Abruptly Bill made up his mind. "You know, Mariana, I talked to my dad and I don't think we ought to get into the real rough stuff tonight. Matter of fact, I made up my mind we should cut out the explosion-"
Mariana eyed him speculatively, her lips quirking in derision. "If I told you something about your dad-something about him and me-"
"I wouldn't believe it!"
"Did you ever see him in the shower?" she asked. He nodded. "Then you know he's got a big, black mole just below the waist-on the left side." She let that sink in and asked, "Now do you want to go through with it?"
He clenched his teeth and his jaw tensed. "Yeah," he said. "What're we waiting for? Let's go!"
AUTHOR'S PROFILE
Warren H. Caryl was born in Sudbury, Vermont. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Vermont and his Master of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin, and did additional post graduate work at Columbia University.
He has been a carpenter, caretaker, box maker, a department store supervisor, government translator and a college instructor. He is the author of more than 40 magazine stories and 6 published novels and is recognized as an expert in the field of 1 8th Century French history.
CHAPTER ONE
That night it snowed and the driving was murder coming home from the lumberyard, and Charlie Harrison wanted to get a hot meal into his stomach, fast. Christ, even with Helen gone for the week, his kid daughter should have something good fixed up. But when he walked into the house Susan wasn't there, .and a note lay on the bare kitchen table. Jake Benson's been trying to reach you.
The phone rang, and as he crossed to it he tried to figure out what the chief of police wanted.
"Yeah, Jake?"
"Goddamn it, Charlie, is Bill home?"
"Hell, ya got me. What's up?"
"Plenty. Two kids were drag-racing down on Cedar Street. One of them crashed through Larkin Bridge and landed smack in the river."
"So what's that got to do with my son?"
Jake didn't answer right away. Through the phone's sour mechanical hum, Charlie heard him yelling orders to somebody about a fire on Maple, but then finally he came on again. "Two old maids living on River Street saw the kid crawl out. According to them, it was Bill."
Charlie had a thing about death, and it came to him instantly. It sliced into his awareness like a sign with a white skull and crossed bones marking bad curves in the Alps. Maybe death's memory had first started with those dull, lead-colored flakes, and maybe it happened every year when he saw them for the first time. But Jake's call had intensified it. Always he saw snow falling again on a stupid French hill no bigger than a pimple; German 88's screamed, and his stomach revolted again at the raw red sight and the raw red smell of human hamburger splashed in the snow.
But damnit, that was a long time ago. What did it have to do with now? For one second more he felt maybe Jake was kidding and it wasn't real. "Aw, come off it, man, stop pulling my leg."
"For Chrissake, I'm not. And listen, when you get hold of him, see that he gets down here. Okay?"
"Yeah-sure."
He put the phone down with disgust. Why, when there wasn't even a battle going on, did he have to get hit like that?
Crash!
Behind him, a door opened, slammed, and he turned quickly to see who it was. Susan ran into the kitchen as if she were trying for a four-minute mile.
"Where ya been?"
"You know what?" she asked, and dropped a bag of groceries on the table. "Al Capone just sneaked down cellar."
"Huh?"
Susan's scrawny thirteen-year-old arms jabbed like pistons, and she started to blurt out something about the Mafia and organized crime, but a car screamed outside and cut her off. Right in front of his house, its motor crescendoed, building up in intensity like a fire siren, and then cutting off abruptly. Charlie shook his head uneasily. What in hell was going on? What?
Susan leaned over the sink, spun the chrome faucet and ran water over a stack of dirty dishes. Charlie stared at her.
"Don't worry," she said, turning and letting her thin face pop out into a half-hearted sort of smile, "there's one good thing about Bill. Do you know he's got himself a job as a disc jockey? 'Bill's Thunder Hour,' he calls it, and-"
Charlie moved quickly then. He lurched around her, raced downstairs, and faster than he'd ever cased houses on the Rhine for snipers, he looked for Bill. There was no sign of him. Finally he discovered the boy stowed on a shelf in the canned food section. What the hell? Was this his son-or a gangster?
It took Bill five minutes to crawl out, and on the way he smashed a jar of pickled beets. When he saw what had happened, Charlie shivered, for lying on the floor, the beets looked like hunks of raw flesh-flesh mixed in with bright pieces of splintered glass.
"Clumsy jerk!"
Bill shuffled his feet, sagged his thin shoulders with an exaggerated gesture of exhaustion and disgust. A savage violence flickered through Bill's brown eyes, and Charlie didn't understand his son at all.
"What's the matter with ya?"
"Aw, Dad, I didn't do anything."
Bill's sudden snarl exploded Charlie into action and he grabbed his son's left arm. "Okay, spill it!"
"Aw, Dad, please." Bill's face twisted into an idiotic smile, and he tried to push a wet hank of black hair out of his eyes with his right hand.
"Spill it!"
"Don't say one word." It was a strange voice, and it sounded soft and vibrant, and Charlie whipped around as if he'd been stabbed. He'd never seen a girl like that in Cedarville. She sure was one beautiful-looking kid, but where, in just that second, had she come from?
The girl took one step, two steps, descended. Like a movie queen, she posed at the foot of the stairs, and when she smiled, her lipstick burned red, matching her flame-colored hair. Her face and cheeks looked milk white and empty, but her eyes sparkled like raw emeralds hacked from mountain granite.
She wore black slacks which were so tight every curve of her legs and hips showed, and her black sweater showed just as obviously that she wore no bra. Though she was blatantly young, her body had at the same time developed into some ultimate and perfect maturity.
"Who the hell are you?" he exploded. "Mariana." But then she turned to Bill. "Lover, aren't you going to introduce me to your father?"
Bill kept his mouth shut. Seeing his inability to speak, she elevated her shoulders and raised her right eyebrow a fraction of an inch. "Mariana Stanton. But, Mr. Harrison, it really doesn't matter. What does matter is that you've got to stop picking on Bill. He's got to live. He's got to do things, and he just doesn't have time for these old-fashioned father-son talks. Do you, Bill?"
"Get out!" The order came out louder than he'd planned, and it subdued him rather than her.
Not moving, not saying one word, she smiled at Charlie and her face held something which he couldn't analyze. It was hateful-charming. He watched her smile begin, grow, build. She smiled with some gigantic force which made her beauty irresistible. Some huge, unsatisfied desire seized Charlie hard, and he didn't know what to do, or what he wanted to do. Did he want to belt her one? Or did he want to kiss her?
"Well, Bill," she said finally, propping her hands on her hips, thrusting her breasts out so abruptly her nipples made vivid points. "Don't spill anything, huh?"
Then, as if she were playing the role of some expert and ancient whore, she swiveled her body around slowly, stepped to the first tread, rose to the next, and disappeared out of his basement, flaunting her sexuality all the way. A look at the devil couldn't have shocked Charlie more.
When he turned back to Bill, he found his son blushing a coarse red. "Who's she?"
"She told you."
Quick anger at the flip retort made Charlie seize his son's arm in a vise-like grip. Because he felt helpless, he had to assert himself physically.
Bill squirmed and felt bad. With his Dad yanking at him and giving him that stupid third-degree eye, he found he couldn't face the old man. Not that it mattered, because he had too much on his mind. First off, he itched hot for making such a fool of himself. He'd hit that road slick one hair too fast. Lucky for him he hadn't been driving his own car. But mostly he worried about Mariana and the fact that she wanted him to do something he didn't dare think much about.
Wild, quick-in-the-sack Mariana!
For a joke, he'd told her that once, and she'd slapped him for it. But she was great. She sure was. Sex with her was like a white-hot thrill shooting through his spine with all the force of a go-green signal for ninety-five.
She came on and went off like a firecracker.
Natch, he'd been in her bedroom.
He'd been there two times, and as soon as "Mother Stanton" was away, he wanted to try it again. She was an experience that lingered long after it was over-
"Ouch, damnit!"
His dad kept on digging those big claws into his arm and wouldn't let up. What was the big stupe trying to prove?
"Bill, what were you doing in that car?"
"Aw, Dad, maybe it wasn't even me-maybe you got it all wrong." At first, when his dad cornered him like that, he'd had no intention of answering.
But now that it was obvious Jake had phoned, he knew everything was sure to come out sooner or later. Even so, he was in a mood to stall. "Yeah, Dad, so what makes you think it was me?"
As far as he was concerned, his Old Man could rot. When his dad should have stuck up for him, he hadn't. Since then it didn't matter what happened. So let the old ball bounce sky-high.
"You'd better tell me."
"Dad, you're hurting my arm."
"Arm, hell! It'll be your neck next!"
Suddenly-and it made Charlie let up some-the sound of Mariana's souped-up car came roaring down into the basement. It filtered down like a token of her body being held out naked and ready, as if her hands were even then stroking down over her belly button, forcing, forging, welcoming. She was back again, playing with her car which could hit 150 like an ordinary one might hit forty. And Charlie's face sagged, his chin went taut, and the Old Man opened his mouth like a dope and stood listening....
"So okay, if you want to know, I had Jack Steele's car, see, and-" Figuring his father was so intently, stupidly listening to Mariana's act, Bill shot those words right out into the chaos of the other sound.
Bill could almost see it. Mariana let her cat hit a rapidly grinding pace, then she slammed on her brakes and a rubber scream caught inside his heart, filling it with her own lips, and breathlessness, and how much she wanted him. Continuing then, hard and intense, her car and herself cried one lonely sound into the night. He could see how Charlie expected to hear a crash, and Bill smiled, knowing perfectly what had happened. With all her skill, Mariana had swung her car into a perfect skid in the middle of the street. She'd turned the car around completely, and now he could hear its deep roaring, throbbing motor pulsing off into the night in one final and majestic thumbing of her nose.
He couldn't help smiling. That was too perfect, too classic, too right.
"What the hell was that?" His dad clenched his fingers tight, jerking his arm nervously. And Bill stared up at his Old Man. Once Charlie Harrison might have been the perfect hero type, with his hair still vividly black and wavy, with it combed neatly more on one side than on the other. His hard, leathery cheeks drew in taut like squares of oak board. And his lips set thin, in a tight nervous line. But one thing was wrong. His jaw pretended to be rock hard, but it wasn't. It had a slow quiver to it. And everything important seemed to catch Charlie on some eternal edge of fear, as if he'd not done enough or proved enough in some stupid war.
"You going to talk?"
"Okay, okay. Just as I was swinging it over the bridge, real easy-like, I got this flat, see?"
It was a lie. Of course it was, but he didn't expect Charlie to catch on. But Charlie's raw anger gushed over everything. His eyes narrowed with it, and Bill knew he couldn't reason with him now.
"You goddamn fool, you damn near killed yourself!"
"So what if I did? Who cares?"
Bill smirked quickly and his Old Man stiffened, snarled some vague word, and then let go of his arm.
Charlie had changed from the old days. Bill could remember when his dad's face and his dad's person meant the world to him. Together, they used to build model airplanes out in the garage; together, they used to dream about moon flights-
But that guff was dead.
It had died because Charlie Harrison had killed it. When Charlie should have stuck up for him, he hadn't. It had been the same with Jake Benson-stupid, fat Jake Benson. Bill had planned it as a joke. He'd been thirteen, hung sweating between twelve and fourteen like a greasy, ripe meatball, and he learned how, with Charlie's insistence, to play-poker.
On that certain evening-which happened also in October-he'd sat in at the man's game. He didn't want to be there, but they'd forced him. He wanted to make his ordeal at least a little interesting and had brought out a deck which he'd bought from a magic shop. With it, he could tell every card instantly from the back.
They played a dozen hands.
It was only when Jake wondered why Bill was winning every pot that the stupid jerk caught on. As if he'd meant it to be anything serious anyway! It was a man's game. What was he doing there? Like stupid, emotional kids themselves, they wanted to see his reaction, push him on, make him do things he didn't want to do.
It was their fault.
Bill could never forget that white look about Charlie's nose as he sat there so stupid-idiot quiet and let Jake read him out. Bill had just won twenty dollars with three aces.
Jake called in the cards and sat there with them in his hands. One at a time, he ran their red-and-white design under his fat, flubby fingers; stroked them, finally saw how Bill had done it. The more he saw and understood, the more Jake bent his red face over, and the more he puffed his cheeks out, and the more his hard, hoarse breathing filled the room. Until that exact time, Bill had never been scared in his life, but seeing a man get so mad and lose his temper frightened him. He could sense how Jake had no control over his feelings. He knew the big man had gone berserk. He wanted to run. He wanted to escape from that hard chair, but all he could do was sit and wait for Jake to say something.
Finally the police chief turned and glared at Charlie, but his father didn't say anything either. After another couple of seconds, Jake started bellowing, "Goddamn it, your boy has pulled a dirty, sneaky trick on us!"
Bill looked over at his father and hoped he would stick up for him. He waited in vain. Almost as if he were sleepwalking, Charlie studied the deck, flipped through the cards silently, then looked down at him, his son, but still he didn't say anything. Bill had been cut off. Charlie couldn't see anything but himself, a grown man, sitting with other men. He couldn't see his boy sitting there, shy, confused, red with embarrassment and not knowing what to do.
Then-right then-Charlie could have worried about whether he was going to live or die. But not now!
Back there, in that tense, smoke-filled room, Jake had shook his head a few more times, looked square at Charlie, reached for those marked cards, and deliberately ripped them up one by one. "I'm afraid," he drawled then, "your boy is going to turn out bad."
So what did it matter what Charlie did now-short of really hurting him?
Suddenly Bill smiled bitterly at the memory.
"Don't you smirk at me!"
"Why not?"
Charlie whipped his right hand across Bill's lips, and Bill tasted the strange stickiness of blood inside the soft tissue of his mouth.
"Dad, I'm sorry."
"What were ya trying to do down there, commit suicide?"
"Naw, I went over the railing, and then I escaped. I got the door open, held my breath and came out perfect." He wasn't bragging, didn't even feel like bragging. He wasn't doing a thing but stating how it happened. But he couldn't keep his bleeding lips from curling back over his teeth in another smile.
He ducked, but he wasn't quick enough. Charlie's open right hand sizzled across his mouth.
"Listen, you little punk. Stop that!"
"Why?"
Bill watched his father shake his head in a dazed way. He wanted to make the Old Man lose all control. Hell, what did one bloody mouth mean?
"Look...." Charlie muttered, and Bill was surprised to see that his Old Man was staring down at the beets again. A knot of angry wrinkles stood out between his dad's eyebrows, and Charlie kneaded them sluggishly. "It's sure a good thing your mother is up in Holden looking after Granddad. I'd sure hate to have her see you cut up like this."
"Aw, heck, Dad, I didn't even come close to dying."
"Okay, if that's the way you want it; I'll let Jake handle this."
"No!"
Bill flinched. Like that time once before, Charlie didn't have the guts to do it himself. He was just going to let Jake read him out, and Bill couldn't stand it. "Look, Dad, I've got my job to think about. What would Mr. Alexander say if he read it in the papers? Oh, man, have a heart."
"Heart, hell!"
Snorting with anger, Charlie yanked him out past Susan, and then they stood beside the green Ford sedan. His dad was unlocking the door, and snow-came out of the night like soft whips. Several flakes flicked across his mouth and he could taste his own blood mixing with the melting snow.
"Get in."
"Yeah."
Bill got in, then he watched the nervous way his dad backed out. Charlie stuck his chin up erect, kept twisting his head quickly. God, the Old Man had to take a dozen looks up and down the empty street before he dared make it all the way. For one final attempt at peace, Bill shot out one final question. "Dad, do you think you're doing the right thing-running me down there like this?"
CHAPTER TWO
Most of the time, Mariana used her car-that black, low Mercedes convertible-like a tool. For her it was as bright and shiny as a surgeon's scalpel, but made of platinum instead of steel. Sometimes, like a surgeon cutting, she could drive with precise control. Sometimes her driving was a sheer creation of art. Sometimes it was a way of flashing faster than a jet, not across the sky, but down a long stretch of country road where tall telephone poles bounced up and down like matchsticks on a wire.
It meant watching for cops. Sometimes, intoxicatingly, it meant driving crazy fast. Sometimes, sensuously lazy, it meant going snail-slow. And there was vital excitement in sitting in her black leather seat, knowing her red hair looked good against black, hearing her motor, feeling her wheel slip fast under her long, delicate ringers, smelling some smell which came, almost imperceptibly, from those rapidly firing cylinders-which seemed to her, in that moment of driving, far more exotic than some fabulous perfume from Guerlain.
"What the-?"
She watched from where she had parked in a driveway next to a dark house, right at the corner of Cleveland Road, and she couldn't imagine Old Man Harrison running Bill down to the police station. Surely no father could be that disloyal to his own son.
"How'n hell could he be?"
But sure enough, there they were. Bill sat straight up next to his dad. Bill's face had that wild look of a ruthless hawk, and Mr. Harrison, like a timid mouse, was backing cautiously into the street. Why couldn't he do it with one total, involved, swift motion? Why this pussyfooting out? Didn't he have any guts? Couldn't he see nothing was coming?
She felt black leather slip fast and easy under her butt, and she eased down on her clutch, brought her car into gear.
Without even thinking about it, she knew which way Bill's dad would take. He wouldn't go out on the freeway, which was the quickest way down town, but he would antsy-pantsy through the suburbs and take half an hour doing it-real antique-like.
As if she'd spent her life following other cars, Mariana pulled in and out of side streets, not after him, but casually checking at certain corners, knowing his green Ford would be there, not wanting to see it, really, but waiting.
This was not a game to her. She had a reason for following them. At least she'd give Bill one chance to say if he wanted help or not. At least she could do that much. For, at all costs, Bill had to be ready for their big night, and she couldn't risk any stupid cop interfering with her plans.
At the crossing of Kelly and Waterford, she held back, waiting. Harrison came along, driving slowly from the right. Where a stretch of leaves had fallen off a long laurel hedge, Harrison's lights flicked through the branches in slow motion. And to her it was like their maid's feather duster flicking softly behind a row of dark perfume bottles. Flick, flick!
Feeling almost but not quite excited, she eased back against her seat and felt her slacks pulling in and pressing against her knees and thighs. From start, with a quarter of a second, she could hit 110. That would give Harrison something to think about; and, while doing it, she could give Bill their special signal.
On that snow-slicked street, it was going to be a tight, intricate maneuver. She had to let Harrison pull at least halfway into the intersection. She would go straight for him, feint to go in front of him; and then because she couldn't figure one last detail, she'd have to go behind him. Now, with a sense better than any radar, she knew no other cars were coming.
Harrison's headlight gleamed white off the snow as they cut into the intersection. She eased in her gears, goosed down hot on the accelerator. She spun, flew. Holding her wheel steady, she caught the green car in her high beams. Suddenly, as if somehow afraid, Bill's face stared out at her in perplexed agony.
"Bill, stop putting it on," she muttered to herself, and then with her fist, hard, she rapped three short blasts on her horn. Bill failed to unfreeze. When he finally did seem to hear her signal, he shook his head vaguely, but he didn't raise his right hand flat and give her any sign that he wanted help. So, okay, he didn't want any, and she concentrated on her performance.
Building her speed instantly, she rolled. At the last second, feeling her own vast control and strength, she let her car go a little further than it should have. She was sure Old Man Harrison, stupid-like, was hitting his brakes. Now, with her slipping controlled, easing it over, she still had not quite done it perfectly, but it sounded even more satisfying. Her bumper raked across his bumper, screaming like a steel tiger, and then she was away, leaping, speeding into the night, which after all was her only friend.
She loved nights-every one of them. Nights were her only hope. Actually, wide-open, she only lived to stay awake at night. Night knew her. She knew night.
And on Riot Night, her long-sought moment would come, and she would exult in that priceless violence, wearing it like a jewel in her heart. That final meeting would go down in history, and it would live like a big pink sign of how Mariana Stanton had finally had Cedarville right between her legs.
Charlie gave up when that speeding car hurled itself at him. It had to hit. His foot froze on the brake and he watched the car skid past. He could never forget the intense angry wail of ripping metal, nor the way Bill reached out and slapped his hand on the dash to brace himself.
"Damn fool kid. Who was it? Was it Mariana?"
Bill turned his head away and stared into the night.
"Bill, was that your girl?"
"I don't know, Dad."
When Charlie pulled up in front of the police station he slammed out and felt like cuffing Bill's head off. But he got some of his fatherly feeling back when he saw the dirty, cigarette-strewn floor inside, sour-green walls, and a large photo of a very grim Mayor Reberhan.
