The Last One Left

by John D. MacDonald

  He looked over at a group of young people at tables on the far apron of the pool. They were locals, children of people with memberships. These were sailboat people, race-week people, sports-car people, raised in the big and gracious old homes which faced the sea. Colonial British, raised among such a flood tide of tourism they accepted it as that sort of inconvenience one puts up with without rancor or particular attention—as Arab children accept the flies in the marketplace. He heard a girl laugh, and her voice had the extraordinary clarity and timbre peculiar to the English woman, and he singled her out as she walked toward the pool, a limber young thing, red-gold tan, sunbaked hair, brief dusty-pink swim suit, looking back to laugh again at her group. A boy got up to follow her and swim with her, a young man muscled and poised, totally assured of himself and of his place within his world. He was older than the others, the same age as Jonathan perhaps. Sam realized that in some past existence he had wanted, for Leila, some Texan counterpart of such a young man. Now, with a sudden feeling of revulsion, he saw how such a one would take the news of the sinking of the Muñeca. Pain and grief, of course. But a manly acceptance, tinged with a certain subconscious unadmitted pleasure in the martyr role, the public image to sustain of having loved and lost. “Damned shame, sir. Bad show.”

  Far better the grotesquerie of disbelief, the absurd search, Don Quixote with bull horn and Japanese binoculars, peering and braying across the ten-thousand-year silence of the shallow Bank, giving not a damn for image, for impression, for status of any kind.

  And I care too much, he thought. So much that I blush for a kind of madness I should cherish. So much I have pressured them all—Leila, Lydia Jean, Boy-Sam—trying to turn them into Carolyn Coopers and fellows full of sleek and watchful assurance.…

  The room phone rang and he went in, closing the glass door, to tell Stanley Moree he had a firm contract and Jonathan would join him at the boat. He then ordered food to be brought up to the room. After he had eaten, he listened again to Lulu Hilger’s voice in a sequence which interested him.

  “I was watching over him. Bill and Bert were topside. Francie had been with me, but it made her too nervous watching him. And there was an unpleasant smell where the burns on his arm were infected, even after Bill Barth had dressed them, and Francie is always just a little queasy when she stays below in any kind of a sea. It never bothers me.

  “He was sleeping, but he would thrash around sometimes and groan and mumble. Bill took his temperature before, and it was over a hundred and two. And his pulse was very fast. I wondered if he was getting more fever. I was sitting on the foot of the bunk. I leaned way over and hitched closer and put the back of my hand against his forehead. He gave kind of a convulsive jump and grabbed my arm just above the elbow. He sat right up, staring at me and breathing hard. I can’t remember exactly what he said. He had terrible strength in his hand. I think I almost fainted from the pain. See? I’ll have these bruises for weeks. He called me Christy. He seemed to be pleading with me to understand something. And like he was almost in tears about it. He was saying something like, ‘It wasn’t that way! You’ve got to understand that, Christy. You’ve got to help me. You’ve got to.’ He seemed terribly agitated. Then he slumped back suddenly, letting go of me. He was breathing very deeply and very fast. His eyes were closed. His face was covered with beads of sweat.

  “I had some lavender-flavored rubbing alcohol, and I sopped a little hand towel with it and swabbed his face off, keeping it away from his eyes. His breathing slowed down. Then he opened his eyes and he was himself and he knew who I was. I asked him who I was. I said he’d called me Christy.”

  “What was his reaction to that, Mrs. Hilger?”

  “I guess it scared him to know he’d been out of his head. It would scare anybod—”

  “No. I mean exactly what did he do and say?”

  “At first he didn’t say anything. He closed his eyes. He pushed my hand away from his face. Not roughly. Just slowly and gently. Then he asked what he’d said. I said he was trying to make Christy understand something and he was asking her for help. I said that people in delirium don’t make sense. I said he was just a little wilder this time.”

  “And there was a special reaction then?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by special, Mr. Boylston. He seemed surprised. ‘This time?’ is what he said, lifting his head off the pillow. I told him that the other times he was just moaning and thrashing and mumbling.”

