"It's all so... nasty," she said, looking up at me.
"Right."
"Clint, I don't think you should turn yourself in yet."
"So what do I do?"
She blushed more violently than before.
"You can stay here tonight. Tomorrow I can find out how... how convinced they are. Somehow. If they aren't completely sure, then you should go in. If they think they can... kill you, then you'll have to go away. I can get you away somehow. I know I can."
It could have been the way she said that. Or the way she looked. Or it could have been a lot of half noticed things adding up in my mind, to make a sudden startling total. Maybe it was merely what she was, and how she was, and who she was. And she was definitely somebody.
She was Toni Mac Rae She was superbly, uniquely herself.
Anyway, it happened to me at that moment. Like, according to the books, it is supposed to happen to everybody.
One minute she was a handsome gal with a good mind, good taste, and far better equipment than average. All that one minute-and then she was suddenly Toni Mac Rae
Not a pastime, not a hobby, not a target for tonight. Toni.
Part of my life. Most of my life. All of my life.
Love at first sight is too trite. When it conics it doesn't creep. It pounces. It isn't even love like I thought of love.
It is something else. It is a necessity. It is a place in the road. You get there, turn oblique right, and take a road you never saw before.
She became, all of a sudden, Toni Mac Rae indisputable, irreplaceable, unanswerable-as necessary to me as lungs, legs and blood. There is no other way to say it.
I stood there and stared at her. She was miracles. Lips, legs, eyes, breasts. All miracles, all precious.
She was still red.
"Just because I say you can stay here doesn't mean that..."
"I know."
"What do you mean, you know?"
"All of a sudden, just like that, I know what you mean before you say anything. We could sit without words and carry on whole conversations. Your eyes are wonderful."
"Too loud!" she hissed.
"Sorry." I sat on my heels on the floor so I could look up at her face. I took her hand. She tried to pull it away and then let it rest in mine, unresponsive.
"Toni," I said.
"Toni!"
"Too loud!"
"Look, it doesn't make any difference if you lock me in your bathroom. Or if I sleep under the bed. One night doesn't matter. We've got us ten thousand coming up."
"Are you out of your mind?"
"I told you, I'm not sure. How can we help not get married, Toni?"
"How can we help... what?"
"It's an accomplished fact, anyway. So they stamp a paper for us for the file. Toni, Toni."
She yanked her hand away.
"Whatever this is, it isn't funny, Mr. Sewell."
"I know it isn't funny. Toni, I started at the wrong place. I'm disorganized. Let's start at a standard place. I love you."
"Oh sure," she said dubiously.
"All of a sudden. You just sat there, all of you, perfectly miraculous, and it came to me, like it fell on my head."
"This is all just because..."
I rocked back on my heels.
"Just because I'm going to stay here? It's a fat line. I tell it to all the girls who hide me from the cops. You haven't got any fire around here I can hold my hand in. I've outgrown crossing my heart and spitting. About the only way I can show sincerity is to go trudging out of here. Bake me a cake and bring it to the dungeon. They can't electrocute Sewell. He has to get married. Suddenly I'm confident. Even Kruslov loves me."
I unlocked the door, opened it and started down the hall. She caught my arm with astonishing strength and whirled me around. Her face was like chalk. She got me back into the room, locked the door, leaned against it and closed her eyes. Her color came back slowly. She opened her eyes and looked at me. She looked at me steadily and for a long time. I looked back. I looked back until the room misted out and there was nothing there but her eyes.
She reached me in three small fragile steps.
"True?"
she whispered.
"True," I said.
She put her hands on my shoulders. I didn't touch her. She put her head a little on the side, still looking, still cautious, still tentative. She put her lips evenly, steadily against mine-firm-soft, warm-cool. All her vulnerability, so sweet you could cry. She was something in my arms.
She was a lot of girl. Then she put the side of her dark head against my cheek and we held tight in a drowning world. She shuddered and it went away and she shuddered again and again.
"What's the matter?" I whispered.
"I don't know. So long.... The... the ice going out, maybe?" She leaned back to give me a crooked grin, but the grin turned into the pinched child-face of tears. She went face down diagonally across the bed, hitting it hard enough to bounce a little. I sat beside her and didn't touch her.
She couldn't possibly feel the same. I sank into a grey swamp-loving and unloved. Then she defeated the tears, turned and curled, and snagged me and hauled me down.
This one was a salty kiss. She put the words with it, and the words were fine. It had come true for her some months back and she had been carrying it around, waiting, without much hope.
We lay facing each other, noses touching, her eyes like sooty saucers. When she breathed I took her warm breath deep into my lungs. My hands were on the concave softness of her waist. Her fists lay against my chest. We told each other how wonderful it was.
