Slam the Big Door

by John D. MacDonald

  “Two brews here, Red,” Jerranna called and got onto the stool beside Mike’s.

  She turned on the stool, forked her hair back with spread fingers, and beamed at Mike. “It’s good to see you, cutie.” She touched a fingertip to her lips, reached out and touched the dampened tip of the finger to the top of his head. “You lost something up here, Mike. A fella told me once a perfect way to save your hair. Save it in a cigar box. How about that? In a cigar box.”

  “You’ve changed a little.”

  She slapped the hip pocket of the red pants. “Just call me Satch. Honest to God, nothing I do does any good. All kind of exercises. You’d die laughing watching me. You wanna hear a hell of a measurement? From top to bottom I’m twenty-six, twenty-two, thirty-seven. Isn’t that a hell of a thing? Birdy says I got me a low center of gravity. He says I’m one-third Miss America. Birdy’s got a real sense of humor.”

  She gulped the beer with automatic greed, her long thin throat working. The years had coarsened her. He had detected a certain sensitivity, a capacity for imagination, in the girl in New York. But the years and the roads, the bars and the cars and the beds and the bottles—they all have flinty edges, and they are the cruel upholstery in the dark tunnel down which the soul rolls and tumbles until no more abrasion is possible, until the ultimate hardness is achieved. So here she sat, having achieved the bland defensive heartiness of a ten-dollar whore.

  But there was more than that. She had retained that unique sexual magnetism which had no basis in either face or figure. It was a dark current generated in some unthinkably primitive source, a constant pressure which tugged the male mind into grubby yet shamefully enticing imaginings. In the back alley of the mind of every man there is a small, black, greasy pool of evil, an unawakened capacity for foulness, a place of guilt. She could walk through your house, past all your prides and glowing purposes, ignoring your display of awards for small victories, and take you out the back door and down the alley to the brink of the blackness you have learned to ignore, and point at it and smirk with an ancient wisdom and say, “See what we found?”

  If all men are alcoholics, she is the bottle. If all men are compulsive gamblers, she is the gaming table. If all men are thieves, she is the open, unguarded safe. If all men are suicides, she is the knife, the rope, the bullet. In fair exchange for your soul she offers self-disgust and unavoidable repetition.

  The tug of evil was, if anything, stronger than before.

  “Who is Birdy?” he asked.

  “Sort of a kissin’ cousin. We teamed up a long time ago, Mike. Over a year. We been all over hell and gone. When there’s a couple you get in less jams. And it’s easier to make out. What’s on your mind, Mike? You trying to be a blocking back for Jamison again?”

  “I guess so.”

  “He says he got in real bad shape after I took off. Drunk himself out of his big job and into a crazy house.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But he’s doing okay again, isn’t he?”

  “Do you care?”

  “Sure I care! He’s not a bad guy. But like I told you before, anything he does to himself isn’t my fault. If a guy goes overboard, he goes overboard.”

  “Sure, Jerranna. Sure. And you came down here by accident and phoned him by accident.”

  She frowned. “Well … I didn’t especially want to. But we weren’t making out so good and I saw that thing about him and tore it out of the magazine and showed it to Birdy and told him about New York and all. You know, you get older, you think of angles. I wasn’t high on coming here, but Birdy and me had never been in Florida together, and the other times I was here it was Miami and Jax only, and he kept at me until finally I said okay. And you know … hell … if you’ve had a guy on the ropes one time you want to find out if you still got that old black magic.”

  “You found out you’ve got it.”

  “Sure thing. I set it up with him and he came over to the cottage and I’d sent Birdy the hell away, and for about fifteen minutes I’d thought I’d had it. He spent fifteen minutes marching back and forth, calling me everything in the book, yelling at me, acting like he was working up to beating me up. Those old poops that live there must’ve got a real earful that night. Then he made a big jump at me. Scared hell out of me. And the next thing I know he’s hanging on to me and bawling into my neck and telling me how much he missed me.”

  “What’s this shakedown angle?”

