A Deadly Shade of Gold

by John D. MacDonald

  "Do you know the names of the people on the boat?"

  "Just the one that Cal brought to the house, the older one. Senor Mineros. I don't know his first name."

  "Where does Tomberlin live?"

  "He has a lot of places. The only one I was at was a sort of lodge, way up near Cobblestone Mountain. I don't mind fun and games. But that got a little too rich for me, believe me. He had a lot of kids up there that weekend. I knew most of them. It got crazy up there. You couldn't walk without stepping on a jumbled up pile of kids and getting pulled down into a lot of messy fooling around. I got out of there."

  She looked at me with delicate indignation, a righteous little snippet, asking my moral approval.

  "How old are you, Almah?"

  "Twenty-four."

  Nora was having a long wait. I looked at the lovely and slightly soiled little blondie. I wondered what I would do with her if I really had the power to judge her and sentence her. Like the true eccentric, she thought she was just like everybody else. She was a cold mischief, with looks which had kept her from paying any penalties. In a small wind in the clearing, blowing toward me, she smelled of scent, of repellent, and a small sharp smell of nervous perspiration. She was too self-involved, in money hunger and pleasure hunger, to be the legendary femme fatale. She was a blunderer, but she would keep landing on her feet. She was never going to bring anyone any luck.

  She had explained something I had felt about Sam Taggart. There had been a strangeness about him. During the short time I'd been with him, I'd felt that we could never again be as close as we had once been. He'd traveled too far. That little boat ride had taken him a long long way. At the time he died, he was trying to come back, but he probably knew he could never make it all the way back. He could pretend for a time. But the act of murder was still with him. Nora would have immediately sensed that strangeness, that apartness. And she would not have rested until she learned the cause of it.

  Little Almah Hichin, with her lavender eyes, and her slender girlish figure, and her greedy and available and random little loins, was going to go her way, making out, aiming for the money, spicing it with her kicks. As most of the people who would become involved with her would be as trivial as she was, she would probably do no great amount of human damage. A child of her times, running free as long as she dared, then setting herself to entrap some monied fool old enough so no childbearing would be asked of her. She felt herself to be infinitely sweet and precious and provocative. Enchantingly foolish sometimes. But talented and admirable. A lovely smile is really all a girl needs.

  "Why don't you say something?" she asked.

  Suddenly it didn't seem suitable to merely untie her. She would preen herself and pat her hair and tell me chidingly that I had been horrid to her. Her manner would be flirtatious and self-satisfied. I wondered if it would be possible to convince her of her own mortality, and if it would do any good. That cold little sensuous brain thought it would live forever.

  "I guess I'm stalling. This isn't something I'm going to enjoy."

  "What do you mean?"

  I shrugged. "Chivalry or something, I guess. And when... a girl is as pretty as you are, Almah, it seems like such a hell of a waste. And, to tell the truth, I'm sort of an amateur at this. I've never killed a woman before."

  Her mouth sagged and her eyes bulged. "Kill!"

  "Sweetie, I told you I couldn't promise a thing."

  "But I've told you everything! My God! You can't be serious! Look I'll do anything you say. You could get in terrible trouble. People will look for me."

  I pointed a thumb over my shoulder. "They won't look back in that jungle. I guess I'm not doing you any favor by stalling. I know I have to do it. But I feel squeamish about it."

  She tried to smile. "This is some kind of nasty joke, isn't it?"

  "I wish it was. I'll make it easy on you. I won't hurt you."

  "But I haven't done anything!"

  "I have to do as I'm told."

  I stared somberly at her. Her color had become quite ghastly. "Now wait a minute!" she said, her voice high and thin. "I'm going to get that money. Listen, you could come back with me and I could get you into the house. You could be with me every minute. You could come with me when we go to get the money. You can have half of it. You can have all of it."

  "You can scream now if you want to. It might help a little. It won't make any difference, but it might help."

  She had begun to babble, her voice high and thin and fast and almost out of control. "But you don't even know me. You've got no reason! Please! I can hide here. You can say you did it. Then I'll go wherever you want me to go. I can wait for you. Please. I'll belong to you. I'll do anything for you. Please don't do that to me!" She began to dash back and forth, yanking at the rope, making little yelping sounds of panic.

  I went to the line and hauled it tighter than before, bringing her up onto tiptoe. Again I felt that urge to howl with sour laughter. Melodrama made me self-conscious. But I thought of what she had talked Sam into doing, and I wanted to make a lasting impression on her. I wanted her to feel death so close she could smell the shroud and the dank earth.

  I took the pocket knife out and opened the ridiculously small blade. I walked up to her. Her eyes showed white all the way around the lavender irises. She had bitten into her underlip. There was a smear of blood at the corner of her mouth. She made a maddened humming sound, and her body spasmed and snapped and contorted in the animal effort to run.

  She looked at the knife, and the ultimate terror of it loosened her control over her bodily functions. Now she was beyond all pretense, perhaps for the first time since childhood. Sam's last duchess. Menterez's last blonde slut. As I raised the blade, she opened her jaws wide in a final yawning caw of despair, and I lifted it above her hands and cut the line.

