And suddenly it was all clarified by the thin, faint, weary sound of Vivian’s voice. I could not hear the words. It was utter hopelessness. I turned my head slowly and looked up at the side of the house. Even with the irritating double vision I could see what the situation was. Sliding glass bedroom doors were open. The screening was not eighteen inches from my face, and the terrazzo floor level perhaps eight inches above ground level. In a faint illumination through a half-open door to the hallway, I could see the bottom corner of a bed, possibly twelve inches from the other side of the screen.
My impulse was to scramble away like a crippled bug before he looked out and saw me. Realization of the situation was like smelling salts, pushing the mists out of my mind, bringing me from stubborn dreamy labor of escape up to a vividness of alarm, awareness of life. At the edge of panic I heard, distinctly, a rustle, slow shift of weight, sigh, whispery sound of flesh stroked. And if I could hear them so distinctly, it was only wild luck he had not heard my labored squirming.
“Now why’d I want to go away, pretty pussycat?” he asked in mock astonishment. “What for I’d do that when we ain’t even half finished off?”
Again her begging, toneless plaint, her tired whining.
“Pore little dead pussycat, thinks she’s all wore down. Ol‘ Boo, he knows better. Such a sweet piece you are now. And you do so fine, so real fine.”
I heard an aimless shifting, rustling, small thud of elbow against wall or headboard, a sudden huff of exhalation, a silence. Then he said, in the voice people use to play games with small children. “What’s this! And this here? How in the worl‘ can this be a-happenin to a pore dead pussycat? It beats all!”
There was a small thrashing, a silence, a whine, another silence.
In a voice suddenly tightened and gritty with effort, he said, “Now how this for you?”
There was a scampering rustle, a loud whimper, a restraining clap of hand onto flesh. And a silence longer than before.
“AAAAAAA,” she said. And again. “AAAAAAA.” It was not a sound of pain or of pleasure, of fright, of want, or of denial. It was simply the sound of sensation, purified, dehumanized, so vivid that I could visualize her head thrown back, eyes wide blind staring, mouth wide and crooked.
And the random and meaningless sounds of motion began a cyclic repetition, steadying into a slow heavy beat.
Across that beat, in a rhythmic counterpoint, she cried “OGodOGodOGod!” in a voice of that same clarity and formality and impersonality I had heard her use to call Love and Ad and Game and Let.
“Stay with it,” he gasped.
And, released from my unwilling voyeurism by the sounds of them, I went hunching and scrabbling along, turning away from the house, heading out across the open yard, aching to get out of earshot of what they had built to, away from that furnace-gasping, whumpety-rumpety, plunging, wall-banging, flesh-clapping prolonged crescendo of the pre-wearied flesh, crawling and hitching, weeping inwardly sick weak tears for the plundered wife, wondering how in God’s name I’d ever had the benign stupidity to formulate the jackass theory that the sounds of love could never be sickening. This was as pretty as the raw sound of a throat being cut. Or the sound of the great caged carnivore at feeding time.
The hurt on the dead side was beyond pins and needles. Though the surface felt numbed, each pressure brought a dead aching pain, as though I had been burned. I felt as if each grunt of effort was tearing the inner lining of my throat. Finally, reaching, I stubbed my outstretched fingers against the fence. I hitched closer to it, reached up and got my hand around the top edge of it. I rested there, breathing hard. Distance had faded the sounds of them, losing those sounds in bug shrilling, frond clatter, mockingbirds, a dog barking two streets away. The little fence was improbably high. I had an arm ten feet long, thin as a pencil reaching up and up to take a weak grasp on the roof-edge of a building, and any idea I could hoist myself up and over was absurdly optimistic. From the mortgaged house came the finishing cry of the tennis player, a tearing hypersonic howl like a gun-shot coyote. Her eyes were a very dark blue, and with sun-coin on the tawny forearm, she had closed her eyes and shuddered at the thought of any Waxwell touch. I borrowed from her cry the energy of desperation, pulled myself up and up, hooked my chin over the bruising wood, and got just enough response from the dead arm to swing it up and over, fence edge biting into armpit. I writhed and pushed and worked, hung there with the edge across my belly, reached and found a tough curl of root, pulled, tumbled, rolled onto my back on the slight slope beyond the fence.
