Authors: John D. MacDonald
Stel dropped the board and sat on it and said, “Madame the Queen is really winging it today.”
“Whatever it is, if somebody could bottle it, you could use it to destroy empires. Your father ought to give her a good thumping.”
She made a face. “He’d rather thump on Roger. My dear daddy made his own bed like they say. I guess the daughter-daddy bit clouds my vision, but he acts so damned—goaty about her. She keeps him on the hook. She makes his hands shake. Years married and still it goes on. He’s scared to thump her, Leila. She wouldn’t let him near her for a year. Anyway, thank God Garry’s got the sense to steer clear of her.”
“It’s Garry now? Gracious me!”
“Oh, come
on!
He’s a nice guy, Leila. A really truly nice guy. And this cruise is rough on him and his wife. I’m glad they’re getting paid well at least. A happy ship. Ho, ho, ho and a bottle of arsenic. Honest, I’m sorry I dragged you along, but I think if you hadn’t been along, I’d have jumped overboard a long time ago.”
“Oh sure. You know, for a guy who’s supposed to have been captaining for years, Staniker seems sort of keyed up and twitchy to me.”
“Darling, the Kayd family does that to everyone. It’s our proudest boast.” She paused. “I guess what really gets me is what Carrie does to daddy. He is so strong in every other way. And she keeps him groveling around whenever she feels like it. She keeps putting the knife in me to see if she can get a rise out of him. When he doesn’t do a thing to get her off my back, then I resent him. And when he crushes poor Rog, I resent him more. I know what she’s doing. She’s cutting us loose from him. Uncontested possession. Anyway, I’ll tell you one thing. This is the last cruise of the Kayd family. As a happy united little group at least. Rog can keep taking it if he wants to. Leila, maybe we ought to jump ship in Nassau and fly back home.”
“Mean it?”
“Mmmm. I don’t know. It’s nice to think about.”
Leila sighed. “There’s not enough cruise left to make it worthwhile to stir up the fuss. Let’s stiff it out, kid. Let’s show ’em we’re tough. Honey, I have to get into that water before I begin to smoke.”
In the late afternoon of that day at Allen’s Cay, with Bix and Staniker still not back, Carolyn napping, Stella reading in the shade of a tarp Roger had rigged over a part of the cockpit deck, Leila swam ashore again and wandered, looking for shells. She came upon Roger
standing in the shallows and casting out over the reef where Stel had paddled before lunch, using light spinning gear. When she asked him if he was having any luck, he lifted a stringer of gaudy fish out of the shallows and said, “Mary Jane’ll know which of these can go in the pot.”
Fifty feet further along the shore she came upon big and curious animal tracks and called to Rog in an excited voice. He came hurrying and looked and said, “Hey now! Garry said there might be some on this cay. Iguana. This groove is where his tail drags. Let’s see where he went.”
“But those feet look pretty big. Don’t they bite?”
“Garry said they’re timid unless you corner them and try to grab them. He said there used to be thousands and thousands up and down the Exumas. But they’re delicious. Like chicken.”
“Lizard steaks? Gaaah!”
“Come on.”
They followed the track for several hundred yards, losing them in the rocks then picking them up again in a sandy patch further along. At last they lost them for good. He had driven a driftwood sliver into the arch of his foot, in the middle of the sole. He sat on a flat stone, and she knelt and picked carefully at it with thumbnail and fingernail until at last she got a firm grip on it and pulled it free. She held it up in triumph and said, “You will walk again!”
He laughed. His teeth looked very white in the saddle brown of his lean face. Of all aboard he was the only one to take a tan as deep as Staniker’s. He had dark hair, like Stella’s, and the same mobile sensitivity of feature, the same hint of vulnerability. Yet he was unflawed in any physical way, slender, muscular, moving with sureness and precision and grace, except when he had to perform any task when his father was watching him. He wore pale blue briefs, a ragged hat from the Nassau straw market.
They were in a cleft in the rocks, with a sand floor, with walls
rising eight sheer feet behind him. It was like a small room which had been cut in half diagonally, looking south across the blue of the depths, turquoise of shallows.
“Thank you, Doctor,” he said, and his smile faded away. He looked at her in a way which made her aware of the skimpiness of her one-piece suit, cut to a deep oval in back almost to the base of her spine.
