The Drowner (14 page)

She was in bed when she heard the siren. It droned down to a growl that died away nearby. It did not start up again. There was no need for haste. She thought of the bruise. If they wondered about it, they would think the edge of the steering wheel had done it. And if, when she had clenched all the strength of her legs around him, she had cracked any ribs, it would make no difference whether they found them or not.

When she was quite certain they were gone and had taken him away, she got up in the darkness. Her room was small and plain. She eased open the bottom drawer of her bureau and lifted out the shallow box of wooden beads. She put it on the floor in front of the window and set the lid aside. She rolled her pajama legs above her sturdy knees, then knelt upon the colored beads, slowly transferring her weight, then straightening, kneeling erect, her palms pressed together in the old gesture of prayer. The agony grew, and she accepted it because it would free her. Just as it began to reach the limit of her endurance, she felt a strange swarming and shifting of a darkness behind her eyes. Her lips had a numbed, tingling feeling. Her breathing slowed and deepened, and her eyelids fluttered. The pain faded away, and she knelt on a feathery softness. Thus was the pain to Joan too, the flames as nothing, the smile, the prayer and the answer.

She did not have to say the words, or think the words. They moved across the blackness behind her eyes. “I am Thy virgin warrior, Thy pure sword of justice. Give me the proper humility to do Thy work. I have slain the whore and the money changer, doing Thy bidding. But I do not have the purity of Saint Joan. Another thing comes into my mind, and I do not know if it is a wickedness. Help me. I should not take such a hot sweet pleasure in doing Thy work. It is an arrogance. It should be done coldly and sadly, with prayers for their souls. But I forget the prayer. Test me. Use me. Teach me. Forgive me.”

She slowly stretched her arms out at her sides, horizontal, palms upward. She tilted her head back. In a furrier blackness she willed a total rigidity. It began with her fingers, turning them hard and numb, and she felt it spread up her arms as her breathing became even slower. It locked her shoulders and spread down her back and down across her belly, drawing all the fibered muscles to an iron rigidity, slowly turning haunch, flank, thigh, calf to tireless stone. And as her throat and face began to harden, and she began to slide into the greatest blackness of all, she said hastily to herself, in a tiny inward voice, “One hour.”

She came out of the blackness and felt the simultaneous softening of all her muscles. Her arms drifted down to her sides, and at the first warning of discomfort she stood up. She felt dazed and soft, rested and refreshed. She put the shallow box of beads away. She got into her bed and rolled the pajama legs down. The flesh of her knees was dimpled by the long cruel pressure, but she was without pain. She had learned it when she was fifteen, had read of Joan and wept and tried to hold her arm over a candle flame and could not, and wept again because she was unworthy. She had tried many times, and one night she had tried holding her arm high over the flame and slowly bringing it down, as slow as the minute hand of a clock. And that night she had found the secret of making the blackness come, of turning flame into a gentle kiss, turning the stink of searing flesh into a smell of flowers—the secret of Joan. But there were too many burns to hide, too many little hard white scars on the underside of her right arm. She experimented and found the beads would do as well, and she had used them for eight years. They were the proof that, among all the millions, she had been chosen.

As she crossed the edge of sleep, the hidden heart began to pump against her hand, but this time her hand slid through to where she could grasp it completely, and as she did so, she burst out of sleep to discover herself suffused with the red mare feeling, her back powerfully arched, her breath fast and shallow, her skin tingling, her loins hollow, her nipples engorged and painfully sensitive. She turned onto her back and her body slowly quieted. She flexed her right knee, clenched her fist and struck herself on the top of the thigh as hard as she could, three times. And then she began to wonder who would next be pointed out to her. She wondered what she would do if it should be Mister Sam. She wondered if she would have the strength and the will to do it. He was a sinner, but soon he would be beyond the wickedness of the flesh, and then he would see the Truth and it would bring him to his knees, begging forgiveness. She would kneel beside him and tell him what must be said.

Planning the words she would teach him, she sank once again into the deep, gentle and trusting sleep of the totally healthy creature in the first rich years of its physical maturity.

