Jack and Susan in 1953

by Michael McDowell

  At the desk, Jack dropped off his room key, saying, “Just in case my wife comes back in the next few minutes…” He picked up the key for the Ford that was almost ready for him in the garage behind the hotel. Then he retrieved Woolf, returned to the desk for a map of Cuban roadways, and went whistling merrily out through the back garden of the Internacional.

  In the garage he waited for a few minutes while the car, privately rented at an outrageous sum from one of the assistant managers of the hotel, was being filled with gas. Jack studied the map, tried to ask a few directions of an old man who, it soon became clear, knew nothing about English, Cuban geography, or the desperation of a hunted man.

  When the car was ready, Jack opened the back door, shoved Woolf inside, and wound the end of the leash around the window handle. He got into the front and drove off with a grim smile.

  Two dark cars pulled up in front of the hotel just as Jack was passing by, and he knew without even having to look that policemen were getting out of them.

  The road south took him past the racetrack, where the wrecked racing car still smoldered in the field. The remaining automobiles in the Gran Premio still circled the dusty track.

  Jack thought he knew why Rodolfo had turned the Cadillac south, instead of returning to Havana.

  It looked as if Jack was going to get to visit The Pillars after all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  SUSAN HAD TIME for reflection in the trunk of the Cadillac. After an hour or so of travel, it became obvious to her that Rodolfo had not driven back to Havana, but was headed elsewhere.

  Susan didn’t like this conclusion.

  She wasn’t happy in the trunk of the Cadillac. Since the car was new, the space was tolerably clean, but it was small, and had hardly been designed for the accommodation of riders. There had been a time when Susan tended toward claustrophobia. That time had been until she climbed into the trunk; but now she knew that she could not allow that fear to overcome her. That fear of not having enough air to breathe; of having a small space suddenly lurch smaller; of walls bending inward and of sharp objects piercing through them; of locks failing to open; of gas seeping inside…

  There were a great many things about the trunk of a Cadillac on a fairly long trip that were not pleasant, and in succession, Susan suffered every one of them.

  She wondered if Libby had been playing a part, if her old rival somehow remained her rival still, despite the fact that they had neatly traded off Manhattan fiancés. Was Libby ever satisfied? Had she lured Susan into the trunk of the car, and was she now laughing in the front seat? Probably not, Susan concluded with relief. Libby was capable of the laughter, yes. Of making the plan and playing so consistent a part, no. Susan suspected that, uncomfortable as she was, with only the two small, heavy boxes as pillows, Libby might be almost as distressed though she had the freedom of the front seat of the Cadillac.

  Through painstaking and dextrous investigation, Susan had discovered that inside the small heavy boxes were rifle cartridges. This discovery did not improve her peace of mind.

  Her eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, and she could see little slits of light here and there around the seams of the trunk. When she stretched and altered her position she even found a tiny hole where a screw had fallen out, through which she could see the rough road over which they were traveling.

  It began to rain, and the rain beat deafeningly against the metal that was only a couple of inches over Susan’s ears, making her feel even more trapped than before.

  She tried to remember her geography. Cuba, unfortunately, was more than seven hundred miles long. And it would be just her luck that Rodolfo’s destination was at the very tip of the island.

  Then another danger occurred to Susan. Libby had obviously anticipated that Susan would spend a short time in the trunk. What if she began to fear for Susan’s life back there? Would she reveal Susan’s presence? Susan certainly didn’t want that; she preferred claustrophobic metal walls. Would Rodolfo realize, by Libby’s nervousness, that something was wrong? And stop the car, and beat Libby till she told him what was bothering her?

  An unpleasant journey became unpleasanter still.

  The rain kept up, and despite everything, Susan fell asleep.

  When she awoke again, the automobile was no longer moving.

  Rain no longer drummed on the roof.

  Her neck ached from her rifle-shell-case pillow.

  She wished desperately that she had taken advantage of the ladies’ comfort station at the racetrack.

  Another hour passed. Visions of Libby’s treachery ran through her mind alternately with fears that there might be some very good and very terrible excuse for Libby’s not coming to let her out of the trunk.

  Not only had the rain stopped, but now the sun came out, and it beat down hard on the metal trunk. Susan began to feel as if she’d been caught in the back room of a steam laundry. Then it felt as if she’d actually been moved in between the blades of one of the presses. She felt woozy, as though her brain were bubbling and boiling inside the casing of her skull. She no longer had any desire to visit the comfort station, but there was an easy and embarrassing reason for that relief.

  Outside the automobile all seemed silent. She heard a few anonymous creaks and snaps, but they were muffled and brief and uninterpretable.

  She slipped in and out of consciousness, but this wasn’t sleep. This was something else. Something darker and more dangerous, but there was nothing she could do to prevent it.

  Suddenly her ears were assaulted with a tremendously loud grating, which was actually nothing more—and nothing less—than the key being pressed into the lock of the trunk.

  She breathed in deeply, as if fresh air were already hers for the taking.

  The trunk lid rose upward with a sweep. Light and air and even the surprising smell of the warm sea poured in upon her. She was blinded with sunlight—and relief.

  “Libby…” she whispered.

