The Last One Left

by John D. MacDonald

  “What are you trying to do?” the Sergeant had roared, so close at hand she had nearly leaped off the platform.

  She had fought him on the way down and they had both nearly fallen. But she did not start the really large scene until he had strapped her into that impossible belt again and forced the link shut and said, sadly, “If’n you can’t be trusted at all, Missy, then I just have to do this ever’ time I have to leave you alone, and ever’ time I have to get some sleep. Don’t like it any better than you do. But you won’t pay attention to good sense!”

  “Good sense!” she had yelled. “Good sense! You’re a crazy! Don’t you even know it? You got that great big dent in your head where they took your brains out. You’re kidnapping me! You know what they’ll do to you? They’ll take you away and they’ll lock you up forever in a big room full of other crazies!”

  But he had just kept looking mournfully at her, shaking his head, and finally he had gone down and brought her bedding up and taken his own down and gone to sleep on the boat.

  This morning he had seemed the same as usual. Perhaps a little quieter. He’d been opening a can of franks and beans when suddenly the can and the can opener fell from his hands. He stood there swaying from side to side in a strange way, and then she remembered what it reminded her of, a long time ago, stopping at that roadside place when she was little, and there was an elephant there chained in the sun, swaying just like that.

  She watched him. She moistened her lips. She glanced at the belt and chain over by the post. The shorts and halter top she wore were good enough for swimming. Run and grab a cushion off the Muñequita. Jump in and swim his little channel through the mangroves and out into the open bay. A hundred yards of channel. Lots of boats on a Saturday.

  He wasn’t looking at her, or at anything. Then she saw the water running out of his eyes. She had to tug and pull at him to get him turned around and, in his sticklike walk, over to his thinking place. She put his big hands on the greasy places on the peeled uprights. He moaned and gripped with such a terrible strength she heard little gratings and poppings of muscle and bone and gristle. He thunked his head against the beam so violently, she screamed and ran and got the thin faded cushion from the old wicker chair and folded it once and held it against the beam. He butted his head against it.

  “You’re not crazy, Sarg,” she kept telling him in a pleading tone. “You’re not. I’m sorry.”

  His hands fell to his sides. He looked at her, half frowning, and he walked over and sat on the bed, face in his hands.

  “Missy?” he said at last.

  “I’m right here, Sarg.”

  “Things spin around and around and get sucked down, like they went down a drain.”

  He shook himself like a big, tired hound and stood up. “Takes it out of me,” he said.

  “That lump on your head is getting huge.”

  He felt of it with cautious fingertips. “Whomped me a good one that time.”

  He started toward the kerosene stove then stopped and looked at her. “I wouldn’t have knowed you’d left, Miss Leila. Why didn’t you?”

  “It never entered my mind.”

  He picked up the can and the opener. “Lost my hunger, but you could eat some I expect. If you’d eat real good—and sleep as much as you can …”

  “Yes?”

  “And if you could run that nice boat down to the city all by yourself and promise word of honor you wouldn’t remember a thing about where you were or who doctored you …”

  “I promise, Sarg. Honest. Cross my heart.”

  “Three or four days more, I could let you go.”

  “Do you mean it?”

  “It’s a promise for sure. Can you wait just that little bitty time more, Missy?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “Then I don’t have to put that danged chain on you. I sure to God hate to see you fastened up that way. In the night I decided I just couldn’t do it one more time, no matter what.”

  Gordon Dale liked to work in the silence and emptiness of the law offices on Saturday morning. He solved the problems of the brief, and when he was ready to leave he remembered he hadn’t heard from Detective Sergeant Dickerson. He was told that Dickerson should just about be arriving at his home. He phoned the home number. Dickerson had just walked in. His voice was weary.

  “Who? Oh, Mr. Dale. To tell you the truth, I forgot all about it. Just when I was ready to go off at midnight, we had a real dandy. I wish to God they’d been one motel further away. That would have taken it over the city line. Fellow on vacation got slopped and beat his little kid to death. His wife put the body in the car and tried to be an ambulance, and took out two palm trees and a light post. So I worked on through. The post showed the kid had a lot of old breaks, green stick fractures that had healed without attention. A lousy night, Mr. Dale. I’m sorry I didn’t get around to …”

  “That’s all right. No rush. Get some sleep, Dave.”

  “Soon as I can get anything, I’ll get back to you, Mr. Dale.”

  • • •

  Sam Boylston lay propped up on two pillows on one of the Bahama beds in the motel cabana. He wore blue swim trunks he had purchased at a dime store in the shopping center a block away. He talked on the phone to Corpus Christi. He was listening for the third time to the kid’s excited tale of danger and injury. He made the right sounds in the right places. He could look out through the window wall and see the three girls horsing around, taking turns off the low board—the fat girl with the red sunburn, the skinny dark one with a loud laugh, and the little chunky one with the deep tan and the straight hair bleached egg white.

  “Well,” he said, “you sure had yourself a time, Boy-Sam. Want to put your mom back on?”

