Dolores Claiborne

like the temperature had begun to drop, too. It all gave me the strangest feelin… like livin in a dream that’s somehow turned real. “Why shouldn’t it be in my name? I’m their father, ain’t I?”

“Well, your blood is in em. If that makes you a father, I guess you are one.”

I could see him tryin to figure out if that one was worth pickin up and yankin on awhile, and decidin it wa’ant. “You don’t want to talk about this anymore, Dolores,” he says. “I’m warnin you.”

“Well, maybe just a little more,” I says back, smiling. “You forgot all about the surprise, you see.”

He looked at me, suspicious again. “What the fuck’re you babblin on about, Dolores?”

“Well, I went to see the man in charge of the savins department at Coastal Northern in Jonesport,” I says. “A nice man named Mr. Pease. I explained what happened, and he was awful upset. Especially when I showed him the original savins books weren’t missin, like you told him they were.”

That was when Joe lost what little int’rest in the eclipse he’d had. He just sat there in that shitty old rocker of his, starin at me with his eyes wide open. There was thunder on his brow n his lips were pressed down into a thin white line like a scar. He’d dropped the eclipse-viewer back into his lap and his hands were openin and closin, real slow.

“It turned out you weren’t supposed to do that,” I told him. “Mr. Pease checked to see if the money was still in the bank. When he found out it was, we both heaved a big sigh of relief. He ast me if I wanted him to call the cops n tell em what happened. I could see from his face he was hopin like hell I’d say no. I ast if he could issue that money over to me. He looked it up in a book n said he could. So I said, ‘That’s what we’ll do, then.’ And he did it. So that’s why I ain’t worried about the kids’ money anymore, Joe—I’ve got it now instead of you. Ain’t that a corker of a surprise?”

“You lie!” Joe shouted at me, n stood up so fast his rocker almost fell over. The eclipse-viewer fell out of his lap n broke to pieces when it hit the porch floor. I wish I had a pitcher of the way he looked just then; I’d stuck it to him, all right—and it went in all the way to the hilt. The expression on the dirty sonofawhore’s face was purt-near worth everythin I’d been through since that day on the ferry with Selena. “They can’t do that!” he yells. “You can’t touch a cent of that dough, can’t even look at the fuckin passbook—”

“Oh no?” I says. “Then how come I know you already spent three hundred of it? I’m thankful it wasn’t more, but it still makes me mad as hell every time I think of it. You’re nothing but a thief, Joe St. George—one so low he’d even steal from his own children!”

His face was as white as a corpse’s in the gloom. Only his eyes was alive, and they were burnin with hate. His hands was held out in front of him, openin and closin. I glanced down for just a second and saw the sun—less’n half by then, just a fat crescent—reflected over n over in the shattered pieces of smoked glass layin around his feet. Then I looked back at him again. It wouldn’t do to take my eyes off him for long, not with the mood he was in.

“What did you spend that three hundred on, Joe? Whores? Poker? Some of both? I know it wa’ant another junker, because there ain’t any new ones out back.”

He didn’t say nothin, just stood there with his hands openin and closin, and behind him I could see the first lightnin bugs stitchin their lights across the dooryard. The boats out on the reach were just ghosts by then, and I thought of Vera. I figured if she wasn’t in seventh heaven already, she was prob’ly in the vestibule. Not that I had any business thinkin about Vera; it was Joe I had to keep my mind on. I wanted to get him movin, and I judged one more good push’d do it.

“I guess I don’t care what you spent it on, anyway,” I says. “I got the rest, and that’s good enough for me. You can just go fuck yourself… if you can get your old limp noodle to stand up, that is.”

He stumbled across the porch, crunchin the pieces of the eclipse-viewer under his shoes, and grabbed me by the arms. I could have gotten away from him, but I didn’t want to. Not just then.

“You want to watch your fresh mouth,” he whispered, blowin Scotch fumes down into my face. “If you don’t, I’m apt to.”

