John MacDonald - Slam the Big Door

The big house — the home of Troy and Mary Jamison — was of stone and slate and glass and redwood — with contrived tiltings and flarings of its egret-white roof. It stood on the bay side of the north end of Riley Key, overlooking the Florida Gulf, partially screened from occasional slow traffic on the lumpy sand-and-shell road that ran the seven-mile length of the Key by a grove of ancient live oaks, so gnarled and twisted, so picturesquely hung with fright wigs of Spanish moss that Mike Rodenska, walking across to the Gulf Beach in the sunlight of an early April Sunday morning, had the pleasant fancy that the oaks had been designed by the same architect who had contributed the light and spaciousness and a certain indefinable self-consciousness to the Jamison home. The architect had drawn the trees and subcontracted them to an artistic oak-gnarler.

There was a shell path leading from the sleeping house to the road edge where a big rural-delivery box, lacquered pale blue, stood solidly on a redwood post. Aluminum letters, slotted along the top of the box, spelled out D. Troy Jamison.

All these years of knowing the guy, Rodenska thought, seventeen years of war and peace, and I never knew about that “D” until it popped up on a baby-blue mailbox.

The dulled edges of the broken white shell bit into the tender soles of his feet, and he walked gingerly. He wore dark blue swim trunks with a wide white stripe down the sides, carried a big white beach towel, a cigar case and tarnished lighter.

He was a sturdy man, Mike Rodenska, who couldn’t stop lying a little bit about his height, and felt disappointed in himself whenever he caught himself in the lie, because he despised all forms of deceit. He was half-bald, with a fleshy nose and a solid thrust of jaw. There was a wryness and a gentleness about him, particularly evident in the brown eyes, deeply set under a grizzle of brow. He had been Troy and Mary Jamison’s house-guest for the past five days of perfect Florida weather, and he had used the beach opposite the house with such diligence that the new deep red-brown tan over a natural swarthiness disguised the softness of all his years of newspaper work.

Beyond the road there was a path through small creeping plants and taller sea oats down to the wide beach. The path curved and he started to walk across the plants, winced and hobbled back to the path, sat down, pulled his left foot up onto his knee and picked three sandspurs from the sole of his foot.

A very bright man, he said to himself. You learn easy, Rodenska. Before, you wore shoes. These are the things that stuck to your socks yesterday, boy. They have a place, a destiny. They stick to you, they get farther from mother, then they settle down and raise baby sandspurs. Nature’s devices.

He got up and followed the path down to the beach. The morning sun was low behind him, so the Gulf was not yet a vivid blue. It was gray and there was a silence about it, a long slow wait between the small lazy nibblings of immature waves against the flat wet sand left by the outgoing tide.

A flock of short-legged sandpipers ran south along the beach, pausing to stab needle bills into the wet sand, eating things too small to be seen, their legs a comic and frantic blur — a batch of tiny men grabbing breakfast on the way to work.

“Eat well,” he said. “Be my guest.”

He spread his white towel. Nine pelicans in single file flew north, a hundred feet off the beach, beating slow wings in unison, stopping at the same moment to glide long and sure, an inch above the grayness of the water, full of a banker’s dignity and memories of prehistory.

“The loan committee,” said Mike Rodenska. “Renew my note, hey?”

The Jamison cabaña, of enduring tidewater cypress, weathered to a silver gray, stood on thick stubby pilings just above the three-foot drop where the big storms had cut into the beach far above the high-tide line. He could see glasses standing on the porch railing, glinting in sunlight, a few with an inch of amber in the bottom, stale forgotten liquor from last night’s party.

He walked along the beach, wet sand cool on the soles of his feet, and came suddenly upon a line of footprints that led directly into the water — narrow feet with high arches. Feminine. He looked up and down the beach and saw no evidence of her return, and he suddenly felt very alert and apprehensive about the whole thing. Some of the ladies last night could have... but logic came quickly. Wet sand. Outgoing tide. And with the last footprint so close to the lethargic suds it had to be a recent thing. He looked up and saw a towel and beach bag on the cabaña steps, then he stared out and at last spotted, at an angle to the south, the tiny white dot of a swim cap over a half mile out.

He waded in and swam, making a great splashing and snorting, losing his wind with a quickness that hurt his pride. He floated on his back, gasping, and as his breathing became easier he was pleasantly conscious of the almost imperceptible lift and fall of the swell. He winded himself again in a grim sprint toward the beach, and had a fit of coughing as he walked up to his towel. When he looked for her again he saw her about two hundred yards out, coming in, using a slow and effortless crawl, rolling on the beat for air, snaking her brown arms into the water. He took pleasure in watching her. She stood up and waded ashore, and he admired the width of shoulder and slenderness of waist before — as she took off her white cap and fluffed that coarse black, white-streaked hair — he realized it was Mary Jamison. She wore a gray sheath swim suit with some pale blue here and there, and as she walked up to him the sun touched droplets on her thighs and face and shoulders, turning them to mercury.

“Good morning, Mike.”

“What year was it you won the Olympics?”

“Oh, pooh! What would you expect? I could swim as soon as I could walk. That makes forty-one years of practice.”

“You do this every morning?”

“When it gets too cold I use the pool.”

“You looked so alone ’way out there, Mary.”

“That’s the good part of it,” she said, and added quickly, “How does coffee sound?”

“Hot and black? Like a special miracle, but you shouldn’t go all the way back...”

“Just to the cabaña.”

“Oh. I keep forgetting the conveniences around here.”

“Sugar?”

“Maybe half a teaspoon, thanks,” he said. “Help you?”

“Stay in the sun, Mike.”

He watched her walk up to the cabaña. A little heaviness in hips and thighs. A little softness in upper arms and shoulders. Otherwise, a girl’s body. Make them all swim, he thought. For forty-one years. What if I’d had that routine? With me it would be forty. Thirty-nine, starting at one year. Rodenska — beach boy. Flat belly. Good wind. All I needed was money. Does swimming keep your hair? Are there any bald beach boys? In Hawaii, no.

Troy’s letter hadn’t said much. But the inference was he had landed neatly on his feet in this marriage. “Mary and I want you to come down, Mike. We’ve got a beach place with plenty of room. We built it three years ago. You can stay just as long as you want.”

And so, Mike had been prepared for a younger Mary, a second-marriage type, golden and loaded. Not this gracious woman who had greeted him with genuine warmth when they arrived, after Troy had driven all the way up to Tampa in the big Chrysler to pick him up and bring him to Riley Key. She was obviously the same age as Troy or a little older, with strong features — a hawk nose, flat cheeks, wide mouth, dark eyes that held yours steadily, rosettes of white in her curly black hair. She had such a special poise and dignity that, after the first ten minutes with her, Mike could not imagine her doing any crude or unkind thing. He found himself thinking — not without a twinge of guilt for the implied disloyalty — that Troy had received better than he deserved.