Tears Are for Angels

by Paul Connolly

  "You got it all wrong, Harry. I swear it." His words chased one another, flat, quick, tumbling from him like the rain falling outside. "I was fishing back at the creek and my car drowned out, see, and I came to use your phone and I knocked and she let me in and she didn't have on anything but that robe there and I-"

  "That's a lie!" she screamed. "That's not so, Harry! He's been after me and bothering me until I thought I'd go crazy and then he said-"

  "Shut up!" She was half off the bed now, one foot resting on the floor, her eyes wild, pleading. "Aren't you a pretty pair?" I said. "Aren't you something? The bed's not cool yet and look at you now. Just look at you."

  The almost funny part was that I was beginning to enjoy myself.

  My wife was sitting there naked on the bed. her breasts mocking reminders of another man's hands, her whole body a possession now of his too, her wild eyes and long, lank hair a far cry from the allure I had once known, begging me to believe she could not help lying in my bed with another man. That very other man stood there barefoot against the wall, his trousers sagging at his hips, the dust of the floor where he had cast them still clinging to them, his body sweating, not only with fear but still with his straining to her, shouting at me that my wife had deliberately lured him into that same bed upon which she now sat, naked and lewd and alone in terror.

  And I was enjoying it. I was enjoying venting upon them the rage at my dispossession, the hurt at my betrayal. and the shame at my cuckoldry at the hands of a man whose habits with other men's wives and daughters was a standing joke in every crossroads store and filling station in the county.

  Or rather, there was someone who inhabited my sopping clothes, and who held the pistol I had brought home from the war, who stood in that room and laughed at the terror of them and the misery of me, who watched it all and laughed, and shut away inside himself that part of it which he knew even then would someday arise to turn his dreams to nightmares and his thoughts to tortures.

  It wasn't I that enjoyed it. But it was someone and I have not seen him since that night.

  Stewart was still talking. "She came up close and started kissing me and playing around and rubbing against me, and I tried to make her stop, but she said-"

  "You shut up, too," I said. "You shut your goddamn mouth and don't open it again. Not once." I must have looked at him pretty hard then, for all of a sudden he collapsed completely and started to blubber.

  Lucy looked at him in a sort of horror in which there was no pity, and in that instant, when that look flashed across her face, I knew what I was going to do to her. I had it all straight in my mind what I would do to her and what I had already decided I would do to him, and there wasn't anything left but to do it.

  "All right," I said. "This is what I'm going to do. I listened to the both of you. I listened to you all I needed to. And now you're both going to listen to me."

  Stewart's blubbering stopped. His head came up, the lips open and the eyes wide, staring at me. His hands, behind him, moved nervously against the wall. Lucy almost stopped breathing. She was entirely off the bed now, standing on the little white rug beside it, her long legs together, slightly bent, and her body shrunken, her arms across her breasts, as if she were trying to cover what she no longer had to hide.

  I took a step backward and sat easily in the bedroom chair she had covered in splashy chintz and I let the gun rest on my knee, my fingers loose on its butt. I looked at them steadily, from one to the other. Outside, the rain had slackened off to a rolling murmur.

  "I'm going to shoot you," I said to Stewart, "right where you did it to her. I'm going to put a bullet right there, and if it doesn't kill you right away, I don't care. Because in the war, I saw a man get it there. Did you ever sec that, Dick? I did and I remember about it, so that's what I'm going to do to you. If you die, good. And if you don't, they won't ever be able to suspect you of something like this again. Not ever. Not the way I'll do it, they won't."

  He seemed to have turned to stone as he listened. No muscle moved in his face, as his mind refused to credit the things brought to it by his ears. And then I saw some of the fear go out of him. I knew it was because the easiest thing to be afraid of is the unknown. He knew, now; he had "heard what I intended to do, it was no longer the unknown, and some of the fear left him at the knowledge. Not all of it. and none of the horror. But even for him it was better just to know.

  I felt my lips slide back from my teeth again and I cocked my eyes toward Lucy.

