Slow Heat in Heaven (39 page)

Lying face-to-face, Schyler lovingly examined him.

"What caused this?" She touched a knick of a scar on his chest.

"Knife fight in Vietnam."

"You got that close to the enemy?"

"Not the enemy. Another GI."

"What were you fighting over?"

"Hell if I know. It didn't matter. We invented reasons for fighting."

"Why?"

"To let off steam."

"Wasn't there enough of a fight going on in the battie zones?"

"Oui.
But that wasn't a fair fight. Most of the skirmishes in the barracks were."

"Were you a regular soldier?"

"I was irregular. All of us had to be to survive."

"I meant did you specialize in something."

"Munitions and explosives." His jaw tensed. "I guess I did my share to get the body count up."

She tried to smooth the hair on his eyebrow, but it was too unruly. "If you felt that way about the war, why did you volunteer to go? I was told you kept reenlisting."

He shrugged. "It seemed like the thing to do at the time. I wasn't doing anything else."

"What about college?"

"I was enrolled, but I knew more about my major than the professors."

"What was your major?"

"Forestry."

"You didn't have to go to Vietnam to get out of college, Cash. You could have stayed here and worked."

He was shaking his head before she finished. "Cotton and I had had a falling out."

"Cotton was partly responsible for you going to war? How? What did you argue over?"

He gazed at her for a long time, then said, "Over your mother's death."

"My
mother's death? What did that have to do with you?"

He rolled to his back and stared at the ceiling. Propping herself on one elbow, Schyler looked down at him inquisitively. He avoided looking at her. "After Macy died, I expected Cotton to marry my mother. He didn't. Wouldn't."

She rested her hand on Cash's breastbone, opening and closing her fingers like the pleats of a fan, snaring curly strands of chest hair between them. "I don't know what to say about that, Cash. I don't know much about it."

"Well I sure as hell knew what to say. I said it all to Cotton's face. We had a helluva fight. We would have come to blows if my mother hadn't intervened."

From what she knew of Monique, Schyler imagined how she must have felt when the two men she loved were at each other's throats. "What did she do?"

"Do? She defended Cotton, of course. She always defended him. She had justifications for everything he ever did. She never saw what a son of a bitch he is."

Her lover was calling her father a son of a bitch, but Schyler didn't jump to Cotton's defense. It was little wonder that Cash resented Cotton for not marrying his mother. Under similar circumstances, she would have felt the same way.

Cotton had been a good father to her and Tricia. She adored him in spite of his shortcomings. But she was no judge on how he conducted his personal life outside of Belle Terre. Until a few weeks ago, she didn't even know about his relationship with Monique Boudreaux and her volatile son. Each man was strong-willed and Schyler clearly imagined how vehemently they could disagree.

"The night we brought Gayla to Belle Terre, you mentioned that your mother had miscarried a baby."

"
Oui
."

"My father's baby?"

His eyes flashed defensively.
"Oui.
My mother might have been unmarried, but she wasn't a whore. She didn't sleep with anybody but him."

"I didn't mean to imply—"

"I'm hungry. Are you?" He rolled off the bed and snatched up his jeans.

Troubled, Schyler took the shirt he tossed her and pushed her arms through the sleeves. "Yes, I'm hungry. What have you got?"

"Red beans and rice."

"Sounds delicious."

"Leftovers, but I'll heat it up."

Together they padded through the house, switching on lights as they went. Schyler sat in a chair at the table and watched while Cash moved about the small kitchen heating up a pan of the fragrant, hearty ethnic dish. When he passed her a plateful she saw that the beans and rice were complemented by large disks of spicy sausage.

"Just the way I like it," she said, digging in. "Hmm, wonderful. Who made it?"

"I did." She stopped chewing. He laughed at her incred
ulous expression. "Did you think the only recipes my mother left me were cures for warts and dyspepsia?"

Schyler ate with an unladylike appetite and finished everything on her plate. As Cash was carrying it to the sink, she studied the graceful lines of his back, the natural swagger of his narrow hips, and his long, lean legs.

He turned around and caught her looking at him with dreamy, misty eyes. "See anything you like?" he asked cockily,

"You're conceited, but, yes, I like everything I see."

"You don't sound too happy about it. What's the matter?"

"What's going to happen tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow?"

Suddenly embarrassed, Schyler glanced down at her hands, which were nervously clasping and unclasping in her lap. The hem of his shirt barely skimmed her thighs. She resisted the urge to modestly tug it down.

"I mean, what's going to happen between us? Daddy's coming home."

"I know." She looked up hastily. "I called the hospital," Cash said by way of explanation. "When you left the landing in such a hurry, I thought something might be wrong."

