“Go ahead.”
The bartender looked up from sorting the slugs and quarters on the bar. “Say, I didn’t know you wore glasses, Elaine. Very becoming.”
She didn’t hear him. With the aid of a scarlet-tipped finger moving slowly from word to word, she was spelling out the newspaper story to herself. When the slow finger reached the final period, she was silent and still for an instant. Then she said aloud: “Well I’ll be—!”
She flung the paper down, its edges crumpled by the moist pressure of her hands, and went to the street door. Her hips rolled angrily, her high heels spiked the floor. The screen door slammed behind her.
I waited thirty seconds and went after her. Rotating on his stool, the desolate youth followed me with his eyes, like a stray dog I had befriended and betrayed.
“Stick around,” I told him over my shoulder.
The woman was already halfway up the block. Though they were hobbled by her skirt, her legs were moving like pistons. The gray foxtail hung down her back, fluttering nervously. I followed her more slowly when I saw where she was going. She went up the outside door, and went in, leaving it open. I crossed the street and slid behind the wheel of my car.
She came out immediately. Something metallic in her hand caught a ray of sunlight. She pushed it into her bag as she came down the stairs. The forgotten glasses on her face gave it a purposeful air. I hid my face behind a road map.
She crossed the parking lot to an old Chevrolet sedan. Its original blue paint had faded to brownish green. The fenders were crumpled and dirty like paper napkins on a restaurant table. The starter jammed, the exhaust came out in spasms of dark blue smoke. I followed the pillar of smoke to the main highway junction in the middle of town, where it turned south towards Boulder City. I let it get well ahead as we passed out of town onto the open highway.
Between Boulder City and the dam an asphalt road turned off to the left toward Lake Mead, skirting the public beaches along the shore. Children were playing on the gravel below the road, splashing in the shallow waveless water. Further out a fast red hydroplane was skittering back and forth like a waterbug, describing esses on the paper-flat, paper-gray surface.
The Chevrolet turned off the blacktop, to the left again, up a gravel road which wound through low scrub oak. The brush and the innumerable branching lanes made an accidental maze. I had to move up on the woman to keep her in sight. She was too busy holding her car on the road to notice me. Her smooth old tires skidded and ground among the loose stones as she came out of one curve only to enter another.
We passed a public camping-ground where families were eating in the open among parked cars, tents, tear- drop trailers. A few hundred yards further on, the Chevrolet left the gravel road, turning up a brush-crowded lane which was no more than two ruts in the earth. Seconds later, I heard its motor stop.
I left my car where it was and went up the lane on foot. The Chevrolet was parked in front of a small cabin faced with peeled saplings. The woman tried the screen door, found it locked, pounded it with her fist.
“What gives?” It was Reavis’s voice, coming from inside the cabin.
I crouched behind a scrub-oak, feeling as if I should be wearing a coonskin cap.
Reavis unhooked the door and stepped outside. His hounds-tooth suit was dusty, and creased in all the wrong places. His hair curled down in his eyes. He pushed it back with an irritable hand. “What’s the trouble, sis?”
“You tell me, you lying little crumb.” He overshadowed her by half a head, but her passionate energy made him look helpless. “You told me you were having woman trouble, so I said I’d hide you out. You didn’t tell me that the woman was dead.”
He stalled for time to think: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Elaine. Who’s dead? This dame I was talking about isn’t dead. She’s perfectly okay only she says she’s missed two months in a row and I don’t want any part of it. She was cherry.”
“Yeah, a grandmother and cherry.” Her voice rasped with ugly irony. “This is one thing you can’t lie out of, sprout. You’re in too deep for me to try and help you. I wouldn’t help you even if I could. You can go to the gas chamber and I wouldn’t lift a finger to save your neck. Your neck ain’t worth the trouble to me or to anybody else.”
Reavis whined and whimpered: “What the hell are you talking about, Elaine. I didn’t do nothing wrong. Are the police after me?”
“You know damn well they are. This time you’re going to get it, sonny boy. And I want no part of it unnerstan’? I want no part of you from now on.”
“Come on now, Elaine, settle down. That’s no kind of talk to use on your little brother.” He forced his voice into an ingratiating rhythm and put one hand on her shoulder. She took it off and held her purse in both hands.
“You can save it. You’ve talked me into too much trouble in my life. Ever since you stole that dollar bill from maw’s purse and tried to shift it onto me, I knew you were heading for a bad end.”
“
The concussion of her palm against his cheek cracked like a twenty-two among the trees. His fist answered the blow, thudding into her neck. She staggered, and her sharp heels gouged holes in the sandy earth. When she recovered her balance, the gun was in her hand.
Reavis looked at it uncomprehendingly, and took a step toward her. “You don’t have to go off your rocker. I’m sorry I hit you, Elaine. Hell, you hit me first.”
Her whole body was leaning and focused on the gun: the handle of a door that had always resisted her efforts, and still resisted. “Stay away from me.” Her low whisper buzzed like a rattler’s tail. “I’ll put you on the Salt Lake highway and I never want to see you again in my life. You’re a big boy now, Pat, big enough to kill people. Well, I’m a big enough girl.”
“You got me all wrong, sis.” But he stayed where he was, his hands loose and futile at his sides. “I didn’t do nothing wrong.”
“You lie. You’d kill
He laughed shortly. “You’re crazy. I’m loaded, sis, I could put you on easy street.” He reached for his left hip pocket.
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” she said.
“Don’t be crazy, I want to show you—”
The safety clicked. The door that had resisted her was about to open. Her whole body bent tensely over the gun. Reavis’s hands rose from his side of their own accord, like huge brown butterflies. He looked sullen and stupid in the face of death.
“Are you coming?” she said. “Or do you want to die? You’re wanted by the cops, they wouldn’t even touch me if I killed you. What loss would it be to anybody? You never gave nothing but misery to a single soul since you got out of the cradle.”
“I’ll go along, Elaine.” His nerve had broken, suddenly and easily. “But you’ll be sorry, I warn you. You don’t know what you’re doing. Anyway, you can put away that gun.”
I wasn’t likely to get a better cue. I stepped from behind my tree with my gun ready. “A good idea. Drop the gun, Mrs. Schneider. You, Reavis, keep up your hands.”
Her whole body jerked. “Augh!” she said viciously. The small bright automatic fell from her hand, rustled and gleamed in the leaves in front of her feet.
Reavis glanced at me, the color mounting floridly in his face. “Archer?”
I said: “The name is Leatherstocking.”
He turned on his sister: “So you had to bring a cop along, you had to wreck everything?”
“What if I did?” she growled.
“Hold it, Reavis.” I picked up the woman’s gun. “And you, Mrs. Schneider, go away.”
“Are you a cop?”
“This isn’t question period. I could haul you in for accessory. Now go away, before I change my mind.”
I kept my gun on Reavis, dropped hers into the pocket of my jacket. She turned awkwardly on her heels and went to the Chevrolet, her hard face kneaded by the first indications of regret at what she had done.
