You Live Once

by John D. MacDonald

  I got out and listened to the silence. A bird sang and a fly circled my head with a self-important buzzing. I decided I had best not think about flies at all. I heard a car motor. It took a long time to come close, but after it went by the sound faded quickly. I saw no glimpse of it between the spring leaves. I could hear water running somewhere nearby. The woods had a spring smell of dampness.

  I knew I had to get it over with. I opened the trunk, pulled the tarp up around her and lifted her out. I dragged the tarp over to the edge of a small drop, let go of two corners, holding the other two, and rolled her out. She tumbled down over the edge, rolled over three times and came to rest with her back to me, supported by a small pine tree. A frozen juice can I had missed rolled out with her and went on down the slope. I went down and got it. There could be a fingerprint on it. I tossed it into the back of the car. Then I went and looked over the edge again. I could see no clear footprint. That made me think of tire prints; I remembered reading that they could identify tire prints. I looked and found two places where they were clear. I could avoid those places on the way out. I got a stick and gouged the prints out.

  Next I folded the tarp as small as I could get it. I walked deeper into the woods and found the rotten stub of a birch tree with a big hole in the side of it, about seven feet off the ground. I stuffed the tarp down in there and it didn’t show at all. I went back and looked at her again. She looked awfully small, like a child dressed up in woman’s clothing.

  The pine shadows were heavy, and her white skirt had an almost luminous look. Twigs and bits of leaf clung to her skirt where she had rolled over and over until the tree caught her across the middle. She was draped across the tree, white skirt pulled tight across dead hips.

  I stood and looked down at her, wanting to leave, but immobilized, caught up in recent memory. It had been an evening when, as usual, we had been out with Dodd and Nancy. Dodd had been surly and Mary Olan had been overly gay, as though taunting the three of us. After Dodd and Nancy went home, Mary had wanted to go on. We hit a lot of little highway places. As she became drunk, she grew more affectionate. It was clear that she was annoyed at Dodd. I felt that I might become an instrument of her revenge, and I was willing.

  We stopped at a grubby, forlorn little motel forty miles from town, and the fat clerk, with insinuating sneer, asked for ten dollars. Once we were in the shabby room, she lay across the bed face down and cried for a long time. She wouldn’t tell me why she was crying. When I asked her if she wanted to leave, she didn’t answer. When I tried to kiss her, she pushed me away. I sat and smoked and waited her out.

  She dried her eyes, cheered up, kissed me lightly and went into the bathroom. I heard the shower running for a long time, and then I heard the sound of a fall. I went in and found her on the floor, half in and half out of the shower. She had hit her head. I carried her, utterly limp, back to the bed.

  Her body was brown, smooth, flawless. Her pulse felt strong and slow. I brought towels and dried her. The mark on her forehead was minor, and I wondered if she was faking. I took her in my arms, but she was completely without response. I suspected her of faking, and was tempted to call her bluff by possessing her. Absolute helplessness brings out an atavistic streak in anyone. Yet there was the chance that she had actually passed out, or that this was some sort of hysterical seizure.

  And, delectable as was her body, helpless as she was, I could not be that cold-blooded about it. I found her crumpled clothing in the bathroom and hung it up. After I had covered her, I got into the other bed.

  Dawn was grey when she shook me awake. She was dressed, impatient to leave, and in a mood of controlled fury. She did not speak on the way back. The sun was coming out as I left her near the Pryor driveway. She walked toward the house without speaking, without looking back. The next time I saw her she acted as though it had never happened. I never got that close to her again.

  Now, standing there in the wood’s gloom, looking down the slope at her slack body, I thought of that other time. It was a chill body now, not steamy warm from the shower. I saw the shape of her hips, the roundness of her arms, the smooth tan of her shoulders. Never again, for anyone, would there be the avid response, the controlled silken surgings of that body, the wide mouth warm. It was death and it was waste. I thought of myself and of the incalculable date of my own death. I shivered and turned away from her and drove away. I was troubled and frightened. And sad.

  chapter 2

  Back on the main highway at fifty miles an hour, each second took me almost seventy-five feet further away from the body of Mary Olan. I told myself I felt fine. I told myself I’d functioned superbly. I told myself I was a hell of a fellow indeed. Actually, I felt shamed and rotten and sick inside.

