Let it lie, I thought. This is a small town. We went inside. The place was empty except for some old counters and shelves, and our footsteps rang with a hollow sound. There was dust everywhere. “We have to go upstairs,” she said.
The stairs were in the rear. I went up first and I could hear the high heels clicking after me. All the windows were closed, and heat lay like a suffocating blanket across the lifeless air. I could feel sweat breaking out on my face. The whole second floor was a jumble of discarded junk, old pieces of furniture, loose and bundled papers, piles of clothing, cast-off luggage, and even some old feather mattresses piled in a corner. A fire marshal would take one look at it, I thought, and run amok. They’d have a fire here some day that would really turn the town out. It wouldn’t take much. Just some turpentine and rags …
“What?” I asked, suddenly aware that she had come up behind me and said something. I turned. She was throwing the clothing on a pile. Her face was flushed with the heat and there were little beads of perspiration on her upper lip.
“I said you must not know your own strength. You carried those things all the way up here, and then forgot you had them. Why don’t you set them down?”
I was still holding the bundles of papers. “Oh,” I said.
I threw them down. She was still looking at me, but she said nothing. It was intensely still, and hot, and there was an odd feeling of strain in the air.
“Is that all of it?” I asked.
“Yes. That’s all,” she said. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
“How do you like our town?”
“All right. What I’ve seen of it.” Why did you have to stand here and talk in this stifling hotbox up under the roof? Her face was expressionless as she watched me.
“Did you ever live in a small town?” she asked.
“Yes. I grew up in one.”
“Oh? Well, you probably know what they’re like, then.”
“Sure.”
“Well, maybe we’d better go,” she said. “It’s awful hot up here, don’t you think?”
“It’s murder.” I nodded for her to go first, and we started weaving our way through the junk, towards the stairs.
“I wondered if I was just imagining it. I usually don’t mind the heat, when I keep my weight down.”
That was the second time she’d thrown it out there, but we understood each other about the small town now.
“Why do you want to keep your weight down?” I asked.
She looked around at me. “Don’t you think I ought to?”
“It looks perfect to me.”
“Thank you.”
“Not at all. It was a pleasure.”
“I mean for carrying the stuff up, when Mr. Harshaw forgot.”
Well, the hell with you, I thought. You just remember you’re married and I won’t have any trouble with you. “That’s what I meant,” I said. “It was a pleasure.”
We went down the stairs. Just as we hit the lower floor I heard her say, “Oh, darn it. What a mess!” I looked at her, and she held out a hand covered with dirt, staring at it disgustedly. She’d forgotten about the dust and had held on to the railing.
I took out my handkerchief. “Here,” I said. “Let me.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I think the water’s still turned on in the washroom. I’ll only be a minute.”
She walked on back to the end of the building and disappeared into a room walled off in one corner. I stood there looking around and waiting for her, and then before I knew it I was thinking about that boar’s nest of trash and junk upstairs. The place was a natural firetrap.
I don’t know why I did it; there was no idea or plan in my mind. But I reached over and wiped my hand through the dust on a step, and when I saw her come out of the washroom I started back that way. “I got some of it, too,” I said, holding out the hand.
There was a window in the washroom, all right, as I’d thought there would be. It was closed and locked with an ordinary latch on top of the lower sash. Before I washed my hands I reached over and took hold of the latch and unlocked it.
4
WHY NOT? IN THIS WORLD you took what you wanted; you didn’t stand around and wait for somebody to bring it to you. I sat on the side of the bed stark naked in the sweltering night, listening to Umlaut beget Frammis in an age-cracked voice on the other side of the wall, and thought how easy it would be. There’d be ten or fifteen thousand dollars or maybe more lying around in that comic-opera bank for a man with nerve enough to pick it up. And you could get away from the rat-race for a long time with that kind of money, with a brown-eyed girl on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean, sailing a catboat and going fishing off the reefs and drinking Cuba Libres where it’s always afternoon.
Why kid myself? I wasn’t a salesman. And I couldn’t go back to sea, if I wanted to. I wasn’t getting any younger, and another whole year was down the drain. I’d quit two jobs and got fired from three, and I’d had to get out of Houston in a hurry after a brawl with a longshoreman over some turning-basin chippy. We tore up a lot of the fixtures in a cheap beer joint by the time the thing became general, and somewhere in the confusion the longshoreman had his jaw broken with a bottle of Bacardi rum. It wasn’t just an isolated incident, either; life was just a succession of jams over floozies of one kind or another.
It had been a little over a year now since the night I’d got back to the States after eleven months of that monotonous tanker shuttle between the Persian Gulf and Japan, with a four-hundred-a-month allotment to Jerilee, to find she’d shoved off with the bank account and some boy friend she’d forgotten to tell me about. I tore my second mate’s ticket into strips and flushed it down the can in a Port Arthur ginmill and for a while I seemed to have some purpose in life, but after I’d had time to think it over a little I quit looking for them and threw away the gun. It wasn’t worth it. She was just another bum in a succession of them, the only difference being that I’d been married to her.