"Hey, son-you know something?"
Bill smiled cautiously. "Yeah?"
Charlie was going to ask him about his disc-jockey job, but then figured he'd wait. "Bill, I wished you played music sometimes with Susan like you used to. You know your sister works hard with that cello of hers." He stopped and went back to poking a strip of bare wood in the bench. While he did that, Bill stared at the ceiling and remained silent.
Outside, a fast-driven car shattered a silence inside which was rapidly getting painful. And at the apex of the car's thunder, Charlie heard the sharp and violent sound of breaking glass.
Three cops flung the door to Jake's office wide-open and raced past. Charlie stood up, then dropped back down. He didn't dare look at Bill. When the cops came in from the hall, Charlie saw, before the hall door slammed shut, a broken window and a heap of smashed glass on the floor. "Charlie Harrison...."
One cop carried a folded piece of paper, and when Charlie looked up, he recognized Jim Kerbitts, but Jim didn't stop. And Charlie didn't dare ask him what had happened.
"Bill, who's this guy Couperin Susan is always jabbering about?"
"Huh?"
"Couperin?"
"Oh, him; he's some French composer. Hell, he lived years ago. In the eighteenth century, I guess. Why?"
Charlie hesitated. When he leaned forward this time he felt a nervous twitch run up his skin as if he had measles. "Bill, why don't you play your guitar any more?"
"Aw...."
"Don't you like it?"
Bill rubbed his hands up and down his wet knees and stared at a calendar in the far right-hand corner of the room. As if it were trying to warn Charlie about something, the calendar showed a bright-red number 28 against a white background.
"Aw, Dad, that's nothing but kid stuff."
"So what did ya do, throw it away?"
Actually, Bill had. Sure, why not?
Maybe back when he'd been fifteen and sixteen, that guitar meant everything to him, but he was seventeen now. He'd given that part of his life up. Sure, he could play teen-age records for the kids, and he could jive them up great, but he wasn't a teenager any more. He'd been sleeping with Mariana for almost a year, and she'd made him a man.
"Think big, Bill," she kept saying. "Run this town-you do it to them. Don't you ever let them run you."
When she first said it, she'd been spread out naked on that black leather seat of her car. Drunk with spring, the wind carried around them the smell of pines, the strong scent of wild flowers, of black dirt crushed by her tires. They were high on Gibson's Rise, and moonlight shot down like silver spray. It settled in her hair, coated her face and her mouth. Her lips looked almost black because of the way the moon was shining on her dark-red lipstick, and before she spoke, she tasted and tested each word first by brushing it up along his wrist.
For Mariana, right then, to be able to take again and again her rich gift of pulsing, throbbing body, with sweet passion coursing through her every vein like so many skyrockets and fireworks on the Fourth of July, he would have given up his life, and any promise of future things. He could have stopped living right there.
"Will you do something for me?" she asked abruptly.
"Sure," he said, "I'll do anything you want."
"Bill, would you kill somebody for me?"
Against that moon, against that night and those bubbling demands of spring, her question seemed almost innocent, but still he hesitated. Her words were too meaningful, yet he didn't really know, couldn't know, what they meant-not immediately.
To kill?
He leaned down, felt the rich, heady odor of whiskey on her breath. "What do you mean?"
"Just what I said."
"I don't know . ."
"Could you do it?" She was insistent, and her white body twisting against him was a thing of silver, pressed down, with her breasts shaping up, pointing up into the night. He could feel her calling to him, asking him to meet her, to race once again into that dark, sinking, wonderful, turning pit of forgetting, escaping everything.
Her lips danced. "Will you?"
"Sure."
He'd said it, but then, in that night, which went on and on, he hadn't really meant it. Being with her was enough, holding her, clutching himself into her, feeling that race of hers equaling his, and then dropping off, looking again at the wealth that was Mariana.
Of all the girls in town, she had the most beautiful breasts. There was no doubt about it, and he should know because he'd controlled the automatic-picture racket for a year.
Mariana Stanton.
For her, he'd taken over two gangs. For her he'd hammered out control of the teen-agers. For her, he had them eating out of his hand. And among those teen-agers he'd acquired a name far beyond anything he or she had first imagined. It was not stupid physical strength either, though he'd had his share of fights; it was knowing how to give orders, how to delegate responsibility.
For Mariana, he could kill.
Sure thing, if necessary, he could. He only hoped-back then on that hill in that Night of Spring-it wouldn't have to be too soon, nor too close to home....
When Charlie moved toward Jake's big oak desk he did it as if he were walking on glare ice. Bill seemed almost calm beside him. The police chief didn't bother to look up, but went on rummaging through a mound of papers. And just as if he hadn't played poker with the guy every Thursday night for years, Charlie stared at Jake's huge red forehead and tried to figure the man out. Finally Jake glanced up and cleared his throat roughly. "Look here, Charlie, I don't want to make a great issue of this. And I wouldn't have called your son in anyway, but-" A folded document skidded off Jake's desk and he fumbled for it. "-it's just the simple fact that your son is playing with fire."
Charlie shifted his feet nervously. "Okay, so Bill had a simple accident. So what?"
"So plenty!"
"But it's not serious."
"Hah! But it's not just one 'accident,' as you call it, even though he could have killed somebody other than himself. Besides, Charlie, there's a helluva lot more to it."
"What do ya mean?"
"Plenty!"
Charlie tried to think and couldn't. Besides, he didn't want to think; he wanted action. Like when he'd killed his first man, it came automatically. A German soldier had jumped a stone wall at the end of a lane in Normandy. Charlie simply jerked up his Ml, fired, and the Kraut dropped dead.
"Charlie, snap out of it!"
"Damnit, the boy had an accident, just like you or me."
"You and me, Charlie, we don't go drag-racing on Main Street. Besides, we've been watching your son for a long time." Jake slapped down one paper, fumbled for another. After a lot of searching he seemed to find what he was looking for. "Maybe you don't know it, Charlie, but for some time now the police have been running special files on delinquent teenagers. They do it in all our major cities and in many of the smaller ones as well. Just recently, for example, they found in our big neighbor to the south an organized ring of teen-age shoplifters."
Charlie lunged for Jake's desk. "You ain't calling my son a thief, are ya?"
"I'm not calling him anything, but I happen to have a few reports here. Let me read a couple of them to you. Ori June first, according to one of my best men, your son was seen tampering with a car in the city parking lot. Later on, it was stolen by a gang of boys who used it for a joy ride to Swan's Bay. On June nineteenth, we suspect your son of acting as ringleader, getting up a carload of beer, and selling it to the other minors in Memorial Park-"
"Wait-!"
"And he was doing the same thing all summer long. Being an old buddy and all, I didn't want to bring it up before. Hell, man, I knew you'd only get mad."
Charlie clenched his fists. Who was crazy-him? Jake? or Bill? He turned toward his son and tried to study the boy's face. But Bill stared at the floor.
"Bill, you look at me!"
Bill wet his lips, tilted his head lower. "Dad, he's got it all mixed up."
"Damnit, you look at me!" Bill brought his head up.
"Ya keep looking at me, and ya tell me the truth."
"What truth, his or mine?"
"Did you do that?"
"Naw, of course not. Only some jerk could do stuff like that. When I work, stupid coppers like him don't pin things on me!" Bill twisted into a terrible shape and sneered at Jake with his lower teeth.
"Stop that!"
Jake raised a triumphant hand. "So, Charlie, you see what I mean? What'd I tell ya?"
"Listen, Dad," Bill yelled, "he hasn't proved one single thing. He's flapping his gums like an old turkey. Didn't you notice? He never once said I did. Didn't you notice? He never said anything but that I was 'suspected of.'"
Charlie wanted to believe him. Bill's logic was good, and he felt that Bill had merely been trying to show off. Accepting that part of it, he placed his hand on Bill's shoulder. "Look, boy, how about it? In the future, you going to talk things over with me?"
Bill blushed.
"Will you do that much for me?"
"Sure, Dad."
"Okay."
Behind them, Charlie heard the vague sound of rustling papers, and he looked around just in time to see Jake shuffling through a new heap. Finally Jake glanced up. "Well, Charlie, what's it going to be?"
"What's what going to be?"
"Himr Jake nodded toward Bill.
"Look, Jake, this is all nonsense; You don't have a thing on the boy."
Jake bent low over his desk, grabbed a hunk of paper.
"Well, do you?"
Slowly, very slowly, Jake went on smoothing out the paper.
"Besides, Bill's just got himself a job at the radio station, and if he ever did some stupid kid trick, he's changed now-" s
"Read that!" Jake thrust a hunk of paper at him, and Charlie looked at it. At first he thought it was a note printed by some five-year-old kid, but the words were not words:
You cops stink, and if you don't stop picking on Bill Harrison, this town will blow up so high, you'll never find the pieces.
When Charlie finished reading the note he tried to keep his hands from shaking, but he couldn't. "Where'd ya get this?"
"Somebody threw it through our window just now. Hey, Charlie, what'sa matter? Don't you like the sound of it?"
Charlie wadded it up, handed it back to Jake, and then he started to yank Bill out of the room. As he did so, Jake cleared his throat loudly. "Charlie, wait a minute. Aren't you in an awful big rush?"
"I think we've had enough talking," Charlie said, stopping momentarily in the doorway.
"You going to accept total responsibility for his future actions?"
"Christ Almighty, Jake, sure I am! He's got a job, hasn't he? And I'm going to see that he sticks to it!"
CHAPTER THREE
And that's the way they had left the police station-abruptly, the way his father did everything. Bing, bang and out they went. More than Charlie's stupidity though, Bill had something else on his mind. He tried not to think about Tuesday night, and he shoved his fear deep and let his dad poke him along toward the car. Mariana's assignment worried him. She wanted him to get rid of Keith Harmanski, who was a smooth-talking and-acting guy, called Misty by the students, and she wanted it done because she said Misty was blackmailing her.
Halfway back to the car the Old Man stopped and peered down at him. As if dimmed by the still-falling snow, a street light made a sharp blue slash across Charlie's face. "Bill, son, what was going on all summer? Aw, sure, I know Jake made it sound big, but there must have been something to it."
"Not that I know of."
"You trying to tell me he made it up?"
"Aw, maybe some of the guys have been doing things like that. But me? I don't know a thing about it." Bill wanted a smoke and pushed his hand into his jacket pocket. But his cigarettes were wet and they crumbled hopelessly in his fingers. One by one he snapped them toward the middle of the street.
"Dad, got a cigarette? "No."
Charlie started to whistle Lili Marlene and headed for the car. Bill smiled. He knew how it was. When things got real hot, Charlie used his old device of falling back on wartime memories.
Bill shivered with cold and didn't feel better until he was inside the car and sat staring out at the snow. It covered everything with a dull white carpet, and he tried to see more of it. To get the frost off the windshield, he rubbed the glass with his finger, and it was right then, with his hand pressed against the cold, that he got the smell. Something smelled rotten, and he knew it came from the paper mills across the river.
Poor Sammy!
That stink always made him think about his cat.
Too many things had hit him too soon in that same complicated year of trying to be thirteen. And that had been one of them. It hadn't been his fault, but he'd killed Sammy. He'd buried him, and then a month later he'd found the cat's body on the town dump. A million maggots crawled through Sammy's silver-white fur, and he never could forget that stink.
The paper mills stank, and he tried to forget. Like so many times before, he tried to. But because Mariana had asked him to kill, he couldn't.
You going to do it, Bill?
Mostly, with her, things were fun. It was like her deal with the high-school girls. She'd made a real ball out of it. She got them giggling and poking each other, and then she got them to walk into the automatic picture booth at the dime store. They pulled off their sweaters and bras after the curtains were pulled and made perfect breast shots. Mariana rounded the girls up for him. He paid the kids fifty cents for the pictures and then sold them to the guys for five bucks apiece. That's how he got his own car. It was a real sweet racket for a long time, and every time he drove that red Ford convertible he had to thank her and those breast shots for it.
Easy! Everything was easy for Mariana. And that picture deal had come to her quicker than anything. They'd been sitting in Mike's and Mary's, having Cokes. She'd leaned over, pouting her lower lip big. "Hey, Bill, let's get organized. I mean, make this town really sit up and talk."
"How?"
"We'll start with the girls."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm thinking. And I've got it. Something to do with sex."
"Sex?"
"Yeah, sex."
And instantly, even as she played with the word, even as she rolled it around in her mouth before saying it over and over, she throbbed hot with it. Her lips turned moist, glistened, pouted out fuller than ever. The tight points of her nipples jutted out under her sweater. She twisted them into the material, now rigid, now inviting, now sticking out firmly. They waited maybe for his tongue, maybe for his mouth. She twisted back hard and violently against the purple seat, and second by second she was seducing him. She sipped on her straw, drawing in the black-brown liquid slowly, and then she dribbled one drop of it out of her mouth so that it ran slowly down the straw.
"Like it?" she asked, making his head buzz with excitement, and he completely forgot the pattern toward which they had been working. He didn't understand what she was talking about, and he waited for her to explain. She wrinkled her nose instead and made that smile which any boy in high school would have wanted for his, and she twitched out her hand in a sudden movement of pure love.
"Do you?"
"Do I like what?" He stared at her and felt stupid.
"Aw, Bill, you know. The way we do it?"
He kept staring at her, and he couldn't answer, for he knew he was blushing. Somehow, when it came to his face, he couldn't cover it with the cold and cynical mask of the gang lord. After all, he had his feelings, and he wanted to think of their act as precious.
"Yeah, I like it."
He said it coldly, not caring to be nice to her. But he did like it. With her, with that extreme pounding of her blood, his blood, he reached an essence and a height which towered sky-high. With her, all those stupid things in his life made sense. With her, all his running around, or making grades, or doing something to keep up with the rest of the kids, and then outdoing them, made sense. She saw to that.
And without her there was no meaning. Without her and that precious deep, hot, wet feeling of Mariana, life was pure rot. He had to have her body. He had to. It made him vibrate even when he was just thinking about it.
"But, Mariana, those girls aren't going to strip to the waist-just like that."
"Hell, they'll love it."
"You kidding?"
"Bill, you don't know women. You gotta lead them into thinking something is sinful and bad, and then you kinda tell them, well, maybe they shouldn't do it. If you keep up long enough, they'll jump for sin like bees for honey."
She was right. Within a month, with the exception of blind Gretchen Luitbeiler, and flat-breasted Sally Steiben, they all lined up like dolls. With no hesitation at all, they ran in and stripped to the waist and took the pictures. It amused him to look at the photos afterwards. For most of the girls, as the shots plainly showed, had sense enough to stroke their nipples into strong dominant positions.
He could have made a fortune and bought two cars, but Tony Ricotta squealed. He got out of it with a warning from Principal Hunt, and that was all right. But two weeks later it was even better. Tony's father got shipped out to the West Coast, at least two thousand miles from Cedarville, and of course Tony and his mother went with him. Mariana used her connections and did that. But with Misty it was going to be different. She was leaving Misty up to him....
Charlie told him to wait in the kitchen, and he did. Susan sat reading a book; she flipped through the pages rather rapidly while he was there, but she didn't say one word. Charlie walked over to him when he came in and looked down at him. "You hungry?"
"No, thanks."
"You sure?"
"Yeah, I'm sure."
He went upstairs and Charlie didn't stop him. He went right to his room and stripped to take a shower. When he had his clammy clothes off, he found he was sure glad to get rid of them, and he left them heaped on the floor in one big pile.
Then, as soon as he got into bed, he found he couldn't sleep. "If only I didn't have to kill." He kept saying it over and over and kept groaning and pushing his pillow with his fist. His fist would sink in, stay, and then when he pulled it out, the pillow would mush flat again.
He rolled into a million positions, and still he couldn't sleep. He just couldn't. Oh, sure, every time he did something for Mariana she gave him a big fat reward; but even her pink naked body did not make her latest request any the less momentous and overwhelming.
Once, paying him back for igniting some lighter fluid for her in the girls' John, she took him up on Mount Tom. She led him through the woods to a cold sparkling brook, where it gushed down through the hard gray rock, and she stripped in a wave of strong bright sunlight. He watched her remove every garment. She ran in front of him. Like something wild, she twisted her sleek, tense body out of his reach. She dropped into the water, glinting whitely through the ripples. She looked so white there that her skin had a blue tone to it because of the way the water surface held her, and Bill was surprised at the way her hair looked even redder than ever. He watched her. He stood on the bank, and as he saw her playing with the water, a quick excitement leaped and clawed into him.
She splashed him, whispering, "Come."
Even then, freezing in the stream, even fighting against the torrent, he'd struggled to her, grabbed her and took her....
How could he kill somebody?
How?
It wasn't real when she spoke to him the next time about killing. How could it be? She sat there once again, her body and face out-lined by moonlight, but this time she was dressed, and it seemed to him like a dirty joke. She couldn't mean it.
He reached down and stroked her chin. "Who?"
"Misty."
"But, damnit, why?"
"He's been blackmailing me."
Until then, until that second, he'd never been jealous in his life. He didn't know what the word meant. But listening to her, he felt his face blaze with sudden heat. He could feel a crazy pulse in his neck, and he couldn't keep his legs from quivering faintly, and she noticed it.
"Scared?"
"No."
"Okay, Bill, okay-you want to do it?"
"Yeah-when?"
She didn't answer him. She looked off across a distant valley, pushed back against the seat, lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings at the moon. "Do you suppose I could blow one right around it?"
"Maybe."
"Shall I try?"
He felt like slapping her, strangling her, beating some sense into her stupid head. "Snap out of it, Mariana. You're not talking sense. You were just asking me to kill somebody-remember?"
"Yes, dear."
"When do you want it done?"
"The night before Riot Night. The night of the Hi Dance."
"How?"
He felt her breath lean close to his neck, and it blew hot where sweat was forming in cold drops in the V of his T-shirt. Then she touched him with her hands, let them roam up and down his chest, down toward his belt, his zipper. "Look, Bill, we'll take Misty for a ride. Professional style. Okay?"
He didn't answer her, but he didn't need to. She sighed deeply and long, and made the sound of her desire hard and fast in his ear.
"Where you want it done?"
"The limestone quarry at intermission."
"How we going to get him away from the dance?"
"Don't worry about that. I'll get him out in my car. Bill, come here!"
Her lips opened wide. "Oh, darling come-come here, fast!"
Poor Sammy!
Sammy's death had burned itself deep into his brain. He'd been responsible. He'd killed him. Oh, sure, it wasn't anything like some stupid mother yelling at her kid to run across a street when a car was coming at seventy. That was stupid, but he'd done something equally bad. He'd been playing down in the basement, working with his HO gauge set, and for background music he'd placed his old radio on the floor and plugged it in. He never should have had a metal box like that anyway. A tap dripped close to the drain and had formed a small pool of water.
Ever since he'd started with that particular HO layout he'd wanted to make it look just like Cedar-ville. He'd spent days just pouring out the plaster of Paris and shaping it, and shaving it down, and then when he'd got the topography just right, he colored it in. Badger River twisted a realistic blue line between shallow green banks. The old abandoned grain elevator loomed beside the river in miniature. The rails of the F&O ran down on the east bank of the river, and Larkin Bridge carried traffic over both the river and the railroad. He'd built the main buildings and the main streets. Like a boy's simple wooden sword, the two main streets crossed. Harness ran across the river at the new bridge and made the long shaft, extending eventually down to the state capitol, and Cedar, the older and shorter Cedar, made the wider, rougher-looking handle.
Sometimes he could imagine himself walking up Cedar, coming from Larkin Bridge, and he would stop at the corner of Harness and look around. In fact one of the little figures on that corner was himself. He knew because he'd placed a certain jacket on one certain little guy.
The day it happened, his mother opened the door and called to him: "Bill, do you want Sammy down there?"
"Yeah, Mom, sure."
He was distracted, trying to make the high school's big slant roof come out right, but he heard Sammy meowing his way downstairs.
"Here, Sammy."
Sammy answered him back.
True to form, Sammy didn't come directly to him. The cat liked to make a game out of it, to play at not making straight lines. Sammy circled close to the wall. He came to the water, hesitated, then jumped on the radio. Bill looked at him, but then something scared the cat. He skidded off, hit the water, froze there. A blue spark flashed violently between the metal box and the water.
Bill screamed. He remembered that much, and he ran for Sammy. He must have touched him, desperately trying to save him, but that was the last thing he remembered....
