Thunder and Roses (32 page)

“We was goin’ to hang him,” said Fellows with awe in his voice.

“Tell’m what Zapappas put in the spring, Fellows,” said Trask.

“Tamarisk,” said Fellows solemnly. “He’s a great hand with the spices, he is. Stripped the bark of tamarisk and biled it down. It’s bitter as hell. He uses it in his stew.”

“Let’s go, boys,” said Trask. “Zapappas is back in Tamarisk by now, fixin’ up the damnedest celebration breakfast this country has seen yet.”

“What about me?” asked Barstow.

“You could drop dead,” said Fellows helpfully.

“Yer county water commission,” said Trask, “seems to of stole your hosses. You should be glad. Gives you a chance to walk off some o’ that blubber. They’s a tradin’-post forty mile up the valley, and a fort thirty mile the other way.”

The last they saw of Barstow was a deflated, dejected figure squatting on the sand by his dry well, in sole possession of a county seat—a ghost town.

Riding through the draw, Trask said thoughtfully to Fellows, “It’s a wonderful thing how a man’ll fight with his own tools. I seen many a sailor brain people with a fid, and I seen a seamstress run a hatpin into a drunk. Zapappas, he fights right out’n his kitchen.”

“Yup,” said Fellows. “Usin’ only kitchen tools.” And he swore to himself to keep his bare back out of sight until those ring-shaped bruises on it disappeared.

Y
ANCEY, WHO HAD
once been killed, lay very still with his arm flung across the pillow, and watched the moonlight play with the color of Beverly’s hair. Her hair was spilled over his shoulder and chest, and her body pressed against him, warm. He wondered if she was asleep. He wondered if she could sleep, with that moonswept riot of surf and wind going on outside the hotel. The waves blundered into the cliff below, hooting through the sea-carved boulders, frightening great silver ghosts of spray out and up into the torn and noisy air. He wondered if she could sleep with her round, gentle face so near his thumping heart. He wished the heart would quiet itself—subside at least to the level of the storm outside, so that she might mistake it for the same storm. He wished he could sleep. For two years he had been glad he did not sleep. Now he wished he could; it might quiet his heart.

Beverly, Beverly, he cried silently, you don’t deserve this! He wished the bed were larger, so that he might ease away from her and be but a shriek among shrieks, melting into the hiss and smash and ugly grumble of the sea’s insanity.

In the other bed, Lois shifted restlessly under the crisp sheet. Yancey looked at her without turning his head. She was a thing of long lines under the dim white, her face and hair two kinds of darkness on the pillow. She was lean and somber. Beverly was happy and open and moved about like the brightly colored bouncing ball which used to lead the singing at theaters, leaping along the lyrics. Lois walked as if she did not quite touch the floor, and the tones of her voice were like the tones of her skin and the clothes she favored—dark and smooth. Her eyes were long and secret and her face was a floe. Her nostrils, and the corners of her mouth, and sometimes the slightest concerted movement of a shoulder and an eyebrow, hinted
at a heat submerged and a strength relaxed and aware, not asleep, not a sleep. Lois … a synthesis of subtleties, of mysteries, of delicate scents and soft puzzling laughter.

Lois moved again. He knew that she too was staring tensely up into the mottled darkness. The spume-flecked moonlight was intolerant of detail, but Yancey had memorized her face. He knew of the compression of her lips, and that the corners of her mouth were softly turned despite the tension. He was deeply troubled by the sound of the sheet as she moved, for if he could hear that over the storm, how could Beverly miss the throb of his heart?

Then he all but smiled: of course Beverly did not hear as he did, nor see, nor feel, nor think with all her mind. Poor Beverly. Poor bright, sweet, faithful bird, more wife than woman, how can you compete with one who is more woman than … anyone?

Better, this was better than the fearful joy that was like rage. His heart began to obey him, and he turned his cheek slightly to touch her hair. Pity, he thought, is a sharing sort of thing—you can feel the helplessness of the unarmed—whereas rage, like passion, stands apart from its object and is a lonesome thing.