On the other side of the wall they were piping Noah over the rail and getting ready for the rain. Sweat ran down my face and I thought about the bank to keep from thinking of that Harshaw woman. Keep her weight down! She could quit leaning it against me. But what about the bank?
It wasn’t so simple, if you stopped to think about it. When you break the law you can forget about playing the averages because you have to win all the time. Who ever won all the time? Yeah, but the thing which always trips ’em is association with other criminals, and I don’t know any, talkative or otherwise. An amateur’s got a better chance than the pro because nobody knows him and he hasn’t got any clippings in the files. I lay there for hours, thinking about it.
The next day was Saturday. Harshaw was across the street at his desk in the loan office all morning and at noon when they closed it, he came over and said he was going fishing for three days down at Aransas Pass.
“I’ll be back on Monday night,” he told Gulick. “If you run into any snag making out papers for sale, you can always get hold of Miss Harper.”
We didn’t sell anything. The town was jammed with the usual Saturday-afternoon crowd, but nobody was looking for a car. I prowled morosely around the lot and wondered what Gloria Harper did when she wasn’t working. Just before we closed, the telephone rang. I answered it.
“Mr. Madox?”
I recognized the voice. So she didn’t go with him, I thought. “Yes. Madox speaking.”
“This is Mrs. Harshaw. I know you’ll think I’m an awful pest, but I wonder if I could ask another favour?”
“Sure. What is it?”
“Mr. Harshaw has gone fishing, and he promised me a car off the lot while he was gone with ours, but he forgot to bring it home. I wonder if you’d drive it out for me when you close up?”
“Sure. How do I get there?”
“Go down Main Street to the bank and turn right. It’s about three or four blocks beyond the edge of town. There are a couple of cross streets,
I think, and then a filling station on the left. The next block is big oak trees on both sides of the street, and only two houses. Ours is the two-storey one on the right-hand side.”
“Check,” I said. “Which car is it?”
“He said there was a Buick. A coupé.”
“Yes. It’s still here. I’ll bring it out.”
“There’s no hurry. Any time after you close up. And thanks a lot.”
It was around six when we locked up the cars and the shack. I told Gulick where I was taking the coupé, and left my own car on the lot. The place wasn’t hard to find, after I’d threaded my way through the double-parked congestion of Saturday-afternoon Main Street. Beyond the filling station she had spoken of, the road swung a little to the right as it entered the oaks. The house itself was back in the trees and had a big lawn in front and a gravel driveway running back beside a hedge of oleanders. It was a smaller copy of the old-style southern plantation house, with a columned porch running across the front and down one side next to the drive. I stopped by the side porch and got out. It was secluded back in here, partly cut off as it was from the street, with long shadows slanting across the lawn.
“Hello,” she said.
I glanced around, but didn’t see her until she opened the screen door and came out on to the porch. She had on a little-girl sort of summer dress with puffed-out short sleeves tied with bows, and was rattling ice cubes in a highball glass. She was bare-legged and wearing wedgies with grass straps, and her toenails were painted a flaming red. I don’t know anything about women’s clothes, but still I was conscious that she jarred somehow. The teenage dress didn’t do anything for that over-ripe figure except to wander on to the track and get run over, and she looked like a burlesque queen in bobby socks.
“Oh, hello,” I said. “I left the keys in it.”
“Thanks. It was sweet of you to drive it out for me.”
“Not at all.”
“How about a drink before you go?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
I followed her inside. The venetian blinds were half closed in the living room and a big electric fan oscillated like a slowly shaking head on the mantel above the fireplace. She stopped and faced me, and again I could feel that faint strain in the air.
“Bourbon and water?”
“That’s fine.”
“Push some of those magazines out of the way and sit down. I’m sorry the place’s in such a mess.” She turned to go, and then stopped and added, as if it was an afterthought, “I gave the girl the week-end off, to visit her folks.”
She went out. It was hot in the room, even with the fan going, and I was conscious of a deep quiet, unbroken except by the whirring of the fan blades and now and then a tinkle of ice against glass out in the kitchen. I lighted a cigarette and put the match in a tray. It was heaped up and overflowing with butts smeared with lipstick. Movie and confession magazines were scattered over the sofa and lying on the floor, and I could see the rings left by highball glasses on the coffee table. Standing there looking around at the evidence of boredom was like watching a burning fuse.
She came back in a minute with the drink, and I saw she’d refilled her own. She sat down in the big chair across from me with her legs stretched out and the toes of the wedgies touching each other, and looked at me with her chin propped on her hand.
“Well, how are you standing the excitement?”
I shrugged. “Maybe it picks up on Saturday night.”
“Yes, it really does. They show two westerns at the movie instead of one.”
“Sounds pretty rugged.”
“Well, you can always join the Ladies’ Club and collect junk. There’s a hot pastime.”
“I might have trouble getting past the credentials committee.”
“I bet you wouldn’t if you approached ’em one at a time. Meow.”
