A Purple Place For Dying

by John D. MacDonald

  "Better?" I asked her.

  "I think so," she whispered. She was still shuddering with cold. She dug closer to me, face in my neck, arms around my waist. She smelled of vanilla. The treat after the movies in the childhood long ago. After a long time she stopped shivering.

  Then it was the catalyst things, of course. All of them. Night, death, fright, closeness, the security of the den. Male and female in the most primitive partnership of all. This was a twisted virgin, frightened by men, sex, pleasure, wanting-thinking it all a conspiracy of evil against her. But now there was a greater fear. There with mingled breath I felt her awareness grow. Her hands held tightly. Slowly her breathing deepened, with a little catch at the peak of each inhalation: Her body heat increased.

  I knew that at my slightest aggressive movement, it would all drain out of her. If I could pretend not to be aware, then it could all keep building for her. But clamped there together as we were by the pitch of the floor, aroused by her closeness, I could hardly hope to conceal my increasing physiological awareness of her, and I was afraid that as it became all too evident to her, it would chill her.

  I noted the exact moment of her realization. She stopped breathing entirely. Her whole body tightened. And then, as she took a breath, there was an indescribable softening, a slow flowering of her hips, as though her thighs rolled outward. I moved my hand to the small of her back, and she gasped, and there was a strange and almost imperceptible tremor of her hips, a moth-wind flutter, subtle and sensuous as the final stage of Polynesian dance. She gasped. I found her soft mouth, and for long seconds her mouth was as sensuous and welcoming as her body, and then the old fears took her and she stiffened and turned her head away, pushed at me and said, "No. Oh no."

  I released her at once. I sensed that it surprised her. With a wary caution she let the upper half of her body rest against me once more, her hips at a sedate distance. I adjusted the jacket.

  I patted her shoulder and said, "Iz, if we get out of this. If I get you out of this. If you're ever in my arms again. Just one word will do it. Every time. No. That's all you have to say. No. And it stops. So don't say it as a nervous habit. Say it when you mean it. No. There's nothing wrong with my hearing."

  She thought it over. "But I always thought... that men..."

  "The ravening beast? Don't arouse him? Every man a rapist? Baby, that's just propaganda. There are some dull-witted boys like that, but very few men. Being denied can make me a little irritable. But I don't have to work it out by being aggressive. Just that little word. No. It works. And you can say it at any point you want, right up to the moment when we are, excuse the expression, coupled. From then on it's Molly over the windmill."

  She shuddered. "I couldn't. I really just couldn't." She thought for a little while more. "But just this much can be sweet, I guess. I never realized before. But I think it would be... dangerous to experiment, Travis."

  She yawned so widely her jaw creaked. In another few minutes she drifted off to sleep, collapsing slowly against me.

  Fourteen

  I AWOKE with a jolt that startled her awake. She turned and stared at the visible grey light at our entrance, then scrambled away from me. I crawled to the entrance, checked the triggered club, wormed under it and looked out at the first of day. The sun was not up. The grey of that light and the reddish tone of the huge rocks made of it a purple world. I felt an inexplicable depression. This was the foolish end of all the foolish things, in a purple place for dying. I was too far from the bright water and the bright boats. My luck was gone. When his bullet hit the stone instead of my chest, that was the last of it.

  I had not told Isobel the thing I feared most.

  I was afraid that he would find our burrow, study it, and then go down to the truck and come back with a few sticks and blasting caps. I dismantled my alarm system. We wouldn't need it from now on. It was a terrible temptation to go on out, but he could be thirty feet away, ready to blow my head apart. I went back in and turned and put my finger to my lips. In the vagueness of the reflected grey, I saw the terse nod of her head.

  Our planning seemed childish. Rabbity. I was stiff and sore from sleeping against rock. Twenty minutes seemed an eternity. The grey light turned slowly to pink, and the pink began to change to gold when I heard a clack of loose stone not far from our entrance. Soon I heard one crunching footstep. I expected him to call out, but he made no other sound. As the light brightened, more of it came in from overhead, two small patches which filled the cave with a muted glow of early light.

  Suddenly I heard a scurrying and a scrambling and a muttered curse. It gave me the wonderful feeling that help had arrived in time. Then there was an almost continuous chirring noise. He was throwing stones at something, kicking sand at it. The something came gliding silently into the cave, head high, and stopped just inside the entrance, in the area of brightness there, and coiled. The tail danced and chirred. The forked tongue took flickering samples of the air. Isobel Webb screamed with total terror.

  He was a four footer, as big around as the woman's forearm. There was no need to motion Isobel back. She had gone as far back as she could get, wedging herself around the small corner back there. I snatched up the stick previously wedged in the entrance. The hardware was gone, but the line for the alarm system was still fastened to it.

  Rattlesnakes cannot strike beyond their own length. Their eyesight is bad. I had backed my way up off floor level, feeling for footholds in the stone stacked to the side of the entrance, moving up to where the rawhide trigger kept the stout club bent upward over the entrance where the man would have to come through. I quickly fashioned a slip-knot loop in the line fastened to the stick I held, and I bent over and delicately fished for the snake. His head swayed. I got it over his head on the second try.

