by Clark Howard
Then he heard the shower stop. Putting the pictures back in their envelope, he returned to his chair and drink.
When Alma came down, she was wearing a kind of muumuu: loose, flowing, mid-calf length, scooped neckline, multicolored in what looked like Aztec patterns. A panty line showed in back when she turned around, but no bra showed when she bent over.
“First thing I have to do,” she said, “is put out the smudge pots; then I’ll join you for a drink.”
“Smudge pots?”
“For the mosquitoes. The pots are actually dried-up eucalyptus plants; it smells very nice, but its natural content, which protects the plant from mosquitoes nesting in them, also drives the little bastards away when you burn it.” She had smiled. “Daddy again.”
Kiley had walked out into the yard with her and watched as she placed the pots, which were about the size of a grapefruit, on four hardwood blocks placed in strategic locations around the outdoor furniture. A moment after she lighted them, their wispy black smoke wafted the fragrance of eucalyptus over the yard.
The two had returned to the porch then and Alma had poured a drink for herself. Barefoot, she seemed very much at ease with Kiley, as if he were an old friend. He did not want the conversation between them to go back to her murdered sister, so he tried to keep on more untroubled ground. But it was difficult, and Kiley began to understand for the first time that being a twin did not simply mean looking like someone else; it meant being part of someone else. So no matter what the subject, Ronnie Lynn was somewhere in or around it.
“This is really a great old house,” Kiley had commented at one point, restating earlier praise. “Being from the city, I’ve never seen one like it.”
“It’s actually way too big for just me,” Alma replied. “I have three of the rooms upstairs closed off. But I couldn’t give it up; there are so many memories here. It was half Ronnie’s, you know, until—well—”
Even impersonal, neutral comments were not immune. “I don’t think I’ve ever been any place so quiet, so peaceful,” he tried.
“Maybe you should try small-town living,” Alma suggested. “In a place like Ripley, you could probably be chief of police. Or get elected sheriff of the county.”
Kiley had shaken his head. “I couldn’t live in a small town. I’ve got city blood. People with city blood have to live in the city.”
Alma tilted her head curiously. “Why?”
“We just do,” Kiley had shrugged. “City blood gives you a kind of pace. Everything else about you adjusts to that pace: the way your heart beats, your pulse; the way you move, see, smell, sleep—everything you do. With city blood in them, people don’t fit anywhere but a city.”
“That’s almost poetic,” Alma had said softly. Then: “It reminds me a little of something Ronnie said just before she left home. She said, ‘If I don’t get out of this town, I think my blood is going to stop circulating. ’ Maybe she had country blood that didn’t work in the city.”
Kiley had thrown in the towel then and stopped trying to avoid the subject of Ronnie Lynn. “For twins,” he said unguardedly, “you two seem to have turned out very differently.”
“We always were different,” Alma told him. “Even the way we were named. Mother and Dad made a deal that she would name one baby and he would name the other. He named my sister Veronica, after some 1940s movie star he liked named Veronica Lake. He was a great movie fan, as you’ve probably gathered: the dog, my sister—he even gave his old Plymouth the nickname ‘Bogart’ because Humphrey Bogart had driven a Plymouth in some gangster picture.” She took a swallow of her icy gin. “Anyway, I was named by Mother, after a favorite aunt of hers. Alma, she said, was a good, solid, middle-America name. She didn’t approve of Veronica for a name, said it was too pretentious. She even went to the library and researched the name. She found out that the original Veronica had been a Catholic saint: the woman who offered Jesus a handkerchief on the road to Calvary—you know, the cloth that supposedly kept an image of Jesus’s face on it? Well, Mother was upset. I mean, her daughter with a Catholic name—” Alma suddenly interrupted herself, looking greatly chagrined. “I’m sorry, Joe, are you Catholic?” They both realized that it was the first time she had called him Joe.
“I’m Catholic,” he said, “but don’t worry about it. My relationship with the church is only occasional.” He thought of old Father Conley. “Go on,” he urged when Alma still hesitated. “I’m not going to be offended.”
