Cornered!

by James McKimmey

  The fire exploded in other directions too. He found a sudden switch of interest and discovered medicine. As a result the athletic drive lessened. The summer after high school he worked with an ice company, loading cakes of ice. But every night he’d gone home and pored over books. The hunger for medicine became full-blown.

  Uncle Ben had been steadily behind him. Grayer now. More bent. Working at his factory job with uncomplaining good humor.

  “You want to be a doctor, Hugh. I’ll help all I can…”

  But Hugh had refused help then. He would not be a burden to Uncle Ben. He’d gotten a football scholarship. He played adequate but uninspired football for three years, getting all the pre-med he could, and working as a janitor to pay for the small room he rented.

  Then the Army. When he returned home, the hunger was greater.

  Uncle Ben said, “Now let me help you, Hugh. You can’t waste more time. Medical school will take all your time…”

  He worked, earning what he could when he could at whatever he could find. He went to school the year around. Uncle Ben helped him. It wasn’t nearly enough. But somehow it worked out. He made it. Uncle Ben, white-haired now and thin, cried the day he graduated.

  Then came internship and residency. He knew, of course, what kind of doctor he wanted to be by then: the best kind of surgeon. The power of the desire was so great that it frightened him.

  He took long and hard walks at night, wondering at the flames inside him. Once, in the blackness of a cold winter night, he felt the flames might explode and disintegrate him, leaving nothing but a flashing brilliance in the night, then only blackness. That was the first time he got really drunk, waking up in the cheap room of a girl with whom he could not remember being. He was spent and dry and shaking…

  Uncle Ben was behind him always. “It’s right for you, Hugh. Being a good surgeon. I’ve talked to doctors who work with you. They believe in you.”

  And Hugh had replied, “It’s more study and more money, Uncle Ben. It’s for somebody else. I’ve got to pay you back now—”

  But Uncle Ben had insisted. And the hunger was great.

  New York then. The finest specialists in the profession. The final, truest training, the honing of a talent to razor’s edge.

  He’d worked harder than ever before, the fire steadying to a red-coal glow. He’d worked with a dedication that allowed for nothing but work, using the money from Uncle Ben without questioning.

  Then that final specialized training was almost over. He’d reached a zenith; they would use him for one of the most important operations any young colleague of these professional masters had ever performed in the clinic, proof of his achievement. Uncle Ben would, at last, realize the fruits of his belief and help.

  But the red-coal glow was again fanned into flames the night before the operation. Uncle Ben died. He died almost penniless, having given Hugh all he could and more. He died without knowing the final victory.

  Once again Hugh Stewart gave in to the flames. He woke up in a jail cell this time, five hours after Dr. Emil Ludgaard himself had successfully performed the operation Hugh Stewart was to have performed. He woke up black-minded and exhausted, empty and grim.

  “It’s all right, Hugh,” Dr. Ludgaard had said, his tired blue eyes avoiding Hugh’s. “You broke up that tavern terribly. They’ll raise hell at the clinic. But I’ll smooth things.” Dr. Ludgaard, like Uncle Ben, would not let him down. “These things happen, Hugh. You thought a great deal of your uncle.”

  “No,” Hugh said. “It was more than that. It was—”

  He had not been able to explain. He didn’t know. It was simply that finally he no longer trusted himself. The flames would steady to coals, but they did not cool and die. They were always waiting. The kind of talent he now owned was not a talent to be offered unreliably.

  He’d decided. He would settle for being a general practitioner. A country doctor. Not a specialized surgeon. This would demand all his energy. The work would come at him in a steady stream. But it would not be likely to build to excruciating delicacy. A country doctor’s duties required of a man all his general medical ability, but it was not often channeled to that final thin blade. In emergency that could be left to others.

  But now here he was. Out of touch with all he’d learned in the clinic. Out of touch with Emil Ludgaard. Lost in the center of a corn-belt flatland. The escape from delicate life-or-death responsibility he’d wanted had been more complete than he’d bargained for. There was no responsibility so far. Nothing.

