There was another window. In the room there had only been one. She frowned miserably, trying to remember, frightened because she could not.
Another window. Six windows in all, three on each side, tight shuttered. A door at the front of the room, closed. A red rusty iron stove with no stovepipe and an empty woodbox. Pillowcases and cartons with things in them dumped in a heap in the corner beside Al’s battered suitcase.
Herself on the floor.
And Al Guthrie on the floor too, sitting on it with his back against the wall. He was wrapped up in blankets. He was drinking from a can of beer and talking.
“—all my life,” he was saying. “Making it tough for me. Everybody making it tough.”
His face was sullen. His lower lip stuck out, moist with beer. He talked.
“I never made any trouble. I wouldn’t let people walk over me, that’s all. A man’s got his rights. But they were all the time making it tough, making it tough.”
He was not talking to Carolyn. She lay still, watching him with her eyes half closed.
He drank more beer and lighted a cigarette and muttered.
“—tough for them now. I’m just about through. Tonight I’ll see what I feel like doing. Goddamn bastards—”
It’s funny, Carolyn thought, I’m not afraid of him any more. I’m too tired. I’m not even hungry. I’m not anything except tired.
She began slowly to remember.
She had been here before. When? Yesterday perhaps. The last time she was awake she had seen the room and Al had told her it was an old one-room country schoolhouse that hadn’t been used for years. That was after they left the other house. After that middle of a night—
No. No, don’t remember that part.
So close. Ben, dear Ben, how happy we used to be and you were so close to me. And I ran and I almost got away. I could see the street. If I could have shouted and screamed, but I couldn’t, and he beat me and hurt me and the ground was cold.
Oh, God. And it was so near, so almost—
After that nothing. Blackness. Sometimes a sound of a car going fast and rough over bumps, but whether she was riding in the car or not she did not know. Probably. Yes. Of course. That’s how she got here. Al must have carried her in. She could not remember anything at all about outside or what it looked like. At some time she had waked up and she thought she had eaten something. Then what?
It’s terrible that I can’t remember, she thought. I must not be well at all. Perhaps he hurt my head that time when he knocked me down.
She frowned and frowned, lying still and cold in her blanket on the warped floor.
Rain. She remembered rain. The sound of it on the roof. Such a nice sound. When she was little she used to go up into the attic so she could hear it. Rain on the roof, yes, and then rain on her face, wetness and stumbling in the dark and the trees thrashed.
You see? she told herself triumphantly. I can remember.
And there was the car again. How many years of her life had she spent on the floor of the car, tied up and gagged and half smothered under a dirty blanket? How many years since she had said good-by to Ben and gone home to her own house to sweep the kitchen floor and look out and see a peddler coming with two big baskets?
The car. But she didn’t know where she had gone in it or why. She had slept all the way. He had brought her back here, and now he was sitting and drinking beer and it was daylight again.
“Are we waiting for something?” she said suddenly.
He jumped and then swore at her. He got up. The blanket slid down off his shoulders and tangled around his feet. He kicked it away.
“Goddamn right we’re waiting for something,” he said. “What’s the matter with you, didn’t you hear what I told you last night?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t hear.”
“I called your husband.” He watched her face. “Your goddamn smart-assed Mr. Forbes.”
Her body stirred and became tense. She lifted her head. “You called Ben?”
“I told him what to do. I told him what would happen if he tried getting smart again.” He leaned over her. “You know what your husband is going to do? He’s going to jump through hoops for me just the way I whistle. And you know who he’s going to have with him? My no-good wife. The pair of ’em. He’s bringing her tonight.”
She stared and stared at him, her heart pounding.
“Did he tell you that?”
“He sure did.” Al thrust his face closer to her. She could smell the rank smell of his breath, the sweat-and-cold-wool smell of his clothing. His jaw had a thick reddish stubble on it and the skin of his cheeks was flushed and coarse-textured.
“You sound,” he said, “like you don’t believe him.”
Automatically she answered, “Of course I believe him.” But she did not. She closed her eyes and sank back onto the blanket. I’ve got to think, she told herself. Shake out the cobwebs. This isn’t for myself, it’s for Ben, and I’ve got to think clear.
