Night-Bloom (13 page)

“Oh, Charley. Charley, darling. I’m so lucky. So lucky it’s me you want. Me you need. Only I wish …” She started to whimper again.

“Now don’t let’s start that again, Myrtle.”

“I know. I know.” She swiped her teary eyes with the back of her hand. “It’s just that I wish … I wish, just that you’d hold me more. And love me. It just ain’t natural the way you keep yourself from me for so long. You know what I mean?”

He was quiet for a time, suffering her wet embrace and her nose boring into his neck. “I told you when we started this, Myrtle …”

“I know. I know, Charley.”

“I said then I wasn’t taking you in as a mistress or a lover.”

“I know that, Charley. I know what you said. Still …”

“I told you then, Myrtle, I was not going to take advantage of your misfortune.”

“I know, Charley. And you haven’t. You’ve lived up to your word. And that’s how come I have so much respect for you. Other guys I know … a girl without money, without a job, no friends or relations to help her out … other guys would have moved in on a situation like that.”

“I told you, Myrtle, I respect you too much.”

“I know, Charley. I know.” She snuffled and wiped her eyes with a crumpled tissue. “Still, I wish you’d hold me more. And touch me. I’m a woman, Charley, and … and Christ, I need touching.”

Watford lay on his back, hands cradled behind his head, find stared at the ceiling. He appeared to be pondering some careful, deeply considered point. Snuffling and daubing fitfully at her eyes, she watched him and waited. At last he spoke:

“When I saw you working in that bar that first night, Myrtle, and the way those fellows in there talked to you, and how the owners treated you, I just knew I had to somehow put a stop to that.”

“I know it, Charley, and I bless you all my life for what you done. Ain’t it been …” She laughed, catching herself up. “There I go again with the ain’ts. See what I mean when I say I’m just not good enough for you?” She laughed again, somewhat selfconsciously. “
Hasn’t
it been great, though, is all I meant. These past five months. Just you and me together in this little place. You with your nice, steady job down at the bank. And me waiting here with supper when you get home. And you gettin’ out of your uniform and all, and takin’ off that awful pistol, and then us sittin’ down and havin’ a drink before dinner. Ain’t that been nice, Charley?” Her face floated up at him out of the moonbeam, stupid and imploring. “Hasn’t it, I mean,
been
nice?”

“Sure it’s been nice, Myrtle.” He patted her as if she were an old retriever. “I wouldn’t change it, not any of it, for the world.”

She sat up suddenly in bed and hugged her knees. “Well, then, why is it I can’t make you happy?”

“You do make me happy, Myrtle.”

“No, I don’t. You’re a million miles away. I want to do things for you. You’re always doin’ things for me. You give me money and presents. I want to give you things, too, Charley. But you don’t seem to want nothin’ back from me in return. That’s not normallike. Not like other relationshipslike. Other guys I’ve known have given me things too, but like they always wanted something back in return. That was the deal. They never had to say it. You just knew it. And you knew the deal would last just so long as they were happy with what they were gettin’ back on their money. Not you, Charley. You always give. You don’t ask for nothin’ back. And I guess … I guess that’s what makes me feel like”—her voice started to quaver—“like you don’t care about me. Like either you just feel sorry for me, or maybe that I just plain old disgust you.”

She buried her head in her knees, and in the next moment her entire body was convulsed with sobs. “Now, now,” he stroked her helplessly.

” ‘Cause, let me tell you,” she sobbed. “I don’t need anyone’s pity. And if I disgust you …”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Myrtle.” He hugged her hard to his chest. She was yielding and compliant, making happy little burbling sounds as he kissed and stroked her. “Don’t ever … For pity’s sake, don’t you ever think such a crazy thing.”

He could not bear the thought that his inattentiveness, his sexual complacency, had hurt her so deeply. Now he set out to disabuse her of such thoughts. Ardor at 4:00
A.M.
was not easy to come by, but he was not going to let the hour stop him.

