I couldn't sleep. I lay there on the floor and tried to straighten it all out in my mind. About Lucy. About Stewart. About the strange, hard, lost woman sleeping a lew feet away from me.
But it all whirled in my mind like a carrousel, going round and round and round and never getting anywhere. Because under it all, around it all. over it all, the desire and the longing in me for Jean swirled and screamed.
I got up and stepped across the floor and stood there looking down at her. And then I saw that her eyes were open and that she was looking at me too.
"I could hear you breathing," I said. My voice cracked on the last word.
"I could hear you too." The pale white oval of her face seemed to swim toward me.
"Every time you moved," I said, "I'd have to remember you were there."
"And every time I turned my head I could see you lying there on the floor." There was an incredulous sort of wonder in her voice.
"It's no use," I said. "Is it?"
"No, it's no use."
"Like you said last night, there isn't anything else for us."
I bent down and pulled back the thin blanket.
And then I heard the dry mattress crackle under me, too, and felt her warm hands touch me.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was over a week later, and [can was again spending the afternoon in town. I was sitting at the shelf at the back wall of the cabin, working on the letter. I wanted to be careful with it, to watch out for slips, and this was the sixth one I had composed.
For our plan, it was a good thing Brax Jordan had put Lucy's typewriter in the trunk two years ago. He had said it was too old to sell and that I could throw it away if I didn't want it. I had been furious, but soon I hail forgotten it. And now it was coming in handy.
Then I heard the sound of the car, not the rattle of the old Chewy, but a smooth hum, a powerful engine pulling through the sand. I got up quickly, put the typewriter in the trunk, and went to the door.
I leaned against the jamb and watched the car pull up.
It was a Buick, a new one. Brax Jordan looked like gnome inside the huge mass of metal. Then he got out and came across the sand.
"Come in the house," I said.
He stopped a yard or two away. "Where is she?"
"You mean Jean?"
"I mean whatever-her-name-is that didn't have any more sense than to marry you. If what I hear is light"
I laughed. "Good ol' Brax. Never spares his clients' feelings. You coming in or just standing there?"
"It'll be too hot inside. Let's get over in the shade."
We went over and sat down by the spring and I handed him the gourd and he took a long drink of the cool water and handed the gourd back. Then he lit up a long cigar.
"You off the hooch, Harry?"
"Yes. And I shave and wash and eat right and sleep right and brush my teeth."
"Then there's that much to her credit. Who is she?"
"A writer. She read something about me in an old newspaper and came out to see me."
"And it was love at first sight?"
"Something like that."
He laughed.
"I bet it was," he said. "Where is she now?"
"In town."
A faint shadow crossed his face. I wonder if he's already heard them talking, I thought.
"They tell me she's a knockout."
"Not like Lucy. Not that much of a knockout."
He leaned forward.
"Listen, Harry. I've got it figured this way. It was like with a child eating candy. The child loves the stuff, he doesn't know why, it pleases him some way, but he can't stop, he isn't able to ask himself if it's good for him, if he ought to eat so much of it. So he goes on eating it if his ma isn't there to paddle his bottom. And then he gets too much of it and throws it up all over himself."
"I don't get it," I said.
"It was that way with you. The way you were living. You finally threw it up all over yourself, and right then, there she was, and you married her because that seemed like a way to begin to get out of it."
"Yes," I said. "Maybe. I don't know."
He blew the cigar smoke in my face and leaned back again against the tree. His small feet were placed precisely together.
"That much figures," he said. "Everybody is thinking that. But listen, Harry. Think about this. Why did she marry you?"
"You think about it. You want to know."
"You are asking me to believe," he said, "that this girl, this Yankee girl at that, who is completely alien to this country, these people, all this"-his hand waved vaguely around him-"who looks like something out of a Grade B movie, who obviously has known men and money and excitement-you are asking me to believe that such a creature drove in here and out of whatever compulsions women feel took up with and married a man who at that time was not only a drunk and a pauper, but who was also dirty, underfed, hardly human, and damn near crazy, and who could not even offer her a roof that didn't leak or a mattress on which to lay her head."
"That roof doesn't leak," I said, "and I'm not asking you to believe anything. You want to see the certificate?"
"Never mind. I've talked to Snuggins."
"Then let it be," I said. "In the first place, you can see it's good for me. In the second place, stranger things have happened. In the third place, it's none of your business in the fourth place."
He puffed at the cigar. His eyes narrowed.
"All right, Harry. I'm your lawyer. God help me. I will concede it could have happened. I will even concede that you believe it happened just the way it looks. But not her. No. I don't like to carry tales, but I'll ask you this, Harry. Do you know they say she's already carrying on with Dick Stewart?"
It's worked. I thought, just like I planned it. Only it's not the way I thought it would be.
Nothing is.
I stood up slowly and I made my voice flat and hard.
"I'll accept your apology," I said. "And I'll take the names of those who say it."
