Without disturbing her, I shifted my position ever-so-slightly, and I took another look at her.
And I thought, I have seen Manny sleep like this, too. Manny who thus far has done everything but kill me, and doubtless plans to do just that.
Then, I thought, Connie looked thus also, for God’s sake! The homeliest, scrawniest broad in the world has at least a moment of surpassing beauty, else a majority of the world’s female population would go unscrewed and unmarried. And I thought that Connie would probably like to kill me, and quite likely would do so if she knew how to safely wangle it.
And I thought, And how about Kay, this lovely child? For all I know about her—or DON’T know about her—she too, could have my murder on her mind. Yeah, verily, even while screwing me, she could be plotting my slaughter. Perhaps she would see my death as atonement for her misuse by guys who had used her. Guys who thought she was awful and not a nice girl just because she did it.
Finally, in that prescient moment preceding sleep, I thought, Congratulations, Rainstar. You have done it again. A very small puddle was in your path, one that you could have walked through without dampening your shoe soles. Yet you shrank—you chronic shrinker!—from even that small hazard. You must spring over the literal wet spot in your walkway, and that mess you came down in on the other side was definitely not a beehive.
21
Manny came out to the house the next day.
She looked very beautiful. Her illness had left her even lovelier than she had been, and…but I believe we’ve already covered that. So let us move on.
I was naturally pretty wary, and she also was on guard. We exchanged greetings, stiffly, and moved on to a stilted exchange of conversational banalities. With that behind us, I think we were on the point of breaking the ice when Kay popped in with the coffee service. She declared brightly that she just knew that we two convalescents would feel better after a good cup of coffee, and she poured and passed a cup to each of us.
Manny barely tasted hers, and said it was very good.
I tasted mine, and also lied about it.
Kay said she would just wait until we finished it, by which time doubtless, since I was not feeling very well, Miss Aloe would want to leave. Manny promptly put her cup down, and stood up.
“I’ll leave right now, Britt. It was thoughtless of me to come out so soon, so—”
“Sit down,” I said. “I am quite well, and I’m sure that neither of us wants any more of this coffee. So please remove it, Miss Nolton, and leave Miss Aloe and me to conduct our business in private.”
Manny said timidly that she would be glad to come back another time. But I told her again to sit down, and she sat. Kay snatched up the coffee things and clumped to the door. She turned around there, addressing me with sorrowful reproach.
“I was just doing my job, Mr. Rainstar. I’m responsible for your health, you know.”
“I know,” I said, “and I’m grateful.”
“It would be easier for me if I wasn’t so conscientious. My salary would be the same, and it would be a lot easier for me, if I didn’t do—”
“I’d better leave,” said Manny, picking up her purse.
“And I think you’d better not!” I said. “I think Miss Nolton had better leave—right this minute!”
Kay left, slamming the door behind her. I smiled apologetically at Manny.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “She’s a very nice young woman, and she’s very good at her job. But sometimes…”
“Mmm. I’ll just bet she is!” Manny said, and then, with a small diffident gesture, “I want to tell you something, and it’s, well, not easy for me. Could you come a little closer, please?”
“Of course,” I said, and I moved over to her side on the love seat. I waited, and her lips parted, then closed again. And she looked at me helplessly, apparently unable to find the words for what she wanted to say.
I told her gently to take her time, we had all the time in the world; and then, by way of easing her tenseness, I asked her if she remembered the last time we had been in this room together.
“It was months ago, and I thought I’d lost the pamphlet-writing job before I even had it. So I was sitting here with my head in my hands, feeling sorry as hell for myself. And I wasn’t aware that you’d come into the room until—”
“Of course, I remember!” She clapped her hands delightedly. “You looked like this”—she puffed her cheeks out and rolled her eyes inward in a hilarious caricature of despair. “That’s just the way you looked, darling. And then I said:
“Lo, the Poor Indian”
“Lo, the Poor Indian” we said in unison.
