Kitten with a whip (4 page)

Hearing noises from around back, he didn't bother to go to the front door but followed the flagstones to the

rear of the house. On the concrete slab patio, in the shade of the aluminum roof, Sid was playing a gasping game of ping pong with his eldest boy. He was David's age but had married younger and both his sons were in their early teens now.

"You look like a coronary," David said to announce his arrival.

"Thank God somebody showed up," Sid said. "Run along, son."

The boy grinned at David and went into the house. Sid, a burly man generously furred with blond hair, got a handkerchief out of his khaki shorts and began to mop his face and chest and legs. "Sit down." He motioned to the place of honor, the redwood chaise longue. He settled his own body in one of the wicker basket chairs and tried to catch his breath.

"You know, it*s getting pretty humiUating," Sid said finally. *The kid had me nineteen-five and showing no mercy. I set out to raise Httle gentlemen, not a pack of wolves."

"You should have had girls. More decorative, and no challenge to your masculinity." For no reason at all, a picture flashed into his mind—Jody*s face, very close . . . "You just didn't think ahead, boy."

Sid grunted. '*You can say that again. I just got back from an overnight hike with Wayne*s troop. Never again. Not that the boys were any trouble but I lost fifteen bucks playing poker with their dads. Helen*s ready to kill me. Oh, how*s your wife?"

"I got tired of her whining and kicked her out." David grinned amiably along with his Httle joke, then realized, disturbingly, that a sort of veil had dropped over Sid*s eyes. His friend, at that instant, was a total stranger, if not an enemy. "She*s in San Francisco. Her mother*s sick, better now."

Sid laughed in his belly, a little more than was necessary, as if to make up for his spUt second of withdrawal into his secret tnoughts. "Living all alone, huh? Bet your house is a wreck, what with a party every night, whisky and dancing girls.'*

"Oh hell, yes." A moment before, David had had a companionable urge to tell his morning's adventure to

his friend—but not now, not even in strictest confidence. Not that Sid would pass it on. But he reaUzed that Sid was not likely to believe the true story, the innocence of it. Sid wasnt himself, David Patton; Sid Wright was somebody else with a different background and desires and present problems. Sid would interpret the interlude with Jody as he, Sid, would have played the leading role. And David was learning again a lesson that he had learned before and would undoubtedly come up again, a new discovery each time—he didn't really know anybody else. It was difficult enough to know yourself. "Why, would you beUeve it, last night I stayed up to nearly eleven o'clock, watching TV?"

Sid sighed, mock-sorrowful. "Real playboy, about my speed. How about something to drinx?"

"Well, a beer, maybe. I can't really stay. I just stopped by to—"

"Hey, Helenl" Sid boomed. "Send one of the Idds out with a beer for our company. And a gin and tonic for me.

A shape stirred behind the screened upper half of the Hollywood door that led into the kitchen. Helen's voice said sweetly, "Oh hi, Dave." Then, "Sid, you're not really going to start drinking gin at this hour."

Sid said nothing. He simply turned his head and stared at the kitchen door for a moment. Helen's murky outline moved away. The refrigerator door was opened and slammed shut.

Sid wasn't smiling. David said, "Well, I just stopped by to see if you've completely ruined my power mower yet."

"Relax and have a drink. You're not going to do any mowing in this heat. Might stunt your growth."

"Yeaii, but I'm a week behind in my yardwork. The weeds in my backyard are getting taller man die house. Ill be getting a ticket as a fire hazard." Weeds and weather, the lingua franca of the suburban householder.

"They'U keep,' Sid assured him. "Oh, I heard a joke on the line yesterday I been saving for you." David relaxed; he hadn't particularly wanted to go, anyway, but it was socially correct to give Sid an opportunity to get rid of him if he wanted. This done, he could linger

with a clear conscience and with his escape route already established whenever he wished to use it. He wanted to be with people for a while, be a part of them—and although there seemed to be something in the air between Sid and Helen this morning, he was comfortably certain that it wouldn't be allowed to materialize in front of company. Married couples in his circle only quarreled privately at home or wholly pub-Hcly at cocktail parties; there was no middle way, apparently.

