King of Spades

by Frederick Manfred

  “Whatever is that for?” Kitty asked.

  “Try walking across them once.”

  “No.”

  Magnus turned to Roddy. “You try it.”

  Roddy did. The newspaper rustled noisily.

  Magnus grimaced, satisfied. “A newspaper scattered on the floor is the best burglar alarm ever made.”

  The next morning, after Magnus left for work and Roddy left for school, Kitty went back to bed to mull things over.

  As she lay amidst her pillows, looking idly at the ceiling, holding her breasts in her cupped hands, she was startled to see a black widow spider come raveling down the air from the ceiling, on a thread of its own making. The black widow spider was a big one; and, Kitty knew, a deadly one. Magnus had lost a patient to a black widow spider’s bite only the past summer.

  Kitty knew she should bounce up and get the fly swatter and kill it. Once in the house it was bound sometime or other to bite her, and if not her, someone else in the family. Magnus would know what to do right off if he got bit and so would be able to save himself. But not she herself. Or Roddy.

  The black widow spider came leasing and releasing down, until finally it was within a few feet of her. It was about the size of a black horse bean. The red mark on the underside of its abdomen had the shape of an hourglass.

  The thought went through her mind that she should let it bite her. One venomous bite, and all problems would be solved.

  Then another thought went through her. The black widow spider represented sin. It represented the sin of doing it at thirteen with her daddy husband. The sin had finally come back to haunt her and was descending to settle on her breast and kill her.

  She watched it come laxing and relaxing down, farther and farther, to within a few inches of her. In another moment it would land exactly on the point of her left breast, right over her heart.

  It swept to within an inch of her.

  With a sudden cry, Kitty slid out from under it, slipping out of the bedsheets and landing on the floor.

  The black widow spider, startled, hairy legs all ascramble, began climbing up the thread again, taking in the thread without a hitch as it rose.

  Kitty quick got to her feet. She picked up two of Magnus’ fat doctor books and caught the black widow spider between them, mashing it.

  2

  Magnus stepped off the boat onto the wiggly wharf. He had just arrived from Omaha downriver where he’d gone to order some medical supplies.

  Automatically his hand checked to see if he still had his revolver with him. He did. It lay warm in his right-hand pocket.

  He wondered what he’d find at home this time. He was dead sure somebody’d been lurking around the house before he’d left on his trip. And now he was even more sure that a man was spying on Kitty, perhaps even right then larking around with Kitty inside the house while she thought Magnus safely out of town.

  In his mind Magnus went over the men in town one by one, wondering which one it could be. Any one of them could be guilty. Even that sly Herman Bell.

  “When will my ship come in?”

  So he’d lost Kitty. It was more than obvious she no longer cared for him. Not even a snap. He was flat to her. The last time he’d drawn her impulsively, even convulsively, into his arms, she’d lain inert under his pressures and invasions, almost as if she disdained him even a feminine show of resistance.

  Yet he knew she still cared for love itself. She had to. She was much too sensuous, even lascivious, to lose that. In the old days she’d never been able to get enough of coupling. Even at thirteen she’d already had more desire and passion in her than most women had at thirty.

  Magnus hurried up the river road into town. There wasn’t a wisp of wind out. It was as still as a block of ice on the streets.

  He turned a corner and started down Main Street.

  Herman Bell had lit the street lamps without a miss. The glass fronts of stores gleamed a shimmering silverish gray, one after the other.

  Magnus saw his own reflection coming and going. His walk was crisp and courtly, stiffly upright, even a little dandified. His squared bow tie had the look of a black mustache somehow fallen under his chin.

  His eyes startled him. Their reflection glowed back at him feverish, with wide glaring big pupils.

  “This has got to stop.” His voice echoed hoarsely down the empty street.

  His eye fell on the gold lettering above his office door:

  MAGNUS KING, M.D.

  Physician and Surgeon

  For a second he imagined he saw the letters M.D. as MAD.

