“An empty gesture, April.”
“Craig—”
He spread his hands, palms raised. “Your parents will see the photographs,” he said. “It’s out of my hands, really. This afternoon it occurred to me that you ought to bid your mother and father good-bye and move in with me on a permanent basis. To further that aim I sent a set of prints to your parents. I doubt that they’ll receive you with open arms.”
“You—”
“Mailed the pictures,” he supplied. “That’s exactly what I did. While I dropped dear Sweet Sue at her home in Xenia, I mailed the photographs. Your parents should receive them in the morning mail.”
“I’ll get them first.”
“By staying home from school, April?”
“If I have to.”
He sighed. “Not even that way,” he said. “You see, I made up two sets of prints. I mailed one to your mother at your house. I dispatched the other to your father, the droll druggist, at his place of business. I don’t think you’ll be able to cut off both letters, dear April. Will you?”
She closed her eyes and thought that she was going to die. Everything, her future, her life, was wrecked, irreparably smashed, she knew. The pictures would kill whatever chance she might have had for happiness. There was no going back now, no living in her fathers house, no life in Antrim.
It was over.
Over and done with.
Everything had seemed so simple before. Just get rid of Craig, go home, relax. Start living like a decent girl again, and in time everything would be all right.
Yes, she thought. That was the way she had worked out her plans. But the future was not going to play itself out that way. A good decent future would have been nice, but a dozen filthy pictures showing April North having sex would make all that quite impossible.
“Damn you,” she said.
He laughed.
“Damn you to hell. I hate you, Craig. I’d love to kill you. I’d like to cut your throat and watch you bleed.”
“Do you hate me that much?”
“God, how I hate you.” She turned from him, unable to look at him now. “You’ve ruined everything,” she told him. “I had a chance until you sent those pictures out I had a chance. I could have carved out a decent life for myself.”
“You’d have died of boredom.”
“I’d have been clean.”
“Clean and dull. April, you’ve come a long way in a short time. You were beginning to learn what being a woman meant. Not a kitchen drudge like your mother—a real woman.”
“I’d rather be a decent human being.”
“You can’t now, can you?”
She drew a breath. “No,” she said, “I guess not I guess you fixed everything, Craig.”
He smiled at her. “You can move in here, you know.”
“What!”
“You can move in with me,” he repeated. “You can’t go home, obviously. It’s out of my hands and into the hands of the United States Post Office, and their hands are too strong for us to tamper with. But you can move into my house and share my bed and five the sort of life you’ve tasted recently. A good life, April. A wild free life that doesn’t take a human being and turn him into a robot.”
“With sex and parties?”
“With sex and parties,” he said. “And don’t try to make a saint out of yourself, child. You happen to like sex and parties. You happen to like everything about them. Don’t deny it. You’ve loved everything I’ve given you and I’ve given you plenty. If you’ve got a brain in your feathery little head you’ll move in here and like it. And sleep with anyone who asks you and have yourself a ball before you’re dead.”
Their eyes met, and she stared at him and let him stare at her.
Then he dropped his eyes.
“No,” she said.
“Are you certain?”
“Yes.”
And her certainty must have showed because after a moment he simply shrugged and nodded his head. He told her she was making a mistake, and she said that she was not, that her greatest mistake had been Craig Jeffers.
“Then you’re going?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Can I give you a lift?”
“I’ll walk.”
“It’s a long walk, April. And it’s starting to rain outside. You’ll get wet.”
“I don’t care.”
“I see. Where are you going, April?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe New York. But it doesn’t really matter, Craig. Nothing matters.”
She started to the door. He moved to open it for her but she brushed him aside and opened it herself. He was right, rain had started and the night was gloomy. Soon she would get soaked.
But she did not care.
“April?”
“Go on.”
“You should stay. You’re doing something silly.”
“No,” she said. “I’m doing something smart.”
She was halfway out the door when something occurred to her and she turned around, coming back inside the house. He was at the bar pouring himself a drink. He raised his eyes at her approach.
“Craig,” she said, “before I said I’d love to kill you. But I don’t wish you were dead.”
“That’s nice of you.”
“I want you to live a long time,” she said. “I don’t want you to die young. I want you to live hard and fast, just the way you’ve always lived, without any moral code and without any sense of obligation to the rest of the world.”
He said nothing.
“I want you to grow to be a very old man,” she said. “Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll be the saddest old man in the world,” she said. “The most miserable old man in the whole world. You’d be very lucky if you died young, Craig, before you were old enough to see what a mess you were. And I don’t want that to happen. I want you to live long enough to be wretched.”
She walked out of the house and slammed the door and started walking.
She barely noticed the rain.
There was a lot of rain, and it was wet. In autumn Antrim has rainy days, and on these days it rains in spades. The sky opens up and the rain comes down, first in a drizzle and then in a torrent, and if you stay outside in the rain you get soaked through, despite galoshes, rainwear, umbrellas.
