Color Him Dead (21 page)

He gave a start. “I didn’t think you heard me.”

She laughed. “You couldn’t sneak up on a deaf mute, Seright. I heard you whooshing through that tube, like a jet taking off.”

He rose and got the plastic bag from behind the rock. He sat down beside her and lifted out the rum bottle. “Rum, syrup, nutmeg and lime juice. A rum punch, already fixed. Also a tin of bully beef and some crackers.”

“Great minds. I brought some roast beef and rolls. I told Meline not to expect me back for lunch.”

“And I told Leta I’d be diving until late afternoon.”

“Leta?” She gave him a sidelong look. “That’s the name of your black girl?”

“She isn’t black.”

“Sorry,” she said stiffly. She reached for the bottle and started unscrewing the cap. “I suppose you didn’t bring any cups?”

“We’re roughing it. Take it from the jug.”

She shrugged and tipped the bottle high. He counted the bubbles: One … two … three…. At the count of ten she lowered the bottle and held it out. Her eyes glistened with tears and her voice was hoarse: “Here, my lips are pure.”

With an inner shock he realized that she had used almost the same words the first day they had met. He studied her a moment, wondering if she might be teasing him. But her face showed only the beginning flush of the rum. He tried to remember what else had been said so long ago, but recalled only that a kiss had followed. He set the bottle aside and pulled gently on her hand. She came into his arms with a boneless resilience, her eyes half-closed. Her lips tasted of rum and nutmeg.
Only the brand of liquor had changed,
he thought. A strange fatigue seemed to settle on his shoulders; he would find no surprises, no great lift of joy, no revelation, no addition to experience. All was repetition….

Her tongue darted between his lips and made a fleeting circuit around the inside of his mouth. His interest reawakened, he stretched back his hand and ran it up the inside of her leg. He touched the stiff fabric of her shorts and, with a brutal roughness which surprised him, dug his fingers beneath it. He half-expected her to stop him as before, but she didn’t. Instead she shifted her position in some mysterious manner and the portal opened, giving his hand all the world to move in. He knew at the first touch that her passion was not counterfeit, only a little too schooled and artful. She was afire.

Her lips moved against his. “Seright, I just remembered the tower.”

Groaning, he rose on stiff legs and crawled up the rock. The low sun drove spears of light through rose-fringed clouds, giving the tower a color of weathered brick. It was empty; the only person he saw was Leta, fishing with a hand-line from the rocks below the shack. Guiltily, he realized she was trying to catch his supper.

When he returned, Edith was sitting with her knees drawn up inside the circle of her arms. There was a remoteness in her eyes which set off an alarm in his mind.

“All clear,” he said, dropping down beside her. When she said nothing he reached out and pinched her bicep. “Psst. I’m back.”

She turned suddenly, her face perplexed. “What’s the matter with me, Seright? I feel very strange … scared or something. Look.”

He looked at her arms; they were covered with goose pimples.

“What are you afraid of?”

“I don’t know. It makes me angry at myself. I know … this isn’t the first time I’ve kept this sort of date, but I have this terrible premonition. It’s … like ice in my blood.” She shivered. “Be patient with me. Undress me and … do it. Don’t pay any attention to what I say or do. Just … go ahead and love me. I feel like I’m going to crack up.”

He reached behind her, untied the halter, and pulled it toward him, off her arms. She looked lovely with the gaudy morning draped behind her. The tips of her breasts caught and intensified the pale pink of the clouds. He felt the blood hammer against his temples; he bent forward and cupped a breast in his hand; touched his lips to it and felt the tiny kernel grow beneath his tongue. Gently he pushed her back on the black sand; she lay with her eyes closed, looking shy and virginal. He unzipped her shorts, hooked his fingers beneath the band, and waited until she raised her hips. He didn’t look at her as he lifted her legs one after the other and pulled the shorts off her feet. Then he kicked off his own shorts and turned back to her. He was surprised to see that she’d squeezed her legs tightly together. There was a small triangle where they met, like black sand in an hourglass when the hour is almost gone.

A kiss now, he thought. She isn’t ready….