Mom kept Sammy's body for him, and two days later when he got out of the hospital he went out-even though he had bandages up and down both arms-and dug a secret hole in a secret section of the lawn, and he buried him. Sammy should have been safe there, but he wasn't. A month later he found Sammy on the dump. When he went in and asked Mom and Sue, they shook their heads. They didn't know anything about it. He found his dad in the living room, reading the newspaper. He asked them, told him, "Dad, it had to be somebody. Somebody had to throw him out there."
Charlie looked up, smiled slowly. "I don't know, son. If you buried him, you buried him. The cat you saw on the dump must have been somebody else's."
"Dad-I dug the place up. He's not there."
Charlie wouldn't look at him; he folded his newspaper carefully and then stood up. He muttered something about not bawling so much, and then promised him a new bike if he would stop, and then Charlie stalked out into the garage. Bill knew he'd been working on a new cabinet for the kitchen. Bill followed him out and watched him work for a while. Charlie couldn't stand it. After a couple of minutes he got nervous and gouged a hole in a brand-new sheet of clear walnut paneling.
Bill never forgave him for that day, and now it was even worse. He didn't respect him. He hated his guts. Charlie had hauled him down to the police station and then had made a damn poor showing in front of Jake. Charlie was weak, gutless.
Bill couldn't sleep and he listened to the wind. The house moved with dull angry shivers, and he knew that even then his dad was downstairs drinking coffee, reading, forgetting everything. Bill clenched his fist under his head and wanted to spit. If instead of some stupid slap in the mouth Charlie had really beat the hell out of him, then that might have been something. But no! And how could a guy who was supposed to have some guts turn out to be so stupid?
That reminded Bill of another time-a more recent time. It was another poker game. Four men sat drawn up in a tight circle around a table piled with empty beer cans. Smoke billowed from cigars. Jake got to talking about teen-agers and what they were doing. It was just a few nights after the second Riot Night in Cedarville, and because Jake couldn't make up his own idiot mind what to do about them, he wanted Charlie's opinion.
"Look," Jake had said, "they kinda scared me. They acted plenty mean, and I've been wondering just what to do about them ever since. Now, Charlie, you were a big name in the war. What would you do in a case like that? How would you handle them?"
Charlie picked up his hand, studied it, discarded three cards, and then scratched his ear. "Hell, Jake, I think the best thing you can do is just let them roam. What do ya want to do about it? Hell, ya got to let them get it out of their systems somehow."
The street light spotlighted in from outside and colored Bill's ceiling purple. He stared at certain cracks up there that looked green, and then he heard somebody come up to his door and listen. He knew it was Susan and that she was sneaking by to check and see if he was asleep.
He lay there quietly and finally heard her pad downstairs.
Wondering what she was up to, he slid out of bed and went to listen at the hot-air register. He heard her asking her father about some music book which he had apparently picked up and was thumbing through.
"So okay, Sue, I was just flipping through it."
"You don't have to make excuses. What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"Dad-something is wrong. It's not like you to sit here and wade through things like that, especially if you don't understand them."
Bill could see the way his dad must have fumbled with the book. "Sue, cut it out."
"I'm sorry, Dad. I didn't mean it like that. I only meant-"
"Yeah, baby, I know."
Bill couldn't hear anything for several minutes, and he could see them sitting together at the table, not looking at each other, but caught in some daydream; which, whenever he caught them together like that, he called their daily dream seance.
Sue broke the silence. "Well, what happened to Murder, Incorporated?"
Bill thought of Misty and shivered. Damn that girl! What was she talking about anyway? He tried to hear Charlie's answer, but there wasn't any, and Bill tried to imagine what was going on in his Old Man's head.
What did Charlie ever get hot about? What?
Charlie didn't get hot except about boards and 8-penny nails at the yard. He only worried about things going on every single day, in endless repetition at that stinking place. Christ, as a matter-of-fact, they ought to blow that place up, too. Day in, day out, Bill never heard anything from his dad but how they were either getting wet lumber, or knots, or junk.
All the builders were crazy, of course. And the men were smoking on the job. And Old Man Kelly, the boss, was nuts. "Dad!"
Sue said it loudly, almost screaming it, and the word exploded through the vent. It burst inside Bill's ear and he wondered what had happened. But almost at once, he knew. Charlie had dropped off into a daze again, and had been staring at the ceiling.
"Yeah, baby?"
"Heck, Dad, don't worry about it. Everything's going to be okay as long as those two gangs don't blow something up on Riot Night."
"Huh?"
Bill heard his dad's sharp grunt and he pressed his own head close to the metal grille. Susan's voice sounded no louder than a whisper. "Yeah, Dad, they've been talking about something bad, and if they do it, there'll be trouble. This town will go off like an H-bomb."
Bill hated her. Susan shouldn't be talking like that. It was almost as if she'd been let in on the very last details of Mariana's plans, or as if there'd been some stinking leak.
Heck, how much did she know anyway? And why did she sound so disgusted? Before this, Riot Night had never amounted to a damn. But this year, Mariana had worked it out differently. Mariana wanted something, and what Mariana wanted, Mariana got, and so for the first time in a century the old town was going to come to life. Yes, sir, the town would never forget Mariana's show-never.
"Susan, stop it."
Bill wondered what Charlie was yelping about now, but then he knew that, too. Apparently Sue was sitting there with a full glass of milk in her hand, like always, and instead of drinking it, she was pushing it back and forth on the table top, slopping it over.
"Dad, you don't know about Bill, do you?"
"Goddamn it! Know what, Sue? What's there to know?"
"Well, it's like this. You see, Bill forced the boss of the Dice Gang to fight the boss of the Black Spiders. They knocked the hell out of each other, and when that was over, Bill moved in with his own lieutenants-"
"Susan, what are you saying?"
"It's true."
"Sue, you trying to make your brother into some kind of Al Capone?"
"I'm not making him. He is. Heck, all he has to do is tell the kids in this town to do something and they do it."
"Sue, stop it! Do you realize you're talking about your brother like that?"
"Ah, Dad, maybe it's good. Maybe it's like you did when you led those men during the war. Maybe he's just copying you."
"Copying me? What the hell for?" Charlie must have stood up to do his roaring at Susan, but then he quieted down. "I'm sorry, Sue, I didn't mean to yell at you."
Bill crawled across the floor and got back into bed. Two hours later, still trying to get some sleep, he lay there and tried to figure out how Susan knew. Or if she did know. Or was she only guessing? But the next morning he knew he had to get hold of her and choke it out of her. That was one problem. But there were many others. Too many.
Sammy walked across a purple lawn looking for him. Misty kept chasing him on a yellow bicycle and spitting at him, and Mariana kept waving at him with hands which looked like stalks of celery. She kept throwing herself up on a trampoline, rising and falling, and she tried to blow kisses at him, and her breasts were pink-looking and she wore gold rings around them like halos....
"Hell." He slammed his fist into his hot, stinking pillow and wondered about Sue's last remark. What about copying his Old Man? What the hell for? Hell, there was nothing there to copy. If his Old Man had ever had any guts, Bill had never seen any proof of it. Big Hero Charlie was nothing but a great, big bag of hot air. And when it came to copying somebody, Bill was only copying himself. He was Bill Harrison. He was the ruler, and he had all the help he needed from good little old Mariana with her two red-hot lips....
CHAPTER FOUR
Charlie wanted to fire Steve Keeler on the spot, but Old Man Kelly held him back. It was Steve's fault. He dragged over a saw rig to cut some broken 2 X 4s, and when the bulldozer arrived from the Hanson outfit to start leveling for their new drying shed, he had his electric cords strung clear across the yard.
Charlie saw only the tail end of it. The 'dozer churned around and rushed backward and spun over those two wires. It stripped the insulation from the naked copper in less than a second.
Charlie yelped, "Look out!" but it didn't do any good, and the two wires, which looked harmless enough on the ground, slapped together and exploded into blue flame.
Steve ran for the switch and threw it, finally, but the wires had burned and fused together, and the air was full of an acrid electrical smell.
Charlie walked up to Steve and stared at the tall, skinny guy and wanted to knock the hell out of him. "Damn fool!"
"But, Mr. Harrison, I didn't mean nothing."
"Naw-of course you didn't."
All afternoon, Charlie kept thinking about it. Those naked wires represented danger. They might burn and explode at any second, and the only thing keeping them from it was one thin coat of insulation. Separate, they were okay, but twist them together and all hell would break loose....
Helen phoned at four. "Look, dear, Dad's worse. I'll have to stay over for another week or so. Everything okay there?"
"Yeah, sure."
After dropping the phone, he went back outside and studied the sky. It wasn't snowing, but a thick mass of gray clouds hung down over Cedarville and the Badger valley. Wisps of black smoke twisted close to the ground. They looked like squirls of black ink, and he knew the paper mills would make the valley look that way all winter.
His men left at five-thirty and he locked the gate after them. On his way home, he found the streets slick with snow and oiled by a fine rain, and he had to be careful. When he got to the driveway, he was sure happy to see Susan had the lights on in the kitchen. He switched off his ignition and sat in the car for a minute, looking around the garage. He had a million things to do, and he wanted to finish his lathe, and he wondered then if all the parts for it were in the storage space up above.
He boarded off that space so Helen could keep some of her teaching stuff stored away, and it seemed sort of silly to him now that right after the war they'd even made love up there. Later, when Bill was twelve, the boy had asked him if he could use it for a clubroom, but Charlie said no, thinking it might be a fire hazard.
It sure smelled strange to him when he stuck his head through the trap door, but he thought it was only matches or candles that maybe Bill had been using in the tight space.
It proved different. There was an old shoebox which had five sticks of dynamite in it, and he recognized the smell then. It was the stink of raw dynamite, and he stared at a shotgun, two small .22 rifles, and something else.
He didn't examine either the shotgun or the rifles, but he did pick up the .45 in its holster and hefted it. Holding it, he fell back into his role of tough noncom. He jerked the gun out and found that it fit his hand perfectly. He smoothed the oil down along the barrel and checked the clip. It was loaded. He was still fingering it when he heard one slight whisper of sound behind him.
He whipped around, cat fast. His finger eased to just one fraction before discharge, and he was aiming the gun right at Mariana Stanton's head. But she only stared back at him and seemed amused by the whole thing.
"You going to shoot me?"
He didn't answer, but kept staring at her face and her mouth. From the way his flashlight, hit her skin, the light made it seem even whiter, and her mouth looked like one deep and scarlet gash.
"Can't you talk?"
He found he couldn't. Why did she hit him so hard? What was she doing? Jesus, one fraction more pressure on that trigger and he would have blasted a slug right through her pink skull.
"How'd ya get up here?"
"Climbed. What did you think?"
"Never mind."
"Say, Mr. Harrison, you sure know how to handle one of those things. Compared to you, the punks I know don't know a thing about it. I guess you were in the war, huh? How many men did you kill?"
"Too many." He had not meant to answer her, but now the .45 felt ridiculous and stupid to him. He slammed it back into its greasy holster and dropped it on the boards.
"Mmmmm." Slowly she slid one thin hand up past her chin and started to reach for the gun, but then she stopped. She cuddled her chin in her hand and smiled at him. "Mmmm. Man, I like you."
"Stop that."
"Why?"
"Look, damnit, you're either raising too much hell yourself or you're behind it. You threw that beer bottle into the police station last night, didn't you?"
"What do I get if I tell the truth-a big fat kiss?"
"Don't your parents tell ya anything?"
"No. Why should they? They're busy. Dad's got his office; Mother's got her lovers. As for me, they let me roam. What more do you want to know?" She lowered her chin down to the floor. Her hair brushed along the dusty boards, and her head, which hung in space by itself, took on the appearance of a sleek and comfortable cat prepared to spend the night.
"Come on, girl, get out of my way!"
First she licked her lips with her tongue, then she tried to touch the tip of her nose with it. "Okay, Mr. Harrison, if that's the way you want it. But don't you realize we could have such fun together, just you and me? After all, what better place than Son Bill's secret clubroom?" She slid down away from his hand, but then stopped descending, twisted her head up and around and looked back. "By the way, want to know how many times I've been up here?"
Charlie tried to grab her, but he wasn't quick enough.
"So long, sucker."
She lifted her foot, kicked over his stepladder, and ran out of the garage. A second later he heard her driving off, and he started swearing and yelling. Why was he so stupid? What was that girl doing to him? And it must have been ten minutes before he attracted Susan's attention.
"Damnit, where's your brother?"
"I don't know."
"Isn't he home yet?"
She shook her head and looked puzzled by his question. "Guess not." Then, after thinking it over, she smiled. "Oh, I know. He's on the air right now."
They went into the house and Charlie listened to Bill's program. For thirty minutes Bill gave out with what might have been a typical teen-age program, but then Bill stopped his easy patter. Sudden tension vibrated in his voice and, sensing it, Susan came to stand beside Charlie's chair.
"Hey, kids, I want you to meet an old friend."
"Hi, gang!"
Instantly, Charlie knew who it was. There could be only one person and one voice in the world like it. It was Mariana Stanton.
"Who's she?" Susan asked.
"Don't you know?"
"Nope."
Charlie stared at his daughter and found he couldn't even mention Mariana's name. Anyway, how come Sue didn't know who she was? If Susan didn't know her, then how in hell did Mariana get in through the kitchen and down into their basement?
Mariana slid her voice between a torrent of crazy records, sometimes sounding like a kitten with a soft, vibrant purr. "Okay, boys and girls. Listen to Bill's Riot Thunder. And remember, Wednesday night we really roll."
"Susan, what's she talking about?"
Sue shrugged her slim shoulders. "You got me."
Records spun on and off. The sound of them jabbed Charlie's brain with an ice pick's sharp point, and he wanted to turn the radio off, but couldn't. Mariana's smoky voice spiced an element of pure raw sex into Bill's kid program, and Charlie shivered dully, for he found the sexy sounds she made slicing up and down his spine like hot knives.
"Bill, shall we go ahead and tell them?"
"Sure, kid."
"Now, boys and girls, one more thing: don't forget Riot Night. There's going to be more notes rocketing to the moon that night than old Mozart produced in a lifetime. Remember we've got a date-a big one. And remember that Uncle Bill will give you the real charge."
"Who's Uncle Bill? And what's she talking about?"
Susan had gone back to the stove and didn't answer. Charlie almost flipped the switch, but Bill came on again.
"So, gang, the number I'm going to tickle your eardrums with now is a classic. Maybe it's prehistoric. But once in a while I'm going to bring it back to you. Hold on, gang. Here's Heartbreak Hotel!"
Charlie lunged over and snapped the radio off and pulled up at the table, but he found he couldn't eat. He sat staring at his place.
"Dad, what's the matter?"
"Sue, have a heart and stop being like your mother."
Sue sat down next to him, her baby-blue eyes looking up out of her almost adult face, and he saw the dark pleading in them. "Okay, baby, come on, tell me."
"Dad, maybe I shouldn't. Maybe it's nothing. But Bill's got a car. He didn't want you to know, but there's a Hi Dance tomorrow night in the gym and he's up to something."
Charlie didn't mind about the car part. Hell, when he was a boy, he'd bought a car and kept it from his Old Man for two years. That wasn't it. Susan's anxiety disturbed him far more. "Okay, Sue, but what could he be up to?"
She didn't answer at first, and she shoved her paper napkin tight against her lips to keep from blubbering. "I think-I think he's going to take somebody for a ride."
CHAPTER FIVE
What'n hell am I doing here? Charlie asked himself. After passing Central High's vast block shape, he swung into the parking lot and waited for Susan to get out, wondering just how stupid he was trying to be. Nobody, but nobody was going to take anybody for a ride.
Susan was stargazing and stumbled against him.
"Hey, Dad, look at the moon. It's running away."
The last thing in the world he wanted to do was look at the moon, but he looked. A thin slice of it stood on edge, high over City Hall, clouds whipping across it like great gobs of white foam racing over a spillway.
"It's not the moon. It's the clouds."
"Yeah, Dad, I know, but it's more poetical the other way."
On their way into the gym, red banners fluttered. Thunder boomed from the stage, and Capitol City's Western Wild Cats jerked up and down in their striped red-and-white suits, banging thunder from their instruments. Kids, with their heads held low, vibrated across the floor in a state of electric shock, and he looked for Bill, but there was no sign of him. Mariana, however, gyrated with some smooth-looking boy not two yards away. She smiled, tossed her hair, and winked. "Hello, Mr. Harrison." He didn't answer.
Except for Jake, he didn't see any parents. Jake nodded briefly and Charlie knew he must be there on account of his daughter, Alice. When the dance ended, Charlie and Susan stood up to see if they could find Bill. "Do you see him?"
"Nope."
He was still standing when the Wild Cats did a strange thing. Making an abrupt switch from their previous beat, they swung into a slow and dreamy waltz. Jungle time flowed into Ritz time, and the kids hardly had a chance to be surprised. Mariana sauntered up to him.
"Want to dance, old man?"
Her request stunned him. For one thing, Susan was watching him too hard, and her quick eyes probed his face minutely, He tried to manage his better-type smile. If he refused Mariana, Susan would think him a coward, and certainly Mariana would think him a jerk.
"Sure."
"Good."
At first, from the way she wiggled into his arms, he expected she would try to make him appear awkward, but she calmed down, fitted in, moved with grace. He expected, too, that she would be doused in some raw and violent scent, but her perfume was not strong. On the contrary, it was subtle, undefinable, like the smell of slate rocks in summer rain.
After they had circled the floor the first time, she pressed his hand and murmured up at him, "You're okay."
"Thanks."
He felt better now, but the name of that waltz bothered him. What was it? And what would Helen say if she saw him dancing with this young, glamorous creature in her stunning white sheath? What would Bill say? It was strange how he tried to remember the name of that song, and its words, and couldn't. The rhythm flowed through his legs in a too-familiar way. It caught at him like a faintly remembered hand stabbing from a huge mob and waving. And it stopped him.
Strange how he couldn't remember.
Mariana offered an impish smile, and a faint suggestion of laughter shook her shoulders, but instead of moving out, she moved in closer and tighter to his body. She pressed against him, and he felt her flesh slipping smooth and resistantly under her thin white gown, "You killed anybody lately? You still mad about that ladder?"
"No."
"Why not?" Her right hand was warm and soft, with no moisture, and it, too, reminded him of something.
"Can't you relax?"
"Hell, I'm relaxed," he said, but he wasn't. Suddenly, thrown off by her insistence on something, he made stiff, wooden movements, while she flowed along easily and precisely according to the music. The skin of her cheeks and forehead glowed with smooth brilliance, and he wondered if they would feel cold to his touch. Certainly, where his hand supported her back, her warm skin burned through her clothes and made a constant and maddening glow of heat. She looked up, and a dreamy something in her eyes talked to him, but he didn't want to understand.
Where was Bill?
"C'est un revel" Mariana spoke in French, the words yanking him off suddenly into another world. It's a dream! What was she talking about? He turned into that other world, his mind whispering into it. Why can't I hold you? Feel you better? Where are you? Cheri, a fait mieux!
"Yvonne!"
He'd shouted it suddenly, involuntarily.
The waltz music whispered on and on of moonlight and roses, but close beside them several curious boys and girls stopped and stared at him. Mariana swung to a stop, too, and she peered up. She half smiled. Abruptly, he found himself standing alone in a big room packed with kids, and he felt horribly embarrassed.
"Who was she?"
"Somebody."
"Was she your wife?"
He blushed.
"I see," she said. "Well, she wasn't your wife then. But was she somebody during the war?"
Her eyes and the perception in them scared him. It was far worse than her body, or her perfume, or her skin which flamed in his hand and made her body heatpermeate madly into his body heat.
"Tell me about her,"
"She was just a girl."
"French-I'm sure."
"Yeah."
When he got back to his seat, Susan was hunched over, talking to a kid who kept her upper lip drawn down stiffly over her front teeth. He was glad Susan was busy, because he sure didn't want to talk to her. Stabbed after a few seconds by his concern for Bill, he stood up and looked for the boy. Where was he? It couldn't possibly be a question of a ride. Stupid nonsense! Kids got such funny ideas these days, and they twisted and turned things so they didn't make any sense at all. If it weren't for those guns....
Yvonne.
