by Gil Brewer
“What about it?”
“Why—” He flapped at the air with the pad but he didn’t lose the smile. “It’s down in the drive. Mr. Decker thought it would be fine to bring it out to you.”
“Oh. I was coming in for it this afternoon.”
“Yes. Certainly.” His voice was all full of this smiling ha-ha. “Thought we’d save you the trip. Not really necessary. Just so Decker’ll know I delivered it.” He winked. “Not that he don’t trust me, y’know.”
I sighed. He pointed through the screen in the sunporch, down at the parking lot in front of the hospital. “Right there, she is. Drives like a dream, too.”
“Thanks.” I didn’t like the guy and I had kind of wanted to go pick it up myself. We shook hands.
“Well, that’s that, Mr. Garth.”
I nodded. He swallowed, turned and left. As he passed through the doorway leading into the ward, Leda brushed by him. She looked at him, frowned, then came over to me.
She was an orgy of loveliness.
“Who’s he?”
I told her. She wore a pale-green silk dress that had black streaks running through it, and it clung. Her auburn hair set fire to that green and when she moved—which she did even when she didn’t—I felt like that Roman of Nero’s time at the feast where the naked princess stepped out of the pie with a snake in her teeth.
Leda moved over to the porch screen and looked down. “I’ve seen that fellow before. He’s been hanging around out here, with someone else. Just lately.”
“Probably delivers other cars, baby.”
“Maybe.”
I went over and stood beside her. The big fellow was just coming down the outside hospital steps. He joined a smaller man and they went on down and sat on a stone bench to wait for the bus. The smaller one had carrot-colored hair and even from this distance a sharp, bright-eyed face. He was pale and middle-aged.
“We’ve got the car,” I told Leda. “There she is. Like it?”
She turned, slid her arms up around my neck. “Anything would do. I’ll run along now. You can say goodbye and meet me at my place this afternoon.”
“All right.”
“I love you so damned much,” she said. “Because you’re going to be a great sculptor and because you’re just a little nutty. And, of course, you’re going to be very, very rich.” She hesitated. “Eric, why don’t we get married here before we leave? Then we wouldn’t have to hide. . . .”
“We don’t hide,” I said. “You know that. Make believe. It’s all right this way, for now. We’ll be married as soon as we get home.” I didn’t tell her I couldn’t take the chance until I knew more about myself. I wanted her as my wife but we’d have to wait for a while.
She poked the fingers of her right hand under my belt, twiddled them. “All right.”
I laughed, pulled her close. For a moment she was quite still. “This way,” I told her, “you’ll be able to make sure I get all that dough.”
Her body moved against me and she wasn’t breathing. Then she did breathe. Right up against my throat. Hot breath and warm, damp lips. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s right.”
A psycho case back in the ward cursed monotonously, then screamed with laughter.
Chapter 2
Leda was staying at a place in San Fernando Valley. She had lived in California for some time but only at the Veterans Hospital. She wanted a short chance to view the trade. She had it. She seemed not to care for it. A ranch-type hotel, catering to anyone who had a buck and a babe to spend it on. It also carried babes without bucks and lonesome bucks looking for babes. The Dark Mesa was just that. It overflowed with eucalyptus, green grass shaved so it just tickled your ankles like an expensive deep-napped carpet, and vine-covered, meandering, low-roofed, alley-wayed, muted rooms with all their views on the inside. It was trellised, fenced, scalloped, walled securely, and when you entered the front door into what was probably the lobby, you got a feeling.
I located Leda’s hideout. She had two rooms and they were heavy like everything else at the Dark Mesa. It was built to appeal to the senses. The same as Leda was. I somehow distrusted her living here. But it hadn’t been for long and I’d seen her most of the time. She was so completely frank about everything, there was probably no reason for my distrust. If Leda slept with any of the bellhops she’d have told me. It was a rotten way to think, but that was her way.
“You took long enough, Eric. I’m all packed.”
There were two suitcases by the door. I hadn’t expected this.
“Packed?”
“Yeah.” She stepped closer. She was wearing a lemon-yellow terry-cloth robe belted tight at the waist. Her auburn hair was thick and mussed and her eyes were oily, fully of sleepy sunshine. Her skin was that way, too, and her lips melted. In a way I would always hate that, hate her—for being drawn to her the way I was. I didn’t want to let her go from my arms. Her body was vibrant, lush beneath the robe, and the warmth from her body reached me. I felt every full line of her pressed against me, through the robe. She pressed hard. She worked at it and sometimes it was as if she fought—like you’d mash two pieces of clay together, grinding them together.
“You like that,” she said.
I squeezed her waist harder and harder. Her eyes fogged and she started breathing through her teeth, hissing her breath in and out, arching backward with the pain. “That’s enough!” she said. “Stop, Eric!” Her voice was full of anxiety now.
I quit, swallowed, searched inside me for the patience every man is forced to be born with. I located enough to grin and take her hands.
“Why are you packed?”
Her shoulders still trembled with the ragged breathing. She cocked her head, tipped her lips nervously with her tongue.
“We said we’d stay here for a while.”
“I want to leave,” she answered.