“What a way to talk about the Ladies!”
“They’re a bunch of dears.”
I put my glass on the coffee table and walked over to the front window to look out through the venetian blind. The house across the street was a little further up and you couldn’t see it from here.
“Which one of ’em lives over there?” I asked.
“Mrs. Gross. She’s the one with fourteen eyes and party-line ears.”
She put her glass down and walked over and stood close to me. “Well, what do you think of the view?”
I turned, and we were staring at each other again. “It’s better all the time.”
“Oh, I meant to ask you. Did you have any trouble finding the place?”
“No,” I said. “I could find it in the dark.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
I put a hand behind her neck and then brought it up in back of the ash-blonde curls, holding it there and pulling her face against mine, hard, as I kissed her. Her mouth was soft and moist, and she came to me like a dachshund jumping into your lap. In a minute she turned her face aside and pushed back.
“You’d better get out.”
“Like hell.”
“I thought you told me you’d lived in a small town.”
“What of it?”
“Don’t you think that old witch over there watched you drive in here? And she’s watching right now, waiting for you to leave.”
I tried to take hold of her again, but she moved back, pushing at my arms. “Harry, get out!”
I could see she meant it, and somehow I had sense enough to realize she was right. There was no use asking for trouble.
“All right,” I said. “But don’t think you can tease me. I’ll be back.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Well?”
Her face was sullen. “Well?” she said.
I picked up my car at the lot and drove over to the rooming house. After standing under the shower a long time, I changed into slacks and T-shirt and drove down to Main. It was dusk now, with heat lying motionless and sticky in the streets, and bugs danced through the beams of weaving headlights. It was hard finding a parking place, but I finally beat two other cars to one in front of the bank and sat there for a while trying to push the sultry weights of Dolores Harshaw off my mind. She was dangerous in a town like this. The hell with her; I wouldn’t go back. But wouldn’t I? What about later on? Keeping the thought of her out of that bleak hotbox of a room was going to be like trying to dam a river with a tennis racket.
I shook my head irritably, and stared at the bank. A light was burning over the vault in the rear, and I could see the layout of the whole room through the glass doors in front of me. The over-all depth would be about fifty feet, and the side door which came in off the cross street was well back, not over twenty feet this side of the vault and the door which probably led into a washroom or closet of some kind. I turned my head and tried to picture about where the old Taylor building would be from here. Down one block, I thought, and two to the right, which would put it diagonally in front of the bank. That was about right. About right for what? I cursed and threw away the cigarette I was smoking and got out to stand on the sidewalk.
I was too restless and irritable to think of eating, so I started walking aimlessly up the sidewalk through the crowd. Up in the next block I went past the drugstore and as I glanced in through the window I saw Gloria Harper in front of the magazine racks. Without stopping to wonder why, I opened the screen door and went in.
She was still absorbed in the magazines and didn’t see me.
“Hello,” I said.
She glanced up abruptly. “Oh, hello, Mr. Madox.” She didn’t smile, but there was nothing unfriendly in the way she looked at me.
“How about a soda?”
She considered it thoughtfully. “Why, yes. Thank you.”
She paid the clerk for the magazine and we went back to one of the booths across from the fountain.
“First,” I said, “I’m sorry about the other day. I must have had the book open at the wrong place.”
The violet eyes glanced up at
me, and then became confused and looked away. “It’s all right,” she said.
“Then you’re not mad at me?”
She shook her head. “Not any more.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “Now we can start even again. Next time I’ll read the instructions on the bottle. What do you do around here on Saturday nights?”
“Not much. There’s just the movie. And sometimes a dance, but not this week.”
“How about going swimming, then?”
“I’d like to, but I couldn’t tonight. I’m baby-sitting.”
“You must be a big operator, with two jobs. What’re you trying to do, get rich?”
“No, it’s just in the family. I’m staying with my sister’s little girl so she and her husband can go to the movies.”
“Oh. Well, I’ll drive you out there.”
“It’s only five or six blocks.”
“I’ll drive you anyway.”
She smiled. “Well, all right. Thank you.”
I watched her while she finished the soda, thinking of that odd gravity about everything she did, and the way she always said “Thank you,” instead of just “Thanks.” A sweet kid from a nice family, you’d say; probably teaches a Sunday-school class and goes steady with some guy in his last year at law school. The only hitch was—where did Sutton fit in? How about the way he’d looked at her, with that secret and very dirty joke of his? It was impossible, and still there it was.
She told me how to get there and we drove out Main, going north past the used-car lot. I asked her a little about herself, and she told me she’d lived around here most of her life except for a couple of years away at school. Her mother and father had moved to California and she was living with her sister and brother-in-law. I slipped over a couple of oblique questions, looking for a steady boy friend, but she let them slide off without saying one way or the other. She didn’t wear any engagement ring, though. I looked.
It was a small white house on a gravelled side street, complete with a white picket fence and a young tree in the yard. “Won’t you come in?” she asked.
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