James M. Cain

Galatea

This story is laid in southern Maryland, a tongue of land comprising five small counties between the Patapsco, Chesapeake, and Potomac estuaries, geographically the South’s northernmost outpost, spiritually of its deepest heart. The Marylander will find much in it that is familiar to him, of names, places, and legend, but the characters are imaginary, not representing, nor being intended to represent, actual persons.

Chapter I

I chopped, grubbed, and shoveled, and the deeper I dug the keener I felt it: I was being watched. At first I tried not to mind, as a holdup case, his first day out, on a cockeyed probation deal, could expect watching, especially if left alone on the farm he’d been put to work on. But it rattled me, and didn’t help any that I was going about it all wrong, the job I’d been given to do. The order was get out trees, and the right way was hire a dozer. But, maybe on account of the cost, maybe on account of me, to test the stuff I had in me, nothing had been said about that, and I was left with the tools that were there. With chain, rope, blocks, and stuff from the implement shed, and a ladder to help with the climbing, I thought I might get by, shackling trees to each other and hauling them out by the roots. But it meant trenching around each one, and was slow, pesky, and tough.

And then, as I was circling the elm I picked to start on, I felt eyes, and they got me, because mixed up with my release was some highly peculiar stuff. I wasn’t on regular parole, and in fact had never been brought to court, as it was all handled by a county police officer, one of those guys that talks noble and looks shifty. He’d got the complaint withdrawn, on condition of a written confession, and on condition the eighty-six dollars I hijacked be repaid by this guy who owned the farm, took charge of me, and started me in on the trees. I thought a fast shuffle was back of it, and it didn’t take any lawyer to see where it put me. But I was over a barrel, and had to take it and like it. Just the same, when these prickles went over me, I felt distinctly itchy. And then, as I reached for the ax, there she was, not ten feet away.

Not counting her eyes, which were big, black, and pretty, or her expression, which was sweet, she was the most sickening sight in the way of a woman I think I’d ever seen. She was short, and had on a coat and dark blue dress which were right for the season, early April, and went nice with her dark, wavy hair. But ruining it all was her figure, which was so fat she was deformed. She looked like a soft, blobby barrel, and even had on the belt, crossed and pinned in front, that only the fattest ones wear, to break the belly line. However, I noticed nothing, but grabbed my jumper and put it on, hopped out of my trench, and asked if she wanted something. She said: “No, no thanks. Just stepped over to speak. I think you must be the — young man — my husband told me about. Over the phone last night. That’s coming to work for us.”

“Oh, you’re Mrs. Valenty?”

“Mrs. Val, they call me. I’ve been away.”

“Yes, Mrs. Val, I’m the one. Your husband fixed it up for me yesterday, down at the — county courthouse. But I was held till this morning for papers that had to be signed. At — Upper Marlboro, I believe the place is called. My name’s Duke Webster.”

“Duke?”

“It’s a family name, yes.”

“But not a Maryland family?”

“I was born in Nevada, Mrs. Val.”

“You’re older than I expected.”

“I’m twenty-six.”

“My husband told me ‘boy.’”

“He used that word at the courthouse, I think to take the cuss off the crazy thing I did. I was old enough to know better.”

Her husband, she said, hadn’t had a chance to tell her much, as she’d been visiting her family in St. Mary’s County, “and on a party line, I thought well to remind him it’s best to make it brief.” I thought she was hinting it hadn’t been advertised, and to make like friendly I asked what county this was. She said: “Prince Georges. This little farm is one mile north of the village of Clinton, Maryland. It’s nine miles south of Washington, and that road out there, that my husband swung into, when he drove you up from Marlboro, is the famous Route 5, gateway to southern Maryland. Once a tragic land, now at last redeemed.”

I’d never heard of Route 5 or southern Maryland, and had no idea why one was famous and the other tragic. But, following her eye around, I realized that if redeeming was the idea, quite a lot had been done, at least on this farm. The house was new, of brick painted white, one story high, and spread out in two wings. The shutters were green, matching the grass, which ran down like carpet to the highway. The other buildings, the sheds, shop, water tank, as well as a little cottage I was to sleep in, were painted white too, and lined up quite neat on two sides of a little street, or back yard as she called it, patio as it was to me. But what brought the colors up, so they looked like some movie, was the drive, of a kind I’d never seen. It was of oyster shells, and led up from the highway to a turning loop in front, with an apron at left for parking, and a bypass at right, for driving around to the rear. Oyster shells are white, and if these had been sprinkled with lime wash, I couldn’t really say, but they had a snowy sparkle. They made the whole place look like pastry frosted with sugar, and it had already struck me as kind of a funny coincidence that the one thing the husband had told me, about himself at least, was that he was in the restaurant business.

She talked about that, about the half-dozen places he had, scattered all over Washington, and a big new place that he called the Ladyship, on Connecticut Avenue, wherever that was, though from the way she spoke, it seemed to be quite a location. For that place, she said, he had advertised his own vegetables, grown right on this farm; so being caught, when it opened, without any help at all had put him in a spot. Just why, with a business like that and the dough to build this house, he couldn’t get any help, she didn’t try to explain, though I thought she skimmed over it a little fast. But about that time I noticed a car in the patio out back. Her car, or the red coupe I took to be hers, was on the bypass facing the highway, as though she’d come in from out back. This car, a sedan, faced the same way, so it could have followed her in. A man and a woman were in it, and it crossed my mind that could be the reason we were having this light conversation, that I could be inspected. I said: “Mrs. Val, would you like it if I stepped over there, so those people can see me? Speak to me, if they want? Maybe ask a few questions?”

She pinked up the least little bit. She said: “This wasn’t my idea, Duke. That’s my brother and sister-in-law, and they were at my mother’s last night when my husband called — with his somewhat mysterious news. They felt they ought to come. I wasn’t yet due to return, and as I’d be all alone and all—”

“We’ll step over, if you want.”

We did, but taking it slow, so she could waddle beside me, and I got that awful feeling you get from a cripple, especially when she started to pant. But I said nothing and, when the other two got out of the car, stood by to speak when spoken to. She called them Bill and Marge and they called her Holly, but she introduced me as “Mr. Webster, Duke,” and them as “Mrs. Hollis and Mr. Hollis.” The result of that was no notice was taken of me, friendly, unfriendly, or otherwise, which was a way of doing, here in Maryland, I found hard to get used to after my life in the West. The three of them talked along, mostly about hams, which seemed to be cooked out here, and Bill kept telling his sister: “If the work falls behind, you let it stay that way. You hear me, Holly? Take it easy.”

She said she would, and all of a sudden he asked me to look at the water in his car. It seemed a funny thing to want, as the filling stations attend to it, but I opened his hood, stuck my finger in, closed up, and said it was all right. He had a little smile on his face, and said: “Duke, you been in the ring?”

“Why... yeah, little. How’d you know?”

“I didn’t, until I gave you that little chore, so I could get a look at your hands.”

“They’re not broke up at all.”

“Quit cracking dumb, you know what I mean. Not even a picture actor handles them nice as a fighter.”

He was a thick, blocky guy of thirty or so, kind of good-looking, though his wife wasn’t, being a thin wispy woman you’d hardly look at twice. He pulled up his right and I cupped both hands over it, which seemed to please him. He said: “O.K., Duke, you’re in. Take care of my little sister.”

“I’ll do my best, Mr. Hollis.”

“Don’t let her work too hard.”

“I certainly won’t.”

They drove off, after kissing sister good-by, and she went in the house, while I went back to my tree. The next step was my blocks, which had triple pulleys, and should give me traction, if I put them on right. I revved the rope through two of them, climbed up and put on a chain, maybe fifteen feet from the ground. I dragged my first block up and hooked it on the chain. I put a second chain around another tree, but closer to the ground, and hooked on my other block. I took the free end of the rope, tightened up my slack, caught hold of a third tree, and muscled up for the pull. My tree bent, not much, but enough to show the thing would work with a little more clearance below. I pitched in, using the mattock, and really dug trench.

By then it was coming on noon, and when I heard my name called, there she was again, blowing hard from the walk, and making signs I should stop. She had changed her dress to a light blue gingham check, and said it was time for me to eat. I said her husband had given me lunch, a take-out carton from his restaurants, and pointed to it, under some bushes, with a Thermos of hot coffee beside it, and another of cold water. She said I was entitled to a regular lunch, to come in and she’d fix it. I climbed out, put on my jumper again, and started to do as she said. And then all of a sudden it happened.

She’d been interested in my gear, and reached out to feel the rope. If she lost her balance, the ground gave way, or what, I don’t know, but whatever the cause, she slid. She slid down in my trench, so the breath squashed out of her and she wedged tight at the hips. I grabbed, but too late, and her head rolled. I jumped down facing her, caught her head, and held it. I said: “Hang on, Mrs. Val, don’t let yourself go! Don’t do it, or I’ll never get you out!”

“It’s my heart.”

“Don’t give in to it! No!”

“I can’t breathe.”

“Try! You must try!”

“...Wipe my face. Please.”

Sweat was all over it, and I got out my handkerchief and wiped it. Then I fanned her, using the handkerchief as you use the towel on a fighter, snapping it into her face. She said: “I’m slipping. I can’t touch with my feet.”

“Keep talking, Mrs. Val. Fight.”

She screamed, then screamed again, from the pain. She said: “I can’t stand it! I can’t!”

“Hang on! Fight!”

Chapter II

All that took time, long, terrible seconds, but I couldn’t help it, because what stymied me was the certainty that if she ever actually passed out I could never move her dead weight, and by the time I got to the house, looked up numbers, and called for help, she’d be gone for the big count. But the pain did what no pep talk could do, whipped her to life, and I could get at the rest of it. I let go her head and knelt in front of her, squinched in so tight one leg was back of the other. I took one of her feet, put it on my knee, said: “Now — your arms — wrap ’em! Around my neck — tight! Lean on me — throw your weight! Twist your hips and pull!”

She did, and I felt her move. She gasped: “Oh — thank God — I can breathe! But — let me rest — please.”

“That’s it, relax.”

She let herself down, a little, and I felt her weight, so heavy it was frightening to think what it would have been like if I’d had to move it alone. I said: “Feel better?”

“Yes, but my leg’s cramped.”

“O.K., straighten up.”

She couldn’t, and I stopped her, to save her juice. I slid her foot down and put her knee on my knee, so she wouldn’t be doubled up and could get some force to her push. I said: “All right, you raise up three inches. You twist your hips and sit. On the edge of the trench you sit, then raise your feet — don’t worry about me, I’ll close my eyes. When your feet are out, roll over, and that’s it. Ready?”

“I’ll try.”

“It’ll hurt. You’re cut.”

“I’m all over blood, from these root ends, and it tickles where it’s running down. But never mind that—”

“Let’s go. One, two—”

Her scream, the grunt of the ground, and my heave came together, as one. I’d let her rest too long, and the tree moved, against the sky, like some terrible fingers. I bunched myself up, got under her, and somehow pushed her out. The tree was already pinching me, but as she rolled I clawed and came out. Then, just exactly then, when her gingham dress, which had been ripped clean off her, bellied out in the breeze and settled on my head, like some crazy blue sail. I tore clear and the tree was still falling, though not in an arc to threaten us — until my shackle tightened. Then it swung straight at us. I grabbed, threw her over me, and did it again. The ground jumped at the crash, and the butt whipped out of the hole.

She was out cold, face in the grass, and except for pants, belt, bra, and the blood smeared all over her, as naked as the day she was born. I took the dress, what was left of it, and spread it over her, then fanned her with my jumper. She hardly breathed, and her face looked blue, the little I could see. I turned her head, to give her air, unscrewed my water Thermos, slopped splashes on her cheek. She moved her hand I should stop, so at least she was partly conscious. I wiped off the water, said: “Mrs. Val, can you hear me? You understand what I say?” She nodded and I asked her: “What’s the name of your doctor? Or do you want me to call Mr. Val, first of all?”

“No! Help me in!”

“You mean, to the house?”

“In a minute, yes.”

“Mrs. Val, listen, you’re in bad shape, you’ve taken one hell of a beating, you need a doctor, right out here now, and—”

“I — said — no! I’ll go — directly.”

“I’ll do what I can. I’ll get stuff to make it easier. Stay where you are until I come back.”

I hustled to the cottage, which was a little one-story shack with a front porch, four rooms, and a little hall. From the bed, where I’d parked my bag, I grabbed up a blanket, and from the parlor two company chairs, which were the kind with chromium pipes and green plastic seats. When I got back she was sitting up, her face hanging in folds, her hair in her eyes, and her breath coming in puffs, but still more alive than she had been. I said: “O.K. First we put on the blanket, keep you a little bit warm. Then you let me help you into this chair I’m putting right here. Then you rest. Then you let me help you to the other one, which I’m putting a few steps nearer the house. Then you rest. I move the first chair nearer, you get to that and rest. Pretty soon, taking one hop at a time, you’ll be there. O.K.?”

“That way I can do it.”

She made it, leaning heavy on me, but at the last stop she sat there, staring off at nothing, as though thinking of something. Then: “Duke, can I ask a favor? That may sound kind of funny?”

“Whatever you want, just say it.”

“You know first aid, don’t you?”

“Not really, no.”

“Oh yes you do, I could tell. From all you said out there. From how you took charge and all. I want you to fix me up.”

“Mrs. Val, you need a doctor.”

“Duke, I can’t have it known, what happened to me. It’s bad enough to be this way, just a sideshow freak. And it’s bad enough when things happen, as they do all the time. But to have it talked about — to have a holy show made out of it whatever it is that happens — to have your heart cut out — like there was something I could do—”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“You will help me, won’t you?”

“After the way you’ve helped me?”

“How have I helped you, Duke?”

“Treating me human.”

“Everybody’s human.”

“Not everybody remembers it. You and your brother and sister-in-law kind of helped with a pretty bad day. Say what it is and I’ll do it.”

“...I want it done in the cottage. So I can shower off there, and in the big house leave nothing to show, like drops of blood on the rugs. In my bathroom are Band-Aids and things, and in my bedroom clothes. You bring it all to me here, and while you’re doing that, I’ll be figuring out what happened to me, and the rest of what has to be done to remove every last trace. Of my unfortunate mishap.”

The big house, when at last I was in it, was just as nice inside as it was out, being furnished modern, in yellow maple, tan rugs, blue upholstery, and copper lamps. I found the stuff she said get, took it into the cottage, and lit the kerosene heater so her shower would be hot. The plumbing and stuff out there was interior, but not up-to-date like what was in the big house, which worked at the snap of a button. When I went out again, she said get the take-out, as it would have to do after all, and I could have it while the water was heating. So I ate while camped down beside her, there on the patio grass, and she said it would all be simple, just a matter of filling the hole, dumping some sawdust on, cutting the tree up in such a way that branches were piled on the sawdust and the stump fell on them. The power saw, she said, would plug right into the cottage and, except for a little shoveling, I wouldn’t be put to much trouble. When it was all done, she said I could pour on some gasoline, toss a match on top, and everything would go up in smoke, “down to the last twig.”

Not quite a political job, at least as I sized it up, but if that’s what it took to please her, I meant to do it her way. I drank from my Thermos of coffee, told how my heart had stopped beating when I saw the death trap I’d dug, assuming there’d be a taproot when nothing was down there but dirt, and we both shivered to think of it, and relived each horrible moment. But whatever we said always led back to the fat. She kind of chanted it: “It’s glandular, glandular, I know it. There’s no cure, none at all, none, and I’ll never live to be thirty. I don’t complain, I speak no word of that kind. I do what I can, my small mite of good, so I leave this earth a little bit better than I found it. But can’t they leave me alone? Do they, do they all, do they every last one — have to talk?”

I was so flabbergasted, since I had supposed her middle-aged, maybe fifty or more, that I was a second late answering: “...Why... O.K., but don’t you talk.”

“You told me to.”

“Out there. Here now, take it easy.”

Her face beaded up, as it did when flashes hit her, and I dried it off with a face towel, wrapping it on, then patting it soft. Then again, pretty soon, she was off: “And, Duke, talking’s not all they do. They laugh. That’s the worst, as it’s meant to be mean. And they turn away, or close their eyes, or make a face, as though you were a mess on the pavement. That cuts into your heart. Maybe they can’t help it, but you’d think they could if they tried. Why do they do things like that?”

“People are funny.”

“You didn’t.”

“I don’t really know what you mean.”

“That’s not true but it’s nice. It’s nice because it’s kind. Duke, I want you as my friend.”

“Mrs. Val, can I say something?”

“Please, Duke. What is it?”

“I was in jail.”

“I didn’t mention it.”

“I spent a night there, and if you ever looked at the moon shining at you through bars, it puts a scar on your soul. And when you didn’t mention it, when you treated me human, it healed that scar — just a little. I’m proud to be your friend, and I want you for mine.”

“The afflicted, Duke, they know.”

“You bet they know.”

“We could say one thing more.”

“Yes, Mrs. Val, what?”

“You being so gentlemanly.”

That kind of shook me up, and for some little time we said nothing. When the time came for the wash-up, I worked through the shower curtains, a one-inch slit I pulled open, but to me she wasn’t sickening any more. I could see her, and the fat rolled and dappled and shook. But all I noticed was her slim, pretty shanks, and all I thought was what a shame they should tremble so, under that mountain of meat!

Chapter III

Mr. Val was a tall, thin man around forty, with gray hair, sallow skin, and a pious stoop, who got on my nerves, I didn’t exactly know why. Part of it, maybe, was how he rubbed his hands and jerked his head as he talked, reminding me of a waiter. And part of it, I’m sure, was his everlasting ant-pantedness, which had even annoyed the girls in the Marlboro courthouse. He cut in on everybody, hustled things up, listened to nothing at all. I owed him my freedom, it was only sense I should like him, and I tried to, don’t get the idea I didn’t. And yet, in the half-hour it had taken for him to drive me over, I don’t think I finished one answer to the questions he popped at me. He’d cut in, blow his horn, feed gas, or do something that made it impossible to talk.

He was that way tonight, soon as he got home. She’d called him, so he knew she was there, and the lights were on very friendly. You’d have thought he’d have lingered with a young wife who had been away, going inside with her when she stepped out the kitchen door. But he had no sooner spoken to her than he was calling to me that I should help him unload. I was back of the cottage, splitting the wood I had sawed, and was perfectly willing to help with whatever he had. But I hated to leg it, while he stood snapping his fingers and slapping his luggage compartment. Thermos buckets were in it, that he said went to the kitchen, and hams in muslin bags, that he said went to storage. She took the buckets from me and set them down. Then she led on to the cold room, which was a low brick building across the patio from the cottage. It had a Yale lock, which she opened, and steel racks inside with rows of hooks, where I hung the hams as she told me.

When we came out he was off in the field, looking at my tree. It was easy to see in the dark, looking like a fire in a Western oil field; I’d done it all as she said, using plenty of sawdust, as it turned out they had a lot of it, stored for smoking the hams. So you could have read the print in a newspaper when I stepped up beside him and said: “I’m sorry it took so long, sir. One whole day to get out just one tree. But—”

“Could you get it out at all — that’s what I wanted to know. Naturally it had to take time. I knew that. But you did it, and you did it right. Filling that hole, burning the stump — just right. I hadn’t expected it, but the ash’ll be wonderful fertilizer. We’ll plow it in, then disk it, with lime and the regular stuff. We’ll be set by the first of May to put in our corn. I’m well pleased, Duke. Now I know you’re my man.”

I’d have been better pleased if he’d let me say something once, but at least he seemed to mean well, and I went to the cottage to dress, as at least I had slacks, sport coat, and a couple of clean shirts.

Dinner, I must say, was remarkable, verging on art. Some of it, the hot vegetables and cold dessert, came from the Thermos buckets, the ones he brought from the Ladyship. But the steak was out of the storage room, the biggest piece of sirloin I think I ever saw. He brought it in the living-room, and told me crease with my fingers where I wanted mine cut. I creased an inch, and with the knife he marked an inch and a half. He marked his own, a half-inch minute steak. But when he went to the kitchen she followed him out. I heard her say: “No, Val, please! Cut me one like Duke’s and take the rest of it back. I shouldn’t have that much, and besides it’s too thick to broil.”

“Broil? I’ll bake it!”

“But it’s three pounds of meat and—”

“You’ve been down to St. Mary’s, and after that mule meat they eat down there, you need something to stick to your ribs.”

I thought to myself: “Is he giving her all the rest of that chunk? Doesn’t he know it’s practically murder, considering that weight she carries?” That was the answer, though, as came out when she waddled back and sat down to wait. She said: “Duke, he tries his best to make me happy — but he’s like all the others — he can’t understand — what this affliction is. It’s glandular! If the food is there on my plate, I have to eat it, I can’t help myself. No overweight person can. Not saying I don’t need a lot, else I get so terribly weak. But — all that meat—”

An electric stove cooks fast, and in a few minutes he was back, saying we’d eat in the nook. We went in there, and I caught the light in his eye as he served the meal, so pretty it was like an ad in the Saturday Post. I also caught how she ate, very dreamy, once she tasted that steak. She cut each piece off slow, sopped it in blood, and closed her eyes as she chewed. So as not to be caught looking, and more or less make like sociable, I put it on with a squirtgun, how wonderful everything was.

Even for goose grease he didn’t seem to have time, and took it over himself, smearing it the way he wanted it. He said: “The steak I admit is O.K. But my real contribution, Duke, is the lunchbox I gave you today. Mr. Val’s Take-Out, I call it, and it’s a revolution on behalf of the American wife. All she does, Duke, is ring us, and she gets it — a unit, to fit other units. One person, one box, that goes in one stove, complete as is, without even breaking the string. When it’s hot she opens it, and it’s ready to eat, there on its plastic plates. When it’s eaten, the plastic burns, it’s all gone, and she’s free. She’s spent five minutes at the stove, and five more at the incinerator — ten minutes out of her day, and the whole family is fed. She has leisure, she can play, she can hold a job, for cash! I tell you, it’s tremendous!”

I piled more compliments on, and for perhaps a minute he listened. Then, in the middle of a word, he cut me off. He said: “O.K., Duke, let’s get at it.”

“...Get at what, sir?”

“All of it. What led you astray, the whole story. Wait a minute, while I put these dishes in the washer, and we’ll sit in the other room. I want to go into this. Thoroughly.”

The dishes took some minutes, my fire some minutes more. I said I was proud of my wood, but actually wanted to stall, because how I wanted to go into it was practically not at all. But at the end of a half-hour or so she was camped on the sofa, in close to the flames, he on the other end, his knees under his chin, I on the love seat across from them, with the cocktail table between. He said: “Now!” — and I couldn’t stall any longer. I said: “...I wanted to be a fighter.”

“Why did you?”

“Well... why not? I’m six feet high, strong as a bull, and weigh a hundred and seventy. As a light heavy I looked like a natural. And in the Army it helps. With — whatever you’re bucking for.”

“Army? Where was this?”

“Germany.”

I edged it to the hitch I’d served, how I got to be technical sergeant, and got my honorable discharge. I worked back to my very young days, when I was a kid out in Nevada, to the car crash that killed my parents, and how I was raised by my grandmother. He asked if she was still living, I said no, and he seemed to be sidetracked. But then: “All right, let’s get to the point. You wanted to be a fighter. What then?”

“I found out I couldn’t hit.”

“What then?”

“...I found out I could.”

“Listen, Duke, stop gagging.”

I said I wasn’t gagging at all, and tried to explain how it was, as a doctor had explained it to me. I said: “Seems to be a question of adrenalin. What gives you the strength to hit. Some fighters have it as needed, and they can hit for money. I didn’t have it at all — no killer instinct, the sports writers called it. Except, unfortunately, I found out, if I got sore enough, I did have it — maybe a little too much. I broke a champion’s jaw, and—”

“Then you were light-heavyweight champion?”

“This was in training camp.”

“Why would you do it there?”

“He gypped me out of some dough.”

“I don’t get this at all, Duke.”

“I was working for him. If you can’t hit you’re just a punk and help train guys that can. I was his sparring partner, at Ojai, California, and I stretched him out on the grass. I also broke his jaw. And, with the smart money that was back of him, I had to get out of the state. I hopped a truck, at Ventura, and kept moving, headed east. Then I went a little bit haywire, and pulled this stick-up, last week. And then didn’t have the adrenalin to scram. I just lay there, on the bed in that little hotel.”

