Slam the Big Door (9 page)

“Sure.”

They went out onto the big unscreened porch and sat on the railing. The pool was closed, the pool lights out.

“Mike, I wanted to talk to you about something that may be none of my business. But I know you’re a good friend of Troy’s. And I think you’re fond of Mary.”

“Yes.”

“Mary is a fine woman. Very loyal.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I don’t think Troy would tell you. I guess it would be a matter of pride with him. And a matter of loyalty for Mary not to tell you their troubles. But Troy is in trouble, Mike. Bad financial trouble.”

“With Horseshoe Pass Estates?”

“Yes. He went into it too fast, without adequate capitalization. He wouldn’t listen to his friends down here, people who know the local picture. He did pretty well as a small builder. But this is just too big for him. If he keeps going on the way he has, he may lose the whole thing, and Mary’s money along with it.”

“Have you told him this?”

“I’ve tried to, Mike. But he’s a stubborn man.”

“What do you think I can do?”

“I don’t really know. I thought you should know about it, though. Troy has been trying desperately to line up additional financing. He’s even tried to get hold of Debbie Ann’s money. But she’s scared of that project. Rightly. Troy has the idea a few more hundred thousand dollars will get it over the hump.”

“That much!”

“It will take much more than that, Mike. He could throw two or three hundred thousand more in the pot right now and all it would do would be delay the inevitable. And whoever goes in with him will take a fat loss. But I don’t think he’s going to find anybody.”

“What can he do?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible that if he was willing to give the whole thing up, he might come out of it with a loss, a substantial one but not a crippling one. I’ve thought that, as a good friend of his, you might find a chance to talk sense to him. Has he talked to you about investing in it?”

“No.”

“He might, Mike. And he’ll talk about the tremendous potential. If and when he does, you might say that you’d like to look into it. You get in touch with me and I’ll introduce you to a man named Corey Haas. He’s put money into it, mostly because he was a close friend of Mary’s father. The loss won’t hurt Corey. But he can give you the true picture of how deep Troy has gone. Then that will give you something to go back to Troy with—questions to ask that he can’t answer. And if you wake him up, you may be doing him and Mary a great favor. I’d hate to see them lose everything.”

“Troy showed me around the area over there, Rob. I know they had to stop the development work because they ran out of working capital, but I can’t see why it would take such an enormous amount to.…”

“Mike, when you start with eight hundred acres of bay frontage swamp, and you have to fill it up to grade, dig canals, dredge, sea-wall, put in roads, curbs, street lighting, sewage, drainage, landscaping, you run into a staggering expense.”

“Couldn’t he complete one small section at a time?”

“It’s too late for that. I thought you should know the picture, Mike. It’s a mess, frankly. He’s licked and he doesn’t want to admit it to himself. I suppose there’s an emotional angle.”

“How do you mean?”

“Nearly all of it is Mary’s money. He could have plunged into this thing to make
so
much more that he wouldn’t have any… feeling of dependence. And that could be why he can’t look at it rationally. And why he’s… perhaps drinking a little heavier than he should.”

Mike looked at Robert Raines, at this sincere, competent, cordial, helpful, courteous young man—blocky, brush-cut and photogenically weathered—who lounged in the rectangle of light that came from the nearby window, one Dak-clad haunch on the cypress railing, raw silk jacket sitting neatly on husky shoulders.

“Come down for a rest, Mike boy,” Mike said wearily. “Just slop around in the sun.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You are talking to me of course because I am gentle and honest and strong, and very attractive to young women. They are dazzled by the gleam of my very high forehead. It goes way back. And my athletic structure—just like Alfred Hitchcock’s. I’m a father image.”

“What?” Raines said blankly.

“I’m touched the way people up and tell me things. All my life people up and tell me things. Along comes some flack to my desk on the paper and tells me very confidential that Miss Bumpy Grind is staying at the West Hudson Hotel with a cheetah. With a gold collar. So I am very impressed, of course, and I am about to send over a throng of legmen, like covering an execution, when all of a sudden it begins to look to me like maybe he is talking to me because he has an angle.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Robert, one chugs along through life and maybe picks up one or two survival ideas here and there. I’ve got one. The bastards come at you from all directions, and there’s no wall to put your back against. There is a footnote to this one, at the bottom of the page, in six-point Caslon, saying everybody keeps his powder dry.”

