by Jim Thompson
The cold edge of his knife pressed against the bulging flesh. She gasped, then screamed, as the blade sank in, was almost buried in the pulsing softness.
"What are you—? 'No! Stop! S-STOP!"'
Arlie lightened the pressure on the knife, asked what the hell she was fussin' about. "Just cuttin' myself a piece of ass like I said I was goin' to."
"You're c-crazy—! 'No! N-n-n-noo!"'
Arlie shifted his weight a little, forcing her face down into the dirt so that her screams became a frantic muffled mumble. She squirmed and pitched, and Arlie only brought his weight down the harder, murmuring assurances that she was making a lot of fuss over nothin'.
"What's one piece o' ass to a gal that's got as much as you have? If you're afraid it'll make you lopsided, I can even things up by whopping off the other cheek. Now, you jus' lay real still an'—"
Big Sis reared up violently. Managed one short, strangled scream. Then she flopped down on the ground again in a dead faint; lay motionless and silent.
When she regained consciousness she was lying on her back, her hands again bound behind her. A gag made from shreds of her clothes was in her mouth, and Arlie was seated on her chest, his back to her. He gave her an over-the-shoulder grin; a reassuring wink and nod. Then, taking a tight hold on the loose flesh of her crotch, he brought his knife down hard and slowly inscribed a circle around her uterus.
He had decided to leave her ass intact, he explained, as a relatively harmless part of her body. Instead he was going to remove the real mischief maker. And with her cooperation and his skill, the operation would be quite painless.
"Wish I had me a nickel for every puss I cut off," he went on, carefully reinscribing the circle with his knife. "An' ol' Indian trick, y'know, an' us Kings are prob'ly more Indian than white. Funny thing is the woman don't hardly feel it—you don't feel nothin', do you?—till a long time afterward. That's maybe because it's mostly muscle, you know, an' stretchy; got more give to it than a mile o' cat gut. Why I seen a fella stretch a gal's puss clean over her head, an' then let it snap shut around her neck. Man, oh, man, what a sight to see!" His body shook with laughter. "That gal was flingin' herself around like a chicken with its head off; strangled to death by her own tokus. Now—'lay still!' You keep up that kickin' and squirmin', you'll 'really' get hurt..."
Big Sis could not lie still; no more could she be silent. Her entire body was racked with involuntary trembling, and an incessant moan came from her muffled mouth.
"Now, less just see," murmured Arlie. "Uh-huh, I reckon that'll just about do it. Just one quick pull on the hair patch, an' the thing oughta lift right off as slick as pig shit."
He knotted his fingers in the pubic hair, gave it a long steady pull. He paused; gave a harder pull. Then turned his head to give her an abashed look.
"You mind waitin' a day or two f'r it to drop off? Seems t'be stuck pretty bad right now. Reckon it musta got sort of scabbed on, what with all the bleedin'."
He held out his hand, by way of demonstration. A hand that was scarlet, dripping with blood. Then, as her eyes grew wider and wider, he reached around and wiped the hand on her crotch.
"Reckon I oughta put it back where I got it, huh? Well, now that we got that over with..."
He stood up, held a hand out to her. She took it silently, staring at him with unseeing eyes, and he drew her to her feet. As he guided her to her horse, helped her to get astride the saddle, he looked searchingly into the frozen face—into the eyes that looked only inward—and was almost shocked by what he saw. Almost moved to pity her.
Almost. He was virtually immune to shock and feelings of pity.
"Now, you're gonna be all right," he said gruffly. "You've had the fear of God put into you, an' you figure you're half-killed. But—"
"I know..." She smiled at him suddenly; the open, innocent smile of a child. And her voice was thin, high-pitched: a child's voice. "It's like Papa says."
"Uh, how's that?" Arlie said.
"I live with Papa," she piped. "Papa an' my little sister, Anne. Papa said it would only hurt us at first, and then it would feel good. An' I guess he ought to know, "cause he's my Papa an' Papas know everything!" She tossed her head in childish bravado; then her voice clouded, and an incipient whimper came into her voice. "But it still hurts. It hurts awful, awful bad. An'—an'—" Dry-eyed, she began to sob. "I want my Mama. 'I want my Mama...!"'
