End of the Tiger

by John D. MacDonald

  When he released her, gasping, she said, “What is this all about?”

  “It is because you are a woman of rare perception and intelligence. And if I have your solemn promise never to gloat, I’ll tell you it is because you were entirely right, and I was dead wrong, darling.”

  “About the job?”

  “What else, pray? I just got bumped ten thousand, baby.”

  “Ben! I don’t know what to say! How incredibly wonderful!”

  “And we’re going to live one mile in the air, woman. You are standing in the presence of the brand-new district manager, Southwest District, headquarters in Denver.” Even as he beamed at her proudly, he was watching her closely. It was the critical moment.

  He saw the doubts go out of her eyes. “Then champagne is exactly the right thing, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Please chill it immediately. And jump when I give an order. I expect more respect around here from now on.”

  “Lord and master,” she said, smiling, and came into his arms again.

  He held the flame of his lighter to read his watch. Another ten minutes and it would be time to start to the airport. You did what you felt you had to do, and when it was done, you lived with it.

  They could be content here, secure and happy. Things might become as good as they had once been, before insecurity began to corrode their contentment.

  But he knew, and he would always know, that he had once climbed to a high and lonely place, that with the climbing irons and the ropes he had reached the last sheer drop before the summit. He had swung there in the frosty gale until finally, too numbed to make the final effort, he had climbed back down the way he had come, back down to a niche where he could be warm and safe and out of the wind.

  He knew he would read and hear about the ones who made it all the way to the high peaks. The lower slopes of the mountains were warm and easy, and the trails were marked. The high places were dangerous. He knew how close he had come, and he could read about the others who had made it. Their powers and their decisions would affect him. And all his life he would wonder just how it felt to be up there.

  He stood up and snapped his cigarette into the night and walked back to the car. As he got behind the wheel he found himself wondering if it was a happy ending. He smiled with derision at himself as that ancient phrase came into his mind. Happy endings were reserved for stories for children. An adult concerned himself with feasible endings. And this one was feasible, as an ending or as a beginning. You had to put your own puzzle together, and nobody would ever come along to tell you how well or how poorly you had done.

  Afternoon of the Hero

  He woke up quite alone in his half acre of bed, in the sealed, soundproofed, shadowy expanse of bedroom, measuring the bulge of pain behind his eyes, tasting the sourness of his tongue. Soon, willing himself to make the effort, he hitched to the side of the bed, swung his legs out, and sat up quite slowly, making a face, scrubbing at his thinning harshness of black hair. He wormed his bare toes into the fur of the big white rug beside the bed and saw himself indistinctly in a distant mirror, the round doll-man in the bright pajamas. He reached to the big button board set into the headboard and punched the one for the draperies. The electric motor whined into life and opened the heavy draperies that covered the big window wall, letting in the flood of mid-May sunshine.

  He pantomimed an extreme agony, covering his eyes with a heavy forearm, holding the other hand out in defense, and saying in one of his Balkan accents, “No, Andreyev, not the torture of the lights, comrade, I beg you.” He peered over his forearm, blinking. “I did it! I did it! I sabotaged the hushpuppy production, you all.”

  He sighed and pushed the button for the tape. After a few scratchy sounds the music came on with a depth and fidelity too impressive for the song. It started up in the middle of a ricky-tick version of the Bahamian ballad Yellow Bird, a girl singing the lyrics in a gassy mock-sensual way.

  He hummed skillful harmony and stood up and became a mortally wounded fellow bent on reaching the bathroom before expiring. He burlesqued it, using all the ingrained art of that big fat spry useful body, faking the smack of forehead against doorframe, the dazed rebound.

  The big bathroom opened into another room with matching tile, containing his exercise equipment, rubbing table, barber chair, and steam box. His spacious shower stall had six shower heads and a back wall mirror. After soap and heat, he danced and gasped for a time in the chill spray of ice water. He knotted a large coral towel around his belly and went back to the bedroom. He went directly to the button board to ring for Robbie but stopped just before his finger touched the button. Just one more time, he thought. He had been aware of the magazine over on his desk from the instant he was completely awake. The special messenger had brought it out to the house the previous evening. Today five or six million copies were going into the hands of the public.

