Authors: John D. MacDonald
“By God, you sure don’t show it a bit.”
“Thanks heaps, but the fact remains. Also the fact remains that I think about it. And I think about you being sixty-seven.”
“Mmmm. Let’s say I show it, but I don’t feel it.”
She went to him, sat crosslegged on the floor close to his chair, took his hand in both of hers and looked earnestly up at him. “Fer, I’m not going to bring out any violins and give you any crap about the best years of my life.”
“But?”
“I think the word is settlement. Some kind of a settlement. You are a tough old monkey and I think you are going to live forever, but I think you would feel better if you knew that if something did happen, you wouldn’t leave me behind cussing you up down and sideways for not setting up some kind of an arrangement to keep your little girl off the streets when the money runs out. Fair is fair.”
She waited in the silence while he thought it through. “Fair is fair, sure enough. It isn’t the easiest thing in the world to set up, Crissy. By God it isn’t. I can’t just go sticking you in my will. The wife and the kids and all the grand kids would rise right up and bust hell out of any codicil like that, especially if it was as big as what you’d need.”
“What do I need, Fer?”
“Pretty good piece.” He went inside to her desk and worked it out on scratch paper. He called her and she went and stood beside him, her hand resting on his shoulder. “Little girl, if you was to live exactly as good as now, with the upkeep to pay on everything and what you have to spend, and if it was set up so you’d live off investment income, it would take four hundred and fifty thousand dollars put away into a good balanced program.”
“Good Christ!”
“But that would mean you’d eventual leave behind a pretty fair estate, going to somebody I don’t owe spit. So it’s got to be worked out on a lifetime basis, so you live fat and die broke. Okay?”
“Sure, Fer.”
“Lump sum life annuity, I guess. And some way to transfer this house out of your name but giving you the right to live here as long as you live. That would pay some of the bite on the annuity. The thing to do is get ol’ Walker Waggoner scratching around seeing what he can come up with. Then the smart thing would be to get you started on it and me pay the gift tax or whatever, then there’d be no fuss from anybody after I’m gone. When I know what it will come to, then I can figure out the best way to scramble it together. Fair is fair, little girl. You said it true.”
Some months later she had to take a complete physical and sign insurance application papers. More months passed and when nothing happened she queried Ferris Fontaine.
It had irritated him. “Little girl, I am doing the damned well best I can, and it is going to get done when a lot of things that affect it one way and another get sorted out.”
Fifteen months ago he had come to stay with her on the middle days of a windy week in January. He complained of indigestion. She heard him get up in the middle of the night, and she could not tell how much later it was when she woke again, reached and found him still gone, and no body heat remaining in his side of the bed. She found the bathroom lights shining down upon him on the floor near the toilet, in the pale blue pyjamas she had once bought him. He had reached up and had unrolled an entire role of flowered toilet tissue, pulling it down upon him so that she had to brush it to the side to see his face and know that it was a dead face. He had told her once what she would have to do if he ever should become very sick at that house, or die. She did not think she could manage it. Then she remembered the loyalty of Bertha, the Swede. Bertha understood at
once. The two women dressed the body, Bertha with silent tears running down her square pale face. Crissy packed his suitcase. They put the body in the front seat of the navy blue Continental, and the suitcase in the trunk.
Bertha got behind the wheel and Crissy followed at a cautious distance in her white sports car. They left the Lincoln on a dark street in downtown Miami. When no cars were coming, they tugged the body over behind the wheel. The motor was running, the windows down, the headlights on. Bertha tipped the Senator forward and as the horn began to blow, she trotted heavily to the sports car and climbed hastily in beside Crissy.
They did not speak all the way back. When they got out of the car Crissy said, “Thank you—for helping.”
Bertha said, “I’m giving you my notice now, M’am. I’ll stay thirty days if you haven’t found anybody by then, but then I’ll have to leave.”
“Suit yourself.”
“I came with him because he asked me to, only.”
“Don’t bother to explain.”
“But I am a decent woman.”