"On the contrary, he's doing much better. But he's still a heart patient. He can't get upset." She ran her tongue over her lips. "I don't know how he would take to something, you know, an affair, between you and me."

"He'll go ape-shit."

Cash's response was not very encouraging. She continued anyway. "You know how busy we're going to be for the next few weeks. We've got to get that Endicott order filled in time. I can't let anything, particularly my personal life, stand in the way of that. There won't be much time
for. . . for. . ."

Cash, leaning against the old-fashioned, corrugated cast- iron drain board, crossed his bare ankles and folded his arms over his hairy chest. His silence urged her to continue. "I'm not sure I'm ready for any kind of emotional entanglement. The relationship I had with Mark was spe
cial, even though it wasn't sexual. I'll miss him. I know you see other women."

She hoped he would enlighten her as to who and how many. Better yet, she wished he would tell her that he was through with other women now that he'd slept with her. But he remained as silent and still as a wooden Indian. It piqued her that he revealed nothing while she held nothing back.

"Dammit, say something."

"All right." He pushed himself away from the drain board. When his bare toes were only inches from hers, he reached down and grabbed a fistful of his shirt, hauling her up by it. "Get back to bed."

Minutes later, they were lying amid the sheets that smelled muskily of him, of her, of sex. She was lying on her side, facing him. His face was nestled between her breasts. He was softly caressing her nipple with his tongue.

"I've wanted to do this for a long time," he mumbled.

Schyler had conveniently dismissed her concerns for the time being. Cash had the right idea. Ignore tomorrow. Let the devil take it. Live for the moment. She might have to pay the piper a king's ransom later, but right now, with his mouth warm and urgent against her breasts, she didn't care.

"You're not going to say something corny like, 'Since the moment we met,' are you?"

"No. I wanted to do it even before we met."

"Before we met?" She looked at him with a puzzled expression. He eased her to her back and propped himself up on one elbow, leaving his other hand free to fondle.

"The first time I remember noticing that you weren't a little girl anymore, we were in the Magnolia Drag. I must have been eighteen, nineteen. You came in with a group of your friends. You were all acting silly, giggling. I guess you were still in junior high. You ordered a chocolate soda."

"I don't remember."

"No reason you should. It was just an ordinary day to you."

"Did you speak to me?"

He laughed bitterly. "Hell no. You would have run in terror if the scourge of Heaven had spoken to you."

"Is that when you rode the motorcycle?" He nodded and she laughed. "You're right. It would have been compromising to my good reputation to even say hello."

"If Cotton had gotten wind of it, he'd've had me castrated. I was banging everything in skirts that said yes. In fact, I was in the drugstore buying rubbers. I'd just paid for them when you came in. I decided to stick around. I ordered a drink at the fountain."

"Just so you could watch me?"

He nodded. "You had on a pink sweater. Fuzzy. A fuzzy pink sweater. And your breasts, or tits as I thought of them then, were making me crazy. They were small. Pointed. But they made two distinct impressions on the front of your sweater." He played with her, his motions as idle as his speech. "I made that vanilla Dr. Pepper last for more than an hour, watching you while you fed quarters into the jukebox and gossiped with your girlfriends. And the whole time, I was wishing I could reach up under your sweater, where your skin would be warm and smooth, and touch your pretty little breasts."

Schyler was mesmerized by the story. Cash stared into her wide, glassy gaze for a long time before leaning down and moistening her tight nipple with his tongue. Years of wanting went into each damp stroke.

"I knew better than to fantasize about you," he murmured. "I'd already been with more than my share of girls, but they'd all been willing partners. I never took unfair advantage of any of them. You were way too young for a man with my vast experience." He moved his face back and forth in the valley of her breasts. "Do you think I was perverted?"

"Very."

He raised his head and grinned. "But you like it?"

"Yes," she admitted with a self-conscious laugh. "I guess every woman likes to think she's been the object of a fantasy at least once."

"You were that, Miss Schyler. You were that. I was a white trash, bastard scum. You were the reigning princess of Belle Terre. I was grown. You were just a kid. You were so far out of my league, it wasn't even funny. But I had no control over myself. I wanted to touch you."

"Because you couldn't."

"Probably."

"We always want what we can't have."

"All I know is, I got so hard I hurt," he rasped, brushing a rough kiss across her lips. "After you and your friends left the drugstore, I got on my bike and drove to the edge of town. I parked and masturbated." He kissed her hard. "One phone call and I could have had a girl under me in five minutes. But I didn't want one. I wanted to get off, thinking about Schyler Crandall." Again, he kissed her. Harder.