  Just as I yanked it tight, and got the scaly squirming furious length partway off the floor, Sosegado fired four fast shots into the cave. The muzzle blast was so deafening. I knew he had poked the rifle into the entrance and fired it. Slugs whined and clattered around on the walls and ceiling. I saw that Isobel had not been hit. She peered around an edge of rock. I gave her a maniacal grin to reassure her.

  As I stepped up and back, moving higher, getting set, bringing the convulsive flapping of the snake with me, I gave a long, hoarse, gargling moan. As she stared at me in terror, I moaned again. Holding the snake off to the side and below me, I opened the pocket knife with one hand, getting ready to lay the blade against the rawhide so I could release the club against his head as he crawled in.

  Isobel caught on. "You killed him!" she screamed. "He's bleeding!"

  I could guess Pablo had some basic infantry training. He knew how to come in. He could see that the snake was not in that daylight area just inside the entrance. He could guess there would be room to stand up. He came in good. He came scrabbling and diving in, rifle first, intending perhaps to roll up onto his feet and fire at the first movement he detected, woman, snake or man.

  He came through so fast, I sliced the thong too late. Instead of getting him in the head, the club gave him a mighty swat across the tight seat of his jeans. He squalled with pain and indignation and surprise. The released end of the rawhide stung me across the face, and I lost my footing and fell the four feet down to the cave floor, knife, snake, stick and all. Isobel, rising to the situation, flung a rock with all her strength and caught me right on the kneecap.

  As I scrambled and stumbled back, trying to brace myself to grab the rifle when he came up with it, I saw the lightning coil of the still tethered snake, the upward strike, saw the big tan triangular head take Pablo just under the chin as he was trying to come up at me. He rocked up onto his knees, his face absolutely blank, reached a slow hand up to touch the snake, then fell heavily onto his side. It took only that long for the venom, carried by the veins and arteries of the throat, to reach his heart and his brain and turn him off forever. Isobel went immediately into violent hysterics.

  The snake let go of Pablo. It studi
ed him for a moment or two, as though deciding he was too big to eat, then turned and glided through the slack loop and on out of the cave into the morning sunlight. She came yowling, teetering, tipping into my arms, her face as reddened and wrinkled as the face of an angry child.

  There were keys in the pickup truck. Halfway to the state road we met the two county patrol cars heading in toward Burned Wells at high speed. Isobel began to bleat again when she saw what they were. As I stood in the dusty road and pointed at the place where they would find the bodies, I saw that the purple look had faded away. Our hill was a dark silhouette against the morning sun.

  It had been a place for dying, but not for us. Not for McGee, not this time. A violent and horrible slapstick-a whack across the pants, sting of the thong, woman's bad aim with a stone-and then the terrible efficiency of the swift tan snake....

  * * *

  Late on Sunday afternoon, Dolores Canario Estobar sat in Fred Buckelberrv's office. She had insisted there was absolutely no need for her to have an attorney. The Sheriff knew it had to be handled very carefully. She was a handsome woman, newly married, pregnant, married to Johnny Estobar who showed promise of eventually becoming a political figure among the Latin American population of Esmerelda County. He had to let her husband be with her. Johnny, bitterly indignant, sat beside his solemn wife and tenderly held her hand. It was a crowded office. Buckelberry, a deputy, a stenographer, the state's attorney, Jass's personal attorney, the Estobars and me.

  Her calm and her dignity seemed unshakable. "Sheriff, I guess the way things are, I have to believe it, that Pablo and Carlos did these terrible things. It's so terribly hard on my mother. I was never close to my half-brothers. How many times do I have to tell you all this anyhow? The only thing I can think of, they got in trouble or something in Phoenix and came back here and plotted this crazy plan to make me rich, thinking that if I got Jass's money they could get a lot of it from me. I've always known I was his daughter. Mona never knew it. Yes, I worked in his house, but I didn't resent him for it. I could have had a lot more education. He would have paid for it. But I quit. He was good to me. I didn't love him, but I didn't resent him. He was being fair in his own way. A lot of men would have done a lot less."

  "You knew about the letters your mother had?" Buckelberry asked gently. "And the pictures?"

  "Certainly. One of my half-brothers obviously took them. They were wild reckless boys. God knows what they were thinking. Maybe they thought they were helping me. Such a stupid, stupid plan. I know your people have been searching my house, Sheriff. I wouldn't even know what strychnine looks like."

  "But you did go to Jass's house shortly after noon on the day of his death?"

  "Yes! I've told you that. He called me up. He asked me to come over. I went over and he was gone. They can tell you that at his house."

  "Do you have to keep asking her the same things over and over?" her husband demanded.

  "I don't think she wants to refuse to answer," the Sheriff told him. "Now, Dolores, you see the little problem you leave us. If a person were very clever, they would go over, Yeoman would let them in. They would pour him a cup of coffee-someone who knew his habits well. They would poison him and leave and go a short distance and wait and then go back to the house as though just arriving. That would account for them being seen in the neighborhood, if anybody saw them and remembered."

  "Do I have to prove myself innocent?" Dolores demanded haughtily. "I thought it was the other way around for most people."

