Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

“Yes sir.”

“Nothing I’m doing is going to make much point to me for a time. What do you say, you come on back and we’ll set it up to go down there to Yucatan and get those same guides and horses I told you about and see if we can get us a jaguar. Might be Ollie Sloan could be talked into coming along. He’s been in sorry shape since his wife died, and you know him pretty good, don’t you?”

“Well enough, Mr. Cooper. I’ll let you know.”

“You do that. And if there’s any red tape over there about that accident, anything I can help with, you call me, hear?”

As he hung up he felt sorry for old Stuff Cooper, and he also felt exasperation and an old guilt about Carolyn Cooper. It was one of Stuff’s myths that Carolyn and Sam had “gone around together” at the University. Sam had been in his first year of law school and Carolyn had been four years younger, a sophomore. At that time Sam had not met Lydia Jean. Carolyn, her daddy’s darling, was vivid, outgoing, arrogant and beautiful, and came complete with white Cadillac convertible, hefty allowance, and an impressive capacity for vodka gibsons. There had been a weekend party at a ranch. At the last moment his date caught a virus and couldn’t make it. He went alone. And the party turned into one of those gaudy brawls which provide several years’ worth of gossip. After Carolyn’s date passed out, she became blankly, blindly, helplessly drunk. Sam was on his way to his car when he came upon two boys hustling the stumbling girl toward the outbuildings. They objected to having their plans changed. It took him four or five minutes to encourage them to see it his way. By then Carolyn was sitting in the grass, hiccuping.

He picked her up and took her to her white convertible, stepping over one of her escorts as he did so. She toppled over and began to snore. He went into the big ranch house and found her purse and the suitcase she’d brought but hadn’t unpacked.

He drove her car over two hundred and fifty miles to the Cooper ranch, arriving at first light, stopping inside the gate, a good mile from the ranch house. When she woke up, she looked wanly at him, then scrabbled her way out of the car throwing up down the front of her dress as she did so, then falling to her hands and knees.

At her suggestion he opened a cattle gate and they drove across pasture land to a water hole bordered by a stand of live oaks. He put her suitcase on the hood of the car. He turned his back as she stripped and walked barefoot across the hoof-marked mud and immersed herself in the clear water, holding her dark hair up out of the way as she dunked, scrubbing her face with her free hand, rinsing her mouth. After she came out, he stood with his back toward her still, and told her what had happened and what he had done.

When she told him he could turn around, he found her standing beside the hood of the car and the open suitcase six feet from him. She had made up her face. She was brushing her dark hair, and looking at him in challenge and expectation. She had posed herself in the first red-gold rays of sunrise, standing hip-shot, half turned to the sun so that it glowed against naked thigh and flank and across the faint round of belly, and against the side of one breast, leaving the other in the half shadow of the gray light of morning, nipples rigid with the sensuous stimulus of displaying herself to him.

“Thought you were too meechy-mild to come on man-size, honey,” she said, taking slow strokes with the brush. He could hear the crackle of static electricity in her black hair in the windless morning.

“So what are you proving, Carrie?”

“It’s what you’re up to proving, isn’t it? Ol’ Stuff keeps saying I should find me a man to steady me down before I get messed up for sure. From what you said, I came too scary close. I’ve been telling him I want me an older man, somebody making out good, not some boy.”

“What makes you think I’m making out so good?”

“Oh, Sam, you haven’t got a pee pot, I know, and you’re not as far older as what I had in mind, but you’ll have the law degree soon, and Stuff can put tons of business your way, and I notice people do what you tell them to do mostly. Maybe you could tell me too and I’d listen. It’s what I need, I know. Not some boy with the only thing on his mind getting it day and night. Maybe it’s my time right now, and you came along just right — for the both of us.”

Leaning against the car boot, looking at her, he had thought of how it would be to marry Yandell Binns Cooper’s darlin’ girl. He would get the law work from Cooper and his whole crowd eventually. Title work and land grants and water rights. Ranch tax work, and mineral rights, and options on sections, and grazing rights. It would lock him into a secondary power structure, and he might work up to a hundred thousand a year gross, but he would be one of Stuff Cooper’s hired hands, and Stuff’s sons would get the land, because that was the feudal way of doing it.

She turned toward him with a half smile, and tossed the brush into the suitcase and said, “The only way I can make out is after being looked at. So it’s like two birds with one stone, Sammy. You get to know if the deal is worth it, the looking and the rest too, and you must have seen that old pink puff quilt in the trunk when you taken my suitcase out, then we’ll get Concita to fix us up a breakfast like you never saw before, and tell Daddy-Stuff when he comes downstairs his worries are done.”

“Better put your clothes on, honey.”

“Nobody’ll come by here.”

“Get dressed, Carrie.”

“Me being sick like that put you off? I feel real good now, Sammy. Think of it like it’s a reward for you saving me like you did and getting a good thump under the eye for your troubles. It isn’t black yet but it’s going to be.” She approached and put her hands on his shoulders and tilted her head.

He did not move or touch her. “Get dressed!”

When she swung he leaned back just in time, but a fingertip hit the tip of his nose, stinging it, making his eyes water. She dressed, used a stick to poke her soiled dress into a patch of brush, slammed her suitcase shut and threw it onto the back seat.

At the ranch house Stuff Cooper was already up. His approval of Sam Boylston was immediate and obvious, and Carolyn, to make Sam uncomfortable, hinted to Stuff they had been seeing a lot of each other. When Carolyn went up to bed, Stuff warmed up the Cub and flew Sam back to the house-party and landed on the ranch strip there. It was too early for anyone to be stirring.

As Sam Boylston drove his old car back toward the university, he kept thinking of how she had looked in the first sunlight of the morning, and he thought of that off and on for quite a long time, then had met Lydia Jean and hadn’t remembered it again until the invitation to the wedding of Carolyn Cooper and Bixby Kayd had arrived.

There had been a few times when he had wondered if maybe it wouldn’t have been better to have grabbed that chance. But after he knew he was doing better than he could have done by marrying Carolyn, he found he felt grateful to her in a strange way. When you make a choice you have to do your damnedest to make certain you did the right thing. You have to make your choice come true. And later he had appreciated how shrewdly the nineteen-year-old girl had gone about it, how sound her instinct had been in judging a man she did not know at all well. She had pretended to be the wanton, and had made him desire her so badly it had bloated his throat, knotted his belly and made his knees feel watery-weak. He had come within a half heartbeat of taking her, and she had so clearly stated the bargain beforehand, he would have honored it had he done so, because he could not permit himself to live with that obvious a flaw in his self-image. The girl had known that about him, had guessed at the severities of his self-disciplines.