He sank to the couch beside her, gathered her to him, found her more liquid, more fiery than ever. Her legs were hot against his hands.

She clung to him and kissed his face. He closed his eyes tightly and didn’t breathe. Then he sighed and said, “I hope you feel this way the rest of your life.”

“No, not this way….” She writhed under his hand. “It would kill me.”

HEAT OF NIGHT

HARRY WHIITINGTON

a division of F+W Media, Inc.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Also Available

Copyright Page

1

IT WAS THE DAMNEDEST SCREAM he’d ever heard. It ripped the peaceful Sunday morning out by the roots, raging through the murmur of flies, muted breezes and village church music into the sick place where his hangover cringed. The scream rattled around inside him.

“Police.” He whispered it first because he was, for the moment, petrified. He leaned forward, hackles bristling along his neck. Then, able to move, shaken and white-faced, he jerked himself upright in his rocking chair on the hotel veranda. This time he heard himself yelling, “Police!”

“Relax.”

He turned, staring at the hotel clerk leaning against the doorjamb. Didn’t these Florida crackers ever get excited about anything?

“What you mean — relax?” Anguished, he jumped up from his chair, a rotund man with a pot belly and an incredible hangover. “There’s a dame being killed.”

“Relax.”

“Sound came from down on the waterfront.”

The clerk shook his head. “ ‘Tain’t nothing, mister. Just Big Juan Venzino making time with his woman.”

“But he’s killing her.”

The clerk shook his head. About forty, he had a lean red-flushed face under pink hair and a mild tic in his left eye. He chewed on a match stick.

“Reckon not,” he said. “Reckon to see Big Juan die long before she does.”

“Man, you heard her scream.”

“Well, he’s been trying to kill Big Rosa that way as long as I can recollect and it ‘pears to me her yells get stronger every year.”

“You mean — he’s loving her?”

“That’s right.” The tic worked frantically. “Whenever Big Juan pleasures Big Rosa, the squeamish cut bait and run for cover. And that’s a fact.”

The clerk continued, lazily, unhurried, describing Big Juan as a colossal monolith of a man, huge in every aspect. His large head bristled with thick black hair, graying some at the temples. Big Juan had entered his forties, the clerk said, thrusting his way into middle age without detecting any lessening of the desires that fired him all the days of his life, any more than he’d noted any improvement in his fortunes. Whenever the clerk saw him, Big Juan still moaned about the new boat he needed, debt that overwhelmed him and how there always seemed to be a new mouth to feed every time he padded up from his nets to his house. He’d tell the clerk he was no different from the way he’d always been but that he should burn more candles. There’d been no slackening in his prowess, either. Big Rosa still screamed as loudly and as agonizingly as she had the first time he drove home to her the scepter of his devotion over thirty years ago, three days before they were married.

Listening to the clerk, the drummer licked his lips. He felt slightly calmer; the butterflies in his head had laid down their anvils. He went back to his chair on the hotel veranda and flopped into it. But he sat tense, ear tuned, waiting for another scream….

• • •

The drummer walked off the Havana Hotel lobby that afternoon and strolled along Dead Bay’s Main Street. He told himself he didn’t have any destination in mind. But he went straight, as if irresistibly drawn there, across the deep-rutted sand road to the waterfront where Big Juan Venzino lived.

He walked past the unpainted frame house to the water. He stared at the rickety wooden piers where Big Juan strung his nets and secured his boats and sank his bait wells. Broken piers had sagged and rotted and had been abandoned to crabs and barnacles. The beach before the house was cleared but was ringed on each side by mangroves and cabbage palmettos, with sawgrass and slash pines in the salt flats out back. Before the beach stretched a quiet bay with small islands separating it from the lime green Gulf with faded sky and clouds and lazy gulls.

The front door of the shack slammed and the drummer turned quickly to face it.

Big Juan Venzino walked to the edge of the stoop, started down the steps. He saw the drummer and stopped. For a moment they stared at each other. Even across the yard, the drummer could sense the darkness behind Big Juan’s eyes.

The drummer gave the barrel-chested fisherman a tentative smile, tipped his straw hat and backed away toward the road. The clerk hadn’t exaggerated in one respect, at least: Big Juan was the kind of man he’d heard about but never seen, an aging giant of a man. The muscles in Big Juan’s chest were like steel-braided cords broiled and tempered by forty-seven years of Gulf suns.

Still backing away, the drummer glanced around, by now possessed by the need to view Big Juan’s woman for himself.

“Howdy, mister.” There was no friendliness in Big Juan’s tone. “You lost?”

The drummer tried to smile again. Nobody had to tell him how these people resented intruders. “Must be, sir,” he said and kept backing away.

• • •

“But what about those kids?” he asked the clerk when he returned to the hotel. “What do they do with them when they start flogging it to death?”

The clerk smiled and the tic produced something like a perky wink.

“The kids?” The clerk glanced around the deserted lobby and nodded. The drummer clung to every word. The clerk was the local Chamber of Commerce extolling the wonders of his town, the beauty of his village that you couldn’t find anywhere else. He admitted that other towns had mansions more imposing than the Hollister place on the bay-bluff west of town, that other places got hotter in summer, colder in winter.

He leaned his elbows on the desk.

“Well, suh, when Big Rosa notices Big Juan stacking up for a party of a Sunday morning, she packs them kids off to church.”

The drummer smiled at this idea.

“What else?” the clerk said. “Real religious folks. Big Rosa has to get to early Mass so’s she can be home by the time Big Juan wakes up growling for her.”

“Off to church? That’s a good one, all right.” A drummer needed wild tales like this in his mental files.

“Yeah. Sundays they do. But it don’t make much difference. When Juan starts exciting her, you can hear them two yelling and laughing ten blocks away in the Baptist Church.”

“Ten blocks? You’re giving me the business.”

“Like hell. What’s ten blocks here on the bay of a quiet Sunday morning? Sound carries. Man, when Big Rosa gets to laughing, hymns ain’t loud enough to drown her out. The women get to twitching in the pews and the men give each other the eye, trying not to grin in church — and I tell you, mister, nobody in this here town draws a relaxed breath until finally Big Rosa screams like you heard her screaming this morning. Big Juan and Rosa — they’re quiet for a spell after that.”

The drummer frowned. “Must be hell on them kids growing up where something like this happens a few times a week.”

“Now wait. Mister, it’s as natural as breathing to them Venzino kids. You never laid your eyes on better or happier kids. I reckon where kids grow up to accept their bodies and sexin’ as a natural thing they’re unspoiled — like birds or little animals.” The clerk laughed, shaking his head in rhythm with his tic. “Now, with Big Juan, there’s one thing he won’t tolerate. His kids are not allowed to see horror movies, or murder pictures. Not even on TV. Big Juan says it’s bad for them.”

The drummer sighed; he now possessed the kind of conversational nugget he could always polish and improve upon.

Another angle occurred to him. “This Big Juan. He must be quite the stud. All that advertising every Sunday morning. Men keep their women chained to home around here?”

The clerk shook his head. He fiddled with the ink pen on his desk.

“Mister, rich women, winter tourist dames, the mayor’s wife — ” he whispered this with a sharp glance around, “and Ruby the prosty down at Jake’s Bar — all of them have tried to get in with Big Juan. And no dice.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, sir. You ask them dames. Things like this is nothing to joke about.”

“I can see that, all right.”

“You don’t have to tell women when a man’s got what they need. They know.”

“I’ll grant you. But what’s wrong with Big Juan to pass up all that stuff?”

“Big Juan don’t want ‘em. First time he ever saw Big Rosa — she wasn’t more’n fifteen then — why he went into Jake’s Bar and he cried like a baby.”

“Cried?”

“He’d seen the woman he wanted and he knowed he was such a sinner that surely even the Mother of God Herself couldn’t intercede and get Big Rosa for him. But — he’s got her — and he’s never stopped burning candles, and in thirty years everybody in this here village can swear he’s never stopped wantin’ her. Man, even if he wanted another woman, and he’ll tell you hisself he don’t, he’d be scared to touch her for fear lightning from a sunny sky would strike him dead. Something about a vow he made to the Mother of God.”

• • •

Big Juan was repairing nets the next morning, contentedly listening to the scream of his children in the shallows of his bay. Something caused him to turn his head and when he did he saw the drummer staring at him.

Big Juan stood up with his fist tightening on his net hook. The drummer tipped his straw skimmer again and crab-stepped sideways toward the roadway, frantically looking for something around the house.

• • •

That night the drummer went into Jake’s Bar. He tanked up on beer laced with moonshine. He joked with Ruby and said a few things to her that were not joking but which she interpreted as jokes.

He felt the floor of Jake’s Bar tremble and Big Juan strode in. Big Juan stared at the drummer, then came to the bar and squatted on the stool beside him.

“Seen you around my place a lot.”

“Yes, sir. Don’t mean no harm, Mr. Venzino. Just that — I heard a lot about you — big man and all, you know — just wanted to see you — and your family. No harm meant.”

Big Juan studied him a moment and then laughed.

“Sure,” he said. “That’s all right. You’re all right.” He was as friendly and unsuspicious as a child. “You come down. Fish. Any time you want to, huh?”

He talked loudly to everybody then, draining off the beer schooners laced with moonshine. He would stop in the middle of some incredible tale and grin at the drummer.

“Heard a lot about me, huh?”

He monopolized the conversation for three straight hours, consumed two dishes of potato chips and hush puppies and a dozen schooners of shine-laced beer. You could hear him above the caterwauling jukebox, cursing his leaky boats that were not fast enough to overtake his competition any more, growling because he never had money enough for the new boat he needed and because even the Good Lord must know he had too many kids. He talked louder and louder, planning to get together everything he owned so he could sell it and buy himself the sleekest thirty-foot inboard this town ever saw.

Big Rosa never came to Jake’s with him.

• • •

The next morning the drummer fished with pole and line from the end of Big Juan’s wooden pier. He sat tenderly, as if poised on a keg of high explosive, darting quick glances toward the front door of the unpainted frame house.

“These piers. All my private property,” Big Juan shouted from the water where he’d waded waist-deep to repair a leaky boat. “Own forty acres both ways. All mangrove swamp. Not valuable. But I don’t like neighbors too close, you understand?” He laughed. “When a man can’t take a leak in his own front yard, the neighbors are too close.”

Big Juan came out of the water, wearing only dungarees rolled above his ankles and drooping below his navel. They were soaking wet but Big Juan was accustomed to this. Sand crabs skittered, buzzing, around his bare feet.

The drummer darted a glance toward Big Juan’s pants, as Juan hitched them up.

“The test of your manhood — this is your heart,” Big Juan said in an accent as thick as the salt-brine smell of mullet on the nets and piers. “When a señor desires his señora with all his heart and his mind, then he is a big man, so big that the horses walk softly around him. This is where a man is big and rigid. Right here.” Big Juan’s fist pounded against his muscle-swollen left breast.

The brutal sound it made was like a blow on a taut drum. A man could be staggered by a lesser blow. The drummer noticed that Big Juan’s skin didn’t even turn red under his fist.

“You know at once when el hombre and his dama are right, one for the other. Ah. When she bites at her mouth and chews a bruise on the palm of el hombre’s hand to hold back her screams and screams anyhow, and don’t even know she’s screamed … this is how it is when el hombre has found his dama of all damas.”

He waved his arm in a gesture that proclaimed that here was the final word on this matter.

“I — hear your wife was a beauty when you first saw her.” The drummer darted an anxious glance toward the house.

Big Juan suddenly began laughing with his head thrown back.

“Listen. These Cuban girls. There are no prettier on the face of God’s earth — and Rosa was the loveliest, with black eyes and red lips and already the faintest down of a mustache and she was then just past thirteen. Agh … and breasts. Breasts like hard ripe melons, standing firm and full and ripe and ready to burst. Agh … she was lovely then, but she is lovelier now.”

• • •

Years later, when the drummer got talking about Big Juan, he would tell with some awe about his meeting with Big Rosa, that week he remained in Dead Bay….

“You see, I never really met her. No. Now, Big Juan showed me all the kids underfoot, girls not in their teens yet and giving you a preview of the heartbreakers they were going to be. And his small, barrel-chested sons, scale models of their old man — chunky Cuban boys who could swim under water three minutes at a time, handle a boat and nets and who weren’t afraid of the biggest manta ray in the bay. And he told me with great pride about his oldest son Alberto — born three days before Big Juan and Rosa had been nine months married, and of his nineteen-year-old daughter who was so soft and beautiful that men trembled when she walked past. A Cuban blonde, if you got any idea how rare they are, with her mother’s black eyes and full ripe beauties. I never saw her, either, but grown men whimpered a little in Dead Bay village when you mentioned her name. So much. So much. Men had been after that girl since she was twelve, yelling for her from behind the cabbage palmettos on moonlit nights — and sometimes crying for her in the middle of storms — and not even Big Juan’s fists could overcome their urge to be close enough to see Dolores and smell her.”

He remained in Dead Bay that week until his boss sent nasty wires, until his wife stopped writing at all, and until the woman upstate he’d been anticipating visiting had begun to date three other men. But there was no sense talking about it; he couldn’t leave Dead Bay until he’d seen Big Juan’s woman.

Then, next morning, Big Juan kissed his palm, hurled the kiss to the sun-bleached heavens and jerked his head toward the stout woman carrying a basket of mullet from the boats to the ice chests up at the house.

“Is Rosa!” he said, whacking the drummer on the back. “You see her? That’s Rosa mia!”

• • •

The drummer caught the next bus out of Dead Bay. He was not downcast. Rosa was in her early forties. What had he been thinking, how had he deceived himself imagining some young raving beauty? She was the mother of that brood, of Alberto who was thirty, and of Dolores who broke your heart when you looked at her. Rosa wore her black hair long about her shoulders because she was too busy to pin it up. She squinted those black eyes because the sun was so blindingly bright. She had breast-fed every one of her children because she believed that this was as God intended, and she believed in God and not in beauty. Her sandals flapped against her heels when she walked and her dress had had all the life washed out of it long ago.

But Big Juan? He stared after Rosa, eyes misted and big head cocked with pride.

This woman the drummer must have seen a dozen times about the Venzino place, never suspecting she was what Rosa had become. And he was eighty miles away on the bus before he realized that she actually was lovelier than ever to Big Juan, who’d never been away from her side for more than two days at a time in over thirty years.

“I stood there and I still wouldn’t have believed it was Rosa,” the drummer said in that awed way. “But Big Juan called some endearment to her — in Spanish — I don’t know what — and the woman laughed. Well. When I heard that laugh, I believed. Nobody but Big Rosa Venzino could laugh like that.”

2

A DEADLY PALL hung over the village of Dead Bay. After thirty years, silence at the Venzino place stunned every villager. Gossips shook their heads over their back fences. The mayor’s wife said to her husband that it was bound to happen, Venzino must have tired. After all, a thing that burns white-hot burns out. Shopkeepers fretted, wondering what the change would do to business in Dead Bay. Amateur astronomers studied their charts and their range gauges; the atmosphere of silence was like the dead lull preceding a storm.

Not for weeks had anyone heard the sound of Rosa’s laughter. Many who’d professed to being annoyed by its abandon, recognized now the quality of love and wonder in it, and the whole village was poorer without it. The priest at the church pondered it. He would have spoken to Juan and Rosa about it but he had never known how to speak to them about love; it was somehow like recommending wine to the people who owned the vineyard.

On Sunday morning, the good Reverend Brother Caulford, preacher at the Baptist Church, paused between sentences in his sermon, cocking his head as though listening for something.

• • •

After supper, Juan came into the juke-loud room at Jake’s Bar. Everybody looked up expectantly. Ruby, who worked as waitress and had a sparsely furnished room at the rear, paused pouring a beer and turned to watch Big Juan take his usual place at the bar. She heard him order his usual beer, saw Jake lace it strong with white shine from a gallon bottle under the counter, saw the other men turn expectantly, waiting for Big Juan to roar out his latest views.

But it didn’t happen.

Ruby set the bottle down and let her customer pour it himself. A tip was one thing and she didn’t mind brushing legs or having her garter belt snapped for a good tip, but an idea was mushrooming in her mind and contemplating it for the past few days made her as breathless as a schoolgirl. And Ruby hadn’t been a schoolgirl since she left the sixth grade. Grown men were paying her for her favors at the time and she was grossing more per year than the sixth-grade teacher.

She moved between the tables, a lush girl in her late twenties. It was difficult for some men around Dead Bay to realize Ruby was still quite young; she’d been around and available for so many years. Faint crowsfeet worked in the corners of her blue eyes when she smiled. Her hips were broad and soft, her ankles trim. She was good for business at Jake’s Bar. He would stop serving white shine before he would let Ruby go, that’s what Jake said some nights after ten o’clock.

Now Ruby paused at Big Juan’s back. As always she felt excited with the urge to smooth her hands hard over the muscles that corded his back beneath his denim shirt. Oh, lord, she thought, I could do just that for five hours straight and get more excitement than I’ll ever find with other men.

That back would be hot from the Gulf sun and those muscles would stand hard and throbbing against her palm. She swallowed back the saliva that had melted upward into her mouth.

“Big Juan,” she said. “Hi, there.”

She wanted him to turn and she was going to let him look deep into her opened and naked eyes. Juan was the kind who didn’t need it spelled out in Braille. If he had trouble at home, she had a room in the back of this place, and there were men who said she had a cash register for a heart but she would let Juan see what a lie this was.

He glanced at her and did not even smile. He did not look into her eyes or make a joke. He always made a joke about how much he wanted her, this for everybody in the room to hear. “I don’t come here to drink,” he would yell. “I come here to watch Ruby go between them tables.”

He could have had her any time in the past fourteen years and he had never wanted her, and even now with this bad trouble — whatever it was — he still did not want her.

She’d never been so sorry for anybody in her life. Here was a man who needed to be cheered. Who better than Ruby to cheer him?

“What’s the matter with you, Big Juan?” Ruby was a direct and honest soul.

He shrugged. Jake leaned across the bar, his fat face troubled. “Yeah, Juan. Break down. You got something wrong, tell us. Ain’t we your friends?”

“Friends.” The way Juan said it, this was the last thing on earth that could help him.

“Sure, we’re your friends,” the owner of the Standard Oil station said. “What’s wrong, kid? You planning to go hunting that sea treasure soon — and afraid we’ll find out?”

“It could be that,” somebody else said. “That would make Big Rosa sore all right. She sure has a big hate for that sea treasure idea of Juan’s.”

“Rosa is not sore at me,” Juan said.

“I’ll bet she is. I’ll bet you got together enough money for a diving gear and aqua-lung. Come on, Juan, tell us, is that it?”

Jake said, “Somebody else found your treasure, Juan?”

Juan shook his head. “Nobody else find my treasure. Nobody but me knows where it is. And me? Agh. I know. I can see it in the Gulf like as if there is a sign sticking out of the water saying, ‘Here it is, Juan, just for you.’ ”

He exhaled deeply. Despair in a man as big as Juan was outsized, bigger than any other man’s grief, something they could not fully comprehend, but it dampened the spirits of the whole place like a long night of rain.

“Looks like if you knew where that treasure was, Juan, why Rosa would want you to go.” They had heard him expound about the treasure a hundred times but now they were trying to lift his spirits.

