John D MacDonald

by A Man of Affairs

  And as I felt the first stirrings of a great need for her, I lost my balance and missed a frantic grab at the last of consciousness, and slid backward and up side down-down the long steep velvety chute that dropped me into a sleep almost as deep as Mike’s. Or Warren’s.

  TWELVE

  I WOKE UP flat on my back and opened my eyes and glared up at a deep blue sky that glared right back. Something small bounced off my bare chest and I recognized it as the same sort of thing that had awakened me.

  "Cut it out!" I mumbled.

  "Oh, such a nice sweet-tempered man in the morning. I’m so glad I found out in time."

  I opened my eyes again and turned my head and looked at her. She sat crosslegged in the sunshine atop the ledge of rock where she had put the clothes out to dry. She had a handful of small pebbles. She plunked another one off my chest. She was fully dressed. My clothes were folded and neatly piled in the approximate order I would put them on. Her hair was a tangly mop, slightly damp.

  "Good. morning," I growled. I realized I was buck naked. I sat up.

  "Good morning, darling. I’ve been up a long time. I’ve done all the housework, and I’ve drawn you a nice warm tub. Right out there." She pointed toward the water. "I’ve had my bath."

  I got up and trudged woodenly into the ocean. The water was clear and I kept a careful watch on the bottom. When I was up to my waist, I plunged and wallowed and floundered. I made seal noises and dipped sand off the bottom and scrubbed myself. My hands stung like fire. They looked in worse condition than they were.

  She was gone when I came out. I dried quickly in the sun and the early morning breeze. I dressed in dry wrinkled clothing, a little crusty with dried salt. The prints of her bare feet were in the wet sand near the water. I followed the trail to the other side of the island. Halfway around I saw the house. It was weatherbeaten, deserted. There were broken boards in the porch.

  I found Bridget staring at an empty cove.

  She turned to me and said, "Dearest, I’m afraid somebody stole the car right out of the garage last night."

  "I have true and classic intelligence. I am a very sharp citizen."

  "Did you leave the keys in it, dear?"

  "There was an anchor and an anchor line, and all I had to do was remember that there are tides in the ocean. And drop the anchor over the side."

  "Do you like your eggs sunnyside-up or easy-over, dear?"

  I walked to a palm pod and sat down. She came over and sat beside me. "I’ll be serious for two or three seconds," she said. "I can’t find anything I’d risk trying to eat, and I can’t find any water. And I tried your lighter and it is finished. So it is going to be a very good idea to wish real hard for a nice boat to come by, I think."

  "I think so too."

  "I’m not going to get scared."

  "I know you won’t, Murph." So I kissed her, because that seemed indicated, and then we did some exploring on our island, and learned to stay away from the shrubbery where the bugs lived. The sun climbed higher and hotter. We could see four other islands. Off to the southwest the sea looked empty. But it was so vividly streaked that we knew we were still in the Bahama Flats. At an estimated ten o’clock we saw a fast boat about three miles away, heading north.

  I peeled the sodden cards and sticky money out of my wallet and put them in the sun to dry. Remembering something I had read, I dug a hole just above the high-tide mark. I used my hands and a stick and a hefty piece of shell. After I got down over two feet, water began to seep into the bottom of it I dipped some up with a shell and tasted it. It was warm, brackish and thoroughly nasty. I was thirsty, but not that thirsty. Yet I suspected that it would keep us alive.

  Bridget had the idea about the empty whisky bottle. There was a fine supply of same in and around the ruined house. We gathered a little pile of dry leaves and small twigs. By experimentation we found the right way to hold the bottle in the sun so that a tiny white-hot spot was focused on a brown leaf. It took time and patience before it began to char and smoke. I huffed at it until I was dizzy, and finally we had a fire. I went out into the water and found some fat conchs and brought them in. We smashed the shells, removed the creatures, pounded them between rocks with the hope it might tenderize them, and then cooked them over our fire, impaled on green sticks we had broken off.