“There’s not much more to tell,” she said, obviously now wanting to close the subject. “Mother tried to get Daddy to legally change Ronnie’s name to something more suitable for a Presbyterian family, but Dad couldn’t be budged. Veronica it was, and Veronica it stayed.”
“Good for him,” Kiley said. “Sounds like he was a good man.”
“Yes, he was.”
“Besides the name, how else were you and your sister different?” he asked, casting all caution aside.
“Oh, lots of ways. Come on,” she had said then, picking up the tray and shouldering her way out the screen door and down three steps to the yard. Kiley followed her out to the now fragrance-filled, mosquito-free barbecue area, where she turned on a string of Chinese lanterns with yellow bug bulbs in them. “In high school, for instance,” Alma continued as she then got a bag of charcoal from under the grill, “Ronnie went steady with the president of the thespian club. I mean, this guy was so drop-dead handsome that every girl in school, myself included, lusted after him. But he wasn’t interested in anybody but my sister—my twin sister. Me, I dated a skinny kid who worked after school at a soda fountain—when I dated at all, that is. Of course, I did get free sundaes from him. But Ronnie just seemed to naturally gravitate toward what was perceived by everyone that age as glamorous: movie dates, dances, school plays, that sort of thing. Ronnie had a kind of glow, a spark for life, that I didn’t have. Ronnie participated; I watched.”
Alma had doused the spread charcoal with starter fluid and tossed a match on it. Eerie blue flames shot up twelve inches, burning off any residue left on the grill, then diminishing to settle into the charcoal and begin turning it from crispy black to glowing yellow. Moving back from the heat, Alma and Kiley stood with their drinks and watched the slow change of color.
“I guess a perfect example of the difference between Ronnie and me,” she said, “is this barbecue. Dad built it and taught Mother and me how to use it: spread the charcoal evenly, wet each piece with starter fluid, toss the match in from at least three feet away, so on. But Ronnie wasn’t interested; Ronnie never learned. She said she wanted nothing to do with steaks until after they were cooked.” Alma chuckled. “Ronnie always said I’d end up married to someone very masculine: a forest ranger, or a fireman.” She paused a beat, then added, “Or a policeman.”
She and Kiley had locked eyes for a moment in the glow of the Chinese lanterns. Then, a little embarrassed, Alma said, “I’ll fix the salad and bring the steaks,” and had gone indoors.
Now the meal was over, the glow fading in the well of the barbecue pit, and an opalescent full moon made the light in the backyard on Elm Street a shadowy, indistinct place that in a Chicago alley would have been shrouded in fear, but here was only cloaked in contentment. They sat side by side on an old wooden glider, shoulders and thighs only an inch from touching, their heads back against the padded cushions that were tied in place, eyes on the stars, the unseen heavens.
“Joe?’ she said. Tentative.
“Yeah?”
“When you looked at the pictures of Ronnie, did you think of me?”
Kiley did not answer. He did not want to tell the truth, but he did not want to lie to her either.
“Did you?”
She waited for what seemed like a long time without asking again. Kiley finally answered.
“Yes.”
“You told yourself that’s how I would look doing it, didn’t you?” Her voice had become throaty again, as it had in the bar across from the bus station
in Chicago. So it was gin, not stress, that did it, Kiley decided. “Didn’t you?” she prompted.
“Yes.”
Rising, Alma lifted her flowing skirt and in a fluid movement slipped her panties down her legs and off. Without dropping the skirt back down, she straddled him, gripping his shoulders with each hand, pressing her face to his neck.
“I want it, Joe—” Barely a whisper.
Kiley put a gentle hand on the back of her head. “Nothing will come of it,” he said quietly. “It won’t be the start of anything.”
“I don’t care. I want it.”
“Then take it.”
She backed off of him enough to unbuckle his belt, unhook his waistband, unzip his trousers, and work the elastic of his briefs down just far enough. His freed erection bounded into her hand and she moved forward again, raising her hips, and covered it, engulfed it inside herself.
