Phantom Nights (13 page)

He moved closer to the sofa where she sat trying not to cower and leaned down with a smile.

"But you didn't send it yet, did you? Because you're too bright, and natural curiosity prompted you to open the package. Oh, yeah. I felt this afternoon like you were sending me a message, out at the cemetery."

The tricky light, a flurry of her eyelashes, he interpreted as conspiratorial agreement.

"As the Lord is my witness—" Mally began.

"Now, Mally." He would not be put off.

"I don't." A lick of her lips. "Know anything. Or want a thing from you. I'm not plotting against you, Mr. Leland. Don't want your money. There is—" She had to massage her throat to force more words out. "No way. I could hurt you. Please believe."

"Mal-ly." His face close to hers, reddened, glistening. She could smell him. Talcum, Vitalis hair dressing, sharp perspiration. And something stronger, vile, a disease she couldn't name. Disease of the soul. Strongest of all, the male musk that his blood was heating up. Mally herself drenched in fear. The tension between them had acquired a new tone. Both of them recognizing this at the same time.

"You just tell me what it is you're looking for, Mally." His confident, persuasive, politician's voice. "Anything. I'm an agreeable and willing man. And I can do plenty for a bright, pretty woman."

He raised his eyes, looking over her head at his own face in misty reflection on the glass of the framed military portrait of William Ulysses "Highpockets" Shaw. Taken before some horrid, forever inescapable moment of the war had stopped his emotional machinery like a rifle bullet can stop a pocket watch. The confidence in the man's face inspired Leland's lust to take a turn into deviltry, a raw desire to deface something William had held sacred, although he was long past knowing.

Leland looked back at Mally with a little nod and a wise smile. His face inches from hers.

"Sure. You want us to get better acquainted before we come to terms. That's all right. Been my thinking too, Mally. You haven't had a man to take care of you in a while. How long? Since William shot his head half off?" He put a hand on Mally's thigh. Words whispery now. "Good news is, Mally, my white snake, you could ask around, is the equal of any colored boy's black snake you ever went straddle on."

She dropped a hand to his wrist and tugged. In his obscene excitement he was bull-strong. Fingers clutched higher inside her tender thigh.

"I swear on my Bible—Mr. Leland. I'll leave tonight. Won't ever come back to Evening Shade."

"No, Mally. That won't do. I'm needing you too much now that you've got me in a lusty way. Have a look—no, down here you honey." Caught her by the wrist and moved her hand toward him as he leaned, bulked up in his trousers. His mouth slackening as he made Mally feel him. She saw the tip of his tongue, bright orange from the candy he'd eaten. "Gal, we are going to be so fine together.
Couch isn't big enough for both of us; got yourself a bedroom back there? Are the sheets clean, Mally? I like to have clean sheets. Get yourself naked right now, or I will by God—" backhanding his mouth again, that unpleasant excess of saliva—"tear those nightclothes off myself. You honey. You sweet brown bitch."

L
ong after the rain had ended—Alex didn't know how much time had passed—he saw Leland Howard and Mally Shaw leave her house by the front porch. Close together, arm-in-arm it looked like, Mally wearing a dress now, and sandals, but she was a little awkward going down the steps, as if she were half-asleep.

He'd last seen both of them as he surreptitiously left the house by the back door. Mally's humiliated body on her bed with cute pillows she'd made, her arms flopping as if useless while he thrust away, Mally just taking it, her eyes closed, both bodies streaming sweat. Alex had been numb from the shock of what he'd witnessed before he fled to the privy twenty yards from the house and sat hunched inside breathing fetid air, rain blowing in through the many chinks between the boards.

He had lingered outside the bedroom door long enough to see that it was ugly, and knew without a doubt she was being raped. He'd heard Mally earlier between thunderclaps, pleading. Mally had called him "Mr. Leland." Alex knew who that was, his face on at least two billboards outside of town. What made it all so bad in his mind as he trembled and chewed a thumbnail to the bloody quick, there wasn't a thing he could do to help her.

When the rain slacked off he moved cautiously out of the privy and made his way down to the boarded-up rib shack and hid again, behind the concrete-block garbage pit that smelled faintly of old burned meat deep down in the ashes. The man who accompanied Leland Howard to Mally's house was smoking inside the Pontiac, the driver's door open and his feet on the running board. Alex could see his face in profile when he drew on his cigarette. He looked country, and rough.

The man got out of the Pontiac and flicked his cigarette away when the screen door squeaked open on the porch. He met Leland Howard and Mally halfway under the spread of still-dripping oak boughs. Leland took something out of his coat pocket, put it in his mouth, and made a sucking sound.

"Mally's going with me up to the farm," Leland said. "We'll take her car. Mally's in a state right now. Can't remember what we need to know or doesn't want to talk. She'll get over it. Meanwhile go inside there, see what you can find. But don't tear the place up."

Leland turned Mally in the direction of her old Dodge. He was half-carrying her, as if Mally were drunk or wounded, or scared half to death. She didn't make a sound. The other man went back to the Pontiac and took a big chromed flashlight from the trunk.

Alex got down lower where he was while Leland coaxed the sluggish Dodge past the rib shack to the highway. He had wanted to see Mally's face but didn't dare to look. He had gooseflesh on his forearms. He felt sick to his stomach.

