by Orrie Hitt
“What are you shooting at?” he asked.
“That little can down there on a limb.”
He finally saw the can. It was a small one, about a hundred feet distant.
“Bet you can’t hit it,” he said.
She swung the gun up and snapped a shot. The can jumped.
“See?” she demanded. “I don’t shoot to miss. I had ten cans up and they’re all down.” She ejected the remaining shells from the gun and checked to see that it was empty. “I do this about once a week.”
“I see.” He remembered hearing reports from a twenty-two before, but he had been too far away to tell where they were coming from. “You’re a better shot than your husband,” he said.
She made a face.
“Hell, he can’t hit anything, except with a shotgun. I hate shotguns. Damn things kick too much.”
He was standing close enough to smell her, and he wondered how it would be if he took her, there in the woods. He didn’t think she would protest or resist. The ground wasn’t the best place, but if you wanted it badly enough the ground would do nicely.
“Hot,” Kitty observed.
“Hotter than blazes,” he agreed.
She nodded toward the traps in his hand.
“You didn’t do much this afternoon,” she said. “I saw you with those when you left for the lake.”
“Forgot half of what I needed.”
“Or you followed Carole?”
“No, I didn’t.” It was the truth. He hadn’t followed her. He had gone on ahead of her. “I know what I’m not supposed to do.”
She threw her head back and laughed up at him. The action caused her breasts to lift and jump.
“You’d like to see her naked on the beach, wouldn’t you, Eddie?”
“You think there’s a man alive who would refuse that chance?”
“I don’t think Jim tried to rape her that day,” she said evenly. “I think he got it free, and that she just put up a yell. And that Roger Swingle who comes up here — he gets it, too. She isn’t fooling me. Maybe she’s got her father fooled but I’m not blind. Which reminds me that Roger will be with us in a couple of days.” She sighed. “I suppose he’ll hang around the rest of the summer and make a nuisance of himself. When he wasn’t with Carole last summer he was chasing me like some animal. A couple of times I had to slap his face.”
“He sounds like a weirdo.”
“What Carole sees in him I don’t know. A girl with her looks, and she ends up with a creep. But they say the beautiful ones sometimes go for the ugly ones.”
They were quite a distance from the house, shielded from view by a growth of trees, and it was a good place for him to try his luck with Kitty. Still he stood quiet, almost rigid, and he did nothing. He had the feeling that once he went the limit with her he wouldn’t be able to stop, that it would lead him down a dark road with a very uncertain future. Yet if he wanted to earn five thousand dollars he couldn’t fool around.
“I’ve got to get going,” he said.
“Oh, don’t be in a hurry. We can talk.”
“What about?”
“Joan Kelder might be a good subject,” she suggested.
He felt uncomfortable.
“I doubt it.”
“Such as how she’s never in her room at night.”
“Well — ”
“You two must have it bad. Real bad, Eddie. I check her room every night and she’s never in there. Well, once she was. The night you went out in the station wagon. She’d been crying.”
“No fault of mine,” he said.
“Perhaps not. Love, to a man, is merely the physical satisfaction of the moment. With a woman it goes deeper. Physical or otherwise, love is the most important thing in a woman’s life. And children. I guess every woman wants a child of her own.”
“Too bad you can’t have one if you feel that way about it.” It gave him a strange feeling to be talking with her in this way.
“My husband isn’t — capable.”
“You told me that once before.”
“I’ve even talked to him about me going to a doctor and having it done. He says if it would make me happy he doesn’t want to stand in my way, but he has to get used to the idea of me getting pregnant by somebody else.”
“That would be true of any man.”
“Probably. But men are so stupid when it comes to sex. All they want is a woman and the joy of the moment.”
“Not always.”
“What about you and Joan?” she challenged him.
“Maybe we’re in love,” he declared.
“Maybe, but what if you give her a child while she’s still married and her husband is in prison? Have you thought of that?”
He shifted the traps from one hand to the other.
“Naturally,” he said.
“It would cost you both your jobs. Frank wouldn’t go for a thing like that. I guess there was something pure about this first wife that rubbed off on him.”
“It didn’t as far as animals are concerned. He’s — oh, I guess you’d say he’s a sadist of some sort.”
“He wasn’t that way before he fell off that horse,” she said. “But the fall and the broken back changed him. It made him vicious. Sometimes when I’m getting him ready for bed he’ll grab one of my arms and twist it just to make me cry. Last night I thought he was going to pull one of my arms right out of the socket.”
“Jesus!” Eddie said, hating Jennings more and more.
“He laughed at me because I cried. He said I’d be letting myself in for a lot worse pain than that if I went ahead with an artificial insemination. Then he — well, I won’t tell you. It was — awful. He — well, he got my breasts in his hand and he made me scream because it was so bad.”
“The bastard,” Eddie breathed.
“I — I think I may have some bruises.”
“Not that I can see.”
She wet her lips with her tongue. For a second he thought she was going to drop the halter all the way but she didn’t. In fact, she tugged it up a little. For a moment he had a wild impulse to throw the traps away, to find her with his hands, to slam his mouth down on hers and give her a second honeymoon right there in the woods.
