An Eye for an Eye

by Leigh Brackett

  Oh, God. And it was so near, so almost—

  After that nothing. Blackness. Sometimes a sound of a car going fast and rough over bumps, but whether she was riding in the car or not she did not know. Probably. Yes. Of course. That’s how she got here. Al must have carried her in. She could not remember anything at all about outside or what it looked like. At some time she had waked up and she thought she had eaten something. Then what?

  It’s terrible that I can’t remember, she thought. I must not be well at all. Perhaps he hurt my head that time when he knocked me down.

  She frowned and frowned, lying still and cold in her blanket on the warped floor.

  Rain. She remembered rain. The sound of it on the roof. Such a nice sound. When she was little she used to go up into the attic so she could hear it. Rain on the roof, yes, and then rain on her face, wetness and stumbling in the dark and the trees thrashed.

  You see? she told herself triumphantly. I can remember.

  And there was the car again. How many years of her life had she spent on the floor of the car, tied up and gagged and half smothered under a dirty blanket? How many years since she had said good-by to Ben and gone home to her own house to sweep the kitchen floor and look out and see a peddler coming with two big baskets?

  The car. But she didn’t know where she had gone in it or why. She had slept all the way. He had brought her back here, and now he was sitting and drinking beer and it was daylight again.

  “Are we waiting for something?” she said suddenly.

  He jumped and then swore at her. He got up. The blanket slid down off his shoulders and tangled around his feet. He kicked it away.

  “Goddamn right we’re waiting for something,” he said. “What’s the matter with you, didn’t you hear what I told you last night?”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t hear.”

  “I called your husband.” He watched her face. “Your goddamn smart-assed Mr. Forbes.”

  Her body stirred and became tense. She lifted her head. “You called Ben?”

  “I told him what to do. I told him what would happen if he tried getting smart again.” He leaned over her. “You know what your husband is going to do? He’s going to jump through hoops for me just the way I whistle. And you know who he’s going to have with him? My no-good wife. The pair of ’em. He’s bringing her tonight.”

  She stared and stared at him, her heart pounding.

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “He sure did.” Al thrust his face closer to her. She could smell the rank smell of his breath, the sweat-and-cold-wool smell of his clothing. His jaw had a thick reddish stubble on it and the skin of his cheeks was flushed and coarse-textured.

  “You sound,” he said, “like you don’t believe him.”

  Automatically she answered, “Of course I believe him.” But she did not. She closed her eyes and sank back onto the blanket. I’ve got to think, she told herself. Shake out the cobwebs. This isn’t for myself, it’s for Ben, and I’ve got to think clear.

  “It’s all arranged, then. He’s bringing Lorene tonight.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  But it isn’t possible, she thought. Lorene would never come back and Ben couldn’t make her. He wouldn’t even try to make her.

  Or wouldn’t he? If it was the other way around, wouldn’t I?

  All right, that doesn’t matter. She isn’t going to come back to Al Guthrie and get herself killed or beaten within an inch of her life because of me—

  Blackness swept over her like a cloud again and she fought it off, struggling to cling to the thin bars of sunlight the shutters let slip so grudgingly.

  I can’t faint any more, she thought. It’s for Ben, damn you, sit up and think.

  “Then this is the last day,” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Al. “The last day.”

  She managed to sit up. “I’m hungry,” she said. “I need to eat.”

  He pointed to the stuff in the corner. “There’s the kitchen. And if you got any complaints about the accommodations, tell ’em to your smart husband. It’s his fault you’re here.”

  “You’ll have to untie me.”

  He grunted and pulled the cords loose from around her wrists and ankles. “You can run around and holler as much as you want to. You’re ’way out in the country now. There’s nobody closer than a couple of miles.”

  But she noticed that he placed himself between her and a second, smaller door in the back of the building. This one was tied shut on the inside with a twisting of strong wire.

  It didn’t mean much to her at the moment. She was too deeply concerned with the effort of crawling over to the corner and rooting among the cans. She was terribly weak. Her head seemed to be clearing, and she thought perhaps the weakness came from not eating. She had not eaten much of anything, really, since Al had taken her. She was not hungry now. But this was an important day, probably the most important one in her life, and she needed to be stronger for it.

  She found a can of tuna and part of a stale loaf of bread. Al had to open the can for her. There wasn’t any water so he gave her a can of beer too. She ate slowly, a sip and a mouthful at a time, trembling with the exertion.

  Al drank and smoked. There was a sound of wind blowing.

  “I think he’s lying too,” Al said. His eyes peered at her, bright and cunning, from under his pale thick lids.

  “Why?” Some demon of unwise malice got hold of her tongue and made it say, “Don’t you believe your wife wants to come back to you?”

  He rose angrily, rattling the floor boards. “Pushing it at me, always pushing it at me. Acting like I was so goddamn dirty or something I shouldn’t even be alive. Who the hell are you? Who the hell’s your husband? What makes you so goddamn good?”

  His beer can was empty. He flung it savagely away.

  “You women are all alike. You think you’re something special and a man ought to crawl around and lick your boots and thank you kindly for letting him come near you. Well, you know what I think you are?”

