Tears Are for Angels (9 page)

    

    

    I was drunk.

    I had to lean for a moment against the candy counter, my eyes furry and my mouth a little slack, and then I had my feet firmly on the floor under me again and I walked on over to the potbellied stove, glowing red against the raw winter chill.

    There was a vacant chair in the circle around it and I lurched down on it, Feeling the sharp edge of the pistol in my hip pocket.

    "Well, Harry," the man sitting next to me said. My eyes focused slowly on him and I saw that it was George Aitken, who owned a small farm beyond my own. Or what had been my own.

    I looked at him and there couldn't have been any greeting in my eyes, because I didn't feel any inside of me. After a moment he turned his head and sent a blob of tobacco juice sizzling against the side of the stove.

    I concentrated slowly on the three other men around the stove. None of them looked at me, although I had known them all most of my life. The hell with them. I thought, the hell with all of them. They didn't know. They don't know anything.

    I reached into the pocket of the heavily lined hunting jacket that had been one of the things Brax Jordan had kept out for me when he sold off the farm. My hand clutched the fruit jar and brought it out. It slipped from my hand, but the heavy glass did not break on the floor.

    I lunged down on one knee to pick it up and then I lost my balance and threw out my arm to catch myself, and knelt like that on the floor, my head hanging and my mouth open and my breathing heavy. I laughed, loudly and harshly, and I picked up the jar and hauled myself back into the chair.

    I offered the jar vaguely around the circle.

    "Have a drink," I said, my tongue leaden in my mouth. "Bes' ol' white y'ever tas'ed."

    They did not look at me and nobody spoke. I was not even capable of anger any more, and I laughed again.

    " 'S your fun'ral," I said, and turned the jar up and drank.

    And then I saw him, standing just outside the circle of silent men, his hands on his hips, looking very steadily at me. Something like a shiver ran down my spine and I was conscious again of the bulk of the pistol in my pocket. I took the jar down from my lips and leaned forward, my forearm on my knee, and looked back at him.

    "Th' Grea' Lov'r," I said. "If's 'not th' Grea' Lov'r."

    His lips twitched.

    "If you have to drink that stuff in here, I wish you'd go back to the storeroom," he said, his voice very flat.

    You ought to be afraid, my fuzzy brain thought. You ought to be shaking in your goddamn boots because I'm going to kill you, now, today, here and now and forever, I'm going to blast a hole right through you, right where I said I would, and they'll all see it, and you'll be dead, dead, dead, and it will all be finished.

    And I said, "Drink where I goddamn please."

    "Not in here," he said. "I don't want any law trouble."

    I threw back my head and laughed loudly again. I screeched and my empty laughter howled back at me from the high ceiling of the old store building. The men did not look at me.

    "A'right," I said. "No trouble, no trouble a-tall. C'mon back'n have one with me."

    "I got work to do."

    "Y'better c'mon," I said. "Y'better "have one."

    "Not now. You go on."

    Suddenly it became very quiet in the long room. Nobody moved. Stewart looked steadily at me and my sodden brain forced my eyes to focus on his. I shifted my weight off the pistol and stood up, swaying, and I heard the thick words stumble from my lips.

    "Y'better c'mon," I said. "Tongue goes l'il loose w'en I drink."

    The eyes changed quickly, warning flashing into them.

    "All right," he said. "Just for a minute."

    " 'Sail it'll take. Jus' a minit."

    And I laughed again. I stumbled past the stove, lurching against Aitken, and he drew away from me, not quickly, and I looked at him and went on.

    " 'S'cuse me," I said. "S'cuse hell out of me."

    It was an endless walk back to the storeroom at the end of the building. The heat from the stove did not carry more than halfway back, but I did not notice the chill. I stumbled against tables and counters of goods, still holding the jar reeling through the store, and I knocked over a plow that stood on the floor; but I did not look back.