“I’ve still got to get back to the house,” he said. “If I’m not there by five I don’t eat.”
They turned and walked together through the woods. She paused when they neared the edge of the trees.
“You’d better go on,” she said. “If he sees us together it’s hard to tell what he’ll think. Even when we were meeting on the beach for a swim he had something to say.”
He stopped walking and stared across the field.
“We didn’t do anything wrong, Kitty.”
“I know it and so do you, but how does he know it? He’s in bed by eleven and he’s so drunk he sleeps like a log. Sometimes in the morning he asks me if I had fun the night before. I’m getting so I hate the God-damned beast.”
He left her and walked across the field. Back there in the woods he could have scored — he felt sure that he could have — but he had made no attempt. He had only to take her once and he could testify that she was an adulteress. Of course, he could do that anyway, whether it was true or not. However, he supposed for five bills Carole would want pictures of the act and then there could be no questions.
When he reached the shed he threw the traps on the ground and left them there. He had handled them with his bare hands and they would have to be boiled again, unless he kept them out for water sets.
It was hot in his room, and he took a cold shower, the fine needles of the spray probing every inch of his skin. As soon as he had dried himself he lay down and tried to think. He wished he had a job on a farm for two hundred bucks a month and was away from all of this. Carole wanted one thing and it was more than obvious that Kitty wanted something else, something that had to do with hate and the utter impossibility of her marriage. Money Kitty had, but love she lacked.
He stre
tched, feeling the sweat gathering on his body, and made an attempt to figure things out. He was powerfully attracted to Carole, but it was purely physical, he didn’t particularly like her. In some respects, she was as cruel as her father. She wanted to destroy Kitty’s marriage, and she was willing to go to the lowest level to do it. Kitty didn’t deserve that. She attended to a cripple, took care of his needs, and he mistreated her for it. If he had to make a choice, he told himself, it would have to be Kitty. She was fighting to keep what belonged to her and nobody could blame her for that.
He finally sat up and lit a cigarette. Jobs were hard to find — how well he knew that — and if he wanted to draw his three hundred a month plus room and board he had to please both Kitty and Carole. Well, it was far from impossible. He could tell Carole he was having trouble scoring with Kitty while he could be looking for something else to do. He didn’t want to go the way Jim had gone. That would hurt him getting another job. Most of the farmers had daughters of their own, and they were always suspicious of a fellow who was young and good looking. The farmers didn’t take into account that half of the time their daughters asked for it, one way or another.
He fell asleep thinking about the woods and Kitty Jennings and wondering why he hadn’t pulled her down to the ground with him.
6
A LIGHT warm rain was falling the next morning, hardly more than a heavy mist. Mist or no, the grass and leaves were wet and Eddie’s shoes soon wet through, his socks sticking clammily to his feet. Again he told himself that he would get new shoes when he received his first pay.
He checked all the turtle traps in Moon Lake first. They held five of the ugly creatures, which hissed at him when he lifted them from the water. Back on shore, he grabbed them by the tails and tossed them up on the sand. Then he shot each one twice in the head. Cutting their heads off with an axe would have been better but they would die of the bullets before too long. That was why he always checked the turtle traps first — it took them quite a while to die and he didn’t want to bury anything alive, not even a snapper.
He left the turtles, carrying the gun, and struck off in the direction of the woods. The mist had thinned, the sun almost coming through the clouds, and the only wet was under his feet. He decided that it would be a hot day, really hot, and he took no traps with him. He was in a hurry and there was too much to do. His line of traps was getting longer and longer, taking more time to cover it, and he had to be over at Goose Lake to meet Carole that afternoon. Unfortunately, he still didn’t know what he was going to say to her.
It was wet in the woods, too, and he avoided the low-hanging dripping limbs. The hemlocks were worst. One brush against a limb loaded with water and you were soaked to the skin.
The set was a good one, right in a little spring run, but somehow the animals weren’t using it. Raccoons usually paraded through the water, always hoping to find some food, but he hoped they would stay away. Even in winter, the best time for furs, he didn’t like trapping them, and their pelts didn’t bring much, only a few bucks at most. Mink was about the best to catch if a man wanted to make money from his work.
As soon as the sun came out, red and hot, the deer flies swarmed through the woods. Every fly in the county seemed to be after him. The hotter it got, the more he sweated, and the more the flies came around, getting into his hair and his ears. One, with vicious courage, even made a dive into his mouth.
Suddenly he swore angrily. He had forgotten his pack basket. A pack basket was a must, and any trapper who went without one was half nuts. Well, he had plenty of reason to have forgotten. He was worried sick, and he’d had to force his breakfast down, almost heaving up the eggs and toast as soon as they hit his stomach. Five thousand dollars was a lot of money, but he couldn’t see hurting anyone in order to get it. Better, he thought, to be on a farm for two hundred a month.
“You have to be honest,” his father had often told him. “Not just honest with other people but honest with yourself.”
