Border Town Girl

by John D. MacDonald

  “No thanks. I want to talk to you.”

  He looked uncomfortable. “Sure,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  It made me feel as though I were in a badly written play. “I guess you know what I want to talk to you about.”

  “I can’t say that I do.”

  He was making it as difficult for me as he could. “It’s about you and Linda, Jeff. What are you trying to do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The four of us never do anything together. You and Linda swim together, go off walking together. You’re making it damn awkward for your wife and for me.”

  He seemed to gain confidence. “Have you talked to Linda about this?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “What does she say, old man?”

  “Don’t call me old man. She doesn’t say much of anything. She won’t explain or apologize. It seems to me like the most thoughtless piece of selfishness I’ve ever seen. It’s spoiling everything. My God, if you want to break up both marriages, at least put your cards on the table.”

  He even smiled at me, though his eyes were still uneasy. “Paul, old man, a vacation is where you do as you please. I’m doing as I please. I guess Linda is too. So don’t get so steamed up. Relax. Enjoy yourself.”

  He sneered a little as he said the last few words. I didn’t have any tiny fragment of liking for him left. I hated him and what he was doing. Linda’s personal promises had been no good. She hadn’t let me touch her since we’d gotten to Florida.

  I was hurt and angry. My hands and arms are hard and tough. I sprang at Jeff and hit him in the mouth. He went over onto the sand and the rifle went flying. He looked at me with complete shock which changed at once to anger as he scrambled up. I was a fool to hit him. He had the advantage in youth, in weight, height, reach and condition. The last fight I had been in had been in a schoolyard—and I had lost.

  Jeff charged me with such fury that he knocked me down without actually punching me. I got up and he hit me in the chest and knocked me down again. As I got up, Stella came running between us. Instead of calling out to her husband she said to me, “No, Paul! No.”

  Jeff picked up the sandy rifle and stared at me and stalked toward their cabin. I saw at once what Stella meant. It didn’t do any good. It couldn’t do any good. Fighting over Linda was purposeless.

  Back on the porch of their cottage, Jeff dismantled the rifle on spread newspapers and cleaned the sand from it with an oily rag. He was as opaque as Linda. It was a game, and neither Stella nor I knew the rules. They were both stronger people, and we did not know what to do about the strange situation. People should not act that way. They were not taunting Stella and me. They were not precisely goading me. They gave us no obvious evidence of infidelity, which would have forced it to an issue. They merely went their own casual way, as though we had changed marriage partners during the day, only to be sorted out again each night, quite late.

  Stella and I were stuck with the marketing. Linda would give me a list. I would drive to Hooker and Stella would come along. Forsaking all pride, she had tried to talk to Linda. She had not wanted to weep, but she did, and hated herself for her weakness. Linda had been just as casual and noncommittal with her as Jeff had with me. It made a nightmare of what both Stella and I had hoped would be a good and happy time.

  Because it was the two of us who did the shopping, the people in Hooker, as I found out later, were understandably confused as to who was married to whom. And much was later made of the fifth of November. That was the day when, as we were about to leave, Jeff asked me to get the car greased and get an oil change.

  We rode to town, not talking much, both of us thinking about the two we had left behind us. It was a curious situation. We could not, in all pride, guard them and spy upon them. We left the car at a service station and walked down the hot street to a small air-conditioned bar. I suppose, as was later said, we did have our heads together, and we did talk earnestly in low voices to each other. And Stella did cry at one point, but very briefly.

  When we got back they were both swimming about two hundred yards offshore.

  It was on Sunday, the seventh, that Stella and I went for our walk. That was the day another distorted facet was added to our relationship. I did not know where Linda and Jeff were. Linda had just washed the lunch dishes and gone. I was on the porch when Stella came over, a strained look about her eyes. “Want to walk with me, Paul?”

  “Sure.” We headed south, walking briskly. “Did they go this way?” I asked.

  “No. They took the boat and went north up the bay,” she said. “Jeff took his tackle. I just… want to walk, Paul, and I didn’t want to be alone.”