  “How soon after that did he go into convulsions?”

  “It wasn’t long after that. Four minutes. Five. It scared me half to death. I thought he was dying. I know what I should have done, but I didn’t know it then. You’re supposed to wedge something across their teeth, as far back as you can get it, so they won’t chew their tongue to ribbons. I ran and yelled to Bill and he came hurrying down. By then Captain Staniker was quiet again. Asleep or unconscious. He was like that without any change when they took him off and put him in the ambulance.”

  He put the tape on fast wind, all the voices sounding like a nest of agitated mice, and, with a couple of pushes on the rewind button, located the resonant and antagonistic baritone of Bert Hilger, plumbing contractor and owner of the Chris-Craft named Docksie. He numbered himself among the boat-people. Sam Boylston was an outsider. A batch of boat-people had been lost at sea, and he resented technical questions from someone who did not know the bilge from the binnacle, yet was compelled to answer because of the familiar gratification of imparting expertise.

  “Check and check and check again,” he said. “You stay healthy if you don’t depend on the gadgets, Boylston. You mistrust them every minute. Duplicate everything and check the gadgets against each other. I run on gas, so I got two sniffers in the bilge, independent of each other. But before I make a run I still crawl down there and hold a cup with a few drops of gas in it next to the probes to make sure the buzzers and blinkers work on both of them. I’m wired for separate electric on both engines, independent fuel supply, and I watch fuel consumption, battery levels, rate of charge like an eagle. I check the compasses against each other and against the charts. I got two big hooks rigged so I can drop them fast if I get into trouble. I listen to every piece of weather I can find on the dial. I carry spare wheels and a wheel puller. Hell, things have gone wrong. Things always go wrong. But if you don’t trust anything, you don’t get into bad trouble. When the sea is building, you’ll find the Docksie in a protected anchorage with all the water and supplies we need to wait it out.”

  “Then you think the Muñeca should have had a detection device for gas fumes.”

  “The question doesn’t mean anything. She was diesel. If I was diesel and had a gasoline generator and gas cans of fuel for it below decks, I would have had a sniffer. Some perfectly sound boat owners I know wouldn’t have. Most of them, maybe. It’s how careful you want to be.”

  “Suppose Staniker was at anchor and wanted to turn on the generator.”

  “Then without even thinking about it he would have opened some hatches and run the blower first. He wasn’t some Kansas clown on his first cruise, you know. He was running, and when you’re running you don’t think of any accumulation of fumes in the bilge, not with a diesel, because you’ve got air movement through the bilge. You pick it up with a bow ventilator arrangement and it runs through and comes out somewhere near your transom. But the way I see it, he ran into a freak situation. He had a following wind and sea at about the same knots he was making. So he was running with dead air below. It wasn’t moving.”

  “And the explosion that blew him into the water could have ignited his diesel fuel?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. As I understand it, compression creates heat, and I’ve seen some of those custom jobs they make for heavy duty work up there in North Carolina. They’re solid. Any fuel has a flash point. Put enough heat on it all of a sudden, and it will go. And if it did, the only place anybody would have a chance would be if they were on the fly bridge. And even then y
ou’d get seared pretty good, the way he did.”

  “Does it seem odd to you that no other boat saw the fire?”

  “Why should it? Let me show you on the chart here. He was north of Andros according to the approximate position he gave me, up beyond North Goulding Cays far enough so no one would see him from Morgan’s Bluff, Nicholl’s Town or Mastic Point. He was moving in toward coral head areas, and it was night, and nobody who didn’t know how to sneak through there, as he did, would be well clear of it, way out in this area, far enough away so they’d see a glow, but if they did, the normal guess would be some kind of fire on shore.”

  “Mr. Hilger, could you show me a few other places on this chart where it would be the same sort of situation, I mean where a fire at sea would attract so little attention?”

  “Well—let me see now. Mmmm. No. I guess you could say that was another part of the way his luck was running. When your luck goes bad on the water it seems to go bad in every possible way.”

