The Lethal Sex

by Christianna Brand

The décor of the chicken yard was white splatters and black dots on a gray pitted background. The chickens worked hard at their chicken yard, pecking and dropping all their lives long. One end or the other reaching for the gray dust, up and down, up and down.

  Chickens were puny. She could step on them and end their senseless industry. She had seen her grandmother do it once, years ago. Gramma had searched out the pick of the lot, a fat, white, single-minded thing, with the red indecency on its head lolling off toward its right eye. Gramma picked it up, its head in her hand, and swung it high in the air, four times around. Then she put the wobbling head on a tree stump and stepped on it. Her brown fingers grasped the three-pronged legs and, with one jerk, the chicken was in two pieces. She let the body part run around a minute to amuse the children. Celia couldn’t remember if there’d been any blood.

  She wished she had a cigarette. Dennis, her husband, wasn’t more than thirty feet away, sitting in the side yard, bathed in sunlight and shimmer. The clack of his typewriter came faintly to her, a dead sound on the dead air. His white shirt burned at her eyes. Would he come if she called?

  She opened the lid of the wooden bin which was nailed to the fencepost and took out a dried, withered cob of corn. She rolled it around in her hands and a few kernels of yellow gold dropped readily away from the cob.

  “Here, chickie,” she said softly, and threw the pellets onto the ground. The chickens squawked and whooped and flapped their wings. They climbed on each other’s backs and pecked at each other’s eyes, then scrabbled in the dust for the golden prize. There was one runt who stayed on the outskirts, pleading to be allowed in. Celia kicked him into the middle of the fray, but he dropped back, unharmed and unfed.

  Celia stepped carefully around the fighting hens and went out into the side yard. The farmhouse squatted solidly in the lawn, its back to the chicken yard, and its face averted from the train tracks on the right that paralleled the south line of the farm. The house wore its new white coat of paint uneasily, with here and there the older gray smearing through. Empty windows looked out at her except from the front bedroom where starched, white curtains scratched at the screen. She’d get drapes for all the other windows tomorrow. Shocking pink ones.

  Dennis sat just outside the porch, with his back to her, bending over a card table. One of the legs of the card table was slanted inward, and it jiggled to the rhythm of the typewriter beat.

  His neck was a pinker white than his shirt. The hairs stood out boldly in the sunlight. She could see the round dome of his pink scalp clearly.

  She touched the mole on his neck. He jumped, and a green eraser flew out of his hand.

  “Do you have a cigarette?” she asked.

  “They’re in the house.” He frowned and picked up the eraser.

  She sat on the grass by the wobbly table leg. She wrapped her arms around her knees and squinted into the sunlight.

  “Talk to me,” she said.

  “What about?”

  “I don’t care. What we’ll have for dinner, or the price of eggs. You name it, I’ll pursue it.”

  Dennis played with the typewriter keys. “Tomorrow is your birthday, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “I’ll be thirty-nine. The dangerous age.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “That’s not old, Celia, and besides, you come from a long-lived family.” He looked up at Gramma’s bedroom.

  “That’s not what I meant. ‘We live in death, and die not in a moment.’”

  “‘With death.’ Sir Thomas Browne,” Dennis said, his eyes shifting from her face to the papers spread before him. He went on. “Now I have a serious problem. I am propounding the theory that the vowel sounds in the words ‘light’ and ‘night’ are different, but my colleagues, I am sure, will say that it is merely a peculiarity of the midwestern dialect.”

  Celia considered the problem. “Isn’t all phonetics made up of hearsay evidence, anyway?”

  “Please don’t be flip, Celia.” He stared at her a moment, then his eyes went back to the papers. He picked up the green eraser and obliterated a word.

  She sat on the grass a while longer. The pecking of the typewriter began again, slowly, then faster and faster.

  She got to her feet and stood looking down at his neck for a long time. Then she turned and walked diagonally across the lawn toward the gate to the middle yard, avoiding the quicker path through the chicken pen.

