Deadly Welcome

by John D. MacDonald

  “I got about a hundred yards from the auditorium. And suddenly, there in the dark, there were three men around me. They wanted to know where I was going all by myself. They smelled like ’shine. I tried to run and they grabbed me and took me around behind the gym. I kept trying to scream and fight, but they kept clamping their grimy hands over my mouth, and they kept hitting me so that I was dazed. They ripped most of my clothes off, and two of them held me down. I could hear the band playing in the auditorium. If they hadn’t been quite so drunk, I wouldn’t have had a chance in the world. But I kept kicking and bucking and squirming. I think one of them was trying to knock me out. Then somebody drove in and when they came to that turn in front of the gym, the headlights shone on the little scene and it scared them. Just then, thank God, the music stopped and I got my mouth free and yelled. And the car backed up so the lights were on us again. They took off. It was Ben Jeffry, coming to get his daughters. He had an old blanket in the car and he wrapped it around me. I was blubbering like a big baby. He took me to the doctor and even though I begged him not to make a fuss, he phoned the sheriff’s office and reported it as rape. Sheriff Lawlor himself came over. By then word had gotten to the dance somehow. Buddy was there, stag, and he came to the doctor’s office and then went home and got me some clothes. I wasn’t marked up too badly. I did develop two dandy black eyes, and I was cut on the inside of the mouth. I didn’t know who the men were, and I couldn’t describe them, and I couldn’t have identified them anyway.

  “You know this town, Alex. There was more damn talk. I felt as if I couldn’t walk down the street without people running out of their houses to stare at me. By the time the gossips got through with it, it was rape instead of attempted rape, and there had been a whole gang of them, and I was pregnant. And, as I learned later, there was one contingent that said that after all I was Jenna’s sister and I had been drinking and carrying on, and when I was caught I’d started screaming to make people believe it was rape, and I certainly knew who the men were. Very pretty.

  “Well, I didn’t really stop being shaky until the following summer. I had a recurrent nightmare that lasted almost until then. But I had begun to wonder about myself. When a boy at school put his hand on my shoulder it made my stomach turn over. And the idea of ever kissing anyone terrified me. I told myself I’d have to stop being silly. After all, I certainly wanted a home and kids eventually. And I decided to cure myself. Poor Billy Hillyard. He’d always been kind of sappy about me. I guess some men like the big cowy type. So I encouraged him. I didn’t see how Billy could upset me. So I gave him the right chance to kiss me that summer. And I stood it just as long as I could and then I had to push him away and jump out of the car and be terribly, horribly sick. I told Billy it was probably food poisoning. But, almost a month later, when exactly the same thing happened, he lost interest.

  “In my junior year it seemed to be getting worse instead of better. I went to a woman doctor in Gainesville. I told her my sad story. She satisfied herself that I was normal physically in every respect and sent me to a psychiatrist in Tampa. I told him my problem. I told him about the attempted rape. He asked a lot of questions and he seemed much more interested in my childhood, in the father relationship and the sister relationship. I saw him three times. Then he summarized. My basic instincts were normal. But I could not react properly because of an extreme and artificial frigidity that was the direct result of the pattern of my home life. If I could spend eighteen months to two years in deep analysis, he might be able to help me. That was impossible, for many reasons. And then the damndest thing happened. When I came home for spring vacation, I found that it was all over town. Just about everybody knew the intriguing fact that I had gone to a psychiatrist because I was scared to death of men. I soon found out how that had happened. The Tampa doctor had asked the name of my family doctor. And, I suppose as a professional courtesy, he had sent old Dr. Bormen a detailed report. Maybe you remember that Heeley woman who worked for him. She talked all over town about every treatment Doc Bormen ever gave. And she had spread the news, but good. Talk about invasion of privacy.

  “But here is the worst thing about it, Alex. In some crazy way it made me a project for every Don Juan who heard about it. As if I were his personal Sleeping Beauty. And he was just the one to do me the enormous personal favor of waking me up. I was inundated by spooks. And they were all so terribly hurt that I wouldn’t even give them a chance. Nobody would have to know a thing about it. I should just co-operate and try not to be afraid.

