Weep for Me (16 page)

“Please come and kill Cameron.”

“No. I just wanted to take the keys and leave you there, and go with him.”

“But he wanted to be thorough.”

“I couldn’t stop him. When he gets … got an idea, you couldn’t stop him.”

“You didn’t want me killed. For old times’ sake or something.”

“Your eyes still look funny, Kyle. I don’t understand what you want. Do you really want us to go on, just the way we were going to?”

There wasn’t any other way. I couldn’t explain it to her. If I left her there, standing in a muddy ditch, where would I go and what would I do? There was nothing left but Emily. In a way, she was the only justification I had, the only rationalization, good or bad. She qualified me as thief and murderer, by being the cause.

“Come on,” I said wearily.

New confidence brought her head up a little. She pulled her feet out of the mud, balanced herself by touching her hands to the top of the little rise as she came up onto the road. One sandal was gone. She turned and looked back at the mud, used one foot to pull the other sandal off. She kicked it into the water. She got
into the car, bringing with her the swamp stink, the sick smell of rancid water that I would never forget.

The highway we came out on was the main route to Beaumont. I stopped by running water and we went down under a small bridge. She stood in the water and rinsed the slime out of the hem of her skirt. I held my hands in the water and it stung my torn palms. Her mouth had stopped bleeding, but the lips were badly puffed.

She seemed strangely shy with me, as though she had given me a new evalution. She came out of the water and wrung out the hem of her skirt. “If you could go up and get the gray bag, I could change and put on the other sandals.”

I got the bag. Though we were only a few feet from the highway, we were out of sight. Under the bridge itself there was a place just about four feet high where grass grew on a slanting bank down to the edge of the stream.

I sat out and watched her in there. She had an awkward time peeling off the blouse and skirt because she couldn’t stand up straight.

She knelt by the open gray suitcase, and as she took out the fresh skirt she glanced over at me. I knew then what it was that had changed her. Death among male animals during the mating season is common. The female animal shows preference only after victory is clear. What I had done—the deed that had sickened me—had made some deeply savage impulse in her respond. Her preference, while Beckler and I both lived, had never been clear.

I went to her in that shadowy place under the concrete arch. The early traffic slammed across the bridge, tearing the air. I took what I had won, the way any animal does. Fox and vixen, on the moist morning grass on the bank of a fast-running stream. There was a new subservience about her, a new yielding to domination. Her lips bled again. Her arms flashed hungry-white against the grass.

It was an ultimate in degradation. Murder in the gray
of morning, an animal mating under the first slant of sun. It was a degradation that I wanted. I wanted a foulness. I wanted to sink lower than ever before. No more illusions about myself. I had learned what I was. Or what she had made me. Perhaps in everyone there is a little river of evil, contained between neat flood walls of convention and conscience. The little river can express itself only in thoughts that are sometimes frightening, impulses that are immediately denied. And then, somehow, the flood wall is breached and evil is uncontained and nothing can ever be the same again. I had tried to fight clear of her a dozen times. It had not worked.

We were back on the road. Beaumont. End of swamp country. Glitter and bustle of Houston. Then the 230 mile stretch of cityless flats of baked rock and dust and mirage that ended at Harlingen, Brownsville, the valley of the Rio Grande.

M
onday evening, in the daylight, we stopped at a motel five miles north of Brownsville. The room was air-conditioned. The place was called, unfortunately, Southern Manner. Beyond the arched entrance were two long parallel courts facing each other. We had one of the middle rooms on the left. We could park the car directly in front of our door.

I pulled the door shut, set the scarred brown bag at the foot of one of the beds.

She lit a cigarette, ran both hands back through the black hair she had just loosened. Her face had a faintly grainy look and lines I had never noticed before ran from the childish, tilted nose down to the corners of the heavy, swollen mouth.

“Kyle, we left too fast. We should have taken all identification off him.”

“I couldn’t have touched him.”

The cigarette bobbed as she spoke. “I could have.”

“Don’t worry about it. He may never be found. That was a deserted road. Even if he floats, who’d stop and look over the edge and see him?”

