Slam the Big Door (27 page)

“Stop changing the subject. Ask the nurse for the morning paper after I leave, which is going to be just about now. You got a lot of time alone. Play this game. Be somebody else, looking at Debbie Ann, getting to know her. What would this somebody else think?”

“I don’t want to know.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I don’t!”

“Do me this,” he ordered. “Give it a try. You got all day.” He held his left hand out. The single eye had a baleful stare.

“Bastard!” she said.

“Coward!” he said, and did not take his hand away.

Finally she reached across her body with her uninjured left hand and took his. “Okay. But I have a feeling I’m not going to enjoy it.”

“Who said it would be a pleasure?” he said, and walked out.

He went back to the house. When he had a chance to speak to Mary alone he said, “She could grow up, that girl. A little delayed, but not impossible.”

“How did she take it?”

“It jolted her. It knocked her off balance. While she was on a tilt, I jolted her another couple of times. The modern style of handling Sleeping Beauty. No kiss. A boot in the tail. Maybe she sits up and looks around. Maybe she goes back to sleep. It’s anybody’s guess.”

“Maybe I kept her asleep so long, treating her like a little child.”

“Don’t treat her that way any more.”

“How could I?”

“Treat her with love. Love isn’t for reward and punishment. Respect is what you give and take away, not love.”

“Mike, Mike,” she said, the tears starting to come.

“If you can cry again, good. Go do so.”

She tried to smile, and fled. He roamed the house restlessly for a little while, and then went over and basked on the beach. He swam a little—with great fury and determination. He walked and found a shark’s tooth, black as the eyes of McGuire. He summoned up specific memories of Buttons, and braced himself for the big wave. It came, and it blinded him, but did not nudge him off his feet.

Mike Rodenska. A chunky brown man on a lot of beach, balding, thoughtful, and alone—relighting the hoarded half of a cigar.

He sat down. A pale gray crab came out of his sand-hole home and squatted, motionless, staring at Rodenska.

“What do you need?” Mike asked him. “You got a hole there. You got a hard shell, and all the beach you can use. You know your trouble, my friend? You’re over-privileged. You got it too good. Go back in the hole and count your money.

He flapped his hand. The crab darted back into his hole. Mike lay back and went to sleep.

epilogue

THE WIDE BEACH is there, unchanging. A storm nibbles some of it away. Another storm replaces it. And the wild things are there, watchful, hungry—generation after generation, yet always the same. Man is but a guest on the beach. He changes nothing, and is soon gone.

A little over a week after Troy’s funeral, Mike Rodenska and Mary Jamison sat on Purdy Elmarr’s front porch, cautious, watchful.

Purdy was saying, “Like I told you, I kept thinking on how Corey Haas could just set quiet and make out real fine on his piece of that corporation, and you two ain’t rough enough to squeeze hard enough to squeeze him out, and him doing so good isn’t in the plans I got for him, and I pledged you I’d help out with that deal, and if a man’s going to help it’s only natural he gets a piece of it. So I just squoze Corey out.”

“You said you bought him out,” Mike said.

“That I did. But Corey’s never stayed as liquid as he should, and when all of a sudden he started needing fast money here and there for this and that, he sold cheap.”

“I guess that… makes us partners,” Mary said.

Purdy grinned at her. “You two don’t look like you’d heard any kinda good news. I’ll want some say in how we run it, sure. And you’re wondering now I got my foot in the door, maybe I’ll squeeze you a little. Keep right on a-wondering. It’ll keep you on your toes.”

“I guess we don’t have too much choice,” Mike said.

“You spoken a true word right there. I’m in to stay. I’m taking a real interest,” Purdy said.

“And my lawyer will check every piece of paper,” Mike said.

“You’d be a damn fool if he didn’t. Now you come along and look at a brand new colt came into the world yesterday. Pretty thing. Wobbly on his laigs.”

