You Live Once (3 page)

I knew what I could use to wrap her up. In the back end of the car there was an old tarpaulin, a greasy mess. I had laid it under the wheels during the winter to get out of heavy snow. On the coldest nights I had kept it over the hood of the ungaraged Merc, a hundred-watt bulb on an extension cord burning inside the hood. I went out through my kitchen and looked at the collection of debris in the attached shed. Warren has garbage collection, but they do not take cans and bottles. You save those until you have enough to warrant a trip to the dump. I had a reasonable collection.

My plan was set and it seemed practical. I went out and backed the car up close to my front door. I opened the rear compartment and took the tarp into the house. I loaded a small cardboard carton with cans and bottles and took it out and put it in the rear compartment, well over to one side. Mrs. Speers appeared with her usual magic, materializing sixty feet away, strolling toward me, smiling, a big unbending woman in a black and white Sunday print, wearing one white canvas work glove and carrying a pair of small red garden shears.

“Going to the dump, Mr. Sewell?”

“I guess it’s about time. Thought I’d drop some stuff off.”

“Oh dear, do you think you could take mine too this time? Joseph forgot it when he did the yard work Thursday.”

“Gee, I’d be glad to, but I’ve got a lot of my own. Tell you what, after work Monday I’ll run it over for you.”

“I don’t want to put you out.”

“That’s okay. I’d do it today, but I’m going right on up to the lake.”

“Joseph is getting so absent-minded.”

She wanted desperately to have a nice little chat. It was too bad that she hadn’t rented her apartment to someone she could have talked to. The woman was obviously bored and lonely. Her life had been busy with husband and kids. Now the kids were grown and had moved away, and the husband was dead.

“Monday for sure, Mrs. Speers,” I said.

“You’re so kind.” She smiled and sidled off to snip something. I went in and shut the door. I spread the tarp on the floor in front of the closet and opened the door. I felt squeamish; I didn’t want to touch her again. I went in and fumbled with the belt. I had to stop and then try again. It came loose and I slipped it off over her head and unloosened it the rest of the way. I found two hairs clinging to the fabric, two of her black hairs.
I brushed them off onto the tarp, rolled the belt up and put it in my top bureau drawer.

The next was the worst. She was sickeningly heavy. I got her by wrist and ankle. I tried to hold her out away from me, but she swung against my shins. Her free arm and leg dragged and her head thudded against the door frame. I put her in the middle of the tarp. She sprawled on her side, hair across her darkened face. I was breathing hard. I got my flashlight and carefully inspected the inside of the closet. I couldn’t see anything, but the walls were smooth enough to take prints. I took a towel from the laundry bag and wiped the inside of the closet. It was good that I did because the damp towel picked up three more long black hairs that I had missed. I wiped it again and found nothing.

I picked up the four corners of the tarp, and joined them. She curled into a ball in the middle. Taking a good grip on the four corners, I picked her up off the floor with my right hand. She must have weighed somewhere around one twenty. I moved over to where I could inspect the sight in the full-view mirror. The tarp fit her body snugly and it was unmistakably a woman in a tarp. Nothing else. If I’d gone out with that, Mrs. Speers’ eyes would have bulged like a Thanksgiving dinner.

I set her down and thought some more. Then I went through into the shed and came back with a paper bag of cans and bottles. I held the four corners up again and wedged the cans and bottles down between her body and the tarp so as to destroy the distinctive rounded outlines. I missed on the first try. The next time, after I had gotten some down around her hips, she no longer looked like a woman in a tarp. She looked like a tarp stuffed with angular junk.

After counting to ten I hoisted her off the floor again and walked through the living room and out the front door. Mrs. Speers was alarmingly close, snipping at a rose bush. I wanted the tarp to look as light as possible. I used every ounce of strength to handle it negligently,
swinging it into the back end of the car, lowering it without too much of a thump. As I swung it I heard the old rotten fabric rip. I saw Mary’s tan elbow sticking through the rip. I banged the lid down and did not dare look at Mrs. Speers.

“My, you
do
have a load,” she said.

“Quite a load this time. I let it accumulate too long.”

“Why, I thought you went last week!”

“I didn’t take it all that time.”

“This is certainly a lovely day to be going up to the lake. Do you go to Smith Lake?”