  I stopped at a roadside place where the siding was made of neat perfect artificial logs. I went in and sat at the counter, looked at the spotted menu and smelled the short order grease. My stomach closed into a knot. I ordered hot black coffee.

  I kept seeing her. Last night she had walked in front of me, her compact, muscular little rump jaunty under the hang and swing of the white skirt, black hair bounding against the nape of her neck. Now there was a pine tree across her middle, and the first person to walk in there would see the white skirt and the brown legs on the slope of the hill—something used up and thrown away.

  Her death had not been dignified, stowed in my closet, but I felt that I had added a further indignity. I had in some macabre way allied myself with her murderer. Between the two of us we had despoiled Mary Olan.

  The conversation with the police—the phone call I could have made—no longer sounded so idiotic. Certainly they would have given me a rough time, but it wouldn’t have lasted long. Where was my motive? They had their lab methods, their trained technicians. Sooner or later they would have come up with something. It was unlikely that someone could kill her and put her in my closet without leaving some important clue.

  Slowly I began to realize that while I had thought that I was being sane, logical and efficient, I had actually been in a state of emotional shock. I hadn’t been thinking well at all. I had stupidly managed to destroy any possible clue. I had gotten myself out of a jam—maybe. And had given the actual murderer a priceless bonus. When the body was found, the murderer might very well be able to prove that he couldn’t possibly have carted it twenty-five miles north into the woods. He was going to be highly pleased with my cooperation. Little by little the full knowledge of my own stupidity came to me. I had reacted from fright. Maybe what I had done took me out of the play, and maybe it didn’t. If it didn’t take me out, if I had made some mistake, overlooked something, I had destroyed whatever would prove my own innocence.

  If I had made a mistake, it was going to be final. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the State intends to prove that the defendant, Clinton Sewell, did murder the deceased, Mary Olan, and hide her body in the closet in the bedroom of his apartment until the following noon when, using the pretext of taking trash to the city dump, he placed her body, wrapped in a tarpaulin, in the trunk compartment of his car and took it to a deserted spot in the hills and left it there. The State intends to prove that subsequent to disposing of the body in the aforesaid manner, Sewell did continue on up to Smith Lake and pretended that he expected the deceased to join him there.”

  They could make me look like a monster. I felt cold all over. And then I thought of something that made me even colder. Assume the police, following up the question of motive, got close to the actual murderer. He knows what he did with the body. He would know by inference what I had done with the body. It would be the easiest thing in the world for him to steer them back toward me. A little lie here and there, maybe a lie about what the deceased had told him—not admissible as evidence, but enough to put them on my trail. “Why yes, Mary told me that Sewell was getting out of hand. She said he’d tried to choke her and then claimed it was just a joke. She said she was a little scared and wasn’t going out with him again after that Saturday
night.”

  I ordered some more hot coffee. I’d been very clever. Just as clever as a man I remembered back in the Fall River plant the first year I had worked for C.P.P. He operated a steam hammer in the forge shop. The hammer wouldn’t come down. So he leaned in over the bed and looked up at it, curious no doubt as to why it wouldn’t come down, and wiggled the lever. It came down that time.

  I began to get into such a panic that I even considered going back and retrieving the tarp and the body, taking it home, replacing the red belt and making my belated phone call. After the second time around, I discarded that idea. I’d put myself in this situation. The only thing I could do was carry on. And pray. Pray I hadn’t slipped.