He settled himself now, and without moving he went limp in the thundering night, giving himself up to the glimmer and shift of his thoughts. More than anyone else on earth, he was sure, he enjoyed being alive, and his perpetual delight was in being alive altogether, awake and aware, conscious of his body and how it lay, and where, and at the same time afloat like a gull on the wind of his thought, yielding, controlled. Perhaps he enjoyed the dark part of his unending day the most, camouflaged by a coverlet and the closing of eyes. In the day he lived with that which, if he wished, he could command; at night he lived with that which he
did
command. He could call a symphony to heel, and make a syllogism stand and wait. He could cut a stack of places, fan a hand of faces, choose his pleasure of them and discard the rest. His recall was pinpoint perfect back and back to the point where he had been dead; before that, only excellent. He used it now as a measure against his heart’s rebellion, so that Beverly could sleep, and, sleeping, not know.

And because the idea of Lois, here, was unbearable, he let his
mind take him back to Lois when she was only a secret. She had been an explosion within him, a pressure and a kind of guilt; but all the things she had been were things he could contain, and no one knew. So back he went, to his renascence; back through the time he had been dead, and still farther to Lois-first-seen, to a time when a man with a job and a wife and a settled gray life found this special astonishment.

There was a lake, and small cheap cabins crouched in a row to sip its shores. There was a “lodge” with its stilted forefeet in the water and its rump on a hillside. There were boats and a float, a splintery dance floor and a bar which purveyed beverages all the way up to beer.

Yancey, with little money and only two weeks’ time, had rented a cottage here sight unseen. He expected little of it, being resigned to the truism that a change of surroundings constitutes a vacation all by itself. He expected little of anything in those days. His life had reached a plateau—a long, narrow, slightly downgraded plateau where the horizons were close and the going easy. His job was safe and, by the chemistry of paternalism, would increase in value as it aged, for all a large business requires of the bulk of its employees is that they stay just as they are.

He had been married for seven years to the blithe and patient Beverly, who was content with him. There had been a time when they interrupted one another in the rush to share themselves, and a longer time when there seemed very little to say, which made them both vaguely unhappy, and they lived with a mild and inexpressible sense of loss. And at last they had discovered that coded communication devised by most folk with their unexciting familiars: small talk, half-finished sentences, faint interrogative and exclamatory sounds, and present—as opposed to absent—silences. Life for Yancey and his wife was not dull—it was too unplanned for that—but its pulse beat between comfortable limits.

This unplanned quality (for why make plans when life is basically so certain?) was responsible for their late arrival at the lake. Last year’s map did not include the dozens of roads closed by the
Thruway; somehow Yancey had never gotten around to having the spare fixed, so of course they had a flat; then they had to drive back for the checkbook Yancey had forgotten; and naturally it rained. It had rained all the previous night and all day, and when they turned into the lake road it was past eleven at night and still raining. They pulled up beside the lodge, where a glistening faded sign proclaimed
OFFICE
, and Yancey turned up his jacket collar and plunged out into the rain and floundered up the wooden steps. When there was no answer to his knock he noticed a soggy pasteboard stuck between the doorframe and a loose pane. He tried to read it and could not. He went to the head of the steps and called, “Bev! Turn the spotlight up here!”

Beverly, between the loose-valved clacking of the motor and the drumming of rain on the car roof, heard a voice but no words. She turned off the ignition and rolled the window down. “What?”

“The light. Spotlight. Shine it up here.”

She did, whereupon Yancey went back to the door and crouched before the card. In a moment he came back to the car and slid in, dripping. “They’re all in bed,” he said, “in cabin 14.”

“Which one is our cabin?”

“I don’t know. They never said. Just confirmed the reservation.

We’ll have to wake them up.” He pressed the starter.

And pressed it, and pressed it.

When the starter would deliver nothing but a click and a grunt, Yancey leaned back and blew sharply through his nostrils. “Wires wet, I guess.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Walk. Or sit here.”

She touched his sodden shoulder and shuddered. “It can’t be too far … we’ll have to take a bag.”

“Okay. Which one?”

She considered. “I guess the brown one. It has my robe in it, I remember … I think.”

He knelt on the seat and reached into the back, found and fumbled the brown suitcase out. “Better turn off the lights. Ignition, too.”

