The Captive (26 page)

"Why aren't you inside fixing lunch?" Bill asked, standing stiffly at the bottom step, almost where the squirrel had been.

"Because it's not time for lunch, Wilhelm," Renee said, watching the squirrel. She was aware of a movement by Bill, and when she looked he had the rifle to his shoulder, taking aim at the squirrel that was hanging on the tree trunk looking back at him. She screamed and the gun went off with a stunning roar at the same time. A chunk of bark splattered out of the tree, and the squirrel disappeared. Renee stood, her hands to her mouth, looking at the big man as he lowered the rifle. Behind her Mina laughed suddenly, and Renee turned to see her pointing higher in the tree.

"You missed him, Daddy," she said, jumping up and down on the porch.

As if he had seen an enemy charging out of the branches at him, Bill raised the gun, cocking it at the same time, and fired again, cocked and fired again, and again, the branches and bark raining out of the tree and the guard on the car fender laughing and slapping his leg each time Bill fired. "Get 'im, Deadeye," the guard hollered. When the gun was empty the silence settled back around the cabin, once more unbroken, and in a moment or two a bird began twittering again off in the woods. The tree had a few marks here and there. Bill grounded the butt of the rifle and grinned  sheepishly at the guard.

"I guess that settled his hash," Bill said.

"No it didn't," Mina squealed, dancing around and pointing  to where high in the branches the squirrel sat, his tail over his back as if nothing had happened.

"Well now we know who not to send out for to shoot dinner," the guard said, lighting another cigarette.

"Your name is Tom, isn't it?" Bill said, losing his smile.

"Thas right, you can call me Tommy Gunn, ho, ho," said the guard, blowing smoke in Bill's direction.

"I suppose you could do better, Tom," Bill said, sneering.

Tom said nothing, raised his slender barrelled rifle and almost before he could have aimed, it went crack! and the squirrel came tumbling off the branch, bouncing from several  lower branches on the way down, and hit the pine needles with a soft thump. It did not move.

"Yup," said Tom the guard, lowering the rifle and tilting his hat back at a Gary Cooper angle.

Renee turned to go into the cabin, feeling sourness in her mouth and hatred in her mind. She reached for Mina, but the little girl brushed past and trotted down the steps to where the body of the squirrel lay. She squatted down beside it, one finger reaching down to pet the limp body. Then she stood up and looked at the guard and said with apparent playfulness, "Just for that, Mr. Tommy Gunn, I'm going to let the Big Pussy Cat have
you
for dinner," and she went up the steps and into the cabin with her mother.

Bill had followed them inside and now stood behind Renee as she got things together for lunch and put another pot of coffee on the stove. He several times got close enough to get in her way, finally standing in front of her so she couldn't move. She stopped and looked at him, exasperated and wondering what he wanted now.

"We're leaving in the morning," he said, his arms hanging at his sides, making no move to touch her. "I want you to promise you'll stay with me."

"You're insane," she said, trying to get by him.

He put one hand out and she stopped rather than be hit again. "I need you to be my woman, Renee," he said softly. "I want you back."

She found it hard to believe what she was hearing, and looked with hard eyes into her former husband's face, seeing there the changes a year had made, the squinted eyes as if he had trouble seeing, the thinner upper lip, the heaviness in his cheeks, and she wondered what indeed had happened to the man she had married when she was only eighteen, the big, brash young man with the crazy sense of humor and the overwhelming love he had had for her then. But she thought about how quickly all that had gone, the light dying out of him as things became difficult, the Depression came, no job for a while, and how he had even helped circumstance to destroy himself. She felt sorry for him sometimes, but mostly now she felt he was out of his mind, hopeless. The times he had hit her just in the last four days came back vividly, as did those times he had forced his body on hers. She looked him straight in the eye.

"I would rather live with the lowest Indian sheepherder," she said in a low voice, calculating to hurt him as much as she could.

