Authors: John D. MacDonald
Each day he forced himself to walk farther, working the stiffness out of his foot, limbering the long muscles of the thighs. Constant washings, accomplished by beating the clothing against the stones of the stream, had turned his clothes to rags, and so he adopted the dress of the others.
At times he was discouraged at his own slow progress. December came, and in that cold month many things of importance happened to him.
In the valley, no matter how low the temperature, everyone in the settlement bathed in the clear cold water that came down from the cleft in the cliff face. Winter or summer, the shock of the water was considerable, both in weight and coldness. The first few times Lloyd had bathed there, Armando had gone with him to see that he came to no harm. A single fence of thatch protected the bather from the patient stares of those waiting to bathe, yet offered no protection against the curiosity of any of the women who might be washing clothes downstream from the bathing place.
When he first stepped under the stream it promptly knocked him down, and Armando pulled him, chilled,
thrashing and sputtering, out of the turbulence of the pool carved out by the falling water. Soon he had become used to the force and weight of it, accustomed to its coldness, almost indifferent to the discomfort of washing himself with the harsh soap, drying his body on the rough scratchy texture of the serape before pulling on his trousers. Earlier he had been ashamed of the flaccid whiteness of his spindly body, the bones like an illustration in anatomy, and he knew that the women who washed clothing looked up the slope and marveled at the whiteness and the frailty. But even after the weather became cold, one could toast in the sun in a protected spot. He had found a niche in the rocks far from the huts and he spent time there when the sun was highest. He had always taken a tan easily, and in this clear air he took a deep tan. For a long time he had been spindly, knobby, under the waterfall, but at least tanned. Now he was filling out, and without softness. He guessed he was at about a hundred and fifty, still much too lean for his height, but the webs of muscle were rebuilding.
On one day he stood drying his thick curl of ginger beard and his short brown hair on the serape. Concha had recently cut his hair with a pair of shears so primitive he felt she was pulling it out rather than cutting it. She objected to his desire for such shortness, but did as he wished, reluctantly. Now he wondered how he looked with the heavy untrimmed beard. As he thought of it, it seemed odd to him that he had felt no desire to see how he looked. He knew his face had been badly damaged, and it gave him a curious feeling to touch the strange shrunken nose. He had always wondered about a beard, and it had surprised him that it had come out such a reddish shade. Red mixed with yellow, so the final product was like a pale toffee.
He put on trousers and shirt, put his head through the slit of the serape, and tried to find a pool where his face would be mirrored. The water was all too turbulent. He found one place where there was a pool, but it was in continual agitation from the current near it. He built a small dam of rocks and mud and the pool became
quiet. He looked into it. He looked for long unbelieving moments and then sank back on his haunches, sick at heart. He looked again, cautiously, and the mirrored image was the same. He sat beside the stream and put his face in his hands.
Lloyd Wescott had been a presentable man of twenty-nine. He realized suddenly that he was now thirty: the birthday had been in June, a month he had no memory of. Some women had called Lloyd Wescott handsome. He had been a man with a rather long face, a square jaw with a cleft in the chin, brows that jutted a bit, deepset eyes of a grey-blue shade, a long straight nose, slightly flattened at the tip. He had been a good athlete, he moved well. He liked people sincerely, and so his charm had not been forced. He had been very good at his work, and that had given him an air of confidence and self-respect. Sometimes he had felt, as everyone does, a definite dissatisfaction with his face when he looked in the mirror. It did not seem to reflect what he felt he looked like.
But this mirror showed him horror. He saw a man he had never known. The high forehead was burned dark bronze by the mountain sun. The tiny irregularities he had felt under his fingertips turned into a great triangular scar, whitish pink against the bronze. It started at the outside edge of his right eyebrow, moved irregularly up on a slant to the middle of his forehead, and then cut back up into his hair on the right side. At the point of entry of the scar, the hair was dead white.
The eyes were deeper than he had ever seen them, and they seemed to have the staring glow of madness. The entire end of the nose was gone, almost to the bridge. It was a sickening thing to look at. In spite of the concealment of the great bushy beard, he could see that the lower part of the face, under the beard, was distorted. In the nest of the beard, between scarred and parted lips, he saw the broken fragments of teeth.
