Reason To Believe (17 page)

He figured the Bunkhouse was probably booked full for the first time since the big rodeo last summer. Probably booked up with professional snoopers like Cady, that was the worst part.

No, it wasn't. The worst part was that Ben had stayed there himself once, but only for a few hours. Even though it had been a long time ago, he could still remember the smell of stale smoke and whiskey mixed with the stench of his sin.

God, he hoped they hadn't given Clara the same room.

He'd feel a lot better having her at his place, where he'd lived pure and sober for nineteen long, lonesome months. All that haunted his little one-room walk-up was his dream of her. He wanted her to know that. Maybe if she stayed there, somehow she would sense it. The work he'd done. The changes he was trying so damn hard to make.

Not much choice for the curiosity-seekers and the goddamn reporters. They'd all be staying at the Bunk-house, lined up side by side in those shabby little boxes with paper-thin walls. Out-of-towners. Out-of-staters. Nosy bastards, mostly, out to spin some yarn about the vanishing race.

He wondered where Robert Cady bought his license plates. Some kind of sunshine state, most likely.

Maybe he ought to get dressed, take a walk, and find out, just for the hell of it.

Ben swung his legs over the side of the bed, sat up, and planted his bare feet on the cold linoleum. He located his cigarettes mechanically, struck a match, and lit up a smoke in the dark. One good thing about living alone was the freedom to have a cigarette whenever and wherever he damn well pleased. Some changes were harder to make than others. He still had a whole shitload of bad habits. Too many for a woman's love to cure. So his woman had taken hers back.

But who was she giving it up for now?

Maybe he ought to take a walk past the ol' Bunkhouse and find out. Ben took a long, slow drag on his cigarette, turning the ash into a small red demon, glowing in the shadows. Mean-lookin' little bastard, he thought as he dammed the smoke up inside his chest and held on to it until it gave him a nice sharp pain.

Christ, he was at it again, and he wasn't even drinking. He exhaled gradually, deflating, sinking like the damaged goods he was until his back touched the cool wall. Some fancy-talking white guy barely makes a little conversation with her, and inside his own thick head he's got them in bed together. He didn't know what she'd done for sex over the last two years. Didn't want to know. Didn't need the aggravation, so why play mind games? She'd refused to sleep in his bed tonight, even without him in it, so that pretty much told him where
he
stood. It was his own fault that he'd been hoping. With this ride coming up, and being with her, being with Annie, he'd been hoping...

The sound of footfalls on the wooden steps leading to his door straightened him up fast. He stuck his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and grabbed his jeans. He was sliding them over his naked butt when he heard the feet hit the landing.

"Hold on," he responded to the soft, bare-knuckled rapping on the door. No need to ask who it was. His thudding heart already knew, which made it a little tricky to zip his jeans. He tore open the door and let the reality of her, the sight and the sound of her, take what little breath he had away.

"I can't stay there," she said in a slight, tentative voice. Light from the streetlamp framed her in the doorway, turning her hair into a lustrous halo surrounding her shadowed face.

He felt like a half-wit when he stepped back, jerked the cigarette from his mouth, then couldn't find voice to invite her in.

"I'm sorry to wake you up in the middle of the night, Ben. I... Now that I'm here, I feel quite silly about it, actually, but I just couldn't—"

He followed her eyes as she noticed the cigarette in his hand. A dead giveaway. He hadn't been asleep, and there were no lights on. The streetlight shone through the shadeless window, dimly illuminating half the room.

Her eyes darted to the other half, the dark corner, where the bed was. "Am I... interrupting?"

"No," he said quickly, closing the door behind her. "Nothin' but... you caught me smokin' again. I'll get the light."

She sighed heavily. "You were right. It's really awful. So depressing, I couldn't—"

"Maybe I'd better
not
get the light."

"Oh, Ben, don't be silly. I've seen your socks on the floor before. Your wet towels, your underwear, your..."

She shrugged out of her jacket, tugged on one end of her scarf like a bell cord, and went on explaining her unexpected visit as though her reputation were on the line. And he followed close behind, listening politely even though he didn't much care why she'd come, as long as she was there.

"Okay, maybe I
was
a little scared. The place reminded me of
Psycho.
That furnace took up half the room, and in the dark it kept kicking on, roaring like some kind of wild animal blowing its hot—" a quick pivot brought her up against the wall of his bare chest "—breath on me."

He wondered whether furnace breath smelled like smoke. He knew his did. Hers was warm and sweet and made him smile like a lovesick fool in the near-darkness.

"Must have been exciting."

"I tried sleeping with the light on, but..."

But, as he recalled, she never could. Light made her watchful, restive. In the dark she lost her inhibitions. She loved to be close in the dark, the way they were now, close enough to breathe each other's breath, sense the course of a shiver and gauge body heat without touching. In the dark she loved to be cuddled underneath the covers—at least a sheet, even in summer. She loved to be loved in the dark, in the night, when the air was damp and heavy, redoubling the intensity of every scent and sound.

Perhaps she remembered, too, for she hesitated to move away, and when he touched her cheek with a tentative thumb she closed her eyes, just for an instant.

But then, barely above a whisper she said, "Yes, Ben, please do turn the light on."

He leaned away from her to flip the switch, dodging his disappointment. He thought the light a rude awakening. The bare walls and shabby secondhand furnishings embarrassed him. But he deserved to be embarrassed. After the initial stab, he indulged himself in displaying for her the price he was paying. Let her look around and be satisfied, he thought. Good penance was hard to find these days.