So David fastened an anticipatory smile on his face and Sid said, "Well, this fellow went into a department store and up to the first counter and asked the clerk-she was a girl—Do you keep stationery?" And do you know what the girl said?"

Helen Wright came out the back door. "The girl said. Well, I do at first, but then I just go wildl* Dave, if you laugh at that. 111 lose all my respect for you."*

David laughed anyway, to make up for Sid who was gazing at his wife with a cast-iron expression. Helen put her tray on the low redwood table between them. The tray contained two glasses and two punched-open cans of beer. Sid looked at that next and then got up and went into the house.

"How's everything with you, Dave?'* asked Helen as she poured the beers.

"Fine, thanks. Weather's sure something, isn't it?"

Helen pulled up a wicker chair for herseLE and crossed her legs. She wore a blue shorts and halter outfit. David had never seen her in shorts before. Her legs were long and slim and dead-white except for a small zigzag blue mark high inside her right thigh. It was no more than a broken vein but it was the first thing you noticed when you saw her legs. David got his eyes back to his beer and took a long drink and said thanks, how good it tasted.

Helen was smiKng at him and he wondered what the reason was. He was never quite sure what to make of her. At first, she had struck him as rather usual, an angular red-headed woman sUghtly taller than her husband, not quite pretty. Her most distinguishing feature was the slant of her eyebrows which were plucked into the thinnest lines David had ever seen. They

reminded him of insect feelers, and it was his wife's opinion that there was no hair there at all, only the two winged pencil lines. No, she wasn't pretty but those times when she kept her mouth shut and simply looked at you with those emphasized, almost Oriental, eyes made nim suspect that there was more to Helen than she wanted to put into words.

Sid emerged from the house again, a gin and tonic in his fist. He stood between them and poured half of it down his throat before he spoke. "Didn't I say she was mad at me?"

Helen said in a very gentle voice, "Now, that's not true. I'm sure Dave's wife tries to look after his health, too."

Sid finished the rest of his drink and went into the house again.

David said, "Yeah, Virginia's a great one for greasing chests. Around our place, anybody sneezes, tney get lubricated from here to here in nothing flat."

Helen smiled, still contemplating him. "Sounds like fun."

Sid came out with anothergin and tonic. Helen glanced at him but didn't speak. The best David could come up with was, "You sure have a lot of luck with roses. Virginia's great with everything else but we're sure a flop with roses."

Helen murmured, "All it takes is a lot of tender care. You treat them as if you love them."

"Oh boy," said Sid under his breath.

David was trying to think why he was talking so much about Virginia and it came to him that it was a defense. He was instinctively reacting as if Helen were making a play for him. At that, he began to laugh at himself. It had been a wild morning, all right. He'd been kissed by a sexy teenager out of gratitude but that didn't give him any call to think he was bowling over the entire opposite sex. He thought, the heat's got me, I guess, or Tm pentup. All I want is for Virginia to come home so I can have somebody to talk to and 1 hope she's not too tired after her trip to go to bed. As for thinking that way about Helen, what do I think I am —the Don Juan of Knoll Valley?

Sid took a couple more gulps of his drink and began

to grin at his wife. The gin was getting to him and he slapped her Hghtly across her pale thigh. ''You start treating me with that tender care, baby, or—'

"Don*t call me baby, for God's sake,' Helen said. "All I want you to remember when you wake up this afternoon is that the money you lost last night was your hi-fi money, not my drapery money. Darling."

"As I was sayiag—"

"And I*m not mad at you."

"As I was saying—or I'll do what Dave did and get rid of you."

Helen raised her improbable eyebrows and David explained his wife's whereabouts. "Well," she said speculatively. "I won't make the usual old cracks about what a mess the place must be in because it probably isn't. But—"

"No," said David quickly. "I've kept the house pretty well picked up." His smile was careful and premeditatea. ''You wives keep us honed to such a fine guilty edge in this day and age that we don't dare be careless."

He didn't know what the smoldering Uttle trouble was between Sid and Helen but he was glad to be able to cast a dart for Sid's side, right or wrong. All Helen did was ignore it. She said, "But you must be at such loose ends, all alone and so forth. Started talking to yourself yet?"