It was then that he came to an understanding of the true courtesy of these people. Not even the children had given him any sign by which he could know that he was monstrously ugly.
When he went back to the hut, Isabella was alone there, sewing. She sensed that something was wrong and she put her work aside.
“What has happened?”
“I saw my face in the water. I saw ugliness. A monster.”
“That is not true!”
“It is what I saw.”
“It is not what I see. It is not what anyone here sees, Lloyd.”
“It is what I see. It is in my mind and I can’t get it out.”
“It is not as bad as that.”
He looked at her. “Roberto brought all the things from the car. There are some things of mine. A razor.”
“No,” she said.
“He did not find those things?”
“We have them. You should not take away the beard. The way you are, the beard is good.”
“Without the beard I’d be so hideous not one of you could bear to look at me?”
Her dark eyes flashed then and she backed away from him. “Perhaps you should be pretty, like a girl?” She walked mincingly, patting her hair. “With a skin so soft and sweet, like goat’s milk. Maybe you want to be in the movies? Señor Roberto Taylor, perhaps, with great white teeth like a graveyard.”
“I know that—”
She stamped her foot, and now her eyes were blazing. “Estupido! You fell from a mountain. You fell on the great stones. Should God have come running to hold under you a great bed of feathers? You should be dead. Your face is marked by the nearness of death. Be a man. Stop being a girl child weeping over a pimple!”
She whirled and left the hut and the goat skins fell back into place. The light in the room came from the chimney hole in the thatch, and around the edges of the goat skins. He sat on his heels. The others often sat that way. He had practiced until he was almost as tireless as they were. After a long time he grinned, and knew
the grin showed the splintered teeth. Vanity was what had caused the pain. So he could stop thinking of vanity. There was money. Fortunately, a great amount of money. Money could buy teeth and a new tip for the nose. Those were essentials, reasonably utilitarian. He traced the scar with his fingertips, the scar on his forehead. That one must have been a brute. Hit in the middle and laid the scalp right back.
And he remembered a man who pulped berries between his fingers and tried to push them past his fractured jaw and down his throat. What sort of face would that man have settled for?
He knew exactly what he had to do. He found Isabella. He stood tall in front of her, hands on his hips. He looked down at her and grinned his broken grin.
“Truly, I am of a stupendous ugliness.”
She started to object and then understood and smiled back. “No man can claim more.”
“I will begin a new work. I will rent my face to mothers all over Mexico to frighten disobedient children.”
She made the usual automatic correction of his grammar and said, “You will have much work. It will be successful. Mexico will have only good children.”
“For love, I will have a mask made. It will be the face of the Señor Roberto Taylor. Then young maidens can fall madly in love with me. I will have great success in that work, also.”
“For me,” she said, “that is not a needed thing.”
“This face does not alarm you?”
“If it does, I have the privilege of closing my eyes, Lloydito. What work did you do? You have never told.”
“I am sorry. That is a rudeness. I was a manager of hotels. One hotel at a time. I went to a school and learned what must be done, and then had a small job, and then a bigger one, and a bigger one.”
“Ah, you were good at that work. And important.”
“Good, but not important.”
She gave him a brooding look. “This Sylvia, she lived in your hotel?”
“Yes. She was the wife of the owner.”
“Then he was not a thief as you said?”
“I did not lie. The money was made by gambling. The gambling was dishonest.”
“Oh. Was it a big hotel? With many rooms? With … twenty rooms?”
He laughed aloud. “The land of the hotel is almost as big as all of this valley. There was a great pool of water to swim in. There were many buildings. There are more than two hundred rooms.”
“Truly, you are the greatest liar of all.”
“It is the truth.”
Her questions had brought back memories. The next morning he worked with Armando, helping to clear land that would be planted in the spring. They felled the trees, dragged and rolled them down into the valley. It was hard work and he tired quickly. He had to rest often. Though he protested, Armando would not let him work longer than a half day as yet. After he had eaten hugely of tortillas and beans, he went off to his protected place in the rocks, stripped, and stretched out on his serape. The basic honesty of these people was an insidious thing, he realized. When you were exposed to it long enough, you were forced to reexamine your own motives. And he knew it was time for self-analysis, to go back over all of the events leading up to his flight with Sylvia, and try to understand completely why he had been able to become thief and wife-stealer.
