Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

The silence in the room was intense, awed, as deadly as fatal disease. She made a chewing sound. “Knew when it was sour. Stuck his little toy gun in his ear. Had it right up against the gunnel where I could pick it up in the dark. Sweet dumb jackassy kid thumping and banging around in the bottom of that boat. Nothing at all left in his head but getting laid. Nothing. Hit my knee getting off onto my dock. Aimed him off, southeast, loop on the tiller bar. Know what?”

“That’s enough!” Palmer Haas shouted at her, getting to his feet.

“I thought it was all roses,” she said. “Then I looked in at my bed and it was like something suddenly sliding sideways in my head. That thing I fixed in my bed was me! And the thing outside looking in, it was made of a wig and a pillow and towels.”

Haas moved toward her saying, “Stop talking, Cristen!”

She straightened herself from her hunched over position, her face showing strain. “I don’t know. I keep getting these cramps all the time, like I should woops my cookies, but I can’t make it.” She shook her head. “Funny. Like when I was thirteen, waiting down in that storage place off the furnace room, in the dark, wondering about rats, waiting for Mister Liborio to come and do it. I made him get me a whole five pound sack of that candy, then I didn’t have to give a shit whether old Satchel-Ass laid a demerit on me or not, but you know, it spoiled the game, jumping the squares to see who’d win, because what’s the point in winning when you got enough hid to make you sick of candy?”

Haas, standing near her, reached to take her arm, apparently to try to get her attention, to make her stop. When he reached, she dodged violently, arm coming up to guard her head from a blow. Still holding her arm up, she stood in a crouch, and looked up at Haas, wary eyes looked out from under the crooked elbow, mouth making the childish chewing motions.

“I’m your lawyer,” Palmer Haas said gently. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

She lowered her arm and straightened up. “Oh hell, I know that. Let me tell you. I can make out. All you smart bastards don’t change that. I bet it all, baby, and I lost it all. So I take the lumps. Don’t worry about me. Write up something I can sign, and then get off my back. I’m not going anywhere I haven’t been before.”

“Mrs. Harkinson, I am your attorney and...”

She moved around him, closer to Little Annie. “Now I’m tired,” she said. “I feel awful tired. I think I want to go lie down somewhere.” She smiled at Little Annie in a humble, shy, placating way, and in a gesture that Sam knew would haunt him as long as he lived, Cristen Harkinson held out her thumb for the come-along chain.

Little Annie looked at Lobwohl. Lobwohl nodded. Little Annie took Cristen by the upper arm and walked her out. Kindler held the door. Little Annie went at the same swift muscular stride, and Cristen jounced along beside her in the obedient half trot, bowed head bobbing, paper slippers making a scuff-pat sound on the institutional flooring.

The door closed. Sam had the feeling they were all exhaling at once, tensions fading. Scheff sat with his eyes closed.

“You realize, of course,” Haas said angrily, “that no part of that is in any sense admissible.”

Lobwohl stared at him. “You are going to go through all your motions, Palmer, and we are going to go through all ours, and if there is any sense and justice in the world we are all going to find some nice quick legal way of avoiding courtroom circuses, and we are going to put that sick dirty animal away with a load of consecutive sentences that will still have a long time to run when they box her and take her out the back gate. And we all live with it in our own way.”

Haas slowly wiped his face from forehead to chin with his open hand. He gave John Lobwohl a weak smile. “Right now I think that my colleague here from Texas and I are going to go quietly off someplace and get plastered. Maybe Boylston and I are the only ones who really know the names and numbers of all the players.”

After five rings Lydia Jean said, “Hello? Who is it?” She sounded blurred by sleep, slightly querulous.

“This is a drunken husband,” he said carefully. “Sodden, disreputable.”

“Sam! Are you really drunk?”

“I have discussed it carefully with a dear friend. After conducting certain tests, we have adjudged each other drunk. Yes.”

“You certainly are very stately about it.”

“It is a solemn occasion, dear wife. There is the matter of a certain paradox which needs exploring. I tried to explain it to my good friend, Mr. Palmer Christopher Haas, member of the Florida bar, and he suggested I should explore it with you.”

“Explore, sir.”

“I telephoned you when I learned that it was really Leila, not some girl they thought was Leila. I was sober. I cannot remember what I said. I am drunk at the moment, but I feel I will be able to recall this conversation perfectly. All I remember of the other one is a desire to tell you good news, and to tell you I love you. Did I relay that message adequately?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“I wish to say it again while drunk.”

“Please do.”

“I love you, Lydia Jean.”

“That was very nice dear. Thank you. I love you too.”

“I have been learning mysterious things about mysterious people. A certain dusky nurse named Theyma Chappie had messages for me. A certain Raoul Kelly pointed out a vague trail through the underbrush. My drinking companion, Mr. Haas, who is now asleep within range of my vision, has decoded some invisible writing.”

“About what?”

“It is supposed to be about me. And thus, indirectly, about you. But it disappears, like — like a dab of cotton candy on the tongue of a summertime child.”

“That’s a very lovely turn of phrase, Sam dear.”

“They seem to come imbedded in the liquor somehow. At any rate, what I am is me. I want to be looser.”

“You sound looser.”

“What I promised, you take care of things for Raoul and ’Cisca and you would have fair warning to zip back to Corpus. But I am going to be me, and you are going to be you, Am I right?”

“I... suppose.”

“The only change, if there is any change at all, dear wife, is that now I know it is not so great to be stuck in the world as a Sam Boylston. It is not so easy for either of us to live with it.”

“The wedding is Monday, dear. High noon. She is a darling. And he is a very wise good dear dumpy little man, and we are frantically laundering her English.”

“You aren’t answering my question, Miss Lydia Jean.”

“Jonathan is flying back tomorrow with Leila. They phoned me just at dinnertime. I asked if you were coming along. They said they didn’t have any idea.”

“Let’s get back to the promise I made you about...”

“You could, of course, stay solemnly drunk over there amid those flesh pots, Sammy, or you could get on the dime and come home with the kids and lend a hand around here, like being a best man and mixing punch.”

“But I want to know what you are going to...”

“How can you know if I don’t know?”

“Excuse me. T’was brillig and those slithey toves were all over the dang place.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The gospel according to Palmer Christopher Haas. He says logic is man’s most destructive illusion. All thinking is done with the glands, and the logic part gets stuck on afterward to neaten things up. So — when I couldn’t follow what you were saying, any answer is okay.”

“Darling?”

“Yep.”

“Catch that plane. Get some sleep now, and catch that plane.”

On Sunday the twelfth day of June, Howard Prowt, humming happily to himself, read the water over the Bimini bar with the skill acquired in these weeks of cruising the islands, and when the hue of the morning water deepened to a dark rich shade, he put the HoJun on automatic pilot on the course which, allowing for wind, the flow of the Gulf Stream and compass deviation, should bring them in sight of the sea buoy off Fort Lauderdale in four plus hours.