“I appreciate the endorsement, lady.”
She jabbed him with an elbow. “Fatuous type!”
“Nothing exceeds like excess.”
“I’ll ignore that, dear. I like the way we talk, that’s what I mean. All the laughs. There’s nothing wrong with anything.”
“Just one thing wrong,” Mike said. “How come we run into so many punk kids on their silly, fumbling little honeymoons. They don’t know the score. They think they’re really living. When they notice me at all, I’m just sort of the background, a dreary old poop trying to get cultured up. If they knew I was on my honeymoon, they’d laugh themselves into convulsions.”
“I’m not exactly what you’d call a teenager,” the bride said.
“You are, thank God, beyond the age of pubescence, woman. And from here to here, you are as young as …”
“Unhand me, sire! This is a public beach!”
“A private beach. Tell me one thing, Mary. Why were you trying to marry me off to Shirley? It gave me the jumps.”
“She would have been good for you, darling.”
“As good as you?”
“Hell, no! But … I’m nearly forty-five. I feel eighteen. Silly, tingly, happy. Is that right?”
“You feel like that? Then maybe you can remember something in the room that you forgot, like. Maybe your lighter. So I could come along, help you hunt for it.”
She looked at him solemnly, owlishly. “I don’t have my lighter. My beach bag is right here, and maybe it’s in the beach bag, but that would be too efficient, to look there first, wouldn’t it? So I’d say the only thing to do is go look in the room first.”
Mike was suddenly on his feet, grinning, paw extended to her. “So let’s go!”
And so this is the second and final fade-out—like hand in hand into the sunset—this Rodenska family, picking itself up off the grainy Spanish sand, picking up the tools of beaching, hurrying a little because when you stand up into the wind, it is hardly a pleasure.
Above the shallow beach are the rocks, and a path that winds up through the rocks, and beyond that what passes in Spain for a paved highway, and beyond the highway the self-conscious confection of a new hotel, like a wedding cake sitting in a quarry.
So the woman goes first on the narrowness of path, and turns to laugh and say something to the stocky brown man following her so closely. They are observed there in the lemon sunlight by but one couple, a lean long-married pair of English tourists from Maida Vale, snug in hairy garments, sitting on rocks. They turn simultaneous heads to stare with the iciness of heraldic griffins, narrow nostrils widening in displeasure.
The man thinks, Wherever those American types come, they contrive to spoil it for us, totally.
The woman thinks, She is hardly a young girl, not by decades, but that figure, my word! By what nasty magic do those types manage it?
They have reached the top of the path. The woman turns to speak and smile again, and in response the man, with his free hand, claps her a jolly one on the haunch. The two narrow heads of the observers snap back into position and two pair of gray eyes stare toward Africa.
“Low types,” the man murmurs.
“Totally,” she replies.
By John D. MacDonald
The Brass Cupcake
Murder for the Bride
Judge Me Not
Wine for the Dreamers
Ballroom of the Skies
The Damned
Dead Low Tide
The Neon Jungle
Cancel All Our Vows
All These Condemned
Area of Suspicion
Contrary Pleasure
A Bullet for Cinderella
Cry Hard, Cry Fast
You Live Once
April Evil
Border Town Girl
Murder in the Wind
Death Trap
The Price of Murder
The Empty Trap
A Man of Affairs
The Deceivers
Clemmie
Cape Fear (The Executioners)
Soft Touch
Deadly Welcome
Please Write for Details
The Crossroads
Slam the Big Door
The End of the Night
The Only Girl in the Game
Where Is Janice Gantry?
One Monday We Killed Them All
A Key to the Suite
A Flash of Green
The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything
On the Run
The Drowner
The House Guest
End of the Tiger and Other Stories
The Last One Left
S*E*V*E*N
Condominium
Other Times, Other Worlds
Nothing Can Go Wrong
The Good Old Stuff
One More Sunday
More Good Old Stuff
Barrier Island
A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald, 1967–1974
THE TRAVIS MCGEE SERIES
The Deep Blue Good-by
Nightmare in Pink
A Purple Place for Dying
The Quick Red Fox
A Deadly Shade of Gold
Bright Orange for the Shroud
Darker than Amber
One Fearful Yellow Eye
Pale Gray for Guilt
The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper
Dress Her in Indigo
The Long Lavender Look
A Tan and Sandy Silence
The Scarlet Ruse
The Turquoise Lament
The Dreadful Lemon Sky
The Empty Copper Sea
The Green Ripper
Free Fall in Crimson
Cinnamon Skin
The Lonely Silver Rain
The Official Travis McGee Quizbook
About the Author
JOHN D. MACDONALD was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.