John MacDonald - Slam the Big Door

There was a certain pleasantness about it. Sun, and the blue bay waters, and idle talk — a fish flapping on the floorboards of the boat — a wind chattering in the palmettos — blue herons stalking the mudflats — the endless brilliance of the nighttime mockingbird, exhausting all the variations of his theme, while a dove talked of sorrow amid a whip-poor-will’s insistencies. Night wind creaked the hingings of the old metal signs, and the widow in Seven cried out in her dream. Rain puddled the dust and hushed the fronds and hurried across the roofs. The high sun swung by, and the years swung by, and spiders as big as teacups spun webs the size of doors. Every year the traffic was heavier on the Key Road, boats more numerous in the bay, fish smaller and fewer.

At three o’clock on Monday afternoon, Mike Rodenska, in the station wagon borrowed from Mary, parked near Ma Shelder’s Cottages. He got out and stood in the white glare of sun on bleached bay shell, then walked around and looked down the double row of cottages. The little porches were empty. Bugs droned the litany of siesta.

A spare old man in sagging shorts, his chest brown as raw coffee, came walking around one of the cottages.

“Pardon me, sir.”

“Eh?” He stopped and looked irritably at Mike.

“I’m looking for a woman named Rowley.”

“Don’t mean a thing to me.”

“She’s with a man called Birdy.”

“Oh, them. Sure.” He scratched the bleached fuzz on his chest. He turned and looked. “The car’s there. Number Five. So they’re in there, or they’re up to Red’s Bar. You the law?”

“No.”

“Hoping you were.”

“Why?”

“Friend of theirs?”

“No.”

The old man glanced toward number Five again, and lowered his voice. There was a New Hampshire flavor in his speech. “D’be no use pretending this is the Parker House. Ma doesn’t give a darn who she rents to long as she’s full up. That pair, they don’t even have the common decency to pretend to be married. T’aint like I’m a prude, young fella. I’ve been around the world nine times and seen things that’d make your blood turn to water, and for thirty-forty years I was wild as they come. Far as I care, they could do it right out here in the open, waving flags, and to me it wouldn’t matter no more’n if they were Airedale dogs. But there’s some folks here get upset easy, and those two, they don’t even care enough to pretend they’re legal. And him renting her out, pimpin’ for her, that doesn’t set too well. When I said that about the law I was thinking of two things, young fella. Either somebody complained loud enough and long enough so the law is looking into it, or I thought maybe the law was catching up. They got that look of people always on the run for one thing or another, and if you’re not the law and not a friend, I’m just thinking maybe you’ve come here as a customer, and if you did I’ve talked too damn much, but I can’t feel sorry.”

“Not that either, friend.”

“I can tell looking at you, you ain’t going to tell me what business you got with those two no matter how I try to find out. So I’m wasting time, mine and yours... They not there, you try Red’s.”

Mike walked slowly to number Five, through the heat and silence of the afternoon. A five-year-old Mercury was parked beside the cottage. It had been altered to sit low on the rear wheels, snout in the air. The windshield was cracked, the body beginning to rust out. It had, at one time, been given a coat of green house paint. It had a look of long and dusty distances, of a hundred thousand miles of going nowhere in particular very fast.

He banged on the screen door of the small porch. The inner door was open. He could see into the cottage where an angle of sun struck a frayed grass rug, a soiled wadded pink towel, a Coke bottle on its side near the towel. He banged again. The place had the flavor of emptiness. He walked over and looked at the car. Torn upholstery. A plastic doll in a grass skirt hanging from the sun visor. Oklahoma plates. Bald tires. Comic books piled in the backseat.

He had a sudden odd feeling about the car. A presentiment of disaster. It seemed to him that he had seen the same car many times. He had covered accidents. He had seen this car before, warped and twisted into ruin, flame-seared and clotted with blood after the bodies were taken out. The wrecker would be looking for a solid place to plant the big hook. And the dangling doll would be there, and the peeling stickers from far places, and the welter of trash in the backseat and on the floor. These were the vagabond cars, the twenty-four-hour cars, dropping like bombs through the many dawns, heading inevitably toward that rendezvous with a pole, a tree, a truck, an abutment.

He walked back out to his car, saw that Red’s was so close there was no point in driving. He walked past the sundries store, where a bulky man with a pinched face was putting the evening newspapers in a rack, the Ravenna Journal-Record , the Sarasota News . BERLIN CONFERENCE STALLED... FIVE DIE IN ARCADIA SMASH... TORNADOS LASH KANSAS... VENICE BYPASS OPPOSED... YACHT AGROUND AT BIG PASS...

He pushed the door of the bar open and walked into a dark and noisy place. After the outside glare it took long seconds for his eyes to adjust. There was a clattering whine of an air conditioner, the drone of compressors in the coolers, the rattling and thudding of the bowling game, the hysterical braying of a television host giving away a twelve-dollar food mixer to a woman with a face like a shy pudding while thousands cheered.

The great tumult, after the silence outside, gave him the impression that he had stepped into a large, busy, jostling celebration. But as his eyes adjusted and his ears sorted and identified the sounds, he realized that there were only four other people in the place. There was a scrawny man with a rusty brush-cut and white eroded face behind the bar, leaning on his elbows, talking above the television din to a brutish-looking young man in a white T-shirt and khaki shorts who sat on a bar stool, bare brown powerful legs locked intricately around the legs of the chair. They both turned to look idly at Mike. The bartender’s eyes were a sun-bleached-denim blue. The young man had an inch of forehead under a towering pompadour of glossy, wavy blond hair, small deep-set simian eyes, a tender little rosebud mouth, and a jaw that bulged with bone and gristle. On his left biceps, across the cantaloupe bulge of his flexed arm, was the complicated tattoo of a faded pink rose in full bloom.

Jerranna Rowley was at the bowling machine, competing with a wide-bellied young man in gas-station khaki. Mike moved onto the stool nearest the door, ordered a draught beer, left the change from his dollar on the bartop. Red moved back to continue his idle conversation with the wavy blond. Mike half-turned to watch Jerranna. He saw her bend, and aim, and concentrate and roll a strike and give a snort of triumph.

When she turned and looked toward the television, awaiting her turn, he saw her face clearly. What was she now? Twenty-five? So little change. The same round face and oddly small head, and welter of mussed tan hair, and the pale gray eyes that bulged a little, the fatty contours of the mouth framing the large, ridged, yellow-white teeth, the long neck and the narrow shoulders. She wore knee-length tight red pants, a jersey T-shirt of narrow red and white horizontal stripes, with the red of the shirt the wrong red to wear with the red of the pants. She wore dusty black ballet slippers, and her bare ankles looked soiled.

He noted the changes, one minor, one major. The minor change was a puffiness around her eyes. The major change was in her figure. She had that same scrawniness, the loose, indolent, shambling, somehow arrogant way of handling herself. Her breasts, small, high, sharp, immature, widely separated, obviously unconfined under the jersey shirt, were unchanged. The change had occurred from lean waist to knee, and was accentuated by the red pants. There, in thighs and buttocks and lower belly, she had become heavy, rounded, bulging, meaty — a gross and almost obscene flowering. It was a startling contrast to the rest of her, as though she were the victim of a casual assembly of the major portions of two different women.