Bring Him Back Dead (17 page)

He expected Olga to cry. She didn’t. “Then I have no brother,” she said, dry-eyed. Her voice was small but fierce. “Believe me, had I known that Georgi had any part in what almost happened to you, I would have killed him myself before such a thing could be.”

Latour sat on the edge of the bed, enjoying the pleasure of just looking at her, wondering how he could possibly have been so stupid. Olga meant what she said.

She shrugged her bare shoulders. “As for this man Avart you say desired me, I could have told you that two years ago. It was in his eyes every time he looked at me.”

Latour felt his way cautiously and told the things he wanted to tell. “Jean has a lot of money.”

“So what is that to me? I am married to you.”

“But you thought I had money when you married me.”

Olga considered the matter. “True. From the time I was very small I was raised with the one idea, to marry a wealthy man. And when we first came to this country, when we thought there was oil on your land, I was very hopeful. All of my dreams had come true.”

“Until they shut down the test wells.”

“That was not your fault. You couldn’t help it if there was no oil.”

“Then why have you treated me like you have for the last two years?”

Olga shook her head. “That is not the question. The question is how you have treated me. You built a wall between us. You no longer even conversed with me. You acted as if I despised you.” She pressed her right hand to her heart “Which, believe me, I never did. I still remember my lover. The husband I had in Singapore. The husband I had on the ship that brought us to this country.”

Her small body swelled with indignation. She was more angry than Latour had ever seen her before.

“But when we found out that instead of being rich, we were only going to have a modest income, did you come to me and say, ‘I am sorry, Olga. But I love you just as deeply. Nothing will ever change that?’ ”

She answered her own question.

“No. If you had, I would have waited on the tables in a café. I would have worked in a store to get you money. Nothing would have mattered, because I would have known that you loved me. But instead you built this wall I could not climb. I cook a meal for you. I cook three meals each day but most of the the time you do not even come home to eat them.”

Hot tears filled her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. She brushed them away with an angry gesture.

“At night, before we go to sleep I have never once failed to offer to be a wife to you. But night after night you do not take me. What am I to think but that is there is some other woman? Judging from what used to be between us, God knows how many other women.”

She cried even harder.

“And when you do take me, as you did the other night, and I do everything I know to please you, to bring back what we once had, what happens? You do not even say, ‘That was nice,’ or ‘I love you, Olga,’ or any of the other little things a wife has a right to be told. You make me feel like a prostitute who has just stayed with a man for her supper.”

She cried in silence for a moment. Then her Oriental background got the better of her righteous indignation. She wiped her eyes on the hem of her slip and stood up.

Her voice was composed. “I am sorry. Such things a wife should not say to her husband. It is just that I have been so upset. I am so glad you are safe I forget my place. You are hungry?”

Latour sat on the bed and unlaced his shoes and took them off. The fault had been his, not Olga’s. In his own hurt and resentment he had created a bitch where none existed. He felt slightly smug. Every man in French Bayou, in the entire United States, for that matter, should have such a wife. How to tell her, how to undo the past two years, was the problem.

“No,” he said, “I’m not hungry.”

Olga was understanding. She knelt in front of him and pulled off his socks. “But very tired.”

Latour finished undressing and lay back on the bed. “That I’ll buy. I feel as if I could sleep for a week.”

“No wonder, after such an experience.”

Latour turned his head on the pillow. “Where were you going just now?”

“Down to the jail,” Olga told him. “I thought if I applied in person to Mr. Mullen he could tell me more about you.”

“But it’s three miles to town.”

“That’s true.”

“How did you expect to get there?”

“The same way I did when I brought you your breakfast and lunch. I have legs. I can walk.”

Latour admired them. “So I see.” He patted the bed beside him. “Sit down here a minute, honey.”

Olga was pleased. “I like to have you call me that. It is almost as nice as sweetheart or darling.”

“It means the same thing.”

Latour tried to put what he felt in words. After the past two years, it was impossible. It was something that he would have to prove by constant daily attention. He could tell her one thing. “There has never been any other woman, Olga. Not since the day we were married.”

“What about this other girl?”

“What other girl?”

“The red-haired one. The one Mr. Avart abused. You were not attracted to her?”

Latour was truthful. “Yes, I was. As any man is attracted to a pretty girl. In fact, the night I drove her home we made a tentative date. But, looking back, I don’t think I meant to keep it when I made it. And after I’d come home to you, I — well, I wasn’t even physically attracted to her.”

Olga was pathetically pleased. “You make me very happy.”

“When I left here that night I was acting strictly as a deputy sheriff. She was, in a way, my responsibility, and all I wanted to do was make certain she was safe.”

“What sort of girl is she?”

“I don’t know,” Latour said. “She may be a tart, but I doubt it. I’d say she was basically good, but a bit confused. A nice small-town girl who made a tragic mistake in marrying an old man. The kind of girl who should be married to some young farmer or an oil-field roughneck. And if it’s all right with you, when she gets out of the hospital, I’d like to give her enough of a stake to get her back to her home town, where she can start all over again.”

“Of course it is all right with me.”

Latour debated telling Olga about the new status of their wells and decided the news would keep. He didn’t want to cheapen the moment, not now that he knew how she felt about having or not having money.

“Know something?” he asked her.

“What?”

“I love you.”

For a moment he thought Olga was going to cry again, but she didn’t. Instead she bent over and brushed his lips with hers. “And I love you. Very much. I am very proud to have such a man for my husband and the father of my children.”

“Our children.”

Olga touched the still visible tooth marks on his chest with the tips of her fingers and blushed.

“How come?” Latour asked. “I mean how come you’re blushing? And what’s this business about children?”

Her voice small, Olga said, “In the old country — that is, the country from which my grandparents came — when a wife is moved to such ecstasy that she unknowingly bites her husband during the act of love, it is said to be a sign.”

“A sign of what?”

Olga’s voice was even smaller. “That God has seen fit to plant one of His seeds. I hope so. I hope so sincerely.”

The thought of Olga having a child by him was pleasing. It would, of course, be a boy. The first of four or five children to inherit everything he had dreamed their children would have. His hand tightened spasmodically on the silk and the firm flesh it covered.

Olga misunderstood the spasmodic caress. “You are not too tired to wish me to retire with you?”

Latour killed the last of the mental tigers that had stalked him for two years. “With your brother in jail, because of me?”

Olga repeated what she’d said before. “I have no brother. I have only a husband.”

“Yeah. Sure. A two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month small-town deputy sheriff.”

“The money you earn is sufficient for our needs.”

“Barely.”

Olga’s smile was sardonic. “Now you are being humorous. You have been in the Far East. You know what conditions are in most of the countries where I have lived. Yes, truly, we are very poor. All we have is a comfortable house and a motor car and a television set and electricity and running water and all we can possibly eat.” She added, “And a bed with an inner-spring mattress. But I believe that I asked you a question.”

Latour’s grin felt tight. “Well, when you put it that way — yes, I’m tired, but you come to bed with me.”

Olga lowered the shades on the windows. Then she pulled her slip over her head and lay beside him.

“It is for you to say. You are the husband.”

Latour held her without passion. That could and would come later. The twittering of the birds in the trees in the yard, even the distant pumping wells, were muted by the magic of the moment. He felt slightly breathless, like a man who had run a long way through a vast, almost impenetrable
jungle and suddenly emerged into the sun.

For now it was enough to feel Olga’s heart beat rhythmically against his, to taste the sweetness of her lips, to savor the promise of her body pressed to his, to know he was safe in her arms.

THE END