John MacDonald - Slam the Big Door

She came down from the cabaña with a tin tray, quilted in the Mexican manner, with fat white beanwagon mugs of steaming coffee, a battered pewter bowl full of Triscuits, and big soft paper napkins weighted down with her cigarettes and lighter. She had brushed her hair, put on lipstick and sunglasses with red frames.

As she put the tray on the sand in front of the towel and sat beside him, she said, “I took a chance you might share one of my vices. There’s just a dash of Irish in the coffee, Mike.”

He grinned at her. “I’ll force myself.”

“What did you think of the party?”

“I was supposed to bring it up first and say thanks. Thanks. I got names and faces all screwed up. I got sorting to do.”

“The party was too big.”

“No, Mary. I like a big party. You know, you get a sort of privacy in a big party. You can do more looking. I’m a people-watcher. Like a hobby. No binoculars, like with birds. I got an hour to kill, I sit in a bus station.”

“Maybe I can help you do some sorting.”

“A pink-faced joker, sixtyish, in Bermuda shorts, with a political voice. Taps you — or at least me — on the chest to make his point. Soon as he found out I was newspaper — or ex-newspaper, or whatever the hell I am — he cornered me and made oratory.”

“That one is easy. Jack Connorly.” He saw her make a face.

“No like?”

“I guess you could say he’s trying to be Mister Republican in the county, but he’s about fifth or sixth in line, I’d say. He’s been after Troy to run for the County Commission.”

“Troy!”

She giggled. “That’s my reaction too.”

“My God, will he?”

“Honestly, Mike, I don’t know. He won’t say yes and he won’t say no.”

“So that’s why Connorly was bugging me about the duty of the citizen and all that jazz. I’ll have to have a little chat with our boy.”

“Jack’s wife is the little dark jumpy-looking one. He’s in real estate.”

“Now how about the blonde on the aluminum crutches?”

“Beth Jordan. She chopped herself to ribbons last year. She ran her Porsche under the back of a truck. They didn’t expect her to live, but now they think she’ll be off the crutches in a few more months. Did you notice the scars?”

“It was too dark.”

“They’ve spent thousands on plastic surgery.”

“Just one more for now, Mary. The kid with your daughter.”

“With Debbie Ann? Oh, that was Rob Raines, a local lawyer. They practically grew up together.”

“You notice lawyers get younger every year? Doctors too. You want old guys, full of dignity and wisdom. So you get a kid looks like a batboy, and how can he have had time to learn enough? There was one guy who treated Buttons...”

A familiar bitter twisting of his heart stopped him, and he sipped the coffee, chewed savagely on a Triscuit, and out-stared an optimistic gull who was walking back and forth ten feet away with all the assurance of a city pigeon, staring at him with alternate eyes.

“You try to be casual and it doesn’t work,” she said gently.

He could not look at her. “Also,” he said, “you don’t expect anybody to understand at all. And when they do, just a little, you resent them, maybe. The special arrogance of grief, Mary. You know. I hurt worse than anybody ever did.”

“Mike, I wanted you to come down, very much. Troy and I talked it over. There was never any question. But I don’t want you to think that I expect that you have to... sing for your supper by talking about private things. But if you ever want to talk...”

He overrode her with a heavy insistence. “I was talking about the one guy that treated her. A kid, you would think. But old around the eyes in the special way the good ones have. And he leveled with me. I appreciated that. None of that mighty-mystery-of-medicine jazz. He gave me time to brace myself by saying — no hope. And I never could lie to her and get away with it, so she got the message too, and had time to brace herself, so toward the end in that hospital — well, like a big airline terminal where the flight is a couple weeks late and you got time for ways to say good-by in all the little ways, and nobody is too surprised when they announce the flight.”

“Mike,” she said.

He could look at her then, and see tears standing in her fine dark eyes and manufacture a fake Hemingway grin and say, “Knock it off, lady.”

“Mike, it fades. It really does. Oh, it always comes back, but not as sharp.”

“They keep telling me that. How long ago was it for you?”

“Seven years. 1952. I was thirty-five and Debbie Ann was sixteen. Haven’t you got a boy about that age?”

“Close. Micky is seventeen and Tommy is fifteen. And three years later you married Troy?”

“Yes. And we’ve had four wonderful years.”

He stared at her until her chin came up a little, in a small motion of pride and defiance, and then he said, “Until when?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Mary, Mary. I know the guy. Five years I didn’t see him. Does he turn into somebody else? I’m not so wrapped up in my own sorrow I suddenly get dense about people.”

“It has nothing to do with you. Excuse me, but it has nothing to do with you. You’re here because you’re Troy’s best friend. And because it’s good for you to be here at this time.”

“You said to me if I ever want to talk... Okay, I give you the same deal.”

She looked angry for a moment, then suddenly smiled. “All right, Mike.” Just then an old car came clanking and chattering up the Key from the south and turned into the Jamison drive. Mary stood up and shaded her eyes against the sun. “That’s Durelda already. Oscar brings her. She works a half day on Sunday. I should go up and get her straightened away on the food. Sunday is a vague day around here, Mike. People come and go, and pick their own indoor and outdoor sports. I do absolutely no hostessing. The only standard item is a big brunch-lunch-buffet deal by the patio pool, from noon to three. Eat when you please and make your own drinks. Introduce yourself to anybody who looks interesting. When you’re finished would you put the tray in the cottage?”

“Sure.”

She walked toward the house, pausing to pick up her towel and beach bag from the cabaña steps.

Mike was left alone in the morning sun, thinking about Troy’s second wife, and Troy’s first wife, and how you always knew when the flavor of marriage was not just right. This one was not just right, and it could be permanent wrong or temporary wrong. He hoped it was temporary. They can’t fool you. Not with the love words and the affectionate gestures, because there’s always that bitter aura, that little stink of coldness, the tension-edge of love gone awry.

A hundred feet offshore a black monster, flat as a plate, burst high out of the water, seemed to pause at the top of the leap, then fell back with a resonant crack of leathery wings against the water. Taken completely by surprise, Mike’s first thought was, I’ll tell Buttons about that.

And he knew immediately that Buttons had been in the ground since the second day of March. Something happened inside him that was like tumbling down stairs, and he caught up a fistful of sand and squeezed it until his knuckles popped.

Who do you tell?

The coffee was gone. He carried the tray into the cabaña and placed it on the countertop beside the sink and rinsed the cups.

He went out and swam again, then lay prone in the sun on the white towel, his eyes clenched against the dazzle, while he walked back through the corridors of memory to the time when he had first met Troy Jamison.

It had been late in 1942, and he could well remember the completeness of the miracle of being clean, of being between coarse white sheets in a hospital bed, and hearing the voices of women after too many lifetimes on the island. He was twenty-three and he had all his hair, a permanent ring of quinine in his ears (they had atabrine but in limited supply), the gray pallor of island warfare (as opposed to the cinema bronze of Errol Flynn in Burma), some ugly ulcers on his legs, and a peach-sized piece of meat missing from his left thigh — high and on the outside, not affecting important mechanical parts — but bitching up the muscle just enough so the slight limp lasted three years.