He hadn’t really understood at the time but he knew now. There was a little thing inside him that kept saying that this was wrong, and it was hard to fight it down. Five thousand might give him a start on a farm of his own, a small one, but he was sure that he would never be happy with it. Earning that much was one thing but smashing someone’s marriage to do it was quite another, Yet, he supposed, if he didn’t do it somebody else would. And, for all he knew, Kitty might have it coming to her. It was fairly obvious that she didn’t love her husband, and was hanging on only for her share of his money. On the other hand, she might deserve it. She wrestled Jennings into and out of bed, and she was generally his personal slave. If, indeed, she had married him for his money, it was hardly any of his business. And — damn it — he liked her. She didn’t have Carole’s incandescent sexual magnetism, nor did he get from her what he got from Joan, but he was still interested in her as a person, a very lovely one. As for making her, he thought it could be done. She was a sexually deprived girl and he was a man, and they were both normal and healthy.
Turning his thoughts in another direction he made up his mind that he must do something about Joan. She wanted marriage as soon as she had her freedom, and he wasn’t convinced that he did. Under these circumstances going to bed with her night after night hardly seemed the decent thing to do. If he gave her a kid they’d be in a real box, and there would be no honorable way out except marriage. A lot of guys were married at twenty-three, or younger, but he just didn’t feel ready.
It took him the rest of the morning to cover his traps and he had pretty good luck — five foxes and an otter, with a skunk thrown in. He shot the skunk from a safe distance and he didn’t bother recovering the trap. He smelled bad enough already from sweat.
Jennings was on the lawn near the house in his chair, and he was highly pleased with Eddie’s take. Jennings was also a little bit drunk, which at this time of the day, was early even for him.
“Killed a dog yesterday,” Jennings said. “Blasted his guts right out with a shotgun.”
“Might have been somebody’s pet.”
Jennings sneered. “People should learn to keep their pets tied up.”
“Was it running deer when you saw it?”
“No, it just started walking up toward my chair, wagging its god-damned tail.”
“My God, how could you shoot it?”
“Easy. I just pulled the trigger.”
Eddie buried his game in the field and then he went to his quarters and took a shower. He would rather have gone for a swim, but he feared that Jennings would think he was goofing off.
After the shower he put on clean shorts, T-shirt, trousers and socks, but he had to wear the same shoes. He felt better, and he went over to the main house to eat. But he couldn’t.
Mary was out of the kitchen. Despairingly, Eddie just left his plate and walked toward Moon Lake. Now that he wasn’t sweating and he was clean the flies didn’t bother him so much. He saw them everywhere, though, their wings like silver dots as they flew through the sunlight that filtered down between the trees.
The lake was calm when he arrived, the water cool and inviting, and he sat down on the sand. He hoped Jennings had not seen him leave without any traps. He wouldn’t know how to explain it. His hours were supposed to be from eight to five, and although Jennings was generally pleased with his work, the more animals Eddie could kill the better his employer liked it. He thought about Jennings killing the dog and it revolted him. He knew that some dogs ran wild, usually in packs, but most dogs just wandered away from home and then returned. Poor little thing — what a way to treat an animal that was trying to be friendly.
The sun was too hot and he moved into some shade, stretching out on the pine needles and closing his eyes. Would she come? He hoped. He couldn’t go on stalling her forever. She seemed like a determined girl who wouldn’t be willing to wait very long for what she wanted.
He heard her coming long before she was close and he sat up, his mouth dry and his throat tig
ht. She had let him kiss her the day before, and if he worked it right he might get farther today.
She wore the same suit as the day before, and just the sight of her lighted a ball of fire in his stomach.
“You look lazy,” she said, standing over him.
“Hell, I’m tired,” he said.
She sat down beside him, Indian fashion, her thighs bulging.
“I feel sorry for you. You work so stinking hard, Eddie.”
“Hard enough.”
“I hope you put in some of your work on Kitty. And, if you did, did you enjoy it? I think Jim used to.”
“I didn’t see her,” he lied. “You think I can just walk into her bedroom and throw back the sheet?”
She laughed at Eddie.
“You aren’t telling me the truth,” she taunted him. “I saw you come out of the woods yesterday afternoon. A few minutes later she followed you”
There was no use trying to lie to her.
“Just talking. I heard her shooting that gun and I thought it might be a kid or a poacher.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Not much. Just how I like my job and that sort of thing.”
“And what did you say?”
“Gee, you ask a lot of questions, don’t you? I told her that I don’t go for all this useless killing. Most of it’s against the law anyway.”
“My father never used to be that way,” she said thoughtfully.
“I wish I could believe that.”
“Well, it’s true. When my mother was alive and I was living home you couldn’t find a man who had a kinder heart. When some organization was trying to raise money for an animal shelter he donated several thousand dollars. Then he had that horrible fall and it changed him.”
“I understand he was drunk.”
“I guess he was — the doctor said he was — but I think Kitty got him that way. I found out later that when she asked for the horses at the stable she requested the liveliest they had. I think she hoped he would fall and be killed.”
