Weep for Me (13 page)

I sat at the table in the breakfast booth at her invitation and she brought me a cup of coffee. I needed it.

She sat across from me and said, “How odd to send the wrong statement to the wrong person! I thought the address was right on the statement and you could see it through one of those little windows.”

Those green eyes were disturbingly shrewd.

“This is just one of those things. Your name got on the other statement and their name got on yours. Fortunately we caught it before the other one was mailed. So we made up this fresh copy of yours with the proper name on it, and made up a new copy of the other person’s from the duplicate in our files.”

“Those things happen, I suppose. But you’d think the checks and everything would be going to the wrong parties, wouldn’t you?”

“It’s a new girl. She got things a little messed up.”

“You people take a lot of trouble, don’t you? Why didn’t you just phone? I’m going downtown later today. I could have brought it in.”

I took a deep breath. “But you see, a bank statement is a confidential thing. We wouldn’t dream of letting anyone else know your business. And so we naturally don’t want any customer examining any other customer’s statement.”

“But from what you say, I wouldn’t even know whose it was!”

“Oh, yes, you would, Mrs. Mallory. There are two checks in with yours that belong with his. I have to take them over to him with an explanation as soon as I get them out of your envelope.”

She sighed. “Banking must be terribly complicated.”

The mailman arrived a little after ten. I followed her
to the door. She leaned down before I could and picked up the mail from the floor inside the front door, under the slot.

I reached out my hand for the statement. The front hallway was small. She gave me a coy smile and hugged the mail. “After all, Mr. Cameron, it
is
addressed to us.”

My eyes moved downward across her smile to the lean throat. I felt the tightening of my arms and shoulders. The sudden brutal instinct frightened me. I think she felt some of it. It was very quiet in the little hallway.

She quickly thrust the statement at me. “I guess it isn’t a joking matter, after all.” She laughed with a trace of nervousness.

I took the envelope and walked into the living room, thumbing it open as I did so. The yellow statement was wrapped around the checks. I slid the rubber band off, and while my back was still toward her, I found the two checks and pulled them out. I held them so that she could not see the signature and turned, forcing a smile, handing her the rest of the checks.

“These will match the statement I brought you, Mrs. Mallory. And thanks for co-operating with us.”

“I was glad to do it, really.”

I put the checks in my wallet, still holding them so that she could get no chance glimpse of her husband’s forged signature.

“We at the bank will appreciate it if you don’t tell how we made such a boner. It doesn’t help public relations.”

“Certainly, Mr. Cameron.”

I put the statement in my inside jacket pocket, smiled again, said good-by to her after thanking her for the coffee, and walked out on knees that felt too weak to support my weight.

I reported to Tom Nairn at eleven, telling him that my sick headache had faded enough so that I thought I could work. He told me not to force myself but I said I was all right. We got my drawer out of the bin in the vault and I opened the window for business. At two in the afternoon I took $1,800.

T
he heat wave struck Thrace on the seventh day of August. It turned the downtown streets into airless ovens. The humidity was high, and the jacket I was forced to wear at work was a misery.

Since the statements had been handled and in the week there had been no kickbacks, I had found a new kind of confidence. It wasn’t like the first week of July. It was an apathy that was shattered only by streaks of recklessness, as though I were trying to be caught.

The apartments were hot, airless, without cross ventilation. As mine was a bit cooler than hers, Emily would come down after her shower, wearing nothing under a thin cotton dress. I had bought a fan. She made me move the bed over by the windows. She would take off the dress and stretch out with the fan on a table below her feet, directed at her body. The only times she spoke during that frightful heat were to demand something cool to drink or a fresh cold washcloth for her forehead. Her voice was listless. She reacted to heat the way a cat will. She refused to be touched and resented being spoken to.

I could look at her there, pallid in the light from the air well, without feeling the least touch of desire. I tried to read, but nothing satisfied me except the cheapest and least demanding sort of fiction. I think that if the heat had continued long enough, I would have eventually worked my way down to comic books.