A bilish lump had risen in Arlie's throat. He gulped it down sickishly. "Jesus Christ!" he breathed. "Jeez-ass Keerist!"
"I got to go now," said Ethel Anderson. "You better go, too, or 'your' Papa'll be mad."
She nodded to him winsomely. Nudging the horse's flanks with her heels, she galloped away. And in the dying sunset Arlie stared after her, the naked woman grown smaller and smaller in the distance. And at last disappearing, as all things must, at horizon's end.
Arlie turned, and trudged away in the direction of his own horse. His big hands clenched and unclenched slowly, and his mind was in turmoil. Emotionally, he was tugged this way and that; self-damned and self-praised; his inner self simultaneously shaken and reassured.
Could a thing be both wrong and right? Could justice be injustice? Condemnation wrestled with rationalization, and the latter at last won out.
He shrugged as he came up to his horse, his face and conscience clearing.
"Shit and four are ten," he mumbled. "Shot a goose and killed a hen."
...It was quite late at night when Ethel Anderson reached the Gutzman farm, and Gutzman was already in bed. Hearing her ride in, he got up and lit the kerosene lamp; trying to maintain his anger with her as she drew oats from the feed shed, then, after a suitable interval led the horse to the watering trough. There was the sound of the barn door opening, the sound of its closing again. And then, finally, the rasping of weary footsteps, crossing the rutted soil of the barnyard and approaching the house.
Gutzman forced back the beam of approval which threatened to disperse his stern scowl.
So his Greta vas a goot woman. So always she took care of the animals first, herself second. Still, vas such an excuse to behave like whoore voman? To stay out half the night, and give him insults instead of explanations.
Standing in his long grayish-hued underwear, he drew himself erect as she entered the door; arms folded across his chest, his expression ominously severe.
"So, Greta!" he boomed. "You vill now tell me vy—vy—"
The lamp wick was economically dampered, so that there was little light outside its immediate vicinity. His view of her, then, was dim and limited: a head and face, a partial torso, painted upon the darkness. But her nudeness was obvious—the fact that she had been out in public, doubtless before other men, without clothes. And that was more than enough to infuriate him.
"Badt girl!" he shouted. "Fallen voman! Vy? Vot iss, answer me!"
Ethel bowed her head humbly. Her hands remained behind her, as they had in the beginning.
In her child's voice, she said, "I lost my thing, Papa. You can't do it to me any more."
"Vot! 'Vot?"' gasped Gutzman, and at last he noted the dark smear of her groin. "Vot has happened to you, Greta? Vy you talk like leetle girl?"
"I'm my Papa's good little girl," Ethel said desperately, "an' my Papa likes my thing better'n anyone's. An' now it's gone. An'—an'—" She raised stubborn eyes to his. "It's not my fault, an' you're not gonna whip me."
'Tell me I'm not, yuh little bitch! Went an' sewed it up, did you? Well, time I tear them threads outta yuh'...!
"Mein Gott!" Gutzman stammered. "Ach, my poor leetle Greta! Blease, you tell Gutzy vy—vot—"
"I'm going to kill you, Papa. I'm going to rip your thing off."
She brought her hands around in front of her, jabbed with the item they were holding. It was a pitchfork, the needle-sharp tines gleaming dully through their encrustations of manure.
Gutzman stood frozen with surprise. Stunned, unable to move, he stammered incoherent inquiries as to the reason for
this horror which confronted him. Ethel crept in closer, ignoring his questions; at last beginning to sing:
'Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,'
A sunbeam, a sunbeam!
Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,
I'll be a sunbeam for him!
She lunged forward suddenly. Gutzman let out a yell, flung himself aside. The tines of the fork sank in the wall behind him, and before he could recover sufficiently to wrest the tool from her, she had jerked it free. Was again jabbing and stabbing at him.
Slowly, he began to back away from her, keeping his eyes on her face. Blindly feeling with his hands for something with which to defend himself. He stumbled against a chair, almost went over backwards as she lunged at him again. He bumped into the stove, cold now after hours of disuse, and began circling it. Too late he remembered the large pile of firewood he had stacked behind it that night. A pile too large for him to move around, or to step over backward. And, of course, he would have to do it backward. Death awaited him the moment he turned away from her.
