Slam the Big Door (6 page)

“Maybe it will be easier… in one sense, not having so much to lose.”

“It’s a big comfort to me. Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound snotty. I’m dead, Mike. In a special way. Walking, breathing, eating, but dead. You’ve been swell. And there’s nothing more to say about the whole thing.”

“Delayed combat fatigue?”

“That’s a wild idea.”

“Is it? Take it this way. They didn’t kill you. They just twisted you a little. New values. But the values didn’t fit you, Troy. And it took you a long time to find out. Then the roof fell in.”

Troy studied him. “Interesting. You know, if I was anxious to find an excuse for myself, boy, I’d be hanging on every word. But somehow I don’t give a damn about the reasons. I know what happened. It happened. I didn’t dream it. Keep your psychiatrics.”

“You must be better, you’re so much nastier.”

For the first months after Troy left he wrote at dutiful intervals, and his letters had somewhat the flavor of those a boy might write home from army training. He had decided on Ravenna, Florida. Big opportunities for growth. He was working for Brail Brothers Construction, living in a used house-trailer he bought, doing a lot of weekend fishing. The letters became less frequent and had a more distant tone. In August of 1954, he started his own small firm, doing foundation work on subcontract. Troy Jamison, Builder. They got a card at Christmas, with a short note. He was busy and prospering, had made a small investment in land and was putting up three low-cost spec houses.

In late March he wrote them that he had married Mrs. Mary Dow, a widow. The next communication was a Christmas card, without note, from Troy and Mary Jamison. It looked elegant and expensive. And others in 1956 and 1957 and 1958, except that in 1958 he knew about Buttons and no cards went out.

About two weeks before the whole thing was over, after Buttons was back in the hospital again, a letter came to the house for her from Bonita Linder, and Mike opened it. It was a warm, amusing, chatty letter, and she sounded a little bit cross about not hearing from Buttons in months.

It made Mike realize that it wasn’t entirely fair to leave Bunny, who after all the years was still Buttons’ best friend, completely out of it. By then, through that sardonic miracle, there was enough money, and he had quit the paper in order to spend more time with her. And he was trying desperately to be steady and dependable and reliable and unhysterical about the whole thing. So that evening he had placed a call to her in Colorado, and tried to tell her how things were with Buttons. But in the middle of it something broke, and she arrived two days later, leaving the girls and her three-year-old son on the ranch, and moved in and took over with a compassionate efficiency that made things a little easier than they had been. The two women had some chances to talk, and it seemed to make Buttons a little less scared of the blackness dead ahead of her—not that she had ever whined or even come close to it, but you could tell about the being scared.

So he thought he had been prepared for it, that he was braced for it. But when it happened it was worse than he had been able to imagine. It was like being struck blind and sick and dumb, and left in a world of strangers.

There were plenty of friends to try to help, but Bunny helped the most. She organized the routines of death, and got him and the boys through it somehow, and stayed until he could talk to her about the future—a word that had always had a nice ring to it, but now had an ironic connotation. Bunny had wisdom. She sensed that if he tried to hold the family unit together it would be an artificial thing, and bad on the three of them. If the boys were younger they would need that security, but at fifteen and, seventeen, it would be like three men forever aware of the empty chair, the empty room, the silences where her voice had been. So, in addition to getting rid of Buttons’ things, instinctively knowing the things he would want to keep, she made the arrangements to get the boys into the Melford School, and through the subtle uses of propaganda, got them into a frame of mind where they were looking forward to it.

She talked with Mike about the money, and she said she felt that old wheeze about hard work effecting a cure was largely nonsense. The thing to do was get away, go somewhere with no obligations, and sit and mend—and told him he was lucky he could afford it.

She wanted him to come to the ranch, but he said maybe later. He had written to all the faraway friends about Buttons, and all of them had answered. But Troy hadn’t, and that was a special hurt, combined with indignation.