“Wait a minute, Duke.”

“That’s all. Then the officer came.”

“Wait. Smart money?”

“Gunsels.”

“Duke, will you forget about adrenalin, punks, gunsels, and all such irrelevant things and give me a straight answer on a simple question of morals, so—”

“He did give it!”

She was standing there, in the light dress she had put on, like some pink blimp with electric lights for eyes. She said: “Are you deaf, Val? Or stupid? Or what? He’s been trying to tell you, he couldn’t hit for money, but he could hit for the right. Isn’t that straight enough? And is it so terrible? I tell you right now I wouldn’t have him here if it was the other way around. Sometimes, Val, I don’t understand you at all. All Bill needed was just one look, and he knew Duke had been in the ring, that he was decent, and—”

“Bill saw Duke?”

“I told you he was here.”

“That’s all I want to know.”

They had it some more, he giving ground fast, and why Bill should settle it I couldn’t quite figure out, as there seemed to be more to it than a favorite brother-in-law. But at last they calmed down, and he said we’d look at the stump. As he led the way outside, she said to me very quiet she’d fallen into the barbwire, at her father’s sawmill in St. Mary’s — “which of course you couldn’t know.” That seemed to cover that, and at the tree I made them stand back while I chunked it with a bar, to knock the red charcoal off and break it down to embers. Then we walked around, and he looked at the house, as it shone in the night, the shells sparkling in front. I looked at the moon, which looked so beautiful now, with no bars between. What she looked at I couldn’t tell, but it seemed the farthest of all.

But after a while we went in, and when I said goodnight, they walked with me to the cottage, to make sure I had enough blankets. As they stepped out on the porch, he said: “Wilkes Booth knocked on that door.”

“Val!”

“Well, he did.”

“It’s not a nice thing to say!”

She was sharp, but he kind of grinned about it, and as to who Wilkes Booth might be, or when he knocked on my door, I had no idea at that time. But later, when I’d gone to bed, prayed up my thanks to God and even I think slept, I sat up in bed quite suddenly. Outside was the sound of a bell, the tiny bell people use to put on a cat. It came to me that while most of the plumbing here drained into the septic tank, the shower water ran out in an open gutter that led to a little ravine, so maybe, if drops of blood were still there, an animal could smell it. But even that didn’t seem to account for a feeling of evil out there.

I suddenly knew who Booth was.

It came to me, I’d prayed up plenty of thanks, for being out from the bars, but hadn’t asked forgiveness for what I’d done to put me behind them in the first place. I worked on that for a while, then felt better, heard nothing more, and fell asleep.

Chapter IV

So for a while Val laid off of me, at least off my misspent life, and for a couple of months I was happy, with my freedom, my work, and her, though busier than that paperhanger, with mosquitoes as well as hives. I snatched the trees out quick, now that I knew how to do it, and was done with them later that week. Then I raced the calendar, to get stuff in the ground so it would start to grow. First I had to lime, or double-lime actually, as the land was fairly poor, and turn it in with a plow. Then I double-fertilized, and cut that in with a disk. Then I seeded, for lettuce, spinach, broccoli, corn, and all kinds of stuff. I did that all with the tractor, sometimes needing help, like someone to ride the planter putting tomato seedlings in, and was given a boy named Homer. He was a colored fellow who parked cars at the Ladyship, and came out every day in the truck to pick up stuff to take in, green stuff, that is, as soon as it was ready and I could cut it and pack it in crates.

On top of all that were the hams, a big source of profit, now the Ladyship was open and made a sales outlet. Getting them ready in town, it seemed, was much too complicated, as they had to be smoked out here, and besides, it was a different kind of routine from what restaurant chefs are used to. From the carcasses he bought, he had them cut every day, and brought them out at night, usually four, two picnics and two big ones, but sometimes eight. She did the curing and cooking, squirting formula into a vein with a little pump she had, then later steaming them under pressure, baking them, and doing them up in plastic, with “MR. VAL’S FINE HAMS” printed on. Once a month, when enough had been formulated up and hung in the cold room, I did the smoking. I rolled the racks to the smokehouse, dumped sawdust out on the floor, tossed a lighted newspaper in, closed up, and watched the dampers. At the end of forty-eight hours, out they came, brown as hickory nuts. The racks, it turned out, were called “trees.” Until then I had thought the Ham Tree some kind of a comedian’s gag, like the Rock Candy Mountain. It turned out, though, to be real.

The formula, she told me, was secret, but one day I called it skookum, and that started her laughing. Then we both laughed so hard we cried. Then she got ashamed, and said stop talking like that. So I did. So she did. So I didn’t. So she didn’t. So after that it was skookum, our own little private joke.

The hams we always did early, as soon as he shoved off for town, but I’d see her again for lunch, and, for her, generally dressed up. Or at least I put on a coat, a new one I bought. It turned out, once I’d made restitution, I was on a salary, one hundred dollars a month and my keep, and the coat was my first outlay. But every little thing brought us closer, like the color the coat should be. I got brown, but she said it ought to be blue, to go with my hair, which is yellow, like molasses taffy, and my eyes, which she said are blue, though until then I hadn’t much noticed. I said brown was quiet, and then we’d argue it out, but it seemed sweet that anyone cared what I wore. In between we’d talk of the fat, but kind of around the edges, generally working in toward the good that needs to be done. She spoke of the church they went to, off Branch Avenue in the city, but more often of another one, in St. Mary’s, that she’d gone to when she was little.

In between everything she’d eat and eat and eat, great big ham sandwiches, with pie, often a whole one, ice cream, pastry, and yogurt. Then at night she had her “one real meal of the day,” as she called it, and he did. We lived on beef, pork, ham, veal, and lamb, with occasional poultry; on potatoes, another vegetable, and gravy; on pie, ice cream, pastry, and pudding, but never fresh fruit or green salad. It was the best food for taste I ever ate in my life, and the worst for health I could even dream of. I couldn’t, of course, say such a thing to him, but to her I thought I should, just as a favor, since I was somewhat an expert on it, from my days in the training camps. I got the surprise of my life. We’d been talking along quite friendly, and I sort of hinted, when she cut herself more pie, that it might not be the best thing for a person of her peculiarity.

For the first time she was disagreeable to me. She said: “Duke, I made it plain, I thought, the first day you were here, that the one thing I ask, on this painful subject, is for people to mind their own business. I want to be left alone. I know, don’t worry, what it means to be like this. I know where I’m headed. It’s to the little graveyard, by my little church, down in St. Mary’s City. But it would seem to me, in view of all that, a friend wouldn’t bring this up.”

“A real friend, he would.”

“Not if he wants a friend.”

“From now on I’ll remember.”

“I do my best, Duke, my remaining time on earth, and if I do, it would certainly seem the little I ask could be given me.”

“All a friend asks is to help.”

“Duke! I’ll go insane!”

For the first time, as she started her singsong chant about the good she did on earth, I heard something phony in it. But the scream she gave wasn’t phony, and neither was the look in her eye, as she got up, left the nook, tramped through the living-room, and from there to the main dining-room, and stood staring at his office on that side of the house, which was in front of the dining-room and looked out at the drive. From that time on, I couldn’t shake off a hunch that she lived in fear, not of me, not of the St. Mary’s City graveyard, but of Val Valenty, her husband.

Came the night, in June, when he broke the news of the party. We’d had saddle of lamb, done on the electric grill, and as usual she was still at it, munching along with her eyes shut, when he and I were done. He was talking for the hundredth time about what he had done for Woman, when all of a sudden, with one of those shifts of his, he said: “However — let’s on to the shindy.”

She said: “...Shindy?”

“Oh, we’ll have to have one.”

“Some particular reason?”

“Housewarming! We certainly ought to do something after the trouble we had, getting the place finished and all.”

He slapped his leg, laughed, and told about some of the trouble, but she didn’t see any joke.

Pretty soon she asked: “When is the party to be?”

“Fourth of July, I thought.”

“Isn’t that pretty soon?”

“Three weeks is time enough.” He thought a minute, then admitted: “Well, that is short notice, but Congress had forced my hand.”

“Is Congress coming?”

“Good Lord, no, not all of them. But some of them would think it strange if I left them out. And with this recess they’ll be taking, the Fourth is my only choice.”

She stayed with the meat as he got off the names of the big wheels who’d been to the Ladyship, and then said to me: “Duke, will you excuse us?”

“Certainly, Mrs. Val.”

I jumped up, relieved to be out of it, yet worried for her somehow, left, and went to bed. For some time I could hear them. I couldn’t hear what they said but it sounded gritty.

She said nothing about it next morning, but her face was heavy when I brought her the hams. Then, when I said: “Hey, hey, hey,” she burst out crying, sinking into a big chair she used in the kitchen to take the weight off her feet. I said: “You cut that out, it’s no way to treat a friend. Besides, what the hell is a party?”

“I’d be ashamed to say.”

“He’s got grub, drink, help—”

“It’s not that, it’s — something I can’t go into.” And then, to shift: “Duke, there’s one thing. He’s bringing you out a coat.”

“Haven’t I got a coat?”

“It’s a white coat.”

“...Oh. You mean, I’m to help?”

“You don’t like that, do you?”

“If that’s how it is, that’s it.”

“I asked you something.”

“Well — no.”

“I knew you wouldn’t. I know blood when I see it. You never speak of your family—”

“In Nevada, that’s not healthy.”

“Why not, Duke?”

“Account of Grandma. In my case, Great-grandma. She dealt faro, ’tis said. In a house. In a gambling house, ’tis said. At Virginia City, in the time of the Comstock Lode, when pretty girls did very well. Out there genealogy’s not popular.”

“Miss Duke, she’s the one?”

“Miss Duquesne, really.”

“And you changed a name like that?”

I said everyone called in Du Quesny, and explained about Nevada, how one bunch that came in, especially girls, were French, another Italian, and so on. I asked: “What’s the matter with Duke? At least it’s short.”

“You should be ashamed.”

Then she said, very solemn: “All right, but one thing I guarantee: I’ll figure a way that Miss Duquesne’s great-grandson Duke won’t put on a white coat. I may need help from Bill, but I’ll see that it doesn’t happen.”

“You’re close to Bill, aren’t you?”

“I don’t say who I’m close to. Right now, it’s enough we have one little thing, a ray of some kind of sunshine. That you won’t have to be in it. That there’s something, if I’m called on to meet Miss Duquesne, that I’ll be able to tell her.”

Chapter V

From then on we worked on the rhubarb, hardly mentioning anything else. She blocked Val all the way, from the kind of food to be served to what his girls would wear. She said it couldn’t be pink, the Ladyship’s summer color, but had to be proper black, with white aprons and caps. To park the cars, she said, Homer could not wear his admiral’s suit, the blue-and-gold he wore for his parking job, but must have a quiet maroon, with the same maroon cap a private chauffeur wears. When my white coat was brought, she ripped the lapels with scissors, where MR. VAL was stitched in red, and bit out the threads with her teeth, to leave it perfectly plain. But whatever she dished out he took, in a peculiarly excited way, because the more she blocked him the more she really gave ground. The only real question was: would the party be given at all, and on that she never said no. I felt, from the look of fear in her eyes, that she couldn’t.

At last the Fourth rolled around, part of a long hot weekend, but with 5 not running much traffic. It was to be a cocktail party, scheduled for late afternoon, so things were quiet all morning. He went to town around noon, and I had a look at the lawn, which I’d mown and combed with a rake, to make sure no drunk in a car on 5 had pitched a beer can to mar its pool-table green. When I came back past the house, she called would I please come in and look at her dress. I went in the living-room and she came out in crepy orange, with white shoes and a necklace of some kind of pearl. She looked like a guppy that grew the size of a whale, but I took it serious and meditated some time. With her coloring, I said at last, and the orange shade of the dress, it should tote up kind of Spanish, but the white things didn’t blend. She asked if red would be better, and I said it would. She went to her bedroom and came back changed, with the orange dress still on, but with dark red shoes and a necklace of dark red beads, big ones, I think made of wood. I said it looked much better, and was glad I could really mean it. Her eyes got big and black, and she seemed childishly pleased.

Around two, when I was in my room half dressed, things began to happen. First came Homer, in the pickup truck he used, with a dishwasher boy named Bardie, and all kinds of stuff on board: a hot unit, a cold unit, hampers of liquor, glasses, dishes, and so on. The two of them carried all that into the kitchen, then got their clothes, which hung in the cab on hangers, and came to my parlor to dress. The maroon suit was mohair, and Homer, who was tall, slim, and light-complected, was pleased at how he looked in it, and how it felt, so cool. Bardie’s outfit was white, and he went into the house with it. Homer surveyed all around, partly I thought to duck work, but partly to figure things out, as the idea was to put cars out back, and leave the front unobstructed, so its beauty could be observed.

Then here came the bartender, whose name was Jake, in a yellow convertible, and the chef, Emil, in quite a high-toned sedan. Then Val came, driving three girls in his car, which was also a sedan, though not a knockout like Emil’s. By then, Jake and Emil were dressing, also in my front parlor, and called out the window the girls could dress with them. By their looks I think they might have, but Val cut in pretty quick and said they should dress in the house. By then it was coming on four, and I soon was alone again, in slacks and Sunday shirt, but with the coat laid out on the bed. The ray of sunshine, I felt, had somehow got itself loused, and I would have to pass drinks. Then I heard the phone, and Val’s voice calling me. I went, and he was just coming out the door, the one from the living-room to the patio, and seemed upset. He said: “Duke — Bill just called — he’s in a spot. You know — he’s with the Association — Southern Maryland Tobacco Growers Association — down in Waldorf — and today of all days — bunch of tractors been delivered — and they got to be parked. He thought about you. What say, boy, can do?”

“I think so, Mr. Val.”

“It’ll mean your missing the party.”

“If I has to I has to.”

“Thanks, Duke. I must have Bill, there’s a reason. No Bill, no party — at least no real party.”

“Do I take a bus, or—”

“Bill’s running you down.”

By that time she was there, staring at me. She said: “Duke, I’m most grateful.”

Bill got there suspiciously quick, and didn’t say much in the car, except I should look Waldorf over, so I’d have it all straight. So I fixed it in mind, a small place twenty miles down, with lumber signs, bars lit up for the Fourth, a tobacco warehouse, and the Association showroom, but not any consignment of tractors. He stopped in front of a bar and we went inside. Marge was in a booth, in a neat speckled black dress, a Manhattan in front of her, holding places for us. She spoke, and Bill asked her: “Did Mom call up yet?”

“She and your father will be along later, with the others. I said we should all meet here.”

Bill said to me with a wink: “The St. Mary’s County bunch. Who’ll go, on account of Holly, but not till I lead the parade. Which is why Val must have me. Not that he likes me.” And then: “Brother, does Holly hate it, having to ask these people!”

That, I thought, explained quite a lot, and I was pleased to sit down with them and pass the time.

The place was dark, with some few people in it, air-conditioned cool, and a battery of bandits. We played them, after Bill got his Manhattan and I got my Coke, and they lost, but I won five dollars. So they didn’t refuse when I ordered another round. So that made it quite sociable, and it came to me if I made any pitch at all I could find out some things, especially about my release. I said: “Could I ask, with nobody else present, the deal that was made on me? We don’t speak of the caper I pulled. I mean why I was sprung.”

Nothing was said for some minutes, but something passed between them, because Bill answered, very careful: “Politics could be part of it.”

“Mr. Val is in politics?”

“What isn’t he in?”

I felt there would be more, and pretty soon she took it up: “Duke, no paper got your case, and we’ve felt, like Holly, that the less said about it the better. But, since you have brought it up, you just as well know that Val is in politics, and in a most peculiar way. How he got started on it we don’t really know, as he’s older than we are and at that time we weren’t acquainted with him. He’s from Prince Georges County, but went to work in the city, as a bus boy, at a place on Dupont Circle. But, as he claims, a bus boy is really a business man, being paid by waiters, so it wasn’t too much of a step when he opened his own place. It began then. He hires girls, but always a certain kind. They live in Prince Georges but like to work in the District. They vote and their families vote, which is the foundation of Val’s strength. And so far as you’re concerned, Duke, some of them have friends, like police officers. And some of them get in trouble, like cashiers. Once that happened, the rest, to Val, was nothing. One phone call would do it. In fact, we think it was done before your — caper. That the officer, Danny Daniel, who goes with that girl in the Ladyship, was simply told: get somebody, package him up, and send him. It happened to be you, that’s all.”

“Then Congressmen’ll come, today?”

“The ones he invites, yes.”

Bill said: “A free feed, a free drunk, a free ride in the papers, and them jerks would miss it?”

“Politics, then, helps business?”

Marge let that ride, but it seemed to annoy Bill. He said: “Duke, what is politics, to you? What’s the idea, as you get it?”

“Oh — moola. Grift. Combos.”

“That’s not it at all.”

He leaned forward, his elbows on the table, really focusing for the first time since we got here. He said: “It’s not even slightly the answer, and since you did bring this up, you just as well know why you’re here, and are not some place else. Politics is power. It’s power over you, over girls, over Holly, over me, over Congressmen, that they have to come when he says so. It’s power to use, power to trade, power to get more power. Don’t ask me why they want it. I don’t know and I’m not at all sure that they do. But the guy who thinks they want graft, or their picture in the paper, or something else of that kind, is playing right in their hands. Those guys like money, as Val does, as you do, as I do, as who don’t, for that matter. But with them it’s still an incident. The chain’s the main thing, the iron they rivet on you, so you have to do as they say — though of course you pretend to like it. ‘Senator, I’ll attend to it today, I’ll count it a privilege.’ It is in the pig’s eye.”

“How long am I in for?”

“What did Daniel tell you?”

“He didn’t say. He made me sign a confession, and the rest is up in the air. Until I reform is the idea, but when is that?”

“My guess would be, when Val’s work is done, in the fall. Once, with stock, there was work on a farm in winter. Now, no. As we hope.”

“You don’t seem too sure, Mr. Hollis.”

“Duke, Val is Val.”

She said: “Bill, he’s not that bad.”

“I should say not. He’s worse.”

He sounded bitter, and I wondered if he had chains on him, maybe of a financial kind. Marge switched to the farm, and I heard for the first time they had lived on it, she and Bill, as it really belonged to Mrs. Val, through inheritance, and was called Hollis Hill. They had tried tobacco, she said, but found that twenty-five acres weren’t enough for a cash crop, though, as she admitted, “perfect for the limited amount of vegetables a restaurant chain needs.” When Val took over, moved the cottage back, and put the big house up, was when trouble started, she said, “as we didn’t propose to live out back like tenants and pick his potato bugs for him.” She said the Association had been mighty glad to get Bill, “much to Val’s surprise.”

Outside, a car turned in, Bill looked at his watch, and I called for my check. I said: “One thing I still don’t get. If Mr. Val has such power, not to mention dough, Mr. Hollis, why does he need me? Why can’t he keep any help?”

“Booth comes around, that’s why.”

“John Wilkes Booth, you mean?”

“Like he did that night, before he stopped at Surrattsville to buy that pint of booze. He didn’t take it kindly that nobody opened up.”

She said: “He never bothered us.”

“Honey, I love you, and we led a right kind of life. But Duke might remember that the help sometimes don’t. They’re scared, with reason. That explain it, Duke?”

“I guess so. Thanks.”

Outside, more cars drove up, and I spotted a middle-aged couple that looked like Bill and his sister. Everyone out there looked sensible, and Bill did, and Marge. The sun was shining bright and traffic running heavy. And yet, after all that was said, and especially this last, I kept thinking, as I paid, of what Mrs. Val had said, that day by the tree, about a “tragic land.” Maybe it was all redeemed, and maybe a few hits weren’t.

Chapter VI

They coached as to what I should say, about the tractors I was supposed to be parking, the bus I was due to take, and so on, then dropped me off at Clinton, I’d say at six thirty. I found a place to eat, fooled around, and then, around dark, strolled up the road, to see if the party was over and I could come bustling in. The house was all lit up, but not many people seemed to be left that I could see, so I came on up the drive, ready to reverse gears if anything developed. It did, right at my feet, on a small headwall over a pipe that drained a low place in the grass. It was Bill, still in his light gray suit, and sounding slightly drunk. He said: “Duke, hold it, stop. Is that you? Whyncha say something?”

“Yeah. Sure. Hello.”

“Siddown. ’M in a spot.”

“What you do, swing on someone?”

“Chrisalminey, cut the comedy.”

“Pal, what’s the trouble?”

“F’ got stuff ’m to get.”

“Stuff? What stuff?”

“F’ her. F’ Holly. ’S happened, Duke, ’t last. Ankles cracked up, but bad. All swell up, jus’ awful. ’S been coming, he knew ’t was coming, ’n he would give a goddam party. ’N doctor, he’s giv’n one too, so fat chance he would come. But he give orders. He said soak’m. Soak’m in some kind stuff f’m drugstore, ’n Marge sent me, get it. ’N f’got what ’t was. ’M parked on road, ’n f’got. Look, Duke, y’ go in, start talk’n t’ Marge, ’n find out—”

“Listen, pal, was it Epsom?”

“Chrisalminey, that’s it! Aw, pal!”

“Come on, Bill, we got to hurry.”

“Yeah, but firs’ mus’ thank you.”

“Come on now, and I’ll drive.”

His car was on 5, where he’d walked back from it, and while he was finding the key, three or four taxis passed, all lit up like Christmas trees, and turned into the drive. He said: “Homer blew, ’count of Booth. Took keys with ’m, so lot a people got to use cabs. Good thing. Damn Congressmen, tighter’n a tick.”

“Kid, we got to hurry. On ankles like that you can’t waste any time. The bigger they swell, the more she’s in agony.”

“Got keys. I’ my hand. Now.”

I took them, loaded him in, started, and headed for town. He said he was drunk, and to head him off from talking. I did, for maybe a mile. Then: “’E’s lower’n a worm, Duke. How could she marry ’at slug?”

“If she likes him, O.K.”

“Him? She likes what ’e’s got.”

“Watch it, fellow, you’re tight.”

What he seemed to be saying made me sick, and I wished he’d shut up. He said. “She likes ’is grub.”

“...She likes grub, period.”

“You got that much grub, Duke?”

“No, have you?”

“He has. Period.”

He quieted down, but then was off again: “Duke, if he wan’ Holly, like man wan’ woman, I might shoot th’ bassid, but respect’m, li’l bit. But whatch say, Duke, jerk don’ wan’ her on’y wan’ her blood.”

“You mean, he drinks it?”

“I mean, she’s a Hollis!”

“And Hollises, they’re hot stuff?”

“Y’ goddam right.”

“Aren’t you a Hollis?”

“Yop. ’M hot stuff too. Why, y’ poor Nevada rat, they come ’n Ark ’n Dove. ’A’s hot’s y’ c’n get.”

“The ark I heard of, and the animals, two by two. But the Dove is a new one on me.”

“Dove’s ship.”

“Same like the Ark?”

“Same’s Mayflower, on’y better. Lis’n, Duke, quit crack’n dumb, quit it I said quit it! ’M drunk, ’m splain’n good’s can. Hollises, they come. ’N Ark ’n Dove, to S’ Mary’s City. ’N t’ scum like him, to goddam bus boy, it’s same’s marry’n God. Same, on’y better. God, maybe, loves ’m, no ’count’n f’ taste. Hollis wou’n spit on ’m.”

He cussed some more, then apologized for doing it, because he said in Prince Georges they didn’t cuss good, like in Anne Arundel, where they do it in meter. But my heart was jumping, because of what he seemed to be saying, that whatever was back of the marriage, it didn’t include any love. Little by little, instead of shutting him up, I led him on to talk, and all of a sudden he burst out: “He nailed ’er feet to board. Like they do ’em geese.”

“What geese, Bill?”

“Stuff’n their livers up.”

“Oh, to make the patty?”

“O.K., y’ know how’s done. Duke, she wou’n look at ’m, ha’n been f’ grub. She went ’way, see? F’m S’ Mary’s, ’count S’Mary’s got no work. Went ’way, five years ’go, age eighteen, took job ’n Wash’n, Byu’ Grav’n Print’n, live on Branch Av’nue. Eat, Mr. Val place. Spen’ all ’er money, f’ grub. Grub she mus’ have, Duke, ’r she die. Got’s trouble. Fatnis, ’n glan’s. ’N ’en he got in it.”