  There was a trembling under her feet. It was a noise in her ears. It grew louder and louder and became the 4:20, slashing through the countryside, coming to her. As always, her body inclined toward the monster and at the last possible second, bent backward away from it, like a pendulum which, having gone too far one way must compensate on the other end of its swing. Her fingers yanked at the zipper that ran down the front of her dress.

  The last of the muted roar was gone now and the quiet came down around her. She pushed at the gate and it swung right back at her, pulled by the chain with the large round weight at its midsection. The weight was smooth now, all its ridges flattened out by the bottoms of countless swinging children. Her bottom. And her children’s.

  She pushed again and slithered through before the gate could smash her. She walked across the middle yard that was a no-man’s-land. A few dispirited blades of gray-green grass, hen scratchings, and horseshoe parentheses.

  Over to her right, she could hear the children screaming invective at each other. She could see one pair of bare brown legs through the trees. One of the kids— Janie?—called to her.

  The orchard wasn’t really anything so grand as the name implied. Four apple trees in a square, and a knobby old pear tree standing guard to one side were all. It was a “family use” orchard. Nobody ever sprayed the fruit, so nobody but the worms and bugs ate it. But the kids liked to climb the trees.

  That was the trouble now. The boys were up in the sturdiest apple tree and every time Janie tried to climb up they stepped on her hands. She was crying and calling them “lousy old bastards” until she saw Celia peering over the fence.

  “Mother, they won’t let me come up in the tree!”

  “Don’t listen to that cry-baby, Mother,” called Junior. “If we let her up, she’ll just throw apples at us.”

  “Janie, if you promise not to throw apples at them, I’ll make them let you go up there,” Celia said.

  “I won’t throw apples at the big sissies.”

  “Come on up, dear sister,” crooned Brandon.

  Janie climbed up unmolested.

  “Mother! She’s shaking apples down on us!”

  “Hey, quit it, you big fathead!”

  “Mother-errr! They’re pushing me!”

  Celia turned away. Let them call. They’d settle their argument only if she didn’t interfere. The three of them came down out of the tree. They started to run, their legs going in and out among the trees.

  She went to her left, down the cement sidewalk. What a silly place for something so citified as a sidewalk. It was like sandpaper with big pebbles in it. It hurt her feet through the thin shoes.

  The sidewalk tilted slowly toward the far end of the middle yard. A broken cultivator lay on its back across the path, its orange-brown talons crooked upward. Celia stepped carefully on a round patch of green—nourished by what?—and reached the safety of the sidewalk on the other side.

  The gate here was just a gate, opening into the animal yard. She could go around the barn and on down the dried mud cow walk to the water-filled quarry. She could walk down there, and in the shelter of the trees, take off her clothes and let the icy water close over her. The silence down there at the quarry was palpable. The mud around the spring was yellow and cold and greasy.

  She walked up the uneven ramp and into the blackness of the barn. The horses were making munching, whispering noises. Ahead of her she could see the buttocks of Beauty shifting, first one side higher, then the other, like a woman whose feet hurt. Or like a whore’s walk. She went up to him and felt his flanks. It gave her fingertip
s the same voluptuous feeling that she got from stroking her sealskin coat.

  She could saddle Beauty, and sitting astraddle, ride out, creating her own wind, riding out the excitement of the feel and smell of a horse. She could snarl and scream and laugh if she wanted to as they sprang over the dust-gray earth.

  She heard a clang and scrape of iron at the darkest end of the barn. Jim. She salivated slightly, and swallowed, and rubbed her open palms down the sides of her hips. She went toward the sound. The darkness was less intense, and with it was going the semblance of coolness. She was growing quite warm, even here, in the barn.

  “Hi, Jim,” she said. A finger of light from a knothole somewhere up above struck the white of his right eye, and shone through the hazel iris so it glittered like a chip from a stained-glass window.

  He straightened up, crossed his legs, and crossed his arms, leaning against the wagon. His tan shirt was unbuttoned all the way down to his belt buckle of tarnished tin, with the middle button hanging by a torn bit of cloth. His shirts were always unbuttoned.

