Against the Day (93 page)

“Oh, I know, sure—” she made a
long arm and swept up little Chloe, who was just about to topple off the porch
into the petunia patch. Held her up and pretended to inspect her, like a
drummer with a sample. “They do have

their appeal, can’t deny that. And the Lord in his mysterious
ways means for

some of us to see them through at least till they can start
in with families of their own, of course. But that’s only for some of us, Lake.
Others have other chores down here. Hell, I wanted to rob trains when I was a
girl—more than wanted, I knew it was my destiny. Me and Phoebe Sloper,
we’d go up back of that grade just over the river, put these big bandannas on
our faces, and spend the day figuring how we’d do the deed. We had a sworn
pact.”

   
“What
happened?”

   
“What
do you think happened?”

So it started
as no more than one of those basic
little chats about the married universe that couples were known to get into
when they found a minute, which was seldom, and the subject this one almost
immediately converged to for Lake and Deuce was having—actually, not
having—children. In the past they had blamed it on outside crises or
stresses—a gang committing depredations in the next county, accusations
of malfeasance from Kansas Citystyle reform groups—when it did get more
personal, and pleasantries like your dick is too short or maybe you picked up
some bug when you were out trampin around were exchanged, the conferences
always adjourned in somebody’s tears, with a resolution to keep on trying.

Tonight she was careless enough to
ask why he was so desperate about the whole thing, and he was unwise enough to
blurt, “I just feel like it’s somethin maybe that we owe him.”

   
For a
second she couldn’t believe he meant Webb. “My father.”

   
“That
if we—”

“A baby.
We
owe Webb Traverse,
deceased, a baby. You think one’ll be enough, or should
we
throw a
couplethree more in the deal just to make sure?”

Deuce slowly grew wary. “I only meant—”

“Just marrying me didn’t work, did
it? Thought you’d give up that wonderful hiredkiller freedom, and that would
make all of it right. Now you’ve gone truly insane. You have drifted clear
around that last bend of the river if you think having a child cancels out a
murder. There’s a price to pay for certain, but more likely it’s no babies.
Ever.”

   
“Ain’t
just me.” Something in his voice now warning her to step careful.

She didn’t feel careful. “How’s that, Deuce?”

“Them last days at the Torpedo, is
all he talked about was you. He could’ve took all the rest leavin, but you,
really, that was the last kick in the teeth. He was a dead carcass with a
jackin hammer in his hand—the highgradin, me and Sloat, just details,
makin it official. You better think about that fore you start in on me.”

 
  
She
snorted, pretending to smile as if he was trying to embarrass her in public.
“Easy story to tell, years later, no witnesses.”

“He cried a lot, more’n you ever saw
him do. Kept sayin ‘Child of the Storm.’ Guess it was somethin about you, you
ever hear him say that? ‘Child of the Storm.
’
”
Not just the phrase but an uncanny impersonation of Webb’s voice.

Deuce being a little customer and not
expecting the blow, no time to brace for it, in fact she knocked him over with
it. And seeing ’s how that was so clean and easy, figured she ought to get in a
few more before he could get up to start hitting her back. Deuce kept his guns
at the office, and Lake, like most women who lived in town, was limited for
purposes of selfdefense to items available in the home, such as the rolling
pin, soup ladle, stovelid lifter, and of course the very popular frying pan,
which had figured in more than one assault complaint in Wall o’ Death County
over the year preceding. Judges usually recognized a difference between a
shorter spider type of handle and a longer frypan handle as indicating the
degree of serious intent. Tonight Lake figured a twelveinch Acme castiron fry
pan would just do the trick, with both hands taking it off the hook on the
kitchen wall and preparing to let Deuce have it. “Oh shit, Lake, no,” his voice
too slow for anything that might happen now. He had hit his head on something.
He was a sitting duck.

She would wonder later if that was
why she hesitated and looked around for some more merciful weapon. About the
time Deuce was getting to his feet and looking over at the carving knife with
some interest, Lake had about decided on the stove shovel. It worked pretty
good, and it helped that by this time she had settled into a cooled and
efficient rage. Back to horizontal went Deuce.

Tace and Eugene showed up at the
door, the Sheriff still half asleep and preoccupied with his galluses, Tace
grimlidded and carrying a Greener shotgun, loaded and unbroken.

“This has got to stop,” she began,
then saw it was Deuce down bleeding all over the patterned oilcloth. “Oh, my.”
She lit up a cigarette and started smoking in front of her husband, who
pretended not to notice.

Later, after the boys had gone off in
search of medicinal whiskey, Lake remarked, “Well at least it wasn’t fatal.”

“Fatal? What’s wrong with fatal? Only
reason it wasn’t is you girlied out with that tin shovel. Has the little
bastard redeemed himself? When was that?”

Tace stalked back and forth.
  
“You
could make a case,” she said after a while, not at all reluctant but as if
allowing herself a longwithheld treat, “that you are every bit as bad as your
li’l wedded husband there. That you’ve both been all along in some unholy
cahoots, your own job being to do what you have to to clean up after him and
see he gets and stays clear of anybody’s payback, including your own brothers.”

