The Last One Left

by John D. MacDonald

  An hour after his late breakfast he was hungry again, made two thick sandwiches of peanut butter and drank most of a quart of milk, drinking it from the cardboard package as he watched television baseball. The game seemed meaningless, and he could find nothing on the other channels to hold his interest. He left it turned on, and soon the sour soundtrack and dramatic voices of an old movie eased the silence of the house.

  He had packed a dufflebag with most of what he would need, and put it in the back of his closet behind his winter coat. He could put the toilet articles in at the last moment. He had composed the note he would leave and had hidden it in his desk. Crissy had helped him with it:

  I have to go away alone for a couple of weeks to think things out. Nothing has been going right any more. I’m sorry for all the worry I’ve given you lately. I have some money. I have to get things straightened out in my head before I do something real crazy.

  Your Son, Oliver

  Crissy was certainly fussy about having things exactly right. She thought one word ought to be changed and she wouldn’t let him cross it out. He had to write the whole thing out again.

  He felt irritated with her, the way she had acted as if he wouldn’t be able to remember things from one minute to the next. She had made him draw the floor plan from memory, even to putting in the street and the little box to indicate where he would park, and a dotted line to the bungalow door. Number 10. Mooney Bungalow Courts. And he had to write out that little list of what to bring with him.

  When he had tried to protest, she had leaned her face into his, her eyes startlingly round and bright. Her voice had been very slow and distinct, her mouth shaping each word as though for a deaf person, and she had put in some words which had shocked him. He had not known she could come on so heavy.

  She had told him not to come by until dusk. He planned to leave the house well before that, so he would be gone before either of them came home. The hands of the house clocks moved with a terrible slowness. Yet when he would realize that another hour had gone by, and he was an hour closer to what they were going to do, the bottom seemed to fall out of his stomach. It was better to think beyond that part of it, and think about going away with her. Perhaps in a week, she said. That’s why the note said he was going alone. So they wouldn’t come after him to get him away from this terrible, terrible woman.

  Going away with her would be the reward for doing what he had to do tomorrow night. She wouldn’t tell him where. She said it had to be a surprise. He would adore it. A lovely, lovely place. Long, lazy days and nights of love.

  He went back to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, and as he reached to get the milk carton and finish it, he caught a faint scent of fresh limes, and it made his heart stand still. The shampoo she used had that lime scent, familiar now from all the times of breathing her in, face in that softness and crispness of her hair. There was one perfume she wore only for bed, a strange heavy bitter-sweet muskiness that seemed to put a sharper and more desperate edge on his need. And there was often the faint odor of rum and oranges in the hot gasping moisture of her breath against his face, and under these mingled smells, another one, the elusive, distinctive scent of herself, of her flesh and of the using of the flesh. Sometimes when it had just ended and she rested in his arms, these richnesses seemed almost unpleasant, and would remind him of the times when he was tiring and she was still demanding, how fleshy and vast she would seem to become in the bed’s darknesses, something so remorseless and devouring it would seem to him, in that half delirium of fading response, that some animal thing was after him, grasping, straining, grunting, churning at his helplessness.

  He could look at her later at a distance, dressed, so slender and tidy and graceful, and marvel that the night-thing could be so completely hidden away, all the soft machinery dismantled and dispersed.

  He walked through the house, touching things. This table. This hassock. These white bricks in the fireplace wall.

  Raoul had taken Francisca to the beach Saturday afternoon, all the way up to North Miami Beach. Commitment had created small tensions between them. They talked too rapidly and gayly about nothing, and lapsed often into silences which were not comfortable. He had the curious sensation that he was taking pictures of her, a mechanism in the back of his mind clicking, filing a color print away. When she swam alone and then came smiling up the little slope of beach toward him, yanking the swim cap off, shaking out her dark hair, pelvis tilting in her slightly self-conscious stride in her brief, one-piece, candy-striped suit, scissoring thighs in the flawless even dusky gold of ancient ivory, the camera clicked again and again.

  When she lowered herself to the big beach towel beside him, the camera in his mind backed away from the two of them and took the incongruity of that lithe elegance in the gross company of such a squat broad hairy fellow with a pocked peasant face, hair thinning. Then the camera took closeups of her beside him, droplets of sea water on her bare shoulder, and an oblique glance of her dark eyes before she looked toward the sea, her profile perfect as new coins against the beach glare, against the background of all the beach people stretching into the distance along the broad band of whiteness bordering the cobalt blue water with its dancing mirror glints.

  It disturbed him to have the camera-feeling, as if he were storing up the memories of her for the empty years ahead. He and Sam Boylston had debated how much danger she might be in. It had to be weighed against the danger of destroying the adjustment she had achieved. It was her hiding place, and were it destroyed, she might seek that other hiding place again, the withdrawal, the meek, passive, unresponsive silence he had seen when he had visited her with her brother.

  With time and love and understanding, he felt there was a good chance of slowly merging the ’Cisca of now with the Francisca who once had been. And then, little by little, the housemaid would disappear, along with the shop-girl mannerisms, the saucy walk, the shallow pleasures.