Her name was a whisper on a warm and expectant night, exploding into his face. He turned a corner off the Rue de Rivoli and she came toward him, running and laughing, just for the sake of running and laughing. It was three nights after the liberation of Paris, and they danced in the Cafe Bonnard until four in the morning.
"Gee-Eye, you're crazy, you know that?"
"Yes, I'm crazy."
In her room, they stared out at Le Sacre-Coeur on Montmartre, and a dim, red light out-lined their naked bodies with a soft and supernatural glow. In that light, her mouth gleamed wetly and she played at eating him up as if he were so much food on a plate.
He grabbed her in his arms, carried her away from the open window and the rush of air, and laid her down on his blanket. Her black hair flowed across her naked breasts and he sat beside her and stared at her beauty.
"Thanks, cheri."
"What for?"
"For being so nice...."
That winter, coming on leave from Belgium, he looked for her all over Paris, but she was gone from her two rooms and from the city. It had happened the way she said it would. Once, during those three days of knowing her, he had leaned beside her, looking down into the Seine. They were on a bridge with a black iron railing near Notre Dame. It was early in the morning and nobody was about, and around them the city rose up like some indistinct etching. At their feet, the river glowed with pale green luminosity. After stroking her hand across his face and lips, she suddenly grabbed the white gardenia from her blouse and dropped the flower into the river. For a second the water held it silently right below them, a white and vivid scar, but then the flower got caught in the current and whirled away. He stood up, stared down the river after it, but it disappeared after a very short time.
She smiled sadly with a little melancholy movement of her lips. "Cheri, that's us."
"No."
"Cest la vie!"
"No!"
He couldn't lose her. He couldn't stand it and he grabbed her and dragged her so close to him that even through the heavy wool of his uniform he could feel the soft pulsing and breathing of her body.
He had loved her, and that had been the only real love in his life. It had been perfect. On those nights of passion, they intoxicated themselves with love. They had drunk deep of it, and their bodies had drawn it in like water. Yvonne's room held them safe, and the space of it was filled with Yvonne's odor and scent. Out of all time and all experience, when he dreamed of Yvonne-or rather when every living cell in his body dreamed, because it was too mentally painful for him to remember more than once a year-he knew during those times that he'd only had it perfect that once.
They had distilled love out of a world's pain. They had flung their fists at the war's violence and the billion hard denials of decent living, and sex with Yvonne had been pure. They lived it. Ate it. Slept it....
He could never forget that, but it was too dangerous, too wild, too intoxicating to keep too close to his mind. For most days of the year he shoved it deep and let it rest inside him like a coiled and ready chrome spring. Now, once again, against all his struggle, it reached out and stabbed him. Mariana brought it back again. By pushing her young body against him; by being, even in her youth, so much of a woman, she dragged it all back.
Instinctively-and he didn't even dare think about it; couldn't think about it, for his thoughts would crucify him-he knew that if they made love it would be the same identical way with her.
Bill strolled in an hour later. Two shifty-looking characters, who couldn't have been any older than he was, followed him. Charlie stared at his boy. He couldn't take his eyes off that hard, thin face; that strange rolling walk, or the way Bill's left hand opened and closed, opened and closed. Something had changed radically. Charlie knew it, and he knew what it was. After his dance with Mariana he couldn't look at Bill in the same way. That was Bill's girl. He had danced with her, and some deep hidden desire wanted her. He knew that, too. He could feel it, and he could feel that Bill stood in his way. Bill was his rival, and he hated that thought. No father should feel or think that way about his son.
How could he chase the same girl as his son? How could he stand in combat against him? It didn't make sense. But he'd been forced into a tight cage, where his own thoughts had reached out for something. They had grabbed for feeling, sensation, love, and he had felt one stark and violent stabbing emotion. And he couldn't let go of it. And yet he had to.
Bill wore his black bean-pole suit and moved casually. His two henchmen were much more nervous. They kept looking around, shifting their hands from one pocket to another. Though they looked like mere kids, the audience knew better. The teen-agers knew that those two carried guns. A strange anticipation showed in their tense young faces, and they stopped dancing to watch Bill cross from the main entrance to the stage, Susan pinched Charlie's elbow savagely, stared up into his face. "Look at him! Is that monster supposed to be my brother?"
When Bill got close to the bandstand, a couple of girls tried to grab him and kiss him, but he shrugged them off and then climbed the platform. Bill didn't even glance toward the leader, but the music which had continued in a subdued vein up until this time, stopped in mid-beat. Bill turned his face from side to side, surveyed the crowd, pushed the mike with his knee, and then shoved his hands deep into his pockets. The mob surged for a second with some heavy, intense anticipation, quieted down then and waited for him to speak.
"I don't have much to tell you this time. Just one word of advice: when we go out of here tonight, the dance has got to go on. Has everybody got that straight?"
Charlie stared, and he couldn't believe he was in Cedarville, listening to his son. What kind of raw bravado was that? Charlie looked around him. Nobody cracked a smile. The mass of boys and girls took Bill seriously. They heard, they accepted, and with a brief nod they indicated their acceptance.
Bill stepped down from the platform. Behind him, the orchestra leader waited for a second and then waved his arms wildly. The band plunged into a new number. Instantly, dancers vibrated into sharp-angled chaos. And even though Bill passed within a few feet of where they were sitting, Bill didn't look at either him or Susan.
"We going to go now?" Susan asked, pulling at his elbow, trying to get him to stop staring at Bill and that obedient crowd. Charlie shook his head, The kids had obeyed his son blindly, without question.
"Dad, you coming?"
"No."
He had to try and study those kids and understand them. What was this all about? Riot Night! Taking somebody for a ride! This whole bizarre show, what was it about?
He'd seen one Riot Night. He couldn't forget that either. But this was not like Riot Night. On Riot Night the kids walked slowly. They shuffled aimlessly down sidewalks and streets, They wore blank and empty smiles. But in the past they'd had no direction. Here, thanks to his son, they had plenty. Bill pointed and they obeyed.
He'd seen that one Riot Night, two years before. He'd gone downtown for a pack of cigarettes and then got stuck there. The kids came milling into the main intersection at Cedar and Harness and he couldn't move his car.
He'd sat in his car and watched them. They marched side by side, half swaggering, half cringing. He heard no sound except a high wind, which tossed the tops of distant elms, and that never-to-be-forgotten sound made by the thin, sandpapery rasping of thousands of feet. The town was closed except for George Feen's drugstore. And George had cowered in his drugstore entrance and had watched them coming. He wasn't going to move. Charlie saw that, but then they started to twist over two steel poles which held his big blue-and-white ice-cream sign. George squealed something and darted into the mob. George was caught, not by one hand, but by a whole wave of hands. They lifted him and shoved him back against his own plate-glass window. Charlie watched the scene, his car doors locked from the inside, and something horrible stuck in his throat. Right behind George, right under a huge gold letter D, Charlie could see that the glass was buckling, bending, giving. He waited for it to break, but it didn't. The mob didn't push George through his window, but they could nave. And George knew it.
Nobody looked at Charlie, and he didn't move. He couldn't. Outside Fourneville, when he took those men onto that stupid hill for Colonel Rome, it was suicide. He had no chance, but here on one of Cedarville's main streets he'd had even less.
Susan kept jostling his arm. "Hey, Dad, if you're not going home, can I ride with Janice?"
"Sure."
"You're not worried about Bill and that business I told you about, are you?"
"No."
A ride! A ride!
Mariana flung those words up and down and juggled them as if they were golden oranges. Up and down, she sent them in quick curving lines, effortlessly. It was fun.
She controlled them all: Misty, Bill-and his dad, too.
Most of the evening she'd danced with Misty, and she'd tried to break him up, make him feel her. Out of all the high-school crowd, he was the smoothest dresser, the smoothest looker, and of course he had not tried to blackmail her. He was too damn decent, damnit. And she wanted to torment the hell out of him because ... because she couldn't seduce him.
She'd tried to get him to make love to her, She'd conned him once into taking her to a motel, where she'd said she wanted him to meet her father. Of course, her dad wasn't there, and they had to wait for him, and she mixed drinks, and then she unbuttoned her blouse and stroked herself against him. He'd snagged her up tight, dug his fingers into her arms. "Maybe, Mariana, I'd like it better if I had to do some of the work."
"What do you mean?"
"You know."
She slapped him, buttoned her blouse, and he had smiled. "Man, Mariana, you sure are a witch."
"Go to hell!"
Routine dancing. Routine rubbing. Misty was too smooth. He did the right things, at the right time, not too much, not too little. His attitude had no kicks. She got much more out of it in kicks and thrills when she danced with Bill's Old Man.
She wanted to see him again, just for the heck of it. He was sitting there, stiff, straight, but the kid, Sue, was gone now.
Strange how she'd detected that desire in him. It didn't show in his voice or his eyes, but it showed in the way his body heated up. It came pleasantly, nicely through his pores; and, damnit, this lust wasn't even for her. It was for some screwy chick, years before, called Yvonne.
"Hell!" She said it and bit her Hp.
"What's the matter?" Misty pretended to kiss her, bent close, pulled her up, stroked her cheek, and didn't miss a step. Nobody looked. Nobody watched. She hated the way he pretended things.
"You mad at me, Mariana?"
"No, I was just thinking."
"About what?"
"Something."
Hitch, shove, hitch! Hitch, shove, hitch! As if correctly machined on a steel press, he placed his steps. He moved precisely with the music. Misty did what the correct teen-ager, correctly dressed, always did. He did nothing more. Nothing less.
She thought of Bill.
After now knowing his Old Man a little bit, she thought she knew Bill better. They were much alike, and suddenly she didn't understand why Bill hated his dad so. Why? They should get along swell together.
With Bill, things were fun. He was different. He had some guts, and he dared do most anything, Finally, playing with her idea, juggling it sky-high, she knew the final test was tonight. If he came through for her with Misty, she'd trust him for anything. If he was ready to kill for her, he would prove something. Yes, yes, yes! It was, next to Riot Night, Bill's final test.
She wanted him to pass it-and he 'would pass it. Easily. Bill Harrison had a tenacity and a furious emotion inside him that nothing could stop. She liked to see this passion burn up, ignite, and volcano out inside his eyes.
He'd never go chicken.
He'd promised.
And she'd promised-promised him a whole night in bed on that weekend when Mother went with Mr. Larson to Chicago. In that bed, on that night, both stripped naked, she'd do everything for Bill. Everything he wanted.
And tonight, after the pit deal, she had to take Bill to the Blue Robin and buy him beers. If after she got rid of him, if after a little while-if then she made another appointment. What then?
She wondered if she could get Charlie Harrison to meet her.
"Look," she said suddenly to Misty and dragged him over quickly to the sideline, "I got to see somebody. You stay here."
"Who?"
"Mr. Harrison."
"You going to dance with that old buzzard again?"
"No."
She studied Charlie carefully and approached him from the side. She noticed how, when he was aware of her coming, he pulled himself up straight and almost smiled. She watched the huge pressure that went into it. His hard masculine face formed that hint of a smile, constructed it, as if he had to cut it and hammer it out of wood. It looked like hard work. But she liked his mouth.
"Guess you wonder about me and Bill, don't you? A father's kind-hearted interest in his son, maybe?"
"I-look, Mariana, maybe I have you all wrong. But the way you've been doing things, I find it tough to see what you really want. Maybe you could tell me what's going on."
She watched his face change from smile to frown, but it was still a good face, basically honest
"Most every night after eleven I'm at the Blue Robin Cafe-alone-if you ever want to talk about things. Me. Or him, for instance. You could come out. How about tonight-later?"
"Maybe...."
"Okay."
She ran quickly back to Misty, dodging through the dancers, trying to find him. He was on the other side of the gym, and she crowded herself into his arms, looked up at him, and kept silent.
"What did you talk about?"
"Not much."
"Sex, maybe?" Misty's face looked nasty.
"That's right. Sex! Speaking of which, would you like to come out to my car and do a little heavy necking, Mister Harmanski?"
"Mariana, please, I've told you before that there's other things-"
"Are you scared, Misty?"
"Me. Scared?" Misty's proper head loomed erect. His proper smile moved very properly along his proper lips, and he made a very properly ugly expression.
"Okay, come on."
She twisted furiously out of his hands and started running for the door. She looked back after a couple of steps and saw that he still stood there, and she yelled at him. "You coming?"
Misty heard her, stared at her, and looked a trifle less proper. Too many kids were staring at him. They were watching to see what he was going to do. Who, they all seemed to ask, wouldn't want to ride in her car? If that stupid jerk refused, then tough for him. He seemed to pick those thoughts up from the floor. They electrified his brain, and Misty took one step, took another, and then broke into a slow run.
She beat him easily through the door.
Still ahead of him, she opened wide the low door of her car, "Okay, how about it, Misty-you want to go for a ride?"
CHAPTER SIX
A ride!
Bill knew it was a screwy word for murder. How did those mobsters in the Twenties ever dream up such a weird expression. He chewed it over in his head and walked straight for the bandstand where those crazy musicians were making ice-cream hash out of good music.
A ride!
Frank Harris and Jay Cloud followed him at a discreet distance. Frank was a tall, dark-haired, cold-looking Italian boy. He looked real mean, but Frank twitched sometimes when they were on a caper; while Jay, who had yellow hair and a heavily freckled face and looked like a hick from way back, could run up to the Devil in Hell and pull the ring off his finger without a second's hesitation. He had them trained fairly well. If he had to kill, he wanted to do it in style. If that's what Mariana wanted, then that's what Mariana was going to get, Aw, hell, what difference did a killing make? Maybe it would stir up indifferent people. With life sitting in one great big bowl like mush, gray and tasteless, wouldn't murder spice it up, make it hot?
Start out with murder!
That was better than starting out with some slimy, grubby little crime that didn't matter a damn. A ride!
"Bill, baby, you going to come to my place?" A small blonde smiled big. "Dad's away. There's a case of beer. How about it?"
"Shove off."
Two other blondes slid up. They offered him their wares. And by doing so, they tilted their chances bang into the no-play area. Bill walked on, not listening to them. It was strange, as he went through that mob, how intensely aware he was of every single detail in the gym.
He saw every banner, every wire. He noticed every imperfection in a girl's skin. He saw how the wax which coated the floor designs for basketball had a thin yellow cast to it. He'd seen, of course, Mariana dancing with Misty, and he'd been intensely aware of the fact that she wore gold earrings in the form of thin, gold scallop shells.
Thanks to her, he had developed this faculty for observation down to a fine edge. By just glancing, not fast, but smoothly up and down a room, he could see and know everything.
"Any time you enter a place," she'd told him once, "remember the Commandos. When they attacked a German station during the war they followed a standard procedure. They didn't knock. That would only call attention to their entrance. They'd yank open a door, look to see who might reach for his gun first, and then they'd start shooting accordingly. They killed a lot of men that way."
"But, baby, I'm not going to kill anybody."
Back then, he thought he was only going along with her joke. But hell, she hadn't been joking. Now murder was a cold, hard fact. Misty Harmanski was going to go for a ride, and Bill visualized the following day's police report. "At ten o'clock Wednesday morning, Keith Harmanski, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Harmanski, was found dead at the side of Highway 90, apparently struck by a car traveling at a high rate of speed."
Heading back for the stage, Bill made his face blank and looked straight ahead. Susan's friend Janice was just coming out of the washroom. He climbed to the stage and, not wasting words or motions, said what he had to say, and then stared for a second more at those assembled faces. Sure, this was another gimmick, but he had to go through with it; Mariana wanted it, and the kids always liked that type of thing. They got a big kick out of it, and they always obeyed.
When he got outside he glanced at Mariana's car. She stood beside it, talking to Misty. Bill ambled toward his car, vaguely casting a look up at the sky. He couldn't hear any wind, but he could see where it moved up there. The sky tumbled with high and fast-flying clouds. And for a second he felt as if he were being tumbled right along with them.
Jay cleared his throat, but didn't say anything.
Bill was nervous, and when Frank snapped a flame from his lighter to light a long cigar, Bill whipped around and glared at him. Smoke billowed from Frank's mouth, and he shifted over to plunk himself down on the fender. "Well, Bill, why don't we plug him first?"
Bill knew, without looking, that Frank was fingering his .45, stroking the oil on it and feeling the weight of it in his jacket pocket.
"I said no."
Frank coughed suddenly, spit something out, and smashed his cigar into the ground. It didn't go out, so he had to stamp on it.
Jay eased up alongside the big boy. "What'sa matter, kid?"
"Nothing."
"Ain't she ever going to get started?"
Jay had asked it, but Bill looked at Frank's face. Even in that faint light he could see great drops of sweat dripping off it.
"She knows what she's doing."
He said it, but he didn't know it, or feel it, and he opened the car door and slid under the wheel. One after the other, he fingered stations on his car radio. Those stupid DJ's were ignorant slobs. They had no style. He jabbed the radio off and then sat there waiting with his hands propped on the steering wheel. They must have weighed tons, and he tried to relax them, but he couldn't. His fingers sank into the plastic wheel, or seemed to, and the wheel kept getting greasy and slippery, and he couldn't let go of it. And he wanted to do something-anything.
The boys circled his car and didn't get in. They weren't talking now, and Jay went clockwise around, and Frank went the other way.
Bill shivered, The moon looked like a broken splinter of glass in the sky, and Jay bent down to whisper to him. "Hey, you think he's wise-doesn't want to go?"
Bill watched her, certain she'd have no trouble getting Misty to do what she wanted. Her stark white dress stood out like a phosphorescent road sign. She said something which he couldn't hear, but he heard Misty's answering laugh and he knew Misty had no idea what was going on....
A ride?
Hell, no! Charlie knew such an idea was stupid. Why, damnit, nobody, not even these wild lads, would try to pull such a thing. He knew it was nonsense, yet he didn't like the way things were going. Something was wrong, and he sensed an angry, raw itch in the air. It stung him and tickled his nerve ends with fire. Why so much funny talk? Why that crash into the river? Why all these mad, crazy actions? He sat there, the wild, hustling music stripping his nerves from him, and he listened. He kept searching the gym, kept looking for something. But the more he looked, the more nervous and uneasy he got, and finally he couldn't sit still any longer; he had to get out of the gym.
He realized what was wrong: Mariana was no longer in sight. Now he knew what had been bugging him-he wanted another dance with her. He wanted to look her straight in the eye and find out things. He figured she controlled Bill-and men in general-and he figured if she had half a chance, she would want to control him. Well, he would kind of like to find out about that. He wanted to test her. Hell, he knew he was stronger than she was, But secretly, down deep in his inner emotions, he wondered what that girl would be like. Yvonne had distilled herself into Mariana. She'd multiplied the attraction, And what would happen when Mariana's lips became too dynamic, too close? What would or could stop her when her whole wild body flared up and exploded with heat?
He was still wondering about her sexual possibilities when he came out of the gym and saw her standing beside her car. He stared at her and felt as stiff as rock. She wore her stark white sheath like a second skin, and he could see every inch of her body, and he wished he didn't have the ability. Hell, she was only a kid. "San Quentin quail." He'd muttered it half aloud and instantly he was glad she couldn't read his lips.
Mariana saw him and darted toward him conspiratorially.
"Hey, Mr. Harrison," she whispered, "you want to go to the Blue Robin sometime? Out there, we could talk plenty-about everything."
He smiled slowly at her and watched the full reckless curve of her lower Up. What did she want? If he hadn't been so worried by so many things, he would have thought she was propositioning him. Hell, what was the matter with her? And what did she mean?
"Maybe you might want to come out tonight? Say after eleven?"
"Maybe."
She paralyzed him, jolted him with an electric shock, and then she turned and pranced unhurriedly to her smooth friend. God, with a walk like that she should have taken over where Marilyn Monroe left off.
"Charlie-I say, Charlie. What the hell ya daydreaming about?" Jake had walked up and was pounding him on the back.
Charlie tried to keep from scowling and swearing at him, and stood kstening, even though he didn't want to listen.
"Say, I didn't know you knew the Stantons. Ya sure that stuff is good for your high blood pressure?"
Charlie watched Mariana leaning toward her "friend" as if she were taunting him about something, and he heard Smooth Boy's words cutting through the mixture of unrelated sounds: the background blare of the Wild Cats, an occasional distant horn, a scream, a loud laugh.
"Okay, let's go for a ride!" Misty said, and he walked around the convertible and got in on the other side. Mariana slid in behind the wheel. Charlie shuddered. He knew where she was leading him. He knew what their final goal would be-and he hated it.