  "Either way," I said, "they won't do a thing to me. Not to Harry London, not in this county, nor for finding him in bed with my wife and shooting him. They'll turn me loose in fifteen minutes."

  "Harry, please listen to me. I love you, Harry, only you, I-"

  "I told you to shut up," I said. "I don't want your lies or anything else. I just want you to shut your filthy mouth. Because I'm not going to kill you. Not now or ever. Not directly. But you're going to live with me, in this house, for the rest of your life, knowing it and remembering it. Knowing and remembering that I and everyone else also know and remember it, and worst of all"-my teeth clenched on the words-"worst of all, you're going to know and remember till the day you die what he looked like and what he was, not when lie had you, but after he had you and after I shot him. Every time you come in this room or get in that bed or lay your eyes on me, you're going to remember that. I'm not going to kill you, Lucy. I'm going to do worse. I'm going to make you live with this the rest of your life. And I hope you live a long time."

  Maybe it was the cold rage in my eyes or the blunt words. Maybe it was the cringing Stewart. Or maybe, for her too, it was just knowing, at last, what I was going to do. Maybe it was something else I couldn't know about. But something returned to her then, something pulled her head up and straightened her shoulders and flashed in her face, and she came across the floor and stood in front of me and bent and put her hands on my knees.

  "I can't undo it, Harry," she said. "It can't be undone now, no matter what I say, no matter what I do. All right, Harry, do what you want with me. But don't add to it, Harry. Don't kill him."

  It was not a plea for him. Her face and her hands and her voice told me that. Something happened to me. too, something crawled up in me and sprang the deep, un-thought-of question I had shoved to the far places of my mind, the question I had not asked her and could not ask myself.

  "Lucy," I whispered, "why? Why'd you do it, Lucy?"

  Her eyes were deep in mine and I took my hand off the gun and touched her face, bent near mine, and for the first time I was no longer aware of her nakedness and her guilty breasts. I waited for her answer with raw hurt carved inside of me.

  And in that instant, that short moment of pain, he filing himself across the room from behind her, almost flatly through space in a swimmer's racing dive. My hand closed again over the gun, but the hurtling shock of him struck against her, and she came down on me and I went over backward in the chair, Lucy on top of me, her stomach pressing into my face. At once, not only all the rage and the hate surged back inside of me, but also a flash of fear.

  I struggled wildly and felt a great weight on me and then a shattering in my head. From far away came an evil roar. Then I swirled away to blackness, deep and hot and lonely.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When it was light for me again that night, I lay there drowsing, with the softness of the rain still on the roof and against the panes. I was glad, I can remember how the joy burst inside of me, knowing it had all been a dream, a nebulous quirk in some dark corner of the brain, and how gratefully I began to squirm deeper into the warmth of what seemed to be the deepest, warmest mattress in the world.

  And then my head ground harshly against some unyielding thing, and I started in surprise and opened my eyes, and simultaneously became aware of my skull against the hard mahogany leg of the dresser and my cheek grinding into the soft fuzz of the white rug, the popping, searing fire behind my eyelids and the parched lining of my mouth.

  And in
that same moment, with pure horror lurking near, waiting to pounce, I knew too, with inarguable certainty, that it had not, after all, been a dream.

  Then, with succeeding shocks like the pounding of breakers against the shore, I felt the inert weight across my stomach and my right leg, touched the soft tangle that could only be hair, and looked along the floor, and saw the limp, nude leg attached to the white flank, the leg somehow flaccid and unreal, not flesh but merely old composition of some lifeless, bloodless substance.

  Lucy lay across me like that and I thrust my right arm under me and pushed up with it and my left elbow and looked down at her. She was face down, the blonde head almost under my left arm, the hands on either side of the body, the legs and useless feet sprawled lifelessly. I could not see any blood, but I did not need to. The living do not lie like the dead.