April had none of these. She was more than soaked. And she did not care.
No cars passed her in either direction while she walked down the narrow road from Craig Jeffers’ house to Route 68. There was only the road and the trees at either side, only the wet and the damp, only the wind like a sword through silk. She was wearing dungarees and a sweater, the wholesome costume of the wholesome girl, and the dungarees and sweater were plastered against her body by the rain.
She went on walking.
There was no place to go now. No place to go and nothing to do. She was stuck. By tomorrow morning both her mother and her father would know that she was a tramp. A rumor alone they might have sloughed off, but a rumor and a photograph are two different things entirely. Quite probably the pictures would literally kill them. And if they did not have heart attacks over the photographs, they would still be killed on the inside.
And they would be through with her. That much was painfully obvious. She could never live with them again, or see them again, or think of them again as people close to her. Home was the place where, when you had to go there, they had to take you in. But she did not have to go there. And if she did, it would be too damned bad for April North, because after her parents saw the pictures they would not feel compelled to take her in.
She kept walking. She could go to New York, maybe. But she had no money, and she did not want to go home and pack a suitcase. And there was more to it than that. She could never feel right simply by running away, simply by escaping. There had been a time when that course had made sense but it did not make sense now.
Nothing did.
Maybe
she could kill herself. It would not be difficult, she thought. Just run in front of a fast car, or lie down on a railroad track, or find a bridge and jump from it Maybe that was the logical answer. If there was nothing to look forward to but misery, what was the sense in staying alive?
No.
No, suicide was no answer. Suicide was ridiculous, because there was always some chance for happiness even if you could not see it at the moment. There was nothing to gain and everything to lose in giving up the gift of life.
No suicide.
Then what?
She reached 68 and started off away from Antrim and toward Xenia. She was walking away from Antrim rather than toward Xenia—God knew that there was nothing worth going to Xenia for, but she surely did not want to go home. She kept walking and wondering and then the car pulled up beside her.
At first she thought it was Craig. But it was not a Mercedes, not by any means.
And then she laughed.
Because she had come full circle, in some mysterious way, and the car beside her was a green Oldsmobile a year old, the green Oldsmobile where her virginity had been taken away in the back seat.
The driver was Danny Duncan.
11
SHE was sitting at Danny’s side in the front seat of the green Olds. She was not sure why she had entered the car but it had seemed like the right thing at the time. She was cold and drenching wet and shivering, and this particular car was where her trouble had all started, and somehow it seemed only fitting for her to get into the Olds now.
He had the radio playing rock-and-roll, and someone was singing Get out the papers and the trash/Or you don’t get no spending cash. She tried not to listen to the blare of the radio, tried not to notice the huge raindrops splattering on the window.
“I shouldn’t be here,” she said.
“Why not, April?”
“Because you were rotten to me,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You made love to me,” she said. “And then you told all your friends about it. That wasn’t very nice, Danny.”
He looked sheepish.
“I hated you for a while,” she went on. “But now I’m getting tired of hating people. I’m sick of it. There are too many rotten men in the world and if I keep on this way I’ll hate all of them. I guess there’s no future in it.”
They rode a mile or so in silence. She looked across at him, at the handsome profile, the basketball build. She remembered that first time—strange, she thought, that it should seem so long ago.
“What’s the trouble, April?”
“Everthing’s the trouble.”
“Tell me about it. Maybe I can help.”
She hesitated but only for a moment or two. “I have to go away,” she said ultimately. “I have to leave Antrim.”
“For good?”
“For better or for worse. If you mean forever, yes. I have to leave and I can’t come back.”
“Why?”
She looked at him. “I’m sorry,” she said slowly, “but I’d rather not tell you.”
“I can keep a secret.”
“So I’ve noticed,” she said bitterly. “Let’s just say I have to leave town and let it lie there.”
“Where will you go?”
“I don’t know. New York, I guess.”
“You’ll take a train?”
“I guess. I don’t have any money.”
She had money, of course. She had the five hundred forty-three dollars and seventy-four cents that she had drawn from her savings account when she tried to leave Antrim for the first time. But that money was at home, safely tucked away, and she could not get it without going home.
And she could not go home.
“I don’t have any money,” she repeated.
He looked at her. The radio had shifted gears to a jolly little number called Ave Maria Rock. The rain was still coming down hard and fast. She felt his eyes brush over her body, noting how the wet sweater clung to her full breasts. She wished he would stop looking at her that way. She didn’t like it, at all.
“Look, April. Maybe I can help.”
He could have helped once, she thought. He could have been more of a man and less of a boy. He could have kept her secret in the first place, could have gone on loving her instead of permitting his love to be killed by her final acceptance of it. Then what would have happened? She might have married him, she thought—and she was suddenly glad that he had talked about her, because she could imagine very few ways to spend her life that were worse than as the wife of Danny Duncan.
