Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

The trembling stopped like something slowly running down. While she was thinking about getting up and taking a pill, she fell off the edge into sleep.

As dusk became night, Mrs. Mooney had begun to fight a familiar battle with her conscience and with her desire.

After she had fed the three old dogs, she turned the lights out in the house. She plodded from room to room, muttering to herself. From time to time she would climb the stairs and go into her bedroom and stand at the window overlooking the row of rental cottages and see through the leaves those fragments of yellowish glow from a light in Number 10, a light in that Mr. Stanley’s bedroom shining through the pale worn shade.

The logic of it was beyond question. With such dense shrubbery, the cottages had a lot of privacy. And on a night so hot, there could be but one reason for pulling the shades down.

She had fought it and won the other night. But tonight it was stronger. Like a terrible gnawing. It was so unfair that it should keep going on and on into these years when she thought it would be over, when she would have rest and peace.

She roamed the dark house, muttering her complaints, and explaining how terrible a thing it was, telling it all to Mr. Mooney, years in his grave now, reminding him that it had begun way back even when he was still alive, and how he had caught her at it once and given her the beating she deserved, told her they could send her off to jail, told her she was an evil woman, and even after she had promised she would never do it again, he had been nasty-polite to her for weeks.

She turned the television set on and sat to watch it, then found herself roaming back and forth across the living room in the pallid flickering light of the horses running, the men shooting and shouting.

The next time she went upstairs she avoided looking out the window and instead went to her big desk in the corner and turned on the desk light and opened the big scrapbook atop the litter of old invoices and receipts.

The three old dogs had already gotten into her bed for the night, and they lifted their heads to look at her, their eyes glowing in the reflected lamp light. She turned the pages, and looked for a long time at the clippings about her marriage to Michael Mooney on the Fourth of July in the center ring of the Coldwell Brothers Circus in Topeka, Kansas. Mr. Mooney had one of the best small-circus dog acts in the business, and she had worked the act with him, had done clown on the side, and had sewed a thousand costumes for the dogs during all the circus years.

All gone now but the three old dogs, all of them single-trick puppies, all eagerness, in the last months before it all came to an end. All gone but Jiggs and Tarzan and Maggie, fat and going blind.

Maybe, she thought, Mr. Stanley had been taken sick and it would be an act of Christian charity to go check on him...

And remembered that she had told herself exactly that same thing back in April when that same Mr. Stanley had taken a cottage for just one night. When their car had local plates and they checked in alone, for an overnight, you knew what the rascals had on their minds.

If I hadn’t slipped that last time, she thought, it wouldn’t be gnawing so terrible now. Maybe it wouldn’t count as a separate sin, but as a part of the sin of the last time.

She closed the scrapbook, reached and turned the desk light off, hit the closed book with her fist. The mind kept making up the shiny, easy excuses to make everything seem all right, and afterward you knew the reasons were dirty, but by then it was done and you were eased and you could say never, never, never again; you could say it was over forever.

She wondered if that Mr. Stanley had noticed how it had unsettled her to have him show up again. Usually you never saw them again. Her heart had bumped and her hands had been shaky. He was one of the ones who had to share the blame of it, leaving the lights on for it instead of liking darkness for it like decent folk.

As she went slowly down the stairs, sliding her hand on the bannister railing, she wondered if it would be the same one, the tall blonde woman with the beautiful slender tan body, but a very strong woman for all the slenderness, a match and more for the hammering brutishness of him.

Held out this long, you have, she thought. So heat yourself up a mug of warm milk and drink it down and go to your bed like a decent-minded widowed dwarf lady, with three old dogs depending on her. It’s late, Little Maureen. Somewhere around ten or later even. Drink the milk and kneel by the bed and pray to God to take away the gnawing and burning because you are too old now for evil.

“Never again!” she said aloud. She bit the inside of her mouth, tasted blood, groaned, trotted into the dark kitchen and folded the little aluminum stepladder she used to reach the dish cupboards. In her cotton housecoat, carrying the ladder, she slipped out into the dark, hot night and threaded her way in her hump-backed stealthy crouch along familiar paths that led behind the cottages. Moving swiftly and breathing shallowly, she set her ladder up under the lighted window and climbed it and stood upon the top of it, hands against the siding for support. She put her eye to the narrow opening between the shade and the framing of the window screen and looked into the room and into the tumbled emptiness of the sagging bed. Disappointment was as sharp as toothache. She saw a pattern of light on the floor which indicated the bathroom light was on across the hallway.

With an anxious agility she climbed down, folded the ladder, and trotted around the rear of the cottage and, as she set it up under the lighted bathroom window, she had a vivid, sweet, dizzying memory of that pair two years ago and more, ah, how they’d sloshed and strained in the suds, and all the while the girl, plump as a little dumpling, squealing and giggling, had teased the poor rascal shamelessly, giving him such little samples he was near out of his mind with the need of it, a torture Mr. Mooney would not have permitted for an instant.

She climbed up the ladder and put her eye to the opening and stood tiptoe tall so as to look down into the tub. She stopped breathing for two long seconds, then turned and stepped off the top of the little ladder into space. The tilt triggered the old reflexes and skills of the clown years, and she jacked her knees up, tucked her head down, rolled her right shoulder under, and relaxed her body completely at the instant before impact. She rolled over and back up onto her feet, gave a little hop to regain balance, and then leaned against the side of the cottage for a moment, feeling dizzy. Poor old Little Maureen, she thought. One little rollover makes her all shaky inside.

She folded the ladder and raced back to her house along the overgrown paths, the leaves brushing at her. The number to call was in the front of the phone book. “Miz Mooney talking,” she said in a voice like a contralto kazoo. “I got one needs help bad and needs it quick, in my number ten cottage. Maybe he’s breathing, maybe not, anyway in a tub so blood dark I can’t see if it was wrists he cut. What? Sonny boy, there’s no way in hell you can find it unless you stop talking and let me tell you where my place is. So kindly fermay the boosh and get your pencil out...”

At eight o’clock the following morning a brisk young man named Lobwohl sat at a steel and linoleum desk with his back to a big tinted window. He was reading the preliminary reports on the Mooney Cottages business and making notes on a yellow legal pad, and pausing from time to time to sip coffee from a large, waxed cardboard cup.

Two men, heavier and older than Lobwohl, came sauntering in. As one of them sat down, Lobwohl said, “It starts like one of those weeks. Did you get hold of Harv?”