  But will she then settle for a Raoul Kelly, he thought. It would be a bitter irony to discover that her acceptance of him as a “boyfran” would be outgrown, along with her delight in soap opera, her collection of movie magazines, her taste for bright, tight clothing and semi-theatrical makeup.

  As the afternoon did not seem to be going well, he decided to take the risk he had weighed and wondered about. He went up to the big parking lot and came back with the folder from his files. It contained a selection of the articles he had done in Spanish-language newspapers, cut to size and Xeroxed on the newspaper machine on 8½-inch by 14-inch sheets, and fastened into a clasp binder. He had made the selection with great care, leaving out those things which might trigger too many memories for her.

  “ ’Cisca, I want to show you why I am unpopular with certain people.”

  She opened the folder, read a few lines and closed it. “You said you are. That is enough for me.”

  “There is something else.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Boys climb to the very tops of the tallest trees. They do very dangerous things upon their bicycles. If the girl is watching. This is my work. It is what I do. I would wish you to admire how I balance in my tree tops.”

  She shrugged almost imperceptibly and opened the folder again. After a few moments she said, “But I do not have the political mind, Raoul.”

  “For much of that it is not necessary.”

  “But such difficult writing, and on the beach?”

  “I am without mercy. Read, woman!”

  She made a face at him and sighed and continued reading. He watched her, and he saw her change. By leaning a little bit he saw which one she was reading. It was the appraisal of the policies of the Twelve Families of the Republic of Panama, and some intimate biographies of those individuals most active in blocking the reforms of the judicial system. She was frowning as she read, her lips compressed. It surprised him that her submerged intelligence should have been awakened by that article. It was one of the more complex ones, and it led with a documented care to the th
esis he reiterated in article after article: In countries where men of good will work to achieve honesty and equality under the law, education, literacy, good health standards, the opportunity to lead a better life than one’s forefathers, Communist subversion becomes futile.

  “Shall we swim now?” he asked.

  “Not now. You go if you wish,” she said absently.

  He swam. When he came back, she had rolled onto her stomach and was propped up on her elbows, reading the pages in the shade of her body. He toweled himself, popped open a fresh can of beer from the cooler.

  Finally she was done. She closed the folder and put it aside. She was lost in thought for a long time.

  “How do you learn these things?” she asked abruptly.

  “Research, study, interviews. There is always a pattern, always a slow movement in one direction or another.”

  “This is a very very important thing you do, Señor.”

  “One would like to believe so.”

  “Does anyone listen?”

  “Fewer than one would hope.”

  It was the steady, thoughtful look of Francisca Torcedo y Sarmantar which met his gaze. “One cannot doubt that they would relish silencing such a man. One man who so carefully stabs at the tenderest parts. I could not know, Raoul. I think it is very possible that you are a great man.”

  “Perhaps you have been too long in the hot sun, querida.”

  “Greatness is to use the quality of the mind to change these slow directions of history, no?”

  “But I am merely …”

  She rapped the cover of the folder with her knuckles. “Tell me. This work in California, will it give you a way to make more men listen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you should permit nothing to interfere. Nothing!”

  “I have accepted. You will come with me.”

  And he saw the little signs of change again, as she edged back into the role more comfortable for her. Small changes in posture, in expression. She laughed, brash and merry, signaling the English that put his teeth on edge. “Crazy sumbitch, you! Eh? Get turned on by sotch a estupid little broad. Looking at your head, I think. So I go with. Okay. Because you crazy as hell, man! Swimming now? Can’t catch.” She hopped up and ran fleetingly toward the gentle surf line.

  He left her at the Harkinson house at quarter to five. He had an article to finish and turn in, and he said he thought he could be back by eight. She had told him that Crissy Harkinson had said she wouldn’t need her that evening.

  Raoul did not return until eight thirty. He went up the stairs carrying the two warm cartons of Chinese food he had promised to bring. The plan was to heat it up on her little stove and eat there and make the ten o’clock feature three miles away wherein James Bond would cavort his way through windrows of women to be beaten sodden by the minions of some chap of incredible rascality before, at last, outwitting him, slaying him in horrible detail in wide-screen color, with gadgetry devised by M.I.T. dropouts, and then at the fade-out, taking his bemused ease betwixt perfumed breasts of such astonishing pneumatic dimension he would have a slightly exasperated and apologetic look, like that of a man trying to take his bass drum into a phone booth.

  The servant quarters were dark and silent. He had noticed that Crissy Harkinson’s little white convertible was gone. The Akard boy’s car was in the parking area, a clumsy, underprivileged shadow.

  He opened the screen door and went inside. “ ’Cisca?” he called. “ ’Cisca?”

  Fright and apprehension seemed to bulge his heart. He put the food aside hastily and began putting lights on, expecting that it would be one of those plausible domestic accidents. But the small rooms were empty. The candy-striped suit hung from the shower rail.

  She came pattering up the outside stairs, calling, “Raoul? Raoul?” His heart lurched and his knees turned watery, and he knew that he could take no chance with her, not from now on, not ever.

