The Brat

by Gil Brewer

  “Help me with the boxes, Lee.”

  We carried the loaded cartons of books and magazines to the barefaced mound. She dumped them there. After I helped her this far, she wouldn’t let me touch them.

  Business Etiquette. Shorthand in Twenty Lessons. Business Management. Stenography. There were perhaps a a dozen different correspondence courses: two on how to train yourself to speak correct English. She did not own a typewriter, but she had several keyboard charts on which she had practiced, so that when the time came she would be ready. There were poetry, a few novels, some of the classics, and many magazines depicting the living conditions of the very rich. All these, and many more, she dumped helter-skelter on the mound.

  Her eyes were brilliant with excitement a kind of madness, and I stood by trying to figure it. There was only the known excuse, the conventional reason. My mind was blankly accepting.

  “Now, Lee.”

  Her voice was soft with urgency.

  She ran lithely back to the car, swung up the gallon jug, rushed to the pile of books and magazines, of dreams and hopes and schemes, and with lips parted, sun-bright hair swinging across her face, poured the contents of the jug over everything.

  The liquid splashed like hot silver.

  She knelt, trembling, and touched a match to the pyre.

  For a little over an hour I watched the flames seethe and finally gutter. I watched her run around the fire, thrusting it to life again and again with a long forked hickory stick. She roved around with a kind of harshly repressed glee. The way she looked scared me plenty.

  Coated with a film of soot, eyes red-rimmed, her shoes smoldering, she returned to the car where I waited.

  “Now that’s out of your system?” I said.

  She did not syeak.

  I looked at her. “Why me?” I asked her. “Why me, Evis?”

  “Because you’re just right. Because you’re going to be rich. And because I love you—I do. Don’t you like it?” The last slyly, with slanted eyes.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  She had turned, twisting against me as she removed her skirt.

  “Undressing, Lee. You, too—take off your clothes. I want you. Now. Here. Before we leave. I want to pull the curtain on all that, Lee.” She turned, kneeling on the seat of the car. “Right now, Lee.”

  Her flesh was still hot from the flames of her dream.

  We came as far as St. Petersburg, on the Florida west coast. This was supposed to be a stopping-off place, but in two days we had rented an apartment, an expensive one. I had lived nearby before heading for the Everglades, and my savings were here. My credit was good. My family had lived here and their reputation had been sound.

  “How did you earn your money, Lee?”

  “Lot of different things. Nothing special.”

  “But how come the money?”

  “I always tried to save.”

  “I like that.”

  Only there was something wrong with the way she said it. I didn’t know it then, but this was the first move toward one hundred thousand dollars plus, in a concrete-walled safe at the Braddock & Courtland Building and Loan Association’s offices, right here in town.

  First there were the buying sprees, the endless charge accounts, bills fluttering into the mailbox like sacks full of leaves.

  She returned to the apartment day after day, the fresh excitement all through her, with crazy things—book ends priced at two hundred dollars, with no books to put between them. So she bought books, by the hundreds. Then furniture, until the apartment was clotted. Chinaware. Drapes at five hundred dollars a crack, to cover a single window.

  I decided it was time to return to work. The savings had dwindled rapidly, but we loved each other, and I got a kick out of her actions. The money somehow didn’t matter. Everything she did was with intense spirit and a degree of excited happiness I’d never seen. I wanted her happy. It was a giddy world, a world I wanted to keep.

  I took a job in a print shop. I knew the work and liked it. We couldn’t be together as much as we both wanted, but I began to realize we had to head into dock.

  • • •

  “Evis, you’ve got to slow down.”

  She would never change. Not Evis. But her outward appearance had changed. She was in the beauty class now. There was no getting around it, my wife was an absolute knockout. People stared. Men flipped a little when she walked down the street.

  “I know I’ve spent too much, Lee. But I had a reason. We’ve got to have a house. I don’t like small apartments.”