  She stared at him. “Would you kindly explain that, please?”

  “Shakedown. How do you explain it? Money. He’s given you money. There must be a reason. To keep you from going to his wife?”

  She gave him a look of complete disgust, followed by a short explosive laugh. “Good Christ! Shakedown! I tell him we’re running broke so we got to go over to the east coast and get jobs, so he gives me a hundred or one-fifty and we stay.”

  “It’s a living.”

  “Mike, don’t get it in your head we’d stay in this stinking place the rest of my stinking life. One day maybe soon it’ll be me or Birdy getting up and looking around and saying, ‘Let’s roll it.’ And in twenty minutes we’ll be packed and gone, and it may be noon or midnight when we take off. That’s the way we are. That’s the way we want to be. It’s the only way to ball it, cutie, the only way to keep the moss off the rock.”

  “So it’s just like it was last time, Jerranna?”

  She bit the corner off her thumbnail. “Just about. Hey, you know what you can buy now? Safety belts for bar stools. Isn’t that a jazz?”

  “Hilarious.”

  “You want to try to beat me a game?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Where was Troy last night? I hung around because he said he’d show but he didn’t.”

  “He fell over a martini.”

  “It figures. He just can’t handle it good. He ought to let it alone.”

  “Think of the reasons he has to drink.”

  “Look at how I’m bleeding, Mike. You’re still cute. Say, you know you got a real good tan? Birdy tans good, but I just get all over freckles. Buy me another brew. Hey, Red!” She turned on the stool to face him more squarely. “You know, you walked out on me one time. You going to do it again? I know what you’re thinking. I always can tell when somebody is thinking the way you are.”

  “You told me that the last time. Do you have to get approval from Cuz?”

  “No. It’s like this, Mike. I do what I want. He does what he wants. And he doesn’t care because it isn’t his main kick anyway. He’s a real seldom man.”

  “With or without approval … no thanks.”

  “Still scared of your wife, I bet.”

  “That’s it. That’s my trouble. I’m chicken.”

  “Too bad, Mike. Real too bad.”

  “Suppose I could dig up a thousand dollars. That would take you two a long way.”

  “Why would you do that? You Jamison’s brother?”

  “Would you take it and go?”

  “What if we were about to go anyway?”

  “Then I made a thousand-dollar mistake.”

  “You wouldn’t have it on you.”

  “Not exactly.”

  She studied him, chin on her fist. “We should trade in that bucket. It’s got a high-speed shimmy. Drives Birdy nuts. I’m interested, Mike. But he gets funny sometimes about the money thing. If he gets the idea anybody is trying to buy him, he flips. So let me put it to him easy. He’s got a lot of pride. You know. And I can let you know. You got a phone?”

  “I better stop by.”

  “This is Monday. Come by Thursday with the money. It should be in tens and twenties, Mike, on account of it’s hard for us to change bigger money. They always want to know where we got it. Somehow I’ve never given much of a damn about money. Funny, isn’t it? There’s a skinny old poop in one of the cottages came creeping up offered me fifty dollars. He’s maybe a hundred and nine—age and weight both. Saved it up out of his Social Security, I betcha. Maybe one
day I got to go that route, but I’m not ready yet. Anyhow, it woulda killed him. You going someplace? Aren’t you even going to finish the brew? I can if you can’t. See you Thursday, boy scout.”

  The door swung shut behind him. The sun, low over the Gulf, glared into his eyes. A red truck went by, stirring up a small whirlwind that pasted a piece of newspaper against his leg. The air smelled like hot asphalt and dead fish. He took a deep breath and said a filthy word and walked slowly to the station wagon.

  He drove into Ravenna, wired his bank for money, and got back to the Jamison house at dusk. Debbie Ann and Shirley McGuire were walking slowly from the beach toward the house, laden with gear, gleaming with sun oil.

  He met them after he had parked the car and gotten out.

  “I’m a hundred and nine,” he said. “I’ve saved a fortune out of my Social Security. The three of us could go to Ceylon, swim at Mount Lavinia, have tall frosty ones at the Galle Face, dine at the Silver Faun, wander through the botanical gardens at Kandy, and be back here in a week. All set?”