“Mr. Pease wanted me to put the money back in the bank, but I wouldn’t—I figured if you were able to get it out of the kids’ accounts, you might find a way to get it out of mine, too. Then he wanted to give me a check, but I was afraid that if you found out what I was up to before I wanted you to find out, you might stop payment on it. So I told Mr. Pease to give it to me in cash. He didn’t like it, but in the end he did it, and now I have it, every cent, and I’ve put it in a place where it’s safe.”

He grabbed me by the throat then. I was pretty sure he would, and I was scared, but I wanted it, too—it’d make him believe the last thing I had to say that much more when I finally said it. But even that wa’ant the most important thing. Havin him grab me by the throat like that made it seem more like self-defense, somehow— that was the most important thing. And it was self-defense, no matter what the law might say about it; I know, because I was there and the law wasn’t. In the end I was defendin myself, and I was defendin my children.

He cut off my wind and throttled me back n forth, yellin. I don’t remember all of it; I think he must have knocked my head against one of the porch posts once or twice. I was a goddam bitch, he said, he’d kill me if I didn’t give that money back, that money was his—foolishness like that. I began to be afraid he really would kill me before I could tell him what he wanted to hear. The dooryard had gotten a lot darker, and it seemed full of those little stitchin lights, as if the hundred or two hundred fireflies I’d seen before had been joined by ten thousand or so more. And his voice sounded so far away that I thought it had all gone wrong, somehow—that I’d fallen down the well instead of him.

Finally he let me go. I tried to stay on my feet but my legs wouldn’t hold me. I tried to fall back into the chair I’d been sittin in, but he’d yanked me too far away from it and my ass just clipped the edge of the seat on my way down. I landed on the porch floor next to the litter of broken glass that was all that was left of his eclipse-viewer. There was one big piece left, with a crescent of sun shinin in it like a jewel. I started to reach for it, then didn’t. I wasn’t going to cut him, even if he gave me the chance. I couldn’t cut him. A cut like that—a glass-cut—might not look right later. So you see how I was thinkin… not much doubt anyplace along the line about whether or not it was first-degree, is there, Andy? Instead of the glass, I grabbed hold of my reflector-box, which was made of some heavy wood. I could say I was thinkin it would do to bash him with if it came to that, but it wouldn’t be true. Right then I really wasn’t thinkin much at all.

I was coughin, though—coughin so damned hard it seemed a wonder to me that I wasn’t sprayin blood as well as spit. My throat felt like it was on fire.

He pulled me back onto my feet so hard one of my slip straps broke, then caught the nape of my neck in the crook of his arm and yanked me toward him until we was close enough to kiss—not that he was in a kissin mood anymore.

“I told you what’d happen if you didn’t leave off bein so fresh with me,” he says. His eyes were all wet n funny, like he’d been cryin, but what scared me about em was the way they seemed to be lookin right through me, as if I wasn’t really there for him anymore. “I told you a million times. Do you believe me now, Dolores?”

“Yes,” I said. He’d hurt my throat s’bad I sounded like I was talkin through a throatful of mud. “Yes, I do.”

“Say it again!” he says. He still had my neck caught in the crook of his elbow and now he squeezed so hard it pinched one of the nerves in there. I screamed. I couldn’t help it; it hurt dreadful. That made him grin. “Say it like you mean it!” he told me.

“I do!” I screamed. “I do mean it!” I’d planned on actin frightened, but Joe saved me the trouble; I didn’t have to do no actin that day, after all.

“Good,” he says, “I’m glad to hear it. Now tell me where the money is, and every red cent better be there.”

“It’s out back of the woodshed,” I says. I didn’t sound like I was talkin through a mouthful of mud anymore; by then I sounded like Groucho Marx on You Bet Your Life. Which sort of fit the situation, if you see what I mean. Then I told him I put the money in a jar and hid the jar in the blackberry bushes.

“Just like a woman!” he sneers, and then give me a shove toward the porch steps. “Well, come on. Let’s go get it.”

I walked down the porch steps and along the side of the house with Joe right behind me. By then it was almost as dark as it gets at night, and when we reached the shed, I saw somethin so strange it made me forget everythin else for a few seconds. I stopped n pointed up into the sky over the blackberry tangle. “Look, Joe!” I says. “Stars!”