Blood Game (7 page)

“As I said, I was told all this. When it was my turn—he liked his mistresses to have just turned sixteen—he took me by the hand and led me out to this guest house they kept down by a stream. He took me inside and took my clothes off one layer at a time. I've never seen a man more appreciative of a woman's body. He was crying, and it was with pleasure.

“He carried me over to the bed and set me down on it and started to kiss me, and then it happened. I had no idea what was going on. He just started making these funny noises in his chest and throat, and then his eyes sort of started bugging out. I tried to help him, but I didn't know what to do. I ran up to the mansion to get somebody to help, and I was so terrified that I didn't even care that I was naked. Then she saw me, his wife. She came running out of the house with a riding crop, and I kept screaming that her husband was dying. But instead of running down to the cabin to see if she could help him, she started beating me. She must have beaten me for fifteen minutes. Finally I just passed out. She had them put me in the bam, in the haymow. They were under strict orders not to help me in any way. I stayed there for four days. I had to drink from the same trough the horses did. I got the chills so badly one night that I had to steal a blanket from a horse who was cold, too. I never forgot the look in his eyes. He seemed to know what I was doing and forgave me for doing it.

“The husband didn't live. The wife went to my family and told them that if they wanted to continue to work for her they'd have to send me to the city to live. She wanted to force me into prostitution.

“My father and mother had fourteen children. They had to look at the greater good—the well-being of thirteen children versus one child. I'm sure my mother never got over it, but they sent me anyway. I never did go into prostitution. I became a decorator for rich people. I even married a white man, but he could never forgive me for being a ‘high yellow' as he always called me. Whenever he got drunk he beat me. He couldn't forgive me for being part colored, and he couldn't forgive himself for loving me.

“By then my brother had started boxing. I left my husband and traveled around with my brother until Rooney gave him that drink and killed him. And all this led me here, to try to kill Rooney.

“I'm sort of a disreputable woman, wouldn't you say?”

She said she didn't mind if he had an after-dinner cigar, so as they strolled along the river, he smoked.

On the dark water, the reflections of yellow and white city lights shimmered. Ducks floated and quacked. Rowboaters angled downstream toward the rush and roar and silver splash of the dam.

A soft breeze flowed over the grassy banks. Fireflies flickered and died. Lost in bushes, and happy to be lost, lovers giggled. An earnest young man in a straw boater sat on a park bench with a bored young woman and tried to impress her with his ukulele playing. An old immigrant sat in rags, despondent, staring at the shimmering water.

They walked upstream past the boat dock and the icehouses and pavilion where church ladies were carting off the last of the picnic baskets from a social.

“Have you even wanted a life like theirs?” Clarise asked Guild.

“I'm not sure.”

“You ever tried it?”

“Sort of, I suppose.”

“Sort of?”

“It's not worth talking about.”

“Were you married?”

“For a time.”

“Were you happy?”

“That's the part that's not worth talking about.”

“I see.”

They walked some more. He finished his cigar, tossing the red eye of it into the black water.

Electric poles hummed and thrummed in the dark night along the graveled river road.

A white-nosed fawn stumbled out of undergrowth like a lost child, standing dazed in a circle of moonlight. Clarise went over to it and fell to her knees and hugged it as if she had borne it, and Guild was moved enough that he, too, went over and knelt and began petting the frightened animal.

At last came the fawn's mother, a loose-fleshed animal that seemed, seeing them, both scared and angry. You could smell the night's heat on the mother, and fecal matter.

The fawn disappeared back into the undergrowth with its mother.

Clarise and Guild went on their way.

They walked another mile. The river angled gently east. At its widest point the moon made the surface pure silver. Laughter came sharply from upriver, like gunshots, as two rowboats oared away from them.

They walked over and sat in the long grass on a ragged clay cliff above a backwash.

Clarise picked sunflowers, tucking one behind her ear. The other sunflowers she twirled, tossing them finally into the water below.