  Yet the flames had flickered again, threatened to blaze once more.

  Hugh Stewart sat down at his desk tiredly, rubbing hands through his hair. Ann Burley. He hadn’t counted on that at all.

  Yet he could think of nothing else. Her face was etched in his brain. It was the way she’d looked when, after he’d kissed her, she’d turned her face away from him, trembling…

  There had been no forewarning. Nothing of substance said between them. They had stood apart in that farmhouse. In Ted Burley’s farmhouse…

  But the unsaid, unadmitted communication was as real as though it could be seen, like spitting sparks along a high-tension line. They’d come together roughly. She’d met his fire-driven passion equally. Then they had stopped.

  He’d left swiftly and returned to his office. Now here he was as the darkness crept into an unlit room. The emptiness, the grimness, had returned.

  He was startled when the knock sounded on his door. He stood up, frowning. There were so few knocks at his door. He opened it, blinking in surprise.

  Ann Burley stood there, blond hair rumpled, wide-spaced brown eyes staring at him as through long distances and a hundred hurts. There was a bruise darkening her left cheek. Blood showed at the corner of her mouth.

  “May I come in?” she asked as though dazed.

  He helped her in quickly.

  chapter seven

  Ann Burley had awakened that morning with a premonition of disaster.

  The day was like any other winter’s day on a farm outside Arrow Junction. The snow was falling, and a lot of snow fell on Arrow Junction in the winter of every year. The wind and cold and amount of snow were reaching blizzard proportions. But there had always been blizzards in Arrow Junction’s history. Snow, cold and wind. The flat barrenness of the country and the old, inadequate farmhouse. It was pretty much like any other winter’s day.

  But at midmorning, when she was alone in the small house, Ann had opened herself to a self-examination more intense than any she’d ever committed before. It was an effort to recheck the events that might have led her to this premonition of disaster.

  She had started in this world twenty-seven years ago, an only child of parents spread vastly in age. Her father was already middle-aged when she was born, her mother barely twenty. As she grew older her mother seemed to want to grow younger. But her father continued to want to ease into a restful twilight of old age. Her parents convivially separated when she was seventeen. Ann chose to distribute her affections equally by going away to school. Her father remained in Sacramento, her mother moved to Los Angeles.

  She spent two years at college in Santa Barbara. When she went to work in San Francisco at nineteen, she was extraordinarily pretty. She worked first in an insurance office on Sansome Street, then in an advertising agency on Montgomery Street.

  It was a smooth transition from girl to woman. There were impersonal visits with her father in Sacramento. The variance in their ages created a chasm, yet the relationship was always pleasant.

  The time with her mother was spent absorbing the gush of her mother’s emotion, her silliness, her attempted deception of time. She had begun to realize the foolishness of her mother.

  Yet Ann’s life was smooth. Her beauty saw to that. The male attendance was vast. She did not fall truly in love. The emotions she experienced were but infatuations which started quickly and ended just as quickly. She simply enjoyed life, a fast clear-running river of activity and work. That s
he might have viewed marriage with suspicion as the result of her own parents’ debacle did not consciously enter her mind.

  So went her existence. Until that chance moment when she’d walked along her street in the dusk and saw one man kill another, and the river had gone to rapids, cascading into dangerous and deadly currents.

  It was a chance incident. She had never heard of Tony Fearon. But she plainly saw him kill a man that evening: stepping forth from a large black car, firing at the man standing before one of the white houses built flush on a steep San Francisco street. She saw him kill and flee in the heavy black car.

  It made no difference to her the reasons behind Tony Fearon’s reason to kill. The thing had been done and she’d seen it. She’d reported it and become a part of it. The river had run into rocks, and the river was her life.

  The trial was a blur. Gambling was at the bottom of it. Tony Fearon headed one group or syndicate, and the slain man had moved in.

