"I know," I said. I sat down by her on the step.
We sat there a while and watched the night creep in, not saying anything. This is going to be a hell of a thing, I thought, until we get it over with. Two complete strangers. And the way she feels about me. Better to get it done quickly.
"When are you going into your act?" I said.
She shrugged.
"Soon. I guess. I might as well get started."
"The sooner, the better. He'll know something is up, but he won't know what"
"Maybe I can't get anywhere with him."
"You can't. Not when he finds out you're my wife. He'll smell a rat. But everybody else will believe it. And that's what counts."
"Yes. That's what counts."
When we went inside to eat, I found she had done wonders over the heater, and I told her so. There were hamburgers and boiled potatoes, canned string beans and coffee and a store-bought cake for a dessert. We'd Mopped on the way back from St. John's to pick up supplies.
Even so. supper was a glum affair. She hardly touched her food, and long before I was through she had moved again to the doorstep and sat there, gazing out at the velvet night, the faint sheen of the stars, and the rolling sand.
I wheeled around in the chair and looked at her lonely back, the small shoulders hunched slightly, and I wanted to go over and put my arm around her. And then I remembered the pledge I had given her that morning.
"I'm going to fix this place up, Jean," I said. "It'll be at least two weeks we have to live out here. Maybe longer. We might as well be comfortable, I guess."
She didn't say anything and I got up and began to do the dishes. I ought to boot her the hell out of here, I thought. I didn't have any business getting into this.
I ought to have had better sense.
We went to bed early. I didn't remind her of my promise, but I made up a pallet on the floor with two of the three blankets we had and rolled into it without a word of protest from her.
I could hear her breathing across the room. The moon would not be up for a while yet, but my eyes were used to darkness and I could turn my head and see the vague shape of her on the bunk. Sleep was going to be a long time coming, I thought.
"You loved her very much, didn't you, Harry?" Her voice was quiet and even in the vast night.
"Yes," I said.
"Do you still love her?"
"I don't know. I thought I hated her after that night. But now I don't know."
"Not her. You just hated what she did."
"Maybe so," I said. "Go to sleep."
"It was that way because you never really loved her. Just what she was and how she looked and the way she made you feel. If you had really loved her you'd have given her a chance."
"Stop it," I said. "She's dead now. It's all dead. It doesn't do any good to talk about it."
"I think I hate you, Harry."
"Go to sleep," I said.
She didn't say anything for a long time and I lay there waiting for sleep to come. And then I heard her move on the bunk and bare feet padded on the plank flooring.
I turned my head and she was coming across the floor. She stood over me then and I watched her take off her pajamas and let them fall to the floor. And then she was on the pallet beside me and her arms were around me and I felt something hot and moist on my neck.
"Harry!" she whispered.
"I don't want you," I said. "Get away from me."
I felt her soft breasts against my ribs.
"You let me come to you like this. You didn't try to stop me."
"Yes. I-"
"There isn't anything else for us, Harry."
And then all the resistance went out of me and my arm was around her and my lips found her breast and the warm blood in her veins throbbed against me.
It had never been that way before, not with anybody. Her hot, frantic, tortured body exploded against mine. We clung together, beyond space, beyond time, beyond anything but the things our bodies did to each other, without direction or design, powered only by instinct and urge and desperation.
Later, the moon spilled across us there on the floor, and I looked down at her as she slept, her face in darkness, stippled shadows falling across the small round breasts.
This is beyond me, I thought.
She hates me, she hates all men. But she comes to me in the night, shameless, selfless, in complete and abject surrender, in some nameless despair and agony, she comes to me like that, and then when it's over, no word of love or tenderness or even liking yet passed between us, she whispers once before she sleeps:
"No. It didn't happen… it didn't happen."
Something curled in me at one thought that would not down: that she had given herself to me to make sure that I would remain a part of our scheme-that she had deliberately paid what she thought was my price.
But she had been right about one thing. I knew it then because of what she had given me that night. I had never really loved Lucy. What I had thought was love was only conceit because she had been my property, because I had made her my property.
Because now I know what love is, I thought. Now I know. It's what I feel for this woman who lies naked and sleeping beside me. It's something I never even knew existed in this world or any other. It's what you feel when you are able to do anything and suffer anything and endure anything and give anything, any time, anywhere, for someone else. Or at least it is for me. That's what love is for me.
And suddenly, I knew with a sort of geometric clarity that I would never again want to kill Dick Stewart.
Because for so long that had been all there was to live for: killing him someday, because he had taken something from me for which I had thought only his life could pay.
But now there was something else. Now there was this woman beside me. Now there was something that could not only pay for what I had lost, but that could wipe that loss from the books of my mind and heart and soul as completely as if there had never been a loss at all.
I didn't want to kill Dick Stewart any more. But I would do it.