    Now I'm going to do it, I thought. The hell with all of it. the hell with waiting any longer. I'm going to do it and get it over with and let them take me and then that will end too and it will be over. Everything will be over then.

    The storeroom was dark and chilly and I turned around and leaned back against a pile of fertilizer bags and drank from the jar again. Then he came in and stopped just inside the door.

    I held out the jar. He shook his head and his words snapped at me.

    "What do you want?"

    "Want? Me?"

    "You got something on your mind."

    "Plenny. Got plenny on my min'."

    "You got to quit coming here like this. This is the fifth time now."

    "S'last time. No more."

    His voice was suspicious. "You want money?"

    I laughed. "Maybe I'm goin' to kill you."

    It was his turn to laugh, and he did, not loudly, a short bark of derision.

    "You'd have done it a long time ago," he said, "if you had the guts. If you hadn't made a bum out of yourself." He spat on the floor. "And you won't get any money, either. You're in this deeper than I am. You have to keep your mouth shut too."

    I set the jar down on the fertilizer bags and put my hand in my hip pocket, touching the gun. He did not seem to notice the movement.

    "Get out of here," he said. "Don't come back. You had your chance the night you came through that door and you didn't do it. And you won't ever do it because you've drunk up all your guts and you're too ashamed to admit I took your wife."

    I pulled out the pistol and pointed it at him. He looked at me calmly, not the way he had that night in Lucy's bedroom, and he did not laugh now, but his voice mocked me.

    "No," he said, "you won't do it. Because if you did, they'd all know then, they'd all know about me and her. And you couldn't take that. You have to stay drunk just because you know it. You won't do anything to let them know too."

    I stared at him and he did not move, his face calm, and I felt my finger tighten on the trigger and then my arm fell to my side.

    "Maybe sometime in the back," he said. "Maybe you'll try to do it that way. But not out in the open. Not so they'll find out about it."

    He was light. Even my whisky-soaked brain screamed it at me. I didn't have the guts, not just to pull that trigger, but to let it all come out. Inside of me there was still the shame and the knowledge of the triumph that this man held over me, a secret inner triumph, known only to him and to me, so that when my triumph came, if it ever did, it too had to be the same, secret and inside and known only to him and to me, so that I could tote up the scores and cross them off, and know that not only his triumph and finally mine but also the very contest itself would then not only vanish but would actually never have been.

    I never hated him so much. But I knew he was right. And I knew, too, with hopeless despair, that the way would never come to me, that I was frozen, incapable, that I would neither face the consequences of shooting him openly nor conquer him with secret, obliterating death, and that I would live the rest of my life bound by it, by the chain of my own weakness and the eternal, torturing ropes of memory.

    I knew all that as I lurched past him, back down the long room to the door, past the set, averted faces of the men at the stove, out into the bleak, raw afternoon, the wind cutting down the street hard now, slicing into me, but no deeper than my own thin, dying knowledge of myself.

    

    

    The glow had crept in from the east while I told it to her, and when I had finished it, we sat there in the gray light, a little chilly and shivery, and we could see the edge of the sun rising crimson and stark against the morning sky.

    "So that's why I'm out here all alone," I said. "That's why I'm dirty, like you said. That's why none of it really matters now. That's why I'm not going to stop you from telling."

    "That's a hell of a story," she said. "And I don't believe a word of it."

    "All right. I don't blame you. But I had to get it off my chest. I had to get it out of me to somebody that I killed her. And now you can go. I won't stop you."

    She looked at me dully and then she got up from the running board and stretched herself in the warming sun.

    "You're a good talker," she said. "I never heard anybody could talk like that before. But you're making it all up. Lucy wasn't that kind."

    "I saw it. It's the truth."

    "I almost wish it was. You must have been halfway decent once. You must have been quite a guy."

    "I'm sorry you don't believe it. But I reckon you have your reasons."

    She looked at me steadily.

    "I knew her better than you ever did," she said. "And I've got a letter from her. She wrote me lots of letters. But this one says she was afraid you'd kill her if you ever found out-something."

