Whom Gods Destroy (6 page)

She was starting for the door when I said it, but she paused and looked around. “Why?”

“You don't have to be told that, do you?”

It was all a mistake and I knew it was a mistake and still I couldn't seem to stop it. Maybe it was because of Lola and because I was still seeing that savage half smile of hers. And I kept thinking helplessly, Goddamn her! but there was nothing I could do, no way to hurt her, and I knew that I had to lash out at somebody, hurt somebody back. Vida was there, so I guess that's the reason I said it.

She was quiet for a minute. Then she walked slowly over to where I was and looked hard at me. She said coldly, “Look, Roy, or whatever your name is. You're a friend of Sid's and that's all right with me. There's one thing you'd better get straight, though; it doesn't go any further than that.”

I don't know how. I knew she was lying. But I knew. She looked like a woman who would cut your heart out if you as much as touched her. She looked hard and tough. But the moment I put my hands on her, she went to nothing.

I pulled her to me and it was like leading a sleepwalker. And then she plastered herself against me, and those white arms went around my neck, her fingernails digging like daggers into my shoulders as that blood-red mouth found mine.

“Roy.”

She flowed against me, and that hungry red mouth was hot and alive. God! I thought. That crazy bastard, Sid! I could have had her right there on the back porch, but then she got my lip in those sharp front teeth and began to sink them in and I could feel the blood spurting. My blood! Instinctively, I jerked my knee up and kicked her with everything I had.

That broke her loose. Her mouth flew open and she half doubled, her eyes sick with pain. I got my handkerchief out and wiped the lipstick and blood off my mouth. She had barely broken the skin inside my lip, but the taste of blood was still there.

She was still pretty sick. I put my arm around her and held her up. “Are you all right?”

She nodded. Maybe a minute went by while she dragged in deep gulps of air. I thought she was going to cry, but she fought it back.

“Look, Vida, I didn't mean—” I started. But she cut in.

“Let's don't talk about it. We'll forget about it and it won't happen again.” She straightened up and arranged her hair. “We'll forget about it,” she said again. Then she went back inside.

My lip had already started puffing, but maybe it wouldn't be noticed. For several minutes I stood there in the cool night air and tried to get myself to settle down. What had just happened with Vida was in the past and I could forget that. The prospect of going back in there and seeing Lola was the thing I had to face.

What I wanted to do was start running and not stop until Big Prairie was behind me for good. What I did was light a cigarette and go back in the house.

“I was afraid you'd got yourself lost, Mr. Foley,” Barney Seaward said when I came in.

“Just an upset stomach. I'm fine now.”

Then McErulur came over and said, “How's about a little poker, Barney? Foley, you'll join us won't you? Nothing big, just table stakes.”

Table stakes could get pretty damn big, but I figured I could hold my own by playing close to the vest. So I said, “That sounds all right with me.”

Vida wasn't around, but Lola came into the room again and I could feel myself squeezing the highball glass hard enough to break it. Instinctively, I tried to get away when I saw her looking at me, smiling at me with that damned fixed smile of hers, but my feet could have been in cement for all the good they did me. I saw her stop for a minute to say something to McErulur's wife, then she turned, smiling, and came toward me with an unlighted cigarette in her hand.

“I seem to have misplaced my lighter, Mr. Foley,” she said. “I wonder if I could bother you for a light?”

“Of course, Mrs. Keating,” I heard myself saying. I found the matches somehow, struck one and held it for her. Even through the haze of hate I thought, She's just as beautiful as she ever was!

“I've been trying to place you, Mr. Foley,” she lied pleasantly. “I think I have—it was Big Prairie High, wasn't it? Football, I believe.”

I thought savagely, You remember, all right. I said, “Yes. Football.”

“Oh, I remember now,” she smiled. “You were going to be a doctor, I believe. No, a lawyer.” She frowned slightly. “But Barney didn't mention that when he introduced us.”

“I didn't get to be a doctor. Or a lawyer, either,” I said. Damn you, I didn't get to be anything but a fry cook.