  “This has got to stop all right.”

  He entered the residential section, his heels cracking hollowly on the boardwalk. Most of the homes were dark. Night watchman Herman Bell was nowhere to be seen. Herman Bell was probably playing cards with the tramps in the jailhouse. He’d better be.

  When Magnus reached the end of the boardwalk, his feet automatically found the path in the grass leading to his house.

  His cottage was dark. With the shutters closed it was sometimes hard to tell whether anybody was up or not. He glanced over to see if Herman Bell’s house was dark. It was.

  Again, automatically, his hand slapped his coat pocket to see if his revolver was handy. It was.

  A couple dozen more steps and he began to walk lightly, on his toes. There was no horse or buggy tied to the hitching post out front.

  His footsteps fell soundlessly in the soft dust. Too bad it wasn’t light out so he could check the dust for tracks. His breathing came quick and shallow. He got out his gun. He headed around to the back door. A surprised intruder was more likely to pop out of the back door than out of the front.

  He paused. He listened intently, one foot up on the back stoop.

  The Missouri murmured with a muted ruckle behind its fringe of trees. An Indian drum boomed solemnly aboriginal in Smutty Bear’s camp. Crickets whirred under the fallen stalks in the garden.

  Then, yes, there it was, a low murmur of voices somewhere.

  He listened intently.

  The voices came from inside the house. Aha! There really was someone with Kitty after all. “By the Lord!” He’d been right all along.

  He gripped his revolver hard and tight. There would now be some ball blood spilled.

  When he started to open the back door it creaked lightly. Lord. One more squeak like that and he’d never catch them in the act.

  He lifted the door by the knob a little and then tried it. It worked. No creaking. Good. Silently he closed the door behind him.

  Halfway across the kitchen, and around the table, he stopped again. Perfume in the house. The essence of puccoons. Her perfume.

  And more murmuring.

  He cocked his gun. A remorseless revolver would know what to do.

  He tiptoed into the sitting room. He directed his hearing toward the bedroom.

  The murmuring was gone. Instead he heard what he thought was the slow measured breathing of someone deep in sleep. There was also the sigh of a lighter sleeper. Damn. It was only Kitty and Roddy after all.

  He backtracked a couple of steps; listened. There it was again, the murmuring. In the kitchen.

  Teakettle?

  Yes. It had to be the teakettle. Kitty must have thrown in a chunk of wood before she went to bed for the water to be boiling so long.

  God damn.

  Well, in the long run it really didn’t make much difference. He was right in any case. Somebody else was kissing her better than he was. Made love better than he did.

  He stood stiffly erect in the dark.

  Steady measured breathing continued to come from their bedroom.

  He slipped the revolver back into his pocket.

  “When will I come into my own?”

  He tiptoed to their bedroom. He felt around in his other pocket for a match. By the Lord. Out of lucifers. He’d have to undress in the dark.

  He placed his clothes neatly in a chair. He made a special point of making the creases o
f his trousers meet neatly at the knee. The floor creaked under his stealthy moving.

  Goose pimples came out on him as he stood naked in the dark. Surprisingly he found himself partially aroused.

  He reached around behind the bedroom door, found his nightshirt hanging on its peg. Shivering, he slipped it on over his head.

  He felt his way round Roddy’s bed, found the foot of his own and Kitty’s bed, tiptoed around to his side, opened the covers, settled on the edge of the bed and got ready to swing in. As he did so, his elbow touched someone.

  Someone was sleeping in his place.

  Cautiously he reached out, feeling for the form under the covers.

  Roddy.

  He was both relieved and enraged: relieved that it wasn’t a man after all, enraged that it was Roddy.

  Fumbling around, he found a match on the nightstand and lighted the lamp. A lemon glow gradually lighted up the bedroom. Their bed, then Roddy’s bed, then the commode and dresser, came to view.

  Kitty stirred, and rolled over to face him. “Daddy?”

  “What the hell is Roddy doing in my bed?”

