A Deadly Shade of Gold

by John D. MacDonald

  She got up and hurried out. I sat there stupidly, and then I got up and lumbered after her. I left my change on the table.

  "Hey!" I yelled. "Hey!"

  She kept walking swiftly. I broke into a heavy run and caught up with her as she was walking through the square. I took her arm and she yanked it away and kept walking, toward the hotel, her chin high. I stood and watched her, and then caught up with her again.

  When we were well beyond the village she looked behind us and then looked at me with a little nervous grin and said, "Did I do it right?"

  "Perfectly."

  "I still don't get the point."

  "Credentials. I'm the big drunken Americano who's having trouble with his woman. I went away and left my money. When I go into town tonight, they'll have me all cased. I'll be the kind of a pigeon they can understand. Ready for plucking. I'll have a lot of friends when I go back in there tonight."

  I arrived at the cantina at about eight-thirty. The tables were full, the bar was crowded, the juke box was blasting. The room was lighted by two gasoline lanterns, rigged with some kind of heavy orange glass, casting a weird and lurid light. Most of the customers were men. There were a couple of fat women with the groups at the tables, and there were four girls in circulation, the one with the red hair and three others. A sparrowy withered little white-haired man was the table waiter. My bartender was still on duty. There was a diminution of the dozen loud conversations as I came in. They made a small space for me at the bar.

  The bartender came at once and placed the forgotten change in front of me. He stared at me without expression. I carefully divided it into two equal amounts and pushed half of it across to him. He gave me a big white smile, and, with suitable ceremony, gave me a free tequila. We were closely watched. He made explanation to all, of which I did not understand a word, and the room slowly came back to the full decibel level I had heard as I walked in. I looked no more and no less drunk than before. My only change was a constant happy uncomprehending smile.

  It took them about ten minutes to rig the first gambit. She edged in beside me, shoving the others to make room for herself, a chubby, bosomy little girl with a merry face, a white streak dyed in her curly black hair, a careless and abundant use of lipstick. "Allo," she said. "Allo."

  I pointed at my glass and pointed at her and she bobbed her head and gave the bartender her order. When it came I pointed to myself and said, "Trav."

  "Ah. Trrav. Si."

  I stabbed her in the wishbone with a heavy finger and looked inquisitive.

  "Rosita," she said, and laughed as if we had made wonderful jokes.

  "Speak English, Rosita."

  "Af, no puedo, Trrav. Lo siento mucho, pero...."

  I smiled at her, took her by the shoulders and turned her away and gave her a little pat, then filled up the space at the bar, my back to her. When I glanced back at her, she was giving me a thoughtful look. I watched her make her slow way through the crowded room and finally edge in near the wall and bend over and whisper to a girl who sat with three men. I could not see her very distinctly in the odd light, but I saw her look toward me, shake her head and look away. Rosita made her way back to the other end of the bar. She beckoned to the bartender. He leaned over and she spoke to him. He gave her a brief nod. A few minutes later he made his way to the girl at the table and bent over her and whispered to her. She shook her head. He said some more. She shrugged and got up. A man at the table yanked her back down into the chair. She sprang up at once. The man lunged at her and the bartender gave him a solid thump on the side of the head. There was a moment of silence, and then all the talk started again, over the persistent sound of the rock and roll. I saw the girl making her way in my direction, and I saw that she was what they call muy guapa. She wore an orange shift, barely knee length slit at both sides. She was quite dark, and she was big. Her dark hair was braided, pulled tight, coiled into a little shining turret on top of her head. Her jaw was squared off, her neck long, her mouth broad and heavy, her eyes tilted, full of an Indio glitter. Her bare arms were smooth and brown, slightly heavy. The shift made alternate diagonal wrinkles as she walked, from thrust of breast to round heavy hip. She came toward me with a challenging arrogance, the easy slowness of a lioness. She was not pretty. She was merely strong, savage, confident... and muy guapa.

  Just as she reached me, there was a disturbance behind her, shouts of warning, a shift and tumble of chairs. The bar customers scattered, leaving the two of us alone in the emptiness. She turned her back to the bar, standing beside me. The man who had been thumped in the head crouched six or eight feet from us. He was young, and his face was tense and sweaty, his eyes so narrowed they looked closed. He held the knife about ten inches from the floor, blade parallel to the floor, winking orange in the light. He swung it slowly back and forth, the muscles of his thin arm writhing.

  The bartender gave a sharp command. The young man bared his teeth and, looking at my belt buckle, told me exactly what he was going to do to me. I didn't understand the language, but I knew what he said.

  The girl made a lazy sound at him, a brief husky message, like a sleepy spit. She stood with an elbow hooked on the bar behind her, her rich body indolently curved. Whatever she said, in that silence between records, was like a blow in the face to him. He seemed to soften. He sobbed, and, forgetting all skill, lunged forward, clumsily hooking the knife up toward her belly. I snapped my right hand down on his wrist, brought my left hand up hard, under his elbow, twisting his arm down and under, giving an extra leverage to his lunge that sent him by her in a long running fall into the tables and people as the knife clattered at her feet. I swear that she did not make the slightest move until she bent and picked the knife up. The next record started. The man thrashed around. People shouted. His friends got him, one by each arm, and frog-marched him out. He bucked and struggled, crying, the tears running down his face.

