“You’ve always loved only the money, and you can’t have the money. Don’t you know that? That’s how it works, Jack. See?”
“Put down that gun, Shirley.”
“No.”
I looked at my hands. They were burned badly, and beginning to pain. I was clutching two or three one hundred dollar bills.
“You may as well throw them into the fire with the rest of it,” she said. “They’re not going to do you any good. You’ll never be able to spend them.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re coming after us, Jack.”
I stood up very slowly, watching her. Her eyes shone, glistening in the fierce light from the fireplace.
“It’s the whisky, Shirley. You’ve done this because you’re drunk.”
“Maybe. I told you about that, but you kept offering it to me. I warned you. But I was going to do this anyway.” She paused. “It came over the radio, Jack. I was right. That woman of yours was here. She followed us— she ran back and got her car and followed us, when we left town that day. Jack—she’s been hanging around outside, hiding ever since we got here. Isn’t that rich?”
“What are you trying to say?”
“On the radio, while I was burning the money. While you were outside. She told the police, and they’re on the way here right now. They didn’t say where we were, but they know. We can’t get away.”
“They can’t know.”
“She told them. Want to know what she said? She told them the truth, what I suspected, Jack. God, and I loved you—I love you, Jack. I believed in you. She told them you had done this because you loved her. She said you pleaded with her to stay with you, and that you told her you were working a deal where you’d have a lot of money, so you and she could go away together. But when she realized what you had done, she couldn’t bear knowing.” She took a step toward me. “So she told them. Isn’t that just too rich for words, though?”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Yes. I do believe it, Jack. I’ve had tiny doubts about you all along. Now I know. You never loved me. It was a way to get money, that’s all.”
She breathed deeply, and her breasts rose and fell. I saw the way her belly worked. She didn’t move that gun, either, and she was just as beautiful as ever, the way she stood there.
“Jack. I’ve a confession, I want you to know. I had never had a man before. All that was talk. I did it to impress you, because you were the kind of guy you were. I had to be like you—your type, so you’d like me. See?” She took another step toward me. She looked like a savage. “But, I loved you. There’s that for you to remember. I really did love you—with every bit of me.”
“This is all a lot of—”
“No, Jack. I’m going to kill you. Then I’m going to take my own life, too. Because, that’s how I want it. I’ll have that much, anyway. I won’t go back there and face them, have them look at me with dirty eyes and hear them talk. They’ll never know how cheap and false and empty all this was. I’ll have that.”
“Shirley, listen to me. You’re wrought up. You’re thinking all wrong. You’ve got to listen to me. We can get away, if we leave right now. We’d have each other.”
“Don’t lie to me! No!”
“Shirley, please.”
“Jack, Victor was right. You’re a son of a bitch. That’s all you are. Not a good son of a bitch. A bad son of a bitch. You didn’t even take my word on anything. A girl named Veronica Lewis told the police you had her check on Victor’s bank account. Was she another hot number, Jack?”
I dropped the bills from my hands. They fluttered to the floor at my feet, on the blankets. My hands burned horribly now and the pain seethed up my arms. I had to reach her, somehow. Maybe I could jump her and get that gun away from her. Because she was
“There’s lots more,” she said. “But why talk about it?”
“Shirley. Honey.”
“It’s a suicide pact,” she said. “That’s what it will seem. I’ve left a note outside, tacked to the door,explaining it. The note is a lie. Like everything else is a lie, since I met you. I told them we burned the money together, because we couldn’t have it, and nobody else would. I told them it was a symbol of our love. Isn’t that rich, Jack? A symbol of our love. But they’ll never know what that really means—how it means emptiness and nothingness. We knew we couldn’t escape the law. So we burned the money and killed ourselves. We would be together. We would never return to be sullied by the world.”
I stared at her. Then I leaped at her.
She fired. She fired the gun four times, and she hit me three out of the four. I never reached her. I stumbled with the pain in my legs and my side, and sprawled across the blankets. The pain was bad.
“Shirley!”
I was bleeding. I lay there and watched the bleeding and the pain was much worse than I thought pain would ever be. I hadn’t thought pain came so swiftly. But it did. It came in blinding white sheets, in hot waves, up and down my body.
I tried to move toward her. I couldn’t move. I was too weak and there was too much pain. I lay there looking at her through the reddish film that seemed to spread all through me and I knew that I would die.
She stood looking at me, holding the gun.
Then she stepped softly toward me and knelt on the blankets. Her face was hell to see. She reached out and touched my head, then snatched her hand away. All I could do was look at her. I kept trying to say her name.
“Goodbye, Jack. You son of a bitch.”
She thought I was dead.
She put the muzzle of that gun to her head and pulled the trigger. For a long moment she just sat there with half of her head torn away. I heard myself scream. It didn’t do any good. I couldn’t move.
She fell over on me, bleeding and dead.
Somehow I finally got her off me.
I lay there and watched the fire die down, waiting to die myself. I knew that by the time all the flames were gone, I would be gone.
There was no pain now.
I had to look across Shirley’s body to see the fire. It leaped across her bare back, and up out of her hair, seething, and it looked as if she were breathing.
She wasn’t breathing. She was dead.
It was quiet. As the fire died and died, I gradually came to hear the river again, pulsing endlessly against the banks, and there was the sound of the wind high in the pines. The day became brighter and brighter outside. The sun yellowed the room. And with the sun, the fire died still more, and finally it was nothing but embers.
But I was still all right. Not even bleeding. I was full of lead. My side was ripped open. My left leg was broken. But I was still alive.
I didn’t want to be alive.
Then I heard them.
They called the cabin.
I couldn’t answer them. I could see the gun, still in her hand. It was about two yards away. I tried to reach it, but I couldn’t. I tried to crawl to the gun, because then I could kill myself. It was ironic. They would fix me up, if they got to me—fix me up for their kill.
I kept trying to reach the gun. But I couldn’t make it.
I shouted at them.
But it was just a sound in my head, it never came from my throat, nothing came past my lips but a whisper.
And then I knew that this was why I had never been able to make it, in all the years of trying, and this was