  The second cup was too hot to drink. I put it down. There was a lingering soreness in my head. It was unlike any headache I had ever had. A new thought shocked me. Maybe the headache indicated something. Maybe it indicated that I was the one who had done it. Maybe she had come back to the apartment. From what I knew of her, such an impulse wouldn’t be entirely alien to her. And I had …

  No, damn it. The mind is a strange thing, but not that strange. At least mine wasn’t. If the police had found her in my closet, they could have determined a few things quickly. If she had been attacked, if she had any skin under her sharp fingernails. I remembered reading that they could type fragments of skin, like blood.

  I was getting too restless to stay there. And it occurred to me that I didn’t want to spend too much time in transit between the apartment and Smith Lake. I asked for some water, dumped some in the coffee, finished the coffee and left.

  The Olan place at Smith Lake was built back in the days when, if you wanted a place at a lake you built a house. None of this camp nonsense. It was stone, two stories and an attic, but the ceilings on both floors were so high the house looked three stories high. Three or maybe even four generations of kids living up the summers had beaten its original grandeur into a condition of scarred comfort. The other places on the lake were surrounded by woods and brush. The Olan land was cleared and seeded. It sat on a wide expanse of green that sloped down toward the lake shore and the boat houses. Up near the road was the horse barn and garages. I had been there twice before, and met all the clan. During the summer there is a staff of four. An ancient iron Swedish lady called Mrs. Johannsen does the cooking. Her round shy maiden lady of a daughter, called Ruth, does the cleaning and helps in the kitchen. They both come out from the Pryor house in town, as does John Fidd, a knobbly, sour man who brings up three or four saddle horses from the Pryor farm and reluctantly takes care of the grounds, obviously considering yard work beneath him. The remaining staff member, Nels Yeagger, is a massive, amiable young brute who is hired locally—has been for the past three summers—to take care of the boats and do odd jobs.

  With this complete staff, the Olans and the Pryors come and go as they please. With the bedrooms in the big house, and the bunk rooms on the second floor of each boat house, quite a crowd can be accommodated. People ask their own friends and stick together, so that it is entirely possible to spend a day there without even meeting some of the other guests. The two times I had been there it had reminded me more than anything else of an old small private club, so long established that there are special customs and even a special language. Nobody makes any effort to entertain you. Unless you’re willing to stir around, you can be lonesome.

  I counted eight other cars up by the horse barn when I parked. I took my swimming trunks out of the glove compartment and went down to the house. Mary’s younger brother was in the living room. He’s a thin pale boy with heavy black hair that starts about an inch above his eyebrows. He’s a remote, terribly dignified boy, and handles himself with a certain style. He was wearing a black turtleneck sweater and white shorts, and he was sitting staring at a big chessboard on which a game was apparently in progress. As I looked at him he moved a piece and made a notation in a notebook.

  When I walked in he looked up and said, “Hello … uh … Clint.”

  “What are you doing?”

  He looked amused. “Do you want me to tell you?”

  “Go ahead. Just for kicks.”

  “I’m making a prepared variation involving the second move of the king’s bishop in the Nimzoindian Defense. I hope to use it in a tournament next month in New York, right after school lets out.”

  “You figure these things out ahead?”

  He gave me a lofty, patient look. “All tournaments are won these days with prepared variations of one kind or another.”

  “Are you pretty good, John?”

  “After this tournament, if I do as well as I hope, I’ll be the fifth ranking player in the country.” He grinned suddenly. “You don’t give a damn about this, so why ask?” For that instant he looked so much like Mary that it nearly broke my heart.

  “Is Mary around?”

  “Didn’t you hear? Aunt Myrna is spinning. Little Mary didn’t come home at all last night. She and Uncle Willy are down in town heckling the police.”

  “I heard about that. The police came to see me this morning because I was out with her last night. I figured she’d be here by now.”

  “She’ll turn up. She always has. But Aunt Myrna always worries. Mary’s no child, she’s twenty-six. I’m no child either, but try and convince Aunt Myrna.” Before I was out of the room he was back in his special two-dimensional world, engrossed in the cruel slant of the bishops, the hungry eccentric leap of the knights.