  The undertow of horror, of terror, of pure panic, of shock and disbelief and incomprehension grasped at my intestines, convulsive and powerful. I cried out and pushed the body away from me and dragged my legs from under it, and shoved myself back against the wall, away from it, and sat there and looked at it.

  Only then did I realize I was holding the pistol.

  The head had flopped toward me, the long hair tangled about it, the eyes wide open, a small trickle of blood coming from one nostril, drying in a brownish stain upon the skin. The bullet hole was above the right eye. almost but not quite even with the nose, and its evil gape was not so horrible as the slack, open mouth.

  After a while, slowly, like the simmering down of boiling water when the fire is removed, repulsion for the inertness there on the white rug in front of me began to go away, and with no thought of how it had come to be there, I began to remember the times and things between us, and grief clawed at me.

  This was Lucy, all there was of her. This was all of the sweetness and the glory, this was how it had ended, what it had brought her to. This was the woman I had brought to my father's house and this, ultimately, was what I had brought her to. Death, naked, ugly, and without gentleness.

  "Lucy," I said, out loud. "Lucy, I'm sorry."

  The emptiness of words mocked me and I drew further back to the wall. I felt the hardness of it at the back of my head and the sudden ache in my temples. And with a roar like exploding dynamite, my brain crackled with awareness of how she came to be heaped there, and of him who should be in her place.

  The sonofabitch, I thought, the words almost an irreverence before the dull eyes and open mouth. And then I realized he was gone.

  The rain was falling hard again, the obliterating, ceaseless rain, and I wished to be in it, to be in the rain, to let it wash it all away, clean away, to wherever the rain goes after it meets the earth. But still I did not move from the wall and still I could not bring myself to touch her, to close the eyes or mouth, to bring some faint semblance of order and decency to unordered indecent death.

  So he was gone. So he had left us there, Lucy and me, the way we had started. No, I thought, not quite like that. Not quite the same.

  But he was gone. And I was still there. And Lucy. And something else, too, all about me in the disordered, death-quiet room, lurking in the air, behind the overturned chair. Something else was there and what it was had to be discovered.

  And so, at last, without bitterness, I began to think.

  The fact stared me in the face. Dick Stewart was gone. I was alone with my dead wife. This, somehow, was connected with the aura all about me in that room. The link was there, but it was vague, mist-washed, and somehow just beyond reach.

  My head was pounding steadily now, and slowly I put the gun down and placed my hands flat on the floor and pushed myself to my feet. I stepped carefully around it and slowly moved across the room to the bathroom.

  My face, in the medicine-cabinet mirror, was unchanged. Look at you, I thought-betrayed, slugged, your wife dead. And not even a wrinkle on your face that wasn't there before. How can so much happen so quickly and leave no mark? Deep-set eyes, bloodshot above a broad, blunt nose, stared back at me from the mirror.

  I knew he must have hit me with something, for my exploring fingers found a small lump high on the side of my head. The skin was not broken. I washed my lace in cold water. Using my two hands for a cup, I gulped mouthfuls of it down my dry, evil-tasting throat.

  And then, in the first clarity of the clean, sweet water, cool against my face and in my mouth, it hit me. I straightened up and looked in the mirror again and consternation stared back at me.

  Without drying my face or hands I wheeled around and stepped quickly back into the bedroom. Nothing had changed. It still lay there inert, the overturned chair beside it no more lifeless than she. Rain whispered at the windows.

  Stewart's clothes were gone too. The rumpled bed jeered at me. The gun lay where I had left it. One bed-lamp burned brightly on a small table and shadows were soft on the walls.

  No. Nothing had changed. Nothing, except that the invisible atmosphere in the room was no longer the scent of the unknown. It was now the smell of danger. For Dick Stewart was gone and I knew there was no trace of him remaining. The rain would have removed his footprints from the earth, it was as if he had never been there.

  And I was alone with Lucy. I was alone with the gun that had killed her-my gun. My linger must have performed the physical act that had pulled its trigger. Her body lay in our bedroom. I had returned unexpectedly from a fishing trip plenty of people knew I was planning. And my reputation for violent temper had been well known since the first day I entered grade school.