  But that made no difference to Ann. All that did matter was that she had witnessed the murder and had the obligation of swearing in court to what she saw. Tony Fearon was convicted, judged guilty and sentenced to death. Despite endless and desperate legal maneuvering the sentence had held. But Tony Fearon had, that day of sentencing, promised loudly that he would know the destruction of this girl who had sounded his death knell…

  That had been over a year ago. Now the end was approaching. The date for Tony Fearon’s final breath was coming near. Ann had been running ever since the end of that trial. But where had she run? And what good had it done? That morning, she asked herself exactly that.

  It was a day like any other winter’s day on a farm outside Arrow Junction.

  You could look across the farmyard and see the snow lying white and new on the ground and on the sheds and on the roof of the barn beyond. In the snowless days the farmhouse and the sheds and the barn were ugly to the eyes with their weather-gray nakedness. But now the snow was a bright and fancy decorator. Yet, snow or not, Ann had not really complained since she married Ted Burley eleven months ago. There had been plenty of reasons. But she had tenaciously ignored these reasons, telling herself steadily that she had not married Ted Burley solely to escape the threat of Tony Fearon in the anonymity of Arrow Junction…

  Ted Burley had arisen that early morning from the cot bed he’d chosen to sleep in almost from the start of their marriage. The cot had been Ted Burley’s since he’d been four years old. From the second bed in the room, the large iron-framed bed that had been used by Ted Burley’s parents before they died and left him the farm, Ann watched her husband arise. Ted Burley walked heavily into the kitchen, his shoulders hulking beneath the fabric of long underwear. He put on a pair of overall pants and started a large pot of coffee.

  Ann got up then too, looking at the alarm clock to realize there were still fifteen minutes before their normal time to arise. She switched off the alarm lever and put on a wool robe over her flannel pajamas. She stopped in the living room to light the stove and followed her husband into the kitchen.

  “I would have gotten the coffee ready.”

  “I’ve already done it.” Ted Burley walked to the back door and looked sourly through the top frame of glass at the still-dark morning.

  “You got up before the alarm again.”

  “Said I would last night.”

  Ann knew he’d said no such thing, but she did not argue. “What would you like? Scrambled eggs? Bacon?”

  “Yes,” he said, and there was almost a pouting tone to his voice.

  “All right, Ted,” she said gently. She did not yet like to admit that talking to him as she would a child was something required. She had thought when she met him in Omaha that he was a very strong man. She set the kitchen table and poured beaten eggs into a frying pan. “Sit down, Ted. It’ll be ready in a minute.”

  “I wish you’d quit nagging me.” He remained standing at the kitchen door, staring out grimly.

  She started to retort, then did not. Her mind this morning kept switching back to her father. She’d had a dream that something horrible had happened to him and awakened in the middle of the night in a bath of terrified sweat, seeing his face smashed and bloody. It was a foolish dream, but the memory still sent her blood cold.

  She placed bacon and scrambled eggs on Ted’s plate. “There you are. I don’t mean to nag.”

  Silently he sat down and began eating. She poured a cup of coffee for each of them and sat down across from him.

  “You going to eat or not?” he asked.

  “When you’ve finished. I wanted to get yours ready right away.”

  “Easy life, isn’t it? I got to eat on the run and go out and work my hands down to a nub. You haven’t anything else to do but eat breakfast whenever you feel like it.”

  “Don’t be mean, Ted.”

  “I’m not. I give you a good life. Maybe it isn’t good enough for you though? Maybe you liked it better in Omaha?”

  “Ted, why all this—” She spread her hands. “Eleven months! It still ought to be a honeymoon, and we don’t even—”

  “You shut up about that, do you hear? I told you once. I won’t any more!”

  “Ted—”

  “I mean it! I know what you’re talking about! Take a filthy mind to think about that all the time. Where’d you get that mind of yours? Where’d you learn to think about that all the time?”

  “Can’t you understand? There’s nothing filthy about a man and wife—”

  “I told you!” he said menacingly.

