The Last One Left

by John D. MacDonald

  It could have happened by now, he thought. He went up and moved close to the bed, sat tirelessly a-squat on his heels, reached and laid the back of his forefinger against her forehead. It felt so unexpectedly cool he was certain it had happened, then the breath caught in her throat in a half-snore. She coughed, sighed, turned onto her side, her back toward him.

  “Cain’t quite make up your mind to live or die, huh?” he whispered. “If you’re making a choice, Missy, living is better, hear?”

  He thought of going back to the bunk aboard the white boat, but he had the feeling that if he left her, something that was hovering over her might pounce. He stretched out on the floor beside the bed, and awoke in first light, feeling a little bit stiff and sore. She was still cool to the touch, and he leaned over her face and snuffed at her, nostrils wide. That sick-smell was almost gone, that soury new-bread smell. He went fishing and came back and she was still asleep. He fixed breakfast and then ate it all himself when he could not wake her up enough to eat it. This was her heaviest sleep of all, and when it lasted through midday it began to worry him.

  He had his back to her, and he was patching a hole in a window screen when she started yelling so loudly he nearly went through the window. He spun and saw her sitting straight up and trying to squirm back away from something. “No!” she yelled. “Oh God, no! Please! Please! Get away from me! No!”

  He trotted to her, wiping his hands on khakied thighs, and grasped her shoulders and tried to ease her back down onto the pillow, saying, “Now there, Missy. Nothing after you. Everything is fine, Miss Leila. Just having a bad dream there, Missy.”

  And all of a sudden he realized that those wide green eyes were staring directly at him, wide scared, wondering eyes, and her lips were sucked white. He released her and stepped back.

  She knew it was another part of a dream, exceptionally vivid, trapped in some kind of a terrible shacky place in some kind of a jungle, with some huge weird type staring at her, scary pale eyes, and that dent in his forehead so deep it made her stomach turn over. She willed herself to wake up, willed the man and the shack to fade away.

  “Are you awake now for sure, Missy?” he asked.

  She closed her eyes and opened them to an undeniable reality which, if it were a dream, was more carefully detailed than any she had ever had. Yet, she thought, if I am ill, maybe a dream could be like this.

  “Missy?”

  “Awake? I don’t know. I can hear my own voice. I’m awake I guess. But nothing makes any sense.”

  “You had the fevers, Miss Leila.”

  “I feel kind of vague and floaty,” she said. She pushed a sleeve up to scratch her arm, sensed a strangeness about it, looked at her arm, and felt a sudden wild alarm. “What’s happened to me! I’m like a skeleton! What’s happening?”

  “Now don’t you be scared. Please don’t you be scared. You’re doing real fine, Miss Leila. You’re a-looking real good today.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Why, I’m Sergeant Corpo, Missy.”

  She looked slowly around the room. “Why am I here? What is this crazy place? Where is it?”

  “Well, this is my place. I built this place. This is my island. Everybody calls it Sergeant’s Island. I’ve been here a long time. The Lieutenant fixed it so I can stay on here for good.”

  “What are we close to, Sergeant? Are we near Nassau?”

  “Nassau? That’s a good piece from here. The closest place, where I buy supplies, that would be Broward Beach, twenty minute run to the south in my skiff.”

  “Florida!”

  “It surely is.”

  She lay back abruptly, thin forearm across her eyes. He thought she was going to sleep. She said, “Sergeant?”

  “Yes, Missy.”

  “You’ve got to help me. I don’t know what questions to ask. You’ve got to just tell me why I’m here, and what this is all about. Please.”

  He came closer and sat on his heels by the bed. “Missy, it was Sunday morning, early, real misty morning, and I was wading the flats to the north of my island, and you like to scared me half to death, come floating right up to me in a big pretty boat, line dragging from the bow, weed tangled in it. There you were laying on the deck when I took a look, jaybird naked, excuse me, and sunburned terrible bad, and that big open place on your head I had such a time sewing up nice.”