  “You gonna ride today?”

  She let that pass. “Do you have a cigarette?” she asked. His fingers were hot as he handed her one. He raised his knee and stroked a kitchen match along the tautened underside of his jeans. He smelled of horses and virility and sweat, or maybe all three smells were a single one.

  “Pull up your zipper,” he said.

  They gazed at each other for a while. He said, “Here, you can help me.” There was a small smile on his face. He had three teeth missing in a row beside a canine tooth.

  The yellow-handled pitchfork was taller than she was, and heavy. They laughed at her efforts to get a forkful of hay up into the trough before it all slithered to the floor. He did it easily, scrunching the fork along the splintering wood, and with one smooth motion, carrying the fork up, up, and over, its load intact.

  “What do the words ‘light’ and ‘night’ mean to you?” Celia asked.

  Jim grimaced. “Are you nuts?” He thought a moment, then laughed. “I guess ‘light’ means work, and ‘night’ means play. Why?”

  “I just wondered.”

  Her hands were getting slippery on the handle. She set the pitchfork on the floor of an empty stall, turning the tines downward as she had been taught to do. She sat down on the mound of straw in the stall and watched. Jim turned and looked at her. He leaned his fork against the wall and came to her. His shoes were black and thick and covered his ankles.

  He put his hand out to her. She reached out and held it. He sat down, and leaning over, pushed her full length into the straw. It was dusty smelling and dry, and jabbed at her everywhere. He kissed her, with lips that were wet as though he had just licked them. He leaned his body along hers, and she could feel the bumps and hollows. He raised his hand to stroke her, and said, “I know what you want. I can always tell.”

  The barn was stinking.

  “No,” she said.

  “Aw, come on.” His smile was knowing. “I’m not afraid of your husband. I’m no chicken.”

  She rolled over and stood up. She rumpled the straw wisps out of her hair, and smoothed her skirt, and rubbed the back of her hand over her mouth.

  “No?” she asked. She picked up the pitchfork from its bed of straw. She hefted it and found its center of gravity. She lifted it as far as her arms could reach and, with all her might, she brought the tines down, just so, across the naked white skin of his neck. Now she could remember. There was blood.

  No Trace

  VERONICA PARKER JOHNS

  Hazel wasn’t a woman to do things by halves. When she was through with a man she did not merely wash him out of her hair; she soaked for hours in tepid bubble baths, the most effective therapy she had discovered for a quick convalescence from love.

  With manicured toes she turned the tap. Warmer water flowed around her, the bubbles wafting upward toward her shoulders. She shut her eyes. For this moment, she decided, and for the very last time, she would think only of the nicer things about Daniel, his strength, the wiry curl that made him look like a one-horned faun. For hereafter she would concentrate upon his less attractive aspects, those tedious accounts of his feats as a college athlete, not to mention his current lack of talent for anything save love and laziness.

  She turned off the water and listened acutely. She had been correct: her husband was in the bedroom calling her name.

  “Walter!’’ she cried. “What are you doing home in the middle of the day?”

  ‘‘I’ve had a slight accident, darling. Nothing to be alarmed about. Are you decent?”

  “Not especially,” she admitted with unwonted honesty. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  She got out of the tub, slipped on a flamingo pink terry-cloth robe, padded across her dressing room, leaving wet prints of her bare feet upon the white carpet.

  Her husband was lying on her twin bed, not his. One of his boots had soiled the coverlet. She was about to ask waspishly why he did not dirty his own nest instead of hers when she noticed his other foot. It was shoeless, bound in a bandage, obviously incapable of carrying him to the far side of the room where he belonged.

  She wondered how it had got him this far. She asked.

  “Mrs. Devin brought me home in a cab,” he replied. “The driver helped her get me up here. She’s in the kitchen now, mixing me a drink and asking Velma to fix me a spot of lunch.”