  She set a fast pace. The sun was hot on my shoulders, but neither of us had to be so wary of the sun any more. We were both barefoot, and she wore a strapless dark blue bathing suit which clung to her body. It had white ruffles at the hips and at the bodice. Her pale hair was fastened back with a silver clip and she wore the massive dark glasses. As I have said before, Stella is not a pretty woman. Her brows and lashes are too pale, her nose too prominent, her mouth too wide in her thin face.

  I can quite truthfully say that until that walk I had never looked at her as a woman, as a woman to be desired. I had been as unconscious of her body as if she had been a younger sister. I do not think that is due to any lack in me. It is because I had gotten to know her as Stella, fully clothed, in her living room at home and in mine. Even after the transition to brief bathing suit, it was as though I still saw her in the rather quiet clothes she preferred, without provocative habits of walk or posture, with only her own subdued and quiet grace.

  My vision of her changed without warning, and it happened this way. We went further down the beach than I had ever gone. We came to a place where a groyne had been built of heavy stones to forestall erosion. The sea had smashed it into a jagged barrier across our path.

  “Turn back?” I asked.

  “Let’s go on.” She picked her way cautiously, over the barrier. I was behind her. Her small firm hips were round under the ruffled suit. I saw the long delicacy of her legs, and the blue track of veins in the backs of her knees. Her waist was slender, her back straight. The lines of her shoulders and throat were clear and clean. When we were across and I walked beside her again I looked almost furtively at her high small breasts, the flex and lift of her thighs as she walked. I had taken her for granted, never quite looking at her, believing her body to be gaunt, bony.

  Now that I was aware of her, I made inevitable comparisons. Linda was flamboyantly noticeable. Stella was subtle in the way that a Japanese print is subtle. Only after a study of the restrained delicacy of the print can you begin to see the strength and discipline and vitality of it. Linda was a portrait in heavy oils.

  Do not think from this that I had begun to walk beside her drooling like a schoolboy. It was just that I noticed her for the first time and saw what she was and was saddened by it. For if Linda chose to hurt me, an action I could halfway understand through critical appraisal of myself, Jeff, in denying this woman, was doing something less understandable and more brutal. Perhaps there is always a deeper and more bitter significance when a woman is hurt. Traditionally, a man can turn to other arms, salving his ego. A woman can only wonder why the gift of herself is found not to be enough.

  A half-mile beyond the rock barrier we found an old house. It had once been impressive. The flat roof had fallen in and storms had shifted plaster walls, exposing the old brick underneath. Sand had covered most of the shattered cement sea wall. Stella walked up the slope of the beach and sat on a tilted section of the sea wall. I sat beside her. Far offshore a school of bait danced and spattered in the sun as torpedo hunger smashed upward at it from deep water.

  “I guess I give up, Paul,” she said tonelessly.

  “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. Stop trying, for one thing. You and Linda have your reservations for next Saturday, don’t you?”


  “That’s right.”

  She gave me a crooked smile. “I’ll use the week getting some more sun and doing some thinking. I—I never ran into anything like this. I’ll let him drive me back. Maybe once they’re apart he’ll talk about it. Even if he was abject about it, I don’t think I could stay. Not after this… special kind of humiliation.”

  She paused, then started talking very fast, not looking at me. “One summer when I was little they sent me to a very smart and exclusive camp for girls. At the camp everybody was assigned to a group of six. I arrived late. The group was all formed. I guess I was pretty discouraging to them. You see, the groups of six were in competition. Swimming and riding and so on. There I was, a wan, shy little bug-eyed thing, looking as I was made of pipe cleaners, and had a mouth full of metal and springs. They had a whole series of secrets they kept from me. They even had a special language. I had a hell of a summer. This keeps reminding me of it. I didn’t know I was still so vulnerable.”

  I knew exactly what she meant. It surprised me because I had thought that money was always the perfect insulation against that kind of aloneness.

  “Couldn’t you have asked your people to take you out and send you to some other place?”