“Yeah? What he do?”

“He’n care about her, not one hoot’n hell. Till, until, ’e hear name. Hollis. Hollis. Chrisalminey, to Valent’ scum, same’s God, on’y better. ’N ’en he nail ’er. Nail ’er feet. Give ’er grub, big thick steak — ’n give ’er free. ‘No check, so glad ’t las’ meet someone ’preciates my li’l steak.’ ’N first time ’n ’er life she got ’nough t’ eat — ’n free. Did she go wild, boy oh boy oh boy, wi’ rings on ’er fingers, bells on ’er toes, ’n rainbows play’n ukulele — y’ hear me, y’ damn Nevada stringbean? — ukulele I said, ’n bass drum. ’N ’en ’e says: ‘Miss Hollis, hozzit we get mar’d?’ She dis laugh, Duke, ha-ha. ’N she foun’ out. S’prise, s’prise, check f’ steak, seven dollars ’n eighty cents. He twis’ it, Duke, ’at chain ’e had on ’er f’oat. Round ’er neck ’e twis’ it. No free steak, no tater, no pie, no pudd’n — nuff’n. Free day, count’m, one, two, three — free. ’At does it. All over. Ole ball game. They get mar’d, have wedd’n. I done my bes’, Chrisalminey, me’n Marge bofe. He got idea, buil’ at d’ive. Know some guy, got chain on ’m, sell ’em fish, got orster shells, big pile out back, down Maine Av’nue. I say, Val, I do it. I buil’ d’ive, haula goddam shells, buil’ it. I took six mont’. ’E cou’n get in place, cou’n live in it, ’t all. Lot good ’t did. Y’ see. ’E’s got ’er. Jus’ chain-twis’n bassid.”

He passed out, and all the time in the drugstore I felt giddy, from buying stuff for her feet, using my own money, and knowing she didn’t want this man, but only the food he had. We started back, and pretty soon he asked where we were. I told him the District line, and he growled: “What I say t’ you? I been drunk again?”

“So much and so silly I don’t just recollect. In fact, I wasn’t really listening.”

“Tha’s it, Duke. Thanks.”

“You practically said nothing at all.”

“Pal, y’ all right.”

I parked on the loop out front, but had hardly cut lights when Marge came running out, so relieved to get the Epsom, and to see who was back of the wheel, she could hardly talk. I handed the keys to Bill, who sat there fumbling them, and the boxes to her, warning her to watch the water, that she didn’t use it too hot. I said it two or three times: “It’s Epsom that draws out the swelling, the liquid there in the joint. Not heat. Lukewarm does it.”

We were through the front door by then, she and I, and she hustled out to Mrs. Val’s bedroom. But in the living-room it was like some crazy dream, with Val walking around, snapping his fingers, and paying no attention to the Epsom; the waitresses working, gathering stuff up; and a thing on the love seat that was like a cartoon in the papers. He was, I would say, fifty, a small man in blue coat, blue shirt, gray pants, and two-toned party shoes, with white hair and a red, sun-burned face. He seemed to be in a rage, and no talk about ankles, the trick Homer had pulled, or anything would calm him down. He was grounded, apparently, for lack of the keys to his car, and meant to be driven home. Whatever Val would say, he’d keep coming back to it: “But, Mr. Vawl, I must awsk you to drive me. I will not take a cawb. I’m amized you awsk me to. I—”

“Mr. Commissioner, I will, when—”

“I’m ready, Mr. Vawl, to gow.”

“But the boy—”

“Has decawmped, as you towld me.”

“And my wife—”

“Has already heard my regrets, expressed to her in person, and has grawnted permission, Mr. Vawl, so if you down’t mind—”

Hammers went in my head, as they had when I hit Pabby Ramos, and I prayed to be saved from wrong-time adrenalin. But about that time in came Bill, weaving, belching, and mumbling. Mr. Commissioner looked at him and went on: “Mr. Vawl, it’s a simple mawttah of prowtocowl, and I shall sit hyaw—”

It was the first I’d heard of protocol, and how it was different from Hadacol I didn’t at that time know. But while he was talking, Bill was lurching, past the love seat, past the table, past the sofa, around to the brass basket full of wood left over from spring. He picked up a chunk and said: “Watch ’t, Val — duck! I’ll teach the son a bitch protocol!”

Now, in the ring, you hit, duck, or block, and on that stuff you do or you don’t. My hand was there, and maybe the adrenalin helped, I don’t say it didn’t. But catching the chunk was just the beginning, because all hell broke loose, with the girls screaming, Val yelling at Bill, Mr. Commissioner yelling at Val, and me yelling at everyone: “Break it up!” — whatever that meant. I went over the sofa at Bill, tied him up, and dropped the chunk in the basket. But he kept right on with his talk, right over my shoulder. He said to Mr. Commissioner: “Pro’col, y’ goddam squirt, pro’col here is me! Stan’ up when I speak t’ y’. What you c’-missioner of? Hey, ’m ask’n y’. Y’ dayum li’l end o’ nuff’n! Y’—”

“Bill!”

The voice in the door wasn’t loud, but, brother, did it carry! Marge jerked her thumb at the girls and told them dress. Soon as they were out she went over to Bill, unwound my arms from around him, and looked at him. He took her hand, slapped his own cheek with it, and started to cry. I wanted to cry. She didn’t wait to see if I did or not, but marched herself to Mr. Commissioner, and said: “John Dayton, you order your cab and go!”

“Why — Mowge Dennis!”

“Stop talking that way!”

“When did you get here, Marge?”

“I been here. All the time. I’m Holly’s sister-in-law. Why, the very idea of you, with all the trouble we got, carrying on like this!”

“This... this is a hell of a note.”

His accent seemed to be gone, and so did the protocol, and I grabbed Bill by the arm, drug him out to the cottage, and parked him on the bed. When I opened the closet door to put his coat on a hanger, there was Homer’s maroon with all keys right in the pocket. Mr. Commissioner picked his out and at last shoved off for town, and the cab he had ordered would do to haul the girls. Val grabbed the phone, snatched a list out of his pocket, and began calling people to say their cars would be sent, this very night at once, as “the tangle is straightened out — and you’ll have it right at your door, if you’ll say where the keys should be put.” I realized I would spend the night delivering cars to town, shuttling back by cab, delivering some more, and shuttling some more.

I sat down on the love seat, to get adjusted to that, and think over all I had heard, as well as what I had seen — like the way things were done, in this peculiar state, with Val not able to stand up to some jerk of a government official, and Marge able to shrivel him up in two words. But then I began to feel bitter, not at the night’s work ahead, but at the way Val took it, putting this bunch of wheels ahead of this thing that had happened, and who it had happened to. I knew those ankles were serious, as Bill seemed to know, drunk as he was. Why didn’t Val know it too? At first it had seemed wonderful he didn’t love her. Now it made me sore, and I felt the hammers again. How long they beat, I don’t exactly know, but then Marge was there in the door, beckoning me to the bedroom.

Only one lamp was lit, and she was lying there, still in the orange dress, her feet in a little tub. Her eyes were closed, but she lifted a hand when she heard me. When I sat on the bench beside her, I saw beads on her brow that said she was still in pain. I took my handkerchief and blotted them, and she nodded her head just a little, in a way that brought us both back to that day out by the tree. I said: “Keep your feet dunked under and you’ll be getting relief. Don’t let Marge make it too hot. Just puts more strain on your heart, swells up the fluid inside. I’d take an Anacin, and a sleeping pill if you have one.”

“I wanted to thank you. For getting the Epsom.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I wanted to.”

I went stumbling out, and all through that crazy night, driving cars up, putting keys in wacky places, coming back and starting all over, I hardly minded at all, because she had wanted to thank me.

Chapter VII

“Duke, can I ask a favor?”

“Of course, Mrs. Val, anything.”

“It’s about my lunch when you fix it.”

“Something the doctor ordered?”

“I mustn’t have any pie.”

It was next afternoon, with Val gone, the doctor gone, Bill gone, and Marge gone, and most of the excitement over, meaning wires, calls about the cars I’d delivered, and pictures on the society page. Before leaving, Marge had dressed her, in pink of some sort, and I had moved her, by getting her into the chair she used in the kitchen and sliding her along on the carpet, as of course she still couldn’t put any weight on her feet. I was about to get her lunch, but her three o’clock lunch, one I hadn’t heard of until today. Her appetite, she said, had come back, since the pain was gone.

She explained, very chatty: “Dr. Semmes doesn’t think much of pastry, and wants me to lay off it, he says. But — he didn’t mention ice cream — of course it’s really a dairy product — and I’m sure it’ll be all right. It’s in the pantry freeze, Duke, all kinds of different flavors. Will you find me a pint of strawberry? And soften it up just a little? In the oven, a few minutes?... Oh well, make it two. A natural food can’t hurt me.”

I don’t know what hit me funny about it, unless she talked too much, or it seemed queer ice cream was in and pie wasn’t. Also, I wondered why Marge, before leaving, hadn’t said something about it, as she had talked to the doctor. I asked if this meant a diet, and this filthy little four-letter word got kind of a shocked silence. Then: “Well, no, Duke, nothing like that, I hope. Dr. Semmes knows my trouble, and would be the first to remind me I have to keep up my strength. It’s just — I had a taste in my mouth — something I’ve had before — I told him about it today. He thinks — they always have to blame something — the pastry could be the cause. I suppose it is — the least little bit rich.”

She looked me in the eye, as a cat does when you suspicion him, and can’t imagine, even with feathers on his nose, why you’re picking on him. I reminded myself how her nature changed when this subject came up, and how even Bill, much as he seemed to love her, never said any different. I studied her, and all of a sudden remembered a guy I had trained, who also had a taste that had to be treated. I said: “You mean, Dr. Semmes made tests? That you wanted kept from Marge? That you rang him just now, after Bill and Marge left, to get the answer in private? Is that it, Mrs. Val?”

“What do you mean, tests?”

“You’re throwing sugar, aren’t you?”

“Sugar? Sugar?”

“In your water, sugar.”

“You dare say that to me?”

“I do, yes.”

“Duke, you may go.”

“I won’t.”

She reached for the phone, which I had put beside her, but I covered it with my hand and set it out of her reach. She started to cuss, sounding much like Bill, and I hardly knew the sweet person I loved so deep. She asked: “Are you by any chance insinuating that I have the diabetes?”

I told her, quite slow, taking my time: “I’m not. I’m insinuating a whole lot worse. At your age, which Bill says is twenty-three, you have, or should have, a hundred per cent normal pancreas, able to supply the juice, or insulin as it’s called, for a normal woman. A woman of one hundred and twenty pounds. Short as you are, one hundred and ten. But it cracks up supplying insulin to four hundred pounds of blubber. I didn’t say diabetes, but the windup’ll be the same. Lady, you’re going to die.”

“I don’t weigh four hundred pounds!”

“What do you weigh?”

“None of your damned business!”

“Over two hundred and sixty, though. That was the first thing I noticed, when I got the first aid from your bathroom — the pair of identical scales, tucked under the cabinet. Because two hundred and sixty is as far as one scale goes, and to weigh, you had to have two. I bet that was a sight, you standing sprat-legged, weighing yourself by halves.”

She got so furious she cried, but I kept driving them in. I said: “As a matter of fact, you’re dying now. Your heart nearly went out when you fell in the hole. It’s laboring now, supplying blood to all that lard, though from your looks I would say it was normal. Your pancreas can’t take it, your ankles are near the end, and your kidneys will make the K. O. One of these days you’ll topple on your face, and Mr. Val will go around bragging of the custom-made casket he got you, as of course no regular casket would fit.”

For some reason that reached her, and she moaned and closed her eyes. Then: “I’ve known I must die, I’m resigned. I do the little I can, my mite of good on this earth, until I hear the call. I’ve asked you: isn’t that enough? Do I everlastingly have to be told? Can’t I die in peace? How often do I have to say it? It’s glandular! It’s an affliction! There’s no cure, and—”

“It’s not glandular.”

“...What?”

“You heard me, I think.”

“And what, then, is it?”

“You. You and your dishonest soul. You, that haven’t the guts to say no to your gut.”

“Listen, I may be weak, and we’re right back where we started. If it’s not glandular, why can’t they find any cure?”

“They can. They have.”

“Funny they wouldn’t tell me.”

“They have, I think. As Dr. Semmes tried to tell you today. But you can’t hear them, can you? You kid yourself they may mean pie, but not ice cream — oh no.”

“And what is this wonderful cure?”

“Don’t eat so goddam much.”

She turned white, not at the words, but the sense, at the fear of not having food. I wouldn’t have been human then if I didn’t go get her lunch. I heated her up two take-outs, warmed her ice cream, found some chocolate sauce, melted it, poured it on top of the cream, found maraschino cherries, put them on top, so I had a tray that looked like something in movies. I set it beside her and said: “There you are, meat, cream, sugar, everything. You’re trying, as you lie there, to make yourself heave it at me, but with the character you got, what you’re going to do is eat it. Aren’t you?”

“And I thought I had a friend.”

“Friend? What you want is a pallbearer.”

She started to cry, and I squatted there, to be plastered with goo if that was what she wanted. She didn’t do any plastering. She ate the last slice, the last crumb, the last drop.

I took the tray, came back, and asked if there’d be something else. She said I could pack, as she’d have to tell her husband of the things I had said, and he’d have to let me go. I felt myself go numb, as that threw me back to the officer, my confession, and what all that might mean. I hated to eat her crow, but after some seconds, when the scare of the bars had done its work, I did. I said: “I have talked very plain, but as you said just now, we once said we were friends, and I spoke for your own good. If you’re bound you must tell Mr. Val, there’s nothing I can say, but before you do, I’d like to tell you more — about myself — my days in the ring — what I learned there — so you’ll know I can help you — if you’ll only let me.”

But her face only got meaner, and, fear or no fear, you can take just so much. I said: “How’d you like to go to hell?” Then I flung out, went to the cottage, and packed.

But the thought of her ankles rode me, especially on certain angles, like her being helpless to get to the bath-room, and maybe needing to go, so I went back, as though to borrow the phone. I said, if Mr. Val had to be told, I’d rather do it myself, and picked up the receiver to dial. She said: “Duke, will you put that down? And sit here, where we can talk?”

“I apologize.”

“I had it coming, and more.”

I put the receiver back and moved the phone where she could reach it. I pulled a chair over and sat down facing her. She touched her tongue to her teeth, said: “I have that taste again. Not sweet — just a queer, gray sensation. And my ears ring a little. As though frogs were here.”

“The sugar in that sundae—”

“I know, I know.” And then: “Part of it’s lying, Duke, to myself, and taking it out on you. But part of it’s fear. Of not having the food I so desperately need.”

“You so desperately want.”

“It’s some little bit need.”

“It’s not.”

“All right, then—”

It must have been a minute before she could make herself whisper: “Want.” Then, after another minute: “Now tell me. About yourself.”

“I couldn’t hit.”

“I know. Not that I’d want you to.”

“I couldn’t hit, but I wouldn’t give up, and that spells punk, or, in other words, sparring partner. But then I got the idea I’d make that racket pay. So I did. I trained guys for title fights, guys that had to make weight. You understand about that?”

“Not very well, I’m afraid.”

“They got divisions, each a different weight, like fly, bantam, feather, light, welter, middle, light heavy, and heavy. Each division carries a title, worth plenty of dough. But some guys, who’d be rich at 160, but are bums at 175, are like you. They can’t, or think they can’t, make the weight. That’s where I came in. I talked to doctors, read in libraries, listened to stuff, and got it down to a science. I was the guy, out there in the West, who could take that 175-pound bum, work on him five or six weeks, and make him a champ at 160. I had all the work I could do... Listen, stupid, for you I could do the same.”

“I haven’t the — guts, you called it.”

“You think you’re the only one?”

I grabbed her shoulder, shook it, and said: “Every fatso on earth is like that from not having guts — but my business was giving them guts. I know how. Don’t you want to step out of that grease? Don’t you want to be free of it? To walk without folding up? To run? To look like other people? To be able to go in a store, see a dress that you like—”

“Shut up.”

“You finish it up.”

“You got a sireen song, Mr. Webster.”

There’s such a thing as knowing when to shut up, because guts are found inside, and can’t be laced on like gloves. I said nothing for some time, and she lay there, her arms folded over her eyes. Then: “Duke, I’ll try it. I’ll put myself in your hands, with the same trust I have in you always — on one condition.”

“Which is?”

“I’ll be facing two fights. One with myself. On that you’ve offered your help and I accept it. The other is — my fight alone. On that I must have your promise you’ll keep out. It must be my fight alone.”

After what Bill had said, I thought I knew what she meant. I said: “Are you sure you’ll have that fight? It seems to me that anyone would be only too glad—”

“Duke, it’s pride. In food. In emancipating Woman with a capital W — and Woman includes me. In something a lifetime is dedicated to. That’s part of it. But there are other parts too, that I can’t go into. Duke, I must have your word.”

“Look. On this subject, in addition to know-how, I’m one hell of a salesman. I had to be. That’s where you begin. I could make with the explaining so—”

“Duke, no!”

She wasn’t impatient, she was terrified. She said: “Unless you promise me, unless it’s to be secret between us, unless I can be sure that not even my family knows until I’ve won — if I win — it’s off. We don’t start. Have I made it clear?”

“...If that’s the deal, Mrs. Val—”

“It is, it has to be.”

“Then, that’s it.”

We shook and she held my hand, so we were closer than ever. And yet, as I write it now, I wish I believed it was quite as good as it looks. On her part it was, I know. But on my part, if she had a taste in her mouth, I had one too, and it wasn’t gray, it was yellow. Just once that afternoon I had remembered what Val could do to me, or I thought he could do. And maybe, even pressing her hand, I may have been slightly relieved to be standing clear of that fight, to be glad I wasn’t involved.

Chapter VIII

Now, there’s no mystery to it, how you get a fat guy thin, a fat girl, or a fat anybody. You take them off sugar, starch, and fat, and put them on protein, fruit, and salad, saying it twice for fruit. You do it with diet, and there’s not any other way — at least, any other way that’s safe, regardless of all you hear about exercise, massage, baths, and pills. Time was, they got results with that stuff, like the dry-out, as they called it, for jockeys, drunks, and fighters. They took them off liquid, water, coffee, beer, or anything that’s drunk, and then sweated them, in Turkish, Swedish, or Finnish baths. It was a cure all right, but often the patient died. Joe Gans did, after he trained that way for Nelson, on account of getting fed up with the wrangle over weight and agreeing to one hundred and thirty-three ringside. He made it all right, but the pictures of him, which they still show you in Goldfield, look like a Congo famine victim, and t.b., two years later, gave him the final K. O. Lot of people have died, even big Hollywood stars, from going about it all wrong and believing fairy tales. It’s done, I said, with diet, and there’s not any other way.

But there’s tricks you can use to ease it, and the first one I’d used, with the fighters, was a few days of thinking it over, to get up plenty of wanna and put less strain on gotta. To that she readily agreed, so her ankles would come back in shape, she could get around, Marge would quit coming up, and Val would shove off to town, as usual before she ate breakfast, and the whole thing would be simpler. Each day we’d talk it over, how much better she’d feel, all kinds of stuff of that sort, while in between would come gaps while she screwed up her nerve. Then, toward the end of the week, soon as I saw Val off, I came in and there she was, waiting for me in the living-room, sitting up on the sofa, no longer stretched out flat. I said how pleased I was to see her around again, she thanked me and drew a deep breath. She said: “My wanna I think I have. What next?”

“Fruit.”

“Just fruit?”

“Stop looking like that!”

“We don’t have any fruit.”

“No restaurant man ever does. They know everything about dishes and nothing at all about food.”

“The Clinton store has peaches.”

“I’ll go get some.”

“Take my car.”

Taking it sounds easier than it was, as all sorts of attachments were on it, pedal extensions and so on, so the seat would push back for her belly, and at the same time she could still reach the controls with her feet. It was like sitting with your legs wound around a kid’s express wagon, but I got there and back, and found her just as I left her, getting the jitters from hunger, but still hanging on somehow. I washed off some peaches, put them in a basket, and brought them to her, with a plate and a little knife. She asked: “How many can I have?”

“Many as you want.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“You eat them, you got mineral and pulp and vitamins, but not enough sugar, compared to the syrup on cakes, even to rate a count. And your stomach’s full, so your hunger is not yet gnawing.”

While she was chewing along, I cooked the rest of her breakfast, and her face lit up when I came with it, as she’d thought fruit was going to be all. She got two boiled eggs, a strip of bacon, and a whole pot of black coffee, which I told her drink plenty of, as it would do the same as the peaches, fill her stomach up and at the same time not make weight. She spoke of diets she’d seen in the papers, cottage cheese and stuff like that, and I said: “They’re all hokumalarkey, every one of those systems. They’re theoretical, and don’t take into account that the person reducing is human. They’ve got to like the diet. The peaches are friendly. They look pretty, they smell pretty, they taste pretty. And you can have as many as you want. How do you feel?”

“I have to say all right.”

“Any hunger?”

“Not even a little bit.”

“Say so if it’s there.”

“No, it’s really amazing.”

We went out and worked on hams, and I brought a small chair from the cottage, so she could slide it around and lean on it and in that way take weight off her feet. Then I thought I could leave her, and drove up to the city, to pick up stuff I wanted for her, like Italian cheese, a grater, olive oil, garlic, lemons, peppercorns, a grinder, more fruit, and other stuff. When I got back she was pooped, all stretched out on the sofa, but definitely yenning for food. She said. “What’s next?”

“Salad.”

“I never cared for it much.”

“And look it, I may say.”

“All right then, salad.”

I made her a Western job, of chicory and romaine torn up, fried croutons rubbed with garlic, a coddled egg broken on, lemon juice and olive oil mixed, ground peppercorns and cheese grated over it. I brought it out on a plate, and she said: “How much of that can I have?”

“All you want, pitch in.”

“My, my my.”

She chumped it down, had a second plate, but shook her head when I offered ham, saying she was full. I said: “All that lettuce and stuff distends your stomach and fills it. The egg and cheese are protein, which is fuel but doesn’t make weight. And the fat, the little bit of butter the croutons are fried in, as well as the spoonful of oil, coats it all, so digestion is slowed down and it stays with you awhile. However, I brought you some strawberries. You eat them as is, of course, without any cream or sugar, but they’ll give you a friendly feeling over your coffee.”

I ate my lunch then, cold ham or whatever it was. When I’d gathered everything up and was ready to do my own work, I asked her: “How you doing?”

“It’s really marvelous, Duke. I feel fed, I’m not hungry, I’m beginning to see how it works. And yet I’m up with it now, the real thing I’ve dreaded.”

“Say what it is, tell me.”

“I feel so weak.”

“What cures that is sleep.”

“How do you mean, cures it?”

“There are two ways your body gets replenished; one’s food, the other’s sleep. Cut down on one, come up on the other, your strength remains the same.”

I could see she didn’t yet get it, so I told her stories to prove it, like the six-day bicycle riders who get no sleep at all and equalize with spaghetti, so they weigh twenty pounds more at the end of a race than they did at the start. I said: “That was the beautiful part, for those muggs I trained out there, that they could hit the hay all day and sleep the lard off. You can do the same.”

“Go to bed now and—”

“Wake up five pounds lighter.”

“I think you’re kidding me.”

She toddled off to her room, and I toddled off to work, having plenty to do. Homer had been taken back and would be out in the morning, so I had to have stuff for him to haul. But by six I was washed up, and when I went in the house she was waiting, in a filmy pink dress. She said: “Duke, it’s a miracle. I was out three hours, like a top. I woke up feeling wonderful and I’m not weak at all.”

She asked what was next on the program, and I said a salad, which I’d fix, to start her dinner off and fill her up, and a dessert, which I’d also fix, with cut-up dates to add some sweetness, to wind it up. I said: “In between, you eat what’s offered, except of course no potatoes or fried stuff, and small portions, which, with the salad inside you, ought to leave you satisfied.”