  Lydia Jean came back on the line. “That was a long talk,” she said. “Oh, just a minute.” In the background he heard her shouting something to Boy-Sam. “Sorry. He was going to go running out without his sweater. There’s an edge in the wind for this time of year. Out of the north.”

  “Was it a bad break?”

  “A very clean simple fracture, and he really didn’t cry very much. He turned white as ghosts. You were very very patient with him, dear. He’s being a terrible bore about it. He can make a description of falling out of a tree last practically forever. He had to be so sure you found out he didn’t cry very much. Sam, all the time he was talking to you, I kept thinking of what you told me about Jonathan. How long is he going to—keep doing that, keep looking for her?”

  “Until he accepts the fact she’s dead.”

  “With Leila, that isn’t easy. She was so much more alive than—most of the rest of us.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you going back to Harlingen now?”

  “Pretty soon, I guess. Why don’t you go down and open the house and wait for me there?”

  “I thought of it.”

  “So why don’t you?”

  “Sam, dear, my heart bleeds for you in this whole thing. I know how you felt about your sister. I loved her too. You know that. And I should be with you. Time of need and all that. I don’t want to be cold and hard, but it would be coming back for the wrong reason. I’ve invested—too much heartache in this to come back for anything but the right reason. You’ll have to understand why I had to leave. And when you do understand, I can come back to you.”

  “Same old paradox. Try this for a partial answer. Remember Rosalie’s brother?”

  “Of course.”

  “I was wrong.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said I was wrong. Dead wrong. Does that mean anything?”

  After a long pause she said, “It’s interesting. I think I would like to know why you think you were wrong, Sam.”

  “I know now that I let Rosalie down and I let you down.”

  “Indeed! I see. You did not live up to what we expected of you.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “But you were perfectly content with yourself, of
course. You knew it would be stupid and out of character for Sam Boylston to go down there and defend that fellow. But because I wanted it, you should have gritted your teeth and—humored me.”

  “What the hell do you want of me!”

  Her voice sounded far away. “A little more than that, I’m afraid. A little more than that. Take care of yourself, Sam.”

  She was gone. He rolled onto his shoulder and slammed the phone back onto the cradle. The chunky young girl appeared just outside his window wall, shading her eyes, peering in at him. She grinned, made a beckoning gesture, pointed toward the pool and made swimming motions. He shook his head no, and she made a pouting face and shrugged and went away.

  He could not stop asking himself what Lyd wanted of him. Talking with Theyma Chappie in her little apartment, when, to his confusion and dismay the tears had begun without warning, he had felt close to an understanding, as though suddenly it would be revealed to him, the way a light bulb appears over the head of the comic strip character, and he could say: Of course! Now I know.

  But if he could never understand, and could not alter some inner perfectionistic coolness, some chronic insistence upon a world of reasonable cause and effect, why could she not accept the flaw for the sake of the rest of it? A presentable man, of scrupulous marital fidelity, fair in his dealings, achieving through all the long shrewd hours of work a position of status, social and professional, and the income to give her a life without want or drudgery. Father of her healthy son. Would she prefer a sickly romanticism, a variant of a Jonathan, baying his lover way across the Grand Bahama Bank? She could not seem to understand that it was a world wherein, if you faltered, They ripped you down quite casually and went on Their way.

  Yet Lydia Jean was not a dreamer. She had that practical streak, that capacity for acceptance of the things she could not change. If he was forever incapable of change, she would not be so merciless. It meant she believed in something within him which he could not identify. And it meant that she believed that if he could grasp it, use it, the benefit would be as much his as hers.

  It was paradox, and as so many times before during the months of their separation, it seemed to spin faster and faster in his mind until a kind of centrifugal force flung it out and away.

  He looked out at the pool. The other two had left. The brown chunk solemnly practiced dives from the low board. He had bought the trunks and gone swimming because his body had begun to feel stale. He was accustomed to exercise. The chunk had challenged him to a race. He had heard her friends call her Toby. The races had given him the excuse to extend himself, the challenge to stretch the long muscles, empty the bottoms of the lungs. When it was just two lengths, she could beat him in free style, most of her advantage coming from the quick racing turn she knew. Three lengths was the best for them, a tossup. When they had tried four lengths, he had won as decisively as she won in the two-length competition.

  Then he had gone in and phoned Lyd. Optimism born of exertion. But it hadn’t worked out.

  He watched the Toby girl. She was trying swans, and getting good elevation off the low board. She would eel out of the pool, climb up onto the board, stand at a measured distance from the end, use both thumbs to hook her pale wet hair away from her eyes, stand very still, then take her steps, land at the very end, and take a maximum spring from the fiberglass board. In the sealed room with the air conditioning humming, it was a silent performance out there.

  Her suit was black and white, formed of two panels, front and back, with red lacing up the sides across the two inch gap between the panels, brown healthy young flesh bulging in diamond patterns against the tension of the lacing. Her thighs were too heavy. Her hips and breasts were hearty, shoulders broad, waist narrow and limber. The muscles of her back, contours softened by the little layer of woman-fat under the wet brown hide, moved smoothly and with precision.