  He brought the magazine back to the bed and sat and read that part again.

  It would be too trite to say that King Noonan, one of the most fabulously successful comics of our time, is, underneath his exuberant exterior, a lonely and complex fellow. And perhaps it is no longer fashionable to look for the basic motivating force. But, if backed into a corner, I would say that the King’s engine is fear. He is not lonely—not with that permanent retinue. Nor is he complex in the ordinary meaning of the word.

  King Noonan runs scared, and thus he runs very hard indeed. He is afraid of the effects of the abuse he inflicts on his big durable body. He is terrified of death. He is afraid of being laughed at for the wrong reasons. He is afraid to think of the probable reasons for the failures of his marriages, the failures in friendship. Failure is indeed his demon. Failure professionally, personally, socially, emotionally. And so he drives himself in the pursuit of a perfection that will make failure unthinkable, and we are the ones who gain thereby.

  One day one of the demons will catch him. But in the meantime we are privileged to watch the chase, and enjoy the by-product of his fear, that great comic art, sometimes vulgar, sometimes as sensitive and delicate as great theater, always competent. Fear is the engine, and laughter is the long bright road.

  He slapped the magazine shut and scaled it across the room, pages rattling. He went after it and picked it up and put it back on the desk. He wandered to the window wall and looked down at the pool. There were a few swimmers, and all the others were stretched out, flesh oiled, in the sun. No sound of them came into the room, no splash or shout or girl laugh, though he could see their mouths. Like a film with the sound gone bad. An idea moved through the back of his mind, a skit where the sound came and went, the silent parts always giving the audience an incorrect and bawdy idea of what was going on. Could they fake running a film backward? Ask Jorgie about that. Maybe do the rubber cane bit in reverse pantomime.

  Robbie appeared less than a minute after King punched his bell. He came in briskly enough, and the smile was there, but King sensed something tentative about the man. The narrow jockey-face looked closed and defensive. So maybe it had been a rougher night than he remembered.

  “There are some strange pussycats in the pool,” King said.

  “Oh, Franklin sent those two out. What they are, they’re for the stewardess part. What he said, either one is okay with him, so you pick. They got the knives for each other, naturally.”

  “Chrissake, Robbie, that isn’t until August.”

  “I know. He says let’s get set as far as we can as soon as we can, on everything that doesn’t start nibbling the budget. What’s the matter with you maybe hustling Kerner on the script some, Franklin says.”

  “Tell him to goose Kerner, and what’s the matter with you? I fire you last night?”

  “Two or three times, King. Look, we’ve got in maybe forty calls, what they say mostly is that Jessup is a rat fink after all the time he spent with you, then doing that fright thing. They say you want he should have a broken leg, okay. I called Barney like you said, and he said nothing actionab
le.”

  King Noonan stared at him. “Like I said?”

  “Last night you said call Barney.”

  “Chrissake, baby, I must have been sauced. Look, do I ever give a damn what’s written about me? No. Jessup is in the business of selling magazines. Right? I’m in the business of selling King Noonan.”

  “Well, it was rough. You know that. It was rough.”

  “Everything is rough wherever you look, Robbie. Let’s join hands and start the dancing around here. This is the way we open. I want Mitch to come pound me some to get my heart started, ten minutes of that, and then Hymie come give me a shave and a trim. While that is going on I can be going over the Chicago material with Mert and Willy. That’s tomorrow night out there, and it isn’t smoothed out yet. Breakfast here in … thirty-five minutes, mucho eggs scrambled, and a herd of those little sausages like yesterday. Have Mary Ann up here to go over those series ideas while I eat, and Maddy to take notes. But the first priority, you find Joseph and send him up here with an ice-cold pitcher of orange juice belted real good with vodka.”

