“Come in,” he said. “Make yourself at home.”
“Sure,” I said. I pulled a foot back and put it behind the edge of the small table beside the bed and shoved. It shot across the room and crashed into the kitchen table. An ashtray rolled, spilling butts, and the kerosene lamp hit the floor and shattered. Oil spilled down between the planks. “Sit down,” I said.
He looked at the mess. “Tough, huh?” He set the buckets of water on a bench by the door.
“Yes,” I said. “Tough.”
His eye drifted towards the shotgun.
“It’s not loaded,” I said.
“Well, what’ll they think of next?” He looked at me.
“What are we going to talk about? Not that I’m nosey, you understand—“
“Gloria Harper. You’ve been on her back a little over a year now—“
“And you came all the way out here to tell me to get off? Is that it?”
“I’m going to do better than that,” I said. “I’m going to help you off.”
I got up off the bed and started for him. He waited, not even putting his hands up. I walked in on him, watching the hands, and when they did move at last, the left feinting at my face, I turned sharply on my left-foot and took the knee against my thigh. Maybe he was expecting somebody from the Golden Gloves, I thought, swinging very low and hard into his belly and moving in with it at the end. He bent over, sucking for air and sick, and I put the glove in his face and twisted it. He groped for me with a left, and I hooked a right to his face which spilled him on to the edge of the kitchen table. The legs caved in on one end and he slid down it, getting mixed up with the plates and a bottle of syrup. He tried to get up, the wind roaring in his throat, and I dropped him again. It was five times before he stayed down. I was winded and my hands hurt, and sweat ran down my face like rain. I got him by the bib of the overalls and hauled him up against the slant of the table-top with my knee in his belly and bounced his head against it three times more for a sales talk and then let him slide down and roll around in the dishes. He was a mess to look at. I went over to the water buckets, fighting to get my breath, and poured water over the gloves to get the blood off, then took one of his shirts off the wall and dried them, and threw it on the floor. I poured the rest of the bucket of water in his face.
When I thought he could hear me, I squatted down beside him. “Now get this,” I said. “You can’t make trouble for her. But even if you could, there’s nothing you can do to me. I’ll still be here. And hell won’t be big enough to hold you. So if you want to go around the rest of your life singing to yourself and slobbering down the front of your shirt, go ahead and try it.”
I went out and got in the car and drove back to town. Maybe I’d sold him, and maybe I hadn’t. The only thing I knew for sure was that next time I’d never get a chance to unload the shotgun.
16
That next week was wonderful. We didn’t see anything of Sutton, and we were together nearly all the time. We had lunch together every day, and I spent a lot of time in the loan office under the pretext of familiarizing myself with the setup. When the other girl was gone we’d turn on to the phony notes, trying to get them organized and establish some sort of pattern for paying them off. She didn’t want to be married until the last one was paid.
“It isn’t just stubbornness, Harry,” she explained earnestly. “It has to be that way. You want me to quit work when we’re married, and we both know I can’t quit till all these are paid. They’re my debt, and I have to pay them.”
I had to admit she was right, in spite of my impatience.
We couldn’t let somebody else take charge of the books until they were in order. I thought of the twelve thousand dollars buried in that old barn, just sitting there, and wanted to go right out and dig it up and pay off the whole fifteen hundred dollars at once. It didn’t take much thought, however, to throw that out. It wouldn’t do. And it might be very dangerous. In the first place, how could I explain to her where I’d suddenly got hold of that much money? And worse than that, I couldn’t be absolutely sure the Sheriff had been lying when he’d said the bank had the serial numbers of it. It would be suicide to try to run the stuff right back through the same bank it’d come out of, and this soon afterwards. I’d just be asking for it. That money was going to stay there a long time, maybe for years, and when it went back into circulation it would be a long way from here. I’d have to think of something. But I didn’t worry about it; I had plenty of time.
At odd moments I did some digging back into sales records on the lot, and I could see that even if I couldn’t build it up I’d still clear five or six hundred dollars a month with the commissions and the salary he was paying me. And I was working on a number of ideas for whooping sales up if we could get the cars. There wasn’t too much live competition around here, even in the county seat, and with some advertising and good promotion to stir it up there was no reason we couldn’t nearly double the business.
The hardest part, of course, was going to be the waiting. We added it all up, and by pooling every nickel we’d make and could spare it would still take until sometime in November to get it all paid off. We wouldn’t have anything left to start with, but I’d have a good job and somehow we’d scrape up enough for at least a week’s honeymoon in Galveston.
Once or twice she got scared and despondent again, thinking of Sutton, but I was able to talk her out of it. She asked me what I’d done and I was as evasive about it as I could be without making her suspicious. I told her I’d had a talk with him and warned him, which was true as far as it went.
It wasn’t always so easy at night though, after I’d left her and was lying there in my room. We hadn’t seen anything of him, but how did I know we wouldn’t? Everything we had planned was based on the assumption that I’d scared him off and there wouldn’t be any more demands. So what if I was wrong? And there was always Dolores Harshaw. I didn’t know what she was going to do about it.
I think it was Tuesday night when it hit me. I was lying there in the dark going around with it for the thousandth time, trying to guess whether she’d meant it or not and what my chances would be if she pulled her alibi out from under me and dropped me back into that hellhole of questions, when suddenly I sat up in bed with the whole answer perfectly clear in my mind. She didn’t have me. I had her. She couldn’t do a thing.
I thought about it for a while, and then turned over and dropped off into an untroubled sleep for the first time in weeks. If she tried anything she was going to get the surprise of her life.
* * *
I went out to see Harshaw Friday night to give him a short rundown on how we’d been doing. He looked a little better. He was still weak and shaky, but the dirty gray color had cleared up and he appeared to be becoming reconciled to inactivity. He was sitting in the living-room reading “Lee’s Lieutenants” while she listened to some quiz show on the radio.
I made the business talk as brief as possible, not playing up the advertising ideas too much because I didn’t want to run the risk of starting an argument and getting him heated up. He grunted more or less approvingly at most of the details, and nodded once or twice. “Sounds all right,” he said. “I guess you’ll make out.”
“I think so,” I said. She had turned off the radio and was wandering restlessly around the room. I could see she was bored, and I wondered what she’d try next. But I wasn’t afraid of her any more.
“How are you getting along with Miss Harper?” he asked.
I grinned. “I remembered what you told me. We’re going to be married in November, so I’ll be able to mistreat her all I want.”