"All right. If you want to."
We got up and went back to the juke box and looked over the tunes. I dropped a nickel in.
"You pick it," I said.
She studied the list again and then punched "September Song."
I put my right arm around her waist. She rested her hand on my left shoulder, because there was no left hand.
After the first few halting steps nothing mattered. She was light as a feather. She put her head against me, just below the shoulder, and I felt the warm length of her against me, and suddenly, for those few moments, it was again as it was in the nights when we lay together in the shack and I looked at her while she slept.
Time vanished. The Lodge vanished. It all went away but the two of us, moving together on the worn dance floor, the slow sweet music only a dim and faraway ribbon between us.
Maybe it was because now I was feeling again the will in me to do anything and endure anything for her, even without the satisfaction of animal desire that had accompanied the feeling before. Or maybe it was like a plant growing in the land, like that one tiny absolute moment when the upward shoot of the plant breaks the last thin layer of earth and reaches for the air and the light.
Maybe that was such a moment. Because I thought, I know now. I know it as surely as I hold you in my arms. This is all I want now, just this and nothing else. This is all I want forever.
I felt her soft body moving against me.
Cod help me, I thought. I love you. I never meant to, but I do. No matter how it is with you, or what you do to me.
I love you.
And then it was over and we went slowly back to the booth, her hand in mine. Willy had the beer and the tea set out for us. We sat down and I smiled at her. And then I saw her lips were trembling.
"I didn't know my dancing was that bad."
She smiled a little and shook her head.
"I was just thinking. Everything could have been so different. I wish I'd been born in a place like this, instead of where I was. It might have been so different. But now…"
"Hold it," I said. "No business tonight. Remember?"
"O.K. No business."
We sat there and talked a little, but not much. One or two people stopped by the table and I introduced her to them. Then Willy brought the steaks, sizzling on their hot platters, with huge mounds of French fries and cooked onions, and a special kind of slaw I never found anywhere except at his place, and a plate of hot biscuits.
She just reached over and cut up my steak in pieces, not too big, not too little.
When you eat one of Willy's steaks, you don't talk much. We sat there in silence, just eating, and when we had both finished, we looked at each other and laughed.
"I guess that shows up my cooking," she said.
"Think nothing of it. Willy's got a colored boy back in that kitchen who used to cook in a big resort hotel down at the beach. Willy has to get down on his knees every Saturday night and beg him to stay another week."
Just then I saw Lou Thomas get up from a booth across the room and start across the dance floor toward us. He's drunk, I thought. He's really plastered.
You had to know Lou to be able to tell that, because he could have a tankful on and only his eyes would reveal it. Lou ran an auto sales agency and he was all right most of the time, but he was a mean drunk. He was big and he was rough and when he was lit he was always looking for trouble.
He slopped at our booth and we both looked up at him.
"Hello, Lou."
"Harry. Want to dance with your wife."
His tongue was only a little thick, but his eyes were blurry and watering. That was the way you could tell it.
"You got a load on, Lou," I said, grinning at him, hoping he would let it pass and go away. "You might step on her or something."
"Let th' lady answer for h'self, why don' you?"
"I'll answer for her. She doesn't want to dance."
I felt my temper rising in me. I hate a mean drunk. If they can't hold it, they ought not to drink it.
Watery eyes narrowed. He leaned forward and put both hands on the table and then he looked right at her.
"They dared me," he said. "Said I didn't have th' nerve t'ask you to dance."
Lou didn't know her. He didn't know who he was dealing with. He hadn't picked on any bashful maiden this time. She leaned her head against the back of the booth and smiled faintly and ice dripped off each word.
"You've got your nerve, all right, mister. You've got plenty of nerve."
He straightened up abruptly and red moved down from his hair across his face.
"So I'm not good 'nough. Not like Dick Stewart. He's good 'nough, I reck'n."
I came up on my feet in one motion and out from behind the table in another and before he could move I hit him in the stomach, with all of me behind it. I felt my fist sink up to the wrist in his belly.
Stale whisky breath breezed over me and his mouth came open and he bent like a safety pin, his arms going across his stomach. I stepped back and reached out my band to his shoulder and straightened him up.
Before he could flop over again I let him have it on the chin and he went over backward and lay there on the floor, the mouth open again and the head twisted over to the side.
I leaned over and took his shirt front in my hand and yanked his head off the floor. I was seeing red now and it felt good to know that I had been able to do it, that I still had the muscle and guts to do it. I stared into his lace and the eyes were quite dull so I let his head fall back to the floor.
People were standing up now, and Willy was hurrying across the floor, his hands fluttering in protest. I swung around and looked at Jean. She hadn't moved and the little smile was frozen on her face.
"Let's get out of here," I said. She stood up obediently and I took her hand and we started for the door.
They were bending over Lou now and we had to push through them. I quieted Willy's bleats with a ten to cover the meal and then we were out of there and walking toward the car.
"He'll be all right," I said. "Whisky is a good shock absorber."