Myrtle Wells, for her part, was not about to be stopped either. Ambition and guile ran a little deeper and possibly darker there than Watford gave her credit for. Within the small compass of her drab, mean, thoroughly misbegotten life, Charles Watford loomed like the Prince of Wales. He was the best main chance. The daughter of a pipe welder at a naval yard in Puget Sound, the only kind of men Myrtle had been exposed to were those who used to regularly immobilize themselves on Saturday-night six-packs, and as a matter of principle, liked to cuff their women about a great deal. Charles Watford, for whatever his idiosyncrasies, was the closest she’d ever come to human tenderness and seeming economic security in a male. She was not about to let that go too easily. ,

“Charley, Charley,” she swooned beneath him, biting his shoulder, smothering her moans in his armpit. “Oh, Charley, that’s so good. Deeper—go deeper, Charley. More. More.”

Her thighs coiled sinuously round his middle while he rocked above her in his cool, passionless way. “I love you, I love you,” she kept gasping in his ear while the excitement in her voice mounted to sobs and little quivering shrieks.

Afterward, depleted and strangely sad, Watford slept. Myrtle Wells, however, lay awake on her pillow, still vibrating like a plucked string. Her skin tingled from the encounter and her chin was bruised from where his unshaven beard had abraded it. She minded none of that, but only folded her arms across her chest with a proud, defiant expression, as if embracing herself, and smiled enigmatically into the approaching dawn.

At the First National City Bank of Kansas City, Charles Watford was looked upon as very much a favorite son. In the six months he had served there as a security guard, he had won the affection of his colleagues and the admiration of his superiors. He had applied for the job on the basis of a record of service as a sergeant of the U.S. Military Police in Vietnam. He had never been any such thing, but he was buoyed by the unalterable conviction that having certified to that effect on his application, the odds were greatly in his favor that the deception would never be discovered.

He was right. Security checks in such matters are notoriously slipshod and, in Watford’s case, only the most perfunctory check had been authorized. Consequently, Watford was hired and in no time at all had proved himself an invaluable asset to First National City as well as a fearless adversary of aspiring bank robbers. He may as well have been the very thing he attested to on his application, for with remarkable aplomb, he had foiled two attempted holdups. In addition, he had demonstrated that he was a man who conducted his affairs with such exemplary discretion as to make it highly unlikely that he would ever prove an embarrassment to the bank.

What’s more, Watford looked the part perfectly. He was attractive, polite and unfailingly attentive to his duties. Given his strong predilection for masquerade, he naturally loved to don the smart gray flannel guard’s uniform with the strip of navy piping running up the trousers. The crowning touch was the .45-caliber service revolver buckled smartly to his hip. At a time when he was still smarting from the indignity of banishment from his sister’s home, and still imagining himself to be a four-starred item on the New York City Police Department’s Ten Most Wanted list, his unremarkable job at the bank out in the boondocks of Kansas suited his needs perfectly. It afforded him an opportunity to keep a low profile as well as build his badly depleted financial reserves. How long he would stay, he could not say. In all his adult life he’d never been able to conceive of any job he held as anything more than merely transitory. For his part, he was always biding time and awaiting the propitious moment to bolt. And when it came to bolting, he had an unerring instinct for just the right moment. In much the same manner that epileptics describe the aura preceding the full attack, so, too, Watford’s bolt was invariably preceded by a whole series of minute, but by now familiar, neuromuscular alarms. As of yet those alarms had not manifested themselves. But something in the uncanny, almost feral prescience of the man told him that shortly they would.

Watford’s closest friend at the bank was T. Y. Bidwell, the second security guard and Watford’s partner. A dozen years his senior, Bidwell was a gaunt, leathery individual with flinty, rakish features. He’d been married three times, and in the final instance to two ladies simultaneously. He was a Texan, or more precisely, a Texarkansan who preferred to pass himself off as pure Texan for whatever special cachet he thought attached to that. Lean, coppery, rawboned, he was the quintessential cowhand. A high liver, after hours he made directly for the more boisterous watering holes of Kansas City, where he could depend on an everready supply of bourbon and pretty women.

