“Troy! Goddamn it, Troy!”
“I know. I didn’t want you to know about it. Pride, I guess. Right back in the same trap. Liquor, Jerranna and things going to hell.”
“How about Mary?”
“Why, I suppose she’ll get the same splendid deal Bunny got. Only it’s going to be a little rougher on her pocket-book.”
“Why wait for Halloween? You can soap dirty words on windows anytime. Be my guest.”
“Ready for a beer?”
“Thank you kindly. For God’s sake, Troy!”
Muscle bulged the corner of Troy’s jaw. “You think I’m enjoying it? You think I get a charge out of wondering if I’m losing my mind? And don’t think I don’t wonder. Often. Sometimes I think it’s as if …” His voice broke. He waited a few moments. “As if I wasn’t put together right. A sloppy assembly job. Some bolts and washers left out. I … don’t want to be what I am.”
“Easy, boy.”
“Isn’t beer for crying into?”
“Can you stay away from her?”
“I don’t know. I’m trying. I’ve tried before. I have the feeling this is my last try before I give up. That’s the sort of thing I should have married. I should have stayed away from ladies.”
“You told me a long time ago that if you ever saw her again, you might kill her.”
Troy shuddered in the hot sunlight. “I came close, Mike. I came damn close. She knew how close I was. I had her by the throat. She looked at me. She couldn’t talk. I could tell by her eyes she didn’t give a damn. She wasn’t scared. If she’d been scared, or fought, that would have done it. I was that close, believe me. I slung her away so hard she bounced off the wall and landed on her hands and knees and looked up at me with her hair falling down across her face and howled with laughter.”
“Does Mary suspect anything?”
“I don’t know. We don’t have much to say to each other. I was careful at first. Now I’m not so careful. It’s like I want to be caught, I guess.”
“I could go see the Rowley woman.”
“What the hell good would that do? What good did it do the last time?”
“Maybe she’s changed.”
“She’s changed. But not in any way that’ll help. Even if I want help.”
“Don’t you?”
“You must get awful damn sick of me, Mike.”
“I should be inspirational. You know. Be a man! Shoulders back! Eyes front!”
“I’m a man, Mike. In a limited sense.”
“There’s one thing about you. You get a compulsion to make a mess. Then you want to roll in it. Goddamn it, you enjoy it!”
Troy stood up. His glasses were back on. Mike could not read his face. He said flatly, “I’m enjoying every minute of it, every delicious wonderful minute of my life. I just couldn’t bear to have it end.” He walked away, his stride wooden.
When all of Ravenna Key was zoned in 1951, due to the dogged efforts of the Ravenna Key Association, every attempt was made to protect the future growth of the Key as a residential area. Based on estimates of future population, certain commercial areas were established which included most of the commercial enterprise on the Key so as to limit as much as possible the number of non-conforming businesses.
However one small business area, midway down the Key, on the bay side, suffered what the owners termed a cruel blow. They insisted that they were being deprived of their rights, that all zoning was socialism. Their particular area was zoned residential. That made the four little businesses non-conforming. Under the law a non-conforming business can continue to exist, but it cannot be enlarged. And, should it burn down, it cannot be rebuilt. It is obviously very difficult to sell such a business. And such a discrimination discourages even normal maintenance.
The four business enterprises, shoulder to shoulder, reading them from north to south, were Whitey’s Fish Camp, Shelder’s Cottages, Wilbur’s Sundries and Lunch, and Red’s B-29 Bar. Whitey’s Fish Camp consisted of a rickety shed where he sold bait, tackle, miscellaneous marine hardware and the random jug of ’shine. He had twenty ungainly scows, painted blue and white, an unpredictable number of five-horse outboards in running condition to be rented with the boats, a gas pump, a big compartmented concrete bait well for live shrimp and mutton minnows, a bewildering display of hand-painted signs, chronic arthritis, a vast moody sullen wife, four kids, an elderly pickup truck, and two ancient house trailers set on blocks near the shed. Whitey and his Rose Alice lived in one, and the kids in the other, and their septic-tank system filtered inevitably into the bay, where the blue and white boats were moored to sagging docks and tilted pilings.