I would do it because it was what she wanted. Even though she hated me, she had come to me and given all of herself to further and insure and seal forever her determination to scourge him. I would do anything and suffer anything and endure anything and give anything she wanted.
I would do it because I loved her.
And she loved only some ideal that had died with Lucy, some dream, far more vast and sweeping and fierce than my own puny feelings for my wife had been, loved only that and hated me, even while binding me to her with a chain stronger than fine steel. Hated me even then.
Or did she? I didn't know.
It was beyond me.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
This is the way she told it to me:
Three men were seated on the bench under the wooden porch roof in front of the Coshocken General Mercantile Company. Their eyes were quiet and unquestioning and only jaw muscles moved in their faces. They were oddly alike in their worn overalls and sweat-stained hats. One of them spat a stream of tobacco as she approached.
They watched her pass and enter the store and there was still no curiosity in their eyes. For even then, only two days after it happened, they knew. They knew that Harry London had married another Yankee girl, one who had appeared out of nowhere and gone to live with him on the Caldwell place, and they knew now, eying her calmly and completely, but without insult, who she was.
She felt them watching her, and she went past them, her heels clicking on the sidewalk, over which the frame porch roof stood.
She knew, for I had told her, that what they saw would spread until the whole county, without having seen her. would be able to recognize Mrs. Harry London. She moved her hips smoothly, and her heels clicked. Her head was up, her breasts firm and high beneath the neckline of her dress, as she went into the store.
He was waiting on a child behind the candy counter. He did not look up as she came in. Far down the dim aisles, a man in shirt
sleeves worked at a desk. Plows, feed bags, mule harness, wheelbarrows, and other stock littered the unswept floor, and shelves ran up the walls full of tools, hardware, and bewildering boxes and packets. She stood quietly by the grilled mail window. Stewart was also the town postmaster and his store served the community as post office.
The little boy was examining the candy stock with slow and infinite care. His gaze moved from striped peppermint to brown horehound to soft chocolate and on to colored balls of chewing gum and his lips moved and his eyes were grave in doubt.
"How much are those?" An incredibly grimy finger pointed to the balls of gum.
"Two for a penny," Stewart said.
"I'll take six."
Stewart counted six of the balls into a small bag. As he raised his head, he met her eyes and she smiled. He stopped in mid-motion and the sack nearly slipped from his grasp. He licked his lips and turned back to the child.
"And two cents' worth of them." Again the finger poked at the glass counter and Stewart took two peppermint sticks and dropped them in the bag.
"That be all, Billy?"
"Guess so," Billy said. "That's all this time."
Stewart glanced at her again. His face was calm now and there was no shiftiness in the eyes. He took the coins the boy held out and handed him the bag. The boy took it and went out. Stewart leaned on the candy counter and looked at her.
"What can I do for you, ma'am?"
"I want to buy a pressure cooker, please."
She moved closer and smiled at him and his eyes melted a little and they ran over her, pausing here and there, and he did not move.
"You lie," he said.
She pouted at him. "That's not very nice."
He laughed. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the man at the desk in the back of the store swing around.
"What did he send you for… Mrs. London?"
She looked puzzled. "Who?"
"Harry. Your husband."
"I told you. I want to buy a pressure cooker."
She was very close to the counter now and his eyes dropped to the low neckline and she leaned forward. The man in shirt sleeves was still watching and she put her face close to Stewart's.
"And I was wondering what a girl does around here for excitement."
She moved away a little then and laughed out loud. Stewart came around the counter and she turned and moved back to the mail window, her hips swaying. He came up behind her.
"He sent you," he said, his voice low and malevolent. "This is one of his tricks."
"What tricks?"
He took her arm and pulled her around to face him and she leaned close to him. He took a quick step back and she saw sweat pop on his brow.
"Listen," he said. "What's he told you about me?"
"Nothing," she said. "I can see for myself."
His face showed his disbelief.
"He's been giving you lies about me," he said.
"Look, mister. I don't even know your name."
"I'm Dick Stewart. You're sure he hasn't said anything about me?"
"Harry doesn't say much about anything."
He looked at her for a long time. Then he relaxed.
"The pressure cookers are over here," he said.
She followed him to a table near the center of the store.
"You sure act funny," she said. "Like you were afraid of me."
"I'm not afraid. I just thought… These are eight-ninety-five."
She looked at the cookers with little interest.
"You still haven't told me… Dick."
"Told you what?"
"What a girl does around here. For excitement."
Her voice had risen a little and Stewart glanced hastily at the man at the desk. This time he did not turn around. He sat very straight in his chair, not moving at all.
"I wouldn't know," he said. "You want the cooker?"
"I wanted a little one."
"This is the smallest size there is."
"Well, I don't know much about cooking."
His eyes feasted on her breasts.
"I bet you don't," he said.
The door of the store slammed. They looked up to see a thin woman entering. Jean hastily moved away, as if she had been caught at something. She touched a hand to her hair.