  But when her eyes had adjusted, she saw that it wasn’t Libby who’d opened the trunk.

  It was a little boy—about nine years old.

  Susan had seen him before.

  He was the child who had slashed the throat of her uncle on the Havana pier.

  He smiled.

  Jack knew approximately where he was headed, even beyond the general direction of south and west. He had a map. He had a decent instinct about proper directions that worked most of the time. He also was driven by a compelling need to find Susan and make certain that she was all right.

  He was convinced quite beyond his ability to explain it, that Rodolfo, with Libby in the front, and Susan much farther back in the back than people tended to sit, had driven down to The Pillars.

  The problem was, he didn’t know exactly where James Bright’s plantation was. He had a province: Pinar del Río, which lay west of Havana. He even had a nearby town: San Cristóbal. He hoped that that would be enough.

  Not very many miles west of Havana lay mountains. Very quickly, in his rented Ford, Jack was driving up steeper and steeper inclines. The roads got less-traveled and rougher, and when it began to rain, it looked as if the whole thing—roads, Ford, Jack, and Jack’s vague plan of rescuing his wife—would all be washed down into the torrent that was tumbling along the side of the road filled with mud and debris.

  But Jack didn’t wash away. He drove and drove, stopping every few miles to check the map, and here and there to ask directions. Those men and women he bewildered with his Spanish eventually made out the name “San Cristóbal” but they never figured out that Jack was also looking for a new dark green Cadillac with a light broken in the left tailfin.

  West and south of the mountains was a flat coastal plain, thirty miles wide, on which farmers raised tobacco to be rolled into cigars. Jack drove along the narrow road, beneath a wide drenching sky; low flat sodden fields seemed to stretch forever on either side.

  San Cristóbal was about seventy miles from Havana, and Jack found it desp
ite rain, despite his broken Spanish and his broken arm, despite the terrible mountain roads. His journey was helped considerably by the fact that the road he traveled lay directly alongside the tracks of the railroad that also went from Havana to San Cristóbal.

  He didn’t know what to expect of the town, but it turned out to be poor and small and flat and dirty. But if it was not as small as he’d anticipated—it was the center of a regional tobacco market—it exceeded his expectation when it came to dirt.

  San Cristóbal was a fly-blown maze of streets and low buildings that had once been painted white. He had no more arrived in the town than the rain stopped, the sun immediately came out, and steam rose from the filthy streets in ghostly curtains of moisture. Remarkably ugly children and quite handsome women paraded the streets. Old men sat placidly in the front of the sad-looking buildings, and old women leaned out of the windows, resting their elbows on stained white cloths. Jack saw no young or middle-aged men of San Cristóbal in the village or the fields.

  He stopped at a small store with a Shell Oil sign before it and bought gas. He got out of the car, released Woolf for a few minutes’ walk, and asked the small boy who had come out to put gasoline into his tank whether this was indeed San Cristóbal. The boy pointed across the way to the railway station. A dilapidated sign, blistered with age and the heat, read clearly, San Cristóbal. Jack then tried to ask the boy if he had seen a dark green Cadillac with a beautiful blond American woman in the front seat, but Jack didn’t know the Spanish words for all those things, and the boy didn’t understand anything but “Cadillac.” He had seen that, and pointed vaguely off in what appeared to be several different directions.

  Jack said, “The Pillars.”

  The boy shrugged.

  Jack said, “Señor Bright.”

  The child suddenly erupted in a torrent of Spanish, gesticulating as he withdrew the nozzle of the pump from the tank. Jack’s trousers were sprayed with the last drops of the gas.

  As he was reaching for a handkerchief to dab at the gasoline stains, the handcuffs on his wrist slipped out of his shirt and dangled before the boy’s astonished face. The sun shone glancingly off the metal.

  Instead of getting out his handkerchief, Jack reached for his wallet, and paid the boy five times the cost of the gasoline. He hoped the boy would understand that the extra cash was a bribe for silence. The boy took the money and ran back inside the store. Looking around, and noting with relief that no one else appeared to have noticed the handcuffs, Jack climbed hurriedly back into the car, calling desperately for Woolf.

  Woolf was interested in a small female dog of ignoble breed, who was wandering around the ramshackle railway station. Woolf would not come.

  By the time Jack had made the hard decision that he’d abandon Woolf—at least until he’d rescued Susan—the boy had come out of the store with a man who looked to be his father.

  The man, who was large-boned and muscular, stood directly in front of Jack’s Ford; the boy had positioned himself directly behind it. Jack could not drive off without hitting the man, and he could not back up without knocking over the boy. Neither alternative seemed a good idea.

  Woolf, humiliated by a stern canine rebuff over across the way, trotted up to the car and whined to get in.

  Jack smiled a confident smile, leaned out the window at the same time that he was trying to open the door to let Woolf in, and said, very slowly, “I’m looking for the home of Señor James Bright, The Pillars…”

  The man’s expression shifted when he heard the name of Susan’s uncle. He came around to Jack’s door just as Woolf was scrambling across Jack’s lap. The man reached in and grasped Jack’s right hand, pulled the sleeve back, and thumped his finger against the handcuffs.