"Besides, the chain on the door was missing," she said, wringing her hands. "And the other lock didn't seem too trustworthy. Such a flimsy door, and you think, gosh, anybody could just pull in off the highway, and they wouldn't even have to break—"

"It's okay." Cautiously he laid his hand on her arm, covered in soft wool, half expecting her to jump away like a green filly. When she didn't, he rubbed briefly, taking the rare opportunity to soothe her. "Really. Can I get you anything? I've got tea."

"All I really want is a little sleep, but I..." At a glance she took in the spartan furnishings, searching for a nesting place.

"You take the bed."

"The chair would be fine. At this point, I could sleep standing up."

"Yeah, right." He tossed a sleeping bag on the floor, followed by a couple of old blankets. He could feel her watching him. "I can fall sleep anywhere. You never could. 'The Princess and the Pea.' Remember?"

When he'd read the romantic fairy tale to Annie, he'd said, "Just like Mom." And, of course, little Annie had told on him. Clara had thought it a criticism at first because she liked to think of herself as a trooper. But he'd always treasured the fragility she tried so hard to hide, for it gave him the leverage to fancy himself needed.

The notion made him laugh as he shook off the pillow Clara offered him. It was the only one he had. "We've slept in some rough beds, haven't we?"

"I didn't complain, did I?" A fleeting smile reminded him of trooper Clara, from the days when she'd loved him no matter what, and he thought, yes, I treasured that, too.

Counted on it. Took it for granted.

She folded her arms around the pillow. "But things were different then."

"They sure were. We didn't have a damn thing then. We were two starry-eyed kids who could have come from different planets for all we had in common. But if my bed was the back of a pickup, that's where you slept."

"We had each other then. I was yours and you were mine." Then quietly, sadly hopeful, she asked, "Weren't you? For a while, at least?"

"I always have been, Clara." His claim rang with desolation, for no matter how deeply he believed it, he could not expect her to. He sighed. "Trouble is, there's always been a part of me you didn't wanna know."

"The part that didn't love me?"

"The part that can't love anything." Dispirited, he shook his head. "The ugly part. The part nobody wants to look at." The part he'd finally dug out and dissected when he'd run out of places to hide it. But she hadn't been there, and he didn't know how to describe it to her.

"The part you have to control," she said. For her it was that simple.

"It was easier to let you try to control it for me. Or deny it. Between us, I thought we had a good thing goin' there for a while. Thought I could be two people." He chuckled humorlessly. "The hell-raiser you fell in love with and the husband you expected to turn me into."

"I couldn't do it alone." She sat on the rumpled bed, flipping the blanket aside as she heel-toed her shoes off.

"You couldn't do it at all." He braced his hands on his thighs and lowered himself like a supplicant at her feet, landing his cracking knees on the pallet he'd made. "I was trying," he told her earnestly. "But only half-assed. Until the law took my driver's license away and I landed in treatment, and they showed me how close I was to losing my job, my home, my family, even my freedom. I was closer to prison than I realized. I was just lucky it didn't go that far. Pure dumb luck was all it was."

"I had no idea you were driving—"

"Come off it, Clara. How was I gettin' around?" He looked up, his eyes inviting hers to attend to their own blind spot.

She endured his provocation only briefly, then stubbornly turned the same old blue-blind eye.

Again he gave the mirthless chuckle. "I'd covered a lot of tracks, but I was gettin' pretty sloppy at it. Too damn cocky, I guess. Sure, I'd let you stop me sometimes. It made you feel good."

"It did not."

"Well, it seemed to make things easier."

With a disgusted
tsk
and a sigh she rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. "Didn't you know it was getting out of hand?"

"When I thought about it, yeah. I thought, one of these days I'm gonna wrap that pickup around a tree, or hit the ditch, slam into an approach, and go out in a blaze of glory.
Bam!"
He rammed the heel of one hand into the palm of the other. "You go from wasted to dead, you don't feel a thing. And you never think about takin' anybody with you. You never think about breakin' your neck and being left with nothin' but the brain you've been too lazy to use."

He rubbed his palms distractedly up and down the worn denim that covered his thighs. "Then you spend a couple days behind bars, and you stand before a judge who tells you you're one step away from being locked away for years." He lifted his eyes to meet hers.
"Years,
Clara. You know how close I came?"

"No, I—" She shook her head quickly, refusing to entertain the notion that Clara Pipestone's husband could possibly have become a prison inmate. "I really don't. All I know is that—"

"All you know is that I fucked another woman."

She turned her face as though he'd struck her.

And in a very real way, he knew he had. He had added insult to injury. Sought to humiliate her by the same vehicle he'd used to defile himself.

"I'm sorry, Clara."

"For what?" She closed her eyes briefly, then shook it all off. The insult, the injury, maybe even the sixteen years. "It doesn't matter anymore."

"It matters to me."

"It's late, Ben."

"Too late?"

She ignored the question as she sought to make her nest by pounding the emaciated feather pillow into submission. "If we don't get some sleep, we'll both be sorry in the morning."

"I've sure been there before." He offered her a folded blanket, balanced on his right hand like a serving tray. "Here, you might need this. You're always gettin' cold at night."

She laid her hand on the army green wool in polite refusal, for he'd little enough for his bed. The gold band on her third finger flashed defiantly in his face. In answer, he put his hand next to hers. The wedding rings were a matched set. Remarkably, neither half had been put away.

She gazed wishfully at the two hands as though they belonged to mannequins in a shop window. "There's a promise engraved inside yours. Remember?" She looked up at him, and he nodded. The seam in her lips tightened. She stared into his eyes, letting him see and feel the fervor in hers cool. "There's nothing in mine."

"Your finger's still in it."

She lifted her chin a notch and claimed the blanket, as though the action would somehow show him. Dumbfounded, he watched her unfurl it with a quick snap.

"You ordered the rings, Clara. I wish I'd thought of having yours engraved, but I didn't."