Moody stared at her solemnly, and then not so solemnly. He looked away when he realized Deena was watching him.
“Bernie,” she said. “What happened to that little red-haired girl who works for you? She seems to have abandoned us.”
“Vicky Clay? She’s probably out in the stable screwin’ somebody. We won’t see her again until morning.”
“But you have a big race tomorrow.”
“Don’t matter. She’s got that stallion into the best shape I’ve ever seen him. Bet your money on Bernie Bloch.”
Showers, pleading his injured leg and the need to rest for the next day’s race, finally managed to escape from Lenore, bidding a hasty good night to Alixe and others in the bar, knowing that the partying would go on for hours. “Depravity is so dreadfully boring,” Lenore liked to say, “but there’s nothing else to do.”
As Showers expected, Becky was waiting for him in his Jeep Cherokee.
“I wasn’t sure you were coming,” she said.
“Of course I was coming.”
“Shall I drive? Save your knee?”
“Thank you.”
His farm was just three miles west of town, on a narrow, curving, hilly road that required a driver’s full attention. He didn’t feel like talking. She did.
“Do you want me to leave, now that Billy’s gone?”
“Certainly not,” he said.
“Everyone will talk.”
“They always talk.”
“I guess you’ve no one else to run the farm.”
“No one else I’d want to run the farm. I wish I could pay you more.” He touched her knee, but only briefly.
“I’d do it for nothing. You know that.”
What she meant, he knew, was that she’d be happy to run the place as his wife, that there was nothing that would make her happier. He didn’t know how to cope with such devotion, let alone repay it, but Becky should know better. He was bound to another. He had been for nearly twenty years.
“Someday you’ll have your own place to run,” he said to Becky. “And a husband and children to help you.”
“I want to stay on your farm,” she said.
She had been born Rebecca Gibbons, the daughter of a well-off Washington psychiatrist. He had first met her when she was a little girl riding in junior equitation competitions at the Dandytown Colt and Horse Show. She had spent much of her adolescence hanging around him and his farm. When her father had bought her a $150,000 horse for her sixteenth birthday, she had boarded it on Showers’ farm, despite the long drive from Washington.
When she’d turned eighteen, she came to Showers’ place to stay—as a runaway, with Billy Bonning, her husband of a few days, in tow. She’d married Billy less for love and his good looks than as a means of preventing her father from ordering her back home—and off to college.
Showers didn’t like Billy Bonning. No one in Dandytown did. He and his sister Vicky were from a local family that dated back to the Civil War but had never amounted to anything before or since. Their father owned a small vegetable and cattle farm and junk car business. One uncle ran a gas station and tavern in Dandytown and another was a horse handler up at the flat-track race course in Charles Town, West Virginia. The worst thing anyone could be called in Dandytown was “common,” and the Bonnings were considered the preeminent example of that. The other term used was “trash.”
Because of an ancestor who had been a commissioned “lieutenant” in the band of Confederate thieves and brigands known as Mosby’s Rangers, the Bonnings had been able to gain admission to both the Sons and the Daughters of the Confederacy, and Billy had made good use of the connection in prowling the periphery of the Dandytown social circuit in search of rich, gullible girls. He was a handsome fellow—blond, freckled, and muscular—and cut a good figure even in the cheapest rental dinner jacket. A lot of young women had gone to bed with him, but few had let him get near their money.
Showers had not been happy when Becky and Billy had appeared on his doorstep, but had let them stay, informing her father that he was doing so. The man had actually seemed relieved, apparently expecting that Showers would serve as a sort of chaperon. He supposed he had.
Under their arrangement, Becky cared for the horses, while Billy did the heavy work on the place. Not all that much was required. Showers owned only a brood mare that had foaled that spring, plus his fox hunting horse. Becky had her show horse, and there were three or four boarders in the stables. In return for the couple’s labors, Showers paid them a small stipend and let them live rent-free in what had been the farm’s servants’ cottage, allowing them full run of the main house when he was away in Washington during the week or traveling abroad.
As Showers had feared, Billy had begun treating the place as his own, throwing parties for some of the younger horse people in the area and humiliating Becky by trying to hustle some of the prettier or richer young women. Billy had even put a daguerreotype of his Mosby’s Raiders ancestor on the mantel. Showers had taken it down. He’d three times thrown Billy off the property—twice for stealing and once for hitting Becky. It was Showers who had urged Becky to divorce him and buy him off if necessary to make a quick, clean break of it.
“You said Billy agreed to a divorce,” Showers said. “He’s willing to sign papers?”
“Yes,” she said, keeping her eyes on the twisting road. “We’re going to see a lawyer in Culpeper next week.”
“How much does he want?”
“He asked for a hundred thousand. I offered him twenty-five. He said he’d take fifty, plus the pickup truck.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you, not with that kind of money.”
“You don’t need to. Daddy said he’d write the check. Only he wants me to go back to college.”
“It’s not a bad idea.”
“I don’t need a degree to ride a horse.”
He didn’t answer her.