Temperamentally, Bidwell was poles apart from the instinctive monasticism of Watford. What drew them together in that improbable bond of friendship was a mystery to the two of them.

“Hey, Charley. What say we punch down a couple,” Bidwell said one night at closing.

“I can’t, T.Y. Myrtle’s …”

“Oh, shit, Myrtle.” Bidwell flapped his arms as if he were about to take wing. “Christ, Charley, I wish you’d get off that Myrtle thing. You got all this pussy over here just pantin’ to drop their knickers for you—just itchin’ to eatchaup alive, and you go skulkin’ off to home—like some weaselly coonhound to Myrtle. Jeeesus.”

Watford hung his uniform in one of the metal wardrobe lockers in the bank’s basement.

“Christ, man. Ain’t you ever got a good look at that woman? I don’t mean to be unkind, Charley, but what’s a good-lookin’ dude like you wastin’ your time with a bowwow like that?”

“I like Myrtle.”

“Like. Like. Hell, what’s sex got to do with liking? You feel sorry for her, that’s all. You wanna take care of her, that’s one thing. But Christ, that don’t mean you have to go home and hold her hand every night. Even Myrtle don’t expect you to be faithful. She knows she’s plenty lucky. She ain’t gonna deny you a little pleasure on the side. Jeeesus. What the hell’s the matter with you, Watford? All that poontang out there packed up to the bar, them big tits just itchin’ for your palms …”

Watford laughed good-naturedly. “Sorry, T.Y. But I’m going home and have a shower and some supper.”

“… watch
Hollywood Squares,
and then, my God, get into bed with Myrtle. Jeeesus, man, be careful. You may wind up marryin’ her.”

Watford pulled a basque shirt over his head, tucked its elasticized bottom into his trousers and belted up. “I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” he said and winked sagely.

Bidwell’s expression of friendly concern turned slowly to a naughty smirk. “Just so long as it’s understood tween the two of you, Charley. Christ … I’d hate to see you stuck with …”

“Not in the cards, old friend. Trust me.” Watford slapped the big man across the shoulder. “Now don’t go getting yourself a dose of something out there tonight.”

Watford picked up the bag of groceries he’d purchased at lunchtime and started out.

“Hey, Charley,” Bidwell called after him. Watford turned, “You thought any more about what I told you?”

“About what?”

” ‘Bout what we discussed last week.”

Impatience sparked in Watford’s eye. “No, I haven’t thought any more about it.” He stared back at Bidwell.

“Piece of cake, Charley. Candy from a baby. No risk. No involvement. Clean and easy as you please. All we do is collect a nice big fat check at the end.”

“Don’t do it, T.Y. Don’t get yourself messed up. It’s not worth it. You don’t know these people. You don’t know anything about them.”

“I don’t have to.” Bidwell’s voice dropped, and he drew closer. Watford took a warm, sweet blast of bourbon from his breath. “All I got to do is say when certain things round here on the premises are gonna be moved off the premises. You get me? Then, just make sure I’m out on my coffee break when and if something happens.” He winked at Watford. “That don’t strike me as nothin’ illegal.”

“Nothin’ illegal, T.Y. Just an accomplice to the crime. That’s all. Just a matter of ten to fifteen years in the pen.”

“Who’s to say?”

“Not me. But that crowd you’ve been talkin’ to. The first sign of trouble—push comes to shove, you won’t see their heels for the dust.”

“Oh, Christ, Charley. That ain’t gonna happen. All we gotta do is …”

“I don’t want to hear no more about it, T.Y.” Watford waved it off like a puff of bad air. Hoisting his grocery bag in his arms, he started out. “I don’t want to know a thing. I’ve forgotten you ever spoke to me about it.”