    That made me blink. I hadn't known she was afraid of me. I had a violent temper and she knew it, but I had never raised my hand to her.

    "Maybe you better tell me a few things," I said. "What was she afraid I'd find out?"

    "I need some coffee."

    "I'm sorry," I said. "I stopped buying it. It got too expensive. Most of my money ran out a long time ago. There's just enough now for-"

    "I know. Well, I couldn't stand that whisky of yours."

    "We could get some coffee. That dirt road out there runs out to the highway and there's an all-night joint. It's about six miles."

    "Let's go."

    She drove fast, but not carelessly, and the old car careened down the dirt road toward the highway and we sat there, side by side, and I looked out the window and tried not to think at all, not even about what it could be that Lucy had been afraid I would learn.

    I don't know what she thought about, or if she thought at all, but she didn't say anything either and pretty soon we turned into the highway and she picked up a little more speed. Finally, she spoke:

    "Even if I could believe Lucy would play around, I can't see her going for some backwoods Romeo."

    "You don't know Stewart," I said. "He's got plenty of money. He's good-looking, I give him that. And he's got the nerve to make whatever play it takes to get whoever he wants. You just don't know him."

    "I'd like to. Then I'd know. I'd know if Lucy could go for him."

    Then we were pulling up in front of the Eat-Rite Griddle. The garish blue neon outlining the roof of the shabby building clashed against the morning light. I had put on a shirt before we left, and my shoes, and I had turned my back while she put on a blouse in place of the torn T-shirt. But we must have been a strange pair, the tall, gaunt man with the wild shock of black hair and beard and the dirty clothes, the grime of weeks on his face and hands and neck, and the trim blonde in slacks, with a purple bruise across the side of her face, both a little worn-looking in the glare of a new day.

    A long-necked youth sat on a stool before the counter, reading a comic book. He looked over his shoulder at us as we entered, and his eyes widened a little at the sight of my beard and her black eye, and he rolled up the comic book and slipped it in his hip pocket and followed us to a booth, wiping his hands on a grease-grimed apron.

    "You want breakfast?"

    "Yes," she said. "I'm starved. What's good?"

    He reached across the booth and took a torn menu from behind the napkin holder and handed it to her. She looked at it a moment and he stood there, his hands uneasy.

    "I'll have Jack's Joy and coffee," she said, and handed it to me.

    I looked for Jack's Joy. The menu said it was "One Golden-Fried Egg Resting Triumphantly on a Delectable Waffle. With Maple Sirup."

    "My God," I said. "Bring me some ham and two eggs over light."

    Her face was mocking. "No beans?"

    "No beans," I said.

    "Maybe he has some of that white lightning around."

    "I bet he has. Listen, get off your horse, will you? I'm sorry about last night. Do what you have to do, but have you got to ride me all the time?"

    "Last night's all right, except for that bra. I can understand last night."

    "But you can't believe what I told you."

    She hesitated. "No. Not that."

    "You'll find out it's the truth. Today."

    "How?"

    "Because it's going to come out anyway, when you tell. So I can go in there today and shoot him and not be afraid to let people find out about it. Because it's going to come out anyway."

    She set the coffee cup down. Over behind the counter the eggs and the ham were sizzling on the grill.

    "You're just going to walk in there and shoot him?"

    "I told you. I couldn't do it before because they'd find out about Lucy. But now I can because they'll find out anyway. That way is better than nothing."

    "Not a hell of a lot. How did you say they do it in this state? Gas chamber?"

    "Electric chair."

    "A fine distinction," she said. "Real fine."

    "I killed Lucy, too. Maybe I deserve it for that. I don't know."

    We sat there for a while, not saying anything, drinking the coffee and watching the boy behind the counter. Then he brought the food and we ate. I put away the ham and the eggs and wanted more, only I knew I had had enough. I wanted more but I just couldn't eat.