The Beach Girls

by John D. MacDonald

  I’d made it on my hands and knees to within ten feet of the office door when Gus loomed up in the moonlight, full of beer and curiosity, on his way back to his old scow, the Queen Bee.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he rumbled at me.

  I told him in several dozen well chosen words. In spite of my alarmed protests, he picked up the solid hundred and fifty pounds with impressive ease and carried me upstairs. I sustained further injuries in transit. He thumped my head on one door frame and my good ankle on another.

  He plumped me down on the bed so hard I bounced. He knelt and fingered the puffed ankle with great gentleness and murmured sympathy. He made me work my foot until he was satisfied I hadn’t broken anything. I told him which cupboard to look in for sheeting. He tore some long strips and did a professional-looking job of binding it and tying the ends.

  He knelt, admiring his handiwork, and then looked up at me. There was a sort of a click you could almost hear. And in the next second he sprang like a lion. I fought for maybe two whole seconds. Afterwards he wept, bashed his deep chest with his fist, demanding I call the police and have him locked up forever. He shouldn’t be free to assault innocent ladies. Finally I got it through his thick skull that the lady didn’t mind a bit. His whole craggy face turned into one vast mask of surprise.

  “Yah?” he said.

  “Yah.”

  So he came back to bed. After a few months I learned not to ask him to make an honest woman of me. I meant it, too. But much as he loved the little dictator who kept him in line for so many years, marriage is not a good word to him. He was kept on short rations, I think. He is a big kid. This is like stealing apples. It gives him a delicious feeling of guilt. When he tiptoes, carrying his shoes, he lifts his knees so high he looks like a football player in slow motion. When he goes, Ssssh, half the night drivers on the Boulevard wonder if they’re getting a flat tire. He feels romantic and devilish.

  I feel guilt too. And sometimes I feel ridiculous. Yet, again, we are two lonely people. Who are we hurting? But guilt is there.

  I sat in the apartment by the window that looks out toward the basin. It was after ten. I saw Helen Hass walking out toward the Shifless. The little nightly beer picnic on D Dock had ended. Boat lights made tracks across black water.

  It’s a good place. I’ll miss it.

  The sound of the television in the little lounge just off the office came up through the floor. I knew who was down there. That damn Jannifer Jean, that swamp-pussy poor crickety old Jimmy Meirs brought back from Georgia three months ago. She’s maybe twenty to his fifty, but who am I to talk? Buys pretties for her. Cooks for her. Makes a damn fool of himself. If he’d ever married before, maybe he’d be smarter. He found himself a sweet chunk of trash for sure. Probably her last chance to get out of the swamps and she grabbed it. Just about smart enough to find her mouth with a fork. And from the look of her you can just tell that she got started off at twelve or thirteen and hasn’t stopped for breath since.

  She hadn’t been here a week before that damn Dink Western got to her while Jimmy was off on charter. About the only streak of decency in her is not taking anybody into the trailer. Maybe she knows if I caught her at that I’d throw her off the place, Jimmy or no Captain Jimmy. She can move around from bunk to bunk.

  Came near throwing her off the place that day last month when she went aboard that boat over at B Dock. Those three hotshots from Miami were aboard. Went aboard in the afternoon and didn’t come off until nine, with Captain Jimmy, in off his charter, about to lose his mind about her. Came off half drunk and smeary-looking and told Jimmy a batch of lies he swallowed. Next morning the boat pulled out, and that afternoon Jannifer Jean went into town and came back with a whole new batch of those tight pants and tight shirts in bright colors. So I know she hustled those Miami boys, but I don’t know how she explained to Jimmy where the money came from.

  Damn if I can understand men sometimes, how any one of them’d want to touch her. That long tangly black hair, and that long white face the sun won’t touch, and those big dull-looking black eyes, and that big bloody-looking mouth. Maybe it’s what’s under those tight shirts, great huge soft white things, so big there’s something disgusting about them, at least to me. She’s slim enough around the middle, and then comes those pulpy hips and those long lardy legs. Those thighs have a loose quiver when she walks. And it’s some walk. I won’t ever forget Christy Yale staring at her one day as she walked away from us and saying, in a sort of reverent voice, “Alice, when Moonbeam walks on the level, she looks like a sack of melons rolling downstairs.”

  And she never looks clean. Her feet are grubby as a small boy’s hands. I keep wanting to get yellow soap and a stiff brush and scrub her neck for her.

  Right in front of her, Captain Jimmy said proudly to me, “Alice, don’t she look exactly like Jane Russell?”

  Jannifer Jean gave me a sappy smile. I swallowed hard and said, “Exactly, Jimmy.” God help me.

  I’m pretty certain even Rex Rigsby put her through her paces one time. I can’t understand it. Rigsby certainly has no trouble finding better material. Poor Captain Jimmy. He must have heard the way Moonbeam screamed at Dink Western to get up.

  So Jimmy is asleep in the trailer and she’s down there now. The bad thing is that Judy Engly may be with her. Jack ought to keep Judy away from her. They’ve been going over to the beach together. A bad thing. Jack can make her sound like a sack of cats, but still she’s acting restless. Meant to have kids.