  “Is that you, Magnus?”

  “What the hell is my son doing in my bed?”

  Kitty whispered up to him. “Roddy’s had a hard day. So, shh, don’t wake him.”

  “Don’t wake him? Where the hell am I going to sleep then?”

  “Shh. I felt so sorry for him.”

  “So sorry? Damnation, woman, don’t you know I don’t hold with sons sleeping with mothers?”

  Kitty’s sleepy lips drew back in partial snarl. “There’s no harm done. He’s only a baby.”

  “Damnation, woman, you know what my wishes are in this matter.”

  “Oh, come now, Magnus, dear, you’re not really jealous of that little tassel of his now, are you? It’s hardly there. Just a little johnny-nods.”

  “Keep this up and you’ll someday have him spoiled for a woman his own age.”

  “I don’t let him touch me. Just excepting maybe my feet.”

  “Damnation, woman, but that’s just the point.”

  “Just about everybody lets their kids sleep with them when the old man is gone.”

  “Old man, is it?”

  “You’re always at me when I do something nice for the boy.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, I’m getting fed up on it.”

  “Not when you do the right things for him.”

  “Maybe you’ve got a rotten mind, Magnus, dear.”

  “In my doctoring I’ve run into some damned strange things. And now I find that lightning has finally struck here in my own house.”

  “Are you suggesting—”

  “Goddammit!” he roared, in sudden black passion. “Wake the boy up and chase him back to his own bed.”

  “You do it.”

  “I want you to do it. So that he’ll know it’s you who’s ordering him out of our bed. You. Not me.”

  Roddy suddenly sat up out of the bedclothes. “Don’t bother, Dad, I’ll get up by myself. All this racket waking me up.”

  Magnus shivered. Check. So the boy had been awake all along. Had probably been awake those other times too. The boy knew. Father and mother had no secrets from him. That made it all the more devilish.

  Magnus waited for Roddy to get settled in his own bed, then said, “Now there’ll be no more of this, you hear?”

  Silence.

  “You hear?”

  Silence.

  “That’s an order.”

  “This is not the army, Magnus,” Kitty said. “The War between the States is over.”

  “It’s still an order.”

  Silence from Roddy’s bed.

  Magnus blew out the lamp; dropped in bed; covered himself.

  Kitty sighed as if she’d finally had the last straw.

  Magnus worked his head deep into his pillow. The more he wriggled down the more he could still smell Roddy in the pillowcase.

  Kitty drew away from Magnus, sleeping as far away from him as she could.

  Magnus continued to work his head deep into his pillow.

  “Besides,” Kitty said in the dark, “Roddy and me slept between different sheets. Not that it really matters.”

  “That I believe.”

  “If you’d just feel around a little, you’d see.”

  Magnus lay stiff. A muscle just above his left kneecap began to quiver.

  After a bit, Kitty gave him a light touch on the hip through the sheet. “You see.”

  “Aha! Now I know for sure it did concern you. After all.”

  “You must be insane.”

  “Very likely. But it still goes. And now you can shut up about the matter and go to sleep.”

  “I don’t intend to shut up when you accuse me of something of which I’m not guilty. There has been no one. As the boy, yes, as even God is my witness.”

  “The boy is a boy. And God I don’t believe in.”

  “Now I know for sure you’re off your rocker.”

  “We will see.” Magnus snapped the sheet tight under his chin. Deliberately he stiffened himself for sleep.

  “What a fool I was not to listen to my aunt. Ohh!”

  When will our ship come in?

  3

  Clear weather pushed out heavy weather.

  Magnus awoke cheerful in the morning. He swung out of bed full of charge for the day.

  He also found himself full of affection for Kitty and the boy. Weren’t they all orphans together, himself included? Singletons? All the blood kin they had in America, in the world for that matter, was they themselves. Suppose something should happen to one of them, who would rush to their aid with help and love except they themselves?

  Magnus shaved over the washbasin in the kitchen. Kitty made breakfast. Roddy set the table.

