***
Minutes dragged by. I poured another cup of coffee, using the last of the instant coffee. For a while I felt Marve's taunting gaze following me about the room, but then he fell asleep again, exhausted. I looked at him curled up like a bug on the shack floor.
I heard a noise in the scrub. I went tense. Marve came awake instantly. He lay there listening, with an odd faint smile pulling at his mouth. Lily sat up on the bed.
My mouth was dry. I heard footsteps out in the clearing. We listened, hearing them pad all the way around the house. He tried the windows, then stepped back and we heard him move away from the house.
He yelled. "Marve. You in there?"
Marve looked at me, laughing. He drew in a deep breath. "Yeah, Brycki. I'm here."
"Let me in, Pooser. We got some talking."
"I got nothing to say, Brycki." He lowered his voice. "You ain't got much time, Jake. Make up your mind. Get me out of this wire."
Brycki cursed out in the darkness. "I'm giving you three minutes, Pooser. You come out with your hands up or I'm burning the shack."
Marve laughed loudly, and I knew how that laugh must have struck like an abrasive against Brycki.
"No, you won't. A smart guy like you? Why, Brycki, people can see a scrub fire for ninety miles. The forest service would have planes in here before you could sweat me out. Man, you want money. You don't want me."
"All right. You throw out the money. We forget you crossed me."
Marve looked at me. "Think fast, fella. Time is running out."
"You think I'll put a gun in your hand?"
"Okay. Keep the gun. You're stupid. I can't change that. But cut me free. Fast. Let me out of here before he starts moving in. If he starts shooting in here-these walls are like dry paper."
"You hear me, Pooser?" Brycki yelled.
I knew what a sucker I was if I freed Marve Pooser. Nobody had ever been able to trust him. But I also knew that man out there meant business. He was primed, he had been crossed. Marve was a bad egg, but I knew he loved Lily. His jealousy was cut from the same cloth as mine. He cared enough for her that he would try to keep Brycki from killing her. Marve must have had a plan for handling Brycki. Anyhow, time was running out. I was a sucker if I freed Marve. I was a dead man if I didn't.
I knelt down, worked at the wires. Lily ran across the room and helped me.
He rubbed his wrists. "Now listen good. You won't give me a gun, okay. This is what you got to do. Hold a blanket up across that fireplace. Both of you. If you let a streak of light out of it, I'm dead, and you two are next."
Lily got two heavy blankets. We crouched on each side of the fireplace, secured the blankets against the rough stones.
"Hold that," Marve whispered.
Brycki yelled again. Marve moved across the blackened room, pushed open a window on the side away from Bry-cki's voice. Brycki had been smart, he wanted no gunfire from a suddenly opened window.
Marve let himself out of the window. We heard his feet strike the ground. Brycki heard it too, from the other side of the shack.
Brycki yelled and ran charging toward the cabin. He fired, the sound filling the room. I heard Lily gasp, and then Marve yelled out there in the darkness.
We stayed there, waiting for what would happen next. I heard something from deep in the yard and then a man screamed. It was a blood-clhilling sound. It was silent for a moment and then the screams started again, mixed with the thrashing sound of bodies against toppling wood.
I was on my knees when the window was pulled open and Marve chinned himself up and fell into the room. Those screams followed him.
We dropped the blankets and the faint light opened up the room and sparkled on Marve Pooser's smug sweated face.
"Man knows how to handle 'gators," he said, "can get right in the pen with 'em. Man don't though, he jumps over a fence in the dark and lands on a 'gator it can get messy."
I stared at him. But he was tense, listening to those screams. He nodded finally. "I knew it. Always have said it. Others say they won't but I always said a 'gator would attack a man-that is if he got hungry enough he would."
***
We came upon the old deserted house the next day. I had to get out of that shack as soon as it was daylight. I felt dead, but it was more than not being able to sleep. It was a hangover of the horrors. The screaming went on until I thought it would never stop, and then when it did, I stood there tense, listening for it.