  “I could have. They would have. But I didn’t want to be humiliated in their eyes, either. I didn’t want to seem inadequate. They both were drowned two years later, off Bimini in their boat in a storm. They were always adequate. Big brown laughing people, with white white teeth. Daddy called me the white mouse. He meant it affectionately, but it always hurt a little. Now I guess that Jeff has—has turned me back into the white…” She put her face in her hands. She cried silently.

  I put my arm around her sun-hot shoulders, moved closer to her. I held her for a long time and when she lifted her face toward me, I kissed her, tasting salt. I took my arm away awkwardly and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. They threw us together. We’re on the outside. We can comfort each other, I guess. Anyway, Paul, I’m glad you kissed me. It makes me feel… well, more competent, I guess. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I haven’t got enough pride. I keep thinking this will blow over. Maybe it won’t be precisely the same again, but it will be enough for me. I don’t demand much, I guess. Or maybe merit much.”

  “Don’t low rate yourself.”

  “I’m not. I’m being honest. I’m still surprised Linda married me. I guess I’m still grateful, in a sense.”

  She frowned and looked away from me. “Ever since I became what they coyly called marriageable, I’ve had a different problem. There were always plenty of them. Nice, polite, handsome, muscular young men. The thing was to decide whether it was me or the money.”

  “It there that much?”

  “Bushels. An obscene amount. I guess I’ve demanded that we live simply as a sort of continuing test of Jeff. Now I wonder if that was wrong. Maybe if I’d decided it was really me he wanted, and begun to live the way we can, he wouldn’t have done this. No, that wouldn’t be any good either. And there’s no sense in saying if I’d done this or if I’d done that. It’s done now. It’s over.”

  “Are you going to leave him?”

  “Yes. And then indulge myself for a while. Play hard. Financial bandages for the bruised ego. You know, Paul, we ought to take off together. Give them back some of their own coin. Acapulco, Rome, the Virgin Islands, the south of France. A tour of the playgrounds. God, how they’d writhe!”

  I looked at her. “But we can’t, of course.”

  Her eyes were somber. “No. We can’t.” She stood up and tried to smile. “Back to the wars, Cowley.”

  We walked back to our strange war. Toward the callousness of two people who would not explain or desist. They conducted some strange campaign against us and we were helpless because we did not understand. Two white mice, perhaps. Two blind mice.

  Wednesday, the tenth of November, was the hottest day of all. Though the sky was a deep and intense blue, the water was oddly gray, the swells oily, the horizon misted. There was a feel of change in the air. The day was very still, but from time to time gusts of superheated air would spin down the beach, plucking the sand up into small spirals that would die quickly as the gust faded away. A solemn army of billions of minnows moved steadily northward a few feet off the beach. Small sandpipers ran in flocks, pecking and then trotting up and away from the lap of waves, like groups of spry, stooped little men in tailcoats with their hands locked behind them.

  There had been no change in either Jeff or Linda. If there was any change at all in Linda that morning, it was a slight irritability hitherto lacking, yet familiar to me, and I wondered if it foretold the beginning of the end of her strange actions. I went out onto the beach at about ten. Stella came out about fifteen minutes later, wearing a trim yellow suit. She spread her huge towel beside my blanket, went out and swam and then came back, taking her rubber cap off, shaking out her pale hair, smiling at me. She stretched out beside me and we surrendered ourselves to the hard pulse of the sun.

  I heard a sharp, snapping sound and without opening my eyes I knew it was the rifle. I propped myself up on one elbow and watched Jeff shooting at the empty cans. I noticed that his eye was off. The day and the sea were so still that once I heard the skree of a ricochet when a slug skipped off the water.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Linda coming down from our cottage. She wore, for the first time, a new swim suit which she had bought just before we left. I wondered why she had saved it until now. I wondered why she had bought it. It certainly did not become her. It was dark green, and so conservative that it looked as though she had rented it. Compared to her favorite, a wispy Bikini which seemed to be supported only by faith, this green one was practically funereal. She stood close to Jeff. He stopped shooting, bent his head a bit to listen to her. Secrets. It made me think of the white mouse in that girls’ camp.