  Not much was said. Roddy and Kitty seemed to be waiting for Magnus to begin.

  Magnus deftly worked the straightedge over and around his chin. Crisp. Crisp. He took hold of his skin over his cheek near his nose and began coming down the side of his face. Crisp. Crisp. He had a fine edge on his straight razor that morning.

  Kitty banged a stove lid.

  Magnus ignored the banging. He cleaned his razor on a piece of newspaper and folded it away. “What are we having for the breaking of our fast this morning, Mother?”

  “Same old thing.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Kitty threw him a surprised look.

  Magnus washed his face with soft water and tar soap. He combed his hair until it shone like the glossy back of a crow.

  Kitty removed a tray of fresh toast from the oven. With her knee she slammed shut the nickel oven door.

  Magnus felt a sudden regret for all the terrible things he said the night before. He shivered. “Jesus.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I thought you said something.”

  “No.” Magnus took his place at the head of the table.

  Roddy looked up from his plate. He studied his father’s face with grave green eyes.

  Magnus summoned up a smile. He winked at Roddy. “What’s on tap for today, boy?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What about school?”

  “Teach is getting married.”

  “Oho. No school then, eh? That calls for something special. Let’s make it a holiday, what do you say?”

  A gleam of interest appeared in the boy’s eyes.

  “What would you really like to do today, boy? Really now?” Magnus cut off a corner of his toast, next cut off a piece of fried egg and placed it precisely on the corner of the toast, next cut off a slice of butter and placed it neatly on the piece of egg, then, in one motion, put the running little triple-decker in his mouth. Very good. Kitty was a great cook for all that. “Name it, Roddy, my man, and we’ll do it.”

  “You promised me once to give me some pointers on how to shoot.”

  “How about a walk out along the new Military Road?
See where the Argonauts head out these days.”

  Roddy was instantly aglow. “Say, Dad, I forgot to tell you. Down by the Big Sioux there I found a good place for target practice. Under those giant cottonwoods.”

  “All right, boy, done. That’s what we’ll do.”

  Kitty poured Magnus some hot coffee. “Do you think that’s wise for a boy so young?”

  “Why not?” Magnus gave Kitty a large smile. “The boy had better learn to shoot right. At least out here. The frontier is just across the river, you know.”

  Roddy slid over on his father’s side of things. “Didn’t you hear our mountain lion out howling again last night, Ma?”

  Kitty wasn’t sure. “I hope you aren’t leading the boy astray with all that talk about guns and such.” She took a bite of egg yolk. It ran yellow off her fork. “I just don’t like guns.”

  “You really are going to take the day off then today, Dad?”

  “Of course. A promise is a promise.”

  Kitty shook her head. “I don’t know. Any time your father wakes up with a smile on his face as big as a small wave on a lake I begin to worry.”

  Magnus took a last sip of coffee. He put up his napkin in its ring. “Can’t a doctor spend a little time with his family just like anybody else?” Magnus then got to his feet and went around to Kitty’s side of the table and placed his hands affectionately on her shoulders. It was like in the old days, almost.

  But when Magnus leaned down to kiss her, Kitty ducked away and his kiss fell on her light-brown hair instead.

  Magnus still smiled down at her. “Don’t begrudge me those lovely Indian lips of yours now, doll. They’re like cut rubies.”

  “Hmf.”

  Roddy got up from the table too. “C’mon, Dad, let’s go.”

  Together the two men of the house went out back and got the guns from the lean-to, Magnus his pistol and Roddy the double-barreled shotgun.

  They carefully wiped off the oil. They polished the wood stock on the shotgun to a shining rosy brown. They filled their pockets with a supply of shells.

  They sauntered out the new Military Road going west. It crossed several dry coulees. In places iron wheels had cut the black earth deep enough to lay bare its clay flesh.

  The road skirted the foot of the north bluffs on their right. High above them leafless trees pricked against the skies like crowds of stick figures.