It was no good. “Agh. What is the good of it? I know where it is. But without the gear … what’s to talk about it?”

“I remember two toughs came out here from West Tampa one time,” Jake said, attempting to stir Juan’s enthusiasm. “They was going to take Big Juan over. They had heard he knew where this sunken treasure was. They planned to take Juan out in the Gulf, let him bring up the treasure and then dump him over in its place. Isn’t that right, Juan?”

He drank his beer and stared at something none of them could see. “Something like that.”

“Come on, Juan. Tell us what you did.”

“Whatever happened to those toughs, Juan?” Jake prompted. He laughed, winking at the others. “They came here with guns and gear. I never saw them around here any more after that. Whatever happened?”

“I don’t know,” Juan said. “I don’t remember.”

He stood up and paid his bill. He drew in a deep breath of the beer-smelling room and then walked between the tables toward the door.

“Five beers,” somebody whispered. “He’s sick. He never walked out of here with less than a dozen beers in his belly before.”

Jake’s face was drawn. “Yeah,” he said. “There goes a man with something bad on his mind.” After a few minutes of pall-like silence, Jake said, “Well, hell, this here ain’t no funeral parlor. You, Ruby. Put some money in the juke. We got to liven this place up…. Ruby?”

Everybody looked around. Ruby was gone, too.

Some of the men smiled in a knowing and contented manner.

“Well,” Jake said. “I’m glad about this. No matter what ails old Juan, there’s nothing I know better for the miseries than Ruby.”

“That’s right,” they all said. And they had certain knowledge of this provident truth.

• • •

“Juan.”

He paused in the darkness of Main Street. The yellow and green light from the sputtering neon over Jake’s doorway fell across him. He looked about, then saw Ruby standing in the narrow walkway between Jake’s and the plumbing shop next door.

“Yeah?”

“Juan. Something’s happened. Could you — come back here a minute?”

He could tell by the breathlessness of her voice that something was wrong with Ruby all right. It troubled him. A nice girl like Ruby. She made more men happy than all the sermons he ever listened to. If some guy back there was making trouble for her, he’d break his head, and he forgot his own grief for a moment as he followed her through the passage, his shoulders brushing the walls on both sides.

She opened the door to a darkened room. He saw a bed with a white sheet on it, a night stand and a faint night light glowing.

The room was empty.

“My room,” Ruby said. Her voice sounded very odd — as though her throat were tight.

“What is wrong?” Big Juan said.

“I — want to talk to you,” Ruby said in that choked voice. “It’s about — your trouble.”

His face darkened. “What you know about this?”

She licked her tongue across her mouth thinking of how desperately she wanted to taste him, of how she had been dying of hunger for him all these years.

She backed away from him slightly into the vaguely lighted room. He stood in the doorway, scowling at her and troubled.

Her frantic fingers worked at the white nylon uniform. He saw it tugged away from her breasts and she wore no bra and she needed none. He was faintly astonished to see her breasts so full, so firm and not in any way sagging. She looked so young. But her fingers were not still; the dress dropped away from her. She thrust her fingers beneath the elastic band of her lace pants and tugged downward.

“No,” he whispered.

“Juan. Come here, Juan. I must talk to you.”

“No.”

“I must talk to you.” Her voice was a whisper but it was wild, growing frantic. She motioned him toward her.

His face twisted, growing hideous with the agony that tore him apart. He lumbered forward a step with his hand outstretched toward her. It was a mortal sin and he could not stop moving forward. He felt himself throbbing hot; he could not stop. He knew only that he must touch the pink firmness and the dark beauty she pressed toward him.

His hands closed on her. Liquid fire melted all the reason behind his eyes, dimmed his sight, blurred his memory of the past or his consciousness of the future. He tried to think mortal sin, but he could think only mortal. Mortal. Mortal.

She whimpered, sobbing when he touched her and she reached both her frantic hands for him, her mouth parted and wet in the light.

She sank back across the bed whispering to him, cooing to him, murmuring his name, feeling the heat of all the suns in his muscles.

Suddenly he lurched away from her, banging his shoulder against the door.

“Juan. My God, Juan,” she whispered.

Tears were streaming down his face. He shook his head, trying to find the doorway and still blinded by the fires raging red behind his eyes. He stared at her a moment, knowing she was young and fresh, and as far as he was concerned — as far as she was concerned, panting there through parted lips — no other man had ever touched her as he would touch her.

She wept piteously, “Oh God, Juan, please.”

He found the door. He tried to speak, tried to tell her it was not her fault — he found her lovely and young beyond belief. The fault was his, he already had terrible grief and now he was trying to compound it here in a room behind Jake’s Bar. There was so much he wanted to tell her but all he could say was, “Mortal sin. Mortal sin.”

He ran down the alley, tears spilling from his eyes, whispering it over and over as he ran.

3

AL VENZINO slowed the Chevy on the black macadam road when he saw the first signs of Dead Bay village ahead.

His hands tightened on the wheel and a sudden warm rush of nostalgia for this place flooded through him along with the urgent need to hurry into the town.

The morning sun was already making of it a burning cauldron two hours before noon; it was so hot not even the bottle flies would be stirring. But he had the urgent anticipatory feeling that he was coming home again after a long time, that he was a kid again and not thirty, that he was going to wade in the bay and swim to the farthest island and help Big Juan with the nets.

“Kids have it lucky,” he said, thinking about the children still at home with Big Juan and not even realizing he had spoken aloud.

“What?” his wife asked. Bea, a stout woman with matronly bosom, was a couple of years younger than Al. She’d been considered one of the prettiest girls in school and she did not forget it though almost everyone else had. Marriage agreed with her. She’d aimed toward marriage since she’d first played house, dominating the game. She was a good woman, and she loved Al, but their backgrounds were different. Marriage to Al was a challenge for Bea and she’d set as her goal making him into the kind of civilized husband she believed he should be.

Bea’s voice jerked Al back to reality and he remembered that he wasn’t one of Juan Venzino’s vital, primitive kids any more; he was a respectable businessman, with Bea working hard twenty hours a day to make him forget his beginnings.

“What did you say, Albert?”

He shook his head. Suddenly he hated her fiercely, the way people learned to hate in this hot village. She was “good people,” she loved him, even her nagging was for his own benefit, but he was sick of it. Why had he married her? Why had he let her drag him away to Tampa and an insurance brokerage? Here he was, thirty years old, with nothing he wanted, not even kids. What was the sense of reminding himself that everything Bea said was for his own good? He was tired trying to be something he was never intended to be. Fairly he had to admit she was right. But this didn’t make him like it.

He stared at this flat, ugly bay country he loved so terribly and felt a sharp pain in his chest. What’s to love? And he couldn’t answer that. For miles before you reached the village the backcountry road was banked up across soggy marshes of saw grass broken by shapeless pools of tidewater. Where the land rose above bay level nothing grew but cabbage palmettos, cabbage palms, and shabby slash pines; there were no living things but hard-shell gophers and rattlesnakes. What’s here to love, for God’s sake?”

But he stared at it all hungrily as if it were something he’d yearned for a long time without even knowing it. The backyards of frame shacks, with garden patches in black squares, displayed clothes strung on sagging lines and privy doors hanging open.

Bea’s nose was quivering the way it always did about here on the way home.

“I hope you’re not going to stay too long this time, Albert.”

“What’s too long, Bea?” he asked wearily. “Is twenty minutes too long?”

“It is for me.”

“Okay. Okay. Pa said it was trouble. That’s all I know.” He sighed, thinking about her correct parents and correct schools and correct existence, and wondering why she’d ever wanted him? “We’ll leave as soon as we can.”

“Well, I’m just not staying overnight, no matter what violent crisis your family is facing this time. Those kids screaming and the mosquitoes and the sand fleas. My God, I don’t see how they stand it. You ought to thank God every day, Albert, that you married me and got out of all this.”

“Sure, Bea.”

“Well, you could still be right here, you know. Here in this Godforsaken village.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got me to thank.”

“Thank.” He said it purposely that way.

“Oh, stop being a smart Cuban. You know you hate all that dirt and the dogs underfoot. You’re going to be somebody — someday — when you quit even coming back to this place at all.”

“That would be nice, wouldn’t it, Bea?”

She missed the irony in his voice. She always missed it or ignored it or overlooked it. Now she exhaled. “It would be a miracle. It would be God answering my prayers when you stopped running over here every time they called you.”

“It’s my family, for God’s sake.”

“Your family. What have they ever done for you? I can tell you, anything that’s been done for you, my family has done it. My family. And yet, every time these people yell, you come running.”

He smiled in a savage way that pulled his mouth out of shape. He was stocky as all Juan’s sons were but he was not as tall as Big Juan, and there was about his chiseled features the look of Rosa. His mouth was soft, his black eyes were gentle. He was losing his hair. It was receding at the temples and he was not handsome as Big Juan was in that rugged, disturbing way. Bea had thought Al very handsome when they met but sometimes now she admitted Albert looked older than his father, especially when the exigencies of the insurance business bore him down. Being inside the office all the time, he had lost his tan, and there was an odd paleness about his olive complexion that made him look as if he’d just been released from the hospital after a long convalescence.

“Not every time I don’t come running, Bea,” he said in a flat tone. “Sometimes you forget to tell me they called.”

Her voice flared. “I do it only to protect you. If they had their way you’d spend all your time over here, giving them all your money and patching up all their woes.” Her voice lowered, becoming very level and patient, but firm. “If they want money this time, Albert, you tell them no, you understand?”

He exhaled, did not speak. They were entering the village now and he swore to himself with a warm inner smile that the place had not changed at all. The same curios in the curio shops that stood empty and forsaken, waiting for the occasional tourist that wandered off the main highway, made a wrong turn or found the spot on a road map and felt adventurous. The streets always looked deserted, even during the busiest hours of the day. Main Street was wide, paved with red Georgia brick that dismayed him when he considered how it must have been trucked in here across those marshes years ago, before he was born.

He watched from the corner of his eye some children playing hopscotch and jacks in the small park next to the drug store. Even when people hurried in Dead Bay they moved slowly. But mostly when people got fretted into hurrying for any reason, they just sat down and stewed about it in the shadiest place they could find.

“You understand me, Albert?”

She was getting through to him again.

“What?”

“Money. No money to them this time.”

“All right, Bea.”

“You know what will happen. Your father will start spouting about that damned fool idea of his of deep-sea treasure diving — ”

“It might not be so crazy, Bea. I always thought Papa might be right. You tell me who knows more about the Gulf than Papa. He might really know where there’s buried treasure.”

“Oh, he does.” Bea’s voice was scathing. “In your pockets. They’re just lined with treasure for him. That’s where his buried treasure is. And not buried very deeply, either.”

“I got to help them the little I can.”

“I wouldn’t mind ‘a little’ so much. But it’s constant. And that talk about buying diving gear and an aqua-lung so he can dive for treasure.” She sniffed, crossing her arms over her bosom. “All the beer he’s drunk, he couldn’t sink even with weights on him.”

Al allowed himself a smile. He knew she hadn’t intended to be funny at all.

“You might have a real point there, Bea. I’ll mention it to Big Juan.”

“Well, don’t tell him I said it. He dislikes me enough as it is.”

“He doesn’t dislike you, Bea. You’re just self-conscious.”

“Oh, they all hate me. They know I’m — well, different — ”

“Better than they are, Bea?” he inquired.

“Well, I admit I don’t like living as they do. They know it. They resent it. That’s why they hate me.” She dabbed a lace handkerchief at her dry eyes. He’d never seen her really cry, though once he thought she’d cried. Now he knew she wouldn’t soil a lace handkerchief with tears; if she were going to cry she’d use Kleenex. “Oh, Albert, don’t make me stay here too long. We’ve so much to do at home. I want to get the swimming pool started and if we’re not nicer to the Magruders, we’re never going to be accepted in the country club…. Do you hear me, Albert? You’ve got to start being nicer to Ted Magruder.”

“Okay. Next time I see him, I don’t spit on him.”

“Now you sound exactly like your father.”

Albert turned the Chevy along the shell-paved side road that led through mangroves, clustered sea grapes, wild oats and tractionless sand, white as sugar, to the house where he’d been born. He felt his heart pounding faster, an anxiety building in him to be there. He stared out at the bay, calm and flat, and the Gulf beyond the islands and the channel, lying dangerous and enticing as a whore.

There was an odd emptiness in his voice. “Don’t worry, Bea. Once in a while I might sound like him. “I’ll never be the man Big Juan is.”

He watched sea gulls screaming out over the piers where some of the kids had tossed fish entrails. A bored pelican perched on a pier support and watched the screaming gulls with one eye. Al could hear the children yelling; one of them was carrying a sting ray, and the others were trying to take it away from him. He was flailing at them with it and screaming as loud as he could. His left leg was bright with blood but his screams were enraged. They were trying to take his sting ray and they were not about to do it. He was going to die fending them off, and die screaming, too.

But the stillness from the house seemed louder than the screams of the children. It was as if the frame shack sat in a vacuum of its own silence. It was as if someone were dead. No one was dead, yet the silence frightened him and he could not say why.

He blew the Chevy’s horn loudly, once, twice, three times, not to let them know he was coming — this didn’t seem a vital matter to him — but to break that worrisome silence.

The kids came shrieking up from the bay, spreading out over the white sand like skittering sand crabs and then crossing through the whiskery growth of sea oats tickling at their bare legs. They were as brown as sea urchins and their teeth gleamed as white as the little stars you found when you snapped open a brittle sand dollar.

“Albert. Now remember. No money. And don’t you go encouraging your father when he starts talking about diving for treasure — ”

“All right, Bea. All right.”

“And no matter what the trouble is, you don’t give them any money. We need every penny we’ve got.”

“I said all right.”

“Sure. You said it. You’re not even paying any attention to me.”

He stopped the car, killed the engine. They were yelling at Albert that a sting ray had slapped its pronged tail into Luis, he had cut away the flesh because this was the only way to get out the prongs that opened like saw teeth after the tail was driven into its victim, and now Luis refused to give up the sting ray. It was his and he was thinking of some way to make it die slowly and painfully.

They scrambled over the car; the dogs lunged barking and yapping against its side.

Bea screamed at them to keep the dogs down, they were scratching the paint. “Can’t you see? Your dogs! You horrible little creatures,” she wailed at them. “Can’t you understand they’re clawing the paint?”

But Albert was not paying any attention to Bea or the kids. He was watching the silent house, waiting for Juan and Rosa to come out of the door.

4

I TELL YOU WHY we call you and Bea to come over, Alberto,” Rosa said. She had walked into the house close at his side, glancing at him with little smiles of pride, touching him, as if after thirty years she could not yet believe this beautiful man was her first-born. “We need you, Alberto.”

“Please,” Bea said. “His name is Albert. Or Al. It is not Alberto. It never was. It isn’t now — ”

“Oh, stop it, Bea,” Al said.

Bea looked about the shadowy room with its ancient furniture, scuffed and marked by the children and the dogs and time itself. She hated this room, hated the religious paintings, the religious articles secured to the dark walls. She wanted to get as damned far from this as she could, and drag Al with her because it was best for him whether he knew it or not.

“I think your people call you Alberto just to annoy me,” Bea said, sitting on the edge of a couch.

Rosa shook her head, looking at Al as if he were some fine statue she’d never seen before. “Always I call him Alberto,” she said, tilting her head. “This is the name of my grandfather. My grandfather hold me on his lap when he die. I am sitting on his lap and talking with him, the way a little child will, and I think he has fall asleep. But is dead. Sitting there dead. Is fine old man. My grandfather.

For him I name my first son. I always call him Alberto.”

“Well, you can stop.”

“For God’s sake, Bea,” Al said. “It don’t matter. It makes no difference.”

She listened to the children yelling in the yard. Luis would allow them to bury the sting ray if they were sure it was the most horrible death possible to it. She felt her nerves drawing taut.

“It does make a difference and you know it.”

Al exhaled, spread his hands. “Go on, Mama. Tell us about it. Why’d you call us over here?”

Rosa glanced at Big Juan. He tried to smile but after a moment shrugged and nodded.

“Is because of Dolores,” Rosa said.

Al walked to the front screen door and back. He had not known what to expect but it had not been this.

“What’s she done?” Al was worried. After all, Dolores was just at that age; men wouldn’t let her alone. Hell, the wonder was she’d kept it this long. He’d heard those men calling her name from the mangroves. Not even Big Juan could drive them away.

“She’s a-fall in love.” Rosa’s mouth pulled down.

“This is bad?” Bea said. “Everybody falls in love sooner or later — even in this Godforsaken place.”

“Yeah.” Big Juan paced the room. “But not every girl — nineteen years — like Dolores — must fall in love for a man twice her age.”

“My God,” Al said. “I thought she was nuts about Ric Suarez.”

“Shu.” Rosa lifted her arms, let them drop. “This we all believe. But you should hear Dolores talk about this now. This was something that happened many years ago when she is a child — nothing but a child. Then she does not even know what is love. This is what she tells me. Ah, but now. Now she knows what is love. With this old man — over thirty — why, almost as old as me — o? you papa.”

“Why don’t you have a talk with this man, Papa?” Al said. “A real strong talk.”

“Is not so simple.” Big Juan spoke in a weary way, a man who has considered all the angles and still has his insoluble problem to face.

“You want me to talk to him?” Al said.

“Now, Al, you promised,” Bea said from the couch. “We were not going to stay — ”

“Shu. Of course you stay. You spend the night. You have Al’s old bed. All to yourself.”

“Al. You promised.”

“All right, Bea. All right.”

“What’s this you promise?” Rosa said.

“Nothing, Mama,” Al said. He turned, facing Juan. “Who is this guy? I’ll talk to him. This afternoon.”

“Is not so simple,” Big Juan said again.

“Why not?” Al stared at his father. He’d never heard the big man admit defeat before. It worried him. It was as if he returned after an eternity to find Big Juan old and feeble. He studied him, troubled. But Big Juan looked the same, physically as strong as ever. “Why you keep saying that?”

Bea said, “Now, Al, if Juan wants to handle this his way, you just let him — ”

“Shut up, Bea,” Al said across his shoulder.

Big Juan padded to the screen door, stood staring at the glazed sheet of the bay and the churning Gulf beyond the channel. Clouds piled black along the horizon. There was the smell of a storm in the air.

It was hot and still in the room. He turned his back on the clouds, stared at his family.

“We try to talk to Dolores — you mama and me. Both try. But she say if we interfere, if we open our big mouth — this she say to her mama and me — she will run away and live by herself so she can see this man any time she like.”

“This is why we got to be so careful, Alberto,” Rosa said, chewing at a hangnail.

“Oh, she’s just gone nuts,” Al said. “A dame falls for some guy and she won’t listen to anybody. Beat her. Hell, take her over your knee, Papa, pull down her pants and beat hell out of her.”

“Oh boy,” Bea said. “That’s what I love about you, Al. Your realistic approach to your problems.”

“It’s what she needs,” he yelled at her.

