“Shoot me,” the officer said, smiling.
“I ain’t gonna—”
“Shoot me, you Yank bastard,” the Jap said.
“Look. Look, I gotta take you back to—”
“Shoot me, Yank warmongering bastard. Shoot me!”
The bird continued to shriek. EEE-CAW! EEE-CAW! Except for the bird, the jungle was still. The officer continued smiling. He continued watching Don and talking to him, and smiling while the bird shrieked and shrieked. The BAR was getting heavy. Don’s hand was wet on the barrel.
“Come, Yankee son of a bitch, shoot me. Shoot me, you dirty Yank bastard!”
Don swallowed again. He could feel the cords on his neck standing out, could feel his heart drumming in his chest. He was drenched now, soaked, standing with a lethal BAR in his hands, listening to the insane scream of the bird, listening to the rising voice of the officer, the smiling officer who calmly stood waiting to be killed. The string of epithets flowed from the officer’s mouth in rising fury, endlessly spewing. All the while, he smiled. All the while, the bird screamed.
Don did not want to squeeze the trigger.
He did not want to kill this man who had sat complacently and smoked his cigarette, who was a real man with a real face, a man with a boy-body and ancient eyes, who spoke English, who did not at all seem like a murderous enemy, he did not want to kill this man, he did not want to kill.
But the officer continued to hurl blasphemy at Don, smiling all the while, eventually striking a combination of words, whichever combination it was, a combination hurled from his smiling mouth unwittingly as he sought profanity after profanity, a combination which did the trick.
“Shoot, Yank bastard. Shoot son of a bitch. Shoot bastard. Shoot rotten rich American warmonger. Shoot big-shot Yank prick bastard. Shoot Yank jerkoff! Shoot rotten bastard mother-raper Yank! Shoot—”
He fired.
His finger jerked spasmodically on the trigger and then held it captured, and the automatic weapon bucked in his hands, and he could see the slugs as they ripped into the Jap’s tunic, tore into the Jap’s face, exploded the ancient eyes in pain. The officer fell to the jungle mat silently. The bird shrieked EEEE-CAW! CAW-CAW-EEEEEEE! and then was silent. Don began crying.
Sobbing, the tears streaming down his face and mingling with the sweat, he stood with the rifle dangling foolishly, and he said, “You shouldn’t have said that, you shouldn’t have said that,” crying fitfully all the while.
Now a decade and more later, in the back yard of a development house in Pinecrest Manor, he dropped his spade because he could no longer hold it in his trembling fingers.
“Margaret!” he shouted. “Margaret, where the hell are you?”
Angrily, he strode to the house.
23
They were almost discovered on a Tuesday in April.
“Overconfidence is the biggest danger,” Felix Anders had said as far back as February, but Larry had not paid much attention to him at the time. They were, after all, exceptionally careful; they no longer met and talked at the bus stop; they continually changed the place of their weekly assignation; they tried to alternate between day and night meetings; Maggie no longer used the Signora as a sitter; and Larry no longer used Felix Anders as a confidant. They had become expert at the dangerous game they played and, as experts, perhaps they became overconfident without realizing it.
Their overconfidence on that late Tuesday afternoon took them to a diner not a mile from Pinecrest Manor. It was, in all fairness, a place not frequented too often by residents of the development. There were closer and better diners. But it was only a mile away and they should not have stopped there for coffee on the way back from the motel.
They left the diner at about four-thirty. It was a bright sunlit day, and they walked hand in hand toward the Dodge. The car was parked at one end of the lot, alongside a high curbing. As they approached the car, they noticed that a dual-control automobile from a driving school was attempting to park behind it.
“There goes one of my fenders,” Larry said, laughing, still holding Maggie’s hand.
“That’s pretty sensible,” Maggie said, looking at the back of the woman driver’s head. “He’s teaching her to park off the street. She can’t get into any trouble that way.”
“Very sensible,” Larry said. “All she can do is smash up my car.”
The driving-school car was alongside the Dodge now. The woman driver turned the wheel and then cut back sharply. Larry and Maggie stood by holding hands, waiting for the woman to clear them.
“Do you know the one about the dual-control car that smacks into a truck?” Larry asked, and suddenly Maggie shook his hand free.
“Mary Garandi,” she whispered.
For a moment he didn’t understand her. “What?” he said.
“The driver,” she whispered, and her meaning became suddenly and shockingly clear.
Mary turned toward the instructor at that moment, saw Larry and Maggie, and blinked in slow recognition. Then she smiled and waved.
“Bluff it,” Larry whispered. “I just met you here. Smile. Wave at her. Quick, Mag, wave!”
Maggie smiled in false exuberance. She lifted her hand limply and waved. Mary Garandi said something to the instructor and then opened the door on her side of the car.
“Oh, Jesus,” Larry said, “she’s coming over.”
“Larry, what are we—”
“Shhhh!”
Mary was grinning like a toothpaste commercial. “Hey, how’d you like that parking?” she asked. She was wearing Arthur’s Navy pea jacket over a flowered housedress. She always looked as if she had just come from swabbing a deck somewhere anyway, but Larry couldn’t understand why she felt the need for a heavy coat on a day like this. She was beaming from ear to ear, apparently concerned only with her mother-turtle accomplishment of having parked the car some four feet from the curb. It had not yet occurred to her that the woman with Larry Cole was not his wife, or that the man with Margaret Gault was not her husband.
Anticipating the coming of the dawn, his heart pounding, Larry said, “This is like old home week, isn’t it? First I run into Mrs. Gault in the diner, and now we run into you. Would you like a cup of coffee, Mary?”
“No, thank you. How are you, Margaret?”
“Fine,” Maggie said. “Isn’t this the funniest thing, though? You can walk all over the development without meeting a soul you know, and here the three of us meet miles away from the place.” She grinned feebly, wondering if she were driving the point home too hard. She had almost, despite her fear, burst out laughing when Larry called her Mrs. Gault. She was concerned now only with the task of impressing upon Mary that this was purely a chance meeting. Mary, however, seemed to have more important things than infidelity on her mind.
“Did you see me park?” she asked excitedly.
“You did very well,” Larry said, trying to be nonchalant but thinking. This idiot will explode the bubble. This idiot will destroy us! “How long have you been driving?”
“Just two weeks. Listen, this is costing me five dollars an hour. I have to get back. Listen, what are you doing here anyway?”
“I was shopping for a dress,” Maggie said. “You know the little shop, don’t you?” She knew full well that Mary Garandi did not know the little shop; she herself did not know whether there was a little shop or a big shop or any kind of a shop anywhere near by.
“Sure,” Mary said. She was still smiling, but she looked at Larry inquisitively and he felt the first seed of suspicion as it took root in her mind and then spread slowly onto her face.
“I was in the city all day,” he said. “Stopped off for a cup of coffee, and who do I meet? Mrs. Gault.” He smiled. He was trying to make this thing a nice neighborhood type outing full of good spirit and brimming with the curiosities of fate and chance. “Do you have your car with you, Mrs. Gault?” he asked.