by Gil Brewer
She stared at him and he didn’t exactly know why he’d spoken as he had, except that it was inside him and he had to get it out. He wished, as usual, that he’d kept his mouth shut. But she was scheming something and he couldn’t take being played like a fish.
“God damn you,” she said softly.
“Is this more in character?”
“Who in hell do you think you are?”
There was a moment’s trepidation, because her eyes had changed, and they were the eyes of many women he had seen before. He drew the bracelet from his pocket, stepped up to her, held it out. “You misplaced this.”
She was a sudden fury. Her face flushed and she knocked the bracelet viciously from his hand. It rattled skidding across the hardwood floor. Her firm breasts thrust at the flimsy stretch of white jersey and she stared at him, breathing a little faster, choked with something, but not saying anything.
Then she began to speak, leaning a little forward, the words like steam hissing between her lips. Right away he knew this was a place where he didn’t belong.
“You’re a hot one to talk like that. I know about you, Gary Dunn—I know plenty. You and your sweet little Doll. A cheap, sexy stripper in a scummy nightclub.” She paused and he had the icy impulse to hit her. “And you—” she said—”Who are you? A bum, that’s what. You’ve been a bum all your life. You’ve been in this town for six months and it’s the longest you ever held a job in your life. Who are you kidding? What about Alexandria, Louisiana! How about that, Gary—I know all about it. I know about a widow named Jane Matthias, and how she and her father backed you in the hardware business. You swiped funds, and skipped town. It’d be enough to slap you into jail if the cops found out.”
The old sickening disease rose inside him, fresh and deliberate. No one knew about that here—not here. He heard the sound of his own voice indistinctly.
“Where did you get that?”
“I know plenty.”
He moved toward her, lifting one hand, and she stepped back, watching him.
“Lots of things, Gary.”
“But where—”
“Never mind. But you’d better be careful what you say to me. I’ll tell her—I’ll tell them all.”
He knew, the way he felt, he had to get away from her. From the moment he’d seen this girl standing at that intersection, calling to him about a flat time, he’d been suspicious. Now he had every reason to hate her, and just looking at her told him there was nothing he’d be able to do about it.
“So long, Miss Harper.”
He turned, started walking toward the door of the room. Her voice changed, and there was a sudden soft impatience in it.
“Gary—wait, please.”
“The hell with you.”
“I didn’t mean it, Gary—honestly. I had to say something, you forced me.” She caught up with him, grabbed his arm. He kept walking, dragging her into a narrow hall. “Gary, listen to me.” Her voice lowered. “I have no one, don’t you see? My father is mean, Gary. He won’t give me any money—nothing—and he’s loaded. You know that. I can’t have any friends—you don’t know how awful he is!”
He paused and looked down at her.
“Let go of my arm, honey,” he said carefully. She was as crazy as he’d ever seen anyone.
She swallowed, trying to calm herself, her gaze flashing away, then back to his face.
“I’ve got a proposition to make, Gary. You’ve got to listen to me. You want money—I know you do. You don’t have any—” She was becoming desperate now.
Her eyes were wet. He couldn’t tell whether or not she was forcing the tears, but they were there. Some of the hate went away, but he knew he had to get out of here. He didn’t know where she’d found out what she had, and she only had half the truth, but she was obviously dangerous.
“Find somebody else,” he said, moving away again.
“I can’t. I’ve gone to too much trouble. I hate him—hate him!”
“Who?”
“My father,” she said bitterly.
He tore her fingers from his arm, began walking fast through broad rooms and long slanting ribbons of tinted sunlight, toward the front of the house. She padded along beside him, pleading. He reached the long front hall and started down, and suddenly she grabbed him again.
“Let go!”
He heard a car squeak lightly out front, saw the gleam of sun on chrome as it parked behind his Ford. He looked down at her and fright was very real, like broken knives behind her eyes.
Then that changed and she clung to him. “All right,” she said. “Damn you!”