“A businessman, then?” she asked brightly. “As I remember, you were terribly bright in school.”

I felt sick and didn't even try to answer it. Sure, a businessman! I make so much money I let your charity bury my old man just because a little detail like that skipped my mind.

But, God, she was beautiful, more beautiful than I remembered. Hair as black as a witch's heart pulled back severely from the pale oval of her face. Her eyes were dark, with no questions in them. Her mouth thin and smiling as she waited for me to say something when she knew there was nothing I could say. And then I remembered that night, and the high-school kid running blindly away from the laughter, too sick with shame to cry. How Lola must have hated herself that night—but just for a little while. Only until she had found a way to justify the thing and turn the hate around and start it going in the opposite direction. But for a little while she must have hated herself almost as much as I hated her now.

I stood there like a statue for what may have been a few seconds or an hour. Time had stopped for me. Lola brought the cigarette to her mouth and dragged on it, smiling, and behind those eyes of hers I could see her thinking, A doctor! You're a Burk Street hoodlum and that's all you'll ever be. And I saw her glance quickly at her husband on the other side of the room with an almost savage pride, a pride born of possession and ambition. I had a feeling that when she looked at Paul Keating she was looking right through him and seeing the governor's mansion.

“You goin' to play?” I heard Sid saying huskily. I had forgotten that Sid was in the room. I had forgotten that there was anybody in the room except me and Lola.

“Of course,” she said evenly. “Please don't let me keep you from the game.”

When she was gone it seemed to me that everyone in the room must have heard the pounding in my chest. I looked at Sid and he was still holding onto the edge of the bar, glass in hand. Finally I took a deep breath and poured myself another drink. “I thought I'd sit in for a while,” I said.

Sid nodded heavily. “You find out what a man's like when you play poker with him. Maybe you won't be so hot for bootleggin' when you find out what kind of men they are....”

He was even drunker than I had thought. He wiped his face, and when I looked into his eyes I could see his mind drifting from one thing to another. “Vida's sore as hell,” he said. “Went out to the car. Won't even talk to me.” Then he reached out and took my arm. “See Kingkade over there, that little dried-up guy? Looks like a prune, don't he? The little punk would move in on me tomorrow if he thought he could get away with it.”

“You mean take over your territory?”

“Sure. He can't do it, though. I'm a friend of Barney's. I did Barney a big favor once. Old Barney won't let me down.” He laughed abruptly. “The sonofabitch'll be sorry if he tries it.”

“What kind of a favor did you do for Barney?”

But that was going too fast. I could see that Sid wasn't apt to ever get drunk enough to answer a question like that. “Roy,” he said ponderously, “you better play poker.” But when I started to move away he grabbed my arm again, and his face was deadly serious. “You were talkin' to Paul Keating's wife.”

“There's no law against it, is there?” I managed to say it tonelessly.

“I'm not so dumb, Roy. And I'm not so drunk that I can't figure out a few things. Stay away from Lola Keating.”

“I wouldn't touch her with rubber gloves!”

Sid grinned faintly. “That's what I mean. Everybody in town knew why you left Big Prairie fourteen years ago. She's Paul Keating's wife, and Paul Keating is the county attorney. That's the way it's got to be—if you want to stay in Big Prairie.”

We stood there looking at each other, and I could feel myself about to blow up. Lola hadn't been satisfied with what she'd done, she'd had to brag about it. Sid handed me a glass, and I poured it down without tasting it.

“Just forget, Roy.”

“Sure.”

Seaward, McErulur, and Kingkade were cutting for the deal when I pulled a chair up to the table and sat down. “Half a dollar ante, Mr. Foley,” Seaward said. “Is that all right with you?”

That could run into big money, and the three hundred dollars in my pocket was all I had in the world. But there was no easy way to back out now. McErulur cut a king and began to deal.