Now, she laughed with childish pleasure, merrily aware of his predicament: then broke into sobs, declaring her willingness to be a sunbeam for Jesus.
All the time moving nearer. And slowly drawing the pitchfork back for its final thrust.
Gutzman fumbled behind him with sweat-wet hands. Feeling the rough bark of the firewood. Trying to find a stick that would serve as a weapon.
He found none. All were sections of split logs; half-logs, in other words. Too big to be gripped firmly, or swung quickly. Large chunks of wood burned longer than small, though they were often difficult to ignite. Usually, it was necessary to splinter one up for kindling, and—
Gutzman at last found his weapon. He swung with it, an infinitesimal fraction of a second before Ethel could lunge with the pitchfork.
She released the fork, and said a single word; a long drawn-out, "Ohhh," that was like a sigh of relief. Then, she crumpled to the floor, and there was no further sound from her except for the bubbling of her wound.
Gutzman let out an anguished cry of "Greta!" He tottered out from behind the stove, and sank down on his knees before her. At first he kept his eyes firmly shut; and when he at last opened them, he kept them turned away from her face and head, from the fatal injury he had wrought, and looked only at her body.
She had fallen on her side in death, one knee drawn slightly up: a semi-foetal position. Gutzman studied the flaring buttock thus exposed, then tenderly shifted her body enough to look at the other one.
He leaned back, frowning. Scratched his frowsy head puzzledly. After a long moment, he turned her on her back, and spread her legs with awkward delicacy. Reaching behind him, he palmed water from the stove's reservoir, splashed it upon her crotch and gingerly scrubbed it with the sleeve of his underwear.
Again he leaned back, baffled by a seemingly idiotic paradox.
His leetle Greta...all bloody she was there in the place he had so happily visited so often. Yet how could this be? Where had the blood come from? There was not even the smallest cut, the slightest break in the skin, either there or anywhere else on her body.
He scowled, looking down at her; then suddenly squinted and bent close.
Circling the pubic area was a deep reddish indentation; much the same kind of marking he had noted on her buttock. He had supposed this last to be a memento of the saddle or of too-tight underpants. Yet that could hardly be, could it, if a virtually identical imprint existed around her crotch.
Gutzman could think of only one thing which might have made such an indentation. One which could not possibly have made it, since, to his way of thinking, it would have been preposterously pointless to do so:
Pressing a knife down hard on the blade's dull edge...
Gutzman gave his head a sad shake, firmly and finally denying the ridiculous theory. No one but he was responsible for leetle Greta's death. Only he had contributed to it. He had babbled to her unceasingly, talked until the sound of his voice must have been like the buzzing of bees. And all night long he had pressed himself upon her, taking advantage of her dependency; giggling stupidly at her profane pleas to leave her alone before he wore it out.
How many times had she cursed him, declared that he was driving her crazy. 'Oh, Gott, Gott! So sorry I am, Greta!' She had warned him, and he had ignored her. And, now, here was the awful result of his selfishness.
Those curious indentations had nothing to do with the tragedy. Already, even, they were beginning to fade and disappear. They would be gone before the marshal could send someone to investigate, nor was there any point in mentioning them. For he, alone, was guilty. He, Gutzman, that selfish, thoughtless, demanding man, who had made Greta murderously insane, and then split her lovely head with a hatchet.
Critch limped out to the well, and drew up a pail of water. He dipped cupped hands into the pail, blew a couple of tiny silverfish from the water and drank thirstily. He repeated the process several times, pausing intermittently to chew down a string of jerked beef. His inner self at last refreshed, he stripped to the waist and gave himself a half bath.
The rays of the dying sun warmed and dried him. He returned to the house, feeling considerably less stiff and achy.
He lay down in the bunk, and lighted a cheroot. By the time it was finished, he was all but drained of his rage against Arlie and was able to think reasonably. To see the dangerous futility of killing his brother.