He looked at me and his eyes blinked once. I hated to make him feel the way he did because he was my friend. He looked smaller than he really was.
"You can have the apology. The best way to get the names is off the county tax lists. They ought to include about everybody."
"You better go, Brax. You better just get the hell out of here."
As I said it, we both heard the first sound of the Chevrolet. The sun was lowering now, and suddenly it was very hot there beneath the trees around the clear, silent spring. The air was still and the sounds of the car were projected ahead across the sand. It came over the low hill and we stood there and watched it.
"Why don't you ask her? You had bad luck with Lucy, Harry. I wouldn't want to see this one get you off the track again. Ask her now. Maybe there's nothing to it.
"No."
"Better find it out now."
"All right, then. And then you go. And don't come back."
He shrugged and flipped the cigar across the spring. We started walking slowly toward the car, now coming to a halt behind the shiny Buick. I towered over him and his head was down now, and I wanted to reach out and put my hand on his shoulder.
Good old Brax.
It had taken guts to tell me what he had, believing what he did, knowing only what he knew. It hadn't been any of his business. He could have let it go. But I was his friend and he had told me.
Jean was getting out of the car. She looked curiously at the little man beside me, whose head was bowed in worry and sorrow, and at my ramrod posture.
"Jean, this is Jordan. He used to be my lawyer."
"Howdy-do," Brax said.
"I've heard about you, Mr. Jordan."
"He talks too much," I said. "About things he ought to keep his mouth off of."
Her face wrinkled in a slight frown and she looked from me to him and back again. He said nothing.
"He says people talk. About you and Dick Stewart."
She took the cue without a hitch. I remembere
d again what a good actress she could be.
Fear flashed across her face and she took a step backward and her voice trembled.
"No," she said. "It's not so."
"You tell me. The truth. I'll believe you."
"I buy at his store. That's all. Honest, Harry!"
It was just right, the way she said it. No one would ever have believed her except a husband who worshipped her. who had made up his mind to believe her before she opened her mouth, a husband who would not hesitate to kill the man who proved her a liar.
"All right," I said. "That's good enough for me."
Brax turned away without a word. He got in the Buick and I thought again how the mass of it dwarfed him, the neat little man who had come out here to tell me what he thought I ought to know.
I stepped to the window of the Buick.
"You didn't say it, Brax. You just said they were talking."
He nodded and pressed the starter button. The smooth roar of the engine flooded the stillness.
"You let it be known," I said, "that it's not so."
"All right."
"And let it be known that I'll shoot the man that says it again."
"They ought to know that anyway," he said. And then the Buick pulled away and we stood there and watched it drop out of sight over the hill.
"That helps,"' she said.
"Yes. Only I hate to be so rough on him. He meant to be my friend."
"Maybe you shouldn't have been. We'll need him after we do it."
"I know Brax. You don't have to worry about him."
"He believes it, too. About me."
"That's the plan, isn't it?"
"Sure. Everybody thinks I'm a tramp."
"Well," I said, "it won't be much longer now."
Suddenly, I saw how tired she was. Not physically, perhaps, but from the strain of it, the thinking and the scheming, and the daily encounters with Stewart. Little lines crinkled at the corners of her eyes, and her movements as she turned toward the cabin were listless.
"You need to relax," I said. "It's getting on your nerves."
"It's enough to, isn't it?"
"Yes. More than enough. Let's go out tonight."
She stopped and looked back at me. She laughed harshly.
"Around here? Where? A corn-shucking?"
"Not the Stork Club. But there's a roadhouse the other side of St. Johns. The food's O.K. and there's a juke box.
Lucy and I… we used to go there sometimes. We could blow in some of your dough on a couple of steaks."
"I've never been to the Stork Club, anyway. You're on."
"Besides, we ought to get out some. People expect to see a man and his wife around. It'll make the whole thing more believable."
She moved closer and touched my arm.
"Just this once," she said, "let's don't mix business with pleasure."
"All right," I said. "Let's get started."
That was nine days after we were married.
In that time, she had cooked for me, washed my clothes, and scrubbed the shack until it shone. She had forced me to shave my heavy beard every day, to go into town and get a haircut; she had made me dress neatly, including tucking empty left sleeves into coat pockets or pinning them up, instead of letting them dangle, as I had done before.
My frame was already beginning to fill out from the good food and regular sleep that she saw to it that I had. And my muscles were hardening again, after the aching soreness of the first day or two.
Because she had made me work too. I had rigged up a pulley-rope attachment so that she could get water from the spring without going out of the house. Coming back from the haircut trip, I had brought with me an empty oil drum, and I had fashioned a tower for it and contrived a rude shower, like the ones we built overseas.
I had walled in the spring with clean pine lumber I had cut and shaped myself from the wooded area adjoining the Caldwell place, to keep out the crumbling sediment. I had even dug a deep hole for an outhouse and built a structure around it, again with lumber I had cut and sawed myself.