  "How do you imagine your brothers learned so much about the affair between Mrs. Yeoman and Mr. Webb?"

  "A lot of people knew about that. They weren't real careful, you know. God, I wish Pablo and Carlos were alive. Then they could give you real answers. All I can do is a lot of guessing. Honest to God, I do not want any of Jass's money. We're getting along fine. I'm really happy for the first time in my life."

  "Why don't you leave her alone?" Estobar demanded.

  I could see the hopelessness in Fred Buckelberry's eyes. Unless he could trap her somehow, she was going to walk away from it. And it was getting easier and easier to believe, even for me, that she'd had no part in it. But something about her did not ring true. She was just too damn controlled.

  I remembered how she had been on the porch of her house when she had flown off the handle. Blood and iron, fire and pride. She had to really hate the old man to kill him that way. And I had a glimmer of an idea. It would be very rough on her. But I had to believe Pablo called the truth to me through the night. He had been certain I wouldn't live to repeat it.

  "May I say something?" I asked Fred. They all looked at me.

  "Go ahead."

  I cleared my throat and looked upset. "I don't know. I keep thinking there's some kind of a mistake here, Fred. While I was working for Jass we got a little stoned together a couple of times. Talked about everything under the sun. I didn't know him a long time, but he seemed like a pretty good guy. The thing is... I don't know just how to say this... it's just hard for me to believe Mrs. Estobar here was Jass's daughter, because he talked about her as if... well, as if she was another woman in the house, if you know what I'm getting at."

  There was a deadly silence, and then she launched herself at me. She wanted to spoon my eyes out on her thumbnails. Her husband got her, held her wrists, her arms out behind her. She bent toward me, and her face was nothing human.

  "Yessss," she said in a dreadful half whisper. "When she was away. That filthy old man. That father I adored. He was drinking. He made me drink too. I tried to help him to bed. He forced me, that filthy old man. He didn't know who I was. Drunk! A woman to grab. I had loved him, like a daughter." She straightened, raising her voice. "He destroyed me! He dirtied me! Oh, I wrote those tax people. They talked to me many times. I told them every damn thing I could remember about every dirty trick I heard him say he did. I told Mona so she would tell him, so he would sweat and squirm and sweat. Those boys would do anything I made them do. They thought it was just for the money. Kill his woman. That was something else gone. I wanted him to live longer, but I couldn't wait. He drank it down and patted me on the cheek and said thank you my dear girl. Isn't that wild? Isn't that hilarious? Doesn't that kill you?" In a slower voice, looking around at all of us in a dazed way, she said, "Doesn't that kill you?"

  Her husband sobbed and caught her as she went down. And not one of us was able to look anyone else in the eye.

  * * *

  Ten weeks later, on a Sunday night, under a moon almost full, I was stretched out on a sandy blanket on the small back beach of Webb Cay. It had been the rarest of all perfect days. Hot and clear, with just enough of a breeze to keep the sandflies away. We'd done a little more work on the house that day. I had cleaned the jets on the cranky kerosene refrigerator and gotten it working with less stink.

  We'd gone snorkeling and come back with four fine crayfish, boiled them up, ate them with tinned butter and Pauli Girl beer. We had sun-drowsed on the beach, swimming when it got too hot, then gone into the shadowy old house, into relative coolness, into the big bed where her parents had slept, for a long lazy game of love and the deep sweet nap until dusk.

  I looked out and saw her swimming in, the moon so bright it almost masked the pale green fire of phosphorescence her slow strong strokes created. She came wading up out of the water, up the shelf of the beach, naked in moonlight, palming her dark sea-soaked hair back with both hands. I had never seen anyone get so dark so quickly. She was like a Carib Indian. In the daylight, with the white goo covering her sensitive lips, she had begun to look like a photographic negative. She was one even perfect color all over, without streak or patch, a primitive honeyed bronze.

  She came to the blanket and knelt and rolled back on her half, and made on my left forearm a Japanese pillow for the soaked nape of her neck. She made a small sound of contentment and lay there in a spill of moonlight that turned the water droplets on her body to a mercury gleaming.

  "Long swim," I
said.

  "Just floating out there, darling. Thinking."

  "About what?"

  "Oh, of whatever happened to that silly beast who tried to kill herself. Maybe you remember her. The one that had fastened herself to the adored brother. A symbiotic relationship. Feeding off him."

  "Vaguely remember her. And I remember a girl who kept saying no."

  Warm chuckle. "Oh, her! She was corrupted long ago."

  * * *

  After all the hundred details of burial, testimony, insurance, closing her apartment, packing, we had taken off in that sedate old sedan, wandering vaguely east, making few miles in each day's drive, following the narrowest blue lines on the map. The journey from Livingston to Fort Lauderdale had taken over two weeks. She insisted on a precise division of all expenses.

  And in the crickety motel nights, in the woodsy old cabins outside small towns, I let her find her own increments of experimental boldness, right up to where she would say, hoarsely, gaspingly, No. And I obeyed that word immediately and without fail. Had I not done so at any time, it would have set her back to the very beginning. She had to know that it would work, would always work, and that it was her option.