John MacDonald - Slam the Big Door

“Troy! Goddamn it, Troy!”

“I know. I didn’t want you to know about it. Pride, I guess. Right back in the same trap. Liquor, Jerranna and things going to hell.”

“How about Mary?”

“Why, I suppose she’ll get the same splendid deal Bunny got. Only it’s going to be a little rougher on her pocket-book.”

“Why wait for Halloween? You can soap dirty words on windows anytime. Be my guest.”

“Ready for a beer?”

“Thank you kindly. For God’s sake, Troy!”

Muscle bulged the corner of Troy’s jaw. “You think I’m enjoying it? You think I get a charge out of wondering if I’m losing my mind? And don’t think I don’t wonder. Often. Sometimes I think it’s as if...” His voice broke. He waited a few moments. “As if I wasn’t put together right. A sloppy assembly job. Some bolts and washers left out. I... don’t want to be what I am.”

“Easy, boy.”

“Isn’t beer for crying into?”

“Can you stay away from her?”

“I don’t know. I’m trying. I’ve tried before. I have the feeling this is my last try before I give up. That’s the sort of thing I should have married. I should have stayed away from ladies.”

“You told me a long time ago that if you ever saw her again, you might kill her.”

Troy shuddered in the hot sunlight. “I came close, Mike. I came damn close. She knew how close I was. I had her by the throat. She looked at me. She couldn’t talk. I could tell by her eyes she didn’t give a damn. She wasn’t scared. If she’d been scared, or fought, that would have done it. I was that close, believe me. I slung her away so hard she bounced off the wall and landed on her hands and knees and looked up at me with her hair falling down across her face and howled with laughter.”

“Does Mary suspect anything?”

“I don’t know. We don’t have much to say to each other. I was careful at first. Now I’m not so careful. It’s like I want to be caught, I guess.”

“I could go see the Rowley woman.”

“What the hell good would that do? What good did it do the last time?”

“Maybe she’s changed.”

“She’s changed. But not in any way that’ll help. Even if I want help.”

“Don’t you?”

“You must get awful damn sick of me, Mike.”

“I should be inspirational. You know. Be a man! Shoulders back! Eyes front!”

“I’m a man, Mike. In a limited sense.”

“There’s one thing about you. You get a compulsion to make a mess. Then you want to roll in it. Goddamn it, you enjoy it!”

Troy stood up. His glasses were back on. Mike could not read his face. He said flatly, “I’m enjoying every minute of it, every delicious wonderful minute of my life. I just couldn’t bear to have it end.” He walked away, his stride wooden.

When all of Ravenna Key was zoned in 1951, due to the dogged efforts of the Ravenna Key Association, every attempt was made to protect the future growth of the Key as a residential area. Based on estimates of future population, certain commercial areas were established which included most of the commercial enterprise on the Key so as to limit as much as possible the number of non-conforming businesses.

However one small business area, midway down the Key, on the bay side, suffered what the owners termed a cruel blow. They insisted that they were being deprived of their rights, that all zoning was socialism. Their particular area was zoned residential. That made the four little businesses non-conforming. Under the law a non-conforming business can continue to exist, but it cannot be enlarged. And, should it burn down, it cannot be rebuilt. It is obviously very difficult to sell such a business. And such a discrimination discourages even normal maintenance.

The four business enterprises, shoulder to shoulder, reading them from north to south, were Whitey’s Fish Camp, Shelder’s Cottages, Wilbur’s Sundries and Lunch, and Red’s B-29 Bar. Whitey’s Fish Camp consisted of a rickety shed where he sold bait, tackle, miscellaneous marine hardware and the random jug of ’shine. He had twenty ungainly scows, painted blue and white, an unpredictable number of five-horse outboards in running condition to be rented with the boats, a gas pump, a big compartmented concrete bait well for live shrimp and mutton minnows, a bewildering display of hand-painted signs, chronic arthritis, a vast moody sullen wife, four kids, an elderly pickup truck, and two ancient house trailers set on blocks near the shed. Whitey and his Rose Alice lived in one, and the kids in the other, and their septic-tank system filtered inevitably into the bay, where the blue and white boats were moored to sagging docks and tilted pilings.

Ma Shelder owned and rented out twenty box-like cottages, arranged in two rows of ten, with just enough space between the cottages in each row so that a car could be parked between them. They were a faded scabrous yellow, with peeling orange trim and green tarpaper roofing, and little screened porches in front. In keeping with the times, Ma called them efficiencies. This was, perhaps, apt, because it would take a high order of efficiency to live comfortably in one of them. There was a wide creaking dock that extended out into the bay so the tenants could sun themselves. Ma lived in a spare cottage, one larger than the others, and nearer the road. The total landscaping consisted of getting a man in to cut things down when the area got too overgrown. Ma, in her day, had danced on three continents and in forty of the forty-eight states. She had raised four children, all dead. At seventy she weighed two hundred pounds, despised mankind, spent most of her waking hours sneering at television, had over twenty-eight thousand dollars in her savings account and was implacably determined to live until she was ninety.

Wilbur’s Sundries and Lunch was a cinder block structure that looked as if it had started out to be a two-car garage. Wilbur’s slattern wife ran the lunch counter, listlessly scraping the grill between hamburg orders. Wilbur paced endlessly through the stink of grease, straightening magazines, dusting patent medicines, counting the packs of cigarettes, sighing heavily. Whenever a customer was spendthrift enough to leave a dime on the counter for the bedraggled blonde, Wilbur, despite his high-stomached bulk, would swoop from a far corner of the store like a questing hawk before the screen door had time to bang shut. On those few occasions when she reached the coin first, he would twist her wrist until she dropped it into his hand, and then, snuffling, she would run out the back door.

Red’s B-29 Bar was a frame structure next door to Wilbur’s. Red had only a beer-and-wine license. He opened at seven to dispense cold packs of beer to Whitey’s rental customers, and remained open until midnight every night. He had draught beer, potato chips, salt fish, pickled eggs, aspirin, punchboards, a jukebox, a bowling machine, a pinball machine, pay phones, a peanut machine, television, contraceptives, tout sheets, some crude pornography and endlessly boring accounts of his flyboy days when he was a C.F.C. gunner.

In spite of the overall grubbiness of the four little businesses, their sun-weathered look of defeat and decay, the community provided a reasonably pleasant refuge for low-income retireds. In fact, one elderly couple had been in one of Shelder’s Cottages for over seven years. The man had his own boat and motor and kept it at Whitey’s for a tiny dockage fee. Unless the weather was impossible, he fished all day every day. She stayed at the Cottages and filled her days with gossip and needlepoint. They ate some of the fish he caught and sold the rest. In the evening they would stroll to Red’s B-29 Bar and have a couple of draught beers, play two or three games on the bowling machine and walk back. Once a week they would drive their old Plymouth into town for a cautious shopping trip, picking up the bargains she had found in the local paper.