Lucky Bastard (42 page)

On a spring night, after a bank board meeting, Morgan came back to the mansion to find Jack, as usual, absent. She was unable to sleep and unable to do anything for herself that would be an aid to sleep. She decided to go down to the office to do some work in her safe room.

The door was rigged so that all the lights went on when the latch was lifted. Stepping over the threshold she found herself in the presence of a naked Jack, who was entwined on the library table with a ripe young bodyguard. The woman's shiny pistol harness lay on a bank box full of laundered currency, beneath her gray trooper's Stetson with its big chrome badge. Her perma-polished boots were crossed in the small of Jack's back. She had one leg out of her whipcord trousers, and true to Jack's ritualized methods, she still wore her skewed panties. They were white, sleazy, lacy. She screamed when the lights came on. Jack continued as if hypnotized, undaunted by the light or maybe unaware of it in his single-mindedness. The girl gazed at Morgan with frantically rolling eyes—stupid with fright. Morgan had seen the same look in the eyes of rutting dogs.

All this was happening, remember, in Morgan's room—the holy of holies, the refuge, the safe place, the inner sanctum to which only she knew the entry code. A sense of angry violation seethed in Morgan's breast.
How did he get in?

The girl trooper was trying to push Jack off. He seemed unaware of her resistance. In a piercing voice, staring wildly into Morgan's furious face, she cried, “Jack! Jack!”

Jack did not seem to hear her. She tried to slither from beneath him, scooting backward across the tabletop. With astonishing agility, refusing to withdraw, he pursued her across the table, pumping rhythmically. Morgan, fascinated—it was like
being
Jack to observe him in this state—saw that his eyes were tightly closed and realized that he really did not know that the lights were on, that he really could not hear voices, that all his senses were concentrated on the single part of his body that he was thrusting into the wild-eyed girl. She was now backed into the wall, forced into a sitting position, unable to move. Her eyes stared, but into space; she groaned. Morgan realized that in spite of all the distractions, she was having an orgasm.

Morgan was seized by rage as if by an enormous primeval animal that shook her, suffocating her, blurring her vision. She snatched up the trooper's revolver. It was a .357 Magnum Colt Python with a six-inch barrel, a most intimidating weapon. Shrieking in primal fury, she fired all six rounds in the cylinder, rapid-fire, into the wall above the girl's tousled head. Morgan was an excellent pistol shot, highly trained. The bullets landed very close, in a tight pattern.

The girl screamed in terror. Jack finished. This seemed to restore his hearing. Still on his hands and knees, still one flesh with his lover, he looked over his shoulder and said, “Jesus Jumping Christ, Morgan.”

Morgan broke open the revolver, ejected the shells, plucked a fresh load from the pouch on the trooper's harness, and snapped the cylinder shut. White-faced, teeth clenched, wild-eyed with an anger that she all too plainly did not wish to control, she cocked the weapon,
click-click
, and pointed it at the girl. She was now sitting on Jack's lap, her body between him and the gun. She struggled to escape, but Jack's arms were locked tightly around her waist.

Frozen by terror, the girl said, “No, no, please.”

Morgan said, “Get off my husband's cock and get your white-trash ass out of here before I blow another hole in it.”

“Oh Mary, Mother of God!” cried the girl. She struggled to escape from the death grip in which Jack held her, but he would not let go, and they both tumbled off the table. The girl leaped to her feet, took one running step, became entangled in her whipcord breeches, and went sprawling. Morgan kicked her hard on the seat of her twisted panties. She crawled rapidly through the door, sobbing.

Morgan closed the door behind her. Hand steady as a rock, she pointed the revolver at Jack's still-glistening member.

“I'm only going to ask this question once,” she said. “How did you get in here?”

Jack's teeth chattered. “Seven-three-eight-three-seven,” he responded.

“I know
what
you know.
How
did you know?”

“Just guessed.”

“Don't fuck with me, Jack. How did you know the combination?”

“Well, Jesus, Morg, it didn't take a rocket scientist. What's your biggest secret? The numbers on the keypad spell ‘Peter' backwards and forwards.”

