Tears Are for Angels (13 page)

    "They're all alike. That's why I never had one. Won't let a man spit on the walls."

    "Why, you old goat," Jean said. "Somebody ought to housebreak you."

    He cackled again and tears came in his eyes. "She's got a right smart lip, too," he wheezed.

    I laughed and took her arm. We were almost out when he stopped wheezing and cackling and called, "Wait up a minute. You ain't told me nothin' about how-"

    "We told you enough," I called back. "After all, this is our wedding clay."

    I could hear him cackling again as we went on down the street.

    "So this is what girls are supposed to hold their breath for," Jean said, as we climbed into her old car. "This is what a wedding day's like."

    "Not for all girls," I said. "Just the ones that go around planning to kill people."

    

    

    I was sitting out by the spring and she was fixing supper. I thought about the way their faces would look when they heard about it, and I almost laughed out loud.

    I listened to the noises she was making with pots and pans, and I smelled food smells. You forget how things like that can be, I thought, you forget the good things so easily when the bad ones squeeze in on you.

    Imagine me with another wife. After these last years. Imagine me with a woman cooking in the house and the smell of her still in my nostrils and the touch of her on my hand.

    And me without a beard. Clean. Sober. And without the face, too. Yes, by God, I haven't seen the face since I told her about it. Imagine that. I never thought I'd see the day again.

    I closed my eyes. I forgot, for a moment, the bed-rock ugliness on which we had founded this partnership. I forgot, too, the old evil that had foamed in brain and memory these past two years. I forgot all that and maybe somehow I was for that moment the old Harry London again, the one that had lived and loved and laughed so long ago, and I was at peace with myself and her and all the world.

    Even with Stewart.

    My eyes snapped open. For that moment I hadn't hated him.

    It had all been washed away, swept off in peace and the realization, at last, that hate and evil were only a part of the whole, not all of it, that life could go on, that there didn't have to be what had for so long seemed so absolutely, completely, and finally necessary.

    Hut then it was gone, the moment had passed, and with it the old Harry London. You're nuts, I thought. The bastard ought to die. He fouls the very air he breathes.

    She came out of the door of the little shack and stood there a moment, looking at me, and then sat down on the rickety stairs.

    The sun dropped behind the dunes and the cool night was fast coming down. A bull bat made raucous sounds in a tree on the other side of the spring and the shadows were gone now, and the earth settled into mellow brownness, still and quiet and calm.

    I got up and went slowly across the sand toward the shack. There was a smudge of flour on her cheek.

    "You look domestic," I said. "Just like a wife."

    Her eyes flared at me.

    "If that's a funny crack," she said, "you can go to hell."

    "All right, all right. Don't be so touchy. I meant it."

    Her face softened.

    "I'm sorry. It's just that it was all so cold and quick and mechanical." She laughed, a little bitterly. "You know how women are. Maybe I've just heard too much about orange blossoms and organ music."

    "I know," I said. I sat down by her on the step.

    We sat there a while and watched the night creep in, not saying anything. This is going to be a hell of a thing, I thought, until we get it over with. Two complete strangers. And the way she feels about me. Better to get it done quickly.

    "When are you going into your act?" I said.

    She shrugged.

    "Soon. I guess. I might as well get started."

    "The sooner, the better. He'll know something is up, but he won't know what"

    "Maybe I can't get anywhere with him."

    "You can't. Not when he finds out you're my wife. He'll smell a rat. But everybody else will believe it. And that's what counts."

    "Yes. That's what counts."

    When we went inside to eat, I found she had done wonders over the heater, and I told her so. There were hamburgers and boiled potatoes, canned string beans and coffee and a store-bought cake for a dessert. We'd Mopped on the way back from St. John's to pick up supplies.

    Even so. supper was a glum affair. She hardly touched her food, and long before I was through she had moved again to the doorstep and sat there, gazing out at the velvet night, the faint sheen of the stars, and the rolling sand.

    I wheeled around in the chair and looked at her lonely back, the small shoulders hunched slightly, and I wanted to go over and put my arm around her. And then I remembered the pledge I had given her that morning.

    "I'm going to fix this place up, Jean," I said. "It'll be at least two weeks we have to live out here. Maybe longer. We might as well be comfortable, I guess."

    She didn't say anything and I got up and began to do the dishes. I ought to boot her the hell out of here, I thought. I didn't have any business getting into this.

    I ought to have had better sense.

    We went to bed early. I didn't remind her of my promise, but I made up a pallet on the floor with two of the three blankets we had and rolled into it without a word of protest from her.

    I could hear her breathing across the room. The moon would not be up for a while yet, but my eyes were used to darkness and I could turn my head and see the vague shape of her on the bunk. Sleep was going to be a long time coming, I thought.

    "You loved her very much, didn't you, Harry?" Her voice was quiet and even in the vast night.

    "Yes," I said.

    "Do you still love her?"

    "I don't know. I thought I hated her after that night. But now I don't know."

    "Not her. You just hated what she did."

    "Maybe so," I said. "Go to sleep."

    "It was that way because you never really loved her. Just what she was and how she looked and the way she made you feel. If you had really loved her you'd have given her a chance."

    "Stop it," I said. "She's dead now. It's all dead. It doesn't do any good to talk about it."

    "I think I hate you, Harry."

    "Go to sleep," I said.

    She didn't say anything for a long time and I lay there waiting for sleep to come. And then I heard her move on the bunk and bare feet padded on the plank flooring.