She rose with a bright smile and said, “Ol’ Iguana is probably back there chomping up your fish, Rog.” As she turned away he caught her, hands on her waist, pulling her back, burying his face in her hair.
“Knock it off, Roger. Please.”
“Leila, Leila, Leila.”
“I
mean
it! Stop it right now.”
He turned her swiftly and tried to put his mouth on hers. She wiggled and twisted and pushed at him. It was all so stupid and unexpected and ridiculous. When struggling seemed to only excite him more, she decided to go dead. She took a deep breath and let it out. She let her arms hang. Except for keeping her lips tightly compressed, she went limp. He would give up in a moment. Her eyes were closed. His hand clasped the back of her neck, his arm against her back holding her tightly against him. He slid his other hand down inside the low back of her suit and, fingers splayed wide, hand cupping her bottom, pulled her against the hardness of himself. The sun came red through her eyelids. He smelled of sun-flesh, wind, salt and maleness. She felt a dreaminess, an inner turning, a loosening of her mouth, a yearning for Jonathan’s body so wretchingly vivid she felt as if her heart had been torn loose. As she put her hands lightly on his shoulders, pressing herself into him, with coughing catch of breath, suddenly all the textures were wrong, and in shame and fright she plunged free of him, stumbling in the sand, to come to her feet and find herself trapped in the corner of the V.
He prowled toward her, hands low, his face as blind as the stones around them.
She felt a stone move as her foot brushed it, and she snatched it up, held it to strike, and yelled, “Roger! Roger!” He was in some far place where he might hear her.
He halted, still in a half crouch, then slowly straightened and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked at her and turned away and went to the flat stone where he had sat before. He rested his arms on his knees, lowered his head to his arms. She saw him in profile, chest and belly expanding and contracting with his fast, deep breathing.
She dropped the stone and walked out to where she could not be trapped again. She saw a movement of his hunched shoulders and thought for one incredulous moment he was laughing at her.
“I don’t—know why,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m—so sorry.”
She sighed and went closer to him. She felt very tired. “Just don’t cry. It doesn’t matter that much.”
He looked up, frowning, eyes wet. “I had the feeling—it would be—some kind of an answer to something.”
She understood. She moved closer. “It could be, maybe. Not with me, though. It’s what he’s doing to you, Rog. He won’t let you have any pride. He won’t let you have—manhood. Or maleness, maybe is a better word. He’s getting you to the point where you don’t know
what
you are. So this was—trying to find out, maybe. I don’t know anything about these things, Roger. Maybe he is trying to—emasculate you because she’s emasculating him. Could that make any sense?”
“I don’t know. I hate him. I keep getting the feeling I’m going to do some terrible thing. I guess—I almost did.” He tried to smile.
“You were very scary, you know. I don’t know if I could have hit you with that stone or not. I didn’t even know you. If I couldn’t—stop you, you were going to rape me.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“If you could hate him, Roger, it would be better for you.”
“I despise him!”
“Sure. That’s why you keep straining all day to do something that will please him. Something to make him proud. And the harder you try, the worse things get. Roger, listen to me. Please. You’ve got to get out from under. Because, if you could—try what you tried, you haven’t got things under control. You
could
do some terrible thing. You’re a man. You shouldn’t let him make you doubt it.”
“I feel so ashamed, Leila.”
“It’s over. Okay? Don’t keep on making some kind of a thing out of it. People can start enjoying remorse. Come on, Rog. Get up. Nothing happened. Nothing will. Nothing has changed. I’ve forgotten it already.”
She could remember going back to the rocky beach with him, remember making him laugh, finally. But she could not unearth any other parts of what was left of that day. It seemed to fade out somewhere between the beach and the cruiser.
Now in this narrow bed in the clutter of the shack, with the Sergeant watching her, she wondered if it had been a very bad decision to do nothing about Roger’s attack. Perhaps, when he had the next chance, when they were in the Muñequita together, he had come at her again and she had not been able to stop him. She had read that a severe blow on the head resulting in concussion could temporarily or even permanently wipe out all memory of the incidents leading up to the moment when the injury occurred. The Sergeant said she had been naked when he found her in the drifting boat. The boat had a good range. She remembered Captain Staniker saying it would go two hundred and something miles on full tanks. That could account for her being in Florida. When it was done, and the madness dwindled, Roger would have tried to wake her up. If he couldn’t, he would panic. He would head for the states, abandon the boat, and
try to run away and hide. But they’d find him. Maybe they already had. She wondered how large the gap in her memory might be, how much time had passed between that day when things faded out to the time she had been injured and abandoned.