“Mean find someplace else?”
“No. I mean let’s head for home.”
“Florida?”
She nodded. “Uh-huh.”
It was quiet for a time. I couldn’t think of what to say. We’d planned staying here for a time. The moments we’d snatched together on the hospital grounds were just that—moments. Hot and anxious in the shadows.
“Figured we’d stay on a bit.”
She turned, walked away, whirled back again. “I want to go, Eric. Baby’s been standing still too long.” Her eyelids closed. “Can’t explain it. I just want to go.”
“Well, okay.” I took her in my arms. “You nervous or something?”
“No. I want to be with you—just with you.” Her voice was way down in her throat someplace, almost a whisper. “If we stay here, we’ll never get away. We’ll stay and stay. You know we will.”
“I see what you mean.”
“Then we’ll leave tonight.” She smiled and I began to wonder if she had something on her mind. Something might be bothering her. Sometimes a woman will go so far with a fetching idea, then scare herself off. It’s called seeing the light. They seldom realize they mentally manufacture that light themselves.
Leda hadn’t been like that. She wasn’t the kind to scare easily. She lounged on the arm of a chair and wrinkled up the corners of her eyes. “Did he scare you? Prescott, I mean?”
“No.” I slumped in the chair and pulled her onto my lap. The robe fell apart over her long thighs. It hit me like always, that white flesh. The smell of her, the feel of her, full and urgent. She wriggled in my lap, fumbled the robe together.
“Prescott does that sometimes,” she said. “When a man leaves the hospital. He think they’ll remember better if they’re scared.”
“I doubt it.” Her hair smelled good. I buried my face in it, kissed her throat. She made a noise of content, but her voice was a shade too loud.
“You aren’t scared, are you, Eric?”
“About what?”
“I mean about—yourself.”
Outside a car hissed up the gravel drive and white light reflected
in diminishing convolutions through the heavily draped Venetian blinds.
“No.”
“Doesn’t it frighten you at all that you’re going to see your brother? That you’re free and on the outside again? Did you feel all right driving over here from the hospital?”
I didn’t want to look at her. I couldn’t hate her for asking these things, yet something twisted tightly inside me. It had always been that way with Leda. Drawn, yet repelled. I loved her. Yet in some ways I hated her. I hated her possibly for the same reasons I loved her. Something inside both of us met with sharp necessity, yet clashed. I wanted to tell her how crazy it all was. That I was as free of any cracked obsessions as she.
I could never actually hurt her physically, though sometimes it came close to that. But sometimes I was compelled to hurt her with words. I knew she wanted to marry, but I had to put it off until I was sure of myself. And once more I thought, We’re a damned odd pair.
“That why you want to leave? Frightened of me?”
“Pooh!”
“Yeah. What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I was wondering, that’s all.”
“Quit wondering.”
It was funny. Things like that came out, and I knew that sometimes I hurt her—just with words.
She took my face in both her hands and blinked at me. Her eyes were very large, concerned, her mouth slightly open. Her chin bunched. “Don’t let’s fight.”
“Think I’m going to crown you?”
“With a wooden mallet?” She smiled.
“You’ve been talking with Prescott.”
I was disgusted with myself for doing this, but I couldn’t stop. I was worried, plenty, and everything was jumbled in my mind.
“You told me all this, Eric.”
“Did you talk with Prescott?” I heard the anger in my voice. I was ashamed of it, but it was there. It was what I felt. I couldn’t rid myself of it. It would take time, like Prescott said. Only I half believed he had suggested eight-tenths of my worry to me. It was up to me to rid myself of it. Let it wear itself out. Or become conscious that it was never there in the first place. “Did you?”
“He called me in. Yes.”
“Great. What’d he tell you to do?” I stood, dragged her up with me. I walked across the room, sat on the divan in front of the fireplace.
Somehow, touching her, being close to her, it was impossible to talk. She hadn’t moved. She stood with her back to me, the long lines of her body showing even through the robe, somehow dissolving the cloth; the supple waist, the flare of the hip, the broad curve of shoulder.
“He tell you to watch out?” I said. I realized what I was saying and I didn’t like it. My voice went on just the same—harsh, filled with bitterness. “He tell you to get hold of him if I acted funny? Did he?”
She shook her head, not moving, with her back still toward me.
“He tell you I was dangerous, apt to do wild things? He warn you to stay away from me—or what?”
She whirled, came across the room, sat down beside me. I got a crazy thought. Maybe she was being paid to do this—part of her job. Maybe she was just seeing me home. . . .
Excitement was in her voice. “No, Eric. Please don’t. You’re hurting me and you’re hurting yourself. I simply talked with Prescott. He wanted to know more about your plans, our plans. You’re so closemouthed.”
“It’s no business of his.”
“He’s concerned, Eric.”
I nodded. “Concerned. Thinks I’ll do some damn fool thing.”
“You’re acting like a child.”
I kept silent.
“He has a right. So’ve I. We want you well.”
“I am well.”
“But, darling, you still dream those horrible dreams. Now, listen. We’ll be married soon, and you know I love you.”