“I just don’t want to leave here,” she said finally.
“Well, the University of Virginia is an hour away,” Showers said. “If you can’t get in there, Northern Virginia Community College is even closer.”
“That would be all right with you?”
He hoped she wasn’t misunderstanding. “Sure.”
She drove a little faster.
The front gate to Showers’ farm was hanging open, which annoyed him. His border collie, Hardtack, was a roamer, and was probably now out coursing across the fields in the darkness. The pickup truck Billy had claimed as his own was pulled up in front of the house by the main porch. As they parked next to it, killing the headlights, the screen door opened and Billy stepped outside, two or three rifles and an old cavalry sword cradled in his arms. He opened the door to the cab of his truck and set them gently inside. Weapons were the only things Billy treated gently. In the back of the truck was a large cardboard box and two old suitcases.
“You don’t have anything of David’s in there, do you?” Becky said.
“Fuck you,” said Billy, and he disappeared inside.
“You’d better look through it,” Becky said to Showers.
“That’s all right,” Showers said, loud enough to be heard within the house. “If anything’s missing, I’ll simply have him arrested.”
“Fuck you, too!” shouted Billy from the hall.
A moment later, he struggled outside with another cardboard box, smaller than the other, but apparently heavier.
“Do you have everything from upstairs?” Becky asked. “All those horrible magazines and movies, including that one with the woman getting her throat cut?”
Sweating, Billy dropped the box into the back of the truck with a thud. He turned and leaned back against the rear fender, lighting a cigarette. He was dressed in boots, blue jeans, and a T-shirt, his normal outfit when he wasn’t costuming himself as one of the local swells.
“I’ve got everything,” he said.
“Where are you staying?” Becky asked.
“With Vicky and Meade. You
can bring my mail there.”
“I’ll have the post office forward it. I don’t want to touch any of those filthy magazines you call ‘mail.’”
“You just make sure I get everything that’s mine.”
“And you just make sure you’re at the lawyer’s office on time. I don’t want to be married to you one second longer than I have to.”
“You seen Vicky?” Billy said. “I tried her room at the inn but she didn’t answer the door. Can’t find her anywhere.”
“You didn’t look in the right bedroom,” Becky said.
Billy glanced at Showers. “Guess I know which one to find you in from now on.”
Showers took a step closer to him, his knee hurting as he did so.
“Leave now, Mr. Bonning,” he said. “I don’t want to find you on this property again.”
Bonning grinned defiantly. “Then maybe you ought to spend more time around here, Captain.” Though he’d only just lighted it, he flicked his cigarette onto Showers’ porch as a further gesture of contempt.
Becky went to extinguish it. Showers simply stood his ground.
“You’re a jerk, Billy,” Becky said.
“Fuck you,” he said, getting into the cab. He paused to light another cigarette, then hit the ignition and gunned the engine, roaring in reverse onto Showers’ lawn. Tires spinning, he ground the truck back onto the driveway and then down the lane to the road. A cloud of gravel dust hung in the air after he had gone.
Showers sat down on his steps, stretching out his injured leg.
“Do you want a drink?” she said. “I’m going inside to make sure he didn’t leave anything behind.”
“All right,” Showers said. “A little scotch and water.”
Two drinks on the night before a race was a lot for him. He would go to bed soon.
She put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed, a friendly gesture, but also a wifely one. “I’ll be right back.”
He slouched back against one of the tall white porch pillars, almost slumping, he was so weary. The day’s racing had been very arduous, and, if he was not yet old, he was well past tireless youth. Halfway through his life. Perhaps.
If half done with life, what were his triumphs? The dusty ribbons and trophies cluttering his tack room? To be sure, he had a tack room. Perhaps that was triumph enough. He had somehow kept the farm, and a few horses, in stables meant for forty. After fifteen years in the foreign service—a decade and a half of carrying messages, sending communiqués and dispatches, relentlessly gathering ignored or ultimately forgotten facts—he still had his job; had in fact attained the high bureaucratic station of deputy assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental affairs. But what were his accomplishments? In all that time, the only meaningful enterprise to which he had devoted his labors was the Earth Treaty, the newly proposed global environmental charter that the president had made the chief priority of his administration—though few were giving it or the accompanying enabling legislation much chance of passage.
Showers had no wife. His parents were dead. A sister, who had come to hate the South, even the modern South that northern Virginia had become, lived an exile in Vermont and had not visited him in years. There was no one else except a dissolute newspaperman cousin and Becky and Alixe and a few other friends. What difference would it make if he were to vanish from this place? If he were to climb into the Jeep and roar off into the night as Bonning had and never be heard from again?
He’d never do such a thing, of course. His frivolous, indulgent, careless father had paid little attention to his upbringing except for his riding, but his grandfather, a fierce old gentleman sternly representing all previous generations of Showerses, had from his early childhood on taught him principles. Simply put, they were honor, duty, family, and resistance to change. Showers had bound himself to them, but the last one had been difficult.