Ma Shelder owned and rented out twenty box-like cottages, arranged in two rows of ten, with just enough space between the cottages in each row so that a car could be parked between them. They were a faded scabrous yellow, with peeling orange trim and green tarpaper roofing, and little screened porches in front. In keeping with the times, Ma called them efficiencies. This was, perhaps, apt, because it would take a high order of efficiency to live comfortably in one of them. There was a wide creaking dock that extended out into the bay so the tenants could sun themselves. Ma lived in a spare cottage, one larger than the others, and nearer the road. The total landscaping consisted of getting a man in to cut things down when the area got too overgrown. Ma, in her day, had danced on three continents and in forty of the forty-eight states. She had raised four children, all dead. At seventy she weighed two hundred pounds, despised mankind, spent most of her waking hours sneering at television, had over twenty-eight thousand dollars in her savings account and was implacably determined to live until she was ninety.
Wilbur’s Sundries and Lunch was a cinder block structure that looked as if it had started out to be a two-car garage. Wilbur’s slattern wife ran the lunch counter, listlessly scraping the grill between hamburg orders. Wilbur paced endlessly through the stink of grease, straightening magazines, dusting patent medicines, counting the packs of cigarettes, sighing heavily. Whenever a customer was spendthrift enough to leave a dime on the counter for the bedraggled blonde, Wilbur, despite his high-stomached bulk, would swoop from a far corner of the store like a questing hawk before the screen door had time to bang shut. On those few occasions when she reached the coin first, he would twist her wrist until she dropped it into his hand, and then, snuffling, she would run out the back door.
Red’s B-29 Bar was a frame structure next door to Wilbur’s. Red had only a beer-and-wine license. He opened at seven to dispense cold packs of beer to Whitey’s rental customers, and remained open until midnight every night. He had draught beer, potato chips, salt fish, pickled eggs, aspirin, punchboards, a jukebox, a bowling machine, a pinball machine, pay phones, a peanut machine, television, contraceptives, tout sheets, some crude pornography and endlessly boring accounts of his flyboy days when he was a C.F.C. gunner.
In spite of the overall grubbiness of the four little businesses, their sun-weathered look of defeat and decay, the community provided a reasonably pleasant refuge for low-income retireds. In fact, one elderly couple had been in one of Shelder’s Cottages for over seven years. The man had his own boat and motor and kept it at Whitey’s for a tiny dockage fee. Unless the weather was impossible, he fished all day every day. She stayed at the Cottages and filled her days with gossip and needlepoint. They ate some of the fish he caught and sold the rest. In the evening they would stroll to Red’s B-29 Bar and have a couple of draught beers, play two or three games on the bowling machine and walk back. Once a week they would drive their old Plymouth into town for a cautious shopping trip, picking up the bargains she had found in the local paper.
There was a certain pleasantness about it. Sun, and the blue bay waters, and idle talk—a fish flapping on the floorboards of the boat—a wind chattering in the palmettos—blue herons stalking the mudflats—the endless brilliance of the nighttime mockingbird, exhausting all the variations of his theme, while a dove talked of sorrow amid a whip-poor-will’s
insistencies. Night wind creaked the hingings of the old metal signs, and the widow in Seven cried out in her dream. Rain puddled the dust and hushed the fronds and hurried across the roofs. The high sun swung by, and the years swung by, and spiders as big as teacups spun webs the size of doors. Every year the traffic was heavier on the Key Road, boats more numerous in the bay, fish smaller and fewer.
At three o’clock on Monday afternoon, Mike Rodenska, in the station wagon borrowed from Mary, parked near Ma Shelder’s Cottages. He got out and stood in the white glare of sun on bleached bay shell, then walked around and looked down the double row of cottages. The little porches were empty. Bugs droned the litany of siesta.
A spare old man in sagging shorts, his chest brown as raw coffee, came walking around one of the cottages.
“Pardon me, sir.”
“Eh?” He stopped and looked irritably at Mike.
“I’m looking for a woman named Rowley.”
“Don’t mean a thing to me.”
“She’s with a man called Birdy.”
