now.”
“You’re blushing, Mrs. Atkinson.”
“Don’t talk about these pants then. I bought them today. I don’t feel very secure about them.”
Cathy was in a six-bed ward. I pulled a chair close, kissed her on the forehead and sat beside her. I hoped she hadn’t seen any dismay in my face. The sallow, thoughtful, rather pretty and fine-boned little face was gone. It was a stormy sunset, a ripe eggplant, a heavy mushroom. There was a single slit of brown eye to see with. Her left hand was splinted.
“Hello,” she said in a dead, fat-lipped voice. I stood up and yanked the curtains and sat down again and took her uninjured hand. It rested slack and warm and dry in mine.
“Junior Allen?” I said in a low voice.
“You don’t have to mind about me, Mr. McGee.”
“I thought it was Cathy and Trav… Why did he do it?”
There is no way to read the expression of bruised meat. She watched me, hiding away back in there behind pain and indignity. “This part of it has got nothing to do with you.”
“I want to know about it because you are my friend.”
The slit eye was closed so long I began to wonder if she’d fallen asleep. She opened it. “He come there to the bar at the Bahama Room, and I messed up a routine awful when l saw him watching us. I don’t know if it was an accident or he heard somehow or what. After, I hurried into my clothes and went out and he was gone. I went outside and saw him crossing the parking, and I ran after him. I caught him and said I wanted to talk with him. He said we didn’t have anything to talk about. I said we could talk about money. That made him wonder. We walked through to the beach. Then I said that if he could just give me a little money out of what he got, maybe even just a thousand dollars, then I wouldn’t make any trouble about any of the rest of it. He ask me what I would mean by trouble, and I said he found something that wasn’t his, didn’t he? He laughed once, short and nasty, and said I had no idea in the world what trouble was. So he reached quick and grappled holt of my neck with one hand, and pounded on my face with the other, and a couple of times he hit me in the belly. It all went dark while he was thumping on me, and I woke up in the ambulance. It… it doesn’t hurt much now.”
“Cathy, why didn’t you tell the police?”
“I almost did.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Not because I’m afraid of him beating on me again. But the whole thing might come out. And then I’d for sure never get a nickel back. And… it would have messed up what you’re fixing to do, Trav. It could have messed you into a police thing.”
What is there to do about one like that? I lifted her hand and kissed the roughened knuckles and said, “You are something, Cathy.”
“I feel next door to nothing at all.”
“Some good news anyway. There’s no way to find out who the money ever belonged to, and no way to get it back to them anyway.”
“What was hid there?”
“We’ll talk when you get out of here.”
“They won’t tell me when. But I was on my feet some today. Hunched up and dizzy, but walked all the way to the john holding onto a lady. So maybe it won’t be so long.”
When I said good-by to her she said, “It was nice of you to come to visit me. Thank you very much.”
I talked a long time with Lois that evening, giving her an edited version of my adventures. I went to bed. As I dropped off I could still hear her in the shower.
She came into my sleep and into my bed, awakening me with her mouth on mine, and strangely there was no shock or surprise in it. My subconscious had been aware that this would happen. A lady is a very special happening, so scented and delicate and breathless and totally immaculate. She wore a filmy something that tied at the throat and parted readily, presenting the warm length of her, the incredibly smooth texture of her, to my awakening embrace.
Her breath was shuddering, and she gave a hundred quick small kisses. Her caresses were quick and light, and her body turned and glowed and glided and changed in her luxurious presentation of self, her mouth saying darling and her hair sweet in darkness, a creature in endless movement, using all of herself the way a friendly cat will bump and twine and nudge and purr. I wanted to take her on her basis, readying her as graciously as she had made herself ready, with an unhurried homage to all her parts and purposes, an intimate minuet involving offer and response, demand and delay, until the time when it would all be affirmed and taken and done with what, for want of a better name, must be called a flavor of importance.
But suddenly it was not going well. She would fall away from sweet frenzy and then lift herself back up, but to a lesser peak. We were not yet joined. She was trying to hold onto all the wanting, but it kept receding, the waves of it growing smaller, her body becoming less responsive to each touch.
Finally she sobbed aloud and flung herself away, clenching her body into the foetal curl, posture of hiding, her back to me. I touched her. Her muscles were rigid.
“Lois, dear.”
“Don’t touch me!”
“Please, honey, you just…”
“Rotten, rotten, rotten!” she said in a small leathery howling voice, dragging the vowel sounds out.
I tried to stroke her. Her body was like wood, that great tension which comes with hysteria.
“Ugly rotten,” she moaned. “You don’t know the things, the ugly things. It can’t ever be nice again. I let things happen. I did things. I stopped fighting.”
“Give yourself time, Lois.”
“I… love… you!” she wailed, protest and lament.
“You tried too soon.”
“I wanted you.”
“There’s time.”
“Not for me. I can’t turn my mind off. It will always come back.”
I laced my hands behind my head and thought about it. It was very touching. Such a total preparation. All plucked and perfumed, scrubbed and anointed, all tremulous with the reward for the heroic rescuer. Then, in the darkness, Junior Allen smirked at her and that sense of her own value, which a woman must have, was gone. She had packed and wrapped the gift with greatest care, labeled it with love, but suddenly it was a gift-wrapped flagon of slime. She had tried too soon, but had I tried to turn her away at the first touch, it might have been more traumatic than what had happened. I wondered if shock would be better than soothing.
“Terribly terribly dramatic, dear Lois.”
“Uh?”
“So sad. Forever soiled, stained, lost, hopeless. The corrupted trollop of Candle Key. Gad, what drama!”
She uncurled herself slowly and cautiously, keeping her distance, furtively tucking the covering up under her chin. “Don’t be a cruel disgusting bastard,” she said in a flat voice. “At least try to have some empathy”
“For whom? A thirty-one-year-old adolescent, for God’s sake? Do you think I’m so starved for a woman I take anything I can get? Sometimes I get a little foolish or a little depressed, and I do just that, but it leaves a bad taste. The bad taste comes from my being an incurable romantic who thinks the man/woman thing shouldn’t be a contest on the rabbit level. The rabbits have us beat. My dear, if I thought you a bundle of corruptions, what feast is that for a romantic? No, dear Lois, you are sweet and clean from top to tippy toe, fresh and wholesome in every part, and pleasantly silly.”
“Damn you!”
“I didn’t tell you one little item, dear. It was Junior Allen who beat up Cathy. In her words, he grappled holt of her neck with one hand and pounded on her face with the other. Until she doesn’t seem to have much of a face at the present time. And she didn’t turn him in, not because she was scared, but because she thought because I’m trying to help her I might be brought into it somehow and the police might mess me up somehow. I keep stacking that up against your dramatics, and somehow you don’t come out too well. Try it yourself and see.”
She was silent for a long time. I could not guess how she would respond, but I knew it was a critical moment, perhaps the moment upon which her whole future was balanced. And I despised myself right along with all other