"Cute, ain't she?" Jake asked.
He heard the quick rasp of Mariana's starter, the high-pitched roar of her engine, and watched as she and Smooth Boy sat close in the front seat. She had her head turned toward the boy and he could hear her mocking words: "You sure you want to go for a ride?"
With a sudden rush, the car spun gravel and swung out toward the highway. Charlie didn't look back at the police chief, for suddenly he realized the truth. If anything was going to happen that night, she'd be behind it. Without one word to Jake, without even telling him to go to hell, Charlie ran toward the parking lot. Before he got there, another car roared into action and followed the first. Charlie waited to see which direction they took and then ran toward his own car.
As soon as he got on the highway he let the red needle on the dash flicker up around seventy, but he never got sight of them. They'd been heading down Route 90, going north, but when he got to the big rise five miles out which overlooked a long sweep of farm land toward the northern twist of the Badger, he didn't see a sign of a car on the road. .
Where were they going? He pulled up and tried to figure it out. They must have had some specific destination. But where? Then, as if a hand had reached out of the night and tapped him on the shoulder, he knew where they were headed, Back a couple of miles, a narrow lane ran from the road into the old limestone quarry. He made a U-turn and headed for it. Before he got there, however, he suddenly remembered an even shorter way in from the top.
Approaching the edge of the quarry, wanting some advantage, he snapped off his lights and stopped the car. He ran to the brink.
Down, a hundred feet below, two cars were parked side by side at one end of the quarry, their headlights illuminating a grim scene at the other end. Charlie's eyes leaped to the figure of the one he thought of as Smooth Boy, tied to a stake. Desperately, he fought against his bonds, shouting something unintelligible. Beside him stood Mariana, apparently taunting him, for her movements suggested the forward darts of a snake setting up its prey for the final, lethal strike. A few feet away were Jay and Frank, moving up and down in impatient, toad-like hops.
Charlie's mind whirled. Where the hell was Bill? And what were these damn-fool kids up to? A ride? It looked more like they were going to burn Smooth Boy at the stake. Snow swirled, blinding Charlie, and he had trouble seeing through the myriad flakes.
He squinted. Mariana turned away from their victim and motioned toward one of the cars. A motor roared to life-and Charlie knew instantly that it was Bill's and he was driving it. Jesus, so that was it!
The car leaped forward, thundering across the floor of the quarry, picking up speed as it drove straight at Smooth Boy. Jay and Frank leaped out of the way. Calmly, almost disinterestedly, Mariana watched the approach of the whining, roaring monster. Still she stood beside Smooth Boy, refusing to move out of the way until the last moment.
The car hurtled on. Smooth Boy screamed! Charlie tried to yell something down at them, but he knew it was useless-no one could be heard above the roar of the car.
It was so close now, its headlights burned into the faces of Smooth Boy and Mariana. You could smell the fear and unleashed violence, even at a distance.
The approaching car was on them now.
Inexplicably Mariana moved smoothly out of the way and then, at the last possible moment, put up an imperious hand to stop the car.
Charlie heard the rebellious power of the engine, the squeal of protesting brakes, a devastating scream from Smooth Boy! At that moment Charlie knew it was too late to stop the car....
He turned his head away for a moment, unable to look-and returned his eyes to the horrible scene, unable not to look. The brakes locked, just yards from the stake, and the car slid the rest of the way like a greased bobsled, snow mushrooming around it.
Once more Smooth Boy screamed-and stared in terror-stricken fascination at the hurtling projectile that had stopped mere inches from him.
After that it was so silent you could almost hear the snowflakes falling. In slow motion-or so it seemed to Charlie-they untied Smooth Boy and packed him into the car. The other two boys got in after him. Bill looked out and said something to Mariana. She shook her head, waved her hand at him, and Bill's car moved out.
For a second Mariana stood alone, her dress only a dull white blaze in the night, and finally she walked to her black car. Charlie watched it disappear. He watched night return to the pit, and he watched how wind tore clouds across a tar-and-concrete sky. He lit a cigarette, found he couldn't smoke it, and tossed it into the quarry. It fell fast and made a red streak like a tracer bullet in the empty space of the black pit' , Striding toward his car, he discovered he was shaking, and sweat was pouring in rivulets down his forehead.
Mariana slid into a booth at the Blue Robin and drank a quick glass of beer. Mmmnv ... good. Nothing could ever go wrong again. Nothing. Her arteries pulsed right, filling her with intense pink stars.
Out at the pit-perfect, perfect. Bill had proved himself, passed his test. She remembered white lights bearing down on her, snow throwing a thin, white lace over the earth, and a chill wind catching hard, bony fingers in her hair. Again, she saw Misty's huge eyes stare from where they'd tied him to the stake, and with full, flooding excitement, she listened to him panting. She remembered his screams. And Bill? His face had looked white, set, but he hadn't hesitated. She knew-in that moment of full truth-that he would have done it.
One night, months before, preparing for this even then, she'd asked him: "You'd do it for me?"
"Yeah-for you, Mariana, I could kill, if I had to."
There had been one flaw: she couldn't let Bill go through with it. Not that she would have minded killing Misty. It wasn't that at all. It was merely that she knew they couldn't get away with it. That-and only that-had made her stop Bill.
But, she gloated, he would have gone through with it!
She relived the moment-the squealing brakes, snow splashing, the roaring engine. She smelled the panic and heard the screams that portrayed Misty's agony, and she knew he must have really sweated it. She sipped her beer, delicately holding her glass, and wondered how long it would be before Misty came around again, Then, almost purring, she shoved her glass toward the center of the table and stared at it.
Bill was supposed to be there.
What was keeping him?
And what about Charlie, the man with the hard-soft face-would he show up, too? Reflectively, tasting herself, she licked her lower lip. Her lipstick tasted like thin raspberries, and she felt the soft inner skin of her mouth tentatively with her tongue. Charlie Harrison was a fool, but otherwise he was maybe okay.
"I guess you think you're damn smart, huh?"
Bill's voice snapped out suddenly behind her and she spilled her beer. She'd heard no sound of his coming until he got right on top of her. She stared up at him, the pink light making his face seem hard and cruel. It flooded up from pink bulbs concealed behind pink glass. It illuminated her table and then showed a black, gleaming dance floor. Several booths, the same as hers, with black tables and black leather seats, circled the floor. The wall behind her was stark white and looked like liquid chalk, and on her table, one white candle flickered inside a red vase.
"Sit down."
He did, but she could tell he wasn't going to be nice to her, and she wanted somebody to be nice to her. She needed it, and she had to have it that way just like she had to have food and air.
"Mariana, why did you have to pretend? That was stupid. After we get all set to kill him, then you call it off. Why?"
She watched his thin nostrils dilate and his lips narrow. He was mad!
"Maybe I just wanted to see if you had any guts."
"You know I've got guts."
"I didn't know how much."
"And do you think you know now?"
"Maybe."
When Al Matt brought him his beer, Bill didn't look at either her or the cafe owner. Al smiled, shrugged a huge shoulder in Bill's direction. "What's bugging him-girl trouble?"
She laughed, feeling good, letting the sound mount in her throat, not forcing it, but knowing it to be real. "No, just kid trouble. You know how these teen-agers are. He thinks I'm cheating on him."
Al's returning laugh sounded like a pane of glass breaking. "And are ya?"
"Sure. Why not?"
Bill's long face grew longer. His jaw squeezed into sharp determination and his eyes looked like splashes of raw black acid. "Shut up!"
"Think I should?"
While Bill held his bottle and his glass with tense fingers, Al took one look and walked away. She saw Bill squeezing against that glass. She saw the way he made his flesh work against that which would never give. And Mariana sensed how keenly aware Al was of how she was playing with dynamite. From a few steps away, Al glanced over his shoulder and shook his head negatively. She only smiled.
"You didn't mean that crack, did you?"
Bill was staring at her with a nasty look in his eye. A brutal twist contorted his lips and she wondered when he'd start digging his hands into her and start trying to play his cave-man bit. "Sure, I meant it."
"You mean everything you said about Misty was a lie-that not only did you pretend he was blackmailing you, but that he's probably been laying you, too? Is that it? You bitch!"
Bill's words exploded out. They slashed her like sharp splinters of glass. They were clear-edged, cutting, flashing without control, and she'd never seen him like that-and she liked it. And yet she didn't. Bill could kill. He could destroy, but somewhere at this point, maybe his reason couldn't control his bright, flooding violence.
"Stop it!" she snapped, disgusted at his too stupid seriousness.
"Yeah, Mariana, you think you can play with me. You think you can use me. Well, you can't. I should have slapped your stupid head off and left you right then-right there in the quarry."
"Why didn't you?"
How long it lasted, she didn't know. She found herself leaning forward, glaring at him, staring into his eyes, and he was staring back at her.
Candlelight flickered over them. It made his face look chalk white; black shadows loomed tall behind his head. She watched his cold hate. She could visualize herself and him. She knew that wolves in the wilderness could stand that way, facing each other. They could be so filled with anger, fear, and sheer violent destruction that their raw emotion itself would freeze them, and they couldn't move.
She heard then, as if it were whispered in her head somewhere almost beyond hearing, a sound which was exactly the sound of her own death. Yes, she knew it then. If he could kill for her, he could kill her.
She felt it.
And instantly she knew she could kill him.
She visualized taking her bottle and smashing it. She held the neck, only jagged edges remaining. She saw herself using it, whipping it up violently into his neck. Again and again she could slash it into his flesh, ripping his skin. She could see blood splashing, dripping. Caught, held by her vision, she saw herself making a weapon for one purpose only-
"Mariana, you promised me something!"
Misty stood behind them. Misty spoke, and it was just as if somebody had thrown a rock at a crystal-clear panel of ice. Misty's voice shattered their hating, and she breathed again.
Bill put down his beer, pulled his hand back from his bottle, and he sat there not looking at her, but looking just beyond her at one stark white wall. She forced herself to do it. She forced herself to swing her head around slowly and look at Misty. "Hi, Misty, long time no see."
"Cut that stuff! You know what you did. You don't have to put it on."
"Who's pretending, Misty? I'm honestly surprised to see you. Want a beer?"
"No, thanks. Are you going to keep your promise?"
"What promise?"
"You promised me we were going necking tonight."
"Did I?"
She looked full into Misty's proper, smooth face, and she tried to find in it some restraint and his same cool politeness. They were gone. He was changed plenty. If somebody had suddenly dunked the boy into a boiling pot carried fresh from Hell, he couldn't have been more different. She watched him standing close to their table, strained, holding his hands close to his sides, doubling them into fists.
"Misty, what is it?"
"You know what it is."
Violent, brittle emotions ran through the skin of his cheek and neck, contorting them. She studied him, and then as if seeing into a mirror which had the power to render instantly the actual feelings underneath a person's face, she saw that Misty could kill, too. He stood waiting, extremely tense, not exactly facing them, keeping his chin high and peering out from under his eyelids to watch both her and Bill, and his eyes flickered with tall, dangerous flames. "Misty, please."
"Beat it!" Bill spit the words at him, but Bill didn't look around.
"Not until she keeps her promise. Remember, Mariana, the boys always told me that when you say something-you do it. Ain't that right?"
If nothing else, the new ferocity of Misty's voice hooked her. Before, she didn't care for his proper being, his niceness, but now she liked his words as he beat them out at her and hurled them like daggers. He slashed out words like a cat uses its claws, and she needed a good dose of male violence. After the hollowness, and, yes, the building to the violence of a "ride," she now felt the need for release.
For a long time she had been building this thing, playing with it. Now it had to burst. She needed and had to have one great orgasm of violence which would free her completely from herself. Violence would do it to her. Violence would send her, and that was her only cure, and she had to have it, She stood up slowly and slid away from the black table. She held on to the booth partition and felt how fragile it was. Finally, she looked at Misty, "Yeah, I'll come."
She waited, not knowing how it would happen, but knowing certainly something had to happen. It was inevitable, as when one finally pulled a pin in a hand grenade and let the lever flip.
"Where do you want to go?" Misty asked.
"I guess the limestone quarry is good enough. Your car?"
"Yeah."
Misty turned quickly and started to walk away.
She followed, but she kept her eye on Bill-and Bill moved. As if shattered out of his waiting, he exploded. As if flung up, hurled, and now having a goal for his extreme violence, Bill shot out of the booth. "Wait!"
"What for? You?" Misty spun around instantly, lowering himself into a half crouch.
Bill moved in fast. He grabbed her arm, flung her back roughly. For a second she was caught completely off balance and felt herself flying toward a post, but she reached out and stopped herself with her hands and then lowered herself down slowly into her same seat. Slowly, too, enjoying that waiting, she reached now for her glass and took a sip.
Right in front of her, right on stage, she had her violence. Now, for her, there remained only her lust-filled, eager waiting.
They whirled around like two tomcats in heat, raring to go, facing each other, feinting in, out. They searched for openings, so they could come in fast, make their kill, and then get out. Like tomcats, too, they wanted to save their real energy for their love act. This fighting, this streaking in and out and slashing of claws represented only their love-play. It made a fascinating prelude to the serious business of sex.
With such performances, such a tickling of the senses, she felt that she could develop a real taste for foreplay of this type. Once she'd read of Latin women proudly bearing knife scars from their lovers. She hadn't understood it then, but now she did. She realized why they wanted that visible sign of then-vast and exploding passion. She felt this necessity. It swept her up and went deep inside her, coming with a power that could overturn the universe, and it made reality real.
They crouched down and moved quickly back and forth, and their shoes made an eerie shuffling sound. Their breaths came in hoarse, quick pants; their eyes looked like the thin, quick slashing of knives. She stared at her lovers, feeling herself close to them, and she didn't care who won. She felt, knew, only that she would give herself to that person who did win. She had to.
Bill tilted his head low to the right side. He held there as if searching out a mark for his fist in Misty's body. He held his long arms in close to his sides, and he moved them in and out like striking snake heads. Misty took an easier crouch. He seemed to search for some wrestler's hold with which to strangle Bill, and they both went on turning, bearing in toward each other, always turning. They did it as if, in that turning, they had learned the only ancient dance still existing in the world.
Misty feinted quickly with his left foot. He jerked it back and brought Bill toward him, and then he lanced himself swiftly for Bill's swinging left arm. Bill tried to brace himself but, still turning with his judo trick, Misty flipped him out and over his inclined back.
Bill skidded headfirst along the floor. Without giving him a second, Misty jumped up. He came into a crouch, and he landed like a panther on top, digging in.
They went over and over like two tomcats, but they didn't make a sound; only the hard impact of their bodies could be heard. They whirled, twisted and turned on the black floor, The sound of their fight thundered through the almost empty cafe, and a juke box went on playing Stardust. From the far left-hand corner, three faces stared whitely, and she didn't know whether they were men or women.
From the beginning, feeling a new breeding violence, Al Matt must have been aware of what was going on, but he didn't move. Now, she watched him quietly fold up his bar cloth, place it behind his sink, and then saunter out from behind his long teak counter. When Al moved, he moved with a long experience of living in fights, controlling, winning them.
He'd developed this talent to a fine point through his long life in Cicero and Chicago. In him, in his appearance, she saw the only possible end to this fight. Having stopped hundreds of them, he would stop this one, too. Seeing this cold fact, she felt both sorry and glad, "Break it up!" Al barked.
She knew they would obey, and that his force would prevent them from doing terrible injury to each other. Before this fight, she'd never cared about Misty. She didn't give a damn much whether he slept with her or not, but now after watching that hard steel spring snap and explode inside him, she did care. She wanted him. She wanted to feel him, feel him in the right way, and know that he was there. And thinking this, she knew she might as well have them both. Why not? Such things made life interesting.
"Okay, break it up!"
Without any visible exertion of strength, no sweat, Al reached down and grabbed Bill by the collar. He closed his fingers, and he had that neck locked in steel. With his other hand, he did the same to Misty.
Al jerked down his knees a little bit and Misty rose as if elevated by a hydraulic lift. Misty hung from that giant hand. Bill rose, too. For a second, his arms flailed weakly like a kitten's paws, and then the two fighters fought no longer. That huge bursting vein of violence, which had kept them turgid, burst. They were no longer tomcats in heat. Both of them were babies-weak and close to wailing.
Al turned toward her, gave her a cold smile, held them up. "Okay, honey, which one ya want for tonight?"
"Neither. Throw them both out." Al did.
She didn't even watch them go. Then, as the sounds of Stardust concluded, she sat quietly, sipping her beer, and wondered very much about her life. She saw again that same violent building of emotion.
It was wonderful. It shot up from peak to peak, spurting up, ejaculating white and splendid-white against black night-carrying her along. She rode a rocket, swift, stream-lined, fired by Bill and Misty's masculine power, but their force was nothing compared to Al's.
For Al was a man.
And maybe Charlie was a man, too. That song-Stardust-poignant, real, belonged somehow to Charlie's youth. Somehow it caught that long-forgotten time, and she knew nothing about it. What did kids do back then? And what, for instance, did they want?
What?
CHAPTER SEVEN
The limestone quarry dropped off suddenly from its high upper edge and slid then, more or less gradually, into the valley. Night stuffed that space black with questions, and Charlie stared down into the quarry, wondering what other tricks they had played on its smooth floor, Hell, yes, when he was a kid they did crazy things. Often. On Halloween they raised plenty of hell, Not pretended murder! But then, as he was still thinking back, Jim Landon's death stalked out of the night, straight at him....
They slipped constantly, trying to see against a wet flicker of new snow on a Halloween night of twenty-five years before, and he and Jim walked once again across the trestle bridge toward Dutch Town. They wanted to scare the old foreigners into thinking a witch was around, by painting X-designs on their outlying schoolhouse. A freight caught them. Jim heard it first and opened his mouth, got panicked, and dropped his paint can. Not able to do a thing, Charlie watched him claw frantically at a timber, slip, and then fall to his death. Charlie could never forget his final, not-to-be-understood curse. "Damn you, Charlie, why'd you do it?"
"Yvonne?"
Night didn't answer. It held nothing but savagely twisting shadows, and he wondered about Mariana. The Blue Robin was out about twenty miles on Lake Cashmere; and, wanting to have a showdown, he made up his mind to drive there and talk to her.
He turned into the place and saw cars pulled up close to a long ranch-type building like baby pigs suckling on a sow. He saw Bill's car, and then Mariana's. In order to consider the situation and stay hidden for a time, he parked under a row of pines and waited. He could watch the entrance from this position, and he wondered how long he would have to wait, but it was only a couple of minutes until somebody shoved Bill and another boy out the door.
The quick, flickering scene reminded him of a section taken from some black-and-white film strip. He saw his son shake himself and stalk over to his car. The other boy, who proved to be the smooth one from the quarry, was pushed by more momentum. He stumbled to his knees, tried to get up, couldn't, and then raised his fists and shook them at the sky.
As soon as they drove off, each in different directions, Charlie walked into the building and hunted for Mariana. He found her sitting alone in a booth and looking as if something had frozen her there. But she glanced up when she heard his step, smiled at him, and waved a slow greeting with her left hand. Candlelight flickered over an empty beer glass, compressed her face, gave it an older look, took out any suggestion of puppy fat, and she was now a woman, who said: "Hi."
"Hi, may I sit down?"
"Sure, I asked you to come, didn't I?"
He sat down, glanced at her empty beer bottle, glanced at her tight hands. "Do you know I was up there, watching your performance-watching my son?"
"Yeah, sure, Mr. Harrison."
She took her empty glass, shoved it back and forth, making it squeak on the wet table. "Do you want another beer?"
"Please, I'd like that."
"Shall I get the waiter?" He started to get up. "No, I'll do it."
She whistled toward the bar, and for a second as he watched the man walk up he could have sworn it was the corporal he'd had so much trouble with during the war. This man had the same walk, the same cold eyes, but Cherokee had been shorter, and had been spawned like a panther from West Virginia's hard hills, "Whatcha want? Beer?"
"A beer for the girl. A double bourbon on the rocks for me."
"Ya better not drink if you're gonna sit with her, Bud."
That sarcastic voice slapped him too hard, and he glanced up into the man's face. It was an ugly, rigid face. The gray eyes functioned with pure efficiency in it as if they were so many steel cogs in a machine. They had, of course, no feeling in them. Normally, Charlie might have shrugged and told him to go to hell, but under the circumstances, with Mariana staring at him, he couldn't take it.
"A double bourbon is what I want. Ya going to bring it?"