“Mr. Rodenska, you sound as if you think I was trying to work… some kind of an angle. I’ve told you all this… I’ve been frank with you because—”

“I’m easy to talk to?”

“Because Troy is in a jam and—”

“You’d hate to see me lose my money because I’m such a nice guy. Naive, but nice. Thanks, Rob. Thanks a lot.”

“Are you a little tight, Mike?”

“I’m just down here for a rest.”

Rob stood up. He looked uncertain. “Well… I better see if I can find Debbie Ann.”

“You’re a lawyer. Lawyers have to maneuver people. I’ll give you a message. When anybody looks directly at me, right into my eyes, which isn’t normal, and doesn’t do any fidgeting, which again isn’t normal, and drops their voice level about a half octave and gets real grammatical, I just lay back and wait for them to bring out the three walnut shells and the rubber pea.”

“Mr. Rodenska, you don’t…”

“You go find Debbie Ann, and when you get a chance, you play poker. Play every night. Better stick to small stakes at first. They ought to teach it in every law school. You had a deuce down and an ace up, and you were convincing me you had aces back to back. Go find your girl.”

Raines hesitated, and then left quickly. He looked back once. His leaving had the flavor of flight. Mike spat the tip of a cigar over the railing and lighted it. He wondered how many cigars he had gone through during this long day. He felt vaguely guilty, and out of that guilt came the great seventh wave again, rolling his heart among the stones. There was no one to chide him about the cigars. No one to give a damn how many he smoked. Nobody to keep count and lecture him.

When Mary appeared below him and looked up at the porch and said, “Is that you, Mike?” he had to wait two long seconds before he could trust his voice and answer her.

She came up the steps and said, her voice too casual, “I just found out Troy was on Tim Gosnell’s boat for a long time. Tim says he was a little more sober when he left, so maybe he got home somehow. We might as well leave, if you’re ready. There’s always the chance he’s taking a nap in a dark corner somewhere, but I’m through looking. If so, he’ll wake up at daylight and walk home up the beach. It’s nearly five miles, but it won’t hurt him any.”

“I’m ready. How about your daughter?”

“She just left with Rob. There’s some sort of party down in Gulfway.”

They walked to the parking lot. She gave him the keys, a spare set she carried. He drove the Chrysler north, through the area near the public beach where the cars sat dark in starlight outside the silent motels, and where a few neoned beer joints were close to their midnight closing, and north past a place where on the beach he saw the silhouettes of people around the red coals of a driftwood fire, and north past the big dark beach houses.

When he drove into the triple carport, parking between Mary’s station wagon and Debbie Ann’s little white Porsche Speedster, Mary said, “Will you come in for a nightcap?”

“I guess I better just…”

“Please, Mike. Just for a minute or two.” Her voice was still casual, but the appeal was clear. He went into the kitchen with her. She made the drinks and they carried them out onto the patio. Stars were reflected, motionless in the black surface of the small swimming pool. He sat in one of the big redwood chairs and she sat ten feet away on a hassock.

“Did you like the Club, Mike?”

“It’s a gay place.”

“Bernard and I used to belong. But living up on Ravenna Key, we didn’t get down very often. It’s much handier, living here. We get a lot of use out of it.”

“The food is fine.”

“How about the people, Mike? How about the people?” She laughed. “You told me you are a qualified people-watcher.”

“I can’t say much without sounding pretentious. I got this out of it. They seem anxious. I don’t know why. It’s as if they had the correct scoop that tomorrow a hurricane washes the Club out to sea. Or prohibition is coming back. Or sex is going to be outlawed. I don’t know. They seem to try too hard. They press. And it isn’t that a lot of them are retired, maybe a little too young. Most of them work. It’s the same all over the country, I guess. But it seems concentrated here, somehow. Like they have to do everything there is to do right now. It gave me the jumps. It’s contagious. I emptied two drinks faster than I like to drink, and I had to say whoa boy.”

“I feel that too, Mike. It’s… undignified.”

“That’s a word I was hunting for.”

“But there were lots of nice ones there.”

“Nice ones everywhere. I met one nice one. Shirley McGuire. She flattered me, laid it on with a trowel, butter from head to foot. I respond fine to flattery.”

“Oh, she’s Martha Tennyson’s niece. A new friend of Debbie Ann’s. I’ve met her, but I don’t really know her. She’s getting a divorce, you know.”

“She told me.”