Lake didn’t answer, and after that
nobody talked to anybody for a while unless they had to.

es well perhaps you did, but I saw the left one, didn’t I,”
declared Neville.

   
“I’m
sure you did,” smirked Nigel. “Now, was that stage left or audience left?”

   
Nigel
looked down. “This one.” He pointed at one nipple. “Correct?”

The two youngsters were in the Great
Court baths, discussing Miss Halfcourt, their desolate sighs merging into the
hiss of the steam.

“Now it’s rumored she’s taken up with
some sort of embryo Apostlet named Cyprian Latewood.”

   
“As
in Latewood’s Patent Wallpapers? Surely not.”

   
“The
very feckless scion.”

“These Mahommedan lasses do love a
sod,” Neville was of the opinion. “It’s that harem mentality, being sweet on
the eunuchs sort of thing. As long as it’s always someone that impossible.”

   
“But
surely she’s not. . . Mahommedan?” protested Nigel.

   
“Well
some sort of Eastern wog Nigel.”

   
“Excuse
me?”

   
“Oh
dear chap,” Neville oozed, “you still can’t be taking it personally.”

“Better than taking it publicly,
i’n’t it.” Referring to Neville’s own extended period of tearful soliloquy at
The German Sea as well as licensed premises further afield, after Yashmeen had
returned a subClerkenwell trinket in actually quite horrible taste, obtained by
the temporarily deranged youngster at great effort and expense.

They lounged, steamed as puddings,
each regarding the other’s penis with lethargic annoyance. Their discussion of
Miss Halfcourt’s own nude person was owing to a stealthy excursion the night
before. At the disconsolate

hour when no one is awake but gyps
and working mathematicians, there had

arisen a tradition among the bolder girls of creeping to the
river, up above

Byron’s Pool, the brighter the moon the bolder the company,
to bathe. Word somehow always got to a group of lads, who were apt to show up
as much from curiosity as from lust. And there in the moonglow would be
Yashmeen, among her handmaidens. Eliciting a range of remarks, from
catchphrases of the day such as “Div!” “Whizzo!” or
“
That
is
that of which
I
speak!” to allnight rhapsodizing in the rooms of friends, or
sonnets written down later when the madness had receded enough to allow at
least the grasping of a pen, or simply an abrupt passage into paralyzed
dummyishness upon having spied her, or someone who might be she, in Cloisters
Court.

   
In so
much public attention, the two N’s—ostensibly at King’s reading
philosophy and classics, now given the additional remit to keep an eye on
Yashmeen, not only for the T.W.I.T. but for certain Desks in Queen Anne’s Gate
as well—found peculiar inconvenience. At Newnham and Girton, one expected
Wrangleresses on the legendary order of Phillippa Fawcett, even romances with
one’s tutors à la Grace Chisholm and Will Young, which with luck might develop
into some married collaboration—but certainly not this nautchgirl
extravagance of looks and selfpossession that Yashmeen presented. This was
shocking the bourgeoisie, not to mention the mathematical persuasion, out of
all known scale. And now there was this Latewood person, his family only a
generation on from socioacrobatic aggrandizement, himself assumed to be a sod
and, less explicably, the object of Yashmeen’s interest.

“Discovered the most frightfully
promising recipe for
opium beer
the other day Nigel. One ferments opium
with brewer’s yeast, quite as if it were malt or barley or something. Adding
enough sugar of course.”

   
“I
say. Sounds ever so degenerate, Neville.”

   
“Actually
it is, Nigel, having been invented by the duc de Richelieu himself.”

   
“Not
the Spanishfly bloke.”

   
“The
same.”

Which was enough to rouse them from
their watery lassitude and return to the important educational task of
obtaining enough drugs to get them through term.

“
L
ine and staff
,” Cyprian Latewood recalled having
heard his father instructing the children, “headquarters and field commands,
and the enemy everywhere you can think of.”

   
“Are
we at war, Father?”

   
“Indeed.”

   
“Are
you a general?”

   
“More
like a colonel. Yes, for the moment, at least, all quite regimental.”

   
“Have
you uniforms, you and your men?”

   
“Come
down to the City someday, and you shall see our uniforms.”

   
“And
the enemy—”

   
“The
enemy, sad to say, is too often found wearing the same uniform as we.”

   
“So
that you can’t always tell—”

“You can’t
ever
tell. One of
many cruel aspects of a cruel world, but better you have it now, from me, than
have to learn it through some possibly damaging experience.”

“And you meekly accepted all that, of
course,” nodded an annoyed though sympathetic Reginald “Ratty” McHugh, fifteen
years or so later.

“I did,” supposed Cyprian, “and I
didn’t. What I was left with was the distinct sense of one more flag it was now
possible to dishonor.”

The boys were lounging about Ratty’s
rooms drinking ale, smoking Balkan Sobranies, and trying without notable
success to mope themselves back into the liliesandlassitude humor of the ’90s.