  She took her arm away, stared at him, then lifted her hand and reached unerringly to the healing wound and touched it tenderly with her fingertips. It felt alien to her, a great thickened clumsy welt, with a dull inner pain when she touched it. How in the wide world, she thought, would I happen to be drifting around naked in a boat in Florida? It has to be some kind of a complicated joke. Or a plot.

  “What kind of a boat?”

  “New and nice, Miss Leila. Blue and white color. Kind of a greeny-blue hull, white topsides, twin stern-drive engines, name Muñequita registered out of Brownsville, Texas, but it’s got a Florida number and a seal on the bow.”

  He seemed so very anxious to please and reassure, but there was an oddness about his eyes that made her wary. “When did this happen, Sergeant? When did you find me?”

  She saw him press both fists against his forehead, then rise and wander aimlessly, go over and start looking through bits of paper fastened to a post which supported a crude beam. He turned toward her and with a shy smile and hopeless gesture said, “Near as I can make it out, it had to be last Sunday. That means this is Thursday. And that would make it the twenty-sixth of May.”

  She felt her mouth go dry, and she went back into the confusing corridors of memory, searching for a date. She found a Friday she knew. The sixth day of May. Twenty days gone without a trace! She could remember the day clearly. They were at anchor at Southwest Allen’s Cay in the Exumas. The island was a long oval barrier of sand and rock enclosing a broad anchorage with but two good entrances for a boat of the draft of the Muñeca, one to the east and one to the west, almost opposite each other. A long still day, dazzlingly bright. But not one of the good days, because Carolyn had been whining at Mister Bix again. She had wanted to go further down the Exumas, and Captain Garry had figured out how far they could go and still get back to Nassau again on the tenth for some kind of business meeting Mister Bix had. But then she had changed her mind and decided she wanted to get back to Nassau sooner. She had apparently agreed to staying at the anchorage another day and a half or two days and arrive back at Nassau on Sunday, and then she had begun complaining about the heat, a rash on her throat, running out of the good sun lotion, a stone bruise on her foot.

  By then the pattern had become familiar. Carrie’s pattern. It set up the usual side effects. Carolyn would be poisonously and damagingly sweet to Stella, ignore her husband completely, and flirt quite openly with Captain Staniker. Bix, suffering rejection, would take every chance to stomp on his son Roger’s pride, pointing out everything Roger seemed incompetent to do, from catching a fish to making a drink. Roger would go about with the stiff-mouthed look of someone fighting tears of helplessness. Mary Jane Staniker would keep her head down and go about her chores with a scuttling look. Staniker, by making an extra effort to be protective and gentle with Stella, would inadvertently add to Carolyn’s sour mood. And Leila would make an extra effort to stay out of everybody’s way. She was in awe of Carolyn’s special talent to make six other adults as miserable as herself.

  In the morning Carrie had Staniker launch and rig the little sailing dinghy, and she went off alone, up and down the protected waters in the light air, managing to look rigidly discontented as far as the eye could see. Mister Bix and Captain Staniker went off in the Muñequita to troll on the Atlantic side, Bix making it clear that Roger would be an unwelcome nuisance to take along. Leila had put her writing materials in a plastic bag and swum ashore. She went to a pebbly beach at the south end of the island where the slope of rock and scrub growth behind her concealed the anchorage where the Muñeca lay. As she sat with her bare back against a smo
oth and comfortable slant of stone, she could see Stel on her plastic float-board paddling slowly back and forth over a coral reef, looking down through the little glass porthole. She finished another two pages of a letter to Jonathan, thinking she would probably add more before mailing it from Nassau.

  The heat of the sun finally made her uncomfortable enough to think of getting back into the water. Stella came paddling to the beach and came walking ashore, carrying the light foam board under her arm.

  Stella limped badly. She had been Leila’s friend for years. Leila had realized in the very beginning with this strange, shy girl that any kind of special consideration made her become remote. So she had treated her as if there was no handicap. And, indeed, there was far less of one than Stella believed. Leila knew the history of it. It had been a difficult delivery. The nerves of the left leg had been damaged. By the time the specialists had achieved a sufficient regeneration to give her the use of it, the leg was smaller around and shorter than the other leg, and it would never be very strong. Both legs were pretty, slender, shapely. They did not match. That was all. Her figure was very good. She had a delicate and sensitive face, lovely eyes which seldom looked directly at anyone. She had a dark, brooding look, and only the very few who knew her as well as Leila knew the quickness of the hidden humor, the taste for the absurd.

