John MacDonald - Slam the Big Door

“So it’s just like it was last time, Jerranna?”

She bit the corner off her thumbnail. “Just about. Hey, you know what you can buy now? Safety belts for bar stools. Isn’t that a jazz?”

“Hilarious.”

“You want to try to beat me a game?”

“No thanks.”

“Where was Troy last night? I hung around because he said he’d show but he didn’t.”

“He fell over a martini.”

“It figures. He just can’t handle it good. He ought to let it alone.”

“Think of the reasons he has to drink.”

“Look at how I’m bleeding, Mike. You’re still cute. Say, you know you got a real good tan? Birdy tans good, but I just get all over freckles. Buy me another brew. Hey, Red!” She turned on the stool to face him more squarely. “You know, you walked out on me one time. You going to do it again? I know what you’re thinking. I always can tell when somebody is thinking the way you are.”

“You told me that the last time. Do you have to get approval from Cuz?”

“No. It’s like this, Mike. I do what I want. He does what he wants. And he doesn’t care because it isn’t his main kick anyway. He’s a real seldom man.”

“With or without approval... no thanks.”

“Still scared of your wife, I bet.”

“That’s it. That’s my trouble. I’m chicken.”

“Too bad, Mike. Real too bad.”

“Suppose I could dig up a thousand dollars. That would take you two a long way.”

“Why would you do that? You Jamison’s brother?”

“Would you take it and go?”

“What if we were about to go anyway?”

“Then I made a thousand-dollar mistake.”

“You wouldn’t have it on you.”

“Not exactly.”

She studied him, chin on her fist. “We should trade in that bucket. It’s got a high-speed shimmy. Drives Birdy nuts. I’m interested, Mike. But he gets funny sometimes about the money thing. If he gets the idea anybody is trying to buy him, he flips. So let me put it to him easy. He’s got a lot of pride. You know. And I can let you know. You got a phone?”

“I better stop by.”

“This is Monday. Come by Thursday with the money. It should be in tens and twenties, Mike, on account of it’s hard for us to change bigger money. They always want to know where we got it. Somehow I’ve never given much of a damn about money. Funny, isn’t it? There’s a skinny old poop in one of the cottages came creeping up offered me fifty dollars. He’s maybe a hundred and nine — age and weight both. Saved it up out of his Social Security, I betcha. Maybe one day I got to go that route, but I’m not ready yet. Anyhow, it woulda killed him. You going someplace? Aren’t you even going to finish the brew? I can if you can’t. See you Thursday, boy scout.”

The door swung shut behind him. The sun, low over the Gulf, glared into his eyes. A red truck went by, stirring up a small whirlwind that pasted a piece of newspaper against his leg. The air smelled like hot asphalt and dead fish. He took a deep breath and said a filthy word and walked slowly to the station wagon.

He drove into Ravenna, wired his bank for money, and got back to the Jamison house at dusk. Debbie Ann and Shirley McGuire were walking slowly from the beach toward the house, laden with gear, gleaming with sun oil.

He met them after he had parked the car and gotten out.

“I’m a hundred and nine,” he said. “I’ve saved a fortune out of my Social Security. The three of us could go to Ceylon, swim at Mount Lavinia, have tall frosty ones at the Galle Face, dine at the Silver Faun, wander through the botanical gardens at Kandy, and be back here in a week. All set?”

“My goodness!” Debbie Ann said. “Could you survive it?”

“It will probably kill me. That’s what I’m counting on. Incidentally you both look sweet, fresh, pretty and decent. It’s a sort of contrast I won’t explain at the moment.”

“Have you been out in the sun all day without a hat?” Shirley asked.

“Oh, this is just senility in action. It’s a kick I’m on.”

“Go sit by the pool, Ancient One,” Debbie Ann said, “and pretty soon we’ll be slave maidens and bring you something tall, cool and delicious.”

He had noticed the other cars were gone. “Where is everybody?”

“Troy is probably working. Mother Mary borrowed my little bug to go to some kind of committee meeting. Durelda went home early with a toothache. We’re on our own, buddy.”

But Mary returned before the girls had finished changing. They all had a drink by the pool as dusk turned to night. Shirley agreed to stay for dinner if she could help. She phoned her aunt and explained. Her call to her aunt emphasized in everyone’s mind that Troy hadn’t arrived and hadn’t phoned, but no one spoke of it. They delayed dinner and finally ate, and after the women had cleaned up, they played bridge.

Shirley was Mike’s partner. It was almost immediately obvious that Mary and Debbie Ann were the superior players, and could have won handily if Mary had been able to keep her attention on the game. She alternated between brilliant play and gross error.

The talk was aimless, a bright and meaningless thread woven through the dark fabric of tensions. There was the click and whisper of the cards, the bright cones of light, the idiot faces of kings and queens, the perfume of the women and the gleam of their hair — their light voices and the small formalities of their smiles.

The rites and codes of the game had, in time, a strangely hypnotic effect on him, leading him into a fantasy that at first amused and then disturbed him. He slumped, heavy-lidded, and looked at the quick oval glintings of their fingernails and thought, This is a deceptive plastic, almost natural. Their eyes are made of finest tinted glass rolling realistically in a special lubricant. Debbie Ann’s brow took a long time to make, inserting the delicate copper-gold wire into the delicate plastic, warmed by the mesh of the invisible heating system.

And he thought that he was utterly alone in the world, easing his emptiness with these clever toys, able to pretend, for a little while, that they were real. But in time he would tire of the game and get up and go to each of them in turn and expose the little control panel set into the small of each tender back, and press the proper silvery stud. As he did so, each face in turn would go utterly blank and dead and they would get up in a wooden way and walk off one at a time to a closet where they belonged and line up, glassy and motionless in the darkness. Should he want one of them to cook for him or sing for him or swim with him, he had only to make his selection, press the proper stud, clearly marked, and the programmed behavior pattern, a card with a printed circuit, would drop into place. This is what we have had to do since all the women left. And if there is need for love, there is a stud for that, a choice to make, programmed after the patterns of the great courtesans, nimble, tender, delicately avid, quite realistic, utterly without significance.

Live comfortably with a Demi-Girl. Our model has a half-life of a thousand years. Buy the assembled model or the kit. Delivered with five hundred program cards. Catalogue of ten thousand other cards immediately available. The General Electronics Demi-Girl is powered by a wafer of thorium, completely shielded for your protection. At your command she will Dance, Quarrel, Play Chess, Shovel Snow, Discuss the Esthetic Theories of Bergson, Recite Dylan Thomas, String Beads, Play Darts, Play Golf at the Selected Degree of Skill, Cut Your Hair, Mow Your Lawn, Prepare Beef Stroganov, Play the Accordion.

Wear-Pruf, set for 98.6°, free of blemishes and imperfections, guaranteed lifelike, basic wardrobe included in purchase price, tireless, never ill, faithful. Specify height, weight, coloring, and simulated age. Immediate delivery. Visit our showrooms. Time payments can be arranged.