“God almighty—” Her words were bursts of warm breath on his neck; then her lips kissed and sucked on the softness of his earlobe, as her hips slowly moved what was inside her in a tight circle: two, three, no more than four revolutions before she stopped, remained very still, curbing the flood of feeling that was on the brim of release. Over and over she did it, the warm wetness of her working its rigid ally to perfect pitch, perfect concert, to the closest, most minute margin of climax—then stopping again, halting ecstasy at the edge, delaying the rapture, basking in what she knew was now hers to take when she could no longer stand not to.
For Kiley it was much like fellatio: He was required to do nothing, had no responsibility other than erection, could not have thrust anyway with her weight on him. His only participation, except to provide a tool for her work, was to slip his hands under the tent-like dress and find her breasts, swollen; nipples, extrusive; armpits, wet, just the barest bristle of shaved hair. It would not have been difficult to imagine, with her lips sucking, sucking, sucking on his neck now, that it was them working on him, instead of the grand part that actually was. But to have imagined that would have required Kiley to think about it, to transfer his thoughts, and he could not do that—because his thoughts were not of the woman astraddle him but instead were of the woman he wanted. His thoughts, insuppressible, were of Stella Bianco.
Even at the supreme moment, when Alma could no longer hold in harness the implosion of her climax, no longer cunningly check by stillness what her body was impelling her to let happen, when she had to abandon the little revolutions of her hips and begin a jackhammer movement of her pelvis, when she came, made Kiley come, brought them both off with exquisite precision, wet against wet, wet into wet—even then, Joe Kiley was thinking of his dead partner’s wife.
And detesting himself because of it.
Seventeen
Kiley got back to the Chicago city limits just after four on Sunday afternoon.
He had ended up staying with Alma all night, sharing the big antique four-poster bed on which she and her twin had probably been conceived, and had been born. Kiley had not wanted to stay, because of what he had perceived to be impropriety in that small Indiana town where Alma lived and taught school.
“It won’t look good if I stay,” he had protested first her invitation, then her plea. “Your neighbors will see my car—”
“I don’t care what my neighbors see.” Alma had been adamant about it. “Anyway,” she said, when they were back in the house, she carrying her panties as if they were a towel, “you can’t leave here like that. Look at your trousers, for God’s sake—”
She was right. The front of his trousers where she had straddled him, grooving out the juices of her body with such abandon, were stained in a very obvious pattern.
“Come upstairs to bed,” she said, taking his hand to lead. “I’ll put them in the washer and iron them for you in the morning.”
Joe had thought briefly of lying his way out, saying he was scheduled to work the next day, insisting that no one would see his trousers on the way home anyway; but the gin, the food, the sex, the prospect of a long drive back to the city, all compounded to make him finally, docilely, follow her. After he undressed, Alma put all of his clothes in the washer, then they showered together, she getting out first because nothing would do but that she put clean sheets on the bed for him. After she stayed up, in her robe, to put his clothes in the dryer, she climbed into bed, with him already sound asleep, and lay contentedly naked next to him, not sleeping as he was, merely dozing along the fringe.
At some point during the night, they made love again, virtually the same way, her on top, except now Kiley was stretched out prone and they were both naked, in the dark. And it was easier for Kiley to imagine that Stella Bianco was on top of him.
At three in the morning, they both woke up hungry. Alma went down to the kitchen and brought up a tray of cheese, pumpernickel bread, apple slices, grapes, and the rest of the limeade. They ate in bed, one small lamp on across the room, and Alma verbalized the sexual hunger she had already twice demonstrated.
