King of Spades (5 page)

But Roddy was always soon over his sulks. In an hour he would be back, whistling, green eyes aglow with some new private game, mountain man and Indians, riverboat captains and pirates, boyish explorings. A couple of times he came back with a spray of puccoons, along with an offer to wash her feet if she was tired and would like it.

 

During Roddy's seventh and eighth years, Magnus was off to the wars to help put down the rebellion. The two years put the boy even more in the mother's corner.

 

Roddy took to jumping off high places, a cutbank along the road, the riverbank above the Missouri, even the roof of their cottage.

Seeing this, Magnus made him a swing.

Roddy became very fond of the swing. Sometimes Roddy pumped himself so high in it, above the fulcrum of the tree limb to which the swing was attached, that the ropes fell slack at the end of each swing, and he came down with a jerk, almost breaking the rhythm.

One day Roddy made himself a sack swing. He'd seen a picture of one in his reading book. He filled a sack with straw, tied it to a hemp rope which in turn he looped over the elbow of a huge cottonwood. He used the limb of a nearby ash for the jumping-off place.

The first time off the ash limb was the biggest thing ever. He stood teetering on the limb, just barely managing to hold onto a tit corner of the sack with his little fist, eyes as big as magnifying glasses, knees shaky—when of a sudden, daring it, crying out, “Here goes nothing!” he leaped.

And just made it. He'd just barely got his knees clamped tight onto the butt of the sack. When he passed the earth below, grass stubble rasped a pair of holes into the seat of his pants. Gollies!

 

Magnus gradually became taciturn, distant. He scowled a lot. He kept his experiences, good or bad, happy or sad, to himself. His liberal lips gradually thinned. His temples hollowed. His dark eyes limned over with what looked like smoke. Sometimes he appeared to be looking out of a pair of fire-scarred window frames.

Kitty on her part began to slam things, the irons on the kitchen range, the tops to storage barrels, the doors of the house. The worst habit of all was the way she slammed the lids out in the privy. When Magnus complained she'd cracked one of the lids, she only shrugged, told him to go get a carpenter and fix it.

Kitty also more and more began to let Roddy have his own way, especially when Magnus wasn't around. When Roddy wanted to go swimming in the Missouri with the boys, she let him, even though she knew Magnus would be violently opposed to it, and even though she herself would live in terror until he returned safely.

At noon when Magnus was out on call, Roddy sometimes tried to slide into his father's armchair. Kitty thought this was going too far and always instantly ordered him to go sit in his own place. When Roddy persisted she at last had to threaten him.

One noon Magnus caught Roddy defying his mother. She had asked Roddy to get some radishes from the garden and he had flatly refused.

Kitty turned red. “Do you want a stinger in the face?”

“You wouldn't dare, Ma.”

At that Magnus picked up his walking stick and snapped it once. “Well, by the Lord! Now you get!”

Roddy got.

Afterward, cooling off, Magnus said, “Son, your mother is your mother. Respect her. You hear?”

“You sometimes fight with her.”

“Not as my mother I don't.”

“Aw, heck, Dad.”

“You hear?”

“Oh, all right.”

 

A carpenter showed up one day and began hammering on the window frames.

Kitty went out to ask what was up.

The carpenter told her he'd been ordered by Magnus to put on some shutters.

Kitty told the carpenter to wait until she herself had talked to Magnus about it.

Magnus went into a rage that night when she told him she'd asked the carpenter to wait.

“But, Magnus, shutters will spoil the look of our little cottage.”

“Right now I'm not so worried about the looks of our cottage. I'm more worried about your safety.”

“My safety? Isn't it safe living out here any more?”

“Some night when I'm not around somebody's going to take a potshot at you sitting in a lighted window like that.”

“A potshot?”

“Yes.”

“But why me?”

“I don't know. But somebody will.”

“Who?”

“Somebody.”

“Gooseberry June and her friends?”

“I've heard about a fellow hanging around here.”

“You have?”