"I didn't mean for you to hit him."
"You just don't say things like that around here and not get hit."
"Well," she said. "I guess it turned out to be a business engagement after all."
"Yeah. I guess it did."
We hardly spoke on the way home that night. At first I felt almost lighthearted and gay.
For one thing, I knew that when I had hit Lou Thomas, I wasn't even thinking of the trail we were laying, of the way it would fit in with our plans. I had hit him out of pure, blinding rage at what he had said to her. I had fought for her and won and I was old-fashioned enough to feel good about that.
Sir Galahad, I thought. You and Sir Galahad.
For another thing, there was no longer any doubt in me that I loved her. Most of the puzzle had gone out of my head back there on the dance floor, and I could look at it straight and clear and know now that I loved her, had loved her since our wedding night on the floor of the shack.
But it all began to come home to me again as we neared the Old Caldwell place. Because my mind couldn't get away from the fact that we were going to kill a man. My gaiety went tumbling out the window of the old car.
If I didn't love her, I thought, if only that hadn't happened, I could get out of it. I could just go on and clear out and the hell with all of it. Or maybe not. Maybe this is my judgment for killing Lucy.
I turned my head and looked at her and saw that she was looking at me too, her eyes almost glowing in the night, and something turned inside of me, the same thing I had felt before, at the shack, back there in the Lodge. Something that not only left no doubt, but also not even the possibility that doubt existed.
So the door was closed behind me. The bridge was burned. Because, no matter how I felt. I would have to do it. I would have to help her, give her the thing that she thought would take away the pain and the hurt and the bitterness from inside
of her, at the loss of something that to her had meant the very existence of-call it happiness.
Oh, I didn't fool myself. I knew what those nights in the cabin were for her. I knew I was merely something that had become necessary during the course of a larger, more important desire. I didn't fool myself.
But I would do it. And we would get away with it. And then?
What then, indeed?
We were digging his grave, all right. And we were digging a deep, hollow, clammy one for ourselves, right beside it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
She spent part of each day in town, laying her trail of unfaithfulness, which we knew now was becoming plain to all, to Brax Jordan and Lou Thomas and everyone who aired to think about it. She didn't miss a day at Stewart's. and at night she would tell me about it, of his increasing fear and hatred of her.
She went about her purpose with a single-minded, calm, and purposeful detachment. She seemed to take no pleasure in it. But she left each day with an air of determination and returned each night with a look of accomplishment. She was doing a job, a job she had to do, and one she could do well.
One night, to boost the cause, I had driven the Chevrolet into town and parked it in the alley behind Stewart's store. I stole away unseen, and slept in the woods near the edge of town. Before dawn, I went back and drove it away. That had been her idea, too.
She had others. Like the notes she would leave for him when she knew him to be out of the stoic, notes that contained innocuous remarks about the weather or some other general topic, but that were generously scented and entrusted to old Joe Buxton with an air of charming secrecy.
It was a good job. all right.
It was done with the finesse of an actress and the cold-blooded skill of a scientist. By the time she decided it was time for me to go in to talk to Stewart, she had hung him in a frame tighter than a noose.
I parked the Chevrolet on the sun-baked street in front of the Coshocken General Mercantile Company, and I sat there a minute, studying the place and thinking it out before I went in and told him.
Then I got out and stepped into the cool shade of the old porch roof that fronted the store. Two men occupied the benches Stewart provided for his customers and their eves were steady on me.
"John," I said. "Ben. How y'all?"
They nodded gravely. I stood ramrod straight and I looked at them steadily and made my eyes hard. I wanted to look like a man who had come on unpleasant business.
Ben spat a brown stream toward the curb and wiped his mouth with his hand. Then he removed the worn felt hat and ran his hand through his sandy red hair, thinning now, and replaced the hat.
"Don't see you around, Harry," he said.
"Fixing my place up. Haven't been in town much."
He nodded.
"Heerd you got married up," John said.
"That's right. Two weeks ago."
"I seen her. Right smart woman."
"Yes," I said.
John shifted his wad toward the other cheek. "Womenfolk is funny," he said. "Don't know why a man can't get on without 'em."
"I don't either," I said. "Or why he should want to."
They grinned, appreciating the joke, but there was no mirth in their eyes.
"Stewart in there?"
"I reckon. Leastways, he was a while ago."
I saw Ben's eyes go to my hip. What he was looking for was there, all right. I had taken the pistol out of the trunk again-the one that had killed Lucy, the one I had pointed at Stewart in this very store-and the bulge of it was plain in my pocket. I knew they were thinking what I wanted them to think: that I had come either to shoot Stewart or to give him fair and final warning.
I squared my shoulders and moved toward the store door.
"See you fellows," I said.
They nodded. I was aware of them, moving silently and easily as ghosts away from the porch, as I entered the store.
***
"All right," I said. "Take it easy, Dick."
"I'm not that big a fool," he said. "You know I wouldn't be that big a fool."
"I don't know," I said. "You can be right much of a jackass, time you set yourself to it."
