John MacDonald - Slam the Big Door

The game ended. She won. She thrust out a narrow palm and he heard her crow, “Pay me, boy!” The voice was rawer, huskier, more ribald in its overtones and nuances. The man paid her. She turned, grinning, and walked toward the bar, and he noticed something he had not observed before, that she was slightly knock-kneed. Halfway to the bar she turned and looked at Mike. And stopped abruptly, lost the grin. She looked puzzled. She nodded to herself and found a grin of slightly different shape, more mocking, and came directly toward him.

He got up from the stool. “Always manners,” she said. “I remember that. I know it’s Mike, but the rest of it is gone.”

“Rodenska,” he said, and briefly clasped the skinny chill of her outthrust hand, noticing the fading saffron hues of a great bruise that reached from the edge of her sleeve to her elbow.

“I thought about you a lot. You were so cute that time. Honest to God, you were so cute, Mike.”

“I was a doll.”

The beefy man had gotten off his stool. He came over to them, thumbs in his belt, his face dangerous in its utter stillness.

“What makes?” he asked, his voice high and thin, unsuitable for him.

“An old friend, Birdy. Birdy, this is Mike.”

“Hiya,” Birdy said. Muscles bunched the arm as he put his hand out. Mike braced himself for a childish display of strength that might be highly painful. But the hand in his was warm, dry, soft, so utterly boneless and flaccid it was like grasping a glove filled with fine loose sand.

“Where’d you know him?” Birdy asked.

“It was when I was in New York the first time, a long time ago. Five years maybe. He was buddy with Jamison. Like I told you he told me an old friend was coming down but that was all he said and I didn’t know it was Mike. This was the guy I told you, honey, tried to bust me and Troy up but he didn’t have the picture.”

“How about that!” Birdy said.

“It’s like they say, a small world,” Jerranna said. They both stood and smiled at him. Though the mouths and faces were in no way alike, there was a chilling similarity in the smiles. They looked at him with a kind of joyous malevolence, an innocent evil, like two small savage boys — one holding the cat and the other holding the kerosene.

“You just happened to drop in here?” Birdy said wonderingly.

“Not exactly.”

Birdy studied him. “Oh.” He turned to Jerranna. “Find out the pitch,” he said, and went slowly back to his stool, swinging his shoulders as he walked, lifting a slow hand to pat the fat glossy sheaf of hair over his ear.

“Two brews here, Red,” Jerranna called and got onto the stool beside Mike’s.

She turned on the stool, forked her hair back with spread fingers, and beamed at Mike. “It’s good to see you, cutie.” She touched a fingertip to her lips, reached out and touched the dampened tip of the finger to the top of his head. “You lost something up here, Mike. A fella told me once a perfect way to save your hair. Save it in a cigar box. How about that? In a cigar box.”

“You’ve changed a little.”

She slapped the hip pocket of the red pants. “Just call me Satch. Honest to God, nothing I do does any good. All kind of exercises. You’d die laughing watching me. You wanna hear a hell of a measurement? From top to bottom I’m twenty-six, twenty-two, thirty-seven. Isn’t that a hell of a thing? Birdy says I got me a low center of gravity. He says I’m one-third Miss America. Birdy’s got a real sense of humor.”

She gulped the beer with automatic greed, her long thin throat working. The years had coarsened her. He had detected a certain sensitivity, a capacity for imagination, in the girl in New York. But the years and the roads, the bars and the cars and the beds and the bottles — they all have flinty edges, and they are the cruel upholstery in the dark tunnel down which the soul rolls and tumbles until no more abrasion is possible, until the ultimate hardness is achieved. So here she sat, having achieved the bland defensive heartiness of a ten-dollar whore.

But there was more than that. She had retained that unique sexual magnetism which had no basis in either face or figure. It was a dark current generated in some unthinkably primitive source, a constant pressure which tugged the male mind into grubby yet shamefully enticing imaginings. In the back alley of the mind of every man there is a small, black, greasy pool of evil, an unawakened capacity for foulness, a place of guilt. She could walk through your house, past all your prides and glowing purposes, ignoring your display of awards for small victories, and take you out the back door and down the alley to the brink of the blackness you have learned to ignore, and point at it and smirk with an ancient wisdom and say, “See what we found?”

If all men are alcoholics, she is the bottle. If all men are compulsive gamblers, she is the gaming table. If all men are thieves, she is the open, unguarded safe. If all men are suicides, she is the knife, the rope, the bullet. In fair exchange for your soul she offers self-disgust and unavoidable repetition.

The tug of evil was, if anything, stronger than before.

“Who is Birdy?” he asked.

“Sort of a kissin’ cousin. We teamed up a long time ago, Mike. Over a year. We been all over hell and gone. When there’s a couple you get in less jams. And it’s easier to make out. What’s on your mind, Mike? You trying to be a blocking back for Jamison again?”

“I guess so.”

“He says he got in real bad shape after I took off. Drunk himself out of his big job and into a crazy house.”

“That’s right.”

“But he’s doing okay again, isn’t he?”

“Do you care?”

“Sure I care! He’s not a bad guy. But like I told you before, anything he does to himself isn’t my fault. If a guy goes overboard, he goes overboard.”

“Sure, Jerranna. Sure. And you came down here by accident and phoned him by accident.”

She frowned. “Well... I didn’t especially want to. But we weren’t making out so good and I saw that thing about him and tore it out of the magazine and showed it to Birdy and told him about New York and all. You know, you get older, you think of angles. I wasn’t high on coming here, but Birdy and me had never been in Florida together, and the other times I was here it was Miami and Jax only, and he kept at me until finally I said okay. And you know... hell... if you’ve had a guy on the ropes one time you want to find out if you still got that old black magic.”

“You found out you’ve got it.”

“Sure thing. I set it up with him and he came over to the cottage and I’d sent Birdy the hell away, and for about fifteen minutes I’d thought I’d had it. He spent fifteen minutes marching back and forth, calling me everything in the book, yelling at me, acting like he was working up to beating me up. Those old poops that live there must’ve got a real earful that night. Then he made a big jump at me. Scared hell out of me. And the next thing I know he’s hanging on to me and bawling into my neck and telling me how much he missed me.”

“What’s this shakedown angle?”

She stared at him. “Would you kindly explain that, please?”

“Shakedown. How do you explain it? Money. He’s given you money. There must be a reason. To keep you from going to his wife?”

She gave him a look of complete disgust, followed by a short explosive laugh. “Good Christ! Shakedown! I tell him we’re running broke so we got to go over to the east coast and get jobs, so he gives me a hundred or one-fifty and we stay.”

“It’s a living.”

“Mike, don’t get it in your head we’d stay in this stinking place the rest of my stinking life. One day maybe soon it’ll be me or Birdy getting up and looking around and saying, ‘Let’s roll it.’ And in twenty minutes we’ll be packed and gone, and it may be noon or midnight when we take off. That’s the way we are. That’s the way we want to be. It’s the only way to ball it, cutie, the only way to keep the moss off the rock.”