I played up. “What’s a wedge?”
“The simplest tool known to man. This room is full of simple tools, and I don’t care if they are loaded down with Phi Beta keys until they walk bowlegged.” She looked at me for a moment longer. I noticed that her eyes were greenish brown, called hazel. “Come on,” she said, taking my arm. “I’ll buy you a drink at the nearest bar, if you’ll promise not to split a single atom, not even a little one.”
Three weeks later we were married; and three years later I was still in love with her, and I thought she was still in love with me; and what good did it do us if we couldn’t manage to figure out a way of living together under the circumstances my job required? I watched her now as she turned the page, big-eyed and studious; and I wanted her back more than I cared to admit, but what the hell? I had my work to do; and you can’t have everything.
She looked up quickly. “Well, it’s about time you woke up,” she said, removed the glasses and dropped them into her bag, and rose and went out of the room, returning with the nurse who asked me the usual silly questions and took the routine readings.
“You can say hello to your wife, but she’d better leave in five minutes,” the nurse said. “She’ll be back tomorrow, won’t you, Mrs. Gregory? We don’t want another relapse, do we?”
We waited until she was gone. “Hello,” Natalie said.
“Hello,” I whispered. “How long have you been sitting there?”
“A couple of days, off and on. I’m staying at the hotel. My God, what a bunch of men in this town! They’re either so artsy-craftsy they’d turn your stomach, or they wear high heels and smell of cows, or they’ve been associating with uranium so long they glow in the dark. Half a dozen characters have tried to pick me up in the bar; and each one of them started out by bringing out a piece of rock and juggling it casually for a while and then shoving it quickly under my nose and saying, ‘Lady, do you know what that is? That’s pure horsematite; runs umpteen per cent uranium oxide!’”
I laughed. There was a funny kind of awkwardness between us. It’s hard for two people to talk in a relaxed way when they don’t know if they’re going to stay married or not.
Natalie said, “Your homicidal girl friend’s in a room downstairs, under observation. There’s a policeman in front of the door. She seems to be doing all right. No skull fracture or anything. I asked.”
“Have you heard what they’re planning to do with her?”
“Well, there was some talk of preferring charges as soon as you are well enough to testify.”
“Charges?” I whispered. “What charges? She was trying to sell me a secondhand gun, since I’m interested in guns. Some fool had left a shell in the chamber and it went off. The noise startled her so she slipped and knocked over a pot of flowers. Why, you saw the whole thing with your own eyes.”
Natalie lit a cigarette, and blew smoke in my direction. “If that’s the way you want it, darling.”
“I had it coming,” I whispered. “I shot her boy-friend. I’m not apologizing, under the circumstances, but the girl was right in a sense: I made a decision nobody’s got a real right to make. The least I can do is accommodate myself to the fact that some people aren’t going to like me for it, and not mess up their lives any more than I’ve already done. She’s got it out of her system; it seems unlikely that she’ll try again. Tell them to let her go, Princess. They won’t get any testimony out of me.”
Natalie watched me for a moment longer. I could not tell what she was thinking. She was wearing a gray-green cashmere sweater and a pleated plaid skirt that involved a good deal of the same color among several others. She looked like a college girl. The skirt rippled nicely when she moved. I’m a sucker for pleats. The sweater was a loose fit, and she put no severe strains on it; however, I have never understood the current fad for outsize bosoms. If I want milk I can always buy a cow.
She said, “For a cold-blooded scientific bastard, you’re a surprisingly nice guy. Sometimes.” She stepped forward and leaned down to kiss me, holding the cigarette aloft. “I can hardly taste the man for the whiskers,” she said, smiling. “You look like Ernest Hemingway; you’re even getting some gray in spots.”
“Well, you know who put it there.”
“I suppose I ought to be jealous. Would you turn me loose if I tried to shoot you?”
“Hell, no,” I said. “You’re dangerous.”