“Oh. Oh. Ohh.” Big Juan shook his head. Here was one of the first angles he’d discarded. “She’s got one big bad temper — ” he tried to smile — “must be she gets it from her mama. But I can see in her eyes. She would love to have me try this — try to beat her. Her eyes dared me. Just try to spank me, Papa, say her eyes. This is all she needs. She really walk out then…. We cannot stand to lose her. It would kill me…. I would not want to live if any one of my kids hated me. It is something I cannot take. All of you are more than my flesh and blood. Part of my heart — each of you. So we got to do something. But what? Is drive Rosa and me out of our senses.”

“Keeps-a me cry,” Rosa said. “When I cry my nose runs. All the time, find myself crying, my nose running.”

Al shook his head. “Well, if you can’t talk to Dolores, there’s the guy. If he’s in his thirties, he ought to have sense enough — ”

“Do you have sense enough, Al Venzino?” Bea said. “Sense enough to what? Some men never get any sense. If you had good sense — ”

“Ho boy,” Al said. “Here we go. What’s eating you now?”

“You ogle every tramp you pass. All the time. You’re thirty. Have you got sense about women? Your tongue hangs out most of the time.”

“So I look at the girls at the office. On the street. My God, am I blind or something?”

“Oh no,” Bea said. “You’re not blind. I’ll swear to that. You’re not blind, all right.”

Rosa shrugged, giving Alberto an indulgent smile. “Is one thing to look at pretty girls. But is another to be in love with them — to want to touch their pretties when you are twice as old.”

Big Juan swallowed hard and turned away to the door again. He did not want them to see his eyes. He could not forget Ruby. That young Ruby, so young, and he had not realized he was getting so old and that girls could be so young, and they were lost to him like the free hot days on the Gulf were lost. He couldn’t get out of his mind the way she had undressed for him, her fingers frantic for she wanted him so terribly, and the way he had stared at her, so pretty and so open to him, and the way he had wanted it and knew nobody had touched her as he would touch her, and the way he had felt himself growing hot, crazy hot in the crazy night, gushing hot in one half-second, worse than some kid on his first date. But worse than seeing her like this was the thought of the mortal sin he had committed. He had run away, he had not done it but in his heart he had done it, wildly and frantically and exultantly he had had her in his heart. He had sinned and his mind was a painful, festering sore. He wished that things people said would not remind him of Ruby. He wished he would not think about Ruby.

The blood stopped throbbing in his temples. It was bad, like the storm brewing far across the Gulf, casting its shadow far ahead over the shallow bay. He realized that Alberto was speaking to him.

“Who is this guy?” Al said. Juan sighed, relieved that the subject had shifted.

“Is this Malcolm Hollister,” Big Juan said.

“Hollister? The contractor?” Al sat down on the edge of a chair. He stared at his parents, thinking they were kidding. “Why, that guy’s got a million dollars. He could buy dolls like Dolores by the dozen — ”

“Then why don’t he do it?” Rosa said. “Some other girls, some other dozen?”

“What would he want with a kid like Dolores?” Al still wasn’t convinced.

“I don’t know,” Big Juan said. “But he has the date with her. Tonight. Every night. She works for him. He drives her home from work. They sit out in his car until past two in the morning. You ask that girl what they talk about? She laughs. She says, who talks? And laughs again. What are we then to think? They are out there in his car, a car plush like a Pullman. A car such as I have never seen up close. They are out there but they are not talking. She admits this. What are we to think?”

For the first time, Bea relaxed. She sat back in the divan, sighing. “Why, Mal Hollister is a gentleman. You ought to be glad Dolores has a crush on him.”

“Shu. A crush. This is all right. To have a crush,” Rosa said. She remembered her own passionate desiring after the young parish priest so many years ago. Nothing came of it, not even the young priest ever suspected but he was the only man beside Big Juan she had loved, and it seemed to her no other passion ever held the same terrible bitter-sweet as that thwarted, secret longing. She shook the memory from her mind. “But this is not the same as a crush. Dolores is running after this Señor Hollister. Shameless. She is crazy for him. She thinks nothing else. Talks nothing else. Eh? What good can come of such a thing?”

“He’s a perfectly wonderful man,” Bea said. “My father knows him.”

“Shu. You father knows him. Dolores’ father knows him. But Dolores is a baby.”

“Look, Bea.” Al’s voice shook. “Hollister might be a wonderful man. A gentleman, you called him. But that’s among people of his own kind. I can tell you, when he’s with a crazy kid like Dolores, he’s after just one thing, and he’s not governed by any rules of conduct that he lives by among his own friends.”

“What do you know about it?” Bea taunted him.

“I know this. I know what I’m married to. My God, some of the people we know. I know what they think of me.”

“Al, you’re a fool.”

“Am I? I get drunk so I can stand some of your friends, so I can live with your mother, good sweet Mother Cunningham. Christ in heaven.” He laughed in an empty, bitter way. “Lord, take just the other night. I came home from a hard day at that damned office. I’d had a few drinks, I was feeling pretty good. I flopped down out in a yard chair. I fell asleep. I woke up, and what do I see? Your mother is sitting straight and rigid in the chair beside me, staring at me with her mouth set and cold. I tell you I almost yelled out loud. I thought I was having some kind of nightmare. And the old woman spends the rest of the evening telling you how can you expect any different when you married somebody like me, and what will the neighbors think, me lolling drunk in the yard chairs. Well, if that’s the way Mother Cunningham feels about me, multiply that by several hundred thousand bucks and you’ll get some inkling what Hollister really thinks about a kid like Dolores — a little nobody with the hots for him. A pants-crazy doll that he can make and then forget.”

Bea seemed not to have heard this last. She was staring at Al, eyes distended. She’d stopped listening when he ceased talking about her mother. “I never heard of anybody as sensitive as you, Al. Why, Mother Cunningham loves you.”

“Sure she does. But wasn’t it her idea that I ought to go to court and change my name?”

Rosa straightened. “Why change you name, Alberto? What have you done?”

“I haven’t done anything. I don’t have to do anything. My name is Venzino. That’s enough. I don’t have to do anything else. All that matters is what the neighbors think. So Bea and her old lady bang away at me. Change it to Vincent. Albert Vincent. Al Vincent. Good ole Al Vincent, the boy with the suntan. Ho boy. And sometimes I think it would be easier. A lot easier.”

“Al, you’re getting all worked up,” Bea said.

“Okay,” Al said. “So get off my back. I know what’s best for my kid sister. I’ll talk to her when she comes home this afternoon. And if that don’t do any good, I’ll talk to that son-of-a-bitch Hollister.”

5

HOLLISTER WATCHED DOLORES cross the office toward him.

He had the uncomfortable feeling that what was happening wasn’t real; he was afraid his eyes were lying even when he knew what he saw had to be true.

It was a disturbing thing but whenever she was around, he didn’t want to take his eyes off her. This was true no matter who was present, or what transactions were in progress, and when a girl is your secretary this can be embarrassing.

Somehow he had to escape this mesmerized condition. He reminded himself that he was thirty-six, divorced, what everybody called a level-headed self-made man with a master’s degree in engineering, and this girl upsetting his whole life was nineteen. But he couldn’t believe this either, because nobody could get that lovely in just nineteen years. Heaven had worked overtime on this girl. Or hell had.

He told himself coldly it was time to look at this whole affair realistically. It was enough just to fall in love, especially after what Stella had done to him. But Dolores was disrupting his business, fouling up his life, giving him an ulcer. There was just one way out and no matter how he tried to keep from facing the truth, he had to admit it at last.

She carried pencils and stenographic pad and for the life of him he couldn’t say why. She ought to be in flowing gossamer robes — she often was in his recent fantasies.

Her hair was blonde — she was a Spanish blonde with features and coloring tracing her lineage straight back to old Castile. Her blood was hot and it stirred his blood. He felt drunk when he looked at her and she was all inside him and unless he did something to end it, he was likely to remain in orbit like this forever, lost in space and off-course to hell. Well, he was going to get back on course.

“What have you got your dictation pad for?” he heard himself saying.

She smiled and she was lovely with soft lips and olive-black eyes. “Didn’t you want to dictate?”

“Do I look nuts?”

She smiled again. “It’s only two in the afternoon.”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

She came around the desk and he stood up, feeling the odd sense of panic her nearness always caused in him.

“What do you want?” he heard this fool saying.

“Everything! Anything! Let me show you.” She laid aside pad and pencils, reaching for his face with both hands.

“Somebody might come in.”

“I locked the door.”

“What did you do that for?” How could such fool words come from the mouth of a reasonably intelligent man?

“For this.” She pulled his head down and kissed him. “And this. And this.” Then she sighed expansively, her breath warm and sweet against his face. “Ah. I’ve been wanting to do that all day.”

“This has got to stop.”

“Why? Don’t you love me?”

“Of course I love you. Don’t you understand that’s what’s the matter?”

She kissed his throat because he held his head stiffly and she could reach only above his shirt collar.

“What’s the matter?” she whispered.

“I’ll just tell you. The matter is I not only have to fight the violent way I want you — I have to fight you at the same time.”

Her lips moved softly as a butterfly. “This is bad?”

“It is for me — the position I’m in.”

“What position are you in, darling?”

“I’m thirty-six. You’re nineteen. I’ve been divorced. You’ve never even been married. Your family would rather I killed you than married you. I know I’ve no right in the world to touch you — and I can’t keep my hands off you.”

She whispered, “I love you when you talk like this. So foolish. So noble.”

“Noble? My God, if you only knew what I’ve been thinking about you.”

“You think I don’t know? Of course I know.”

He muttered. “How could you? You don’t even know about some of the things I’ve been thinking.”

“But I want to know. I want to know everything with you.”

“My God, Dolores. This has got to stop. How long do you think I can stand this?”

“I don’t know, my love. This troubles me. You are so strong — no matter what I do, still you resist me.”

“You make me sound like a bigger ass than I am. I’m only fighting you because I could ruin everything just by grabbing you once the way I want to. The way I’m going to if you don’t get the hell away from me.”

“What do you want me to do?”

She went around the desk, sat down, pulling the hem of her skirt across knees whose dimples were hewn from pure gold. He felt chilled.

He walked to the window, stood looking out at the village. Dead Bay. No movement in the street. A bread truck stood baking in the sun at the curb. Three old men hunched over a checkerboard in the shade outside the drug store. He felt her gaze on him. Why couldn’t he make her understand? He’d had a vile marriage with Stella; she’d cheated, the whole business had been a nightmare of dishonesty, the last thing he wanted. Maybe he was nuts. With Dolores he could envision a clean, honest marriage that would be consummated the night their vows were exchanged. You could make all the jokes you liked about it; there was good on this earth but a man couldn’t throw it away and expect to have anything.

“Maybe I know I can’t have you at all,” he said aloud as if she’d been following the maze of his thoughts.

“Why?”

“Because Big Juan would shoot me before he would let me have you.”

“They don’t know you. If they knew you, they’d love you as I do.”

“Why don’t you quit this job, Dolores?”

She sat forward. “Quit? Leave here? Why?”

“I’ll give you a month’s pay. Two month’s. A year’s. Hell, whatever you want. But quit. Get away from here. Go marry a nice Cuban boy.”

“I don’t want a nice Cuban boy. I want to stay with you.”

“I’m old enough to be your father.”

“I’m glad you’re not.”

“You’re all — clean and new — and virginal — ”

“How do you know?”

“I know. Also I know that every man who ever saw you wanted you. You could have anybody. Suddenly you decide you want me. You must be nuts.”

“Yes. It is a horrible idea, isn’t it?”

“If you don’t think so, ask Rosa Venzino. If she tells you I’m the man for you, I’ll never protest again.”

“Poor Mama.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because she doesn’t know how wonderful you are. How sad you’ve been. How hurt you’ve been … you deserve so much that’s good — I only hope I can be good enough for you.”

He wheeled around. “Stop it, Dolores. You think I would have held you away all these nights sitting out in your backyard if I had thought there was any chance for us — if I hadn’t known there was no sense thinking about you — that you were too lovely to foul up?”

“But I want nobody but you.” Her voice was very low. “If you won’t have me, I’ll walk down Main Street and I’ll give myself to the first man that asks me.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“It’s true. I know all about you. You’re afraid you’ll hurt me — afraid they won’t let me marry you.”

“Exactly. That’s why the whole thing has got to stop. I — won’t see you again.”

She stood up. “All right. The first man — the very first man that asks me.”

He strode to her, touched her arm. She remained rigid. “Cut it out. I’m nuts enough. Stop torturing me.”

“You’re torturing yourself. You’re torturing both of us.”

“I’m trying to be honest with you.”

“Then don’t. I’m not afraid of you. I’m only afraid of losing you.”

“Oh, lord.” He dropped his hands. “What are you doing tonight?”

“I don’t know yet,” she replied with simple honesty. “What are we doing?”

He shook his head; this made it worse: no girl could be this young, this honest. Yet he’d learned Dolores was utterly without pretenses. Once, at first, he’d decided it was a game with her, that it pleased her ego to have him walking on the ceiling, jingling change in his pocket, fumbling for words. He could have sworn she was laughing at him. She had to be. He’d be laughing at himself if he could stop crying inside long enough.

His mouth pulled wryly. He no longer believed her direct and simple honesty was a game. She was nineteen, sought after, but first above everything she was virginal. From earliest girlhood she’d wanted the kind of happiness her mother had, and Rosa had drilled into her that a girl must take her body untouched to the one man for her. It was not just something Dolores believed; it was a vital part of her, coloring everything she did.

“You do want to go out with me, don’t you?” she said.

He nodded, smiling sourly, gaze fixed on her face.

Dolores looked up at him wondering at his odd smile. He seemed possessed of some knowledge about her and it troubled her that anyone, even Mal, should know her most intimate secrets.

Finally, he pulled his gaze away thinking, it’s all right, Dolores, your secret is safe with me.

“I was thinking about something special,” he said. “I’m tired sitting out in your backyard with your folks wandering around in the dark.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I knew you’d get tired of me sometime.”

“Tired of you? I’m tired of that car. Tired of glancing around for the moon and finding Big Juan’s face peering in at me.”

“It’s just — they don’t trust you.”

“You don’t have to tell me what it is. Just the same, I was thinking that tonight we could have soft music, a good dinner with wine, and a view, maybe candles and — ”

The telephone beside him rang suddenly and he tensed, startled. Dolores smiled when he cursed.

The phone rang again and he lifted it. He listened a moment and his face went white. “For Christ’s sake, Stella. What do you want?”

He saw Dolores breathe deeply. Dolores knew Stella was his ex-wife. He’d have been pleased if he’d thought Dolores jealous, but he’d learned from life with Stella that there need not be anything personal about a woman’s possessiveness. Often she disliked another woman’s wanting you even when she personally couldn’t use you.

Stella said, “I want to talk to you, Mal.”

He scowled, a lean, tall man with green eyes bitter with old hurts, an easy-smiling mouth. “You couldn’t have called at a more inopportune moment, Stella, not even if you’d tried.”

“You think I didn’t try?”

He covered the speaker with his hand. “Take the afternoon off, Dolores. “I’ll be by your place for you about seven.”

Dolores nodded and stood up. She looked pale, hurt. He felt a sudden sense of frustration. It was as though Stella was clinging to him across this line. He’d make it up to Dolores tonight. He’d make up everything tonight.

He watched her walk away from him, close the door behind herself.

Stella said, “Where are you?”

“I’m here.” All the life had gone out of his voice. “What did you want, Stella?”

“Well, aren’t you abrupt?”

“Cut it, Stella. I’m your ex-husband. By request. Nothing more. It’s that way. I want it that way.”

“All right. I need some money.”

“Impossible. You’re in to me for more now than I ever got from you if it had been virgin platinum — and it wasn’t — either one.”

“Don’t be nasty. The routine was all pretty familiar to you, too.”

“Flattery, Stella? Now? After all we’ve done to each other?”

“I warned you to stay out of the courtroom, darling.”

“Well, you’ll never get me in another one.”

“I might, lover, unless you agree to up my alimony.”

“I’ll see you in hell — ”

“If I get there first, I’ll wait for you. Meantime, I need some money.”

“No.”

“Then we’ve got to meet. We’ve got to talk about this.”

“Impossible. We’ve nothing to say.”

“I’ll send my lawyer.”

“Well, that’s better than coming yourself, I admit.”

Hollister parked his Cadillac Coupe de Ville in the drive at the side of his house overlooking Dead Bay. He paused, glancing from this bluff where his fifteen-room house stood, across to the darkling sky over the Gulf, the calm circle of the bay and the roofs of the village to the east of him. Stella had wanted this place as a hideaway, she’d told him. The only item she neglected to mention was that she’d wanted it so she could hide away from him.

He shook his head, trying to escape the bitterness that always suffused him after any interview with Stella. It darkened the world, clouded his viewpoint. He always realized what a sucker Stella considered him. She had taken him, but good. And the worst part of it was the way she’d laughed as she twisted the knife.

He moved across the walk, entering the house through the rear door. He couldn’t really blame Stella. He had been a man running, driven. His father had been wealthy, the kind of wealthy that means passage to Europe on a whim, twenty-thousand dollar parties to celebrate a long shot winning an obscure race, losing money just to beat the income tax. But by the time Mal reached high school all the wealth was gone, everything was gone, including his old man. All that remained was the desire to be somebody, to make that name respected as it once had been. God knew, he worked all the time; he’d worked his way through a university to which his father had given two dorms and an engineering building; he’d been obsessed by a need to have more money and more clothes and more cars than anyone he knew. He began by underbidding contractors on state jobs, forcing his will on others. It had consumed fifteen long years but he had piled it up. He had almost a million dollars and more to come, and he had lost his wife. She had crossed him and cheated him in every way and he didn’t blame her. You could say what you wanted, when a marriage ruptured, it tore apart from the inside, always.

The cook turned when he entered the kitchen. Her stout face was white. “Why, Mr. Mal, you frightened me.”

Mal grinned. “Why? What were you stealing?”

The butler, man-of-all-work, was sitting at the kitchen table eating pie heaped with ice cream. He laughed, spewing ice cream from his mouth. The cook was his wife.

Mal put his arm about Mrs. Harker’s broad shoulders. “Did those things I ordered arrive?”

She nodded. “What a feast you’re planning.”

“Right, Harker. And for two.”

“Two?” the cook’s husband looked up from his ice cream. “I thought it was a banquet anyhow.”

Perhaps it is, Mal thought with that chill of bitterness. Maybe it’ll be the banquet where the big bad wolf eats Little Red Riding Hood before she turns out to be Stella’s sister under the skin and devours him first.

“It may be,” Hollister said. “But there are only two of us to be there.”

“Fine,” Mrs. Harker said. “I’m glad you’re getting interested in some fine girl — ”

“Interested is a mild word for what’s afflicting me,” Hollister said. He was in love with a girl half his age, a girl whose parents would rather see her dead than married to him, a girl that was begging him to take her and with whom he’d been the soul of honor. Me. Stella’s cast-off. Who was he kidding?

“Wonderful. I always said you could be happy with some nice girl — if only she gave you half a chance.”

“That’s enough, Reeva,” her husband’s voice was sharp. Mrs. Harker had always hated Stella. Harker didn’t mind as long as she kept her views in the kitchen.

Hollister spoke to the butler. “I want dinner served on the closed terrace. A table for two — ”

“With candles,” Mrs. Harker said.