“You can’t imagine what living in a town like this is like for an unmarried woman. There’s not an eligible man in Ripley that I would even consider going steady with, much less marrying. And in the area of having an affair, something just to satisfy one’s physical needs, I’ve got a selection of beer-guzzling poolroom loafers, prissy store clerks, or married men who are eager to cheat on their wives.” She popped a grape into her mouth. “I know you must have thought down in the yard that I was some kind of nymphomaniac barracuda, but honest to God, Joe, I was just starving for it. I can’t even remember the last time I slept with a man. It’s been two, three years, at least—”
“Why don’t you move somewhere else?” he asked. “Wouldn’t have to be Chicago; some smaller city like Evansville or Springfield. They must need teachers everywhere.”
“I don’t want to move away, Joe. I love this house. I love my job. And, really, the town itself is a very nice little community to live and work in. It’s just that the prospects for a personal relationship are so limited.” She sighed rather dramatically. “I’m sure I’ll end up an old maid. ‘There goes poor Miss Alma: ninety years old and still living alone. Bless her heart.’ God, I hate it.”
“Somebody will come along for you,” Kiley said quietly, with no conviction at all. At one time, he had felt pretty much like her: his own prospects so limited because he considered the availabilities unacceptable; he had resigned himself to a similar fate—that of lifelong bachelorhood; come to actually like it after a few years, and gave no further thought to marriage and a family. Then his partner had been killed and left a widow—
As Kiley was preparing to leave late the next morning, after a real killer breakfast of fried farm eggs, country sausage, biscuits and gravy, and freshly ground coffee, Alma had said, tentatively, “You know, Joe, I’d love to have you come back any weekend you want—or,” glancing away, “if you liked, I could even run up to Chicago—” She paused, sighed, laced her fingers in front of herself. Then she said, making a feeble attempt at levity, “I don’t know whether I’m being brazen or just shameless—”
“You’re not being either,” Joe said, taking her clasped hands in both of his own. “You’re just being honest, which is very nice—particularly to me, because in my line of work I don’t hear a lot of it. So,” he took a deeper than usual breath, “I’m going to be honest back. I’m not what you’d call completely involved yet, but there is a woman back in Chicago—”
“Oh.” Spoken like a surprise she hoped would not occur.
“—someone I’ve known a long time, who—”
“No, please, I’d rather you didn’t give me any details,” Alma objected.
“I did tell you last night that nothing would come of it—”
“I know you did. I’m not upset with you, Joe, really I’m not. Disappointed, sure; people always hope, don’t they?” Alma bit her lower lip. “I wouldn’t change last night for anything in the world, I want you to know that. It was beautiful, it was—incredible, and
the memory of it will probably sustain me through many, many lonely nights.”
“I can’t believe that the right guy won’t come along for you, Alma,” he said. “You are a hell of a special woman. Any man would be lucky to find you.”
She had forced a smile. “Well, not any man.”
Now, cruising back into Chicago on the expressway, Kiley almost wished he had not gone to visit her in the first place. One of the things he hated worst about his work was seeing blameless, unprepared, unsuspecting people get hurt by the crimes of others—as, himself aside, Alma’s life had now been emptied by the death of her sister. It bothered Kiley not a fleck when mob guys killed mob guys, street gang punks killed other street gang punks, wives killed abusing husbands, daughters killed molesting fathers, convicts killed convicts; but he sometimes had difficulty dealing with residual victims: those outside the immediate circle of the criminal act itself. Like Alma. Ronnie had been the primary level victim; Alma was a secondary level victim. She had lost her twin sister, been exposed for the first time to violent crime, introduced to an imperfect criminal justice system—and now, because of him, suffered a disappointment in her personal life that he might have prevented. Might have, but probably not been able to, even if he had tried—because his own hunger had been as compelling as hers; he had needed a release from his own burden of pressure, his own stress, his own guilt.
But he was very, very sorry that what they had done for each other had soured in its aftermath.
It should not have surprised him, he knew. Almost everything else in his life had soured since the night he and Nick had looked down on Ronnie Lynn’s poor, battered, dead body.
When Kiley drove up to his apartment building, he saw two familiar faces in a black Cadillac parked out front. Uncle Gino Bianco and his flaky son Frank. As Joe got out of his own car, they also got out and walked over to him, Gino Bianco smiling.
