by Orrie Hitt
“That’s okay.”
I’d been pounding on him about a retirement plan and that’s how we’d got to discussing the cabin. He’d told me about what he hoped to do that season and about the vacant cabin, and I’d got interested in it right away.
“Now, about the girl,” he said. “If she can work the desk, she can start next week.”
I’d talked to him about Sally, and a job. After I’d shown some interest in the cabin he’d been more than receptive to that.
“Not before?”
“We don’t get the crowd until then. There’s hardly anybody here now. Our season don’t get started until just before the Fourth.”
“I’ll give you five hundred,” I said. “And she starts tomorrow.”
He squeezed a fly between his fingers and watched it drop to the ground.
“I should say no to something like that, Mr. Weaver?”
He laughed and we walked on over to where I had left my car parked in the shadows of some birches. I could smell the maidenhair ferns that had been crushed under the wheels and the dampness of the swamp beyond.
“You’re not peddling her, Mr. Weaver?”
He leaned up against the car, grinning at me. I felt like unhooking a couple of his front teeth for him.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, Mr. Weaver, but you’ve got no idea what goes on up here in the summer. Last year I hired a clerk and he wanted me to put his sister on as a waitress. She tried to charge me twenty bucks the first night I got into it.”
I pushed him out of the way and slid in behind the wheel of the Buick.
“I’m telling you,” I said. “You try a caper like that with Sally and it won’t be good.”
The car engine belched into the heat.
“Private stock, huh?” Then he stuck his head inside and laughed some more. “What the hell, Mr. Weaver, we’re all human, aren’t we? What am I supposed to think? A guy comes along, rents a cabin and pays to get a job for his girl — what would you think?”
“I wouldn’t,” I said. “I’d figure I was lucky to rent that crow’s nest.”
“Not sore, Mr. Weaver?”
“Hell, no.”
“All right. Just bring your check around tomorrow.”
“The girl, too.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll be here around noon.”
“Any time,” Johnson said. “Any time. And I won’t say anything to the girl.”
“No,” I said, backing out into the road. “She don’t have to know anything about it.”
I straightened the car into the dirt road, gave him a wave and let the big tires churn up the dust.
For a short distance the road followed the brook, twisting like a snake. Then it made a dip and a dive at the entrance of the hotel, curved left and shot down a graveled hill to Highway 54. Down at the junction there was a combination gas station, soda fountain and fruit store.
I parked the car near the busted screen door, jumped out and went inside. There was a phone over on the wall. As I dropped the nickel in and hit the bell, an old woman came from the rear of the building, leaned up against the candy case and watched me with interest.
Sally answered.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “Throw your stuff together and I’ll bring you out tomorrow.”
“Oh, Nicky! That’s fine!”
“It looks like a nice place.”
It was. The hotel was new, not fancy, but with a certain air to it that had impressed me. The lobby had been wide and airy and the tables in the dining room had glistened in the sun. Johnson hadn’t told me how many he accommodated, but from the looks of the key rack I had judged it to be around two hundred. Two hundred normally. Four hundred in the summer season.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”
The way she said it, sincere-like and all choked up, tightened something in my chest. I glanced at the old lady and caught her grinning at me.
“I’ll pick you up for dinner,” I said. “Around seven.”
“Yes, Nicky.”
I told her good-bye and hung up. I hadn’t said anything about renting the cabin because I hadn’t wanted her to get any wrong ideas about why I had done it. I’d have rented the thing, Sally or no Sally. In the first place I was getting tired of that room in town, of the smell of the railroad smoke and Miss Hankins always complaining about her flowers and the dry weather and things like that. It’s funny what gets on your nerves sometimes. But it wasn’t that with me. I knew what it was. The cabin was in Pine Valley and not far from the white Cape Cod bungalow where the Schofields lived. I had to drive past that every time I went to town.
“Hey, mister!” the old lady said.
I turned at the door.
“Yeah?”
She had a big smile but I couldn’t see any teeth.
“We sell ‘em,” she said. “Three for a dollar.”
“Small, medium or large?” I wanted to know.
The smile left her face. She grabbed up a Hershey bar and limped off toward the rear of the store. When she got back there she turned around, munching on the candy, and gave me another grin.
“Assorted,” she said.
I laughed and went out and got into the car. I reached over in back and got the briefcase off the seat. I didn’t bother opening it up, just put it there beside me. I knew what was in it. The Schofield policy.
It was only about three miles to their place. I could have driven there in no time, but I took it slow, trying to think. It had struck me that there was something phony about her buying all those life insurance policies on herself. Yet there are some people like that, who buy insurance all the time, from every guy who comes along, like some people are always buying new cars or refrigerators or television sets, whether or not they can afford them. That part of it was all right. The rest of it was all wrong.
By the time I reached the Schofield driveway I had made up my mind about a lot of things. I was going in there and hand her that policy, put the bee on her for the first premium, collect it and get back to town and Sally as soon as possible. After that she could mail her premiums in to the office, and nights when I drove up to the cabin I’d wind the Buick up when I went past their place, thinking about Sally and how clean she was and what a fool I might have been. Getting right down to it, there was only one thing that Irene Schofield had that I wanted. Sally had the same thing and Sally was young and new and beautiful, too.