  “We can’t swing a house. I’m not making enough money at the shop for that. They’ve got a lot of new accounts—in fact I got them for them. But I get my salary, and that’s all. How the hell can we buy a house? You nuts or something?”

  “Come here, darling.”

  She was lying on the floor with a bunch of pillows, wearing one of these damned house smocks …

  We managed a house. There still wasn’t enough money, but I had the job, a good salary. We swung a loan for the house. I could see rough sledding ahead the way she went at things. Like a blitzkrieg in tight nylons. I didn’t see black night and no sled at all.

  She came running into the house one afternoon.

  • • •

  “I’m working, Lee! Braddock and Courtland. It’s a loan outfit down on First.”

  You’d think she’d been emancipated, the first woman to earn a buck by working for it. She wouldn’t hear of quitting. It bothered me the way she began talking about wanting more and more money.

  Along about then we got to arguing about her family. Trying to reach her some way, I ridiculed them. Instead of agreeing, she resented it. I’d been drinking more than usual, and I went out that night and got drunk. I met a guy Ed Fowler. He brought me home and we’d been good friends ever since.

  Ed was a writer. He sold adventure articles to the men’s magazines: “How I Fought Vampire Bats on the Island of Mazoom,” “I Waded Through Crazed Electric Eels,” “THE DAY I FACED THE GUILLOTINE,” The Dancing White Daughter of Pygmyland.”

  The thing was, I found out that Ed’s stories were mostly based on fact; things he’d really been through. I’d been around plenty myself during my Merchant Marine days, but Ed Fowler had me beat hollow. He could talk all night about the crazy places he’d been, the bizarre and almost unbelievable things he’d seen, if you supplied him with plenty beer. Evis got a kick out of his stories. He had lived a full life gathering material, and now, still very young, he spent his time putting it on paper.

  “Ed’s a good scout,” Evis would say. “I wish you could be as relaxed as Ed is.”

  Relaxed.

  I seldom thought of Berk Kaylor—but more and more I turned her family into a joke; bitterly, I guess. Maybe as compensation for what I’d seen that bright high noon in the woodshed.

  “If you’d open up a business of your own, we’d make more money. You know printing from A to Z—you told me so.”

  “Evis, listen—with both of us working, payments are due on the house. I’m not a third up on things you bought.”

  Her voice calmed. “Didn’t you ever hear of credit? Your credit’s tops. Look at your family’s background.” She began to warm up. I was getting used to it. “Why not open up your own printing shop, Lee? The place you work for makes big profits. Why shouldn’t they be yours? You got them lots of their big accounts. Those accounts would be yours, with your own shop.”

  She was damned convincing. I told her all the reasons why it was out of the question. She didn’t even listen. And in two hours’ time we were both speaking excitedly about the printing business. It was a good, rising business. She was right about those accounts coming over to me if I had my own place. I felt certain they would. I’d have more work than I could handle.

  “It’d be a headache. But if I could swing it, we’d be set.”

  • • •

  I didn’t lie to them. I just promised too much when I signed the papers, talked
with the different heads of companies, assured them, related family background, established credit—because nothing had happened yet.

  Then it began … the bills. In two or three years everything would be straight. The money would likely be tumbling in. But how do you explain that to the collection agencies?

  There are the excited lies about monies due you, the stories of fanciful bank accounts, the glib but quite empty yarns about cash on hand. Lies. How do you explain once they’ve found out and won’t listen?

  “It’s all right, Lee—don’t you worry.”

  I wanted to pay off the shop rent, take care of the bills for the presses, the linotype, the paper stocks—Evis wouldn’t hear of that.

  In a year and a half of struggling, we’d been through a descending graph into a dead period that was frightening—and the creditors swooped.

  Nebulous deadlines came in. Credit fell through. Every company in the county was running reports on me. Each day another rigid-voiced collector turned up, bright-eyed and abrupt, until I began dodging out the back door into the alley.