“Don’t underestimate that girl just because she’s a blonde and doesn’t know how to dress.”
“Underestimate her?” I whispered. “You sound as if I was planning a long and happy relationship with the kid.”
“Kid, hell,” Natalie said. “She’s a couple of years older than I am. That robust type doesn’t grow up before forty.” She grinned her mischievous grin. “And how would I know what you’re planning? Well, I guess my tune’s up. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Toward the end of the week it was decided that I was strong enough to have a little more work done on the interior; I spent the morning in surgery and had no visitors that day. The following day it started snowing and Natalie called up from Albuquerque where she had gone to pick up some clothes and stuff; she left a message with the nurse that the roads were too bad for her to make it back, which I could well believe, looking at the white stuff falling past the window. Our friends in the east seem to labor under the delusion that we live in a tropical climate; they forget that Albuquerque is five thousand feet in the air, and Santa Fe, seven thousand. You get some weird scenes around here in the winter, with all the desert country and its spiny vegetation covered with snow. There’s nothing more unlikely-looking than a snow-covered cactus.
I lay in bed and tried not to feel neglected, and fell asleep doing it. A knock on the door awakened me.
“Come in,” I said.
It was one of Van Horn’s men. “Do you want to see a young fellow named Rasmussen, Dr. Gregory?”
“A fellow named Rasmussen? Not a girl?”
He shook his head. “Her brother. After the hassle last week the desk figured they’d better clear with us. Should I tell him to go roll his hoop?
I said, “No, send him up. Without a gun.”
“Don’t worry. He’ll be safe as a little white mouse.”
He went out; a few minutes later there was another knock, and a boy came in. I would not have recognized him on the street, although I had seen him once before up in the mountains. If there was any resemblance to his sister at all, it was in the mouth and eyes. This was a slender dark youth with olive skin, wearing dark, pleated slacks, a pink sports shirt, and a straight light jacket with a zipper down the front, which was open. He stopped just inside the door.
“I didn’t mean to panic the joint, Dr. Gregory,” he said. “I just… I mean, Nina wanted me to thank you. For getting her released. She just blew her top there for a while. She’s all right now. I mean, there won’t be any more trouble.”
I said, “How is she feeling?”
He grinned, showing very white teeth against his dark face. “Lousy. They shaved off half her hair. She won’t be fit to live with till it grows out.” His grin died. “I guess the whole thing was pretty much my fault, Dr. Gregory. I was…well, when something like that happens to a friend of yours you like to blame it on somebody; and I guess I just shot my mouth off too much around the house. Don’t pay any attention to anything she said in here; she was just quoting me and my big mouth… I still can’t figure it, Dr. Gregory. Paul taught me how to handle a gun; he was always bearing down on how you should be careful. Well, I guess it was just one of those things. Well, Nina just wanted me to thank you. I guess I’ll be running along.”
When he opened the door, I caught a glimpse of Van Horn’s man waiting outside. I suppose I should have been grateful for the protection, but the fact is that being under surveillance, even for my own good, is something I never get used to. Besides, who’s kidding whom? You know damn well that if I didn’t have some things in my head considered of value t
o the country I could hire myself out as a duck in a shooting gallery and no voice would be raised in protest. This business of having my brain and its contents considered public property, and myself only a kind of unreliable and possibly subversive custodian, gets irritating in the long run.
It wasn’t irritating enough to keep me awake, however; and I slept through the afternoon and evening except for the usual breaks imposed by the hospital routine. Some time in the night I awoke suddenly, aroused by a sound outside. It was dark in the room except for the glow through the frosted glass of the hall transom. Then I heard a kind of scuffle beyond the door; and abruptly the door swung open, letting light pour in. I saw two silhouettes, one kind of pulling at the other, and heard a nurse’s voice: “Please, Mrs. Gregory! Visiting hours are over. I assure you he’s perfectly all right—”
“You’d say that if he was dead and buried!” Natalie’s enunciation was not quite as clear as usual. “Everybody in a hospital always says everybody’s all right. Even when they’re dying… Greg?”
