The Last One Left (34 page)

She smiled at him. “I’m very very grateful to you, Sergeant. It’s nice things worked out this way. Now I’d like you to take me to Broward Beach in the boat so I can get in touch with my people.”

He leaned forward and stared at her. “What’s the matter with you, girl? You haven’t heard what I’ve been saying to you?”

“Certainly I have!”

“Any damn fool could take one look at you and he’d
know
you were a mighty sick little gal. Your head is healing good but it sure God looks recent like. And the fever’s melted all the meat off your bones and you’re weak as a kitten. Why, if I took you in there the shape you’re in, they’d all
know
I kept you here and doctored you myself and it would be pretty near as bad as taking you in dead.”

She stared at him in dismay. He had that careful and earnest logic of the deranged. He had the raw sinewy look of enormous strength. His homemade haircut was grotesque. His eyes, of the palest gray she had ever seen, had an eerie luminosity about them, as though lighted from behind. She had seen animal eyes like that.

With a catch in her voice she asked hopelessly, “When
can
I leave? Please.”

“When it’s
time!
When nobody could ever know you’d ever had a sick day in your life, Miss Leila. Why, you’re going to get so you’re fat and sassy and laughing the whole day long. Your hair will all be grown back to cover that scar. You’ll be healthy like never before. Don’t you fret about things to do around here. There’s a thousand things, Missy. I can show you the kinds of wild orchids and air plants, and how the fiddler crabs make signals to each other, and
how comical them baby pelicans are. Misty mornings, early, I can take you out on the flats, and sometimes I can have you scrunch down in the skiff and we can go to some beaches I go to where real good stuff washes up and there’s nobody there at all. We’ll have us a
fine
time, and you’ve got Sergeant Corpo’s word on that. Then, say along toward fall, you can just say goodby and set off in that fine boat. If you don’t know how to run it, I can teach you easy. And you can bet that boy Jonathan and your brother Sam will be glad to see you looking so fine and happy. They see you now, it could scare them some.”

“How do you know about them!”

“I swear, you asked me that three times now and ever’ time I tell you it was from listening to you talking to that whole mess of people when you were sickest.”

“But they’ll be so
worried
about me, Sergeant!”

He shook his head sadly. “You know if you fret about it, you’re not going to have you a good time on my island at all. You’ll spoil it for sure for the both of us. Now don’t you worry about the ladystuff you’ll need. A gal has her needs and she has to have pretties and all, and when I get set to go on into town, you can give me a list of anything you can think of.”

He got up quickly and went over to his great jumble of boxes and containers and came back with a green metal box and put it on the floor beside her feet. “This here is an ammunition box and they’re good things because the damp can’t get into what you put in them.” He opened it and looked expectantly up at her and she saw that it was full almost to the top with money.

“Where did you get all that!”

“I cash the army check and I don’t never need that much for what I have to buy, so I just bring the rest of it on back and put it in this box. Been doing it for years and years. I got a box that filled up a long time back and I had to start a new one. It’s over there someplace.
I surely would like to know how much there is all told. Maybe you could he’p me count it out. I used to try but it took so long I’d get all mixed up somewhere in what number thousand it was I got to. So I gave up on it.”

He closed the box and put it back with his other boxes. He sat down again and said in a tone of wonder, “I know I got to keep you here like I said, Missy, but I never thought in my whole life I’d be glad to have anybody close by again. Folks make me edgy. But you, somehow, it doesn’t bother me one little bit. I swear, when I didn’t know if you was living or dying, you were still the prettiest little thing I ever saw anyplace, and I can see now that all you’re going to do as you get better is get prettier. It’ll be a nice thing, having you here with me for a long long time, Missy.”

He seemed to be implying something, and it gave her a little crawling feeling of growing apprehension. She looked wide-eyed at him and moistened her lips and said, “I—I don’t want to be—your
girl
, Sergeant!”

He was motionless and then he jumped up so wildly he knocked his chair over. He glared at her and said, “Who said any such thing as that? You think I’m some kind of animal? You think I ought to be locked up? That it? Why I wouldn’t lay a hand on you.…” He gave a grunt of astonishment and stared down at his right hand as if he had never seen it before. He turned it this way and that.