But then he remembered that their first time had been a harsh and violent affair verging on combat. He put his knee between her knees and moved above her. Hesitantly the portal opened. He felt the touch of intimate flesh, felt the almost fiery heat envelop him. It was too hot; it was almost painful. Then the inside of her thighs turned hard and rigid, resisting him. He stopped, and her thighs relaxed. He moved, and the resistance came again. He tried twice more, and each time his movement triggered her resistance reaction. It was no good, no good at all, his control was slipping away.

“Edith, relax!”

“No, please … no.”

“What’s wrong, Edith?”

Her eyes flew wide and staring.
“Who are you?”

“Don’t you know?”

Her resistance ceased to be passive. She twisted beneath him and arched her back, trying to close him out. But it was too late for that; he had neither strength to stop, nor strength to wait. He reached back with both hands, seized her legs beneath the knees, and lifted them, forcing the tight gate open, thrusting forward until some wall at the end of the passage blocked him from further progress. Then he let go of his control, feeling no joy, but only a great relief as the spasm shook him like a fever chill and left him—

—Emptied, he tried to withdraw.

“Noooo …”

He felt her hesitant movement and a sour anger filled him. Edith you fool, why didn’t you do this before? Now there was only pain and a tender agony each time she moved. He tried to leave her but her knees rocked up. She sobbed once and her calves came down hard on the small of his back; the wall at the end of the channel opened, and he felt himself drawn in until only his body prevented further entry. The painful heat became a half-pleasure as her hips moved jerkily without rhythm. He felt himself shut out now in a different way. She was taking a private ride and he could not join her; he felt a vague regret that he had not waited for her. Suddenly all her movement stopped; she froze, trembling, like a stone poised on the lip of a precipice. Then with a long shuddering sigh she collapsed; her legs dropped to his side and she lay with her head twisted back, her tendons standing out like cords, the air hissing between her clenched teeth.

He looked down at her, and he felt a strange guilt, knowing she would not want to be seen this way. All her defenses were down; her face looked fallen and pinched—old, old. And he realized that all before had been phony and faked, a skillful pose of passion. Here was Edith unadorned; Edith as she had never been since she was ten and her brother took her beneath the willows. He felt excitement swell his chest; he had a godlike feeling of universality, an awareness of life and all its labyrinthine turnings. Edith who had never become a virgin, had never lost her virginity. Now at last perhaps she had become a woman.

He felt the surf on his legs, and saw that their struggle had carried them into the water. Her hair floated around her head like a copper halo. When the sea receded it lay wet on the sand, with black granules caught in its shining strands. He felt his exhilaration fade. It was too late, ten years too late. He rose, feeling that flat and tasteless regret that a man feels when he leaves a whore for whom he has paid too much.

She opened her eyes. His feelings must have shown on his face, for she said, with a weak and tremulous smile: “I’m sorry.”

“There’s no need—”

“Don’t be gallant. I spoiled it. I wanted to make it good for you, but something happened.”

“Tell me how you felt.”

She sat up, frowning. “When?”

“When you were fighting, when you asked who I was.”

“That.” Her face clouded. “I’ll try to explain … later.”

She jumped up and ran into the surf. She made a shallow dive and came up swimming in strong swift strokes, straight out to the open sea. He dived and swam after her, seizing her around the waist. She shrieked and twisted in his arms, laughing. She threw her arms around his neck and hugged him tightly. “Seright, I love you!”

Then, wrapping her legs around his waist, she arched her back and pulled him beneath the surface. He returned her embrace and felt her lips touch his in a cold, half-numb kiss. He held her as they sank into a green twilight, until the pressure became a thin high whistle in his ears. Then he pulled her to the surface and floated on his back, looking up at the clouds which scudded like soap foam on blued water. It seemed to him that sky and water had blended, and he hung between them, rocking gently on a soft mist.

He felt her hand slide into his, fingers intertwining. “Did we ever do that before?”

“Which?”

“The whole business … make love, swim nude….”

He turned to look at her. She was the picture of serenity, her face unmarred by worry. She floated with her eyes closed, her face submerged to the temples. Her breasts were two objects separated from her, swaying gently in the wavelets, their pale tips almost colorless in the sunlight, pinched tight by the cool water.