Morgan threw the cocked revolver at him. A fully loaded Colt Python weighs almost four pounds. It hit him on the scalp, opening a tiny but gushing wound, and went off at the precise same moment, sending one more high-velocity, metal-jacketed round slamming into the wall.

In the tiny moment of consciousness left to him, Jack thought he had been shot. Was this his fate, to be murdered by a madwoman he had been forbidden to fuck? To be blown away by a jealous wife who was no wife?

4
When Jack awoke, he found Danny Miller standing over him, his arms around Morgan, who was hysterical.

Danny said, “Hi. How do you feel?”

Jack touched his scalp and looked at his hand. “Jesus, the blood,” he said.

“Just a scalp wound.”

Danny was calm, reassuring, smiling over Morgan's shuddering shoulder. He handed Jack a set of car keys.

“Take my car. I'll catch a ride with Morgan.”

After Jack left, Danny attempted to comfort Morgan. She was crying again, sobbing, beating her fists against the soft panels of the soundproof walls. She wore a pleated knee-length skirt that swung prettily with the movements of her body. Danny gazed at her mismatched legs—so like his own, except that each of Morgan's was perfect in its own way. He was aware, too, of the beauty of the rest of her body, and of her ravaged but lovely face. The transformation of the frigid drab he had known for years into this wildly sobbing homicidal beauty was profoundly disorienting.

Feeling his eyes on her, Morgan turned to him, looked long into his eyes, and then uttered a loud sob and held out her arms. The heartbroken sound she was uttering seemed to come not from the Morgan who stood before him but from some much earlier and much smaller and much younger and vulnerable Morgan. A Morgan who could hide nothing from him.

Moments later, with the feral scent of Jack and the trooper still faintly present in the stale air of the sealed room, the inevitable happened. Then again, and again. Morgan poured a dozen years of frustration, anger, and lust for revenge—not to mention her Swallow wisdom—into a frenzied marathon of sex that lasted until dawn. By then Danny was in the grip of what he knew was a sexual obsession from which the richly aromatic, nude, and purring Morgan, regarding him with an air of satisfied ownership, would never let him escape. As for Morgan, she found that she was strangely excited by Danny's wounds, aroused by the pornographic rush of making love to a man who had lost his perfect body in battle against the Viet Cong. It gave her a wonderful sense of power, as if he were her prisoner.

5
Danny and Morgan became lovers—or partners in lust, depending on your point of view—on the night Cindy's mother died of pancreatic cancer in Tannery Falls. It was a hard death; Cindy held her mother's hand until the life went out of it. Then she closed the corpse's eyelids, and tried to reach Danny from the bedside phone. It was two-thirty in the morning. She got the answering machine, her own businesslike voice. She tried the office and got no answer. She went to the nurse's station and told them that her mother was gone. Two nurses rushed down the hall, as if in their familiarity with death they might yet catch the old lady before her boat left shore. At four in the morning, having signed all the necessary papers and talked to the undertaker, she got into her car and started to drive to Columbus, pressing redial over and over on the car phone as she sped down the long, straight north-south highway through villages in which the only sign of human life was the blue-white flicker of television screens in bedroom windows. Was Danny dead, too? She saw a vision of him throwing himself between Jack and an assassin's bullet: not the fleeting real-life event itself on a distant stage over the heads of a crowd, but close-up television images in slo-mo. A highway patrol car passed her; she thought of chasing it, blinking her lights, asking the trooper to find out if anything like that had happened. Or if there had been any fatal accidents involving anyone named Miller.

She arrived home at six. Danny came in at six-thirty.

He said, “Your mother is gone?”

Cindy nodded, unable to speak. She embraced him, burying her face in the pocket between his shoulder and his neck, then recoiled.

“You smell like cunt,” she said.

Danny told her everything.

Cindy said, “Morgan Adams? You're telling me that you're fucking Morgan Adams?”

“Tonight was the first time,” Danny said. “Cindy, I'm so ashamed, so sor—”

She slapped him hard. “Shut up,” she said. “I can't talk to you when you smell like this. Go take a shower.”