So die right here, McGee. Cheat the bastard out of that much. But maybe, with a light, he can follow you. Torn and flattened grass. Wetness that could mean you leave blood. Maybe it’s as obvious as the sheen a snail leaves on a sidewalk. And Boo would act with the same jolly and intensely personal manner, giving death the same intimacy as assault. Now what’s ol‘ Boo found hisself here? MY my, my -
I tried the dead arm and it came up slowly, as remote from me as those coin games where you look through glass and work the claw to pick prizes out of the bin of candy. It steadied, outlined against the double images of the stars. I put the good hand up and took hold of it. No feeling in the skin, like taking a stranger’s hand. But when I squeezed it a bone ached announcing identity.
So scrabble on, this time getting a partial use of it, a slight helpful leverage of elbow. Then, when, next I rested, I heard a clumsy thrashing and stumbling coming toward. me. I felt more irritation than alarm. A damn fool way to go busting and blundering through the night. It came on and was going to pass me, ten feet away, and I saw it, the shape and posture of the doubled silhouette familiar.
“Arrar,” I said in a voice I’d never heard before. It stopped him. There was something loose and sloppy and wrong about the right side of my mouth. I firmed it up with effort. “Arthur.”
“Trav?” he said in a nervous whisper. “Is that you?”
“No. It’s just one of us gophers.”
He felt his way to me. “I… I thought you were dead.”
“You… could be right. Gemme outa here!”
He couldn’t carry me. It was not the kind of terrain to drag people across. We got me up, with fumbling clumsiness, dead arm across his shoulders, his left arm around my waist, dead leg dangling and thumping along between us like a sack of putty. It was damned high up there. Like standing on the edge of a roof. And he kept coming close to losing me when we’d get off balance. He would brace and heave and I would manage a little hop on the good leg. Several weeks later, we came upon the car. During the final fifty feet I had been able to swing the dead leg forward, sense the ground under it, lock the knee and lurch forward on it. He fumbled me into the passenger side of the front seat. I slumped, resting my head on the seat back. He went around and opened the door and got halfway in and stopped. The courtesy light shone down on me. I rolled my head and looked at him. The double image slowly merged into one and then separated again. Double or single, he wore a look of horror.
“My God!” he said in a thin high voice. “My God!”
“Get in and close the door. He shot me in the head.” I had to speak slowly to make the right half of my mouth behave. “It isn’t supposed to make it pretty.”
He piled in, anxiety making him breathe hard, fumbling with the, ignition, saying, “I got to get you to a doctor… a… doctor…”
“Hold it. Got to think.”
“But…”
“Hold it! How much time’s gone by?”
“Since you… It’s quarter of two.”
“Took you long enough.”
“Trav, please try to understand. I… I went after you a long time ago, when you didn’t come back. I sneaked over there, like you said. I got into the side yard, behind a tree, looking at the house. I couldn’t hear anything. I didn’t know what to do. And all of a sudden he came around the side of the house, in sort of a springy little trot, grunting with effort and he… he had you over his shoulder. He passed the light from a window. Your… arms and head were dangling and bouncing all loose and dead. And… he trotted right to the car and stopped short and gave a heave and you… fell into the car, in back. He didn’t open a door or anything. You made such… such a thud, such a dead thud. He stood there for a little while and I heard him humming to himself. He opened the trunk and got a blanket or something out of there and leaned into the car, apparently covering you up. Then he went back into the house. Lights started going out. I heard a woman sobbing like her heart was breaking. And I… couldn’t make myself look at you. I crept away. Please understand. I got far enough to run, and ran back to the car, and started up to Palm City to get Chookie like you said. I went very fast, and then I went slower and slower. I pulled off the road. I wanted to come back. I tried. I couldn’t. Then I went all the way to the marina, but I stopped outside the gates. I’d have to tell her what happened. I’d say it was the only thing I could have done. But it wasn’t. She’d know that. I couldn’t face her. I couldn’t come back. I wanted to just run away. I turned around and came back, and it took me a long time to make myself get out of the car and… come looking for you. The only way I could do it was telling myself he was gone, he’d driven away with you. Trav… is he gone?”