I went to the kitchen to fix up the salad and dessert, and she came to keep me company. We got on the subject of raw food, and I told her: “It’s the rawness that keeps you healthy, not bulk, though that helps keep appetite down. Raw stuff eat first, while you’re hungry, as we always do out west, so you’ve got it and don’t hit meat so heavy.” I explained about stomach juices, how they digest cooked stuff too soon, so the large intestine quits from lack of work “and makes all kinds of trouble.” If she got what I was driving at, I didn’t quite know, but I kept on with it, as I suspected her of every ailment there was, and meant her to see the point. I told her: “Raw stuff digests slow, so the large intestine keeps working on it, clear to the end of the line.”

She listened, her eyes quite big and friendly, and then, in a complete switch: “Duke, when I woke up I called Dr. Semmes. I told him I’d read of a diet, in the paper somewhere, and had driven to town, now I’m able to be about, to get the things it called for, and he was all for it, really enthusiastic. So when my other fight begins, at least I have that advantage: I got the idea from some place that’s not personal at all, and I’m backed up by someone who knows. However, when Val comes in tonight, I don’t want you here at all. You come out of the cottage to take his car, you wait before coming to dinner.”

“Just put on a vacant look?”

“You notice nothing.”

As she had told it, Val was due to act silly, but ugly is the word I would use. He got so furious he trembled, the first time I’d seen him like that, and said it made no sense. He called the doctor, with a squawk that reminded me suddenly of what Bill had said about power, and the kind of people that want it. The idea, as he dished it out, was that Dr. Semmes had “exceeded his authority,” and that he “ought to have been consulted.” Dr. Semmes, to judge from the rasp in the receiver, dished out some stuff of his own, and told him he was responsible to his patient and nobody else, and also spoke pretty sharp of the treatment the patient had had, and the horrible effect of “all that rich food,” words Val picked up and roared back, so I had to know what had been said.

All that time, while Val was camped by the phone table, which stood against the wall with two chairs beside it, and I sat on the love seat, she sat on the sofa, the pink dress ballooned all around, not looking at me or at him, but somewhere out front, her eyes narrowed to slits. I felt the hammers’ beat, and then fear of prison would speak. I made myself simmer down, but kept having this hot wish I could smash things up for her, set her free of this man I was starting to hate. It was a grim meal, and at the end of it I was the one who took the dishes out and started them in the washer. She went in the living-room, while he still sat blinking, at the rib roast on its plank, for the first time only half eaten.

Chapter IX

Val got uglier and uglier as the summer crept along, and two things made him worse. One was the sugar, which she was improving on, as she knew from some home testing-kit the doctor made her get. But instead of making him glad to accept the diet, it seemed to act just opposite. He dingdonged at it; there was no need for diet now, and she should enjoy her food. There was some little honesty to it, as he loved to show off his cooking, as well as the applause it got him. But it seemed a costly bid for a hand to risk his wife’s health, and maybe even her life. The second thing was the awful Maryland weather. I had never known anything like it, a heavy, push-down heat that was out there whether the sun was shining or not, a mug, a humidity, that wouldn’t let you sweat, relax, or even so much as breathe. It was simply hell on this earth, and when a storm would come piling up, generally around supper time, it never helped with the mug, but it did frazzle Val’s temper. He snarled and snapped and growled, and once, when a flash put the power on the blink, I thought he’d throw things at her.

But the first big fight, or say the first one when she fought back, wasn’t about food, and wasn’t even during a storm. It was about church, on a bright Sunday morning when we’d been sitting in recliners, the three of us, out front. They’d been going to church as usual, and each Sunday I’d load take-outs into his car, twenty-five for needy people, which seemed to be the “good” she had talked of so much, or the main part of it anyway. I had done the same today — brought the car out front, and sat down, as invited. I was in shirt and slacks, he in fresh blue mohair, she in a house dress, a new one but not at all fancy. By then her weight had come down, under the two-hundred mark, so she had bought herself a few clothes, “in-between things,” as she called them. Soon he looked at his watch, said: “Dear, I don’t want to hurry you, but — it’s getting quite late. It’s getting on to ten, and we really ought to get started.”

“Oh, I’m not going to church.”

“Holly, I’m surprised.”

“But I’ve nothing to wear.”

There was kind of a break, and she said: “I’m being sensible, I think. On this clothes question at least. I still have to come down by pounds and pounds, so nothing I get can be more than temporary. I can’t go in this very well, and my decent things, such as I have, are practically hanging on me.” She went on, very airy: “Besides, I’m only human, and I don’t relish the talk.”

“What talk, Holly?”

“About the change in my figure.”

“I didn’t know there was talk.”

“Oh, there will be.”

“It’s not a thing you can hide.”

“Then all right, Val. When I’m normal, properly dressed, and ready, I’ll go through with it once and for all. Right now it doesn’t suit me to do it over and over, week after week, telling all those women how I lost the weight.”

“I would think it would be duck soup.”

“Val, I don’t understand you.”

“A normal woman likes such talk.”

That’s what I thought, and I wished she’d get off that tack. But I also thought it was time for me to get out, so I asked if I could have the day, and went back to put on a coat. When I came from the cottage and started out front, they were at it again, and I could see him, through his bedroom windows, marching around. As it seemed a bad time to walk past, I stopped and heard him say: “Why don’t you out with it, Holly? It’s not the clothes and it’s not the talk.”

“What is it, then?”

“And it’s not a what. It’s a who.”

I could feel her heart stop as mine did, as she said, very muffled: “...Oh.”

“Oh. Oh. Oh.”

His voice was mean, and he roared on: “It’s me, the forgotten man on this place. That tries to please you. By giving you the one thing you ever loved in your life, which is food. Food fit for a king. Food I’ll serve to a king, if a king’s coming to town. But no, though you love it, you look down on those who make it, and so you try to be half married and half not married. You want to eat a little bit, enough to live on, but not a real meal, enough to thank me for. You—”

“Val!”

She got up and did some marching, of a kind I’d never seen. Her hands, though pretty, had always seemed quite clumsy, as to keep them from bumping her side, she did what a fat woman does, swung them wide from the elbows, as though doing the crawl stroke. But now, with the hips straighter, she could let her hands act natural. One went to her belt, the other hung down straight, as she went to him and said: “What’s the matter, Val, you afraid to go alone?”

“Go where?”

“To church, of course.”

“What’s to be afraid of, there?”

“Mr. Commissioner Dayton, and his prowtocowl. And Dr. Carroll, and his hawndshake. And Mrs. Carroll, and her lorgnette. And—”

If it was how she mimicked, or what, I don’t know, but he broke, without letting her finish. He cringed, rubbed his hands, and was the same old bus boy again. He said: “What’s come over you, Holly? We had our differences, like when we gave the party. But we’d each concede a point, and—”

“I conceded the points!”

“And I did!”

“No.”

By then she was looking right up at him, smiling, almost laughing. She said: “You love to crack the whip, don’t you, Val? But like all whipcrackers, you jump at a whip too, don’t you? And those people, in church up there today, frighten you, don’t they? Well, they won’t bite you. You go now, leave soon if you want, and when I’m normal — we’ll see.”

She snapped her fingers under his nose and went swaying into the house. I waited, whistled some tune, scuffed my feet, and came bustling out. By then he was in the car, and said he’d ride me to town. For some minutes he had nothing to say, and then: “Holly, if you ask me, spends entirely too much time on the telephone, talking to her relations.”

“...You mean, in St. Mary’s?”

“I mean in Waldorf.”

Then one of those fights jarred me in a way I didn’t expect. It was late September, and his special dish that night was some kind of a lamb roast, done like a broil, on top of the stove. But while he was working on it and I was in the pantry, putting stuff in the freeze that he’d brought in the car, she called from the living-room door: “If that’s lamb you’re cooking, just leave me out altogether. I thought it would simplify everything if I had dinner alone. Little stew I made — not much but quite enough. I’ll keep you company and have some coffee with you, but on dinner, no.”

His face went white as usual, and he licked his lips in a way I hadn’t seen. But he said nothing until she’d drifted into the alcove and sat down at the table, to wait until we would come in. Then he said: “Duke, we’ll eat right here. In the kitchen, just us two.” And then, in a rotten way, raising his voice to make sure it carried: “That health food, stews and stuff like that, leaves kind of an odor.”

From where I was I could see and I strictly didn’t hear. He got out the white metal table and set it for two, with doilies all very snappy. He ladled my soup in a two-handled cup, put crackers on my butter plate. He served the lamb and carved it, ladled his own soup, took his place at the table, and waved me to my seat. She came in, looked at the lamb very interested, and listened while he talked, to the oven it seemed like, on how some roasts are better broiled, and some steaks better roasted. But he didn’t get up, and he didn’t get a third chair.

She turned to me and waited, and when I made no move to sit down she raised one foot and kicked. The table hit the deck with a crash you could hear a mile. She said: “Val, you and Duke will eat your dinner, if you eat your dinner, in the alcove, when it pleases me to drink my coffee.”

“You do this to me? Before Duke?”

“You spoke to Duke about an odor.”

She was walking around by then, her right hand at her belt once more, and once more he took what she said. Because once more here was the eye of a Hollis, and once more he couldn’t meet it. So we ate in the breakfast nook, or alcove as she called it, or went through the motions thereof. But all that, except for the table, was kind of a retake on other brawls, and wasn’t what shook me up. The unexpected part, to me, was she’d lost still more weight, so it swept over me, as she swayed around in front of him, that inside that blubber, once I’d melted it off, was a shape to set you nuts. I had never once suspected it.

From then on, my life was simply a hell. Because while I’d known that I loved her, that was love of a different kind. It was friendship, which in a way is deeper than love, as it’s there in spite of fat, and in spite of anything. This was all that and more besides, so it was more like insanity.

Chapter X

You can live insane if you have to, but not forever, and one day I woke up I was near the end of the plank, and had better watch what was next. It was an October morning, with the mug gone and the weather fine, and began by the water tank. I had run the pump, but we’d had a drought, and the well couldn’t take it, to use my usual system, which was pump till the tank was full, as shown by the overflow pipe squirting out. I had to pump half full, and do it somewhat by guesswork, so after I cut I would have to climb up, throw open the vent on its hinges, and gauge with a bamboo pole I had hung up there on a nail. As I started down, here she came from the house, and I may have stalled on the ladder, to watch her a second or two. She wasn’t quite normal yet, but was something to see just the same, round, strong, beautifully put together, with a high-born tilt to her head. In place of the waddle was a graceful, swaying walk, and in place of the crawl stroke was this way she had with her hands, of putting the right one to her belt, just over the hip, and letting the other one swing. In her tan skirt, maroon sweater, and maroon shoes, she looked more Spanish than ever.

When I was down, I asked if there was something she wanted, and at first she didn’t answer, but stood staring at the ladder. Then she said she was going to church and wanted me to drive her. I said: “That would be nice, wouldn’t it? First you play hooky, and then, lo and behold, you’re back, but not on a Sunday, on a weekday, and not with your husband, but with a tall, thin guy who somewhat favors a fighter.”

“I didn’t mean the church up in the city that Val and I go to. I mean my own. The one in St. Mary’s City.”

“You mean down in the party-line belt, where nobody ever tells anyone, as it might be heard and repeated?”

She thought that over, very dark, looking at the yellow Maryland sunlight. Then: “Duke, I have to go. Couldn’t you park somewhere so you wouldn’t be noticed? And wait for me? While I go in? To be — alone with myself?”

“Can’t you drive yourself down?”

“I want you with me.”

“I’m paid to work.”

“It’s not yet nine, and we’ll be back by lunchtime, easy. We’ll not be missed, no matter who calls or comes.”

But she knew, I think, I couldn’t say no to her, and around nine thirty we started, me at the wheel of her car, which by that time had the attachments removed, she curled up in one corner, a rug over her legs. She kept staring at southern Maryland, which was mainly cutover tobacco, with yellow suckers growing out of the stalks, some corn, quite a few flocks of turkeys, and scrub woods that gave off a wild-grape smell. We swung right at T.B., where 5 runs on 301, and rolled on down to Waldorf, eight or ten miles. Passing the Association warehouse, she cut her eyes hard left, in case Bill would show, but once we were by, she said take it easy. Then: “My, what a change, Duke! Waldorf used to be nothing. A station, a store, and a hotel. Now look. Houses everywhere — and hope.”

“And cocktail bars.”

“It always had liquor.”

“And bandits.”

“It always had gambling.”

She said there was a poker game that went on fifty years, “and one time a fellow won twelve hundred dollars in a jackpot. He hired a car, went to Washington, got four girls from C Street, and rode them right back to Waldorf. He commenced whooping and hollering and carrying on until his money was gone, and it was a scandal. He had no regard for his family.”

“Well?”

“It’s all part of it.”

“Part of what, Mrs. Val?”

“Everything. Me, maybe. He was no doubt some relation. Almost all of them are. I told you, till the university got busy, taught us, and all, it was a tragic land. It was — so poor. Poor, poor land, poor, poor people. Only difference is, these people are proud.”

We turned left at the Waldorf light, where 5 leaves 301 and runs by itself again, and started through the village. But she suddenly told me to stop by an open place in front of a store. When I had pulled in she said: “My mother has told me often that on this very spot an old man made his living. He had a cart and two runty oxen, a yoke of yellow scrubs. He’d come to town every Saturday, with a silver dollar he had, dented up from what he’d do with it, and smooth from the rub of his pocket. He’d look around, find him a stranger, and offer to bet. He’d throw down his silver dollar, and the bet was he could roll his cartwheel on top of it and swing his cart clear around. If he came off the dollar, the stranger could pick it up. If he stayed on, the stranger owed him one dollar. So the whole town would gather, and he’d sing his oxen around: ‘Come yay, come gee, come petty whoa, come yo!’ Some drivers sang Haw for the swing to the left, but mostly they sang petty whoa. It was a sight, my mother says, with those steers moving like ballet dancers, first the right foot over, then the left foot under, their heads swinging low in the yoke, always to the left, as seems to be natural to them, as the old man knew, of course. They never let him down and always won him his dollar. But the awful part was he lived on that dollar all week. It was all the money he had — and that was part of it, too.”

Something seemed to be gnawing her, and I didn’t quite get what it was, but it was wonderful to be with her, and to know she wanted to be with me. I went on, but we’d gone just a few hundred yards past the village when she told me to stop again. She stared at a side road and said: “Wilkes Booth came that way. Beyond is the Mudd house, still standing. Dr. Mudd set his leg, and was sent down to the islands, though he wasn’t guilty at all. Mudd’s a Charles County name, and the family still lives here. Mudds and Beans and Carricos. I hear Beans live in Texas. Dr. Semmes is a Charles County name. He’s the same family as the one who commanded some Confederate ship, I forget which one it was.”

“Booth stopped at your place?”

“Val shouldn’t have said so.”

I was getting curious about Booth, but she flinched away from him and I drove on. Pretty soon she said stop again, and when I did, pointed at a wagon track through a woods. She said: “That’s what our roads were like before this highway was built. If an oxcart met a fix, neither one could pass and the fix would have to unhook. They’d back it into the bushes, lead the horse around, and leave room for the cart to go through. That was part of it too.”

Around half past ten she gave a little gasp, and, sure enough, just ahead was the St. Mary’s County sign, quite a nice one, saying how welcome we were and how the county would grow. She exclaimed how beautiful it was, and I didn’t see much difference, but did my best to give out. She said: “It’s like Ireland, they say, which is out in the Gulf Stream, so it’s warm, wet, and green. It’s a long, narrow strip, no more than ten miles wide, between the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay. They close it in, so it’s warm and wet and green too. Except now, in the fall weather we have, it’ll be all kinds of different colors. You’ll see the difference. You watch.”

That began to interest me, and as we drove along, I did notice changes that weren’t her imagination. The houses were small, with green lawns, much like the ones we had passed, and the corn, tobacco, and poultry were the same. But the woods, which she kept looking at, were terrific. They were thick, with big trees, all blazing with yellow, red, and gold. She said: “Do you see the laurel, dogwood, and holly, Duke, all scattered under the trees? I was named for the holly. I came around Christmas time, when it was all over the house, and my mother never sees it without thinking of me.”

We passed a place called Leonardtown, the county seat apparently, with a sign on it telling how old it was, which was more than three hundred years, quite a way back, I thought, but when I asked her about it she said it was right, so no mistake had been made. We hit open country again and she started to talk. She said: “They had all this heaven, but at that time they didn’t know what we know, about fertilizer and such, and they let the land run down. By the Revolution it had run way down, and by one hundred years ago it had run down to nothing at all. And then they got a terrible idea. They took slaves and bred them, and drove them up for sale, in gangs that carried their chains. They drove them to Port Tobacco, which was just a slave town. The breeders and dealers and lawyers had offices one side of the square, the storekeepers had their places another side, the barracks were on the third side, where the stock was locked until sold, and the fourth side was open, facing Port Tobacco Creek, with the slave block right in the middle. A slave auction was the awfulest thing this country ever produced, with the buyers stripping the colored girls bare, looking at them and feeling them all over, little children being torn from mothers, whips coming down, and the screaming going on — just horrible. My mother has seen Port Tobacco; it was a ghost town before the bricks were carted away to La Plata, or Plata Station as they call it, and there can be no question about it. The one fine thing it had it still has: a little artesian well that even a slave could drink from, right at the side of the square.”

“In St. Mary’s, this place is?”

“No, it’s in Charles.”

“But it’s part of it too?”

“Part of it? Duke, do you know why they bred those slaves? They didn’t have enough to eat. They were hungry, like that old man, like his runty oxen, like everybody. Like me, maybe. That could be the answer. Why I couldn’t say no. To food, when I had the chance.”

“Stop breaking my heart.”

“I’m not weak no more.”

“Any more.”

“I talk like my people talk.”

“Talk as you please, Holly.”

I hadn’t known I would say it, her first name, at last, and she caught the start I gave when it slipped out of my mouth. She took my hand and pressed it.

We came to an arrow sign, BAYSIDE LUMBER COMPANY, which she said was her father’s sawmill, with her home just beyond. But she didn’t say stop, and I kept on past a little inlet, with boats tied up at landings. Past that was another sign, ST. MARY’S CITY, with news about the settlers of 1634. A road led up to the right, which she told me to follow. Beyond a hill we came to a hedge that ran on our right, with various buildings ahead, and she whispered I should stop. I parked beside the hedge, so we got a better view, and I could see, at the side, to our right, what looked like a school. Past that, the other side of a wall and through some trees, we could just see a church, an old brick one. In front of us, beyond the wall too, where it turned to follow the road, was what looked like a statehouse, about the size of the one in Carson, meaning quite small.

But at first she paid no attention to what she saw, but stayed with the smell, inhaling it with her eyes shut. She said: “Do you catch it, Duke? Isn’t it wonderful?”

“What is it, a flower?”

“Box. The hedges are old English box. There’s no smell in the world like it. And those trees there are old, old chestnuts. It’s not possible, but there they are. All American chestnuts were killed by the blight years ago. These weren’t. The water protected them, so the blight never came in. Do you wonder I love it? My beautiful St. Mary’s?”

“I almost love it myself.”

She pointed to the water, which we could see beyond the church, below a bluff, and told of the boats that had come. Bill had told me their names, the Ark and Dove, the night he got so drunk, but I let her tell me all over, as they seemed to mean so much to her. She told how it was spring when the settlers came ashore, “with the flowers blooming, the Indians friendly, and even the birds singing a welcome.” She said they picked one bird to be their special friend, “on account of the nest it built, so strong, so safe, as they hoped this place would be. The bird was the oriole.”

“That’s the Baltimore oriole?”

“Lord Baltimore had the patent.”

She went on: “Soon they built their statehouse, the one you see right there, except this one is a duplicate, put up in 1934, when we had the three hundredth anniversary. The original was carted off, as Port Tobacco was, in the dark, poor days. And they built Trinity Church, the one you see right there, which at least is partly original. At first Church of England, then Protestant Episcopal, as I am.”

“That you came to pray in. Remember?”

“...Don’t hurry me, Duke.”

“Why haven’t you gone to church?”

“All kinds of reasons, Duke.”

She thought, and then: “I’ve talked about doing good, and maybe I have done a little. But that’s not the reason I made a life in the church, and the real reason was wrong. I went there to hide. To be safe. To be where no one could laugh at me for being fat. Now you know. Now I’ve told the truth. I’m not that person at all, the one I pretended to be. She was just part of the lying. Duke, I’ve been trying to fool God.”

“Is He so easy fooled?”

“I tell you I’ve been living a lie.”

“And so far as reasons go, on this, there aren’t any bad ones. Some are better than others, that’s all that can be said. Listen, it’s getting late. Shove off, and make with the mumbling.”

“...If I do.”

“If? You better, do you hear me?”

She tied a scarf over her head, dropped the robe from her knees, and got out. She had put on a light tan coat, and stopped to button it. Then, her head bowed, she walked quite slow to a break in the hedge, went through, and headed for the church. She was gone some little time. A guy came out, and two or three women went in. Then here she came back, but the way her head was still bent didn’t mean peace of mind. She got in, pulled the robe over her knees, leaned her head on the door, but so the scarf hid her face. I waited for her to speak, and when she didn’t, asked her: “You pray?”

“...I didn’t go in.”

“Why not?”

“I couldn’t.”

She looked at the trees, and went on: “I went up to the door, then wanted to wait or something. Lloyd Dennis, my uncle, came out, passed, and didn’t know me. I realized, then, how different I must look, and a funny feeling came over me. Then those ladies came up, half peeped, and went in, and didn’t know me either, though I know them, from way-back. It was like that dream you have, where you’re floating downstairs, and everyone is there, staring into the coffin, and it’s you, so beautiful and all, at your own funeral. I wanted to go in, and couldn’t. I walked to the edge of the bluff, so nobody else would see me, and tried to make myself go in and kneel — and that’s all. I thought: if I could just come down here, where it’s part of me and all — I would get straightened out. I’m not. I’m in — worse shape — than ever.”

She started to cry, and I pulled ahead. I swung left past the statehouse, hit No. 5 again, and started back where we came from. After we passed the inlet, and were in open country again, I said: “Listen, you can’t kid a pal. There’s more to this, a whole lot more, than fine points connected with reasons. If that was all, you could start over, and I imagine God would be satisfied. Now, out with it: what’s this really about?”

“I couldn’t make myself tell you. Duke, some things are so black you dare not take them to church. You can’t have them in your heart when you kneel in there. To make with the mumbling, that’s sweet, to hear you say it, to know how you feel about it. But it’s not enough, to mumble. It won’t cleanse your heart. That has to come first — then all the rest follows. Duke, for the first time since I’ve owned that place up there, since by a crazy accident it was left to me — I’ve known Booth to be there. In me has been evil.”

It seemed, for some minutes, the most beautiful wish of my life, that I might perhaps hold her close, tell her to open her heart, so I could make the evil go away — whatever it was. I took it to be some hangover of the rows she’d had with Val. But then, all of a sudden, she said: “How far would you go for a friend?”

“I don’t quite know what you mean.”

“I know how far you went.”

She said that day by the tree I could have saved myself and left her there to be killed, with nobody the wiser, and that instead I had saved her first and only then myself. She said: “I can’t do less, and won’t.”

There was something terrible about it, and for some minutes my heart just sang. But then here it came creeping in, that same fear I had had, of prison, and the spot I was in. She could mean, I realized, that something was in the wind, that the cops had something in mind, or Val had, or somebody. I said: “Are you talking about me? My release? Or — some kind of trial I may have to face?”

“You are released. Aren’t you?”

“Not to be told, anyhow.”

“I don’t understand you, Duke. I know nothing about your release, beyond what Val tried to tell me, over the phone that night, when I cut him off. I’ve never discussed it since, with him or anybody. Why? Has something come up?”

“Nothing’s come up, that I know of. And nothing’s been settled either. I just thought — from what you said just now — you could have heard something. I’m sorry I brought the thing up. Let’s skip it.”

“You want to leave? That’s it?”

“I’d like to know where I’m at.”

“Then — please — ask Val.”

We sounded like a hired man making his squawk and the boss’s wife not liking it. Of what had been between us, or I supposed there had been, there wasn’t even a trace. I drove on, sick with fear, trembling from her hold on me, and furious that so long as things held like they were, I couldn’t hold my head up.