The man with the flashlight was in Mally's house for a long time. Alex stayed where he was because the only other possibility was to walk away from there, and he wasn't going to leave his bicycle. His lower lip was swollen and sore. He kept thinking about it, that scene in the kitchen when he was trying to get himself a glass of milk and all hell, in the person of Cecily Gambier, broke loose. No idea what she was carrying on about. He hadn't gone near Brendan's nursery, was just home from the show and had been down in the basement looking through his tackle box because he and Bobby—

Then his thoughts jumped to the other scene he wasn't going to forget no matter how long he lived, Mally being raped and the sheer size of Leland Howard, his penis like Popeye's or Dagwood's or Mandrake the Magician's in one of those "Eight-page Bibles" a few boys at school circulated and let certain girls have peeks at, as if their reactions would provide an accurate assessment of their willingness to experiment. He wondered how Francie Swift looked bare-naked and what it would be like to feel her up. Tumult in his groin. Thinking about sex behind a garbage pit while he watched the stealthy beam of the flashlight in Mally's house, another violation of her that he was powerless to do anything about. He had to let Bobby know what had gone on, but would his brother even listen after Cecily gave him an earful about Alex's supposed transgression? He was desperate to be home and in his bed, but what if Cecily had gotten her way finally, told Bobby a big-enough lie so Alex wouldn't be let back in the house? Trouble with that was, he had liked Cecily in the beginning, before the birth of Brendan changed things, his own status. And he didn't believe she was a liar.

Alex dozed off with his back against the fake-brick siding of the rib shack and presently dreamed of his sunny afternoon in the Swifts' pool. Francie was there too, blonde hair slicked back, bewitching in her soft-spoken way. They were just lazily cutting up, but Alex was embarrassed; he'd lost his suit somehow, and his own incredibly sized hard-on kept popping up out of the water. Francie was merry about it though; she thought it was the
cutest
thing and wanted to . . .

"W
here are we going?" Mally asked, breaking her silence after fifteen miles of driving. Leland Howard had done the talking, being genial, liking the sound of his own voice probably. Or he was one of those men who just couldn't keep shut for longer than ten seconds. Full of observations and opinions and of course a favorable, boastful slant on his own unique self. ("I've got my little flaws, Mally, Lord knows; but who among us is without human failing? When you get to know me better, you'll learn that I'm a caring man.") Before turning off the hard road onto a rutted and twisty wagon track, barbed wire rusted and sagging on one side, a greenskin slough on the other, Leland had spent a few minutes trying to get across to Mally that there were no hard feelings on his part that she had aroused him to such a randy pitch he just couldn't control himself. Like a little kid with a bedwetting problem. Mally knowing he was going to rape her again, only a question of when and where. No difference to him that she was leaking a little blood, her period coming on days early after his assault. Some men liked that.

The bad road was murder on her old Dodge. She thought the radiator might be leaking again; there was steam from under the hood. She could jump out now and probably not be hurt. But Leland had made her take off her sandals once she was in the car. If it came to a foot race, he had the advantage.

"The farm here," he said, answering her, "was my mother's legacy to me, which I took over when I reached my majority. I was only sixteen months old when she was swept away by the influenza epidemic during the Great War. I blame my old man for that; the bad climate in Washington, D.C., where he did his wartime service, was not agreeable to her."

Mally had no sympathy. Her own faithless mother had run off to Atlanta on the brink of the Depression with a tenor-sax man, never to be heard from again. Severely annoying Mally's father; he had been sour on women and romance from that day on. Sometimes Mally wasn't sure he loved her. Ramses had always been dutiful toward her, kind in his fashion, but she had never heard him say a loving word. In spite of that, at the moment she missed him fiercely.

"I lease out most of my acres," Leland went on. "It's just a place I get up to now and again, use it mostly during quail season. Keep my dogs here. You a dog fancier, Mally?"

She glanced at him; he didn't look as if his mind was on dogs, but on what was still unfinished between them. A farmhouse had come into view, a high barn with a peaked roof over the loft doors, a pond in a meadow. There were poplar trees around the house with their leaves still turned silver-side to the cooled night air. The hard rain passing through had left puddles and a false sheen of health on acres of stunted corn.

Leland parked the Dodge near the front stoop of the house and left the engine running. In the headlights' throw, Mally saw his rangy dogs kenneled beside the large barn. They were running and leaping, rattling the chain-link fencing that enclosed them. But for the most part they were silent, which made them all the more formidable. They were shades of black and gray with plentiful white markings. Because of flop ears and bobbed tails, they resembled some pointers Mally had seen, but their eyes were like blue frost. Those pale whetted eyes, the power in their long legs and deep chests, and most of all the habit of silence gave her a strong chill.

"They are Catahoula Leopard Dogs," Leland said pridefully. "Spanish war dogs that found their way to the Gulf Coast on some of the early expeditions three centuries ago. Catahoula Indians in the Louisiana Territory got hold of a couple and crossed them with wolves. Nowadays they're bred to track wild boar through the swampland. But they will track anything that moves, Mally, and not make a sound. Like bloodhounds on the scent."

He took out another piece of hard candy. He'd been snacking on the candy since he'd sat up naked and all wrung out on the side of her narrow bed and, no longer tantalized by her liquorish darkness nor moved by tearshine, the low, sick sway of her head as she clung to the edge of the bed beside Wm, told her brusquely to put clothes on. This time he offered candy to Mally, but she looked away. He unwrapped the piece, which turned out to be lime, not his favorite. Popped it into his mouth anyway, beside his rainbow tongue.

"Needing to go round back now, kick on the generator. Turn the house lights on. You can get out of the car if you want. Have a closer look at my dogs." He paused to emphasize what came next. "Let them have a closer look at you." He made the sucking sound she'd learned to despise, savoring his candy. Watching her. She gave him enough of a look to let him know she understood what he meant. Leland nodded. "I thank you for being sensible, not wanting to cause me any trouble."

"No. I wouldn't want to cause you trouble."

"Well, I like the sound of that. We have a ways to go in our relationship, but I do believe it's going to work out fine for both of us. That's so, Mally?"

After a few seconds Mally nodded. "Yes, sir."

A politician's cocksure smile, all the necessary votes in his pocket. "Why don't you just call me Leland from here on?"