Tears Are for Angels (5 page)

    I looked down at him, nearly five inches shorter than I was. I stand six feet five inches in my socks. I looked down at the swart, handsome man who had destroyed my world and I calculated, coolly and malevolently, and decided to kill, for the first time decided to kill, after feeling, absorbing, accepting the instinct, the urge, but staying my hand.

    In cool, calm hatred I made up my mind to kill Dick Stewart.

    "Never mind your damn drawers," I said. "Just get your britches on. I don't want you to look too pretty."

    He fumbled a little with his slacks, almost stumbled as he thrust a leg into them. I'm getting to him now, I thought; he's beginning to choke up. It's hitting him now. Pleasure squeezed me all over, then. His eyes never left the gun.

    Lucy's voice raced at me, rising, falling, pleading with me. I didn't hear any of it. I looked at her and her face was streaked with tears and she shrank toward the foot of the bed, her hand groping toward her robe.

    She picked it up and in two strides I was at her side and tore it from her. I flung it against the wall.

    "Harry!"

    "You got nothing to hide," I said.

    "Harry, please. If you'll only listen…"

    I flicked the gun at him again.

    "Besides," I said, "I want him to be looking at you. I want you to be the last thing he sees. Just the way he made you."

    Her hands flew to her head and she was weeping then, sobbing loudly and unbeautifully, and her eyes begged me and I grinned at her and felt my skin split back across my teeth. I kept looking at him, his back against the wall now, terror at last coming into his face, and I talked to her, but I wanted the words to nail into him like spikes.

    "You can explain," I said. "Sure you can. How it was just a little accommodation. How he just gave you a little while I wasn't here to do it. How it didn't mean a thing to you. All right. I believe it. And since it didn't mean a thing to you, you won't mind if I kill him. Will you?"

    "You got it all wrong, Harry. I swear it." His words chased one another, flat, quick, tumbling from him like the rain falling outside. "I was fishing back at the creek and my car drowned out, see, and I came to use your phone and I knocked and she let me in and she didn't have on anything but that robe there and I-"

    "That's a lie!" she screamed. "That's not so, Harry! He's been after me and bothering me until I thought I'd go crazy and then he said-"

    "Shut up!" She was half off the bed now, one foot resting on the floor, her eyes wild, pleading. "Aren't you a pretty pair?" I said. "Aren't you something? The bed's not cool yet and look at you now. Just look at you."

    The almost funny part was that I was beginning to enjoy myself.

    My wife was sitting there naked on the bed. her breasts mocking reminders of another man's hands, her whole body a possession now of his too, her wild eyes and long, lank hair a far cry from the allure I had once known, begging me to believe she could not help lying in my bed with another man. That very other man stood there barefoot against the wall, his trousers sagging at his hips, the dust of the floor where he had cast them still clinging to them, his body sweating, not only with fear but still with his straining to her, shouting at me that my wife had deliberately lured him into that same bed upon which she now sat, naked and lewd and alone in terror.

    And I was enjoying it. I was enjoying venting upon them the rage at my dispossession, the hurt at my betrayal. and the shame at my cuckoldry at the hands of a man whose habits with other men's wives and daughters was a standing joke in every crossroads store and filling station in the county.

    Or rather, there was someone who inhabited my sopping clothes, and who held the pistol I had brought home from the war, who stood in that room and laughed at the terror of them and the misery of me, who watched it all and laughed, and shut away inside himself that part of it which he knew even then would someday arise to turn his dreams to nightmares and his thoughts to tortures.

    It wasn't I that enjoyed it. But it was someone and I have not seen him since that night.

    Stewart was still talking. "She came up close and started kissing me and playing around and rubbing against me, and I tried to make her stop, but she said-"

    "You shut up, too," I said. "You shut your goddamn mouth and don't open it again. Not once." I must have looked at him pretty hard then, for all of a sudden he collapsed completely and started to blubber.