I stared down at Marve, deeply asleep on the floor where I'd wired him up again. Even in sleep there was a depleted, sated look to his face and it showed pale under the deep tan. The kind of kicks he had got hearing that man scream last night was something I had never even imagined before.
I was sick of all of it, of Marve, the scrub, this chase for money. I had to think. I shook Lily until she woke up, told her to come with me.
"Where we going?"
"We're going to take a walk, going to look around."
Marve woke up, rolling on the floor. "Going to look for my money, Jake-boy?"
"Our money." I did not look at him.
He laughed. "Not until we get it out of this scrub, Jake. There's that little matter. Don't waste your time looking for it. You'll never find it."
I prodded Lily again. "Come on. I'm not leaving you here with him."
"Somebody has got to fix my breakfast," Marve said. "That's my woman, Jake. It's her job to feed me."
"You were free last night. You should have kept going."
He shook his head. "I wasn't free, Jake. No more than you are. We're trapped. Right here in this scrub-as long as we want that money. And I want it."
Lily walked ahead of me. I asked her what roads were near the shack, how far away was the river, where was the nearest house. She did not answer. She walked silently ahead of me through the jack oaks.
We stepped out into a clearing and ahead of us was this dilapidated old two-story frame farmhouse. In places the roof had caved in, and it looked as if hunters had used the sideboards for firewood. Ninety or a hundred acres had been cleared around the shaded yard, but it was grown high in dog fennel, beggar weed and wire grass. The old oak, magnolia and Cottonwood trees in the yard were strung heavily with moss so their limbs sagged under the weight of it.
"The Pooser house," Lily said. "This is where Marve and his brothers grew up. Their mother went insane. When she died old man Pooser moved away. He married again, but Marve came back, lived with some relatives."
We walked around the house. "Marve might have hidden the money here," I said.
She shrugged. The silence was intense.
I caught her shoulders, turned her around to face me. "Listen to me, Lily. You can't care anything about him. He's an animal. You heard what he did to that man last night."
"He was going to kill Marve."
"Sure. And Marve could have killed him. But he didn't want to kill him. He decoyed him into that 'gator pen. That was what he wanted. That's how he gets his kicks. Just as he gets kicks from degrading you."
She twisted free. "It's none of your business."
"It is, Lily. I'm crazy about you. We don't have to go back to that shack. Marve's going to get himself killed, get you killed. It's not worth it, Lily."
She laughed coldly. "I thought you wanted that money so badly you'd do anything for it."
"I thought so too."
"You don't have to stay here. Clear out."
"If you'll go with me."
"No. Maybe I'd go with you… if you had that hundred thousand dollars. But I won't go with you now. Not like this. Marve would kill us. Even if he didn't, I'd be no better off than I am now."
"I'd love you, Lily."
"I'm sick of love."
"Do you think what you have with that animal is love, Lily? He's making you what he is. I'll take care of you, Lily. I swear it."
She laughed, a sharp bitter sound in the ageless silence about the sagging house. "How?"
My voice was hoarse. "You're not going to stay with him."
She turned to walk away. I felt the hopelessness like an injection paralyzing me. Sure, it's easy to say forget her, she's no good. It's easy to love the good ones, but nobody ever proved a woman had to be good to be loved. I had been through hell that started on the river when she stopped me with that knife at my throat. It had built past anxiety to a frantic compulsion as I watched Marve with her. I knew all along I couldn't have her. She was what Marve Pooser called her, she was his woman. No matter what fine things she wanted, she had no will to resist him.
I grabbed her arm, spun her around again.
"What's the matter with you?"
"Don't you know, Lily?"
"I don't even want to know."
"How crazy do you think you can drive a man, Lily, and get away with it?"
"You touch me and Marve Pooser will kill you."
"You don't give me any odds, baby. He'll kill me anyway, the first chance he gets."
