The Last One Left

by John D. MacDonald

  The third incident was far more subjective. It happened after Lydia Jean had been gone from home for two months, living with their boy in Corpus. And one night as he was going to bed, he had the sudden thought of how easy it would be to employ an agency to install phone taps and keep track of her movements and make regular reports. He knew that the thought was not as sudden as it seemed. It had that special flavor of thoughts which lie on the floor of the mind for a long time before emerging into the conscious mind.

  It was a wretched idea. If she could not be trusted, there could be little point in yearning for her to come home. If she learned he could do that to her, his chances of ever getting her back were that much less. As he discarded the idea, he realized that ever since he had learned of the new marvels in electronic espionage, he had been gradually accustoming himself to speak less openly to everyone in his own offices and in those he visited. He had thought of it as merely a sensible precaution. If one assumed everything was overheard and recorded, one could cease worrying about what might be safe to say. It made a life more drab, more guarded, more ceremonious. All men of any degree of responsibility had begun to speak for the record, for the unseen audience, and old intimacies had withered because closeness must depend upon the exchange of the innermost thoughts. Orwell, in 1984, had not considered the consequences of such a diffusion. An ever-watchful Big Brother could be outwitted, but a gnat-throng of little brothers could only be endured. Miniaturization of electronic circuitry was effecting that great change in human relationships which, in other cultures, had been created only by using secret arrest, imprisonment and torture to turn brother against brother.

  He got behind the wheel of his rental car, but before he could start the engine, another of those strange spasms of grief and loss squeezed and twisted his brain and his heart. Chin on chest, eyes tightly shut, he grasped the steering wheel with such strength it numbed his hands and started a tremor in his arms and shoulders. It was more like a combination of terror and anger than like a sense of loss. During those few moments when it was most intense, the three women of his life merged into a single entity, something which was sister-dead, wife-lost, mother-dead, fading swiftly, leaving him to stand chilled and alone, like a small figure in a barren landscape in an old book.

  He came out of it and, as before, found that the spasm had dulled and slowed his mind. Daylight had a cinematic unreality, and he had to reconstruct the schedule he had set himself, putting each errand into its proper place, like stacking tumbled blocks of great weight.

  When Sam Boylston returned to the Nassau Harbour Club there was a message for him to call a Mr. Cooper at a number in Austin. Yandell Binns Cooper, known throughout the southwest as Stuff Cooper, father of Carolyn, Bix Kayd’s second wife. Sam returned the call and braced himself for the force and weight of Stuff’s imperative personality.

  But after the secretaries had put him through, Cooper sounded vague and mild. And old. “Sam? Sam, boy, I tracked you down through your office. Is it like all the papers and television got it?”

  “I’m afraid it is, Mr. Cooper.”

  “Damn all! Ever’ one of ’em, eh? All the time I was thinking it was some kind of thing ol’ Bix was pulling. Everybody knowed he was upsot having to let go too much of that Bee-Kay stock a couple years back. What I figured it for, he wanted to turn up missing so as some of his people could buy it in cheap. Thursday it had fell off to eleven something and I picked up some on a hunch. When he calls me back I know what my broker man is going to tell me, he can’t find any takers noplace. Damn over-the-counter stuff. Sam?”

  “I’m here, Mr. Cooper.”

  “Sam, I can’t believe it. I keep on seeing her. She had that special smile for her daddy. I keep on seeing Carrie the way she was when they made her queen for that bowl game, way up on the float, all them flowers, ruffly dress, holding that booquet, a-wavin’ and smilin’. It ain’t right, boy. You know that.”

  “I know it.”

  “And that pretty little sister of yours, and those kids of Bix’s from before. I didn’t want her to marry Bix. Hell, he’s only five years younger’n her daddy. You know what I wanted, boy. I made it clear enough. When you and Carrie were going together.”

  “I know. It just didn’t work out, Mr. Cooper.”

