King of Spades (27 page)

He looked down at his plate.

“Will you ask the blessing, Ransom?”

He swallowed a loud click inside his high white collar. Pray? Finally he managed to shake his head.

She still had a smile. “There'll soon be a preacher here. Then we can be married legal like you always wanted.”

There was already a preacher of sorts in town. She apparently hadn't heard about him.

“Even if we are already married common law.”

“I see.”

“I'm so glad you still want to.” She spoke sideways to herself. “I should've known better than to let you go by yourself and live alone here so long. Bachelors out in the wilds always fall into bad habits. Get peculiar notions about things. Antisocial. They want a woman all right, but not all night.”

Of all people Madam Kate ought to know. The thought left a bitter trace in his mind.

She lifted the bowl of potatoes with both hands and passed it to him. “Why don't you begin, dear.”

The potatoes were done to a fare-thee-well. So was the gravy and the meat and the cabbage. And so was the sweet dried-apple pie. It was good to eat a town meal again.

All through dinner she kept up a bright patter of talk. She refused to notice his noncommittal air, that all was not well
between them. Though every now and then she couldn't resist more bemused sideways remarks. “My, what a handsome man that stagecoach driver was.” She pecked at her potatoes. “Once he called me a young lady.” She poked at her meat. “I was most grateful to be called that, what with all that dust.” She picked at her pie. “From where he was sitting up there on the boot, my skin probably did look young at that.”

Ransom touched a hand to his right eye. Already about to be a father of a child by one woman, here he was now in a spot where he still might very well become a father of a child by a second woman. It was time he ran off to some other set of far dark hills.

She even had a box of cigars for him. Remembering how Sam had liked them, Ransom lit up. He blew out a plume of smoke.

“Now you just go over there and set in your easy chair, husband darling. By the bay window there. Where you can see the people go by.”

“I'd rather watch the stream go by.”

“Suit yourself.” She watched him settle down in the big leather chair, watched him put his feet up on the footstool. “With that cigar, you look so … so dignified. Like a town father almost. Or a senator even.”

Where was Erden? Right at that moment?

Katherine kept talking pleasantly all through washing dishes. She was as game as hornets.

After a while the cigar began to taste foul and Ransom chucked it into the brass spittoon beside him.

And all too soon it was time to go to bed.

She locked the front and back doors. She drew the blind to the bay window. She blew out all the big lamps. She picked up the small night lamp and headed for the stairs.

Ransom sat on, silent as a coyote at noon.

She paused on the bottom stairs. “Coming, dearie?”

“I … I think I'll sleep down here on the sofa.”

“Why, Ransom, husband, we are going to sleep together, aren't we? We don't want to go through that again, do we?”

“I'll sleep down here.”

She refused to see it except in a certain way. “Such a shy fellow you are. Like some rusty old bachelor.” She breathed heavily. “Oh, please come, Ransom. We are man and wife now, aren't we? And it's been such a long time since we've made love. I've saved myself all this time for you. Oh, my darling, please.”

The familiar winning tone of her voice reached into him so that he found himself once again turning a little in her direction.

She stepped behind him. She leaned down and kissed him on top of the nose. “Darling,” she breathed. The front of her white dress opened.

The puccoon perfume of her poured over him. It tore him all up. “Katherine.”

“Everything's all right, darling. Come away to bed. I can't wait to hold you in my arms.” She touched her lips to his ear. “Don't deny your wife.”

“Can't we first get acquainted a little?”

“First? You are deep, my husband.”

He closed his eyes.

With a coy gesture of indulgence she placed the night lamp on the smoking stand beside him. She sat herself in his lap with a winsome flounce. She ran her fingers through his beard and gave several little tigerish tugs. She nuzzled him. She suckled the lobe of his ear. She lipped his lips. “Don't you ever say anything ever, darling?”

There was even some puccoon perfume in the stitched black patch over her left eye. He tried rough wit. “My bellows don't work so good with you sitting on them.”

She liked that. She teased him with the tip of her tongue.

He let his lips and teeth be opened. He groaned. He could feel himself awaken under her. His flesh was willing.

She loosened his tie and collar. She ran a hand inside his clothes, stroking his skin, pressing her small palm around and over his shoulder muscles. “Darling. The thought of your sweet boy innocence … the thought that someone else's enjoyed it besides me, oh God, that drives me wild.”

His arms were of a mood to betray him. They slipped around her. They pressed her close.

“Talk to me,” she whispered hoarsely. “Talk to me. I do so love the sound of your voice. I hear red when you talk. The kind of red that drives me mad.”

His fingertips found supple flesh under her necklace. He felt himself sliding.

“It's been so long.”

Even as he was about to swing over her, it started again. That odd haunting business of knowing he'd lived that moment somewhere sometime before. And again it would not quite come clear. Though he was as sure of it being true as he was of the smell of her perfume.

She shifted in his lap. She loosened his trousers. There was in her gesture the hint that she might be helping a little boy.

The re-remembrance remained dreamlike. Something about being rooted and then cut off.

She fondled him.

He had to know. He gnashed his teeth to keep himself in hand. He found that to hold himself back was delicious ecstatic. Ahh. It was touch and go. He could go either way. Ahh. If he could just hold himself back another moment, trembling, firm, quivering, he just might, finally and at last, penetrate the mystery of that not quite re-remembrance.

She fondled him.

It was wrong. There was Erden. But also because of something else. What was it? He trembled. He wavered.

She gave him a little tug of love.

It tipped him. The almost re-remembrance faded away.

“Love.”

He cursed inwardly. Then, letting go, he hugged her hard. He drew back and taking hold of the top of her white dress with both hands, he tore open her bodice all the way to her waist. The sight of her half-fallen pear breasts and her slim waist was also an old half-remembered ache.