“I want the view,” Hollister admitted the view of this bay was new neither to him nor Dolores but there was always the chance that seeing it together would make it new for both of them. A man had to hope for something. He’d been planning to sell this place until he saw Dolores Venzino working in the Dead Bay branch office. Well, he’d had enough sentimental thoughts. He was thirty-six, this girl was nineteen, she was throwing herself at him and only one thing could come of it — and that might as well be tonight.

He shivered, wondering why he hated himself.

He went over each detail of the menu with Mrs. Harker, including wines, their temperature and the precise moment when Harker should serve them. He left nothing to chance. He never had in the last fifteen years.

When he was sure the dinner would be what both of them would enjoy, and would make Dolores smile with pleasure, he walked into the oversized living room that opened upon a closed terrace with view of forest, bay and Gulf. Candles and moonlight would make it irresistibly lovely. The ideal setting for the moment when a girl learned the hard facts of life, he told himself coldly, trying to forget how terribly, how tenderly, he loved her. He felt his hands sweating.

Going into the music library he chose records for three hours of uninterrupted background. Everything had to be right, something had to give. This girl was making an idiot of him: he could hear Stella’s distant laughter, taunting, full of contempt. Stella had made a sucker of him, this girl would too, give her time. She already had — wasn’t he a fool trying to control all his natural impulses? Well, he was tired playing the clown, tired believing in that goodness that always meant so much to him. He couldn’t go on, a walking zombie like this, trying to out-think the politicians and unable to think about anything except Dolores. This had to be the night.

6

ROSA WAS CRYING as she washed out some clothes over a tub in the back yard. She couldn’t make her nose stop running.

She swallowed, vision blurred. Her hand slipped on the scrub board and she uttered a blasphemy, quickly crossing herself. She needed an electric washer, that was what she needed, even the manual wringer type would be nice. There were reasons she never mentioned such a machine. No sense worrying Juan. If he knew she wanted an electric washer, it would worry him until he found some way to get it for her. And she knew what way he would find. He would go deeper into debt.

And it might start him talking about going out in the Gulf in one of his rotting boats to find that treasure — this treasure would solve all their woes. Aiee. She’d been hearing about this treasure so long. Sometimes she even believed perhaps — truly if talking about a thing made it so …

She sniffled and wiped her red raw knuckles across her nose leaving a trail of suds. She blew at it, sticking out her underlip.

“Rosa.”

She hadn’t heard Juan approach behind her. She caught her apron in her fist, wiped at her face, trying to wipe away the traces of her crying.

“You need a washer,” Juan said. “We got a TV. You got no washer.”

“Is all right. I love that TV.”

“Al and Bea,” he said. “Where did they go?”

“In to the A and ? store to buy something to eat. They said there was nothing in the house.”

He spread his hands. “Funny, I had no idea we have nothing to eat in the house.”

Rosa said, “Shu. For that one of Al’s we have nothing. You should know we have nothing for Miss Lace Drawers.”

“She’s a good girl.”

Rosa shrugged.

“The Cunninghams. They have done a lot for our son. He makes plenty of money, I bet.”

She shrugged again.

“One of these days,” Juan said. “I get an aqua-lung. A cheap one, even. I no longer need pumps and all that stuff. This is for the weak. When I get that treasure, you see. I buy us a fine new boat, and a washing machine.”

But his face was drawn, he could work up no enthusiasm.

Rosa’s protest was only half-hearted. “You must not do this, Juan. Suppose something happen to you? What would I do if something happened to you? I am to find another man like you — and I have not seen one in thirty years?”

“Maybe you better — without a man like me.” His voice was flat. He sighed. “You think Al can talk to this man — this Hollister?”

“Alberto is a fine man, Papa. He is smart. He’s selling insurance all the time. He knows the thing to say. You let him handle, Papa.” Her voice was troubled now, all her worries pressing to the surface.

“I worry. What can Alberto do?”

“Is not Alberto I worry about. Alberto will talk with him. It is you — what you might do, Papa.”

Juan looked down at his fists. They were clenched and he had not even known he’d balled them up. The terrible thoughts he had troubled him more all the time.

“You let Alberto handle, Papa?” There was pleading in Rosa’s voice.

“Something got to be done.” He was not speaking to her but to his fists.

She touched his clenched hands, caressing them, willing them to relax.

“Maybe — like Bea said, Papa, this Hollister not be as bad as we think…. maybe he be good for her, eh, Papa?”

His voice grew hard. “You know better. A man like that — a man with money like that. And you know what else he is. You know better.”

She nodded. She knew better.

They saw Dolores cross the yard from the shell road, going toward the house. She waved to them but did not stop. Her smile brightened the yard for Juan. He moved to follow her into the house.

Rosa caught his arm. “Papa. Let me talk to her a minute. You do this for me?”

Dolores was undressing when Rosa came into her bedroom. It was a small room, overcrowded with a chest of drawers and a twin bed. Big Juan had added this room for Dolores when she was fourteen and old enough for privacy. Old pictures of movie stars were pasted on the walls, and figures of Christ on Calvary and the Blessed Virgin. The mirror over the chest was old and smoky.

Dolores gave her mother a smile.

Rosa sat on the bed, watching Dolores. “I have something for you, mi corazon.”

“What is it, Mama?” Dolores was hurried. Her slip was too tight across her breasts and hips and she was searching in the top drawer for a newer one. What she suspected was true: there was none.

“This, darling. I want you should have it.”

She held up her beads. They were expensive, an heirloom from her grandmother.

Dolores stopped rummaging in her dresser. She turned and leaned against it, frowning. “Why, Mama, you don’t want to give me those beads.”

“I do. I want you should have them. I was much younger than you when they were given to me. When I die, you will get them. Why not now?”

“Because you are young, because you are not going to die. Why, Mama, you are younger than I am.”

“When you go to church,” Rosa persisted. “It is nice to have such rich beads.”

Dolores bit her lip. “When I go to church. Mama, stop worrying about me. Please.”

“Worrying? What is this worrying? I want you should have these.”

Dolores sighed. “Oh, Mama, I know. You want to remind me of religion. Of the church. Why don’t you just come out and say it?”

Rosa sat straighter on the bed, a look of righteous indignation pulling at her face. “All right. I say it then, to you. You must say it to yourself many times. But I say it, if you want so bad to hear it. He is divorce. He is divorced man. He is divorce.”

Dolores spread her hands, eyes hurt. “And I love him.”

“A sin. You love a sin. A man that would live in sin.”

“Mama. He doesn’t look at it the way we do.”

“No. Oh, no.” She gave a laugh that called herself a woman of the world. “I know how he looks at it, all right. It is plain enough how this one looks at it. A little bit of fun, eh?”

“Oh, Mama. Please, let’s not fight.”

“Is not fight. Is trying to make you see what already you got to see inside. This man is not like you.”

“Bea Cunningham was not like Alberto, either. But you didn’t fight Alberto.”

“Shu. Bea is a lovely Catholic girl. And she is not in divorce, either. It is not the same. What will the people we know think of you — a man that is divorce.”

“Mama.” Dolores’ voice was weary. It was as if she’d gone through all this with herself so often she was already fatigued. “Mama, didn’t you ever do anything that might seem a sin to other people — but that for you — you knew it was right for you?”

“Divorce.” Rosa’s face twisted. “A divorced man. This man is not free. And in your heart you know he is not free…. This is a mortal sin that you take so light.”

“Mama, you’re not answering me. I asked you. I asked you a question. Didn’t you ever do anything wrong — that you knew was wrong?”

Rosa’s eyes brimmed with tears. She was more miserable than ever. “This is a sin against God.” But she was remembering the young parish priest so long ago and the way she’d felt about him. She had not loved him as a father, as all the parishioners should, but with the young, urgent, itching kind of desire that waked her up in the night with his name on her lips and nothing to make her sleep again but the touch of his hands and she did not have his hands, and she could not have them, and she did not sleep. In her heart dwelt this sin, bigger even than her heart.

“It is a sin,” Rosa said again. But her voice was weak. But understanding Dolores’ sin didn’t change it, didn’t make it less a mortal sin. “It is a sin.” This time her voice was stronger.

Dolores paced the room slowly. At last she spoke. “All right. It is a sin. But I live if I love Mal. I die if I don’t. I am young, Mama. I want to live. I want to love him.”

Rosa caught her arm, her mouth pulled down. “You want you papa to do something terrible?” She hissed the words. “This is what will happen. Nights, you papa does not sleep. In the day, his face is turned away so I will not see the thoughts in his face. Shu … but I know. The way he hates … the things he might do … and we must lose you papa because you must have this sin — this divorce man!”

• • •

Al walked back and forth before the divan where Dolores sat with Rosa. Bea was in a chair facing them. He could see Dolores’ mind was closed against anything he could say. He recognized the look, he’d seen it in the faces of obdurate insurance prospects.

“Look, kid. If there was anything going to come of this, I’d be the first one to yell and cheer for you. All your life, have I been on your side or not?”

Dolores chewed at her lip but did not answer.

Al said, “Look, kid. This guy. He wants a good time, that’s all. Looking at it from his angle, maybe you can’t blame him. It’s just that he picked on you — and we can’t have that.”

“I love him. He loves me.”

“Kid, no. He’s a business man, a widower — ”

“A divorced man,” Rosa said.

Al hurried on, “A man looking for a good time. You think he loves you. But he’s not interested in getting married, eh?”

“That’s not what he says,” Dolores answered. She smiled wanly, remembering what Mal had said, the way he had held her.

Al threw up his hands. “What he says. What he says. Right there you prove what a kid you are. Quit believing what a man says. Believe what he does.”

“Amen,” Bea said. “You just got the word from the master.”

“Stay out of this, Bea,” Al said. It was a mechanical response by now. He leaned over Dolores again. “Kid, this guy ain’t being honest with you. Men like that who play around with young girls are doing just that — playing around, for God’s sake. Maybe at first they don’t even mean any harm — ”

“Is that the way you start, Al, not meaning any harm?” Bea inquired.

Al straightened, turning, gentle eyes blazing. “All right, Bea. Maybe it is. Jesus knows I live at home with a woman who wants a swimming pool in the backyard and a membership in the country club and she wants twin beds — ”

“That’s between us, Al.”

“Then stay out of this. You know nothing. Sex to you is a dirty word. It’s for husbands and whores.”

“The master speaks.”

Al sighed. He turned his back on Bea again. “I’m trying to help you, Dolores. What Hollister says to you don’t matter. I’m telling you if you could see clearly right now, the things he says wouldn’t even make sense. You’d die laughing.”

“I’m not laughing,” Dolores said. “I’m not laughing at you, either, Al. I don’t think you ought to talk about him. Not until you know.”

“What’s to know, for God’s sake?” He prowled the rug. “His wife divorced him. He’s found out he can play around with anybody he wants to. So he found you. You’re too good for this kind of thing, Dolores. Too nice. Be a smart kid and tell him where to go.”

“I love him.”

“Love. What do you know about love?”

“Listen to Dorothy Dix,” Bea said. “Ask Abby. Get the word from Ann Landers. Old know-it-all.”

“I know Mal Hollister,” Al said.

“Sure you do. How do you know him? You play golf with him? You visit with him?”

“I don’t have to know him personally, for God’s sake. I know the type.”

“Al, why don’t you butt out of this?” Bea said. She looked at her wrist watch. “I want to go home.”

Al yelled at her. “You want to let it drag on until Papa does something we’ll all be sorry for?”

“I want to go home,” Bea said again. She could not believe that Juan would resort to violence. People just didn’t do such things.

“Then go home, goddamn it,” Al yelled. “You don’t need me. Your twin bed will be just as cold after you get in it as it is now — ”

Bea said, “Stop talking like this, Al. Stop taking out all your old hatreds on Malcolm Hollister.”

“I’m not taking out my hates on anybody.” Al’s voice sank to a hoarse whisper. “You and me. We’re married. All that matters now is what the neighbors think. Okay. I married you. It’s for the rest of my life. But I’m not going home while some guy is trying to mess up my kid sister. Something’s got to be done. I want to be sure it’s the right thing. I’m staying until it’s done.”

“Al, you promised — ”

Al ignored her. “Won’t you listen to me, Dolores?”

She shook her head. “You’re wrong, Al. You’re all wrong about him.” She stood up. “You’re all going to get to meet him tonight when he comes. You’ll see how wrong you are.”

“We’re older than you are, kid,” Al said. “Why should we all be wrong and you right?”

Dolores smiled and stroked his cheek. “I don’t know why,” she said, teasing, “but there it is.”

She looked at them, their faces set against her. She forced herself to smile. “You’ll see,” she said. “All of you will see. When he gets here.”

The screen door slammed and little Luis came in, cut leg dirtily bandaged. “Sis,” he shouted at Dolores. “You got company.”

“Mal.” She whispered it involuntarily, in panic. It couldn’t be so late. She looked around, frantic.

“Naw,” Luis said from the door. “It ain’t the one in the big new car. It’s Ric. He says he’ll wait for you out on the front steps.”

Dolores stood in the middle of the room, wanting to laugh and cry at the same instant. All their faces had relaxed now, and they were smiling with satisfaction. Ric Suarez was out there, waiting. Right now she could even believe they had sent for him. Damn. She had thought things couldn’t get worse. This just proved how much she knew about it.

7

BIG JUAN CAME UP from the piers, carrying freshly cleaned mullet in a pan. He stopped on the porch where Dolores stood with Ric. “Ho, Ric,” he said. “Good to see you. We don’t see enough of you around here.”

“You know how it is, Mr. Venzino. I’m busy at the lodge — and well, sometimes I ask Dolores,” Ric glanced at her, frowning. “And she puts me off.”

“You don’t pay no attention to her. Hey? What girl this age knows what she wants, eh?”

“Papa. Why don’t you go talk to Al — or something?”

Big Juan gave Ric a sheepish grin. “Yeah. Sure. Leave you two alone, huh? Nice a young guy be alone with a pretty girl, eh?”

“We don’t know, Papa,” Dolores said. “Who would know around here?”

Big Juan moved toward the door, paused, stopped. “Ric. You stay for supper with us, yes?”

“Maybe Ric has something else to do, Papa,” Dolores said.

“Ho. What else he got to do? You stay, Ric? Right?”

Ric glanced uncertainly at Dolores.

“If — Doll wants me to,” he said. “Why sure, I’d like that fine.” He was watching her face.

Dolores was angered. It showed clearly in her black eyes. She averted her face, and then thought, why shouldn’t he stay? Why not? Stay if you want to. I won’t be here.

• • •

She sat on the top step, hands locked about her knees, watching him ramble about the front porch with the nervous energy that would never let him sit still, that had him forever fiddling with something, pulling at light cords in lamps, fussing with strings on mats, worrying the catch on the door. His hands were never still. It was as if Ric would not be able to endure the boredom of who he was and what he knew himself to be if he stood still long enough to think about it.

“Had a real live one today,” Ric said.

“What?”

“A hunting party. Came to the place last night, as a matter of fact. Fellow swore he knew me when I played for the Bears. Beats me. I never saw the guy before, you know?” He shook his head and paced the room. “This guy. Don’t even look a little familiar. And I got a pretty good memory for faces, you know — ”

“You must have seen an awful lot of faces.”

“When I played for the Bears, you mean? Yeah. Only, this guy I never saw. You know what I think? I mean, you know?”

“What?” Why wouldn’t he go home? Why wouldn’t he admit to himself that the summer she had loved him had been a lot of winters ago — he’d been a sophomore back-field sensation in Dead Bay High. She’d been just a kid. Since then he’d been a sensation for the University, for the Bears. A lot of winters ago.

“I mean I think some of these characters may have seen me play football. You know? And maybe somewhere, maybe they’ve seen my picture — maybe in the papers. And they decide because they know what I look like and have seen me play football, they figure they know me and I oughta know them. You think maybe that’s it?”

“I’m sure of it. You’re a pretty famous guy, Ric.”

“Yeah.” His voice was flat. He was no longer impressed with his type of fame. He slapped his big fist into the palm of his hand. “Looks like then I could make a go of this hunting camp idea of mine … I tell you, Dolores, I never had a idea that looked so good when I got it. I ever tell you when I got this here idea of a hunting camp?”

She nodded but he didn’t notice. He paced the front porch, bumped the old swing with his knee and then sidestepped it when it returned. She watched him fiddling with the flowers Rosa grew in coffee cans. He’d very likely uproot them without knowing he did it.

“I was playing football. With the Bears.” He turned and glanced at her. “I guess when you used to watch me play for the little old high school in this dump you’d never think some day Ric Suarez would be playing for the Bears. Huh?”

“I knew you’d do something wonderful, Ric. Whatever you wanted to do.”

He was silent a long time. He’d forgotten the hunting camp idea born to him when he was playing football for the Bears.

“No. I never done a damn thing I wanted to do. I wanted something … something big and exciting that I could do … I used to get that feeling. I felt like that when I used to play football in high school. I liked them notices I got. I liked having coaches and sports writers come as far as from Miami just to watch me play. They used to clown with me before the games in the locker room, and kid me to make me mad so I would brag before the game how many points I was going to score — maybe twenty-one or twelve — or whatever I had that feeling about in me — I always had this feeling before the game how many points I could make if I wanted to. Mostly, I’d keep it inside me. But they got on to how they could rag me and I would tell them what I was going to do in that game — and then I would go out and do it.”

“I know.”

“Sure. I got the rep for having a swell head. But it wasn’t like that, Doll. You know me. I’m no swell head. Really what I am is a guy who wants something real bad — something that half the time I don’t even know what it is I want, you know?”

“It’s all right, Ric. You’re young. You can still be anything you want.”

“No.” He shivered visibly. “No. When the Bears fired me … I knew then I’d had it. All I was ever going to be was in back of me when they fired me. I felt just the same, and I would look at myself at night standing naked in my hotel room and I looked just the same, but I just didn’t have it any more. And it got through to me that I was finished. Just like I was an old man.”

“You drank, Ric.”

She made this statement without hint of rancor, without making it in any sense an accusation. If he were smart enough to understand he would know from this that she didn’t love him. If she loved him, his drinking would worry her and she might try to change him, or improve him. If she loved him she would want him to be better than he was. But she didn’t care. He was a stranger and his drinking was his own business, and though because he was a friend, she might wish he would quit his drinking, she didn’t truly care. Why couldn’t he be smart enough to see this?

He nodded. “Yeah. I was adjusted. Is that what you call it? I was a good guy. Everybody liked Ric Suarez. I didn’t even like to drink at first. But I could get along with people I didn’t even like when I drank. I forgot what my old man had been — and what I was afraid I was going to be. All it took was a few drinks. Everything was lovely then. Yeah. I drank.”

“That’s what happened to you and the Bears.”

He shook his head. “No. That’s what they thought, and that’s what you think. But drinking wasn’t the reason. It wasn’t what finished me. I was already finished when I started drinking — and because I knew I was finished, I started drinking heavy.”

“What?”

“Sure.” He walked to the steps and stood in front of her. “You think I would have touched anything that would have hurt my football when I was here in high school — or even the first year I was at the University? But — that was when I found out. That first year up there.” He shook his head, ran his hand across his face.

She frowned. “Found out what, Ric?”

“That I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do no more. I quit the University when the Bears offered me a job. You know why? Because I knew then. I already knew in my heart that if I stayed three more years at the University, the Bears wouldn’t want me. Nobody wouldn’t want me.”