"I'll take this," she said. She pointed at a fifty-pound bag of fertilizer. He looked at her in exasperation.
"Charge it to me," she said.
The woman was near now and Jean stared at her insolently. The woman's glance was hostile.
"Be with you in a minute, Mrs. Hartley," Stewart said.
He wrote a ticket for the fertilizer and stuck the pad in his pocket.
"I'll carry it out for you."
"That'll be sweet, Dick."
He made a noise beneath his breath and hastily bent and heaved the bag to his shoulder.
He started toward the door and she smiled frostily at Mrs. Hartley and followed. Her hips swayed more than necessary under the tight skirt.
"Listen," Stewart murmured when they had passed beyond the thin woman. "You keep away from here. I don't want any truck with that husband of yours."
"I like it here," she said. "I like you."
He swore and pushed open the door.
The old Chevrolet was parked just down the street from the store. He jerked open the door and tumbled the fertilizer to the floor.
The three men still sat beneath the porch roof, apparently not watching, occasionally spitting tobacco juice.
He straightened up and she swayed close to him. One hip brushed against his leg.
"Thank you," she whispered, "for everything."
"You go to hell," he murmured.
She moved even closer and her breasts now almost touched him. As if drawn by a magnet, his eyes dropped to her neckline. Then, with another low curse, he jerked around and went back to the store.
"See you tomorrow," she called after him, quite clearly, and laughed.
One of the men spat again and stood up and silently moved away.
***
"I feel dirty," she said, when she had finished telling it. "That man. Ugh!"
"You did fine," I said. "That ought to get the ball rolling good. Old Joe Buxton, the bookkeeper, and Lena Hartley, and whoever the three men were. That ought to start things off with a bang."
"I felt like a prostitute," she said. "All that paint and throwing myself at him like that."
"It won't be for long."
"He was scared. He tried to act mean, but I could see how scared he was."
"He's got reason," I said. "He knows it's no coincidence. Not twice, he knows it wouldn't happen twice, not after that night, anyway. But he won't figure it until it's too late, until we lower the boom on him."
"You know," she said, "when he looked down my dress like that, I wanted it to be right then. He's from under a rock."
"If you didn't know what you do, he wouldn't be so bad, would he?"
"I don't know. He's handsome, all right. And those bedroom eyes and those hands. But I don't think I'd like him even then. That's what I can't understand about Lucy. That's why I know there must have been something we don't know about."
We didn't say anything for a while, sitting there in the night, on the sand in front of the shack. It was pretty nice, I thought; you have to hand it to women. They make a place a lot nicer. Just to have one around, to know she's nearby, and to see the skirt swirl at her knees, and the smooth skin, and the faint woman smell.
"What are you thinking about, Jean?"
"Oh… I was remembering-something Lucy wrote in one of those letters, after she married you."
"What was that?"
"She said something about she had been out hunting with you. It wasn't anything much. But I was thinking how she said she had been hunting with you and then all the rest of that part of the letter was about you, how many birds you killed, what a good shot you were. Not a word about herself."
"I remember," I said.
"That was like her. To show that she was happy, not because of what she herself was doing, but because of what you were doing. To be happy because you were happy."
"Yes," I said. "That was like her."
"I wonder if she's happy now."
"You keep talking as if she were alive," I said.
"I know. But I got to thinking…"
"About last night?"
"Yes."
Something savage bit at me.
"What do you want me to do?" I said. "Get down and pray a little and ask her to forgive us?"
I felt her whole body tighten up beside me. I wished I could call the words back.
"I'm sorry," I said. "That was a lousy thing to say."
I didn't tell her that I barked out the harsh words because she had touched a sore spot. In the daylight, the night before seemed unreal, and all that day I had remembered my feelings then with a sense of betrayal.
You get a woman in your bed again, I had thought, and right away you forget Lucy, forget the woman you loved and killed, forget the two years you went through a living suicide, forget everything, even the debt you have to pay, and tell yourself it's because you're in love with a cheap bitch you've slept with twice in the three nights you've known her. A fine avenger you are.
But I hadn't quite convinced myself. I couldn't dismiss it that easily. And her words had pointed up the puzzle in my brain.
"Listen," she said. "I told you how it was. What you and Lucy had between you meant something to me. More than you could know. It meant that such things-oh, I know it's corny, but such things as love and home and happiness really existed. And now she's dead and I…"
"All right," I said. "It doesn't have to happen again. Maybe it's best that way. Maybe we ought to just keep our minds on the job."
She turned her head slowly to look at me. Then she laughed, bitterly.
"We have got a job to do, haven't we?" she said.
Have we? I thought. Goddamnit. Have we? I don't know. I don't know anything any more.
***
I could hear her breathing, slowly and evenly, and when I turned my head, I could see the vague shape of her on the bunk. When she moved, I heard the dry mattress crackle.
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