  We said they were just fine. They were edible. Barely. The sun was overhead, and then it began to slide toward the west. I did not care very much for the idea of another night on the island. If there was no wind, we would be eaten alive,

  "Well now!" Bridget said. I looked at her. She was staring at a coconut palm.

  "Trust us to overlook the obvious," I said.

  We considered the problem. I could get up the palm and I could get them down. But how do you tell which ones you want?

  "I think they slosh, sort of," Bridget said.

  "And how do you open them?"

  "That’s easy," she said. "I’ve done it a dozen times. You sit on your back porch with a hammer and a big nail and you hammer the nail into a special little place on the end of it, and then you pour the milk into a jelly glass."

  "Of course," I said.

  At the expense of several square inches of bide, I got up the most promising tree, twisted the nuts loose and dropped them. I split and scraped the husks off on the rocks and used a conch shell to pry a rusty nail out of the house. I hammered it straight between two rocks. I pounded it into a coconut, then worked it out I poured her a shell full of the cloudy liquid. She drank it and held out her shell and said, "More."

  "Fix the fire first, woman. It’s going to go out."

  She fixed it. We drank the juice. She sighed and said. "Look at us! Water, of sorts. Fire and food and fruit juice. Sam’l, I’ve got a funny idea about us." What is it?"

  "I think we can survive, no matter where they drop us. I think we can make out."

  "Is this a proposal?"

  "For goodness sake, don’t leer like that".

  "Okay, but look. I’m a fool for work. I work a twenty- hour day when I have to. You could get lonely sometimes."

  "I’m a woman of resource. I’ve got scads of fertile ancestors. So I’ll fill our tarpaper shack with a raunchy crew of little Gliddens, all with runny noses. When the bill collectors come, they’ll say mommy is out in the shed writing a novel."

  "Please don’t look over your left shoulder, Murph, or you’ll see something coming so directly at us that all I can see is the bow wave on either side of the white bow."

  It was an eighteen-foot open boat from the Grand Bahama Club, one of the charter boats. It had twin outboards. It had a brown little guide named Spider. It had been chartered for the afternoon by a couple from Indiana named George and Kate Thatcher. It had an ice chest and, on the ice, several bottles of an English brew called Dogs Head Ale. Nothing had. ever tasted quite as good. They told us it was quarter to four. They had caught some Spanish mackerel and some small amberjack trolling, and Spider had suggested running over to the island and trolling for some barracuda before going in. And we said that was very, very lucky indeed. Kate was worried about George’s sunburn, and she was willing that we should run right back in. It was only nine miles, Spider said. About thirty minutes with five in the boat. I went and collected my dry money.

  As Spider was pushing us off the shallows, Mrs. Thatcher said incredulously, "You were _rowing?_"

  "Sure," Bridget said. "You know, A little moon-light row on Saturday night."

  "And you spent the whole night on the island?"

  "Well, about half of it. We got here pretty late."

  But by then Spider was ready to roll, and the roar of the motors made all further conversation impossible. I looked at my blonde with the tangled hair and the ruined clothes, and she looked very good indeed.

  At the Grand Bahama Club dock we thanked the Thatchers and Spider, warm and heartfelt thanks. Bridget and I walked up to the hotel, and through the lobby, trying not to notice the people who stopped in mid-sentence to
stare. We went out the far door and acquired an ancient and asthmatic Chevy which took us down to the village and waited for us in the muddy yard of the tiny cable office.

  I sent one to Al Dolson. MIKE DEAN DIED HEART ATTACK YESTERDAY. ALTER PROGRAM ACCORDINGLY. BACK SOONEST.

  And Bridget sent two. One was to a friend on a New York paper, a managing editor. WILL DICKER ON EXCLUSIVE ON YESTERDAYS DEATH MIKE DEAN AT BAHAMA HIDEAWAY. FELLED BY CORONARY AMID BIG DEALS.

  She handed the second one to me instead of to the man. It was to her folks. PLAN MARRY KING SIZE CASTAWAY. BELIEVE CAN CIVILIZE IN TIME. DETAILS FOLLOW.