  As they reached the doorway, the girl swung the knife back and yelled "Cuidado, hombres!" They gave her a startled look and dived into the night.

  She hurled the knife and it stuck deep into the wooden door frame. The populace whistled and cheered and stomped. A cautious hand reached in out of the night and wrenched the knife out of the wood and took it away.

  She leaned on the bar again and turned toward me, a deep, dark, terrible amusement in her eyes, and in a clumsy accent, but a total clarity, said, "So what else is new?"

  Then we were both laughing helplessly, and they applauded that too. She staggered and caught my arm for support, the tears squeezing out of her eyes. I bought her a drink. When we had stopped gasping, I said, "He would have killed you."

  "He? No! He would stop. So close, maybe." She held up thumb and finger, a quarter inch apart. "Or cut a little small bit."

  "You are sure?"

  She shrugged big shoulders. "Maybe."

  "You didn't move."

  "It is..." she frowned, "how you say it. Proud. I am not proud to run and fright from such a one. Ai, you are quick for so big a one. You can think he cuts me, no? How could you tell? Maybe this time he does. I say him a bad word. Very bad. Everybody hear it. Proud for him too. You unnerstan?"

  "Yes."

  She spread that big mouth in a warm approving grin. "Thank you for so brave, mister. Rosita say one man here wants a girl speaking English, but I say no. Then I say yes. Now I am glad. Okay?"

  "Okay. So am I. What's your name?"

  "Felicia."

  "I am Trav."

  She tilted her head slightly, a small memory nudging her perhaps. "So. Trrav?"

  "No, dear. Trav. Trav."

  "Trav? I say it right?"

  "Just right, dear. Another drink?"

  "Yes, please. You like some dancing maybe? Tweest?"

  "No thanks."

  "Okay here? Or a table is better?"

  "Okay here, Felicia."

  "Good!"

  Over the rim of her glass she looked at me with approving speculation. This was no wan foolish heart
broken village girl. She had a coarse, indomitable vitality, a challenging sexual impact.

  "You like the hotel?"

  "It's a nice place."

  "I was there. Kitchen work. Not any more."

  "Hard work?"

  "Not so much. Unnerstan?"

  "Sure."

  She leaned closer, breath heating my chin. "I like you, Trrav. You unnerstan that too?"

  I looked down into the dark face, the soft-coarse pore texture, the unreadable darkness of her eyes. False jewels twinkled in her pierced ears.

  "I understand."

  With a twisting and eloquent lift of her head she managed to convey the idea of a place of refuge for us on the floor above.

  "You want to make some love with Felicia, Trrav? Two hundred pesos. Especial for you, uh? Much better than your skinny woman at the hotel, uh? I do this sometimes, only. When I like."

  "Okay, dear."

  She nodded, biting her lip. "What we do, you stay here ten minute, okay?" She was leaning close to me, leaning against me to be heard over the uproar. "Go out, go to the left, that way. Go beside this place to the back. To stairs. Up stairs is a door, unlock. Go in. Count three doors inside. One, two, three. Okay? It is number three door, mine."

  She dragged her fingernails down the back of my hand, squeezed her eyes at me, and then went away in that lazy, swaying, hip-rolling walk. She stopped at tables, talked to people, kept moving, and disappeared into the left hand doorway. I knew her departure had not gone unobserved. I hunched over the bar. I had the feeling that eight out of every ten people in that room knew how soon I would leave and where I was going. After a while I settled up, left a generous tip for the mustache and departed.

  The alley beside the building was so narrow, my shoulders nearly brushed the side walls. There was a fetid smell in the narrow space. I stepped in something wet. After about twenty feet, it opened out into a small courtyard. I waited and listened. The noise from inside the place muffled the sound of anybody who might want to try something cute. The courtyard was littered with papers and trash. The stairway was open, with no guard rail. It creaked and sagged alarmingly as I went up it, brushing the side of the building with my fingertips. Mist had come with the night, haloing the few faint lights I could see.

  I was careful about the door. Always be careful about doors. They can be the handiest surprise packages around. Do not carry your head inside just where it is expected to be, or at a predictable velocity. There was a clackety latch, the kind you push down with your thumb. It opened inward. I stayed against it as it opened, then moved swiftly sideways to flatten against the corridor wall. There was no sound close by that I could detect over the louder din from the room underfoot. No movement in the narrowing light as the door creaked slowly shut. When it was shut I had only a faint memory of the corridor. The blackness was total, except for a faint line of light ten feet or so away, close to the floor. I used my lighter, shading it with my other hand to keep from dazzling myself. One, two, three, with the thread of light under hers. It was the same kind of latch. I thrust it open abruptly and went in swiftly, and at an angle, giving her a dreadful start. She spun from her mirror, eyes and mouth wide.

  I closed the door, saw a bolt lock and thumbed it over. With a definite effort I took my eyes from her and inventoried her small room. She had two fiberboard wardrobes overstuffed with bright clothing. She had one window, curtained with a heavy green fabric, a wash stand with pitcher and bowl, a dressing table fashioned of boards across crates, partially disguised with fringed green fabric, and loaded with a vast array of lotions, cosmetics, jars, perfumes.