  “It’s Velma’s day off,” she reminded him. “Can your secretary also cook?”

  “Like a streak, I imagine,” said Walter. “She’s probably raiding the icebox on my behalf. I was on my way to lunch when it happened.”

  “But what did happen?” Hazel asked belatedly.

  “I was run over. You remember that narrow alley behind the buildings?”

  “Yes,” she said, with a shudder. She had once paid a wifely visit to Walter’s home away from home, deep in the financial district. She remembered the view from his window which would have terrified an acrophobe, which she was not. She would never forget the nightmarish alley favored by Walter as a short cut to the restaurant he patronized daily. In the dreams of a claustrophobe, which she was, it would persist eternally.

  Well, said Walter, “this crazy fool came driving through there like a bat out of hell. I think it was the getaway car for a robbery that never took place. I’m sure the driver had been parked with his motor running when we first saw each other. I figure he lost his nerve and ran out on his pals, afraid I’d got a good enough look to be able to identify him.”

  “Could you identify him?”

  “I’m afraid not. All I caught was a blob of a face in a nondescript car.”

  “Didn’t you even get part of the license number?”

  Walter shook his head.

  That was typical of him. If he had kept his wits about him, he might at this moment be a hero. There would be interviews in progress with the press and scheduled for television. In the spotlight, which she would inevitably share, she would graciously answer such loaded questions as, “How does it feel to be the wife of a man who foiled a robbery?”

  It would, she was sure, feel just fine. She would never know. She was, irrevocably, the wife of plain old Walter, because it paid well. Walter would never capture a daylight bandit. Walter, bound for the restaurant and in a hurry to return to his ever-loving desk, had wrongly gauged the speed of the moving vehicle and stepped off the curb into its path.

  Typically, again, he had stepped with caution, with the same lack of derring-do with which he urged his clients to stick to blue chips. Only his foot had been injured.

  “It will take about a week to mend,” he said, almost apologetically. “I’ll try not to be too much in your way. Mrs. Devin will have to come in a few hours every day, but we’ll keep it to a minimum.”

  “Couldn’t you have gone to a hospital?” she blurted, not even pausing to phrase the question more tactfully. Walter’s face did that terrible thing it did when she hurt him deeply, furrowing, the e
yes darkened by anguish.

  She tried again: “I mean, wouldn’t you be better off there, get well faster?”

  “The doctor thought I’d do better here, with those who love me. Of course,” he added, a hint of irony now in his eyes, “he was a stranger to me. The police called him, so they could make a report.”

  A tall brunette came into the room, carrying a highball glass. Walter introduced the two, saying it was high time they met personally since they so frequently exchanged pleasantries on the telephone.

  “I’m sure we’ll be great friends,” said Hazel. “We have so much in common.”

  She excused herself and went into her dressing room. Selecting the clothes she would wear that day, she reflected that all this was too tiresome.

  Jane Devin, her husband’s secretary, was Daniel’s wife.

  Hazel chose a red dress, aware that Daniel adored her in it, that it would twist the knife when she said good-bye at the end of their final rendezvous.

  He did not know that the curtain was coming down. She had written this scene without benefit of his collaboration, carefully composing her own lines which would cue him into a gasping acceptance of the situation. This was her due. At rise of curtain it was Daniel who had set the stage, had forced her into her role without so much as one rehearsal.

  act one: a Tuesday morning in December, four months prior to the present. The telephone rings at the bedside of Mrs. Walter Cranshaw. She lifts it.

  “I’m Daniel Devin,” he said. “I’d like to talk to you. It’s about my wife, who works for your husband. They’ve just left on a business trip, haven’t they?”

  “Why, yes,” she stammered. “They have.”

  “That’s what you think. Mind if I come over and set you right on a fact or two?”

  She told him to come immediately. She spent the intervening minutes pacing the floor, terrified by the thought that the sweet-voiced creature who answered Walter’s phone might be a siren to lure him away from her. After having been so considerately discreet about her own affairs, was he going flagrantly to flaunt one in her face?