Untamed Lust

by Orrie Hitt

  One trapping chore that was new to Eddie was trapping snapping turtles in the lake, but he soon mastered the technique. The traps were big, about the size of a barrel. They were made of three lead hoops, fixed in position by three longitudinal wood strips, the whole covered with rope netting that looked like a tennis-court net. The front of the trap was funnel-shaped. All Eddie had to do was lower the trap in about four feet of water, drive a stake into the mud to secure the trap, and bait it with fish. Once a turtle entered the funnel-like opening to take the bait, he was unable to back out. A string arrangement at the back of the trap opened the net to permit removal of the catch. The first morning Eddie checked the turtle traps he had seven snappers, one almost fifty pounds. This pleased Jennings enormously.

  “I couldn’t ever get Jim to use these traps,” Jennings said. “He insisted there weren’t any turtles in either lake, but I knew better. That’s where the young ducks have been going. They go out for a swim and a snapper drags them down.”

  This was true, and Eddie didn’t mind killing the turtles. The death of just one turtle could save the lives of a lot of ducks. There were any number of them around the lake now, wild ducks that would disappear before winter.

  Eddie buried everything he caught in a field, some distance from the house. He hated himself for what he was doing and he often thought of giving up the job. But he knew that he couldn’t. He checked the newspaper “help wanted” columns every day and there weren’t any farm jobs advertised. All that seemed to be open was door-to-door selling, and he knew nothing of that type of work. He was, he guessed, just a dumb farm kid with a strong back.

  Evenings after supper he went down to the lake. Kitty was always there. She had a different bathing suit for every day in the week, all very brief and form-fitting. He admired her red one most. The top was very daring, and when she came out of the water, climbing up onto the dock, the swelling breasts seemed about to burst free. Then, laughing a little, she would hitch at the suit, trying to get a square inch of fabric to cover two of flesh.

  “You’re doing fine,” she said to him one night, as they sat on the sand. “Frank said you’re better than Jim ever was.”

  “Well, I’m giving it the best I’ve got.”

  “Time for you to take a day off, isn’t it?”

  He lit a cigarette. “I don’t see how I can,” he said. “The law says you must look at your traps every twenty-four hours.”

  “Frank wouldn’t hold you to the law.”

  “I know, but I’m thinking of the animals. I don’t want to torture them. They fight a trap harder during daylight than at night.”

  She lay back on the sand, staring up at the sky.

  “You’ve got a kind heart,” she said thoughtfully. “Frank is vicious in everything he does, but you aren’t.”

  “He has his reasons, I guess.”

  “Because he’s a cripple? Thousands of people are cripples, but they don’t turn down the road of hate.”

  “You married him,” Eddie pointed out.

  She nodded, putting one of her hands against his bare leg.

  “When I married him he wasn’t the man he is today. He had lost his wife just a couple of years before and he was lonely. I met him in a club where I was singing, and I felt sorry for him. We had a few drinks, one date led to others, and the next thing I knew I was married to him. Less than a week later he was in a hospital with a broken back.”

  “Tough.”

  “It wasn’t the horse, Eddie. He was drunk and he shouldn’t have been riding, but he wouldn’t listen. When he bought that poor horse and had it shot, it made me sick. It proved to me that if I ever did anything he didn’t want me to, he’d just as soon have me shot.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “You don’t know him as well as I do. If I’m not right there waiting for him when he’s ready to go to bed, he calls me names that I wouldn’t even repeat. Then — well, I won’t go into it. The fall pinched some nerve in his back that prevents him from being a man in the way a woman wants a man. Do you follow me, Eddie?”

  It was suddenly very hot.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  Her fingers dug into his leg.

  “I’m too young for that, Eddie. Much too young.”