Nine

PAUL STANIAL heard the night-drone of the air-conditioner as he went silently and warily up the first flight of steps at the Hanson boat house. When he reached the level of the covered deck, he peered in. There was a single lamp lighted. The semi-opaque shade was blue. He thought he could make out a figure on the bed.

“Paul?” an uncertain voice said, off to his right. He turned quickly. Barbara Larrimore got out of a deck chair and came tentatively toward him, and when he spoke her name, she hurried the rest of the way, lurching solidly and rather clumsily against him.

He put his arms around her and said, wonderingly, “Your clothes are all damp.”

She made a muffled sound that could have been sob or laugh. “They were worse,” she said in a low voice. “I’ve dried off some. Dear God, what an absolute nightmare evening.” She stepped back away from him. “I’m sorry. Weakened condition. But not drunk. I was, for a while.”

“You sounded so strange over the phone.”

“It’s near the bed and the last thing I wanted to do was wake him up. Paul,
please
take me away from here. I called three times…”

He walked toward the stairs with her. “It was ringing when I came in. Have you got everything? Purse?”

“I left it somewhere, and if they have another room key for me, I couldn’t care less. I’m so
damned
ashamed of myself.” They reached ground level and he took her arm to guide her along the path. “The thing is, Paul, these people aren’t monstrous degenerates. They’re just silly. Silly, vulgar show-offs. There’s something pathetic about them. They try so hard. And I had to get just as silly as the rest of them. I’ll tell you all, as penance.”

“You don’t have to.”

“It will be good for me.”

“Watch your step. Here’s the car.”

After he had turned toward town, she said, “Was the college girl any help?”

“No. But she wasn’t what I expected. I liked her. She made me feel a hundred and ten. She hasn’t exactly found out what the world is all about, but her basic instincts are good, and they’re slowly swinging her around like a compass that has to point the right way eventually. But she’s fighting it every inch of the way. She kept trying to shock me. And that would be a pretty good trick. Kids her age, I’ve seen them brought in so rotted away with drugs, so diseased, so sexually abused they’re in a semi-catatonic state. That’s one part of cop work I don’t miss.”

“Well… I scored a big zero too. As a conspirator, Paul, I’m worse than useless.”

She had not finished by the time they reached the motel office. She went in and he waited until she came out with a key. She came to the car window and said, “I can walk this far at least. Suppose you put the car back by your place and kill about ten minutes and then come and hear the rest of it.”

She opened the door as soon as he knocked. She wore a yellow quilted robe. Her face was scrubbed and shiny, and she had made a white turban of one of the motel towels. It struck him that it gave the modeling of her face a cleaner look, and perhaps her normal hair styling was not as becoming as a more severe style would be.

When they were seated she made a rueful face and said, “One in the morning. Maybe listening to confessions is beyond the call of duty. Bill me for overtime, Paul. Where was I? Oh. Kelsey dragged me through what seemed like several miles of black wet woods, and I just came blundering along like a zombie, soaked to the skin. Then he trundled me up those stairs and into that place of his and pushed me into a chair. He made two stiff drinks and put one in my hand. Believe me, I pretended to drink it. He sat on the bed and worked on his and kept up this eerie monologue. I don’t know how he got so terribly drunk so fast. But he seemed to really believe I was Lucille. And there was… a dangerousness about him. You know? I didn’t want to make the slightest objection or cross him in any way. He hit that Mr. Furrbritt a terrible blow in the face. I don’t know how badly he was hurt. Kelsey did a lot of rambling and mumbling, and there was a lot of it I couldn’t follow. But he was trying to talk Lu into coming back to him. Everything would be different. And every once in a while he’d give me a horrible leer and tell me how happy he was going to make me when he took me to bed. I was sober by then, you can believe me. And I knew that if I could get out the door, I could outrun him. But he was closer to the door than I was. Right in the middle of a sentence he just toppled over onto his side and began to snore. When I was absolutely certain he was asleep, I phoned you. And waited and phoned again. And waited and phoned again. Then when you said you’d be right out, bless you, I crept out onto that porch and waited in the dark for you.”

“But absolutely no results on the other thing?”