"I've never seen Belle Terre at dawn from this side of the yard," Schyler remarked from the cab of Cash's pickup. "I've viewed sunrises from my upstairs window, but never from the outside looking in."

"I've never seen it any other way."

Her head came around quickly, but his expression didn't suggest hostility. It didn't suggest anything. She tried to lighten the mood. "I feel foolish, sneaking in at dawn."

"I wonder what your company thinks about you being out all night."

"Mark! I forgot about him. I really should be there when he wakes up." She placed her hand on the door handle, but was reluctant to officially end the night. "What are you going to do? Go back to bed?"

"No."

"Surely you're not going to work this early." The sky was still gray at the horizon.

"I've got other things to do."

"At this hour?" His eyes became even more remote. It was a visible transformation. "Excuse me," Schyler said testily, "I didn't mean to pry." She shoved open the door, which still bore Jigger Flynn's bullet hole, and got out.

"Schyler?"

"What?" She spun around, angry with Cash for not being more affectionate and angry with herself for wanting him to be.

"I'll see you later."

His steamy look melted her thighs and her resentment. His expression and tone of voice intimated he would be seeing a lot of her later. With a slow, possessive smile, he shoved the pickup into gear and drove off.

Jigger woke up with a painful erection. Before he remembered that she was no longer there, he rolled over and reached for Gayla. Instead of warm, wonderful woman, he came up with a handful of grubby sheets.

Cursing her for not being available when he wanted her, he stumbled into the bathroom and relieved himself. Glancing in the mirror over the chipped, stained sink, he hooted in laughter at his reflection. "You'd make a vulture puke." He was uglier than sin. His beard stubble showed up white on his loose, flabby jaw.

Too much whiskey last night, he thought. He released a vile-tasting belch. His eyes were rivered with red streams. There was a large hole in his dingy tank T-shirt. It was a miracle that his voluminous boxer shorts kept their grip on his skinny ass.

He was hobbling back to bed, when he abruptly stopped and stood still. He had just realized what had woken him.

"What the hell?" he mumbled. He had never heard anything like that sound. He shoved aside the tacky curtains and peered through the grimy glass. A ray of sunlight
pierced his red eyes, stinging him as if he had been speared through the back of his skull. He cursed viciously.

Once his eyes adjusted to the light, he blinked the yard into focus. Nothing unusual was going on. The puppies were yapping at their dam, demanding breakfast. Everything was normal.

Everything but that sound.

Jigger's gut knotted with foreboding. He had razor-sharp instincts about these things. He could smell trouble a mile away. That sound meant bad news. Menace. But where the hell was it coming from?

Compelled to find out, he didn't bother with dressing. Knobby knees aiming in opposite directions, he walked through his shabby house. It had really gone to seed since Gayla's defection. Mice scattered like a sack of spilled marbles across the linoleum floor when he entered the kitchen. Jigger cursed them, but otherwise ignored them. He pulled open the back door and pushed through the screen. The dogs in the backyard pens began barking.

"Shut up, you sons of bitches." Couldn't they tell his head was splitting? He raised a hand to his thudding temple. "Jesus." The blasphemy was still fresh on his lips when he spotted the oil drum.

It was a fifty-five gallon drum, silver and rusty in a few spots, but otherwise in good condition. It was ordinary.

Except for the sound it emitted.

Jigger recognized it now. It was a rattler. A hell of a one if the racket it was making was any indication of its size.

The drum had been left square in the middle of his yard between the back door and the toolshed. But by whom, Jigger wondered as he stood there with his hands propped on his nonexistent hips, staring at the dram in perplexity. Whoever it was had been a cagey bastard because his dogs hadn't made a racket. Either it was somebody who was used to handling dogs or it was somebody, or
something
spooky. Whatever it was, it was fackin' weird. Goose bumps rose on his arms.

"Shit!"

It was just a snake. He wasn't afraid of snakes. When he was younger he'd traveled all the way to West Texas several times to go on rattlesnake roundups. That had been a helluva good time. There had been lots of smooth booze and coarse broads, lots of snake handling and one-upman- ship. He'd lost count of the rattlers he'd milked of their venom.

No, it wasn't the snake that bothered him. What was giving Jigger the shivers was the manner in which the snake had been delivered. If somebody wanted to give him a present, why didn't he just come up and hand it to him outright? Why leave it as a surprise for him to discover while he still had a bitchin' hangover and before his morning coffee?

Coffee. That's what he needed, coffee dark as Egypt and strong as hell. He needed a woman here every morning to
j
get his coffee. Yes, sir. He'd look into that today. He'd find a new woman. He had put up with that black bitch far too long. He needed one who didn't sass, one who kept her mouth shut and her thighs open. He was coming into some money soon, a goddamn fair amount, too. Nothing to sneeze at. With that, he could buy the best pussy in the paiish.