“I’m not worrying. It would just have been smarter.”

“Let’s not talk about him.”

“All right, Kyle. We get our tourist permits in the morning, don’t we?”

I looked in the phone book. The Mexican consul was located in the Pan-American Building. That was the next to the last hurdle. The last hurdle was customs inspection on the Mexican side of the bridge. I had let it go too long without a plan. I had a vague idea that a twenty-dollar bill would get us through without the brown bag’s being opened. But it was a risk.

As I was wondering what to do, she said, “I want to tell you something.”

“Go ahead.”

“I didn’t plan that with Ralph from the beginning.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I was going to make myself forget him. He always made me feel cheap and dirty. He always laughed at me.”

“I told you that it doesn’t matter.”

“After that night in Harrisburg, I woke up thinking about him, so I went down and called him.”

“Just like that.”

“I thought you ought to know how it happened.”

“How much did you tell him?”

“It was over the phone. I had to hint. But he understood right away that we’d left with money from the bank. In Lake Charles when I told him how much it was, his eyes nearly dropped out.”

“Why didn’t you just take the car keys and go on alone? Isn’t the world full of Becklers? And Camerons?”

“I don’t like to be alone.”

“You’d never be alone long.”

“He laughed at me and made me mad, but always, I could make him do what I wanted him to do.”

“Just like me.”

“I thought that about you. Now I don’t know. You’re changing, Kyle. And you’re learning too much about me. Maybe I like that.”

“I’m learning about you. There’s nothing to you. Greed, and a lot of it. And a psychopathic preoccupation with sex. And a selfishness so monumental that it isn’t even selfishness any more. It’s like a new and special kind of disease.”

“But I’m what you want, Kyle. After today, I know that you’ll never let me go, will you?”

“There’s only one way I’ll let you go.”

She knew what I meant. Her eyes seemed to break against mine, and she looked quickly away. “Don’t change too much, Kyle.”

“We’re wasting time. Think of how we’re going to ge this money across the border, through customs.”

“Is that going to be a risk?”

“No. The man just opens the suitcase, looks at the money, closes it again, and stamps our papers.”

“Will they open everything?”

“How do we know they won’t?”

“Don’t they take things across borders by hiding them right in cars somehow?”

We talked about it for a half hour. Her idea still seemed the best. I brought the back seat in. I pried out the tacks that held the burlap across the springs. It was a tight fit to get all the money in around the springs. We rolled up a lot of it and inserted it in the springs themselves. We made a bundle of the discarded padding to dispose of on the following day. I retacked the burlap, using the lug wrench as a hammer, and carried the seat back out and wedged it into position. It would have to do. Our attitude was what was going to determine how thorough the search was going to be.

She said, when we were through, “Now you’re going to learn something else about me, Kyle. Maybe you won’t like it.”

“What new talent is this?”

“I saw a package store a little way back. Get Scotch, Kyle. The best they have.”

I brought it back to her. I stretched out on my bed and watched her. She sat on her bed, facing me, a thick bathroom tumbler in her hand, the bottle on the floor by her feet. She drank with metronome regularity. Splash an inch or so into the bottom of the glass. Hold it for a long time. Toss it off. Reach for the bottle. Repeat. She looked across me and out through the wall.

After a half hour of it, I said, “Do this often?”

She moved her head rather than her eyes, turned her head slowly until she looked directly at me. “Not often.” Her voice was faintly slurred.

“Usually alone?”

“Always. First time with somebody watching. It isn’t very pretty, is it?”

“They say it indicates a sense of inadequacy. Don’t tell me you feel inadequate.”

“A good word, Kyle. Inadequate.”

“What sets you off?”

“Are you going to make me talk?”

“I think you should talk.”

She pondered that for a long time and then gave a drunken nod. “Set off by something Ralph said this morning, outside the cabin.”

“What did he say?”

“It was about Harry. He said Harry was marrying a little Irish girl. Planning on a big family. That set me off.”

“Why should it?”

