by John Farris
"When she calmed down and we talked it out, she agreed with me. Just a question of money, Mom told me, don't give it another thought. She's ready to write a check tomorrow for professional help, you know, psychiatric care in a good place, not the awful asylum over there in Bolivar."
Bobby put the beer bottle down and rubbed smarting eyes with a knuckle, feeling overcome by a grim sense of inadequacy and fear for his brother.
"If you love me," Cecily said, "and you love Brendan, then you have to do what's right."
"Got to find Alex first."
"You're not thinking about going out again?"
"No. The deps on the twelve-eight are on the lookout for Alex. Maybe he'll show up here. What the hell, I don't know. Let's go to bed, Cece."
"I'm so nauseated. I was this morning too. Bobby, I'm not sure yet, but I may be pregnant again." She laughed, then sobbed, looking to him for help, for his love. His eyes were no longer bleak, just amazed and a little bewildered. A daddy times two.
"Now you quit that, you hear?" Bobby said, smiling and blinking away a tear of his own.
"Listen to w-who's talking."
Bobby got up to kneel at her side and cradle her head in the hollow of his shoulder.
Many caught Leland Howard on the right side of his head with the heavy, butt end of the brass fireplace poker. He'd been standing sweaty naked with his back to her getting a cigar going. He hadn't fucked her this time in his own bedroom—not sure of the condition of the sheets—but down on a blanket thrown over some davenport cushions in the living room. Just before she struck him he had a rosy look of satisfaction, puffing away with head tilted to the ceiling, no doubt pleased with his stamina and her own spiritless compliance. Quite sure he'd worn her out as she lay there with a lax hand lying on her pudenda. Facing the brick fireplace.
So Mally reached out and lifted the sooty poker from the rack of fireplace tools, reversed it as she twisted around in a catlike crouch, uncoiled with her well-aimed swing. Years ago William had shown her how to hit a baseball. The same principles applied. There was a loud, meaty smack but no underlying deadly crunch of bone in his hard skull. The blow staggered Leland sideways, cigar flying from his fingers. He fell on one knee, then pitched against the wall, beside the fireplace, his eyes haphazard, closing as she crouched again, taut and wild, with the poker raised and back for another swing.
But he was out, and the only sound she heard was a slow fart as Leland's body settled inertly, knees under him, head upright in the angle made by the wall and the side of the fireplace.
The surge of adrenaline, her heart knocking, then the contents of her stomach coming up. Mally projectile-vomited, and for a minute afterward was so dizzy she had to sit down on the cushionless davenport to collect herself, fright stirring up her mind. What if she'd killed him? She stared at a blue welt an inch below his temple, blood oozing from the ear on the side where she had hit him. Then at his chest, which rose and fell in a shallow rhythm. Her gaze dropped to her own body, knees wide apart, the mess clabbering her inner thighs, her blood and his dribbled stuff. She choked and thought she was going to heave again, her sore stomach trying to turn itself inside out.
In the kitchen she wet a dish towel and held onto the counter with one hand while she cleaned herself. She wanted to lie down somewhere and just go to sleep. Instead she tossed the bloody towel into the sink, ran water again and filled her bitter mouth from the tap, rinsed and spat three times.
When she returned to the living room one of his legs was moving and an eye had peeped open like a speck of blue sky in his grayish face. Mally was terrified. He was looking at her but not as if he knew who she was or what had happened to him. Mally had attended to enough accident victims during her hospital training to know that he was a long way from being fully conscious and ambulatory, which helped her calm down.
She dressed quickly while Leland Howard continued to stir ineffectually and make hurt little moans. Then she went through his jacket and trouser pockets looking for her car keys. Couldn't find them. Terror again. Leland's head lolled and his eyes opened wider but remained insensate.
She came across the money in the envelope he'd baited her with, hesitated, then took one of the bills, enough money to get her to Nashville and the safety of her father's house. Safe for a few days at least, while they decided what she must do.
If she couldn't drive her car, then he wasn't going to drive it to chase her down either.