“I guess they’ve been trying to find me, Sergeant Corpo. I guess there’d be a big fuss about it in the papers and on the air.”
“Now I wouldn’t rightly know about that, because there’d be nobody coming by here to tell me. Don’t have a radio or get a paper. Lot of noise, foolishness, gets people all stirred up.”
She tried to smile. “You’re kidding me!”
He sat on a rickety wooden chair and tilted back dangerously. “One time some kids came and messed this place up for me. But they won’t be back. And the Lieutenant stops by to see how the place looks, maybe once a year. But I go on in every month to town to cash my army check and stock up on what’s needed. Have to go back sometimes when I forget something. Damn—excuse me, Missy—nuisance.”
“Then you’re a hermit!”
The chair legs came down with a thump. He looked aggrieved. “Hermit? Some nutty old man in a cave? Miss Leila, what I am is a veteran on a pension. Having people around gets my head to hurting. Maybe on account of getting wounded in the head. I couldn’t say. When I was a little kid I liked to go off by myself. Go into the big swamp and stay in there for days.”
She sat up straight and swung her legs out of the bed. The look of them shocked her. They were like old pictures of people in concentration camps. The backs of her legs were pink and tender where the deep burn had shredded away the tanned skin of cruising.
She looked at the improvised garment, the rolled and knotted blue bandanna which served as a belt. She saw the brilliant red flowers in the glass jar on the crate beside the bed. She saw the piece of cheap costume jewelry pinned to the front of the white shirt. Red
glass mounted in a brass brooch. It was like someone dressing a doll, a tender game which made her feel shy.
“You—you’ve been taking care of me since Sunday morning? Alone? You’ve been doing everything that had to be done?”
He got up restlessly. “Missy, I had a long time in them hospitals, believe you me. What has to be done has to be done. You were burning up and clean out of your head.”
She tried to stand up but the room swam and darkened and she fell back as he hurried to her. “Now don’t try a fool thing like that!”
She sat in a huddle of misery and said, “I—I have to go to the bathroom.”
He covered his eyes with his left hand and began snapping the fingers of his big right hand, making a very loud cracking sound. “Now just a minute. Now you wait. I had something worked out.
Oh!”
He spun and hurried out. A spring slapped the screen door shut. She heard him clumping down outside stairs. Soon he was back looking pleased, carrying an old-fashioned chamber pot. Water sloshed in it as he set it down close beside the bed. The lid was from a small green garbage container. He said, “You get well enough to walk, I’ve got a privvy about a hundred feet from the cabin. I recalled finding this pot a long time ago, and I kept looking till I found it. Brush grown up around it and a mess of other stuff. I sand-scrubbed it clean as a dollar.” He moved the chair over next to the pot. “You just kind of ease yourself over, and take it slow and easy so you don’t get faint, Missy. You need me, you just yank on that cord there and it’ll jangle some cans I’ve got hung below. When you get settled back into bed you jangle them anyhow. I’ve got to cook you up a good dinner. You slept on through breakfast today, and you should be next door to starved.”
After she had crawled back into the bed and covered her legs with the sheet, she lay quietly, her eyes stinging, fingertips resting on the
absurd piece of jewelry. It sounded too dramatic to tell herself she had fallen into the hands of a madman.
What had happened to everyone? Where were they?
Suddenly ravenous, she reached and grasped the cord and jangled the cans vigorously.
She heard his distant voice. “Coming, Missy. Be right there.”
THAT FRIDAY
, the twenty-seventh day of May, was a very hot still day. A mist hung over the land, a broad area of silvery glare showing where the sun was. The mist caught and held the aroma of the fires of the drying, dying Everglades, a faint stink—like a memory of disaster. The mist held the sharp pungencies of a hundred thousand tail pipes. Days such as this in Dade County, infrequent, corroded the broad leaves of tropical plantings, stung the eyes, smudged white roofs, and lay an almost invisible scum on the motionless water of ten thousand swimming pools. Off-season tourists, lard white from the long midwestern winter, would be deceived by the overcast look, spend hours on the beaches, and a certain predictable number would die days later of the merciless ultraviolet burns.