  “And it would be deep water there they tell me.”

  “It’s the Tongue of the Ocean, Boylston, and it comes in pretty close to the eastern shore of Andros. It’s a steep one. Within a hundred yards, say you’re heading east, you can go from forty feet of water to six thousand. That’s why they’ve got that experimental base at Fresh Creek on anti-submarine warfare. That’s down the coast of Andros, about forty miles south-southeast of the Joulters.”

  “Thank you ver—”

  He thumbed the button that took it off playback, then pressed the rewind button. He put the reel back into the original box and put it into the drawer in the bedside stand. He loaded a new reel on the recorder, and put the little machine into the side pocket of his jacket as he left.

  It was almost five thirty when Theyma Chappie admitted Sam to the tidy little apartment in the Harbour Heights development. She had been home from the hospital long enough to shower and change. Her dark hair was undone, ribbon-tied, spilling down her slender back. The ends of it were damp, and she smelled of flower perfume and soap. She wore a sleeveless rose-pink knit shift in a coarse soft weave, gathered at the waist with a narrow belt of the same material, flat white sandals with gold thongs. Her mouth was made up a little more abundantly than in the morning. She had a warmer, livelier look.

  He accepted her offer of a drink and said he would take whatever she was having. It was gin and fresh fruit juices in large weighty old-fashioned glasses with a sprig of fresh mint. He sat on a severe couch upholstered in pale gray fabric. Under the glass top of the coffee table in front of him was a display of exotic seashells. She sat on a low footstool on the other side of the table, arms wrapped around her knees, and in reply to his question, she gestured with a tilt of her head toward the recorder, the one she had taken to the hospital and brought back. “Oh, it was a most easy thing. But I was frightened all the time it was there. You can see. Most of the tape is used up. He was much better today. Except for the speaking. His tongue is swollen and bruised. It is painful for him to talk or eat. He must speak carefully. But they did question him today. Dr. McGregory permitted it. The fever is gone. Sub-normal, actually. Pulse slow and strong. No rales in the chest. But these things can turn bad quickly.”

  “How much questioning?”

  “I would say forty minutes this morning. And almost an hour later in the day.”

  “Officials?”

  “Yes. I could not say who. The head nurse brought them and asked me to leave.”

  “Did any newspaper people interview him?”

  “Oh no! And they are eager ones, I tell you. All manner of sly tricks. Oh, I say I could have made very much money today, to help some of them sneak into the room. Or to ask the Captain some question and then tell someone what he answered. One of them offered me five pounds to take a little camera in and take a picture of him. Stay five feet from him, the man said. Look through here. Push this little button. Bring the camera back to me. The flash bulb is all ready.” She frowned. “When I said I could not do such things, all the time I knew what I had hidden near the bed behind the towels.”

  “It isn’t the same, Nurse.”

  “Best you keep telling me that, Mr. Boylston.”

  “If there was any trouble about it, I guess Sir Willis could intercede for you.”

  She made a face, took deep swallows of her drink. “My brother asked this. I think we may leave Sir Willis out of it. The great man would not bother his head. You know? It would offend him, I think, to be asked to help such an unimportant little female person. He would say, Oh my God, what will they ask of me next? And he would worry about what all his important friends might think if he came to the rescue of …” She stopped quite suddenly and gave him a look of challenge he could not interpret. “It does not matter. One learns to look after oneself, yes?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Is something the matter?”

  “All of a sudden you ducked behind a wall.”

  She pondered that, then smiled. “I rather like that. Yes. I went behind my wall. Perhaps I forgot my place for just one little moment. Sir Willis is Bay Street. And so are you. A Bay Street in Texas. You have the look.” She pressed her fingertips to her cheek. “I heard what it is called there, I think. A touch of the tar brush? Perhaps it is uglier there than here. But ugly here, too. At least here we are not something one lays with to change one’s luck.”

  “I reckon we’ve got our share of people who like to suffer on account of the color God happened to be handing out at the time.”