“It’s all arranged, then. He’s bringing Lorene tonight.”
“That’s what he said.”
But it isn’t possible, she thought. Lorene would never come back and Ben couldn’t make her. He wouldn’t even try to make her.
Or wouldn’t he? If it was the other way around, wouldn’t I?
All right, that doesn’t matter. She isn’t going to come back to Al Guthrie and get herself killed or beaten within an inch of her life because of me—
Blackness swept over her like a cloud again and she fought it off, struggling to cling to the thin bars of sunlight the shutters let slip so grudgingly.
I can’t faint any more, she thought. It’s for Ben, damn you, sit up and think.
“Then this is the last day,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Al. “The last day.”
She managed to sit up. “I’m hungry,” she said. “I need to eat.”
He pointed to the stuff in the corner. “There’s the kitchen. And if you got any complaints about the accommodations, tell ’em to your smart husband. It’s his fault you’re here.”
“You’ll have to untie me.”
He grunted and pulled the cords loose from around her wrists and ankles. “You can run around and holler as much as you want to. You’re ’way out in the country now. There’s nobody closer than a couple of miles.”
But she noticed that he placed himself between her and a second, smaller door in the back of the building. This one was tied shut on the inside with a twisting of strong wire.
It didn’t mean much to her at the moment. She was too deeply concerned with the effort of crawling over to the corner and rooting among the cans. She was terribly weak. Her head seemed to be clearing, and she thought perhaps the weakness came from not eating. She had not eaten much of anything, really, since Al had taken her. She was not hungry now. But this was an important day, probably the most important one in her life, and she needed to be stronger for it.
She found a can of tuna and part of a stale loaf of bread. Al had to open the can for her. There wasn’t any water so he gave her a can of beer too. She ate slowly, a sip and a mouthful at a time, trembling with the exertion.
Al drank and smoked. There was a sound of wind blowing.
“I think he’s lying too,” Al said. His eyes peered at her, bright and cunning, from under his pale thick lids.
“Why?” Some demon of unwise malice got hold of her tongue and made it say, “Don’t you believe your wife wants to come back to you?”
He rose angrily, rattling the floor boards. “Pushing it at me, always pushing it at me. Acting like I was so goddamn dirty or something I shouldn’t even be alive. Who the hell are you? Who the hell’s your husband? What makes you so goddamn good?”
His beer can was empty. He flung it savagely away.
“You women are all alike. You think you’re something special and a man ought to crawl around and lick your boots and thank you kindly for letting him come near you. Well, you know what I think you are?”
He told her, in language so brutally simple that there wasn’t any doubt of his meaning.
“Guys like Forbes,” he said, “can crawl to you if they want to. They’re nothing but a bunch of goddamned yellowbellies anyway. But I’m damned if I will.”
Carolyn said, “Well, if we’re such a low lot as all that, I don’t see why it makes so much difference if you lose one of us.”
“Because this one belonged to me. She was my wife, Mrs. Albert William Guthrie. She don’t run out on me and jump in someone else’s bed.”
Carolyn was quiet. She still felt light and swimmy, not able to trust herself. Al, looking ugly, opened another can of beer.
Presently he said:
“Don’t worry, I’ll know if he’s lying.”
“How will you know?”
“Because I’m going to talk to Lorene first, before I make any arrangements. On the phone, see? And if her and Forbes are trying to pull some kind of a trick I’ll know it. And they’ll wish they hadn’t.”
He moved restlessly around the room, creaking and rattling on the loose boards. Carolyn closed her eyes and rested.
All of a sudden she was afraid again. Afraid of Al Guthrie and dying, afraid of the coming night. Terribly of what was going to happen to Ben.
Because he is lying, she thought. He must be. He is planning some kind of a trick.
And Guthrie will kill him.
Al Guthrie paced like a big four-footed thing in a pen, going from one window to another, peering and squinting through the cracks.
Carolyn watched him. I must do something, she kept thinking. Ben will come and be killed unless I do something.