  Jack didn’t know the Spanish for, “This was a most amusing practical joke my wife played on me,” and before he had time for another thought, the man had dragged him out of the car and into the store. Woolf trotted amiably behind.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  SUSAN PUT HER hands on the edge of the trunk and raised herself up. She saw that she was in some sort of courtyard before—or perhaps behind—an immense white house. The surrounding vegetation was thick and green, and looked a great deal cooler than she herself felt. She was still woozy with the heat she’d endured while locked inside the trunk of the Cadillac.

  The boy retreated a few feet, not, it appeared, out of fear, but merely as if waiting to see what Susan would do if given enough room.

  He was much better dressed, she noted, than when she’d seen him last. He wore a little uniform, in fact, such as she’d seen in Havana on boys that attended private school. Short pants, white shirt, blue tie. But there was no doubt in her mind that this was the child who had murdered her uncle.

  And unless she was very much mistaken this was her uncle’s house, outside of San Cristóbal. There were doubtlessly other plantation houses a few hours from Havana that Rodolfo would have had some reason for visiting, but somehow Susan knew that this was The Pillars.

  She said nothing to the boy as she climbed cautiously out of the trunk of the car and stood on the swept, even pavement of the courtyard.

  Two possibilities presented themselves for escape from this killer-child. She could run into the house; the success of that plan rested on the hope that she could gain entrance by an unlocked door or window, and that once inside, she’d find help there. It was more likely, she knew, that Rodolfo was inside. Rodolfo, who’d tried to have her and her husband arrested for the murder committed by this boy.

  She could dash into the forest that began just beyond the garden fringing the semicircular courtyard. That choice supposed that she was strong and rested enough to outrun the boy and then fight her way through a virtual jungle. Even then there would be no way to get in touch with Jack. Even if he had managed to avoid arrest, he wouldn’t have been able to return to the hotel. Where could Jack possibly be?

  They’d been foolish, Susan saw now, not to have had some plan, some place of meeting, some code for use in emergencies. But how could they have known?

  Then Susan thought of something that made her heart give an extra beat. In absence of a plan, and with a return to the hotel impossible, there was one place where Jack might think to meet her—and that was here, at The Pillars.

  She tried to walk to the house, but after only a few steps her legs gave way beneath her and she collapsed onto the pavement. She didn’t know whether she was glad or sorry to think that Jack was possibly on his way here.

  Strong arms raised her up, and Susan knew by the smell of his hair oil that the strong arms were Rodolfo’s. “You are very foolish,” he said, and she had neither the strength nor the inclination to disagree.

  He lifted her up and carried her toward the house. Her head lolling over his shoulder, Susan watched the murderous boy padding silently after them. He smiled up at her again, as if pleased that she were going to be taken care of.

  They entered through a set of glass doors into a room with whitewashed walls and bright carpets; it was filled with rattan furniture covered in chintz. A photograph on the wall—of her father as a very young man—confirmed her intuition. This was indeed her dead uncle’s house.

  It occurred to her a moment later that, as his heir, this house was now hers.

  Rodolfo laid her on a sofa, and when she turned her head toward the windows at the other end of the room, she could see a pillared veranda and the Caribbean a few hundred yards beyond, down a slope of shorn grass and a strip of white beach. A pleasant place, she thought, under different circumstances.

  “Very foolish,” Rodolfo repeated.

  “Where is Libby?” Susan asked—or tried to ask. Her voice didn’t work as it ought to have. Her words were a whisper, hoarse and unintelligible. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Where is Libby?”

  “Upstairs,” said Rodolfo, sitting down in a basket chair across the rug from her, crossing one leg elegantly over the other. “I am very disappointed in Libby
for not telling me that we had a guest in the trunk of the car. Armando,” he commanded in Spanish, “bring Miss Bright—I mean, Mrs. Beaumont, some water.”

  In a few moments the boy appeared with a glass of water. He knelt delicately on the rug at her side, carefully lifted her head, and pressed the glass to her lips. She drank slowly, and when she fell back again, she felt much better.

  Rodolfo smiled, and asked, “Would you like to see the rest of the house?”

  Susan hesitated only a moment, then nodded. She raised herself up on the couch, and Rodolfo waited politely for her to recover herself. Then he rose, came over, and helped her to her feet.

  “Lean on me,” he advised.

  He walked her through the rooms of the ground floor of The Pillars. These low-ceilinged rooms were long and comfortable, but relatively narrow, and windows opened both toward the Caribbean to the south and to a sheltered and shaded courtyard in the back. A house in the tropics needed as much cross-ventilation as possible. Everything was clean and bright and comfortable, and Susan had no difficulty imagining her uncle here.

  “Where are the servants?” Susan asked.

  “In mourning,” said Rodolfo.

  Which was to say, no one would come if Susan called for help.

  In the kitchen, which was surprisingly modern and surpassingly pink, Susan drank a second glass of water and then felt still better. The disarray and general filthiness of her condition began to make her uncomfortable, even though she knew that conventional decorum should not apply in such a situation as this—when she was being held in the firm grasp of the man who doubtless had engineered the murder of her uncle.