  Robbie moved toward the door. “Fennison is here with that deal about the French television …”

  “Baby, after Mary Ann. Then we schedule and run like a train.”

  He was stretched out on the rubdown table with big Mitch chopping at his shoulder muscles when Joseph scurried in and poured a tall glass of juice. Hymie was waiting by the barber chair, stropping his razor. Mert and Willy came in with pink copies of the Chicago material. The juice had reminded him of something. He had Mitch quit and he sat on the table and said, “This juice, I remember I was eighteen, nineteen, working this club in Camden, New Jersey. A little palace for cockroaches and the material strictly blue, the bar whisky two bits a shot, the broads cruising like vultures, you know the type place. So on a Saturday we all hear the place is closing, it’s the last night. Midnight we roust the customers we’ve got, maybe three, and word is around, so the bartenders, the broads, the entertainment from the other joints along the street, they come in through the back, and what we have is these odds and ends of bottles. Aquavit, Curaçao, crap like that, so we make a hell of a big punch bowl, and it tastes so bad we squeeze a hell of a lot of oranges in.” He was into the rhythm of it then, the clown face mobile, words flowing into the apt gestures, timing professionally precise, voice flexible. He told the little audience of four how one of the girls, anxious to use up all the bottled goods, had, when they mixed the second batch, dumped in the entire contents of the bartender’s little bottle of chloral hydrate, thinking it some kind of bitters. He bounced off the table and imitated the way they went down—the glaze, the sag, the little blind stagger. He had the audience howling and weeping with laughter. “Three years before I could stare an orange in the face,” he said and got into the barber chair. Hymie tilted him back and wrapped his face in the steaming towel.

  He put on his dragon robe for breakfast. Mary Ann Mize was waiting for him at the bedroom table, sipping hot coffee. Maddy was over at the desk, her steno book and pencils ready. He ignored Mary Ann and went over to Maddy and kissed her, then hooked a finger in the top of her blouse, pulled it away from her body, stared severely down, and shouted, “You men down there! Back to work! We need more barrage balloons to save London.” Maddy flushed and giggled.

  He went to the table and began to eat, without word or glance for Mary Ann. She was a fox-faced woman in her forties, with a sour inverted smile. She waited him out.

  “So make the pitch again,” he said at last.

  “I will make the pitch. And keep making it. Pressure, sweetie. This year is in the can, and the ratings are holding. Pressure from the network, the sponsors, the agencies. And pressure from me, sweetie. We should give them another thirty-nine weeks like the last thirty-nine weeks. It is hot and running. Everybody thinks you’d be insane to move to a new format, even if we could come up with a good one.”

  “Do you think I’m insane?”

  “Sweetie, after fifteen years I think I know how your mind works. Always you want to quit ahead. Right. About next season you wonder if it could go stale, and you get scared that …”

  He turned the direction of the piece of buttered toast and, cat quick, thumbed her chin down and shoved it into her mouth. “The King is never scared, Mary Ann.”

  She chewed and swallowed, her eyes narrow and angry. “You buy my advice, so take it, King. I say ride it another season. Already we’ve got six good scripts. We shuffle the writers some to hold it fresh. We’ll hold a top rating, believe me.”

  He aimed a finger at her. “What you do, you brief me on the new ideas right now. Maddy writes down my reaction. I come back from Chicago, I say whether we ride the same thing another year or we come up with a new one.”

  “The time is getting short, you know.”

  “And if we go with the same one, it’s a risk for me. For taking a risk, I get paid money. They understand I’ll want more?”

  “They understand and they’re crying, but they’ll pay.”

  “Shut up and start reading.”

  All things considered, it was an easy day. By one in the afternoon he had disposed of Franklin and the French deal. He had given Mary Ann some new ideas to whip into shape. Mert and Willy were putting final touches on the Chicago material. He had made a couple of long lazy phone calls to friends on the Coast, proving in an indirect and discreet way that Warner Jessup had been faking it out and hadn’t moved in close enough to sting the King.