  “I keep thinking she’d be alive if they had. You can’t blame me for that now. Lydia Jean is as sweet as they come for sure. Maybe a better wife than Carrie would have made you. What she wanted most, I guess, was being the wife of a big man, so she could go in any store and they’d all jump and come running up, rubbing their hands and smiling. I told her one time that was just what she’d get with you. It would mean waiting a little spell, that’s all. You’ve been proving me right, boy. I’m glad for you, but it don’t help much right now. You about to head on back?”

  “Pretty soon I guess.”

  “You being a lawyer I guess you can imagine what kind of a mess it’s going to be for a long long time. It wasn’t just Bix not letting his right hand know what his left hand was doing. He was more like that Hindu gal they got statues of, three or four arms growing out of each shoulder, and not one of them hands knowing what any other of the hands was up to. Everybody connected with him in any business way is plain scrambling right now, like trying to run acrost the front of a landslide. He’d set up his private affairs pretty complicated too, from a couple things Carrie told me. All kind of insurance trusts and residuary trusts and holding corporations and foundations and so on. I bet he covered every possible contingency except a common disaster where him and Carrie and Stella and Roger all passed on at one and the same time. I bet you the state boys and the feds and the lawyers don’t get it all unwound for twenty years and more. Sam?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Nothing I’m doing is going to make much point to me for a time. What do you say, you come on back and we’ll set it up to go down there to Yucatan and get those same guides and horses I told you about and see if we can get us a jaguar. Might be Ollie Sloan could be talked into coming along. He’s been in sorry shape since his wife died, and you know him pretty good, don’t you?”

  “Well enough, Mr. Cooper. I’ll let you know.”

  “You do that. And if there’s any red tape over there about that accident, anything I can help with, you call me, hear?”

  As he hung up he felt sorry for old Stuff Cooper, and he also felt exasperation and an old guilt about Carolyn Cooper. It was one of Stuff’s myths that Carolyn and Sam had “gone around together” at the University. Sam had been in his first year of law school and Carolyn had been four years younger, a sophomore. At that time Sam had not met Lydia Jean. Carolyn, her daddy’s darling, was vivid, outgoing, arrogant and beautiful, and came complete with white Cadillac convertible, hefty allowance, and an impressive capacity for vodka gibsons. There had been a weekend party at a ranch. At the last moment his date caught a virus and couldn’t make it. He went alone. And the party turned into one of those gaudy brawls which provide several years’ worth of gossip. After Carolyn’s date passed out, she became blankly, blindly, helplessly drunk. Sam was on his way to his car when he came upon two boys hustling the stumbling girl toward the outbuildings. They objected to having their plans changed. It took him four or five minutes to encourage them to see it his way. By then Carolyn was sitting in the grass, hiccuping.

  He picked her up and took her to her white convertible, stepping over one of her escorts as he did so. She toppled over and began to snore. He went into the big ranch house and found her purse and the suitcase she’d brought but hadn’t unpacked.

  He drove her car over two hundred and fifty miles to the Cooper ranch, arriving at first light, stopping inside the gate, a good mile from the ranch house. When she woke up, she looked wanly at him, then scrabbled her way out of the car throwing up down the front of her dress as she did so, then falling to her hands and knees.

  At her suggestion he opened a cattle gate and they drove across pasture land to a water hole bordered by a
stand of live oaks. He put her suitcase on the hood of the car. He turned his back as she stripped and walked barefoot across the hoof-marked mud and immersed herself in the clear water, holding her dark hair up out of the way as she dunked, scrubbing her face with her free hand, rinsing her mouth. After she came out, he stood with his back toward her still, and told her what had happened and what he had done.

  When she told him he could turn around, he found her standing beside the hood of the car and the open suitcase six feet from him. She had made up her face. She was brushing her dark hair, and looking at him in challenge and expectation. She had posed herself in the first red-gold rays of sunrise, standing hip-shot, half turned to the sun so that it glowed against naked thigh and flank and across the faint round of belly, and against the side of one breast, leaving the other in the half shadow of the gray light of morning, nipples rigid with the sensuous stimulus of displaying herself to him.