We laughed, and smiled at each other. She took my month’s retainer from her purse and gave it to me, and we went on smiling at one another. And she spoke to me in a voice as soft and tender as her smile.
“Poor Lo. How are you, my dearest darling?”
“Well, you know”—I shrugged. “For a guy who’s been shot out of the saddle a few times, not bad, not bad at all.”
“I’m sorry, Britt. Terribly, terribly sorry. That’s what I was trying to tell you. I haven’t been myself. At least, I hope the self I’ve been showing wasn’t the real Manuela Aloe, but I’m going to be all right now. I—I—”
“Of course, you’re going to be all right,” I said. “I pulled a lousy trick on you, and you paid me off for it. So now we’re all even-steven.”
“Nothing more will happen to you, Britt! I swear it won’t.”
“Didn’t I just say so?” I said. “Now, be a nice girl and say no more about it, and start reading these beautiful words I’ve written for you.”
She said, All right, Britt, swallowing heavily, eyes shining too brightly. Then the tears brimmed over, and she began to weep silently and I hastily looked away. Because I’d never known what to do when a woman started crying, and I particularly didn’t know what to do when the woman was Manny.
“Aah, Britt,” she said tremulously. “How could I ever have been mean to anyone as nice as you?”
“Doggone it, everyone keeps asking me that!” I said. “And what the heck can I tell them?”
She laughed tearily. She said, “Britt, oh, Britt, my darling!” and then she broke down completely, great sobs tearing through her body.
I held her and patted her head, and that sort of thing. I took out my breast-pocket handkerchief and dabbed her eyes, and honked her nose in it. Conscious that there was something a little nutty about performing such chores for a girl who had almost killed me, even though she hadn’t meant to. Conscious that I again might be playing the chump, and, at the moment, not really caring if I was.
I crossed to my desk, and began putting the pages I had written into an envelope. I took my time about it, giving her time to pull herself together. Rattling on with some backhanded kidding to brighten things up.
“Now, hear me,” I said. “I don’t want you looking at this bawling and honking your schnozzle, and being so disgustingly messy. Us Noble Redmen don’t put up with such white-eye tricks, get me, you silly squaw?”
“G-gotcha…” A small and shaky snicker. “Silly squaw always gets Noble Redman.”
“Well, I just hope you’re not speaking with a forked tongue,” I said. “These are very precious words, lovingly typed on top grade erasable-bond paper, and God pity you if you louse them up.”
“All right, Britt…”
She did sound like she was, so I turned back around. I helped her up from the love seat, gave her a small pat on the bottom and pressed the envelope into her hands. As I walked her to the front door, I told her a little about the manuscript and said that I would look forward to hearing from her about it. She said that I would, no later than the day after the morrow.
“No, wait a minute,” she said. “Today’s Friday, isn’t it?”
“All day, I believe.”
“Let’s make it Monday, then. I’ll see you Monday.”
“No one should ever see anyone on Monday,??
? I said. “Let’s make it Tuesday.”
We settled on a Tuesday P.M. meeting. Pausing at the front door, she glanced out to where her own car stood in the driveway and asked what had happened to mine. “I hope the company hasn’t pulled another booboo and come out and gotten it, Britt. After all the stupid mix-ups we’ve had in the past, that would be a little too much.”
“No, no,” I said. “Everything is as it should be. I believe that exposure to the elements is good for a car, helps it to grow strong and tough, you know. But since I haven’t been using it these several weeks, I locked it up in the garage.”
“Yes?” She looked up at me curiously. “But you get out a little bit, don’t you? You don’t stay in the house all the time?”
“That’s what I do,” I said “Doctor’s orders. I think it’s pretty extreme, but…” I shrugged, leaving the sentence unfinished.
Again, she gave me a curious frown. “Very strange,” she murmured, a slight chill coming into her voice. “I was certain that the doctors would want you to get a little fresh air and sunshine.”