“Oh, them. Sure.” He scratched the bleached fuzz on his chest. He turned and looked. “The car’s there. Number Five. So they’re in there, or they’re up to Red’s Bar. You the law?”
“No.”
“Hoping you were.”
“Why?”
“Friend of theirs?”
“No.”
The old man glanced toward number Five again, and lowered his voice. There was a New Hampshire flavor in his speech. “D’be no use pretending this is the Parker House. Ma doesn’t give a darn who she rents to long as she’s full up. That pair, they don’t even have the common decency to pretend to be married. T’aint like I’m a prude, young fella. I’ve been around the world nine times and seen things that’d make your blood turn to water, and for thirty-forty years I was wild as they come. Far as I care, they could do it right out here in the open, waving flags, and to me it wouldn’t matter no more’n if they were Airedale dogs. But there’s some folks here get upset easy, and those two, they don’t even care enough to pretend they’re legal. And him renting her out, pimpin’ for her, that doesn’t set too well. When I said that about the law I was thinking of two things, young fella. Either somebody complained loud enough and long enough so the law is looking into it, or I thought maybe the law was catching up. They got that look of people always on the run for one thing or another, and if you’re not the law and not a friend, I’m just thinking maybe you’ve come here as a customer, and if you did I’ve talked too damn much, but I can’t feel sorry.”
“Not that either, friend.”
“I can tell looking at you, you ain’t going to tell me what business you got with those two no matter how I try to find out. So I’m wasting time, mine and yours … They not there, you try Red’s.”
Mike walked slowly to number Five, through the heat and silence of the afternoon. A five-year-old Mercury was parked beside the cottage. It had been altered to sit low on the rear wheels, snout in the air. The windshield was cracked, the body beginning to rust out. It had, at one time, been given a coat of green house paint. It had a look of long and dusty distances, of a hundred thousand miles of going nowhere in particular very fast.
He banged on the screen door of the small porch. The inner door was open. He could see into the cottage where an angle of sun struck a frayed grass rug, a soiled wadded pink towel, a Coke bottle on its side near the towel. He banged again. The place had the flavor of emptiness. He walked over and looked at the car. Torn upholstery. A plastic doll in a grass skirt hanging from the sun visor. Oklahoma plates. Bald tires. Comic books piled in the backseat.
He had a sudden odd feeling about the car. A presentiment of disaster. It seemed to him that he had seen the same car many times. He had covered accidents. He had seen this car before, warped and twisted into ruin, flame-seared and clotted with blood after the bodies were taken out. The wrecker would be looking for a solid place to plant the big hook. And the dangling doll would be there, and the peeling stickers from far places, and the welter of trash in the backseat and on the floor. These were the vagabond cars, the twenty-four-hour cars, dropping like bombs through the many dawns, heading inevitably toward that rendezvous with a pole, a tree, a truck, an abutment.
He walked back out to his car, saw that Red’s was so close there was no point in driving. He walked past the sundries store, where a bulky man with a pinched face was putting the evening newspapers in a rack, the Ravenna Journal-Record, the Sarasota News. BERLIN CONFERENCE STALLED … FIVE DIE IN ARCADIA SMASH … TORNADOS LASH KANSAS … VENICE BYPASS OPPOSED … YACHT AGROUND AT BIG PASS …
He pushed the door of the bar open and walked into a dark and noisy place. After the outside glare it took long seconds for his eyes to adjust. There was a clattering whine of an air conditioner, the drone of compressors in the coolers, the rattling and thudding of the bowling game, the hysterical braying of a television host giving away a twelve-dollar food mixer to a woman with a face like a shy pudding while thousands cheered.
The great tumult, after the silence outside, gave him the impression that he had stepped into a large, busy, jostling celebration. But as his eyes adjusted and his ears sorted and identified the sounds, he realized that there were only four other people in the place. There was a scrawny man with a rusty brush-cut and white eroded face behind the bar, leaning on his elbows, talking above the television din to a brutish-looking young man in a white T-shirt and khaki shorts who sat on a bar stool, bare brown powerful legs locked intricately around the legs of the chair. They both turned to look idly at Mike. The bartender’s eyes were a sun-bleached-denim blue. The young man had an inch of forehead under a towering pompadour of glossy, wavy blond hair, small deep-set simian eyes, a tender little rosebud mouth, and a jaw that bulged with bone and gristle. On his left biceps, across the cantaloupe bulge of his flexed arm, was the complicated tattoo of a faded pink rose in full bloom.