Late on the Sunday before the last week a sudden thunderstorm cooled the air. It brought her up out of her sultry, petulant lethargy to vibrant, demanding life. Afterward, I fell into heavy sleep. When I awakened the heat was worse than before, and she was gone. She was not in her apartment.

I went down onto the street after midnight, looking for coolness. People sat on the steps of buildings. Small children whined sleeplessly. The cars, pulsing by the end of the street, made a sound like the panting of a vast,
weary animal. There was the threat of violence in the night.

I saw her come around the corner under the street light, the man tall beside her. She walked slowly. She stopped and faced him. I saw that they intended to finish their conversation there, and she would walk the rest of the way alone.

Heat had destroyed everything but an aimless curiosity. I walked directly up to them. Emily spun around quickly. “Kyle!” she said.

He was big and young and his face under the light had a curiously unfinished look. As though it had been carefully carved, but the maker had tired and given up before doing the final polishing.

“Is this Beckler?” I asked.

“Hello, Cameron,” he said. His voice was deep, lazy, slow.

“Were you following me?” Emily demanded.

“Don’t mind her,” Ralph Beckler said. “She’s got a disposition like a coral snake.” His laugh was deep.

I felt a curious affinity for him. Yet he was better off. I sensed that he had retained more of himself.

“Why don’t you leave her alone?” I asked quietly.

“Me? I’m what you might call an old friend of the family. Isn’t that right, honey?”

“Don’t call me honey.”

“Cameron, what are you kids cooking? I like the place you work.”

“We like it too,” I said.

He laughed again. “I bet you do. Why don’t you make room for old Ralph? Hell, we can all get along. A threesome is better than a twosome.” He prodded me with his elbow. “And there’s enough of it to go around.”

I was standing, half turned toward him. My right hand was at my side. He was on my left. When the heat of the night exploded in me, I brought my right hand up. I swung it with all my strength, coming up on my toes as I did so. He moved his head back an inch or two. My fist slid by his face and he took my wrist easily, made one
hard turn. It spun me around, pinned my hand between my shoulder blades.

“Looks like Junior doesn’t want to co-operate, honey.”

“I told you to stop calling me honey!”

“Honey, you take Kylie-Wylie home and tell him about the bees and the flowers.” He put his free hand on the nape of my neck and gave a powerful shove that sent me running head down toward the apartment steps. I tried to regain my balance but I couldn’t. I went down, taking both knees out of my trousers, rolling over and over, burning the back of my hand against the sidewalk.

When I stood up, she was walking slowly toward me, no concern, no interest on her face. Ralph Beckler had already gone back around the corner.

As we went up the stairs, like strangers who happened to be going up at the same time, I wanted to cry like a child. Maybe it was the humiliation. Or the fear of the past few weeks. Or the sordid knowledge of what I had become. But I couldn’t cry. It had to stay bottled up, inside me.

“You went to him,” I said. “He didn’t come after you. You went out and found him.”

“Lower your voice.”

I pushed her ahead of me into my apartment, slammed the door behind us. “Tell me. Did you go to him?”

“Yes.”

“For God’s sake, why? Why do you do a thing like that to me?”

“Does it make any difference?”

“I have to know why.”

She turned her back on me. “I don’t really know why. Maybe because he’s more like me than anyone else I ever met. He thinks the way I do. I don’t like him. I hate him. He knows me too well and he laughs at me. But I have to … go back to him.”

“You’ve got to make a choice.”

She stared at me. Even with the anger in her face I could see beyond it to the slackness of satiety. “Choice? Choice! What choice? I’m going away with you.”

“Don’t see him again before we go.”

“Fix your hand and your knees. You’re bleeding.”

“You are going to promise not to see him again before we go?”

She yawned, with a little shudder and grimace at the end, like a cat. “It’s too hot to argue. It’s too hot to talk.”

One moment she was standing there. The next moment I saw her reeling backward, turning, falling. I looked at my doubled fist. The knuckles throbbed. I had no remembrance of hitting her, and yet I knew that I had. She lay where she had fallen, on her left side, both knees bent, left cheek against the rug, hair across her eyes, hands slack, together, almost touching her doubled knees. It was as though someone had reached over my shoulder to strike her down.