“What're you doing?” she squeaked.

“You have too many nice clothes as it is.”

“Ransom!”

Carefully he tore the rest of her dress down to the hem. She looked like a halved white harvest apple. “You won't miss this dress.”

She hated having her dress torn. Yet she took the tearing to mean he was crazy in love with her again. “Darling, you're mad.” Quickly she covered her wrinkled scar with a hand.

“Mad I am, yes.” He pushed her hand aside. He shoved his brushy face into her neck and between her breasts. He surged up, rose with her in his arms, placed her on the purple Persian rug and possessed her.

She took it all for true love.

He set himself against any other thought but the way of a man with a woman. Comb still bright and high, he next carried her upstairs, finished undressing her, finished undressing himself, took her yet again on their four-poster. If he was going to sin against Erden he might as well sin the whole hog.

She cried out from the midst of her rack of joy. “At last! At last! To be doing it again and again. Oh, Ransom, darling, I fear I have an unnatural appetite for it.”

Through half-open eyes he saw that the throes made her a young girl again. The tiny netlike traces around her eyes were hard to find. Her sighs were those of a girl-child.

They were insatiable with each other. They seemed to be on top of each other all night long.

He went on a burst with her for a week.

5

Two months later. It was morning. They had just thrown back the quilts and were about to get up. Once again his eye fell on the scar on her stomach. It still fascinated him. The wrinkled smile of it was like the smile of an old woman with a secret to tell.

As before she tried to hide it with a covering hand.

He promptly pushed her hand aside.

“Please, Ransom.”

“Sure is funny you ain't proud of that scar.”

Her gold hair rustled in her pillow.

He gave her belly a light clap. “Lots of people used to die from gallstone operations. So you should be proud of it.”

“Please don't stick your nose into something for which you may be sorry later on.”

“What's the matter, chum? You got something to hide?”

She sat up blazing. “What do you mean?”

“Have you?”

“Listen, you.” She quite deliberately placed her hand on her velvet wings. “I'll have you know that no child has ever passed these portals.”

Ransom noted that for all her blazing manner her brown eye for one fleeting second couldn't quite hold up to him.

“I swear to God, Mr. Earl Ransom.”

After a moment Ransom shied off himself. “I have to believe you.”

“Well! I like that.”

Then it was his turn to bristle. “Listen, puss, you were running The Stinging Lizard when we first met, you know.”

Pause. “That hurt.”

“All right. I believe you.”

There came over her face again that familiar sudden grimace, part sneering, part wincing.

He leaned an elbow over her. With his finger he gently poked her near breast, then her chin, then the tiny crow's feet at her eyes.

His touches melted her. “Oh, Ransom, I do so love you.”

He smoothed back her gold hair with his full hand.

“Though sometimes I think the way we act we're no better married than monkeys about the middle.”

“Who am I?”

She blinked. “What did you say?”

“Skip it.”

She studied him. The string to her eye patch had slipped a little from his stroking of her hair and she adjusted it.

“But I agree with you. It should mean more than just coupling in the dark.”

She smiled, expecting advances. “How more, Ransom?”

He looked at the early morning sunshine glowing in the pine tree outside their bedroom window. “Oh, I don't know. Like a bobolink singing maybe.”

“That's just what it means to me. Sweet birds sweetly singing.”

He closed his eyes. He recalled Sam Slaymaker's remark.

“Oh, you'll know when you finally make it, boy. It's like when all the birds fly out of the straw pile.”

“Isn't it birds singing for you too when we're together?”

He couldn't get himself to say it wasn't.

“Isn't it?”

He let his smile linger for answer.

“You got to love me now darling. You've just got to.”

He ran a fingertip up and down her long scar.

“You see”—she lisped the next words—“our baby should have the privilege of growing up with its own father.”

His head came up.

“Because, you see, we are going to have a baby. You've probably noticed.”

He stared big green eyes at her.

“What's the matter? Don't you want it?”

Silence.

“I thought you said you wanted sons?”

Silence.

She pushed his hand away from her scar. A pout darkened her face. But she couldn't quite look him in the eye.

In turn he pushed her hand aside and once more placed the flat of his hand on where she said she had his baby. The thought of a little acorn of his own flesh started there under the scar almost unhinged him. Lord. Now he was to be a father of children with two different women.

“Isn't it really birds singing for the both of us?”

He swore to himself inside. She couldn't have it. She couldn't. She had to get rid of it. Somehow. And if she didn't, by God, he'd drive the damned little nubbin out of her himself. Hard. Mean. If he had to.

“Aren't you happy about it?”

“I guess so.”

“I thought you once told me you wanted a son? To start a new line off with?”

“I do.”

“Well?”

He needed time to think. He masked his feelings as best he could. “Sure I wanted a son.”

“Because if you don't want it, it's easily taken care of. With me it is anyway.”

“It's fine. Fine. It's just that it's … kind of a shock to know … it's finally coming at last.”

“Well, that's a lot better.”

“Ahh … I suppose you would be the one to know how it could be easily taken care of. If need be.”

Pause. “That hurt too.”

“I'm sorry.”

Abruptly Katherine got out of bed and began to slip into her clothes. “Time to make breakfast. For a hungry man.”

He watched her. Erden didn't have wrinkles in the armpits. Nor creases under the thighs. It had to be that Katherine was one of those who couldn't help but look old for her age. Because Katherine couldn't be that much older than he was.

“Just you remember one thing though, my husband. I'm not going to let you throw me on the scrap heap like some old sucked-out lemon.” She tied a knot in the belt of her robe. “I don't know what's been troubling you lately. But whatever it is, I'll never let you get rid of me. I'll kill myself first.” She fluffed her gold hair in place. “And that's not so funny. I've looked death in the eye before.”

His lower lip doubled on itself.