  “Ah. Cowboy talk! It is beautiful! I have made you angry. Why should you be angry? I am doing you a favor. I am giving you a very nice drink. Who are you to get angry if I say the world happens to be round?”

  “What gives you the right to classify me?”

  “Ho! So back there in your Bay Street of Texas, you are some bold crusader, yes? And so you go rushing out from your big office to defend some poor nigger girl because she has this so touching confidence in you, yes? Ah, you are a very valuable fellow!”

  He stood up quickly with his drink and went and stood at the windows, staring out, eyes unfocused, at the distant vista of Nassau harbor. She came and deftly took his empty glass from his hand. She rattled ice in the small kitchen, brought him a new drink.

  “Is the world round, Mr. Boylston?”

  “Sam. It is very damned round.”

  “I am Theyma, Sam. And it is too bad it is so damned round I think.”

  “My wife left me over five months ago, Theyma. Not for another man, or because I was mixed up with another woman. Nothing like that. I seem to be a little less than her ideal. One of the things she threw at me surprised me. About a year ago the brother of a woman who worked for us got into a cutting scrape down in Brownsville. The woman’s name is Rosalie. Short, dark, plump, cheerful, not too much English. She’s Mexican-American. She asked me to defend her brother. I did the sensible thing. A lawyer in Brownsville owed me a favor. He does a lot of that kind of work. I asked him to take the case. The brother got off with ninety days, which was pretty good, considering. Rosalie acted huffy about it. When my wife left me she said that was one of the times I let her down, when I let Rosalie down. I said I wasn’t that kind of a lawyer. She said there were apparently only two kinds of lawyers. I thought it was a lot of romantic idiocy. Until you shook me up, Miss Theyma.”

  “Have you lost her for good?”

  “I don’t know. I hope not. I miss her, and I miss the kid. He’s five now. I can’t let myself think she’s gone for good. This is a stronger drink.”

  “It seemed like a good time for the drinks to be stronger.”

  “I was wrong about Rosalie’s brother?”

  “If she trusted you, yes. It is a matter of honor, of her being part of your family. If you appeared in court and he went away for a year, she could still be proud.”

  He turned toward her, smiling, and said, “Miss Theyma, why does so much of the round, round world make so damned little sense?”
>
  And as he tried to keep the tone light, to his dismay he felt his eyes filling with tears. He tried to hide it by finishing his drink. But when he lowered the glass, she took it from him and set it aside and took his hands in hers and stood, head tilted, looking at him in a troubled way.

  “I did not mean to hurt you, Sam.”

  “I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me!”

  “Sam, I was being naughty. That is all. To give you—what is it?—needles. I did not mean to hurt. To hell with the roundness of the world, Texas Sam.”

  “Okay.”

  She studied him. “You know what I think about you? You are a very severe man. Very strong, very rigid, very honest in your own fashion. Too much is happening for you now. The loneliness of no wife and boy. The pain of the sister. Hatred for that Captain. Be careful, Mister Sam. A man can break, and he can do mad things and spoil everything forever.”

  The directness of her sympathy made his eyes begin to smart again, and in a clumsy and unexpected way of hiding his face from her, he took her into his arms. She stood rigidly, but without protest, and he had the feeling she had stopped breathing. Then her arms slipped around him. She inhaled tremulously, pressed the warm wiry slender strength of her body against his, her fingers prodding into the muscles of his back, rolling and twisting her hips against him, nipples suddenly hard as little pebbles against his chest, through fabric. As he felt the planes of her slender back, the small ripeness of her hips, he inhaled in her crisp hair and soft throat an incongruous scent from childhood, suddenly recognizing it as the smell of vanilla Necco wafers. As he searched for her mouth, she suddenly gasped, thrust at him, wrenched herself away, ran to the couch and sat on the very edge of it, head bowed, back deeply curved, fists on her tawny knees, breathing audibly.

  He went to her, touched her shoulder. She reached up and put her hand over his. “Sorry,” she breathed. “Sorry.”

  “My fault.”

  She stood up, gave him a wan smile and went off to her bathroom. It was a full five minutes before she came back, in full possession of herself.