No Place for an Angel (21 page)

“That's right,” said Jerry. “You're exactly right.” His tone cut completely, smoothly as the nasty blue jet of acetylene, underneath the “nice” thing she had brought herself to utter, and now she just said, “God!” and turned away.

“Well, Millard,” said Jerry. “It's obvious I'm not too welcome, so I think we—”

“Not welcome?” Catherine had left the bedroom in the wing, moved across the patio near the swimming pool and now had opened the door and stepped inside. She had a light silk scarf tied around her neck, which was red below the ear.

“What's wrong with your neck?” Priscilla asked.

“A bee stung me, out in the car,” said Catherine. . . .

“Oh, I hate him!” Priscilla said, writhing in her deck chair after Jerry and Catherine had gone.

“Now, dear. Now, baby. A rest at the farm may be all they need.”

“Millard, you know that's not true.”

“You want me to kill him? Lynch him? Castrate him? Liquidate him?” A new magazine had come, a Paris quarterly, but over the top of it when he turned the page, he could clearly make out that what she was extracting from the pocket of her chartreuse pedal-pushers, though the fashionably pulled-out shirttail of her handprinted Italian shirt may have concealed its outline, was a .44 revolver.

“I might even have done it,” she said, and checked the safety catch and laid the gun on the table with its muzzle facing into the wall as a person trained to handle guns is taught to do. “I may some day.”

Millard swallowed stiffly. “It's going to make you even madder to know this, but there really was a dead bee on the car seat. I noticed it when I went out to see them in the car. But now, for God's sake, don't shoot me.”

“All right,” said Priscilla balefully. “All right. Nobody will take me seriously, not even you. But he did strike her. I saw it and I know. If the bee was conveniently there to give him an excuse, that's his luck, isn't it? Don't you think I know when something looks vicious, it is vicious? In other words, don't you think I know Jerry Sasser? You've let them go off out there together, trying to be so reasonable, trying not to take anybody's side, and who's to guarantee what he'll do? Who's to guarantee it?”

“The female of the species,” Millard quoted, “especially in Texas. Who's to protect Jerry if they let you out there? I never have liked him, but all he's managed to do so far is go to his father's funeral, like a dutiful son, and kill a bee that was stinging his wife.”

Priscilla was really angry now. Her hair, shaken down, coiled about her face as though possessed of a life of its own. “Oh, you make me so mad! Why do you act so spineless? Nobody—
nobody
—understands Jerry Sasser but me!”

So after the funeral they rode off together in Millard's second car, Catherine bending down low and Jerry, his hat pulled down to the rim of his dark glasses, edging the Cadillac through Merrill's one back lane, out to the highway.

“What's on your mouth, Jerry?” Catherine asked. She was crouched on the floor of the front seat, looking up at him.

He bobbed up toward the rear view mirror, at the same time wiping the back of his hand across his lips. “Millard gave me a Bloody Mary back at the house. I had to steady myself after Priscilla's attack. She hates my guts, that woman. I wonder why.”

“She saw you hit me. She saw it, so she knows now. It was way too hard a slap for just a bee.” She laughed. “I thought in the church that I saw everybody drinking blood out of a pitcher. Did I, Jerry?”

“Catherine, you came there to spy. We had agreed you weren't to come. You had promised not to come. Now you expect me to give you information you tried to get and couldn't. You want to have your cake and eat it too, you Lathams. Priscilla wants to go get a gun and shoot me because I don't believe she's a sweet little girl. Well, sweet little girls don't go get guns and shoot their brothers-in-law.”

