Tears Are for Angels (4 page)

    But she couldn't know, I thought. She couldn't! Nobody knows but Stewart and me. And she doesn't know Stewart.

    So I had to get up then and go back, go back to find out what she knew and how she had learned it and to tell her how it had been. The horror of it. at last released, could not be borne alone. That was the main thing. I had to go back to tell her how it had been. I had to share it now, after the years of hiding, I had to tell it to someone.

    I kept listening for the car to start. I remembered the tire. It would take some time to put the stem in and get it pumped up. And sure enough, she was working away with the pump when I came over the last dune.

    I came silently up behind her, my bare feet silent in the soft, night-cooled sand, and watched her bending with the pump. She had the T-shirt pinned around her now, and its tail fluttered with her movements.

    "What makes you think I killed her?" I said.

    There was the slightest jerk in the rhythm of the pumping. Then she went on with it, steadily, as if no word had been spoken.

    "You owe me a bra," she said. "That was my best one."

    "How did you know about it?"

    She didn't say anything.

    "I'm not going to hurt you."

    She stopped pumping and kicked at the tire. Then she went back to the work.

    "What are you going to do?"

    "Go to the police."

    There was no emotion in the voice. It was simply a flat statement of purpose.

    "All right," I said. "Let me tell you how it was first."

    "I know you killed her. And I know you. That's enough for me."

    "It was an accident."

    "Prove that to the police."

    "I'm not trying to stop you from telling them. I just want you to know how it was. I've got to tell somebody. I can't live with it any more."

    The pumping was finished then. She kicked the tire again and knelt down and began to unscrew the hose from the valve.

    "All I'm interested in is that she's dead and you killed her. She was… a friend of mine."

    "Lucy?"

    She didn't say anything. She picked up the pump, opened the car door, and started to slide in the seat. Then she looked at me again, still standing barefooted in the sand. The side of her face was quite dark now, the purplish bruise accusing and shameful.

    "It didn't happen the way the papers had it," she said. "I know it didn't. Maybe I can't prove it, but I can try."

    "And you're sure I did it?"

    "Yes. I'm sure."

    I stepped forward then and I put out my hand to touch her arm. But she moved it, and I let my hand fall.

    "If you knew her," I said, "you ought to want to hear how she died."

    She laughed, hard and brittle in the darkness.

    "All right," she said. "There's plenty of time, I guess.

    I've already waited two years."

    I sat down on the sand and she turned in the car seat and put her feet on the running board and her elbows on her knees. The car door swung gently against her legs.

    "I had started down to the coast on a fishing trip, late one afternoon. I got about halfway down there, but then it began to come up a storm…"

    

    

    I didn't really mind. I had looked forward to that trip for some time, but now, when I was actually on the way, I began to miss Lucy. So I turned around and started home.

    That was a real storm. The rain drove hard against the windshield and there were thunder and lightning, like giant Roman candles, and I began to have trouble seeing the road. But I was going home to Lucy, the flat, rain-washed ribbon of pavement in front of me was taking me to her, and I thought, To hell with the storm. To hell with fishing, too.

    I remembered the way she had clung to me when I had left that afternoon, as if she might never see me again. I felt my pulse throb at the memory of her body pressed to mine and I stepped harder on the gas pedal.

    It was late when the headlights picked up the dirt road leading off to the right, leading to the old-fashioned - farmhouse where Lucy was waiting. She won't even be in bed yet, I was thinking, maybe reading or playing one of those damned card games she likes. I braked carefully and made the turn and felt the wheels, less sure now, on the rain-soaked earth.

    The London place-that's what county folks call it-is less than a mile from the highway, a low, rambling old house, white-painted, with a porch running around three sides. It's one-storied, set back in a grove of trees.

    My father left the place to me and his father to him and so on back to the first London, whoever he was, who cleared the land and put in tobacco. When I sold it, it had the biggest tax valuation in Coshocken County.

    The Pontiac nosed cautiously into the drive. The house was dark, and I decided Lucy must be in bed after all. I braked to a stop by the house, rather than going on back to the barn. From here it was only two jumps to the unrailed porch and I would not get so wet.

    In the darkness outside the car, I could see the pale reflection of water standing on the ground, and I swore. I had stopped right in the middle of a large puddle.

    I glanced around the cluttered interior of the car. I can bring all this stuff in tomorrow, I thought. I swung around, lifted my feet to the seat, and quickly untied my shoes. Carrying them in my hand, the heavy socks stuffed down in the toes. I opened the door of the Pontiac and leaped through the rain to the porch.

    In the instant it took me to gain the shelter, I became soaked through. I stood now, breathing quickly with the sudden movement, on the side of the house opposite from that where our bedroom was located.

    It opened onto the same gallery-like porch on which I now stood. The rain beat in under the low, wide eaves.

    I walked silently along the porch, the bare pad of my feet on the planking lost in the drive of the rain. I turned the corner to the front of the house, and as I did so I was instantly aware of a thin, pale glow, an atmosphere rather than a beam of light, from around the far corner of the house.

    Quick pleasure thrilled in me. She's still awake, I thought. Reading in bed, like as not. Except for the living room, the bedroom was the only room opening onto the porch. The light could only come from there.

    For a moment, in stark animal pleasure and pride and greed, I knew how she would look, propped up in the wide four-poster, sunk in the deepness of the feather mattress, her knees drawn up before her. the book, a mystery, or a movie magazine, on her knees, the coverlet only to her waist against the rain chill, the pale, mellow gold of her hair about the pink-white curve of shoulder and arm and breast, the lips parted and the eyes avid on the page, but all of her eager, waiting, not expecting, but still waiting anyway for my return, for me to come home to her.