  Drowsy from exertion, depressed by Lydia Jean’s response, he drifted into erotic fantasy. He brought the brown girl into the room, drew the transparent blue draperies across the window wall, pressed the night-lock button on the door. He would take her gently out of the suit. Her body would be wet, scented with soap, chlorine, and the healthiness of flesh. Tremblingly apprehensive, goose-pimpled, pleading softly while he pressed her gently down and …

  Outside, as if on cue, the Toby girl went halfway out the board, turned around, sat and stretched out, face turned toward the sun. A great grinding spasm of lust catapulted him up out of drowsiness, a wanting that was as vivid as great pain, obliterating everything but itself, as pain does. In the constraint of the built-in support of the cheap swim trunks, he bulged hard as marble. Shocked by the intensity, he sat up and caught his breath and took a derisive look at the lonely man far from home. The chunk could not be more than sixteen years old. Under the ragged edge of the bangs which half concealed her eyebrows was the round uncommitted face of childhood. A real conquest, fella. They’d come after you with a net.

  But as the hotness of immediate and overwhelming need faded he was uncomfortably aware of the residue it left in the back of his mind, an urge to pull down all the walls, tumble them in upon himself, go plunging out into the streets and commit acts of such vileness and terror and pointlessness that when at last they brought him down, all his chances would be gone forever, all careful things undone, all accomplishment forgotten. And then, because it would be past rebuilding, no one would ever expect him to even try. And he would be free. There were other ways to be free. To disappear so cleverly he could never be found. Or to find that hiding place, where they had hid from you long ago, and looked as if they were inwardly smiling at how easy it had been. They were like tinted wax. Scent of a thousand blossoms. Dark wood and silver handles, organ playing as the people came in, making little rustling and creaking sounds as they sat down. They coughed. And then the man came out from the side with the book, and put it down, opened it, looked out at all of them and cleared his throat …

  “You could on sudden impulse harm yourself,” Theyma Chappie said, as clearly as if she sat there beside him.

  Again, on cue, he saw one of the motel maids, in white uniform, a Negro, walk across his line of vision on the far side of the pool, passing in front of the cabana directly across from him. She was much darker than Theyma, but he saw, perhaps made more evident to him by the uniform, the same slenderness, the same high-hipped, gliding walk, saucy bulge of rump.

  He reached for the nearest reality and had the operator make the call person-to-person to Mr. Taylor Worth, Boylston and Worth, Harlingen.

  “Things are beginning to pile up, Sam,” said Worth. “I got a postponement on the Gianetti thing, but hizzoner was a little puckered. How long do I have to stall?”

  “I don’t know. Not much longer, maybe. I can’t say for sure. I appreciate your holding the fort by yourself.”

  “People are wondering about some kind of ceremony for Leila. You know how many friends she had. Sorry to bring it up, but there’s a big memorial service for the Kayds tomorrow. People keep phoning up. Anything you want me to tell them?”

  “Just that it will have to wait until Jonathan and I get back, and that’s indefinite at the moment. Tay, have you heard any locker-room gossip about Bix?”

  “Well, there was a hell of a lot in the beginning. You know how it would be. A pretty shifty type. Then when they finally got the whole story and that captain was cleared, it all died down. Now it’s beginning to pick up again.”

  “Why?”

  “You should be able to figure that out, Sam. Because you’re still hanging around that area. Why? As a special personal favor tell me why.”

  Sam Boylston reached quickly and found a plausible answer before the silence lasted too long. “I was checking around when I first got to Nassau, before we found out what happened. I came across the bits and pieces of a deal Bix was putting together. Of course the structure fell apart, but the pieces are still lying around.”

  Taylor Worth chuckled. “And that offends the Boyl
ston sense of order?”

  “And greed.”

  “The ultimate motivation.”

  “Keep it quiet. Later if I can find a way to put the pieces together, we can pick up some blocks of that Sunshine thing of his, then let the news leak out a little.”

  “You awe me, Samuel. Keep me posted. I’ll keep stalling. Right now I’ve got to run.”

  As he was taking his shower, Sam found himself thinking that it could be done without any deal. Just quietly pick up Sunshine Management at depressed prices over-the-counter, then leak word that Sam Boylston was getting into the act. The golden touch should be good enough to average out maybe three points if the holdings were unloaded again carefully enough. It would make the shareholders feel right at home, he thought. The same kind of a deal Bix would have rigged—and Sam couldn’t stomach.

  Oliver Akard was in the empty house of his parents in the empty afternoon. Dust motes winked in the shafts of sunshine. His father was working overtime at the shop. His mother was at a Saturday afternoon benefit bridge.

  He had slept so late she was gone by the time he got up. It had been a relief not to have to face that martyred, wounded look, the audible signs of affliction. It had been almost dawn when he had come home, and on an impulse to challenge them, instead of turning off the engine and coasting into the driveway, he had driven in, parked in his usual place beyond the carport, revved the engine three times, the holes rusted through the muffler adding a snare-drum resonance to the insult to the neighborhood peace.