“He’s come crawling back,” the old woman announced in a perky voice. “Like I told you all along.”
“Close the door after you, can’t you even remember?” the old man said irritably. “You’ll freeze us all, Crazybone. Go on. Get.”
“Oh, all right,” she said, shrugging indifferently. “I’ll nail it up tight.” She pushed aimlessly at the strands of gray hair. “Seems like it should be fixed once and for all.” But she didn’t move; she stood staring at the tips of her boots without any expression at all on her face.
“Go close the door,” he said quietly. “Close it, you hear?”
She turned and stalked from the room, her rubber boots squeaking dryly on the cold floor boards. The man sighed and put his head on the pillow. “You fellows been in an accident?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Ingram said.
“Bad night to be outside. Only a rich man or a fool goes out in weather like this.” He chuckled softly, flicking glances at them with suspicious little eyes.
The old woman returned and opened a door on the opposite side of the room. She smiled back at Ingram, her glasses flashing in the gloomy light. “I told you you’d come back,” she said.
“Don’t pay her no mind,” the old man said, as she slipped through the doorway. “Crazybone’s a little daft. She’s my wife. Crazybone’s just a name I gave her. Real name is Martha, like George Washington’s wife. We used to keep a dozen colored hands a long while back. When the farming went bad they drifted off to the city mostly. Crazybone’s always looking for ’em to come back. What kind of accident was you in?”
“There’s just the two of you here?” Earl said.
“Don’t need nobody else. Seems like we get along better every year. Eat less all the time.” He chuckled again, but his eyes were switching back and forth between them like vigilant little swords. “Pretty soon we’ll stop eating altogether. That’ll be a good trick, won’t it?”
“You got any whisky around?” Earl asked him. He felt very weak; the strength seemed to be draining out of him from the wound in his shoulder. It wasn’t bleeding much; but that could be bad or good, he wasn’t sure which. A small heap of wood burned in the great stone fireplace, but no warmth penetrated the thick cold dampness of the room.
“No whisky, no gin, no beer,” the old man said, shaking his head with finality.
“How about coffee?”
“Told you we eat less all the time. Same goes for drinking.” He seemed proud of their abstemiousness; his eyes twinkled with sadistic merriment. “A man can get along without lots of things. You learn that when you’re old as I am. What happened to you? You sick, mister?”
“Where did your wife go?”
“Hard to tell about Crazybones. She keeps a man studying, I can tell you.”
“Go take a look,” Earl said to Ingram. “See what she’s up to.”
“Oh, don’t worry about her,” the old man said.
“You got a phone here?”
“Don’t need one.”
“How about neighbors? Any people likely to stop by tonight?”
“Nearest house is a mile down the road. No call for anybody to come by. What’s worrying you anyway?”
Earl glanced around and saw a radio on a table beside a sagging sofa. “That work?” he said to the old man.
“Wouldn’t have it around if it didn’t.”
Earl went slowly across the room, limping to favor the pain in his side, and sat down on the sofa. He turned on the set and a light gleamed faintly behind the rheostat. Finally the strains of a dance band overcame the static and flooded the cold air with incongruously cheerful rhythms. Earl rested weakly against the arm of the sofa. The pain in his shoulder beat slowly but solidly, pounding against his nerves with sledge-hammer blows.
He glanced around, taking an automatic inventory of the room. There was little furniture, just the bed, sofa and a couple of straight-backed chairs. The mantelpiece above the massive field-stone fireplace was crowded with junk; dirt-rimmed bottles, yellowing newspapers, a few chipped cups, several faded photographs in wooden frames. The floor boards were of uneven widths, buckled with cold and age, but they were like iron under his feet. It was a house built to last a dozen lifetimes, he thought, looking at the stone walls and hand-hewn beams that ran along the ceiling.
The dampness cut into his bones like a knife, but in spite of the cold there was a sharp odor of decay in the room, a sour-sweet putrescence like the stench from a heap of rotting vegetables. And there was something else, Earl realized, a medical smell, an acid stink that bit sharply through the humid chill of the room.
“What kind of trouble you fellows in?” the old man said slyly.
“Don’t worry about us,” Earl said. “Do what you’re told, and you won’t get hurt.”
“I can’t answer for Crazybones. She don’t pay much mind to anybody.” He stared at Earl with bright, excited eyes. “What’d you do? Kill somebody?”
“No,” Earl said shortly.
“You steal something then? Break into a store?”
The old man’s prying eyes made him uneasy; there was something fierce and sick about him, like the sweaty reek of a lynch mob. Their trouble had stirred him up, Earl realized, pumped his frail old body full of invigorating excitement.
“You’re hurt, ain’t ye?” he said, peering closely at Earl. “Got a bullet in ye, I can tell.”
“That’s right. And I got six in my gun. Think about them, Pop.”
“You got no call to hurt us. We’re old people, mister.”
Ingram came back into the room and said, “She’s all right. She’s fixing up some food.”
“You better get the car out of sight,” Earl said.
“Nobody coming by here in this cloudburst.”
Earl looked at the old man. “Any place in back he can hide it?”
“The barn is dry enough but somebody might see it there.”
“You said nobody ever came by this way.”
“Well, that was before you stopped in, mister.” He chuckled at this and glanced slyly at Ingram for approval. “You fellows might make the place popular. Anyway, we got some coon hunters in the country at night and fox hunters in the day. They’re a sight. All dressed up in red coats and shiny black boots. Women, too. Sometimes a fox goes to ground in a barn or woodshed, and then the hunt piles up while they poke around trying to start him running again. They might stumble on your car, yes sir. I wouldn’t put it in no barn if I was you.”
“Where would you put it, Pop?” Earl realized the old man didn’t want them to be caught right away; he wanted to prolong the excitement, to lie in bed and watch them squirm and sweat.
“There’s a little road runs from the back of the house into the woods,” the old man said. “They used to mine mica there years back, and one of the old quarries would be a nice place for the car. Nobody would ever see it there.”
“Can he get the car down that road?”
“Oh, sure. It’s a fine little road.” The old man winked conspiratorially. “And tomorrow the tracks will all be washed away. Got to think of that too, you know.”
“All right, Sambo,” Earl said. “Get started.”
“Damn it, you hear that rain? Let’s wait till the flood stops.”
“I hear it,” Earl said quietly. In the silence the sound of the rain was like an angry flail beating against the sides and roof of the house. He stared at Ingram, and said, “How much money you got, Sambo?”
“I don’t know. Forty, forty-five dollars.”
“Put it on that chair.”
“What’s the matter with you? You think there’s something to buy around here?”
“Do like I say, Sambo. Put the money on the chair.” Earl took the gun from his pocket and shifted forward onto the edge of the sofa. The effort brought a sudden sheen of perspiration to his face, but the gun in his hand was relentlessly steady. His voice rose suddenly, trembling with a savage anger. “Then get out of your clothes. Jacket, shirt, pants. You hear, Sambo?”