Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

Once she had awakened — yesterday? the day before? — to find she had been turned face down, the improvised night-gown pulled high, while hands that were at once strong and gentle rubbed a pungent ointment into her back, working from high on her shoulders all the way to the backs of her calves and back again. In that disjointed world of half-sleep, Daddy was once again putting on that stuff that stopped the terrible itching-burning of the poison oak. Sam didn’t get it as bad as I did, she thought.

Then she heard the stranger-voice, crooning to itself, “... enough skin come off to build a whole new gal, I do swear... no bad places left... coming pink and new like a baby... pore little burned ass ain’t board-flat no more, plumping up again...”

Just as her body began to tighten in alarm, he had given her a little pat on the shoulder, grunted to his feet, spread the clean white shirt down over her, pulled the sheet back in place. Her thought of protest faded into the velvet dark of sleep.

Remembering, as she wondered why the Sergeant had left without a word, she reached a hand under the back of the shirt and felt of herself, felt on her back and buttocks, under a slight oiliness of medication, an ugly random pattern of welts and lumps and ridges instead of the familiar smoothness. There was no pain, yet here and there a special tenderness.

After a long time she heard him clumping up the outside steps. It took a moment to remember the name of the song he was singing without words. Lili Marlene. “Dum dum dah dum dah — dum ti dum ti dah .”

He told her the boat was ready. He wrapped her in a blanket and picked her up. From the top of the stairs she had expected to be able to see water beyond the shoreline of the island, but the trees were too high. The light hurt her eyes. The world seemed far too huge and bright. The steps looked unsafe. She clung to him. She saw the small boat basin, like a pond in a swamp, the water black and still, and saw the channel where it entered the thick mangrove growth and curved out of sight.

Over his few dum-dah-dum bars of the song, repeated over and over, she heard the tiny song of mosquitoes around her ears, face and throat. In the shadows of the mooring place under the house he stepped lightly aboard the Muñequita from his sheltered dock. The overhead was far too low for him to carry her into the forward cabin space. He set her down and steadied her as she backed down the step and clambered weakly into the bunk he had made up. He came in, closing the screening behind him, sat on his heels and sprayed the mosquitoes which had come in with them. The hatch was propped open overhead, the screening in place.

He flicked on a weak bulb over her bunk, turned it off again. “The batteries are charged up pretty good, Missy, so if you’re wan-tin to use the light it shouldn’t take it down much, and the gas is full near to the top so as I can run the engines in neutral and recharge, comes to that. And you can run this little fan too I’d say, when the air gets too still.”

He pressed a switch. The little rubber-bladed fan began to whir. She felt the wind against her face, glanced up at it, and a picture formed quickly in her mind and disappeared, leaving an aftertaste of fear and despair she could not identify. She had too brief a glimpse of the dark, bloated, horrid face of the woman to identify her. Eyes bulged from the sockets. Thickened tongue protruded from the mouth. And a long strand of her hair had been caught in a small fan, wound around shaft and blade. The fan did not move. It hummed and stank.

“You all right, Miss Leila?”

“... Yes. Yes, I’m all right.”

After he left her alone she made herself get out of the bunk and look for the things she had hoped to use. The search did not take long. The little pistol and the shotgun were gone. The spear guns were gone. Both bronze keys were gone from the ignition switches and from the compartment under the instrument panel where the little Japanese transistorized ship-to-shore radio was locked away. She stretched out on the bunk and wept for a little while. Then she collected from the compartment under the other bunk a few things she could use. Towels, insect repellent, a terry beach coat which belonged to Roger, one of Stel’s swim suits, the yellow one with white trim.

There’s one way, she thought, when I’m strong enough. Put this suit on and slip over the side and swim out his crazy channel to the open water. Even if it’s five miles to shore, I can make it. So I better work it into the conversation sometime that I can’t swim.

But there was another thing to try first. And planning it, she fell asleep.

On Monday, far stronger than she had hoped to be, she was able to walk halfway up the steps, clinging to the Sergeant before she tired and had to be carried the rest of the way. With his primitive sewing kit, she had fashioned herself underwear pants from a piece of sheeting, a short skirt from a beach towel, a bandeau top from a smaller towel. After she had rested and eaten well, she said, in polite accusation, “You should have taken me to a doctor right away, you know.”

“Missy, you don’t know about head wounds. You don’t know a thing.” He touched the sickening dent in his forehead. “After I was sound as a dollar, they kept me in that place three whole years! ”

“But this isn’t the same! ”

“Well — there’s another thing I expect you better know about. If it wasn’t for the Lieutenant, all them pretty little people in those little houses over there on the mainland shore, they would have got me stuck back into that place long ago. I get mixed up a little sometimes. One of them fat little sons of bitches — excuse me — he stood right up in court and he asked the judge that time how they had any garntee I wasn’t going to sneak over there some dark night and kill them all in their beds, like I was some kind of maniac. I don’t bother them. Why’d they want to bother me like they do? Missy — from the minute I found you, I had that on my mind. You understand? What if I took you to a doctor and you were dead when we got there? What if you died and never come to? All those people over there would jump right onto a thing like that and say Sergeant Corpo, he hurt that pore girl and he should ought to be locked up. Missy, the onliest thing I could do was nurse you good as I could and hope.”

“But what if I had died?”

“I had a spot picked out, and I got lumber to make a good box, and a Bible to say words over you. I would have took that good boat out on a dark night on an outgoing tide and let it go on out the pass into the ocean. It would have been the best I could do, Missy.” He gave a single loud clap of his hands. “But what good is this kind of talk? Here you are setting up, smart as paint, and everything is fine as can be.”

She smiled at him. “I’m very very grateful to you, Sergeant. It’s nice things worked out this way. Now I’d like you to take me to Broward Beach in the boat so I can get in touch with my people.”

He leaned forward and stared at her. “What’s the matter with you, girl? You haven’t heard what I’ve been saying to you?”

“Certainly I have!”

“Any damn fool could take one look at you and he’d know you were a mighty sick little gal. Your head is healing good but it sure God looks recent like. And the fever’s melted all the meat off your bones and you’re weak as a kitten. Why, if I took you in there the shape you’re in, they’d all know I kept you here and doctored you myself and it would be pretty near as bad as taking you in dead.”

She stared at him in dismay. He had that careful and earnest logic of the deranged. He had the raw sinewy look of enormous strength. His homemade haircut was grotesque. His eyes, of the palest gray she had ever seen, had an eerie luminosity about them, as though lighted from behind. She had seen animal eyes like that.