Every so often Al would go out the back door and shut it carefully behind him. There was a storm vestibule to protect it from the wind and snow so that she could not see anything beyond the door. Al was never gone more than a minute or two. Then he would come back in and hunker down to drink more beer and smoke and then rise to pace and peer from the windows.
What shall I do? thought Carolyn. Oh, Lord, what shall I do?
She began to stare covertly at the back door. The next time he went outside she got to her feet and trotted across the room and pushed at it. It was jammed some way on the other side. She could not open it. She waited for him to come back in and said:
“I want to go out too.”
“Okay,” he said. “The old privy’s still standing.” He took her by the arm. “Oh no, you aren’t going alone. And remember what happened the last time you tried to run away.”
He took her out the door, looking cautiously around first to make sure there was nobody in sight. The sunlight struck painfully on her eyes so that she had to cover them with her hand. She had not been out of doors, nor even out of a darkened room, for days. From under her hand she looked eagerly, hungrily around.
The schoolhouse stood in a little meadow overgrown now with hazel bushes and stiff clumps of goldenrod and brambles. There was a thin young wood across from it, grown up long after the school was built, and there was a narrow road almost as grassy as the meadow. The building itself looked like a miniature church with its tiny belfry and tall windows.
Sometimes these old one-room schools were built of brick and sometimes they were of clapboard. This one was clapboard, weathered to a silver gray. The roof was slate and still sound. Sometimes people bought them and made homes out of them. They never seemed to be torn down.
Farther along the road, which did not look as though any cars used it any more, was the naked and half-fallen skeleton of a braced-frame barn and beyond it half a chimney standing over a mound where a house had burned and filled in its own cellar. All the rest was woods. Everywhere. No lived-in house or cultivated field was visible. Only trees and brush. The sky was beautiful with white clouds rolling across it and a pair of hawks swinging in high circles, riding the wind without once stirring their wings.
“Real lonesome, ain’t it?” said Al. “I brought a girl here once is how I happened to know about it. Looking for a quiet spot where we wouldn’t be bothered. I was already on a hell of a back dirt road and turned off into what I thought was just an old logging cut, and pretty soon here was this place. I was only here the once but I remembered it. The road don’t go anywhere any more. We’re pretty safe.”
But he did not give her any chance to run. Being out in the air and moving around made her feel better, but she knew that in any case she would not have been able to outrun him. She would have liked to stay out longer, but he hurried her back inside, and she thought he was nervous about somebody coming along the road and seeing them and wanting to know what they were doing there. The car must be hidden in the woods somewhere.
So running away was out, and there was no hope of attracting anyone’s attention. The same old weary problem she had grappled with and not been able to solve since she came to in Al’s car that first time. How to get away, how to call for help. And there wasn’t any way.
She sat on the blanket, thinking. The thin slivers of light dimmed and brightened as clouds swept over the sun. It was cold. She watched the shadows shift along the wall as the day wore on.
The last day.
Her last day. And because of her, probably Ben’s last one too.
She watched Al Guthrie drinking his beer and smoking his cigarettes, pacing and peering, crouching and waiting. Sometimes he scowled and sometimes he smiled to himself, licking his lips as though he tasted something good.
If there was only some way I could kill him, she thought.
I tried that before and it didn’t work. But that was silly. I’m not strong enough to kill him with my hands or anything like it.
But if I had a gun.
He
has a gun.
Yes. Yes, his gun.
He’s shown it to me often enough, bragging what he was going to do with it. I think he keeps it in the suitcase.
The next time he goes outside again. I’ll have to hurry. There will only be a minute or two. I will stay quiet with my eyes shut so he won’t think to tie me up.
God, won’t he ever go outside again, with all that beer he’s drinking?
Finally he did get up, grumbling, rubbing his hand over his face. He stumbled on an empty beer can and kicked it with a sharp clatter into other empty cans and then kicked them all in a spiteful fury, saying God damn it over and over. Carolyn gave one wild start that he seemed not to have noticed and then after that she pretended to be asleep.