The Brat (3 page)

The man’s gaze flicked toward me. He did not move from the two-by-four. Then he lunged away from there and came out of the shed. He walked slowly up behind her. He did not slap or pat—he gripped her harshly by one buttock. She did not move.

“See you, Evis,” he said, releasing her. He turned and walked away. He went as far as the corner of the house, where he leaned again, watching.

I shook her off, started for him. I was out of my head now. Rage bloomed like fire. It was the first time I ever wanted to kill.

“Lee—wait!”

He watched me come at him. He snatched a clasp knife from his pocket, flicked it open, stropped the blade against his left palm.

She ran beside me. “Lee!” She grabbed my arm. “Come with me, Lee!”

“You better,” Kaylor said, holding the knife.

“Lee!”

I stopped, looking at the knife. She was breathing harshly, and Kaylor did not move, just waited. Some of the rage went away, and I walked behind the shed with her.

“Don’t pay any attention to that, Lee. I knew you wouldn’t understand, and I’m sorry you saw it. He didn’t want to fight. He didn’t know what to do—”

“That’s just how he looked, all right.”

“He’s a cousin. It’s always been that way. There’s nothing I could do.”

“I can do plenty.”

“No. For me, don’t. He’d kill you. Forget it. We’re going away. I love you, Lee—remember that. It would have no meaning.”

She clung to me, pleading desperately with her eyes.

“I’ve forgotten it,” she said. “Don’t ever mention it.”

I pulled away, walked around the shed. Kaylor was gone. I ran on to the house. There was no sign of him. She came again to my side, smiling now, fresh and composed and it
was
as if it had never happened. But it had.

“You’ll have to help me with the boxes, Lee.”

“All right.”

• • •

The books and magazines were in the boxes—the dream. We piled them in the convertible, until I wondered if the engine would pull the load, all the time thinking about Bert Kaylor—and then, because of her actions, her words, putting him aside, out of mind, but not ever really forgetting.

Her family didn’t gather. They stood among the trees, in the dust, watching like dubious deer.

“If you’d care to speak with them alone?” I said.

“No, darling. Just one more thing.”

She went hurriedly to the rear of the cypress shed and returned with a gallon glass jug of white liquid.

I thought about Berk Kaylor. Now, Sullivan. Now is the time to get out of here. Now is the time to run, or you’re damned….

“What’s that?”

“You’ll see, Lee.” She placed the jug in the trunk.

She slid onto the seat. I climbed behind the wheel. She looked at me, at the windshield of the car. Never once did she turn toward them, out there. She didn’t even say good-by.

The family watched. Rona waved, started toward us, then hesitated and waved again, her dark hair blowing faintly in a noon breeze. She leaned back against a palm, her hands flat against the tree, watching, not smiling now. Suddenly she turned and ran for the cabin door.

“Drive, Lee! Drive away.”

Luz Helling spat against the rough and sun-hot bark of a slash pine and looked at the frothing trickle of amber juice. We drove off.

Evis’s face was pale, her hands clasped together in her lap. She watched the road straight ahead. When I spoke, she didn’t answer. When she finally spoke, it was as if nothing were the matter, as if everything were quite ordinary. But I saw the savage signs of escape.

I knew what I was doing and wanted exactly that.

A tall flannel-shirted man stepped from behind a copse of cedar and watched us pass. Berk Kaylor. She saw him, but made no sign. Once she shot me a bold glance, as if to say, “Remember—don’t mention him!” Then she said aloud, “I know how that makes you feel. For the last time, then—it was never anything, Lee. He’s a cousin, that’s all. It’s not out of the ordinary down here. I couldn’t stop him doing what you saw. It’s never been anything more than that.”

If she lied, it didn’t matter, anyway—not now. Evis was all that mattered to me, then or ever. I loved her, had to have her, and that was all.

Just before we reached the highway, we passed a small clearing on a low mound of yellowed grass beside the country road and Evis asked me to stop the car.

Kaylor, I thought, is back there. Forget him. There has always been somebody else. You know that. For every woman like her, there is a Kaylor. It has to be.

“Help me with the boxes, Lee.”