“Slinking around. Trying to catch you undressing.”

Kitty gasped. “Why, you better tell Herman Bell about this then. He's our night watchman.”

“Herman Bell's too dumb to catch anybody. Specially this fellow.”

Until then Kitty had sometimes been antagonistic just to be a little devilish about it, as a part of the usual bristling between man and wife. But now instead she began to worry about him.

 

Going to bed one night, Magnus took a newspaper and scattered its various pages over the floor, around their bed, around Roddy's bed.

“Whatever is that for?” Kitty asked.

“Try walking across them once.”

“No.”

Magnus turned to Roddy. “You try it.”

Roddy did. The newspaper rustled noisily.

Magnus grimaced, satisfied. “A newspaper scattered on the floor is the best burglar alarm ever made.”

 

The next morning, after Magnus left for work and Roddy left for school, Kitty went back to bed to mull things over.

As she lay amidst her pillows, looking idly at the ceiling, holding her breasts in her cupped hands, she was startled to see a black widow spider come raveling down the air from the ceiling, on a thread of its own making. The black widow spider was a big one; and, Kitty knew, a deadly one. Magnus had lost a patient to a black widow spider's bite only the past summer.

Kitty knew she should bounce up and get the fly swatter and kill it. Once in the house it was bound sometime or other to bite her, and if not her, someone else in the family. Magnus would know what to do right off if he got bit and so would be able to save himself. But not she herself. Or Roddy.

The black widow spider came leasing and releasing down,
until finally it was within a few feet of her. It was about the size of a black horse bean. The red mark on the underside of its abdomen had the shape of an hourglass.

The thought went through her mind that she should let it bite her. One venomous bite, and all problems would be solved.

Then another thought went through her. The black widow spider represented sin. It represented the sin of doing it at thirteen with her daddy husband. The sin had finally come back to haunt her and was descending to settle on her breast and kill her.

She watched it come laxing and relaxing down, farther and farther, to within a few inches of her. In another moment it would land exactly on the point of her left breast, right over her heart.

It swept to within an inch of her.

With a sudden cry, Kitty slid out from under it, slipping out of the bedsheets and landing on the floor.

The black widow spider, startled, hairy legs all ascramble, began climbing up the thread again, taking in the thread without a hitch as it rose.

Kitty quick got to her feet. She picked up two of Magnus' fat doctor books and caught the black widow spider between them, mashing it.

2

Magnus stepped off the boat onto the wiggly wharf. He had just arrived from Omaha downriver where he'd gone to order some medical supplies.

Automatically his hand checked to see if he still had his revolver with him. He did. It lay warm in his right-hand pocket.

He wondered what he'd find at home this time. He was
dead sure somebody'd been lurking around the house before he'd left on his trip. And now he was even more sure that a man was spying on Kitty, perhaps even right then larking around with Kitty inside the house while she thought Magnus safely out of town.

In his mind Magnus went over the men in town one by one, wondering which one it could be. Any one of them could be guilty. Even that sly Herman Bell.

“When will my ship come in?”

So he'd lost Kitty. It was more than obvious she no longer cared for him. Not even a snap. He was flat to her. The last time he'd drawn her impulsively, even convulsively, into his arms, she'd lain inert under his pressures and invasions, almost as if she disdained him even a feminine show of resistance.

Yet he knew she still cared for love itself. She had to. She was much too sensuous, even lascivious, to lose that. In the old days she'd never been able to get enough of coupling. Even at thirteen she'd already had more desire and passion in her than most women had at thirty.

Magnus hurried up the river road into town. There wasn't a wisp of wind out. It was as still as a block of ice on the streets.

He turned a corner and started down Main Street.

Herman Bell had lit the street lamps without a miss. The glass fronts of stores gleamed a shimmering silverish gray, one after the other.

Magnus saw his own reflection coming and going. His walk was crisp and courtly, stiffly upright, even a little dandified. His squared bow tie had the look of a black mustache somehow fallen under his chin.