“Harry did something to me. When I think about it I want to drink like this. And the hell of it is, I hate kids. Always have. Runny noses.”

“You’re not making much sense.”

“Harry wanted me for fun and games. That’s all. He made it clear. I angled him into marrying me, so he got even. He got a big kick out of it. Should have heard him laugh, Kyle. He had some hold on the doc. It was just supposed to be appendix. So he had me fixed like a setter bitch. Tubes tied. He told me he was doing humanity a favor. He told me that the only thing I’d breed would be a monster, anyway. Laughed and laughed.” She gave me a wide, ghastly grin. Never before had she smiled so broadly. Death’s-head eyes above that smeared grin. “And the hell of it is, I hate kids. So why should it worry me? It makes life simpler.”

It brought her into sharper focus. I felt something toward her, for the first time, that was remarkably close to tenderness. I watched her go steadily through the Scotch. The next time she spoke, I couldn’t make out the words. Suddenly she stood bolt upright, as though she had heard some terrible warning signal. The glass slid out of her hand and bounded, unbroken, on the rug. She folded slowly over the foot of my bed, face down, too close to the edge. There was no footboard. She rolled off and I heard the thud of her head against the rug as she landed. I sat up. All I could see between the beds were her legs from ankle to knee.

I lay back and thought of how utterly unprepared I had been by environment and background to cope with this sort of woman. Shawn had known how. Beckler had
known how. They had treated her with a perfect understanding of what she was. I not only had had to learn, over many weeks, just what she was, but I also had had to learn that such people actually existed.

After a time I got up, lifted her onto her bed, and undressed her. She had a rag-doll slackness and her skin was cool and clammy. She breathed heavily through her mouth. I covered her over, took a long shower, went to bed. Her heavy breathing disturbed me and it was difficult to get to sleep. Maybe part of it was being afraid to go to sleep, afraid of what dreams would bring, afraid to see Beckler crawling toward me, up the shale slant of the hill.

But the only dream that awakened me was of the stained glass eyes of the disciple at the Last Supper. It was three o’clock. Her breathing was more normal. I got up and had a cigarette and a glass of unpleasant-tasting water from the bathroom tap. I looked out the front window at the car sitting there. The red neon by the office made bloody highlights on the hood and the edge of the roof.

The next time I awakened it was bright daylight. Her bed was empty and the shower was making a metallic sound against the metal stall. The bathroom door was open. By the time she stepped out of the shower I was half through shaving.

I looked at her reflection in the mirror in front of me. “Feel bad?”

“Not too bad.”

“Considering.”

“The back of my head hurts.”

“You fell on it.”

“I told you about it, didn’t I?” she said, looking at me through the opening in the towel with which she was scrubbing her dark hair dry. The swelling of her lips had gone down.

“Maybe you hadn’t planned to.”

“I don’t like people to know about it.”

She left the bathroom and I finished shaving. By the time I came out she was dressed, sitting at the dressing table and fixing her hair, bobby pins between her lips.

“Will we come back here, Kyle?”

“No. We see the consul, go to the bank, and cross.”

“Could he turn us down?”

“Only if they’re watching for us, have descriptions, have found out in Syracuse the names we’re using.”

I took the affidavits I had arranged in Syracuse, attesting to our dates of birth, places of birth, and transferred them from my suitcase to the inside pocket of my rayon cord jacket. I clipped sunglasses over the rimless glasses and looked at myself in the mirror. Walter C. Marshall, American citizen. Tourist. His ears stuck out and there were tired lines around his mouth. Because of loss of weight, the jacket was baggy. Mr. Walter C. Marshall and Marian, his dark young wife in the too tight skirt.

The consul’s office was on an upper floor of a building in the heart of town. A big drugstore occupied most of the ground floor. We went up in a small, slow elevator. My shirt was sticking to my back. Her blouse was darkened at the armpits.

We walked in and stood at the high counter that extended across a small office, dividing it in half. We took blanks from the pile and filled them out. A girl was typing busily by the windows. A quiet, dark-haired man glanced over the blanks, asking a few routine questions. The girl typed out two tourist cards.