    I turned my head and she was coming across the floor. She stood over me then and I watched her take off her pajamas and let them fall to the floor. And then she was on the pallet beside me and her arms were around me and I felt something hot and moist on my neck.

    "Harry!" she whispered.

    "I don't want you," I said. "Get away from me."

    I felt her soft breasts against my ribs.

    "You let me come to you like this. You didn't try to stop me."

    "Yes. I-"

    "There isn't anything else for us, Harry."

    And then all the resistance went out of me and my arm was around her and my lips found her breast and the warm blood in her veins throbbed against me.

    It had never been that way before, not with anybody. Her hot, frantic, tortured body exploded against mine. We clung together, beyond space, beyond time, beyond anything but the things our bodies did to each other, without direction or design, powered only by instinct and urge and desperation.

    Later, the moon spilled across us there on the floor, and I looked down at her as she slept, her face in darkness, stippled shadows falling across the small round breasts.

    This is beyond me, I thought.

    She hates me, she hates all men. But she comes to me in the night, shameless, selfless, in complete and abject surrender, in some nameless despair and agony, she comes to me like that, and then when it's over, no word of love or tenderness or even liking yet passed between us, she whispers once before she sleeps:

    "No. It didn't happen… it didn't happen."

    Something curled in me at one thought that would not down: that she had given herself to me to make sure that I would remain a part of our scheme-that she had deliberately paid what she thought was my price.

    But she had been right about one thing. I knew it then because of what she had given me that night. I had never really loved Lucy. What I had thought was love was only conceit because she had been my property, because I had made her my property.

    Because now I know what love is, I thought. Now I know. It's what I feel for this woman who lies naked and sleeping beside me. It's something I never even knew existed in this world or any other. It's what you feel when you are able to do anything and suffer anything and endure anything and give anything, any time, anywhere, for someone else. Or at least it is for me. That's what love is for me.

    And suddenly, I knew with a sort of geometric clarity that I would never again want to kill Dick Stewart.

    Because for so long that had been all there was to live for: killing him someday, because he had taken something from me for which I had thought only his life could pay.

    But now there was something else. Now there was this woman beside me. Now there was something that could not only pay for what I had lost, but that could wipe that loss from the books of my mind and heart and soul as completely as if there had never been a loss at all.

    I didn't want to kill Dick Stewart any more. But I would do it.

    I would do it because it was what she wanted. Even though she hated me, she had come to me and given all of herself to further and insure and seal forever her determination to scourge him. I would do anything and suffer anything and endure anything and give anything she wanted.

    I would do it because I loved her.

    And she loved only some ideal that had died with Lucy, some dream, far more vast and sweeping and fierce than my own puny feelings for my wife had been, loved only that and hated me, even while binding me to her with a chain stronger than fine steel. Hated me even then.

    Or did she? I didn't know.

    It was beyond me.

    

    

    This is the way she told it to me:

    Three men were seated on the bench under the wooden porch roof in front of the Coshocken General Mercantile Company. Their eyes were quiet and unquestioning and only jaw muscles moved in their faces. They were oddly alike in their worn overalls and sweat-stained hats. One of them spat a stream of tobacco as she approached.

    They watched her pass and enter the store and there was still no curiosity in their eyes. For even then, only two days after it happened, they knew. They knew that Harry London had married another Yankee girl, one who had appeared out of nowhere and gone to live with him on the Caldwell place, and they knew now, eying her calmly and completely, but without insult, who she was.

    She felt them watching her, and she went past them, her heels clicking on the sidewalk, over which the frame porch roof stood.

    She knew, for I had told her, that what they saw would spread until the whole county, without having seen her. would be able to recognize Mrs. Harry London. She moved her hips smoothly, and her heels clicked. Her head was up, her breasts firm and high beneath the neckline of her dress, as she went into the store.

    He was waiting on a child behind the candy counter. He did not look up as she came in. Far down the dim aisles, a man in shirt sleeves worked at a desk. Plows, feed bags, mule harness, wheelbarrows, and other stock littered the unswept floor, and shelves ran up the walls full of tools, hardware, and bewildering boxes and packets. She stood quietly by the grilled mail window. Stewart was also the town postmaster and his store served the community as post office.

    The little boy was examining the candy stock with slow and infinite care. His gaze moved from striped peppermint to brown horehound to soft chocolate and on to colored balls of chewing gum and his lips moved and his eyes were grave in doubt.

    "How much are those?" An incredibly grimy finger pointed to the balls of gum.

    "Two for a penny," Stewart said.

    "I'll take six."

    Stewart counted six of the balls into a small bag. As he raised his head, he met her eyes and she smiled. He stopped in mid-motion and the sack nearly slipped from his grasp. He licked his lips and turned back to the child.

    "And two cents' worth of them." Again the finger poked at the glass counter and Stewart took two peppermint sticks and dropped them in the bag.

    "That be all, Billy?"

    "Guess so," Billy said. "That's all this time."

    Stewart glanced at her again. His face was calm now and there was no shiftiness in the eyes. He took the coins the boy held out and handed him the bag. The boy took it and went out. Stewart leaned on the candy counter and looked at her.

    "What can I do for you, ma'am?"

    "I want to buy a pressure cooker, please."

    She moved closer and smiled at him and his eyes melted a little and they ran over her, pausing here and there, and he did not move.

    "You lie," he said.

    She pouted at him. "That's not very nice."

    He laughed. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the man at the desk in the back of the store swing around.

    "What did he send you for… Mrs. London?"