I said that, Oh, well, she knew how doctors were, knowing that it sounded pretty feeble. Actually, of course, it was not the doctors but Claggett who had absolutely forbidden me to leave the house.
Manny said, Yes, she did know how doctors were. “I’ll say good-bye here, then. I wouldn’t want you to go against orders by walking to my car with me.”
“Oh, now, wait a minute,” I said, taking a quick look over my shoulder. “Of course, I’ll walk to the car with you.”
I tucked her arm through mine, and we crossed the porch and started down the steps.
We descended to the driveway and sauntered the few steps to her car. I helped her into it, and closed the door quietly.
Mrs. Olmstead was out shopping per usual, so she could not reveal my sneaking out of the house. But I was fearful that Kay might spot me, and come storming out to yank me back inside again.
“Well, good-bye, darling,” I said, and I stooped and hastily kissed Manny. “Take care, and I’ll see you Tuesday.”
“Wait, Britt. Please!”
“Yes?” I threw another quick glance over my shoulder. “I love being with you, dear, but I really shouldn’t be standing out here.”
“It’s just me, isn’t it? You’re afraid of being here with me.”
“Dammit, no,” I said. “That isn’t it at all. It’s just that, I—”
“I told you nothing more would happen to you, Britt. I’m all right now, and there’ll never be anything like that again, and—Don’t you believe me?”
Her voice broke and she turned her head quickly, looking at the scantily populated countryside across the road. There were a few houses scattered over a wide area, and land had been graded for a number of others. But everything had come to a halt with the advent of the garbage dump on former Rainstar property.
“Manny,” I said. “Listen to me. Please listen to me, Manny.”
“Well?” She faced me again, but slowly, her gaze still lingering on the near-empty expanse beyond the road, seeming to search for something there. “Yes, Britt?”
“I’m not afraid of being here with you at all. You said that nothing more would happen to me, and I believe you. It’s just that I’m supposed to stay in the house—not to come outside at all. And I’m afraid there’ll be a hell of a brouhaha if—”
“But you’ve been going out.” Manny smiled at me thinly. “You’ve been going out and staying out for hours.”
“What?” I said. “Why do you say that?”
“Why?” she said. “Yes, why do I? I’ve certainly no right to make an issue of it.”
And before I could say anything more, she nodded coldly and drove away.
I looked after her, as her car sped down the driveway and turned into the road, became lost in the dust of the ubiquitous dump trucks wending their way toward the garbage hummocks.
I turned away, vaguely troubled, and moved absently toward the porch.
I went up the steps, still discomfited and puzzled by Manny’s attitude, but grateful that Kay had not discovered me in my fracture of a strict order. One of the few unhappy aspects of sex is that it places you much too close physically while you are still mentally poles apart. So that a categorical imperative is apt to be juxtaposed with a constitutional impossibility, for how can one kick someone—or part of someone—that he has laved with love.
I couldn’t face up to the consequences of Kay Nolton’s throwing her weight around with me again. No sadist I, I could not slug the provably and delightfully screwable.
I reached the top step, and—
There was a sudden angry sound at my ear, the buzz of a maddened hornet. The hornet zoomed in and stung me painfully on the forehead, the sting burning like acid.
I slapped at it, then rubbed the tortured flesh with my fingers. As a boy, growing up on the old place, I had been “hit” by hornets many times. But I could remember none having the effect of this one.
It was numbing, almost as if I had been hit by an instrument that was at once edged and blunt. I felt a little dizzy and faint, and—
I took my hand away from my head.
I stared at it stupidly.
It was red and wet, dripping with blood, and more blood was dripping down onto the age-faded wood of the porch.
My knees buckled slowly, and I sank down to them. My eyes closed, and I slowly toppled over and lay prone.