Half an hour later Danny found her at the kitchen table, hands folded, back erect, feet on the floor—exactly, he thought, like the good girl she had been in the fifth grade, waiting for the teacher to come into the classroom, ignoring the hell-raising boys. Danny had shaved; his face shone. His hair was wet. He began to weep.

Cindy said, “I don't think we'll have a funeral. Picture ops for Jack and Morgan at the graveside is a little more than I want to handle.”

Danny spoke her name. His voice broke, tears flowed. She said, “Stop that.”

Danny went to the kitchen sink and washed his face. Then he said, “What do you want to know?”

“What more is there to know? If you want to let it all hang out so you'll feel better, see a priest. What do you want to do?”

“I want to come back.”

“Can you do that?”

“It's what I need to do.”

“That's not quite the answer to my question.”

Danny said, “Cindy, I promise you. It will never happen again.”

Feeling the faint nausea that follows a sleepless night, but blocking everything else from memory except—as she remembered later on—a bright isolated image of Danny dribbling a basketball, faking, shooting, grinning, shining with sweat, and then another image of him as he had been in that locked room at Walter Reed, Cindy sat in silence for a long moment.

Then she said, “All right.” She looked at the clock. “I have to be in court in an hour.”

And when, the very next day in the deep cottony silence of Morgan's room, Danny told a wise-eyed Morgan about his promise to his wife, she said, “What kind of soap do you use at home?”

“Dove. Why?”

“If Cindy's got such a great sense of smell, we'll have to get you some for the shower here.”

Then, though Danny resisted, she seduced him and, in the weeks that followed, seduced him many times more. Danny lived in guilt and a fear of discovery that was worse than any emotion he had ever felt in Vietnam. Cindy never referred to his adultery again.

6
Before she lost the power of speech, Cindy's mother had asked her to have a child: “Oh, Cindy, it was wrong to let you wear that thing. Your father wouldn't listen to me, but God punished us. If you'd had a child, that boy would have gone away. A second you, a beautiful little girl, would have been so wonderful.”

Another daughter might have taken the old woman's ramblings for delirium, but Cindy recognized the barely audible monologue for what it had been, a confession of unhappiness so great—unhappiness caused by Cindy—that her mother preferred death to its continuation. Cindy understood how such a state of mind, produced by a single mistake, a single violation of the rules by which she lived, might take control of a woman. Even though she never used contraceptives with Danny after he was drafted, she had conceived no child except the son she aborted.

Danny had offered many times to have himself tested, to do whatever was necessary for them to have a child of their own. Cindy declined. She did not want to know. If Danny proved to be sterile, that would mean that Jack had made her pregnant. She did not want to confirm this darkest suspicion of her life. But now she realized that at long last she had no choice but to face facts, seek medical help, and conceive a child with Danny, no matter by what means and with what consequences.

She and Danny did not resume physical relations—another sign, he thought, that she knew what was going on—but went to a specialist in fertility problems who, after several attempts to artificially impregnate Cindy with Danny's sperm, suggested the last resort of in vitro fertilization. By now this was a common procedure, though it often resulted in multiple births.

Cindy said, “You mean twins?”

“I mean multiple fetuses. But all but one—or two, if you wish—can be terminated.”

“A multiple abortion?”

“We avoid that term.”

“I know,” Cindy said. “No thanks.”

After that she dreamed often about the doctor. In her dream the doctor, a stringy humorless woman, was conspiring with Morgan to use Jack's sperm instead of Danny's. She woke up to find herself alone in the bed. Danny was sitting downstairs in the dark, weeping.

She went downstairs as she was, naked. He told her that the affair with Morgan had resumed. She asked for a divorce.

Danny said, “I can't. It would ruin Jack's chances to be president.”

“What?”

“It would destroy his candidacy.”

“You bet it would,” Cindy said. “Let me ask you something. Do you love that freak?” She saw that Danny did not know which Adams she meant. She said, “I mean Morgan.”

“No. It's not that at all. But I'm—”

“Besotted by her? Isn't that the word they use in books?”