And Now the News (33 page)

“It's all right,” she said again. “There's nobody around but us.”

“What about Kewkie?”

“I sent him to town to tell the sheriff about Roy.”

He tried to swallow but there wasn't anything to swallow. His mouth was dry as an alkali flat in a droughty August. “Tell him
what
about Roy?”

“How he got killed.”

Vic Ryan didn't say anything.

“Got killed fighting with the nester,” she amended.

His mouth opened and breath rushed in, but nothing could come out because of the cool hand she laid on it. “It makes everything come out right,” she said. He wished she would talk without fixing her eyes so hard on him; he felt like a skunk pitchforked to a henhouse wall. She got larger, or moved closer, he couldn't tell which. “Vic …” she said.

He wanted something of this woman, and he couldn't name the thing he wanted. He knew, though, what he didn't want. “Where's my clothes?”

“Vic,” she whispered.

“Where's my clothes?” She was still for so long that he turned to look at her. “Well?”

“I'll get them,” she said in a low voice. She rose and turned with one motion so that she did not face him again. He lay looking out the window, eastward down the valley, and the only thought he could capture was something that couldn't matter now: Roy had been the only one at Circle F who didn't care if the nester came or went.

He heard the soft
plath
of cloth on wood, but did not turn his head until he heard the door close. Then he rose and for the first time in years dressed from neck to toenails in clean, ironed, mended garments. He found his boots by the bed—not the ones he had worn last night, but dry ones from the bunkhouse, all scraped and oiled.

He stepped out into the kitchen. Hot coffee steamed in a china mug beside a platter of eggs and bacon, a bowl of butter with the paddle-marks still on it, and bread that had to be oven-new, for he could smell it. “Dig in,” she said.

He wondered why she had to speak before he could notice that she had changed while he was dressing; she now wore a simple, starched house dress with bright little strawberries and green leaves printed over it. He had seen her in it before, but never with her hair this way and her mouth all different. He sat down before the food, and saliva squirted so heartily he felt pain under his tongue.

“You sure fix everything the way it should be.”

She shot him a quick look, “Everything?”

He ate, thinking hard about eating; but pretty soon he'd eaten it all, so he had to say, “Roy's dead. Ain't things a little cheery around here?”

“Yes!” she said fiercely.

“All right,” he said. He watched her picking up dishes, the way she moved. “You thought right away it was the nester done it?”

“Anybody would think so—why not? Didn't he threaten us all with a gun? I was there. I remember. You were there. Besides, he's just a squatter and Roy had the right to drive him out.”

“I tell my story, you tell yours, and everything's all straightened out.”

“Yes,” she said. Suddenly she smiled at him. He didn't like it. She
asked, “Thought about what you'll do then?”

He hadn't but he did now, and there was no hesitation. “I'm going to get just as far away from here as I can get.”

She came quietly and sat down opposite him at the table. “You wouldn't do that.” She was gazing at him the way she had in the bedroom; he could feel it like heat on his lowered eyelids.

He muttered, “I couldn't stay here without … with just the two of us. People would … it wouldn't be right.”

“It could be right, if—”

Slowly he raised his eyes. Hers were fixed on her hands, which turned and churned and pressed each other, trembling. Abruptly he laughed. “I still don't have but a saddle and a skillet!”

She colored. “Oh … you remember everything, don't you?” Suddenly she took his hand. It burned him. She said, “Can't you see it's all different now? I have all this—everything. And besides, you never could understand: it wasn't me who turned you down, it was Roy. Roy wouldn't chance a better man as a relative. If I'd married you, he'd have thrown us both out, or burned down the place if we wouldn't go. That was the one thing he prided himself on all these years—keeping you on, keeping us apart.”

“I still don't have nothing.”

“You do! You do! Or you would … I have the Circle F, but you have me!” she cried.

And now, only now, he knew what else it was that had been waiting—waiting all these years deep inside him—part and parcel of the thing he had relieved on the trail yesterday. “Ask me right out.”

“Wh-what?”