    Lucy looked at him in a sort of horror in which there was no pity, and in that instant, when that look flashed across her face, I knew what I was going to do to her. I had it all straight in my mind what I would do to her and what I had already decided I would do to him, and there wasn't anything left but to do it.

    "All right," I said. "This is what I'm going to do. I listened to the both of you. I listened to you all I needed to. And now you're both going to listen to me."

    Stewart's blubbering stopped. His head came up, the lips open and the eyes wide, staring at me. His hands, behind him, moved nervously against the wall. Lucy almost stopped breathing. She was entirely off the bed now, standing on the little white rug beside it, her long legs together, slightly bent, and her body shrunken, her arms across her breasts, as if she were trying to cover what she no longer had to hide.

    I took a step backward and sat easily in the bedroom chair she had covered in splashy chintz and I let the gun rest on my knee, my fingers loose on its butt. I looked at them steadily, from one to the other. Outside, the rain had slackened off to a rolling murmur.

    "I'm going to shoot you," I said to Stewart, "right where you did it to her. I'm going to put a bullet right there, and if it doesn't kill you right away, I don't care. Because in the war, I saw a man get it there. Did you ever sec that, Dick? I did and I remember about it, so that's what I'm going to do to you. If you die, good. And if you don't, they won't ever be able to suspect you of something like this again. Not ever. Not the way I'll do it, they won't."

    He seemed to have turned to stone as he listened. No muscle moved in his face, as his mind refused to credit the things brought to it by his ears. And then I saw some of the fear go out of him. I knew it was because the easiest thing to be afraid of is the unknown. He knew, now; he had "heard what I intended to do, it was no longer the unknown, and some of the fear left him at the knowledge. Not all of it. and none of the horror. But even for him it was better just to know.

    I felt my lips slide back from my teeth again and I cocked my eyes toward
Lucy.

    "Either way," I said, "they won't do a thing to me. Not to Harry London, not in this county, nor for finding him in bed with my wife and shooting him. They'll turn me loose in fifteen minutes."

    "Harry, please listen to me. I love you, Harry, only you, I-"

    "I told you to shut up," I said. "I don't want your lies or anything else. I just want you to shut your filthy mouth. Because I'm not going to kill you. Not now or ever. Not directly. But you're going to live with me, in this house, for the rest of your life, knowing it and remembering it. Knowing and remembering that I and everyone else also know and remember it, and worst of all"-my teeth clenched on the words-"worst of all, you're going to know and remember till the day you die what he looked like and what he was, not when lie had you, but after he had you and after I shot him. Every time you come in this room or get in that bed or lay your eyes on me, you're going to remember that. I'm not going to kill you, Lucy. I'm going to do worse. I'm going to make you live with this the rest of your life. And I hope you live a long time."

    Maybe it was the cold rage in my eyes or the blunt words. Maybe it was the cringing Stewart. Or maybe, for her too, it was just knowing, at last, what I was going to do. Maybe it was something else I couldn't know about. But something returned to her then, something pulled her head up and straightened her shoulders and flashed in her face, and she came across the floor and stood in front of me and bent and put her hands on my knees.

    "I can't undo it, Harry," she said. "It can't be undone now, no matter what I say, no matter what I do. All right, Harry, do what you want with me. But don't add to it, Harry. Don't kill him."

    It was not a plea for him. Her face and her hands and her voice told me that. Something happened to me. too, something crawled up in me and sprang the deep, un-thought-of question I had shoved to the far places of my mind, the question I had not asked her and could not ask myself.

    "Lucy," I whispered, "why? Why'd you do it, Lucy?"

    Her eyes were deep in mine and I took my hand off the gun and touched her face, bent near mine, and for the first time I was no longer aware of her nakedness and her guilty breasts. I waited for her answer with raw hurt carved inside of me.

    And in that instant, that short moment of pain, he filing himself across the room from behind her, almost flatly through space in a swimmer's racing dive. My hand closed again over the gun, but the hurtling shock of him struck against her, and she came down on me and I went over backward in the chair, Lucy on top of me, her stomach pressing into my face. At once, not only all the rage and the hate surged back inside of me, but also a flash of fear.