  She fell in a sprawling soiled heap, sobbing and shuddering, rolling her face against the earth. I looked down at her for a moment, pocketed the knife and walked out to the car.

  Nora started to say something, and looked at my face and stopped abruptly. She slid over and I got behind the wheel. I drove in silence to the hotel. Nora got out there.

  She said, "Are we going to leave?"

  "Tomorrow."

  "AIl right, dear."

  "I think I'll go back and pick her up."

  "Yes, dear."

  Fourteen

  ALMAH HICHIN had taken a long time to free her hands and pull herself together enough to start walking west, toward the village. Felicia had walked it.

  She was only about a hundred yards from the obscure entrance to the isolated clearing. She stopped when she saw the car coming. She looked small, lost, displaced in time and space. I went on by her, turned around in the road and came back through my own drift of dust. I stopped beside her. She leaned on the closed door and gave a gagging cough.

  Then she looked at me with a hideous remnant of flirtatiousness, like the grin on a cholera victim, and said in a trembling voice, "Did you... want to give me a ride?" Her glance met mine and slid away, utterly humble.

  "Get in."

  She slid in, wary and apologetic and self-effacing. As I started up I told myself that something would have broken her sooner or later. She would have come up against something that couldn't be teased, cajoled or seduced. The ones with no give, the ones with the clear little porcelain hearts shatter. And in the shattering, some chips and splinters are lost, so that when, with great care, they are mended, the little fracture lines show.

  Did she, for God's sake, think she was going to be immune forever? The blackness is always a half step behind you, hand raised to touch you on the shoulder. Sam learned that. Carlos learned it. Nora learned it. Little golden girls cannot stay ignorant forever. But when you break a pretty thing, even if it is a cheap pretty thing, something does go out of the world. Something died in that clearing. And she would never fit together as well again.

  I pulled over and stopped abruptly, short of the ridge where the village would
be in view. She had ridden with her head bowed, her small fist and marked wrists cradled in her lap.

  I got out and said, "You can take it from here."

  She raised her head slowly and looked at me through the sheaf of spilled blonde hair, her face crinkled and puzzled, like a child wondering whether to cry.

  "Why?" she said. Here lip was badly swollen where she had gnawed it in her terror.

  "Because you have to play these games with real blood and real people."

  "Who are you?"

  "Sam was my friend a long time ago," I said. "The woman on the boat was real. The knife was real. The blood was real. Sam died on that boat. It was just your turn to die a little."

  "I'm just sick now. I'm just terribly terribly sick."

  "So is Carlos."

  She coughed into her fist. "You say crazy things. I don't mean to hurt anybody. You want to hurt people. You wanted to hurt me. God, I feel destroyed! What does that make you? Does that make you so great, scaring the wits out of me?"

  There was no real defiance. It was just a reflex, an habitual attitude, accompanied by that horrid little smirk I had seen before. Her glance moved swiftly away again, reminding me of the way a spiritless dog cringes when inviting a caress. She would have to learn how to imitate defiance. There wasn't any of the genuine article left. It had crawled off into the brush behind the clearing to die and rot. I wondered if she could sense how it was all going to be for her from now on. The jackals can always sense that kind of vulnerability. Imitations of defiance amuse them. They travel in packs. They would hand her around. She wouldn't last very well.

  There was no answer I could give her. I began walking toward the village. After fifty feet I looked back. She was still on the passenger side. At the top of the ridge I looked back again. She was behind the wheel. A little later I heard the car start and come toward me. I played a little game, with a flavor of penance. As the car came up behind me, I listened for a sudden change in the motor noise, and I was poised to dive clear. If there was that much spirit left, maybe she wouldn't be jackal meat after all. Maybe there was a toughness I hadn't reached. The red car went by me, slowly, as far over on the other side as she could get it. She gave me a single empty look and went on, clutching the wheel at ten after ten, the blonde hair blowing in the dusty wind.

  I went right to the Tres Panchos. It was a little after five. There were a half dozen fishermen in there, smelling of their trade. The juke was playing the bass pasodoble of the bull ring. I leaned into a corner of the bar, and made Mustache understand with bad Spanish and gestures that I wanted a glass of ice and a bottle of tequila anejo.

  "Botella?" he asked. "La Botella?"

  I reached and took it out of his hand. Twenty pesos. He shrugged and watched me pour the glasses and shrugged again and walked away.

  I motioned him back and had him get himself a shot glass. I filled it from my bottle. I held my glass up and said, "Drink to me, my friend. Drink to this poisonous bag of meat named McGee. And drink to little broken blondes, and a dead black dog, and a knife in the back of a woman, and a knife in the throat of a friend. Drink to a burned foot, and death at sea, and stinking prisons and obscene gold idols. Drink to loveless love, stolen money and a power of attorney, mi amigo. Drink to lust and crime and terror, the three unholy ultimates, and drink to all the problems which have no solution in this world, and at best a dubious one in the next."