He was afraid to kiss her, but he kissed her anyway and she seemed quite pleased about it.

As they lay in the long grass, they could hear night birds and roaming dogs and distant cows. Nearer by, they could hear the soft lap of water on the shore and the wooden creak of rowboat oars and a young man singing a soft song, presumably to his girl.

He was scarcely aware of where his moments with Clarise were leading so suddenly.

“I can't help the way I am,” Clarise said. “I don't like most men, and it's been a long time for me.”

“Will you roll me one of those?”

“Sure.”

“A lady oughtn't smoke.”

“I suppose not.”

“But then a lady, a real lady, oughtn't do what I just did.”

“Aren't we a little old for oughtn'ts?”

She laughed. “Speak for yourself.”

He rolled the cigarettes and got them going red in the dark night. He gave her a cigarette and then lay down again with her. They'd put their clothes back on in case somebody came along.

“You seem like a troubled man, Guild.”

He did not want to talk about the little girl and spoil everything for them. He said, “And you seem like a troubled woman.”

They said nothing for a long time. They just listened to the soft lapping of water on the shore and the reedy sound of breeze through the long grasses.

“I enjoyed myself, Guild.”

“So did I.”

“I guess I don't care if you think I'm a whore or not.”

“I don't.”

“That's what most white people think of us.”

“You want me to tell you what most white people think of me?”

She laughed again. “Look at that moon. You ever wonder what's going on up there, in the parts that look like continents?”

“Sure. I wonder about that a lot.”

“Wouldn't it be funny if there were people up there and they were just like us?”

“No,” Guild said. “I hope they're not. I hope they're very, very different.”

“In what way?”

He sighed. “I hope they don't have politicians the way we do, and I hope they don't let people go hungry, and I hope they don't kill children.”

He felt her shudder. “Kill children? That's a terrible thing to think of.”

“Yes,” Guild said. “It's the worst thing you can think of.”

“Then stop thinking about it.”

She drew him back to her then, and the wonderful softness and heat and moisture of her mouth pressed to his again.

“Another one?”

“Please.”

“You're all alone tonight, Mr. Reynolds.” The bar was small, a narrow walk-in just off Church Street. The smell of whiskey and sawdust and stale ham from the free lunch filtered through the air.

“Yes.” He left it at that. He did not want to talk about Helen anymore, or her marriage two months ago to a bank clerk. Everything had been fine with Helen until she learned by accident that he was a thief. She still loved him enough that she had not turned him over to the law, but nothing since then had gone right for Reynolds. Nothing. There had been, for instance, an easy breaking-and-entry job in Milan, Illinois, two weeks ago. He'd been going in through the back window when the entire casement fell down on his head, knocking him out. The incident had very nearly been comic. He'd come to with time enough to get out of the empty house with its walls filled with expensive paintings, its drawers filled with money and silver. Then he had tried breaking into the liquor store over on Harcourt Street. Two steps in he'd noticed a copper walking past the back door, a looming shadow. A copper. He'd cased the job for a week. Coppers were not supposed to come by for twenty minutes. But for some reason one did this night. He'd been forced to flee with nothing. And it all started when Helen told him she was going to marry the boy she'd graduated eighth grade with.

“You going to see the fight tomorrow, Mr. Reynolds?” the bartender asked.

“Isn't everybody?” Reynolds tried to make a joke of it. “Dam near, from what I hear. You have tickets?”

“I bought one today, matter of fact.”

“You're lucky. I have to work.”

“It'll be some fight.”

“The colored guy's going to get killed. You've heard about Sovich, haven't you?”

“He's killed several colored boys, from what I gather.”

“You gather right.”

Reynolds eyed him. “You like prizefighting?”

“Sure. Don't you, Mr. Reynolds?” The bartender had sort of a high voice for somebody who was so chunky and had such massive hands.

“I don't know. I always think I'm going to like it, and then the blood starts flowing—” He shook his head. “I just don't know if I do or not.”