  I lay back and shut my eyes. Some time later—I do not know how long, perhaps ten minutes—I opened my eyes and saw that Jeff was sitting on the other side of Stella. His long hard legs were brown, and the curled hair on them was bleached white. He sat looking out at the Gulf and I saw the knob of muscle stand out at the corner of his jaw as he clenched his teeth. I wondered what he was thinking.

  It was still morning and the sun was high, though slightly in the east. A shadow fell across me. I looked down and saw the long thin shadow of the rifle barrel, the bulkier shadow of Linda. I looked back at her. She was standing behind me. She had the rifle to her shoulder and she was aiming it carefully at Stella’s head. I believe that what I started to say was something to the effect that you shouldn’t aim a gun at anybody, even as a macabre joke. I said half a word before Linda pulled the trigger. As the muzzle was about three feet from my face, the sound of the shot was much louder than any that had gone before.

  It has been verified that the small leaden pellet struck approximately an inch above Stella Jeffries’ hairline and ranged down through her skull, hydrostatic pressure of the pellet against the brain fluid bulging her face grotesquely. The pellet lodged in her throat after smashing a major artery. The immediate brain damage imparted a stimulus to the central nervous system so that her body bowed upward, resting only on her heels and the nape of her neck, rigid as iron for what seemed to me to be seconds on end, then collapsed suddenly and utterly with a small wet coughing noise that smeared suit, throat, shoulders and big towel with bright red blood.

  If you have never seen an equivalent moment of bright violence, it will be impossible for you to understand the mental and emotional results of the shock. For one thing, the actual moment itself is stamped into your mind as though hammered there by a great steel die. Imagine that each of your areas of thought is a sheet of paper, and these sheets of paper are carefully stacked, and the impact of the die embosses the picture of violence all the way down through the stack, sharply and clearly. So that later, should you think of chess or spinach, ashtrays or beef cattle,
even the texture of that area of thought bears the clear-edged memory of sun and sand, of the way the long muscles of her legs pulled rigid as she bowed her body, of the way the single eye you could see, far open in the instant of death, showed white all the way around the blinded iris and pupil, of the way the hand nearest you, after the collapse and gout of blood, made one last movement, a tremor of thin fingers so slight that perhaps you didn’t see it at all.

  The second aspect, more difficult to describe, is the way shock makes subsequent though processes unreliable. It is as though the brain makes such a convulsive effort to take in every tiny aspect of the moment of violence that it exhausts itself and, thereafter, functions only intermittently, absorbing varied memories but interspersing them with periods of blankness impossible to recall.

  When I looked, stupefied, at Linda, I saw the muzzle of the rifle swing slowly toward Jeff. She worked the bolt expertly. A tiny gleaming cartridge case arced out onto the sand.

  Jeff gave a great hoarse cry of panic. I believe I shouted something at the same moment. What it was, I do not know. I tried to grab at Linda, but she moved quickly away from me. Jeff had bounded to his feet and he ran hard, ran in a straight line away from us. The rifle snapped and he plunged forward, turning his right shoulder down as he fell, rolling over twice to lie still on his face. Linda fired again with great care a fraction of a second before I grabbed the gun and twisted it out of her hands. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jeff’s body twitch as she fired.

  I had the gun. She looked at me. Her eyes were like frosted glass. The lower half of her face was slack. Her underlip had fallen away from her teeth. I remember that there was a fleck of brown tobacco on one of her lower teeth and that I had the insane impulse to reach out with my finger and remove it. I do not know what was said, if anything, because at that point there came one of those blind spots in memory.

  I remember standing there with the rifle in my hands. Linda had apparently walked up the beach some hundred feet. She was standing in the water, in shallow water, bending awkwardly forward and being sick. I could not look at the body of Stella or the body of Jeff. I have always been that way. Linda laughed at me one time a few years ago. During the night a cat had died in our yard. I don’t know what had killed it. I could not touch it. I could not stand looking at it. I dug the hole for it and went in the house. Linda put it in the hole and covered it up.