She came out of the water and sat on the beach beside me after I had managed to fumble into my swim suit. She talked quietly for a long time. I guess I was too foggy to figure out exactly what she was saying. At least I was for several days. Then it was too late.
After a while, she got back in the water. She dove in with a flat racing dive through the surf and swam straight out. A long ways, maybe four hundred yards before she turned over on her back. I could barely see her bobbing with the ground swell. I waved and settled down to force my poisoned brain to think.
I never did hear what she called. I just heard her voice and looked out. She had raised her head out of the water and was calling. From the sound of her voice I knew she was in trouble.
I started swimming too soon. I should have waded as far as I could, but it seemed too slow. So I started swimming as fast as I could. By the time I got to her I was sick with fatigue and biting for air.
Her face was warped with pain and she was spitting water. She managed to croak, “Cramp...”
I got my hip under her and hooked an arm over her shoulder. For a while her head rode well out of the water, but I was too tired. I slowed and she kept pulling me under water. My arms ached and burned and my fingers felt so numb I could no longer tell whether I had a grip on her.
Finally, I had to stop. And I had to let go of her to get turned in the water. She went straight under. I grappled for her and pulled her up again and, in turn, submerged myself. Then I managed to hold us both up for a few quick breaths. When I got my other hip under her and reached across her shoulder, I knew it was too late. I knew she was dead. Where her breast touched my arm, its springy roundness had turned to slack flesh. Still I started out with her. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t care. It just seemed important to get her to shore.
We still had another hundred yards to go when we both went under. Thought was impossible. I did the only thing I could. I let her go. Somewhere in my oxygen-starved brain was the idea that I would dive for her as soon as I rested.
I tried it a couple of times before I realized that one more and I wouldn’t be able to make it to shore myself. So I left her and slowly sidestroked until I could feel sand under my feet. I lay with my head on the beach for thirty minutes before I could manage to get to my feet.
Divers with Scuba gear worked two days searching for the body before they gave up. The tides had taken her out.
The event worked a transformation on Bet. She sobered up and had to fight hard to keep from showing her jubilation when people were around. Her pride in me was so boundless I never told her how it happened. I just let her think what she wanted. She showed her happiness by smothering me, almost literally, with affection.
For a while things looked indescribably good. Up to where the insurance refused to pay until Louise was declared officially dead. The process takes seven years.
We managed to make it work partly for us. Louise’s income was put in trust just in case we had a child before the seven years was up. Bet was sweet about it.
“At least we have seven years to try for a child and no Louise around to spoil it,” she said.
Then her morale ran out. She started drinking. I let her, as much as she wanted. It became a standard joke for Bet to go to a party and be sick on the rug.
I got into the habit of taking her home and going back to the party. With my troubles I needed all the fun I could get. That’s what I told everyone, amid gales of laughter and assorted evil snickers.
It made it work out easy. During a party one night I took her home after being sure she had drunk enough to be thoroughly unconscious. I lugged her into the dry pool and carefully picked the place under the board. I smacked her head, once, very hard, on the bottom of the pool and drug her half way to the shallow end. I started the water back into the pool and returned to the party. At the time of death, from drowning after a swimming pool accident, I was at a party thirty miles away in the valley.
When I got home that night, I carefully chlorinated and neutralized the pool. I took a chilly swim to stir it up. Then I sprinkled half a pail of dust over the water. By morning, it looked like the water hadn’t been changed in a month.
The newspapers ate it up. An authentic irony, a double tragedy. Both women in my home dead from drowning. I played along and had the pool filled in. For one thing it wasn’t the same without Louise to swim with.
It had been easy. Ridiculously simple. Louise had been right that afternoon on the beach. It was easy. Louise had known that even if she hadn’t figured out just how to do it. That had been my own invention. And I’m not so bad off. By the time I add Louise’s insurance to Bet’s I’ll have a nice income. It could have been a lot better. But, with Bet’s shape, how could anyone tell she was three months pregnant?
City Cop
by Jack Belck
“A girl named Tillie Miles was found beaten to death and criminally... hell, raped... in her father’s barn.”
He checked his watch. Ten a.m. It would be after noon before he arrived, got out of his suit, and started to breath fresh air again. Half the weekend shot already. Damn.
Damn them anyhow, complaining about the way he did his work. Always complaining, but that didn’t stop them from shoving a sixty or seventy hour week down his throat. Pushed for an excuse, they probably would have mumbled something about a critical shortage of manpower in the department and needing every man they could get, even a detective sergeant who was too quick to shoot, too quick to use his fists, too quick to bully witnesses and threaten suspects.
He slowed for one of many sharp corners on the back road, driving from habit while he thought. The cabin was his one escape from people. The precinct captain had said he needed rest, but he didn’t understand that Martin’s homemade shack in the woods supplied him with all the rest he needed. Each month for two days, or one and a half if he was unlucky like this time, he could get away and let off steam by just cooping himself on his two acres with only a bag of groceries, a portable phonograph, and a bottle for company.
He knew that he could get to the cabin faster by going through town, but the second grade, tarred road he was on served as a silent insult to the townsfolk. He was bypassing them, detouring around them, so the nosey ones wouldn’t see his five-year-old car every time he came up for a weekend and say, “Just seen Martin, the city cop, go by.”
The road was bordered by brushy fields and an occasional rundown house that still managed to stand erect long after farming had ceased to be profitable, if it ever was, in this neck of the woods.
He lit another cigarette and slowed the car as it approached a low-lying white house on the left, its front yard littered with rusting derelict machinery and scavenged cars. Across from the house was an odd-angled, leaning and weatherbeaten barn to which was fastened a lazy fenced corral.
The horses were there as usual, and so was the girl. He could see her sitting on the fence when he was still a hundred yards off. His practised eye told him she wasn’t wearing a bra under her faded man’s shirt, and there wasn’t room for anything more inside her blue denims either.
She didn’t turn as he drove past, showing the back of her head with its long black hair.
Horses, Martin mused to himself. Horses! She was about the closest thing to a real, live human being he had seen around these parts, and all she cared about was horses.
Some day the right kind of man would come along, and the horses would go and starve.