Authors: Vin Packer
3 Day Terror
THE TERROR BEGINS
She was hurrying past the field on her way home when the man stepped out from behind a tree and stood spraddle-legged in her path.
Ginny Lee was uncommonly pretty, a small girl with unusually long legs for someone her size, good legs with finely molded ankles; and her breasts above the rounded hips and very thin waist were large and full, not in a way that gave her a top-heavy look, but a proud, feminine look. Ginny Lee was happy about her looks except for one thing. She needed glasses.
She stood there blinking and squinting, trying to recognize the man who stood there so menacingly.
“Who are you?” she asked, suddenly frightened.
He laughed, took her roughly and threw her down.
Vin Packer
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
He parked his car in a spoke of the circle surrounding the grassy spot opposite the courthouse. Folks in Bastrop would say that the tall young man with the citified suit and the New York license plates pulled his old Chevy into the Wheel, because even though Bastrop wasn’t really a very small Southern town, 1,468 in the last census, with a “city” listing, it was as curious about, and as aware of a stranger in its midst, as any half its size; so it would particularize more in describing him; guess — because of his plates — that he would be one of these Yankees who said his final g’s and all his r’s; and speculate some as to his business.
But because he arrived at
10:45
on that rainy Friday evening at the beginning of September, when most in Bastrop were at home, still watching the late show down the street at The Alabama, or attending the Eyeball out at the Yellowhammer Country Club, he went unobserved, except for Turner Towers and his wife, who were just pulling out of the Wheel when he yelled at Turner.
“Hey, nigger! Where can I get something to eat?”
Turner told him Porter Drugs over yonder; after, he said to his wife, “Nice mouth he’s got — nigger!” then he forgot the stranger; never dreaming there’d be cause to remember him.
But the stranger some weeks back had circled in red on a map, Bastrop, Alabama; had come for a reason; and it wasn’t likely that Turner Towers, or anyone else in town, would soon forget him.
“That’s just the way I am — even in
Paradise I’d know all the wrong people.”
T
HAT NIGHT
Delia Benjamin got back to town; the first face she saw was his face — the stranger’s. He held open the door of Porter Drugs for her.
A moment before, driving through the familiar streets of Bastrop with her mother, she had wondered why she had come home. She had wondered that just after she had asked her mother to pull in at Porter Drugs so she could buy cigarettes, and her mother had answered:
“Right off the bat — in buying your’ cigarettes! Delia, now,
that
won’t make a good impression.”
Delia knew it was futile to say the hackneyed, that women smoked quite unashamedly nowadays — even those who
weren’t
divorced; knew too that her mother realized that much, but clung more comfortably to the archaic, and believed that Delia should adopt those standards, “under the circumstances;” because people were going to judge her all the harder now. Mrs. Benjamin’s people were the “girls” of the Birthday Club, the “girls” of the Methodist Muses, and the entire congregation of Second Methodist Church.
Delia had said, “I didn’t come back to make a good impression,” and it was just at that point that she had wondered why she
had
come back; then vaguely recalled lines of a poem in some long-lost textbook that seemed to answer the question:
Home is where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
Mrs. Benjamin, voluminous in magnolia-splotched print silk; voluble — some in Bastrop say old Judge Benjamin was talked dead — had removed one white-gloved hand from the steering wheel momentarily, gathered her black nylon raincoat more securely to her shoulders, patted the wiry new “perm,” and continued, “I hope you didn’t come home to make a tawdry impression either!” Mrs. Benjamin pronounced it toe-dree, and thought of it always as the only antonym “good” had. “Not just when everything is nice and it’s Music Emphasis Month. Delia, I wrote you that I’ve been elected a muse, didn’t I? I’m Terpsichore until October fifteenth.”
Delia’s eyes had scanned Court Street as the car turned off West Tennessee and onto it; saw the same low-lying stores and buildings leading down to Courthouse. Square, and the Wheel; and there in the shadows by the Wheel, the gray stone figure of the Confederate infantryman, with Porter Drugs across the way.
She had said, “God, it all looks the same. Now, Mama,
do
pull in so I can get cigarettes.”
She had thought, it
is
the same too, and I’m not much different.
Mrs. Benjamin had slowed up, saying, “I’m the muse of choral singing and dancing. Gay Porter is Clio, and she’s not very pleased about
that,
because you can imagine how little there is for the history muse to do during Music Emphasis Month … I wish you wouldn’t say God that way, Delia.”
“I’ll be right back,” Dee had said, getting out of the car.
Mrs. Benjamin had shouted after her, “Don’t buy two at once, Delia. I think it looks tawdry to buy two packages of cigarettes at once like some chained-smoker.”
“Chain-smoker!” Dee had laughed over her shoulder, “and I am!”
Then she was facing him suddenly — this stranger who was holding open the door of Porter Drugs, and “he was speaking to her.