“Never happen again anyways,” he said in a strange voice. “Happen again and I cut you off, finger by finger.”

“What happened?”

“When I first toted you up here. I had to look close at you to see every hurt place. This fool hand—it reached itself out and felt your little bare titty.” He looked at her in shame and distress. “It was only that one time, I swear, and nothing can’t ever happen again like that, Miss Leila, on my word of honor— All I want— All I want …”

He stopped and his eyes changed, looking through her rather
than at her. He turned slowly and in a wooden manner quite unlike his normal movement walked to a place to one side of the door where he grasped two uprights fashioned of peeled poles. She could guess from the tension of his body how strongly he held them. They were a few feet apart, and the areas where he held them were darkened with the past times of standing there. He leaned forward, put his head against a heavy cross beam. He rolled his head slowly from side to side and made an almost inaudible moan. He leaned his head back and then thudded it so heavily against the beam she felt her stomach turn over.

“Sergeant!” she cried. “No!”

When he did it again, she made her way to him, clung to one arm, tried to pull his grip loose and turn him. His arm was like marble.

He turned slowly at last and looked at her. He said empty syllables that fitted his mouth loosely and did not combine into words. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. She got him over to the bed and he sat down. He frowned up at her. “Get a little bit mixed up now and again.”

She felt no fear of him and knew there would never be any fear. The luminous look of those strange eyes was the limpid clarity of a kind of innocence. A child looked out at her. The rigid ethic of boyhood controlled the big tough body. It was as though he had built a tree house, a place to play pretend, and had filled it with toys, and she was another toy, the newest of all.

There would be chances to get away from him just as soon as she was strong enough.

“It’ll be just like you say, Sergeant. We’ll have a fine time. We’ll have fun.”

The slow smile lasted a long time. “Surely will,” said the Sergeant.

RAOUL KELLY KNEW
he was on some special lists. He had caused too much trouble for too many people to expect to go unnoticed. There had been one very clumsy attempt and one very skilled attempt which went wrong only because by some freak of luck the set-gun so mounted in his bureau drawer as to fire into the chest of anyone opening the drawer had misfired. After the second attempt he was able to get a pistol permit without too much difficulty.

He was licensed to carry it for self-protection. It was a Colt Cobra, a 38 Special with a one-inch barrel, and it fitted lightly and without bulge into the side pocket of his trousers. But usually it was locked up in the glove compartment. Guns made him feel foolish and theatrical, as if he were called upon to imitate a quite different sort of man. All through weapons training before the Bay of Pigs he had the idiot impulse to pull the trigger and yell BANG, YOU’RE DEAD. And after the fiasco as he was being led away, he thought it would be far more logical if all those very still, manlike lumps would
get up, shrug, grin, wash off the fake blood and go buy each other beers.

He knew that it was with the very best of intentions a small group of compatriots had demanded he acquire the pistol permit from the Dade County authorities. At the same time they arranged an informal roster, and kept a watchful eye on his car and his rented room. After much thought, Raoul had taken his own quiet steps to insure his safety. He had typed out thirty pages of those guesses, hunches and gossip which were very probably quite true, but were so unprovable he could not risk publication. He left out two names. They were both, he was quite sure, clever and highly trained revolutionaries masquerading as anti-Castroites. He showed his notes to both those men and said that should anything happen to him, three close friends had copies and all guaranteed they would get the material published. And he had added that from time to time, as he discovered more probabilities of the same order, he would supplement the notes. There was, he thought, one very comforting thing about the Enemy. They were unfailingly practical. Given a choice of two evils, no emotions entered into their decision to pick the lesser one.

When, leaving the Harkinson place, with ’Cisca beside him, turning from the narrow road onto the highway he had seen the new-looking gray Plymouth sedan still parked in the same spot, he remembered the weapon in his glove compartment. He had not thought of it for weeks.

From time to time during that Monday evening, as he pleaded vainly with the stubborn and unyielding Francisca, he kept remembering the gray car. And at last it provided inspiration.