The garage yawned black and empty beyond the curtain of hot sun. I swore softly and brought the Buick to a stop. She had told me to call before coming out and I hadn’t done that.
I got out of the car and started over toward the house. Then I stopped and listened, thinking that I heard a noise up over the garage. I didn’t hear it again, so I walked into the garage and listened.
“Hello!” I said into the gray heat.
“I’m up here.”
The voice came at me clear, through thin boards. It was Irene all right.
I found a pair of wooden stairs at the back of the garage and I started up these. The building was relatively new and I could smell the pitch in the pine wood.
At the top of the stairs I turned, took a quick look, and dropped my briefcase.
She stood over by the window, perfectly still, smiling at me. She didn’t move and she didn’t say anything. And she didn’t have a God-damned thing on.
She had let her blonde hair down and it came around her shoulders in soft waves. She had been out in the sun plenty because her arms and legs and stomach were burned a deep brown. There was a streak of pink across her full, pointed breasts, the nipples almost as brown as the rest of her. They stood out straight, exaggerating the deep hollow between them. Lower down, too, there was another spot of pink, sweeping across her loins in a curving arch. I looked up and grinned. There was no doubt about it. She was a natural blonde.
“I thought it was my husband,” she said.
Her voice was cool, unaffected. She bent slowly to pick up th
e robe at her feet. Nine out of ten women have soft bodies that can’t stand that test of the figure. She could.
“You were supposed to call,” she said, shrugging into the robe.
My knees did things to each other.
“I’m glad I didn’t,” I said.
She laughed and sauntered across the room. The robe swung back against her, holding her curving loose, making her even better.
“I guess you have my policy, Mr. Weaver?”
I picked up the briefcase.
“I guess I have.”
I tried not to look at her. I wanted to play this smart. I couldn’t stop looking at her.
“I thought you were my husband,” she said again. “I was posing for him — this is his studio — and they called from town and said he had a telegram in there with some money in it. He drove in to get it, and — well, it was so hot I just waited like this.”
“Sure.”
It wasn’t a very big room and there didn’t seem to be much in it for an artist’s studio. Over in one corner, pushed up against the eaves, was an easel and some canvas and a lot of paints on top of a small table. There were some chairs scattered around and an old davenport that didn’t amount to much. Almost out of sight, in the shadows, I could see a camera on a tripod.
“I guess Mr. Schofield takes some pictures, too,” I said.
She was quiet for a long time. The smile was gone from her face.
“Once in a while,” she said.
It was hotter than the top of a stove up there close to the roof. I kept staring at her and the way her flesh poked out through the thin material of the robe. It didn’t get any cooler.
I fumbled with the briefcase and got it open. The policy felt sticky in my hands.
“I guess you wanted this on an annual premium?”
She nodded.
“But I can’t pay you now, Mr. Weaver. If you had called — well, my husband, he doesn’t know about this. I have to arrange it with him. I’d forgotten to discuss it with him.”
“I see.”
“He’s not too liberal with — money, Mr. Weaver.”
“Oh?”
“I lied to you about how much insurance he had, Mr. Weaver. He doesn’t believe in it. He hasn’t got any — not a cent.”
She turned sort of sideways, looking out the window. I got a blood-pressure view of one of those big cans of hers.
“I’d like to talk with you about it when you come back,” she said. “He ought to have some insurance.”
“I might be able to talk him into it,” I said.
She turned back to me, ripping the view away. All I could see now was the pulsing hollow where I’d like to put my hands.
“You’d better tell me about it and then I’ll talk to him.” She gave me a smile and tossed her curls. “Do you think it’s terrible for a woman to want her husband insured — adequately?”
“Of course not.”
“A woman needs some protection.”
“You told me he had twenty thousand,” I reminded her.
She lowered her eyes.
“I told you a fib, Mr. Weaver.”
“It isn’t the first time,” I said. “They all do.”
“He makes good money,” she said. “What if something happened to him?”
“You hit the nail right on the head.”
“You’d better talk to me about it first, Mr. Weaver.”
“Okay.”
I put the policy back in the briefcase. She watched me while I was doing it. Then she came over and pulled the zipper closed for me. She was right up close. I could smell her perfume and her body odor. I could see the light coming into her eyes, wild and hot. She was breathing a little hard and her breath came at me, clean and reckless, hitting me in the face.
I let that briefcase drop to the floor, and I pulled her to me. I wasn’t gentle about it because she did things to me. She was driving me nuts. I wanted her. I wanted everything she had.
Her lips responded for just a second and then she pulled away, laughing up at me.
“You’re a hell of an insurance man,” she said.
She picked up my briefcase so fast that I didn’t have a chance to get at her again. She stuck the case under my arm and turned me toward the stairs.
“You’d better get out of here before my husband comes back,” she said.