He said, “That’s a sick habit, chain-smoking.”
He smiled, or at any rate his lips tipped in what must have been a smile, and his dark eyes shined unusually bright. He was tall and lean, with a stiff stance to his figure, in the gray flannel suit, ivy-league cut. He seemed to wait for her response. Dee noticed all this, thinking that he sounded like a Northerner, and she was about to answer him in some casual way, when she saw a second face, the face of someone she did know — Jack Chadwick’s, a face she had not seen in six years. He was sitting in a booth in the rear of the drugstore. Cass, his wife, was with him, and her back was to Delia.
If Dee had known that they would be in there, she would never have insisted that her mother stop.
Now it was too late to turn back. She drew a deep breath, and her heart, which had paused, rushed to beat again. It was bound to happen eventually, she thought. She clutched the expensive alligator bag to her side, worried that her short, loosely waved black hair had come down in the rain, making a mockery of the monk’s-cap cut which Kenneth had labored over at Lilly Dache; then compensated for that anxiety by remembering that she had automatically done a careful makeup at the airport over in Baldwin; retouched it en route to Bastrop in the car; and that the white linen collar which she had attached a moment before she stepped off the plane was crisp and clean above the tightly fitted jacket of the beige summer suit.
The stranger said something else, but Dee didn’t hear it. Then he walked on to the fountain, and she remained at the cigarette counter. In a moment Jack Chadwick would look up and see her standing there. It was not too unlike, she recalled absurdly, the first time
she
had ever seen
him,
when she had been sitting in the back booth, and Chad had been standing in the exact spot she was, back in 1943.
• • •
That was the day in June when the temperature was well up into the nineties, and the humidity was killing, the year Judson Forsythe was in love with her, the beginning of that summer when everyone was singing “As Time Goes By.” All the girls were speaking in husky voices like the new movie actress, Lauren Bacall, and all the boys were destined to copy what Judson Forsythe was about to do that afternoon in Porter Drugs, if he could ever get Delia Benjamin to stop talking.
Her hair was long then, down to her shoulders, and she had that habit of winding it around her fingers when she was impatient, which she was; but undaunted, Jud kept insisting she be still long enough to look at what he had to show her, kept tapping his finger on a box wrapped in red tissue, tied with white ribbon, set between them on the table. She was easily the best-looking girl in Tate County, and, her dates agreed, the most talkative, taking after both her parents in that fact, but favoring the judge, in spirit, because Delia Benjamin liked to “talk serious.”
“Not now,” Jud was imploring her, “not when I got something to give you, Dee.”
“But I was smack dab in the middle of asking you to explain something to me,” she said, “and you won’t.”
“Well. why don’t you ask your daddy, Dee? I don’t know what all this withholding tax stuff is … Look, ‘member
Casablanca
we saw at the Alabama last week?”
“You don’t know what the bill is President Roosevelt signed this very day, Jud Forsythe?”
“Oh, I know, but ye gods and little fishes I bought you a dog-damn
whistle,
Delia Benjamin, just like the one Humphrey Bogart gave to Lauren Bacall! ‘Member, in the movie?” He shoved the box across to her. “I had it inscribed, too,” he said.
Still frowning, Delia took the whistle out of the box and read: “If you want anything, just whistle. J.” She said “It’s very nice, Jud. Thank you. But it does seem it’s a funny place to present it. Right out in the open in the drugstore.”
“I did it because of the air conditioning,” Judson answered. “Knew you wouldn’t want to take a hike out to the Dip in this heat.” He’d been looking at his thumbs; blushing, and when he looked up and said, “Well, do you like it? Do you remember the part in the movie, Dee?” she was looking past him toward the front of Porter’s, looking at someone standing up there by the door. “I’ve never seen
him
before.”
“Him?” Judson had swung around in the booth to see the short, wiry young man with the bright red hair, who was buying a package of cigarettes and clowning with Cassie Beggsom. “He’s the new boy. Family just moved here from the state of Missouri. Name’s Jack Chadwick, only everyone calls him Chad,” Jud said; then added significantly, “He’s older — he’s more Cassie’s age, eighteen or so.”
Chad told Dee later that he had noticed her that same afternoon; that he had seen her sitting back there looking bored and beautiful and that he’d thought, She’s someone I’m going to get to know better, almost simultaneously with her thinking, He’s someone I’m going to fall in love with this very summer. But it took him a long time and plenty of cat-and-mouse before he confided this to her. Dee, of course, thought
she
was the cat, never dreaming he had flung himself headlong and heart-sore across her snares, his soul filled to spilling with her after his encounter with the first snare of the series, before he was sure enough of her to tell her the way he felt.