Lloyd Wescott first met Harry Danton in the late summer of 1963. Lloyd, at that time, had just been promoted to manager of a deluxe resort hotel on the coast of Maine north of Portland. He had turned twenty-seven that summer, and was trying very hard to both look and act older. It was an old hotel, with a regular clientele who had become so accustomed to the sedate ways of the previous manager that they tended to treat Lloyd as though he were a half step higher than a bell hop. This was the first season under new ownership, and the new owners hoped to attract new business. Lloyd, then working as assistant manager of a very large and successful
summer hotel in the Adirondacks, and in the winter as assistant manager of a hotel in Jacksonville, Florida, owned by the same people, heard of the vacancy in Maine and applied for the job. He was thoroughly astonished when they hired him. He got to Maine six weeks before opening. A new pool and a new lounge were being constructed. He worked an estimated twenty-hour day for six weeks, lived through the first three days of the opening, and then went to bed for forty-eight hours.
His delicate mission was to attract younger people without alienating the old hands. The hotel had not been operating at capacity for several years because far too many of the elderly clientele had died, and too many had become unfit for travel.
In his greenness and in his eagerness to have a full house, he had taken several chances on mail reservations, trusting to his judgment and instinct, there being no time to check back. He approved a reservation for a one bedroom suite and a single on the same floor in the name of a Mr. Harry Danton of Detroit. Danton’s letter was on creamy thirty pound bond. The letterhead said A and D Enterprises, Incorporated, and gave a Detroit address, two phone numbers, a cable code. The accompanying check for two hundred and fifty dollars was imprinted with the name of the corporation, had been made out on a checkwriter, and was signed by Harry A. Danton. Lloyd remembered fingering the bond paper, running a fingertip over the engraved letterhead, and saying, after checking the occupancy board, “Okay. Confirm it.”
He then forgot it until the morning of August fifteenth. He got down to the front at eight fifteen. He had had to attend one of the guest parties the night before, but had managed to slip out early enough to get in six hours. He knew that if he could get through the house routine, the office routine and the kitchen routine early enough, he could catch a nap in the three to five lull.
Belter was the night man on the desk. He had twenty years of front experience and Lloyd respected his judgment.
“Morning, Stu. Check-ins?”
“A couple. The Durards. Old hands here. Two brat kids, but they tip the whole house. Another case where they’ll want a personal welcome from the new manager.”
“Tell Smitty to let me know when they come down for breakfast.”
“The other one, I think, is a problem. I don’t know how much, but a problem for sure.”
“Ouch!”
“Harry Danton from Detroit.”
Lloyd frowned, then snapped his fingers. “Suite and a single. Right?”
“Right. For about three weeks, he says.”
“What’s wrong?”
“You can smell money from here to there. He looks like maybe he runs a bank. I mean people might guess that about him. Not me. He’s got eyes on him like looking down a gun sight at you. He’s smartened up a lot, but the clothes are just a
little
bit wrong. And the way he talks is just a
little
bit wrong.”
“You mean you know him?”
“No. I wouldn’t have caught it from the name alone. But seeing him and adding the name to it, I ring me a far away bell, Lloyd. Mob stuff. Syndicate stuff. I’ve heard the name in that connection. Those people from the old days have gone very respectable, you know.”
“If you’re right, he isn’t the type we’re after. But maybe you’re the only one who’ll be able to tell, Stu.”
Belter grinned. “About
him
, yes. But the item in the single is going to churn this place. Here’s the sign-in. Miss Daintree West. About five nine. Really stacked. An accent right out of the five and dime. Blonde hair down to here. Black tight pants, green shirt, green shoes, green gloves to her elbows, mink stole. They came into Portland on a late flight and taxied out. While he registered, she stood right where you’re standing, yawning and combing her hair. Finally she said, ‘Jee-
zuzz
, Harry, snap it up! I’m pooped.’ She’s maybe twenty. He’s maybe fifty. She’s signed in as his secretary. If she can type, I’m old Dirty Thumb Gulick.”