  He beamed without comprehension, and said, "Salud!" We drank and bowed and I filled the glasses again.

  I know that for a long time there was a respectful area of emptiness around me, even when the place had filled up. The Mexicans respect the solemn, dedicated, brooding borracho, and have an almost racial empathy for the motives which can send the soul of a man crawling down the neck of a bottle to drown. I know there was a purchase of another bottle. But from there on, memory is fragmented by a vast paralysis of the cerebral cortex.

  Chopped bright fragments of memory endure. McGee dancing-the feet very deft very tricky, so that I could look down with awe and watch them perform on their own. McGee, the soul of generosity, buying drinks for multitudes of friends. McGee leading a choral group in a song so heartbreaking it made him weep-Somewhere Over the Rainbowwwwwww...

  And then a hilarious and giggling and cooperative process of getting the unwieldy bulk of McGee up a narrow staircase, some of the sweet gigglers pushing from behind, and some ahead pulling him by the hands. Light of two yellow flames. Great blundering sprawl into a rickety clatter of bed, huge McGee guffaws-McGaw guffees?-mingling with the soprano jabbering, laugh-squeals, clothes-tugging. Later, in a heavy sweet humid blackness, awakening to incomprehensible effort, a half-dream of holding someone, of trying to overcome, together, a great steady remorseless beating, of trying to still and silence something as implacable as the sea itself. Texture of dense hair, not clovery, thick with perfume, taint of kerosene. A sticky chomping next to my ear. Thin smell of spearmint mingling with the rest. Guilt. Then a strange awareness of a sour justice in it. This will cure that.. This will end that. This will atone for that....

  I awoke into suffocating heat, to barbed needles of light which went through my eyes and into my brain, to a mouth dry as sand, clotted teeth, and a headache that seemed to expand and contract my forehead with each heartbeat as though it were a red balloon a child was trying to inflate. Tequila hangover, in a gagging density of perfume, under a tin roof, on the sweat-damp sheets of a village whore. She stood naked beside the bed, bending over me, looking at me with melting concern, the heat in the room making her look as if she had been greased.

  "Leedle seek?" she said.

  "Oh God. Oh God."

  She nodded and shouldered into something pink and went out the door. When she came back she had a tin pitcher of ice water, a jelly glass, and some ice wrapped in a towel. I drank water until my belly felt tight as a drum. Then I lay back and chewed ice, with the chilly towel across my forehead and eyes, wondering where she had gone. She came back and took the towel off my face and handed me a half glass of reddish brown liquid.

  "Drink fast," she said, making the gesture of tossing it off.

  I did so. I think one could achieve the same result by drinking four ounces of boiling tabasco sauce. I sprang up. I roared and paced and wept. I sweated and gasped and wept and held my throat. I ran back to the bed and opened the towel and stuffed my mouth with ice and chomped it up like Christmas candy.

  When the worst of it was over, I subsided weakly on the bed. Felicia had watched the whole performance calmly, standing leaning against the door frame, her arms folded. As I became aware of my headache again, I realized it was not quite as bad. I mopped my face with the cool towel.

  The cure reminded me of an ancient joke. A man has all his teeth pulled and new plates put in immediately. The dentist tells him they'll be uncomfortable for a while. Two weeks later he runs into the dentist. He is hobbling along on two canes. The dentist asks him what happened. He explains that he had gone fishing with his wife and she had fallen out of the rowboat. In diving overboard to rescue her, he had misjudged distance, and caught himself in the groin with an oarlock. He says, "You know, for about forty seconds there, Doc, my teeth didn't bother me a damn bit."

  She went over to her dressing table, opened a box, and came back with my watch and wallet. It was five of eleven by my watch.

  She said, "Every goddam peso is there, Trrav. "

  She went over and filled the wash basin, laid out soap and towel and comb. She tossed her pink wrapper aside, searched one of the cardboard wardrobes and pulled out that orange shift I had seen her in before and pulled it on. She gave a couple of casual swipes at her hair with a brush, painted her mouth, yawned and said, "I am downstairs, okay?"

  "Okay. I guess I was a damn fool."

  She shrugged. "Pretty dronk, Trrav." She gave me a broad merry smile. "Almost too dronk for the love." She went out and closed the door.

  Getting dressed was sad and enormous labor. A man in the
grip of the remorses is a pitiable thing. You think of all the promise you once had, and what has become of you. A hundred different versions of yourself sit in the audience and applaud ironically. Your own body disgusts you. Alcohol is a depressant-physically and emotionally. And that final fermentation of the maguey seems to uncork the bottom-most cask, where you have been hiding the black despairs of all the years.

  When I found the inside staircase and went down, I was glad to see that only Mustache and Felicia were there. As I trudged toward the bar, Mustache uncapped a bottle of beer and set it on the bar with a flourish. He knew a glass would be superfluous. I held the bar with one hand and tilted it up with the other, and set it down when it was empty. I stopped him from opening another one.

  Felicia took me by the wrist and tugged me over to a table. I told her I had to get back to the hotel. She said we had to talk first.