“How do you know about them!”
“I swear, you asked me that three times now and ever’ time I tell you it was from listening to you talking to that whole mess of people when you were sickest.”
“But they’ll be so worried about me, Sergeant!”
He shook his head sadly. “You know if you fret about it, you’re not going to have you a good time on my island at all. You’ll spoil it for sure for the both of us. Now don’t you worry about the ladystuff you’ll need. A gal has her needs and she has to have pretties and all, and when I get set to go on into town, you can give me a list of anything you can think of.”
He got up quickly and went over to his great jumble of boxes and containers and came back with a green metal box and put it on the floor beside her feet. “This here is an ammunition box and they’re good things because the damp can’t get into what you put in them.” He opened it and looked expectantly up at her and she saw that it was full almost to the top with money.
“Where did you get all that!”
“I cash the army check and I don’t never need that much for what I have to buy, so I just bring the rest of it on back and put it in this box. Been doing it for years and years. I got a box that filled up a long time back and I had to start a new one. It’s over there someplace. I surely would like to know how much there is all told. Maybe you could he’p me count it out. I used to try but it took so long I’d get all mixed up somewhere in what number thousand it was I got to. So I gave up on it.”
He closed the box and put it back with his other boxes. He sat down again and said in a tone of wonder, “I know I got to keep you here like I said, Missy, but I never thought in my whole life I’d be glad to have anybody close by again. Folks make me edgy. But you, somehow, it doesn’t bother me one little bit. I swear, when I didn’t know if you was living or dying, you were still the prettiest little thing I ever saw anyplace, and I can see now that all you’re going to do as you get better is get prettier. It’ll be a nice thing, having you here with me for a long long time, Missy.”
He seemed to be implying something, and it gave her a little crawling feeling of growing apprehension. She looked wide-eyed at him and moistened her lips and said, “I... I don’t want to be — your girl, Sergeant!”
He was motionless and then he jumped up so wildly he knocked his chair over. He glared at her and said, “Who said any such thing as that? You think I’m some kind of animal? You think I ought to be locked up? That it? Why I wouldn’t lay a hand on you...” He gave a grunt of astonishment and stared down at his right hand as if he had never seen it before. He turned it this way and that.
“Never happen again anyways,” he said in a strange voice. “Happen again and I cut you off, finger by finger.”
“What happened?”
“When I first toted you up here. I had to look close at you to see every hurt place. This fool hand — it reached itself out and felt your little bare titty.” He looked at her in shame and distress. “It was only that one time, I swear, and nothing can’t ever happen again like that, Miss Leila, on my word of honor— All I want— All I want...”
He stopped and his eyes changed, looking through her rather than at her. He turned slowly and in a wooden manner quite unlike his normal movement walked to a place to one side of the door where he grasped two uprights fashioned of peeled poles. She could guess from the tension of his body how strongly he held them. They were a few feet apart, and the areas where he held them were darkened with the past times of standing there. He leaned forward, put his head against a heavy cross beam. He rolled his head slowly from side to side and made an almost inaudible moan. He leaned his head back and then thudded it so heavily against the beam she felt her stomach turn over.
“Sergeant!” she cried. “No!”
When he did it again, she made her way to him, clung to one arm, tried to pull his grip loose and turn him. His arm was like marble.
He turned slowly at last and looked at her. He said empty syllables that fitted his mouth loosely and did not combine into words. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. She got him over to the bed and he sat down. He frowned up at her. “Get a little bit mixed up now and again.”
She felt no fear of him and knew there would never be any fear. The luminous look of those strange eyes was the limpid clarity of a kind of innocence. A child looked out at her. The rigid ethic of boyhood controlled the big tough body. It was as though he had built a tree house, a place to play pretend, and had filled it with toys, and she was another toy, the newest of all.
There would be chances to get away from him just as soon as she was strong enough.
“It’ll be just like you say, Sergeant. We’ll have a fine time. We’ll have fun.”
The slow smile lasted a long time. “Surely will,” said the Sergeant.
Chapter Sixteen
Raoul Kelly knew he was on some special lists. He had caused too much trouble for too many people to expect to go unnoticed. There had been one very clumsy attempt and one very skilled attempt which went wrong only because by some freak of luck the set-gun so mounted in his bureau drawer as to fire into the chest of anyone opening the drawer had misfired. After the second attempt he was able to get a pistol permit without too much difficulty.
He was licensed to carry it for self-protection. It was a Colt Cobra, a 38 Special with a one-inch barrel, and it fitted lightly and without bulge into the side pocket of his trousers. But usually it was locked up in the glove compartment. Guns made him feel foolish and theatrical, as if he were called upon to imitate a quite different sort of man. All through weapons training before the Bay of Pigs he had the idiot impulse to pull the trigger and yell BANG, YOU’RE DEAD. And after the fiasco as he was being led away, he thought it would be far more logical if all those very still, manlike lumps would get up, shrug, grin, wash off the fake blood and go buy each other beers.
He knew that it was with the very best of intentions a small group of compatriots had demanded he acquire the pistol permit from the Dade County authorities. At the same time they arranged an informal roster, and kept a watchful eye on his car and his rented room. After much thought, Raoul had taken his own quiet steps to insure his safety. He had typed out thirty pages of those guesses, hunches and gossip which were very probably quite true, but were so unprovable he could not risk publication. He left out two names. They were both, he was quite sure, clever and highly trained revolutionaries masquerading as anti-Castroites. He showed his notes to both those men and said that should anything happen to him, three close friends had copies and all guaranteed they would get the material published. And he had added that from time to time, as he discovered more probabilities of the same order, he would supplement the notes. There was, he thought, one very comforting thing about the Enemy. They were unfailingly practical. Given a choice of two evils, no emotions entered into their decision to pick the lesser one.
When, leaving the Harkinson place, with ’Cisca beside him, turning from the narrow road onto the highway he had seen the new-looking gray Plymouth sedan still parked in the same spot, he remembered the weapon in his glove compartment. He had not thought of it for weeks.