Ellison, in the way of barkeeps sensing trouble, was industriously wiping a clean deck with a damp rag. Benton, without thought, took it from him and wrapped it around his left fist. In high school he’d had one bad fistfight and the knuckles of his left hand — his best punching hand — had hurt for weeks after. It was a simple act of preparatory defense, he claimed later in court, and did not constitute, as the D.A. tried to contend, premeditation. But that night the rag felt cold and hard around his fist and some atavistic observer in his mind was pleased. It was a weapon.
The big young man touched Benton firmly on the shoulder — that was generally agreed upon at the trial — and suggested he get the hell out of the place while he was still mobile.
“Why should I?” Benton asked.
“Because you’ve threatened Mr. Carswell — everybody knows that.”
“I have not threatened Mr. Carswell. And what everybody knows is that Mr. Carswell forced my wife’s car off the road and caused her death.”
“There’s no proof of that.”
“What everybody knows need not be proved. The guilty flee where no man pursueth, kid — and hire guards against no threat.”
“Get out or I’ll throw you out,” the big young man said flatly, and thus made it a matter of pride. Plus something else that Benton would admit only to himself — an opportunity to rid his heart of rage.
“No,” Benton said and swiveled to his feet to face the young man. It didn’t come out in the testimony later that he looked almost happy.
But outside on the street this first morning of his freedom, he wasn’t happy and showed it. He had a prison pallor of face, and still something of a prison pallor of mind. He had killed the big young man with his left-hand weapon, and there was no joy in that. He had not wanted that night, or at any time ever, to kill Carswell, or anyone else, but he couldn’t prove that, of course. He’d wanted only that justice be served, that the illegal death of his wife would be balanced by a legal retribution.
The rage in his heart that night he knew he could contain — as he had for three weeks — and feather out over time. It is everybody’s problem and everybody’s duty to contain the rage that lives in his heart. But there was no doubt in his mind that Carswell was guilty, an opinion shared by most of the town. By ten o’clock of the day after Sheila’s death Carswell had reported his big canary-yellow Cadillac stolen. It was never found, but a sheriff’s investigator had determined that a Cadillac of the same vintage and color had had a front fender replaced the next afternoon in a Sacramento garage, been painted blue, and disappeared. The garage had a reputation for handling such problems quickly.
At the coroner’s inquest, Hampton Carswell did admit to having spent some time that night at Hildy’s Place and to having had one or two drinks there. But he claimed cold sobriety as he drove home over the winding, ill-kept, rocky road that ran past Benton s hundred-acre ranch and was the single link between Hildy’s after-hours house of all joys and civilization. Beyond Hildy’s the wilderness was pristine and almost impenetrable. Sheila had been coming home alone from a late drive-in-theater movie at about the same time, but Carswell claimed he saw no one on the six-mile run to town. The whole right side of Sheila’s dark-green Toyota was streaked with canary-yellow paint. Benton had found it at two o’clock that morning at the bottom of the steep, stony arroyo alongside the road. His wife had not died instantly.
From the safety of his table at Ellison’s that night, Carswell had hollered, “O.K., kid, lay the bastard out!” The big young man had drawn back a brick-sized fist and had torqued his upper body halfway around to the right, leaving his chin hanging midair. Benton, well-set, flat-footed, had arced his wrapped left hand up to meet it square and the big man had stumbled backward two paces and fallen down dead. Benton knew it at once. With his arm and shoulder still ringing from the impact, he jumped forward and fell to his knees beside the man’s head, then looked up at Ellison and told him to call an ambulance.
Then there was the memory of Carswell’s back, made broad by a thick slab of fat, edging down the hall to the rear exit. He had the shamble of a primate as he moved, the forward lurch of something primeval and ill-formed. He had killed Benton’s wife; and between the two of them they had killed this big young man. In Folsom, that fixed image of Carswell’s flight became for Benton a symbol of all that still links us with our animal past; and when he thought about it that morning he shuddered in the cool quiet air and turned away, partly away from himself.
At eight o’clock the town was coming alive and Benton ducked into the ABC Cafe, sat down at a table, and ordered coffee and a couple of doughnuts. He didn’t particularly want to meet any of his old friends out on the street just yet. The waitress greeted him by name, and he looked up sharply and said, in instant pleased recognition, “Well, Bessie Wright! Hello, Bessie!”
Bessie’s smile blossomed. They’d known each other since high school. She said, “It’s good to see you back.”
“It’s good to be back, Bessie.”
She put her hand on his arm, her face sobered. “Tom, almost nobody around here believes you were guilty.”
“Just the jury.” Benton smiled ruefully. “But I had a fool for a lawyer.”
“That’s what people said. They said that if you hadn’t defended yourself you’d have gotten off.”
“I didn’t think people were all that interested, Bessie.”
“They are. Some are.”
“Did anybody know I’d be back today?”
“I did. Charley Hoskins told me.” Charley was Bessie’s brother-in-law, a deputy sheriff.
“Yes, he’d know, wouldn’t he.”
Bessie went back to her duties and Benton ate his doughnuts and drank his coffee with some pleasure. He’d always liked Bessie and her husband Jack. He and Jack had fished together a lot. It was good to be back, and it would get better now.
At eight-thirty he got up, waved to Bessie, went out, and walked briskly across the street to Harry Moss’s real-estate office, where he helped Harry open his front door for the day. He said, “Hello, Harry,” and Moss’s sleek round face darkened as though caught in some sinful act. But Harry had always been a nervous man, and blushed easily. “Well, Tom — Tom!” he spluttered, but extended no hand.
Inside at his desk, still pink-faced, he showed Benton a folder of records on the ranch — rent and tax receipts, bank-deposit slips, and so forth. Before Benton went off to jail, Harry had urged him to lease the property and it seemed then — and still did — a sensible idea. Not only would it produce useful revenue, Harry had urged, but an empty house deteriorates faster than a lived-in one.
But Harry hadn’t left it at that. Twice during Benton’s sentence he’d appeared at Folsom on visitors’ day with an offer to buy the place, the second offer substantially higher than the first. But Benton had turned both offers down flat. He couldn’t imagine the amount of money it would take to pry him loose from where his heart would always reside. He still couldn’t.
The term of the first two leases Benton had agreed to was one year each. On the third he’d agreed to six months only because he was confident of parole toward the end of that period. And that had happened — twenty-eight days, in fact, before the end of the lease. Now twenty-seven. Tomorrow it would be twenty-six.