His eyes startled him. Their reflection glowed back at him feverish, with wide glaring big pupils.

“This has got to stop.” His voice echoed hoarsely down the empty street.

His eye fell on the gold lettering above his office door:

For a second he imagined he saw the letters M.D. as MAD.

“This has got to stop all right.”

He entered the residential section, his heels cracking hollowly on the boardwalk. Most of the homes were dark. Night watchman Herman Bell was nowhere to be seen. Herman Bell was probably playing cards with the tramps in the jailhouse. He'd better be.

When Magnus reached the end of the boardwalk, his feet automatically found the path in the grass leading to his house.

His cottage was dark. With the shutters closed it was sometimes hard to tell whether anybody was up or not. He glanced over to see if Herman Bell's house was dark. It was.

Again, automatically, his hand slapped his coat pocket to see if his revolver was handy. It was.

A couple dozen more steps and he began to walk lightly, on his toes. There was no horse or buggy tied to the hitching post out front.

His footsteps fell soundlessly in the soft dust. Too bad it wasn't light out so he could check the dust for tracks. His breathing came quick and shallow. He got out his gun. He headed around to the back door. A surprised intruder was more likely to pop out of the back door than out of the front.

He paused. He listened intently, one foot up on the back stoop.

The Missouri murmured with a muted ruckle behind its fringe of trees. An Indian drum boomed solemnly aboriginal in Smutty Bear's camp. Crickets whirred under the fallen stalks in the garden.

Then, yes, there it was, a low murmur of voices somewhere.

He listened intently.

The voices came from inside the house. Aha! There really was someone with Kitty after all. “By the Lord!” He'd been right all along.

He gripped his revolver hard and tight. There would now be some ball blood spilled.

When he started to open the back door it creaked lightly. Lord. One more squeak like that and he'd never catch them in the act.

He lifted the door by the knob a little and then tried it. It worked. No creaking. Good. Silently he closed the door behind him.

Halfway across the kitchen, and around the table, he stopped again. Perfume in the house. The essence of puccoons. Her perfume.

And more murmuring.

He cocked his gun. A remorseless revolver would know what to do.

He tiptoed into the sitting room. He directed his hearing toward the bedroom.

The murmuring was gone. Instead he heard what he thought was the slow measured breathing of someone deep in sleep. There was also the sigh of a lighter sleeper. Damn. It was only Kitty and Roddy after all.

He backtracked a couple of steps; listened. There it was again, the murmuring. In the kitchen.

Teakettle?

Yes. It had to be the teakettle. Kitty must have thrown in a chunk of wood before she went to bed for the water to be boiling so long.

God damn.

Well, in the long run it really didn't make much difference. He was right in any case. Somebody else was kissing her better than he was. Made love better than he did.

He stood stiffly erect in the dark.

Steady measured breathing continued to come from their bedroom.

He slipped the revolver back into his pocket.

“When will I come into my own?”

He tiptoed to their bedroom. He felt around in his other pocket for a match. By the Lord. Out of lucifers. He'd have to undress in the dark.

He placed his clothes neatly in a chair. He made a special point of making the creases of his trousers meet neatly at the knee. The floor creaked under his stealthy moving.

Goose pimples came out on him as he stood naked in the dark. Surprisingly he found himself partially aroused.

He reached around behind the bedroom door, found his nightshirt hanging on its peg. Shivering, he slipped it on over his head.

He felt his way round Roddy's bed, found the foot of his own and Kitty's bed, tiptoed around to his side, opened the covers, settled on the edge of the bed and got ready to swing in. As he did so, his elbow touched someone.

Someone was sleeping in his place.

Cautiously he reached out, feeling for the form under the covers.

Roddy.

He was both relieved and enraged: relieved that it wasn't a man after all, enraged that it was Roddy.

Fumbling around, he found a match on the nightstand and lighted the lamp. A lemon glow gradually lighted up the bedroom. Their bed, then Roddy's bed, then the commode and dresser, came to view.