  I’d hired two people. Art Salter, a good printer, a fast man with a linotype, and a Mrs. Timothy who took care of the stationery store out front. We handled the only complete line of paperback novels in town, arranged categorically in easy-to-reach-and-scan cases of my own design, with special monthly selections displayed in one window. The books were a tremendous draw. Because of them I was able to pay Mrs. Timothy’s and Art’s salaries. But that was all.

  The time came when it was, “Pay, or else, Sullivan.”

  The “or else” was a simple matter of losing everything: shop, car, home—the works. Creditors got together and set a deadline for payment.

  I was sick and desperate. Evis came up with the answer.

  It was like being cracked over the head with a rock again and again and again—because she meant it.

  • • •

  “Don’t tell me it won’t work, Lee. You’re a fool not to take the chance. The money’s lying right there in the safe.” In the middle of the night, talking softly across the warm darkness. “Look at it this way: no matter what you do, they’ve got you. You didn’t want it this way, but it is this way. I’m sick of it, Lee. You owe thousands. This is the only way you’ll ever pay it off.”

  She ignored everything I said. I was mad as hell. But she had her damned plan and was determined I’d go along.

  “In a business like our office, a big business, one man’s entrusted with opening the safe. That’s Ray Jefferies. He spends lot of nights working overtime. When there’s a mistake in the accounts, no matter how small, I have to find the error. You remember when I’ve worked till midnight, even, Lee.”

  Then she sat up on the bed, there in the dark, and told me. “I’m going to falsify an error. Ray’ll be there with me. I always handle the money. The safe is open. Ray goes out for coffee for us every time we work late, and he leaves me with the money. You can meet me. It’s that easy, Lee!”

  She wouldn’t stop. We fought and argued all night long and she wouldn’t listen. The law meant nothing. She kept hammering and hammering for days, until one hot midnight I just said, “Yes, okay.”

  A woman can do that to you. There were times when it seemed the solution. Then it was the solution. It had to be. It had become a small matter of action in our minds. We’d talked the edge off it. We couldn’t see the woods for the trees.

  We set the date. I didn’t excuse myself.

  • • •

  “It’s all ready to go, Lee.” The thought of that money was tamped down inside her, like some kind of lingering explosion. The deep blue eyes were even bluer now, the small, full lower lip pouted, and the cheek and jaw turned in a touch of defiance you couldn’t miss. All that crazy, mixed-up thinking inside her that you could do nothing about, because there was the outside.

  There was what she could do to me—any time—with a look, a gesture, a word. A lust I couldn’t quit. Then rich ash-blonde hair. The movements of her body. A sheened and elegant grace with touches of that awkwardness that could stun. The sly movements of hands and hips, the boldness, the intense, savage loving.

  “Yes.”

  She thought we were buying time to get away before the deadline, before they clamped down on me. She began planning in her mind for what could come later …

  … And I began to know we could never do this.

  We’d been a couple of fools. We weren’t going to do it. She had to understand that.

  I called her for lunch that day.

  There was something crazy wrong with the way she’d been acting. It was more than just talk of money. She moved and looked and laughed as if she had all the Law in the world praying at her knees, as if that money were already hers—not even ours—just hers.

  How do you deal with that when it’s the woman you love and want more than anything in the world? What do you do when just the touch of her sends you nuts, when you know she’s smart, you know she understands right from wrong? Suddenly the shield is too thick and you can’t break through and she’s back there laughing at you, maybe—but you can’t say for sure.

  What do you do, knowing she’s not psychopathic, that she feels and feels and feels, but that she just doesn’t give a good God damn …

  I figured it would be a bad time when I told her.

  It was worse than bad.

  It was crazy.

  She had on a tight ice-blue sheath dress, and she looked beautiful as hell. We sat there in the restaurant and I told her how the cops in this town were hot as hell on the pettiest of thefts, how we weren’t going to do it. I’d turn her in first. I told her to think of Jefferies. She’d be hunted for the rest of her life. It didn’t crack the nut—it didn’t touch her.

  “Evis, for that much money they’ll hunt us forever. You think the Law will sit by while this happens? While we walk off with over a hundred thousand dollars?”