Outside she plunged a bread knife from the kitchen into bald spots on the old front tires. Retrieved her sandals, kept the knife, and jogged down the farm road, calculating how far it must be to the highway. Not more than a mile. She had good wind and felt that she could cover the distance, dodging mud puddles, in under ten minutes. No hope of transportation, a bus, so late at night. She would have to find herself a cabin on another farm, friendly folk to take her in.
The stars were out, the night quiet except for the harried sounds of her breathing, slip-slap of sandaled feet. The cooled air freighted with sharp wild odors of fields and low-standing water and her own, human heat and mistings that only a hound's nose could raise. She could see the moon bobbing out of the corner of her eye at the level of scarecrow trees along the owl-haunted slough. Careful about her footing, but she slipped twice and muddied herself. Tasted a swallow of blood from her tongue. She had to pause, once the farmhouse was well behind her, and snatch some breath, leaned-over and holding her knees, fear using her up faster than she had anticipated.
Mally looked back once and saw nothing, looked back again as she resumed her jog and saw the Catahoula dogs coursing in her tracks, coming twice as fast as she could hope to run in mud-caked sandals. Not a sound out of them, only the icy wolfen shine of their eyes by bold moonlight, and that was the horror of it.
Past tangled barbed wire in a pasture to her left she glimpsed a tree she could climb and a few cows standing beneath its low boughs. She tore her flesh getting over fence line the dogs would leap across with ease and ran for the sanctuary of the spreading oak as the cows, alert to her fear and aware of dogs on the hunt, began to lumber off. Mally stumbled over a snakelike root and fell into cowshit, lost her grip on the bread knife. She groped for it, jumped up again thinking that if she could only get her back against the broad trunk of the tree, then—
Alex woke up with a chilling start when a cockroach skittered across a bare instep. He shook his foot and heard the Pontiac's engine rev up with a series of roars as if the man driving was stomping-mad about something. After turning the car around he cut out of there spewing gravel from beneath the whitewall tires. A small rock skipped over the top of the garbage pit, hitting Alex near the left temple. The pain and injustice of being unexpectedly struck again caused him to flood.
When he had cried himself out and thought it was safe, Alex got up to retrieve his bicycle from Mally's porch. He didn't know what time it was and couldn't locate the moon; it seemed to be low behind the trees, west of the house. He heard a car on the highway as he was taking his bike down the steps. His blood turned cold enough to start him trembling. He dropped the bike and crouched beside the steps, but the car went past. He recognized one of the homely '49 Fords from the sheriff's department, important-looking chromed bullet lights above the windshield. Momentarily he thought it might be Bobby out looking for him. More likely it was only one of the rookie deputies on the boring midnight-to-eight-a.m. shift.
As he was about to get on his bike, it occurred to Alex that he didn't have anywhere else to go. Dead of night, he was nine miles from the house on West Hatchie and at least a million miles from anyone's good graces. Tired as he was, still he'd manage to peddle to the house, but then what? Would he be given a chance to justify himself? The older he got the more he needed to speak, and the more distant that possibility became. He hadn't tried for over a year, and then, prompted by the goodwill of a teacher he had admired and wanted to please, he had strangled on a single syllable in a roomful of tittering classmates. Turned red and just died there in his
seat, furious, helpless.
All he could think of was that he might have given Cecily a bad scare, but it wasn't as if he purposely had sneaked up on her in the kitchen.
Reminding him: What was his wastebasket doing there? What did she mean, I found it? The expression on her face like he was in the habit of doing dumps in his own wastebasket. For Chrissake, as Holden Caulfield would have put it. Alex had recently discovered Holden as a soulmate, and, although Catcher in the Rye was six days' overdue at the library, he was reading it for the second time.
Whatever Cecily's problem was, it was all her problem, and Alex took small comfort knowing from past incidents he had more or less innocently precipitated that it should all settle out given enough time.
He looked back at the house with a quick flare of anger. This thing wouldn't settle out. If he ever had the chance, one chance to get even with Leland Howard for what he'd done to Mally tonight—
But it was Bobby who would deal with him. Bobby was the Law, and the Law was more powerful than a man with his face on billboards.