  “They’ve given up now, most of them. But I’m still one of the town’s more notorious crazies. I don’t date, and I don’t expect to. They watch me. And I suppose it’s common knowledge that this is the third time I’ve been out here. You can understand now how Donnie was being nasty. I like the work at the yard. I like swimming and sailing the Lady Bird. I am quite content, thank you, but I do sometimes miss the opportunity of having a normal and uncomplicated friendship with a man. Too much girl talk bores me rigid. So that’s it. Don’t try to make me your project, Alex. I’ve filed away those dreams of the joker on the white horse who was always killing a fat dragon who looked like Mr. Bolley. I am resigned to my busy spinsterhood. Even though I think you a very nice guy, Alex, and it’s good to see you after all these years, if you were to lay a hand on me in anything but accident or physical assistance, it would chill me to the very marrow of my bones. And as far as being held and kissed by a man, I would much rather stick my head into a bucket of snakes.”

  “I keep seeing that kid in the blue dress, wanting to be admired.”

  “So do I, Alex. She was so vulnerable. She can break my heart. You won’t mind being a friend of the curious and unnatural Miss Larkin?”

  “Not at all. I’m honored, Miss Larkin.”

  She grinned at him. “Thanks. Say, is there any bread and anything to put between it?”

  She made hefty sandwiches and they ate them on the beach. She went back to work. He baked himself in the sun and thought about her. It seemed curious that she should have such a distorted idea of her own appearance. That was probably part of the quirk. She thought of herself as big, bungling, bovine, cowy. At about five nine and an estimated hundred and thirty-five or forty pounds, she was certainly not tiny. But in the configuration of her body, in the walk and the grace of her, she was superbly feminine.

  And, to his own wry amusement, he found himself composing mental charades in which he taught her that she could fulfill her role as a woman. It was a tantalizing situation, and he suspected that any other attitude toward her would be rather less than normal. But it was, of course, impossible. At the very first gesture toward any kind of intimacy, she would be off and running, never to look back.

  He swam again, deliberately taxing the sore muscles, getting a certain satisfaction out of feeling the stretching and the pain. The club lumps on his skull were smaller, but still tender to the touch.

  He showered and dressed and, at five o’clock, drove over into town. He went to Bolley’s Hardware and bought another spinning rig and got a receipted bill to give Celia M’Gann. He had time to pick up some more groceries. He saw Junie Hillyard in the supermarket. As soon as she recognized him, she deliberately turned her back.

  He started back toward the beach but, on impulse, just as he reached the foot of Bay Street he turned left on Front Street and drove along the bay shore and parked across from the Spanish Mackerel. As he walked toward the Mack he saw that it had changed very little. It was still a fisherman’s bar that managed to look like a seedy lunchroom.

  The late afternoon sunlight flooded in through the front windows. It sat in shabby patience looking across the street toward a fishing dock and boats and rotted pilings, and a pelican sitting on a slanting channel marker, and the green jungly growth of Ramona Key beyond the blue bay water.

  The walls of the Mack were painted a soiled cream and green, cluttered with calendars, smutty mottoes, dusty mounted fish, pieces of net and old cork floats.
There were warped Venetian blinds at all the windows. The bar was on his left as he went in, topped with that imitation marble that used to be used on soda fountains. There were a dozen wooden bar stools stained dark. On his right were a dozen round tables with green formica tops in a green that clashed with the green on the walls. Across the back wall was a huge juke box, and two pinball machines, and a bowling game machine, a wall phone, an open door that exposed a narrow dingy area containing a blackened hamburg grill and a big tarnished coffee urn; a closed door that, he remembered, gave access to a back room for card games, a kitchen, a staircase to the upstairs where Harry Bann lived.

  The only customer was a man sitting on the stool farthest from the entrance. He wore a blue work shirt and denim pants, with the shirt sleeves rolled high to expose muscular arms thickly matted with curly black hair. He had an empty beer bottle and an empty glass in front of him. In profile his face looked dark and predatory under a forehead so high and bulging that it gave him something of the look of a surly embryo. The girl behind the bar was leaning on it and talking to the man in a voice so low that Doyle could not distinguish a word. But it all had the flavor of argument. She gave Doyle a casual glance when he took the stool nearest the door and returned to the inaudible wrangle.

