Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

On Tuesday afternoon Staniker was awakened from his nap by the muted clacking of the slats of the blinds as his day nurse opened them. Just outside the window was a vivid bough of bougainvillaea, the sun lighting the petals from behind, turning them to hot flame.

He lay with lids half closed, idly watching her do other small housekeeping chores around the room. With a remoteness and objectivity alien to him he noted that she moved well, with a hightailed, saucy, frisky, promising look. It was a flavor he had always appreciated in a young woman, and over the years he had come to learn that more often than not, it indicated a considerable amount of sexual energy.

Nurse Chappie stopped and made a frowning inventory of the room, to see, apparently, if anything had been overlooked, and as she did so, she fingered her slender, tea-tan throat...

Throat! He closed his eyes. He had a new image of what the inside of his head was like. It was a smaller place than ever before. It had dwindled because he had been forced to erect a square framework inside it from which he suspended a heavy fabric hanging from ceiling to floor on all four sides. He had dragged all harmless things into the lighted area, that cube wherein he sat. But things stirred in the darkness beyond the fabric. They could be summoned by a certain kind of thought, and then the shape of them would begin to bulge inward against the fabric, and you knew that if it kept up, they would come crawling under the fabric from out of the unspeakable blackness. So you gave your thoughts a quick twist and aimed them in a safe direction, and the things would quiet down and the fabric would once again hang quite motionless. When danger was over you could take deep breaths, unclench your belly muscles, and let your eyes open.

He had escaped them this time by aiming his thoughts at the motor sailer he was going to buy. It would be like the one he had seen last year in Miami, up for sale because the owner was ill. Teak and mahogany hull built in Hong Kong, and then glassed and finished and rigged in Sweden. The diesels and electronics and navigation aids had been mounted aboard in Germany. A blue water sailer, with power winches, enormous fuel and water tanks, big generators, freezers, air conditioning.

He walked her decks and, young again, he stood at the wheel balanced against the easy movement of her, outward bound from Wellington to the Loyalty Islands, and sprawled atop the trunk cabin, bikinied and sun-drowsy, but smiling at him with a happy and grateful warmth, was one of those superb and vital New Zealand girls, a truly great one, greater than the very best of all the ones he could remember. A great vessel and a great grinding girl, and all the money packed into the barrel safe so carefully hidden down below it was no worry at all to him.

When Mary Jane got a look at that money, she’d...

It took a violent twist to turn swiftly enough into a new direction because that had made a great stir behind the fabric.

“You slept well, Captain?” the nurse said, not knowing how helpful it was to have her speak at that moment.

“All I seem to do is sleep,” he said.

“Ah, you speak much better now,” she said, leaning to slip the thermometer under his swollen tongue. She laid the pads of her fingers against his big wrist, and, frowning, watched the sweep second hand of the gold watch pinned to her white nylon bodice as she counted.

After she had put the thermometer back in alcohol and was marking his chart he said, “I’m expected to live?”

Her smile was quick and bright. “You are not actually in a dying condition, mon. Now you must have water again.”

“How many gallons will that make?”

“Dr. McGregory says we can stop keeping track of the fluid balance now. He’s satisfied there’s no kidney damage. Here. Drink this now, and then you may go on a journey. With some help. All the way to the water closet.”

When he was seated on the edge of the bed, in the short gown, she worked his left arm into the sleeve of the robe, then hung it lightly over the shoulder on the burned side. She helped him up with a considerable wiry strength, and, from his left side, her right arm around his waist, his left arm heavy across her narrow shoulders, she walked him in small steps to the private bathroom about eight feet from the bed. She left the door ajar, saying, “If there is any faintness or dizziness, Captain, call out. And do not forget the specimen. The bottle is there on the shelf over the lavatory.”