He was talking on and on the way he talked when he was tired and wound up and couldn't stop. It was nerves and anxiety. There was still the article. They had not seen a paper or heard a news report since morning. To catch Ogden, or Jerry Sasser maneuvering for Ogden, on the tender point of his civil rights fence-sitting, was enough to make headlines if the newspapers caught the hint from one leak. Jerry's head hummed like a defective TV set, sputtering out bars and cross patterns in black and grey, trying to produce a picture. Had he actually gone through his father's funeral thinking about the Presidential race? It not only seemed possible, Catherine believed it. It is one thing to sense the nation's power as a protective force, fatherly, somewhat absent-minded, but capable of powerful action, when aroused; it is another to feel the power grow nervous because of power itself, to see it pace the floor, prowl from window to window. It was what made him handsome, Catherine thought, looking at the rich muted blue-green carpeting of the Cadillac. Wall-to-wall. It was what made him have to have women and women have to have him. A case of mutual need. “When it really gets bad,” he had told her once, “it's like being an alcoholic about everything—cigarettes, whiskey, women, talk—in other words, everything. It's the feeling that nothing can touch me, nothing can stop me, I can go anywhere, do anything, remake the world and throw it in the garbage.” Another time he had said, doubtfully, weary and knowing it, “I think I may not be around much longer. There are lots of new men coming in. They've got degrees, they're talking smart in a new way. I've depended so much on Ogden and Ogden depends on a hundred other people. Nobody can control what happens to any one of us, least of all Oggie himself. Maybe they'll all gang up to show me up as a two-bit con man. I'm getting tired, Catherine.”

But he wasn't tired now. He was on his toes and longing to know the score, but couldn't get a glimpse of the scoreboard. He was thinking about the election. His body was thinking it, it ran along his veins and played like green voltage in the delicate webbed nerves of his brain. He was aware that Priscilla had got out the gun, and this had in some way only brought him to a deeper focus. His father's death which he had not seemed really to think about might have been too like the final dropping off of a scaffolding. Hadn't he turned the feeling of it over to Catherine in the taxi coming in?

Am I afraid to go out there with him? Catherine wondered. It would not even have occurred to her except that Priscilla had been afraid for her to go. Much better to be with him somewhere in silence and alone than anywhere out in the world, asking questions that never get answered, hearing his lovemaking through a wall, observing his father's funeral through a slit of green baize. I'm so happy to go, she thought; happy and willing. She wondered how to tell Priscilla this and thought of writing the message on bits of paper and scattering it out the window along their path. Of course, once out at the farm she could always telephone. But she did not really want to do that, and Jerry for once anticipated her thought, when they arrived at the farmhouse, by unplugging all the phones.

“I promised you a rest, so you're going to get it,” he said. “I won't have Priscilla ringing up here every five minutes.”

“She's going to think you're trying to kill me,” Catherine said. “She's going to think it because she thinks you've driven me crazy as it is.” She laughed. The laugh rose through the country quiet they weren't used to yet.

Outside, the evening wind was drawing out toward the desert, pulling the silken green of the cottonwood trees. When you stood under them they made a sound like water or like lots of children's hands clapping at a distance. By now, Jerry had already switched on the air conditioning, so they could not hear anything but that. The old farmhouse had been all fixed up since the days of the two old uncles. The front porch was gone, had been incorporated into a great big living room full of rugs, couches, deep armchairs. There was a fireplace and a gun rack and several deer heads mounted on the wall.

“If Priscilla was here, she'd shoot you with one of those guns,” said Catherine. She snuggled down in an armchair, and though she was a tallish woman she could look small in a big chair.

“I think all of life is some kind of contest, some sort of war,” said Catherine. “It's either us and the Germans or us and the Japanese or us and the Russians. When it isn't war we have to get all excited over football, who's going to win what, or the World Series, who's going to win that, or the Democrats and Republicans. That's all people want to know, who's going to win. It's always us against somebody else. And when everything else runs out, there's always you and me.”

“Oh, Catherine!”