"No, just been having myself a smoky old time, reading, watching TV—"

"Smoky?" Helen asked. "What does that mean? I think I've heard the boys say that."

Once again she was gazing at him as if she knew everything—or wanted to. "I don't know," David said. "Expression I picked up somewhere. At the plant, I guess."

"Must have been from another candy-striper," said Sid, controlling a belch. "Sounds too tippy-toe to have come from a union man."

David laughed. "The only thing I got against yoxir yellow badges is your lousy snobbery. You bums loaf all day and if you get caught at it, you call it a grievance and it gets reviewed by seventy-seven committees. You ought to learn to Uve dangerously. Why

up in the Brains department, where I work, all they have to do to fire me is tap me on the shoulder and point toward the door/'

"Live dangerously, hell," snorted Sid. "Get organized, boy. By the time a grievance gets reviewed, you re old enou^ for the pension plan, anyway."

David was enjoying Kidding around with Sid but Helen leaned forward into the conversation. "I got the baby-sitter all right," she told her husband.

"Good deal." Sid studied the bottom of his glass, as if trying to decide if he should go for a third one. "Helen's making me take her to Tijuana tonight. You know, my penance for last night." He chuckled happily and slapped her thigh again.

"Maybe Dave would care to come along, dear," Helen said sofdy.

"Why, that's a wonderful ideal" Sid beamed as if nothing finer had ever happened to him. "The three of us could reaUy turn the town over."

"Well . . ." The idea was appealing. One night out while his wife was away, something to tell Virginia about when she came home so she wouldn't think he was completely a vegetable. But David felt uneasv about it. If this thing between Sid and Helen should come to a head . . . ^'d better not."

Sid headed toward the house for a refill. "Talk him into it, Helen, honey."

Helen started taUdng and suddenly there wasn't anything ominous about her steady gaze. Her sole and earnest desire was to get out of her house for an evening that would seem irresponsible but be irreproachable and the more friends the merrier. "It's a wonderful idea, Dave. Itll give you something to do and make it lots more fun for the two of us. And besides—as a personal favor—youll be able to drive home. Sid always gets so swacked and you know how I worry. Of course, if you've got sometning else planned . . ."

"No, it isn't that. I haven't got any plans. It's just that I don't want to butt into anything you . . ."

Sid came ambling out with his third gin and tonic and, between them, the Wrights chided and cajoled away his nebulous objections. It was settied that they

would pick him up around eight o'clock. David briskly drained the rest or his beer and got to his feet.

" 'Bye, Dave." Helen picked up the second beer which had gone untouched and gave him a parting smile over tJie glass. "Glad you came by." She crossed her legs the other way and leaned dreamily back in the wicker chair and began fingering designs on the sweating glass in her hand.

Sid walked him into the garage workshop where the power mower was sitting. "Just a bent drive shaft/* Sid explained. Putting his drink down, he nearly missed the workbench. "That's what was causing all that vibration and throwing the gas out." He waved away David's thanks and helped him Hft the machine into the back of the station wagon, tottering only sHghtly. "Hey, what's this doing here?"

It was a shower of brown cloth that he held high in his fist, Tody's reformatory nightgown that she had flung into the rear of the wagon. David hesitated only an instant. "Oh, just an old rag."

"Looks hke somebody's nightie. I didn't know anybody wore these things any more."

"They don't. That's why it's here." He took it from Sid as casually as possible and thanked God that his friend was tignt. "See you at eight, huh? Take it easy, now."

As he drove away, he wondered why that was the standard farewell these days. "Take it easy"—as if everyone was secretly afraid of being overwhelmed by the jagged intricacies of the daily rat race, too afraid to speak of it openly but anxious to exchange the twentieth century password, share a benediction that meant something in an assembly line world. Not mere "good-by", that antique coding of "God be with you". No, "Take it easy" was the up-to-date magic spell. Spare us this day our daily dread . . .

He kept tne nightgown balled up on the front seat beside his leg until he reached the freeway to Knoll Valley. Then, after glancing in every direction to make sure there were no cars very close to him, he flung the garment out the righthand window.

Seconds later he passed a roadside sign:

UNLAWFUL TO