“Yes,” I said.
She pulled herself free and came running across the room, a little unsteadily. The light came on abruptly, and I saw that she was wearing slacks and her mink coat; her head was bare and her long hair was a little untidy. There was more color in her face than usual, from the cold outdoors and from whatever she had been drinking; she looked very pretty.
“Greg, are you okay?” she cried. “Darling, I had the most horrible feeling—”
I said, “That’s nothing to the feeling you’re going to have tomorrow morning, Princess.”
She stopped beside me, and giggled suddenly. Then she went to her knees beside the bed, put her face against the covers, and began to cry. The nurse was still standing by the light switch, looking stern and disapproving. One of Van Horn’s men was at the door; maybe the one I had seen that afternoon, maybe not. I never bother to learn their names or remember their faces.
I said to both of them, “Get the hell out of here.”
They went. Natalie said in a muffled voice, “That’s telling the old bitch.” Then she cried a little more. I patted her head in a gingerly fashion. After a while she said, “That damn house just got on my nerves, darling. Nobody in it but me. I made up a pitcher of martinis for company. Then I started… started worrying. I called the hospital long distance and they said you were doing fine, just fine, in that damn insincere voice they use for reassuring the family and friends… I had another drink and was sure you were dying and I couldn’t stand it any longer and I threw my coat on and got in the car and came on up. Fellow at a gas station said I couldn’t make it without chains, but they just think in terms of Detroit iron. They don’t know what baby can do… Well, here I am. Are you really all right?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m fine. Doing very well. Everybody’s proud of me.”
“Excuse me for being a damn fool,” she said.
“I don’t mind,” I said. “I’m used to it.”
She made a face at me, and we looked at each other for a while.
I said, “You’re a screwball, Princess. You might have killed yourself.”
She said, “Look, let’s stop this horsing around, darling. Do you want me back?”
I said, “Getting divorced wasn’t my idea.”
“Is that all you’re going to say?”
I said, “The hell with you, Princess. I did all my crawling last summer. If you want to come back, come back, but don’t expect me to get on my knees and ask you.”
She said, “You don’t leave a girl much pride.”
I said, “You’ve got enough.”
She said, “Well, I’m coming back. Somebody’s got to look after you. And it’s going to work this time. I’m going to make it work. You’ll see. I’m just going to love this lovely old country with its lovely old dust storms and its fascinating old men in dirty old blankets and its enchanting old mud ruins… I think I’ll become an authority on old ruins. I might as well, everybody else is. What the hell are you laughing at?”
“You’re drunk, Princess,” I said. “Go over to the hotel and sleep it off.”
“There he goes,” she said. “After pleading with me for hours to come back to him, he’s trying to get rid of me already.”
FIVE
THEY LET ME come home for Christmas. It was the first time in my life I had been glad to leave picturesque old Santa Fe for Albuquerque, which is a big, impersonal, modern city; and one it’s hard to get very fond of. There’s no visible reason for its existence except tourist courts; and you can’t see what the hell a tourist would want with the place. Aside from a small plaza, known as Old Town, there are few historical attractions; the scenery is nothing out of the ordinary for that part of the country; and the much-advertised Rio Grande—the historians’ Rio Del Norte—is a string of mudflats much of the year, since most of the water is drained off for irrigation from early spring to late fall.
Despite these handicaps, you have one of the largest cities in the southwest sprawling over a God-forsaken stretch of desert along the banks of the little river that mostly isn’t there. The city is divided into two parts; there’s the Valley, and the Heights. The Valley is the river bottom; outside the downtown business district, green stuff will grow there if you water it with reasonable regularity. The Heights is the barren upland, or mesa, in the shadow of the abrupt Sandia Mountains east of town, and nothing grows there unless you soak it down good each night to keep it from blowing away in the morning. The bluff that divides the two sections is not precipitous, but it is quite noticeable, and the climatic difference is such that all Albuquerque weather reports give temperature readings for both parts of town. Since the Valley was taken up by the first comers, who weren’t so dumb, all the new developments, including ours, are on the Heights.