  “Thought you were too meechy-mild to come on man-size, honey,” she said, taking slow strokes with the brush. He could hear the crackle of static electricity in her black hair in the windless morning.

  “So what are you proving, Carrie?”

  “It’s what you’re up to proving, isn’t it? Ol’ Stuff keeps saying I should find me a man to steady me down before I get messed up for sure. From what you said, I came too scary close. I’ve been telling him I want me an older man, somebody making out good, not some boy.”

  “What makes you think I’m making out so good?”

  “Oh, Sam, you haven’t got a pee pot, I know, and you’re not as far older as what I had in mind, but you’ll have the law degree soon, and Stuff can put tons of business your way, and I notice people do what you tell them to do mostly. Maybe you could tell me too and I’d listen. It’s what I need, I know. Not some boy with the only thing on his mind getting it day and night. Maybe it’s my time right now, and you came along just right—for the both of us.”

  Leaning against the car boot, looking at her, he had thought of how it would be to marry Yandell Binns Cooper’s darlin’ girl. He would get the law work from Cooper and his whole crowd eventually. Title work and land grants and water rights. Ranch tax work, and mineral rights, and options on sections, and grazing rights. It would lock him into a secondary power structure, and he might work up to a hundred thousand a year gross, but he would be one of Stuff Cooper’s hired hands, and Stuff’s sons would get the land, because that was the feudal way of doing it.

  She turned toward him with a half smile, and tossed the brush into the suitcase and said, “The only way I can make out is after being looked at. So it’s like two birds with one stone, Sammy. You get to know if the deal is worth it, the looking and the rest too, and you must have seen that old pink puff quilt in the trunk when you taken my suitcase out, then we’ll get Concita to fix us up a breakfast like you never saw before, and tell Daddy-Stuff when he comes downstairs his worries are done.”

  “Better put your clothes on, honey.”

  “Nobody’ll come by here.”

  “Get dressed, Carrie.”

  “Me being sick like that put you off? I feel real good now, Sammy. Think of it like it’s a reward for you saving me like you did and getting a good thump under the eye for your troubles. It isn’t black yet but it’s going to be.” She approached and put her hands on his shoulders and tilted her head.

  He did not move or touch her. “Get dressed!”

  When she swung he leaned back just in time, but a fingertip hit the tip of his nose, stinging it, making his eyes water. She dressed, used a stick to poke her soiled dress into a patch of brush, slammed her suitcase shut and threw it onto the back seat.

  At the ranch house Stuff Cooper was already up. His approval of Sam Boylston was immediate and obvious, and Carolyn, to make Sam uncomfortable, hinted to Stuff they had been seeing a lot of each other. When Carolyn went up to bed, Stuff warmed up the Cub and flew Sam back to the house-party and landed on the ranch strip there. It was too early for anyone to be stirring.

  As Sam Boylston drove his old car back toward the university, he kept thinking of how she had looked in the first sunlight of the morning, and he thought of that off and on for quite a long time, then had met Lydia Jean and hadn’t remembered it again until the invitation to the wedding of Carolyn Cooper and Bixby Kayd had arrived.

  There had been a few times when he had wondered if maybe it wouldn’t have been better to have grabbed that chance. But after he knew he was doing better than he could have done by marrying Carolyn, he found he felt grateful to her in a strange way. When you make a choice you have to do your damnedest to make certain you did the right thing. You have to make your choice come true. And later he had appreciated how shrewdly the nineteen-year-old girl had gone about it, how sound her instinct had been in judging a man she did not know at all well. She had pretended to be the wanton, and had made him desire her so badly it had bloated his throat, knotted his belly and made his knees feel watery-weak. He had come within a half heartbeat of taking her, and she had so clearly stated the bargain beforehand, he would have honored it had he done so, because he could not permit himself to live with that obvious a flaw in his self-image. The girl had known that about him, had guessed at the severities of his self-disciplines.

