“It was so unreal to me when you were talking, Gevan,” she said. “It all sounded wild and mad. That business of gray eyes and blue eyes, and Niki being somebody else — I wondered if you were losing your mind. But... every minute it seems more real and true. I remember something. I think it fits.”
“In what way?”
“I told you the other night how much I hated her after you started to date her. I used to yearn for ugly, terrible things to happen to her. She seemed so... invulnerable. We used to talk about her. She was polite and friendly to all the other girls, but nobody could get an inch closer to her. She seemed to be laughing at all of us, somehow. There was a lot of gossip... on account of the way she got her job. She made us all feel inadequate. There was a strangeness about her we all sensed. She didn’t seem entirely real. One of the girls was from Cleveland too, and about the same age. She kept trying to pump Niki, to find out more about her, and we kept egging the girl on. Niki was polite and evasive. One day the girl cornered her, alone, in the second floor stock room, determined to pin Niki down. We never found out what actually happened. When the girl came back to her desk she acted frightened out of her wits. She was chalky and shaking, and she moved strangely, as if she’d been hurt somehow. In the middle of the afternoon she suddenly had hysterics and went home. Two days later she gave notice. She wouldn’t tell us what happened. She wouldn’t even talk about it. It made Niki seem more eerie than ever. When I found out you were going to marry her, I knew with all my heart that it was a dreadful mistake. I didn’t know why. I just knew it. It seems to fit, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I’m so glad you didn’t marry her, Gevan. I’m so glad you didn’t have that kind of relationship with her. She’s like... some kind of animal, different from all the rest of us.”
I thought of white quilted plastic, the black line of poplars watching us, the sliding scent of the sun oil, the narrow scabs on my back. The vividness of my total recall seemed as inexcusable at this time and place as if I had shouted an obscenity into the silence. Yet so complete was my reappraisal of the dark, compelling magic of Niki that I had the feeling of being convalescent. I had gone under a strange knife. A rotten place had been cleaned and drained. With proper care and caution, I could live a long life.
“I never knew her at all,” I said.
“I don’t think your brother did, either.”
“Would you sneer at an act of total cowardice, Perry? Excuse me, dammit, but that Perry name doesn’t set quite right. Joan fits so much better.”
“Joan is family. Perry is kind of a public name. It sounds better to me for you to call me Joan. What am I supposed to sneer at?”
“I’ve brought you to an old-timey necking spot, and now I think I’ll take you to a motel.”
“This is terribly sudden. I can’t imagine such a thing. What kind of a girl do you think I am? Pick a nice pretty motel, huh?”
“No joke. We’re out of town and we’ll keep going. I’m not the hero type. The conspiracy is too big and too tough and too ruthless. We’ll make some miles, and then you can phone your mother and tell some feeble lies, and then we’ll make more miles, and we’ll hole up, in two widely separated rooms, if you say so. In the morning we start making long-distance phone calls from wherever we are, some of them to people who will remember me and listen to me. We’ll come back after the Feds have the situation in hand.”
I was barely able to see her nod before she spoke. “I’ve always thought heroes would be very dull people, Gevan. I got over wanting one when I was eleven. If, in all your guesses, you’re only twenty per cent right, it is still a very good time to go hide. And afterward, Gevan, there is another thing you are going to do. I took a lot of orders from you in bygone days. Now you take one from me, sir. You haven’t been proud of yourself for a long time. You haven’t been pleased with yourself. You haven’t had any basic, important satisfactions. So I’m ordering you to go back to work where you belong, and do the job you were meant to do, and stop being a forlorn, dramatic, bored guy.”
I sat waiting for my own anger, annoyance and indignation. Enough people had been prodding me. But I thought of going back, and I felt a hollow fluttering of excitement and anticipation in my belly.
“You are a marvel, Miss Joan. As long as it’s an order, ma’am, I’ll obey it, ma’am.”
She laughed with her gladness. I reached on impulse and took hold of her wrist. I had wanted to pull her toward me, with some vague idea of sealing this vow with a kiss that would be light and quick and gay. Her laughter stopped. Her wrist was warm and fine and delicate. There was a tremulous resistance in her, an audible catch of her breath.
How fine, I thought. How very fine that it should be this way, so that I can be permitted a feeling of protective tenderness, rather than to have my slightest touch bring the woman surging and bulging against me, all blurred, gasping, softening, with blinded hungry gropings, digging at me with breasts and groin, usurping the aggressive function of the male, using me with a need so animal, so unselective, that were she to be interrupted on her dogged way to her completion, it would take her long moments to remember my name.
Joan knew who I was, every moment. She said my name after the first tentative kissing, made sweet by the shy-bold curling and shift of her lips, and again, with small and breathless laughter after kneeling in the seat, her palms flat against my cheeks to hold me for the rain of kisses in quick, prodigal, random diffusion, and again, with a note of wonder, after a long and bruising time, a bittersweet ferocity, an adult hunger.
I held her then, tightly, marveling at a sweet fit of her against me, so perfect as to seem habitual, like coming home, with the silk of her hair against the angle of my jaw, our fast hearts and breathing mingled. This closeness was not enough, and I thought that perhaps the sweet and complete coupling of our bodies — which would come in our good time at some other place — might also have this same flavor of not being the ultimate closeness for us, because this time, and forever, it was the celebration of the joining of the spirit in which we were involved. Our bodies would be good with each other. We could sense that. But they, no matter how hot and keen their pleasures, would be merely symbolizing the more valid union of the souls of Gevan and Joan, rather than performing an ancient act complete in itself.
I whispered to her, “You said the big crush ended. You said you got over it.”
“Of course it ended, dear. I just didn’t tell you what it turned into. Just hold me tight, like this, for a long, long time.”
I looked beyond her, through the car window. I saw the silhouette of a faceless man. As I lunged to trip the lock on the door on her side, the door behind me was ripped open and a hard arm clamped around my throat, dragging me out from behind the wheel as Joan screamed.
I tried to grab the wheel but my hand slipped. I went back and down, the concealed running board scraping against the small of my back, my shoulders thudding against wet grass. In the endless moment of the fall, I thought of my stupidity in making no effort to find out if we were followed, no attempt to see the car that had probably hung back, lights off, following the rented sedan. And I also thought of the truck that had come barreling down on the hill when I left Niki’s house. Mottling had told her I was coming. The penalty for stupidity was high. Too high, because Joan was in it too, and the Brady girl had talked before they killed her.
The fall released the pressure on my throat. I braced my feet against the side of the car and thrust myself over in a backward somersault, swinging my legs high as I came over. My right shoe thudded against something and I heard a gasp of pain. I landed on my hands and knees, facing the car. I swung and dived forward, arms spread wide. A knee glanced off my cheek, making my eyes water, but I grabbed one leg and drove ahead hard, like a linesman.