“Listen, Jerry, did you ever think about the Japanese? They worshipped the sun, did you know that? They were children of the sun, and then at Hiroshima, look at what the sun did to them, because that's all the atom bomb is, isn't it? It's just the sun burning you up to a cinder. Did you ever think about that, Jerry? Listen, Jerry, you know Lottie Ogden? She's always telling me to get interested in something. Business, she said for a long time. Then she said, Honey, you've got to start reading American history. It's glorious, she said. So I thought, Well, I really will. So I took a long stack of books with me up to Maine the last time I drove Latham up there and I started reading. It was what you might call advanced history, and I remembered a lot of it from school but somehow in school it had lacked reality. I never knew any people in government then and so it couldn't get through to me. I thought, for instance, that we were good—on the good side. Whoever gives us the idea that we're so good? I read and I read and all it seemed like was people shooting down buffalo on an empty plain as far as you could see until the plain was covered with skinned carcasses of buffalo, left to rot because the hides were so valuable, and they had all been there so beautiful, so stupid and dignified, wandering in the sage grass and letting little birds live on their backs. I think about them whenever we get up from one of those long banquet tables where we've had fruit cup, chicken à la king in pastry shells, peas, mashed potatoes, salad with french dressing and ice cream with macaroons—I think about the buffalo or all those poor Japanese—”

He handed her a lighted cigarette. She used often to go on about one thing or another in her light pleasant voice, so that he could move about the room, draw open the curtains, adjust others against the sun, think with increasing ease. She did not ask to be listened to, and if the topics had changed since the old days, had imperceptibly drawn toward what might have been described as symptomatic, still she did not demand listening to.

“I guess we're better than the Germans,” she went on. “They killed Jews instead of buffalo.”

“That's good, Catherine,” said Jerry. “That's great.” He kissed her, lifting her half up out of the chair, then releasing her. “Is brain unwinding?” he asked. He picked up the suitcases, which were standing inside the door, and ran upstairs with them. She could hear him barging about. Presently he reappeared wearing shorts and the kind of sweatshirt that Millard Warner was always wearing. He must have borrowed Millard's. He looked about a thousand times better in anything than Millard Warner. Now he was opening the liquor closet. I wish that he loved me, Catherine thought. If he loved me I would not have nightmares about Hiroshima, I would not think so much about the buffalo or the Japanese. I wouldn't believe that Jerry drank blood out of a pitcher and it would never occur to me to object if I heard him making love through a wall, for I would know some girl got him there.

She closed her eyes. Her lids were warm. Now he was going into the kitchen with a drink in his hand, opening the deep freeze. She should get up and select something to thaw for dinner. “Is a steak all right?” Jerry called. She said that a steak would be all right.

In the armchair she fell asleep and dreamed. The dreams—there were a number of them—were full of warmth and love. She saw Uncle Dick again; they went walking in Sandy Gulch and built a sand house and while she waded he sat on the bank in the sun with his straw hat low over his eyes and his walking cane across his knees. He sat beside her sandals. On the way back to the house they passed a lot of people coming out of the fields, some riding on wagons and some walking. They said, Where are you going, and the people said, Haven't you heard? There's a boy who fell under a wheel and hurt himself. Don't you hear him crying? Then Uncle Dick took her hand and walked fast and faster, printing his cane in the dust. He said, That's just what they're saying, they're really going to a wedding. Didn't you see all the tambourines? Who would take a tambourine to see a boy die in the sand? They're going to dance on the sand. But she knew that wasn't true. She could hear the boy crying Mother, Mother! or was it Mercy, mercy! And it made her wild to go and find him and she couldn't eat the peaches Uncle Dick peeled for her and then Uncle Mark came up the hill and said He's dead, hee, hee, they killed the orphan. So his grave was on their hill and now she could eat and sleep because no matter what Uncle Mark said this was a place of love and graves even were loved because Grandfather went all the way to California to see the people who had lost the boy who died, maybe to let them know that the grave was tended to, was loved, to let them know something he never did say, never could say, that no one could say . . . to let them know. . . . Grandfather leaving in the stagecoach from Dallas looking at his gold watch, said, I will bring you back what you want most in the world, what is it? A tambourine? All right, I will bring you back a tambourine from Neiman-Marcus. Don't cry. Then the stagecoach door closed like in the movies. Grandfather sat on a velvet seat with his carpetbag beneath his feet and his little brass-bound trunk up above on the luggage rack, strapped on. There was a lady in full taffeta skirts inside and a drummer and a cowboy and grandfather. Grandfather took his hat off and said, How do you do, ma'am. Then they drove off through the plains where all the buffalo looked lonely and sad because they were about to die.