  So now I’ve talked myself into putting my shoes on and going down there and, if Judy is there, busting it up.

  I went down the narrow stairs and into the dark office. I walked to the doorway to the little lounge and looked in. Jannifer Jean sat sloppy on the rattan couch, all alone, one white leg folded under her. She had a box of popcorn. She was chewing slowly, eyes on the screen. Every once in a while she would dip her hand in the box, shove more into her mouth, and then lick the tip of each finger.

  I went in and turned the volume down to where it belonged. On the screen they were about to hang a cowboy.

  “You deaf?” I asked her.

  She looked at me with those dull eyes, chewing like a sleepy cow. “Lahk it loud,” she said.

  “Keep it turned down, hear?”

  “Show thing, Miz Stebbins.” She was watching the screen again.

  “And lock the outside door when you leave. It was unlocked yesterday morning.”

  “Show.”

  I sighed. They hung the cowboy. I turned to go back upstairs. A voice in the dark on the other side of the screen door said, “Alice?”

  “Who is it?”

  “George Haley.” He opened the screen door and came in.

  “George, you’re a damn pest.”

  “Hell, I know that. But something new came up.”

  “Come on up, then.”

  He followed me up to the apartment, breathing hard on the stairs. He’s a big soft man with an oddly small head, a sun-red face, big black glasses and a gay wardrobe of pastel slacks and gaudy sports shirts which are always worn hanging outside the pants. His real-estate office is half a mile south on Broward, a little air-conditioned cinder block building not as big as the sign on the roof. DEAL DAILY WITH HALEY.

  I opened us a pair of beers. He sat in Jess’s big chair and I sat in the rocker.

  “Late for a business call, George?”

  “I saw the lights. Thought I’d take a chance.”

  I decided to needle him some. “How you coming along with the most beautiful girl in Florida? Agnes thrown you out of the house yet?”

  His face got redder. “Now I’m telling you, like I told Agnes and like to tell everybody that’s got the wrong idea—I hired Darlene Marie Moyd for pure business reasons.”

  “Sure, George.”

  “And it’s working out, too. You’d be surprised how many more customers come in the office.”

  “Men.”

  “They buy the property,
Alice. And another thing. I leave that door open so she can’t help hear what goes on in my office. You’d be surprised how many men, knowing a girl like that can hear, won’t dicker as much as usual. It’s a pure business thing with me.”

  “Wouldn’t it look better if she could type?”

  “Her typing is coming along real good. I don’t know why everybody has to go around thinking I—”

  “What’s this new thing that came up, George?”

  He looked happy to be off the subject of the winner of fourteen beauty contests. He leaned forward.

  “Now you know, Alice, you’ve been pretty slippery about talking to the boys who want this place.”

  “I never said I wanted to sell. And if I did, what they offered is ridiculous.”

  “I’ve wasted time talking sweet to you. Now I’m going to put the cards right out where you can see them. This is a crummy, run-down place. It’s a damn eyesore. It’s hampering the development of the land around it. Important people own some of the land around it. They want to see that land value go up. You haven’t got the capital to improve this place. And so, sooner or later, in one way or another, they’re going to squeeze you out of it. Right?”

  And I knew he was right. When they decided it was time, they could dig up enough city ordinances to close me down. Jess was always able to handle city and county commissioners, but he couldn’t do me any good now.

  George said, “I’ve kept them off your back, Alice. This has been building for a year. I want a good commission out of it. And I won’t get it if I let them close you down. Right?”

  “Keep talking.”

  “I admit the syndicate offer was a little low—”

  “Low! It was less than the value of the land with nothing on it, George.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You aren’t zoned right.”

  “I’m zoned right for what I’m doing, George.”

  “But not for what they want to do. They want to tear everything out, put in new docks, shops, a motel, and a big restaurant and bar. But they couldn’t be sure they could get a zoning change.”

  “I see.”

  “Today they fixed it so they know they can get the zoning change. They cut the Decklin brothers in. They’re the ones could have blocked it. And they’re the ones that can guarantee it will go through. So now they can go higher.”

  “How high?”

  “Hundred and eighty thousand. Twenty down, balance in equal installments over eight years at five per cent. You hold a first mortgage.”

  “That isn’t a lot higher.”

  “It’s thirty thousand more, and that seems to me like a lot of money, somehow. And I’ll take my commissions out of the payments as they come along instead of out of the first chunk. Okay?”

  “I don’t know, George. I don’t know.”

  “Use your head, Alice. You know those Decklins. Now that they’re in on it, and believe me, the boys thought a long time before letting them in—they squeeze so hard, you haven’t got a prayer in hell of selling to anybody else. Nobody bucks the Decklins on this coast.”

  “I don’t know why this has to happen, George. Why can’t they leave me alone? I make enough to pay the help and support myself. Who am I hurting?”

  “The city can use a first-class marina, Alice. Like down in Lauderdale.”

  I got up and went over to the window and looked out across the big boat basin. Something big was moving south down the waterway. Opposite the entrance to my place they started to give their three longs for the Beach Bridge. A little while later I heard the bridge siren and I could see the flashing red of the signal that stopped traffic across the bridge.

