Pretty Leslie (48 page)

“I wasn't laughing.”

“I'm scared of going on and scared of coming back. Not scared for myself. Just
scared
.”

He licked his dry sticky lips. “Because you're pregnant. I guess we knew that's where the fear would be. Was.”

“Oh. You know that,” she said. “Already.”

In her confirmation he felt the same—and in the circumstances proper—thrill of relief as when she told him she was running west. It would have been the last, unspeakable abomination of irony if she were not pregnant, an irony that would have smashed his freedom and by sheer ugliness ruined his power to pay for the life he had taken.

“Then I suppose you've seen him. You weren't supposed to ever have to. Oh God, Ben. I did such a lousy job of covering my tracks.”

Then he was laughing at her. He laughed with hysterical force, as much to drown out her being ashamed of Patch (instead of her guilt) as to respond fully to her gross misstatement—for he knew that no one had ever been a scout by night in this world with greater stealth and cunning than she. He had never seen her naked as a wife must be to her husband until he found his way to Patch's apartment. He hadn't known what he could do best for her until Patch rendered the knife. “Cunning,” he said. “Give me some credit for following.”

“But don't follow this time,” she said. “That's what I called to tell you”—as if she had just now stumbled on the reason that had motivated her a while ago. “It would be just like you to. Even knowing.”

“No.”

“I didn't call because I was chickening. It's more about the child and whether you'd want.… It's you I'm thinking of. It's your child. There isn't any … much … doubt of that. You know?”

“I know.”

They were saying some things to each other that no doubt needed saying, but the words were failing them. Everything depended on tone and nuance, and it was as if while great animals were attacking in the dark they had nothing but smiles and whistles for defense.

It seemed to matter very little if he told her or didn't about the murder. She would inevitably know about it some time tomorrow when he was dead too. Whatever was to be communicated must be delivered now.

Then he heard her laugh oddly, taking the absolute stretch of his tolerance, taking it by right, because he was her husband. “No. It doesn't have a father. It was only me with either of you. I caught it like a cold. I did it all.”

He recognized the crazy truth, simpified to a joke, but ringingly, perfectly true as none of her soberer confessions had ever quite been. It was as if a living voice and the best authority were confirming what he was ready to admit when Patch gave him the knife. Impossibility and absence were the terms of his right marriage. He and Leslie had blundered toward each other for years without finding what she had just given—one responsible signal of love, better than an old age of compromise and longing that soured more with every passing year. And he wanted to answer back that, yes, he knew she had skipped unspotted through degradations. They had never touched her.

He had to have the right answer for her, and neither his life nor his death was adequate to express what he meant. There had to be a word. Actions were only actions, and to leave love to them was to trust it once more to the flesh in which it had gone astray, was to invite some Patch or other to intervene again and scramble the necessary message. To let her come back to the shambles of tomorrow without the one instruction he intended was no more his right as husband than to tolerate her wallowing in Patch's bed. It was to betray her again into dark without relief. They would be at her hard tomorrow—the police, her family, their friends, and the merely curious.

He owed her more than an action, then. But of course words in their profusion had always smothered their meanings too. There was no love word still innocent enough to serve.

But then he thought he had it, absolutely pure and sufficient. He found the tone from nowhere of much importance—from the retreating and already spoiled memory of a life he wished to reject. A straw. An afternoon so little worth remembering that he might have lost it years ago in the shuffle of larger things, but just hadn't.

It was an afternoon in a Flushing movie theater, and he was there as much to kill time as for any other reason. Twelve years old and already too sophisticated for the Grade B western that was playing. He had come to the theater in a peculiar lassitude, no doubt led by the fact that even in summer when there was no school, Saturday afternoons bothered him with their vacuity. They were the times when something still seemed to whipsaw him between what Aunt Peg said he was not to remember and what he thought a boy ought to remember if he hoped to become a real man. The movies were a time-killing compromise. Only that.

But there'd been this moment of the pointless afternoon when the good guys were surrounded by bad guys plus some renegade Indians. Somebody had to get through to the fort or it was all up for the settlers. So the bearded sergeant and the wounded guide were looking for who to send, someone who was willing to make the run for the others.

Ben knew who ought to go. He sat forward on his sliding cushioned seat, crouching and tense, waiting for the minute when the Indians came closest and then stupidly walked right past the gap in the weeds above the riverbank. The camera showed the emptiness of the sky up there beyond the weeds where he had to run. He felt himself about to cry, but he took a big breath instead and crouched forward in the seat, searching with his toes for the purchase he needed. Ready for a bursting start, knowing, just knowing he could make it through because they counted on him. Knowing also that he wouldn't run because there was nowhere real to run to.

“Leslie,” he said. Then he said what he was condemned to say out of loyalty to the good women who always tried to make him believe in happy endings. “Leslie …
go!
”

About the Author

R. V. Cassill (1919–2002) was a prolific and award-winning author and a highly regarded writing teacher. Among his best-known works are the novels
Clem Anderson
and
Doctor Cobb's Game
and the short stories “The Father” and “The Prize,” the latter of which won him an O. Henry Award. At the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Purdue University, and Brown University, Cassill taught many acclaimed authors, including Joy Williams and Raymond Carver. He founded the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) in 1967 and after his retirement became the editor of
The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction
, a position he held for nearly a quarter century.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1963 by R. V. Cassill

Cover design by Drew Padrutt

ISBN: 978-1-4976-8515-4

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com

EBOOKS BY R. V. CASSILL

FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

Available wherever ebooks are sold