Chapter XI

That night, at dinner, instead of eating her fruit, she cut herself some pie, wrapped it in a doily, and said she’d have it later, while Val all but danced, and I went to bed sicker than ever. Next day, and for several days, she let me eat alone, humming little tunes as she served my food, and saying nothing at all, except maybe what beautiful weather. And then one day in the field, while I was sorting the pumpkins to be wired as counter displays in the restaurants at Halloween, I heard the slam of a car door, and when I looked, there was Bill. I managed to come out with the usual hello, where-you-been, and long-time-no-see, but he didn’t hear me, and didn’t see my hand. He popped out with it quick, like on purpose to catch my guard down and watch the look in my eyes: “What cooks with Holly?”

“How the hell would I know?”

It came out without my knowing it would, and sounded mean, but he sounded meaner still. He said: “Cut out the goddam stalling.”

“What does she say about it?”

“Nothing, but you will, Duke. She’s in the house right now, not answering the bell, pretending she’s not there. But her car’s there, so she is. It’s gone on now three months. She calls every day, she talks to Mom, to Marge, to me, to everyone. But she doesn’t come and she doesn’t ask anyone here. Something’s up. What is it?”

I took a crate off the trailer, put it down for him to sit on, climbed on the tractor seat, and by then had my face fixed up, and had also had time to think. I said: “Listen, I love you chum, but this is her business, not mine.”

“You playing around with her?”

“I... what?”

“You heard me, I think.”

“That’s a nice thing to say.”

“Nicer yet to do.”

“What makes you think I am?”

“She never mentions you. Talks all kind of stuff, never a word about you. Don’t that hit you funny?”

“Not even slightly amusing.”

“Might interest Val, though.”

“Not unless somebody tipped him.”

“Duke, that bassid’s no friend of mine, but between scum that washed dishes and a right guy that did time, I still string with the bedbug. You just as well know it.”

“I was detained one night.”

“Jail’s jail.”

It was a jolt to the belt, as I’d liked him, and it didn’t help much to see he still liked me and hated to say such stuff. Kind of a pall came down, so you could hear the birds. Then: “Duke, something goes on, and knowing what it could be, I got to make you talk.”

“What could it be, then?”

“Hollis Valenty.”

“I never heard of Hollis Valenty.”

“You sure? You sure that scum hasn’t been bragging on Hollis Valenty? You telling me the truth?”

I got down from the tractor seat, gave him a little cuff, just with the flat of my hand, but enough to remind him who he was talking to. I said: “Spit it out: who is Hollis Valenty?”

“A dream. What Vally lives for.”

And then: “Hollis Valenty’s a nit, a little bedbug he wants. That’s to be named, boy or girl, Hollis Valenty. After that, she can die tomorrow, for all that’s he gives a hoot. What does he care? He’s got this child, mingling his name and hers. He—”

He didn’t finish, as my lunch came up, and he held my head to steady me. When he saw my Thermos in the trailer, he unscrewed it and poured me some water. Soon as I’d rinsed my mouth, I said: “It’s not Hollis Valenty. That I know of.”

“Then what is it?”

“She lost weight.”

“You mean she’s sick?”

“I mean she’s not.”

I tried to leave it at that, but my face wouldn’t fix any more, and I burst out: “Permit me to change that a little. She wasn’t due to be sick, she was well on the road to health, with the help of a diet I gave her, that she wanted kept quiet for some reason — until she backslid, like the gutless slug that she is, as I knew she would all that time. And now, if you don’t mind, I’m busy, doing my labor, in lieu of the jail I never served in, but that you were kind enough to mention just now — so how’d you like to get out?”

“I take the jail part back.”

“I told you, shove off.”

“I was hell-bent to smoke you out.”

“You’ll be bent worse than that if you stand there chattering much longer.”

“At least we know it’s not you.”

He had a funny look as he got in his car, but I went back to my pumpkins, loading them on the trailer. Then she was there, in the outfit she’d worn on the trip, blowing a little and wanting to know what he’d come for. I paid no attention and went on with my work. She asked what had made me sick, and by that time I was loaded, ready to haul to the cottage, where I’d clean, cut, and wire. I started the tractor and pulled up to the patio, sounding like the field artillery. She walked along behind, and when I stopped she said: “You better come in and sit down. You’re white as a sheet.”

She took hold of me and led me into the living-room and sat me down in my usual place on the love seat. She went and got some buttermilk, said: “I’ve been putting this on my salad to vary the monotony. If you can drink it, it should settle your stomach.”

I drank it and she brought me another. Then she sat beside me and asked once more what made me sick. Then: “That lunch I gave you, every bit of that food, was all right, I would bet on it.”

“Wasn’t the food. Was the talk.”

“Something he said?”

“Hollis Valenty.”

“So he brought that up?”

“He knew it had to be something that was making you hide. He thought that could be it. With Marge, he figured it out.”

“And that made you sick?”

“Not really, just a little.”

She suddenly seemed quite friendly and told me sip my buttermilk a little bit at a time, as it would stay down better that way. Then: “What did you tell him it was?”

“Just a weak stab at a good idea, that lasted until you backslid. On account of you being ‘a gutless slug’ were my exact words, I think, if they matter at all.”

“Something I wanted to show you.”

She went out toward her bedroom, while I sat and sipped and sulked. She was going some minutes, but when she came back she had on the same maroon snakeskin shoes, but slacks and a different sweater. The sweater was blue, and hugged her in a way that made me feel faint all over again. The slacks were gray, and fit her like skin on a doe, so you could see the muscles and the set of her strength. She said: “I fell for these slacks and the little sweater to go with them, one day last week, when I slipped off to the city. But I was still too big to get into them. Now, though, I’ve lost still more weight, they slip on just like a glove.”

I said they were fine, and she came close, so I could see. All of a sudden, I could smell it, the package she had in her hand, which had to be the same old piece of pie, in the same old paper doily, that she’d taken to eat that night. She went into the kitchen with it, and I heard the clink of the garbage can. She came back and said: “You were so busy being spiteful, in the pumpkin patch just now, you didn’t notice how I got there. Or even ask, that I heard.”

“Well, how did you?”

“I ran.”

She ran down again, held my glass to my mouth for a little sip, put it down, wiped my lips with her handkerchief, and said: “For some time now, I’ve walked good as anybody. Today, when Bill left, and I had to know what he wanted — I ran. I forgot myself and ran. I was halfway out there when I realized what I was doing. I felt like a calf. A little calf. Running around her mother. In the pasture kicking her heels up.”

“I was busy, I didn’t see it.”

“Me, you mean.”

“I was behind with my work.”

“What comes next after running?”

“That’s about it, I would say.”

“Oh no, Duke, there’s more!”

“I’ll bite. What is it?”

“Next in order is dancing.”

“All right, dance.”

“If someone taught me how.”

“Don’t you know how?”

“How would I know? Who would have danced with me? Who’d dance with a hogshead of tobacco?”

That stabbed my heart, because while I had known all the big reasons for her to start a new life, I kept forgetting there were little, childish ones too, that maybe meant a lot to her. I said: “I’ll teach you.”

“When you feel better, Duke.”

“I feel O.K. now.”

She went over to the radio, fiddled with it, found an FM station playing dance music. I gave her the general idea, put my arm around her, and said: “The two main things are: follow your partner’s lead, and keep time to the music. Don’t think of your feet. They’ll pick up the step, give them half a chance.”

We danced some little time, and it really was childish, the kick it seemed to give her. After she got the hang of it, so she relaxed nice to my lead and eased off from trying to concentrate, we could take it slower, and let it come dreamy. In between, while the announcer made with his chatter, we kept right on with our swaying, so when the music started again, we took up where we left off. Little by little, my face was deep in her hair, where it was fluffed by the little red ribbon, and my cheek began touching hers. She didn’t pull away, but let her mouth come edging around toward mine. Then I could feel lips, like soft, shy little flowers. Then, through my heart, crept a tiny, yellow thread.

I pulled away.

I stopped dancing.

I said: “Got work to do.”

I left her crying and went.

Supper, after the flurry of good feeling we’d had, was right back in the grit, with her saying nothing, he nothing, and me less, if possible. Soon as I finished, I took the Scotch tape, wires, and bulbs he’d brought out from town, and took them out to the cottage. I got a garbage can, sat on the cottage porch, and began my cleaning and cutting. I scooped out pulp and seeds, then cut the face in each one. I made triangle eyes, triangle nose, and overlapping triangle grin. There were twenty-four to be done in all, two apiece for the smaller places and seven pairs for the Ladyship, and when I was done out front, I took them all to the bedroom, where a baseboard plug was handy, for the electrical work, and tests. It took until well after twelve, but in the middle of it, around nine I would say, there he was in the door, I supposed to see how it went. He said the work looked fine, but instead of pinning medals all over his chest, on how that’s all it took, a little imagination, to decorate a restaurant nice, he sat on my bed, very low. Then: “Duke, has anyone been out here?”

“Why, Mr. Val, all kinds of people come. Homer, every day. The oil man, to fill the tank. The meter man, to take readings. They’ve all been out, I guess. If that’s what you’re talking about.”

“You ever hear of Sol Lippert?”

“Not that I know of, no.”

“He’s a racketeer, Duke. He sells liquor, and keeps calling me up. It’s business, or could be. He says he wants my account. And yet — and yet — I can’t shake off a feeling he’s checking on my whereabouts. Has he been out here?”

“I haven’t seen such a guy.”

“Something’s going on.”

And then, after snapping his fingers some minutes: “Duke, if he comes, I want to know.”

“Sir, on what doesn’t concern me—”

“Duke!”

“Yes, sir. O.K.”

That night was even blacker than the one in jail. I hated myself for discussing her, or anything that might mean her, with him, behind her back. I hated the yellow thread that had wriggled through my heart. Most of all, I hated the way I’d refused her soft little flower and ground it under my heel. At last, dog-tired, I slept, but not for long, it turned out. Along toward morning I woke, dreaming about Wilkes Booth. Mixed in with the dream was a bell, the same tiny cat’s bell I’d heard that first night. I got up, put on a robe, and went out to check on my can, that the lid was on tight, with the handle pulled up. I went back, got in bed again, and tried to go back to sleep, but once more I felt evil outside, as well as inside me, and didn’t know why.

Chapter XII

In the morning, Val said a power crew was coming, to fix stuff on the road, and that I should stand by to help. He had little to say as I put him in the car, and just stared at the sky, his eyes squinched up small. That wasn’t so good, as I’d have been a fool not to know that one day he had to wake up to what this was, but the job suited me fine. She hadn’t showed for breakfast, and if I could skip the hams, I needn’t see her at all, could even have lunch in Clinton while I tried to think things out. Around nine came the truck, and the job was to clear a cable fouled on a tree, a big oak that Val liked and meant to save if he could. Resetting a pole would do it, so while the boys tightened a guy, I worked the clamp, topside. It took less than an hour, but in the middle of it, what do I see but her? She was all dressed in a suit, a brown one I hadn’t seen, with the same maroon shoes, and a hat and bag to match. From my pole I watched her come out, go back and unstable her car, close the garage, and go rolling off to the city without one look in my direction.

As to what went through my heart, I’m not sure that I know, or even if anything did, as by that time my heart had had about all it was able to take. But I know what went through my head, which was: “If anything’s to be done, you better get at it and do it, as this is your big chance.” Soon as the power crew went, I legged it up to the house, let myself in with my key, and called Bill at Waldorf. I said: “Pal, I thought it over, and now, as I believe, I got stuff to tell you.”

“O.K., shoot.”

“Not on a party line.”

“It’s not no party line.”

“Look, I’m loaded and friendly, but at the same time I must show my power. The disease seems to be catching. I won’t talk on the phone, so—”

“You gaw dayum fool, you—”

“Get up here.”

“On my way, Duke, right now.”

I met him at the door with her sweater and slacks, to bug his eyes, and they bugged. I told him I’d misjudged her when I told him she backslid, and these things would give him the idea. He kept stretching the sweater, as though there must be some trick, and I led him into her bedroom, where he stared at the rest of her clothes, still not able to believe it. I told a little about it, the fight she’d made, my part in it, and Val’s reaction, which of course brought some remarkable cussing. Then I said: “However, that’s not why I called. On that I’ll make it quick. Yesterday, after you left, I had a talk with your sister, and it turned out you were right. About me, and how she feels toward me. I didn’t respond, which made her a little sore. But even allowing for that, she’s one hundred per cent nuts about me.”

“Aw, Chrisalminey!”

“Shall I go on Bill, or not?”

“What you getting at, Duke?”

“Right now, at the start, I’m making you take what I say. Dishing it out at you. Some of those things you said yesterday, they slightly got my goat. It came to me, the squat you’d have done in jail if it hadn’t been for me — right in this very room, when you let heave at Mr. Commissioner, and—”

“I took it back, didn’t I?”

“Not too loud, however.”

“I take it back — is that better?”

“And apologize.”

“Listen, goddam it—”

“I said—”

“I apologize.”

I said take it easy and listen what I told him. I took up the diet again, and explained: “It’s had a peculiar effect. She wants to kick up her heels. Like a heifer, she says. She was a fat girl, a good girl, too long, and now she wants a change. To whoop and holler and laugh, to run and dance and sing. To cut up — especially with me. I’m the guy that showed her how, the one that set her free.”

He cussed at me, but I wouldn’t let up. I said: “I just want you to get it straight, the kind of hand I hold. Right now I’m in her doghouse. As I told you, she made like friendly and I made like scram, quick. But there’s nothing griping her that one good pass won’t fix. You got all this straight, stupid?”

“If you’re after dough, I got none.”

“I’m not after dough.”

“Then what is it?”

“I told you I thought it over, all that you said yesterday, and the proof that I did is I do make like scram. On all but one or two points I think you were right. I think, considering the husband she’s got, the setup here and all, I’m not the guy she should have. You just as well know, I’m just as nuts about her as she is about me — if she is. Just the same, I’ll bow out. On one condition only.”

“Which is?”

“You know that officer, Daniel?”

“The one that took you in?”

“You acquainted with him, Bill?”

“We get along, yes.”

“I want that confession he took.”

“For that you’d blow?”

“Bill, never mind how she feels about me. If you ever repeat what I told you, I’ll make you wish you hadn’t. As to what I feel about her, I couldn’t tell you, see? There aren’t that many words in the language. Spite of that, to get that confession I’ll blow. From that you can get an idea how I feel about jail. It’s a deal. You get that for me, I’m gone.”

He thought for some time, without cussing or anything. Then: “I know this Daniel, Duke. I’ve known him, I’ve done him some favors. Maybe he listens to reason, maybe he hands it over. But suppose I don’t get it, what then?”

“I still blow, but different.”

“How different?”

“I take her.”

He’d been walking around, and now wheeled to hit me. I paid no attention and said: “If that’s what’s waiting for me, this eight-ball Daniel has, if that’s what Val has on me — O.K., that’s it. But before he gets me, I’ve had a fling with his wife. Maybe I’d like to cut up. Don’t make any mistake, Bill. I mean business, and it could happen tonight.”

He did no more wheeling, but sat down to the phone, dialed, got Marlboro, got the county police, got Daniel, and started to talk. It was about me, my summer’s work, and my reform, with nothing said about favors, only what I deserved. Then he listened, for quite some little time, to talk from the other end. Then, very glibby, he said: “Will you, Danny, for me? Will you do that little thing? Believe me the guy’s all right, in spite of his one mistake. He’s got it coming.”

He hung up, squinted down at his feet in a way that reminded me of her, said: “He’s going to look for it. Tonight he’ll try and find it. That, and the gun he took off you... Why would he need all that looking?”

“Doesn’t he know where he put it?”

“Duke, one thing hit me funny. He said he’d been busy as hell, hadn’t thought of it lately, all kind of stuff like that. But in between, he’d say: ‘It was really Val’s idea.’ What do you make out of that?”

“Nothing I like. One damned bit.”

“We better go into this.”

He dialed again, got the Ladyship, asked for a Miss Coulter. When she came on he acted mysterious. He said he represented the “credit company,” and wanted more “information” about “that note you signed, Miss Coulter — just a few questions I have, so—” However, he didn’t finish, as she screamed back very loud, and he cut off. He put the receiver back, said: “That was Danny’s girl, that’s all right except she likes clothes, and got herself into trouble. She gave a note to Val, meaning he made her give it, to cover a shortage she had, then commence paying back. He’s all the hell on restitution, Val is. Well, the way she talked, she’s clear. If she hadn’t been, ’stead of bawling me out that way, she’d have been scared to death and showed it. Only one thing would have made Val give her note up, and that’s something he’d rather have. If your confession was his idea, that’s it and that was the deal. To get her back that note, Daniel sold you out. The reason he’s got to look, and the reason he won’t be able to find it, is that it’s passed to Val.”

“Then Holly and I—”

“Not so fast, Duke. You said it once.”

He dialed again, and then was talking to Marge, down at Waldorf. He caught her up pretty quick, what the thing was about, and then: “Marge, Duke is O.K. He knows it’s time to go, and feels he’s earned the right. He’s done Val’s work all year, so there’s hardly any work left. He’s done all kinds of things for Holly, along the line I told you, but it’s better than we had any idea — simply terrific, I’ve seen her clothes. She’s a normal girl at last, and it’s mainly due to Duke. Besides all that, he’s gone straight himself. He wants out, but what’s hanging it up is this thing Daniel has apparently given to Val. Without that Duke is worried, and I for one don’t blame him. Baby, what can we do? Once again, it’s the bassid against the rest of us, but there must be something to do!”

If he was expecting some nice, friendly advice, that’s not how it turned out. For the second time since we started, a woman was sounding shrill, but this time he couldn’t cut off. He had to sit there and take it, which he did, saying mostly: “I see,” and having no back talk at all. At last he hung up, crossed to the sofa, wiped his brow, and said: “Marge says Holly can get it, if anyone can. If anyone can, Marge said.”

“Yeah, but how?”

“Listen, Duke, if to get it Holly has to love that bassid up, that may be tough, but you should have thought of it when you hijacked the filling station.”

I thought that over, said: “Well, this is not so good, but at least it’s plain. However, I think I told you I’m in the lady’s doghouse. Would Marge speak to her for me?”

“Not as she feels now.”

“Something she holds against me?”

“Duke, you heard me just now, the way I put it to her, explaining your idea about it, and giving her reasons I thought were better than the ones you gave. She didn’t go for it. Fact of the matter, she was shocked. She’s kind of caught on, as I tried to tell you yesterday, that Holly and you are in love. And she calls it love, not nuts or something like that. On top of which she’s got these ever-and-ever approaches to stuff like that. So she’s shocked. She thinks you should stick.”

“Get myself sent up to the Maryland Penitentiary, and then Holly’ll be waiting when I get out — she will like hell. If Marge wants a cure for love, that’s it.”

“I’m telling you what she said.”

“What do you say?”

“I’m for Holly, that’s all.”

“That’s no answer.”

“You got one, tell me.”

I had none or I wouldn’t have called him, but in spite of how I’d been jawing, my face was getting hot, from the way Marge had felt. Because in the first place I thought she had more brains than the rest of us put together. And in the second place there it was, the loyalty I knew she had, not only for Bill, but for everyone that she loved, so she had to be one hundred per cent right. It was some time, after I simmered down, before I got going again, so we just sat there, he on the sofa, I on the love seat, like a couple of buzzards. But then, creeping into my mind, came the realization that a split had taken place in the corner across from mine, that he favored one thing, Marge something else. I said: “In other words, if I measured up to her standards, Marge would be on my side.”

“Too late for that, I’m afraid.”

“Then I’ll stick.”

“Damn it, you promised to go!”

“If you got me that paper, and on that you’ve been no use at all.”

“I found out who has it, di’n I?”

“And in the second place, on anything of this kind, Marge is the one that’s smart. I string with her, regardless of how she feels just at this moment.”

He held his face in his hands, and I think he wanted to cry. In his secret heart, what he hated most of all was that his sister would get mixed up in something, specially something in stripes. But in a minute I bulled on. I said: “Tell Marge I’ll thank her for the opinion she had of me once, and say I’ll try to get it back. Tell her, on sticking, it’s what I want to do, and on love, no one could have any more. Tell her, regardless of pride, what it costs me, or anything else, I’ll proposition her sister-in-law, on my knees if that’s what it takes.”

Chapter XIII

So I did, and soon, but in a way I didn’t expect. After he left, Homer came, to haul the Jacks off to town, and I had to load him with care, so the wiring wouldn’t get busted. When he left, it was one, and two when I finished eating, the little bit that I did. But I kept having a feeling, of things about to pop, and of having to hug the bag, so as not to get caught by surprise. I decided on some repairing, a reasonable thing as I thought, since at that time of year, except for spinach, pumpkins, and other late stuff of that kind, nothing was growing at all, and there was no field work to be done. I went out to the implement shed and rolled the harrow out. Then I got my kit of tools, sat down there in the patio, and began tightening bolts. I’d been at it some little time before movement caught my eye, and through the living-room windows saw her car stop out front. I kind of made with my back, so she would have to speak first.

But who spoke was a man, and I almost jumped out of my skin when his raspy voice called: “Hey! Hey you, back there!”

I turned and saw a guy in racetrack clothes, a million miles from anything you’d connect with her. He was in the open living-room door, so she’d apparently brought him in, then asked him to speak to me. He came strutting back, a medium-size man around thirty, with a pasty citified face, a small eyebrow mustache, and a look in the eye that said underworld. I don’t remember speaking, but must have asked if there was something that he wanted, as he said: “I? No. But the lady would like some service.”

“She tongue-tied she can’t ask?”

“She asked me to tell you.”

I walked to the house, trying to make allowance for the state she was in, but still all crossed up as to why she’d be here with this jerk, or give him the idea I was in some way hard to handle. I followed him into the living-room, and there she was on the sofa, still in her hat, still in her new brown suit, looking over brochures that were all spread out on the table. They seemed to be about liquor, from the pictures of bottles and all, and I suddenly remembered what Val had said last night, and had a hunch who this guy was. She looked up and, in a hoity-toity way that wasn’t like her at all, said: “Oh, Duke. Will you take Mr. Lippert’s things? Just put them in the breakfast nook.”

I took his fawn hat, blue scarf, and tan coat, went to the alcove, dumped them on the table, and kept on to the kitchen, trying for a little control. I walked around some minutes, still minding my message to Marge, and telling myself the parade was all hung up until I put the thing over with Holly. It was tough, as Bill had said, but still I had to grin. When I thought I could risk it I went back in the living-room and, as pleasantly as I could, asked if there’d be something else. By then he was on the sofa, sitting close beside her, explaining about some bourbon. He seemed to be making the same pitch Val had spoken of, one to get the Ladyship account. She said: “Please, Duke, a fire. It’s a little chilly in here.”

The furnace worked on a thermostat, so it wasn’t chilly at all, but I went to the cottage, got kindling from the kitchen woodbox, and newspaper from my bedroom. I went back to the living-room, kneeled in front of the fireplace, jammed the paper in, laid the kindling on top. I put a chunk in place, the one Bill had heaved. I put a chunk in front of it and a third one on top. I lit the paper, got up, pushed the fire screen in place. I asked her: “Will that be all, Mrs. Val?”

Instead of answering she let me stand there, turned to him, and asked if the fire wasn’t pretty. He nodded and leaned back comfy. He reached in his pocket and pitched me a half dollar, so it danced on the cocktail table. He reached for her hat, took it off, and dropped it on the sofa. He grinned when she made a face and touched her head to his. I said: “O.K., Mr. Lippert, shove off.”

“...You talking to me, punk?”

“Beat it. Out.”

“Why, you poor, dumb creep—”

He jumped and started at me, then stopped and whipped off his coat, like to hang a sign on it he really meant business now. She got off some chatter, in a foolish unnatural voice, that I’d forgotten myself, hadn’t I? I said nothing, as I couldn’t, on account of the hammers starting, as they always did in my temples when I needed them like a hole in the head. He laid his coat, very careful, out flat on the telephone table, then came rocking over, elbows out, feet tracking wide. He said to me: “I don’t want any trouble with you, didn’t from the start. But if trouble’s what you’re looking for—”

With that he started a hook, the kind a guy uses that thinks he’s a barroom fighter, a mean little junior haymaker supposed to land on my button. He didn’t fall quite where I wanted, right at her feet I mean, because instead of doing a Bordie he went down limp like a dish-rag. However, he fell, twitched once or twice, like a dog having a dream, and curled up, like a cat having a nap. I turned to her, but she had already started for me. She said: “You seem to have it when needed.”