The first one was set at the Yellowhammer Country Club, three days from that afternoon in Porter’s. She attended the Friday night dance with Judson Forsythe, and even though, like any good daughter of a Southern belle, Delia Benjamin knew even better than most how to “follow,” and Judson Forsythe enjoyed a reputation as an excellent escort on the ballroom, Jack Chadwick and Cassie Beggsom found themselves perpetually pushed, shoved, and jostled by the pair. Chad could hear Jud protesting, “Dee, what
is
the matter with you tonight? You’re not paying attention;” and Cass Beggsom decided, “Dee Benjamin’s been drinking. She always was a little too precocious for her own good,” smiling up at Chadwick with an air of amused tolerance at Dee’s antics. Cass liked Dee then and called her “cute;” and Cass, precocious in her own right, already attended the University of Alabama at age eighteen, in her sophomore year, added matter-of-factly: “Dee’ll probably be coming to Alabam in a coupla years. I’m going to have to tell the Pi Phi’s to look out for her. She’ll make good sorority material. A little wild, though.”
Cassandra Beggsom was wrong about one thing, right about the other. Jack Chadwick found it out toward the end of that evening, when he went out behind the Yellowhammer to get his car. Sitting in the front seat, playing the radio, Delia Benjamin smiled up at him as he pushed down the convertible’s door handle; said, “It’s crazy the way music makes you feel, you know? Even the tackiest old pops that rhyme moon and June — you hear them often enough, they begin to get you. Like this one:
We strolled the lane together, laughed at the rain together,”
she sang in an off-key soprano. Chadwick winced. “Oh, I know I can’t carry a tune, but lane and rain and all that tacky mush. Still, I don’t mind it.”
Chad said, “There are worse.” He got in beside her, took a package of cigarettes from the pocket of his white linen jacket, lit one, blowing the smoke out in a cloud that she brushed with her hands.
He said, “I’m sorry,” and held his arm over near the window. “Look, Cass is waiting for me on the steps.”
“I expect Judson will be keeping her company.” She smiled at him. “You know my name?”
“Sure,” he said, “Cass mentioned it tonight. Said you’d make good sorority material when you go to Alabam.”
The radio announcer was talking about corn plasters. Dee Benjamin reached over and turned it off. “I wouldn’t go to Alabam for anything,” she said. “I don’t believe in going to college in your own state, do you? I don’t believe in sororities either.” She looked at him frowning. “Do you Chad?”
Chad had told Dee later that it seemed like the craziest thing that had ever happened to him, walking back and finding her in his car, the green net gown she wore spilling over his yellow straw seat covers, showing the bare burnished skin at the dip above the incredibly full bosom, white shoulders and soft-looking long white arms, half covered by the matching net stole, and down at the gown’s other end, the glistening, silver spike-heeled slippers. He told Dee later that he had wanted to reach out then and there and touch the long coal-colored hair, bring his face close to it and smell it, feel it rub against his cheeks. But he let on none of this that night; he stayed stoic, seemed nonchalant, smoking his cigarette and answering her, “I’m going to
my
state university when I get out of service. It’s got the best school of journalism there is, Missouri has.”
“That’s different.” She traced the edge of the net gown with her finger. “You probably know what you want to be, and are going where you can take the right courses.”
“I’m going to be a newspaper man.”
“Do you believe in sororities?” she asked. “You know what I heard? I heard that the Chi Omegas down at Alabam make their pledges get into a coffin during initiation; and then close the lid on them. I mean, I think that’s just awful to imagine. Tempting death like that. Lord knows, I’m afraid enough of dying, are you, Chad?”
He felt the slight pressure of her hand come on his knee, then go. “I don’t much like the idea,” he said.
“The idea of dying, or the idea of sororities and fraternities?”
“Neither one.”
She said, “I don’t either. We’re liberals, I guess.”
“I guess,” he said.
They were quiet for a bit. Behind them at the clubhouse the Alabama Blue Notes were playing a raucous jitterbug tune; there was the noise that crickets make coming from the golf links; and out at the cooks’ quarters the Negroes were giggling and shouting in a game of craps. A breeze was beginning, stirring the long-leafed pines in the distance, and the haw trees close.
• • •
Jack Chadwick finally repeated, “Cass is waiting for me on the steps.”
“Do you feel like kissing me before I get out and go on back?” she asked.
He smiled and turned toward her, but saw she wasn’t smiling. He looked at her for a minute. He told Dee later that was the very minute he fell dizzy in love with her, but when he reached for her he did it in some mild calm trance; he pressed his lips down on hers for only an instant, then placed her back against the seat with his hands on her shoulders. He straightened, and started the motor.
“I better
walk
back,” she said. She got out of the car, and looked back in through the open window, her arms leaning on the edge. “Chad?”
“Hmmm?”
“Take me to see
For Whom The Bell Tolls?
It’s coming to the Alabama Sunday.”
“All right, Dee,” he said.
She paused. He had been looking straight ahead, his profile turned to her. Then he looked at her directly.