“You want to be sure I won’t kill my brother when I see him, don’t you? You wouldn’t want to be hooked up with a murderer. Damn it, Leda. Nothing’s wrong with me.”
“All right, darling.” She came against me like a flame draws to your hand. “Now I’m going to dress. You’re going to sit here and think. We’re not going to be like this anymore.”
She rose, swung into her bedroom. She blew me a kiss as she closed the door. It was like she’d swung her hip against me. I heard her humming in there and I sat on the couch and knew how wrong I was to take off like that, blow up inside.
So much of what I thought was Leda could be my imagination. There was no evil in her. Not the kind of evil you’d think of, anyway. She was pent up. Her nature was like the heat that hesitates along the top of a blast furnace. Withering, hot, molten—anxious to consume. To consume was her nature. It was in her walk, in the way she moved her lips, in the motions of her hands—in fact, of her whole body. Yet it seemed unconscious on her part. I tried to read conscious movement into it. But when I thought about it, I knew it was nothing but instinct. Perhaps Leda was more like her mother than she thought.
I wondered plenty about myself, too. What was going to happen when I returned? There was the loan business my father had left. Frank was running that now. I wanted to get back and get some money. I needed money bad. Because with money I could go on with my sculpturing. That and Leda were the important things in my life. I wanted to do a nude of Leda in stone. Maybe then I’d have her—cold and warm at the same time.
And me. What about me? What was going to happen to me? Because there was always that void between sleep and waking. For the long moments after I woke up, after dreaming, it seemed as real—the wooden mallet, Frank, everything—as it seemed that blood-and-thunder day back in Korea.
Leda and I had met close to a year ago. I was in bed all the time then, unable to get around. I had a private room at the far end of the ward and Leda was helping out at the library. She wheeled the cart of books around, for bed patients.
There were trees out beyond my window and some hills, and if I rolled and propped myself on my side I could see pretty well. The room was small and out there it was small too, only in a different way. It was a place composed of the region within my sight. It was good to see it all. The four walls of the room were bare except for a religious painting at the head of the bed and that single window with the sky blue, gray, white, pale, dark with rain or with the unrebellious succession of days, and the green.
I was in a far wing of the hospital so there were no buildings in sight, only the voluptuous unreality beyond the pane of glass: unreal because I wondered then if I would ever be there again—where it was. A kind of through-the-looking-glass thing, though not backward. And between the myriad procession of hospital events, the time-clocked meals, needles, blood-pressure and pulse counts; “We’ll take off the dressing. There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”; nights of dreams; Prescott’s first visits, “You don’t dream?”, the lies; “Ah, so you do dream?”, the truths at last, “A wooden mallet!”; the bedpans, the changing of sheets, shave, wash, brush your teeth, the toenails clipped, scar-tissue, haircut, the occasional scream of agonized sound purling across the thick night, and worst of all the first realization that that last scream was you—during the time between I would look out the window. It was always fine and better than any movie or play. It never became monotonous. Once in a while people passed out there, though seldom, and I speculated as to what they did in life; the fat, the slim, the quick, the weary. I speculated and dreamed and thought intensely about my sculpturing and of how much I needed it, how I wanted to return to it. Because thinking about it grounded you somehow, made things real again. And I watched the skies change and the clouds and winds in the trees out the window.
Then one day my door opened.
“Hi! How’d you like something to read?”
“Thanks. Never mind.” I hadn’t looked. That door had previously brought nothing to me but a minor or major agony. This could be nothing else.
“Well, have a look, anyway.”
I heard the door swing wide and wheels runni
ng—one with a squeak—and crepe-soled shoes and the hiss of a nylon dress against what I suddenly saw was female flesh. The cart was piled high with books, with tabs sticking out of them, and magazines. That’s what she’d meant for me to look at. I looked at her. She was something to watch.
There she was. My fate stood right there in the door with the books in the cart and looked at me out of still blue eyes. A fate that was going to be mixed up with death, murder, money, and hell. A lush red-lipped fate with thick auburn hair and long legs in a white dress which seemed to have been spun across her body.
Maybe I didn’t think anything right then. Except that she was something real. You didn’t have to look hard to see it.
“They say you haven’t had any books,” she said. “I thought you might like some.” Her voice was soft, yet there was a rasping quality to it. An exciting voice. Her eyes were very steady. I raised to my elbows, pushed back against the pillows. Something tore in my back and hurt like hell, but she was morphine.
It was a day in May, about three o’clock in the afternoon, and it began raining when she opened the door.
I hadn’t said anything and she looked embarrassed. Her face colored up. When she started to turn the cart through the door, it caught her skirt.
“Don’t go,” I said. “I might like something.”
She was dubious now. But it was easier at that moment to let me see the books on the cart than to wheel the cart out the door. She half smiled and pressed her hair away from her face with both hands. It was a gesture I would often see and remember for the rest of my life. There was something in that gesture that made you want to sink your hands into that hair. As she moved closer to the bed, I realized her eyes had changed from blue to gray. A cold gray, like wet black slate. Her mouth was broad, full-lipped, her body long and willowy with deep breasts, and she was very much alive. The blue returned to her eyes.
