Home, she thought ruefully, looking with disrelish at the accumulation of dust and grit which covered the wooden floor. She rubbed her hands together briskly, passing through the doorway into the bedroom alcove. There were two closed doors side by side in the right-hand wall; the nearest, the door to the bathroom (bathroom, now that was really very funny, she thought, a john with a high wooden tank and a long pull-chain, for God’s sake, not to mention a cracked enamel sink and an exposed shower that sprayed water almost as muddy as that from the slough, even though the piping was supposed to connect with a county supply line). The other door was padlocked through a hasp: the storage closet.
Andrea unlocked it with another key. From the shelves inside she removed several wool blankets, an old Coleman pressure lantern and a tin of kerosene. She put the blankets on the cot and carried the lantern and kerosene into the other room. Then she found the box of kitchen matches she had bought and took them to the stove and began to build a fire inside, remembering how Steve had done it with bits of kindling from the pile and some of the newspapers. Before long, she had one of the redwood blocks burning; she closed the iron door and stood with her back to the stove, trying to warm herself.
This week alone here was going to be very good for her in a lot of ways, she reflected; she was going to be on her own for a long, long time, having to fend for herself, and there was nothing like disciplining right from the beginning.
When the fire began to crackle hotly inside the potbelly, Andrea found a broom and a mop in the storage closet and began systematically to clean the interior of the shack.
In the bedroom of her small three-room apartment in Santa Clara, Fran Vamer sat moodily sorting her week’s laundry and thinking of Larry Drexel.
He could be so strange at times, she thought, putting an orange bath towel into one of the two wicker baskets on the floor at her feet. Like this afternoon, like the way he had yelled at her, practically chased her out of his house, for no reason at all that she could see. She was almost frightened of him at times like that—of course, he’d never hit her or anything, but he had such a violent temper, he’d fly off the handle like a little boy having a tantrum when everything didn’t go his way. And he could be so cold and distant, too, as if nothing ever reached him deep inside, as if nothing ever moved him. The only time he was truly warm, truly demonstrative, the only time she really felt spiritually close to him, was when they were making love; when he was inside her, moving, his lips on her breast . . .
Fran’s cheeks burned furiously. Oh, you’re terrible, she told herself; you’re really a wanton, immoral thing. Abruptly, she stood and went to the bedroom window, staring past the frilly curtains at the rear courtyard of the apartment complex. A group of laughing teen-agers, voices raised in shrill merriment, were swimming in the oblong pool beyond the parking area. She watched them for a time, ducking one another in the chill water, making cannonball dives off the low board at one end, oblivious to the cold and the overcast sky, to all but them selves and the very present, the wonderful immediacy of youth.
She had been that way once. A good girl—God, such a meaningless term!—playing good-girl games, thinking good-girl thoughts, pure and innocent, knowing in her heart that when she gave herself to a man it would be on her wedding night ...
With the carefree incorruption of the young, knowing a foolish lie. Because she had met Larry Drexel.
And fallen blindly in love with him.
Whatever he was, whatever he felt for her, whatever he said and did to her, she loved him and she would go on loving him.
Fran turned from the window to look toward the near bedroom wall, to where a small calendar hung. There were lines drawn with a red felt pen, through the dates starting with August 28th and running to the present.
Two months and six days.
She was still waiting.
She couldn’t put off going to a doctor much longer, she knew that. And if it were true, if the reason she had not had her period in two months and six days was because she was pregnant, it was better to know it for certain —wasn’t it?—than to keep falsely hoping she was late because of some hormone imbalance or simple nervousness.
The thing that was bothering her most, of course, the real reason she had put off seeing a doctor for this long, was not the mere fact that she might be pregnant. No, it was having to tell Larry that she had lied about taking the birth control pills, that she had foolishly succumbed to an inbred religious belief that you did not prevent the conception of human life, that she had been going to his bed for the past year on irrational faith alone. It was having to see his face when she told him that, and about the child, having to hear his reply when she asked him not to allow the baby to be born out of wedlock.
She was almost certain what he would say.
He would say that she had done it on purpose, to get him to marry her. And he would refuse.
Fran returned to the bed and sat down again, lighting a cigarette from the pack on the nightstand. No, now no, she couldn’t think about such things, she had to put it out of her mind. Maybe she wasn’t pregnant after all, maybe everything would be all right given enough time; things always worked out, didn’t they?
At five-thirty, the limping man walked to O’Farrell Street and entered a small coffee shop. He sat in an ersatz-leather booth at the rear. A chubby waitress with eyes like slick black buttons took his order: a fried ham sandwich and coffee, no cream.
When the coffee came, the limping man sat watching the steam spiral upward in thin wisps. At the booth across the aisle from him, a young man in a bright blue blazer was talking in low tones to a pretty flame-haired girl. They were holding hands under the table, their knees pressed tightly together. The girl laughed loudly and happily at something the young man said, showing even white teeth and the long slender column of her throat.
Traffic noises filtered in from the street outside in a regular, almost monotonous, rhythm. The limping man lifted his coffee cup, wondering: How am I going to do it this time?
The first one—Blue, in Evanston—had taken the cleverest planning thus far. Blue always went to the Urban Betterment League meeting on Thursday nights, the limping man had discovered; and invariably, he parked his car at the rear of the lot adjacent to the Elks Club, where the meetings were held. The lot was shadowed, unattended during that time, and the limping man had been able to slip quietly and unobtrusively through the parked cars to Blue’s new Camaro.
He had waited there for some time, to make sure the lot was completely deserted; then, using a small pipe wrench, he had reached beneath the car and removed the drain plug at the bottom of the gas tank. The resultant flood of gasoline—only six or seven gallons—had been greatly absorbed by the dry, gravelly surface of the lot; the spreading stain was hidden almost completely beneath the Camaro and in the deep shadows. When only a few drops remained in the tank, he had replaced the drain plug. Then, with a Phillips screwdriver, he had extricated the left rear taillight and carefully broken the stop-light bulb with the blade of the screwdriver, to expose the filaments. From his pocket, he had taken a three-foot length of lamp cord, slit on both ends, and, with an alligator clip, attached one side of one end of the cord to the positive portion of the filament in the broken bulb. Using another alligator clip, he had grounded the second side of the cord to the metal taillight frame, first having bent it slightly inward so as to take the clip. The opposite ends of the cord had been stripped bare, and he taped those ends together with electrician’s plastic tape, so that the exposed wire tips almost, but not quite, touched—like a spark gap. Then he had removed the gas cap and inserted the cord inside the tank until the wire tips touched bottom, lifted them perhaps a half-inch above it, and then taped the cord in that position with more of the electrician’s tape. The entire operation had taken less than ten minutes.
He had been waiting on a side street when Blue and the others came out of the Urban Betterment League meeting. As was usually the case when a man got into his car, simultaneous with starting it, Blue had depressed the brake pedal. The resultant spark from the stop-light filament to the exposed ends of the cord had ignited the fumes in the tank—and the gasoline puddled under the car—and the ensuing explosion had eliminated all traces of the rigging.
The limping man smiled thinly, thinking about the brilliant orange flash which had illuminated the Illinois sky that night, and the booming concussion of the blast. The chubby waitress brought his fried ham sandwich and departed silently. He chewed thoughtfully on the sandwich, his eyes bright and clear as he visualized the violence.