After they drove the boys up and got them settled, Bunny went back to her kids and husband. He had promised her he would go away. Close the house for an indefinite time and go away. But after she was gone he couldn’t seem to make the move. He lived in the emptiness of the house, and often he would not answer the phone or the door, and he did not eat very well. He could not seem to get enough sleep.

And then the letter came from Troy. It was a good letter. He explained they had been on a cruise, hadn’t had their mail forwarded, had come back and tried to reach him by phone. He insisted Mike take time off from work and come down and stay as long as he could. Mary Jamison had written her warm invitation at the bottom of the letter. It was the stimulus he had needed. So he had made the arrangements and gone down, and been met by Troy in a shining car a half block long, and been driven down through St. Pete, and over a bridge, and down through Bradenton and Sarasota to Ravenna and on down to Riley Key to a home so beautiful, a wife so gracious, in a setting so sun-and-sea spectacular that Troy Jamison was obviously fighting to keep from showing understandable pride.

He had explained to Troy about the money, but had concealed that the fact of his unemployment was largely the result of Bunny’s instinctive wisdom about him and the shattering extent of his loss. Left to his own devices, he would have gone back to work, would have tried to dull mind and memory by knocking himself out on the job and trying to keep up a shallow imitation of a family unit.

On the second day of his visit, on Tuesday, alone on the beach, he had suddenly lost all reservations and knew that Bunny had been right. He wasn’t the kind of man who could make an adjustment to loss by turning away from it. He had to be alone where he could look at it squarely and brace himself solidly, and then open himself up to the realization of the total significance of it. It was his only hope of mending, and Bunny had sensed it.

He sat on the side of his bed and drained the drink and sighed again, then went to the small desk to write to his sons. They did not like joint letters. They wanted one apiece.

“Dear Micky, There is a curious phenomenon down here called sunshine. I will try to explain it to you. Every day this big round yellow thing comes up out of the east, surrounded by a sky which is an abnormal blue instead of the grubby gray we’re used to. Exposure to this yellow thing turns people bright red instead of the infinitely more pleasing fish-belly white, but the natives down here seem to feel this ugly red is a desirable.…”

The “o” on the old portable was printing solid. He opened the lid, picked the goo out of the “o” with a match stick, lit a cigar and continued the letter, typing with four fingers, working—in a special sense—at his trade, taking comfort in the familiar sound, the cigar angled well to port to keep the smoke out of his eyes, a stocky man—very much alone.

three

ON THE NINETEENTH DAY of April, on that sleepy Sunday afternoon while the residents and their guests on the north end of Riley Key used the beach and each other’s houses and cabañas, with a customary stop at the Jamison’s, and drank, and played bridge and tennis, and did a little surf-casting and went out in their boats, and discussed the weather, property values, segregation, the Vice-President, local sexual intrigues, diets, investments, and where to go in Nassau and Varadero, and while they made their vague arrangements about ending up in one group or another at the Key Club, later on, four men, thirty-five miles away in another county, were deciding the financial future of Troy Jamison.

They had met, by prearrangement, at Purdy Elmarr’s ranch, twelve hundred acres, part of it bordering the upper Myaka River. The old frame ranch house was set back about three hundred feet from State Road 982, at the end of a straight sand road bordered by squat elderly oaks. The infrequent tourist who braved the potholes of 982 could look at the old house with the oak hammock beyond it, and the old trucks and implements corroding away in the side yard, and the gray, soiled-looking Brahma cattle feeding in the flat pasture-lands between the scrub pine lands and the overgrown irrigation ditches, and see a certain picturesqueness in a down-at-the-heel ranch with rickety sheds, sway-backed roofs, weather-worn paint. If they jolted by shortly after the rural delivery truck, they might see Purdy Elmarr himself trudging out to his roadside box, a wiry old man in dusty work clothing, with a big shapeless black felt hat, steel-rimmed glasses—and feel that pleasant pity which is born of a sure knowledge of superiority. Poor old fella.