My last thought, before I lost consciousness, was of Manny. Her indirect insistence that I accompany her to her car. The hurt in her voice and her eyes when I had hesitated about leaving the safety of the house—hurt which I could only expunge by doing what I had been sternly ordered not to do.
So I had done as she wanted, because I loved her and believed in her.
And then, loving and trusting her, I had remained out in the open exposed to the danger which is always latent in loving and trusting.
I had lingered at the side of her car, pleading with her. And she had sat with her back turned to me, her gaze searching the landscape, apparently searching it for…? A signal? A rifle, say, with a telescopic sight.
I heard myself laugh, even as the very last of my consciousness glimmered away. Because, you see, it was really terribly funny. Almost as funny as it was sad.
I had always shunned guns, always maintaining that guns had been known to kill people and even defenseless animals, and that those who fooled around with guns had holes in their heads. And now, I…I…I had been…and I had a hole in my…
22
When I came back into my consciousness, I was lying on my own bed, and Kay was hunkered down at the bedside, staring anxiously into my face.
I started to rear up, but she pressed me back upon the pillows. I stammered nonsensically, “What why where how…” and then the jumble in my mind cleared, and I said, “How did I get up here? Who brought me up?”
“Shhh,” said Kay. “I—we made it together, remember? With me steering you, and hanging onto you for dear life.”
“Mrs. Olmstead helped you. I wouldn’t have thought the old gal had it in her.”
“Mrs. Olmstead isn’t back yet. She’s never around when you need her for anything. Now, will you just shut up for goodness sake, and tell me how—Doggone it, anyway!” Kay scowled, her voice rising angrily. “It’s just too darned much! I have to follow that woman around, do everything over after she’s done it! I have to watch you every minute, to keep you from doing something silly, and all I get is bawled out for it! I have to—”
“Oh, come on now,” I said, “it really isn’t that bad, is it?”
“Yes, it is! And now you’ve made me lose control of myself, and act as crazy as you are! Now, you listen to me, Britt Rainstar! Are you listening?”
She was trembling with fury, her face an unrelieved white against the contrasting red of her hair. I tried to take her hand, and she knocked it away. Then, she quickly recovered it and squeezed it, smiling at me determinedly through
gritted teeth.
“I asked you if you were—oh, the heck with it,” she said. “How are you feeling, honey?”
“Tol’able, ma’am,” I said. “Tolerable. How are you?”
She said she was darned mad, that’s how she was. Then she told me to hold still, darn it, and she tested the strip of adhesive bandage on my forehead. And then she leaned down and gently kissed it.
“Does it hurt very much, Britt?”
“You wouldn’t ask that, if you were really a nurse.”
“What? What do you mean by that?”
“Anyone with the slightest smattering of medical knowledge knows that when you kiss something you make it well.”
“Ha!” She brushed her lips against mine. “You were told not to leave this house, Britt. Not under any circumstances. Why did you do it?”
“It wasn’t really going out,” I said. “I just saw Miss Aloe to her car.”
“And you got shot.”
“But there was no connection between the two events. She’d been gone for, oh, a couple of minutes when it happened.”
“What does that prove?”
“I’m sure she had nothing to do with it,” I said stubbornly. “She told me she was sorry for what she’d done, and she swore that there’d be no more trouble. And she was telling the truth! I know she was, Kay.”
“And I know you got shot.” Kay said. “I also know that I’ll get blamed for it. It’s not my fault. You practically threw me out of your office, and told me to leave you alone. I was only t-trying to look after you, b-but you—”
I cut in on her, telling her to listen to me and listen good. And when she persisted, obviously working herself up to a tear storm, I took her by the shoulders and shook her.
“Don’t you pull that on me!” I said. “Don’t pretend that that little stunt you pulled down in my office was an attempt to protect me. You were just being nosy. Acting like a jealous wife. Miss Aloe and I were discussing business, and—”
“Ha! I know her kind of business. She’s got her business right in her—well, never mind. I won’t say it.”