“Congratulations,” Crissy said and went into her house. She stripped the bed, remade it fresh, showered, made a stiff drink and went to bed and waited for tears. There weren’t any. She had liked him well enough. He had paid well for what he wanted from her. But the old floof had let her down where it counted most, maybe.
After the Senator had been buried by his family, with suitable fanfare and an attendance so large that it was rumored that half of them came not to mourn but to assure themselves he was dead, Crissy drove all over the state seeing in privacy those men who had been members of the inner clique, trying to use the leverage of her special knowledge to pry loose some promise of support.
But they seemed more amused than distressed, and she gave up
quickly after one of them, eyes gentle as flint, alternately squeezing and stroking her shoulder, said that they sure didn’t want to upset anyone Fer had been fond of, but they’d have to rig up something to give her a nice long stay up to Chattahoochee to ponder it all out some. You had it right nice for a nice long time, considering …
So she had hurried back to the house, aware of having been a fool, of having attempted a dangerous game. She had to learn wariness all over again, after these past lush years. She knew it wouldn’t be difficult. The practice had started early, maybe way, way back when they took you from the grammaw-house to the Home, and you knew it was a terrible mistake and you were too little to explain it to them, but you knew somebody would remember you and fix the mistake. Then you gradually realized it wasn’t a mistake, and it wouldn’t be fixed.
You learned wariness when you were a child bride and the New Orleans cop bounced a slug off the pavement into the back of Johnny Harkinson’s curly head as he was racing off with a snatched purse. Wariness during the thousand nights Phil Kerna owned you, and you were his luck, sitting back out of the cone of light, watching the poker sessions. Owned you and then loaned you, when the markers came due. Wariness in New York, sharing the apartment with Midgie and Spook, the three of you modeling Frankal’s cheap wholesale imitations of high-fashion items, and hustling the buyers but giving them a fair and full return because Frankal didn’t want any repeat business ruined. New lessons in wariness when you pulled stakes and went down to Savannah with Midgie and used her contacts to get lined up with that Friendship Club, a telephone operation, hundred-a-week dues. Once they couldn’t come up with it and spent ninety days working in the prison laundry, ruining their hands and teaming up to fight off the old bull dykes. From then on you make certain you always have your dues.
Drifted to Atlanta, where it was closer control, a straight percentage
action. Wariness in the slow realization that it had stopped being something you were doing for just a little while for kicks. You were a seasoned hooker, and you’d turned twenty-seven, and because your score on repeats was falling off because of competition from the kid stuff just breaking in, you had no more choice left on who, and damn little choice left on what. So, in your wariness, you knew that a really big score was the only way out. So when you got picked for the Key West duty, one of the six packages picked up by the company airplane, one of the steadier types, and the chance with the Senator opened up, you begged and bargained your way loose, using tears and money saved up.
But in the end it was only a partial score, girl, because you turned soft and sweet and trusting. And that was the final lesson. The long years shot and no time to work on any score that would take more years. No time for mercy, girl, and who showed you any? The thing about this score, it had developed out of the Senator thing. You could say it was even a part of it—a chance to more than make up for not having really put the pressure on that old goat sooner and harder. Should have put security on a pay-as-you-go basis right from scratch, when finding out I could turn him back into a man was such a miracle to him, I could have made him crawl on broken glass all the way from his twenty-six thousand acres to where he had me stashed. Every year, old man, you lay fifty thousand on good, fat, blue chips in little girl’s name, or the fun stops.
Spilled milk. Oh God, Garry, if you messed up my second chance at the jackpot …
She heard the latch of the sliding glass door and turned her head and saw the boy, Oliver, peering in at her and sliding the door open as she had told him to do.
As he came in, closed the door, turned to her, she held both her hands out, her smile brilliant, and whispered, “Darling, darling, darling. Come here, dear. Sit right here where I can look at you.”
The shyness of translating last night’s intimacy to broad daylight made him approach her with a most curious gait, partially a humble shamble, partially a self-conscious strut.