Thinking of his older brother with the gold badge pinned to his uniform shirt pocket, Alex felt proud and confident of the doctrine of just desserts.
He yawned. Couldn't know if Mally would return tonight, but he doubted it. Even when she eventually did come home, probably it wouldn't bother her knowing he had stayed there. For cry-eye, Mally had enough to be upset about already.
James Giles arrived at Leland Howard's farm to find Leland in a rocking chair in the yard looking as if he had survived a bad accident and got drunk afterward. There was crusty blood in his hair above his right ear. The front of his white shirt had blood all over it. He was barefoot, having discarded his shoes. Which were bloody as well, as if he had danced the night away in an abattoir. The fifth of Old Crow he'd been working on was three-quarters empty. His face was dirty, with tear tracks through the dirt.
Giles looked him over carefully and looked at the dogs in the kennel, either asleep or just lolling, as if they'd been run hard. Before Leland spoke Giles already had a chilling idea of what had happened here.
"James, James, it wasn't my fault! I don't know what to do, James."
Giles walked closer to the man who employed him and could send him back to Brushy Mountain Prison on a whim and took the bottle of Kentucky whiskey away from him.
"What happened?"
"Mally hit me with a poker when my back was turned and ran off."
"After that."
"Well, she—I didn't know which way she'd gone."
"Turn the dogs loose then?"
"It's not my fault! I didn't know they would—"
"You damn fool," Giles said in his customary low-pitched voice, no special emotion in this assessment. "Ever one of those Catahoula bitches is in heat. They can be mean cusses then. The nigger woman have blood on her?"
"I think she did, James. I think she was into her period. Not flying the flag, but there was a bloody dish towel in the kitchen she might've used on herself. I let the dogs have a whiff on it."
"You damn fool," Giles said again. He took a kitchen match from his shirt pocket and chewed on the wood. It helped his thinking. "You'd have done the woman better to pour gasoline over her and light her up."
"I didn't know, I didn't think!" Leland cried, rocking furiously. "I didn't know so much blood could come out of a human body. She's dead, James."
"Most likely." Giles looked around and didn't see a corpse. He looked at the Dodge nearby, wondering why Mally had been afoot. But there were two flat tires. "Show me where they caught up to her."
"I can't go back there! I can't look at her again. You don't know what those Catahoulas did once they got ahold—"
"Yes, I do." Giles tilted the whiskey bottle and emptied it, slung the bottle high over the roof of the house. He put a hand on Leland's shoulder and bore down, squeezing until Leland gasped in pain. "You ready to quit that damn rocking now? Listen to me?"
"Jesus, I've got a whopper of a headache. I think I need to go to the doctor; I'm still seeing double."
"No doctor." Giles looked down at the gold lozenge of the Bulova watch on Leland Howard's left wrist. "Three, maybe three and a half hours to sunup. And you don't want her body found anywheres near your place."
"What can I do? No matter what, I'm a ruined man!"
"Start with, get up out of that granny rocker." When Leland didn't obey, Giles lifted him out of the seat by his shoulder. Leland began to weep again. Giles slapped him on the undamaged side of his face, fingers stinging like bony whips.
"You're still a man. An important man. Don't go throw it all away count of some trifling nigger woman."
"But they'll say I killed her!"
"Not if we do this thing right. Shut up your blubbering. Go in the house and clean yourself up while I get a couple tarps. You didn't kill nobody. Can't call it murder necessarily; reckon it's a style of murder. Dogs got after her; well, that's just how they'll say it was. Pack of wild dogs. Nobody's fault less'n hers for being in the wrong place tonight. You never got seen with her; that puts you in the clear." He gave Leland a shove toward the house. "Hurry it up. I need to get two spares on that old Dodge and butcher a hog. Twenty minutes, you better had be sober enough to drive."
"Why are you doing this, James? Why are you helping me?"
