Hot Spot (7 page)

“Well, I’ll see you around, baby,” he said. He got in his car and drove off.

She sat there for a few minutes after he left, just staring off at nothing, and then she slowly gathered everything up and put it in the car. When she was out of sight down the road I walked over to the porch. The picture was lying face up in the sand. I picked it up. It looked fine except for the smear of red he had drawn across it from one corner to the other. He liked his little joke, all right.

One of these days somebody would probably kill him. I wondered who.

Monday evening while I was putting on a fresh shirt the landlady knocked on the door.

“Telephone, Mr. Madox.”

I went down the hall to the phone. “Hello. Madox,” I said.

“Harry,” she said, “why didn’t you call me?”

“You think I’m crazy?”

“I want to see you, Harry.”

“Look—”

“I miss you.”

I started to tell her to go to hell and then hang up, but I didn’t. I began to think about her. She could do that to you, even on the phone. Maybe it was because her voice matched the rest of her.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“At the drugstore. I thought I’d go to the movie, but again I may not. I’m sort of restless—you know how it is. So I might go for a ride.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe up the highway about five miles to where a road turns off to the right and goes over to an old sawmill. It’s not hard to find. Once you get on the road you can’t get off.”

I put the phone back on the cradle. She’d said it, all right. Once you got on the road you couldn’t get off.

I tried to eat some dinner, but it was straw and it choked me. I walked restlessly up the sidewalk, going nowhere. Sutton was in front of the pool hall with a handful of numbers from a tip board, reading them and throwing them on the sidewalk. He nodded and we looked at each other. I thought of what he had said to Gloria Harper. He liked his laughs so well, why not shag him one in the mouth and watch him laugh his teeth out? Why not mind his own business? He wasn’t shoving me around, was he? And I wasn’t Gloria Harper’s mother.

I got in the car. Why try to pretend I wasn’t going out there? Did I think I could kid myself? I found the road without any trouble. The moon wasn’t up yet, and it was very dark under the trees. The old sawmill was on the side of a wooded ravine a mile or so from the highway. I saw a dilapidated shed and a pile of sawdust in the headlights, but there was no other car. I cut the lights and sat there, waiting, but I was too restless to sit still very long and got out and walked around.

I heard the car coming then. It stopped under the trees and the lights went off. The ceiling light came on momentarily and I knew she had opened the door to get out. I walked over. I could see her very faintly, just the blur of her face and the blonde head, but she couldn’t see me at all.

“Where are you?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. I stepped closer and reached out and put my hands on her. She gasped, and turned, her arms reaching out, groping for me. I kissed her roughly and her arms tightened about my neck with an urgent wild strength in them. She twisted her face a little to one side and her mouth whispered against my cheek, “Harry, I just had to see you.”

She was partly right, anyway. She just had to see somebody.

We were in the car with moonlight spilling into the other side of the ravine. “Do you love me, Harry?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Well, that’s a fine answer. You might at least say you did.”

“Why should I?”

“I just thought it might sound better that way. It don’t make any difference, though, does it?”

“No.”

“I suppose you think I’m in love with you, don’t you?”

“And why would I?”

“Because I’m here. Well, let me tell you—”

“You don’t have to tell me. I know why you’re here. But you don’t think we’re going to get by with much of this, do you?”

“Why not?”

“And you’re the one who asked me if
I’d
lived in a small town.”

“It’s all right. He’s at a lodge meeting.”

“It’s dangerous as hell. You know that.”

“I notice you’re telling me that now. You didn’t say anything about it a couple of hours ago.”

“You didn’t expect me to think then, did you?”

She laughed. “How’s about another kiss, and to hell with the sermon.” She was a witch, all right. She leaned back against me with her head in my arms and her feet on the window, bare legs a faint gleam in the darkness.

“Why’d you marry him?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe I was just getting scared. I’d been married twice before and it didn’t work out, and I was trying to make a living out of a crumby little beauty shop and not getting any younger. I’d known him a long time. He used to come and see me when he was in Houston. It was a kind of a—arrangement, I guess you’d call it. And then, after his wife died—” She paused for a moment, and then went on irritably. “Oh, hell, I don’t know. He just kept after me about it till I gave in. How’d I know it was such a dump?”