  There were two kerosene lamps, one at either end of the dressing table, casting an even yellowish glow. She had a nylon rug designed to imitate a leopard skin, a tin kitchen stool in front of the dressing table, a stained old upholstered chair near the window, with stacks of comic books in the corner nearby, a big sagging old iron bedstead painted hospital white, with lidded chamberpot underneath it, and she had the walls covered with pictures, all of them taped there. Jesus and Mary and Elvis, sunsets and madonnas and pinups, Mexican movie stars, fashion drawings clipped from magazines, sailboats and saints, Mr. Americas, kitty cats and sports cars, an astonishing, bewildering array from baseboard to ceiling, like some fantastic surrealistic wallpaper. The size of the room, no more than ten by twelve, made it all the more overpowering. There was a slant of corrugated metal roof overhead, radiating the remembered sun heat of the day. In the heated air was a strong scent of a dozen perfumes.

  She stood up from the stool as I looked at her room, and tossed the hairbrush aside. The orange shift had been draped over the footboard of the iron bed. She had undone the braids and combed her hair out. It came below her shoulders. She was naked. She stood there for me, obviously and properly pleased with herself. Her body, a half shade lighter than her face, was broad and rich, rounded, firm and abundant, the slender waist flowing and widening into the smoothly powerful hips. Muy guapa and muy aware of it. She made me think of one of P. Gauguin's women, framed against the Macronesian jungle. She came smiling toward me, two steps to reach me, arms lifting. She looked puzzled when I caught her wrists, turned her gently, pushed her to sit on the edge of the bed, near the footboard.

  God, they were noisy downstairs, thumping and yelping. I turned away from her, took a fifty dollar bill from my wallet, turned back with it and held it out to her. Her eyes widened, and a look of sullen Indio suspicion came over her face. This much money might mean that something highly unpleasant was required.

  "What for?" she asked, glowering.

  "All I want to do is talk about Sam Taggart."

  She sat motionless for perhaps two seconds, then came at my face with such a blinding, savage speed that she nearly took both my eyes with those hooked talons, actually brushing the eyelashes of my right eye as I yanked my head back. She followed it up, groaning with her desire to destroy me with her hands. I have never tried to handle a more powerful woman, and the heat in the room made her sweaty and hard to hold. I twisted in time to take a hard smash of round knee against my thigh instead of in the groin. I got her wrists, but she wrenched one free and tore a line across my throat with her nails.

  She butted me solidly in the jaw with the top of her head, and then sank her teeth into the meat of my forearm, grinding away like a bulldog. That destroyed any vestige of chivalry. I chopped the side of her throat to loosen her bite, shoved her erect and hit her squarely on the chin with a short, chopping, overhand right. She fell into my arms and I heaved her back onto the bed.

  I found a pile of nylon stockings on the lower shelf of the sash stand. I knotted her wrists together with one, her ankles with another, then bent her slack knees and tied the wrists to the ankles with a third, leaving about ten inches of play. Then I looked at the lacerated arms which had made the whole procedure slightly messy. I wondered if girl bite was as dangerous as dog bite. There was a half-bottle of local gin on the floor by the comic books. Oso Negro it was called. Black bear. I poured it over the tooth holes, and clenched my teeth and said a few fervent words. I looked at my throat in her mirror, and rubbed some gin into that too. I tore away a piece of white sheeting and bound my arm and poured a little more gin on the bandage. Then I tried the gin. Battery acid, flavored with juniper. I picked my fifty dollars off the floor and put it in my shirt pocket with the pesos.

  She began to moan and stir. She was on her right side. I sat on the bed near her, keeping a pillow handy. Her eyes fluttered and opened, and remained dazed for about one second. Then they narrowed to an anthracite glitter, and her lips lifted away from her teeth. She had good leverage to use against the nylon, all the power of her legs thrusting down, all the power of arms and back pulling. She tried it. I do not know the breaking strength of a nylon stocking. Perhaps it is a thousand pounds.

  She closed her eyes, her face contorted with effort. Muscles and tendons bulged the smooth toffee hide. Her face bulged and darkened, and sweat made her body shine. She sub
sided, breathing hard, and then without warning, snapped at my hand like a dog. I yanked it away, and the white teeth clacked uncomfortably close to it.

  I saw her gather herself, and I picked the pillow up, and at the first note of the scream, I plopped it across her face and lay on it. She bucked and writhed and made muffled bleating noises. Slowly she quieted down. The instant I lifted the pillow, the scream started and I mashed it back down again, and held it until she was really still. When I lifted it she was unconscious, but I could see that she was breathing. In about three minutes her eyes opened again.

  "What the hell is the matter with you, Felicia?"

  "Sohn of a beech!"

  "Just listen to me for God's sake! I wasn't trying to insult you."

  "You wanna find Sam, uh?"

  "No! I'm his friend, damn it. When I said my name you had a look as though you heard it before. Travis McGee. From Florida. Maybe he said my name to you."

  "His friend?" she said uncertainly.