"Maybe."
"Whaddya mean-maybe?"
"Look, mister, maybe I only serve people I like. Maybe I want this kid for myself. Maybe ya got an ugly mug which I don't like. Maybe-"
Those words stung him instantly, and instantly Charlie whipped to his feet. He crouched, swung his shoulders, and he shot his right fist into that big, hard chin. He held back, and then watched Al shake his head slowly and settle back on his heels. Al didn't fall; instead, he went down, more from reflex action than anything else, and simply sat on the floor.
Charlie rubbed his fist with his left hand and felt to see if any of his fingers were broken. They sure felt that way. He stood and watched Al pull his legs slowly under him, and stand back up in the same methodical way he had gone down. Charlie waited patiently, almost as if he didn't know what he was waiting for. When finally Al stood on his feet, he grinned happily at Charlie. "Bud, ya shouldn't have done that."
Charlie tried to stop his sudden fear and moved in fast. He punched with all his strength and weight behind it. But that opposing body whipped in and out too rapidly. Charlie couldn't follow him, and then somehow Al got hold of his arms. Al flung them up and whipped in behind him. A second later, Charlie felt two huge hands work under his shoulders. They came down on his neck in a tremendous full nelson and bore down so hard his bones squeaked. Charlie's mind whirled, crazy-fast, and he knew his neck was going to be broken, and he couldn't do one single thing to stop it.
"Al!"
It amazed him how perceptive he was of every sound and every shade of light. That black floor gleamed under him with its dull coating of wax, and he could see himself falling into it. He was plunging down as Jim had done, and he was diving into that black, deadly river.
"Al, let go of him!"
This time, Mariana's voice sounded no louder than a whisper, but instantly the man broke his savage grip and let up. Charlie stood alone and still stared at the floor. He didn't see Al step back. Suddenly, as if receiving an empty pay envelope, Charlie felt cheated-but he couldn't tell why.
Al glared at him and then muttered hoarsely under his breath. "Okay, Bud, so I'll get your drink."
Charlie was ashamed of himself, and he tried not to look at Mariana when he lowered himself into the booth. He was also surprised to find himself panting, surprised at the intensity of sound.
He couldn't speak.
She smiled, put out her hand. "It's okay. I know you're big and strong. But against Al, nobody has a chance. He was a fighter for a long time-too long."
Casually, she let her hand touch down on his still-clinched fist. "You know, sometimes when a man fights too long, like Al did, then there's nothing else. Women don't mean anything any more. There's nothing but money-cold hard cash. So like that, Al is pure. He's just got one vice, dollars!"
Trying to control his voice, trying to keep the shakes out of it, he looked at her and asked, "How do you know?"
"Because."
She didn't explain further, and Charlie watched the bartender walk up. Al came, holding their drinks in one hand, placed them down and walked away. Mariana took a sip of beer and looked after AI's departing back-while under the table her knees touched, pressed against his. She'd started it. She'd brought her knees in tight, and Charlie was surprised at the raw daring of her act. He wanted to pull his away but, caught by some power beyond him, he didn't dare do it.
She poured her beer. "Tell me about her."
"Who?"
"Yvonne, natch, who else?"
For a long time, trying to think straight, he toyed with his glass. He felt ice cubes rattling, and he even started considering telling her about Yvonne. Maybe, as a matter-of-fact, it might help him to get rid of those emotions which were so suddenly avalanching down on top of him.
"You going to tell me?"
"No."
He didn't want to, he couldn't; besides, what was he doing there with Mariana anyway? What? He saw his crazy weakness for her grow. It came up inside him, hot and hard, and he couldn't help getting more and more disgusted. He knew he had to get away from himself. He gulped his whiskey and stared at her. "What about you? Why don't you tell me about yourself? For instance, what have ya got against Bill? Against me? Why do you want to destroy everything?"
"You got it all wrong, Mr. Harrison-" She stopped, hesitated, starting pushing her glass back and forth. Her hair swirled tightly over her shoulders, half concealed her chin, and the way it hung reminded him of girls back when he was dating and dancing.
"Ya want to tell me?"
Her face took on a grim, serious look; and, counterbalancing it, her knees pushed in even harder against his under the table. He couldn't help feeling that offer, that suggestion, that heat, and then again that suggestion.
After pouting for a second, she let her tongue flicker across her lips. "If you tell me about her, I'll tell you anything you want to know about me. Okay?"
He didn't want to bargain with her, but he did. He agreed to talk, and for a long time he sat there playing with his glass, feeling her knees. He didn't dare look her in the face, but he told her about the war. He told her what it meant to have a woman to hold and cherish against violence, death and nightmare. He didn't mince words, but he simply told her how it was, and she listened quietly. When he finished, she reached out and touched his hand. "Thanks."
"So, Mariana, that was me. What about you?"
"In a minute."
He waited.
He studied her face and wondered what she was going to say. After smiling inwardly to herself, she took his hand, rubbed her warm, moist finger up and down the inside of his palm. "Charlie, would you make love to me if you didn't have to feel so guilty about it?"
Mariana kept careful count of glasses while Charlie drank. Only a couple more maybe might do it. If he drank enough, if she got him up into AI's private apartment, she was sure she could seduce him, and she could have him right where she wanted him-weak.
Charlie tossed off his fourth glass and gave her his wide happy-go-lucky smile. His obviously good feelings had come back to him with his telling of Paris and Yvonne, and how their love shone stark white against a black war. "The two of us," he'd said, "used to burn up in our love like a fire consuming itself along with its own fuel."
Whiskey didn't seem to touch him much, but she knew that wide, heavy gleam in his eyes-which he apparently was putting on to show how much he could drink-made it easier for her to step into domination.
"Want another?" she asked casually.
"Sure."
She felt herself leading. She felt him following. It had always been that way. It would always be that way. When she wanted to-and what else was there?-she could always lead. She could always control.
She got it from her father, big Mike Stanton, and she cursed herself for having his power. It meant her being what she was. It meant other people being what they were, and it meant two scenes in her mind. They came out of her past, and one symbolized the other.
In her house, they always had the best. The Stan-tons had the best servants, the best food, the best clothes, the best of everything. Nothing at 57 Crescent Drive was hard. Living was easy.
By the age of ten, she knew damn well there were two ways of life: that of the rich, that of the poor. And later, when she was thirteen, she really learned it for real. One summer afternoon, bored, doing nothing, having nothing to do but wait for dinner that night, she sat on their wide marble terrace which overlooked their wide, green lawn. She considered that precise blue lake, which was also part of Mike Stanton. He'd made it. It was his. A hot sun spilled over their terrace with .golden, boring precision, but her thoughts were far from sunny. She sat on a white wrought-iron chair and held a silver knife. A few minutes before, she'd sent Sally Benson, the maid, to bring her back a pound of butter. Now, it lay like a lump of yellow gold, squarely in the middle of her plate.
"Is that all, Miss Stanton?"
"Yes."
She didn't know why she wanted it. Or what she was going to do with it. She was alone, bored. Nobody could stop her, and Sally, now turning around and leaving her, didn't say one word, one way or the other. Still staring at the butter, Mariana took that silver knife which was hot from the sun and let it sink by its own weight into the butter. It sank-and met no resistance. Nowhere. Nowhere.
"Nice."
Where the dull blade sank, butter parted in great oily folds. It fell away, making, causing, giving no opposition to the blade. It had absolutely no resistance. Her whole life was the same way. She asked and she got-and nobody said her no.
"Nothing! Nothing!"
There was nothing anywhere to stop either that solid-silver knife or this solid-gold girl.
That was one scene. The other scene, happening still in that year of being thirteen, went with it.
She'd been hiding in her father's study, for what reason she no longer knew. Mike Stanton never used that room much, but it had to go with his house, and it was full of his books, his junk from hunting and fishing trips; and, for some unknown reason, it had a model of a strange and fascinating house. This house was too big for a doll house, for it stood four feet high, and it was utterly flamboyant, decorated with fancy baroque designs.
That day, she'd crept inside it, and she was still in it, dreaming, when her father walked into the study.
Mike Stanton!
When she watched him walk in-and she was still a child then-she knew how hard he was. Her father got what he wanted. He stepped on people. She'd seen that same face before, and then she knew where she'd seen it. It was in a book of Renaissance art, and that face was best represented by a Medici bust.
It was a rock-hard face, brooking no opposition, and it had a rock-hard mind behind it, that used people, and their emotions, and their feelings, in the same way that other human beings used objects and things.
Now, four years later, she knew that, in a way, Al and her father were much alike. They were both fighters and both had fought too much. Sex to them meant nothing human-no necessary human action. It was only a sometimes-used function of the body. Since it was not necessary to their daily lives, they could suppress it, and they did.
Under some other circumstances, being in that miniature house, having come there in the first place to be quiet maybe and to try and find herself, she might have tried to burst out and scare her dad. She knew he wouldn't scare, but he might have been surprised. He might have cuffed her head once or twice and said to her: "Well, Chick, you sure got me that time."
But she didn't, and Mike walked in smoking one of his huge cigars, the kind people sniffed after, and Jake, chief of police, followed him in. Jake's fat face gleamed with sweat as if he were walking on red-hot coals, and he kept fidgeting with his uniform jacket as if every button on it were too tight. "Sit down."
Mike Stanton pointed to an easy chair facing his huge desk, which was utterly bare. The dark wood shone with a polish that seemed to indicate nothing but money. Puffing smoke in every direction, Mike strode behind that desk and stood severely. Sometimes he leaned down and touched the desk with his hand, but more often he just looked at Jake, and sometimes he looked at the miniature house, but Mariana knew he couldn't see her.
"Mr. Stanton...."
"What do you want, Jake? You know I don't like to see people here."
Still fidgeting, still sweating, Jake raised his chin, raised his right hand. "It's about Arthur Rice."
"Yeah, what about him?"
"He's still in the hospital."
"So what?"
"Mr. Stanton, you did it. You hired those four toughs. You planned it. Just as he was coming out of his bank, they caught him and beat him up."
Her father laughed. He roared; he leaned down; he placed his cigar on an ash tray and then held his guts. His roaring, gurgling humor went on for several seconds, and then it stopped just as abruptly as it began.
"Me? You think I had something to do with that?" Her father rose, stood erect and severe. Now he was that solid-silver knife. He was bearing down on a shiny block of yellow butter. He was slicing it, cutting it. And in front of him, the soft butter was falling away in thick, oily slabs.
"Mr. Stanton, we know you were behind it. We caught all four of them."
"How come?"
"Their car broke down just outside of town-heading back to Chicago." Jake said it almost apologetically.
"So?"
"So-look, Mr. Stanton, I want you to be careful in the future. You can ruin people like that. Just because Mr. Rice stood up against you and tried to keep you from getting control of his bank, you didn't have to cut him down, did you?"
"Why not?" Her father's smile sharpened into an extremely sharp razor, but there was no reason for the sharpness. In front of him there was nothing but soft, soft butter. He had no resistance, no opposition, nothing to cut. She wondered what Jake would do. What would he try to do? She wanted him to fight, but he didn't. Apparently her father saw his same gutless melting, because he turned his question. "Why not-why shouldn't I have my say in this town? If I weren't around, nobody would stand up for anything here. Not even you!"
"Mr. Stanton-" Jake started to rise, but then Mike's look brought him down again. "There's a law here in this town. I represent the law, and we're going to bring you to trial."
Mike laughed, bringing out each new sound of his merriment with pure, ringing joy. "Try it!"
"We're not playing, Mr. Stanton. This is damn serious. The law will see that you are held responsible for Mr. Rice's injuries. He's going to bring you to court. We'll cut you down."
"Try it."
"Don't worry, we're not going to let you push us around." Jake struggled to his feet. He was sweating worse than ever now, but some determination showed in his face. "You'll go to jail for this!"
"How about a thousand? Would that make you happy?"
"You can't bribe me!" Jake shouted. His face got intensely red and she wondered if maybe it might burst like an overblown balloon. He went on to rave about what an honorable man he was, how he upheld the law, how he looked after Cedarville.
After listening quietly for a while, Mike stopped him, slashed through his words. "Who's bribing you? I'm talking facts, Jake. If you want your job, you can play ball with me-or you can get the hell out!"
Jake sank, rose again immediately. "You can't do it, Mr. Stanton. I'll fight you. The law is stronger than you are."
"Like hell! And if you don't go back there and tell them it was all a mistake, and how everybody heard wrong, I'll make it known over town how you ran a cathouse in Mitatogag County ten years ago.
"But-"
"Oh, hell, I know all about it. You had a place not as nice as that one." Mike jabbed his fist at the miniature house where she was hiding. "That one there was the pride of Warthurburg until the middle Thirties. It was the prettiest place you'd ever want to see anywhere. I knew it when I was a boy. Got my first lay there. God, those decorations-solid gold and silver, the rooms lined with pure silk, and gold mirrors, and the women...."
"Mr. Stanton, you can't do this to me."
"The hell I can't. You go back to your fat little station. You turn my boys loose and say you made a big mistake, and things will turn out okay for you. By the way, Jake, weren't you interested in getting that restaurant on Cedar started right? Weren't you?"
That made two times. Two scenes. Her father had sliced into Jake like a hot, sun-heated knife. He was the silver blade sinking through butter. Without meeting opposition, without contradiction, or any resistance, her father had done away with Jake. Jake represented the law, but that was more buttery and more oily than he was. That's what she thought then.
She had never learned different.
Those two scenes plagued her, taught her, made her understand, but for some time afterwards she wondered what a cathouse was. She was fourteen when she finally found out.
She'd asked her dad in that same study, pointing. "What's a cathouse? What's that model?"
He looked at her, sat behind the desk, and stared at her for a long time. "Yeah-so you were there that day. You saw it. Heard me?"
"Yes."
"Okay."
He took up his cigar, lit it carefully, drawing in neat little breaths. "That's the way the world is, Mariana. You can step on it, or it steps on you."
"And that house?"
"It's where women sell themselves. They sell their bodies to whoever wants to buy them. That's all it is-just another word for a whorehouse."
"And are they worth much?"
"Sometimes."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Charlie was drunk. He knew it. His face felt as tight and frozen as an old board, but he was still vividly aware of Mariana's hand. It was hot and warm and it was leading him outside through the cold, and then up a flight of stairs back of the Blue Robin, and then in through a hot dense darkness. He knew she'd promised him something, and he knew what it was. She'd promised to tell him everything-just as long as they got the hell out of that stupid, smoky atmosphere.
"Where you taking me?"
"AI's room-but he only uses it when he has some blond chick come up from Chicago for the weekend. They're never the same girl, but no matter who it is, he calls them all Marilyn."
Even though he tried to stop and tell her something, she kept pulling him along behind her. He kept ricocheting from one wall to another, and he thought the walls were made out of rubber. But he kept telling himself that in spite of this queer sensation, he wasn't really drunk. No matter what he felt, he had full control of himself, and he was in perfect command of the whole situation.
She stopped quickly. He plunged against her, and for a second he felt her warm fragrant breath on his face, and then she swung a door open and pushed a button. He went inside. The room, when he finally stumbled to a halt, looked garish as hell. It had red walls, a black ceiling, a white floor, and a black bed. Pink lights and green night tables completed the decor which had about as much quieting effect on his nerves as a cherry bomb let off in a herd of frightened elephants.
She brushed past him and sat down on the edge of the bed. "Sit down, Charlie."
"Where?"
"Here-right beside me."
"Mariana...."
"Yeah?"
He tried to make his tongue work. He knew he had to solve some problem. He knew he had to ask her about his son. "What you kids trying to do in Cedarville? You trying to wreck the joint?" But even as he phrased his questions, he felt his head whirl with dull, circling rythmns. Her lips, body leaned too close. He could almost touch them. He could almost feel them. He wanted to reach out and touch her. Every muscle and nerve in his arms wanted to grab her young, vibrant body. "Why, ya wanta wreck the joint?"
"What makes you think we do?"
"Because-"
"Okay, Charlie, you tell me." She looked at him, yawned sleepily and fell back on the bed. She lay there like a wide-open flower, staring up lazily at the garish black ceiling.
"What'sa matter with you kids?"
"Don't you get it, Charlie? Don't you understand? Kids kill each other all the time. Younger kids, huh? Cops and robbers. Cowboys and Indians. They kill over and over again. They always make a symbolic killing of someone. You see a cute little boy maybe. Maybe he's a real dear, holding a toy gun. Do you think if it was a real gun he would use it any less?
Can't you imagine a real gun, real bullets, and a pile of bodies on a sidewalk someplace?"
"Mariana...." Suddenly he found himself not listening, but leaning over her. He was looking down at her. His two hands were propped close to her shoulders, and he was staring into her green eyes. He felt the green, molten color of them changing into some new, deep and secret depth.
He saw her lips move slowly. Her lips formed slow words, and he kept watching their slow emergence. "Yes, Charlie...."
"Why don't you be good?"
"I don't want to be good."
Her lips moved like molten lava and formed one hot kiss which waited for him. He felt her hands. He felt the full, deep warmth of them moving up his elbows. They were pulling him down to her. He leaned close. He was almost touching her, and he could almost taste her perfumed breath, almost feel the moisture inside her mouth which was welling up in the pockets at the corners of her lips like pouts of dew. He fell toward her kiss and relaxed into his own dark, hard, throbbing pressure. He stopped. He couldn't kiss her. He knew it. Just when his blood was almost exploding with pressure, he yanked himself back and staggered to his feet.
He heard her laugh.
"What's so funny?"
"You. You scared or something?"
"No."
"Okay, so sit down. I won't bite you."
He kept hearing her laughter. He kept seeing the wet lick of moisture on her lips, and he stared foolishly at her body. It seemed perfect. Her whole being was fashioned superbly, as if she'd been lying there for an eternity to make love to him. But he couldn't do such a thing. She was a kid. Underage. Of course he couldn't. He couldn't go fooling around with any Lolita type of female. He could look, and that was all. He could be a father to her maybe. Maybe he could tell her what to do, how to live, and how to behave. He had to look out for her, but he could never, never make love to her. Never!
Mariana had been so close to getting the big man on top of her that his sudden pulling back startled her more than she ever wanted to admit. She'd never known a man who had come so close to her and then had withdrawn. How, after once feeling her, or seeing her, or just tasting her breath, could Charlie do that? With Misty, it was different. She hadn't even really started playing with Misty, but she'd been only too keenly aware all evening of Charlie's throbbing pressure. He wanted to crush her. He wanted to take her, and she knew it. She had felt it coming close, and then he'd pulled back from her.
She kept looking up at him, letting her eyelids flicker, and she let her gaze wander up and down through her half-closed eyes. He looked bigger that way, more cruel even. His tie was crooked. He'd forgotten his coat somewhere downstairs in the bar, and his shirt was mussed. It was pulled out a few inches from the tight belt which girdled his heavy waist. She watched a huge, demanding pressure which knotted and twisted through the muscles of his face and neck, and she pretended to laugh at him. But it was not a real laugh. It was only a pretend laugh, and she was only using it, as she knew too well, for a weapon. No matter what, she had to get him under her control. She had to weaken him, and get him to come to her. She had to feel him. She wanted to feel him. She had to know finally that she had him there, and that she could and did hold him hard and fast between her smooth young legs. If Yvonne could control him, if his stupid wife could do it, then she had to do it, too. But how? He stood there and rejected her completely. He was playing some almighty father role, or he was trying to play it. He was telling her she should take care of herself, or save herself, or preserve her youth and innocence. And oh, Christ, that she should be virtuous.
"What the hell for?" she asked.
"Someday, you'll be sorry."
"Me? Hell, I'll never be sorry."
She felt the black bedspread move and slip suggestively under her tight silk dress.
She knew her dress was creeping far above her knees. She knew the top of her stockings were showing. She knew his eyes were watching her. She felt her hair move like one soft luscious wave under her head, and she knew that she could whirl it out against the black cloth like a red flame, and she knew she had to get him.
Somehow, she had to.
And for sure.
"Want a drink, Charlie?"
"No."
As if he was perfect now and throwing over every temptation, he stood in front of her, hard, masculine and supreme. And she watched his face. It had strength, great strength in it, but it had weakness, too. It could fight, as he had fought once, but it could give in. Somehow, oh-so-delicately reaching, she had to touch his weakness and then bring him into her.
"Charlie?"
"Yes?"
"What did you like best about her?"
"Who?"
"You know."