Jerranna Rowley was at the bowling machine, competing with a wide-bellied young man in gas-station khaki. Mike moved onto the stool nearest the door, ordered a draught beer, left the change from his dollar on the bartop. Red moved back to continue his idle conversation with the wavy blond. Mike half-turned to watch Jerranna. He saw her bend, and aim, and concentrate and roll a strike and give a snort of triumph.
When she turned and looked toward the television, awaiting her turn, he saw her face clearly. What was she now? Twenty-five? So little change. The same round face and oddly small head, and welter of mussed tan hair, and the pale gray eyes that bulged a little, the fatty contours of the mouth framing the large, ridged, yellow-white teeth, the long neck and the narrow shoulders. She wore knee-length tight red pants, a jersey T-shirt of narrow red and white horizontal stripes, with the red of the shirt the wrong red to wear with the red of the pants. She wore dusty black ballet slippers, and her bare ankles looked soiled.
He noted the changes, one minor, one major. The minor change was a puffiness around her eyes. The major change was in her figure. She had that same scrawniness, the loose, indolent, shambling, somehow arrogant way of handling herself. Her breasts, small, high, sharp, immature, widely separated, obviously unconfined under the jersey shirt, were unchanged. The change had occurred from lean waist to knee, and was accentuated by the red pants. There, in thighs and buttocks and lower belly, she had become heavy, rounded, bulging, meaty—a gross and almost obscene flowering. It was a startling contrast to the rest of her, as though she were the victim of a casual assembly of the major portions of two different women.
The game ended. She won. She thrust out a narrow palm and he heard her crow, “Pay me, boy!” The voice was rawer, huskier, more ribald in its overtones and nuances. The man paid her. She turned, grinning, and walked toward the bar, and he noticed something he had not observed before, that she was slightly knock-kneed. Halfway to the bar she turned and looked at Mike. And stopped abruptly, lost the grin. She looked puzzled. She nodded to herself and found a grin of slightly different
shape, more mocking, and came directly toward him.
He got up from the stool. “Always manners,” she said. “I remember that. I know it’s Mike, but the rest of it is gone.”
“Rodenska,” he said, and briefly clasped the skinny chill of her outthrust hand, noticing the fading saffron hues of a great bruise that reached from the edge of her sleeve to her elbow.
“I thought about you a lot. You were so cute that time. Honest to God, you were so cute, Mike.”
“I was a doll.”
The beefy man had gotten off his stool. He came over to them, thumbs in his belt, his face dangerous in its utter stillness.
“What makes?” he asked, his voice high and thin, unsuitable for him.
“An old friend, Birdy. Birdy, this is Mike.”
“Hiya,” Birdy said. Muscles bunched the arm as he put his hand out. Mike braced himself for a childish display of strength that might be highly painful. But the hand in his was warm, dry, soft, so utterly boneless and flaccid it was like grasping a glove filled with fine loose sand.
“Where’d you know him?” Birdy asked.
“It was when I was in New York the first time, a long time ago. Five years maybe. He was buddy with Jamison. Like I told you he told me an old friend was coming down but that was all he said and I didn’t know it was Mike. This was the guy I told you, honey, tried to bust me and Troy up but he didn’t have the picture.”
“How about that!” Birdy said.
“It’s like they say, a small world,” Jerranna said. They both stood and smiled at him. Though the mouths and faces were in no way alike, there was a chilling similarity in the smiles. They looked at him with a kind of joyous malevolence, an innocent evil, like two small savage boys—one holding the cat and the other holding the kerosene.
“You just happened to drop in here?” Birdy said wonderingly.
“Not exactly.”
Birdy studied him. “Oh.” He turned to Jerranna. “Find out the pitch,” he said, and went slowly back to his stool, swinging his shoulders as he walked, lifting a slow hand to pat the fat glossy sheaf of hair over his ear.
Slam the Big Door Page 10