  “My goodness!” Debbie Ann said. “Could you survive it?”

  “It will probably kill me. That’s what I’m counting on. Incidentally you both look sweet, fresh, pretty and decent. It’s a sort of contrast I won’t explain at the moment.”

  “Have you been out in the sun all day without a hat?” Shirley asked.

  “Oh, this is just senility in action. It’s a kick I’m on.”

  “Go sit by the pool, Ancient One,” Debbie Ann said, “and pretty soon we’ll be slave maidens and bring you something tall, cool and delicious.”

  He had noticed the other cars were gone. “Where is everybody?”

  “Troy is probably working. Mother Mary borrowed my little bug to go to some kind of committee meeting. Durelda went home early with a toothache. We’re on our own, buddy.”

  But Mary returned before the girls had finished changing. They all had a drink by the pool as dusk turned to night. Shirley agreed to stay for dinner if she could help. She phoned her aunt and explained. Her call to her aunt emphasized in everyone’s mind that Troy hadn’t arrived and hadn’t phoned, but no one spoke of it. They delayed dinner and finally ate, and after the women had cleaned up, they played bridge.

  Shirley was Mike’s partner. It was almost immediately obvious that Mary and Debbie Ann were the superior players, and could have won handily if Mary had been able to keep her attention on the game. She alternated between brilliant play and gross error.

  The talk was aimless, a bright and meaningless thread woven through the dark fabric of tensions. There was the click and whisper of the cards, the bright cones of light, the idiot faces of kings and queens, the perfume of the women and the gleam of their hair—their light voices and the small formalities of their smiles.

  The rites and codes of the game had, in time, a strangely hypnotic effect on him, leading him into a fantasy that at first amused and then disturbed him. He slumped, heavy-lidded, and looked at the quick oval glintings of their fingernails and thought, This is a deceptive plastic, almost natural. Their eyes are made of finest tinted glass rolling realistically in a special lubricant. Debbie Ann’s brow took a long time to make, inserting the delicate copper-gold wire into the delicate plastic, warmed by the mesh of the invisible heating system.

  And he thought that he was utterly alone in the world, easing his emptiness with these clever toys, able to pretend, for a little while, that they were real. But in time he would tire of the game and get up and go to each of them in turn and expose the little control panel set into the small of each tender back, and press the proper silvery stud. As he did so, each face in turn would go utterly blank and dead and they would get up in a wooden way and walk off one at a time to a closet where they belonged and line up, glassy and motionless in the darkness. Should he want one of them to cook for him or sing for him or swim with him, he had only to make his selection, press the proper stud, clearly marked, and the programmed behavior pattern, a card with a printed circuit, would drop into place. This is what we have had to do since all the women left. And if there is need for love, there is a stud for that, a choice to make, programmed after the patterns of the great courtesans, nimble, tender, delicately avid, quite realistic, utterly without significance.

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  I am alone, he cried, crouching and howling back in the desolated ballroom of his mind, his anguish echoing amid the bedraggled crêpe paper and soggy balloons of the party that was forever ended. So damned awful alone. No kiss for the bruise. No apron to hide in.…

  “I’ve had enough,” Mary said. “How about you people?”

  “Golly, it’s nearly midnight,” Shirley said. “I didn’t realize.”

  “Nightcap before I drive you home?” Debbie Ann asked.

  “No thanks, honey.”

  After they left, Mary went to the edge of the living room and stood looking out at the patio. There was a rigidity in her stance. She stood with her head slightly tilted, as though she were listening to something very faint and far away.

  His empathy for the little signs of agony made him feel ham-handed, dull, awkward. “Mary?”

  She turned slowly, rubbed the back of her hand against dampness under her eyes, smiled in a crooked way and said, “Stupid, I guess.”

  “Is it?”

  “It’s … wondering what I’m doing wrong. Not knowing the right way to handle it.”