"Listen to me." She spun away from my arms. "He's killed other men-when they just kissed me."
"Good. Since I'm going to die for it, I'm going to have it all."
She writhed free, tried to run. I caught her and twisted her around in my arms. She opened her mouth to scream and I clamped my palm across her lips. She closed her teeth, sinking them in until my hand bled. I backhanded her across the face and she staggered against the side of the house.
I moved forward and she went limp until my arms were around her. She brought her knee up and I twisted her away. She moaned and I caught her hair in my fists, closing them.
"Stop fighting, Lily. I'm going to have it."
Head back, her eyes stared wide at the metallic sky.
"Not unless you kill me."
"I'll do that, Lily, if I have to."
"Must make you feel fine."
"It's past that, Lily. I tried to be nice to you. You wouldn't have that. All you know is Marve Pooser. Okay. I'm going to show you-"
"How powerful-when I hate you."
"Shut up. You talk too much," I said.
"You'll never make me shut up."
"No. I'll only make you wish you had."
"I'm going to kill you. When I get back, I'm going to tell Marve. If he don't kill you, I'm going to."
"Sure."
"If not now, later. When you're not looking. When you're asleep. When you turn your back."
"All right."
"You think I won't."
"I don't care. Just shut up."
"Is this the way you want it? The only way you can get it?"
I thrust her back against the porch. "It's one way."
The breath was hot and sharp across my mouth. She moved back on the porch. She was not trying to get away from me now, and I caught her and her body pressed against mine and she screamed. The blue jays and the mockingbirds fluttered up from the cottonwood and she went on screaming and the birds screeched and the whole scrub was savagely loud with the sound. But then she was moaning and then making no sound at all and only her head moved back and forth in slow rhythm on the boards of the porch.
THE VENOM
We were walking back through the jack oaks of the scrub and I was conscious of the gun pushed under my belt, the rifle in the crook of my arm, and of the way the sun cooked the back of my neck and my shoulders. About myself I was most aware of the sense of being tired, of wishing I could lie down with Lily close beside me, her black hair against my face and her body against mine so that we could lie together and rest, the way it should be now. I shook my head, watching the way she walked ahead of me, the sun on her hair, the way her shoulders were set.
"It was not bad, Lily. There was nothing bad about it."
She did not say anything but walked faster, as if trying to run away from me and escape what we had done together on the porch of the ruined old house.
"I couldn't help wanting to love you, Lily. I never could." There was the sound of her catching her breath against the stillness of the scrub.
"You think I won't tell Marve because you call it love?" She stared over her shoulder at me, her expression bewildered.
"I only know what it is. With me."
She paused for a moment and for just that moment there was the sweet scent of roots and plants, and the feeling of the sun warm against us. In that second I thought her eyes clouded. I thought she was going to cry and I wanted to move forward and clasp her in my arms and make it all right, make her know how right it was.
Her voice was scalding and indignant. "I don't think I believe in love. Unless love is just taking what you want."
"Lily for God's sake. You've got to believe somebody sometime," I said gently.
"Do I?"
"Not everybody is Marve Pooser."
She laughed. "Marve doesn't pretend to love me but he doesn't try to sweet-talk me either," she said bitterly.
"I love you, Lily."
She shook her head, turned and walked away from me, moving swiftly.
I walked behind her and neither of us spoke again. Her lithe body moved magically beneath that cheap dress. It was more than I had ever dreamed of, more than I could ever forget. But in my mind I could picture how she would tell Marve what I had done to her, because she had sworn she would, to spite herself, perhaps even to spite Marve. She knew she had no will, no defenses against Marve, but she could taunt him now with what happened between her and me. I wanted to laugh aloud in bitterness. She wasn't so blind that she couldn't see the jealousy in Marve and me; it was like a tangible thing in that shack. It spilled out the windows, it seeped across the yard and ran wetly across the dry sand. She could hit back at us all right; she could drive us both crazy.