  He told her, in language so brutally simple that there wasn’t any doubt of his meaning.

  “Guys like Forbes,” he said, “can crawl to you if they want to. They’re nothing but a bunch of goddamned yellowbellies anyway. But I’m damned if I will.”

  Carolyn said, “Well, if we’re such a low lot as all that, I don’t see why it makes so much difference if you lose one of us.”

  “Because this one belonged to me. She was my wife, Mrs. Albert William Guthrie. She don’t run out on me and jump in someone else’s bed.”

  Carolyn was quiet. She still felt light and swimmy, not able to trust herself. Al, looking ugly, opened another can of beer.

  Presently he said:

  “Don’t worry, I’ll know if he’s lying.”

  “How will you know?”

  “Because I’m going to talk to Lorene first, before I make any arrangements. On the phone, see? And if her and Forbes are trying to pull some kind of a trick I’ll know it. And they’ll wish they hadn’t.”

  He moved restlessly around the room, creaking and rattling on the loose boards. Carolyn closed her eyes and rested.

  All of a sudden she was afraid again. Afraid of Al Guthrie and dying, afraid of the coming night. Terribly of what was going to happen to Ben.

  Because he is lying, she thought. He must be. He is planning some kind of a trick.

  And Guthrie will kill him.

  twenty-two

  Al Guthrie paced like a big four-footed thing in a pen, going from one window to another, peering and squinting through the cracks.

  Carolyn watched him. I must do something, she kept thinking. Ben will come and be killed unless I do something.

  Every so often Al would go out the back door and shut it carefully behind him. There was a storm vestibule to protect it from the wind and snow so that she could not see anything beyond the door. Al was never gone more than a minute or two. Then he would come back in and hunker down
to drink more beer and smoke and then rise to pace and peer from the windows.

  What shall I do? thought Carolyn. Oh, Lord, what shall I do?

  She began to stare covertly at the back door. The next time he went outside she got to her feet and trotted across the room and pushed at it. It was jammed some way on the other side. She could not open it. She waited for him to come back in and said:

  “I want to go out too.”

  “Okay,” he said. “The old privy’s still standing.” He took her by the arm. “Oh no, you aren’t going alone. And remember what happened the last time you tried to run away.”

  He took her out the door, looking cautiously around first to make sure there was nobody in sight. The sunlight struck painfully on her eyes so that she had to cover them with her hand. She had not been out of doors, nor even out of a darkened room, for days. From under her hand she looked eagerly, hungrily around.

  The schoolhouse stood in a little meadow overgrown now with hazel bushes and stiff clumps of goldenrod and brambles. There was a thin young wood across from it, grown up long after the school was built, and there was a narrow road almost as grassy as the meadow. The building itself looked like a miniature church with its tiny belfry and tall windows.

  Sometimes these old one-room schools were built of brick and sometimes they were of clapboard. This one was clapboard, weathered to a silver gray. The roof was slate and still sound. Sometimes people bought them and made homes out of them. They never seemed to be torn down.

  Farther along the road, which did not look as though any cars used it any more, was the naked and half-fallen skeleton of a braced-frame barn and beyond it half a chimney standing over a mound where a house had burned and filled in its own cellar. All the rest was woods. Everywhere. No lived-in house or cultivated field was visible. Only trees and brush. The sky was beautiful with white clouds rolling across it and a pair of hawks swinging in high circles, riding the wind without once stirring their wings.

  “Real lonesome, ain’t it?” said Al. “I brought a girl here once is how I happened to know about it. Looking for a quiet spot where we wouldn’t be bothered. I was already on a hell of a back dirt road and turned off into what I thought was just an old logging cut, and pretty soon here was this place. I was only here the once but I remembered it. The road don’t go anywhere any more. We’re pretty safe.”

  But he did not give her any chance to run. Being out in the air and moving around made her feel better, but she knew that in any case she would not have been able to outrun him. She would have liked to stay out longer, but he hurried her back inside, and she thought he was nervous about somebody coming along the road and seeing them and wanting to know what they were doing there. The car must be hidden in the woods somewhere.

  So running away was out, and there was no hope of attracting anyone’s attention. The same old weary problem she had grappled with and not been able to solve since she came to in Al’s car that first time. How to get away, how to call for help. And there wasn’t any way.

  She sat on the blanket, thinking. The thin slivers of light dimmed and brightened as clouds swept over the sun. It was cold. She watched the shadows shift along the wall as the day wore on.

  The last day.

  Her last day. And because of her, probably Ben’s last one too.

  She watched Al Guthrie drinking his beer and smoking his cigarettes, pacing and peering, crouching and waiting. Sometimes he scowled and sometimes he smiled to himself, licking his lips as though he tasted something good.

  If there was only some way I could kill him, she thought.

  I tried that before and it didn’t work. But that was silly. I’m not strong enough to kill him with my hands or anything like it.

  But if I had a gun.

  He has a gun.

  Yes. Yes, his gun.

  He’s shown it to me often enough, bragging what he was going to do with it. I think he keeps it in the suitcase.

  The next time he goes outside again. I’ll have to hurry. There will only be a minute or two. I will stay quiet with my eyes shut so he won’t think to tie me up.