Marshal Thompson had warned them both about taking the law into their own hands. And the marshal was obviously not a man to be trifled with. He would not accept a murder attempt by Arlie, as an excuse for killing Arlie. He would simply point out that only the law was authorized to deal with criminals, and that individuals who did so were criminals themselves. And that would be that—the next to the last chapter in the life of Critchfield King.
The best argument against killing Arlie, however, was the pointlessness of it. It would not get him his money back. It would leave him stuck here on this debt-burdened ranch, a place he was as incapable of running without Arlie as he was of flying.
There were two good reasons then for not killing Arlie. And added to them, Critch admitted, perhaps a third. The fact that he was doubtless incapable of killing. In the blazing heat of his rage, he had believed himself capable—had sworn that he would take Arlie's life. But now that he had cooled off, had had time to think clearly...
Arlie's demise was desirable, of course. If nothing more, killing him was the best insurance against getting killed. For the present, however, it must remain only an ideal. Something only to be achieved if and when the right time came.
In the meantime, and killing aside, Arlie must certainly be punished. He must be taught that an injury or an attempted injury to his brother would bring prompt and painful retaliation.
Critch sat up in the bunk, gazed thoughtfully around the darkening room. Then, his eyes lighting, he arose and went over to the stove; reached a hand under it. The hand closed over a metallic object, and he drew it out. Stood hefting a heavy steel poker.
'Nice, he thought. Very nice, indeed.' And loosening his belt, he slid the poker down his trouser leg. He refastened the belt, took several tentative steps. He could only walk stiff-legged, naturally, but that was all right. Even without the poker, his movements tended to stiffness.
He returned to the bunk. Lay back down again. The darkness became almost absolute, and he closed his eyes. And within minutes was fast asleep.
Several hours later he awakened to the distant rattle of wagon wheels. He sat up slightly to glance out of the window, and he saw the bobbing glimmer of a lantern. He stayed where he was for a time, watching the lantern draw closer, listening to the sound of the wheels grow louder. Then, at a faint 'haloo' from Arlie, he arose and limped out into the yard.
"Here!" he shouted. "All ready and waiting."
"Good! Be right with you!" Arlie shouted back. And he soon was.
He leaped down from the wagon seat, came forward with anxious off
ers of assistance. Critch accepted it, directing it so as to conceal the presence of the poker and to place his brother in line for a hard kick as the latter hoisted him into the rear of the wagon.
"Yeeow!" yelled Arlie, clutching at his groin. "Watch what you're doin', God damn it!"
"Oh, did I kick you?" Critch asked innocently. "I'm terribly sorry, Arlie."
"Well, you sure as hell—! Ah, to hell with it," Arlie said, and he rounded the wagon, and climbed up in the seat. "Make yourself comfortable on them quilts," he said grumpily, as they started off. "Got grub an' a jug of coffee there somewhere, if you want it."
Critch thanked him warmly. He again expressed regret for the kick, vocally hoping that it had not landed on his brother's balls. "I know how much that can hurt," he went on. "Why, when that saddle came down on top of me today, I thought my nuts had been crushed."
Arlie cleared his throat noisily. He popped the reins over the horses' backs, sending them forward with a leap.
"Uh, how you suppose it happened?" he said, finally. "Cinch bust on you?"
"It must have. Anyone who cut it would have to be a real lowdown, rotten, bastardly, mother-jumping son-of-a-bitch—wouldn't he? And I don't know of anyone like that around here—do you?"
"Uh, er, looky," grunted Arlie. "Why don't you eat some of that grub?"
Critch said he believed he would, at that, and locating the lunch basket, he began to eat. (He also found the pepper shaker, and loosened the lid on it.) Between mouthfuls of food and coffee, he continued to muse profanely, lewdly and loudly re the type of person—if it were possible for such a creature to exist—who would cut a man's saddle cinch.
"You know what, Arlie? I think anyone who would do a thing like that would screw a skunk in the ass, and then eat its—"
"Shut up!" howled Arlie. "You hear me, 'shut up!"'
"Shut up?" said Critch. "Now, why should I, anyway?"
Arlie turned around, yelling because, that was why! "Because if you open your stinkin' mouth one more time, I'll—'Yeeow!"' he yelled and flung his hands to his eyes. ''Eeyow!' You crazy son-of-a-'OOoouch!"'