“Well, tomorrow's going to be special.”

It sure is,
Reynolds thought.
I'm going to have to shoot somebody. And with the way things have been going, I 'm going to kill
him by accident.

“Special? You mean Sovich?”

The bartender nodded, wiped out the inside of a schooner with his white towel. “Sure, Mr. Reynolds. It isn't likely a town this size is going to see him again.”

Six customers came in through the front door. They were laughing and slapping each other on the back. One, very drunk, was singing. He sounded Swedish. He was off-key.

The bartender moved down the bar to serve them.

This was what Reynolds had wanted, anyway. Solitude. He liked to stand at a bar and think through his problems and plan his robberies.

Tonight he'd gone to an alley with the Navy Colt his old man had owned. He needed to practice firing. His ineptitude with firearms was obvious. People assumed because you were a good thief you were also good with a gun. In fact, most of the robbers Reynolds knew were peaceful men. They would rather give themselves up than be shot or shoot at somebody.

He agreed with Stoddard that the robbery would look more believable if somebody was shot. Victor Sovich was less likely to be suspicious.

But he wondered how it would feel, shooting a man like that. Just shooting him.

He had a few more drinks—thankfully, the bartender got to talking with the group that had just come in and left Reynolds alone—and then of course he started thinking about Helen again.

Things had been very, very good with Helen. They'd made a lot of plans, including a family and a cabin by a lake they could share with her cousin in Wisconsin. They were even talking about what parish they were going to belong to (Helen was partial to St. Michael's; he to All Saints), and then it just had all gone to hell. He wished he were better at crying. Being a small man, though, he'd carefully taught himself not to cry. He needed every vestige of manliness he could summon. But sometimes crying would feel good, and he knew it. To just goddamn sit down and bawl like a baby. He'd seen his old man do it in the last failing months of the old man's life, when the black lung had gotten especially bad and when he coughed up blood more and more. He could never have imagined the old man crying. But there he was in bed, with his wife holding him as if he were her child and not her husband, and he was bawling away without shame. The old man didn't have her faith in the afterlife. He thought we were just like road dogs, nothing but ribs and a skull left of you, and then not even that after a time.

“Why don't you have a drink on me, Mr. Reynolds?”

“Sure. What's the occasion?”

“The fight tomorrow. Those men down there rode all the way over from Chicago to see it. They say it's going to be one hell of a fight, and the colored guy's going to be lucky he doesn't get killed.”

The bartender poured him a drink.

“You be sure and go now, Mr. Reynolds.”

“Oh, I'll be sure. Don't worry about that.”

He wished there was some way he could explain to this Guild that he was really sorry he had to shoot him.

“Well, you not only be there but you enjoy yourself, you hear now, Mr. Reynolds?”

Sometimes Reynolds suspected that the bartender fixed himself good, hard drinks when nobody was watching. You could see this in the way he walked after a certain hour.

“I'll try to enjoy myself,” Reynolds said. “I'll do my damnedest.”

“That's the spirit, Mr. Reynolds. That's the spirit.”

Reynolds had two more drinks and then walked back to his sleeping room. He propped the window up with a book and stripped down to his shorts and lay on the bed and smoked a cigarette. The smoke was gray in the leaf-shadowed light from the street. He thought of Helen and going with her dressed up to mass every Sunday. Jesus, but how sweet that would have been. Then he thought of this Guild he had to shoot tomorrow. He was going to get him in the calf and make it fast. In the calf there wouldn't be any way he could go wrong. If he tried to shoot him in the arm, maybe he'd hit the chest. Then things could go very wrong.

He lay there finishing his cigarette and then they started, the tears. He had to keep them down because the man on the other side of the wall would hear them and tell everybody in the boardinghouse.

He lay on the bed in the leaf-shadowed light all curled up like a little kid. His thin body jerked and started with his silent tears. He tasted them in his throat and his mouth and his nose.