The Last One Left (20 page)

Three days later he stopped at her house to pick up the promised letter. She was irritated at the broker’s pessimism. He had said, “It’s a good make and a good year. It’s in good shape. Two months ago, if you’d brought it in then, I could have moved it in maybe a week. But now—I don’t know. Things might not perk up until the season starts again. It’s hard to say. And you’re asking top dollar on it, you know.”

“I checked around. I looked at what they’re asking for boats like mine.”

He had shrugged. “Sure. They’re asking that. And the boats are right there waiting for a customer, right? I’ll do the best I can.”

She was further displeased to learn she would have to pay a monthly fee covering dockage, insurance and maintenance. It was considerably less than her costs had been, but she had not realized there would be any expense at all.

Her mood was not improved when Francisca woke her from a nap to tell her Staniker was in the living room. She had forgotten to write the promised letter. She went out and said, “Come back tomorrow, will you?”

“But I need it now, Crissy. Please. I can wait. You take your time. I’ll wait right here. Okay?”

She went back to her bedroom desk and started to write the To Whom it May Concern letter. After writing a paragraph she stopped, tore it up and took a fresh sheet of her note paper.

“Should anyone wish to know the reason why Captain Garry Staniker is no longer employed by me, I shall be happy to explain it over the telephone.” She wrote her phone number and signed her name. She took it to him and, smiling, handed it to him. He started to thank her, then stopped in the middle of a word.

“What kind of a letter is this?”

“You can read, Captain. It’s the very best kind.”

“But the way it sounds …”

“But it’s so
much
more personal than a letter, Garry.
Really!
I’m not good at letters. But when someone phones me about you, I can give you all kinds of marvelous recommendations.”

He was dubious and suspicious, but he had no choice but to accept her way of doing it. An elderly man phoned her at noon the next day and put his wife on an extension so they could both talk to her. They started off quite enthusiastic about Garry Staniker. But at the end the life had gone from their voices, and she knew they would not hire him. Yet she could have repeated every word she had said and Staniker would have approved. What he could not know was the timing and the intonation.

“Did you ever have any problem about drinking on the job, Mrs. Harkinson?”

“… No?” The long pause then a thoughtful No with a slight question. “No. None at all. I would say … no problem at all.” Very emphatic, yet with another curious pause.

The game amused her. After she hung up she had a fleeting sense of mild guilt, but she shrugged it off. Let Garry sweat it out too. This was the year for it. The Senator was gone, and the party was over. Why should anybody land on their feet? Mary Jane Staniker
had found a job at Parker’s Marina. It wasn’t as though Garry would have to stop eating.

When she came back from a shopping trip in the late afternoon he was waiting for her, pacing up and down the terrace.

“What did you tell the McMurdies?”

“Don’t yell at me, Garry. It annoys me.”

“It
annoys
you!” She carried her packages into the bedroom, and he followed her in, talking all the way. She dropped the packages onto the chaise and turned to him and said, “Did I ask you to come in here, Captain?”

“Crissy. Please! They were okay, and then they phoned you, and then they said they’d let me know. But I could tell it was off. Damn it, that was a
good
job. If you put the knife in me, I’ve got to know
why
. And I’ve got to know what I have to do so you won’t do it the next time.”

“What’s the matter with you? Every single word I said about you was a top recommendation. Why should I do anything else?”

He sat on the straight chair by her desk and shook his head dolefully. “I don’t get it. I don’t know what turned them off then. What you have to understand, it’s a time thing. There are more guys with the papers than there are owners who want a hired crew. You come off one job, that’s when you have to move into the next one. You try to line something up, and the owner finds out you’ve been on the beach two or three months, he thinks you’re a clown. I thought—you were sore at me for something I’d done or didn’t do. Look, could you give me a regular letter? Please?”