  God, won’t he ever go outside again, with all that beer he’s drinking?

  Finally he did get up, grumbling, rubbing his hand over his face. He stumbled on an empty beer can and kicked it with a sharp clatter into other empty cans and then kicked them all in a spiteful fury, saying God damn it over and over. Carolyn gave one wild start that he seemed not to have noticed and then after that she pretended to be asleep.

  “I’ll show ’em,” Al muttered. “I’ll make ’em pay for it. Squatting in a dump like this freezing my ass, kicked around like a dog, and all because I want my own wife—”

  He stamped out through the back door, slamming it behind him.

  Carolyn left her blanket and scrambled toward the suitcase.

  She had forgotten the boards. They made a loud noise. She didn’t stop. She grabbed at the suitcase and got it open. There was a lot of stuff inside, dirty musty-smelling shirts and underwear and socks. She pawed through them frantically, hearing the door open behind her and thinking, I’ll find it, it must be here, and I’ll turn around and kill him.

  But there was nothing in the suitcase, and when she turned around he was standing watching her and he was holding the gun in his hand. He must have had it on him all the time, in the big deep pocket of his jacket.

  She sat down on the floor and let her hands fall.

  He laughed. “It makes me feel good,” he said, “the way you people that think you’re so smart can act so dumb. Now put all that stuff back just the way you found it.”

  She looked up at him through the lank down-fallen locks of her hair. “You go to hell,” she said. “And I don’t give a good God damn whether you shoot me or not.”

  She stood up and walked back to her blanket. She sat down on it and did not look at him.

  He only laughed again and put the gun away. “There’s no rush,” he said. “Tonight’s time enough. It ain’t far off.”

  He started to open another beer.

  And there was a sound of hoofbeats, and distant voices.

  Al tensed and dropped the beer can. Carolyn jumped up. She started to shout and he swung around and clamped his big hand over her face. She fought him with the frenzy of desperation, hearing hope come closer and closer down the road.

  The horses were galloping. There were at least three. The voices were boys’ voices. Farm kids out for a ride on their ponies after school. Perhaps they came this way often. There were no cars and the grass-grown road was fine for the ponies to run on.

  If she could only make them hear.

  She screamed, and all the noise of it was trapped in her mouth and throat by Al’s hand. She tried to kick and thump with her feet against the wall. He pulled her away from it and wrestled her down and held her with one powerful leg clamped over hers. She tried to bite his hand and it was pressed so cruelly into her mouth that she only cut her own lips.

  The swift-running hoofs slowed and stopped outside.

  She could hear the ponies blowing and shaking their bridles. The boys apparently dismounted. She could hear them talking and laughing. Their voices were clear but the words were obscured by the walls and Al’s muffling arm and the harsh tight sound of his breathing. What are they doing out there? she thought in an agony of hope. Maybe they’ll come in, maybe they play here all the time. But she knew better than that. Al had had to break in through the back door. She heard their voices outside, now near the walls, now farther away. Suddenly there was a sharp noise overhead. One of the boys had thrown a rock at the cupola and it hit and fell bouncing down over the slates of the roof. There was another one, and then more, bumping and clattering on the roof. And in the dark shuttered room Al held her still and there was nothing she could do.

  After a while the boys returned to their ponies and rode away and everything was quiet again.

  Al waited until the last sound of their going had died away. Then he threw Caroly
n on her blanket. She cried bitterly until he shoved a gag in her mouth and stopped her. He tied her hands and feet. Then he went and got the can of beer he had dropped and opened it and drank. His hands shook and the red color was gone from his face.

  The wind dropped and the light got fainter and fainter. Presently it was dark. Al had a flashlight. He shaded it under his jacket, turning it on every few minutes to look at his wrist watch. He was talking again, so low and indistinct that she could not hear what he said.

  Her own watch had stopped days ago, and she couldn’t see it anyway. But she could hear her heartbeats, light and sharp like the sound of a pendulum, ticking away the minutes. She kept moving her head, trying not to hear them, but she couldn’t escape them.

  She thought of Ben.

  Al switched the flashlight on again, and now he had the gun in his hands, making sure it was loaded.

  He put it in his pocket and got up and turned the beam of the flashlight full on her. He bent and untied her feet.

  “Get up,” he said. “It’s time.”

  twenty-three

  It was twenty minutes to nine on Thursday evening, the seventeenth of November.

  The house was quiet. It was full of people but there was no laughter and very little talk. They were all waiting.

  Ben Forbes moved restlessly from the living room to the hall and back again. If he sat down he was up again in a few seconds, moving, always moving.

  The living room was a sort of gruesome mockery of a party. Ernie and Bill Drumm sat on chairs, Bill physically relaxed but with very alert eyes, Ernie almost as wire-drawn as Ben. They would go with Ben in his car, if the meeting was arranged with Guthrie, Ernie in the back seat and Bill in the deck. Packer and Harbacher were there too. They had an arrangement with the Sheriff’s Office in case the meeting point was outside their jurisdiction. Packer and some other men would follow Ben according to the circumstances, joining forces with the Sheriff’s cars in the same way.