  He sat and stared at a card of potato chips, a jar of evil-looking pickles, a peanut machine, dusty liquor bottles aligned in front of a long blue panel of mirror, a chrome paper-napkin dispenser, a withered menu with a water-skiing maiden on the front, a squeeze bottle of catsup and one of mustard, both obviously used often and carelessly, two busy flies on the coffee-spattered rim of a thick china sugar bowl, one poster announcing a dance over in Wellsland that had taken place two months ago, an ancient cash register which sat on a smeared glass case containing cigarettes, cigars, candy and, incongruously, a small plastic Santa Claus with a face of discontent.

  He waited patiently, becoming more and more aware of the effluvia of stale grease, spilled beer and elderly nicotine. More subtle were the drifting odors of rancid coffee, perfume, fish scales, armpits, bad plumbing, and the nausea of ten thousand Saturday nights.

  The girl finally walked down toward Doyle, a girl in her early twenties he guessed, with carroty red hair, a moon face lightly pocked with old acne scars, small features squeezed together in the middle of an expression of surly petulance, a pinched discontent. She had made her mouth vast and square with a shade of lipstick that did not suit her. She wore tight threadbare red shorts, a faded red halter, a small stained apron. Her figure was heavy, but reasonably good. Her skin had that damp and luminous blue-whiteness of cheap lard and overturned fish. When she walked she set her heels down so heavily she awakened little jinglings among the racked glasses, and her large breasts and heavy thighs joggled most unpleasantly.

  He ordered a beer and watched her walk back to the beer cooler, the pulpy buttocks working under the frayed red fabric. From her coloring he guessed she was some kin to Harry Bann’s wife. Mrs. Bann had been a meaty carroty woman who had often come to visit Doyle’s mother at the hotel, and who had died that same winter Mary Ann Doyle had died. Some kind of kidney trouble.

  She banged the beer down in front of him, slapped his change from fifty cents on the bar top and went back to her friend. The old man he had seen reading the comic book in Ducklin’s shuffled in, talking gently to himself. He threw down a double shot and trudged out. The hairy embryo stood up and snarled something at the girl.

  “So never come back!” she yelled. “So who cares?”

  The man left. The screen-door cylinder hissed wearily as the door swung shut. The girl sighed and began to mop the counter listlessly, working her way down toward Doyle.

  “Not much business,” he said.

  “Friday and Saddy there’s more.”

  “You related to Harry?”

  She stopped mopping and stared at him, her eyes small and pale and blue and suspicious. “I’m his niece. Who’s asking?”

  “My name is Doyle. I used to live here.”

  Her face brightened. “Hey, you’re the one! I hear people talking about you. My brothers were in, talking about you. Lee and Gil. I’m Janie Kemmer. My ma was Miz Bann’s sister. Gil says you and him used to fight. How long you been gone?”

  “Fifteen years.”

  “Then I wouldn’t remember on account of I was three or four years old.”

  “I met Lee when I first got back.”

  “And he was drunk, I bet.” She sighed. “They just don’t seem to give a damn. They do a little fishing and they hire out on construction sometimes, but most of the work they do is free road work when Donnie Capp picks them up for drunk or fighting. Gil was sent away once for four years. It was just a fight right out behind here in the lot, with a drunk tourist. He was sort of old but he wanted real bad to fight Gil, so that’s how come it was only manslaughter. Now Lee is back on road work. Donnie picked him up last night again.” She smirked. “Old Lee, he sure is funny sometimes. He didn’t have a ride back down to Bucket Bay and he was trying to steal a boat.”

  “It looked to me like you were having a fuss with your friend sitting up the other end of the bar.”

  She looked desolate. “That Charlie is a jerk. I been going with him three years; and now I want to get married, he wants to go back in the navy. All the time he says when I’m eighteen we get married and everything is fine. Now he wants to go in the navy.” The blue eyes suddenly began to leak tears. “God damn him!” she said, and snatched a paper napkin, turned her back and blew her nose.

  Doyle sat uncomfortably until she turned back and said, “I din’t mean to pop off. Only he gets me so mad. Only he’s twenty-eight, and how long should you wait anyhow? I’m supposed to hang around here and wait or something. Nothing ever happens here. Nothing!”

  “From what I’ve heard since I’ve been back, a lot has been happening around here, Janie.”