“Well, why do you stay?” I asked.

“What’re you kicking about? You seem to be doing all right.” She was rugged; there was no doubt of that.

“You think you’re going to get by with this forever?”

“Who the hell cares about forever? Forever’s when you’re dead.”

Yeah, I thought; forever’s when you’re dead all right, but you don’t have to rush it. She was as crazy as frozen dynamite. I wanted to ditch her, and I knew that as long as I was around this town I never could, unless she got mad enough to ditch me. I’d always come back. In the only field of activity she cared anything about, she was terrific.

I didn’t see her for a couple of days, and then on Thursday night I was too busy to think about her. It was the cloudy night I’d been waiting for.

I
WENT TO THE MOVIE
and sat through a double feature without seeing it, feeling the tension beginning. When I came out at 11:30 it was still overcast, with thunder growling far off in the west. I got in the car and drove a long way down the highway, beyond the river, killing time which died too slowly. It was a little after one when I came back to town, the streets deserted now and the only lights the all-night café and a filling station on the other end of Main. I circled through back streets and stopped under some trees by a vacant lot a block away from the Taylor building.

I cut the ignition and lights and sat there in the car for ten minutes. Nothing moved. The one-man police force would be drinking coffee and kidding the waitress under the fluorescent lights three blocks away. There was no use waiting any longer. This was as nearly perfect as it would ever be. I got out and opened the trunk. Everything I’d need was in the cardboard box except the flashlight I’d bought, and I dropped that in my pocket.

A lone drop of rain splashed wetly in my face. It was so dark I could see only the faintly blacker loom of the trees against the sky. Then I could just made out the square shape of the building across the vacant lot. I was at the rear of it now. Suppose someone had discovered the unlocked window and fastened it again? Well, suppose they had? I couldn’t help it now. I came around the corner and felt for the sash.

It slid upwards. Nobody had ever noticed it. I reached the box through and set it on the floor of the washroom, and then climbed in myself and pulled the window down. After feeling my way out of the little room I closed the door and sighed with relief. So far, so good, I thought.

I went up the stairs. It was hard to breathe in the hot, dead air up here under the roof. My footsteps echoed through the building as I picked my way through disordered piles of rubbish.

I set the box down against a wall and swept the light around. Anywhere would do. This was as good as any. I set the light in an old chair and opened the box, lifting out the pitch pine shavings I had whittled out that Sunday in the woods. Taking four kitchen matches out of the box, I bound them to the wire cross-arm as I had done before. Then I wound and set the clock, checking it against my watch, and wound the alarm. I set it for 12:30, and released the catch. I was sweating profusely now. The heat was almost unbearable.

I put the clock back in the box and eased the sandpaper up against the match heads, checking for just the proper tension. Then I took a folded newspaper off a pile nearby and sliced it to shreds with my knife, dropping the strips into the box over and around the clock until it was full and overflowing, dribbling dozens of matches through it as I went. I added the pine shavings and slivers, building it up. There would be no smell of oil or kerosene here when they started investigating. Of course there would be the clock, or what would be left of it, but there were already at least three or four of them in all this junk so it would probably never be noticed. The solder would melt in the intense heat and the wire cross-arm would drop off, leaving it looking just like any other discarded alarm clock except that the bell was gone. I pushed the pile of newspapers against it on one side and set some chairs on the other, then tore up more papers to pile on top of the box.

I wiped the sweat off my face and stood back to look at it in the narrow beam of the flashlight. It would do. Once those matches caught the whole rat’s nest would take off like gunpowder. Well, I thought, they like to go to fires. This’ll give ’em one to talk about.

