Read Online The Deep Blue Good-By by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online Page A

edge she will become placid, listless, somnolent. And dependent."
    "You said to get her away from here."
    "I'll take a look at her tomorrow."
    The thunderheads built high that Thursday afternoon, and after a long hot silence, the winds came and the rain roared down. The sound of the rain terrified her. She could hear, in the sound of the rain, a hundred people all laughing and talking at once, as though a huge cocktail party filled all the other rooms of the sterile house. She became so agitated I had to give her the second one of the quieting pills.
    She awakened after dark, and she had soaked the sheets and mattress pad with sweat. She said she felt strong enough to take a shower while I changed the bed for her. I had found one last set of clean sheets. I heard her call me, her voice faint. She was crouched on the bathroom floor, wet and naked and sallow as death. I bundled her into a big yellow terry robe and rubbed her warm and dry and got her into bed. Her teeth chattered. I brought her warm milk. It took her a long time to get warm. Her breath had a sour odor of illness.
    She slept until eleven and then ate a little and I[ then talked some more. She wanted the light out when she talked, and wanted her hand in mine. A closeness. A comfort.
    I heard more of it then. A vague outline. She had thought Junior Allen gone forever, and he had come back in the shining cruiser, wearing his brand-new resort clothes, curiously humble and apologetic and anxious for her esteem.
    He had tied up at her dock, just across the road from the house. She had told him to go away.
    She kept looking out the windows and saw him sitting disconsolate in his new boat in his new clothes, and at dusk she had gone out onto the dock, endured another profuse apology, then gone aboard for a tour of the cruiser. Once he had her aboard, had her below decks, he was the smiler again, crude and forceful, and he had taken her. She fought him for a long time, but he had been patient. There was no one to hear her. Finally in a kind of terrorized lethargy, she had endured him, knowing he was not quite sane, and thinking this would be the end of it. But it was not. He had kept her aboard with him for two days and two nights, and when he had sensed that she was too dazed and too exhausted and too confused to make even a token resistance, he had moved into the house with her.
    "I can't really explain it,' she whispered in the darkness. 'There was just nothing that had gone Page 34

    before. The only past I knew was him.
    And he filled the present, and there wasn't any future. I didn't even feel revulsion toward him.
    Or think of him as a person. He was a force I had to accept. And somehow it began to be terribly important to please him-with the food I cooked for him, the drinks I made for him, the clothes I washed, the continual sex. It was easier to stay a little bit drunk. If I kept him pleased, even that kind of life was endurable. He turned me into an anxious thing, watching him every minute to be certain I was doing what he wanted me to do. I guess that is a kind of physical response to him not pleasure. A kind of horrid release, a breaking. He learned how to make that happen sometimes, and he'd laugh at me. Then he would go away on that boat and it would be the same, and come back here and it would be the same. I didn't even think of it ever ending. I was too busy getting through each hour as it came along."
    She slept then. I went out into the night. The tropical earth was steamy-fresh, bugs chirring and tree toads yelping, and the bay a moony mirror. I sat on the end of her dock and blew smoke at the mosquitoes and wondered why I should be so cynical about her.
    It was true that she was a sensitive and introspective woman, and equally true that Junior Allen was a cruel crude bastard, but I could not quite comprehend how his use of her could have brought her to such a state. in the Victorian tradition, it was the fate worse than death, but she was an adult