  “Believe me, you’re not doing anything wrong.”

  “I’ve tried so many things some of them must be wrong. Scenes. He walks out. Indifference. He doesn’t seem to care. Where did he go, Mike? Oh, I don’t mean now, tonight. He went somewhere, inside himself. I love him. I can’t find him. It’s so damn difficult trying to be an adult. When he … shames me.”

  “It’s a kind of sickness, maybe.”

  “He’s never told me very much about … what happened to him in New York, before he came down here. It was pretty bad, wasn’t it?”

  “Pretty bad.”

  “Mike … if I knew all about it … if you could tell me, if it wouldn’t be a kind of disloyalty for you to tell me … it might help me understand. We used to have such … fun.”

  He sat down with her, sat close beside her on the couch, and told her. When they heard Debbie Ann drive back in he stopped, but she went to her room without coming in. At one point she took his hand and clung to it tightly, and he did not believe she was consciously aware of doing so. He tried to make it as factual as the ten thousand news stories he had written.

  “This,” she said blankly, her eyes very round, “is the very same woman?”

  “But you shouldn’t get the idea this is … you know, a fatal fascination. I don’t know how to explain what I feel. It’s like a symbol of something. Of a flaw. Somehow he hates himself. She’s a club he beats himself with. I know him, Mary. He’s a good man. That’s the hell of it. From the time the war ended until that mess in New York it was like he was pulling something inside himself tauter and tauter, straining at something, and then it snapped, and, like a compulsion, he destroyed everything that meant anything to him. Bunny is a fine woman. You’re a fine woman too, Mary. You fell in love with the goodness in
the guy. It’s a sickness. And I think there’s a pattern. He’ll try to destroy everything this time, too.”

  “I won’t let him, Mike. I won’t let him do that to himself. Why should he—despise himself?”

  “I don’t know. He had a little psychiatric treatment last time. Not much. The doctor said he didn’t respond well to the treatment, wouldn’t cooperate. He had the idea it all went back to a thing during the war. He got that out of him with sodium pentothal.”

  “What happened?”

  “First you got to understand this was a decent kid from a decent home, bright and sensitive and essentially kind. We had to turn a lot of those kids into killers, fast. It didn’t leave any mark on the louts. It never does. But it can be a hell of a thing to do to an imaginative kid. He volunteered himself into the Corps on December eighth when the lines were long. They did their best to brutalize him in boot camp. He’s got ability. He can do a hell of a lot of things well. They pushed him up fast. We were learning how to fight a war, and making mistakes that would sicken you. As a sergeant, a platoon leader, after forty days of nightmare, he got sent a stupid, pointless patrol in command of ten men. Later on, when he’d gotten smarter, he would have gone far enough to be out of sight, dug in, and come back at dawn and faked a report. He made the patrol. It didn’t accomplish anything. He was ambushed and lost six men and managed to get clear with the other four. They were cut off. They had to make a big circle. They crawled. A snake got one in the throat and he died in ten seconds. They got separated from another one somehow in the darkness. He was never seen again. Three left. Once a big Jap patrol walked by, close enough to touch. They didn’t know where the hell they were. Later a sniper got one of them through the head, and the other in the belly. He dragged the wounded one away. A two-hundred-pound man. He finally got back to the lines, fourteen hours overdue, carrying the wounded man on his back. But by then the wounded man had been dead, they estimated, for three or four hours. Once we got drunk in Melbourne. He told me about it, telling it as if it was a long funny story, grinning. He laughed when he was through and then he started to cry. I never heard a man cry like that. I hope never to hear it again. He felt it was his fault, losing them like that. The ambush, the snake, getting lost … all his fault. Ten guys he knew well. Ten guys who believed he could take them out and bring them back. It’s a good bet nobody could have. Maybe something snapped right there. Maybe that’s when they should have taken him out. But they left him in and he made them a good officer and later a good company commander. Before that patrol, maybe it had all been sort of brave and glorious adventure to him. After that it was just dirty, bloody work. And he learned his trade.”