  He had been looking at her breasts while she stared up at the sky but now he glanced away. Jennings might be a slob, but Eddie would be very foolish to get involved with his wife. He might better spend his evenings in his room, waiting for Joan, or take the station wagon into town. If he were lucky he could pick up a girl who wasn’t expensive and try something new for a change. This business with Joan was becoming far too serious.

  “Carole’s coming in tomorrow,” Kittty said. “On the bus. You’ll have to drive down for her.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because Mr. Wilson will be busy and I drank too much when I was in town this afternoon. It’s all right for Frank to drink but he has different rules for me. He says I have to stay away from town for a week and learn a lesson.”

  “I see. Double standard, huh?”

  “Something of the sort.”

  The early shadows of evening were beginning to creep across the lake, and he could smell the sharp odor of the pine trees.

  “What does this Carole look like?” he asked.

  “She’s blonde, with about the biggest bosom and smallest waist that you’ve ever seen.”

  Kitty sounded jealous.

  “I guess you don’t like her,” Eddie said.

  “I don’t.”

  “And I suppose the feeling is mutual?”

  “It is. She has hated me ever since I married her father. She was not opposed to his getting married again; she just doesn’t care for show people and resents having one in the family.”

  She lifted herself on her elbows, letting go of his leg, and her back arched. He had a frantic urge to drive his mouth down over her lips and push her down onto the sand again. It washed through his body, like a hot flood.

  “I’d better go up to the house,” she said. “He’ll want something and I won’t be there, and there’ll be hell to pay.”

  She got up, brushing the sand from her legs, and then he pulled himself up to his feet and stood beside her.

  “I wonder if I could use the station wagon,” he said.

  “Help yourself. Just don’t get a speeding ticket. Last year I got one and he wouldn’t let me drive for two weeks.”

  They walked up the beach and separated. He wanted to turn and look at her, to watch the movements of her body, but he didn’t dare. She was a woman, every last ounce of her, and the desire for her was spreading through him like a disease. If he knew what was good for him he’d wash her out of his mind.

  Half an hour later he left the estate in the station wagon, choosing not to wait for Joan. He wanted to go to some little bar where he could be alone and think, not just about Kitty but about Joan and lots of other things.

  Two miles down the highway he pulled in at a place called The Ferns, which was well known around Twenty Mile River. Girls from nearby farms came in for drinks and the boys who worked at summer camps on the other side of the village drove over to pick them up. It wouldn’t be quiet inside, but beer was only ten cents a glass and in town it was fifteen. He didn’t have much left of the extra ten Jennings had given him.

  The girls were in there all right, clustered around the bar, but he found a stool at one end by himself. He had been there about an hour when the boys began to come in, college kids with crew cuts, and started pairing off with the girls. The free girls would get their chances first and the ones who demanded money would be last, asking top prices at the beginning and then coming down to what the traffic would bear.

  The beer was good and cold and he drank steadily, trying to put his jumbled thoughts together. If that Kitty weren’t so pretty it wouldn’t be so bad. But he was enormously attracted to her and he couldn’t help himself. Even nights when he was with Joan in his room he thought about her, so
metimes pretending that Joan was Kitty. It didn’t make sense, and he knew that he should forget about her. She was a married woman, and as dangerous to him as a stick of dynamite.

  The night was not yet old when he left the bar, but he was feeling the beer and he drove carefully toward Wildwood Acres. He had no real affinity for alcohol, and he was sorry now that he had bothered. Only a few cents remained in his pocket. He was back in the throes of poverty until pay day.

  His room over the garage was dark when he arrived. He was not surprised. Probably Joan had seen him drive away, and she had bedded down in her own quarters for a change.

  His room was oppressively hot, and he stripped to his shorts before he snapped the light off and stretched out on the bed. The beer reinforced the heat, squeezing rivulets of sweat from his pores.

