Harry cleared his throat, turned pink again, and produced a legal-looking document. Benton recognized it at once — another offer to buy. “No!” he said sharply, reflexively.
“Look at it!” Moss pleaded. “One hundred and fifty thousand bucks, Tom!”
Twenty-five thousand higher than the last offer three months ago, and a lot of money. But it roused only Benton’s curiosity. He said, frowning, “Who are these people, Harry?”
“Your tenants. Same as the last two times.”
“Yes, but who are they, why do they want it?”
“Read it, Tom. The name is McCord. They just like the place, that’s all.”
“Take me out there,” Benton said abruptly. “I want to pick up my truck.” His Ford half-ton, up on blocks, had been left in one of the sheds on the place.
But the request seemed to unnerve Moss. He nearly gasped, “I can’t, I got these calls coming in today.” He fought for more breath. “Tom — listen — I’ll rebate half the commission — another forty-five hundred bucks.”
“Keep your commission, Harry. Just give me a ride out to the place. I want to pick up my truck.”
“Tom — all of it, the whole hundred and fifty grand — it’s yours!”
“No! How come you’re so pushy about it?”
“It’s in your best interest.”
“But not yours, huh? C’mon, Harry — you can be back here in twenty minutes.”
In the still-cool morning air Harry’s round cherubic face glistened with sweat. His fingers drummed the desktop. He wanted a drink desperately and his eyes glanced at the drawer where he kept a bottle. He would rather cut a wrist than take Tom out there, but — they’d told him to, hadn’t they? He watched his front door open and his secretary walk in, late as usual, and he sighed and got to his feet. “Yeah, O.K.,” he said, as though condemned.
Standing in front of his house with a five-gallon can of gas picked up at the Texaco station on the way out, Benton felt a cataract of rage break free and nearly buckle his knees. He’d never known such anger, such grief, not even with Sheila dead in his arms. The house, a plain white-painted clapboard bungalow, looked as though, somehow, it had been lifted up, dipped in filth, and put back down again. Sheila’s beautiful yard was dead — trampled dead, laid waste with evil intent. Nothing lived there any more. Benton, his ears ringing with anger, barely heard Moss’s four-door Lincoln tool rapidly away down the gravel drive.
The slats of the picket fence around the patch of baked front lawn were either askew, broken, or missing, and the gate was hanging on a single hinge. Benton shook himself and blinked his eyes clear enough to stalk stiffly up the walk to the front door and beat hard on the frame of the screen, ripped out where some hand had reached through to undo the hook. His rage was total, black, his eyes dancing with pressure spots as the door edged open and a rail-thin woman peered at him from the inner gloom, a tousle-headed dark-eyed kid clinging to her waist. The word “slattern” leaped into his mind for the first time in his life and he let his rage gather around it like hot magnetized particles of steel. Two other thoughts entered his mind: that he would kill Harry Moss, and that he d better register quickly at the sheriff s office, as they’d told him to do. He had the innocent man’s right to unlimited indignation, but the parolee’s need to behave.
“Mrs. McCord?” he managed to say, and the lank-haired slattern’s head bobbed. A low-keyed acidic stench reached his nose from the house. “I’m Tom Benton. I’ve come to pick up my truck.”
“Go ahead,” she said and the door began to close. “They thought you would.”
He turned, rigid, emotionally back in Folsom, his eyes level and unfocused as he walked by rote around the house to the complex of buildings out back, seeing, but screening from his mind, the clutter, the savage unkemptness of the place. He aimed for the shed, the leftmost building.
One of the codicils of the lease provided for the truck, padlocked in the shed, but his mind, turned sullen and paranoid, knew before he saw the broken hasp where the padlock had hung that that would mean nothing to these people. The two plank doors were swinging loosely ajar. He threw them wide and was surprised more than pleased to see the truck was still there. But it wasn’t on blocks, it was on its tires, and that leavened the surprise. The McCords were trash, as lawless as they were unclean. He would absolutely kill Harry Moss; this was like dumping garbage on Sheila’s grave.
He circled the truck in the gloom of the windowless shed, fearful of damage. But it hadn’t been unmarked when he’d locked it up here. In the mountain country he and Sheila used to explore, a truck got used hard. The driver’s-side fender had had a bad dent, and still had, but no more than that. And the passenger side, scraped its whole length once against a ponderosa’s platelike bark, had sustained no further damage that he could see. But he was thinking about Moss — what he would like to do to Moss, but couldn’t.
“Hello,” a voice said, and Benton saw the silhouette of a man standing in the sun-bright door. “I’m Ben McCord.”
Benton walked up to him, a firm leash on his anger now; he was a parolee, his freedom conditional. But there was a harsh edge to his voice when he said, “How come this truck’s been used? The lease—”
“Well, hell, Mr. Benton, we couldn’ta put more’n twenty-thirty miles on er. Ours busted down last week and we needed it to make a couple trips to town.” He gestured at the can of gas still clutched in Benton’s hand. “You won’t need that,” he said. “She’s got maybe a half a tank.”
“You hot-wired it.”
“Well, hell, Mr. Benton, there ain’t nothin’ to that.”
“Except it’s against the law.” Benton swung the gas can up to the bed of the truck, braced it against the tailgate, and turned back to McCord. He was young, twenty-one, twenty-two, probably the slattern’s son. A wispy blond moustache grew patchily on his upper lip and crescents of blackheads traced the nares of his nose in the bright sunlight. He was wearing a stained cowboy hat, a short denim jacket unbuttoned over a flat, tanned chest and belly, blue jeans, and oil-black, flat-heeled boots. And the family smell.
Benton had much more to say to him — about damages done and trashy ways of life in general — but he kept his mouth shut. He couldn’t afford to feed his languishing pride, and, besides, what good would it do? He got in the truck, started it, and backed out of the shed with a teenager’s flourish. When he wheeled around and aimed for the road, McCord bent over and picked up a rock and jounced it a couple times in his hand, grinning.
Benton stopped first at Moss’s office to offload his rage. But of course Harry wasn’t there, and his girl, not unexpectedly, said she didn’t know when he’d be back. Harry was in hiding.
But Benton had himself under better control now. He was profoundly frightened of precipitating anything that might land him back in the can, and for the next couple of years he’d have to be as inoffensive as a nun. From Harry’s he went to the sheriff’s substation and dutifully registered as a parolee; then he went back to the motel and took a long, needle-sharp shower, letting it almost hurt. Then he put on fresh clothes. It was eleven-thirty and, surprisingly, he was hungry.
He decided to walk the half-dozen blocks to the ABC Cafe, where Bessie worked, and on the way, his mind more orderly now, he wondered how come the Ford, a congenital slow-starter, had fired up that morning on the first turn of the key. It never did that unless it was warm. And then he wondered if what he’d seen tucked under Ben McCord’s belt when he’d bent over to pick up the rock was a gun. He shook the thought away; they’d told him at Folsom that he’d suffer all kinds of delusions for a while, large and small.