It was a moonless night, and the scented summer darkness was very close. The light from the house windows stretched in broad yellow panels across the lawn but barely penetrated the trees beyond. Fireflies flitted in the soft gloom, and there was the buzzing and bumping of other, larger insects.
There was never silence on such nights. Showers could hear the raspy croaks and peepings of frogs down by the creek, and the myriad sawing sounds of grasshoppers in the high pasture grass. A few wakeful birds mewed and called in the nearby tree branches. A dog barked somewhere, and then another. In the woods, other animals spoke, barely heard, unidentifiable.
These were supposedly tranquil, peaceful sounds—all part of the pleasure of life in this gentle country place. Yet it was, he realized, a sham, a romanticized confection. The reality was that the glow of the female firefly was a deadly lure, attracting males with which to mate but also others on which to dine. The birds were telling each other to stay away, to go to hell. The frogs were devouring masses of insects and the insects were devouring each other, and snakes and swooping owls and bats and bobcats were devouring everything they could. All of God’s creatures, killing and eating each other, as they did every night and every day all over the earth. Man rhapsodized over this and called it nature, called it beauty, called it life.
Some near or distant day, perhaps some night like this, he would die, just like some firefly snatched on the wing. And generations after his death, this farm might be a suburban parking lot, or a barren plain, or a radioactive wasteland. No Earth Treaty could stay the explosive moment, a billion years hence, when the sun and all around it would flare cataclysmically and die. The few bright stars visible in the night haze; how many were just the expended, far-flung, slowly traveling light of now dead suns?
His thoughts surprised and depressed him. They had intruded upon his consciousness without invitation, like a nightmare into his sleep.
He was getting old. He needed a son, a daughter, a wife. Life was a great burden to bear alone. He was glad when Becky brought his drink and sat down beside him.
A soft, gathering breeze stirred the warm air and the smaller branches of the trees, making the summer scent more intensely fragrant. He sipped his drink and felt a little happier.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Billy forgot one of his tapes,” Becky said, holding up a videocassette. It was marked with a plain white sticker that bore only the word VICKY. “God only knows what’s on it.”
“Give it back to him when you meet with the lawyer,” he said.
“Should we look at it?”
“No.”
“I’m curious.”
“Becky, just get him out of your life, as soon as possible.”
She set the cassette down on the step and leaned back, her blouse pulling tightly against her large breasts.
“You’re going back to your apartment in Washington Monday?” she asked.
“Yes. Of course. Have to.” The ice clinked in his glass.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t, if you stayed on here and just ran the farm?”
“Without my government salary, I’d lose this place.”
“You could work up a business training and boarding horses. Alixe could help you with money.”
“Becky, I’ve worked all these years to pay off my father’s debts, not pile up new ones.”
“My father could give us some money.”
“We’ve been through all this before, Becky.”
They sat quietly a moment.
“Now that Billy’s gone,” she said, “do you still want me to sleep in the cottage?”
“That would be best.”
“What difference does it make? We’re all alone out here. People will be saying things anyway.”
“It makes a difference.”
“You don’t want me.”
“Becky.”
“Well, you don’t.”
“You’re very dear to me, Becky. I couldn’t manage this place without you. Let’s just leave it at that. Let’s not complicate things.”
She drew her knees up and reste
d her arms on them, looking at her hands. She then removed her wedding band, studied it, and tossed it in the bushes.
“All right, Captain Showers. Whatever you say.”
He heard an automobile coming along the road. Headlights suddenly appeared, swerving left and bouncing as the vehicle turned into his drive. Showers thought and feared at first that it might be Billy returning, bent on more trouble, but the vehicle was much lower than the pickup truck. It was a long, fancy motor car, a black Jaguar. When it came to a stop and the headlights went out, they could see the driver clearly.
“Go to bed, Becky.”
“I guess that’s where you’re headed now, isn’t it, Captain?”
“Just go to bed. Please. Good night.”
She rose and leaned to kiss his forehead, then went to the end of the porch and down some side steps, disappearing into the shadows. The Jaguar’s door slammed shut. Lenore Fairbrother stood a moment, her hand against the car for balance. Then, with a wicked smile, she reached to the back of her dress and began to come forward. With a wriggle of her shoulders, her dress fell to the ground. She stepped out of it and kept walking, reaching back this time for the catch of her brassiere.
She had on no stockings. By the time she reached Showers, she was wearing only shoes. She knelt before him, perhaps six feet away, like a supplicant in some Eastern religion.
“Lenore, please.” He was so tired.
“Please?”
“Please don’t. Not now.”
She sat back on her haunches, her pale breasts catching the light.
“Why not?”
“I just don’t think it would be the best thing you and I could do right now.”
“But David, darling. You and I have made love all over Banastre County.”
“That was a long time ago—and now you’ve married to Lynwood.”
“More or less. But so bloody what?”
“Lynwood is my friend. It makes a difference.”
She squirmed to make herself more comfortable. “Bosh. Come on, Captain. It will limber you up for tomorrow.”
The Last Virginia Gentleman Page 3