“Just leave everything to me,” he said. “You’re going to have clean clothes and a hundred bucks, and then I’ll drive you to Xenia and you can catch a night train to New York. You don’t have a thing to worry about, April I’ll take care of everything.”
He was turning the car around now. He drove a mile on 68, then turned off onto a winding dirt road. The car splashed water from puddles in the middle of the road.
“Got to find a place for you to stay,” he said. “While I go find those clothes for you.”
“Where will you get them?”
“My sister,” he said. “She’s about your size and she won’t miss a few clothes. I’ll get the clothes and the money and come back for you. Meanwhile I know a place where you can stay.”
“Where?”
“A barn. There’s an old barn along this road—we used to hack around out here when we were kids. Nobody’ll bother you. Hell, nobody ever goes there any more. You can relax and dry off while I get the clothes and the money.”
“The money,” she said.
“Yeah. A hundred dollars. That’ll be enough for you, won’t it?”
“Of course. But where will you get it?”
He chucked her under the chin. “Don’t you worry about a thing,” he said confidently. “I’ve got a pretty good idea where I’ll get it. Don’t worry, April.”
The barn was old and sagging, weatherbeaten and ready to crumble. But it was better on the inside than out. First of all, the interior was dry. Although the roof leaked in a dozen or more spots, there was one huge section where no rain dripped through, and that section was comfortable enough. The floor was covered with hay and dead leaves. The barn had a barnlike smell which she did not find unpleasant. This was certainly a hell of a lot better than wandering around in the rain.
“You’ll be okay here,” Danny said. Sure.
He was looking at her now, his eyes warm. She saw how he was staring at her breasts and she knew what was on his mind. He was not exactly hard to figure out
“All this hay,” he said. “Sort of a shame to let a place like this go to waste.”
“Is that what you did when you used to come here?”
“We were just kids then,” he said. “But now things are a little different.”
She did not want to make love with him. She did not want to make love with anybody, Danny Duncan least of all. She wanted, in fact, only to be away from Antrim and on her way to New York. But he was getting her dry clothes, was giving her a hundred dollars, and was driving her to Xenia—perhaps he deserved something in return. And she had only one thing to give.
So she offered no resistance when he came to her, taking her in his arms and pressing his mouth against hers in a kiss. At first she merely stood still like a robot, but then she realized that she might as well make it good, that he had probably never had a very experienced girl and that she could give him something he would never forget.
She ground against him, her loins seeking his, her mouth hot and demanding. She felt nothing, nothing at all, but her lack of feeling he would never have to know about. She would make it good for him. He let her go and stepped back. She looked at him, at the strong athlete’s body. She felt no burst of passion, no rush of desire. In a sense, she was entirely cold-blooded about what she was going to do.
“Now, Danny.”
He came to her again, embraced her, and they tumbled to the floor. She felt le
aves and hay under her body, pricking her flesh a little, getting her itchy. She drew him down upon her and burned his mouth with a kiss. He was hotter than a two-dollar pistol now, she thought, and she herself was cooler and more accomplished than a two-dollar whore. Her tongue was in his mouth, doing wonderful things and driving him wild, and he was squirming on top of her, writhing with excitement.
He moved, his hands grabbing for her breasts. He squeezed the mounds of flesh, stroked them, patted them. She felt nothing, but she knew enough to feign excitement. She wriggled on the hay carpet, thrusting up her hips and softly moaning.
“You’re the greatest, April. I never saw anybody like you. Never!”
She took one of his hands from her breast and moved it downward slowly, over her flat stomach. He touched her with greedy fingers, and she went on with her pantomime of passion, squirming and moaning as if his actions were exciting to her.
She thrashed beneath him, taking up the rhythm of love with the intensity of a dynamo, driving him outward and upward, making him moan and shriek with passion unlike anything he had ever experienced before. He bit her shoulder, cried her name to the skies.
Then he finished.
She held him for a moment, thinking that he was a child and that she was an old and sinful woman. She remembered the woman in Marseilles that Craig had talked about. Give me another twenty years, April North thought.
He got up slowly, his face flushed, his eyes wide. “That was—pretty great,” he said.
“I’m glad you liked it.”
He took a deep breath, held on to it for a moment, then let it out slowly. “I’d better get dressed,” he said. “Better get going. So I can get the clothes and the money for you.”
“Leave some cigarettes,” she said.
“Sure.”
“And some matches.”
“Yeah, I will.”
“And hurry back,” she said.
She did not bother to get dressed. The clothes were wet and to put them on again would have been ridiculous. Instead she sat on a pile of loose hay and smoked three cigarettes one after the other. She did not think about anything in particular at the beginning. She merely sat on the pile of hay—which tickled her rear end slightly—and smoked the cigarettes. She put them out carefully. It would not do if the whole barn went up in a sheet of flame. People would be annoyed.
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