“Ask me,” he said. Something began to pulse, to kick. “Ask me what you want.”

“I don't—”

“I'm going to roll my blanket,” he said. “I'll leave as soon as—”

“Marry me,” she whispered, and lowered her face to her arm.

He laughed. “I can't hear you.”

“Marry me.”

“Beg me.”

“Why you—you …”

She stood up and looked down at his laughing face. “I do, Victor—I beg you marry me.”

And that was the other thing, and that was all. His secret place closed down on itself with its secrets gone, and he could feel it healing; and he yelled,
“NO, by God!”

When he looked down at her face he was frightened. He sidled up off the bench, his eyes on her like those of a hypnotized bird, and backed off a safe two paces. For moments they hung like that, and then there was the thump and rumble of horses, and they turned to stare out at the yard. The sheriff, three deputies, the coroner, Kewkie. They dismounted, and went where Kewkie pointed—the saddle shed.

Delia's voice, when she spoke, had the frightening overtones of that hawk's shriek Vic had heard the day they warned the nester. She said, “Better have your story straight when they come in. It's got to be the same now as at the trial.”

“I'm not worried.”

“You should be,” she said. “When we cornered the nester he ran for his gun. What he brought out must have been the only gun he had—a shotgun. Roy wasn't killed by a shotgun.”

“All this time you—”

“I could testify the nester had a carbine,” she said coolly. “And if you did too it would be the word of both of us against the nester. I'd be glad to testify that way, Vic, if you wanted me to.”

“Well, I want you to.”

“Matter of fact, there's a way to keep me from testifying against you—ever.”

Steps on the porch, knuckles on the door. “Yes,” he said blackly. “I know three ways.” He turned his back on her and opened the door.

“Howdy, Vic. Miss Fox.”

“Howdy, Sheriff. You been in the saddle shed?”

“A second,” said the sheriff. He was a gray little man with what looked like brand-new eyes. “Doctor's in there now. I saw all I needed. Sorry, Miss Fox.”

Delia clasped her hands together, watching Vic Ryan. “Did you get the nester?” she asked the sheriff.

“He's safe and snug in the jailhouse,” said the sheriff.

Vic's eyes met Delia's. With sudden, profound composure she inquired, “Well, what can we do for you now, Sheriff?”

“Just tell me what you know,” said the sheriff. “Miss Fox? Vic?”

“I'll give you mine first,” said Vic Ryan tautly. To Delia, he said, “Marrying you is the first way. This here's the second.”

“What?” asked the sheriff.

“Nothing. Something we were talking about when you came in. Sheriff, I killed Roy Fox—shot him going away, on the trail. That nester, he didn't have but a shotgun.”

Delia Fox screamed.

The sheriff blinked. “Well, that's enough to start out with. I'll have to have your gun, Vic.”

“The carbine? It's in the bunkhouse. Or were you talking about this one?” and he unholstered his Colt and held it so it pointed exactly on the bowknot on the cotton belt of Delia Fox's starched house dress. “This here's the third way,” he said softly.

Nobody breathed for a time. Then the sheriff said, “You better stop playing around now, Vic.”

“Sure,” said Vic, and handed him the gun. “I wouldn't shoot you, Delia. You're dead already. I hope you live to be a hundred and twelve and spend it countin' your money.”

Delia Fox cast her eyes in one wide arc, taking in the shabby Circle F, its people, all its shabby years. She gasped, “But the nester—”

“Oh, that nester, sure,” said the sheriff grimly. “You know, folks, I'd give a good deal to hear the story you were about to tell just now … guess I never will, and it don't really matter any more. The nester—I got him in jail all right. Had him there three days, going on four, tucked in safe and snug with his wife and kid. That's where he wanted to be, so we let him. You folks scared the chips out that pore farmer; he wouldn't've stayed on his little spread past your deadline to save his everlastin'.”

Delia covered her face.

Vic Ryan said, “Roy would've been real proud.”