“Have what, you bitch?”

“Adrenalin.”

“And I got more, for you.”

The hammers were smashing me up, and I meant to let her have it, if I knocked her clear through the wall. But she stepped in close, dropped her eyes to my mouth, and said: “You hit him for me, didn’t you?”

I almost broke her bones, mashing her to me, and at last we had that kiss, our first one, hotter than we’d ever dreamed. We held close, and trembled, and cared nothing for what was on the floor. She said: “How could you? Fix to go off and leave me?”

“It wasn’t like that at all.”

“It was, it was! You meant—”

“There was a hell of a lot more to it than you know, or even dream. Damn it, stop talking about that, so we get on what’s to be done.”

“Don’t you — ever again—”

“That’s all under control! Now—”

She strained still closer, slapped me once or twice, and then at last looked at the sleeping beauty. She touched him with her foot, said: “Oh... oh... what can be done, Duke? I didn’t expect this? What’ll we try to do?”

I knelt down, felt for his pulse, and got it, down deep in the wrist, very weak and thready. I said: “He’s still alive — so far. I’ll call the police — say it’s emergency — let them take over from there.”

I went to the phone, but she grabbed me. She said: “Not yet, Duke, not just yet, no. There must be some other way. We can think of something.”

“Listen, he’s alive so far. But—”

“Come in here. Just a minute.”

She took my hand, led me to her bedroom, sat me on the bed, crouched on her heels in front of me. She started to cry, said: “I’ve just ruined it. I thought it would be so nice. That he’d go running off, with a bloody nose or something. That I’d snap my fingers in some kind of silly way. That you’d be down on your knees, saying you’d learned your lesson.”

“And instead of that—”

“I know.”

I had meant it was the opposite of nice, but she thought I meant knees, and flopped down on hers. She leaned her head to my heart, mumbled she’d been a “dunce.” I held her to me, sank my face in her dress, kissed into her neck. She kept coming back to it, she had thought I meant to leave her. She started crying again, said: “I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t, I couldn’t. I had to make you, make you, take me, hold me, love me. You do, don’t you?”

“Haven’t I told you?”

“But tell me now.”

“I do, you know I do, and cut this caper out. Look, don’t you know what’s hanging us up? What everything depends on? Why I asked what I did? About my release and all?”

“...I’m listening, Duke.”

I told her about the confession, talking fast, trying to communicate without taking all day. But I had hardly started when she jumped up. She said: “So! That’s what he’s got on you! So he can ride you to town! Every day, in winter. To the Ladyship, he says, to help out there, and wear that awful white coat. And then in spring—”

“Start all over again.”

“Seems so hateful.”

“I tried to tell you.”

“All I’ve thought about, Duke, is what I was going to do — if he ever found out the truth — and tried to do something to you. I’ve had terrible things in my heart.”

“You got that confession straight?”

“Yes, Duke, at last.”

“Marge says you’re to get it.”

“Oh, if I only could.”

“You figure on it. And in the meantime—”

I reached for the phone again, the extension beside her bed, but once more she grabbed my hand. I said: “That guy out there is not in very good shape.”

“We’ve been here four minutes.”

She pointed to the electric clock beside the phone, and I said: “It takes one second to die. Little less, as a matter of fact.”

But she held me, and I was weak and couldn’t pull clear. For two minutes nothing was said. And then suddenly she jumped up and gasped: “It wasn’t dumb! It wasn’t a mistake at all! Bringing that fool out here, and you knocking him out! It was just right!”

She leaned close, began shaking me, and said: “It fixes everything up! You didn’t hit him for me, but for Val, don’t you get it, Duke? From indignation, that such a thing could even be in the house! And that shuts off any suspicion Val would have of you. He’s known there was somebody, but so far he hasn’t suspicioned you! And if he don’t, if we can just hold him off a little bit — I’ll get that paper, Duke. I’ll get it for you, I see it all, clear. I’m cracking this thing wide open, and I’m doing it now, tonight. And if we work it right, if you follow my lead, we’ll have it all, everything we want. And then — what?”

“One thing at a time, Holly.”

“Your feet cold again?”

“No, I’ve learned.”

“Then where we going, honey?”

“Isn’t Nevada O.K.?”

“Oh, I’d love it.”

Cracking it open was just the beginning, the way she tore in with her teeth. Cops, ambulance, and Val all got there in a bunch, car after car rolling up and parking on the apron, the far side of the loop. Lippert was still out, but I was working on him with ammonia, ice, and massage, partly from how it would look, and partly from real worry, as now when I dug in his wrist I couldn’t find any pulse. But he flinched when the intern dug in his eyeball, and was groaning when they took him out on a stretcher.

Soon as the ambulance left, the sergeant jerked a thumb at me, but Val got in it quick. He roared, asking what I was charged with; and if I was protecting his wife, why I was charged at all. He read the book on Lippert, as a no-good racketeer, who’d served one rap for perjury, had had his license suspended, and been in trouble over his taxes. It was partly an argument, partly throwing his weight, and from the squint the cops were giving it, I knew he’d have his way. The main thing for Holly and me was he was fooled, one hundred per cent apparently, and had been since I called him, told him what I had done, and asked for further orders. After the sergeant thought it over, he decided it was up to Lippert, and warned me to stand by until the hospital was heard from. Val eased off, and was quite sociable walking the cops to their car.

He was like a tiger when he came back inside, white, trembling, and with his tongue licking his lips as he went over to her. She was on the sofa as usual, her little red hat beside her, holding the fire screen with one hand, the poker with the other, as she pushed my logs together to make them blaze up nice. It seemed strange that even now the fire was new and had hardly got burning good. He jerked the poker away, and I stepped up close pretty quick, as for a second I thought he would brain her. He saw me, nodded, put the poker in place, pushed the fire screen up. All that time she stared at him very impudent, until their eyes locked, and he burst out: “Holly, how could you? To your own home! Your family’s place! In your own car! That I bought you! Bring a gangster!”

“Aw, Solly’s cute.”

“Holly, are you out of your mind?”

“But I’ve known Solly. He’s called up. He’s kidded along. We’re old friends. And the prices he’s quoting on bourbon. Why, Val, I ask you to look at these pamphlets.”

He nodded very sarcastic, scooped all the brochures up, tilted the fire screen again, and slid them down on the flames. She looked astonished as they blazed, said: “Val, it’s you that’s out of your mind. Oh well, let’s drop it.”

“Drop it? Drop it! My wife makes such a holy show of herself that Duke has to step in, and now we’re going to stop it!”

“The wonderful Duke.”

“That I apologize to.”

“For what, Val, may I ask?”

“For the suspicions I’ve had about him. I’ve known somebody was back of all this, and, God help me, once or twice I’ve even thought of Duke. That’s one thing I apologize for. The other thing is the spot my wife’s put him in. For what Lippert may do to him, once he’s back on his feet.”

That caught her by surprise, I could tell by the look in her eye, but she laughed quite brassy and said: “Val, I don’t much care.”

“That doesn’t surprise me, Holly.”

“I’m getting sick of Duke.”

“He’s helped you, humored you—”

“Val, I told you, when you first mentioned him, that night over the phone, when I was down in St. Mary’s: I want no piece of him. I tell you again, now’s he dared to butt into my affairs: get rid of him.”

“However, maybe I won’t.”

“Then, you’re rid of me.”

“I don’t take orders from—”

She screamed, jumped at him, clawed at his face with her nails. Then she ran to the kitchen and came back with the long knife, of stainless chromium steel, that he used for slicing beef. She ran at him with it and I grabbed her from behind. I tied her up, told him to take the knife. She dropped it and he picked it up, stalking with it back to the kitchen. She whispered: “Now’s your chance, Duke! You offer to go! You’re willing — except for that paper! You can’t go till you get it!”

When he came back, she was sitting by the phone table, but snapped at him with her teeth, so they gave a little click. He said: “Duke, thanks again.”

I said: “Sir, I think I should go.”

“That’s for me to say.”

“I hadn’t known I was objectionable to Mrs. Val, but now — I certainly ought to leave, and I’m willing to. I remind you, though, I’m bound in a sort of way. By a — confession I gave. To Officer Daniel.”

“That no longer figures.”

“May I ask you why?”

“Duke, can’t you take my word?”

“Sir, with that paper outstanding, like some wild deuce in the deck—”

She jumped up and screamed at him: “Why don’t you tell him the truth? That ’stead of Dan having the confession, you have? That he traded it to you, to save that trollop of his, the one took the money, and—”

“How do you know what he did?”

“I got it from Bill — and he knows!”

They faced each other panting, but she had reached him, I knew. She jerked her thumb toward his office, which was in the front of the house, on the other side from the bedroom, said: “Unlock your desk, Val. Get the confession and hand it over. Because until Duke goes, your wife is out — on strike.” He sat down, wiped his lips with his handkerchief, then made one of those switches I never could understand. In a low, extra reasonable way he said: “I did make a trade with Daniel, that’s true, all true, though I’m surprised Bill should know it. I did it partly to wind it up, the mess the girl got into. And partly for Duke’s protection, so he wouldn’t be open to shakedowns, or anything like that — unlikely, of course, as Dan is a fine officer, but on a thing like that, we shouldn’t take any chances. But I certainly wouldn’t keep it here in the house. It’s at the bank, in my box, and it just so happens that five in the afternoon is a little too late to ask them to open up — even to please you, Holly.”

“Then tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow we’ll see.”

“And I’ll see. Because until Duke’s out, I am. And you may be, Val. In spite of your well-laid plans, your legal caution, and all the money you’ve spent, this place still happens to be mine — and don’t get the idea I’m too nice or dumb or scared to put you on the road. Val — Duke — goes.”

She picked her hat off the sofa, and his jaw fell as she put it on. My heart gave a jump, because, much as I hated it all, and in spite of the jolts he had given her, I had to hand it to her how she’d worked him into a corner, driven the punches in, and hung him on the ropes. It was all I could do not to kiss her as she stomped, climbed in her car, which was still parked out front, and, drove off, turning south on 5.

He watched her, slumped down on the sofa, and then squinched up his eyes, as though things went through his mind. Then without a word he picked up his hat and coat, which he’d parked on a chair near the door, went out to his car and drove off. He took the same turn she did on 5, or in other words to southern Maryland, not toward Washington City. I had the feeling, in spite of what he had said, that he was up to something that she didn’t know and I didn’t know and nobody knew but himself.

Chapter XIV

I did the one thing I could think of, which was call Bill at Waldorf, to say she was headed his way and warn him Val might come. But who answered was Marge, and she didn’t seem much surprised at the turn things had taken. On Lippert, at least Holly’s reason for bringing him, she wouldn’t hear one word, to leave it open, I assumed, to take it as Holly would tell it, with no behind-back angles. On cops, ambulance, hospital, and how bad Lippert was hurt, she wanted to know everything, and I told her what I could. We left it she’d speak to Bill, soon as he came in from work, so at least they’d both be on guard. I tramped around a little, trying to think what should be next, heated a take-out and ate it, and tried to gulp down some coffee.

Then came a call and I took it, in the dark living-room. It was Marge, saying Bill was upset at what had been told him by Daniel, the same officer he’d spoken to that morning. It seemed he had called Daniel, to ask for the dope on Lippert, how he was and all, and Daniel had been surprised, as “your sister’s right with him now, there in the hospital room.” She said Bill had called him a liar, but Daniel wouldn’t back down. He said an officer had seen her, one of the boys on the case, who had just come from the house and already remarked on the change in her looks, from how she had been before. Marge said: “Of course, there was no answering that, and Bill is fit to be tied. He’s outside walking around, trying to cool himself off. Duke, what’s come over Holly?”

Now I didn’t know, and this news rocked me plenty, but what I said was: “Mrs. Hollis, you got my message?”

“I did, Duke, and I knew all the time we could count on you. And from now on, please call me Marge. We know each other well enough for that, don’t you think?”

“Then, Marge, on your sister-in-law, I can only say she’s made herself over complete, and it’s caused her to go slightly haywire. It might cause you the same if you knew you had to die and then found out you didn’t.”

“I’m crazy to see how she looks.”

“She looks just — beautiful.”

She asked questions about it, and I told her all kinds of things, especially about clothes. Then: “Duke, she must know what she’s doing.”

I said we could hope so, and to have her call when she came. To do something, after she hung up, to pass another wait in the dark, I set all doors ajar, so I could duck back to the cottage if Val’s lights showed. After a long time the phone rang, and my heart jumped when Holly spoke. She said: “Darling, I had to go there, to Lippert, I mean, and quick. That was all new to me, what Val said, about his underworld life, and I almost died at the wheel of the car when it finally perked in my head the danger I’d put you in. I was waiting when he opened his eyes, and — he promised me. That you wouldn’t be bothered, he called it.”

“What do I say, ‘Oh, thanks’?”

“You do I’ll come kick your teeth in.”

“What made him act so nice?”

“He didn’t act nice a bit. He — was cold as a clam. But — I took all the blame on myself. I said you — respected Val — and had got a wrong impression. I don’t know what I said — anything I could think of. But he promised. He wasn’t nice, but he looked me in the eye and said you wouldn’t be bothered. That’s what I went there for, and now — if you don’t mind — I’d like to forget it.”

“Where is Val, incidentally?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is Marge there?”

“She is, and Bill is.”

“Put her on, please.”

But that was so I could ring off on the call without ringing down on my peeve, and all I said was that Holly had had her reasons, “though up to now I’ve managed to take care of myself.” She gave it a snicker, and I could close up the house at last and go to my room in the cottage.

I went to bed, but a fat chance I could sleep. Around midnight started a thin, misty rain, the first we’d had in two months. Around two, Val’s car lights flashed, and he swung around the house. After he closed the garage he went past the cottage with quick, grippy steps and slammed the house door hard. He was up by the time I was, called he would give me my breakfast, and ate with me, saying nothing. I got his car out, and as he climbed in, watched the look in his eye. He had no look, just a vacant stare at the fields. Then: “Duke, I’m getting that paper today. I’ll bring it home when I come.”

“I’ll be most grateful, sir.”

“Sorry it’s turned out this way.”

“However, for this year at least, there’s not much more work to be done. The Halloween pumpkins about wind it up.”

“See you later, Duke.”

I went to my room, sat, and told myself to really get grateful, to one who was turning out better than he generally got credit for. All I could stir up in myself was fear, of him, whether he’d keep his word, and what he meant about her, once he found out the truth about what she was really up to. Around nine I heard a step, and my door began to move. Then she was in my arms, and the little red hat was sliding down on one ear from the way I was holding her, pushing my hand through her hair and pressing my lips against hers. I said: “We’re playing with dynamite, but what do we care? To hell with him, to hell with anything.”

“I’ve been parked since dawn, watching, and he’s gone up to the city. Soon as I made sure of that, I parked on the back road and came on in here. I have to have some clothes.”

“He’s gone for my confession.”

We went in the house, where she said she would change to her slacks before packing the rest of her stuff, and I sat down in my place on the love seat to give her a chance to do it. She said: “Nobody asked you to stay there, grumping off by yourself.”

“Nobody’s grumping.”

“I might need some help.”

“When your bag’s packed, call me.”

“Listen, Mr. Blond, there’s something you may have forgotten. You carved me from grease, that’s true, like a turkey chipped out of ice. So I’m yours, complete. But I’ve got some rights just the same. There are certain things this might call for. Things I might like to do.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“Showing myself to you.”

“I can see you from here.”

“Not all of me, perhaps.”

“Enough. Plenty.”

“Some ways I might be prettier.”

“You certainly would. You’d be pinker, which of course means prettier. But the smacking, to bring up that pink, might not be so good. You git, and git quick. We’re cutting this thing off clean before we do any showing.”

She came out in the slacks, the light coat on, and the red stuff as before. She was lugging two bags and I jumped up to take them. We went out in the patio and headed back for her car, each of us stepping careful on the damp dirt that was there on account of the rain, though it had been barely a sprinkle. She grabbed one of the bags, so she could hook on to my arm and be close as we walked. But pretty soon she stopped, looked at the water tank, said: “All right, Mr. Duquesne Webster, now I’ll tell you something. You said we cut it clean, and I want you to want it that way. Just the same, until now I haven’t been too sure how it was going to be cut. I’ve been afraid — not for my sake, but for the sake of someone I love. Someone who gave me life, health, hope — everything.”

“Come on, we’ll talk in your car.”

“We’re talking here.”

She grabbed the bag I had, set both bags on the ground. She said: “That someone, I felt, was in danger. Or would be in danger if things got out of hand. You see that water tower? How high that ladder is? If I had to, I meant to use that water tower. I’ve been making out you weren’t running the pump, so gauging has been done, while you’ve dressed for dinner. Not by me. I just stood and watched. But I’m nimble now, I’d be able to climb. I would have climbed, if I knew I had to. The rest of what I’d have done, I don’t choose to say.”

“This tank is out.”

“You heard me, what I said?”

“Holly, we’re cutting it clean.”

We sat in her car, which was parked by a thicket of persimmon trees, on the little blacktop that ran behind the farm. We held hands and looked at the overcast day, which we decided was beautiful. It wasn’t like the dark days in summer, but gray, cool, and damp, full of the smell of fall. Then she said she must go, and that I should ring her at Waldorf the second I had the confession and at last we were free. She said she’d come and get me, at Clinton or wherever I was. She said we’d drive along and sing. She said we’d go to a picture show. She said we’d stop, look at the stars, and pray.

Chapter XV

I came back, ate a take-out, ran the pump, but just a little, as the light rain that had fallen couldn’t have done much for the well. I climbed up and gauged, thinking of what she had said. I met Homer when he came, rode with him out to the spinach patch, cut the last of our crop, and helped him load his crates. I told him that was all, he needn’t come any more, said I might be leaving, and shook hands. I rolled out the cultivator, from the shed where I’d put it when Lippert was taken away, finished up with my work. I got out the harrow, did what I could with that, rolled it back in the shed. By then it was coming on dark, and at last I could take off my workclothes, pack them in my bag, put on a decent suit, and be ready to leave, I hoped for good. I had just slicked down my hair when lights showed outside, and there was Val in his car.

I took it, put it away, and went to the living-room when he called come in. By then he had the lights on and was parked on the sofa, one hand held to his head as he stared down at the floor. I paid no attention to that, as he had plenty of reason, considering all that had happened, to feel low in his mind, but sat in my place on the love seat, I hoped for the last time. I waited for him to speak, but all of a sudden felt nervous when I saw him peeping at me, just once, through his fingers. At last I heard myself say: “Mr. Val — did you get me — that confession?”

“I did, Duke. I did indeed.”

He got up and went to the dining-room, the main one, that they didn’t use, and I heard him go to his office, which was at the front of the house and was reached by the dining-room door. He came back with an envelope, came over and handed it to me. It had my name on it, in ink, Duke Webster, Esq., a small, tight handwriting I’d never seen, but that I took to be his. The envelope flap was open, but inside, at last, was this thing that had plagued me so, a typed-up sheet in the form of a letter to Daniel, on the letterhead of the Prince Georges County Police. However, one corner, the one where I’d signed my name, was torn off, and I must have looked funny when I noticed it, as he said: “I did that, Duke. I had a reason.”

“It’s all right, Mr. Val, of course. Without that, it’s just a piece of paper — exactly as I’d want it. For a second — I was — startled — but I’m really — much obliged.”

“That much was due you, I thought.”

“I don’t quite understand.”

“Duke, there was something I meant to do. Something that had to involve me with the police. It seemed only fair, since I would be searched and the place might be, not to leave things lying around that might involve you too. Especially considering the obligation I felt for what you did yesterday. So, to leave you easy in mind, with the confession accounted for, but at the same time not make you trouble, I did what we do in business, when things of that kind come up — I tore the signature off. That would have left you completely in the clear, as I had made Daniel turn it over to me before he had a chance to have photostats made. There’s only one copy, the one you have in your hand. Does that explain it for you?”

“Not wholly, sir. No.”

“Say what it is that puzzles you.”

“Why would the cops make a search?”

“You feel that concerns you?”

“I don’t know, sir, but it might. I have the paper, and I thank you. But, if I may say what I think, you’re still talking peculiarly.”

“I meant to kill a man.”

“Who, Mr. Val?”

“How would that concern you?”

By then there was no mistaking the hard light in his eye, but I had what I wanted of him, and that seemed to make things different. I said: “From where I sit it does. Spit it out, Mr. Val. I asked you who.”

He didn’t answer, but his hand, which had been jammed in his right coat pocket, came out with a little jerk. In it was a gun, a blue automatic, that he leveled directly at me. He said: “Burn your paper, Duke. On that your mind should be at rest. I want it to be.”

I piled confession and envelope in the copper ashtray, and my fingers trembled as I held the match, perhaps from fear of the gun, but mainly I think from relief the thing was destroyed, as I don’t remember, at that time, thinking much about the gun at all. He watched the flame, and made no move as I took the paper-cutter, chopped the embers up, and emptied them in the fireplace, banging the copper on brick. When I blew on it and put it back, he said: “Sit down — perhaps I can elucidate. Perhaps I can explain how it didn’t concern you at first, and then later did.”

He backtracked to the previous day, when he drove off in the dark, leaving me alone by the telephone. He said he’d gone to Cheverly, where the county hospital was, to talk to the cops who had Lippert, “on your behalf, Duke, because at that time I had only respect for this thing you’d done. Respect? It was reverence, as I couldn’t have done it myself, I’m too weak. The act, as I thought, of a fine righteous outrage, of loyalty to an employer, a benefactor, a friend. I wanted those cops to know that whatever Lippert would do, they had a fight on their hands, and leading that fight would be me. And I happen to have some influence, here in Prince Georges County, whether they think so or not. That was my frame of mind when I parked by the Cheverly Hospital. Imagine my feelings when I started into the place and saw my own wife’s car parked there beside mine.”

I opened my mouth to tell him the reason she’d gone there, but decided that any reason that I knew before he did could only make things worse. I clammed, watched the gun, and waited. He went on, almost sobbing, to tell the ride he had taken, “for hours, through a drizzling rain, to Annapolis. To Solomons. To La Plata. Any place, to try and deaden the torture in my heart. No use. No use. No use!”

By now he didn’t even try to hide the tears in his eyes, but reached around with his left to his right-hand hip pocket, got his handkerchief out, and wiped them off. Then he told of how he’d come home, and then in the morning had kept his promise. He said: “I went to the bank, got the confession out, and came with it here, to give you. I called, but you weren’t around, and I went to my desk for an envelope, so I could leave it, in your room some place, where you’d be sure to find it. And there, in my desk drawer, looking at me, was this gun. Duke, do you know whose it is?”

I had the shivers so bad, from realizing that all this must have been while she and I were out back, holding hands in her car, that I was a little late when I said: “...My gun, I imagine.”

“Your gun, Duke, that Officer Daniel took off you, the gun I made him give me, with the confession you’d given, that morning down in Marlboro, to assure you complete protection. That gun, this gun, looked up to mock me.”

“Mr. Val, I don’t get the point.”

“It told me, this forty-five did, what one man had done. One gallant man, I thought. A thing beyond me, as I haven’t the strength. But the gun would give me strength. With it I could do what in my heart I knew I must. I sat down. I thought it out. I tore your signature off the confession. I enclosed it in an envelope, put it in the drawer. I took the gun out. I drove to Cheverly. I lost my nerve. I drove to Marlboro, to Glen Burnie, all over, as I had during the night. I drove to Cheverly again.”

He stopped, sobbed, stared at the gun, went in kind of a trance. I asked him: “Have you killed Lippert?”

“No, thank God, no.”

He seemed to shrivel as he sat there, pitying himself for “being inspired by a god, a god who turned into a rat — by you, Duke, that’s the horror of it.” Little as I pitied him, and bad as he had me scared, I caught something in his eyes just the same, that I knew most men never feel, of torture, at being fooled, at having his power mocked, that for a second or two changed him from a bedbug into a guy, and a terrific guy at that. But then all that was gone, when he began working me over, all he had done to help me: “—for your own good, Duke. Just to help you go straight. Out of the goodness of my heart.”

“You sure got a heart and a half.”