  She looked at the vivid flush of his face. For the first time since that memorable moment of their first night together in this house or anywhere, she thought he might hit her again. She had a fleeting thought of Dr. Hugh Stewart. She had a strange impulse to get up suddenly and flee to him for protection.

  But Ted Burley did not hit her. He’d done that just once so far, and that had been after their first night of married love. That night Ann had found out a lot about Ted Burley.

  She did not know Ted Burley when she married him. Their courtship had been only a month long. He’d come to Omaha from the farm, a lonely man who needed her desperately, he’d told her. He’d been thirty-one and large and, even in his wind-burned and raw-boned look, handsome enough. He’d seemed to Ann as capable and strong as her idealistic concept of a noble frontiersman.

  But she was on the run. She’d left San Francisco and gone to her father in Sacramento because she did not trust her mother with the knowledge of where she was. Only her father knew that she’d dyed her hair from dark brown to blond, that she’d then gone to Omaha and assumed a new name of Brown. Only her father had her Omaha address. He had not written to her since she’d got married. She had not written to him.

  On the run, she had chosen what seemed solid protection in the form of Ted Burley.

  She’d met him at the Stockyards Exchange where she’d gotten a job as a secretary. He’d come once on business, then returned again and again. Suddenly they were married. And Ann had gone home with him to the farmhouse outside Arrow Junction and the bed of his mother and father.

  It was there, eager with a love she was certain was real, that Ann found that, despite his large size and rugged look, Ted Burley was but a prudish child.

  She’d sensed his nervousness and had thought it was simply a strong man’s hidden shyness. So she’d done the advancing, and he’d been caught up by it, driven to a wild emotion. She’d willingly accepted the drive of it, no matter how brutal and selfish. When it was over he hit her.

  She did not understand, and he didn’t care that she didn’t. He’d left her alone. His soul having been exposed, he seemed to hate her. He slept in his child’s bed that night; he’d slept there ever since. For weeks on end he would contain his emotion, then he would unleash it as though he were using a whip on her. Then the same withdrawal again. She began to understand more about the child within the man’s exterior. But she could not mature the spirit of him…

  “D
on’t like my bacon so damn well done,” he said.

  “I tried to do it the way you like.”

  “Maybe you don’t know how to do anything the way I like. Maybe it’s too bad you’re here and Ma isn’t. She knew everything there was to know.”

  He stood up and disappeared into the parlor. He reappeared dressed and shoved his thick arms through the sleeves of a heavy mackinaw. “You going to town today?”

  “I’d planned on it.”

  “Well, I don’t have chains on the sedan yet. I didn’t count on that today. I got to go clear over to Webster in the truck in this damn storm.”

  “If I knew how, Ted—”

  He laughed harshly. “You couldn’t do anything in this world if I didn’t watch you. And I don’t have time to be teaching you how to put chains on a car! I’ll do it myself.”

  She looked at him in honest wonderment. Then she said, “Did your mother know how, Ted?”

  “Sure she did! She did it lots of times!”

  She examined him closely, nodding.

  “Got to get going,” he said, pulling a wool-lined cap over his hair, unfolding the flaps down over his ears. “See you try to keep from getting sassy with every man in town, do you hear?”

  Her examination of him turned from curiosity to amazement. For a moment she was ready to laugh. He’d only started this kind of thing recently. She could still not believe he was serious. But he was, she saw, dead serious.

  “Ted, you don’t honestly believe that I—”

  “Damn, yes!” He left the house, slamming the door against a gust of snow-driven winter wind.

  By midmorning over coffee she had become entirely introspective. And she had again allowed her feeling of fear to be felt fully. She thought of how Tony Fearon must be sitting in his cell right now, dreaming, she was certain, of how it would be when he knew she was dead, just as he’d threatened…

  Shortly after that she got into the old sedan that Ted had readied earlier with chains. She drove into Arrow Junction and parked outside the Arrow Junction General Store.