They could have no way of knowing that Purdy lived exactly the way he wanted to live, that no matter how frequent his visits to his bank in Sarasota, wearing his drab city-suit and an old cloth cap with a long visor, the executive staff of the bank leaped to attention, and became excessively affable—a social and professional gesture that never elicited a shadow of response.

He had a good riding horse and a pack of Blue Tick hounds, and two high-stake poker evenings a week. He got his turkey and quail and deer
every
year. At sixty-six he was in perfect health, and drank one full tumbler of prime bourbon whisky every night of his life. His granddaddy, a drover out of Georgia, had homesteaded a big chunk of land and bought more, ranch land and Gulf land and Key land and bay frontage. His daddy, with very little fuss or notoriety, had acquired a lot more. It had been simpler for them to get it, hang onto it and make a profit off it. Purdy had to use the services of a sharp firm of attorneys and accountants. He had control of about twelve corporations, but he wasn’t confused. He could read a financial statement with the same ease—and almost the same degree of pleasure—with which most men would read a dirty limerick. He drove a six-year-old car, listened to a twelve-year-old radio, underpaid his help, was generous with his friends, knew almost to the penny what he was worth at all times, and hated to see a month go by without adding to it. He was in citrus and celery, cattle and securities, motels and shipping, dredges and draglines, shopping centers and auto agencies. But the basis of all of it was land. He loved land with almost the same degree of intensity as he loved money.

He knew more about other men than they were ever able to learn about him. He knew the flaws and strengths and habits and vulnerabilities of every long-term resident in three counties who had a net worth of over twenty-five thousand dollars. Those men could be divided into three categories. There were those who had never had any dealings with Purdy. To them he was a mysterious, powerful, slippery old coot. Then there were those who had gone in with him on something and tried to get fancy and had got thoroughly stung. To them he was a vicious, crooked, merciless old bastard. Others had gone in with him and let him call the turn, and taken their profit. To that last group, Purdy was the salt of the earth.

The four men sat in comfortable old wicker chairs on the wide front porch of the ranch house. Purdy Elmarr was the eldest. Rob Raines was the youngest, twenty-seven, a solidly-built young man with a small mustache who had the manner of earnest reliability of the ambitious young lawyer. (A manner which, he had begun to suspect, was not helping him at all in his program of re-seduction of Debbie Ann.) On this day, in this place, he was so full of deference as to hover dangerously close to obsequiousness. He had the wind-and-weather look of the sailing enthusiast. After much thought he had worn a necktie, which he now knew was a mistake, but it was too late to take it off. It was his first invitation to the ranch. He sensed that his career was balanced on the sultry edge of this idle afternoon—and here it would be determined whether, in the far golden years, he would become Judge Raines, a figure of dignity, solemn with wealth—or ole Robby Raines, that lawyer fella they say had a real good chance and muffed it that time, back when old Purd Elmarr was still alive, making deals. Rob Raines wondered whether he had poured too much or too little bourbon into his glass. As the idle talk went on, with nobody coming to the point, he was getting more instead of less nervous.

It seemed as though J. C. Arlenton would drone on forever. He was Buddha fat, pink-bald, with little short thick hands and feet. He wore khaki pants and a white shirt and carpet slippers, and he had driven out in a Cadillac that was as dirty as any car Raines had ever seen. Rob knew he had been in the state legislature one time, a long time ago, and since then had shoved a couple of governors into office. He had a lot of grove land over in Orange County, and a good-sized building-supply business, and he was known to be in a few things with Elmarr. One of them was the regular poker session.

J. C. Arlenton sat hugging his glass with his little thick hands and said in a tone of complaint to the fourth man present, Corey Haas, “Now Corey, damn it, you know better’n to set right there telling me Wink Haskell ever had one dollar put into Sea-Bar Development. Wink, he never went into nothing without control and that was the reason how he lost out here and there, and Sea-Bar was one he lost out on, so don’t you let him suck you in hinting on like how he had him a fine thing there, because Wink, he’s like to do that way to you, proving how smart he is. When Sea-Bar sold that whole tract to Mackel, ole Wink didn’t get one dime on account he wasn’t in it, so don’t let him hint you different.”