  She spoke in a rapid whisper, leaning across the table, her fingers crumbling a slice of pumpernickel. “You like to sleep with me, honey. You like what I can do—you like that a lot. Maybe I’m your wife, but I can keep you knocking on my door. Can’t I?”

  “Knock it off, Evis.”

  “No. You’ll do what we planned. I want that money. I want it so bad it’s an itch. You think I’m playing games, you’re crazy.” Her mouth was wet and red, her eyes were dark. “It’s the end of the month. Two more days and that money won’t be there. It’ll be in the bank, and another month to wait—maybe six months—for a pile like that. Ray’s going out for coffee, and you’re going to come in and we’re going to clean that safe out. And we’re going away—tonight!”

  The clatter of lunchtime eating was remote.

  “I’m leaving a note,” she said, “saying you picked me up. That we had to leave. That I finished my work, found the error. And I will have. He’ll have no reason to check the money. The money box will be there, so why should he look inside? He won’t. He’s stupid. Nobody’ll be there tomorrow or Sunday. By Monday we’ll have vanished. The cops will know we did it—but it will be too late.”

  “I’ll turn you in before I let it happen, Evis.”

  “Like hell you will. Like hell—” She started to slide off her chair, then turned toward me. Her skirt was up over her round silken knees and a red-faced guy at the next table ogled her legs over a pastrami sandwich. She let him look.

  She started to say something, then got up and stalked out of the place. It got jumbled then. I went after her. I had to pay the check. I saw her meet Ray Jefferies outside on the street. I called to her to wait. There was a sudden line-up at the cashier’s stall. I flung money into the girl’s lap and ran.

  She waved at me, from Jefferies’ car, as he drove off into traffic.

  • • •

  I kept pouring the whisky down.

  Sometime in the afternoon, I ran into Ed Fowler. He tried to get me to head for home and sober up. Said something about his heading for the West Coast. He ke
pt asking me what was the matter.

  “It’s the shop,” I said. “Don’t want to lose the shop. It’s got me down.”

  “You’re lying in your teeth.”

  I kept thinking how I was supposed to meet Evis at home for dinner. She’d said she would cook a big meal, so we wouldn’t have to worry about eating until later on.

  “All right,” I said. “It’s not the shop. Something else. She fought alligators barehanded as a child.”

  “Evis? What the hell you talking about?”

  “She’s ashamed of fighting alligators barehanded. Running through the Spanish moss in her bare feet. Of eating fish. Swinging on the watermelon vines. All she ever wanted was to get out of that swamp.”

  Ed kept staring at the wet wood of the bar. He had heavy brows, like a thick block of wood, and a nose that must have at some time been broken and reset off center. He was wearing an old blue sweater and white flannels.

  “Like a disease, it was,” I said. “Like she was burning up with some kind of fever, and it would spread. Maybe it even spread to me. I don’t know. She had to get out of that swamp. But she’ll go back there, just to show them.”

  “Show who what?”

  “Her family, for Christ’s sake. Just show them, that’s all.”

  He didn’t say anything and I shut up. Because that was the plan for tonight. She’d have to go back there. That was the one thing she had to do. Get the money and return to that God-damned misty place in the sun and just show them how rich she was. Then she’d be free. It wouldn’t matter any more.

  Ed was gone.

  The bar was dark, quiet, and I was talking fast and low with this tall blonde with the overabundant breasts who had miraculously appeared on the stool beside me. There were times when the blonde was Evis, except that Evis didn’t own a black dress with silver chains dangling. Evis didn’t own the make-up-hidden traces of a round black eye.

  “Yeah,” she said, “that’s right, honey. Texarkana.”

  “Well, all the way from Texarkana! What you doing here?”

  She smiled with patience. “What in hell you think, honey?”

  She went right on looking like Evis, turned on the stool and clamped her open knees against my thighs. There was that bold, almost sly and very professional look in her eyes as she put on the pressure and touched me with the backs of her fingers.