  There was danger in that room, all right. Danger of a jury of twelve and bars of iron and the electric chair. Danger of all that for me.

  I glanced at the clock. It was eleven-thirty. It had been maybe a little after ten when I had returned. The hands of the clock told me time was short.

  I sat down on the bed and my brain began to accept and reject, almost automatically. I hardly gave a thought to telling the truth, as it had happened, as much of it as I knew. I could never make it stick. Stewart would be even now sealing up an alibi with the credit-bound Negroes who traded at his general store. The room showed no trace of his having been there.

  No. Even with his reputation, it would never stick.

  All right, I thought, so I get the chair. So all right. I did pull that trigger, didn't I? It's what you get for murder, isn't it?

  And every fiber in me sang into protest. No, by God, I thought. Goddamnit, no! I will not go to the chair for this, no matter who pulled the trigger. As sure as she lies there, that sonofabitch is responsible. She's dead because of him. And he's the one who's got to pay out for it. He's the one who's going to pay.

  I would have to make him pay it out. But I couldn't do that in jail. You couldn't do anything in jail, or after they strapped you in the chair. I had to get out of it, too. I had to get clean and then there would be all of my life to make the bastard pay and pay and pay.

  I looked at it again, at the long, slim legs. The substance of them had lost all beauty, even all ugliness, and merely sprawled. But I could close my eyes and conjure them up, and the rest of her, the way they had been. I could remember the long nights and the hot fires bright in us, and the hands, moving then, the legs violent and seeking, the breasts against me, soft and round and big, and the moist lips I had thought were only mine.

  I could remember that and, remembering, I could hate, hate with a rage that burst from some dark recess inside me, hate for the man who had killed all that, not only killed it but taken it from me before the act of killing. I could hate for that, and maybe a little bit just for Lucy's sake, who no longer could hate or love or laugh or cry or anything, only sprawl inert upon the patient floor.

  And something else, too. Something else was in me, and I looked at it and examined it and knew it for what it was. My wife had been taken in my own bed by a man about whom I had often joked, in company with others, a man whose eyes and hands coveted all women and possessed many.

  And I knew I was
not enough of a man, I didn't have the guts to face what I would get if I told it, to hear the quick, muffled snickers, to see the eyes, amusement veiled only a little in them, the hush of voices when you entered and they were talking, the insistent whispers. I knew it would be that way. I had seen it before, I had been a part of it. If I told it I knew it would be that way.

  So, even if I could have made it stick, I knew that I would never tell the truth of what had happened in that room that night. Had I killed him, the county would have respected that, sympathized with it. But he had got away, and I didn't have what it took to face it.

  So I had to be free of it too. Then there would be just the two of us, and a way could be found. A way could always be found.

  I got up and went across the room. I closed my eyes and leaned over and put my hands beneath the arms. Already, it seemed to me, the clay chill was on the flesh.

  I dragged it, limp and sprawling, across the room and put my leg behind the dressing-table chair and let it down into it. At first it kept slumping forward, and then I gritted my teeth and put my hand under the chin and tipped the head back. Sightless eyes fixed on the ceiling. The arms dangled loosely on either side of the chair, but it stayed upright and I moved away.

  The robe lay on the floor where I had flung it. I picked it up and brushed it carefully. The reminiscence of her clung to it. I folded it across my arm, carefully, and went slowly back to the dressing table.

  It was hard to get the arms into it, but I managed. I had to manage. More than once my hand brushed across the breasts, each time shock coming at me that I should touch them without the answering rush in my veins. I pulled the robe closely about it, finally, and put it back into the chair and lipped the head back again. The arms still dangled.

  I looked at it carefully. There could be no other chance if I fouled it up now. The bullet had entered the forehead above the right eye, angling toward the center of the head, and powder stains smoked the edges of the dark wound. That was the only blessing I could see' in the whole business. It could make no difference to her now if the gun had been one foot or twenty feet away.