“Yes m’am.”

“Mr. Speers and I used to go up there years ago. He adored bass fishing. He was never very lucky, but he loved to fish.”

“I guess it used to be a good bass lake. There’s talk of restocking it.”

“It’s nice that you have friends up at Smith Lake, Mr. Sewell, with summer coming on and all. It makes a nice change. Who are you going to see up there? Any of the old families?”

“Mary Olan invited me up.”

“You don’t say! Their place is one of the oldest places on the lake. It certainly is the biggest, at least it was the last time I was up there. You know, Mr. Speers and I used to know Rolph and Nadine Olan quite well. I mean we weren’t
close
friends. When Mary was quite little my youngest girl used to play with her. Their tragedy was a terrible shock to this city, Mr. Sewell, they were so prominent.”

“I haven’t heard much about that. Mary doesn’t mention it, of course.”

“She wouldn’t, poor child. I can remember it like it was yesterday, the expression on Mr. Speers’ face when he read it in the morning paper. Nadine always seemed like such a quiet woman. Almost shy. Sensitive, too. And Rolph was so clever at business. They say she never has responded to a single treatment and she’ll have to stay in
that place the rest of her natural days. I suppose it’s a blessing though that she isn’t well enough to realize she killed her husband. Afterwards we heard that he had been … seeing someone else.” Mrs. Speers blushed delicately. “I suppose that’s what drove Nadine out of her mind. She was Pryor, you know. Willy Pryor was her brother. He went for a time with my youngest sister before he married that Myrna Hubbard. I understand Mary Olan lives with them.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s a wonder that Mary, poor child, survived the shock, finding her father’s body like that. Well, if you’re expected up there at the lake, you mustn’t let an old woman hold you up with all her chatter and reminiscences. Give my best regards to Mary.”

“I’ll do that.”

“I understand … I know this is none of my business … that Mary travels with a rather fast set. They say there’s a lot of drinking.”

“Quite a bit, I guess.”

“Well, I suppose you have to forgive her. With that background and all. You really can’t blame her if she’s a little wild. Now you run along and enjoy yourself, Mr. Sewell.”

I waved to her as I drove away and headed out toward the city dump. I drove as though the car rolled over eggs. A few minutes ago it had been a body, something I had to get rid of. Mrs. Speers’ conversation had turned it back into Mary Olan, the girl I had kissed last night. My hands were wet on the steering wheel.

I had to go to the dump. If there was any question, I’d be checked on that. The Warren dump is east of the city. It is a very orderly dump with bulldozer-dug trenches. There was a pickup truck unloading, and a station wagon with a father and two yellow-headed sons further down the line. I parked way beyond both of them and backed up to the trench. Nobody could see into the back end of the car, and nobody was likely to
park right beside me. People seem to like privacy for disposing of trash. I opened the trunk and took out the cardboard box and heaved it into the trench. Then I opened the tarp and took out the cans and bottles, trying not to touch her and trying not to look directly at her. The sun caught the two big diamonds in her wrist watch. I thought I could smell the odor of death about her. I wrapped her up hastily, shut the lid, got back in the car and drove away. As I came toward the station wagon it was pulling out. I saw my chance to be remembered. There was plenty of room to swing around him. Instead I leaned on the horn, a long heavy blast. The man and his two sons turned and stared at me with indignation and disgust. I gave them another blast, glaring at them, and they drove away.

Back on the highway, I turned toward town. I had to go down into town to catch the highway that leads north into the hills of the lake country. There seemed to be an exceptional number of police around for an early Sunday afternoon. I drove over the bridge in heavy traffic headed north. A mile and a half north of the river I passed the Warren Tube and Cylinder Division of Consolidated Pneumatic Products, Incorporated—my employer. The place is six years old, cubical, landscaped and sleekly efficient. I rode by my place of employment with her body in the trunk compartment.

I have never driven so carefully. It was like the extra care you seem to use when you cross a street while carrying a batch of expensive phonograph records. I had visions of what could happen if somebody smacked into me just hard enough to spring the trunk open. The more care I used, the more narrow squeaks I had. The road was crowded with damn fools, all of them in a hurry.