  Only once on the cruise had Leila made an effort to comfort Stel. Carolyn, one night at dinner, had been exceptionally, cleverly vicious. She talked about bringing “poor Stel” out of herself. She seemed incapable of saying her name without adding the “poor,” and she would jump to Stel’s assistance when she least needed it. Leila awoke in the night in the cabin she shared with Stel to hear the smothered sound of weeping. So she had stepped over to the adjoining bunk and slid in with her and held her. Stel had been rigid at first, and then had softened and clung and wept herself out. It had made Stel strange toward her for the next few days, but then they had found their way back to the casual warmth they knew best.

  Stel dropped the board and sat on it and said, “Madame the Queen is really winging it today.”

  “Whatever it is, if somebody could bottle it, you could use it to destroy empires. Your father ought to give her a good thumping.”

  She made a face. “He’d rather thump on Roger. My dear daddy made his own bed like they say. I guess the daughter-daddy bit clouds my vision, but he acts so damned—goaty about her. She keeps him on the hook. She makes his hands shake. Years married and still it goes on. He’s scared to thump her, Leila. She wouldn’t let him near her for a year. Anyway, thank God Garry’s got the sense to steer clear of her.”

  “It’s Garry now? Gracious me!”

  “Oh, come on! He’s a nice guy, Leila. A really truly nice guy. And this cruise is rough on him and his wife. I’m glad they’re getting paid well at least. A happy ship. Ho, ho, ho and a bottle of arsenic. Honest, I’m sorry I dragged you along, but I think if you hadn’t been along, I’d have jumped overboard a long time ago.”

  “Oh sure. You know, for a guy who’s supposed to have been captaining for years, Staniker seems sort of keyed up and twitchy to me.”

  “Darling, the Kayd family does that to everyone. It’s our proudest boast.” She paused. “I guess what really gets me is what Carrie does to daddy. He is so strong in every other way. And she keeps him groveling around whenever she feels like it. She keeps putting the knife in me to see if she can get a rise out of him. When he doesn’t do a thing to get her off my back, then I resent him. And when he crushes poor Rog, I resent him more. I know what she’s doing. She’s cutting us loose from him. Uncontested possession. Anyway, I’ll tell you one thing. This is the last cruise of the Kayd family. As a happy united little group at least. Rog can keep taking it if he wants to. Leila, maybe we ought to jump ship in Nassau and fly back home.”

  “Mean it?”

  “Mmmm. I don’t know. It’s nice to think about.”

  Leila sighed. “There’s not enough cruise left to make it worthwhile to stir up the fuss. Let’s stiff it out, kid. Let’s show ’em we’re tough. Honey, I have to get into that water before I begin to smoke.”

  In the late afternoon of that day at Allen’s Cay, with Bix and Staniker still not back, Carolyn napping, Stella reading in the shade of a tarp Roger had rigged over a part of the cockpit deck, Leila swam ashore again and wandered, looking for shells. She came upon Roger standing in the shallows and casting out over the reef where Stel had paddled before lunch, using light spinning gear. When she asked him if he was having any luck, he lifted a stringer of gaudy fish out of the shallows and said, “Mary Jane’ll know which of these can go in the pot.”

  Fifty feet further along the shore she came upon big and curious animal tracks and called to Rog in an excited voice. He came hurrying and looked and said, “Hey now! Garry said there might be some on this cay. Iguana. This groove is where his tail drags. Let’s see where he went.”

  “But those feet look pretty big. Don’t they bite?”

  “Garry said they’re timid unless you corner them and try to grab them. He said there used to be thousands and thousands up and down the Exumas. But they’re delicious. Like chicken.”

  “Lizard steaks? Gaaah!”

  “Come on.”