“She’s an… interesting looking girl.”

“She talked to me, and that Rob Raines talked to me.”

“What did Rob talk about?”

Mike crossed his fingers in the darkness. “Sailboats.”

“He’s very high on sailing. Debbie Ann crewed for him in Yacht Club races when she was practically a child. She has a silver cup they won. He seems very interested now, but I can’t feel he’s right for Debbie Ann. There’s a sort of… heaviness about him. He doesn’t seem to have the light touch.”

There was a silence. He heard the ice rattle in the bottom of her glass as she finished the weak drink she had made herself.

“Mike?”

“Yes, Mary.”

“About what you said this morning. I wanted you to come in because I thought I wanted to talk. But I don’t. Not yet.”

“Any time.”

“I have to do some more thinking. And even then, I don’t want to… drop my troubles in your lap. When I do talk, I won’t be asking you to do anything. It will be just… to get my own emotions straightened out. And even that isn’t fair to you. To have you come down here and then—”

“Knock it off, Mary. I’m your friend. I’m Troy’s friend. I’ll listen because I want to. Okay?”

“Okay, Mike.”

He said goodnight to her and went out the kitchen door toward the private guest wing entrance. The night was very still. The richness of jasmine hung in the air, almost too strong. He felt no desire for sleep, so he changed to swim trunks and slippers, took a towel and went over to the beach. After he was in he realized it made him uneasy to swim at night. The water seemed to have an oily texture. He could imagine monsters sleekly stalking this blundering thrashing chunk of live bait. When he stood up to walk out with courageous dignity, something brushed against his leg, and almost instantaneously he was fifteen feet from the water’s edge, breathing hard.

Face of a hero, he said to himself. Race of a hero. They need you in the Olympics, Rodenska. New event. Fifty-yard dash in three feet of water. Symbolic, anyway. You get scared of the things you can’t see. Comedy routine. Minnow nibbles fat man. Fat man roars out of water and then, with enormous nonchalance, peers up and down deserted beach to see if anybody was looking. Like Troy in Melbourne that time, when a lorry tire let go and made that prolonged and significant whistling, and when he came so damn close to dropping flat on the sidewalk, and then pretended he had stumbled.

Mike walked back and showered and went to bed, but his brain was a gaudy tin top, spinning and whining, his eyes glued wide open, his hearing acute. He guessed it was an hour later when he heard the car drift in with due consideration for those asleep. He walked over to the window, the terrazzo pleasantly cool against his bare feet. They sat there in the MGA, the parking lights on, talking in low tones. They got out of the car, met on her side of the car and kissed. Her back was toward him. He saw Rob’s hands slide slowly down from the small of her back to cup her haunches and pull her tightly against him. She acquiesced for a few seconds, then wriggled free, made a mock gesture of slapping him, giggled in a high tinkling way, and spun toward the door.

“Tomorrow?” he called.

“Phone and find out,” she said.

Mike went back to bed. He heard her stirring about in her room, with a quick tick-tack of heels which ended when she took her shoes off. He heard nothing for a long time, and then the soft closing of the other door to the bath they shared. A little while later the whispery roaring of the shower began.

He lay in darkness, moving closer to sleep, hearing her hum tunelessly above the shower sound, building pink and soapy and explicit visions of her, remembering what the McGuire girl had told him, and pretending in that drifting area of half-sleep that when she had showered she would come sweetly, moistly, silently into his room and…

Sleep was suddenly rolled back by his sudden contemptuous realization that he had imagined himself right into a state of acute physiological readiness for her—the shallow breathing and the sweatiness and the ponderous gallop of his heart and the knotted loins.

He rolled and thumped his pillow and said to himself, Maybe you should go back into high school. Maybe start a nice collection of dirty pictures. An adolescent old man. It’s a fleshy trap. The mind is entirely satisfied with continence. But it’s the old ape body which strains with unreasoned desire. It knows how much time has passed. So it rests here, hairy, heavy, with all the scars and marks and saggings of forty years, all the blemishes and erosions of its ape maturity, waiting with a massive arrogance for the glands to force the mind into some sort of pretty rationalization which will clear the way so that it can again exercise its plunging primordial function, its mute declaration concerning the continuance of the race. It’s an ape thing, squatting on its hairy haunches behind a screen of brush, slack-jawed, picking lice off its belly, watching the young females of the tribe, and making plaintive rumblings in its chest.