He didn't answer, but stared straight down at her, and his eyes had a steady fixed stare, as if they were seeing through her and beyond her. But even in their drunkenness, they always had to come back to that intermediate surface, which she knew was her own body.
"Did she do nice things for you? To you?"
"Sometimes...."
As if every movement had to be molded out of a perfection of action, she reached up behind her to the zipper back of her neck. Her arm was crooked over, but she could still control it, making her curve of shoulder and head very desirable. She let her fingers pull at her zipper, and she knew now that he was watching, his hard breathing under some small control. He didn't let his gaze flicker away, and he didn't say one word.
"Charlie, want to make a bet?"
"Huh?"
"I bet you won't be able to resist me naked-that you can't stand it. No man can stand back from me and resist me when they see me. Do you know that, darling?"
"I'm not betting!"
"Why not?"
"Because-but you can't break me, Mariana, no matter what you do. You can't do that. Never!"
She watched with intense fascination as his teeth gritted into one grim line. Slowly, delicately, she shrugged her dress from her shoulders. It felt so warm and damp somehow, and then she slipped it in one swift movement over her head. She lay there fingering the lace edge of her slip. She stared up at him, watched him stare back at her, and then she licked her lips slowly with the tip of her tongue, stroking the tip over her upper lips with slow motion. And his eyes tightened as if he experienced sudden pain.
Her slip went off easily, too, and she lay there, fingering her white bra and her white panties. Charlie's face looked a severe fighting red now, but he didn't move. He seemed frozen. He stood there, waiting
"Want me to take my bra off? My panties, huh?" His voice sounded hoarse when he spoke. "Mariana, I don't give a good goddamn what you do!" Slowly, slowly, she let her bra slide from her round firm flesh. She let her fingers glide over the petal softness of her nipples, and then she watched his eyes intently. She brought her hands down to her panties. She raised herself slowly on her elbows and then slowly slid her panties down, letting them rest for a long time just above the spot on her body where her pubic mound rose up hard and big, and his eyes watched her every move.
Then she lay there naked, felt pink lights flooding over her nakedness. She felt pink light almost entering with warm rushing tones into her body, almost filling her with a sudden jutting, roaring feeling of milky pressure. She felt herself lying like an open flower on black cloth, and Charlie did not move. His hands were clenched into fists. His eyes bulged and he stared strangely, and then she rose toward him-but did not touch him.
She moved close to him, circling in front of him, picking up each garment she had shed, and putting them back on. In her studied act of dressing, she sat on the bed modestly, rolled on her stockings, and she did it with no real intent to tease now. She did it modestly, as if she were alone in her bedroom in the morning, with a new sun, full up, sweeping into her face, and as if she were just preparing to go out for a long drive, maybe.
She smiled softly, thinking of her car.
Finally, when she stood there beside him with her dress pulled on correctly, she moved closer to him; but still she kept her body from touching his, and then she turned in front of him, making her words sound almost commonplace. "Zip me, please."
For one second he hesitated, but then she felt his fingers reach out and touch her zipper, and then he moved preparatory to zipping her up. His breath hit suddenly against the back of her neck, and his breathing started to come in short, quick gasps, and then she reached out with one long, quick finger and jabbed the light button.
Instantly the room went dark. Instantly, in the dark, he pulled her into his arms. Instantly, she felt that hard, searching, passionate pressure of his mouth on her mouth. She felt his hand rubbing savagely up and down her body, and then her flesh was jerking in savage time to his own savage thrusts, and then in a savage whirl of seconds he tore her clothes from her, and she lay naked against his nakedness....
"Come, Charlie, come!"
"Oh, yes, darling, yes...."
CHAPTER NINE
When Bill got done with what he was doing, he was sweating. It was not the effort of lifting the wooden boxes. It was the excitement. He knew they couldn't explode very easily; nevertheless he lowered the trunk lid to his car carefully, and even more carefully he let the lock snap shut. He was ready.
Just before nine o'clock that night, he would place the five cases of dynamite against the main supporting shaft of the old grain elevator. The explosion would take place in full view of his audience-two thousand boys and girls. And he knew that explosion would equal two things: it would be the supreme moment of Riot Night, and it would be his personal gift to Mariana.
She'd told him. "If you pull it off right, Bill, I'll scream so loud the sky will split wide-open. And you'll know I'm having an orgasm all by myself, just listening to it roar."
Outside the gas station, where three gas pumps waited forlornly for customers who had stopped buying gas there three years before when the freeway went in, a black patch of greasy concrete stretched below the concrete awning. Except for that patch, the rest of the corner lot was white with snow, and the only tracks Bill could see were those he'd made when he walked in that morning. His tracks from driving in and leaving the car there the previous night were already covered over.
The station, which was white concrete and looked like a child's block with a blackboard on top, was closed. Nobody came there any more, and yet Bill could remember how big a business old man Dyer used to do before the new road took away all his customers. The old man had made a good living off that corner. Now it wasn't worth a thing. People didn't even want to build a house there because it would be too expensive to remove the concrete apron. When Bill first got his car, he'd thought of the empty station as a good place to hide it, and he had gone over and asked the old, half-blind man for the key. Mr. Dyer had given it to him without any question. "Sure you can use it, any time you want. Go right ahead, Billy-boy. You put your car right there; ain't nobody going to bother it a bit. Guess you can keep it there, too, until somebody buys the place."
But nobody did buy the place, and it didn't look as if they ever would.
Bill left the smudged, frosted window and walked back toward the left-rear corner. There was a small square washroom painted green just beyond the grease pit. Bill didn't know who had stuck the nude picture up over the mirror, but it must have been one of old man Dyer's former mechanics. Sometimes, just. for the hell of it, when he felt kind of disgusted with the bad deal Dyer was getting, and how the town was going to hell, he went in and took a look at it.
He didn't look at it for the sake of the nude, who was very blond, who had a very stupid look on her face, and who had breasts like a Jersey cow's udders. They were colored a bright red, and his nude shots of those high-school girls were much better. Mostly, when he looked at it and examined the garish nature of the thing, he studied it for another reason. He looked at the picture and tried to imagine why some damn-fool mechanic had ever stuck it up there in the first place. Did the picture excite him when he went to wash up after work? Did he dream of a woman like that-of what made him plaster his dream on the bare wall? Or was it a joke?
In sharp contrast to the blonde's blondness, the guy, whoever it had been, had stuck the picture to the green wall with heavy black friction tape.
Why?
Bill had studied it many times during the past and had never found any suitable answer. Today, however, in that dim light which drifted in from the outside, he noticed something else. The blonde had both arms raised, reaching for a bunch of purple grapes, and somebody had smudged her armpits with black grease. The grease made her look as if she had hair growing there. Bill had never really seen hair growing in a woman's armpits, but he'd heard European women didn't shave. Somehow he wanted to see one sometime and see if he liked it.
He might....
Just as he tried to figure out why he'd never noticed the black smudge before, he heard a car slow up and stop in the street outside. He ran to take a fast look, for he expected it to be either Mariana, who had come to make that final council meeting at eleven o'clock, or his men.
It was neither.
It was his dad.
The tall, erect figure scuffed through the snow and Bill watched him walk toward the gas-station door without once looking up. Finally, Charlie reached the door. He knocked and Bill said come in.
After almost a minute of apparently studying something, Charlie walked in and looked slowly around. He strode to the car, patted the front fender, smiled. "Nice car you've got. I wish I'd had one as nice when I was your age. I had an old beat up Chevie myself."
Bill looked at his wrist watch. The others were due in about five minutes, and meanwhile he had to put up with the Old Man.
"Bill, do you know I was up there last night-up at the limestone quarry, and that I saw the whole thing?"
BUI itched to shrug his shoulders, and he did. He couldn't have cared less. "Oh, yeah, what about it?"
Charlie didn't look back at him, but allowed his glance to settle down to inspecting the trunk of Bill's car. For a second, Bill fancied his Old Man could X-ray through the metal and see those five cases of dynamite. But Bill knew it wasn't possible.
After walking clear around the car, looking at it, Charlie came and leaned beside him against the rear fender. "Bill, I want to understand you. After all, you know I've been guilty in all this, too. I guess you know that. I guess you know I've let you go it alone too much. And sure, I took you down to Jake, but
"Dad."
"What?"
"It's no good. You can't change things now. Things are the way they are. As soon as you pour concrete out of the mixer it starts to harden and you can't change the shape of it."
"Bill, wait, listen to me-you know you didn't even want to try and be decent. You could have at least tried to be that much in front of Jake."
"What's decent?"
"Being a man is decent. Talking like one. Not like some nut. And assuming responsibility for your actions, that's decent."
"Dad-you know something? I just want to tell you this much, and you'd better listen. You know that old grain elevator down on River Street?"
Charlie nodded briefly.
"Well ... tonight we're going to blow that thing sky-high. We're going to blow it clear across the river, and nothing you do, or say, can stop us. Nobody can stop us. You hear that?"
"Maybe I don't want to stop you."
"The hell you don't. Of course you want to stop us. You want to stop me! Of course you want to be a big hero. You want to stop me like you've always stopped me. But you can't do it this time. And you know how we're going to work it? Dad-don't you want to know that?
"Well, there's five cases of dynamite in this trunk, and we'll blow the place sky-high. I saw you sniffing around a second ago. You could smell it, couldn't you? You had to do that much, just like up there over the garage. Smelling around. What'd you want to pretend you didn't smell it for? You scared or something? Up there, we had only a couple of sticks-just to take the stuff out in the country and see how the stuff works. You listening?"
Charlie walked to the window and stared out at the snow. "I'm sorry, Bill. Sorry for a lot of things. Sorry you can't learn to be a man. Sorry that I'm not big enough of a man to show you. Hell, I'll admit it now, I'm sorry I've been weak."
Charlie stood there with his hands shoved deep in his pockets, staring at the snow, and Bill looked at his father's back. Seen from that angle, it looked like a strong back. It could carry a big load, and it seemed to Bill in that second that his Old Man was carrying the biggest load of his life. He was actually-after all that guff-admitting his weakness. Finally, he was admitting he'd been wrong.
"Dad-"
"Yeah?"
"It's too late. You tried. I'm sorry. But I've got to go through with this thing now. It's not just me alone. It's all of them. They're counting on me. They want it done, and I've got to do it."
"Maybe I can stop them. Maybe we can stop them...."
"No."
"Why not, Bill? What do you want? Really want?"
"I don't know."
"Want me to tell you what you want? It's simple. You want a feeling of security-just like any other human being. It's no world-shaking problem. It's been with us for a long time. But Bill-son-you don't get it with this gang junk. You don't get it with Mariana, who's-"
"Leave her out of this!"
"Okay. But I'm out to stop you this time, Bill. I really am. You can't get away with this. And I'm not going to let you. The town will stop you, Bill. Tonight, they won't stand for it. I'll see to that!"
Charlie turned quickly away and Bill watched his dad walk back to the car. He watched him drive off, and he made up his mind to something. If the Old Man had guts enough to stop him, then he'd see to it his Old Man didn't get hurt. Maybe-even if Mariana got plenty sore-he might call off the whole deal about the explosion.
Mariana felt good. She felt so perfectly round and good inside, driving home that morning, and the new snow purred softly under her tires, giving her a feeling or riding some smooth, purring cat. Charlie had left her early. She'd heard him grunt something. She'd turned over and whispered, "Bye-bye."
Now she had to contact Bill fast and let him know she couldn't meet him until two that afternoon. Before she saw him, she had to get cleaned up.
After checking to see if her mother was around, she hurried into Mike Stanton's study and picked up the phone. For a few seconds, sitting at the huge desk, she considered the gray cold instrument, and she imagined it ringing on the other end. She imagined how Bill would jump out of his skin when he heard it. He'd be swearing at her because they hardly ever used that private number. Besides, the phone always did make him jump, for some reason.
She leaned across Mike's desk, felt her breasts rub the wood, dialed their unlisted number and went on shivering deliciously, thinking of the lonely, lovely sound the phone was making in the closed gas station.
She was supposed to have been there before the others, and she knew Bill would hate the phone even more being alone like that.
She sat there shivering violently while listening to the insistent voice of that instrument ringing in the big, empty concrete room, and she knew how Bill heard it, and she could imagine how Bill was even now strolling over nervously to pick it up.
"Yeah?"
"It's me-and I'm sorry about last night."
"Yeah, okay. So why you calling now? Why aren't you here? You knew our plans."
"I can't make it this morning-I'll see you there at two this afternoon. Okay?"
"Yeah, So what's up?"
"Not much. I've got things to do."
"But damnit, Mariana, you know we wanted to get this thing settled. Who's going to lead the march? Who's going to turn on the searchlights? Besides, I'm not sure we want to go through with dynamiting that old place."
She breathed fast and hard at his words. She pictured his indecision, guessed part of the cause, and panted into the phone. "Darling, listen, you wouldn't deprive me of an orgasm, would you? So then-okay, darling, we go through with it."
She hung up fast and then sat there staring at her dad's things. Everything on Mike's desk had a purpose, as all his things had a purpose, and since she was his daughter, she had the most purpose of all.
Even while she was dreaming there, still sitting with her elbows propped on the desk, her hands cupping her chin, still wearing the same old torn and crumpled white dress, the maid came in. "There's somebody to see you, Miss Stanton."
"Who is it?"
"He didn't give his name-just said something about Charlie."
She reached for the letter opener, pulled the small efficient dagger out of its rich leather container and wondered what Charlie wanted. "Okay, send him in please."
She wondered about that man and, as she did, a certain excitement tugged at her existence. It had been good with him. He felt good. He did the right things at the right time. There was no unsureness in bed at all. But what did he want now? And why had he come so soon? She'd been happy all morning in her victory over him, but what could he possibly want now?
She pulled back, sat up erect in the chair across Mike's big desk and awaited his appearance. She tried one variety of smile on her lips, licking them top and bottom to make them glisten correctly, and then she tried another. Maybe he'd like that thankful-type smile best.
Charlie entered, looked at her, stood awkwardly in front of the desk.
"Hi. Won't you sit down?"
"No, thanks."
It amazed her. More apparent than anything else was the mask he wore across his strong, masculine features. The face said one thing, but the mask said another. The mask was pulled thinly across Charlie's facial tissue and bones, but the mask, even if it weighed nothing, yelled out something which neither the man nor the face nor the voice could ever silence. The mask yelled. "Look at me. Look at me, World. I'm guilty."
"Charlie-I wish you'd sit down. You make me nervous standing like that. You're not angry, are you?"
"No ... but I've found out exactly what you kids plan to do. Bill told me-just now down in the gas station-how you plan to blow up that old grain elevator." As he talked, Charlie's hand opened and closed, opened and closed, and his voice had a strange note to it, as if he were pleading with her for something.
"Yes, Charlie?"
"Well, Mariana. I know how much you run my son and, as one human being to another, I'd like to ask you to call the whole thing off. You could do that, Mariana. You could do that for me-for us, maybe. You don't have to go around blowing up buildings. You don't have to destroy something like that-"
"Why not?"
She watched his face carefully, saw the mask of guilt loom out of his eyes. She saw it turn toward her, and she triumphed in the furious twitch of his guilt, for she knew she'd won once again, just as she always won. Winning went with being a golden girl, which she was, and she couldn't help but win. She repeated her question carefully, underlining each word. "Why-not-Charlie?"
He placed his right hand on the desk, leaned on it. "If necessary, Mariana, I'm going to see that you're stopped. This town will stop you. And I'm going to do everything in my power to see that it does."
She felt her smile. She knew it was real, and Mariana let her arm slide out across the desk as if she were reaching for his hand, and then somewhat coyly she let her chin sink down to the desk's polished surface. She could see her laugh growing in that wooden mirror just below her lips.
"Charlie, dear-why don't you go ahead and try it? Why are you talking to me? I'm just a girl. Why don't you go and see the mayor and talk to him, man to man. And then go and see good old Jake, of course. He's one of your buddies, isn't he? And then you can go around and talk personally to all the aldermen; they'll be happy to see you. And then you might try calling on the governor-or call him long distance. He might even send a special detachment of the militia down here to look out for you and your son-Charlie!"
But Charlie had already gone.
Feeling a sudden smile on her lips, the sudden thrill of being once again in command of a situation, she picked up the phone and dialed her dad's attorney, Jeff Wood.
"Yeah, kitten-what's up?"
She told him quickly, promising him meanwhile another trip to his apartment, told him that a Mr. Charles Harrison would be doing the rounds to see all the city big brass.
"But, kitten-"
"He's going to try and get them to stop Riot Night, and this is my night tonight, and it's got to be. It's just got to be! You understand that, Jeff?"
"So, kitten, what do you want me to do? Shall we send around word that some kind of nut is out trying to stir up trouble for the town?"
"Hell, no, Jeff-you let the mayor and everybody else know that they should be very nice and polite to him. In a way, I kind of like the guy. Just let them know that after he's done talking, they should pooh-pooh his whole idea. Why, it's not that serious. Let them tell him kids will be kids. And that they're sure there won't be any real trouble."
She hung up, let the phone rest in her hand for a second, let her chin rest on the desk, and she thought about butter. People were butter. They were nothing but yellow, soft, greasy butter.
Thirty minutes later, while she was still in the shower upstairs, the mayor's elderly secretary called her up and gave her the full report. She held her bedroom phone, stood under her huge black towel, dripping small pools of water onto her pink rug.
"Yes, Miss Stanton. That's right. A Mr. Harrison did drop by. He wanted to talk to the mayor. Certainly the mayor listened to him, but certainly the mayor turned down any idea of the town doing anything tonight. Unheard of! Yes, yes, Miss Stanton, I'm sure your Mr. Harrison is going to get nowhere at all with his crazy talk."
Promptly at two, she burst into the garage. Bill was alone, sitting in the front seat of the car, its door open, pretending to listen to the car radio. But he wasn't listening to anything. She knew very well he was waiting for her-just waiting for her, and with no other thought in his head.
She slid in beside him and pushed up her lips for a kiss. He didn't respond.
"Bill, darling, what's the matter?"
"What's the matter with you? Playing with me-leading me on?"
"Bill, kiss me!"
"No."
"Kiss me." She let her hands swing along his cheeks, pulling at the corners of his sensual mouth, and then she lowered her fingers down his neck. She tickled him in the armpits and worked her fingers down over his ribs. He was amazingly thin. He giggled, and she kissed him.
"Bill-"
"Yeah."
"Let's make love."
"We can't. Somebody might come. They'd see us here in the car."
"There's that washroom back there-the one with the nude picture in it. We could do it there."
"You're crazy."
She slid out of the car, reached for him. "Bill, come on. I owe you something and I want to make it up to you."
She felt the sweaty pressure of his hand. He tried to jerk away, but she held on tight. And he followed slowly. She twitched her hips and body ahead of him. She was wearing her black slacks, and as soon as they got inside the small, square room she offered the zipper to his hand. His eyes had a tight, stiff glare. He zipped the zipper down and then he pulled her slacks down over her bare legs. When her panties came skidding off after her slacks, the air rushed in and felt suddenly chill to her naked body. She felt Bill's hot hands. The cold and chill made her have goose pimples, but the cold excited her, too.
"Mariana, we can't do it."
"Of course we can, stupid. Here, I'll sit on the sink-it'll be just right."
She folded her slacks into a square, then bundled them together with his jacket. She took this makeshift pillow and placed it over the chrome faucets which had been shut off a long time before. The cold, weird light of afternoon clanked into the dark, tiny room like a shower of metal coins. Bill got naked, too, and the sink looked very white to her for a place where mechanics supposedly had washed their greasy hands, and she slid her rear up and over the sink rim. The cold metal felt like a huge block of ice to her bare skin. She shivered expectantly. It was cold. She spread her legs wide, but when she felt Bill's hard, hot heat invading her, it wasn't so cold. It was cold, hot-hot, cold. One feeling came running fast after the other, and the sensation excited her more and more.
These contrasts, and that strange wobbly light coming in from outside, and the raw desire shining in Bill's face excited her more than she'd ever been excited before. It was a new experience and yet it was the same experience, but the new part of it made everything seem more intense, wilder. She felt like shouting it: Wild ... wild ... w-I-l-d ...!
Afterwards, she still sat there, even after Bill had moved away to put on his clothes. She relished her blatantly wanton position, and even resented Bill's sudden disinterest. That was the trouble with men, she decided; at a certain point they were gone, and she wanted to go on, on, on....