“Okay,” she said. “Sure, Garry.” She went slowly toward him, feeling a quickening of herself which grew more immediate with each step. She knew it was not a specific desire for a specific individual named Garry Staniker. It was a way to turn off all thought. He was a hiding place. He had the weight and skill and enough
special knowledge of her ways and wants to turn the world off, and out of his anxiety would come a doggy earnestness to please. Then sleep would be deep. She had not been sleeping well.

When the next prospective employer phoned her she was prepared to recommend Staniker highly, but the man who phoned was the personnel manager of an electronics firm which owned a corporation boat, and in a most contentious and irritating way he cross-examined her over each answer she gave. “How do
you
know that?” “What makes
you
think he’s competent in
that
area?”

She said, “Little man, you seem confused. I’m not applying for a job.”

“It’s my job to double check these things, Mrs. Harkinson. Please don’t tell me how to do my job. When the safety of the executives of this corporation is involved …”

His voice faded as she reached and dropped the phone back onto the cradle.

Through the hot months she lazed and drifted in a self-indulgent stupor, baking herself in the sun, getting fuzzy on the midday drinks, taking long naps in the cool darkened bedroom, watching much television in the evenings. She told herself that she could not really make any plans until the cruiser was sold. The money was going. She knew she ought to get rid of Francisca, perhaps try to rent the house, make an effort to get a good price for the jewelry she had left. But she would push those thoughts aside, stretch and yawn and shout for Francisca to bring her a drink.

Several times through the hot months and into the coolness of the beginning of a new season, she became aware of the dangerous softness and heaviness of her body. Then she would spend days in the disciplines of exercise, diet, abstinence. She would try on everything
she owned and leave the bedroom and dressing room heaped with clothing for Francisca to put away.

Staniker had gone to work at the marina where his Mary Jane worked. The man who had been working there had been caught pocketing some of the boat-rental money. The marina was not far away. There were no set hours when he had to be there. He and Mary Jane lived in a cottage on the marina property. Staniker stopped by to see Crissy quite often, arriving in his old car or in one of the rental outboards. He complained constantly. He said he was looking for better work all the time. Yet when she asked specific questions, he became vague and evasive.

They would drink together. Sometimes they would go to bed. They quarreled often. She had lost a measure of control over him when he realized she was no longer capable of helping him find a job. Sometimes he became ugly when he drank too much, and a few times he struck her and hurt her. At those times he told her she was his bad luck. She had spoiled everything for him forever. For a time she could not understand why, after she would become so angry with him she would tell him never to come back, he would make such humble and earnest efforts to regain her favor.

She realized one day that she was a necessary part of his status, of the fiction he made of himself. As long as he could come without invitation to this beautiful and isolated house where lived the attractive blonde ex-mistress of an influential man, and drink her liquor, be brought food by her maid, swim in her pool, pull her into bed, then he was maintaining one final contact with the golden world of yachts and ports and parties, and the inner image of the bronzed captain on the fly bridge, nodding down with amiable and knowing grin at the banquet of girls spread sun-struck on the foredeck.

So long as this relationship could be maintained, he could pretend that the dreary little beer, bait, outboard rental marina was but
a temporary setback in the shining career of youthful Garry Staniker. And she could guess that, for the sake of his self-esteem, he would by nod, wink, nudge, veiled phrase, let the people know that Staniker had a good thing going.

In January the Odalisque was sold. She had cut the asking price several times. The offer she accepted was still lower. The expenses of sale were heavy. And there were bills to pay out of the cash she received, including back pay for Francisca. The amount she had left was frighteningly small.

Still she could not seem to stir herself to change anything. There was still the house itself. Prime waterfront. It would sell for a good amount of cash. She did not try to find out how much. She did not want to think in exact terms, because if she knew how much, then she would begin to work out how long it would last her.

In sleep she began to dream quite often of old times, before she had met Fer Fontaine. It was a life where you were told what you would do and where you would be. Punishment was brutal and immediate. She would awaken from such dreams with a curious sense of regret and nostalgia. It had not been a mode of life she had sought, or even realized what currents of chance had drifted her into it. She had told herself it was something she was doing for a little while. But the little while had been years.