Inside the cabin I had built another rough chair and another bunk, across the floor from the first one, and I had replaced some of the weak floor planking and erected strong, new steps in place of the rickety old ones.
All of this I had done with one arm and with the old tool kit I had bought the day I had moved out there. I had worked and was growing strong again and I did not see the fate any more now and I had taken down the stick upon which I used to hang the bean cans.
We rarely if ever mentioned the thing that lay at the bottom of both our minds. We avoided speaking of the day rushing closer and closer to us, of the irrevocable deed almost upon us. But I could see the pressure of it in her eyes and it must have been in mine, too.
For my part, the puzzle that had started in me that night on the floor of the shack continued to plague me. I had thought then, in almost blinding certainty, that I did not want to go through with it. Now I didn't know. I could still feel the cold rage pop in me at the thought of Dick Stewart and what he had done to Lucy, and the still unknown something he had known, learned, unearthed that had enabled him to do it. When I felt that, there would be no doubt in my mind.
But then would come the nights, the nights when we would lie in tortured determination, in a sort of suspended rigidity, waiting, waiting, breathless, for one of us to crack, to give in, to make the first move toward the other and that incredible impact of desire and despair and desperation.
And afterward (because one of us always did, one of us always made that first move) I would lie in the night and know again the almost unarguable truth of the love that I had been so sure of that first night when she had come to me. And know again too that my desire to kill Stewart was dead and gone, and that I would do it only for her.
Perhaps if she had seemed to return the feeling, we could together have found some solution. But she came to me in defeat, gave herself to me in despair, and left me in bitter and consuming shame. Had it been the same with me, there would have been no problem.
So, with this between us, and with the ever present, lurking, approaching moment always in our minds, it was no wonder we had both welcomed my idea of a night out. A little fun seemed a wonderful thing.
Maybe we could find it at the Lodge.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was about a mile beyond St. Johns, a low, rambling concrete-block structure, with a parking lot between it and the highway. The front door opened into a small room with a counter at one side, lined with stools, and a few tables were scattered across the floor. Beyond this room a half wall, topped with dark green curtains, set off the main room.
We went on back, not looking at the few people in the front part, most of whom were men drinking beer, and paused in the doorway. It was a long, narrow room and a row of booths went along each side wall. The juke box was against the rear wall, between the two doors.
Willy Carson, a fat, balding party who managed to keep his whisky and beer sales not inside the law but not far enough outside to get the sheriff interested, had a sense of humor. You could tell it the minute you looked at those two doors, because each of them had a bird dog's head outlined on it in plywood and beneath one head was the word "Pointers" and beneath the other "Setters." That was the kind of place the Lodge was, and the kind of guy he was.
Willy was hurrying across the floor toward us now, and before he was within ten feet of me he was reaching for my hand.
"Harry! Am I glad to see you again! Boy, we missed you." He was pounding at my back now. "Just the other night I was saying now Harry's gone and got hisself married again, he better git to comin' out here some more. I was tellin'…"
Willy was a harmless cuss and I was touched at his genuine welcome. I grinned back at him.
"Willy," I said, "this is Jean."
His eyes twinkled over fat cheeks and he grabbed her hand and began to pump it too. I cut him off before he could go into the back-slapping routine again.
&
nbsp; "Got a booth for us, Willy?"
"Always got one for you, Harry. Right over by the Jan."
He led us to a booth near the rear. The place wasn't more than half full. As we walked across the floor, I could feel the other people there watching us. I nodded at the ones I knew and they smiled and waved, flow the tongues will wag tomorrow, I thought. They'll be telling all over the county about that low-neck dress she's wearing.
We sat down and Willy oscillated over us.
"I got some good cold Miller's up there, Harry. You always liked that Miller's."
I grinned at Jean.
"Bring her one, Willy. I'll have iced tea."
I could almost taste that beer. I could see the thin head on it and feel it, cool and brash, in my throat. But I ordered the iced tea anyway.
That had been the hardest thing of all. The whisky.
I had stayed away from it, and only then did I realize the grip it had taken on me. In the nights I ached for it and my head pounded for it, my dry throat begged for it, and my nerves screamed for it. But I had stayed away from it, and I did now, even from a beer.
Because just one was all it would take. Just one and I would never be rid of it again.
"Iced tea?" he said, his face screwed up in bewilderment. "My God. I'll see if we got any."
"And bring us a couple of steaks, Willy. Some of those good ones you always stick away for your favorites. Make them rare. Plenty of French fries and the other trimmings."
His face was happy again, then, and he toddled off to put in the order.
"Well, this is it," I said. "The local hot spot."
She was looking around her, her face alive with interest. She had put on a dark cotton dress, and her tan shoulders and neck rose out of it to the small head and the eager face and the short blonde hair.
"I like it. It looks like these people have good times here."
"They do," I said, "because they only come here when they want to. They don't practically live here, like folks do in a big city."
"Maybe that's it. Harry, let's dance. I haven't danced since I left South America."
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