John MacDonald - Slam the Big Door

“Don’t you want it?”

“Sure, we want it.”

“Then what the hell kind of an agreement do you want?”

“I talked it over with her,” Birdy said. “I didn’t think you’d come up with it. I said if you did, okay. You can give it to us. Like a present. Then after you give it to us, no strings, then we decide if we’ll leave. Maybe we will and maybe we won’t, but that way we’re not being pushed around none.”

“Do I look like a sap?”

“Buddy, I don’t know what you look like. You figure she’s poison for your pal. You want her out. Did you ever think of asking real nice, no money or anything, please take off?”

“Frankly, no. But if that’s what you...”

“It’s too late for that now, buddy. That’s what you do first. And if it don’t work the money comes next. You bitched yourself, buddy, thinking you could buy us. So you only got one choice left. Leave the grand and we’ll think it over.”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Jerranna said. “Troy was getting kinda boring, but not yesterday, man. Yesterday he was real crazy. Yesterday was full of kicks. I saw in the paper he didn’t make it home.”

“So now you’ll stay even if I turn over the money.”

“Did anybody say that?” Birdy demanded.

“That crazy Troy wanted to trade punches with Birdy. He smacked Birdy one good one, and Birdy hit him — pow — and I swear to God he slid eight feet on his back and got up laughing so hard he was crying. He was having a ball yesterday.”

“I’m not getting into any kind of crazy arrangement about the money, the way you people want me to do it.”

“Suit yourself, buddy,” Birdy said.

Mike got up and said, “There’s no reason why you can’t take it away from me, I suppose.”

“Then it would be the same thing,” Birdy said.

“What do you mean?”

“We’d have to leave. We’re people, like anybody else. I took it away from you, it would be the same deal again. If we were going anyway, we would. I would. You’re heavy and you look solid, but I could snap your back across my knee.”

“Good for you.”

“He can pick up the front end of a new Caddy,” Jerranna said.

“If I don’t give you the money, will you stay longer?” Mike asked, feeling confused and desperate.

“The way I feel right now, buddy, when both of us get ready to leave at the same time, we’ll take off, and I don’t know when. You don’t get with things very good. You don’t come on very fast.”

“I feel like I’m dreaming this damn conversation,” Mike said. He stood up and pried the bills out of his pocket and looked at them stupidly. He sighed and opened the packet and slowly counted out five hundred and put the rest in his pocket, placed the five hundred on the table.

“What’s that for?” Birdy demanded.

“It’s a present,” Mike said thinly. “For two lovely people. I like your eyes. I like your hairdos.”

“And we go or stay. It’s up to us,” Birdy said.

“Yes. This is — a gesture of undying friendship.”

Birdy grinned. “Man, now you’re coming on better. You could even get with it, you keep straining.”

“Stick a gold star on my forehead,” he said and walked wearily out. When he was ten feet from the porch door Jerranna said something he couldn’t quite catch. And then they both began laughing. Mike flushed. When he got to the station wagon, he could still hear the laughter, very faint and far away. He drowned it with an angry roar of the engine.

Conned, he thought. Conned out of five hundred bucks. I’m not with it. I just can’t come on. I can’t dig the tribal customs. What the hell kind of a code of honor is that? And how much did Troy leave with them yesterday — as a touching gesture? It’s like you try to give a shark a cheese sandwich to stop gnawing your leg, and the shark says that as a moral, upstanding shark, he can take the sandwich only as a gesture of friendship. Give it to me, boy, and I’ll decide later on.

He went back to the house. Debbie Ann was still out. Troy was napping. So he went out and swam and fell asleep on the beach and awakened in time to see the last bloody segment of the sun slide into the Gulf.

I can pick up the front end of a new kiddy car, he said. I could snap Shirley’s wrist across my knee, after a course in calisthenics. And I can sure as hell give money away.

Some days the world seemed a lot less real. This was one of those days.

On Friday morning he left the house at nine before Troy was up, and while Debbie Ann was having breakfast, and drove up to see Mary. Though the peak of the tourist season had passed, the Tamiami Trail was thick with cars from Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan. The cars were dusty from travel, the rear window ledges cluttered with Kleenex boxes, fruit, seashells, coconut masks, children’s toys, yellow boxes of camera film.

As he neared Sarasota the tempo of the traffic slowed for the long, tawdry, dangerous strip of commercial slum — juice stands, beer joints, drive-ins, grubby motels, shabby sundries stores, tackle shops, shell factories, gas stations, trailer parks, basket shops — all announcing the precariousness of their existence with big cheap bright signs imploring the passerby: STOP — BUY — EAT — SHOP — CUT RATES — SALE — BARGAIN — SPECIAL. Here and there were trim, tidy, attractive operations, lost in the welter of potentially bankrupt anxiety, in the dusty flavor of a dying cut-rate carnival. Tires yelped and horns brayed indignation as people cut in and out of the lines of thirty-mile-an-hour traffic.

The road widened as he entered Sarasota. He found a marked turn through an exceedingly complicated interchange, swooped around a bay-front drive and on out over bright new bridges to St. Armands Key where the leggy brown girls walked in their short shorts, and there were a great many convertibles. He found his way to Longboat Key and drove past some vast and florid hotel ventures along the Gulf front and, just when he was wondering if he had passed Lazy Harbor, he saw the high blue and white sign ahead, with a plywood seagull balanced on one wing tip on top of it. He parked by a long low pink building, asked for Mrs. Jamison, and was told she was out by the pool. He found her in a deck chair in a white sheath swim suit that accented her tan, her long legs burnished with oil, big black sunglasses with coral frames, cigarettes close at hand, an O’Hara novel propped on her stomach.

“Pardon me, miss, but haven’t I seen you someplace before?”

“Oh, Mike!”

“I generally don’t try to pick up young girls,” he said, and moved a chair closer to hers and sat down.

“It must be this suit. I bought it Wednesday, and yesterday when I was walking over on the beach, I was whistled at, by a boy Debbie Ann’s age. It made me feel horribly smug. This suit must do something special.”

“You do something nifty to it, maybe.”

“Stop it right now, or I’ll become unbearable. What’s happening, Mike? How is Troy? Don’t you think I ought to come home?”

He told her about Troy, how he was reacting. It took a long time. She had a lot of questions. Then he told her about Jerranna and Birdy and how that had worked out.

“They sound like members of a different race,” she said wonderingly.

“Martians, maybe. I don’t know. It’s a kind of evil, Mary. Psychopathic. I saw one like him once, a younger version. Killed his parents. They wouldn’t let him have the car keys. He was indignant. Why the big fuss, he wanted to know. They wouldn’t let me have the keys. I got sore. They didn’t have any right not to gimme the keys, see? I had a date.”

“And have you ever seen anything like her?”