“Have it your way, J. C.,” Corey Haas said indifferently. “You’ve been down on Wink ever since he crossed you on that zoning thing and ever’body knows it.”

Corey Haas was, in this matter, Rob Raines’ ticket to join the discussion. Corey had thrown Rob a little bit of legal work lately. Of the four, Corey was the only one who wasn’t a native Floridian, but he had come down from West Virginia so long ago there wasn’t any perceptible difference in speech or manner. He’d lost a land-boom fortune so big that he’d spent the rest of his life trying to catch up to where he once had been. There were some who’d said he’d made it all back. He liked to get in on land syndicates. And he was in with Troy Jamison on Horseshoe Pass Estates.

“You stop chawin’ each other a minute, we can get business out of the way and get back to drinking,” Purdy Elmarr said quietly.

“Sure, Purd,” J. C. said quickly.

Purdy Elmarr looked over at Corey Haas with a little glint of animosity in his faded old eyes and said, “Don’t properly remember just how you come to go in with Jamison, Corey.”

Corey looked uncomfortable. Rob, watching the exchange, suspected that Purdy knew exactly why Corey had gone in with Troy Jamison.

“I told you,” Corey said. “It’s on account of Mary being Charlie Kail’s daughter before she married Bernard Dow, and her remembering how Charlie and me and Dow were in on a few things together, and when it looked like more than Troy could swing, they come to see me and it looked all right. And my end sure isn’t enough to pinch anybody. I got forty-five thousand into it. It was like for old times’ sake, Purd.”

“Man has a right to throw his own money away, I guess,” Purdy Elmarr said.

“I told him forty times he was going about it wrong,” Corey said hotly, “but he’s got control and he’s stubborn, and there was no point bringing it to a head on account of she’d vote it the way he asked her to. So I’ve been just waiting.”

“What were you figuring on doing?”

“Just waiting, Purd.”

Purdy Elmarr smiled off into space. “I know that tract well, boys. I guess we all do. Little over eight hundred acres, with two thousand feet on the bay right opposite Horseshoe Pass. Joe Wethered had it and he passed on and June Alice Wethered had it and passed it onto young Joe and I remember it because he damn near lost it for taxes one time and I was hoping on picking it up. You remember old Joe used to have a fish shack there?”

“Remember it well,” J. C. said.

“I got no quarrel with the figure Jamison paid for it. Eleven hundred an acre. Figuring conditions and location, I think it was bought fair and sold fair. I made me some rough figuring the other day. You take eight hundred thousand for that land, and with the clearing, grading, canals, bay fill, sea-walling and all, you got to put in another seven—eight hundred thousand, maybe more. Then say a half million on streets, entrance, sewers and so on. But I figure you get two thousand prime lots that’ll average out at eight thousand a lot, meaning sixteen million, or a gross of thirteen five, which sort of brings my interest to a head, boys. Now just how do you think he’s gone wrong, Corey?”

“The big mistake, of course, was trying to engineer the whole thing at once. He shoulda took one little section and finished it off complete and nice, and sold it off to pay for the next piece, but he had to go right ahead and do it big, bulldozers, dredges, draglines all over the damn place, so every one of ’em had to be pulled off the job near two weeks back.”

“That’s the trouble with the little fellas,” Purdy said. “They try to get big too fast. You take him. He was a little bitty house builder, only down here a few years, not big enough for anybody to pay any serious attention to, and making a little money here and there, so he up and marries Mary Dow and she’s got just enough money so he gets to thinking big, and he loses it for her. But he got to be big for a little while. How much has he got into it, cash money, his and hers, Corey?”