“Yes,” he said finally. “Do you remember?”

“Just a feeling. When you were about to … begin, I felt it had all happened before and ended in some horrible tragedy. I was frightened. I wanted you to stop because I was afraid it would end the same way this time. But then I was glad you didn’t.” She came closer, and her hip brushed his. “Because after that first scare it was right for me. I wasn’t pinched and tight any more; it wasn’t skill or practice or just going through motions I’d learned. I just wanted it all inside me. I never felt like that before. I always wanted to be on top—not literally, I mean, but in control—”

“Let’s get back to your memory.”

She was silent a moment. “I think … we’d better not. I don’t want to spoil our day.”

Abruptly she rolled over and started swimming toward the rock, now a hundred yards away. She called back over her shoulder: “Last one ashore eats bully beef!"

He awoke in fear, as always. A shadow had passed over him briefly; now he sat up, wide-awake, and scanned the horizon. He saw the float-plane low in the west, banking toward the capital. Tourists coming, he thought—or Doxie, or those self-consciously worldly young men from the FBI—

He didn’t want to think about it. He crawled over Edith’s sleeping figure and found his cigarettes half-buried in the sand. His shorts were beside them and he pulled them on, painfully aware that his untanned midsection had burned while he slept in the sun.

How long? The sun said four … five o’clock. Damn, gotta go. Another day lost—but a day to remember….

He regarded the ten square feet of gouged and furrowed sand where they had lain after eating. He had been applying suntan lotion to her body, touching the same tender curvings he had once rubbed with baby oil, feeling the growing tremors in her flesh, hearing the huskiness in her voice: “The sun never hits me there, Seright … no,
don’t stop …
“ It was different this time; the tearing passion was there, but she made no attempt to reduce him to the status of a disembodied appendage. She searched out his mood and his rhythm, blended her movement with his, and for the first time they made that long dive together….

He looked at the bas-relief he had made of her in the sand. The sea had eaten it away at the edges, but the shape remained, and the two pink shells she had placed atop the mounded bosoms. She had been like a child, and had told him of a dry stream bed where a skinny, big-eyed child called Edie had once built a castle. But when he had tried to bring her memory forward to include himself, her face had clouded with concern, then hardened with a brittle glaze of false gaiety. He had a feeling that her life with him was the root of her amnesia, the core of the onion, which would not appear until all else had been peeled away.

I’ve got to have more time,
he thought.

He looked down at the half-eaten sandwich in her hand. Like a child, she had fallen asleep eating. Her lips were half-open, swollen and red from the countless kisses she had given him. An ant crawled over her stomach, halted at the brink of the crater which was her navel, then veered left toward a thick forest which caught red-black highlights from the low sun. Drew flicked off the ant and pressed his lips to the spot, blowing a flatulent sound against her stomach.

She sat up, gasping.

“Time to go, Edith.”

She frowned peevishly, then broke into a yawn which made her jaws crackle. “I can think of better ways to wake up.” She gave him an oblique look, then her eyes traveled down to his shorts. “You sneak. You closed up the shop while I wasn’t looking.”

Drew laughed and dropped her clothes in her lap. “You’re sick, you know that?”

“Mmmm.” She fumbled the halter onto her shoulders, then turned her back to him. “Do me. I’m all thumbs.”

He started tying the ends. “You’re supposed to put the other part on first.”

“You don’t say. It happens that most women prefer this sequence when there’s no man around.”

“And if he is, why reverse it?”

“To be more provocative. Women think the other part is ugly.”

“Women have no taste.” He finished the knot and slid his arms around her waist. Her stomach gurgled, trembling against his palms. It made him feel intimate and close to her. “Tell me though, if she’s getting dressed, the party’s over. Why provoke?”

“For the next time, of course.” She put her hands over his and raised them, brushing up her halter. Her breasts filled his hands. “And since you brought it up, when?”

“I was thinking about tonight.”

She laughed softly. “We’re both sick.” Her hands pressed hard against his, flattening her breasts beneath his palms. She drew a long hissing breath between her teeth. “Lord, I feel like I’ve saved up for ten years. I don’t suppose …”