  They followed the track for several hundred yards, losing them in the rocks then picking them up again in a sandy patch further along. At last they lost them for good. He had driven a driftwood sliver into the arch of his foot, in the middle of the sole. He sat on a flat stone, and she knelt and picked carefully at it with thumbnail and fingernail until at last she got a firm grip on it and pulled it free. She held it up in triumph and said, “You will walk again!”

  He laughed. His teeth looked very white in the saddle brown of his lean face. Of all aboard he was the only one to take a tan as deep as Staniker’s. He had dark hair, like Stella’s, and the same mobile sensitivity of feature, the same hint of vulnerability. Yet he was unflawed in any physical way, slender, muscular, moving with sureness and precision and grace, except when he had to perform any task when his father was watching him. He wore pale blue briefs, a ragged hat from the Nassau straw market.

  They were in a cleft in the rocks, with a sand floor, with walls rising eight sheer feet behind him. It was like a small room which had been cut in half diagonally, looking south across the blue of the depths, turquoise of shallows.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” he said, and his smile faded away. He looked at her in a way which made her aware of the skimpiness of her one-piece suit, cut to a deep oval in back almost to the base of her spine.

  She rose with a bright smile and said, “Ol’ Iguana is probably back there chomping up your fish, Rog.” As she turned away he caught her, hands on her waist, pulling her back, burying his face in her hair.

  “Knock it off, Roger. Please.”

  “Leila, Leila, Leila.”

  “I mean it! Stop it right now.”

  He turned her swiftly and tried to put his mouth on hers. She wiggled and twisted and pushed at him. It was all so stupid and unexpected and ridiculous. When struggling seemed to only excite him more, she decided to go dead. She took a deep breath and let it out. She let her arms hang. Except for keeping her lips tightly compressed, she went limp. He would give up in a moment. Her eyes were closed. His hand clasped the back of her neck, his arm against her back holding her tightly against him. He slid his other hand down inside the low back of her suit and, fingers splayed wide, hand cupping her bottom, pulled her against the hardness of himself. The sun came red through her eyelids. He smelled of sun-flesh, wind, salt and maleness. She felt a dreaminess, an inner turning, a loosening of her mouth, a yearning for Jonathan’s body so wretchingly vivid she felt as if her heart had been torn loose. As she put her hands lightly on his shoulders, pressing herself into him, with coughing catch of breath, suddenly all the textures were wrong, and in shame and fright she plunged free of him, stumbling in the sand, to come to her feet and find herself trapped in the corner of
the V. He prowled toward her, hands low, his face as blind as the stones around them.

  She felt a stone move as her foot brushed it, and she snatched it up, held it to strike, and yelled, “Roger! Roger!” He was in some far place where he might hear her.

  He halted, still in a half crouch, then slowly straightened and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked at her and turned away and went to the flat stone where he had sat before. He rested his arms on his knees, lowered his head to his arms. She saw him in profile, chest and belly expanding and contracting with his fast, deep breathing.

  She dropped the stone and walked out to where she could not be trapped again. She saw a movement of his hunched shoulders and thought for one incredulous moment he was laughing at her.

  “I don’t—know why,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m—so sorry.”

  She sighed and went closer to him. She felt very tired. “Just don’t cry. It doesn’t matter that much.”

  He looked up, frowning, eyes wet. “I had the feeling—it would be—some kind of an answer to something.”

  She understood. She moved closer. “It could be, maybe. Not with me, though. It’s what he’s doing to you, Rog. He won’t let you have any pride. He won’t let you have—manhood. Or maleness, maybe is a better word. He’s getting you to the point where you don’t know what you are. So this was—trying to find out, maybe. I don’t know anything about these things, Roger. Maybe he is trying to—emasculate you because she’s emasculating him. Could that make any sense?”

  “I don’t know. I hate him. I keep getting the feeling I’m going to do some terrible thing. I guess—I almost did.” He tried to smile.

  “You were very scary, you know. I don’t know if I could have hit you with that stone or not. I didn’t even know you. If I couldn’t—stop you, you were going to rape me.”