She sat there for a few minutes after he left, just staring off at nothing, and then she slowly gathered everything up and put it in the car. When she was out of sight down the road I walked over to the porch. The picture was lying face up in the sand. I picked it up. It looked fine except for the smear of red he had drawn across it from one corner to the other. He liked his little joke, all right.
One of these days somebody would probably kill him. I wondered who.
* * *
Monday evening while I was putting on a fresh shirt the landlady knocked on the door.
“Telephone, Mr. Madox.”
I went down the hall to the phone. “Hello. Madox,” I said.
“Harry,” she said, “why didn’t you call me?”
“You think I’m crazy?”
“I want to see you, Harry.”
“Look—“
“I miss you.”
I started to tell her to go to hell and then hang up, but I didn’t. I began to think about her. She could do that to you, even on the phone. Maybe it was because her voice matched the rest of her.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“At the drugstore. I thought I’d go to the movie, but again I may not. I’m sort of restless—you know how it is. So I might go for a ride.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe up the highway about five miles to where a road turns off to the right and goes over to an old sawmill. It’s not hard to find. Once you get on the road you can’t get off.”
I put the phone back on the cradle. She’d said it, all right. Once you got on the road you couldn’t get off.
I tried to eat some dinner, but it was straw and it choked me. I walked restlessly up the sidewalk, going nowhere. Sutton was in front of the pool hall with a handful of numbers from a tip board, reading them and throwing them on the sidewalk. He nodded and we looked at each other. I thought of what he had said to Gloria Harper. He liked his laughs so well, why not shag him one in the mouth and watch him laugh his teeth out? Why not mind his own business? He wasn’t shoving me around, was he? And I wasn’t Gloria Harper’s mother.
I got in the car. Why try to pretend I wasn’t going out there? Did I think I could kid myself? I found the road without any trouble. The moon wasn’t up yet, and it was very dark under the trees. The old sawmill was on the side of a wooded ravine a mile or so from the highway. I saw a dilapidated shed and a pile of sawdust in the headlights, but there was no other car. I cut the lights and sat there, waiting, but I was too restless to sit still very long and got out and walked around.
I heard the car coming then. It stopped under the trees and the lights went off. The ceiling light came on momentarily and I knew she had opened the door to get out. I walked over. I could see her very faintly, just the blur of her face and the blonde head, but she couldn’t see me at all.
“Where are you?” she asked.
I didn’t answer. I stepped closer and reached out and put my hands on her. She gasped, and turned, her arms reaching out, groping for me. I kissed her roughly and her arms tightened about my neck with an urgent wild strength in them. She twisted her face a little to one side and her mouth whispered against my cheek, “Harry, I just had to see you.”
She was partly right, anyway. She just had to see somebody.
* * *
We were in the car with moonlight spilling into the other side of the ravine. “Do you love me, Harry?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Well, that’s a fine answer. You might at least say you did.”
“Why should I?”
“I just thought it might sound better that way. It don’t make any difference, though, does it?”
“No.”
“I suppose you think I’m in love with you, don’t you?”
“And why would I?”
“Because I’m here. Well, let me tell you—“
“You don’t have to tell me. I know why you’re here. But you don’t think we’re going to get by with much of this, do you?”
“Why not?”
“And you’re the one who asked me if I’d lived in a small town.”
“It’s all right. He’s at a lodge meeting.”
“It’s dangerous as hell. You know that.”
“I notice you’re telling me that now. You didn’t say anything about it a couple of hours ago.”
“You didn’t expect me to think then, did you?”
She laughed. “How’s about another kiss, and to hell with the sermon.” She was a witch, all right. She leaned back against me with her head in my arms and her feet on the window, bare legs a faint gleam in the darkness.
“Why’d you marry him?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe I was just getting scared. I’d been married twice before and it didn’t work out, and I was trying to make a living out of a crumby little beauty shop and not getting any younger. I’d known him a long time. He used to come and see me when he was in Houston. It was a kind of a—arrangement, I guess you’d call it. And then, after his wife died—“ She paused for a moment, and then went on irritably. “Oh, hell, I don’t know. He just kept after me about it till I gave in. How’d I know it was such a dump?”
“Well, why do you stay?” I asked.
“What’re you kicking about? You seem to be doing all right.” She was rugged; there was no doubt of that.
“You think you’re going to get by with this forever?”
“Who the hell cares about forever? Forever’s when you’re dead.”
Yeah, I thought; forever’s when you’re dead all right, but you don’t have to rush it. She was as crazy as frozen dynamite. I wanted to ditch her, and I knew that as long as I was around this town I never could, unless she got mad enough to ditch me. I’d always come back. In the only field of activity she cared anything about, she was terrific.
I didn’t see her for a couple of days, and then on Thursday night I was too busy to think about her. It was the cloudy night I’d been waiting for.
7
I went to the movie and sat through a double feature without seeing it, feeling the tension beginning. When I came out at 11:30 it was still overcast, with thunder growling far off in the west. I got in the car and drove a long way down the highway, beyond the river, killing time which died too slowly. It was a little after one when I came back to town, the streets deserted now and the only lights the all-night cafe and a filling station on the other end of Main. I circled through back streets and stopped under some trees by a vacant lot a block away from the Taylor building.
I cut the ignition and lights and sat there in the car for ten minutes. Nothing moved. The one-man police force would be drinking coffee and kidding the waitress under the fluorescent lights three blocks away. There was no use waiting any longer. This was as nearly perfect as it would ever be. I got out and opened the trunk. Everything I’d need was in the cardboard box except the flashlight I’d bought, and I dropped that in my pocket.
A lone drop of rain splashed wetly in my face. It was so dark I could see only the faintly blacker loom of the trees against the sky. Then I could just made out the square shape of the building across the vacant lot. I was at the rear of it now. Suppose someone had discovered the unlocked window and fastened it again? Well, suppose they had? I couldn’t help it now. I came around the corner and felt for the sash.
It slid upwards. Nobody had ever noticed it. I reached the box through and set it on the floor of the washroom, and then climbed in myself and pulled the window down. After feeling my way out of the little room I closed the door and sighed with relief. So far, so good, I thought.
I went up the stairs. It was hard to breathe in the hot, dead air up here under the roof. My footsteps echoed through the building as I picked my way through disordered piles of rubbish.