  She raised one calm and questioning eyebrow.

  I handed the cable blank to the man, and we held hands in the rackety cab all the way back to the hotel.

  I had a very lucid idea of what was going to happen, of course. I would go back to Portston and find time to be married, and then put in a few years of hard labor turning Harrison healthy.

  I did go back and we did get married on the Fourth of July, and we did find out that it was going to be the very best of marriages. You never know that until you try it a while.

  Harrison was in no danger from the remnants of the Dean organization. The empire fell apart completely, and very quickly. Bridget and I had given it the final push, and we were not sorry. I did some checking when I was in New York and found out that Amparo had gone back to nursing, Cam had gone back to his home town and into private practice, Fletcher Bowman was still looking.

  Bonny Carson’s musical opened in early December. And closed in early December.

  Louise lived alone in the big house, terribly muted and terribly tragic. Tommy and Puss sold their house and moved to Texas.

  So it should have gone the way I thought it would go. But the Harrison Corporation was still a crippled animal in the jungle, and we couldn’t move fast enough. I had a year of it before a crew that called themselves Kell-Mar Associates moved in on us. They’d picked up the Harrison holdings from the Dean estate. The operation was headed by a little man named Kellison. He wanted to engineer a merger because our loss picture made us damn attractive, tax-wise, to one of the more profitable firms in the industry. At least it was slightly more wholesome than the raid Mike Dean had planned.

  We put up a battle, but maybe by then we were getting a little weary of battles. And. Louise and Tommy were bored with trying to sustain old and meaningless loyalties.

  So it went through. And they cleared us out. Me and Dolson and Budler and Murchison and the rest.

  I had plenty of places I could go. And be placed fast. But I wanted time to unwind, and get the world back in perspective. So I listed myself with an executive placement agency in New York, and after we counted our money, I said I would be available on January first.

  And so right now we are taking our long delayed honeymoon in Mexico, and we have a small house with a walled garden and a tiny swimming pool and, a beaming maid named Carlotta and a morose and effective gardener named Miguel.

  I am on the patio, in the shade. On the table at my right is half of a tall rum drink. Beside the drink is the most recent report from the agency. And this time I like the sound of the job and the size of the salary. And the idea of living in San Francisco. When dusk comes I will have a committee meeting with my Bridget and we will make a decision, maybe.

  I needed this time to unwind, and get reacquainted with myself. And my bride. We have often talked about the lurid week on Dubloon Cay. It was not a waste. It gave me a clue to myself. It taught me that under certain conditions I could become a rascal, and readily rationalize my own rascality. Bridget says that will keep me from becoming too fatuously pleased with myself. She says every man should be aware of his own capacities for villainy, so he knows what to look out for.

  From where I sit I can look out into the sunny garden, at a picture I admire. I look through a fringe of flowers at a green pool, and beyond it a gray wall heavy with flame vine. And above the wall, a deep blue sky.

  Bridget is between the pool and the wall, supine on the faded yellow canvas of a poolside cot, her forearm across her eyes. In the privacy of our walled garden I have no objection to her wearing the startling bikinis she adores. No objection at all. This one is fashioned of red silk bandannas, and the Mexican sun has browned her most beautifully.

  It is quiet in our Cuernavaca garden, and I run a loving glance from high instep up straight leg to convex thigh, up to red silk breasts and gentle throat and round firm chin.

  She insists that it is beginning to show, but I cannot see it yet. But the timing will be fine. Around the end of March a new Glidden will take its first angry look at a dazzling world.

  I look at her and I think of my crazy luck, and it makes my eyes sting, And I have the superstitious fear that something will spoil it. But if something wants to come along and spoil it, it will first have the chore of killing Sam Glidden, inch by inch.

  So I go out into the garden on the pretext of seeing if she needs new ice. But actually just to be closer to her.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John D. MacDonald was graduated from Syracuse University and received an MBA from the Harvard Business School. He and his wife Dorothy, had one son and several School. He and his wife, Dorothy, had one son and several grandchildren. Mr. MacDonald died in December 1986.