He tried to thrust her away, but she twined her legs around his and he heard the front door swing open. She reached up, grabbed the throat of her jersey and stretched it, tearing it down over one shoulder and exposing most of one plump, bare breast. He struggled with her, and she hung onto him, her nails scratching at his jacket. She mussed her hair, and he heard the zing of the zipper on her shorts.
“Arlene—baby—what’s going on?”
“Daddy!”
Gary was half crazy inside now. He looked up, saw Franklin Harper hurrying toward them down the long plush hall, his feet soft on the thick carpet. The girl stepped back, making a big thing of covering her breast, her eyes anxiously sly, face flushed.
Harper stopped walking. Wearing a cream-colored suit, carrying a Panama hat, his face was beet-red, his eyes wild. For a moment he just stood there staring at the girl.
“It’s all right, Daddy,” Arlene said. “Really it is.”
Gary looked past the man at the front door, knew he’d never be able to make it. He felt helpless, and he knew he had to get out of here.
“It’s all right,” Arlene said. “Nothing happened, really—Gary was just leaving.”
Instead of pulling a weep scene, she was making matters still worse. Harper opened his mouth, his eyes oddly pained, and a kind of composure seemed to come over the man.
“There’s a big mistake here, Mr. Harper,” Gary said. His voice was thickly nervous. “It’s not the way it looks. I’d like to explain, if you—”
Arlene put one hand over her mouth, her eyes wide.
“I’d rather you wouldn’t say anything at all,” Harper said. His voice was brusque. “Please get out of my home.”
“Look, Mr. Harper,” Gary said. “I’d like to—”
Only Harper’s lips moved. “Didn’t you understand me?” He turned to his daughter. “Be kind enough to show your guest out, Arlene.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
Gary did not move. The girl gently took his arm, tugged him toward the front door, her eyes on her father, her other hand gripping the stretched flare of her tight shorts where the zipper was undone.
Harper’s eyes avoided them both now.
“Not that way,” he said. “The back door, if you will?”
Gary found himself going along with her, thinking of nothing save how that man looked, standing in the hall. He hurried through the house with her. They passed through more distant rooms, another shadowed length of hall and into the rich bloom of a glistening alabaster kitchen, trimmed with red and gold.
“Drive away as fast as you can,” she said. “He might change his mind. I’ll contact you.”
“Contact me hell. You stay away from me, hear?”
She opened the back porch door. “Hurry,” she said. Her eyes mocked him. “I’m sorry for what happened. Honest.”
He turned from her and rumbled down broad stone stairs, started around the rear of the house, past thick shrubbery, moving through heady odors of blossoming flowers. To his right, he was conscious of a sprawling, endless garden, with green paths, stone, and carefully pruned trees, thinking, The rich—the rich, the crazy rich, in a kind of weird singsong.
“Gary?”
She ran after him, then stopped as he turned.
Her whispered words reached him. “I said I’d contact you. I have an interest in you, just remember that. You’d better do as I
say or I’ll tell him you did it to me—that you forced me. He’ll believe anything I tell him. Anything. You’d be fixed for good.”
She vanished back around the house, her feet hissing on the grass, still clutching her shorts, and from inside he heard Harper call:
“Arlene? Arlene, baby, where are you? Come back here.”
He ran now, as silently as he could, along the side of the house and out to the front. A glinting black Cadillac was parked with its bumper nearly nudging the Ford. He reached the Ford, slipped beneath the wheel. Turning, he glanced toward the entrance and saw the door open. Harper stepped outside and looked at him, frowning. He heard Arlene call from inside the house.
“Here I am, Daddy.”
Gary drove out fast, came into the street, turned left, and pressed the gas pedal to the floor. He forced himself to ease his foot, and gradually began to slow down. Somehow he had to think this out.
Behind him, a green Dodge sedan pulled swiftly away from the curb and sped after him, slowly gaining, then shooting ahead. For a moment it pulled just behind the Ford and Gary swerved to the right side of the road, giving it more room.