“Now then, Señorita,” he said, her dark eyes looking at him over the rim of the cup as she sipped her coffee, “I must outline the situation.”

“Oh, of course. Completely. And then perhaps it will be possible, Señor, to talk of other things?”

“Perhaps. You will not quit your job.”

“The job will end itself when she can no longer pay me. Until then it is easy work. She does not interfere in my life. I am content.”

“You refuse to marry me.”

“Or anyone.”

“Or come with me to California on any basis.”

“To go so far! No.”

“Then, truly, I must not go, because I cannot leave you.”

“You will find friends there. I will find them here. I am not so important to anyone, Raoul.”

“To me you are.”

“But I do not
wish
it to be that way.”

“It
is
that way, regardless of what you wish,
querida
.”

“Perhaps it should be ended then.”

“I would stay near you in any case, ’Cisca. And one day, perhaps this year, perhaps next, they will manage to kill me.”

Watching her closely he saw the vapid look which signaled her change from shop-girl Spanish to crude and clumsy English. “Sotch a crazy theeng! Oh boy.”

“They’ve tried twice.”

“Ho! To rob sotch a reech man, you bet.”

He reached across the booth table, captured both slender wrists in his workman’s hands. She tugged, looking angry, but he held her firmly.

“The same people who killed your brother,
querida
.”

“Let me go!”

“The people’s republic in the land of peace and brotherhood, baby. Because I’m still fighting. Because I sting them with the words I write.”

“Please. Let go!”

“You won’t read what I write. You want to make believe nothing ever happened. You can’t remember Havana, eh? You were never
there. There isn’t any war. You never scrubbed the soldiers’ barracks on your hands and knees out at Rancho Luna. That was some other girl. And when they kill me, you’ll forget that too, like everything else.”

She made such a sudden violent effort she nearly wrested her hands free, but he did not let her go. She lowered her head, chin on her chest, so that all he could see of her was the lustrous darkness of her hair. A waitress moved near, curious and concerned. He gave her a nod and a smile to reassure her. She moved away, but glanced back, her expression showing a certain dubiousness.

Her arms were completely limp. He released his hold slowly. She remained there unmoving, and he could see the slow lift and fall of her breath under the pale green blouse.

Oh, you are a clever one, Kelly, he thought. Without any trouble at all you push her back into her empty and silent cave. The operation was brilliant, but the patient died on the table.

Slowly she raised her head and looked at him. Tears were streaming down her face. But her eyes had a look of awareness of him and of herself he had not seen before. They were the eyes of Señorita Francisca Torcedo y Sarmantar, only daughter of Don Estebán, only sister of Enrique.

To his vast astonishment she spoke in English, husky, halting, thickened by grief. “Doan be deads. Then nobody. Nobody left. Nothings. Not loving me, please. Sotch a rotten girl! Not to marry, please. But you for safe, I go with. Any places. All my life, I go with. Care for you, anytimes you say. Jesus help me. I swear for it.”

She lowered her head again, sighed very deeply. His own eyes were wet as he realized how desperately he had needed this affirmation of her love, kept so carefully hidden. It had been more than his pride which had been affronted by her apparent happy willingness to think of their relationship as a casual affair, something suitable for a housemaid who would be expected to have a boyfran who would
take her to movies, to the beach, and to bed. And he suddenly understood why, once she had been forced into revelation, it had to come out in English. There were too many blocks for it to be said in Spanish. She had used it like a code, a way to say things she could not say, like the secret languages children invent.

When he took her out to the car she moved like one recovering from illness. She was remote, emotionally exhausted, shy.

He decided that if English was the way to reach her, he would stay with English. The “rotten girl” part puzzled him. It indicated that there was guilt involved in her long withdrawal, as well as shock and grief and sickness. But what could cause her to feel so unworthy? He suspected that it would be very unwise to try to find out. Maybe some day. Certainly she would not feel guilt at having tried to kill one of those “liberators” who had so clumsily shot the adored papa, or guilt at having been made pregnant under circumstances she had no way of controlling.