    I want to see it, I thought, I want to see her that way and her not know it and then go in to her with it inside of me, and her still not knowing I have seen her that way, and take her to me and feel her in my arms.

    Quickly now, I turned the corner of the porch and silently moved down its length to the lighted window. The shade was half pulled and I went easily to my knees and put the shoes down softly beside me and peered in through the window.

    In that first second of glancing, a million years peeled away from me and left me naked, all the sum of civilization piled at my knees where it had fallen. No thoughts, no dreams, no fears, no pride, not even physical pain, but only raw fury rose in me as I crouched on the damp porch.

    My legs straightened and I was on my feet, moving forward as if I would surge through the interfering glass. Cut some instinct reached up from the heapings at my feet and caught at me and my arms dropped to my side and I stood there, half stooping, my arms dangling, my fists lax and free, and watched them through the window.

    They were on the bed, Lucy and the man whose face I could not see, only his naked, ugly rump and his back and his shoulders, clutched together, writhing together, primal in their attitude. Lucy's face was visible over the hairy shoulder, the eyes closed, the mouth open, the whole lace grimaced, and the hair the same mellow paleness I remembered, but not clouding to her shoulders now, but plunging straight and lank to the whiteness of the bed.

    The man's head lifted momentarily, almost abruptly, and was down again. But it was enough for me to see. to know, and shame flowed in me with ravaging power at the sight of him there with her, and I turned and walked again along the porch, my fists clenched now, feeling in me again, and hate, red hate, rolling up with the rage and the shame to my brain.

    Silently I entered the front door. I moved across the old rug to the high-backed desk, opened its center drawer, and took from it the pistol, and closed the drawer again and moved away, down the hall toward the bedroom and the two of them straining together there.

    I did not check the pistol's chamber. It was always loaded. I put my hand to the doorknob and opened the door and stood there in the hall, watching a widening view of the room past the slowly opening door, their heads first, then their bodies, then the rest of the room, the light from the single lamp flooding over me now as I stood, feet wide, the pistol dangling in my right hand.

    They had finished now and lay unmoving. Somehow, this was the final and absolute, the incredible peak of their crime. To lie as I myself had so often lain with her, weak and empty and warm, all of my love poured out into her and all of hers risen to meet it, to take it, to encompass it, with the warmth and the knowledge sweet inside of me that she was mine and I was hers-that was the part of it I could not bear anyone else having. The other part was instinctual, animal; but this was the human part of it, and by having it too, this man had taken it from me forever.

    I raised the gun and placed the sight on his head. At that moment her head swiveled, and she looked at me and I saw the quick movement and then our eyes met. I lashed her with hate and scorn and shame and rage; she lashed me with fear and despair and wild, disbelieving horror.

    

    

    She screamed then, and the man rolled swiftly over to look toward the door and saw me and the gun. He yelled too, not a scream, but a quick, short shout, surprise and fear mingled in it, but not tenor, not horror, Not yet.

    He put his feet to the floor and sat up, his motions even and slow, as if not wanting to scare a nervy horse, and his voice was very gentle as he spoke:

    "You got a right to shoot, Harry."

    "No! Oh, Harry, no!"

    She was crouched beside him on the bed then, her eyes stricken with pleading and fear, her hair wild now, and her breasts which had always thrust forward, a little too large, but high and firm and stirring, now sagging, her skin not pink-white, but stark white, and her mouth dry and narrow and old, not curving, alive, red.

    "Listen, Harry. You can't. Let me tell you, Harry-"

    I took a step forward and her voice stopped, abruptly, on the same note, and oddly I was aware again of my soaked, clinging clothes, somehow more obscene than their absolute nudity.

    "Did you whisper in his ear? Like you do in mine?"

    I had not known I would say it until the voice, surely not my own. rasped in the stillness.

    Her hand went to her throat, the white rounded arm covering one breast, the other curiously out of place without its mate, her stomach pulled flat with a sharp intake of breath.

    "Look, Harry." The man's voice was still gentle. "Take it easy. You got a right to shoot me. Sure you have. But think a minute, Harry-"

    "Shut up." I didn't take my eyes from Lucy.

    "Did you say those things you always say, those words you use? Did you do that, too?"

    Thought was coming back to me, thought to go with the pain and shame and fury, and it was the more intolerable because of the thinking. This can't be happening, I thought. None of it is true. It will go away with the rain. It can't be happening to me, to Harry London.

    Lucy was speaking now, quickly, her voice harsh, the charm and the allure gone out of her, and only the nakedness and the fear left.

    "I can tell you how it was, Harry! He made me do it… he forced me. Please, please, don't look at me that way until I tell you about it, Marry!"

    "I won't shoot you," I said. "You don't have to beg. Just him. Just Stewart."

    "Listen to me," Stewart said. "You're mad. You're hurt. I don't blame you. Hut shooting me won't help, it won't do any good. You'll go to the chair for it, Harry."

    I laughed. "The chair," I said. I laughed again. "In this county? For killing a guy I catch with my wife?"

    "It's murder."

    "Murder is a word. Murder is when you killed somebody, the word they use. Murder's not when you step on a snake."

    "Harry, please," Lucy said. "Don't make it worse. If you'd only listen…"

    "I used to laugh about you, Stewart. We all did. The Great Lover, we called you. We wondered how long you could get away with your tomcatting without getting shot. And now I know. Now I know."

    Suddenly, their nudity together was an obscenity not to be borne. "You." I flicked the gun at Stewart. "Get your clothes on."

    He stood up, slowly, easily, fear still in his eyes, but not yet panic. I could figure him, how he was still thinking, still figuring, knowing there was a way out, that he only had to find it, the path, the words that would get him out of it. I saw it all in the darkly handsome face, the blue eyes, the set of the broad shoulders.