Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

“She’s humoring you, you know. Quite a cruise for her. Bix Kayd, and that truly poisonous second wife of his, Carolyn. And poor ineffectual Roger Kayd. But there is a kind of sweetness about Stella. I guess you did the Kayd family a favor, at least. Carolyn won’t lean so hard on her step-children with Leila along. So you think the yacht clubs and marinas and the drinks around the pool are going to make Leila skeptical of Uruguay? It’s all going to make her ache to get back to Jonathan, dear. You see, what you are doing is not permitting them to live up to their own image of themselves. You are asking that they live up to your image of them. And when they marry, and they spend a year doing what Jonathan wants to do with his life, I will bet you a dollar to a dime you’ll tell them that now they’ve gotten the nonsense out of their systems, you have a great opportunity for them.”

“Does she really know what she wants? That’s the question, isn’t it?”

She studied him, chin on her fist. “Sam, darling, when you suddenly look around you and see that — life itself is the basic magic, the real miracle, then we might have a chance. You are trying to impose your sense of order and fitness on the randomness of people and the illogic of fate. You want to refute the basic textures, the crazy mixture of life, and neaten it all up. Boy-Sam and I are refugees from that pattern, dear.”

“I wish I could understand what you’re driving at.”

“So do I, dear. So do I, believe me.”

She had to get back. He paid the check and they walked out to the parking lot, in the dry white heat of mid-May, walked to her red Mustang, his present to her on her twenty-seventh birthday, three weeks before she packed and left him.

When she grasped the door handle, he put his hand on the door to make her wait a moment. She turned toward him.

He said, “Remember, on that four-day honeymoon up there in the Hill Country, that day we walked up those hills beyond Ingram and you could see the Guadeloupe River?”

“Yes,” she said flatly.

“I bought a forty acre piece of hillside. I had Seddon and Garvey draw me up plans for a hideaway lodge. They started construction three weeks ago. I can take some time off early in July. I’ll phone you. I can pick you up at your mother’s here, and we can go up there and really talk this out. I love you, Lyd. I need you. We can patch it up if we can get away together for a week, just the two of us, believe me. It will be beautiful up there then.”

He put his hands on her arms just above the elbows, gave her a little shake, drew her closer. “Please, Lyd.”

Her mouth softened, and her eyelids drooped with a sensual heaviness, and she took a deep slow breath. Then abruptly she pulled away, pushed her dark hair back with the back of her hand.

“No, Sam. We tried to solve too many things just that way. And I want you that way. You know that. But the other has to be talked out, and I have to know that you know what I mean. Thank God you are too honest to fake it, to pretend to understand, and throw my words back at me. Why don’t you just — think about what we’ve said, and phone me in a month and we’ll meet — in another place like this one.”

He opened the car door, and she got behind the wheel and looked up at him. He said, “I’m sending you enough?”

“More than enough. You know that. It makes my pay for the part-time library job look — ludicrous. Well — do try to get some rest, dear. You have to understand that I had to do this.”

“I’m taking your word for it, Lyd. You’re acting like a kook. But I know you’re not a kook. So I’m just missing the key somewhere. Take care of yourself, Lydia Jean.”

“You too, dear.”

“Give Boy-Sam a hug.”

He watched her wait for traffic, then move into the tempo of it, heading toward the city. It seemed a saucy little car, unsuitable for someone who wasn’t having much fun lately.

He walked to his car, a dusty white Pontiac sedan with the maximum power option, heavy-duty tires, springs, shocks, load levelers. He went west on Forty-Four, and by the time he turned south on Seventy-Seven, toward the valley, Harlingen, and home, he had turned the air conditioner back to low. There had been other talks during the five months. And now, as after the other times, the flavor of plausibility of the things she said faded quickly away, and it all became nonsense, a neurotic and inexplicable and corroding rejection by the woman he thought he had known so well.

Below Kingsville, recalling the many things said, he kept thinking of better responses. His attitude had been wrong. She was having some kind of girlish tizzy, and the right approach would have been to tell her that he had humored her long enough. Tell her firmly and pleasantly that fantasy time was over, there was the wife-job to do, the one she had contracted for, so let’s go get the kid and the suitcases and take you home where you belong. But being with her made him feel uncertain, an unfamiliar and unpleasant state of mind, wanting to confess to crimes he could not comprehend.

He felt a tremor in the steering wheel and glanced at the speedometer and saw it resting at just under a hundred miles an hour. It irritated him to have been unaware of such high speed, and even as he accepted the need to drop down to eighty, he pushed the gas pedal to the floor, hands locked on the wheel. At a hundred and fifteen the slight tremor smoothed out. But at a hundred and twenty-five the heavy car began to feel light, buoyant, floating slightly on the irregularities in the paving, no longer under his total control. Sam Boylston felt an angry exaltation, a pleasure in an unnamed defiance. The speedometer moved upward a bit more, but so reluctantly he knew the car was at its limit. If any one of several variables went astray now, the car would stop only as smoking junk far off the right of way, and the damned woman could wonder the rest of her life how much her stupid intractability had contributed to the death of the husband.

Something attracted his eye, and when he glanced in the rear vision mirror he saw, far behind him on the long straight stretch, bleached by sunlight, the pulsing of the chase-light atop the roof of the patrol car in pursuit.

He took his foot off the gas at once. An asinine performance. Erratic and juvenile. Sober man indulging in the kind of dramatics usually reserved for the drunk or the disturbed.

But, he thought, damn Lyd anyway. I kept everything in order, kept everything moving along very nicely for three months. But for the past two the world has been going out of focus. Sudden irritability with people who haven’t deserved it. Appointments forgotten. Some very sour decisions — in small matters, fortunately. A drink or two too many at the club. That curious impulse to smack Bern Wallader in the mouth last week. And, too, that sweatiness and sense of sick anticipation when I stopped at the light in Brownsville and that little chippy in her short tight skirt, rolling her hips, walked so impudently across in front of the car, glanced, half smiled and glanced again, Indio blood showing in the breadth of her face, tilt of dark eyes, stepped up on the curb, stopped there to give me the chance, turning with a certain hauteur, arching herself in display. All I had to do was reach over and swing the door open. Came damned close to it. Not over sixteen, I’d guess, more probably fifteen. Disaster in a prematurely ripe package. But the car behind me honked, the light was green, and I went on, with the palms of my hands cold and slippery on the wheel.

“What are you trying to do to me?” he said aloud, striking the top of the wheel with the heel of his right hand.

His speed was down to fifty. The patrol car was on his bumper and the siren gave an imperative growl. He braked and steered over onto the shoulder and stopped. The patrol car passed him and cut in and stopped directly in front of him, chase-light still revolving. The husky trooper got out quickly and as he approached, Sam was mildly surprised to see that he had the revolver ready in his hand.