I stood dumbly and looked at her. Her hands moved first. She rolled onto her back and pushed the hair away from her eyes. Her eyes were not focused. She sighed and felt of her jaw. Then she sat up and looked at me.

“You won’t see him again,” I said.

“Don’t ever hit me like that again. Don’t ever hit me that hard again.”

I took a step toward her. My fists were still doubled. I stared down into her eyes. “You won’t see him again.”

She did not answer for a long time. Rage grew instead of diminished. If she had defied me again I do not think I would have stopped until I had smashed her face beyond recognition.

Her eyes dropped first. “Whatever you say, Kyle.”

I let the anger fade away, and then I picked her up. She smiled at me, almost shyly. “You surprise me, Kyle. I think you’ll be boss for a time.”

I saw the invitation in her eyes. I turned away from her. I didn’t want her, not with the smell of love-making still clinging to her.

“Go upstairs and wash,” I said.

“Yes, Kyle,” she said in a small voice. I did not turn. I heard the door shut and then heard the sound of her familiar step on the stairs.

Monday when I pocketed money I didn’t bother to
use the handkerchief. I shoved it into my pocket and left my cage immediately. It was that way all week. Thursday I turned in an unusually low cash balance. Friday I wrote both Grinter and Raddmann chits for drawer cash, and cleaned up what was left of the checks.

The total for the week was a crazy $71,200. The grand total was five thousand over a quarter of a million. I took one long look at the bank floor, at my familiar cage, after the Friday check-out. I told myself I was well out of it. You can tell yourself a lot of things.

There was the desk where Tatley first interviewed me. Ruptured duck in my lapel that day. Haven’t seen one of those for ages.

I got the usual number of casual good nights as I left. A little warmer than usual. Instead of “Have a nice week end” it was “Have a nice vacation.” I told them I was going up to Wolf Island and do a little bass fishing on the Canadian side. That would make it tough to get hold of me. More of a delay in case of doubt. A better running start.

All this had started when I had looked out of my cage with a kind of longing, and watched the young girls at the windy corner. On the way back that last night, money bulging my waist, I watched the young girls. Something had changed them. They were sweaty in the heat. Dresses clung to meaty hips, were pasted to fleshy breasts. They all looked feline, chunky, oddly vulgar.

As planned, after I closed the apartment, I waited in the garage for her, after I had strapped the money into the suitcase. She came down with two heavy suitcases. Limebright had given her Monday and Tuesday off. If we were lucky, we’d have until Wednesday before the news stunned the bank staff.

I threw the apartment keys out behind the garage. She got in beside me and we drove through the billows of heat, out through the cooking caverns of the city to a dusty, parched countryside. The heat was so great we could not talk or think. I drove with dogged caution. It was no time to be picked up. We could not realize
that one segment of it was over, that another had begun.

She rested her head against the back of the seat, her eyes closed. She had her skirt up to her hips, baring her ivory thighs to the scalding air that blew in through the vents.

Halfway to Syracuse, with the day beginning to fade, with thunder muttering all around the horizon, we pulled off onto a secondary road and found a place to park. We destroyed all identification as Kyle Cameron, as Emily Rudolph.

When we drove back onto Route 20, it was as Mr. and Mrs. Walter C. Marshall. It made the thick air no easier to breathe, the heat no easier to bear.

I had sent the landlady in Syracuse a postal money order for the rent, as coming from Walter Marshall. I told her we were sorry but I had to check out. A change of territory. She was stuffy about it until she realized that I wasn’t going to ask for a refund of the extra two weeks’ rent paid in advance. Then she became very charming.

We packed in minutes, barely speaking to each other.

I drove down to South Salina, turned left, down the steaming highway, through the impossible night. Route 11 toward Cortland. She was like something dead beside me. Sodium vapor lights made the world yellow, unreal. Off to the right was the Tully Valley. The big green car dipped into the hollows, droned strongly up the hills. I kept it at fifty. It was a little after ten. By midnight we would be in Pennsylvania. I knew that since the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, both robbery and embezzlement had become federal offenses, and thus a state border was no protection. But I knew that I would feel better once the border was crossed.