“I’m telling you, Purdy Elmarr, if Mike should lose money on…”

“Now you hush up, Mary Kail. We’re through with money talk for the day.”

Ten months later, after all lots were sold out in Area One of Horseshoe Pass Estates, Area Two was opened for sale, prior to completion of the final portion of the roads and sea walls. The public response was most encouraging to the officers and directors of the corporation.

A week after Area Two was opened, a letter arrived from Thomas Arthur Rodenska to his father.

Micky and I have been looking at those pictures you sent a thousand times I bet. And we I can’t hardly wait to fly down Easter. Last summer was sure a keen deal, being in Florida, but like you said in your letter to Micky it’s one thing renting a place and another thing having your own. Are you sure the house will be done by the time we come down? Will it be ready to live in even? We have been having big fat arguments about what the surprise is. Finally I figure the way Micky does. In one picture you can see just left of the house a sort of thing that could maybe be the end of a dock. Could the surprise be a boat? Could it be a sailboat? I know you won’t tell because you never do, but I am asking anyway. If it is a boat, will it be there when we get there? There is one thing you should know about next summer anyhow, even if it is a boat. We have talked it over, what you said about good times and all that in my letter, and it is best for you to know we are going to get jobs next summer. That means we will not have so much time for the sailboat, so if it was there for Easter we wouldn’t have anything else to do and we would get a lot of good use out of it. You said you had everything sent down and that means all our junk from home and a lot of that is kid stuff. So it was too bad to spend the expense of sending it down but we can sort it down there for give away and throw away and keep. We can probably do that at night when it is too dark for anyone but foolish reckless people to be out in a sailboat.

A little over a year after Troy’s funeral, Mary Jamison received the first letter in three months from Debbie Ann. It was mailed from Los Angeles. The address was the same, but the tone of the letter was new. It was a very long letter, and Mary Jamison went over it many times. Part of it read:

I don’t know if this is of crashing importance to anybody but me, but somehow I have let myself get all worked up and earnest about a Project. I am sorry not to have written in so very long, but now that things have sort of simmered down for me, I might do better. After I bored the Scotts to death in Carmel, and bored Nancy Ann to distraction in La Jolla, I looked up June Treadway in L. A. I don’t think you ever met her. I am a real pro at moving in with people and staying practically forever. I located her through her parents. She had a marriage that went blah, and she rooms with a girl in an apartment so roomy they could fit me in. But they both work, so it was very empty daytimes, and you can really get bloody bored just shopping and beaching and seeing movies and having daytime dates with the tiresome men they seem to have a lot of out here. June does social work for the City and County of Los Angeles. Case investigation. I always thought social workers were a joke, a very tired sad joke. But June told me such weird things I got interested. I can see that if I try to give you the whole history this letter is going to take forever. Here is the current picture. I am employed. How about that? I got sneaked onto the payroll as a trainee, and I can’t do any casework all by myself, and the pay is pitiful. I am taking night courses at U.S.C. and putting billions of frightening miles on the Jag I bought just before I left Florida. I can barely find time to eat and sleep, and I haven’t had my hair done in a century, but I love it, and I keep wondering when it will suddenly wear off and I will be my usual aimless self.

I am dating one guy only, name of George Pickner, who is exactly one day older than I am, a fact he brings up whenever possible. He is a graduate student, hacking away at his doctorate in Sociology and teaching on a fellowship. My instructor. That’s how we met. Anyway, he is such a nice guy that I finally tried to drive him to cover by giving him the whole dreary emotional history and tawdry escapades in the life of Deborah Ann. It gave the poor dear a rocky evening, but he has bounced back by convincing himself I am a New Woman. This he cannot sell me. I have told him to stay braced because all of this is only one of my temporary enthusiasms and it will no doubt wear off suddenly when least expected. Enough of that.