This mental monologue had given Jigger time to walk all the way around the drum, inspecting it from all angles. Thoughtfully, he scratched his nose. He scratched his crotch. The lid of the drum was anchored down with a large rock. He reckoned he ought to open it and look inside to see just how monstrous this rattler was.

But damned if that sound wasn't getting to him. It was playing with his nerves something fierce. That snake was good and pissed off for being confined to that drum. He tried to remember just how far raiders could strike.

He recalled one guy who was a fanatic about rattlers. He'd told Jigger that one could strike as far as he was long. Jigger hadn't believed him at the time. He was a bom liar, and a Texan to boot. Besides, he'd been drunk as a fiddler's bitch and his tales had been nearly as tall as the blond broad who'd been straddling Ms lap and licking his ear.

But now, when such information was critical, Jigger wondered if the fellow knew what he was talking about. Yet it could be that it only sounded noisy because it was in the bottom of that hollow dram.

"Hell yeah, that's it, don'tcha know. It just sounds big."

He approached the drum with garnered bravery, but as a precaution, he carried a long stick of firewood with him. His nerves were jangling as energetically as the rattler's tail when he knocked the rock to the ground, using the piece of firewood.

He moved the stick from one hand to the other, while alternately wiping his palms on the saggy seat of his boxers. Then, reaching far out in front of him, he eased the end of the stick under the rim of the drum's lid and carefully levered it up.

A bluejay squawked raucously from the tree directly overhead. Jigger nearly jumped out of his boxer shorts. He dropped the stick of firewood on his bare big toe.

"Goddammit to hell!" he bellowed. His cursing sent the pit bull bitch into a frenzy. Snarling and slavering, she repeatedly threw herself against the kennel's fence. It took several minutes for Jigger to quiet her and the litter and to scare off the territorially possessive bluejay.

Scraping together his courage again, Jigger picked up the stick and wedged it under the rim of the lid. He prized it up no more than an inch, but the volume of the sinister sound increased ten times. Jigger approached the drum on tiptoes, trying to see into it, but he could see only the opposite inside wall.

Taking a deep breath and checking to see that nothing was behind him, he flipped the lid to the ground. At the same time, he leaped backward like an uncoordinated acrobat. His heart was beating so quickly it reverberated in his eardrums, but nothing drowned out that deafening, nerve- racking, bloodcurdling sound.

No snake came striking out. He crept closer to the dram and peered over the edge, leaning forward as far as he dared.

"Jesus H. Christ."

He couldn't see all of it. He could see only a portion of a body that was as thick as a muscle builder's bicep. Quickly he scouted the yard for something to stand on. Spotting a bucket in a pile of junk, he brought it back to the drum at a run and uprighted it. Then he stood on it, still a safe distance away, and got his first full look at his snake.

It was a monster, all right. Coiled several times around the bottom of the drum, he estimated it to be eight feet long. Six minimum. It filled up a good third of the drum. Sticking up out of the center of that deadly concentric coil was a rattling tail that looked like it would never stop. It shook so rapidly, it was impossible to count the individual rattles. But it was a great-granddaddy of a rattlesnake; it was mad as hell, and it was
his.

Jigger clapped his hands in glee. With childlike delight, he clasped them together beneath his chin. He stared in wonder and awe at his marvelous gift. Eve's serpent couldn't have had any more sinister allure. It was entrancing to watch something so consummately evil, so gloriously wicked.

Everything about it was corruptly beautiful—the geometric pattern of its skin, the obsidian eyes, the forked tongue that flicked in and out of the flat lips, and that incessant rattle that was ominous and deadly.

Quickly, but cautiously, Jigger replaced the lid of the drum and weighted it down with the rock. He wasn't really worried that the snake could get out. If it was capable of striking over the rim of the drum, it would have by now. That snake was mean, diabolically so. Jigger instantly developed an attachment to it.

He loved his snake.

He ran for the house, full of plans on how to capitalize on the gift. It was a gift. He was sure of that now. Whoever had left it meant him no harm. He reasoned that it had been left by somebody who owed him money. That could be just about anybody in southwestern Louisiana. He wasn't going to worry about that now. His head was too full of commercial plans.

First, he'd have a flyer printed up advertising it. By nightfall his yard would be crawling with customers who wanted to see his rattler. What should he charge? A buck a peek. That was a neat, round figure he figured.

He entered his house through the back. The squeaky screen door slammed shut behind him, but he didn't hear anything over the clacking noise that his fabulous rattler made. In Jigger's opinion, it was music.