He was again astonished at how weak and how frail he felt. Better than yesterday, at least. So better than this tomorrow. When he came out, she helped him to the armchair and, after she had finished making his bed up, helped him into bed and took away his robe and hung it in the shallow closet. She went off with the sample to deliver it to the lab, and when she returned, young Dr. Angus McGregory was with her. He was sunburned and portly, with a ginger-gold moustache of RAF impressiveness.

He nodded at Staniker, studied the chart, jotted some new instructions on it. “Confirms what Nurse Chappie here tells me. Grotesquely healthy, Captain. An affront to my profession. So let’s have a look at the arm first. Nurse?”

They had him straighten his right arm. She held it in one hand by the unburned fingers and helped McGregory unwind the overlapping gauze. Staniker looked at the outside of his right arm as it was exposed and felt his stomach dip. The whole arm had a strange blue-gray sheen. It looked dead. He expected a grunt of alarm from the doctor.

Instead McGregory said, “Marvelously ugly, what? New spray technique. Porous enough to let air in, but it won’t let fluid out. Sulfa derivative in it. Otherwise inert. And one can see through the bloody thing to see how you’re mending. It’ll dissolve as new skin forms, hopefully at about the same rate. Leaves less of the typical burn scar, that shiny puckery look.”

He leaned closer to study it inch by inch. “Very, very good! Oh, you’ll have scar enough, dear fellow. We had to snip away quite a bit of bad meat, but very little muscle tissue. No functional impairment. What you must do, Captain, is keep working and flexing the arm. Not vigorously. Same with the leg. It will slow the healing at the joints somewhat, and hurt a bit, but you’ll maintain a better muscle tone and the skin won’t draw tight on you at the joints. Now let’s have a look at that right thigh and calf, Nurse.”

After they were through, McGregory said, “Those types tire you this morning?”

“Not too bad.”

“They should be the last of the official lot. The insurance wallahs wanted a go at you this afternoon, but I said absolutely no. Tomorrow morning should be better. Then by Thursday it will be up to you who you care to see, if there’s no hitch in the way you’re coming along, Staniker. Press people. Magazine people. And a very odd little telly batch from Miami with monstrous lights and cables and such. But I could give you a word of advice on all that.”

“I would appreciate it, Doctor.”

McGregory gave the nurse a meaningful glance. She nodded and left the room. McGregory lighted a cigar little larger than a cigarette and sat in the armchair. “None of my affair, I suppose. But were I you, I would give a bit of thought to number one, eh? Work in your line might be hard to come by for a time. Reason I know of the situation, a chum of mine got innocently involved in the Profumo mess. Buggered his income for a time. But he had the wits to sell his exclusive story. Chain of newspapers. They put a writer fellow on him to shine it up. Made a handsome package out of it. Eight hundred pounds if I remember. Actually, poor Harold didn’t have much to tell. Been pronging one of those wenches and had the bad luck to get bashed about by her dark-hued chum. But the bits he did know, he kept to himself so as to have something to peddle to the papers. Painful to you, perhaps, but all the little clerks and shop girls would want to read the Captain’s personal story of the last cruise of the Muñeca. And you are, you know, under no obligation to give your story away to those clots who are so anxious to get in here to see you. Oh, they’ll tell you one must speak to the press. That one has to. Lot of bloody nonsense. More you tell them, the less you can sell the rest for. So among the rabble are a few chaps with contracts in their pockets. Were I you, Captain, I’d make every one of those people send up a note about what they want of you. I’d weed out the ones with an idea of paying for an exclusive story, and see them one at a time, get their names and addresses, sign nothing, and when you get back to Florida find some nimble chap to represent you. There is no hurry. My word! Texas millionaire, beauty queen, yacht, tropical islands, castaway — the story should intrigue the masses for years and years. And I fancy your picture would not hurt the female readership level one bit. As I said, none of my business. To give you an idea. One bloody fool offered me fifty pounds to give an exclusive story about you . And Nurse Chappie has been under pressure also. But she is a sound one. Very sound indeed.”