Everything dowly became more heated, crowded, excited. We had started up the slant of a dangerous spiral. I moved away from her.
We whispered until one. We fixed my bed, spare blankets on the floor under the windows, with a sheet and her winter coat over me, and her extra pillow under my head. I was all tucked in in the dark room when she came out of the bathroom, the light behind her. Her summer pajamas might have been hung between two shrubs by a self-respecting spider. She turned out the light and the floor creaked as she came over to me. She knelt and kissed me.
"Sleep well, darling," she breathed against my cheek.
She smelled of all the summer gardens of my childhood, with a dash of Pepsodent. I slid my arm around her waist.
She pulled back a little.
Then leaning against my arm, she made a funny sound way down deep in her throat and came toward me.
It was a foolish and desperate chance, born of haste and greed. It could have been cheap. It could have spoiled too many things.
But it was magical.
chapter 8.
I awakened in the high bed in the morning, awakened early for me, and without any shock of disassociation. I knew exactly where I was and why I was there and all about it. I knew she was behind me.
I rolled over with the greatest of care. The covers were over her shoulder and bunched under her chin. A good clean line went down from the point of her shoulder to the nip of her waist, then mounded up warmly over her hip. A strand of black hair lay across her cheek. Each soft exhalation stirred it.
Her face was smooth, faintly dusky, without blemish or scar or mark of living.
The alarm clock behind me let off a horrid clanging. Eyes still closed she lunged for the alarm, sprawling across me. She gave a gasp of fright and shock and yanked herself back, eyes wide and dazed and uncomprehending. I turned and grabbed the metal beast and stilled its fury. When I turned back to look at her, her eyes were shut again.
"Don't look at me," she whispered.
"But I like to look at you."
"Please. I feel so strange."
I kissed her and tried to hold her. She pushed my hands away.
"Go in the bathroom," she whispered.
I took my clothes in, dressed in there. I thought as I walked by the gossamer pajamas, crumpled on the floor near my makeshift bed, that they looked forlorn, betrayed. After quite a while she tapped on th
e bathroom door and I came out. She was in her woolly yellow robe and her hair was combed. She wouldn't look right at me.
I took her by the shoulders and shook her gently.
"Toni! What's the matter?"
"I... I feel ashamed."
I tilted her chin up with my knuckles.
"There's no need for that. Kiss me good morning
She dutifully allowed herself to be kissed. But she still wouldn't look at me. It wasn't until after she was dressed that she seemed to regain self-respect.
"Don't make me feel that it was a mistake," I pleaded.
She glowed then.
"It wasn't, Clint darling. I know it wasn't. But... well, if you want to know, I never woke up with a man before. I guess it's stupid. I feel shy or something. And Clint..."
"What?"
"I don't want to do this again until... afterward."
"All right."
She looked at me dubiously.
"You aren't cross?"
"You're lovely, Toni."
"I've got to go to work."
"Your boss won't be in today."
She stopped the nonsense and gave me my orders:
leave the door locked; not a sound while she was gone; don't walk, the floor creaks; don't run any water; don't put the blinds up; don't cough or sneeze; if you snore, don't take a nap.
"Do I snore?"
She looked away.
"I was going to stay awake and sort of... watch over you, but I fell asleep."
She left and the long day began. I heard people moving around the house, someone using a vacuum cleaner. I began slowly to starve. I was empty from collar to knees. I was a hollow tree, with squirrels enlarging the hollow. As a desperate experiment I ate a Kleenex; it didn't help a bit.
I wished I could risk using the little radio to find out what they were saying about me. The dull, interminable minutes went by. I stood at the window and looked out the crack between blinds and frame and watched the infrequent cars and local delivery trucks go by. Next door an old man, scrawny and withered as a dead chicken, guided an asthmatic power mower back and forth across the May grass.
I thought about my darling. Globe of firm breast, and the flexing satin of haunch. Furnace mouth and cool shoulders. All alive in the whispering darkness, all alive and for me and forever.
And I thought of other women. They seemed poor things in retrospect-flaky skin and sour hair, raddled thigh and suet breast. Not like my darling. Not firm and proud and tall In her skin, like my darling.
He came at three-seventeen. I heard his voice in the hall, suave and easy.
"I know this is unusual, Mrs. Timberland, but it's work she brought home from the office and we need it today. She said it would be all right if you'd unlock the door and watch me to make certain I don't steal anything." He laughed and the woman laughed.
A key nibbled metallically at the lock and she said, "I can't seem to get the key in."
"Let me try, will you?"
