The Blackstone Commentaries (32 page)

“Sure you don't need some help?” Dooley Trivett asked, a twinkle in his eye.

“You know, Mr. Reedy, the altitude up here … It's a long way down.”

“Damn, boys!” was all he could say. He'd never seen them like this. It was disrespect. But they climbed in their cars and were soon bouncing back up the road.

In the sudden, hushed tumult of the forest, Winthrop felt the sun warm his face. He hadn't moved from the spot where he'd paid the drivers. She hadn't moved either. But without looking, he knew precisely where she was and felt her stillness.

“I'll just drop this trailer on that pad,” he said suddenly. “You guide me. I'll leave the blocks for Mr. Snipes.”

With that, he strode resolutely across the clearing to the truck. In a few minutes, he dropped the trailer precisely in place.

“Damn, you did some good directing, Peanut,” he said once he was on the ground again.

“Kind of ugly, isn't it?” she said, looking at the trailer.

Her unsmiling bluntness took Winthrop aback, but then he decided he liked it. “Yeah, I told him. Tried to show him one that would have done more justice by you, ma'am. A real home. But he knew what he wanted.”

“Grady always knows what he wants.”

“Mr. Snipes your husband, ma'am?”
Now, why the hell do I need to know that?
he thought.

“Ha!” she laughed. “I've seen prettier trailers on construction sites. You have a key to this sardine can?”

“Yes, ma'am.” Winthrop retrieved a pair of keys from his shirt pocket and dropped them in her hand. She hadn't taken her eyes off the trailer, and he found himself a little disappointed.

“Any furniture?” she asked, reaching up on tiptoes to unlock the door. As she did, her shirt fell open where the buttons were undone, revealing one entire lovely breast. Winthrop swallowed hard, then looked away as she grabbed the sides of the open door and effortlessly pulled herself the almost three feet up into the trailer.

“I'll just unload these blocks and the hookup kit—the pipe and all that, ma'am—then you'll need to sign some papers.” Winthrop grabbed the clipboard from the cab.

She was standing in the door of the trailer, leaning outward, when he returned. Both hands clutched the frame while she looked down on him, making his eyes travel up her body to find her face. “Show me around,” she said.

“Yes, ma'am.” Reaching for the doorframe, he pulled himself up. His face landed between her thighs, flowing like tanned silk out of those shorts. She didn't move. Winthrop gulped pungent, sun-warmed skin and hidden excretions.

“And it's Peanut, please,” she said, still not moving while he half-hung from the door. “I appreciate your Southern manners and all that, but I'm not married and you're making me feel ancient.” Then she moved back while Winthrop prepared to pull himself up again, trying hard not to look anywhere at all.

Scrambling through the door on his knees, Winthrop gained the shadowy interior of the trailer with a good deal less grace than he'd strived for. Again he found her standing in front of him inside that space where he
knew
he wasn't touching her, but damn if it didn't feel that way. “I gather you're not from around here,” he said, clearing his throat and avoiding the word
Yankee
, in case it might offend her.

She was staring at his chest. “Mantoloking, New Jersey. Ever been there?”

“No … Peanut.”

“It's by the ocean. All houses, sky and telephone poles. Everybody's rich as hell. You can look out to where the sky and sea come together and become nothing,” she added, turning her back on him and padding to the front of the trailer, where she paused, legs wide apart, hands on hips, and looked around, her skepticism evident. She brushed past him, her bare arm just touching his, and made her way toward the rear of the trailer, first stopping at the kitchen to twist the handles on the faucet and peek into the refrigerator, then pushing the bathroom door open and sticking her head in there. Finally she entered the bedroom.

Winthrop found her standing in the same pose she'd taken at the front of the trailer. She wiped her hand across her brow. “You're Mr. Reedy?”

“Winthrop,” he said. “If you'll just sign these papers …” He lifted the clipboard toward her, feeling like a schoolboy asking his teacher for approval.

“It's damn hot, Winthrop, isn't it?” she said, ignoring the clipboard.

Striving to appear relaxed, like he had all the time in the world and didn't have a business to run, Winthrop leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms over the clipboard, pressing it to his chest. He heard the tick of expanding metal and was surprised by the ferocious humidity so high up. “It sure is,” he agreed. Watching her move unhurriedly from window to window cranking open the jalousies, panic began to tug at his insides, as Damascus, work, the entire day threatened to slip away.

“What are we supposed to sleep on? Did he buy a bed?”

“Not from me,” Winthrop said.

All at once, she lifted her head from an examination of the floor and gave Winthrop a piercing look. Then she glided to the door where he stood and, slipping her hand around his waist, drew him into the room. “Come here and look at this! It's damn small, isn't it?” she said, stopping in the middle of the room.

“I guess so.” She hadn't removed her arm. Winthrop felt sweat begin to
flow freely down his forehead and under his arms. “Whew,” he said. “You'll need air conditioning.” Her hand felt like a ten-ton feather on his hip.

She turned and pressed his body with the front of hers, from about his knees to his stomach. Reaching up, she lightly brushed the fingertips of her free hand over his forehead, her eyes following her fingers. “Where did you learn to drive a truck?”

It was another moment before Winthrop became aware that her fingers were moving over his chest, playing in the dampness there, making little circles. He hadn't felt her undo the buttons of his shirt. Sweat began to sting his eyes as though he were crying. He felt like he
was
crying, like he was on fire from an exquisite pain that was going to blow his body wide apart. His hands found her waist, lifted her shirt and wrapped themselves around satiny skin so his fingertips met. For a moment, he felt the top of her shorts, then knew the shorts weren't there anymore.

Her smell overwhelmed him as sweat suddenly gushed down his body.