  She had on sleek white slacks and a fussy little red blouse and far too much lipstick. She gave him a quick little hug and kiss, and then laughed at him and said she had given him a clown face. She hurried and got a kleenex and dabbed the red from his mouth. As she busied herself with reheating the food and laying out the dishes and silverware, he said, “The boy is at the house waiting for her?”

  “Oh no. She is there too. Why would you— Of course, her little car is gone. She took it in this morning to be fixed. But by noon it was not done, and they stop work at noon. They will finish it on Monday. A garage man drove her back here. They will deliver the car on Monday. She was very angry. She called me over to speak with her. We talked for a long time. I have good news.”

  “What?”

  “When we are eating. Then I will tell you.”

  They sat down at the small table she had set by the window, and she got up almost immediately and dug into the pocket of her slacks and took out folded bills and sat down again.

  She held the money up and said, “This is until the end of this month of June. She talked to the one you found, that Amparo, on the telephone. Amparo will come here on Wednesday and after I show her where everything is kept and explain how things must be done, then I may go. And she will give me a letter. I think I can find work in California. Maybe I will work for an important actress. Mmmmm. This is very good food, Mister Kellee!”

  “What else did she talk about?”

  “Oh, one minute. Something else to show.” She hurried into her bedroom and returned with a savings account book, handed it to him gravely. “Inspect it, please.”

  The total, deposited in small amounts over two years was just over eleven hundred dollars.

  “Obviously you could have no idea you were associating with such a rich girl,” she said loftily. “I shall pay my share of the expenses of the trip. I would like to know what it is they do to these very small shrimp.”

  “I am honored to have the attentions of such a rich lady. What else did Missy Crissy have on her buzzard’s mind?”

  “She is not so bad as all that! She asked that I do a special favor for her tomorrow night. She is upset. She confided in me. She had tears in her eyes. Sometimes it is possible to feel sorry for her.”

  “What about?”

  “She and the Captain Staniker had a great quarrel before he went away to the Bahamas. That is something I did not know. She told him she never wanted to see him again. She said she was tired of his coming over and complaining about all his troubles, and drinking her whisky and getting ugly and mean. She ended the affair. Now the Captain has returned. He had telephoned her. He insists on seeing her. She begged him not to come here. When he telephoned the second time last evening, the boy was with her. She said the boy became very agitated. She says the boy has an infatuation for her. She admits there was an affair with the Captain, but she looked into my eyes and said there had been no relationship with the boy. That is the kind of lie one cannot expect a housemaid to believe. But I suppose it is a matter of her pride. Even though she knows I know, she cannot say it. It would make her appear foolish, this seduction of a silly boy who could be her son. She said the boy is acting strange and violent, and thinks to protect her from the evil Captain. She cannot make the boy understand that she can protect herself without help.”

  “Where was the boy while all this was going on?”

  “We spoke in the kitchen, sitting with cups of coffee, like old friends. Perhaps in a way we are. She said that all of this has exhausted her. Perhaps the boy was asleep in her bed while we spoke. I could not say. She said that tonight she is going to be very firm with the boy and send him away forever. Doubtless he will make a great scene. She says she cannot endure such nonsense any longer. She says the Captain is a bore and the boy is a fool. She does not want any ugliness here which will bring the police. Tonight she will finish it with the boy and that will be the end of it. And so tomorrow she asks that I remain here all day and all evening. We shall close the big gates. Lock them with the chain and the padlock as when no one is
here. She will turn the switch which silences the phone. Should either one arrive, the Captain or the boy, I can go onto my porch and shout to them that she has gone away, and they can see from the gate her car is gone, an accident of some convenience. She explained she wishes to have a very quiet day alone. I shall fix lunch for her, fix an early dinner, and she will take sleeping pills and go to bed early and see if she can sleep the clock around, or longer, to restore herself. She says she will lock the doors to her bedroom to avoid any chance of the boy bothering her when he comes to remove his sailboat. She said he has promised to come by, in the boat of a friend, at dusk tomorrow and take it away from here. She suggests that I might go around to the bay side of the house at nine o’clock to look and see if the boat is gone, and look in at her to see that she is not being bothered by the boy. She has engaged herself in crude behavior I think, and now wishes to escape, and rest, and perhaps find someone more agreeable.” She gave him a wicked wink. “It is possible of course that she is no longer young enough to accommodate such a hearty young man without finally becoming exhausted, even such a type as she is.”

  “So we do not go back to the beach tomorrow?”

  “It is a pity. When you leave me tonight, you can help me close the gates. They are heavy.” She looked at the clock. “Look! The time! Oh, we will miss the beginning! Hurry!”

  As she sat beside him in the new hard-top movie house at the shopping plaza, gasping and squirming at the magic excitements of Bond, digging her nails into his hand and wrist at the moments of deadliest danger, he followed the plot with a portion of his attention, and at last devised a plausible way to handle the situation.

  The boy’s car was gone when they returned. When they were in the little apartment she chattered about the movie until he said, “Lovely lady, I, Señor Jaime Bond, must ask your assistance in helping me elude the deadly agents of Schmaltz.”