She took his hands, turned her face upwards, eyes half closed, soft mouth demanding the kiss. He bent hastily and clumsily, got his nose in the way, managed to kiss the corner of her mouth and, in sitting back on the chaise lost his balance, squashed his weight down onto her knees, shifted off them, apologized hoarsely, sat there blushing sweatily and intensely. She noted the way he was dressed, and guessed it had been the result of anguished decisions. He wore sand-colored skinny stretch jeans, and a dark blue sports shirt with the sharp creases of brand-newness still in it, buttoned down the front with small brass buttons. He seemed able to look everywhere except at her.
“Olly, my darling, I have been sitting here waiting for you and trying to believe that what happened really happened. It all seems so fantastic and incredible. It was so—completely unplanned. When you woke up did it seem as unreal to you?”
“Yes. I guess it seemed that way to me too.”
“What is happening to us?”
“It—sort of just happened.”
She gave a sharp tug at his hands. “What’s the matter? Can’t you look at me? Can’t you say my name? Can’t you tell me how you feel?”
She saw him force himself to look into her eyes. His deep tan was suffused with the pink tinge of his blush. With his somewhat indistinct chin, and with those eyes set a little too closely, he looked at her fixedly with an expression of such wondrously enthralled goofiness, she came dangerously close to laughter. His adam’s apple slid up and down his throat as he swallowed. In a huskied and very uncertain voice he said, “I—love you, Crissy. I love you.”
It was what she wanted to hear him say, and it had come sooner than she had expected.
She leaned, lifted his right hand to her lips, kissed the heavy knuckles one by one, feeling him tremble. “I don’t know whether I love you, Olly. Love is a very precious thing. It is a lot more rare than people think. But when you find it, and it’s for real, it is worth the most terrible sacrifices. I don’t know if—if we’re strong enough.”
“Strong enough?” he asked, puzzled.
“If you think I’m going to keep us some kind of a state secret, dear, if I decide I do truly love you, then you are making a mistake about me. I am going to be proud of us. People are going to know about us. And they are going to say very cruel things. Are you strong enough for that? And for the pressure your family will put on you? We have to be so terribly sure, Oliver. After all, I’m twenty-eight years old, and I’ve been married. And widowed.”
“I’ll be twenty in July.”
“The world will say wicked things about us. And a lot of people will even laugh at us. That’s why we have to be so sure.”
She could sense that it alarmed him. Poor bunny. So many things to alarm him and fascinate him all of a sudden. In empathy her memory went all the way back to Phil Kerna, and the strangely dazed, swooning, hypnotic feeling she’d had after that first time with him, when after that night and day and following night in the Reno motel he had left her there alone and gone back to the poker table. Having been married to Johnny for a year had left her as innocent as a child in comparison with what Phil had been able to make her experience. Now it would be just the same with Olly Akard, who had come to her with only the experience of a couple of years of furtive intimacy with his little steady girl, Betty, had come to her with that curious conviction of the male of limited experience that his role was that of sole aggressor, full of determined
anxiety to perform properly just as it was written in the books, and with the pitiful belief that the one small pleasure he had always achieved was all his body was capable of.
She knew how deeply he had been confused and frightened, first by her, and finally by the unexpected and wild and savage intensity of his own guided response. Curious guilts and shynesses made him feel very awkward to be with her in daylight, knowing she too remembered all the tumbled deliriums and grotesqueries of the unending night.
Though she knew she had brought him far enough for there to be little danger of his being frightened away now, she laughed softly and fondly, hitched herself closer to him, put one hand on his powerful shoulder, laid her right hand against his cheek and with her thumb stroked the furry sheen of his eyebrow.
“But no need to look so scared already, dear little bunny rabbit boy,” she said. “I won’t want to parade you on display until I am absolutely certain. And meanwhile we will be dreadful sneaky sneaks. Like the page sneaking into the quarters of the sexy old queen. My little maid is discreet. And this home of mine was designed to frustrate nosey people.”
He said with overly casual and clumsy curiosity, “I—I suppose that’s the way the Senator wanted it.”