“S’okay,” she shrugged, sleepily.
“You want one?” I said, offering her a Lifesaver. “They’re lime.”
“N’thanks,” she said, smiling crookedly. “G’night.” She rolled back over on her stomach, and the sheet slid down and left her back bare; she was already asleep again.
I wanted to stroke her back. Bend over and kiss the small of it, run my hand over the rise of her buttocks. But I didn’t. Instead I lifted the sheet up to her shoulders, tucked it around them, kissed her neck and whispered, “Goodnight,” but she didn’t hear me. I think.
I wandered back out into the living room and plopped back down on the couch, where I was spending the night, leaned my head back against the armrest and sucked on my Lifesaver.
Half an hour before, I’d given up on going to sleep: my mind was back trying to sort things out again. I’d managed to put all of it out of my mind, for a while, when after supper Rita and I had gotten into some friendly small talk-and some wine, which is why Rita was sleeping here tonight, since I didn’t want to drive her back to the Cities tipsy. I think maybe both of us would’ve liked more than that to have happened, but we didn’t let it-or hadn’t so far; but with her sleeping nude in the next room, it was, shall we say, hard to sleep. Even without the rest of it to mull over.
After we left her brother at the Norman house, we’d stopped at the all-night supermarket across from the place and came back to the trailer and had a good time getting a late supper for ourselves. Rita made up a whole skillet of American fries while I broiled steaks and tossed a salad. There seemed to be an unspoken agreement between us not to delve further into the Janet Taber mess any more that night.
While we were eating, however, Rita began to tell me things about her brother, in an offhand casual way, and though she said nothing directly related to Janet Taber and company, I knew she was trying to fill in some of the holes for me.
An uncle of theirs, she said, had worked for Simon Norman from the thirties up until ten years ago. This uncle was usually referred to in the family as the “rich” uncle, since he had by far the best-paying job of any family member. When the uncle had to leave the position due to failing health (he was sixty-five at the time and died within the year), he recommended his nephew Harold to Simon Norman as his replacement. Even though Harold’s background was a trifle rough (he had lost his eye in a gang-fight as a kid, just as Jack Masters had told me), he had covered, in a five-year period of bumming around, a number of jobs that seemed applicable to the position: he had been everything from nightclub bouncer to gardener to short-order cook to hospital orderly, and the only duty of the uncle’s he couldn’t take on officially was that of chauffeur, since he couldn’t get a chauffeur’s license due to his missing eye; but unofficially he was up to it, and Norman rarely went out these days, anyway.
When Norman gave him the job on a trial basis, Harold made an immediate effort to live up to his “rich” uncle’s image, an effort that helped fill the long hours in the empty old house. He began a self-education program, by reading, and, later, through correspondence courses of many kinds. While he had grown intellectually since beginning to work for Norman, he had become increasingly isolated and somewhat arrested socially-or so Rita felt. She said that even his irregular visits up to different clubs in the Quad Cities-where among other blacks he would revert somewhat to his rougher, less reserved old self-had stopped a year or so ago, when Norman had a severe stroke. And he rarely if ever went out into Port City even on errands, having everything delivered, and only once in a great while would he drive up to Rock Island to see Rita. He’d had for a time a steady woman in the Cities, but broke it off shortly after Norman’s stroke.
I lost patience sucking and bit down on the Lifesaver. I chewed it up and swallowed. I had kind of a raw taste in my mouth, combination of sour, from not brushing my teeth for a decade or so, and sweet, from chewed-up Lifesaver. I got up to get a drink of water.
Even though I hadn’t been sleeping, it took me a moment to get my balance. I stretched my back, felt the spinal knuckles pop, and suddenly was very awake, even more awake than is usual in my occasional insomniac turns. I decided I was awake enough to have more than a glass of water, ready for a glass of orange juice, maybe. I made my way to the kitchenette, my eyes so well-adjusted to the dark I stubbed not a single toe, and opened up the icebox and got out a bottle of Pabst.
I went over to the couch and sat staring at my front door, drinking my Pabst, feet on the coffee table, feeling, about halfway through my beer, tired for the first time that night. My eyes were getting fuzzy and the lids were drooping and I almost thought for a second I could see the door knob moving. Turning.
Well, boy, when inanimate objects start moving around, then you know you’re falling asleep, or already asleep and dreaming, and I was about to let my lids slide all the way shut when the door opened, all the way, and I was awake again.
I didn’t move.
It was dark. Whoever it was wouldn’t expect me to be up, wide awake, eyes in tune with the darkness.
He was big. The outline of him as he stood in the doorway was huge, shoulders almost touching the frame of the door. But I couldn’t see who it was, it was just a massive black form in the door, the light very bright around the shape, from the streetlamps and the piece of moon now out from behind the clouds.
I stayed motionless. I was sure he didn’t see me. He was putting something in his pocket now, the skeleton key he’d used to get in, maybe, or maybe some gizmo he’d picked the lock with.
One thing I knew: it wasn’t John, or even Brennan, or anybody else friendly or semi-friendly who might be playing a practical joke. He was too big even for Brennan, too wide, and the slow, methodical way he moved had no humor in it at all, just deadly, serious business.
He stepped inside and shut the door gently behind him and lifted a hand with a long-shafted flashlight in it. He switched on the flash and aimed it over toward where the living room trails into the hall that leads into the bedroom.
I slipped my feet down off the coffee table. Like I was balancing an egg on each toe.
He directed the flash down the hall, moving toward there himself, his free hand balled into a fist that was like a rock he was getting ready to pound into somebody’s head.
I threw the beer bottle at him and caught him on the ear.
He fell against the wall and slid down, the flash rolling out of his grasp, and I jumped through the darkness at him and caught a knee in my stomach. I tumbled away and smacked into the coffee table and then crawled off to catch my breath, but I could hear him scrambling around behind me.
He wasn’t used to the dark like I was, and he didn’t know where the light switch was, to do something about it. I hustled off on my hands and knees toward the kitchenette while he was rustling around after the flashlight, which had gotten switched off when he fumbled it.
Then the beam of the flash started cutting through the room’s darkness like the searching strokes of a knife. I huddled in the corner of the kitchenette, my mind stuttering. I edged my hand up the woodwork and over into the sink and my fingers found a glass, and then the skillet, still greasy from the American fries. I brought both skillet and glass, carefully, soundlessly, out of the sink and down to me, clutching them to me like treasure. I hefted the skillet; it wasn’t as heavy as I would’ve liked, but it was iron and it would do. I watched the probing beam of light, then aimed as best I could and pitched the glass at him and knocked the flash from his hand, then crouched with the iron pan in hand and waited for him to come after me.
Light filled the room.
Rita stood at the mouth of the hall, her hand on the light switch. She presented quite a sight: a beautiful naked brown girl with tousled black hair and brown nipples and…