'Shut up,' he said, and she did. She hugged the blanket to herself. The moonlight sliding in through the window-the window through which her lover had fled-showed her arms pale and bare against the dark blue wool.
He yanked the blanket off her. She was naked under it. He'd known she would be. Breathing hard, he lashed out and slapped her twice, forehand and backhand, fast as a striking snake. She gasped, but made no other sound. If he killed her on the spot, no jury would convict him. She had to know as much.
When he'd caught her the first time, she'd used all her bodily charms to mollify him. It had worked, too, even if he'd felt filthy and used as he traveled back to the front in west Texas. Now he aimed to use his body to take revenge. He undid his trousers, let them fall to the floor, and flung himself upon her.
She endured everything he did without a whimper, without a protest. In other circumstances, he might have admired that. Now he just wanted to break her, as if she were a wild horse. When his imagination and stamina ran out at last, he got up from the bed and lit the gas lamp above it. Having spent himself again and again, he was prepared to go easy-and too worn to do anything else.
Or so he thought, till he saw that the shirt on the floor had the left sleeve pinned up. 'Bedford,' he whispered in a deadly voice. Emily's face went pale as skimmed milk, which only made the bruises he'd given her look darker.
He pulled up his pants, then yanked her out of the bed and slung her over his shoulder. She squealed then, squealed and kicked. Ignoring everything she did, he carried her out of the cottage and dumped her, still naked, on the walk. Then he went back inside and locked the door behind him.
When she came up crying and wailing, he shouted, 'Go to hell. You made your choice. Now you pay for it.' He'd made his choice, too. I'll live with it, he thought. He went back to the bedroom, lay down, and fell asleep right away.
Arthur McGregor worried every time he left the room he'd taken in the cheap Winnipeg boardinghouse. He worried while he was in the room, too. That wasn't because inside his trunk sat a wooden box containing the largest, finest bomb he'd ever made. He worried about the bomb when he left the room: he worried that someone would discover it, and that he wouldn't be able to use it.
When he was in the sparsely furnished room, he worried about the farm. He worried about whether Maude and Julia and Mary could do everything that needed doing without his being there. He also occasionally worried about whether the story he and his family had put about-that he'd gone to visit cousins back in Ontario-would hold up under close scrutiny. If some bright Yank added two and two and happened to come up with four…
But the Yank likeliest to do that, Major Hannebrink, was dead. McGregor had made sure of that, and he'd got away with it. Now he was going to make sure of General Custer's demise, too, and he thought he could get away with that. And, if he couldn't, he was willing if not eager to pay the price.
'Strike a blow for freedom,' he muttered under his breath as he went downstairs for breakfast.
He wasn't used to eating anyone's cooking but Maude's. The eggs here were fried too hard, while the bacon felt rubbery between his teeth. Morning chatter flowed around him. Apart from a 'Good day' or two and a couple of polite nods, he added nothing to it.
Off he went, for all the world as if he had a job to which he didn't want to be late. His landlady thought he did have a regular job. He'd made certain she thought that. If she thought anything different, the Yanks were liable to hear about it. That was the last thing he wanted.
Almost three years after the end of the Great War, Winnipeg presented an odd mixture of rubble and shiny new buildings, as if a phoenix had risen halfway from the ashes. In another few years, McGregor thought, it might turn into a handsome city again. The rubble would be forgotten. So would the buildings and the hopes from which that rubble had been made. The new Winnipeg would be an American city, not a Canadian one.
HORNE'S HOUSE PAINTS, said a sign on Donald Street. 37 COLORS AVAILABLE. If Horne had been in business before 1914, if he wasn't a johnny-come-lately Yank, his sign would have advertised 37 COLOURS then. Even spelling changed under U.S. rule.
McGregor scowled. To him, COLORS looked clipped, unnatural… American. He stepped off the curb-and almost got clipped himself, by an American motorcar. An angry blast from the Ford's horn sent him leaping back onto the sidewalk. 'Watch out, you goddamn hayseed!' the driver screamed, in an accent unmistakably from the USA. 'Ain't you never seen an automobile before?' He stepped on the gas and whizzed away before McGregor could say a single word.