“Ric. What are you talking about?”

“About what I wanted. I found out I didn’t want to play football any more. When I went to the University on a football scholarship, I was proud because I was going to take up engineering. Old Mal Hollister was going to take me in with his construction company — ”

Old Mal Hollister. Dolores chewed her lip, Mal wasn’t old, at thirty-six he was younger in every way than Ric Suarez. She averted her, gaze, watching the horizon darken with grumbling storm clouds. She didn’t want Ric to see her eyes even though she was aware he wasn’t discerning enough to read her annoyance in them.

“Why didn’t you take it?” She managed to keep her voice level.

“Engineering? Because. My God, don’t you know? I didn’t have it. Engineering is tough. It took brains I didn’t even have. It was pulling my grades down so low the coach wanted me to take something easier.” He laughed suddenly. “It had problems you had to figure out with a slide rule. Hell, I couldn’t even figure out the slide rule.”

He laughed again but it was a hard, painful sound, torn from his throat. “And college football … It was a business. Like professional football. Just like it. Some of the boys they hired and brought in there came from schools that had restrooms bigger than the whole damn Dead Bay High. Those guys were sharp and mean in close. They were out to kill, because it was their job, and this was a business. Man, I was easy meat for them. They tore me up. Only one thing kept me going. I was still fool enough to think I could get what I wanted. So I fought back at these football sharpies. I looked good. But it wasn’t costing these sharpsters anything — and me? It was killing me to keep up with them. My God, I was only able to keep moving at all because of gallons of liniment. They killed me and they weren’t even pressed to do it. And you know what? There I was — forcing myself to look a little bit better — but all the time it was taking out of me more than I had in me.”

“Oh, Ric.”

“So. Hell. I got this chance to go pro. I mean really pro. It was all pro at the University. But I took the job with the Bears because I knew by then. I knew I didn’t have a prayer in engineering and here was a chance to pick up some fast dough so maybe in a year or two I could latch on to some kind of business. You know? But I had to live with myself, and to do that, I had to drink. But drinking wasn’t what finished me — no matter what you believe — I drank because I was already finished and I couldn’t stand to stay sober knowing it.”

“Oh, Ric. It can’t be that bad.”

He laughed in that bitter way. “Oh, yes, it can. It’s a lot worse. Because all my life I wanted something better than I could have — better schools, better clothes, better cars, a bigger drunk. Oh my God. I don’t know how to say it. But it’s like I’m still a dirty little kid playing down there on the beach at the bay and reaching for something that’s way out on one of them islands. Inside I know I can’t ever reach what I want. But God, how I want it.”

“Give yourself time, Ric. You’ll find what you want.”

“Oh no. I found what I wanted. Years ago, when I was the biggest guy this high school ever turned out. When they gave parties, they were always really for me, and I walked in with you on my arm. I had what I wanted — a blonde Cuban girl that loved me. And I was crazy about her. Wasn’t ever anybody else for me, Dolores.”

“I’m sorry, Ric.”

He stared at her. “Sure. Because I knew I had to be better than I was ever to get you. Why you think I fought them bastards at the University team? I had to stay there — I had to stay alive and on that scholarship so I could make something of myself so you would be proud of me, and I could give you something you wanted and deserved.”

“Oh, Ric — ”

“You’re all that keeps me going, Doll. I know. I’m just a bum. Sure, I own a fishing and hunting lodge. Pretty ritzy. I sell enough beer to keep going, once in a while I get a party of swells, and I make enough for taxes and all the other son-of-a-bitching costs of just staying alive. That ain’t what I want, Doll. You know? I want you. I always wanted you. Right from the first — ”

“That was such a long time ago, Ric.”

“A long time ago? It’s right now. You’re a hurting ache right in my guts, Dolores. You think Big Juan loves Rosa, huh? That’s kid stuff. I hurt, Dolores. At night alone, wanting you and knowing I got nothing to offer you.”

“That wouldn’t matter, Ric, if — ”

“If?” He stared at her. “If what? What you mean?”

“Oh, Ric. We were children. It was so long ago.”

“What? What? When you loved me?” He shook his head. “Dolores!” He yelled at her, his voice ringing so the dogs and the children down at the bay were suddenly quiet, listening. “You can’t throw me over. It’s you that’s kept me going. I been beat, Dolores. I been beat down hard, but I took it. Because — I thought I still had you. I can’t lose you, Dolores. That would take every last thing away from me. I can’t take that, Dolores. I can’t take that.”

8

MAL HOLLISTER PARKED his Coupe de Ville in the turn-off behind Juan Venzino’s house. Dusk was boiling up gray from the saw grass flats. He got out of his car, glancing toward the clouds banked black and threatening on the western horizon. Abrupt lightning flashes ripped them and revealed them swollen, smoky-white for an instant, and then they were blacker than ever.

He walked toward the house. The storm clouds meant there’d be no moon tonight. At thirty-six, he no longer had any use for the moon, but Dolores was young and young girls responded to nocturnal niceties. It mildly irritated him that he couldn’t order the night precisely as he desired it.

He saw an indeterminate number of cypress-brown children of all ages and sexes watching him from the corner of the house, nudging each other and giggling, pointing at him.

He couldn’t censure their inordinate interest in him. He admitted he looked rather attractive; it had taken him a long time to dress tonight and he’d done it carefully and tastefully.

One stocky child moved away from the others and approached him in a determined but timid manner, like a skittish colt searching for lump sugar.

Hollister saw that the boy was built like Big Juan but very tiny, with a pirate’s black eyes and a dirty rag tied around a deep wound in his leg.

The child came across the yard slowly, arms at his sides, looking Hollister over minutely, warily.

“There’s another one here already,” the child said at last.

Hollister paused, looking down at the dark-haired child. “That right?”

The child nodded. “It’s Ric. He’s been here a long time. Got here a long time before you.”

“Oh?”

“They asked him to stay to supper.”

“That’s good. He’s very fortunate.”

“They like him.”

“I’m sure he’s a fine fellow.”

“He’s big in football … in what are you big?”

Hollister shook his head. “Not me. I’m not big in anything.”

The child did not look astonished at this. He nodded solemnly.

“You look pretty nice,” he said in a kindly way. “Not all of us can be big in football.”

“Thank you.”

“Your eyes are not frightening.”

“No.”

“They — ” he jerked his head toward the children at the corner of the house. They watched, awed. “They said you had terrible eyes — frightening.”

“But they’re not so bad, huh?”

“To me they look very kind.”

“Why, that’s very nice of you,” Hollister said. He paused, searching for a name. “Son, which one of Juan’s boys are you?”

The little sun-darkened face got a crafty look and he grinned in a secret way. “I’m the one that can swim to that island out there. The biggest island.”

“But I like you. What do I call you?”

The imp’s face pulled into a pleased grin, and Hollister saw he’d been led into a trap by a cunning mind very proud of itself.

“Call me anything, mister. I don’t care what you call me just so you call me in time for dinner.”

The child laughed immoderately at this, watching Hollister’s face to see the effect of his bon mot on him.

Hollister laughed, too. This pleased the child and he laughed even louder. Hollister stared at the small hard body racking with Spanish-accented laughter over this joke.

Hollister said, “I’ll bet this is a joke you learned from Big Juan?”

The boy stopped laughing. “Him? Where would a man of his years get a new joke like this?”

“Oh? This is a new joke?”

“Sure. I just heard it.”

Hollister nodded, moved to go around the child. The boy touched at his leg. “Mister.”

“Yeah?”

“I just told you a fine new joke. Don’t you know a new joke you could tell me?”

Hollister considered. “I don’t know. You didn’t tell me your name. But — it’s all right…. Tell me, how did you get that cut on your leg?”

“A sting ray. But you should see what I do to this sting ray.”

“You let a sting ray stick you like that? Boy, if you had brains you’d be dangerous.”

The child hesitated, then recognized the joke, saw he’d been neatly trapped as he in turn had trapped the man. His mouth opened, showing gleaming teeth, and he laughed loudly, the sound racketing against the house.

“Mister, this is a fine joke.” He hesitated. “Is it new?”

“Did you ever hear it before?”

The child shook his head.

“Then it’s new.” Hollister walked toward the house. The child ran toward the other children to test his new joke. Then he stopped, returned to Hollister, caught his sleeve, looking up with friendly black eyes.

“Mister. My name is Luis.”

• • •

When Mal Hollister stopped in the yard to chat with Luis, thirteen-year-old Linda ran around the house and up the steps, going past Ric Suarez who was sprawled in a straw-bottomed rocker. Ric glanced at her, thinking she was growing up pretty fast.

He called to her, inviting her to sit in his lap, but she had more urgent matters on her mind. She tossed him a smile that carried voltage she didn’t even suspect.

The screen door slammed as she went through.

Ric sighed, staring at the storm clouds, feeling the charged silence that pushed in ahead of the storm across the bay. He remembered when Doll had looked much like Linda, but blonde.

He felt like crying and could not say why.

• • •

Linda said, “He’s here. He’s coming across the yard. This time he does not sit in the car. He’s coming into the house.”

Dolores pressed both hands against her glowing face. “It’s Mal. I’ve been home all afternoon and haven’t had a chance to get dressed.” She ran to her bedroom and slammed the door. It opened again at once. “Tell him I won’t be a minute.”

She closed the door again.

Big Juan’s hands were opening and closing.

“Why does he come in tonight?” he said. “What does he want?”

“Let him come in,” Al said. His voice had a taut quality. “Give me a chance to talk to him.”

“No,” Bea said. “Not now, Al. You’re all wrought-up. You’ve got to think it over. You’ve got to calm down.”

“Stay out of this, Bea.”

“I won’t stay out of it. Now, come on. You and I — we’ll go for a walk down by the bay.”

“You hate the bay.”

“I hate scenes worse. I hate it worse for you to say things when you won’t even know what you’re saying. Come on, AI.” Her voice was hard, determined. She stood looking down at him.

Al glanced helplessly at Juan and Rosa.

“All right, Alberto,” Rosa said. “You papa and me talk with him. Later maybe you got to see him.”

“Sure,” Bea said. “Later.”

Al got up. His pale face was tense but his hands were trembling and he suspected that maybe Bea was right. He might say too much. He was charged with anger. He wanted to say the right things. It was important they be right. He glanced toward Dolores’ closed door, frowning. Still, something had to be said. This man had to be made to see before he did something he could not recall — and Big Juan retaliated in a violent way none of them could repair.

He swallowed hard, following Bea from the room.

They met Mal Hollister coming up the front steps. Bea closed her hand hard over Al’s. They stepped aside and Hollister bowed slightly, smiling.

Bea said, “Good evening, Mr. Hollister.”

She heard Al’s savage breathing. She tightened her grip on his hand. From the chair they heard Ric Suarez grunt something. But Ric was not Bea’s responsibility. She had all she could handle with Al.

“Go right in,” Bea said to Hollister. “Dolores will be ready in a minute.”

“Thank you,” Hollister said. And Bea thought, he has such a nice, gentle voice. She dragged Al after her, hurrying toward the bay, the stinking, smelly bay. She was going to ruin a perfectly good pair of shoes walking in that wet sand.

9

JUAN STRODE AROUND the chair in which Mal Hollister sat, staring at the cut of his features, the texture of his suit, the gold of his watch — or so it seemed to Mal.

What was the man looking for? Hollister thought he was an ordinary kind of character; maybe he’d dressed carefully tonight, hoping to impress Dolores, but certainly he looked no different than usual.

Juan shrugged his denim shirt up on his shoulders. It was unbuttoned almost to his navel. He wore no shoes. The quality of Hollister’s clothing angered him because it did not belong in this room, any more than Hollister belonged here.

“Hey,” Juan said at last. The word burst upon the room. Silence had borne down since they’d exhausted talk of the weather. He glanced up but the word meant Juan was speaking to himself, testing his own vocal chords like a violinist tuning his fiddle.

Juan stopped in front of Mal’s chair, as abrupt and direct as the child Mal had met in the yard. “Out on the town tonight, Meester Hollister? Out for a good time, hey?”

Mal frowned, not in the least deceived by the smile on Juan’s face. He’d known this man for a long time, casually, it was true, and from a distance. He’d never seen quite this belligerent manner on him before. He wondered mildly how drunk Juan was, or if he were drunk at all? Maybe Big Juan needed a dozen beers under his belt to slow him down to civilization’s pace?

“Dolores and I are having supper together.” Mal decided this was noncommittal enough.

“Have supper, huh? Have a big supper?”

“If she likes.”

Juan had held the smile so long now it looked painful. “What you mean — if she likes? What she likes? If she likes four, five cocktails before dinner, hey? Fine, huh? If she’s a-like a wine during meal, you think this is fine, huh? And after you eat, what, huh?”

“I don’t know yet, Juan. I play by ear.”

He was instantly sorry he’d said this; he’d intended it to sound honest; it was honest but he saw neither Juan nor Rosa saw it in this light at all. It was a sophisticated man’s sarcastic answer to people not worthy of his attention. This was in their faces and it was not his intent at all.

“Yeah.” Big Juan shivered as though he were cold all over. He paced across the room and back. Mal looked around helplessly, wondering why Dolores was taking so long.

Juan swung around on his bare feet, changing the subject abruptly, pointing at Mal, finger extended.

“How many girls you hire at your office, huh? How many?”

“Well, what you mean? I hire as many as we need.”

“All the time you need new girls, huh? Is this true? I don’t mean you need just girls, Meester Hollister. I mean between you and me and Rosa. We all grown up, huh? We all know our way around, right? We all three about the same age, huh?”

Mal shrugged. He was not about to argue with Juan over a matter of ten or eleven years. He agreed that generally they were the same age.

“Yeah.” Big Rosa spoke suddenly. She pushed her hair from her face. She leaned forward staring into Mal’s face. “You — don’t care much for girls old as you, huh?”

Mal flushed. Big Juan glanced over his shoulder and made a downward gesture toward Rosa. Mal saw Juan felt he was being subtle in his approach while there was nothing subtle about Rosa’s frontal attack on his morals.

Juan got together a new smile, compounded of the agony in his eyes and the sag of his weary mouth muscles.

He said, “I ask you a question, Mr. Hollister? How many girls you hire as you secretary? Huh? How many girls like Dolores? How many — say — in one year, huh?”

“I don’t know, Juan. You know how it is with girls. They get married. They quit for one reason or another.”

Juan gave him a smile that was full more of rage than of camaraderie. “Or maybe you fire them, too, huh? I mean — if they not friendly with the boss — hell, why keep them, huh? A man like you — and me — we like the girls around us to be real friendly, huh?”

Mal couldn’t help laughing. “You, mean unless they date me — I fire ‘em?”

Juan’s mouth pulled down in a raging leer. He tried to sound friendly and in complete empathy. “Oh, you kid. Some fun, huh? Plenty new girls. Huh?”

He looked as if tears would break his mask of laughter.

“No.” Mal spoke in a determined way but he may as well have been speaking against the winds roaring in from the Gulf.

Neither Juan nor Rosa believed him. Rosa made a clicking sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

Juan tried another tack. “You kicked around a lot over on Twenty-second Street in Tampa when you was a young guy, right?” Juan’s haggard eyes still tried to smile. “Cuban girls. Over in Ybor City. Some hot chickens. Huh?”

“I don’t know. I had to work pretty hard. I didn’t have a lot of time for fun.”

Both Rosa and Juan digested this thought for a moment. It altered the complexion of things slightly, but not for the better.

“This a-way it is with some men. They think when they get older — older like us three — they have missed something,” Rosa said She got up and walked to where Juan stood before Mal’s chair. Both bent from the waist, staring down at him. “They work hard when young. Pile up some money. Get to looking around for pretty young girls they missed, huh?”

“I don’t know,” Mal said.

“You,” Rosa said. “What’s a man like you want with a young kid like Dolores, huh?”

“I — like Dolores.”

“Shu. You like her. She likes you. She likes her papa, too. Her mama. We get our age — we all got to look after kids like Dolores. Huh? You think this?” Rosa’s eyes were troubled but they defied him to utter the wrong answer and he knew there was no right answer.

Mal breathed deeply, not knowing what to say. He supposed they did not know how insulting they were, or if they vaguely suspected, they didn’t care. They loved Dolores. They wanted to protect her and were like two embattled mockingbirds pecking at the hawk that molested their nest. He told himself he was beginning to feel like a hawk. They were right, he had no right here. The simplicity of their rage was convincing. Anything so simple and honest must be right. Then he remembered his dreams about Dolores, many of them waking dreams.

Rosa rocked her head back and forth. “A man like you. You must have had plenty women in you time, huh?” She did not wait for him to answer. “Why you waste your time with a young girl like Dolores? What you think a little girl like this knows, huh? The things a man like you wants, what would she know about them?” She made a tent with the fingers of her right hand, staring at them with contemptuous eyes. “What a child like this know for a man like you?”

He gave up, defeated. He said, “She’s a lovely girl. That’s all I know.”

Big Juan said, “This we know, too. It’s this lovely girl we want to keep like this. Let her marry some nice boy her own age. Eh? A man like us — like you and me, our age — what we want with such a child, huh? What a man like you and me think of a child like Dolores, eh? Not much. A little fun tonight — and then phoo. Is — this what you think?”

Despite his best efforts, Big Juan’s voice was trembling on the brink of outrage and violence.

Mal stood up suddenly, his movement so abrupt both Rosa and Juan stepped back, startled.

“I don’t think anything like that,” Mal said.

The screen door slammed and Ric stepped into the room. He glanced at them, slumped into a chair in the corner. He fiddled with the lace arm coverings. None of them looked his way.

“Shu,” Rosa said to Mal, completely unconvinced.

He was tired of them. He spoke sharply. “Dolores can take care of herself.”

He heard Rosa’s sharp intake of breath. He’d made another bad mistake. There was no sense trying to batter his way into their closed minds. He just wanted to keep them quiet until he could collect Dolores and get out.

Rosa said, “Maybe you think this that Dolores can take care of herself, sir, Meester Hollister, sir. But kindly listen to me. It is for us to take care of her. A man like you got no good in his mind when he thinks about a girl like Dolores. Why not you find a woman like you wife — you own age, huh? You find she’s a lot better for you. A woman knows what a man wants. A girl — what does she know?”

Mal did not answer. He felt his own rage growing against them, and against himself.

“Tell you what,” Juan said suddenly as if he’d just thought of something fine. “Why you not let Rosa tell Dolores this date is all off, huh? You and me. We got time to go down to Jake’s Bar. Have some drinks. Big laughs. We men who know our way around, huh? We not got time for keeds, huh? This is a laugh when you stop to think over it, huh? Say, you know this girl down there at Jake’s Bar. She’s a-wait tables, huh? Oh, she’s a good one for fine jokes. She’s got fine wide hips, too. She knows how to make a man laugh, how to laugh with a man. What you say?”

“I’m sorry.”

Big Juan exhaled. This man was pushing him to the very edge of violence. Just the same, he’d tried hard to be friendly. He stared at Hollister, at Rosa, at his fists, at the night darkening his windows.

He made a decision. He said, “Rosa, now we fix dinner, huh? We late for dinner now, huh?”