"I really do want you back, Renee. We are going to begin a new world, maybe go to Germany to join the fight there, and I need you to be my wife." He looked big and helpless now, asking for her love again as he had so many times after doing terrible things, losing himself in drunkenness for a week at a time, spending all their money, not paying bills and lying to her about it until they came to repossess the furniture or the car. And perhaps, she suspected, although neither man spoke of it, perhaps he had tried to kill Barry by putting the car on the tracks at the railroad crossing. She marvelled at his complete lack of self-knowledge. How could a man be so blind to what he was? She felt defeated when she tried to think of a way she could get through to him, and gave up on the attempt to hurt him. She could not kick him in the face. And besides, he hurt himself enough without help. She looked away.

"Just say you won't try to run off," he said, trying to look into her face. "You don't have to love me right away," he pleaded.

"I love Barry," she said, not looking at him.

"You can't love that weak kneed Jew-boy," Bill said, some of his violent tone coming back.

"If it makes any difference, he isn't Jewish, and if you think he's weak kneed, why didn't you come to the house when he was there?"

"Things will get better with us," Bill said. "Just go along with me to New York, to the Bund rally. You'll see how great it all can be being part of a new civilization, starting all fresh and clean and getting rid of the inferiors and the blood suckers that are ruining our country. That's what we're going to do, make a pure society where all of our kind of people can live happily."

"If I get a chance, Bill, I will run away," she said.

"Renee, I'm ready to get down on my knees. You remember  how I got down on my knees when I proposed?"

Yes, she remembered, in the parking lot of that speak-easy,  both of them high on gin or whatever they had been drinking, and Big Bill Hegel on the knees of his rented  tuxedo in the gravel parking lot, his hands together in prayer as he looked at her in her flapper outfit, that silly red dress that had the hem cut all different lengths that Mother had laughed at. Yes, she remembered nine years ago. But there was no emotional charge left in the memory. It was too far back, covered over in too many layers of blows and lies and unloving coldness and being turned away from his mind and body so many times that it had lost all the power it once had, if that was ever anything but pure childish  sentimentality.

"It's no use, Bill," she said, giving a sigh. "Now I have to get busy and fix lunch before your cross-eyed little fuehrer comes in."

"I'll let you go back and get whatever you want from your house," he said, stepping out of her way as she went about setting out the plates.

She stopped and looked at him. "And what about Barry?"

He looked at the floor and said nothing.

"You said at home that day you came bursting in threatening  us and knocking me around that you were going to kill him. Don't you know yet that that's why I went with you so fast? To get you out of the house so the poor man didn't walk right up to his own back door and get shot to death? I didn't know when he was coming home. I couldn't let you  hang around the house with your guns and your crazy threats and maybe kill him. That's why I went with you instead of screaming for police or neighbors, instead of stabbing you with a kitchen knife, you, you maniac." She realized she had said too much and drew back, prepared for him to hit her in the face again. When he turned abruptly toward the door, she flinched away so that he looked around at her curiously.

"I never did have a chance anymore with you, did I?" he said, pausing at the door of the cabin. "It was all for that long-dicked Jew-boy of yours, wasn't it? Just to keep dear Barry from getting hurt." His face contorted with rage again, the eyes squinting and the mouth curling into a grimace of hatred. "Well, we'll see about dear Barry," he finished, and swung out the door. He picked up the rifle and slammed the door behind him.

After lunch, the little troop of madmen, as Renee thought of them, spent some time listening to Ludwig again, and then paid some money and signed papers, each one coming forward to the table, raising his hand and swearing on the flag of Germany that he would uphold and further the work of the National Socialist Party and the Amerika-Deutscher Volksbund, and a lot of other nonsense that Renee found revolting to listen to. After that they did some close order military drill, learning the commands in German after they had practiced them given in English. But in any language, Renee thought, standing with her arms folded and watching them from the porch, they were a sorry bunch. Look at that, she giggled, as they attempted a command in German and half of them turned about while the rest did a flank movement  and the whole mob banged into each other, dropping rifles and some of them getting knocked on their butts on the ground. They were good humored about it, laughing and pushing each other around, but Ludwig's face was a study in concealed rage. It was obvious to Renee that the little organizer had expected much more of a turnout here in the Great Southwest, and of much higher quality, both in Nordic characteristics and intelligence, than he had found. She had heard him hissing at both Lowden and Bill that he had been misled, that he was wasting his time and money, on a dozen recruits who would not last past the first rally. She thought Bill had done the propaganda job on Ludwig. He could be persuasive when he was not drunk, if one did not know he moved in a constant fantasy world of his own making.