The green sedan swept up beside him and Gary looked across into the driver’s strained, stolid face, and the man looked back at him. Some citizen, maybe troubled at the way he’d been speeding, wanting to say something, but losing his nerve.
Slowly the green sedan dropped back until it was lost in the sunny traffic of early afternoon.
THREE
IN A KIND of furious dream, he suddenly found that he was near the duplex where he lived on the outskirts of the town. It was a quiet stretch of humpbacked macadam road, potholed here and there, bordered by scrub oak and an occasional stubby cabbage palm. He drove in a steady vacuum, not even allowing himself the inevitable persuasion of thought. He hunched above the wheel, his palms sweating on the plastic rim, and inside his chest was all the old moiling sludge he’d thought was gone at last. He’d been a fool to think that. It was never gone. Covered, maybe, with a thin veneer of hope—but ready to be ripped out naked and bleeding again whenever anyone scraped it with a chiseling word.
That wild, crazy, scheming little bitch. What was she doing, pulling a stunt like that in front of her father.
He yanked the wheel, narrowly missing a deep, jagged hole in the black-top, and the car danced over loose planks on a worn culvert. The sky was white with sun, burning against the windshield, frying the already heat-seared grass in the outlying fields. He passed a frame house or two, the Country Tavern where he often stopped in for a beer after work, another house, a closed garage, a small stand of slash pine, and turned across the road into the sandy yard of the duplex, a white, boxlike affair, baking in the ovenlike afternoon. The upper apartment was empty, and he didn’t suppose it would ever again be rented, unless the owner did some repair work.
He got out of the car and went inside.
It was stifling. He flung open two windows in the living room, felt for a breeze that didn’t come, walked past the few sticks of furniture, the battered couch, into the bedroom, and on into the kitchen. He found a bottle of beer in the icebox, uncapped it, and drank his way back to the living room.
He threw himself on the couch, lay there with the bottle balanced on his chest, the sweat beading down across his hands, pooling on his khaki jacket.
What was he going to tell them?
She was crazy enough to call the yard and ask for him, wanting him to return and finish installing her God-damned hi-fi. He tried to avoid thoughts of Harper himself. He kept seeing him in his mind’s eye, standing there, strangely, in the hall. The man hadn’t taken any action, but anything was possible now. It had been as if Harper were shocked—yet, at the same time, it looked like it might be a regular occurrence. He didn’t know what to think, but the agony inside him was very real. On top of that, he’d given the girl plenty of lip, which was the wrong thing with any woman who had spirit. He’d never learn to keep his mouth shut.
He tipped the bottle up and drained it steadily, the cold beer faintly biting in his throat. He dropped the empty on the floor and it rolled under the couch. He lit a cigarette, letting the thing inside him wear and wear away at him.
Damn her!
He thought he had at last escaped Jane Matthias and the Alexandria mess. Like everybody else, Arlene Harper had the facts wrong—all wrong. But if she talked, others would take it that way. And what would Doll say?
He sat up quickly, hands pressed on either side of him deep into the overstuffed couch. He had never told Doll about Alexandria. He wished he had. The hardware business had been backed by Jane’s old man when he’d become certain they were planning to marry. It had been good. He’d thought he loved her, and she’d certainly acted the part of loving him. It was like getting cut across the throat when he found she was laying not one guy, not even two—but every beer-faced stud in the county. And then coming back to him with her fine virginal face, her just-for-you-honey body, and her church-going, fine, clean mind that manufactured all the crazy promises that had him standing on his ear night and day. And he never knew until that time in a bar, when a stranger began bragging to him about the quick piece he’d knocked off that afternoon in a park on the edge of town. He hadn’t believed, hadn’t wanted to believe what he gradually found out was true. And he hung on, because he couldn’t get her out of his system, still not wanting to believe. He tried to talk with her, tried to understand. He drank more than he should; the business started going to hell. And then the whole thing blew up in his face, creditors on his neck, Jane passing rumors around town that he’d stolen funds from the business. He left town with the noise trailing him wherever he went, and hit the skids. He hadn’t wanted to recover, either. Nothing meant a damn to him—until he met Doll.