He pushed her ahead of him into the kitchen. While Rosa worked, he watched Dolores’ bedroom door. When she came out of her room, he would solve the matter. He would tell her simply she could not go out with this man. He would say it in front of him and this would end it.

He winced, knowing better. Unless he killed this man there was no way to end it. They had been through it all with Dolores. Over and over. You fought with Dolores, she became stubborn. She would meet this man anyhow — sneaking out to meet him. Desire is a terribly strong compulsion to drive a person to do strange things, strange even to his own nature. He knew this from his own experience. No, he could not force Dolores to do anything. Her will was too strong, she was too much like Rosa, too much like him.

He covered his face with his hands. There had to be some other way — some way like taking Hollister far out in the Gulf and holding his head under the water for five or ten minutes.

10

MAL STARED AT Ric Suarez slumped in a corner chair. He could feel the hatred being generated in this room. It was so thick it could be cut with a knife.

Mal gazed around, feeling trapped. He’d thought being left alone on the grill with Juan and Rosa was as bad a thing as could happen to him. But this — alone with this malevolent football hero was even a new low. It was the sort of situation he dreaded. He’d started out the night gay, feeling almost young, almost alive again for the first time since Stella had divorced him. But now his thoughts were darker than the Gulf, wilder, with inner rages against himself and the Venzino family.

He checked his watch, wondering if they had Dolores chained in a room somewhere.

He walked to the screen door, stood framed in it, staring at the lowering sky, the way the bay seemed flat, as if withdrawing from the fury lashing across the Gulf, spiraling in on thick wind and black clouds.

He couldn’t endure the silence.

“Looks like a real storm brewing,” he heard himself saying. Hell, next they’d be discussing the crops.

“Yeah,” Ric Suarez said. He got up and paced back and forth, unable to sit still, popping fist against palm.

There was more silence and Mal said, “Some weather.”

“Yeah.”

“We — haven’t had a real twister — not a bad hurricane, not in years.” He despised the sound of his own voice, why couldn’t he cut it off? “Not in years.”

“Yeah.”

Mal shrugged. Even a football dummy should have learned more than one word. He glanced toward the kitchen, hearing Rosa banging pots around in there, but was unable to see her. He wondered if the kids ever came in until they were forcibly dragged in to their meals?

“Hear you dropped out of football,” Mal said after an interminable three minutes of silence. Pebbles or debris or bits of palm frond were slapped against the roof by the rising wind. Silence moved charged and dry ahead of the storm. What the hell, if Suarez hated him so badly he could not speak, why make conversation with him, talk neither of you want, about matters in which you have no interest. You owe him nothing. Why not suggest goal posts at twenty paces?

“Yeah.”

What a lovely evening is building up here. “Too bad,” he heard himself saying. “You really had it one time.”

He heard Suarez snatch in his breath and realized this was too near the truth. It rankled Suarez to realize someone else considered him a has-been, even if he already believed it about himself.

“Yeah?” This time the word was a question, inflection hard and pointed.

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded, Ric. We’re all very proud of you here.”

“Yeah.”

Mal gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Me. I never could play football when I was in school. Too light. Not fast enough. If you’re light — you got to be fast.”

“Yeah.” Ric stared at him and slapped his fist.

“I was light. Light and slow, plodding.”

“Yeah.”

Mal exhaled. “You were fast. Well, it’s a big man’s game. A little man is a fool to buck it — I mean unless he loves it. I got stepped on a few times. I knew I had had it. Right then and there.”

“Yeah.” Suarez prowled the room.

“You probably wouldn’t think I was too light when I was a kid — I mean to look at me now.”

“Yeah.” This didn’t mean anything.

Mal walked out on the porch, letting the door slap behind him. The hell with Suarez. What was the sense of this, apologizing because he’d never played football? Jesus. He’d never even wanted to play football.

The door slammed behind him and he turned thinking it was Suarez. It would relieve some of the tension in him just to take a poke at that neanderthal monster.

“What’s the matter, Mal?” It was Dolores, in a simple print frock and a roll-collared cardigan against the rising wind. God, she was lovely.

She took his arm, he felt relief flood through him. He could smell the elusive fragrance of her. He ached across the bridge of his nose, wanting her, loving her, needing her out of here, away from here.

She looked up, smiling. “You want to go?” she said.

Ho boy, he thought, the understatement of the year.

11

MAL HOLLISTER STOOD at the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked bluff, wind-buffeted pines and palms, the dark void of the bay and the storm approaching across the Gulf. After all his elaborate planning only one thing was certain this night: a storm brewed.

Everything had gone wrong.

He heard the music; its stereophonic sounds hammered at him from every direction: a mockery of his own devising and selecting — something by Mantovani. He’d always enjoyed Mantovani. Well, he was wrong about everything. He should have cleared out of this place before he became so deeply involved. For sure, he was closing this whole damned house, he was selling it off as he should have done after Stella divorced him. This place was hers, and had been evil for him from the first.

“Mal.” Dolores’ voice reached out and caressed him like sharp kitten claws from the divan. “Come here, Mal.”

He sighed, and nodded.

“As soon as I close the drapes. This damned lightning snaps off right in my eyeballs.” He tried to smile. “Reminds me of your mother.”

Dolores’ voice remained soft and urgent. “If she knew how much I loved you, she would love you.”

He shook his head. “If she even knew you were here, she’d kill me. With her bare hands.”

He turned, looking at her stretched out on the divan, blonde hair against the pillows, dress high above her golden knees. He felt a sharp twist in his loins and cursed himself.

He pulled his gaze away to the intimate dining table for two and stared at the remains of the supper. True, he hadn’t eaten much but Dolores had devoured almost every edible on the table. How this girl loved black olives. She’d eaten his filet mignon, too: no sense wasting it if he was sure he wasn’t going to eat it. His anxiety had killed his appetite and she ate like a young horse, a young child. A young girl.

His gaze touched the chilled wine bottle he hadn’t opened, the cocktail shaker he’d ignored since the moment he brought Dolores into this room. It was as though Rosa and Juan stood all evening in the shadows, daring him: open it, you evil man, get her to drink, intoxicated, a child and you would do this.

He closed his eyes, still standing beside the windows and the romantic view that was lost in the storm’s unearthly dark. He saw the way he’d planned it, music, wine, the way they’d lie together on the divan, the way he would carry her naked and moaning to his bedroom. This was bad enough but worse was the desire and excitement in her eyes: she wanted all this, even more than he did. He would have to be blind to miss it. He wasn’t blind. Knowing she wanted to give herself to him stopped him cold, showed him clearly he had no right.

He caught the drape cord, glancing once more at the storm-riven night. Well, there was no moon, either. Nothing was as he’d planned. Abrupt lightning clicked at the tip of his nose. When he could see again, he stared into the cosmic darkness and muttered bitterly, “The hell with you, too.”

He yanked the drapes closed.

He stood with his back to the drapes hearing the storm outside the windows and the one raging within him.

He looked at her, saw he could have her, anything he wanted, everything, she was waiting. He must take her or she could not endure the need. Her untouched body had been an obsession with her, Rosa’s most vital teaching from infancy, but she wanted to forget it now because he was more important to her.

She was a devout and innocent girl — innocent in the wonderful way only a Venzino offspring could be innocent — aware of life but innocent of guile and evil. She’d grown up believing her virginity was the greatest gift she could bring the one man she would love; not even chastity was an acceptable substitute. The ecstasy her simple and revered parents shared was what she wanted with the man she married and she’d come here to him tonight, untouched. She was a virgin, for God’s sake, in this age and time when such a condition no longer mattered to the sophisticated, except as a jest. But she wasn’t sophisticated and she believed in the gift of herself to the man God made for her — it must be for her as it had been for Juan and Rosa.

All this he saw — like something haunting him — everytime he looked at her. It was part of her, like the vulnerable softness in her deep dark eyes.

He walked slowly toward her, faintly astonished at how cozy the room had become, breathlessly warmed and charged with something that had nothing to do with the encroaching storm.

Then he saw she’d kicked off her shoes and was wriggling her bare toes in the luxurious pillows like a child in sand. If only her frock were less simple. If only there were the faintest hint of guile about her. If only he hadn’t brought her here in the first place.

One thing sure, the whole place, on the market, the first thing in the morning. He’d sell the place, clear out. He’d leave this child — this virgin — alone. But he was only human, worse, he was human as hell. To leave her alone he’d have to get out of here. All right.

She stretched out her bare arms, extending her moving fingers to reach for him. This was almost as he’d dreamed it, only there’d been no little-girl frock to remind him he was divorced, twice her age.

The music changed now, muted, soft, a love song. He felt an ache at the nape of his neck. He wanted a drink. He wanted a fifth, straight.

He stood in front of her. He felt the pounding of his heart, his terrible need for her. He longed to fall beside her, gather her in his arms, bury his face in her gold hair, greedily, wildly. He did not move.

“Mal?”

“Yes?”

“You sound angry.”

“It isn’t that.”

“You — you’re disappointed.”

“Me? Disappointed about what?”

She sat forward, staring up at him, smooth face troubled. “I don’t know. Perhaps there is something I should know, something I should do. You’re disappointed.”

“God no. I’m glad you’re with me.”

“Yes. But you’re dismayed. Because I’m dumb.”

“Dumb?”

She nodded, contrite. “Yes. I ate like a foolish puppy. I chattered like a little fool. Only because I was so wildly happy. Only because something like this is what you dream — it never really comes true.”

“It was the way I wanted you to feel. I wanted you to be happy, so there would be no memory even of any other happiness. So this would be the finest — ”

“Oh, it is, Mal. That’s what I’m afraid of. I don’t want to be stupid and spoil it.”

“You’re not stupid. You’re only young.”

She reached up her arms again. “Help me, Mal. Please. Tell me. I’m not really dumb. Tell me what you want — and I’ll do it, anything.”

“Don’t talk like that, Dolores. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I do know,” she cried. “I want to love you. I want to love you with all of me that there is, every way there is. It’s all I want.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

She bit her lip, lay back on the divan. Her eyes glistened with tears. “Is that what’s the matter, Mal?”

“What?”

“Because I’m a virgin, you don’t want me.”

There was no sense trying to stand there, his legs would not support him anyhow. The sounds of the storm were lost to him, there was no music, there was nothing but her body, lush and young and hot and the way he wanted her.

He sank to the divan beside her. She caught his hands, pulled them over her heart, pressed them tightly against her.

“It doesn’t matter, Mal,” she whispered. “I’m a virgin only because I can’t help it. They tried. There were boys who tried. I should have, I guess. Now, I wish I had. I’d be so much smarter for you. But I just couldn’t … because I didn’t want them.”

“It’s all right.” His throat was closing.

“You don’t mind?”

He dragged the back of his hand across his eyes. His vision was impaired. “No. I don’t mind. I’m glad.”

“I tried to, Mal. I thought — I ought to know. But I couldn’t. All my life I knew how wonderful Mama and Papa were together. My mama loved nobody but Papa. He was crazy in love with her. Only the two of them, it was so right — with any one else it would be wrong. Do you see? So I wanted to find the one man I would be so wonderful for — just for him — only I was afraid if I — did it with anyone else. When I used to have a bad dream — that I had done it with the wrong man — I would cry. And I felt I wouldn’t want to live if this happened to me.”

“All right.”

“Why do you say that? All right. In such a way? What do you mean?”

“Never mind, Dolores. It’s only that I don’t know how to talk to virgins. I haven’t known very many.”

She stared into his face, intently. “No. Why did you say all right — such a final sound?”

“Only that I’ll keep my hands off you. Somehow. I’m damned if I know how. I will.”

“Why? If you don’t love me, then I’m never loved. If you don’t touch me, no one will. I couldn’t stand someone putting his — hands on me — not since I’ve known you. Not since the first time I saw you.”

“Dolores, don’t talk like this.”

“The truth? Why not?” She bit her lip. “You don’t love me? You don’t want me? What a fool I’ve been.”

“No. I want you. Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

Her secret smile ripped at him. “I know. But how must I get you to say it?”

His hands closed on her, the firmness, the heat, the trembling sense of excitement. “I want to spend all my life telling you how much I love you.”

She pressed closer under his hands, murmuring. “You have to remember that. Don’t say it and not mean it.”

“I mean it.”

“Yes. But tell me, tell me all the time. I never doubt you, only myself.”

He got up, strode over to the hi-fi, snapped it off.

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s going to rain. Got to get you out of here. Come on. I’ll take you home.”

She burst into tears. “You don’t love me.”

He fell beside her on the couch, gathered her so fiercely in his arms that neither of them could breathe.

“Shut up, you hear me?” he whispered, yelling in hoarse whispers. “Don’t ever say that. Nobody ever loved the way I love you. Don’t you forget it. Damn you. Don’t you forget it.”

She laughed through her tears. “Then damn you. Stop talking about taking me home.”

“I’ve got to, Dolores.”

She moved her fevered hands over him. He touched her and found her body was liquid fire, there had never been such white-hot fire. He’d touched her, he could never stop touching her.

“Oh God, Mal.”

“Please listen to me.”

“Don’t stop.”

He hurled himself away from her and she sprawled back, clothing disarrayed, legs awry as if she were a rag doll or didn’t give a damn how she looked. She lay there chewing at her mouth, staring at the ceiling.

“Mal.”

He stood above her, looking at her and she was lovelier than his wildest fantasy ever promised. If it killed him he had something to say, and he realized the fool who talked when he should keep his mouth shut deserved the frustrated memories he would carry with him to hell. “Will you listen to me?”

“Can’t you hold me while you talk? Soothe me if you must talk? Hold me. I don’t care what you say.”

He sank to the couch beside her, gathered her to him, found her more liquid, more fiery than ever. Her legs were hot against his hands.

“You know what I’ll be in nineteen years?”

“You’ll be my love. Always my love.”

“I’ll be fifty-five years old.”

“We’ll have to be so careful with you, my angel.”

“Stop it. You’ll be as old as I am now.”

“Yes. To think, when I’m as old as you are, I’ll have had nineteen years of loving you. Nineteen years … All the years I’ve lived to this moment and they’ll all be filled with the way I love you.”

“All right. There’s this. I didn’t intend to marry you when I brought you here — ”

“Of course not. You had so much on your mind. You didn’t know yet.”

“Well, God help me, I know now. And this I know. Nobody’s going to like the idea. They’re going to hate it.”

“How could they? I love you — and only you.”

“But I’m divorced, twice your age, everything wrong for you.”

“I love only you.”

“God, how I wish it were that simple. But it isn’t. Your family will do everything — ”

She kissed his fingers, moving her lips over them in a hungry, sucking way. “Then we’ll listen to them, and nod. It’s so easy to get along with them — and for such a little while. How long? Until we get a license, until we can get married.”

“I hope you feel this way the rest of your life.”

“I don’t.” She writhed under his hand. “It would kill me.”

“Well, kill you or not, tonight I’m leaving you just as I found you — ”

“You wouldn’t be so cruel.”

“We’ll have trouble enough, without giving them real reason to oppose us. Juan hates me. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Somehow — I’ve got to show him you mean more to me even than you do to him.”

She pressed her mouth hard against his hand.

“I’ll get a license in the morning. We’ll rip out every piece of red tape we can, and as soon as possible, we’ll be married. Until then — if it kills me, or kills you — we’re waiting.”

She clung to him. “All right. If you promise to hurry — I’ll wait.”

“Then come on, we’re getting out of here while we can.”

She clung to him for a long time. He closed his eyes tightly against her, didn’t breathe, clenched his fists. She kissed his face, his eyes, the tip of his nose.

He moved away then and thunder rumbled back into his consciousness. The storm was much nearer.

She pushed her feet into her slippers, found her cardigan, trailed it after her, walking sleepily. Nothing had happened to her but she sure as hell looked as if it had.

If Juan saw her like this, he might not live long enough to buy a marriage license.

He watched her going ahead of him, still unable to believe the magic of her loving him, knowing hell was worth it. Come on you bastards, make your trouble, I’m ready for you. She’s worth the worst you can do.

In his car, she snuggled close against him. Great round drops of rain smashed violently against the windshield. Lightning illumined the world, then plunged it into thundering darkness that shook the car on the road. Palms and pines bent under the force of the gale. He smiled. This storm was nothing compared to the one he’d weathered back there in that patio with Dolores.

He drove along the shell road and pulled over at Juan’s house. It was dark. “You better run,” he told her. “Once this rain starts, it may never stop.”

She clung to him, mouth parted and hot. She was breathless. “I never loved anybody but you,” he said.

“I don’t care if you did.”

“But I didn’t.”

“It won’t matter. It won’t be the same anyhow. You’ll see.”

“It already isn’t the same.”

But she’d slipped out of the car and was running across the yard. Lightning sent sheets of white fire dancing around her. Paralyzed, he sat watching until she disappeared around a corner of the house. He turned the car then, driving slowly away, chilled without her. The storm was almost upon them.

Dolores ran up the steps. She would never go to sleep but how pleasant it was going to be to snuggle under her covers in this storm and dream of what had happened, of what was ahead.

She heard movement on the darkened porch and she paused, catching her breath.

“Dolores.”

His voice was flat with his misery. It was Ric.

12

RIC.“ DOLORES WAS BREATHLESS, feeling the night wind at her back, riffling her hair, chilling her. “What are you doing here?”

A sudden flare of lightning showed his face an ash gray. Whether she wanted to or not, she saw into his tormented eyes. She clenched her own eyes tightly shut and only partly because of the glare of lightning. She did not want to see what was in Ric’s face.

“I was waiting for you.”

“I’m sorry, Ric.”

She saw him straighten in the shadows. “It’s all right…. I haven’t been here long.” His tone implied a meaning to these words but she missed it. They were hard and sarcastic, flung at her but she didn’t understand anything except that he wanted to hurt her because he was hurt.

“I am sorry, Ric.”

“I want to talk to you.”

She bit her lip, flung her gaze about the porch helplessly, feeling trapped. “Oh, Ric. It’s so late.”

“I know how late it is. I still want to talk to you.”

She protested even when it was fruitless to protest. “Everybody is asleep.”

“Nobody is asleep around here. They’re all awake. Don’t think they’re not. All awake — all worried about you and that old man.”

She felt empty and futile, it pleased Ric to call Mal old man — it was the easiest way to express his bitter hatred: cursing him wouldn’t do half as well. Nothing could point up the differences between Mal and herself better than the difference in age. This made Mal a fool to pursue her, made of her something worse and lower to allow it.

She exhaled. “Oh, Ric.”

“I want to talk to you. You hear?”

She shook her head. “It’s late, Ric. So chilly out here. It’s going to rain. Besides, we’ll only keep everybody awake.”

He stared down at her. “We can talk in my car. It’s out back of the house.”

She frowned. “I didn’t see it.”

“You didn’t see anything but that guy. That boss.”

“Ric. I don’t want to fight with you.”

“Too tired to fight, eh?” His voice was bitter but misery made it quiver.

“I just don’t want to fight with you.”

“We won’t fight…. I want to talk. Come on.”