We carried the loaded cartons of books and magazines to the barefaced mound. She dumped them there. After I helped her this far, she wouldn’t let me touch them.

Business Etiquette. Shorthand in Twenty Lessons. Business Management. Stenography
. There were perhaps a a dozen different correspondence courses: two on how to train yourself to speak correct English. She did not own a typewriter, but she had several keyboard charts on which she had practiced, so that when the time came she would be ready. There were poetry, a few novels, some of the classics, and many magazines depicting the living conditions of the very rich. All these, and many more, she dumped helter-skelter on the mound.

Her eyes were brilliant with excitement a kind of madness, and I stood by trying to figure it. There was only the known excuse, the conventional reason. My mind was blankly accepting.

“Now, Lee.”

Her voice was soft with urgency.

She ran lithely back to the car, swung up the gallon jug, rushed to the pile of books and magazines, of dreams and hopes and schemes, and with lips parted, sun-bright hair swinging across her face, poured the contents of the jug over everything.

The liquid splashed like hot silver.

She knelt, trembling, and touched a match to the pyre.

For a little over an hour I watched the flames seethe and finally gutter. I watched her run around the fire, thrusting it to life again and again with a long forked hickory stick. She roved around with a kind of harshly repressed glee. The way she looked scared me plenty.

Coated with a film of soot, eyes red-rimmed, her shoes smoldering, she returned to the car where I waited.

“Now that’s out of your system?” I said.

She did not syeak.

I looked at her. “Why me?” I asked her.
“Why me, Evis?”

“Because you’re just right. Because you’re going to be rich. And because I love you—
I do
. Don’t you like it?” The last slyly, with slanted eyes.

“What are you doing?” I said.

She had turned, twisting against me as she removed her skirt.

“Undressing, Lee. You, too—take off your clothes. I want you. Now. Here. Before we leave. I want to pull the curtain on all that, Lee.” She turned, kneeling on the seat of the car. “Right now, Lee.”

Her flesh was still hot from the flames of her dream.

We came as far as St. Petersburg, on the Florida west coast. This was supposed to be a stopping-off place, but in two days we had rented an apartment, an expensive one. I had lived nearby before heading for the Everglades, and my savings were here. My credit was good. My family had lived here and their reputation had been sound.

“How did you earn your money, Lee?”

“Lot of different things. Nothing special.”

“But how come the money?”

“I always tried to save.”

“I like that.”

Only there was something wrong with the way she said it. I didn’t know it then, but this was the first move toward one hundred thousand dollars plus, in a concrete-walled safe at the Braddock & Courtland Building and Loan Association’s offices, right here in town.

First there were the buying sprees, the endless charge accounts, bills fluttering into the mailbox like sacks full of leaves.

She returned to the apartment day after day, the fresh excitement all through her, with crazy things—book ends priced at two hundred dollars, with no books to put between them. So she bought books, by the hundreds. Then furniture, until the apartment was clotted. Chinaware. Drapes at five hundred dollars a crack, to cover a single window.

I decided it was time to return to work. The savings had dwindled rapidly, but we loved each other, and I got a kick out of her actions. The money somehow didn’t matter. Everything she did was with intense spirit and a degree of excited happiness I’d never seen. I wanted her happy. It was a giddy world, a world I wanted to keep.

I took a job in a print shop. I knew the work and liked it. We couldn’t be together as much as we both wanted, but I began to realize we had to head into dock.

• • •

“Evis, you’ve got to slow down.”

She would never change. Not Evis. But her outward appearance had changed. She was in the beauty class now. There was no getting around it, my wife was an absolute knockout. People stared. Men flipped a little when she walked down the street.

“I know I’ve spent too much, Lee. But I had a reason. We’ve got to have a house. I don’t like small apartments.”

“We can’t swing a house. I’m not making enough money at the shop for that. They’ve got a lot of new accounts—in fact I got them for them. But I get my salary, and that’s all. How the hell can we buy a house? You nuts or something?”

“Come here, darling.”