  He dreamed about Kitty that night, dreamed of the sweetness of her lips and the soft hollows of her body and the surging strength of her full thighs. When he awoke in the morning to the drumming of rain on the window — he had that lucky faculty of an internal alarm clock — his head ached and every emotion was stretched to the breaking point

  He stumbled through his morning ablutions, dressed quickly and walked through the rain to the main house, his cheap canvas shoes soaking through immediately. As soon as he was paid he would have to get a sturdier pair.

  Mary wasn’t in the kitchen, but Joan was waiting for him.

  “Thanks,” she said bitterly. “Thanks for taking off without me last night.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t you think I get sick of being stuck out here, too?”

  “Next time,” he mumbled apologetically at the table.

  Mary came in as Joan left, greeted him cheerily and went to the stove. In moments the kitchen was filled with the staccato sounds and savory odors of frying eggs and bacon. In a surprisingly short time Mary brought the bacon and eggs over to him, with a cup of steaming coffee, and he fell to.

  He had just downed his second cup of coffee when Jennings wheeled his chair into the kitchen.

  “Pick up my daughter at the bus station,” Jennings said. He glanced at the clock over the sink. “It’s due in forty-five minutes.”

  “Will do.”

  “Use the Bentley. The keys are in it. After that you can take the rest of the day off.”

  Eddie shook his head.

  “I’d rather look at the traps,” he said. “I don’t want an animal suffering any more than necessary. I’ll save my day off until pay day.”

  “Suit yourself, but don’t miss that bus. If there’s anything I hate more than animals it’s people being late for their appointments.”

  “I won’t miss it.”

  Eddie was glad when Jennings wheeled himself out of the kitchen. He wished he could like his employer but somehow he was repelled. The feeling, he tried to assure himself, had nothing to do with Kitty.

  Outside, he saw that the rain had almost stopped and the sun was about to break through. He hoped not. Once the sun came out after a warm rain the heat usually seemed worse than before.

  The bus terminal was down near the river, not far from the Hotel Dalton, an unprepossessing building which had seen better days. There was a neon sign outside which hadn’t been lit in years — “Quickline Is Your Mountain Route” — and the old siding was in sad need of paint. The bus company had tried to drop Twenty Mile River and some of the other small towns from its schedule, taking the thruway instead, but the state authorities had blocked the move.

  He found a place almost in front of the terminal and backed the Bentley into the curb. The sun was out now, hot and bright, and he rolled all the windows down, admiring the silent action of the automatic window lifts. A car like this spelled class, in a way that the chromed and finned vulgarity of a Cadillac could never match. At one point he had owned a Ford. The year after his graduation from high school he had purchased the old wreck for seventy-five dollars but within two days the motor had blown. The dealer had finally agreed to buy it back for ten dollars, as junk. After that experience Eddie hadn’t had much desire to own a car.

  The bus was on time, and Eddie climbed out of the car, hoping he would be able to spot Carole Jennings.

  His concern was unfounded. Only two people got off, — the driver and a girl in a dress so tight and revealing that it made Eddie stare and swallow hard. The color of polished copper, it contrasted sharply with the girl’s blonde hair. All her exposed skin was tanned deeply from the sun. But it was the incredibly lush curves of her body that held him in temporary paralysis, curves so startling that a few more would be caricature.

  “You must be Carole Jennings,” he managed to say as the driver started removing her bags from the luggage compartment.

  Blue eyes lifted to his face and studied him briefly.

  “Do I know you?” she inquired. She had a nice voice, low and soft, with a bedroom sultriness lurking behind the conversational tone.

  “I’m Eddie. I took Jim’s place. Your father sent me to meet you.”

  “They built you big while they were at it,” she said.

  That always embarrassed him, and he turned to her luggage, three suitcases that the driver had lined up at the curb. As he followed her toward the car his eyes were riveted to her hips, swaying sinuously before him, and he felt a pounding in his head.

