barefoot.

She turned on the overhead light in her largest closet, went to the back of it, opened the hinged panel and, biting at her lower lip, dialed the combination on the barrel safe. She opened the cash box, took out two twenties for the boy for the two days of sailing lessons, then took an additional amount to replenish her household and walk-around money. The amount left was dangerously thin. She did not want to count it nor to guess how much might be there.

But it was no longer something to start up the little itchings of desperation, the feeling of bleakness and dread. Instead it gave her a feeling of excitement and tension and hope. This time it would work. It had to work. She would make it work. And it would be an end to any need to scramble, ever again.

“Bless you, Bixby,” she whispered, “you big jolly Santy Claus. You ripe juicy pigeon.”

She closed the safe, tweaked the dial, closed the panel and turned off the closet light as she left.

When Francisca cat-scratched at the screen panel, Crissy was carefully adding the measured ingredients for two Planters Punches in the tall glasses.

“Come right in, please, Oliver,” she called, then heard the panel slide open, slide shut, heard Francisca’s sandal-slap fading swiftly along the terrace stone.

Without turning from the task, she said, “Do sit down, Oliver. Anywhere, please. I want to know why I keep getting into such foul trouble when I try to come about when we’re really dusting along.”

“M’am, I guess it’s on account of the Dutchman, it’s a real tender boat, and you’ve got it in your head you can keep her on the plane coming about, so you try to slam her around too fast. You have to ease her, haul her pretty short when you bring her up to point, then feed it to her as fast as she’ll take it and she’ll get back planing. You can’t yank her around. But — you’re getting better at it.”

She took the two tall glasses up, turned and walked toward him, saying, “Thank you, dear Oliver.” The carpeting, in a pale tone of cinnamon, was laid over foam rubber sheets, and the pliancy of it under her bare feet accentuated her awareness of herself, oiled sockets of hip and knee, the shift in alternating diagonal stress lines pulling the softness of lining against the sunheated flesh, of the stronger odor of her perfume vaporized in her private warmths, of the ice-cold glasses in her hands, of the slippery lining of her underlip where her tongue-tip touched it, even of the slight heaviness and dampness of a sun-white curl bobbing against her temple in the cadence of her walk toward the boy. No western light could enter this room, but a reflected orange-golden light came in, partly from the cocoanut fronds tall enough to reach into the sunlight and turn to copper. Beyond the brown boy she could see the homing boats of Saturday, a few of them, dots on the broad bay, heading northerly to Dinner Key and to the city. In the strange, fading light she felt leonine, softly powerful.

She held a drink to him and said, “I hate these when they’re made too sweet.”

“Please — I got to leave, I really got to leave.”

He stood awkwardly in the shorts and white T shirt, one shoulder higher than the other, eyes moving swiftly from side to side, his vision moving across her at throat level, his throat bulging in an effortful, dry swallow, his hand reaching aimlessly behind him for the catch that would free the sliding panel.

He had a bony face, and not quite enough chin. His ears stuck out, and his upper lip was lugubriously long, and even at nineteen there were the beginning signs of how the brown-dark hair would recede. Poor lamb, she thought as she put the drinks on the nearby table.

She turned toward him, with pretty sigh, query in the tilt of head, moving so that he abandoned the escape place, trying to move casually away from her, with nervous social cough. She felt sad, wise, maternal and utterly gentle. Poor ordinary chick-child, scared almost sick of all the richnesses of maturity. Poor eagle-scout child, with its mama herding it relentlessly toward the ministry. Poor trembler, facing now the fleshy actuality, quite different from all those erotic little night-thoughts it fancied so evil.

“I really got to leave,” he said in the golden stillness, his voice unsteady.

“Of course, dear Oliver. I know.”