  At one o’clock he put on some baggy madras shorts and went down to the pool. Joseph was tending the garden bar, and some of his people were beginning to set up the lunch buffet. Hobbie and Marda and some of that crowd had come over, and thirty seconds after King had a drink in his hand, he realized that they were going to give him the rough treatment on the Jessup bit, with Hobbie leading the way. So he did the only thing he could; he took it right to them, pantomiming extravagant terror of every small thing. He went on the high board and did a guy too frightened to jump, who finally fainted and fell off. When anybody came up behind him, he would give a great shuddering leap. He renamed himself Chicken a la King, and after he started them all swinging his way, he zeroed in on Hobbie Thorn with particular attention to Hobbie’s network cancellation, and he kept driving it in until Hobbie finally went roaring off in his golden convertible, the back of his bull neck brick red.

  It was sometime after three o’clock when, among the pool group, he noticed one of the pussycats Franklin had sent up from town. He got her aside. A small-boned blonde, young, wise-eyed, with a lot of facial business, conversational extravagance, the choppy gestures of the industry. Her name was Adele Bowen, and she recited a whole string of credits with watchful aplomb.

  He sat on a bench and beamed up at her and said, “The way we’ll work the picture, dear girl, we shoot it tight, like in thirty days, but we play it free and loose, like improvise, so we can all have some fun. I like to move around in the lines, and you got to pick it up without breaking up.”

  “King, I’ve done a lot of …”

  “You do me some quick takes right now, dear girl. Walk by me and double take into horror and astonishment.”

  She went into it without pause, the bland glance as she passed, the halt, the slow turn of the head, eyes widening, mouth sagging, a look of comic, stricken idiocy.

  “Fine. Now you are getting yourself set to pounce on a very attractive guy. You’re working up to it. Play it broad.”

  She fixed him with a vast, suggestive, avaricious leer. Slowly, slowly, she raised each palm in turn to her lips and pretended to spit. She moistened her lips, gave a little hitch to her bikini pants, one slow suggestive roll of her hips, and then came swaying toward him, eyes slitted, working her fingers like claws.

  “Give me some heartbreak.”

  She stopped and looked at him, half smiling, half frowning, her head tilted. “Oh, no, darling!” she whispered, and with the tender smile still in place, her eyes filled slowly, and one tea
r trickled as she shook her head.

  He took her wrist and pulled her down onto the bench beside him. She sniffed and wiped her eyes. “Now, cookie,” he said, “you are me and Hank Franklin sends up these two broads, so which one do you pick if you are me?”

  She moved away a little to stare suspiciously at him. “What do you expect me to say to a mad, mad question like that, King?”

  “What’s the name of the other pussycat?”

  “Wendell. Priscilla Wendell.”

  “Appraise her for me, dear girl.”

  “Well, I’ll just assume you do want me to be terribly honest and fair. As she had made goddam certain you and everybody else would see, she truly has one hell of a figure. She’d make Mansfield feel insecure. She’s Equity, of course, but honest to Jesus, King, I can’t think of her as pro. What she’s had is experimental theater and girl college stuff. And some chorus line. Put it this way. What I just did, she couldn’t do. She seems nice, but a thing like this would be out of her league. She’s so damned anxious to beat me out for it, she’s all tightened up. But she seems nice enough. You know. Maybe she could cut it later on, but this year she’s green.”

  He pinched her by the chin and kissed the tip of her soft young nose and said, “Hang around, pro. I’ll have the word.”

  Priscilla Wendell was in a white tank suit. She had a long rich shine of chestnut hair and soft green-brown eyes. She was trying to play it very cool, but her eyes swiveled too much, and her hand was damp and chilly and trembling. He was slightly stoned and a little bit sleepy, so he took her around through another door and through the big silent house and up to his bedroom study. He picked an old script at random and leafed though it and found a long female speech and told her to read it. She stood very erect. She had a precise and cultivated voice, and he knew she was no good for what he wanted of her. Adele would do the stewardess.