He jumped up, ran around the table, chocked the gun in my ribs, and said apologize. I clipped him, bouncing him off the table, so it rocked around on the rug. But it was just an uppercut, pulled up from a sitting position, and he didn’t really go out. Quick as I jumped for the gun, he was quicker with his roll, so he fetched up against the wall, the gun still leveled at me. He screamed back up and I backed, but had gained a little at that. If plugging me was the idea, why hadn’t he already done it? He had to have more on his mind, and I could risk one pitch to uncover it. I said: “You didn’t kill Lippert, then. If not, why not?”

“He had a better idea.”

That wasn’t so good, and when he told me sit down, I went back to my place. He started straightening table, ashtray, and rug, and I said: “Take your time, bus boy, do it right.”

“So, you’ve been talking to Bill!”

“Who has your number, I’d say.”

“That worthless, good-for-nothing drunk, who couldn’t even keep up with the mortgage till I stepped in at the bank. Calling me a bus boy, a bedbug—”

“But if you are a bedbug—”

For one awful second I thought I’d overshot it and would hear the better idea somewhere in kingdom come. I shut up and did it quick, and he sat down on the sofa again and wiped his tears again, but not until he’d finished at the table, being a bus boy until the last thing was in place. He said: “He begged me, Lippert did, on his knees with his hands up, on his bed, soon as he saw me. I went in without knocking, ready to shoot six bodyguards if it was necessary, to do what I had to do, which was — shoot him. He knew from my eye what I meant, and wailed like a puppy-dog: ‘Please, Mr. Val, no! You’ve got the wrong man, I swear!’”

He said he hadn’t believed Lippert, even a little bit, but wanted to watch his eyes before he died, and told him, “about Dan Sickles, what he had done, what the jury had done, and the rest — which he said didn’t apply.”

I said: “Who is Dan Sickles, by the way?”

“Duke, Washingtonians know.”

“However, I’m from Nevada.”

“Sickles married a wife. The wife took a lover. Sickles shot him dead, and the jury acquitted Sickles, fast. I wanted Lippert to know it would do the same for me.”

He sobbed, went on: “But Lippert kept wailing: ‘It’s another guy, Mr. Val — she was over here, begging me here in this room, that I should spare his life.’ And that I couldn’t laugh off, as I knew she had been there, because I’d seen her car myself. And yet I still didn’t believe him when he said the guy was you, Duke, that he’d been brought there just to be hit, that she’d even admitted as much. But then, Duke, he said: ‘I’ve placed him at last, Mr. Val, that hired man of yours. He was king of the sparring partners. He trained all the champs, out west. He was the guy who could get the weight off!’”

Once Lippert had told him that, we were into the last round, and I did no more pretending, but sat there and waited. He balanced the gun on his knee, wiped his eyes some more, drew some deep breaths, and then, in a quiet conversational way, went on: “Duke, it was interesting, my talk with Lippert. Once I realized, and he knew I realized, that he was telling the truth, he gave it to me quick, the talks he’d had with her, kidding along on the phone, the cock-and-bull story she’d told, about the uppity hired man, the real purpose he had which was getting the Ladyship account. That all corresponded, right down to a T, with what I already knew, and there was nothing I could say. But mainly he talked about Sickles, refreshing my recollections on angles I had forgotten — fascinating angles that put the whole matter in a totally different light.”

“May I ask what those angles were?”

“I’ll tell you, Duke, in due time.”

“I’d like to say one thing.”

“Feel free, Duke. Please.”

“It may be true I’m in love with your wife. It may be true I helped save her from a fate, from a death you were fattening her for. It’s not true we’ve done anything we shouldn’t.”

“That’s a lie, you have.”

He began screaming, that he’d trusted her, trusted me, “and all that time, every day, she was out there in your bed — your bed, oh God, your BED!”

“How can you say such a thing?”

“Because she hasn’t been in mine — not since you came here, not once. She was sick, she was cut up by barbwire, she was this, she was that, and, fool that I was, I believed her!”

By then I could hear Jordan roll, and yet, as I sat there, my heart gave one little bump, after those insane nights I had spent, knowing she was in here with him, to find out now she’d been true to me all along. He must have known how it changed the score, because he sat for some seconds staring, trying to look at me and not being able to. Then he told me move to the sofa, put my hands on the table, and keep my back to the phone. I did as he said, heard him pick up the receiver and dial. He asked for Bill’s number, and when a voice answered, I began to feel sick, because I knew it was Holly. He talked along very friendly, and I could tell, from what was being said, she was alone in Bill’s house. When he found that out, he said she could come on up, that I was all ready to go, with the confession burned and everything, but wanted to tell her good-by. From her voice I knew she was worried, and after what she had said, at the water tank that morning, about the fear she had for me, and what she would do about it, I knew if he kept at it there could be only one answer. Sure enough, after a break while she thought it over, I heard her tell him: “All right,” and he was excited when he hung up.

He said: “Well, she’s on her way, but we still have plenty of time to get her welcome ready. Go to the kitchen, Duke. Walk backwards, and hold your hands out toward me.”

He snapped the kitchen light on, told me to turn on the spigot over the sink. I did, he snapped the light off, and we marched back, I taking my place on the sofa and holding my hands as before. He said: “I didn’t get the reason until after I left Lippert, but she’s been making me gauge. Climb up on the tank to gauge. Telling me you were lazy, and not running the pump as you should. Insisting I climb up and gauge, while you were dressing for dinner. I thought it was funny, until driving home just now it came to me, what you and she have been up to, what you’ve had in mind. Well, we’ll have some gauging soon. But of course we must have a reason — for the officers, when they come. The empty tank will explain it.”

We sat, I in his place on the sofa, he in mine on the love seat, the gun keeping us company, along with the splash of the water. He said: “Interesting sound, isn’t it? Like blood on a slaughterhouse floor. Very wasteful, that blood. On account of the law we have, covering tubercular cattle, no part of the carcass can pass till the inspector sees the lungs, and the blood goes down the drain — we use it in fertilizer only. Would make the best bouillon cubes, but we’re forbidden to use it for that. Still, society must be protected against disease, tubercles, parasites of all kinds.”

“Like bedbugs?”

“And jailbirds.”

Chapter XVI

The water kept running, until I thought I’d go nuts, and still he made me sit there, while he giggled along about blood. When her lights flashed in the window, I intended wonderful stuff, like warning her off, with yells, but all I did was lean back, the second he told me do it, fold my hands on one knee, and act natural. I’d heard of guys that broke, in the middle of the third degree, not from the rubber hose, but from what the cops asked them, stuff they couldn’t answer. It had all seemed so fine, the way she’d figured it out, to save me by using the tank, and the way I had shooed her off, that morning to keep it decent — so long as it was our little secret. But when he caught on to it all, dragged it out in the open, and smeared it and stank it and fouled it, I could hardly speak any more — from fear or whatever it was, but mostly I think from shame, that anyone would know but us.

She came in very cagey as he opened the door, keeping his right side from her, and holding the gun in his pocket. She looked from him to me and back, trying to get some clue to what went on. Because from her angle, if I looked slightly queer, I was supposed to put on an act, and if he looked slightly silly, he generally did anyway, so that didn’t prove a great deal. As to why I played it so quiet, I don’t deny I was scared, but at the same time, there was a hundred-to-one chance he might lose his nerve, now that he’d blown off his steam, as he had done on the way to Cheverly — provided I did nothing to steam him up again. And no hero act I could think of would top a forty-five gun.

She was still in the clothes she had worn when we said good-by that morning — slacks, tan coat, and red things — and as she stood pulling off her gloves, her face began to screw up at the sound of water gurgling. About that time it gave a yurp, meaning the pipe was empty, coughed once or twice, and stopped. She said, pretty annoyed: “Well, that’s nice. The second I turn my back, Val, you let the water run out. I hope we don’t have a fire, and I hope, before he goes, Duke will pump a few gallons up. I remind you this property’s mine.”

She went to the kitchen and he let her. While she was closing the spigot, he jerked the front door open and had a flash at her car, maybe to look for Bill. When she came back he was walking up and down, about the same as before. But she studied him sharper now, especially his jaw, which was getting red where I’d clipped him. She said: “Val, what have you done to your face?”

“Duke did it. He hit me.”

“...What for?”

“Trying to get the gun.”

He took it out then and stood with it half raised, so it all but pointed at her, and also covered me. She said: “Well. You can’t really blame Duke. Not much, at least. For not liking — a gun.”

“It’s his gun. It’s the same old gun.”

“And you’re the same old Val, I see.”

That did it, if it really needed any doing. He gave one of his yells and said he knew everything, everything, about what had been going on, but she yelled still louder. She said: “You hang on, don’t you? Like a leech, Val. After all your promises. About letting Duke go his way. About getting his paper for him — that shameful thing you extorted from Danny Daniel, that I’ve only today heard the details of, down there in Waldorf. You were going to act human, just once, but you can’t do it, can you? You can’t let go, you’re like a... a—”

“Say it, why don’t you? Bedbug!”

“They don’t let go, ever.”

That led to more yells, from him and also from her, because don’t get the idea the Hollis blood had hold of her, to make her act like a lady. She sounded like a hundred per cent trollop, and when I got in it, mumbling at her take it easy, that just made it worse, and then the three of us yelled. Then we cut, to get some breath. Then he took it: “Holly, there’s just one thing. Before we wind this up. You’re going to tell me the truth. I know what it is, but you’ll own it, if I have to shoot you to make you. If I have to half kill you right here, and then stand by while you say good-by to this rat. Dying, you’ll tell the truth, and then at last I’ll hear you.”

“You sure you do know the truth?”

“You bet I do, Holly.”

“You sure you want me to tell it?”

“I’ll make you tell it.”

“It may be worse than you think.”

“It couldn’t be, no.”

“Well see.”

She went over it step by step, from that first day in spring, when I saved her from the tree. She pushed the knife in his heart very slow, twisting it every inch. She said: “Those cuts weren’t from barbwire, as I felt compelled to say. They were from that tree you made Duke get out, and from that day I’ve been sealed to him.”

She played the whole record back, the party, the ankles, the diet, and the church, while he wilted into the chair by the telephone. She told how she called Lippert up, and the exact reason, which of course corresponded with what Lippert had just told him. She even told of the tank, the idea she’d had about it, and the exact reason for that.

She stopped, smiling at him, as he let out little moans, her eyelashes looking like hornets as she squinched them close together. Then: “That brings me to this morning, Val. This morning here in this room, after you went off to town, and I came in to get some things. To change my clothes and pack. And I was bound, Val, I must have one thing. I owed Duke what I was, my good-looking figure and all, and I was set he must see me. You asked for the truth, Val, and I’m telling it, all as it was. You know it’s the truth so far. Do you want to hear the rest?”

That broke him, as he had broken me.

He screamed: “No, no!”

He jumped to stop her, and as he jumped I did. I let go with a left, but she was pulling away from him, and her elbow touched my fist. I landed, but not on the button. It was on the side of his neck, and he was able to fire the gun. She screamed as it barked like a cannon, there in the closed room, lost her balance, and fell, though her being in motion was probably what saved her life. I helped her up, but dared not swing again, as I couldn’t forget it was her he had shot at, not me.

For the second time I had missed.

He circled, to get her in line of fire, between him and me, and cut out his bughouse shrieks. He fanned his face, to get the smoke out of his eyes, told me take hold of her arms and back up beside the door that led to the patio. That left her still in line of fire, but I tapped her elbow quick, to keep her from blowing her top, as once he’d fired, he could do it again, any time. I guided her as he said, and when I bumped the wall, he stepped over, opened the door, and said get on out. I guided her down the step, and in front of the kitchen he told me stop. He slammed the door behind him and began backing us fast, out to the water tank. He told me let her go and get on up the ladder, which I did. It was too dark to see the rungs, and I had to do it by feel, but I climbed, and fast.

And then I thought: “If it’s too dark to see, it’s too dark to shoot, at least any distance up in the air.” I stopped and said: “O.K., Mr. Val, here I am. Quarter-way up, maybe. But I don’t go one inch further until you turn her loose. When I see her leave, when her car goes down the drive, O.K., you say it and I’ll have to do it. Until then I balk.”

“Shut up, jailbird.”

To her I said: “Holly, you do what I said. I love you, and don’t love dying, not even a little bit. But it’s important that somebody be left to hang this crazy fool.”

She didn’t answer me, and for some seconds I hung there, looking up at the night, trying to make myself realize it would be my last one on earth. Then I heard him whispering, and yelled at him to quit it, to come on, get it over with. I heard her gasp, and it seemed to me she was crying. I heard him growl: “You want to save him or not?” Then something touched the ladder, and I peered down, trying to see what it was. I caught a glint of red, as by now my eyes were getting used to the dark. I realized it was her hairribbon, and that she was under me, climbing up. I leaned out and saw him, under her, punching her with the gun.

I cussed at him, but to give her room, had to go up a rung. He kept punching, she kept climbing, he kept following, not letting her stop at all. I took another rung, another, and another. Then I was at the top, my chin over the housing, the little circular roof that ran around the top. He said: “Duke, open the vent.”

It worked like a wedge of pie, and I opened it so it banged and he could hear it. I caught the rim of the tank, pulled myself up a few inches, and put one foot on the catwalk, to get it out of her face. He punched and she came still further up, so her head touched my knee.

I cussed, but he said shut up and listen to what he said. I asked him: “Haven’t you said enough?”

“It’s about Sickles, Duke.”

“Who?”

“That guy. You asked about the angles.”

“We’ll skip him. If you don’t mind.”

“No, no, it’s important. I was telling Holly, down there on the ground, about that point Lippert reminded me of. Sickles killed the lover, and the world cheered his name. He took back the wife, and the world spit in his face. I won’t make that mistake. Because — I might be weak. I... might take her back... Holly, did you hear what I said?”

“You? Take me back?”

“Then, Holly — will you take me?”

“After all you’ve done to me? Gambling with my life for your own selfish ends?”

There came a second of silence that told me this was about something that hadn’t been mentioned yet, in spite of all their screaming. Then, very quick, very glibly, he said: “Holly, I was ignorant then, I didn’t know what it could lead to, what I asked of you then. Holly, my little Holly, let’s watch this jailbird die! Let’s wash the slate in his blood and begin all over again!”

“That’s your idea of a beginning?”

“It’s the only way that’ll work.”

“You promised, if I came up here, you’d let Duke go free, and now — as always, you’ve got some rotten way to squirm out! Val, can’t I ever believe you?”

By that time I knew if she just said yes, he would let her live, whatever he did to me, and I pleaded with her to say it. She paid no attention, but began to scuff with her feet, and I realized she was kicking him in the face. She said: “Val, stop poking me with that gun! Shoot, if you’re going to, but leave me alone till you do!”

He said nothing, but she kept on with her scuffing, and I reached with one hand to grab her, as all he had to do was give her foot a pull and she’d topple down to the ground. She tired, sobbed, and panted. He whined at her once more, with his same old blood proposition, and when she didn’t answer at all, said, very cold: “I see... Then Lippert was right after all. Sickles did have it backwards, he picked the wrong one to kill. All right, Duke, in a minute she’s going to slip, and what you tell the cops is: you left the water running — which of course you did. You knew nothing about her climbing up, to gauge if we still had water, or anything of that kind. You were in the cottage, you came when you heard me call, you helped me carry her in, which of course you will. You—”

“Suppose I don’t.”

“I’m taking a chance that you will. After the look in your eye, when you burned that confession just now, I’m taking a chance you’ll do anything to get clear, to get out from under, to get away. And then, the rest of my life, I’ll feed on your dirty rat heart, knowing that every night you’ll see her, this girl you say you love, and that you let die without saying a word, simply to save yourself. Nice, isn’t it?”

“O.K., if you like rat.”

“I love rat.”

“Bugs do as a rule. Causes bubonic.”

She gave a hysterical titter, and he began to rave: “All right, Holly, laugh, take your time. Because I want you to realize what this guy is. In your last moment alive, to know that he’ll walk off from your grave without lifting a finger to punish me. Have a good laugh, Holly, really let it come out.”

How long we hung there, a minute, a year, or a century, while he kept on snarling at her, I don’t know, but my guess would be four or five seconds. She began whispering, and I heard: “Dear, merciful God.” He heard it too, and said it was about time she prayed, and she’d need all the prayers she had. I still had my right topside, hanging to the rim of the tank, and was holding her with my left, under her right armpit, so my wrist was touching the ladder. It came to me, if I shifted my left to a rung and then let go with my right, I had just an outside chance to wrap quick with my legs as I slammed down past her, and at last get a position between her and him. I signaled to her quick, with two or three finger taps, and moved my hand very stealthy, but not stealthy enough. He saw me, told me put up my hand, and swung out to cover me. I still held on to the rung, and he aimed the gun to shoot. About that time, once more, down below, I heard my same little cat, the bell going ping, ping, ping, down on the ground, below.

He heard it too, and yelled: “Get out, get out of there, you!” Then he fired, not up at me, but down. With the blaze of the shot still around us, I let go with my right. I slammed down as I’d expected, but didn’t wind up under her, over him, or anything of that kind. I yawed off, under the ladder, not on it, and swung out on the other side, so my left hand was wrenched clear off. I had tried the third time and missed.

Almost.

My right did wrap, or try to.

It fanned around, touched cloth, and grabbed. Somehow I knew this was pant leg, and that whatever I did I must hang on. I started spinning, like a gator twisting the leg off a pig, while above me he started to moan. Then I was falling, still hanging on to the cloth, the moan rising up to a shriek. Then the volcanoes of hell hit me, and their fire shot through my brain.

Chapter XVII

“Come on, Webster, you making a deal or not? Here they hang you — it’s not no friendly gas chamber. You killed Valenty, didn’t you — you and this here wife?”

“You think I did, sure enough?”

“Listen, we know.”

“Very idea scares me.”

“She got him up on that tank — we can prove it. You followed him up — we can prove it. You made him jump at gun’s point — we can prove it. And he knocked you off coming down — we can prove it. Now you own it up and we’ll do what we can with the court — get you clemency, all that stuff. You keep this up and you get it — feet first, through the trap. And she does. You might consider her.”

“Boys, I hear all you say. Somebody, I’m sure is dead, and some dame is in trouble. But all I know is what I’ve told you before: I did hit Pabby Ramos. I did lam out of Ojai. I did board a truck at Ventura, and I did doze and slide off. I must have, to wake up falling. But that’s the last I remember, and that was east of Yuma. You say this is Maryland, and you’ve brought me stuff to prove it — newspapers, anyhow, whatever they’re supposed to show. But I say it’s Arizona, and I say I’m not going back. You want me in California, you extradite me, see? I’m instructing this gentleman to see the Governor.”

“You lying crumb.”

“You even talk Arizona.”

It was in the courthouse corridor, on the second floor at Upper Marlboro, a few minutes before the trial. I’d been brought on a stretcher, by the county in private ambulance, from the same old hospital at Cheverly, and carried in by police. “This gentleman” was a lawyer she’d got, a gray-haired guy named Brice, who came up after I’d been put on the floor. Talking were cops — not Daniel, but others — who had hammered me six long weeks, in my hospital room, trying to open me up. Arizona wasn’t so good, but it was the best I could think of in the way of a cover-up, to keep from having to talk. Because unfortunately she had talked, and plenty, as there was really no way she could help it. Both of us there on the ground had been breathing when she got down, groaning along pretty lively; and hoping to hush things up, she had grabbed the gun and hid it, back of a smokehouse cinder-block. Then, when she dived for the house, she found herself locked out, from phone, handbag, keys, and everything, so she couldn’t call for help, start her car, or anything. She had to run down to 5 and get such help as she could, and the first thing that stopped was a truck. She talked about “gauging the tank,” how the “men slipped and fell,” and so on. And one thing led to another. And when Val died during the night and the shells were found next day, nothing she said matched up. She was arrested that afternoon, and held without bail at Marlboro. She was not only in jail, but there was no way we could talk.

Because I was still in concussion, and stayed that way three days, and after that in anesthetic, for the operations they did on me, to set broken bones and tie up stuff inside. I came out of it little by little, but with something whispering to me, after seeing one night some police blue in the hall. I knew, by then, what it means to sign a paper, and back-pedaled into my cover-up. When Mr. Brice came to see me, I was afraid to let down my hair, for fear he’d ethic on me, and I’d be one hundred per cent in the soup. However, I did mention the “mystery lady,” and say: “If she’s nice, please give her my love.” He said he would, gave me a long, hard look, and said: “On the whole, Webster, if you could manage, consistent with conscience, to postpone recovery of memory until the trial gets under way, it might be a good idea.”

All in all, I piled a few points up, as she did, since she hadn’t talked under oath, and perjury wasn’t involved. And of course she was who she was, a big point in her favor. But the total tote was bad. Arizona caught on with the papers, and then there I was, by wirephoto from the West, all posed up in trunks, no good in southern Maryland, where they don’t think much of boxing. Her “hunger strike” caught on too, to hurt us most of all. I of course knew the reason. She was terrified to be tried looking as she had looked, and the strike was to get proper food brought to her there in the jail. But in print it was wacky, and not only got laughs, but lost her a lot of the ground her family had given her.

So that’s how it stood, there outside the courtroom, when Brice ran the cops down the hall, and I saw the top of her head. She came upstairs fast, a young officer at each elbow, dressed completely in black, but I was shocked at the change in her looks. From being soft, plump, and pretty, she almost verged on thin, with hollows in her cheeks and no color at all. Her eyes were big as saucers, and though she let them cross mine, to tell me we still had our love, they also told me we didn’t have much else. She went in the courtroom, and the police bearers picked me up. They carried me down the aisle, past a mob that was there, to a table inside the rail, and set me down on top of it. She was a few feet away, at another table, where Brice sat down beside her. The prosecutor, Mr. Lucas, a small, neat man around forty, with a pink face, sat at a table facing her, one or two assistants beside him. Outside, beyond the rail, on the first row of benches, were police, people I’d never seen, and Lippert. Behind them were Bill and Marge, and Mr. and Mrs. Hollis, Bill and Holly’s parents, that I’d seen just once at Waldorf. From behind the bench came a judge, and everyone but me stood up. An old geezer said this honorable court was now in session. The judge sat down. The people sat down.

Coming up for the bell, round one.

Allowing for every point that could be counted, it was ten times worse than I’d feared, as it had nothing to do with my caper back in the spring, the confession, boxing, her hunger strike, or anything of the kind. Mr. Lucas was quiet, but once the jury was picked, he put it right on the line, and said he would prove we had fallen in love, that we had decided to kill Val “as a convenient way to get rid of him,” that we had hit on the water tower as a way of doing it, that she had “enticed him up” after letting the tank run dry, and that I had climbed up under him and compelled him at gun’s point to jump. He said the scheme had backfired, as I had fallen too, but insisted that “clumsiness of execution is no mitigation of guilt, and sets up no reasonable doubt.”

Never mind the Valenty sisters and what their brother had told them, or the neighbors and what they had seen, or the cops and what she had told them, or Lippert and his two cents’ worth — or all the rest of the stuff that put us in love, which a blind man must have seen. The first jolt to our button was the bags all packed up — mine in the cottage, hers in Waldorf, all ready, as Mr. Lucas put it, “for the projected honeymoon.” Next came the light man, who had asked her why the meter reading was low, and been told of “restricted use of the pump on account of the drought.” He had warned her, he said, just in a friendly way, to gauge the tank, and had been “struck by the interest she showed.” Next was a colored boy, who had been on 5 that night, walking home to Clinton, and heard “a shot, a bop, and a screech.”

Mr. Lucas let him tell it, “in your own words,” and they sounded to me like the words of some Indian around Tonopah. But they made it plain enough: “Was walkinny road, pass Hollis Hill, walkinny road home. Den I yeared talkinny air. Uppinny air talk, talkinny woman crying. Stopinny yeared a shot. Shottinny boppinny screech. Uppinny air, yeared woman screech.”

“Go on, what next?”

“I run I did.”

“But tell the jury why.”

“Cause yockommy hant, loping.”

“Object!”