And then, as if awakening from another kind of sleep, she came out of the long lethargy of waiting on that last day of March when Bixby Kayd came to see her. He had been at the house several times when Fer was alive, when a small group of men were quietly buying up raw land, marl deposits, gravel pits and central mix plants along the route for a big new highway later to be announced officially by the State Road Board. As a familiar index of the man’s importance, Crissy knew he had also gone on some of the Senator’s little cruises aboard the Odalisque, those cruises which would include the more special members of the larger group, the ones capable of making
those special arrangements which would make their share a little richer than the shares the smaller fry would get.

Bix had phoned her and arrived a half hour later in a rental limousine. He sat in an armchair, facing her, in the living room beside her slate fireplace—a big, brown, beaming man with a loud jocular voice, custom-tailored suit in western style in sand-colored twill, elaborate stitching of boots, pale stetson on the floor beside his chair, the bourbon on ice she had fixed him looking dwarfed by the size of his hand. His hair, with the light behind him, was a sandy stubble a quarter inch long covering those places on his big skull which had not gone bald.

Francisca, as she had requested, brought in the tray of small crackers, the spiced cheese melted and hot atop them, slightly brown by the broiler flame, passed them, put the tray down within Mr. Kayd’s reach.

It was a time of mutual appraisal, as Kayd offered belated sympathies about the Senator, said how pleased he was to find her still living here, had phoned on the off chance, killing time between the flight from the Bahamas which had brought him into Miami International and his jet flight to Houston, where his own plane and pilot would meet him to take him back home to the Valley.

She was alert to all familiar nuances in the male attitude. He had that automatic courtliness, that appreciative manner of the self-confident man who finds himself alone with an attractive woman. She considered, and dismissed, the possibility he had come to check the possibility of sampling wares he had found interesting back when Ferris Fontaine’s presence made all curiosity academic. It was not that sort of visit, nor was it a social call.

Finally he gobbled a cracker, wiped his fingers on a paper napkin, took a large swallow of his drink and, hunching forward, lowered his voice to what, for most people, would have been the normal conversational level.

“Fer Fontaine was a damn careful man, Crissy. That’s why it was a pleasure doing business with him. That and having his handshake worth anybody else’s notarized signature. That’s how I know if you were the kind that runs off at the mouth, he wouldn’t have kept you around a week, much less all the time he did keep you. And he wouldn’t have left you fixed up pretty good like this, with the house and all. So I can ask your help in a little private problem I’ve got.”

“I’ll help any way I can, Bix.”

“Fer wouldn’t have had anybody around who wasn’t solid. So the times we did business aboard that boat of his, that fella I chatted with, that captain that ran it, with the chunky little wife who could cook up a storm, they had to be just as reliable as you. For the life of me, I can’t remember his name.”

“Staniker.”

Kayd snapped his fingers. “Right! Larry? No. Garry. And is her name Jane?”

“Mary Jane.”

“I remember him telling me about knowing every foot of water in the Bahamas. Do you know if he’s still in this area? Do you think you could locate him?”

“I don’t think it would be difficult.”

He lowered his voice a little more. “When you find him, you tell him Bix Kayd wants to hire him and his wife for six weeks, maybe a little longer, starting sometime after the middle of April, to work aboard my boat for a long cruise in the Bahamas. Tell him it’s a fine boat, fifty-three foot, custom built in North Carolina, twin diesels, every extra and navigation aid you can dream up, comfortable crew quarters. Name of it is the Muñeca. Soon as I get back, we’re going to get her ready to go and take off. She’s in Brownsville, Texas, right now, and me and my boy Roger will bring her around the Gulf, and my wife and daughter will be aboard, maybe a friend of Stel’s too. Stella is my daughter. Once we get here, we’ll buy some kind of
runabout and take her in tow, so we can get to places too shallow for the big boat, and so the kids will have something to horse around with, skin diving and water skiing and so on.