Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

“I’m grateful to you, Doctor. I really am.”

“We can protect you long as you’re here. But of course the moment you’re released, they’ll swarm upon you like May flies.”

“When do you plan to release me?”

“To decide, I must know if there is someone to look after you for a bit. Your wife is gone, I know. Would there be a relative, a close friend, someone to take you back to Florida?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I won’t be held to it, understand. But if you have to do for yourself, I should guess I might let you go a week today. A good thing your Mr. Kayd carried such splendid insurance. I see no reason also why we cannot keep your day nurse on until we let you go. She’ll keep the pests away from you. I’ve canceled the midnight to eight one, and after today I see no need for the four to midnight lassie.”

“I haven’t even got clothes I can wear out of here.”

“The marine insurance fellow could give you a bit for that I should think. And Nurse Chappie could do a spot of shopping. If they are paying for your flight back, they can’t expect you to board a BOAC affiliate naked as an egg, now can they?”

“You’re very helpful, Doctor.”

“Nervous twitch. Typical of the trade, I expect. Probably why we get into it in the first place. I might get carried away if you can’t work something out with the assurance company, and advance you a few pounds myself. You could send it back when they’ve arranged for the pay you have coming.”

“There’s money in a savings account in Miami but it’s in my wife’s name. And there’s a small policy on her life. So if I have to ask you, I can send it back as soon as I... arrange everything.”

McGregory stood up, rubbed his cigar out on the sole of his shoe and dropped it into the white wastebasket. “You’re a hardy one, Staniker. Good thing. Few men could have survived the effects of that week on the island, much less come out of it with no complications. I’ll stop by and have another look in the morning.”

After he had been gone ten minutes, the slender nurse came back in and told him the choices for the evening meal and helped him decide. She was past her usual time of leaving. She said the other special nurse was in the hospital and would be along shortly. She rolled the night stand around and tidied it, adding to the stack of face towels. With her purse clamped under her arm she stood by him, ran the backs of her fingers along the line of his jaw.

“Tomorrow, Captain, you will have to shave yourself. A blessing, I suppose. I am not very good at it.”

“Nobody is very good with a dull razor, Nurse.”

“I shall even buy a blade for it.”

She was standing at the left side of his bed. He reached and put his left hand on her waist, thumb and first finger clasping the narrowest part of it, hip socket fitting the palm of his hand, the other three fingers splayed against the swell of roundness of her hip.

For an instant she stood absolutely motionless. He felt a faint tremor and then she jumped back far too violently, something oddly like terror on her face.

“Come on , now,” he said. “It isn’t that serious, is it?”

“It — startled me. That is all.” She moistened her lips. Her smile was quick and unconvincing. “It proves you are recovering, Captain.”

In the evening, after he had eaten, he thought again of how she had reacted. As if brought suddenly face to face with a monster. But it could not mean anything. She was of a certain type. That’s all it meant. They look knowing. They have saucy little hips, sharp little breasts. Their eyes are incurably flirtatious. But the slightest touch panics them. Her reaction was far less distressing to him than his own. He had touched her deliberately, coldly, experimentally, hoping that the girl-feel of her, the flesh-warmth under nylon, the rounded meaning of the young waist and hip would awaken him. In all his life, ever since puberty, except during those brief times when he had achieved total sexual exhaustion, he had not been able to look upon a woman who had even the slightest trace of physical desirability without being aware, in an absent-minded way, of his own physiological changes, a sense of heaviness, a slight swelling of the neck and hardening of the shoulder muscles, an impulse to yawn, the very slight beginnings of tumidity. Yet even when she had walked him, her arm around his waist, his arm across her shoulders, in spite of her warmth, scents, desirability, there was no reaction at all to her. He could have been made of cold bread dough. He had hoped the deliberate caress would restir the familiar heats. But he could have as well been resting his hand against a palm bole or a traffic sign.

It’s something about the burns, perhaps the medication. Or having so much fever. It had been the same as always during those long days aboard the Muñeca, and at the anchorages. Nothing wrong then. Carolyn Kayd had known just what she could do to him, passing him in the narrow areas of the boat, swaying that muscular butt just enough to give him a solid thud with her hip when they were opposite each other, then excusing herself with such a laughing innocence.

... but then slack and loose as a bag of butter, moving with the roll of the dead boat as he looped the length of quarter inch nylon line around her and threaded it through the lift ring of the hatch cover, snugged her down there so tight, made her so fast that the line dug into the softness of her waist and...

“Nurse!”

“Captain, what is wrong? What is wrong?”

“Could — I have a drink of water, please?”

“Of course, sir.”

And he realized that he had just gone through the worst of it. It could not happen again, not that dangerously. The dark movements beyond the four walls of fabric had been unbearable because of the weakness. He felt thankful. It reminded him of a time when, in Key West, with a hurricane coming, a drunken hand off a shrimper which had put in for shelter backed him slowly into a corner of a bar, holding the knife blade low, with that slight professional upward tilt which seeks the belly. All sound in the bar had stopped, and then he had seen in the man’s eyes an inability to use a knife on living flesh. It was the same kind of relief and gratitude, awareness of the narrowness of the escape. He had sidestepped, chopped down at the wrist as he hammered at the face. He had kicked the knife into a corner, snapped the wrist bone, and had been with the shrimper’s woman through the twenty-hour scream of the wind of the hurricane which had missed the town by a narrow margin, the eye passing twenty miles south, heading for Texas.

Now, in the center of his mind, he was able to bestir himself, stand up and stretch, walk about, anticipate the task of taking down the frame and the fabric. He knew the names of the black things out there, and he could let them in, one at a time, and tame them. They were called Throat, and Fan Motor, and Head Nodding. Once tamed they would begin to blur, and some day they would be difficult to recall.

He closed his eyes and once again he examined one of the objects he had dragged into the safe area. Suitcase of medium size, aluminum in a dull finish, ribbed for greater strength. Trade name — Haliburton. Good gear for the heat and damp of tropic cruising. The catches were designed to exert enough leverage on the double rubber seal inside the lip to make the suitcase airtight. The fourth key he had tried had fit the stowage locker. The second little brass key fit the suitcase. It all rested in there in such orderliness, such dignity. Official paper belts around the middle of each packet. There were two rows of stacks of the packets, six in each row, arranged vertically, across the long dimension of the case. To fill the additional width there were three stacks of packets placed end to end. Fifteen stacks of banded money, to a depth that filled the case to about two thirds of its depth.