The clipping about Rob Raines being disbarred was unexpectedly depressing. Very hard on him and Dee too, I would imagine. Say hello to Mike for me…

A year and a half after Troy Jamison’s death, Mr. Michael Rodenska, President of the Horseshoe Pass Estates Corporation, before leaving on his honeymoon, made a public announcement that he was retiring from the land-development business, had bought into the Ravenna
Journal-Record
and, after his return, would take an active hand in the operation of the paper.

Two weeks later Mike Rodenska and his bride were baking themselves into a happy, lazy stupor under a Mediterranean sun, on a private hotel beach on the Costa Brava—protected from a chilly wind by a canvas windbreak.

“Florida beaches are much, much nicer,” the bride said drowsily.

“Shaddap! This one is cheaper. So Marco is better, but this one is cheaper. I love you, but you complain too much.”

“He makes more money than he ever saw before, so he goes looking for a cheap beach! How about that!”

“Listen. It’s romantic here. You know. Spain. Castanets. Bull fights. Shut up and enjoy it, please.”

She sighed. “That’s what’s so nice about honeymoons. All the sweet talk!”

“You take my first honeymoon,” Mike said, “I was highly nervous. Now I’m an elderly sophisticate. I take it in stride. Nonchalant.”

“I guess I’ve
never
had a better time,” the bride said.

“I appreciate the endorsement, lady.”

She jabbed him with an elbow. “Fatuous type!”

“Nothing exceeds like excess.”

“I’ll ignore that, dear. I like the way we talk, that’s what I mean. All the laughs. There’s nothing wrong with anything.”

“Just one thing wrong,” Mike said. “How come we run into so many punk kids on their silly, fumbling little honeymoons. They don’t know the score. They think they’re really living. When they notice me at all, I’m just sort of the background, a dreary old poop trying to get cultured up. If they knew I was on
my
honeymoon, they’d laugh themselves into convulsions.”

“I’m not exactly what you’d call a teenager,” the bride said.

“You are, thank God, beyond the age of pubescence, woman. And from here to here, you are as young as…”

“Unhand me, sire! This is a public beach!”

“A private beach. Tell me one thing, Mary. Why were you trying to marry me off to Shirley? It gave me the jumps.”

“She would have been good for you, darling.”

“As good as you?”

“Hell, no! But… I’m nearly forty-five. I feel eighteen. Silly, tingly, happy. Is that right?”

“You feel like that? Then maybe you can remember something in the room that you forgot, like. Maybe your lighter. So I could come along, help you hunt for it.”

She looked at him solemnly, owlishly. “I don’t have my lighter. My beach bag is right here, and maybe it’s in the beach bag, but that would be too efficient, to look there first, wouldn’t it? So I’d say the only thing to do is go look in the room first.”

Mike was suddenly on his feet, grinning, paw extended to her. “So let’s go!”

And so this is the second and final fadeout—like hand-in-hand into the sunset—this Rodenska family, picking itself up off the grainy Spanish sand, picking up the tools of beaching, hurrying a little because when you stand up into the wind, it is hardly a pleasure.

Above the shallow beach are the rocks, and a path that winds up through the rocks, and beyond that what passes in Spain for a paved highway, and beyond the highway the self-conscious confection of a new hotel, like a wedding cake sitting in a quarry.

So the woman goes first on the narrowness of path, and turns to laugh and say something to the stocky brown man following her so closely. They are observed there in the lemon sunlight by but one couple, a lean long-married pair of English tourists from Maida Vale, snug in hairy garments, sitting on rocks. They turn simultaneous heads to stare with the iciness of heraldic griffins, narrow nostrils widening in displeasure.

The man thinks, “Wherever those American types come, they contrive to spoil it for us, totally.”

The woman thinks, “She is hardly a young girl, not by decades, but that figure, my word! By what nasty magic do those types manage it?”

They have reached the top of the path. The woman turns to speak and smile again, and in response the man, with his free hand, claps her a jolly one on the haunch. The two narrow heads of the observers snap back into position and two pair of gray eyes stare toward Africa.

“Low types,” the man murmurs.

“Totally,” she replies.