She glanced about helplessly. What was there to talk about? Anything to say between them had already been said a thousand summers ago — those faraway lost autumn evenings when he was the school hero and she was his love — when they were children. Oh, why couldn’t Ric see that? What was there to say to him? She was sorry for him but he didn’t want her pity. She didn’t love him any more — she hadn’t truly loved him, ever. A schoolgirl crush on the high school hero. It was as though it had happened to somebody else. She wasn’t even that same person — any more than he was what he had been then. They were both different people. Why didn’t he leave her alone? She didn’t want to say this to him, either. She didn’t want to hurt him any more.

“Oh, Ric. Please. Not tonight.”

“Tonight.” He growled it at her. “I know you’re all tired out. I know why. God help me, I know why. But this you better know. Either you talk to me — or I go talk to your fine boss. You make up your mind. Which you want?”

“He’s nothing to you, Ric.”

“He’s something to me, all right. He’s twice your age. A rotten old man, playing around with the girl I love. You’re too good for him, too decent … I’d think of something to say, all right.”

“Please, Ric. Stop.”

“Come on out to the car.”

She sighed and nodded. He went ahead of her down the steps, shoulders braced, hands shoved into slack pockets. She glanced toward the bay. The rain was somehow held suspended, a few raindrops were blown in on gusts and then there was only the charged silence.

They went around the house and across the yard, Ric striding ahead and Dolores trotting to stay at his heels. As she moved she tried to think of something that would send him away for good, but she could think of nothing. Even if she told him that she didn’t love him, had never loved him, he wouldn’t believe her. People never believed that truth. It would only rouse his anger more.

Ric pulled open the door of his three-year-old Ford. She glanced at him but his face was cold, set against her. She got in the car, struck by pungent odors of gun oil and whisky.

“Ric, you’ve been drinking.”

“I been waiting for you. What should I do?”

“Oh, Ric, you’ve got to stop this.”

He laughed, a savage sound in the closed car. “Stop what? Stop loving you? How do I stop loving you, Dolores? How do I turn it off?”

She shook her head, knotting her fists in her lap. “Ric. This is no good.”

“What’s no good? You mean I got no right to wait here for you when you’re out laying with that fine boss?”

“Ric!”

“Well, it’s the truth, ain’t it?” He spoke in helpless savagery; before he’d always been so careful with her. Now he’d lost her, he knew he’d lost her, it didn’t matter what he said, what he did: he was lost anyhow.

“No.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

Her voice was cold. “Ric, I wouldn’t lie to you about anything. I would tell you the truth. About this, I certainly would. But it’s not true.”

He wasn’t tortured enough, he had to twist the knife in himself. “Do you love him?”

“Stop tormenting yourself.”

“Do you?” He crushed her arms in his hands, hurting.

“I think so. All right. Yes. I love him.”

“Oh my God.”

“Ric, I didn’t want to hurt you. But you’ve got to know the truth.”

“The truth. That you love that stinking rich bastard? Jesus, Dolores. I don’t know how to tell you, you’re all I got left. The last thing in Christ’s world. They’ve taken everything else from me. He can’t have you. I won’t let him.”

“Ric. He didn’t. I don’t love you.”

He didn’t even hear her. “If I ain’t got you, I got nothing.”

“Ric, it would be better if we stopped seeing each other. So much better. For both of us.”

“For both of us?” He heard this, and snarled at her. “You don’t care about both of us — you just want me out of the way for a while so you can play around with this guy — and then come back when you’re tired of him — ”

“No, Ric. No.”

“You want me to stay away so you can lay that old guy — ” He laughed at her, a choked sound. “He’s been married once — a dame he couldn’t satisfy, couldn’t keep. God knows, I know plenty about her. If he was no good for her, what does he want with another one? He couldn’t keep her — so now he comes smelling around, messing you up.”

“Ric, this isn’t helping anything.”

“What’s the matter? Can’t you take the truth? That son-of-a-bitch cattin’ around! And what does that make you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can tell you what it makes you.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Well, you might as well get used to hearing it. It makes you his slut.”

She reached for the doorhandle. “Goodbye, Ric.”

He caught her shoulders and jerked her around to face him. “Where you think you’re going, slut?”

“Ric.” She shook her head, eyes brimmed with tears. “You got no right to talk to me like this.”

“Why not? What else are you? Catting around with a man old enough to be your father. What about us?”

“I told you, Ric. Oh, I tried to tell you.”

His fingers closed on her shoulders, bruising her. He shook her. He didn’t want to hear the truth. He closed his ears and his mind against it.

He pressed his face close to hers. She was aware of the heat and smell of whisky on his breath. She felt nauseated and tried to pull away. He wouldn’t let her move. Lightning snapped, thunder rattled outside the closed car. They were not aware of it. Gusts of wind shook the car on its frame and they didn’t notice. Sudden rain slapped at the windows. Dolores could think only that she had to get away from him. She’d tried to be nice to him, that didn’t help, wasn’t any good. If she got away from him now she’d never see him again. She owed him nothing, she’d tried to tell him but until now, tonight, she’d never actually hated and despised him.

And Ric could think only that he could not let her go. She was the last thing he had in the world and he could not lose her. If he lost her he wouldn’t even want to go on living. He wouldn’t lose her, he wouldn’t let her go. Somehow, he’d make her come to her senses, if he had to beat some sense into her. She loved him, she’d always loved him, she was all he had left.

His face was twisted. His voice shook. “What’s he got, Dolores? What’s he got that’s so wonderful?”

“I don’t know.”

“What makes you so sure you love him then?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows why they love someone — ”

“You just do? He’s got a big house, a big car, lots of bucks to spend on you … or does he buy it from you?”

She caught her breath, straightened, but saw the ugly words he hurled at her tormented him even more than they injured her pride.

“Stop it, Ric. I won’t stay here and listen to this.”

“You’ll stay here. And you’ll listen, slut.”

“Ric, shut up.”

“He’s not going to have you. You’re the last thing I got on the face of God’s earth, and that son-of-a-bitch ain’t going to take you away from me.”

She stared at him, moved her gaze about his car, about the darkened cage of night. “Listen, Ric. I don’t love you. I don’t.”

“Sure, you don’t. You can’t see anything but that old rich character. He’s got nothing I haven’t got — and by Jesus, tonight you’re going to find it out.”

“Ric!” His hands were mauling at her body, pulling at her clothes, rough, angered, crude. She fought at his hands, trying to escape him.

“Lay still! Lay still or I’ll kill you! I know what you did up at his place, slut. Hell, you think I didn’t see you?”

She whispered it. “You followed us.”

“You’re goddamn right to hell I followed you. You ought to tell your old stud you can see in those big windows just as good as you can see out of them. Quite a show. God damn you, you slut. Quite a show.”

“Ric, you disgust me.”

“Don’t give me that! I watched you. Music. A servant bringing dinner. Stupid son-of-a-bitch. Can’t make you on his own, so he turns on money like water in a tap. Did that do it, slut? That why you sprawled out on the couch with your legs open?”

“Ric. You’re drunk. Disgusting.” Her eyes blazed. She broke free and struggled with the doorhandle.

He yelled at her, breath hot with whisky, thick with hate. “I told you, damn you. Stay here or I’ll kill you.” He caught her, thrust her down on the seat, pressed himself against her. “I saw you. Showing it to him. Well, you’re going to show it to me. I’m going to have it, like he had it, all of it. I’m going to look at it, and touch it, and have it — ”

“Ric. Let me out of here.”

“All these years, I tried to be somebody big for you. Boy. That’s a laugh. Thought it mattered to you. You didn’t give a damn. All you could think was to run up there and slut for that old stud.”

She could hardly breathe. She tried to writhe free. He twisted her body, thrusting her lower on the seat. She felt her head reeling.

“Why didn’t you give him that old song and dance you used to give me, slut? You had to wait, you couldn’t do it until you married — had to be the right man — you’d die if it wasn’t the right man. Had to be like Juan and Rosa, had to stay a virgin, most important thing in your life. Crap. And I fell for it. But he didn’t fall for it, did he?”

She thrust upward and he struck her across the face. “Did he?” Ric yelled at her.

She toppled back, stunned, staring up at him, eyes distended. “You’re crazy, Ric. Crazy and drunk.”

“Sure. I went crazy when I saw that bastard pulling those drapes closed up at that whorehouse of his. I got drunk waiting for you to get out of there.”

“Oh, Ric,” she whispered. “You’ve no right.”

“I got every right. I fell for that virginity gag. I waited but you’re mine. You always been mine. Ask anybody. They’ll tell you. Dolores Venzino and Ric Suarez. Ask ‘em, damn you. Ask ‘em.”

“Ric, I don’t love you.”

“Sure. You love him, the fine big stud. Well, baby, you’re going to know whether I’m better than he is or not.”

His hands caught at her dress front, ripping it. His hands moved and he no longer knew what he did, no longer cared. Blood throbbed in his temples. His eyes felt as though they were being pressured from his head. He could no longer see her beneath him. Before his eyes was only this white sick splash of failure. Bum. Coward. Drunk. A nothing. Without Dolores, he was less than nothing, when he lost her he lost every reason for living. But he wouldn’t lose her, he couldn’t lose her. He tore away her clothes, she was no longer the girl he’d loved with tender, and hesitant passion, almost afraid to touch her because he might offend and lose her. Now he saw nothing but those drapes closing across the windows up on the hill.

“Oh my God,” he moaned aloud.

His hands moved on her, pressing her, touching her, squeezing her. He saw himself on a muddy field, bowl empty in the practice afternoon, grass spotted and cleat-torn, chilled; they beat him down and made a fool of him, taking away his scholarship and his feeling of accomplishment, and they didn’t even care. And Dolores didn’t care, and he hated them and he hated her. He wasn’t going to let her. go. Couldn’t she see this? Why did she fight him? Why did she gouge at his face? Why was she screaming at him? She belonged to him, didn’t she? He had to have her. He had to keep her.

“Stop fighting, damn you. You want me to kill you?”

She screamed but even in the car the scream was lost, unheard in the thick hatred.

“Ric. For God’s sake. Don’t. Please don’t.”

He laughed at her, weeping at the same time. “Save the waltz, tramp. Save it. This is in two-time. By God, you might want Hollister after this — but you’ll know about Ric Suarez, about a man wantin’ you. Is this what he did, baby? Hold you like this? Like this? Is this what he did to you? This? This? This?”

His head rolled back and forth on the seat. She scratched at him, kicked at him. “Don’t. God, please don’t.”

She began to wail, rolling her head, wild. “I won’t see him again, Ric. I promise. Anything. I won’t see him. Please, Ric. God knows, I can’t stand it! I’ll die, Ric. It’s all I am, Ric. All I have. Don’t Ric. I won’t want to live …”

His laughter shook the car, his laughter and sobs. “How you know, baby? How you know? Maybe you ain’t ever lived until — right now. Now. Now …”

13

STILL THE STORM HELD ITSELF suspended, wind waiting in the empty places, clouds swollen, black, spitting gusts of rain into the silence and dry tension ahead.

Dolores walked rigidly across the yard and went stealthily into the kitchen. She didn’t know how she got out of that car, or crossed the yard, or entered the house, or even why she bothered to do any of it. Why didn’t she simply die out in the yard?

She held her breath, afraid she’d meet someone. She didn’t see how she could endure facing any of them now. She was too dirty, she couldn’t face anyone.

She pushed open her bedroom door only enough to allow herself to slip through. She closed it cautiously and did not breathe until she heard the catch snap into place.

She turned on the light suspended from the ceiling on a drop cord. When she turned she glimpsed herself in the smoky mirror.

She bit the back of her hand to keep from screaming. Her face was swollen, bruised, but this didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that Ric had hit her. Her dress was torn, ripped, and she smelled of gun oil and gasoline and whisky and stale cigar smoke and Ric and everything vile.

She trembled, toppled face first across the bed. She lay inert, refusing even to think. Tears wet the covers. A lump swelled in her throat making it difficult to breathe.

Her hands shook. She hated Ric Suarez and she hated herself and she hated God’s world and if this were God’s world, then He could have it.

“Dolores. Baby. Mi corazon.”

She gasped, spun over on the bed, stared up at Rosa.

Her mother wore a faded flannel gown that hung like sacking on her. She’d braided her hair haphazardly. She hadn’t slept. Rosa glanced at Dolores’ tear-streaked face but her gaze riveted on the ripped dress, torn underthings. All her nightmares were suddenly true.

She hugged her breasts, crooning her illness. “The Mother of God.”

Dolores tried to pull her dress together. Rosa shook her head, stunned, unable to pull her gaze away.

“He did this? He tear off you dress?”

Dolores’ eyes brimmed. Her mouth trembled, she did not speak.

Rosa answered herself. “You dress … he tear off you dress.”

“Mama.”

“Shh.” Rosa’s voice was stricken. “Don’t talk loud. Don’t wake you papa. Don’t let you papa see you this way.”

She turned trying to lock the door but there was no key. There were no keys on any doors in Juan’s house. He said, “With a key who you keep out? You friends. That’s only who you keep out when you lock a door.”

Rosa leaned against the door, folding her arms. If anyone tried to open it, she would have warning.

“This dress, child. Take off. Quick. Give it to me. We must not let you papa see this.”

Dolores moved woodenly, stripped away the dress, hating her body, exposed now as Ric had exposed it. Rosa gathered up the dress, retreated to the door.

“Musn’t ever let you papa know. He see this dress, he do something so terrible. We lose you papa. We can’t never lose you papa. No matter.” She shook her head. “You lie down. We got to think. I hear you cry. I come quick. I slip from bed so I not wake you papa.” She looked about, stunned. “I do not think to see this.” Her lips bared her teeth. “Do they call him a gentleman now?” She shook the wadded dress in her fist. “A fine gentleman. My God. I could kill him with my bare hands.”

Dolores stared at Rosa, shook her head.

Dolores pressed her face into the pillow. She was too ill to lie there and yet she never wanted to get out of this bed.

She squeezed her eyes shut and still could not shut out the way it had been, lying there, dead in mind and heart and body and feeling Ric’s whisky-hot breath, feeling his hatred, and dying inside because of what he did to her.

Rosa sat on the bed beside her, mattress and springs sagging and whining under her bulk. Rosa smoothed her forehead with a cool cloth. Thunder rattled the plankings of the house.

Dolores trembled, pulling away from Rosa’s hands. She couldn’t endure anyone’s touching her now. His hands … She squeezed her eyes shut again.

“Tell you mama, what he did — ”

Dolores rolled her head on the pillow.

“Tell you mama. When he get you alone, he rip you clothes. Ah, this vile thing. To a child he would do so vile a thing.”

She touched gently at Dolores’ bruised face. “Now you believe you mama. You see, you mama knows. A vile man. You will not see him again.”

“I — don’t want to see anybody — ever again.”

“Shu. This will pass. You will forget. We will not tell you papa. We bury this dress. Of clothes he never thinks.” She crossed herself. “But you face — what we do about you poor face?”

“It — doesn’t matter, Mama.”

“Shu. How it matters. This vile thing is evil all in itself but God trembles to think what happens if you papa hears. This we got to think about now. Papa was ready to kill him for coming near you. And now — ” she could not speak of it.

“You are young,” she said after a long time. “This is wicked. I am sick it is so wicked. But you are young, Dolores. You will forget.”

“I begged him, begged him not to.”

“Shu. Of course you did. Quiet, please do not wake you papa.”

“Poor Papa … Poor Mama.”

“Try to sleep. Do not waken you papa — you papa get in a rage to kill.”

Now the first stunning shock had subsided, Juan was her first concern. It had always been like this. All their lives the children lived with Rosa’s terror of the law and Juan’s contempt for it, her fear of the consequences of Juan’s violent temper driving him to commit a crime and thrusting him into the clutches of the law. She did not see how she and her brood could exist without Juan. Her first thought was to protect Juan from himself.

“We can hate this man, but we got to think what you papa do if he learns the truth. You love you papa but for a little while you disobey him. You think Dolores is so grown up, know all about men. Now you believe you papa, you be all right. We keep this terrible secret, you and me.”

Her voice softened to a crooning whisper. “You sleep now, my beautiful one. Some way I think on these bruises of your face … we tell you papa you bump something in dark kitchen. This make you cry. Then mama come in to see. Like now. Is this not the answer?”

Dolores did not move.

“Tomorrow we go to confession. We ask God to help.”

“God.” The way Dolores said it made Rosa tremble and cross herself.

She closed her fingers on Dolores’ shoulders, looking upward supplicatingly, speaking inside her mind: The child is young, God, she does not understand. Such a child. Such a big hurt. Surely in a heart big like yours, you can find it to forgive her?

Aloud she spoke coldly, “Don’t talk this way about God. Is not God’s fault a man is like this one — dirty and evil — to chase young girls.”

Dolores lay, eyes closed, remembering the knife she’d seen on the kitchen drainboard. When she walked through the kitchen a sudden flash of lightning glared on the knife blade. She’d paused, trembling, still seeing the knife after the white flare of lightning passed. So easy, she thought, there was the knife, so close and so easy.

“I want to die,” she whispered.

Rosa clutched the girl’s body fiercely against her. Her face twisted, tormented: to take one’s life a mortal sin, to think of it, a sin.

“Don’t talk this way.” Her voice was hard with the fear in it. “No. Don’t you never talk this way — not to you mama, not to nobody.”

She rocked the girl in her arms, crooning. “You are my body. You are from my body. My child. My heart. So young. So lovely — you mama want to cry when she sees you walk on a street, in a church. So lovely, so much to live for, you must never talk this way.” She shook her head. “When you not see this old man no more, you forget — ”

“What?”

Dolores lay back on the pillow, staring up at Rosa. “What did you say, Mama?”

Rosa shrugged, shook her head. “I don’t know. What? You no see this wicked old man no more. We keep you from him now. You see only nice Cuban boy. We not talk about him no more. We no let you papa talk about him.”

Dolores shook her head, unable to believe Rosa thought Mal capable of this ugly crime. She felt a sudden urge to hysterical laughter. Why not Mal? A man like him, foreign to them, who else but Mal?

Dolores cried out, shaking her head.

Rosa clapped her hand over Dolores’ mouth, pressing her down into the pillow.

“You want you papa should come in here? You do not have to protect this dirty man from us. Never would I let you papa know what this man has done because you papa would kill him — and he’s not worth you papa’s toe!”

“He didn’t do it!”

“You all upset — ”

“Listen to me — ”

“I believe what I see. We beg you to stay away from this dirty man, this divorce man. We ask him nice to leave you alone. You go with him — you come back clothes all rip, face bruise. This I see. I believe what I see.”

“Ric! It was Ric! Drunk. He was — waiting for me — ”

She covered her face with her hands, shuddering.

Rosa stared at her a long time, eyes distended, face bloodless. She heard the words but could not believe. Ric was a good boy, a good church upbringing. She nodded to herself, it was clear, Dolores was shielding this man, even from her.

“Hush. Now hush,” she said at last. “You not know what you say. In the morning we get the priest, we get a doctor.”

Dolores turned her face to the wall, buried her face in the pillow.

Rosa stayed a long time, soothing her, crooning, singing the songs she’d sung to all her children. She thought of what Dolores had said about Ric, tried to believe it, tried to reconcile it in her mind with what she knew about Ric, about his family. She couldn’t do it. She shook it from her mind.

When she thought Dolores at last asleep, she said a prayer over her, snapped out the light. She stood a long time in the darkness, finally went out and closed the door softly. Dolores rolled over on the bed.