    I struggled wildly and felt a great weight on me and then a shattering in my head. From far away came an evil roar. Then I swirled away to blackness, deep and hot and lonely.

    

    

    When it was light for me again that night, I lay there drowsing, with the softness of the rain still on the roof and against the panes. I was glad, I can remember how the joy burst inside of me, knowing it had all been a dream, a nebulous quirk in some dark corner of the brain, and how gratefully I began to squirm deeper into the warmth of what seemed to be the deepest, warmest mattress in the world.

    And then my head ground harshly against some unyielding thing, and I started in surprise and opened my eyes, and simultaneously became aware of my skull against the hard mahogany leg of the dresser and my cheek grinding into the soft fuzz of the white rug, the popping, searing fire behind my eyelids and the parched lining of my mouth.

    And in that same moment, with pure horror lurking near, waiting to pounce, I knew too, with inarguable certainty, that it had not, after all, been a dream.

    Then, with succeeding shocks like the pounding of breakers against the shore, I felt the inert weight across my stomach and my right leg, touched the soft tangle that could only be hair, and looked along the floor, and saw the limp, nude leg attached to the white flank, the leg somehow flaccid and unreal, not flesh but merely old composition of some lifeless, bloodless substance.

    Lucy lay across me like that and I thrust my right arm under me and pushed up with it and my left elbow and looked down at her. She was face down, the blonde head almost under my left arm, the hands on either side of the body, the legs and useless feet sprawled lifelessly. I could not see any blood, but I did not need to. The living do not lie like the dead.

    The undertow of horror, of terror, of pure panic, of shock and disbelief and incomprehension grasped at my intestines, convulsive and powerful. I cried out and pushed the body away from me and dragged my legs from under it, and shoved myself back against the wall, away from it, and sat there and looked at it.

    Only then did I realize I was holding the pistol.

    The head had flopped toward me, the long hair tangled about it, the eyes wide open, a small trickle of blood coming from one nostril, drying in a brownish stain upon the skin. The bullet hole was above the right eye. almost but not quite even with the nose, and its evil gape was not so horrible as the slack, open mouth.

    After a while, slowly, like the simmering down of boiling water when the fire is removed, repulsion for the inertness there on the white rug in front of me began to go away, and with no thought of how it had come to be there, I began to remember the times and things between us, and grief clawed at me.

    This was Lucy, all there was of her. This was all of the sweetness and the glory, this was how it had ended, what it had brought her to. This was the woman I had brought to my father's house and this, ultimately, was what I had brought her to. Death, naked, ugly, and without gentleness.

    "Lucy," I said, out loud. "Lucy, I'm sorry."

    The emptiness of words mocked me and I drew further back to the wall. I felt the hardness of it at the back of my head and the sudden ache in my temples. And with a roar like exploding dynamite, my brain crackled with awareness of how she came to be heaped there, and of him who should be in her place.

    The sonofabitch, I thought, the words almost an irreverence before the dull eyes and open mouth. And then I realized he was gone.

    The rain was falling hard again, the obliterating, ceaseless rain, and I wished to be in it, to be in the rain, to let it wash it all away, clean away, to wherever the rain goes after it meets the earth. But still I did not move from the wall and still I could not bring myself to touch her, to close the eyes or mouth, to bring some faint semblance of order and decency to unordered indecent death.

    So he was gone. So he had left us there, Lucy and me, the way we had started. No, I thought, not quite like that. Not quite the same.

    But he was gone. And I was still there. And Lucy. And something else, too, all about me in the disordered, death-quiet room, lurking in the air, behind the overturned chair. Something else was there and what it was had to be discovered.

    And so, at last, without bitterness, I began to think.

    The fact stared me in the face. Dick Stewart was gone. I was alone with my dead wife. This, somehow, was connected with the aura all about me in that room. The link was there, but it was vague, mist-washed, and somehow just beyond reach.