She sat down on the rough step, looking at the guard's back as he smoked and watched the troops doing their comic soldier act. It might be possible, she thought, to brain her guard with a heavy skillet. But her stomach folded up as she thought of it, and she knew she would probably be shaking so hard she would miss his head. She did not want to leave here tomorrow, feeling that Barry would find them if only they did not get too far away, but what could she do? She might at least leave some sort of message, and she began to plan what she would write and where she might hide it. She looked over at Mina who had arranged pine cones and sticks into corrals and barns, putting her little "cattle," which were a bunch of unhappy doodlebugs she had caught under the porch, into the little enclosures. Such a fine child, Renee thought, to keep hope up, to not even complain and to take this confinement with such equanimity. She kept talking about the big pussycat, that it was going to find them very soon and then they could go home. Dear child, if you only knew how futile fantasies were against the power of men with guns and numbers in their favor. At that moment Mina announced she had to go to the bathroom, which meant the outhouse. The guard said to Renee, "You come along. I ain't no nursemaid," and motioned with his rifle for them both to walk ahead of him.

In the close little foul smelling place, Renee waited for Mina to finish, ducking the wasps, when she heard the guard grunt a greeting to someone passing outside. She listened hard then, for the next words were in Bill's voice.

"Wiggy doesn't like the idea, but I think it has to be done."

"He's a cockeyed old fart anyway," the guard says.

"If we can use your car, with the spotlight?"

"Where the buggy goes, I go."

"Good enough," said Bill. "We ought to head out right after supper, you know, when Wiggy is listening to the  German broadcast he gets on his shortwave."

"Suits me," the guard said.

She heard the voice getting farther away, still talking softly, and wanted so much to hear that she cracked the door open, but she caught only one word, and that was "Jews."

"They're going to be sorry," said Mina, getting up.

"What do you mean, darling?"

They stepped out of the outhouse into the sunshine of late afternoon, waiting for the guard to come back.

"They said they were going to teach Barry a lesson," she said, a curious smile on her face. "And they are going to be sorry."

"Sweetheart," Renee said incredulously, "you could hear what they said?"

"Yes," the little girl said. "I've got almost as good ears as the Big Pussy Cat." And she strolled back toward the cabin with her bragging walk, swinging her feet out to the side and scraping the pine needles with them, looking back archly at her mother and grinning.

Renee didn't know whether to believe her daughter or not, but it was like Bill to get an expedition together to go put Barry out of action. She felt a tightening in her stomach, but then told herself that was silly. Barry could take care of himself. He had probably got the police on the case by now, and those half-wit imitation storm troopers would go out and get themselves thrown in jail if they went anywhere near the house in Albuquerque. She kept her mind on that, on the forces of law that were, after all, on her side, and she  determined to keep as strong a faith as she could, not giving in to weakness or hysteria and concentrating on fixing a message of some kind that Barry would find if he got here too late.

She managed to observe that the group getting ready to leave after supper consisted of four men, that all carried rifles, and that they were taking the old Plymouth. She also saw that Ludwig was quite aware of their plan and heard the little cross-eyed man confer with the two recruits who spoke German, all in that language, so that she could not  understand what it was about. She kept dropping things, spilling things, as she cleared up the cabin, glad that the rest of the men, except for a new guard who sat on the porch, were going down to the other cabin for a conference. She had been told they would all leave after breakfast in the morning, so she had washed her things and Mina's as well as she could and had hung them up in the sun, and now they were dry, very wrinkled, and ready to be packed. She thought humorlessly about how she was going to look at the big Bund rally in her stained and horribly wrinkled green print like something just unfolded out of a trash basket.
Well, let's hope none of that foolishness ever happens
, she thought, finishing the last dish.