“I’d say about… oh, three hundred thousand.”

“They got more to put in?”

“By selling stuff. The boat, jewelry, mortgage the house, maybe they could find another hundred quick. But the way I see it, his nerves have got jumpy and he don’t want to ask her to put every last thing in.”

“How much would it take to save it?”

“Well, the land payments are spread pretty good, and I think maybe it could be done for three hundred thousand, no less.”

“I expect they’ve come to you for more.”

“I just couldn’t spare more. My cash position isn’t so good right now, Purd.”

Purdy Elmarr grinned like an amiable old coyote. “I can tell just what you were fixin’ to do, Corey Haas. You was going to set right there and let things get just as bad as they could get, where it would look like Jamison was going to lose the whole damn thing, and all of a sudden you were going to be able to put in cash to save it, but you’d want control, and he was going to be so grateful after being so scared you were going to do just fine, and once you had control you were going to run it your way, and slap one section together cheap and fast and soon as it begun to prove out you were going to unload your stock-interest you stole from him, and make a big capital gain and get the hell out. And I bet you had that in mind right from the start, but you didn’t know I was going to get interested in it.”

“Hell, I didn’t even know you were going to find out about it.”

The three of them laughed. Raines felt confused. There were undercurrents he didn’t understand.

“Now here’s maybe what will happen. You set us up a little corporation so we’ll be ready, boy. Ought to have a name. You’re good on names, J. C.”

“Uh… how ’bout Twin Keys Corporation? Riley and Ravenna are about the same length, and this land is chunk between ’em.”

“Boy,” Purdy said to Raines, “you check that name out with Tallahassee and set it up fifty and one-half percent to me, thirty-nine to Corey, ten to J. C. and a half percent to you instead of legal fees and all. Set it up minimum, boy. Corey, you look like you bit down on something soured you. Got anything to say?”

“Not a word, Purdy.”

“Good. Now here’s the way it it’ll work, Corey. Listen close. You set the timing. When things are as bad off as they’re going to get, you tell Jamison you’re peddling your stock to this Twin Keys Corporation for forty-five thousand, and getting out of this Horseshoe Pass Estates Corporation. Tell ’em it’s me behind Twin Keys. And you hear I’ll buy theirs too. That’ll get ’em in the clear without much loss to speak of. Wouldn’t want to hurt Charlie Kail’s girl too bad. So Twin Keys borrows and buys up all the stock, then sets on it a while, and we get good estimates on just what it would cost to complete it, and what we can figure on getting back off sale of the lots, and then we sell the whole thing to my Ravenna Development Corporation and take us a good fat capital gain on the holdings of Twin Key stock, hear?”

J. C. stirred and grunted and said, “Ought to work out, Purd. Ought to work out good.”

“Excepting for one thing,” Purdy said gently. “We got to be sure Jamison don’t get no he’p anyplace to bail himself out. Corey, you tole me this lawyer boy could find out what I was a-wondering about.”

“He found out,” Corey said. “Go ahead, Rob.”

Raines cleared his throat. “Well… I was with Debbie Ann last night at a party at Jamison’s and later at a beach party. I don’t know exactly how much her father left her because I didn’t ask her directly, but from what I was able to check other places, she got somewhere around three hundred thousand then. She doesn’t have to touch it now because she gets enough alimony from that Dacey Hunter to live pretty good. I found a chance to ask her whether she’d invested anything in Horseshoe Pass Estates and she laughed at me. She said Troy Jamison had had a long talk with her about it three weeks ago, showing her the engineering plans and talking about potential and all. She said she’d told him that when she came into the money she’d had it taken out of the trust and put in an investment portfolio that was heavier in common stocks than the trust list had been, and it had been doing so good she certainly didn’t want to disturb it for any land deal. She told him her father wanted her to be comfortable her whole life long, and that was just what she planned to be. She told him she couldn’t help it if her mother was a damn fool about money. That didn’t mean she had to be too.”