It was the kind of night that you have once in a lifetime, if you're lucky. I was still boiling, and every chance I got I'd sneak a glance at Lola and curse her under my breath. Half the time I didn't even know what I had in my hand, but it didn't make any difference. The cards kept falling one on top of the other and I couldn't lose.

“Are you sure you're not a beginner at this game, Mr. Foley?” Joe Kingkade asked gently. “I don't believe I ever saw anything like this except in what they call beginner's luck.”

When I could count my chips I found a little over five hundred dollars in front of me. It jarred me. “Luck like this can't last all night,” I said, and tried a laugh that didn't come off very well.

Sid wandered off somewhere. Then McErulur fell out and Paul Keating sat in. They jumped the ante to a dollar and the pots got bigger, and that was when my luck started going downhill. I had almost a thousand dollars in front of me at one time, but then I started playing the cards close, or jumping in on wild hunches, and pretty soon it had dribbled down to about seven hundred. Every card got to be harder to play and I started trying to outguess them. But you don't outguess men like Seaward and Kingkade.

I thought, How the hell am I going to get out of this? I can't just get up and say I've had enough. Kingkade would squeal like a stuck pig. As the game got hotter the women stopped their talking, and pretty soon there wasn't any sound at all except the few words mumbled by the players. I could feel Lola watching me, and that didn't help my game. Roy Foley! I could almost hear her thinking it. Burk Street Foley. Roy, you're the funniest thing! Then I could hear her laughing.

It wasn't my imagination this time. She was really laughing. The sound was hard, bouncing like bullets around the brick walls of the room. One of the women said, “Lola, what on earth—?” And she said, “I—I just thought of something. It struck me as amusing.”

“Are you going to call, Foley?” Seaward said.

I looked at my cards and all I could see was Lola's face. I turned them over and said, “I fold.”

Then I heard the front door slam and the click of high heels coming down the hall and into the living room. It was Vida.

“Roy,” she said, “I don't want to break up the game, but I've got to have your help.”

“What is it, Vida?” Seaward asked.

“Sid's down,” she said, spitting out “Sid” like a curse word. “He's wallowing like a pig in the front yard, and he says he won't talk to anybody but Mr. Foley.”

“I hate to quit when I'm this much ahead,” I said, shoving the chair back. “But maybe we can finish the game some other time.”

Seaward did make an attempt to be pleasant, but his eyes looked worried and I could see that it had nothing to do with the game. “Sure, we'll get together again, Foley. You go on and take care of Sid.” Keating was being dignified about it. Kingkade was calling me thirty kinds of bastard under his breath, but he kept a straight face. I shoved my chips to the center of the table and collected my money from the game's bank.

“Well, it's been a pleasure, gentlemen,” and I shook hands around the table and with McErulur. I nodded to the women and almost made it to the door before Lola said:

“Oh, Mr. Foley, I do want you to know that I'm awfully sorry about your father. If there is anything else my Christian Aid Society can do to help you, please let us know.”

I don't know how I got out of the house. At that moment I could have killed her. My hands ached for that lovely white throat of hers, ached to choke her slowly, slowly, slowly....

Somehow I got to the front porch, shaking, feeling that if I didn't start hitting somebody I'd go crazy. I stepped up to the porch railing and smashed it viciously with my fists and the pain shot up my arm like a bright needle. It was good.

“Roy, are you crazy?”

I smashed the railing again and heard a sickening crack in my hand. Then pain washed over me and blotted out everything.

“I'm all right now. Where's Sid?”

We found him on his hands and knees in a rose bed to one side of the steps. He was trying to get up and couldn't make it. I got a shoulder under him and swung him across my back in a fireman's carry, then dumped him in the car. I sat on the outside and Vida got under the wheel, holding Sid up between us. As she slammed into gear, she said, “He makes me sick! He makes me so damned sick I could die!”

“Does he get this way often?”

She made an ugly sound in her throat. “Seven nights a week is all. You'd think he'd take a holiday sometime, but not Sid. Not one of Big Prairie's most prominent bootleggers. He has to get drunk and shoot off his mouth and tell everybody what a big shot he is.”