The sheriff said, “So you see how perplexin' it was to be keepin' a man in the jailhouse for his own protection, and then have someone
ride in with the rumor he'd killed Roy Fox fifty miles away.” Delia whispered, “Vic, please—”

“Come on,” said Vic Ryan to the sheriff. “Whatever she's got to say, I'd still rather hang.” Inside, he felt good, the way a man must feel if he has everything, has done everything, he ever really wanted.

P
EOPLE LOVE
E
LOISE
M
ICHAUD
—by the millions they love her. Eloise wrote
To Bed, To Bed
, which sold more copies than
Gone with the Wind
—more, even, than
Furilla's Rose
, which Ellie Michaud also wrote. The critics throw up their hands and the sophisticated cry corn, and she sells and sells and sells.

She writes as if she truly believes in the Triumph of Good over Evil. Eloise does believe—evenly, sweetly and firmly—in enforcing virtue by summary execution. But neither readers nor critics know about that. Her characters, for all their Diors and Dusenbergs, live in the Age of Chivalry, when Knighthood was in Flower, and dispense unalloyed and unabashed Romance. Millions love it, and her.

Eloise, in turn, loved a guy. She met him at a literary tea, right after he had called a newspaperman Mister and then punched him in the nose.

“You can't talk about Miss Michaud that way around
me
, Mister.”
Wham!

She asked somebody who he was, and, for a while, nobody could find out, because he had nothing to do with the book business, he was only one of the loving millions.

When she did hear his name, that was about it, all by itself. The only time she had ever voted in her young life, it was for Vito Marcantonio, and that sight unseen and solely because she had never heard a lovelier name.

The honest-to-Christmas name of this cavalier of the cocktails was Lancelot deMarcopolo, pronounced MarCOpolo. He was in the automobile business, not the business that buys and sells cars, but the business that buys and sells car dealers.

Eloise got herself introduced by a queenly crook of the fingers. She acknowledged him with a regal inclination of her kitten head
and demanded the rosebud from his lapel. She took the flower and, holding it with both hands, placed it in the soft concavity between her chin and her lower lip. Over it, she glowed at him.

During their subsequent meetings, which were soon and often, Lance confessed and anatomized his passion for her. He even gave her its (the passion's, of course) biography. It had been born of a book jacket, the one responsible for the only really nice thing ever said about Eloise Michaud in a metropolitan review—“The photo-portrait on the book jacket will move as many books as, say, good writing might. To be honest, however, the picture is worth quite the price of the volume. Miss Michaud is the most scrumptious scrivener ever to set pen to the paper of a book-club contract.”

Lance deMarcopolo bought this picture, book attached, for his night table, and found himself reading the thing. It was the first real book he had read all the way through since
Raggedy Andy
and it entranced him.

“Who,” he once answered a critical friend, “
wants
to read about people you know, anyway?”

He found complete harmony between book and portrait. Both were open, honest, innocent,
good
. He was not disenchanted as he came to know her, either. He found what he looked for. Other men had found the same things, but he was the first to believe his own eyes.

Ultimately, he asked her to marry him—just what she wanted him to ask—and he did it just the way she wanted him to, in a penthouse, on his knees, with the lamps low, and sweet music murmuring from somewhere. She said yes, and he took her home at a decent hour and removed his hat before kissing her good night. Eloise sighed as the door closed after he left, then went and banged the typewriter all night.

They set a date and made a lot of arrangements, which required pretty close timing what with his out-of-town affairs and her lecture tour and press interviews and all. It was his charming conceit to have her begin married life with nothing she had owned before—everything new, everything custom-made.

Eloise was charmed—with all that royalty money in the bank she could afford it. Exceptions to the regime of burnished newness were few—the manuscript and notes for her unfinished book, the ancient typewriter on which she had written everything she ever published, some heirloom jewelry.

Then Binghamton reared its head.

She called him, in desperation, at the last possible moment and explained. This was the one lecture she hadn't been able to cancel or postpone. The only possible way to handle everything in time for the honeymoon plane reservations was for her to go to Binghamton now—and so, would he pick up just those one or two things at her place and get them checked somewhere safe.