“What took you so goddamn long?” Cub demanded as Winthrop wandered into the garage. Behind him in the yard, the sun spilled under the oak tree and over the Firebird in long, golden streams, churning dust and insects. Winthrop stared at Cub's thin, freckled, earnest face and scattered mop of hair. Suddenly they were very funny to him, but strange, too, unreal like the day itself, a kind of dreamy, lost feeling pervading everything.

“Willie and Dooley said you ran into some kind of wood nymph up there. They didn't want to leave you.” Cub laughed, showing his bad teeth. His eyes were angry.

I don't believe this is about the truck
, thought Winthrop. But Winthrop was having trouble focusing, much less taking anything seriously. There was a sadness in him, too, filling him and pressing outward like a huge balloon. “Surely, Cub. All I've been doing all afternoon is chasing a wood nymph.” Winthrop listened to his own words as though someone else were speaking them over a microphone. He looked down and wiped his hands over his clothes, over streaks of dirt on his jeans and shirt. His boots were scuffed. Only the Cross pen glinting in his pocket looked the way it had when the day began.

Leaving the woods, Winthrop had stopped where the grassy track rose to the pavement and, grabbing some handfuls of dirt from the shoulder of the road, rubbed them over his clothes. The sadness hit him hard then, though it had begun nibbling at him hours before in that trailer, like dizziness almost.

“Better go. Grady's due back,” she'd said, standing once again in the space where even if he weren't touching her, he could be and more. Only he was touching her, his hands resting on her hips where they sloped toward her waist, she not wearing a stitch, just standing before him in that empty trailer. Again the sweat had poured from him like liquid fire, devouring his senses. Again they'd melted together.

“Lizzie's been calling since about three. I didn't know what to tell her, Winn.”

“The truth, goddamnit!” he said. “Look here!” He flicked his hands angrily over his shirt front. “That Snipes fella may work construction, but he doesn't know shit about mounting a trailer. He showed up right after the boys left, but I wound up jacking that whole damn rig. And no phone, or sure as hell I would've called you!”

“You have no need to swear,” Cub said with uncharacteristic primness, holding up his hands. “I didn't know. I just never saw Willie and Dooley acting so.”

“Neither have I,” Winthrop said. Looking at Cub, he realized that his friend didn't want to believe for a second that anything had happened, not to someone doing so well and married to Lizzie.
Nothing did happen
, Winthrop told himself. “Maybe I got to stop tipping,” he said, and laughed. Cub laughed, too, his eyes betraying the degree of his relief.
He damn near worships me
, Winthrop thought, disheartened. Cub was tight-wired, and though he rarely showed it, he had a hell of a temper. “Cub, I got to go take a shower,” Winthrop said, swinging the Firebird's key ring. “Put the extra hours on the tab.”

No, she didn't have Lizzie's lean good looks, nor her brains and quickness. But she was pure instinct, he thought, feeling that exquisite pain again. He wished he were back up in the mountains, where she might be paying attention to him instead of that Grady creep.

Then somehow he couldn't believe any of it; he didn't know what to believe anymore. For the first time, he didn't feel that swell of pride as he
drove by the Banner Days sign and little office on the bypass. He didn't even look at them. He knew they were there, sure, the way he was aware of cars, traffic lights, trees heavy with summer and sunlight softening into the long-departed evenings of his childhood.

XXXIII

Dugan

At last, he heard what he'd been waiting for. But waiting so long, since just after sunup, he'd become unsettled by his surroundings: the Trotter Building with its double glass doors opening from the street onto a narrow hallway that in turn opened into a foyer capped by a huge, oval skylight. The skylight hovered almost five floors above, sunlight cascading through it down the burnished brass railing of a spiral staircase. When earlier he'd parked his truck behind the building and pushed through those glass doors and climbed the stairs, his boots ringing on the iron treads, he'd felt like he was ascending into some faraway grandeur—big cities and money. Since then, he'd grown alert to the building's sounds. From the fourth floor, he could hear the outside doors opening and closing, and sometimes voices as well as footsteps echoing up the stairwell. But even before other doors closed on lower floors and the silence returned, he'd known the footsteps were not those for which he was waiting. No one that morning had even reached the fourth floor.

Now, however, the footsteps had left the third floor and were still climbing.

Where he was standing, he couldn't be seen until the person reached the top landing and turned around. Waiting, he felt like an intruder, though not the same way he felt when he was in the wealthy section of Damascus. No, this was another kind of awkwardness, one of unfamiliarity; he was simply not used to urban settings. Waiting, he even began to feel sneaky, like an impostor. He'd never felt that way in all his years as a lawman; he'd always felt free and open, his authority to be doing what he was doing clear. He began to wonder if it was the building or something more fundamental affecting him.
I'm not hiding! I just have to see him
.

The light on the top floor was resplendent and beautiful; the spacious central area with its polished hardwood floor surrounding the stairwell and its ornate grill seemed to float in it. A tenuous silence emanated from the closed doors in the shadows and churned idly over the brass work. It was another world. It was as though he'd fallen into a hole amid all that was familiar, fallen into the smoldering core of a dream or a nightmare—he wasn't sure.

Keen to the approaching footsteps, he felt his body grow taut. But all at once, he didn't know what to do with his hands—they felt unnecessary, clumsy—and something like panic came over him. Then, seeing a man appear, and seeing his total unawareness of another's presence, he again felt like an interloper or spy, a violator. The man moved out onto the floor and turned toward a door at the front of the building, a door Dugan knew led to an office with big arched windows looking over the courthouse square. The man paused, then, one hand dangling a brass key, looked right at him with a pained air of disbelief. “Mr. Willis,” Dugan said.