The key I had left in the door was forced out of the lock. It fell noiselessly to the rug. I came out of my stupor too late to take refuge in the closet. The door swung open and Paul France smiled politely at me. The landlady, a worn woman with a muzzle like a boxer dog, stared at me in shock which turned quickly to outrage.
"What are you doing in my house?" she demanded.
France touched her shoulder gently.
"Now, now, Mrs. Timberland. I'll take care of this. I'll see that he's out of your house in five minutes. We can't have this sort of thing, can we?"
He bobbed his head and smiled at her and came into the room and pulled the door shut. She stood out there for a few moments and then went down the hall walking with a very heavy tread.
Still smiling, he said, "A six-state alarm and you hole up two houses away. My goodness." He made a clucking sound with his tongue.
"How did you find me?"
"Your Mr. Wills cooperated with Mr. Pryor and gave me the run of the plant. Including your office. When I began to paw through your desk, the highly decorative young lady became very incensed, too incensed. So I began to look at her more closely. Shall we say she had a fresh high bloom about her? A dewiness? That sort of Joan-of Arc look young ladies get when they perform a great sacrifice? Once I got her address from your personnel section, I was almost positive. The key on the inside of the door was the clincher, Sewell."
"What do we do now?"
"The fearless investigator takes you in, thus earning his fee."
"Do you think I did it?"
"They think you did."
I moved a little closer to him. I hoped I was being inconspicuous about it. He backed off a little, stopped smiling.
"Please don't try anything, Sewell. I can guarantee failure."
I guess he could have guaranteed failure if his luck hadn't been bad and mine hadn't been very good. He made me stand in the doorway, my back to the room. I heard a faint creak and rustle and guessed that he was bending over to pick up the key. I swung my leg back hard. I did it with no anticipation of success, in the mood of a child kicking the wall when he's been stood in a corner. There was a slight shock against my heel and a truly theatrical sound of falling. It was the same sound they use on radio after the ringing shot. I turned around. France lay on his face, his glasses a few feet from his head. Even as I looked at him, he grunted and moved his right arm. I picked up the key, went out in the hall, closed the door and locked it.
Mrs. Timberland was standing down in the hall, her arms folded, chin out.
"Tell your friend she has to be out of my house tonight."
I did not answer her. As I went out into the sunshine, I heard France begin to bang on the bedroom door. A grey sedan was parked in front of the house. I threw the room key into the shrubbery.
The world looked different to me. The new and special relationship with Toni had given me a great deal of optimism. False optimism. Up there in the room, with memory so bright and so recent, I had begun to feel that there was good will in the world, that Kruslov would listen, that all could be explained.
But I had left my confidence up in that room. Running down the stairs, I had planned to go turn myself in. That plan evaporated in the sunlight. A woman stared at me from her front porch, then turned and went into her house.
I lengthened my stride. If I turned myself in, they would have all they needed. Every bit of it. The joy of a newfound love had affected my judgment. Toni had been brighter about it when she spoke of trying to get me away.
I knew that I had to get myself away. I had about twenty dollars on me, a stubble of beard, and the clothes I walked in.
I decided that I would get out of town, somehow. I could contact Tory and he could mail cash to a general delivery address somewhere. I felt as I had in the side lot that night after Yeagger had been knocked out. All the houses had eyes and all the eyes watched me.
I would go far away from them, and later I could get in touch with Toni and she could come to me. I was in panic.
My hands were sweaty. I walked as fast as I dared, turning corners not quite at random, heading southeast, knowing that I would hit a main route at the southeast corner of the city. I went through meager neighborhoods, passed candy stores thronged with school children. I
turned my face away from traffic, and the impulse to keep glancing behind me was almost ungovernable.
The houses began to thin out. Weeds grew high in vacant lots. Junked cars rusted behind small service garages. Finally I came to the end of a dead end street.
The pavement was heaved and cracked. People had dumped rubbish at the end of the street.
I looked south and saw fast truck traffic a quarter mile away and knew that was the highway I was looking for. I cut across lots where the ground was marshy. At one place I had to jump from hummock to hummock. I slipped and went into black mud well over my shoes. I wiped my feet on the grass. Halfway to the highway I came across a young girl and a boy who had made a nest for themselves on a blanket in the tall
grasses. After the first glance I did not look toward them. They did not move or make a sound.
At the highway I stopped behind a billboard and tried to regain some confidence. I wanted to crawl into the thick grass and hide there. It was far too easy to think of how they would kill me, quite legally, if they caught me. I walked across the highway, stood on the shoulder and began to thumb the eastbound traffic.
John D MacDonald - You Live Once Page 11