The old man sitting at the table said, “You was going to be in for twenty years, Roy. She had her life to live.”
“Yeah, I was inside and she was outside,” Kester said bitterly. He shook a cigarette from the pack and turned back to me. “What’s your line of work?”
“I’m a tax collector for the state.”
“Plenty of graft, eh?”
“No,” I said.
He laughed. “What d’you know, Pop, Lucy went out and got herself an honest working stiff.”
“She was always a good girl,” the old man said. And he put his arms on the table and his head on his arms and seemed to sleep.
Roy Kester went to the window where he stood looking out at the road. The stillness was back — the hot, cloying stillness in which I could hardly breathe. We waited.
Our jalopy could be heard approaching from quite a way off, its worn springs protesting against the rutted road. I listened to it come closer and stop. Kester stirred at the window and the old man lifted his head from his arms.
The car door slammed. Then there were her steps on the porch, barely audible because she wore rubber-soled sandals. Then she was coming through the screen door, and all three of us were turned to her.
Perhaps she said something, uttered some kind of sound far back in her throat. Her lips moved, but the slamming of the screen door behind her was louder than anything else. She had stopped just inside the doorway, and she stood there trim and lovely with a bag of groceries in her arm.
“Hello, Lucy,” the old man said.
She drew in her breath, and that made her breasts swell at the low, square neck of her gingham dress. And Kester’s eyes were all over her — the eyes of a man six years without a woman and six years without this woman who had once belonged to him.
“Baby,” he said, “you look as luscious as ever.”
She didn’t as much as glance at him. She moved to the table and put the groceries down and said, “Pop, did you have to come here?”
The old man lifted a hand and let it drop limply. “You hear what happened, Lucy?”
“I read it in the paper in town. You and Roy broke out of jail last night.”
“You got the paper with you?” Kester asked.
“I didn’t bring it home.” She spoke to the old man. “What do you want from us?”
“Please!” the old man said. “We got to lay low a couple days till the heat dies down a bit. Then we’ll go on. Ain’t that all we want, Roy, a place to stay a couple days?”
“Yeah,” Kester grunted, and he never stopped looking at her.
“Roy’s got a fine hideout,” the old man went on. “There’ll be nothing to worry about when we get there. Dough waiting for us too. But we got to get through this part of the country. The hideout is—”
Kester said, “Shut up, Pop.”
The old man nodded tiredly and lit another of my cigarettes.
“Neal, what happened to your face?” For the first time since her return Lucy spoke to me. She bent over my chair, touched the swelling on my left cheek. “What did he do to you?”
“It’s nothing,” I muttered.
Kester drawled, “He tried to pull a fast one. I had to learn him.” He tugged his gun out of the waistband. “Next wrong move he makes, or if you make one, he gets a slug in the belly. Understand?”
She straightened, trembling, beside my chair. She opened her mouth and then closed it without saying whatever she had intended to say to him. Her hand was on my shoulders and I could feel her fingers constrict.
“So you’re stuck with us, baby,” Kester said cheerfully. “Now how’s about something to eat? Pop and me ain’t had a bite since morning.”
Without a word she took her hand from my shoulder and picked up the groceries from the table and started toward the kitchen. Kester stared after the undulation of her hips, and I could sense the hunger in him that was not a hunger for food.
From my chair at the living room window I saw Roy Kester do something to the jalopy. He had the hood up; evidently he was disconnecting a wire. Pop was napping on the sofa, snoring with his mouth open, and Lucy was in the kitchen preparing supper.
Kester came through the screen door carrying a big chunk of ice. We had no deliveries of anything here, so whenever Lucy went marketing she picked up a piece at the icehouse in town. Up to now there had been a problem bringing it in from the car to the icebox because with my broken ankle I was absolutely no help to her. Now she had a man in the house to do the heavy carrying.
I heard her say, “Thank you, Roy.”
After a few minutes he came out to the living room with dishes and silverware and set the table for four. She was giving him the chores that I would be doing if I were able to get around — and that no doubt he had done when he had been her husband. Now, to some small extent and for a short time, he was back in the routine.
I knew very little about him, not even the crime or crimes for which he had been sent to jail for twenty years. She almost never talked about him, or about her own past, as if with her marriage to me she was starting a completely new life. I had never, in fact, met any of her family. As far as I could tell, she’d been pretty much alone in the world when she’d met me.
Kester shook the old man awake. “Soup’s on,” he called out cheerfully.
Lucy brought me my crutches and I hobbled to the table.
The meal was eaten pretty much in silence. The two escaped convicts were too busy wolfing down food, and Lucy and I had nothing to say.
Afterward Kester and Pop played gin rummy. I was back in the armchair, not reading as I ordinarily would have, just sitting there. Lucy was in the kitchen washing the dishes. The room darkened. Kester fetched the kerosene lamp from the fireplace mantle and set it on the table and lit it and the game went on.
Suddenly Kester’s head snapped up from his cards and that look was in his eyes, and I knew she was in the room. He followed the movements of her body to the tiny square hall that led to the two bedrooms.
A few minutes later she was back, telling them that she had made up the bed for them in the other room. “It’s a double bed,” she said. “You’ll have to sleep together.”
Kester grinned at her. “It ain’t Pop I’m hankering to share it with.” She looked at him and through him. She said tonelessly, “Neal, I’m tired. Let’s go to bed.” Then she turned and was gone.
I hobbled after her. When I entered our room, she was lighting the lamp. There were no keys to any of the doors in the bungalow, so I couldn’t lock this one. All I could do was close it. I sat down on the bed and watched her pull her dress over her head.
I said, “How did he know you were staying here?”
Her fingers paused at the snaps of her brassiere. She took it off and hung it over the back of the chair before answering. “I’ve no idea.”
“You must have kept in touch with him,” I said. “Written him.”
“No.”
She put on the peach nylon nightgown I had given her for her birthday. It had practically no bodice and was close to transparent. She looked very lovely in it.
“Then how did he find out?” I persisted.
“He must have heard somewhere.”
“From whom?”
“I suppose we have mutual acquaintances,” she said.
I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t say it. Things were bad enough without starting an argument at this time.
She was pulling off my sock when the door flew open and Roy Kester came in.
The bedroom was small, as were all the rooms in the bungalow, and the soft kerosene light reached his face. His mouth hung slackly open as he stared down at her. Kneeling and bent forward, her breasts showed over the nightgown, and his face bore the greediness of a man who had been a long time hungry.
“All the time I dreamed about you,” he whispered.