"Two months since my parole, you never lorded it over me. Reckon when you make it to the high station you're bound for, a pardon won't be out of the question."
"That's right. Whatever you want, James. Whatever's in my power—"
"I never did have no big wants. Like to get my name clear, that's all. Now get going, Mr. Howard." Leland had taken a couple of steps when Giles remembered. "By the way. Didn't find such as you told me to look for in the woman's house. But that there be a problem for another day."
In his dreams Alex was exploring Mally's house and finding rooms he hadn't known were there. One was exactly like the reading room at the Evening Shade Public Library where he spent a lot of time: shelves of reference books and a couple of maple tables with green-shaded lamps on them. The placid old soul of a librarian behind her desk, distance in her eyes, listening to her books like a sailor listens to the sea. He wished he could settle down with a good novel by Ernest Haycox or a Saturday Evening Post serial by Luke Short, but he caught a glimpse of Mally in the stacks and followed her instead.
Then he was inside the boarded-up depot at Cole's Crossing, where no trains had stopped since before the war. He could recall having been there only once, when he was about three years old. The trains that had stopped were sooty locals with antiquated rolling stock, mixed baggage and coach. Only a handful of passengers, nearly all of them colored, getting on or off.
In his dream he was looking up at the familiar octagonal clock with Roman numerals above the closed ticket window. The clock seemed not to be working. Bobby stood on a tall ladder taking it apart, finding the works clotted with old pink bubblegum. He didn't have time to talk to Alex, who felt guilty. Although he knew it wasn't his bubblegum. He wasn't allowed to chew gum in the house, another of Cece's rules.
Cecily and Bernice were playing hearts in a corner of the depot. Cece was naked, as she often was in his dreams. They were using a coffin for a card table. Alex's mother lay in the coffin. He was furious with Cece and Bernice. Such disrespect. Why didn't they close the lid? He could smell the stuff they'd put on his mother's burns. And coal smoke that poured from a black locomotive standing on the tracks outside the depot.
Mally Shaw was on the platform. When she saw him, she shook her head as if she was annoyed about something he'd done. Everybody had rules where he was concerned. Maybe it was because he had slept uninvited in her house. He started to run down the long platform toward her, but his feet like Wyatt Sexton's were on wrong. Wherever he willed himself to go, he stumbled in another direction. Mally boarded the grim-looking train while he flopped around with misery in his soul. Alan Ladd came along leading an Indian pony by the reins and tol
d Alex it was ten cents to ride for ten minutes. Alex found himself on the pony's back, but he was three years old now and scared. Just trying to hang on while the pony broke into a trot. But there was no saddle, and he was slipping slowly off the back of the pony, going upside down beneath its belly before finally falling . . .
Alex woke up on the floor beside the bamboo sofa. He sat up and although it was still dark and his eyes were tearing he saw Mally in the hall down by her bedroom looking around at him.
"It's over, sugar," she said. "Go back to sleep." She went into her bedroom and he heard the door close.
He tried to lie down again on the cushions with his knees bent the way he had made himself almost comfortable earlier, but now he had a crick in his neck and he needed to pee.
When he passed Mally's bedroom the door was standing open, although he was sure she'd closed it. Moonlight filled the little room with its rumpled bed, reminding him of what he'd seen going on there during the rainstorm. Some clothing strewn about, her intimate things.
Every corner of the room was alight, and Mally was not there.
Nor was she in the bathroom, or the kitchen, or standing outside on the back porch where he ultimately chose to relieve himself, arcing into the weeds around the cistern while listening pensively to peepers and the early staccatos and trillings of birds in the back woods.
When he was inside again, he spoke her name a couple of times but knew the house was empty except for himself, although he had clearly seen Mally for a couple of seconds, heard her voice. Then heard the closing of the bedroom door. The hidden rooms of Mally's house had existed only in his fretful dreams.
Now he was alone, but he had not been alone.
Go back to sleep, she had said, fondness in her tone.
Alex rubbed the prickling skin of his forearms.
Not much chance of that.
FIVE
Secret Pleasure
The 4:10 from Nashville