Our house was of the local, single-story, flat-room, cement-block, picture-window design, plastered to look vaguely like the native adobe. The resemblance was sketchy, since adobe forms soft outlines and rounded corners, while no amount of plaster will camouflage the rigid rectangularity of the blocks. The lots in this development were somewhat larger than average, giving me plenty of opportunity for healthful exercise with the lawn mower; the watering system for the lawn was built in, with sprinkler heads peeping through the grass every twenty feet or so, which made watering the lawn easier than it might have been. Our house was pastel blue; the one to the north was pale yellow; and the one to the south, baby pink. Somebody once told me that this represented authentic old-time southwestern atmosphere, but I looked it up and found that most early writers comment explicitly on the drab and monotonous appearance of New Mexico towns of their time. They were all one color, the color of adobe mud. Maybe this is an improvement.
I had never quite managed to think of the place as home. For one thing, I’d had nothing to do with picking it out or paying for it; for another, it was too much machinery and too little house. I was brought up in a big old Wisconsin farmhouse; to me, a home is three stories high and has an attic full of junk you don’t use, and a cellar full of junk you use, and a great big old coal furnace—if it has central heating at all; we lived without it for years—that has to be fed by a shovel in the hands of yours truly. To be able to get heat into the place without even striking a match, and wash the dishes merely by turning a button, is convenient to be sure, but it seems a little like cheating. So does the fact that the whole works was given to us as a wedding present by Natalie’s father.
“I know you want a plate glass mansion on a hill, Princess,” Mr. Walsh said in presenting us with the deed, “and this man of yours probably wants a shack out in the woods. While you’re arguing about it, you can live here. Don’t bother to tell me you don’t like it; I had it picked for its investment value, and you can sell it any time you decide what you really want. Here’s a check toward the furniture; I’ll let you choose that for yourself.”
That was three years ago, and I guess you get kind of used to a place in three years. Despi
te my reservations about it, I found myself remarkably pleased to see it again. Natalie’s little red sports car was in the driveway; she had driven ahead to get things ready. The ambulance boys wanted to cart me inside on the stretcher. I told them I had been making the perilous journey to the john for a couple of weeks now; I could manage to stagger into my own house.
There was a Christmas wreath with a big red bow on the front door. Before I reached the door, it swung open, and Natalie came out on the step in a short, shiny bright green dress with an inadequate bodice and a skirt that took up a lot of room and rustled when she moved. These old-fashioned hoops and crinolines the girls have been getting themselves up in of late look remarkably silly shopping in the supermarket, but they do have a nice, impractical, festive look for special events. She had a red ribbon in her hair and looked very Christmasy indeed. She took me by the arm.
“Brace yourself, darling,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “It’s a goddamn surprise party.”
We stepped inside, and a lot of people jumped out of the corners with bells, ringing them madly and singing—you guessed it—“Jingle Bells.” At least it seemed like a lot of people after my cloistered hospital existence. Once the din had subsided and I had been deposited in a long chair with a blanket over my legs, the number reduced itself to three: Ruth and Larry DeVry, and Jack Bates.
Somebody put a vegetable-juice cocktail into my hand to give me something to hang onto, and Ruth said, “I hope you don’t mind, Greg. I think surprise parties are silly, and I know you’re tired after your long ride, but the boys were bound they were going to welcome you home, and Natalie seemed to think it would be all right if we didn’t stay too long.”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s swell, Ruth.”
“You will let us know the minute you get tired.”
“Sure.”
She said, “It is good to have you back. We’d have come up to see you in the hospital, only at first they wouldn’t let us and then, well, you know how it is just before Christmas…”
Assassins Have Starry Eyes Page 3