'Christ!' McGregor wiped his forehead on his sleeve. 'That'd be all I need, stepping out in front of one of those damn things when I'm carrying…' He let his voice trail away. He did not intend to mention out loud what he might be carrying. He wouldn't have come so close had he not just come close to getting killed.
Had so many motorcars scurried through the streets of Winnipeg before the Great War? McGregor had come up to the city only a couple of times in those days, so he couldn't be sure, but he didn't think so. It might end up prosperous as well as handsome.
He didn't care. He would sooner have been poor under King George than rich under the Stars and Stripes. The Yanks had taken his country away from him. If they expected him to be happy about it, they were in for a disappointment.
As a matter of fact, if they expected him to be happy about it, they were in for a big disappointment. He chuckled grimly-so grimly that a fellow in a business suit edged away from him. He didn't notice. He wanted to make sure their disappointment was as big as possible.
He crossed the Donald Street bridge over the Assiniboine and strolled past a three-story building that had somehow come through the war intact. Soldiers in green-gray with pot-shaped helmets stood guard around the building in sandbagged machine-gun nests that gave it a formidable defensive perimeter. He didn't linger. The U.S. guards asked pointed-or sometimes blunt- questions of people naive enough to linger around General Custer's headquarters.
They would, without a doubt, ask even more pointed-or perhaps blunt-questions of anyone foolhardy enough to try to leave a wooden box anywhere in the neighborhood. McGregor had seen as much on his last trip to Winnipeg.
There was a park not far away. It didn't even boast children's swings. All it had were grass and a few benches. McGregor sat down on the grass and waited for noon. He'd done that a good many times by now, and come to know the park well. The earth here was not smooth, but full of round depressions of different sizes and depths. A narrow zigzag strip of low ground, partly obliterated by the depressions, ran across the park from east to west. The troops defending Winnipeg had made a stand here. McGregor grunted. They'd failed, damn them.
He wasn't the only one out on this fine, mild day. Boys and girls frolicked where shells had burst and men had bled. An unshaven man in a filthy Canadian Army greatcoat and tattered khaki trousers lifted a bottle to his lips. He set it down slowly and reluctantly, as if its opening were the mouth of his beloved. In a drunken way, that was bound to be so.
McGregor killed time till the bells of the St. Boniface Cathedral, across the Red River, chimed twelve. He got up and ambled back by Custer's headquarters. He'd timed it perfectly. He'd just gone past the building when a chauffeur-driven Packard-the motorcar that had almost run him down in Rosenfeld when Custer was on his way up to Winnipeg-pulled away from the front of the place. He kept on walking, hardly looking at the automobile, and turned west, away from the Red River.
After a little while, he went up Kennedy. Sure as the devil, there in front of a chophouse called Hy's sat the Packard. The chauffeur remained on the front seat, eating a sandwich. General Custer and his aide, a tubby officer who seemed to accompany him everywhere, had gone inside.
McGregor smiled to himself. Custer dined at Hy's every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. He was reliable as clockwork. He ate his dinner somewhere else-McGregor hadn't been able to find out where-on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So far as McGregor could tell, no swarm of guards surrounded him here.
Luck had had very little to do with McGregor's discovering his weekday routine, or at least three-fifths of it. The embittered farmer had taken to tramping the streets of Winnipeg during the dinner hour, looking for that Packard. Patience paid, as patience has a way of doing. McGregor walked past the motorcar on the other side of the street. The driver paid him no attention whatever. Had he suddenly turned around and gone back the way he'd come, that might have drawn the fellow's notice to him.
He couldn't have that, not when he was so close. He made his way back to the park, though he didn't go past Custer's headquarters this time. 'Now they shouldn't see me at all,' he said as he sat down on the grass once more.
