I expect you’re right about that. I was wondering about the panties. Are they part of the experiment, too?
He flushed a deep crimson. I’d want your agreement to remain silent. I’d have to have that in writing; I trust you have been circumspect so far. Again, I’m trying to avoid misunderstanding. I have a position in the community, a reputation to maintain.
I want fifteen thousand dollars. That’s nothing to you, pocket change. I could ask for a lot more, and you’d have to pay it, but I’m not going to be greedy. All I want is the money you cheated us out of and a fair amount for the grief you’ve caused us.
Whatever you call it, it’s extortion. Blackmail. Both of them are against the law.
She shrugged. All right. We both go before the grand jury and tell our stories. We’ll see how it all comes out when they dig up a grave or two.
I don’t keep that kind of cash around. I’d have to make a withdrawal.
Then make it. You’re getting a bargain and you know it.
I can have it for you in a day or two. I may have to convert some bonds into cash.
Then you’d best be converting. You don’t get the picturesor the panties, until I’ve got the money in my hand. We’ll be waiting on you.
She rose. She was halfway to the door when he made some curious strangled noise. She turned. He was watching her. He shrugged helplessly. You must think me terrible, he said.
She didn’t have an answer for that. She went out and pulled the door to behind her. She went down the hall and through the office and so into the street. She stood for a moment letting the rain wash over her. A cold wind smelling of trees, the wet streets, woodsmoke. She looked up and let the rain course down her cheeks. The rain felt cold. Clean.
He sat unmoving while the day drew on, and still he sat with dusk gathering at the windows, and ultimate dark fell unnoticed with the rain fading to just a persistent murmur at the glass, and he didn’t turn on a light. The dark suited him very well and soothed the seething turmoil of his mind.
What to do. Options presented themselves only to be discarded and alternates sought. Nothing seemed feasible. The dread thought of the retribution she’d spoken of left him weak and clammy with cold sweat. He closed his eyes. Tried to clear his mind, to force order onto the chaos of his thoughts. He imagined his mind a slate, an eraser moving methodically across it. Then what had been at the bottom of his mind all along surfaced, like a rotten log in a swamp brought up by its own putrescent gases. A headline from last summer’s newspaper: local man indicted for murder. A measure of peace returned to him. A feeling of self-confidence, of being in good hands.
Granville Sutter, he thought.
Early in June of that year Lorene Conkle came out of the drugstore and Sutter was there the way she had known he would be. He was leant against a brick wall with a toothpick cocked up out of the corner of his mouth. When she walked past him, he unleant himself, elaborately casual, and followed her as if he’d been going that way all along and was just waiting for the notion to strike him.
The drygoods store then. She’d look up from whatever garment she was fingering and glance covertly through the glass and there he’d be, this time leant against the column that supported the striped awning. A tall, gangling man with the false appearance of sleepy indolence. Warped and twisted by the bad glass as if this glass had the property of character analysis and showed the world what you were like inside your skin. He caught her looking and just looked levelly back, and she dropped her eyes.
Was it something I could help you with? the clerk asked. He had approached silently behind her and startled her. A prissy little man with an oldmaidish air about him.
She seemed to make up her mind about something. She laid the gown carefully atop the pile. I reckon not right now, she said. I may be back later.
Sutter wasn’t watching her now. When she stopped in front of him he was looking off toward the railroad track where the train was uncoupling boxcars. He seemed finally to notice her and turned toward her. High cheekbones with the leathery brown skin pulled taut over them. A blade of a nose broken once and healed slightly askew so that the face looked different from side angles, a face with two different profiles. The eyes were brown and flecked in their depths with gold so they looked almost amber.
I want you to stop watchin me.
Then don’t stand in front of me. Folks don’t always get what they want. It’s people in Hell cryin pitiful for Eskimo Pies, but they ain’t handin none out. It’s a free country and I can watch who I want to.
You been followin me, too. And this is not the first time you done it. I seen you parked across the street from my house a few days ago.
I was just visitin a feller lives down there. Besides, you don’t even know I’m followin you. You in a drygoods store. That’s a public place. I might have had in mind to buy me a set of drawers or a pair of socks or somethin.
I want you to let me be. And my husband Clyde, too. I hadn’t said anything to Clyde, and I don’t want to go to the law. It’s been too much about trials and lawyers already. I don’t want no part of it. If I ever mention it to Clyde, he’d have to talk to you, and you don’t want Clyde ahold of you.
You know who I am, don’t you?
Yes.
Why don’t you just mention it to Clyde? He might not even want ahold of me.
You just let it be. Clyde couldn’t help bein on that jury, and he couldn’t help votin what he knew was right. What does it matter anyway? You got out of it, didn’t you?
It took a year out of my life. Two trials. I’d of been acquitted the first time if your old man hadn’t been bound and determined to send me to Brushy Mountain. Eleven votin not guilty and he had to hang the jury.
Yeah. Eleven people afraid you’d burn them out like youdid old Mrs. Todd. Clyde wasn’t afraid of you.
You think I burnt that old woman’s house?
I know good and well you did. And so does everbody else. What you can’t buy off you scare to death with threats.
You come down mighty hard on me, Sutter said. You believe too much of what you hear. I’m just like everbody else. I had a old daddy and a old mama, and I come up hard the way everbody else did around here. You think you’re better’n me, don’t you?
He had leant his face to hers, and she backed away. Her expression was a mixture of anger and contempt.
Cause your old man works in a drugstore, he went on. Wears a little white apron and mixes up pills and nerve tonic and shit all day behind a counter. Yes, ma’am, no, ma’am. I reckon you think your shit don’t stink.
You watch your nasty mouth with me or I will go to the law. I swear I will. Such law as there is in this town. And yes, I do think I’m better than you. Not because of my husband but because I mind my own business. I don’t burn people’s houses in the middle of the night or steal from them or poison their livestock.
Aww, you just got me all wrong. You was to get to know me better you wouldn’t be so down on me. Hell, catch me right and I’m a likeable sort of feller. You right nice lookin. A little long in the tooth maybe, but you’re holdin up all right. Me and you just might get together sometime.
She just stared at him utterly aghast, as if such a bizarre circumstance was beyond her powers of comprehension.
Sutter was fumbling in the bib pocket of his overalls. He withdrew a worn leather wallet secured by a clasp chain. He opened it and for a surreal moment she thought he was tryingto give her money, for what she couldn’t say.
Here, he was saying. I keep tryin to tell you I’m like everbody else. I was a innocent babe the same as you. Now this here’s my first-grade picture.
He was pressing upon her a photograph, and in a moment of confusion she took it from his hand and stared at it.
A fairhaired child of five or so stood facing the camera. Perhaps it was even Sutter. His arms were upraised, and each hand was clasped by a disembodied adult hand, one large and one more diminutive. The woods he stood in were sundrenched, and the child was squinting into the sun or the eye of the camera. He was naked and superimposed over his genitals was an enormous drooping penis that reached nigh to his ankles. A great bull’s scrotum. His stomach was covered with a thicket of dark pubic hair.