  I walked on down to the beach, to the stretch of sand between the two boat houses. There were a lot of people there, most of them familiar to me. I waved to a few, went to the men’s bunk room and changed. Then I started circulating on the beach, sitting on my heels to talk to various groups. They were casually interested in the fact that Mary was missing. It was a mild game to try to guess what had happened to her—what she had taken it into her head to do.

  I saw that the three girl children of Willy and Myrna Pryor were there. They were, of course, Mary’s first cousins. They are aged fifteen, sixteen and seventeen. They are brown and husky and pretty, with crisp brown hair. Due to Willy’s absence in town, they were considerably more relaxed with their three male guests than I had seen them on other occasions. Their swim suits were of the ultra-conservative cut (Willy’s idea, probably), but one of them was using the small of her boyfriend’s back as a pillow. Another girl provided a pillow for her escort in the form of a round brown thigh. The third pair had their heads together, whispering. The girls are called Jigger, Dusty and Skeeter—but I do not know which is which. They make me feel very very old.

  I had seen some of the other guests at the club last night and they knew I had been out with Mary, so I had to tell my story several times, always careful not to deviate from the one I had given the two officers who woke me up. I kept thinking of the silent body I had left in the woods.

  I took a short swim and came back to the beach. Somebody gave me a can of cold beer. I was talking to a dainty blonde who seemed to be making a sun-dazed pass at me when I saw Dodd walking toward the beach, obviously looking for someone. He saw me and headed for me, smiling and waving at friends as he passed them.

  He is my boss. He’s as tall as I am, but thirty pounds heavier. The extra weight is not concentrated in any one place—it is all over him in an even layer, blurring his outline. His brown-blond hair is wavy, worn just a shade too long. Except for his mouth, his features are good, and his color is high. His mouth is a bit small, so that in anger his expression becomes a bit pinched and womanish. He has friendly, hearty mannerisms. He is almost a nice guy. That was what made it so rough when he reported—to find out he was almost a nice guy.

  His predecessor, my previous boss, had been the best there is.

  chapter 3

  I have been with Consolidated Pneumatic Products, Incorporated, for five years. It is one of the big ones. You hear more about G.E. and General Motors because they have consumer lines and keep the name in front of the public. C.P.P. se
lls strictly to industry. You find the two page ads in the technical journals. There are sixteen plants, of which the Warren Tube and Cylinder Division is one of the smaller ones.

  I started out in Fall River, was moved next to Buffalo, and then out to Warren a year ago. C.P.P. believes in keeping all managerial talent on the jump. Three years in any one place is about as long as you can expect. It is smart policy. It makes your executive talent in all echelons interchangeable and broadens your men. It facilitates standard management methods and procedures. And when a boy graduates from the gypsies to top management he will know quite a few of the plants intimately, and know personally a great many men in the field.

  So many of the big corporations have adopted this plan that it has developed a whole new class of people in this country, people without roots. Or, perhaps, people with a different kind of roots. There are thousands upon thousands of us—the married couples filling up places like Park Forest, Illinois, like the two Levittowns, like Parkmerced in San Francisco, and Drexelbrook in Philadelphia. And, of course, like Warren’s smaller version, Brookways. It is the new management caste, and what it will eventually turn into, nobody knows. Joe Engineer and his wife move out of Parkmerced and into Park Forest two thousand miles away. The first day they are there they can start playing do-you-know with their neighbors. Get the latest word. Wilsie quit and went with Reynolds Metals. Dupont sent Kingley back to the business school. The Bowens have three kids now. They live in the big developments, work on community committees, set up sitter banks and draw on each other’s time; live with a minimum of privacy and a maximum of borrowing of gadgets, party glasses and utensils.

  As a bachelor, I have not yet gotten into the community living aspects of this gypsy existence. Doubtless it will happen to me one day. A married man seems to have better promotion chances with top management.