“Unless you count what George Furrbritt said about sacks of money and secret agreements and Sam Kimber having rough friends and so on.” She frowned and shook her head slowly. “Oh, I have a lot of useful excuses. I was so emotionally exhausted I was vulnerable. And like a fool I gulped down that monstrous martini. And the storm and the lights going out made everything kind of unreal. And he really was a very skillful and mature and self-confident and reasonably attractive man. You know, when a man is the least bit tentative or apologetic or uncertain, it leaves you good places to say no. But when they just carry you along… oh, hell, Paul, I can give myself all the benefit of every doubt until hell freezes over, but I’m still going to be left with the crawly realization that while I was drifting along with it like a dreamy idiot, thinking about it as if it was some sort of sardonic game we were playing, that sleek son of a gun came within about three hot breaths of tipping me over behind the potted trees, and I have the horrible feeling that the instant I was jolted back to reality would have been the instant it was a little bit too late. It makes you think.”

“But the lights did come back on, so you’ll never know.”

“Golly, I didn’t come down here to indulge in any agonizing reappraisal of myself. I’ve sometimes felt wretched, and I’ve made some very bitter mistakes, but never before have I felt like a cheap, amiable floozie.”

“Maybe there’s something in the air out there.”

She smiled at him. “You’re quite nice. And now I’m feeling shy. I thought I was cold sober, but I wasn’t. Suddenly I’m quite shocked at myself for the… ultimate revelations. So maybe now I’m getting sober.”

“There isn’t anybody else to talk to.”

“Of course. In a way, that makes it worse. The compulsive confessor.”

“Not your fault, Barbara. It’s a cop talent. I look understanding and nod at the right places and hang on every word and make little sympathetic sounds. People tell me everything.”

“I bet they do at that, you poor guy. And you couldn’t care less.”

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. And when I want to hear more, I can always drop the significant question in the right place.”

“Let’s hear one.”

His eyes wavered momentarily. He moistened his lips. “Sure. Who was Roger?”

He saw her stiffen and saw her mouth change. He met her glance and he was the first to look away, but not before he sensed, from a change in his pulse, that their emotional relationship to each other had suddenly changed.

“You
are
very good at that, Paul.”

“Cancel that one. It was a mistake.”

She took a cigarette from the pack on the table. The angle of the lamp light made her smooth face, under the turban, as empty as a mask. In the V-neck of the robe her throat was a soft column, firm, with a dusky pocket at the base of it. He looked for a visible pulse and saw none, but knew that if he held his lips there he could feel a pulse against them. He experienced such a rush and torment of desire for her, he felt his shoulders lift, and felt the small creak of his back teeth as his jaw tightened. She was still looking down, gravely and thoughtfully. She shifted her quilted yellow hips in the chair. She gave such an aura of roundness, such a long slow firm roundness of arm and roundness of leg, dusky-sweet and tentative—a lip curling just so, an eyelid creased just so, and the soft clue to breasts set uncommonly wide in the long round torso. It was no longer possible for him to diminish his awareness of her by telling himself this was indeed quite a plain girl, solemn, rather sulky looking, too self-involved. Desire had worked too much of its transforming magic, and objectivity could not suppress the growing inventory of small delights and perfections.

She lifted her gaze suddenly, staring across at him through the slow gray lift of smoke, a gray-green stare, ancient and challenging.

“In that one letter, of course. But you see, you ask a good question and get a tiresome answer. He is a very decent man, really. A few years older than you, I’d say. With a look of sadness and patience. But he could make you laugh. A half-defeated man. Three children, and a wife with a totally dull and ordinary and inflexible mind. But very sincere and very dependent. There are always stages, you know. It started with liking. With friendship. Working in the same place all day, laughing at the same things. So you explore points of view, and find so much alike it turns into wistful romantic love, all very bittersweet and sad because you know you can’t do anything about it. And the whole city turns into a sort of foreign film, so that even the way the birds fly has artistic significance. So with a terrible reluctance, inch by inch, you talk each other into thinking that somehow you have
earned
the right to go to bed. And that means plots of course, schemes and inner shiverings and a girlish terror of anticipation. And it is going to be magic, of course. Our little bit of happiness. Ah, we are such ineffably precious people, the little vulgarities of assignation will not touch us at all!”