Finally the rock-hard, straining muscles went flaccid. The toes stopped digging, the clenched hands opened. His strap hadn’t been fastened, so his helmet had flipped off, and Curt’s jaw was gouged hard against the short-clipped hair. The breathing stopped below him, but Curt didn’t move. He listened as the rest of the band fanned out across the airfield, but his moment of fierce exultation had turned to lassitude, to a drained, almost sick feeling.
Five minutes passed.
He had been nearly asleep. He rolled off Paula’s nude, sated body in the dark, then groped back again toward heavy melon of breast, silken hollow of hip, warm swell of pubic mound.
“Paula!” he whispered softly.
She didn’t move, playing dead. Curt chuckled and reached across to her far shoulder, tipped her toward him.
Her head flopped solidly on the pillow and she stared at him in the semi-dark, slack-jawed, with the sentry’s dead sand-gritted eyes.
Curt uttered a hoarse, jaw-creaking shriek of terror, his eyes strained so wide open that the whites showed all the way around. He hurled himself back, twisting in midair, and struck the varnished hardwood floor of the study with his chin, hard enough to jar his teeth.
He sprawled there for a moment in his pajama pants, then rolled over and sat up. His eyes still were wild and his jaw ached. A shudder of revulsion passed through him: he still had an erection.
Not bothering with a light, he staggered down the hall to the bathroom and threw cold water into his face. His luminous watch showed it was just a little after four. Monday morning. He straightened up from the washbasin, cold water dripping down his chest.
He knew it then, for the first time, with an icy certainty.
He was going to find the boys who had raped Paula. Find them, break them, physically and spiritually. Make them crawl and grovel, mew with terror and pain. If the law couldn’t touch them, he would be his own predator. Why would he do it, for himself or Paula? Who could unscramble it? Who cared? To hell with motivations.
He padded down the hall, opened the door, was halfway into the bedroom before he realized where he was. It was the first time he had entered the room, except to move his clothes, since the night of Paula’s death. The cleaning lady kept it tidy, the king-size bed made up.
Curt didn’t even pause. He crossed the room, tossed back the spread, climbed between the sheets. Could his continuing agony of spirit merely have been an agony of indecision? He didn’t know; but he slept right through until nine o’clock.
Okay, you want them. You’ve made your decision. Now where do you start?
Sixteenth Avenue was in the old section of town near the tracks, two miles north of the business district. The street was straight, not curving; the curbs were high, angular, not shallow dips for the convenience of trike-trundling kids. Two-storied houses: prewar, Midwestern in flavor. On these streets it still might have been 1938.
Curt parked in front of 1248 16th Avenue and looked it over. The rambling two-story house had white siding which would soon peel, and a lawn that needed mowing. The old-fashioned black iron gate was rusty. He went around in back, and found 1248B underneath the wooden steps leading up to the kitchen of the owner’s flat. It would be an apartment, here on ground level, that wouldn’t get much light during the day.
Not that Harold Rockwell would be worried much about light or darkness any more. The girl who answered his rap was at first glance very pretty; at second glance, almost emaciated. Her baggy cotton dress had been cut to be tight; her hair was mousy, her eyes, large and brown and begging to be lustrous, were as lifeless as her hair.
When Curt said he was looking for Mr. Rockwell, she didn’t react in any way; so he added, almost as a question, “Mr. Harold Rockwell, is he home?”
She finally heaved a long-suffering, where-else-would-he-be sigh. Even the thin gold wedding band was loose enough to slip off her finger. Love winch might be proof against cataclysm is often vulnerable to the slow erosion of a continuing, day-to-day tragedy. “I’m his wife, Katie. He... if you could tell me why you want to see him, he... hasn’t been very well...”
“My name is Curt Halstead. My wife—”
Her face suddenly was animated. She turned, called into the tiny apartment, “Harry, Mrs. Halstead’s husband is here!” Without waiting for his reply, she caught Curt’s arm and almost dragged him inside. “Come in, come in, he’ll be so glad to see you!”
The kitchen had walls daubed bright yellow. As if Katie Rockwell had made a vain attempt to brighten the drab apartment. The fridge was ancient, the gas stove the same, the linoleum curling at the corners. The sort of furnished apartment almost every young couple pass through on their way toward the style of life they will live together; but the Rockwells were frozen here now, rocks in a glacier, without much hope of a thaw.
“Don’t mind the place, Mr. Halstead. These old apartments...”
“I’ve got the same problem.” To Curt, his own voice was falsely and offensively hearty. “My house is very old...”
The living room was more of the same: a portable TV on a corner of the coffee table, a couch, an easy chair like those lugged into dorms by students following a visit to the Salvation Army salesroom. Rockwell, in the easy chair, in slacks and tattered cardigan, might have been remaindered himself. Smoked glasses concealed his ruined eyes but could not disguise the petulance in his pale, sensitive face. He had a great shock of blond hair fringing out thickly above the ears.
“I just dropped around...” Curt began, when Rockwell bleated to cut him off.
The blind man jerked like a moth impaled on a pin. He had a sharp reedy voice like an heirloom hand-crank victrola. “Well? What do you want? Why did you come here?”
The self-pity stifled Curt’s own pity; he had seen too many maimed by battle to sympathize with the self-destructiveness of one who wasn’t coping. He was moved by the man’s plight, but not by the man. “I came after information. My wife is dead. Before she died—”
“We heard,” broke in Katie Rockwell. “We’re both terribly sorry. She... came to see Harry in the hospital the week after he... he...”
“Don’t say I’m sorry!” cried Rockwell shrilly. He pounded his knee in futile rage. “Why me? I’m blind! Blind! At least your wife is dead! At least—”
“Harry!” she cried, aghast. “Harry, don’t you dare say—”
“It’s all right, Mrs. Rockwell,” said Curt. “I understand...”
“Do you?” yelled Rockwell. He jerked and writhed in his chair, fumbled at his glasses, hurled them across the room, where they struck an arm of the sofa and fell on the rug, unbroken. “Do you understand? Look at my face! Get a good look! Get—”
Curt picked up the glasses and handed them to Katie Rockwell. The scarred, sightless, milky eyes did not shock or repulse him; all they did was make him angry. With himself, for coming here. With Rockwell, for destroying himself, his marriage, his wife. But blazingly with the predators, for the destruction they had left behind them. The blind man had slumped down in his chair and, behind the glasses his wife had replaced, had begun to sob.
“I don’t know anything about them. I hadn’t seen them before, they just... came at me...” He raised his sightless face. “Go away. Just... go away...”
As if on cue, the sudden full-bodied cry of an infant just awakened from its sleep came from beyond the closed bedroom door. Rockwell’s bony hands stopped moving in his lap; his face behind the dark glasses became attentive and still. In mid-word he stood up and went across the living room, familiar territory, to the door. He opened it. “Just leave me alone,” he repeated flatly, and went inside. After a moment the crying changed in tone and intensity, then died away to comforted abstract whimpering.