  “Oh, you mean the murder. Well, that was something, I guess. But how many of those do you get? I mean how often? Every hundred years or something. Oh, I don’t mean there hasn’t been killings. Knifings and like that. The last time there was a murder-type murder, it was a long time ago, down in Bucket Bay. I guess I was maybe nine or ten. When that old Paul Garnette, him that had all the kids, got caught by that Casey Myers when Paul was fooling around with Casey’s fifteen-year-old daughter, the one that wasn’t right in the head. Casey grabbed a gaff and yanked him off. Got him right in the throat with the gaff, and then that girl really went nuts. They had to put her away some place. Casey was only in jail overnight and it didn’t get into all the big papers like when Jenna was murdered. God, this little ole town sure was jumping. Harry and I liked to work ourselves to death. Those newspaper people drink almost as fast as the commercial fishermen.”

  “I used to know a lot of the commercial fishermen.”

  “I guess there was a lot more fifteen years ago, Mr. Doyle. Plenty of them moved further south, and a lot of them got out of the business, they say. There’s empty shacks down to Bucket Bay, just standing there rotting. They can still make it on the shrimps, but they got to go to Tampa or Key West to ship out.”

  She excused herself to go greet two young men in sweaty khakis and serve them beer at the far end of the bar. She talked with them for a little while and then she came back to him. There was just enough coquetry in her walk and manner so that he suspected that he had been considered as a possible substitute for the uncooperative Charlie.

  “That’s a real pretty sport shirt, Mr. Doyle.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What’s your line of work?”

  “Nothing right now. I’m looking around. Maybe I might pick up a used dozer and see if I can get some land-clearing work.”

  “There isn’t as much of that to do around here as there is other places. But there’s some. Don’t they cost a lot?”

  “I’ve got a little ahead. I just came back from working in Venezuela.”

  “God, I’d like to travel some. I’d
like to see me some far away places. Nothing ever happens here.”

  “Except a murder every once in a while.”

  “Now you just stop teasing me, Mr. Doyle.”

  “Alex.”

  “That’s a nice name. I like that name.”

  “I heard Jenna was in here the night she got killed.”

  She glanced toward the two boys and lowered her voice. “I’ve got orders from Harry not to talk about it to strangers. I don’t see what difference it makes. It gets talked about a lot in here. And sometimes you wonder if maybe somebody talking or listening is the one did it.” She hugged herself with her heavy white arms and gave a little shiver. “That’s kind of creepy. Anyhow, I guess it’s because Donnie Capp doesn’t want any strangers around prying. He runs ’em off. I guess he’s maybe afraid somebody might by accident pry around and find out who did it before Donnie finds out. He’s got to be the one who gets the killer because it’s a matter of pride. The big shots sorta pushed him out of the way last fall when they were investigating. But since you come from here, I guess you aren’t a stranger. She was in here all right that night. Friday night. I went off at six on account of Harry doesn’t like me working at night, especially on a Friday or Saddy night when things can get rough around here real fast and a girl can’t walk across the room without wise guys grabbing at her. But she was here before I went off and she stayed until closing. And then she walked right out and got herself strangled. I couldn’t hardly believe it when I heard it the next morning. I wanted to get to see her at Jeffry Brothers, but that sister of Colonel M’Gann had fixed it so nobody could get to see her but the family, and they say the colonel didn’t get to see her even. On account of his bad heart.”

  “I guess Jenna wasn’t much like her kid sister.”

  “I swear I don’t see how those two came out of the same family. You know, Betty comes in here a lot.”

  “She does!”

  “The boat yard is just down the road another two blocks, you know. And all the fishermen, they think she’s the finest damn thing on legs. When old Spence Larkin was alive they say he wouldn’t touch a commercial boat unless it was cash on the line. But she works things out with them so they can get work done when they have to have it. And she’ll stop in here and have a beer with them. Usually in the afternoon, but sometimes in the evening. And you don’t see anybody making any grabs at her. If anybody did, all her boatyard customers would tear the poor guy’s head off and use the rest of him for chum. Not that anybody but some stranger would get fresh with her, him not knowing about her. There’s something wrong with her. She looks like a lot of woman but she isn’t. Something terrible happened to her a long time ago, and she just isn’t any good for anything. God, I’d hate to be like that. I guess it just about wouldn’t be worth living, wouldn’t you say?”