Slam the Big Door (11 page)

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 the Shelder 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 floor-boards of the boat—a wind chattering in the palmettos—blue herons stalking the mud flats—the endless brilliance of the nighttime mockingbird, exhausting all the variations of his theme, while a dove talked of sorrow amid a whippoorwill’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 tea cups 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 back seat.

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 back seat 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 sunbleached-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,

“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?”