She had something there, so I went along. She wasn’t pushing me, just had her hand there on my arm. Before she let me go, she gave a little squeeze and brought her breasts around hard against me.
“Can you come back on Monday, Mr. Weaver?”
“I don’t know about that.” I wasn’t going to be too easy to get. “I have a lot of collections every Monday.”
“Mr. Schofield goes to New York every Monday. That would be the only time for me.”
“Well, it would have to be in the evening.”
Her face came around to me, smiling.
“He doesn’t get back until Tuesday,” she said.
My blood short-circuited and boiled over.
“Say, around seven?” I wanted to know.
She tried to straighten out the robe. I got a good look at almost everything she had.
“I’ll be here,” she said.
I went down the stairs, smelling the pine again, feeling all dried out and beat-up and shot to hell inside. There’s something about a beautiful woman that always gets around to the other side of a man. The side where violence and love live, holding hands.
“Good-bye, Mr. Weaver.”
I looked back at her. If she hadn’t stepped away from the top of the stairs, I’d have gone back up there after her — even if her husband had been sitting on my shoulders with a loaded shotgun.
“I’ll see you Monday,” I said.
After that I went out and got into the car. I backed out to the highway and almost got clipped by a guy and a girl racing south. I drove down the road and for a long way I kept watching that Cape Cod in the mirror. Finally, it got smaller and smaller and drifted away into the trees.
She could count on me showing up on Monday. Next Monday. Every Monday. Even though it got so that there were seven Mondays in a week.
CHAPTER VI
IN THE INSURANCE BUSINESS, SUNDAY is a good day on which to die. That is, if you work on a debit, because you die every Sunday, anyway. But maybe you do that on Saturday night. I don’t know. But I do know that it is twenty-four hours of the week that are lost. You just hang around for that period so that you can be resurrected every Monday morning.
At the start of every week you’ve got a bunch of tough clients-pension cases, relief-getters, bogcutters, bastards. You keep going back to them, drumming them, doing everything but knock them flat with the debit book. You get a proposition to take it out in trade, but the place is dirty and she hasn’t got any teeth and her husband’s sleeping in the back room. You keep going around every day, every night. By Saturday noon you’ve got it cut down to one. And that’s the one that gets you.
“I’ll give you three weeks,” the old bag tells you. “But not this week. Come back Wednesday.”
You go out and get a drink and that starts it. Some character you meet at the bar begins to tell you what a hot insurance prospect he is and you set up the drinks. You talk insurance and you buy more drinks. You’re a sucker and you know it. You see a good-looking broad and you leave the guy. You forget about insurance. You’re smart. You’ve got only one thing on your mind. You get it from her or you don’t. After a while it’s Sunday, you’ve got a big head, and it’s damn near Monday and time to start all over again.
And you can’t remember that guy’s name.
It wasn’t like that with me this Sunday. I’d spent my first night in the cabin, alone and sober. I’d sat out there on the porch until after twelve, smoking and watching the lights across the valley. It had been a long time since I’d listened to the summer sounds of night in the woods. Too long. So long that just doing that had been quite enough.
&nbs
p; I’d paid Miss Hankins off on the previous afternoon, loaded Sally’s luggage in the back of the car with mine and driven on out to Pine Valley. Johnson had taken my check, looked Sally over pretty good, and put her to work right away, checking in some guests that had come in unexpectedly. Later in the evening I’d gone down and had dinner in the grill room. I’d seen Sally but she’d just been going off duty then and she said she had to get settled in her room in the annex. That had been all right with me. It was one night I had wanted to be alone. To think. I’d done a lot of it. And I hadn’t settled a thing.
When I got up the sun was bright and hot, pouring in across the bed. I started to get dressed, then went over and got a pair of swimming trunks out of the dresser. I put those on, stuck my feet into a pair of sneaks and went on outside.
I walked down the steep path toward the hotel. I could see a couple of people out on the tennis court, whacking a ball around. Then, dropping down through a tangle of trees, I lost sight of the hotel until I came out on the soft grass of the lawn.
The lawn was a big one, with lots of chairs around, a badminton court at one end and a croquet set-up on the other. Most of the chairs were occupied by drowsing men and fat-legged women.
I cut across the lawn and over to the pool.
The pool wasn’t a large one. It had been constructed by the simple expedient of damming up the brook and dumping a lot of sand in so that there would be a good bottom. But the water was clear and the high board looked like you could break your back coming off of it, if you didn’t make the right kind of a dive.
I climbed the ladder and shot down the board, hitting the end of it hard and straight. I made the right kind of a dive all right, cutting it off sharp near the sand and coming up about half-way down the pool. The water was cool and fresh and I could feel my body tingle with it. I took a lung-full of air, went down again, and stayed under water until I got back to the diving platform. When I came up I blew out the air, throwing up the water around me.
“Well, for Chrissake!”
I got my eyes open in a hurry and looked up at the pert little redhead who had been hopping tables in the grill the night before. She had a nice white body that filled out her one-piece red bathing suit in the right places, and a pair of blue eyes as big as almond nuts.