When I awoke the next morning it was a minute or so before I remembered. I began to tighten up then. When I looked at my watch I thought of that clock ticking away the seconds and the hands creeping slowly around and the fact that nothing could stop it now. It was eight o’clock, and the next four hours and a half were going to be rough. Once it was started and I got moving I should be able to shake the nervousness and keyed-up tension, but the waiting was going to be bad. I had to act naturally. I couldn’t be looking at my watch every three minutes. It started off all right. As soon as I had a cup of coffee and got over to the lot, Harshaw and I got in another beef about something. God knows that was routine and natural enough. I can’t even remember what this one was about. It never took much to start us off because we always reacted to each other like a couple of strange bears. And the funny part of it was that I had begun to have a sort of reluctant liking for him. He was as tough as boot-leather and he barked at everybody, but you were never in doubt as to how you stood with him. He told you. But the fact remained the more I had to admit he wasn’t a bad sort of joe, the more I’d go out of my way to start a row.

“You know, Madox,” he said, leaning back in his chair and sticking a match to the cold cigar. “I can’t figure you out. You sell cars, but I’ll be a dirty pimp if I know how you do it.”

He was right. I’d hit a lucky streak the past few days and unloaded several of his jalopies. “Well,” I said, “it’s sure as hell not the advertising. Why don’t you go ahead and build a fence around the place to keep people from finding out you’ve got cars in here? They keep sneaking in.”

“So you sell three cars, and now you’re going to tell me how to run the place?”

“I don’t care what you do with it,” I said, and walked out of the office. I had to relax. At this rate I’d blow my top before noon. A Negro boy came in and stood around with his hands in his pockets looking at the cars the way they always do. You get the impression they’re waiting for something, but you don’t know what—maybe for prices to come down or cotton to go up.

Suppose I lost my head? I thought.

I went over and gave him sales talk you’d use on an oil man looking for Cadillacs for three of his girl friends. Or at least I think it was all right. He seemed to like it. I didn’t hear a word I was saying.

You can take care of everything except chance. Chance can kill you.

“How much the down payment?” he asked. That was all they ever wanted to know. You could sell Fords for eight thousand dollars if you’d let them go for five dollars down.

Somehow ten o’clock came and went. I walked over to the restaurant and had a cup of coffee. It was hard to sit still now, or stand still, or think straight about anything. At 11:45 Gulick went to get his lunch. Suppose he didn’t get back in time? Harshaw would leave anyway. It would look funny if I ran off and left the place completely unattended. I prowled around the lot, trying not to look at my watch. At 12:20 he came back and Harshaw left. Then it was 12:25. I stood behind a car, looking at the watch, waiting. It was 12:30.

And nothing happened. There was no noise, no siren, nothing. The streets were as quiet as any weekday noon. It was 12:35, 12:40. It hadn’t gone off. Somebody had found it. The whole thing had failed. And I couldn’t try it again, if somebody had found that one. Was I glad, now that the pressure was off? I didn’t know.

Then it came. The siren tore its way up through the noonday hush, growing louder and higher, screaming. The firehouse was only two blocks away, and in a minute or so the fire engine came lumbering past the lot, headed down Main, with the cars beginning to fall in behind it. Gulick and I ran to the sidewalk, both of us looking wildly around for the smoke.

“It’s down there, in front of the bank somewhere!” he said, pointing. People afoot were running now, and cars were beginning to jam up down at the other end of the street.

“Stick around, and I’ll go take a look,” I said. Before he could answer I jumped in the car and shot out into the street. Most of the traffic and the people afoot were at least a block ahead of me. People were pouring out of stores and the restaurant, yelling at each other and running. And in the midst of all the uproar I discovered I was cold as ice and clear-headed, without any panic at all. A block before I got to the bank I turned left and pulled the car to the kerb near the mouth of the alley in the side street. Two or three other cars were parked along here, so it didn’t look conspicuous. Two people went past, running, not even seeing me.

The side street was empty now. A few people still ran by on Main, but they looked straight ahead, their eyes on the smoke. I reached into the back seat. The blanket and piece of line were carefully folded up inside the coat to the seersucker suit I had put on this morning. I picked it all up, put the coat over my arm, and went down the alley, running fast. When I got to the end of it I slowed a little. A man came running past, but didn’t see me, and went on up past the side door of the bank. There was nobody else in sight except the stragglers going by on Main. I went up alongside the bank building to the side door, stopped, and looked in. This was where it had to be right.