"Not that big," he said. "I don't know what she's up to, but I haven't even smiled at her. Not once."
"I wouldn't worry about it," I said. "That's not why I'm here. Whatever it is you're talking about."
"I don't care why you're here," he said. "I want you out. And I don't want you back any more."
"I'm going to sit down in that chair," I said. "I reckon you have a gun on me, but if you shoot it you're going to get worse than I could ever give you."
I moved forward and sat down in the chair. In a moment I heard him take a step or two forward.
"You got trouble," I said. "All kinds of trouble."
He came into my range of vision then, moving carefully to my left, on my stump side, in a circle around me. Sweat was popping on his brow but the gun was very-steady and straight, pointing at me.
"Put it down," I said. "I won't bite."
"What trouble? What trouble are you talking about?"
"Put it down," I said. "Then we can talk."
"All right. Take that gun out of your pocket and lay it down on the floor over here."
I grinned and reached into my pocket. He watched me narrowly and I saw his knuckles, white against the dark metal.
I put the pistol on the floor.
"Slide it this way," he said, and I did.
He kicked it with his toe into a corner of the room.
"That gun keeps popping up between us, doesn't it?" I said.
He didn't answer. He went around the corner of the desk and sat down in the big leather-covered chair and laid the pistol down on the dusty, paper-strewn desk. His hand hovered near it and the sweat was running freely on his face now.
"What trouble have I got?" he said.
I felt my teeth pull bark in a grin I couldn't stop. "This wife of mine," I said. "She's quite a bitch."
He just looked at me. "She used to know Lucy."
His hands, twisting nervously in his lap, stopped, still and motionless, and his head jerked visibly, as if he had been slapped.
"Real well," I said. "They were old chums, you might say."
"All right," he choked. "So what?"
"So there were letters," I said. "A lot of letters. Like this one."
I reached inside my coat and pulled it out and tossed it on his desk. His hand reached for it, darting, and stopped just short of it. He licked his lips and suddenly his shoulders squared slightly and he picked it up and opened it and began to read.
I had worked so long to get it just right that I almost knew it from memory. I let the words of it run through my mind as I watched him read it. The first page was just routine stuff I had copied from one of the other letters. The real juice was in the last two paragraphs:
You know I told you about this Dick Stewart in my last letter. I haven't told Harry anything about it yet. He would kill Stewart, I know he would, he has such an awful temper. Anyway, Stewart is coining out here tonight, or says he is, since Harry's away.
I don't know what I'll do. I'm in a jam, Jean, and I don't know how to get out of it. All I can do is just hope and pray Harry never finds out.
It was a chance we had to take. But it stood to reason, from what we knew of Lucy and of Stewart, that she must have known he was coming that night, that it was possible she would have written such a letter. If she hadn't known he was coming-well, it was a gamble.
I sat there and watched him while he read it. Then he began to sag in the chair and I watched his face break up and grow old under my eyes and I laughed out loud.
"You see the date on that letter, don't you?" I said.
"Yes."
"The day she died."
"Yes." He made an effort to get hold of himself. "I don't believe she ever wrote this thing."
"That's all right. I don't care whether you believe it or not. A jury probably would. B
y the way, that's only a copy there. The real thing is safe out at my place."
And then the gun was in his hand like lightning and I looked at death in his eyes and in the shaking hand.
"You shut up," he said. "I'm not going to take any more. I'll kill you first."
I didn't say anything. There is a point beyond which it is not safe to push even a rabbit. And he was no rabbit. He was desperate, harried, dangerous. I just sat there and watched him and pretty soon the light went out of his eves and he put the gun down and I started to breathe again.
"All right," he said. "What are you going to do?"
I leaned forward slightly.
"I fixed it up that night," I said, "after you left it all lying in my lap. I got us both off all right. Except for a little matter of me being out one wife and one arm. But that letter could screw the works if the right people saw it."
He took another pull at the bottle.
"That's how she suckered me. I didn't know anything about her knowing Lucy until after she came out there and wiggled those hips at me and got me to marry her."
I stood up and walked around the desk and deliberately shoved the gun aside and sat down on the corner where it had been.
"She didn't know I didn't have any more money. She knew the farm was gone, but she thought I still had all the money I got for it and all the money I used to have, hid out somewhere. That was what she was interested in. She figured when she had me hitched up, fair and square, she'd spring the letter on me. There's enough in it to persuade the sheriff to open up the case again."
He listened as impassively as if I had been one of his customers, begging him to extend a little more credit.
"You see, she had it figured that I had found out somebody had been playing around with Lucy, but that I didn't know who. And that I had killed Lucy because of it, and then arranged the suicide. She thought the letter would force me to sign over all the money she thought I had to her. And she was pretty close to the truth, at that."
His face was a little puzzled now. He could feel it coming but he didn't know yet quite what shape it would take.
"She was real disappointed about my money," I said, "until I told her how it really happened that night, and about how much money your wife has."
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