Эд Макбейн - Last Summer

She yanked back her hand. A look of startled rage crossed her face. “You fucking idiot!” she shrieked, and reached for her again, lips skinned back, teeth bared as if to return the bite. Something slid into her eyes. Intelligence or guile, cunning or concern, it jarred her to an immediate stop. Trembling, she forced a smile onto her mouth and gently said, “Rhoda, we can’t stay here. Come on, Rhoda. Please.”

Rhoda nodded.

We began running toward the ferry slip.

Behind us, I heard Aníbal scream, “Ayúdeme, por Dios, ayúdeme!”

The night wasn’t over yet, the night was just beginning.

Rhoda wept all the way back to the island, sitting inside on the ferry, and attracting the attention of several grownups who must have thought Christ knew what. We tried to calm her down, but she just kept shaking her head and weeping, so finally the three of us went outside and stood on the deck, but we didn’t say anything to each other we just kept watching the water slide by the boat.

I felt lousy.

When we got to Greensward, we took a jitney up the beach and said goodnight to each other without making any plans for the next day. I went inside the house and could tell immediately that it was empty. This was Saturday night, and the end-of-August parties had already started, a week sooner than they should have. My parents were certain to be out having a grand old time, Daddy guzzling scotch and Mommy shooting green-eyed daggers at him. I went into my room, took off my clothes, put on a nightshirt I had bought from a guy who went to boarding school, and climbed into bed. I kept thinking of Aníbal Gomez facing those hoods. I kept hearing the soft sounds of combat.

I was walking through a castle. Alfred Hitchcock was showing me through the castle. There were large high stone rooms. There were tattered drapes hanging at arched windows. There was a closed door. “Don’t go into that room,” Hitchcock warned me. The door of the room opened a crack. Sandy in her mother’s red wig whispered, “Come to me, Peter, come see my tits.” David was behind her, grinning. His hands came up. He began fondling her nipples. The door closed. “Don’t go into that room,” Hitchcock said again.

The castle was endless.

I tried to follow Hitchcock, but he was walking very fast, and I lost him. I was alone in what must have been the ballroom, with a huge chandelier hanging in the center of it, candles guttering, torn drapes moving at the windows, dust on the floor, knee-deep dust that rose and settled as I walked through it.

The candles went out.

There were things in the darkness, bats or birds. They flew silently about my head. I could hear the soft flutter of their wings. The dust was deeper. I had difficulty moving through it. It was higher on my body, it had risen to my chest.

“That is the dust of corpses,” Hitchcock’s voice said.

The fluttering above my head stopped. There was stillness. The dust had risen to my neck. I pushed through it in panic. I had to get back to the room. The dust touched my nostrils. I began breathing it. It was in my mouth and in my nose. I tried to push it away from my face. I saw the closed door through the darkness, through the dust. The dust was heavy and thick, I pushed through it and breathed it and spit it and choked on it. I reached the door. I forced my hand through the dust and clutched the doorknob. “Come,” Sandy said. “Hurry,” David said. I could not turn the knob. I struggled with the knob. The dust was rising over my head. I was suffocating. “Ayúdeme,” I shouted, “por Dios, ayúdeme!” and the knob turned, and the door opened.

The room was white, white walls, white ceiling, white floor, white drapes flowing over windows through which a blinding white light streamed.

They were moaning.

They were in the far corner of the room where the white walls joined, naked and white on the white polished floor, fucking.

I screamed.

“Peter,” the voice said.

I screamed again.

“Oh, Peter,” the voice said.

I opened my eyes.

My father was sitting by the side of the bed.

“Oh, Peter,” he said, “oh, Peter.”

“Get away from me!” I screamed.

“Oh, Peter,” he said, “oh, Peter.”

I got out of bed. I was sweating. I ran out of the bedroom, and then out of the house, and I stood outside breathing hard and saw the light in my father’s bedroom go on. I heard my mother say something in an angry voice, and heard an object falling, and my father cursing, and then the light went out and everything was still. I kept watching the house for a long time.

When I finally went inside, my father was snoring. I tiptoed over to the open bedroom door and looked in. My mother was asleep, too. I went into the living room.

I opened a fifth of Cutty Sark and took it with me into my bedroom. I drank right from the bottle. I must have finished half the bottle, and then I guess I passed out.

I slept until eleven.

It was a bright hot muggy day. The sheets were sticking to me when I woke up, and I was covered with sweat. I felt mean and hot and surly. I looked at the clock on the dresser, and then I called David while I was still in bed and asked him what the plan was for the day.

“You know what the plan is,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know,” he said.

“I don’t think I can get the boat,” I said. “This is Sunday. My father’ll probably want to use it again.”

“Oh,” David said. “Yeah.”

“So it’ll have to wait till tomorrow,” I said.

“Yeah,” David said, and sighed. “Well, I’ll give Sandy a ring, we’ll probably go out to the point.”

“Okay,” I said, and hesitated. “You think I should call Rhoda?”

“Why not?”

“Well, she seemed pretty upset last night.”

“She’s probably fine by now,” David said. “You going to stop by here for me?”

“Yeah, sure, give me a half hour, okay?”

“Right, I’ll call Sandy.”

“And you think I should call Rhoda, huh?”

“Sure,” David said, and hung up.

I put the phone back on the cradle and looked up at the ceiling. There were four squashed mosquitoes near the light fixture in the center of the room. I had killed them at the very beginning of the summer, before my father and I had put up the screens. I thought of the night before, and then sighed and got out of bed. I didn’t feel like calling Rhoda just yet. I felt that if I called her right then, I would probably begin yelling at her over the phone, that was the way I felt. I had a terrible headache and I was a little sick to my stomach. I had never drunk hard liquor before, and I decided now that I didn’t like it at all, not if it made you feel this way afterward. I sneaked the half-empty fifth back into the living room, and then I went into the kitchen and told my mother I’d like some orange juice and cold cereal, but nothing else. She naturally raised a fuss, so I also had scrambled eggs and corn muffins and then vomited everything up in the bathroom.

I was getting dressed for the beach when the telephone rang. It was Sandy, and she sounded very cheerful.

“Hello, gorgeous,” she said, “how do you feel this morning?”

“Just great,” I said, and pulled a face.

“I wonder how Annabelle made out,” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“He shouldn’t have got so drunk.”

“Well...”

“I called Rhoda,” she said, changing the subject. “We want to go out to the point, is that okay with you?”

“Sure.” I hesitated and then said, “ You called Rhoda?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Well, last night...”

“Oh, she was hysterical last night,” Sandy said. “You can’t blame her, can you? I was pretty scared myself.”