What was the use? He’d torn himself apart already. Whenever it came to women, he was bound to get messed up sooner or later—mostly sooner.
The only way Arlene Harper could have found out about it, or anything else, was to have somebody who knew him back there tell her. But who could it be?
He leaped up, stepped across to one of the dirty, curtainless windows, and stood there staring out across sun-stroked fields.
Why would she do that?
Because of all those old heavy years behind his thirty, the running, the devil-may-care, the tender striding along on the edge of the law and not wanting anything else, suspicion walked with him like a shadow
Only he wanted something now. He’d found Doll.
He loved her. He wanted her so badly that sometimes he became ill with it. Funny, finding it in a stripper, and wanting to marry her. Wanting to save every cent and build toward something, knowing all the time it could be smashed with one stroke, like a thin sheet of glass.
And he knew he had to see Arlene Harper again. He knew he would fight it, try and stay away from her, but he’d see her again, because he had to know.
He rubbed his eyes with both hands, fingers massaging his face. If she knew about Alexandria, what she might do could touch what he and Doll had.
Doll was planning for them, dreaming on what they would have together. They even went window-shopping—him, walking with her across the cooling twilight before she went to work, gawking at bedroom suites with an eye to springs and mattress—he who had tossed years away on wooden bunks and army cots and linoleum floors and sleeping bags and the flat-packed, plastic-sheathed rump-risers of sweating, roach-infested Southern whore houses in an effort to forget a woman with whom he’d done the very same thing—hoping to Christ this was different. Commenting on the varied sizes of throw rugs, and the practicality of table lamps, and living room drapes—and liking it.
Because Doll believed in him, up out of all that pitching past, there hadn’t been one person who ever really believed in him. Maybe he’d struck out against that, too, from the beginning.
Maybe he had to pay for a time yet.
Only for what?
But Doll did believe. She loved him. She
’d never had it very good herself. Now it was good for both of them. It had started out as a one-night stand with him, and abruptly changed into promise of marriage, with the hopes all over again—and she was his woman all the time and any time, and never anybody else.
All right, then. Put the other aside. Let it ride. Forget it—or try to, anyway. Because you’ve got to keep this job no matter what happens—you’ll never find another like this. You’ve been lucky. Go on back to the yard, and keep your fool yap shut, and get the lumber and tools ready so you can bring them back here and work on that dining-room furniture tonight. It’ll surprise her, and it’ll knock three hundred bucks off the total cost of the dream.
He walked slowly out to the car.
A green Dodge sedan slowed on the macadam, turned off toward him across the sandy yard, and braked softly behind the Ford.
“You,” the driver called. “You, over there—come here a minute.”
Gary frowned, watching the man step out of the car and slam the door on the green sedan, a tall, broad, quick-moving man in a pale blue tropical worsted suit. He saw a sharp profile, a hooked nose, a chin jutting in a heavy thrust under broad, flat lips. The ugly man wore no hat, his hair iron-gray, raked straight back from a forehead like the prow of a ship.
The man’s voice rose. “I said, come here.”
“Must be some mistake.”
“No mistake.”
The man walked over to him. Sun gleamed on the oily hair. He stopped three paces away. They watched each other and the man’s pale eyes were without expression. He said, “You don’t know me, but I know you.”
Gary moved his head. “Sorry, there’s still some mistake.”
The man simply stood there, gray eyes blinking thoughtfully now. The collar of his white shirt was sweat-wrinkled and the neat knot in his blood-colored tie was slightly askew. The man’s face was very red and Gary saw the eyes darken. The man was about forty-five and there was that same barely contained slumbering brutality about him that can be seen and felt when standing close to a bulldozer that’s abruptly idle after a fierce day’s work.