She was lying on the floor with a bunch of pillows, wearing one of these damned house smocks …

We managed a house. There still wasn’t enough money, but I had the job, a good salary. We swung a loan for the house. I could see rough sledding ahead the way she went at things. Like a blitzkrieg in tight nylons. I didn’t see black night and no sled at all.

She came running into the house one afternoon.

• • •

“I’m working, Lee! Braddock and Courtland. It’s a loan outfit down on First.”

You’d think she’d been emancipated, the first woman to earn a buck by working for it. She wouldn’t hear of quitting. It bothered me the way she began talking about wanting more and more money.

Along about then we got to arguing about her family. Trying to reach her some way, I ridiculed them. Instead of agreeing, she resented it. I’d been drinking more than usual, and I went out that night and got drunk. I met a guy Ed Fowler. He brought me home and we’d been good friends ever since.

Ed was a writer. He sold adventure articles to the men’s magazines: “How I Fought Vampire Bats on the Island of Mazoom,” “I Waded Through Crazed Electric Eels,” “THE DAY I FACED THE GUILLOTINE,” The Dancing White Daughter of Pygmyland.”

The thing was, I found out that Ed’s stories were mostly based on fact; things he’d really been through. I’d been around plenty myself during my Merchant Marine days, but Ed Fowler had me beat hollow. He could talk all night about the crazy places he’d been, the bizarre and almost unbelievable things he’d seen, if you supplied him with plenty beer. Evis got a kick out of his stories. He had lived a full life gathering material, and now, still very young, he spent his time putting it on paper.

“Ed’s a good scout,” Evis would say. “I wish you could be as relaxed as Ed is.”

Relaxed.

I seldom thought of Berk Kaylor—but more and more I turned her family into a joke; bitterly, I guess. Maybe as compensation for what I’d seen that bright high noon in the woodshed.

“If you’d open up a business of your own, we’d make more money. You know printing from A to Z—you told me so.”

“Evis, listen—with both of us working, payments are due on the house. I’m not a third up on things you bought.”

Her voice calmed. “Didn’t you ever hear of credit? Your credit’s tops. Look at your family’s background.” She began to warm up. I was getting used to it. “Why not open up your own printing shop, Lee? The place you work for makes big profits. Why shouldn’t they be yours? You got them lots of their big accounts. Those accounts would be yours, with your own shop.”

She was damned convincing. I told her all the reasons why it was out of the question. She didn’t even listen. And in two hours’ time we were both speaking excitedly about the printing business. It was a good, rising business. She was right about those accounts coming over to me if I had my own place. I felt certain they would. I’d have more work than I could handle.

“It’d be a headache. But if I could swing it, we’d be set.”

• • •

I didn’t lie to them. I just promised too much when I signed the papers, talked with the different heads of companies, assured them, related family background, established credit—because nothing had happened yet.

Then it began … the bills. In two or three years everything would be straight. The money would likely be tumbling in. But how do you explain that to the collection agencies?

There are the excited lies about monies due you, the stories of fanciful bank accounts, the glib but quite empty yarns about cash on hand. Lies. How do you explain once they’ve found out and won’t listen?

“It’s all right, Lee—don’t you worry.”

I wanted to pay off the shop rent, take care of the bills for the presses, the linotype, the paper stocks—Evis wouldn’t hear of that.

In a year and a half of struggling, we’d been through a descending graph into a dead period that was frightening—and the creditors swooped.

Nebulous deadlines came in. Credit fell through. Every company in the county was running reports on me. Each day another rigid-voiced collector turned up, bright-eyed and abrupt, until I began dodging out the back door into the alley.

I’d hired two people. Art Salter, a good printer, a fast man with a linotype, and a Mrs. Timothy who took care of the stationery store out front. We handled the only complete line of paperback novels in town, arranged categorically in easy-to-reach-and-scan cases of my own design, with special monthly selections displayed in one window. The books were a tremendous draw. Because of them I was able to pay Mrs. Timothy’s and Art’s salaries. But that was all.

The time came when it was, “Pay, or else, Sullivan.”

The “or else” was a simple matter of losing everything: shop, car, home—the works. Creditors got together and set a deadline for payment.

I was sick and desperate. Evis came up with the answer.