  He shrugged off the memories of Carolyn, unboxed the duplicate tape recorder he had bought before returning to the Harbour Club, and began listening once more to the tape of the Hilgers and the Barths answering his questions aboard the Docksie III. He found it uncommonly difficult to keep his attention in close and careful focus. It irritated and puzzled him. One of the abilities he had found most useful was the knack of shutting out everything except the task at hand, and never permitting any random thought or distraction to intrude.

  And this kind of listening was part of his profession—to listen to the words people said and weigh the nuances, guess at the deletions, evaluate the inconsistencies. Verbal communication was astoundingly inexact. People seldom listen to one another. But the truth was always there in some form, sometimes only a shape seen through layers of mist.

  He began tape and stopwatch again, brought himself into a total focus, and began to jot down a log of the portions needing a more careful evaluation. The segments to study were when Dr. Barth, the wiry sunbrowned dentist with the steel-rimmed glasses was answering questions, and where Lulu Hilger, the tall brunette wife of the owner of the cruiser, was speaking. They had been the only ones in the cabin when Staniker had explained what had happened.

  When Jonathan Dye knocked at the door, Sam emerged from his work, was instantly aware of hunger and was surprised to see that it was two o’clock in the afternoon.

  Jonathan strode about the room full of restless energy and explained that he could make a deal with what seemed to be the right boat and man, if Sam approved.

  “His name is Moree. Stanley Moree and he’s from Nicholl’s Town at the north end of Andros, Sam. He knows the Great Bahama Bank like the back of his hand. He built a boat he could use on the Bank. It’s a sailing catamaran and he can set the rudders up so it draws less than a foot of water. He’s got a way to fix a little five-horse Seagull motor on it, and he built in a fresh-water tank too. He’s even got a little one-lung gas generator he can start up that’ll run a little marine radio. When we find her we might have to get help in a hurry. He says that if I buy the provisions, he’ll charge me four pounds a day. Or twenty pounds a week. That’s only fifty-six dollars. It’s seaworthy. He’s brought it over here and taken it back a dozen times. It’s here now. And he can leave any time. It’s only twenty miles, a little more, from the tip of New Providence to Nicholl’s Town and from there we’re only twelve or fourteen miles from the Joulter Cays. Some friends I’ve made here say he’s a good man. Is it okay with you, Sam?”

  “It’s fine with me. I brought some cash along out of the office safe.” He went to the closet and took his billfold out of the inside pocket of his jacket, and with his back to the room took four hundred dol
lars from the amount in the back compartment, hesitated, added another two hundred. He handed the money to Jonathan saying, “I didn’t know what I might need it for. Renting a plane or a boat. Something like that.”

  Jonathan counted it. “This is—quite a lot. Thanks, Sam. I can get some other things I was thinking about. Some more first-aid stuff. And a good pair of binoculars. Some flares. And I want to see if I can find one of those bull-horn things that run off six-volt batteries.”

  “Take some salt tablets for yourself. And sun lotion. Get a good sleeping bag.”

  “Stanley Moree is going to phone me here in a few minutes. To find out if it’s okay. Then I’m to meet him at the boat in an hour.”

  “There’s some interesting things on this tape. Want to hear them?”

  “If you don’t mind—I mean, I can’t get very interested in what Staniker said or didn’t say. It’s sort of—after the fact. Sam, could you tell him I’ll meet him down at the boat, and everything is all set?”

  After Jonathan was gone, Sam Boylston went out onto the small balcony into the sun heat from the air conditioning. He leaned his palms on the cement of the balcony wall. The great clowns, he thought, were great because they could give you a pungent taste of that curious emotion, that fringe emotion where tragedy and comedy overlapped, could make your eyes sting while you guffawed. Jonathan, in his tall bony, sallowed, half-clumsy toughness, in all his earnestness and his self-delusion, would glide through the crystalline Kodachrome shallows in the homemade catamaran, lift the bull horn to sun-cracked lips and send that forlorn electronic bray across the nubbins of sand and rock and weed, startling the crabs and the sea birds. LEILA LEILA LEILA.