Mr. Brice was red as he jumped up and cut it off. He said he was amazed the prosecution would offer such shady evidence. He said every member of the jury knew the legend of this hant at Hollis Hill, and knew also the presumption of wrongdoing the hant’s presence would set up. He said this was Upper Marlboro, Md., not Salem, Mass., in the seventeenth century, “when superstition was law.” The judge said: “I’m inclined to agree,” and told the jury to disregard stuff about hants. When Mr. Lucas said: “Your witness,” Mr. Brice acted as though such a witness wasn’t even worth cross-examining, and asked no questions at all. He had hurt us, though, that boy. He had put her up on the tank, where she hadn’t mentioned being, in any statement to the cops.

And finally there were the shells, the one in the living-room, ejected when Val shot at her, the other outside, both with my fingerprints on, which was natural enough, as I’d loaded the clip in the spring. But no prints were on the gun, to show who had done the shooting, as it was caked with mud when found. That night, when Mr. Brice came to the hospital, he admitted he was sunk, “as low as I ever get.”

I said: “Wouldn’t the truth help, Mr. Brice?”

“Well, what is the truth?”

I told it for maybe an hour, as well as you can tell anything to a man who flinches in pain and all but cuts his throat at everything you say. It went on like that till I got to Sickles, when all of a sudden he grabbed me. He said: “What was that? What was it? Wait a minute, Webster, start over again!”

I did, putting in Lippert’s part in it, the stuff Val had told me, there in the living-room, and then the rest of it, what he had said on the ladder. When I finished, he kept staring, and I said: “Listen, Mr. Brice, it was a big case they had here, several years ago.”

At that he burst out laughing, and said: “Webster, it’s terrific. Why — it even convinces me. Until now I had thought — well who wouldn’t? — that you and she did it, as Lucas says.”

“But you took our case?”

“You’re entitled to counsel.”

He explained, for quite some time, that no matter who did it, we had to be represented, and that if every lawyer in the county declined, the court would still appoint one for us. But still the smile was there, until I said: “Well, what’s so funny? First you groan and then you laugh — I’d like to know the joke.”

“I don’t think I’m telling you. I think I’ll leave it there, something you don’t know, that could make trouble for Lucas if he accidentally stumbles into it. All right, then, Webster? You’re willing to spill it all?”

“I’ll do what has to be done.”

“I want nothing held back. I don’t have to put you on, but if I do, the only witness that’ll help is an absolutely reckless witness. One that’s not only willing to talk but anxious to talk — that kicks all immunities aside and cuts it loose.”

“I got nothing to hold back.”

“The holdup?”

“I hate it but I’ll tell it.”

“You’re on, first thing in the morning.”

Chapter XVIII

So I tore in, but found out right away how important counsel is, as he asks the questions. The holdup was in, but in front was restitution. The gun was in, but in front was the deal that had been made, so it had been given to Val. The love I bore her was in, but Mr. Brice called it “devotion,” which made it seem slightly different. All of it was in, but from our angle, and in a way to prove we meant to break it clean. On Sickles we took off all wraps, and I really let go, especially Lippert’s part in it, which Brice figured he probably hadn’t told Lucas, thinking it died with Val. It hit the court like a bombshell, and I knew I had landed solid, because the gasps that came from the courtroom were like the roar of a crowd at a hook. When I came to my flying tackle, I all but used blueprints, showing where I was, where Val was, and where she was. Mr. Brice went into the moaning, which I described, and the scream she was supposed to have given, which I said I didn’t hear. A mumble went around, so the judge tapped on his desk, and I knew the people were putting it together my way, reasoning that naturally I wouldn’t hear her, as I was already knocked out.

While I was talking, she had listened and not listened, staring off part of the time, as though rehearsing what she would say, and in her lap part of the time, at an envelope she had there. Lucas watched her, more than he seemed to watch me, and made some notes on a card. When he started to cross-examine, he did it very friendly, first straightening up my blankets, asking how I felt, and making a little crack about my recovery of memory. I bore in mind to be reckless, and handed it back as he gave it, as though the memory was a bit of a joke. He kept it up, being so funny I had to laugh myself, and of course I’d try to top him. Then he began to bore in, until Brice got up and objected. There seemed to be some kind of rule that if I hadn’t been asked about it on direct examination, I couldn’t be grilled for it on the cross. Brice said it was “irrelevant, a waste of time,” but Lucas said he had asked the police about it, in presenting the state’s case, and could go into it therefore, here now questioning me. And then: “As to irrelevance, it has a solemn bearing on this case that this defendant, as a means of obstructing justice, has already invented one complicated, ingenious, and incredible story, which he regards so lightly as to joke about it, and may have invented another — once he heard about Sickles.”

The judge held it was proper, and we went over and over and over it, my memory there at the hospital; and repeatedly, when I was to “tell in my own words” the way things happened, I could tell nothing at all. When at last I burst out: “Listen, Mr. Lucas, suppose you try facing a murder rap, and see what you make up” — that did it. He insisted I had made it up, every word about Arizona, and I said: “Just to protect myself — until I knew where I was.” He made me repeat it, and I realized how it sounded. Then, at last, he moved on to Sickles, and I said: “It was a big case they had — several years ago.” That got a laugh, even from the judge, and I realized it was the booby trap. Because of course, if I’d been making anything up, presumably I’d have got the thing straight. But Lucas just laughed too, and said: “Several score years ago, Webster. Sickles lost a leg at Gettysburg. You need a clerk to look up your cases.” That got an even bigger laugh, and on it, quite suddenly, he sat down, without going into the main event on the ladder at all.

It helped a little, maybe, that Brice called Daniel and pinned the gun switch on him, but not much. I had led with my chin and landed.

I had taken all day and part of the next morning, so it was the afternoon of the third day of the trial when she took the stand, white, grim, and tense. After the usual preliminaries, Brice gave her a general question: “Now please tell the jury, Mrs. Valenty, in your own words, what led up, the main events, in any way relevant, to the death of your husband.” She answered, very slow: “In my own words, Mr. Brice, let me say at the start that none of it had any relation to what I told the police officers. I said what they’ve said I said. I made things up — not to shield myself, as it never entered my mind that I would be accused. To hush up for my husband what he tried to do to me, so it never, never would come out. I remind you, Mr. Brice, that after I got down from the tank, after screaming no doubt, since a point has been made of that — both the men were alive, groaning there on the ground. And if I did what I did with the gun, I’m not ashamed, I’m proud of it. And if Duke Webster made things up, he had reason, after the way one police officer practically sold him to slavery. And if Mr. Lucas is making things up, misrepresenting Duke as he is — no doubt he has reason too, after the part he played in my husband’s designs on my life.”

Wham.

“Just a minute!”

“Yes — Mrs. Valenty — please.”

Lucas was white, Brice hardly able to talk, she icy, a tight little smile on her face, as she watched the effects of what made my poor little bombshell look like a firecracker. The judge told the jury to retire, and when they had clumped out, said: “Mr. Brice, what does this mean?”

“I’m completely caught by surprise.”

“Mrs. Valenty?”

“It means that Mr. Lucas, knowing my husband was set on a child, though the doctor had said it would kill me, didn’t even make one phone call to warn me what was in store for me. It means my husband rang him, before he was state’s attorney, to find out who made the decision in case one had to be made, as to the life that would be spared — a conversation that I overheard — and that he did not, not ever, ring me. He was my husband’s friend, but perhaps it won’t be such fun to accuse the widow of murder.”

The judge argued with her, saying it was not up to Lucas to discuss his client’s affairs, and Brice argued with her, saying it was “utter folly” to claim justifiable homicide. She said: “If you don’t want my case, Mr. Brice, I can get somebody else. But I can tell you right now, we’re going to try my case, and not some case you think ought to be my case. My husband wanted me dead, and Mr. Lucas knew it. That’s the first event that led to my husband’s decease. I was married to Death, and he pursued me to the end — but didn’t get me, thanks to a brave boy, Duke Webster. That’s my case, and I won’t have any other.”

Brice wiped the sweat from his face, but Lucas took it quite calm.

He said: “The call was made, Your Honor, exactly as she says, and I’ll stipulate it, if that helps, or take the stand, if Brice wants — though it may surprise her what I said at the other end, which she apparently didn’t hear. But I see nothing I can object to. If that’s her case, I may feel, as Brice does, she’s courting complete disaster — but there’s nothing I can object to.”

“Bring the jury in.”

She ripped along with it, on the same question all afternoon, and told of her childhood, St. Mary’s, the oxen, the church, the holly, all the stuff that had meant so little to me but that the jury seemed to get the point of. She told of her “weakness,” and the relation it had to Val’s hopes for a child. It turned out that Hollis Valenty was ten times as dark an idea as Bill had mentioned to me, and that the volcanoes I’d heard in the summer were plenty real. Toward the end of the day she opened the envelope she held in her lap, and broke out the pictures that got such a play, “taken of me, by my husband’s photographer, on my wedding day, and by myself, with a camera I have, by working it with a string — as I became, little by little, with Duke Webster’s help.”

Brice squawked as usual, and the court warned her that if introduced, the pictures would be public property, subject to use by the press, but she said: “I want the jury to see what I’m talking about. Why I could have no child, as natural birth was impossible, and an operation, a Caesarean as it’s called, was impossible too, as no stitches could hold in such fat.”

So the pictures went to the jury, and the men looked away quick, but the women, the three middle-aged women at the far end of the box, studied each separate one. The papers got them too, and ate them up, hog-wild, just why I don’t quite know. But some, the fat ones, were too ugly to be quite decent, and the others, the slim ones in bra and panties, were just a little too pretty. There was a pause during the looksee, and she sat staring at me, her face turning pink.

“Webster, is there anything on earth, anything you know I can tell her, any message you can send, that’ll stop this insane recital?”

Brice had stopped by the hospital that night on his way to see her, and after saying that, in spite of the Arizona fumble, my testimony had helped a lot, he got bitter about her and “this damned surprise she’s sprung on me.”

He went on: “It’s worse than you think, Webster, because Lucas is really decent. He warned Valenty, and he’s got the memo to prove it, notes typed up by his girl, that he was heading for trouble if he went through with any such scheme of having a child that could kill his wife. He’ll take the stand, sure — if I’m silly enough to ask him. And on top of that he’s too nice. He’s got something on her, and I don’t know what it is. So he’s the guy, Webster, she’s picking a personal feud with.”

“He’s the guy to lick just the same.”

“But why make herself trouble?”

I thought that over, pointed out she already had trouble, and Lucas wouldn’t pull any punches just from her pulling hers. Then I asked him: “You heard of Doc Kearns?”

“Not that I know of, no.”

“Fight manager. Had Dempsey.”

“Oh. Jack. Yes.”

“Beautiful boxer, Dempsey, one of the best in the business. But also a socker, see, the best in the business. Well, making him box was safe. But letting him sock was dough. So the doc gave him his head, and, brother, how it worked. Of course they were taking a chance, because Jack could stop one, same as anyone else. And, as a matter of fact, he did. Firpo lowered the boom, and Jack all but went out before he climbed back in the ring. But he won. That was before I was born, but they’re still talking about it. Listen, Mr. Brice, you got a socker. Goddam it, let her sock.”

“I wish I thought she could?”

“Could? She has. My heart’s still jumping at the swings she landed today — and a heart can’t be fooled. And besides, you heard what she said. This is her case — not some case you dream up tonight.”

“It’s your neck too, Webster.”

“And my heart, especially that.”

So he let her sock, and by the time she was done, the middle of the next afternoon, it was clear for the whole world to know that in her mind at least the scene on the tank was just one more chapter of “something ordained from the beginning, except that Duke intervened.” All that time Lucas was quiet, not objecting, hardly seeming even to listen. When it came his turn to question her, he got up, stood studying his fingernails, and then spoke very easy: “Just one or two points, Mrs. Valenty. First, was there or was there not a pregnancy?”

“That was a fine invitation to be a mother, wasn’t it, now, Mr. Lucas? What would you have said? No, there wasn’t a pregnancy.”

“Did your husband tell you, after the call you overheard, of the warning I gave him then? About the consequences he’d face if you did incur pregnancy and he took no surgical steps to protect you?”

“...No, he did not.”

Suddenly the points she had piled up looked sick. But he was polite as he asked her: “Later, judging from the pictures, a child was possible?”

“I guess so, I—”

“Yes or no, please.”

“I could have had one, yes.”

“And you still refused?”

“I didn’t want one no more.”

“Your improved health, you testified, came after Duke Webster’s arrival, and in fact was due to his help. If, as you say, you no longer wanted a child, you must have had some reason not connected with health. Was this reason Duke Webster?”

She skinned back her lips, so her teeth flashed mean. She said: “Mr. Lucas, when a man treats me that way, so even you own up you warned him, do I have to run into his arms the minute I’m restored, and holler ‘oh goody goody, now I can have a baby’? Is that what I have to do?”

“The question, Mrs. Val, is whether Duke Webster was the reason for your later refusal to have a child. Please answer yes or no.”

“Quit telling me what to answer.”

“I’m not telling you what to answer, Mrs. Val. I am telling you that your failure to answer, to give me a simple yes or no, will be pointed out to the jury, to be weighed by them in its bearing on your guilt.”

She had got red when she flashed her teeth, but now little by little, as the seconds dragged on and the place was still as a tomb, she turned gray, chalky white. Then: “For the love I bore — for the love I bear — a clean, decent boy — who showed me the way — to health, hope, and God — my answer has to be — yes, yes, YES.”

She was on the floor, with the count started, but Lucas was still polite. He said: “One more thing, Mrs. Val. Webster, in his testimony, said your husband — up on the ladder this is — shot at a — at an animal. Did you become aware of such a creature, Mrs. Val?”

“I wasn’t listening to Duke.”

“No, you were engrossed with your pictures, I noticed. But let’s get back to the tank. Did you see any animal at that time?”

Only little by little, as her eyes got bigger and bigger, did she realize that this was the case against us. No matter what had gone before, about Hollis Valenty or anyone else, if I were low man on the ladder and had actually fired that shot, it all boomeranged against us. She said, half crying: “What are you talking about, Mr. Lucas? It was too dark to see that night.”

“Did you hear an animal, Mrs. Val?”

“I was in prayer, Mr. Lucas.”

“Can you name the animal for us now?”

“No. No, Mr. Lucas, no.”

“That’s all, Mrs. Val.”

Chapter XIX

Lucas, winding it up, was nice to us and more. He wasn’t called to the stand, but more or less told it all anyhow. He said: “I have no doubt that the general trend of her life was just as Mrs. Val says. Val Valenty I counted a friend, but I couldn’t rest with my conscience if I didn’t tell this jury he was exactly the kind of man he has been depicted here in this court. He was staunch, fanatical, in his loyalty to all who succumbed to his will, and it is my belief, in spite of what Mrs. Val says, that had she agreed to the child, he would have spared no expense, trouble, or care to pull her, as well as the child, safely through Once she thwarted him, however, he became hard, and every word she has repeated, of his call to me, was spoken just as she told it, and I gladly add to her story, if it helps her case at all, the warning I felt compelled to give him that he was heading into something serious — ‘one hell of a spot’ were the words I used, according to my secretary’s notes at the time — if he persisted in his intention.”

He stopped, studied his nails in a way that seemed to be habit, and went on: “I’m perfectly willing to believe in the decency of her love for Webster. I allege no impropriety. Life is replete with instances of conscience ruling the heart, and this may well have been the case here. But you are not asked to judge a moral question, to decide if a wife, driven by fear, by hate, by love, by the great wave of circumstance, has the right to kill as one way out. If that were all, the case would be simple, if dangerous, for let us admit the annals of crime are replete with instances of juries who found for the wife. You, however, are asked to pass on a question of fact: did the husband, though it was the wife who was driven, who feared, hated, and loved, who first conceived of the tank, as we know from credible evidence, as an instrument of death — did the husband, on one afternoon’s caprice, reverse the course of the wave and attempt the deed the wife had plotted against him? Did he, because of Webster’s quick intervention, fall into his own trap?

“I don’t believe it. Waves never reverse. They invented one-way traffic. If any falling was done, into a waiting trap, it was Webster who fell, and into a trap that continued to hold him long after that fateful night. I wish now to point out to you three strange aspects of this most peculiar case.”

He had raised his voice a little, but now let it drop and took a handkerchief out, a clean one, neatly folded, from his left-hand breast pocket. He crumpled it, passed it from palm to palm, and shoved it in his right-hand side pocket, where Val had kept the gun.

He went on: “First, by a disastrous mischance, Webster himself got hurt, so this pair, from that time to this, have had no chance to confer, to cook up some new tale to square with the unexpected development. Second, by a still more disastrous mischance, Mrs. Val, when left on her own, turned out a very poor liar. She had no talent at all, and told tale after tale to the police, each more incredible than the last, and none, until she took the stand just now, bearing any relation to the truth. Third, by the most disastrous mischance of all, Webster turned out a slick, cool liar, adept, by his own facetious admission, at inventing things for the police, first a tale of amnesia that served him well for a time, then a tale of acrobatics that served him a little too well.”

He tossed the handkerchief again, batting it as a cat bats a mouse, and said: “In other words, in this card game, if we exclude, as we must, my distinguished colleague Mr. Brice from any part in stacking the deck, Mrs. Val found herself — and I intend no pun — in the position of dummy. She couldn’t play until Webster finessed to her hand. Then, for a time, she played very well, following his lead closely, though not seeming to, as she mixed everything with the story of her life in a moving, convincing way. But watch the way, the almost Biblical way, she made one misplay. Toward the end, Webster hurried over the one bad part of his story. Try as he would, he could not talk down that shell, with his thumbprints on it, that he fired, as I think, to compel Val to jump, or perhaps to startle him into jumping. If, in his story, Val fired it, at what, in heaven’s name? At Webster? At Mrs. Val? How could he miss at a point-blank range? So Webster invented a cat, a cat which we are asked to believe came from nowhere and, instead of running away from a ruckus, was actually strolling toward it. But at this moment the eternal Eve in Mrs. Val tempted her to take her eye off the cards and turn it on her pictures — very pretty ones, understandably a matter of pride with her.”

He let that soak in, and then: “Now, though I would like to have questioned Webster in regard to this remarkable cat, I refrained, as it occurred to me: if this card she neglected to watch was the one she couldn’t pick out when I let her choose from the pack, it would prove beyond a doubt what I suspected about Webster’s tale. I risked the state’s whole case on this one vital point. You heard me: I offered the pack, the whole pack, and nothing but the pack to pick the card. I asked her to name the animal Val had shot at, as Webster told it here, and she couldn’t. She heard no cat. She saw no cat. There was no cat — and no scene on the ladder as Webster described that scene!”

There was more, a great deal more, but I didn’t quite hear it, on account of a ringing in my ears. Mr. Brice made a speech, a terrific speech, smacking out all that had been said against us. The judge instructed the jury, and around half past two of maybe the fifth day of the trial, it went out.

The judge went, after calling some kind of recess, and a buzz went over the place, now that people could talk. Lucas went. Suddenly Holly got up, came over, took my hand, and spoke my name, the first word she had said to me, just between us two, since that morning when we held hands in her car. Brice grabbed her hand and pulled it away. He said: “Damn it, Mrs. Val, haven’t you done enough, wrecking this whole case while you admired your cheesecake, without this? Suppose a juror sees it? Or a bailiff? Don’t you know there’s no such grapevine as the door of a jury room?”

She pulled her hand from his and put it back in mine. She said: “I’m sorry, Mr. Brice, if I haven’t acted to suit you, but I may never see Duke again, and there are things I have to say to him — if you’ll excuse me.”

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Valenty.”

He went back to his place, peevish, yet pulling for us both.

She said: “Duke, do you love me?”

“I said so, didn’t I?”

“As I did, darling, and do again. At least they didn’t break us, to set us against each other. Duke, one thing I have to say. It wasn’t that I doted on — cheesecake, whatever that is. But I had to show them, they had to know, what Val would have done to me, and what you did for me... Duke, it seemed wonderful, heaven on this earth, that one day you would see me as I was created to be. I little dreamed the whole world would, that I must practically undress in front of them all. We all get what we pray for. The trouble is, we get it all.”

The whispering went on, but I was stretched on my back and could only hear this crowd, not see it. She pushed pillows under my head, so at last I got a view of what went on. It was a mob, with everyone staying put, for fear they’d lose their place when the jury came in with the verdict. Lippert was gone, not having been called back to the stand, the cops were gone, the colored boy was gone. But the Valenty sisters were there, and Mr. and Mrs. Hollis, huddled with Marge and Bill. That huddle caught my eye, as Marge seemed to be frantic, and she never fussed up over nothing. And then here the four of them came, she leading the way through the gate. She whispered with Holly a minute, then stooped over me. She said: “Duke, that cat? Did it by any chance have a bell?”

“I said so, didn’t I?”

“No! You said: ‘He shot at a cat’ — like you didn’t even believe it yourself — ‘and I let go the tank with my right.’ If only, just once, you could have forgotten your left and your right and told what happened, so someone could understand it.”

I said I was sorry, and she turned away. Then Holly was there, pulling a chair up close, and I asked what it was about, and what difference it made whether I mentioned the cat bell or not. She said: “Nothing you could help, and I’ll never blame you for it. It wasn’t a bell, Duke. It was a spur, the one the colored boy heard. The same one as caught in a flag, the night Lincoln got shot.”

She said it solemn, and I could see she believed every word. By then Brice was there, over his peeve, now that he’d heard this news, and taking it very serious. Holly said to me: “Marge was the one who realized that when I didn’t hear that spur, it proved my heart was pure.”

“Mine was set to kill.”

“But for my sake only. You could hear, but you weren’t meant. Only Val was called.”

“He did some praying too.”

“When did Val ever pray?”

“For Hollis Hill. He got it.”

Her eyes opened wide, but about that time Brice put her hand in mine. He said: “Mrs. Val, I apologize — maybe, maybe you proved your case, instead of ruining it.” And then, to me: “If she’s a socker, boy, now let her sock. The door of a jury room can even hear heartbeats. From now on it’s a question of faith.”

He left us, and our hands gripped together, but hers so hard it locked on mine like a clamp. She closed her eyes, and I did, and it was pure communion in prayer.

The lights came on, the judge came in, the old geezer spoke his piece, and once more the court was in session, with the judge calling the jury back in, to see how things were going. The foreman talked pretty glum, said he saw no chance of agreement. A gray-haired woman stood up, said: “We can agree. What’s more, we will.” The judge said they must try, and recessed until nine. Marge raced through the gate, whispered: “She knows! Oh, thank God, she’s got it!”

“How do you find the defendant Holly Valenty?”

“Not guilty.”

“How do you find the defendant Duke Webster?”

“Not guilty.”

She bowed her head and I closed my eyes, each to pray our thanks up before people swarmed all around. I was raised on spurs; my father was a packer in the Sierras on the Truckee, I know what they sound like, which is more like tambourine clickers than any bell. What went by was a cat, that had probably been under the pump-house and made tracks when things got noisy. But when her hand at last was tucked into mine, so thin, so tired, so strained compared with what it had been, I knew, and will believe the rest of my life, that John Wilkes Booth was on Hollis Hill that night, and knew who he was looking for.

Chapter XX

So now we’re out in Nevada, on a ranch she bought, after she wound up the business and picked a church in Virginia where we could slip off and be married. We’re doing for other people what I did for her, and it gives her a boot to take some wreck of a guy, all shot from booze and food, and build him into a man, clean, lean, and hard. Just the same, in all that the papers carried and all that she said in court, too much was made over what I did for her, and practically nothing at all over what she did for me. I know what that was, and it’s more than you might think. After that fall, I’ll never fight again, never even be able to punch my way out of a paper bag. That I didn’t go haywire, that I found a meaning in life, work that might be some good, and ideas that make some sense, was due one hundred per cent to her.

So I want it known, and I’ve told it, all as it was, exactly, so if she ever wants to go back, her people will know we tried to walk in the right. They’ll also know, in the little St. Mary’s church, what she said the other night as we stood watching the sun drop back of the hill beyond the Tonopah road. Those hills look five miles off, and are actually fifty-five. She said: “Duke, they’re like the ocean, that’s why I love them. I saw the ocean once. We went to Ocean City, as my mother had heard salt water might make me lose weight. It didn’t, but I watched the waves, and realized they’d always been there, even before Columbus discovered America. So have those hills. They’re eternal, that’s why they speak to me. You know what they talk about?”

“God.”

“That’s it. God.”