  Someday, he hold himself, as he put the suitcases in the trunk …

  4

  WORK WENT along pretty well for Eddie, but everything else was confusion. When he was busy in the woods or out on the lake taking care of his traps it wasn’t so bad, but when he had a chance to think, his head spun madly in utter frustration. He was sleeping with Joan every night, but all the while he wanted Carole so desperately that he couldn’t see straight. He seldom saw her, but he knew that she went swimming in Goose Lake every afternoon, alone. The temptation to slip over there and spy on her was almost irresistible, but he fought it down.

  “You aren’t yourself lately,” Joan said to him one night.

  “I guess I’m getting tired of killing animals.”

  “I don’t think it’s that.”

  “What then?”

  “Because Kitty has stopped meeting you on the beach.”

  “Well, she can’t. She says that Carole has a tongue as long as a split rail fence. Not that we’ve ever done anything wrong. All we ever did was go for a swim and pass the time of day.”

  It was dark in the room, except for the faint light of the moon slanting through one window. Joan moved against him taking one of his hands.

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t wanted to,” she said.

  “Wanted to what?”

  “Be with Mrs. Jennings the way you are with me.”

  “Oh, come off it, will you?”

  “Or maybe that Carole looks better to you.”

  “Shut up, you little fool. You think I’m nuts or something?”

  “Common sense doesn’t have much to do with sex.”

  “Well, we ought to know. We’re proving it every night. If Jennings finds out what we’re doing, he won’t like it. And then what would we do? You’d be back in the diner and I’d be off on some farm — if I could get a job.”

  He had promised himself that he wouldn’t touch her that night but once their lips were together he forgot the promise. She was a woman and he was a man and there were just the two of them.

  “Be good to me,” she begged.

  He was.

  Next morning he skipped breakfast for the first time, and hit the traps early. He had his first otter, a big fellow with a savage snarl and a twisting body that seemed to turn around inside its skin. It took two bullets through the head to finish the frantic animal. Eddie took the trap along with him. The whole area had been torn up by the otter’s desperate efforts to free itself, and it would probably be weeks or months before another otter would visit the spot. Had he planned properly, he could have fixed the trap so that the otter would drown, but he had thought this the least likely
of all locations, and had not bothered. It just went to prove that no man can always outguess his four-footed quarry.

  He returned to the main house around noon. Jennings was sitting in his wheel chair on the front lawn. He hadn’t yet started his drinking for the day.

  “Well, by God,” Jennings exclaimed, when Eddie took the otter from his pack basket. “If that isn’t something! Jim could never catch one of those buggers.”

  Eddie stretched the otter out on the grass.

  “Big fellow, isn’t he?” he inquired.

  “About the biggest I’ve ever seen. Must be all of four feet. Too bad it’s summer and the fur isn’t prime or I’d have it made up into something for Mrs. Jennings.”

  “Too bad any of the animals have to be killed during the summer,” Eddie said. “If they have young the young only starve. It just isn’t human.”

  “Well, you’re doing it, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I’m doing it, for three hundred a month, room and board.”

  “You’ve got no complaints,” Jennings said. “And I haven’t any either. You get paid and you kill the animals. I’m satisfied.” Jennings examined the rest of the day’s bag — a mink, three foxes and four snapping turtles. “What about Goose Lake?” he asked suddenly. “You doing anything around it?”

  “Not yet, I was thinking about getting over there this afternoon.”

  Jennings nodded.

  “Stay away from this end of the lake,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “That’s where Carole swims, and I don’t want her disturbed. You stick to the upper end, in the swamps.”

  “There won’t be any trouble,” he assured Jennings. “What she does is her business and I’ll take care of my job.”

  “That’s what Jim said, but he blew his cork. Men do that sometimes in the woods. Some men shouldn’t ever live in the woods. But you seem happy enough.”

  “Hell, I like the woods.” Eddie picked up the animals and the turtles and put them in the large pack basket. “I’ll stay away from that part of the lake,” he said, not sure whether or not he would. “The swamps are better for trapping anyway. You can’t get much along a beach.”