“The ignition
is
off,” Beverly said, trying it.

“What!”

“When you were on the porch. I couldn’t hear you. I turned it off.

The advantage of that status between married folk which communicates by grunts and silences is that scorn, as well as contentment, can be expressed with little effort. Yancey was simply and completely silent, and she said, “Oh dear.” Then, defensively, “How was I supposed to know you didn’t turn it back on?”

Yancey merely snorted. Beverly huddled in the seat. “Now it’s all my fault,” she muttered. This was more than a statement of fact; it meant in addition that any discomfort from this point on would be laid to her, and that the day’s previous delays and exasperations would also be attached to her, making her culpable in every way for everything. Yancey maintained his silence. Anything he might say would militate in her favor—to say one thing would forgive her, another would give her some ground for defense or counterattack. There was no real vindictiveness in his silence. He did not care whether or not she accepted the guilt as long as it was clear that guilt was not his. To put it another way, married familiars in this stage, though not necessarily enemies, are just not friends.

They left the car by their respective doors, and the rain immediately increased as if it had been cued from the wings. The sporadic wind died completely and suddenly and water seemed to displace air altogether. It ran down Yancey’s spine, it bashed at his eyelids, it threw gouts of mud up to his knees. He felt his way along the fender and around the front of the car until he collided with Beverly. They clung together, gasping and waiting for some kind of light to penetrate the hissing deluge. Some did, at last, a sodden skyglow with a dimmer echo from the lake, and they began to wade up the shore along the line of cabins.

Visitors to the lake have been known to complain that the cabins were built too close together. It is clear that such plaintiffs never walked the row in the seething black of a summer rain. Each cabin boasted a wooden post with a number, cut from plywood with a jigsaw, perched on it. These could be read by water-wrinkled fingertips as they progressed, and they seemed to be fully half a mile apart.
Yancey and Beverly did not attempt to talk; the only speech between them was a muttered number when occasionally they investigated one of the posts to check their progress. It was enough to make exasperation itself turn numb, not to be reawakened until they found cabin 12, bypassed the next, and turned in at what should therefore be 14, only to find it called 15.

“Fifteen, fifteen!” Beverly wailed wetly. “Where’s fourteen? It’s gone!”

“Gone, hell,” growled Yancey, uselessly wiping at the water streaming over his mouth. “That’ll be it there, that we just passed. Afraid to number a cabin thirteen. Superstition. Well, you know a woman runs this place,” he added.

Beverly inhaled, a sharp gasp at this injustice, but took in as much water as air and could only cough weakly. They backtracked and fumbled their way up to the dark bulk of cabin 14. Yancey dropped the suitcase noisily on the small porch.

“Yance! You’ll wake everybody up!”

He looked at her and sighed. The sigh transmitted, “What did we come here for?”

He pounded on the door and they pressed close to it, trying to get some shelter from the decorative gable over the door. A light showed, the doorknob moved, and they stepped back into the rain. And nothing, nothing at all told Yancey that in this second a line fell across his life, so that forever his biography would consist of the parts life-before-Lois and life-since-Lois, with nothing between them but a sheet of rain and the opening of a door.

It opened altogether, fearlessly. He said, “I’m Yance Bowman, this is my wife, and we—” and then he saw her face, and his voice failed him. Quickly, effortlessly, Lois spoke into his sudden silence and made it unnoticeable. “Come in, come in!” With one swift balanced movement she took the suitcase from his hand, whirled around them to reach out in the rain for the doorknob, and, closing the door, swept them in.

They stood panting and dripping, looking at her. She wore a maroon hostess robe with a collar that stood up like an Elizabethan ruff; the material fell away and draped from her wide flat shoulders
with the static fluidity of a waterfall, all movement even while she was still. Her slight turn and bend as she set down the suitcase told him that those wide shoulders were indeed shoulders and not padding, and the flash of a bare foot declared that here was a woman who would stand and look straight into his eyes.

Beverly spoke, or began to; he turned to her and saw that she was, by comparison, dumpy and wet and exceedingly familiar. “We didn’t know which cabin to—”