Dressed, Bill stood out there looking back at her, a sick kind of smile playing across his mouth. Apparently he hadn't got as much out of it as she had. Too bad for him. Slowly she closed her legs, hopped down off the sink and began to put on her clothes.
"I guess you could do it anywhere-even in a snowbank," he said.
"Sure. Why not?"
He watched her again, shaking his head in wonderment, and finally helped zip her up. It was some time before either of them spoke again.
"Mariana, I've been thinking-Dad stopped by here this morning, and I don't think we should go through with the explosion. Everything but that. Matter of fact, I've made up my mind."
She walked out, leaned over, caught the zipper in his pants, ran it up and down. "Want me to change your mind?"
"Not like that you can't."
"Only because you've had enough for the moment. But what if I told you something about your dad-something about your dad and me maybe. That he's very good in the sack."
"I wouldn't believe it."
"Did you ever see him in the shower?"
"Yeah."
"Then you know he's got one big, black mole just above his pubic hair-on the left side." She stepped away from him quickly, smiled. "Darling, believe me now?"
Having lived with violence so much, having created so much of it herself, she was used to anything. But she was not used to the way Bill's eyes turned in that second from brown to black and then went on growing more and more intensely dark, so that she had trouble looking into them. He didn't say a word. He just clenched his teeth together and his jaw set like a steel vice clamped around a soft piece of lead.
"Bill, you going to go through with it?"
"Yeah."
When she left the garage and walked out to her car, she was surprised at the snow. It had kept on falling slowly and it had covered her tracks with a thin layer, and the world was strangely white and blank like an open, unprinted page. Or maybe it was like a photographic plate ready to receive an impression, any impression, just the way the snow was receiving the impression of her feet scuffing along in it now. Or the way it could receive the full impression of sex even. And, at that second, she had a vision of herself and Bill making love in a snowbank. She was naked, and he was naked, and she could imagine the impression pressed into the snow by their act, and how it would look afterwards.
It would be quite a sight to see it there-every single line of it written true, and she rubbed the snow from her car window, and then she slipped in over her cold leather seat.
Nobody listened to Charlie Harrison-neither the mayor, nor Jake, nor any of the town officials. Most of them knew him, by sight at least, but not one paid any attention to his story about the kids.
"Nonsense," they told him, "you're dreaming. Those kids wouldn't think of doing such a thing."
He looked at his watch. It was four o'clock, and he felt exhausted. Every bone in his body ached. He called hbme. Susan answered the phone, but Bill wasn't there. He felt as if he couldn't move a muscle in his arms or legs. Inside his spine, a vague frightened feeling kept tearing up and down his central nerves. He didn't dare call it fear, but as he got in the car again and headed for the gas station, he knew that's exactly what it was. It was fear, and he was scared sick.
He didn't expect to find Bill in the place really, but Bill was there all right, and his car was there, and Charlie knew he was going to take that dynamite away from his son. He had to do it. But first he knew he had to talk him out of it, if he could.
Bill didn't look at him. Bill sat leaning against his front fender and he kept flipping up a small chrome wrench, letting it fall, catching it by the handle, tossing it up again.
"Bill, I want you to listen to me."
"Sure, Dad!"
"You're old enough now to know that people have to do things according to law-according to responsibility. You just can't take it into your head to do something just because you want to do it. Do you know what they make traffic laws for?"
"Yeah, Dad, so stupid cops will have something to do." Bill missed his catch. The wrench dropped and clanked hard on the concrete.
"Bill, cut it out. They make those laws to protect us. All of us. Imagine a busy intersection where there were no rules. It'd be a mess. So we've got to have and show responsibility."
Bill had picked up his wrench, but now he stopped tossing it and held it loosely in his right hand. "Sure, Dad, we've got to have responsibility like you with Mariana, maybe. Is that what you mean?"
Charlie felt his face go white, and it was as if he could never breathe, or feel anything in it again. Bill's voice shocked him enough, but it was more the shock of hearing the almost casual way Bill referred to it. Deep inside, he knew Mariana wouldn't have kept it as a secret, but he didn't expect to see his son stand there and smile at him in just quite such a buddy-buddy way-as if they'd taken part in some gang job together; as if they were two GIs shacking up with the same girl.
Somehow this whole attitude and mess made him roaring mad. "Okay-Bill, you asked for it. I was a fool when it came to that girl-but I'm going to see that yotHre not fooled by her any longer. You're going to give me that dynamite right now. I want the key to your trunk."
Without a second's hesitation Bill reached into his pocket and pulled out his car key. "Sure, Dad, sure-"
"Isn't the dynamite in there?"
"Why don't you look?"
Charlie juggled the keys and got the trunk open. It was empty. "Where is it?"
"The gang's got it. Zero hour is nine o'clock tonight, in case you're interested. Why don't you come along and join the fun?"
Charlie stepped toward him. He wanted to throttle him. He clenched his fist and then thought better of it. "Bill, I'm warning you." . "Sure, Dad, why don't you try and stop me? Why don't you lock me up? Why don't you beat me up, huh? You're big enough-strong enough, aren't you?"
"Bill-"
"Why don't you just lock me up some place, Dad? Solve all your problems that way. Why don't you?"
Charlie felt that sick, quick twisting of his guts. He could sense a huge raw terror stalking somewhere close to him, and he couldn't see it, and he couldn't touch it, and he was scared.
"I'm not going to lock you up, Bill, but I'm going to stop you! I'll be there tonight-alone, if necessary-and I'll stop you. I'll stop all of you."
Bill smiled widely. "Why don't you try that, Dad? Why don't you just try that?"
In the dull, dead light of afternoon, as Charlie walked out of the garage, the snow looked to him like a dirty white bandage tied over a sick and dying world. And Charlie hated it-every bit of it.
CHAPTER TEN
Bill had sweated the thing for two hours. First of all, according to Mariana's plan he was to drive his car and lead a march down Cedar to the intersection of Harness, up Harness the short way to the new bridge, and then back down the street. He showed up at six, and a yelling horde of boys and girls started gathering thirty minutes later. Jay and Frank sat up in back, trying to direct things. At the beginning, they managed to keep things fairly quiet.
But at eight-thirty, just when he was making a U-turn to ease his way through the mob and go back down Harness, Barney Kelly squeezed out of the crowd and walked toward the car. Barney smiled down at him with a wild and crazy look, as if he'd been drinking a lot all day, and his voice grated with a hard, urgent sound. "Come on, Bill, hurry up and give us the big one."
"Not until nine."
"Hell, let's rush it. Everybody's here!"
Only Bill knew everybody wasn't there. He knew that Mariana wouldn't show up until the last minute, and that his dad would probably be there, too, and that he personally had to get even with his dad.
Barney reached in and yanked him out of the car, and Bill could smell the sick odor of gin and beer coming out of Barney's heavy, pimply face.
"Come on, Bill!"
"No."
Barney let go of him, and the half-drunk boy stepped back to swing, but Bill lanced his right hand under his jacket and got hold of his .45. "Okay, Barney, stop right there! Go on, get back with the rest!"
Barney's face twisted into a sour frown and he looked mad enough to kill a bull, but he went back into the crowd, his face and body melting into that formless mob made up of two thousand kids. Bill poked his .45 back into his shoulder holster and climbed back into his car.
But the crowd's mood had changed. He could feel it as he drove back among all those bodies. They pressed against his car, stared down at him. For the next thirty minutes they kept chanting, yelling and shouting, and the sound was like one voice. "Come on, Bill, give us the big one!"
For the first time since he had started ruling the town, he realized he had no real control over them. This huge, churning mass, this large body made up of separate, smaller bodies, had a life of its own-it was a group of cells molded into one living thing, but it lacked, at that moment, any real head.
He could direct it to some small extent, but he had lost his real leadership over it. And he had to stall it off until that final minute.
Even with his men beside him, he could do nothing to change them. Their chant went on and one. "Come on, Bill, give us the big one!"
He had only one hope for slowing them down. The dynamite was back in a VW panel truck on Pine Street, and he leaned back quietly and told Jay Cloud to get rid of the truck keys. When the mob saw that they couldn't get the truck started, a thousand throats exploded into one continuous, angry scream. But he yelled at them, got them quiet, finally, made them listen to sense. "Push it! Get behind it, some of you guys, and push it."
He got out and followed them. He knew they would need at least twenty minutes to get it down and around the road which they would have to take. He knew it would take five minutes for him to place his dynamite, arrange his fuses, wires, and detonator.
It would take time, but in spite of the weight of the thing, they came tearing down River Street with the rest of the mob, pulsing out that same crazy electric cry. "Come on, Bill, give us the big one!"
As soon as they cleared the rise, coming down toward the river, the searchlights snapped on, and Bill tried to keep up with the rush. Up on that higher bank, three boys had operated the lights according to his instructions, and the huge concrete tower loomed black and tall in the dark night. Snow flicked briefly across it. Several years before, in a foolish attempt at increasing revenue, the city had deepened the channel near shore and had built the elevator.
Bill was panting now, and he tried to get ahead of the mob. They rolled gigantically out onto that wide shelf which extended from the higher bank to the tower itself. Bill had arranged things like a stage for Mariana. He had placed his searchlights on the upper edge of the bank, and now they blasted a pattern of white light across the apron of snow and the black rope which he had put up as a safety line. He wondered if it would work, but the mob surged up to the rope, and then stopped obediently. The rope held them back, and they grew silent and waited. But they moved with ever-increasing impatience as Jay and Frank opened the truck doors and took out the dynamite. At the sight of it stacked in the snow, they whistled....
It was one minute to nine when he got done.
Mariana still wasn't there. His dad wasn't there either.
He stood alone, facing them, feeling more and more scared on that wide, white stage, while the mob's tension increased to the breaking point. Their faces stared at him whitely, tensely. They couldn't wait. He listened to them. Their cry came stronger than ever now. It surged out of them. It burst out of them like billions of pounds of water pressure out of a cracked dam. He knew he couldn't stall them off forever.
"Come on, Bill, give us the big one!"
Mariana needed one thing. All her life, she'd needed that one thing. She'd felt, with a dozen boys and men, a million mights, maybes and perhapses, but she'd never had it complete. She'd never had a climax with her emotions spinning off, with her mind vanished, with that complete shutting off of all her existence. She'd had it big, and even bigger, but she'd never had the blockbuster-the biggest!
Secretly, she called it that: the blockbuster! She knew she had to have it finally. She knew how she would have to feel it. She knew the gigantic thrusting form of the tower, disintegrating, falling over, erupting, exploding, ejaculating fire, could give it to her. And nothing else ever could-
"The blockbuster!" She said it out loud.
It had to come from something that gigantic. It had to be as gigantic as that tower, as gigantic as that explosion, as gigantic as that watching, waiting, drooling mob, dripping with ecstasy. And at that instant of thinking about it, of preparing herself for her love bath, she knew exactly why some strippers went into show business. At some exact second of throwing their naked bodies around a stage, pinpointed by one blasting light, they must have felt the exact, demanding, thrusting violence of every man in the house. They had every man! Every man had them! That's why they did it. That's why they kept it up. They were the lucky ones, for finally they felt it and had it for real. Once she'd seen it in Chicago. She had known then the experience in that wildly bumping, grinding blonde's wild, staring eyes. And the more the blonde enjoyed it, and the more she got her kicks, the wilder and wilder the audience got.
"The blockbuster!" Again she voiced her hope.
All her life she'd taken showers, but this time she knew she had to do it differently. She had to bathe in the tub. She had to prepare her body for love, for final love. She had to make her skin more perfect, more lovely than ever. She had to make every pore of her body, every hair, receptive and eager. She had to use creams, oils, lotions. She had to use bath salts. She had to sit in the tub, daydreaming, stroking her arms, breasts, legs into waiting loveliness.
She really saw her own body for the first time. Its flesh was more than a tool. It was beauty. And as a work of art has to be refined, she had to refine herself. She had to do it in this final preparation, from late afternoon to evening, not watching the time, but always knowing when and where nine o'clock was located on that great clock's face outside there somewhere in the world. She, like a work of art, being both the artist and the creation, had to refine herself, bringing her body to a state of final, total perfection.
She carefully rubbed herself down with her towel, applied creams, placed perfume along her legs, her knees, breasts, armpits, wherever those mysterious waiting lips of that mysterious gigantic climax might seek her out and try to find her, reach her, know her-send her. In every intimate cell of herself, in every pore, she prepared. In every cell and pore she waited, and she had to feel-feel-feel!
"Come, darling, come."
She whispered the words into her mirror, lasciviously studying herself most intimately. Softly she let her fingers caress. "Come, oh, come soon!"
She knew what she had to wear. She had to wear white. And even if it was cold and snowy and almost winter, her dress had to be light and frilly and as soft as air. Between her and that final quick thrust, there could be no barrier of any kind.
She had to feel!
Feel!
Feel!
Indeed, she had the dress. She'd had it for a long time, and she'd never worn it. It was too old-fashioned maybe. Or it was too different, and in Cedar-ville they didn't know about such things, but it was vastly expensive. She'd found it in Paris, and it was so light and simple and divine that her beauty burned beyond power, beyond knowing when she wore that dress.
And holding her breath tight, holding her life in one vast beating of blood, she put it on. She stood looking into the mirror. The vision smiled back at her, in comfort, in agony, and in waiting. Her pink rug accentuated her color. Her black bed made her white dress violently white. Her red hair flamed in perfect fire and she let the tip of her tongue slip out slowly and stroke one final perfect touch to her lipstick.
"Are you ready?" she asked that violently beautiful vision, and the vision replied, "I'm ready."
She drove slowly down the long driveway from the Stanton house. She drove slowly through town. She saw, before she got there, the glare of searchlights tinting the sky with red. She heard a faint rumble of voices. She felt immensely ready to make her entrance upon that marching stage; which, after all, she had set, prepared.
Thinking, not thinking, she drove over the hill, feeling, expectant for sensation, waiting, wanting that entrance. It had to be perfect-and then suddenly, awfully, it was spoiled.
Bill stood on the stage-that part was right-and she could see that everything was ready for her blockbuster. But a foreign figure loomed up like an insect. It wiggled there like an outrageous ant on a virgin piece of cheescake. She shuddered. It was as if some bug had blown into the theater at the last minute and now threatened to spoil her whole show. That figure-and she refused to identify it-stood between her and the final completion of her act. Feeling a vast sudden anger, she drove through the mob. She heard no sound, saw nothing but that foreign object. She stopped in the center of the audience and stood up on her seat.
She couldn't control her anger. She waved savagely at Bill, yelling at him to do it. She held out her hands, pleading. Her body was ready. She was ready. Bill had to give-give-give! She had to feel it-feel it-feel it!
She pleaded and Bill shook his head no.
Savagely, knowing only one thing, she dropped down behind her wheel. She knew one thing. If there was an obstacle, she had to remove it. She snapped on the ignition, whipped the car into gear, and screamed toward her target, intent on finishing that which she needed, and that which she had to have....
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Charlie knew what he had to do and just how he had to do it. But this knowledge helped him not one bit.
He stared down at the mob, and he was scared. His fear burned inside him, tugging, turning to ice inside him, and he couldn't move. He knew damn well he was a coward. He stood there looking through the broken window in the old bedroom in that tall abandoned house which overlooked the mob scene below, and he couldn't believe them, nor himself. He smelled dead black dust drifting around him, and he knew this was not like war. This was a group of crazy teen-agers, without any guiding principle whatsoever, and they were down there, waving their arms, waiting, chanting a war chant, and his son was leading them on. He saw the wide stage where his son played the chief role, where his son stood with a detonator at his feet.
Charlie looked, shivered with strange nervous tension, and then yelled out over their heads, bellowing one word. "Wait!"
Slowly he started walking. He went down the stairs, some of them rotted to the point of being unsafe, and others missing entirely. He skidded down the slippery, snowy slope. He almost fell twice, and he could see that those who were standing on the outskirts of the mob were staring at him. He reached the rope. He touched it, and it felt ice-cold in his bare hands, and then he slid under it. Slowly, feeling that deliberate pull of Death's hands on his shoulders, he walked past his son. Bill stared at him, but Bill didn't speak, and then Charlie stood exactly in the path of the explosion, placing himself halfway between the dynamite and the watching crowd. He couldn't stand too close. He had to say something, maybe one final last word, to his son.
His action had its effect. Bill's face looked white now. It was not only the raw glare of the searchlights. It was the inner struggle going on inside his son. Charlie had made his move. Bill had seen his father's action, and now Bill knew that Charlie wasn't going to fight him, not hand to hand, but, instead, he'd handed the choice over to Bill. And Bill had to make up his own mind whether he was going to push that button or not.
Bill moved spastically. He took a step, hesitated. "Dad, get out of there. You can't stop me that way. You're crazy. If you don't get out, Dad, I'm going to push this button. You hear me, Dad-?"
The crowd twitched into silence. As if this newer version of some ancient ritual and combat had seeped finally into their imaginations, they watched. And then as the picture and the setup became even clearer to them, the mob grew suddenly, electrically, insanely excited. They knew they were going to get a bonus. And they wanted it. They had to have it. They needed it. The looming, imminent explosion became suddenly minor, but this combat of father against son, together with the explosion, increased to total and full significance. They wanted something. They didn't know what, but Charlie knew. He knew they wanted blood.'His blood.
If this was a fight to the death-and it was-they knew somebody had to win, and they wanted his son to win it. They wanted the winner to be Bill. They shouted their want, and their desire and their need. "Come on, Bill, give it to us. Give it to us. Come on! Come on!"
Bill hesitated. As intently aware as the mob, and Charlie, and now completely on the spot, Bill turned and pleaded with him. "Dad, please, Dad, get out of there. Please. Please."
Charlie knew fear, but he smiled at his son. He smiled steadily at him, and he saw the boy's face turn away. He saw that the power of the mob was too great. Bill couldn't resist it. He saw suddenly that Bill wasn't leading any more; he was being led. Bill had no control. Bill had to follow their orders and their commands. Agony showed in Bill's eyes, even as he bent over, even as he groped toward the detonator.
The wild, bleating blast of a horn stopped Bill. And Bill, the mob, and Charlie looked up the hill, staring up that descending road toward what was coming down it. It was Mariana's open Mercedes, and she was driving slowly, straight into the mob. She wore a flimsy white dress, and she looked like a bride. The mob parted to let her through, her presence increasing their excitement. Their blood boiled with tension, and their anticipation for thrills was increased to the nth degree.
After that slow descent, Mariana came to a stop in the center of the mob. Charlie stared straight at her windshield, straight at her head. She was in the exact orchestra seat which offered her the best advantages for seeing, and for being seen. Charlie stared at her black car. He saw with misery her wildly tossing red head of hair as she peered over the windshield; and he knew then that there could never be for him, or for anyone else, for that matter, a woman quite like her anywhere in the world.
The mob muttered, shouted, groaned. Mariana looked at them, looked at Bill, and then she gestured toward Bill for him to carry out the explosion, and it was just as obvious to Charlie that she wanted to see his execution. Bill looked back at her and shook his head. Mariana stood up, yelled something at Bill, which nobody could hear exactly. She made a quick, peculiar movement of her hips and body, and then sank down into the driver's seat.
Charlie stood there in the snow facing her. He heard the hard exploding roar of her motor. He saw her car leap out at him, and he didn't see or know what hit him, but he heard somewhere in the vast twisting torrents of snow, the voice of his son saying, "Dad...."
They sprawled in silence together in the snow. That silence ended instantly, and they heard the wild maniacal scream of brakes. They heard also a woman's scream which knifed the sky with a long, thin and endless sound, and immediately a tremendous concussion closed off all existence of sound. There was no more expectation. There was nothing but silence.
Charlie leaped up into that silence and stood staring at the black skid marks which Mariana's wildly speeding car had dragged into the snow. Mariana had tried to stop, but the ground was too slippery. He saw that grain elevator. It was still looming above them, but now tipped crazily to-one side. It was hung by some strange thread of concrete structure against the night. He saw the snow down at his feet, and it was sprayed with what looked like pink enamel, and he knew what it was, and he knelt down then, weeping quietly with his head almost pressed in that pink snow.
He kept muttering words into it, kept wanting them to matter. "I didn't want her to die. I didn't want her to die."
And Bill's voice sounded above him, pleading with him again, but this time with reason, "Please, Dad, don't cry. Please don't cry!"