Once in the hills, I was in an area where many small roads branched off to small lakes. I took one of the less traveled ones. It was black narrow asphalt, lumpy and extensively patched. It climbed over steep crests and fell into crooked valleys. I had met no car as yet and I
looked frantically for a turnoff. I braked hard when I saw an old lumber road, a faint trace leading off to the left. Leaves and branches scraped the sides of the Merc as I turned into it. I drove about three hundred feet. I was well out of sight of the road.

I got out and listened to the silence. A bird sang and a fly circled my head with a self-important buzzing. I decided I had best not think about flies at all. I heard a car motor. It took a long time to come close, but after it went by the sound faded quickly. I saw no glimpse of it between the spring leaves. I could hear water running somewhere nearby. The woods had a spring smell of dampness.

I knew I had to get it over with. I opened the trunk, pulled the tarp up around her and lifted her out. I dragged the tarp over to the edge of a small drop, let go of two corners, holding the other two, and rolled her out. She tumbled down over the edge, rolled over three times and came to rest with her back to me, supported by a small pine tree. A frozen juice can I had missed rolled out with her and went on down the slope. I went down and got it. There could be a fingerprint on it. I tossed it into the back of the car. Then I went and looked over the edge again. I could see no clear footprint. That made me think of tire prints; I remembered reading that they could identify tire prints. I looked and found two places where they were clear. I could avoid those places on the way out. I got a stick and gouged the prints out.

Next I folded the tarp as small as I could get it. I walked deeper into the woods and found the rotten stub of a birch tree with a big hole in the side of it, about seven feet off the ground. I stuffed the tarp down in there and it didn’t show at all. I went back and looked at her again. She looked awfully small, like a child dressed up in woman’s clothing.

The pine shadows were heavy, and her white skirt had an almost luminous look. Twigs and bits of leaf
clung to her skirt where she had rolled over and over until the tree caught her across the middle. She was draped across the tree, white skirt pulled tight across dead hips.

I stood and looked down at her, wanting to leave, but immobilized, caught up in recent memory. It had been an evening when, as usual, we had been out with Dodd and Nancy. Dodd had been surly and Mary Olan had been overly gay, as though taunting the three of us. After Dodd and Nancy went home, Mary had wanted to go on. We hit a lot of little highway places. As she became drunk, she grew more affectionate. It was clear that she was annoyed at Dodd. I felt that I might become an instrument of her revenge, and I was willing.

We stopped at a grubby, forlorn little motel forty miles from town, and the fat clerk, with insinuating sneer, asked for ten dollars. Once we were in the shabby room, she lay across the bed face down and cried for a long time. She wouldn’t tell me why she was crying. When I asked her if she wanted to leave, she didn’t answer. When I tried to kiss her, she pushed me away. I sat and smoked and waited her out.

She dried her eyes, cheered up, kissed me lightly and went into the bathroom. I heard the shower running for a long time, and then I heard the sound of a fall. I went in and found her on the floor, half in and half out of the shower. She had hit her head. I carried her, utterly limp, back to the bed.

Her body was brown, smooth, flawless. Her pulse felt strong and slow. I brought towels and dried her. The mark on her forehead was minor, and I wondered if she was faking. I took her in my arms, but she was completely without response. I suspected her of faking, and was tempted to call her bluff by possessing her. Absolute helplessness brings out an atavistic streak in anyone. Yet there was the chance that she had actually passed out, or that this was some sort of hysterical seizure.

And, delectable as was her body, helpless as she was,
I could not be that cold-blooded about it. I found her crumpled clothing in the bathroom and hung it up. After I had covered her, I got into the other bed.

Dawn was grey when she shook me awake. She was dressed, impatient to leave, and in a mood of controlled fury. She did not speak on the way back. The sun was coming out as I left her near the Pryor driveway. She walked toward the house without speaking, without looking back. The next time I saw her she acted as though it had never happened. I never got that close to her again.

Now, standing there in the wood’s gloom, looking down the slope at her slack body, I thought of that other time. It was a chill body now, not steamy warm from the shower. I saw the shape of her hips, the roundness of her arms, the smooth tan of her shoulders. Never again, for anyone, would there be the avid response, the controlled silken surgings of that body, the wide mouth warm. It was death and it was waste. I thought of myself and of the incalculable date of my own death. I shivered and turned away from her and drove away. I was troubled and frightened. And sad.