  I knew that if you took the Stebbins’ Marina and stuck it way off somewhere by itself, it wouldn’t be worth twelve cents. The important money was for the land, which Jess had paid six hundred dollars for a long, long time ago.

  “Where will the people go, George, the ones living here?”

  “What do you care about that?” he asked in an irritable way. “You responsible for them? You haven’t been charging them as much as they should pay for years.”

  “They’re my friends.”

  “For God’s sake, Alice!”

  “And where’ll I go?”

  “With that money you can live about any place you feel like. Do some traveling, maybe.”

  “How much time have I got?”

  “I wouldn’t say you got too much time. I’ve been telling them you’re going to be reasonable.”

  “Every year, you know, they give me a surprise birthday party. You came to the last one.”

  “I’m not about to forget it.”

  “I’ll let you know then, George.”

  “I forgot when it is.”

  “The thirtieth. A Saturday.”

  “This is only the seventh. That’s a long time. I don’t know if—”

  I turned around from the window. I’d had enough of being pushed. “That’s the way it is, George. It isn’t going to be no different, no matter what you say.”

  “Don’t get sore, Alice.”

  “And you got yourself something to do the rest of the month. I’m paying the commission. They’re not. You go get me a better price, hear?”

  “But it’s—”

  “Maybe some other real-estate people can get me a better price, George.”

  I saw him get sore and cover it up quickly. He did a little wheedling. But he knew my mind was made up. And, damn him, he knew what the answer had to be when I’d tell him on the thirtieth. I was being pushed out. It’s a hell of a word they use—a marginal operation. It means you just get along. No money for fancy improvements and maintenance.

  When he left, I went down with him. Moonbeam was gone. She’d put the door on lock. I let George out. The night was soft and quiet. Traffic had thinned out on Broward. Just as George started out of the lot, there was a terrible squealing and yelping of tires and I braced myself for the sound of the crash. But nothing happened. In the Boulevard lights I saw the little white Triumph turn into the lot and park. So Rex Rigsby was back. He took a suitcase out and then started to put the top up on the little car. I strolled out.

  He turned and looked at me and said, his voice a little shaky, “Who was that damn fool, Alice?”

  “Deal Daily with Haley.”

  “I was turning in. He didn’t even look.”

  I saw no point in mentioning the fact that if George had killed him, it would have been an excuse for general rejoicing. “Rex, you took off without catching up on your rent like you promised. And you got a gas bill and a laundry bill and a repair bill.”

  “I was a little short.”

  “If that was true, I wouldn’t lean on you. But I know damn well you’re not short. You’re just close with money, Rex. You got it and I want it.”

  “Now, Alice—”

  “Don’t turn on the charm, boy. It won’t work. Don’t bother smiling. Just pay up.”

  “First thing in the morning.”

  “For all I know the Angel will be gone in the morning and I’ll sit here a couple weeks wondering if I could attach this little car. You come in the office right now, boy, and pay up.”

  “Can I finish putting the top up, please ma’am?”

  “You can do that, yes.”

  He came into the office. I turned the lights on and opened the file and got his bills out, added them up. He owed a hundred eighteen seventy. He looked them over real careful, and then the son of a gun took a bill clip out of the pocket of his linen shorts, thick with money folded once. He put down two fifties and a twenty without making it look any thinner. I marked the bills paid and gave him his change. He shoved it loose into his pocket, grinning at me. When he grins I find myself thinking how fine it would be to kick him square in the face. He wore a white shirt, unbuttoned, the tails knotted across his flat brown belly. The gap in the shirt exposed the curly mat of hair on his hard brown chest. Christy calls him �
�that Errol Flynn, junior grade.” He’s got a brush-cut, amber eyes set tilty, a neat mustache, a white-toothed, knowing, wicked grin.

  “It doesn’t look like you’re fresh out of money, Rigsby.”

  “It was a lovely house party. Charming people. A beautiful home near Naples. But they drink more than they should, doll. And when they drink they have this fantastic belief in their own ability to play gin and poker and what-all. Even Scrabble, hardly a game for wealthy illiterates.”

  “Why don’t you just carry a gun?”

  “I’d much rather be a house guest, Alice dear. I met them at Varadero last year and they said do come over and see us in Naples because now we’re living there all year round. And this seemed like the time to go. People are so much more relaxed in the summer, don’t you think?”

  “You’ve paid your money and made your brag. I don’t need conversation, Rex.” He left, still grinning. You can’t insult him. You can’t dent his ego with a sledge. And, as some indignant husbands have learned, he’s rough. He’s quick and hard and he doesn’t scare.

  I don’t know how old he is. You would think he’s about thirty unless you took a close look at the skin under his eyes and on his throat and the backs of his hands. He makes a living as a tomcat. That’s the most accurate way to put it. His ketch sleeps six. He knows the Bahamas the way most men know their own back yard. From the Abaco Cays to Turks Island. I’ve heard men who know the water say he’s a fine sailor, but a little too bold. They say that whenever you find a man who loves to wear a turtleneck sweater and a sheath knife in port, it’s certain he’ll take a few more chances than he should.