Her eyes were wide open.

14

DOLORES SCREAMED.

It was the last thing she wanted to do, the last thing she would have done except that a long time after Rosa left her alone, she fell asleep.

She screamed in Ric’s car when he ripped off her dress. It may have been an instant after she fell asleep, a few minutes, an hour later. It did not matter. She screamed and lunged upward in bed, feeling the chill in the room, the cold against the windows.

Suddenly everyone in the Venzino household was awake and yelling at each other. The dogs barked, quieted, and then barked again louder than ever. The smaller children wailed, the older ones giggled. Within minutes all were on their feet and every light burned brightly.

The raging storm could no longer be heard inside the Venzino house.

Dolores reached out frantically, turned on her light.

She sat up in bed, shivering, stunned by the sound of her own scream, staring at the limber shadows the wind shook against her window.

Rosa stood guarding the door to her room, haphazard braids bobbing, bulbous hips almost filling the doorway.

“Is all right. Is all right,” Rosa was saying. “Go back to bed, children. All of you, back to bed.”

“Dolores screamed,” Al said. His voice was calm but troubled. Across Rosa’s shoulder, Dolores saw Al, eyes puffed, sleep-swollen, thinning hair standing up about the crown of his head. “What’s the matter with Dolores?”

“She had — bad dream, this is all. Please — go back to sleep.”

“Come on, Al,” Bea said from behind him. “Let’s go back to bed.”

For all of them this had a middle-of-the-night unreality. Al peered over the top of Rosa’s head and his eyes widened, his mouth twisted. Dolores remembered the discolored bruises and turned her face away, covering it with her hands but it was too late.

“Ma, I want to know,” Al said. “What’s the matter with Dolores?”

Rosa ignored him, herding the children to their beds. They all protested, all had to troop to the kitchen for water, the older ones padded to the back porch to quiet their dogs. Finally they straggled back to their beds with Rosa crooning, “Back to bed. Is all right. Everything is all right.”

She still barred Dolores’ doorway with her body. Finally, Al firmly but gently moved her aside and stepped into the room.

He stared at Dolores. “What happened to you, kid?”

“Dolores is bump her face. In the kitchen in the dark, when she come home. This is all. Is this not true, Dolores?” Rosa was frantic with her lie, crossing herself, mutely pleading with Dolores to substantiate her story, because even hearing it from another would take some of the curse off her lie, make it nearer the truth; at least, the sin would be shared.

Dolores nodded. She did not lift her head. She kept her face covered with her hands.

“Dolores, you’re lying. Something happened to you. I want to know what it is.” Al was firm but at the same time very kindly.

“All right. All right. Shu.” Rosa felt relieved, less abandoned by heaven now Dolores had agreed she’d bumped her face in the dark kitchen. She was ready now for another lie, another sin.

She crossed herself covertly. She’d get them all back in bed and quieted, somehow pacified. She glanced about worriedly for Juan and caught her breath, hearing him moving about in another part of the house. The world tilted, seemed to stand still as she waited. She was troubled, confused, had to keep her mind on what she said had happened to Dolores so none of them heard anything too near the deadly truth.

She touched Al’s arm. “She — had a little fight — ”

“A little fight? She looks like she was overmatched.”

“I do not mean a fight at all.” Rosa brushed a braid from her face. “This I do not mean. A quarrel. With this man — make her unhappy — ”

“Hollister?”

Rosa nodded. “But all for the betters. Dolores have make up her mind. She is not going to see him any more. Is this not true, Dolores?”

Dolores nodded, the words were painful, she wasn’t ready to hear them spoken yet. She wasn’t going to see Mal any more — she couldn’t face him after what had happened to her but she couldn’t endure either to look ahead to the empty days without him.

“What’s the truth, Dolores?” Al said.

“What’s this, Alberto?” Rosa sounded injured. “You think you mama tell you a lie?”

Al smiled faintly but ignored Rosa. “What happened, Dolores? Did Hollister throw you over?”

She shook her head, did not look up.

Bea said, “Whatever it is, Al, it’s too painful for her to talk about. Her heart is broken.”

“What do you know about it?” Al said. “When did you ever know anything about a heart?”

“I studied one once. In biology.”

Al sank to the side of the bed. “Dolores. Tell me. What’d he do? I’ll go up there right now. I’ll beat hell out of him.”

“Al, please — ” Bea said.

“You stay out of this. I listened to you once tonight. I let you drag me out of here when Hollister arrived. I should have talked to him then. If I had talked to him then, none of this would have happened.” He put his hand on Dolores’ shoulder. “What’d he do to you, baby?”

“Nothing.” Dolores whispered, pressing her hands more tightly against her heated face.

“Don’t try to save his bacon, baby. Don’t lie to save that no-good.”

“He didn’t do anything!”

Al stared up at Rosa. “Well somebody is wrong. No sense trying to get anything from either of you. I’m going up there and see Hollister.”

“In this weather?” Bea cried. “This time of night?”

“What the hell do I care what time of night it is. I can’t sleep anyway.”

Bea caught his arm. “Al, for heaven’s sake. Wait until morning, anyhow.”

He laughed at her, a snarling sound. “Sure. Wait until morning. Make a social call on that bastard. Well, we’ve been polite too long now. If we’d told him once and for all how we felt — Dolores wouldn’t be messed up like this.”

Dolores touched his arm. “Al — please don’t…. He didn’t do this…. Ric — did it.”

Al gave a puzzled laugh, hesitated. He glanced at Rosa but obviously she didn’t believe Dolores. Al didn’t know what to do.

He shook his head. “Why would Ric do a thing like this? He never did anything like this before.”

“Shu. She’s all upset. Don’t know what she says.” Rosa watched Al’s face, seeing her own need for vengeance in his eyes. Hollister was to blame, no matter what anyone could prove, and she wanted him hurt, as Dolores was hurt, as she and her family were hurt.

Al nodded. “You afraid what Papa might do to Hollister, kid? Think he’d be easier on Ric?” He shook Dolores’ shoulder. “Is this true?”

“No. I told you. It was Ric, I swear.”

“Stop covering up for Hollister. By God, I’m going up there. I can’t stand seeing a thing like this happen to her.”

Rosa nodded, this was as it had to be, the only way. She wanted revenge, she could not think of vengeance cruel enough but she knew Juan would kill Hollister and she didn’t want this. She wanted Hollister dead. Alberto was smart. There was much Alberto could say and do.

She closed her fingers on Al’s arm, face white. “Yes. You go there, Alberto. Quick. Before you papa can do something we all regret.”

Al stared at Rosa. He’d never seen her face like this, contorted with rage and the need for vengeance. He nodded, not looking at Bea.

“All right, Ma. All right.”

He heeled around, strode from the room. He struck his shoulder against Juan who was coming through the doorway. For a moment they stayed wedged there because neither cared to give way. Juan’s face was like something hewn from peeled cypress.

Rosa stared at Dolores’ torn dress wadded in Juan’s fist. She slapped her hand over her mouth. Juan was dressed, ready to leave the house.

“Papa,” Rosa said.

She caught Juan’s arm, looking wildly at AI, her black eyes begging him to do something. Anything. He held her gaze a moment then strode across the parlor. If he got to Hollister ahead of Juan he could throw a scare into him, get him out of town.

Juan stepped close to Dolores’ bed, grasping the torn dress in his trembling fist. He shook Rosa aside as though she were a small child.

“Dolores.” Juan’s voice was deadly.

With hands over her face she looked up. In his face she saw the agony and anger. Her swollen mouth quavered in a silent prayer. When he learned she’d been attacked, he’d kill somebody — Mal or Ric. He would kill. She had to lie with Rosa and keep him from learning the truth. She hated Ric, she wasn’t trying to protect him, she only wanted to protect her father from his own wrath and its consequences.

Mostly she wanted to be left alone — in the dark.

He saw the bruises on her face now, but since he’d found the dress where Rosa had stuffed it behind a chair in their bedroom, he’d become immune to further shock. He shuddered. His eyes darkened.

“I find this.” He shook the dress. “This you dress? Dress you wear out of here tonight?”

“Papa,” Rosa said. “Is not what you think.”

“Is not what I think. How you know what I think?” Juan’s voice was flat. “Is what I know.”

“Papa, no,” Rosa said.

He shook the dress again before Dolores’ face. She sagged against the pillow.

Bea bit at her lip but did not speak. She stared at the torn frock, frowning. Something was terribly wrong. She couldn’t make herself believe Mal Hollister had done this. She knew Rosa and Juan would believe Hollister was guilty but wouldn’t believe Ric was. You trusted first in your own people.

“Dolores,” Juan’s voice was choked, but gentle. “Just answer you papa one question. You hear you papa?”

Dolores nodded. His trembling fist shook the dress. “This man. This Hollister do this?”

She moved her head from side to side.

“He did not tear it? This Hollister?”

“She tell you no!” Rosa said.

“You stay out of this. Now, Dolores. You papa ask you one more thing.”

Dolores did not move. Bea went to her, put her arm about her and Dolores sagged against her.

Juan looked ill. “He not do it, then who?”

She shook her head, frightened eyes darting toward Rosa. If they told him Ric had done it, his rage would be uncontrollable. She prayed Rosa would not speak.

Juan bent forward, pleading. “Dolores. You papa very sad. Very sick. You not fool with you papa. Not now. You tell Papa. If not this Hollister, then you tell me quick.” His voice rose, raging. “Who did this?”

She shook her head, pressing hard against Bea.

He raged at her. “You don’t have to tell me. I know — and I kill.”

He turned and his shoulders sagged. His mind was tormented and full of gray thoughts. He was no longer young — once he had acted in rage, now he stopped to think first. He was getting old. The thought of killing was more terrible now than in his youth. But he had not gotten so old that a terrible wrong like this should go unpunished. It was just that it seemed to him he was old suddenly and God was turning his face away when for the first time in his life he needed Him. He moved toward the door.

“Papa.” Rosa said.

He turned, waiting.

“It was not this Hollister, Papa. You got to believe the girl.”

“You lie about it, too. You think to turn me from what I got to do?”

Rosa ran after him, caught him when he reached the high shelf in the front room where he kept his ancient Colt .45. They looked at each other. The rain battered the roof, driven by wailing wind.

“You crazy, Papa? You gone crazy?”

“I guess so. Mama, maybe I never had good sense. The man who does this to my daughter. If he lives — what kind of man am I?” His fist closed on the dress.

“Papa, you think I not hate? But — maybe it was not this man — what then?”

Juan nodded. “I’ll give him his chance to beg before I — ”

“Oh, Papa. If you kill this man, you kill not just him but also kill me, you kill yourself — and the children.”

“You talk as if this is something I want. Is something I must do.”

“He’s not worth it, Papa.”

“No. But not worth living, too.”

“But that’s it, Papa. He not worth it. Not worth the bullet. Not worth one day of Luis’ happiness. And Linda? What of her? At thirteen, she begins to need a papa — what of her? And of me, Papa? You think I have not had nightmares when you talk of hunting treasure in the Gulf? Why do I weep to keep you home? Yet a hundred times I rather you go out there and hunt this treasure — with air-lung, without air-lung — because in the night when I stand on the porch looking for you to come home across bay — I know in my heart maybe there is a chance you do come home…. But no — if you go now, if you kill this man, I got no hope. I cannot live like this, Papa … not without no hope.”

He shook his head slowly, tears standing in his haggard eyes. “What you want I should do, Mama?”

She looked about prayerfully but her gaze came always back to the ripped dress, the big ugly gun. “Leave the gun here, Papa. Sí. Sí. I know. You got to do something. Sí. Go to the sheriff. Tell him what happened. Ask him what to do. Tell him there must be a law — some law.”

He thought about this for a long time, looked at the wadded dress, at the gun. “I go to him, Mama. But Hollister is — a rich man. I am a fisherman. I do not hope the sheriff will do much.”

“But you will have try. Never can they say you did not try.”

Finally he nodded. “Still I tried to talk to this Hollister. This did nothing.”

“But you did try. Once more try, Papa. For me.”

He nodded again. “But if the law does nothing, then I must. You see this, Mama?”

She nodded, no longer hoping for anything but time. “You wait for me, Papa. I go with you as far as the church. I must pray.”

He jerked his head impatiently. “Then hurry. I might change my mind as I stand here.”

15

STELLA’S LAWYER took a long pull at the Scotch-and-water Hollister had mixed for him. He gestured with his glass, ice tinkling. “Against the rain.”

“Against anything, at this hour,” Hollister said. Stella had told him Norcross was going to call on him but she didn’t say it would be after midnight in a storm.

Norcross let his gaze move about the room. It had the cozy look of a recent rendezvous. He was a dark-haired man of medium height who wore a look of the correct schools, good law practice, and impenetrable smugness like a mask against the world. He let his gaze dwell on the remains of the intimate supper, the drapes drawn at the windows, the warm way the big divan was rumpled. He was a man who never managed a rendezvous for himself but believed the worst of other men upon finding the scrappiest evidence. But it was all here for him to look upon. He hid his smirk behind the excellent Scotch; it was of fine quality and he wondered if Hollister’s taste in women was as good. He hoped so; he deserved it. Stella had given him a rough time.

“Wouldn’t have come at this hour and in a storm, Mal,” Norcross said. “But you know Stella.”

“We both know Stella.”

“She says she needs some money and she’s quite capable of taking you back to court to get it.”

“Let her. I told her. I tell you. I’ll see her in hell first. She’s getting a lot more from me than I ever got from her.”

“That’s hardly a point of law. This happens in most cases.”

“Stop being friendly. Tell me what you want.”

“I want to be friendly. After all, Mal, you’ve done your brave act. You told her to go to hell. She told me what you said. But now you’ve got to be realistic. A man doesn’t stand a chance in a divorce court and you ought to know it by now.”

“Threatening me won’t get you anywhere, either.”

“I hardly want to threaten you. From the looks of this storm, I may have to accept your hospitality and spend the night.”

“How pleasant. Will you have another Scotch?”

“Please. It’s delicious.”

“I’ll give you my recipe.”

Hollister poured him another long drink. They were silent, listening to the storm.

“Reminds me of Poe,” Norcross said, shivering. “Sounds like someone trying to get in.”

“Just the storm.”

“Well, my idea is that if we can get this little matter of increased alimony settled tonight, we can both sleep better.”

“I don’t mind staying awake a bit.”

Norcross smiled, studying him. “I have what may be some good news for you, Mal.”

“Stella is getting herself a job?”

“No. She might come back to you.”

“What?”

“She’s hinted as much. She suggested I sound you out. That’s why I came tonight. So you see I am friendly. This is what you might call a personal visit.”

“Last I heard she had a rich old guy on the string.”

Norcross shrugged.

“You must be drunk.”

“As a matter of fact, I’m not. You see, Stella has found divorce less than she thought it would be.”

Mal’s laugh was cold.

“Man who’ll chase married woman run like hell when she’s free. Old Hindustan proverb.”

“Well, be that as it may, I don’t know anything about it.”

“What you mean is, as Stella’s lawyer you’re not about to admit she has lovers. The hell with you, Norcross. She had them when we were married. Right here in this house — hell, in this room.”

“This is an allegation you couldn’t prove at the divorce hearings, Mal. But I’m quite willing to overlook it. Another Scotch? Fine. The important thing is that you didn’t want to let her go — ”

“Like a fool I thought marriage meant something — ”

“And now you have an opportunity to get her back.”

“My God, man, you are crazy. I finally found out nobody has to live in a meat chopper and you want me to stick my head right back into it?”

Norcross shrugged. “It’ll be a lot cheaper than the alimony she’ll gouge out of you. You’re a rich man, Hollister; we have your tax reports. You’re set up like a clay pigeon.”

“I ought to throw you out in the rain.”

“And add assault to your other woes?” Norcross smiled. “I don’t think so.” Now he frowned. “I swear, Hollister, that sounds like somebody beating on your door.”

Hollister listened. He didn’t believe there was anyone at the door but was pleased to leave Norcross.

“I’ll see who it is. Meantime, your room is the guest room, first right at the head of the stairs.”

“I’ll just finish my Scotch.”

Hollister strode from the room, feeling anger mount in him against Norcross, against the courts, against Stella, against himself.

He opened the door. His mouth sagged open when he saw Alberto Venzino standing there. He hadn’t expected to see anything except a limb blown against the door.

But Alberto read something else in his startled look. Hollister was a guilty man. This was clear in the whiteness of his cheeks, the sag of his mouth. Al did not ask if he could come in, he pushed by Hollister, dripping rain on the foyer carpet. He glanced around, conscious of a sense of insecurity. This was a lovely house, it would make Bea’s eyes round with awe. Al hated it but was impressed despite himself.

“I’m surprised to see you, Alberto.”

“Knock it off. Don’t be polite to me.”

Mal shrugged. This wasn’t his night, hadn’t been; he’d ordered a moon, gotten a storm.

Al frowned when he followed Mal into the living room and saw Norcross. He refused a drink but saw the small table, candles, intimate placing of the chairs, the wine, the cocktail shaker, the disarray of pillows on the divan, the drawn drapes. A red haze filmed his eyes.

Norcross watched all this over the top of his Scotch glass. He hid his smirk, moved toward the hall. Neither Al nor Hollister glanced at him.

Norcross gathered up his brief case, thinking he’d have an interesting story for Stella. With a little local research which he’d handle in the morning he could get her anything she wanted. Meantime, climbing the stairs, he felt a faint compassion for Hollister. A man couldn’t yell uncle quickly or loudly enough once his troubles started. He shrugged. Well, that was the way the trap snapped.

“You — brought her here,” Al said. His hands trembled. He strode close to Mal. He was half a foot shorter, but stocky and quivering with the anger in him. “I want you to stay away from her — ”

“I — ”

Al cut him off, yelling at him. “Don’t talk to me. I don’t want to hear your talk. You stay away from her. And so you know I mean this — ”

Before Hollister could set himself, react enough to move or lift an arm, Al drove his fist hard into him, wrist-deep below the belt.

Mal gasped, doubling over. He gagged, caught his arms across his groin. Al struck him on the side of the head, a long looping right cross.

Still holding his stomach with crossed arms, Mal toppled off balance, struck against a small white-covered table, knocking it over. Then he sprawled out on the floor. Gasping through his mouth, he lay on his side with fiery clouds billowing behind his eyes. Through his mind raced thoughts of what he was going to do when he got to his feet. He’d pluck the feathers off this character. He’d pull off his arms and stuff them down his goddamn throat.

He stretched out one leg, tensing it, some of the pain in his groin relaxed. After what seemed a long time, he managed to get to his knees.

He pulled himself up, braced on a straight chair. The room skidded in red and liquid fire. He rested another few seconds, watching Venzino warily.

“I don’t want to hit you,” Al’s voice was miserable. “I don’t want to hit nobody. You hear this? But you got to keep away from Dolores.”

Mal pulled himself up.

Al’s voice raged at him, quavering. “You go ahead, mister. You love somebody. Anybody. That’s fine. You love somebody — ” he waved his arm — “that lives in a house like this. Some dame knows her way around. You got that plain enough? You get on some other kick, mister. You went on the town, okay, but you picked the wrong girl for your hot time. Be pleased that I come here instead of Big Juan. He would not have hit you so gently, he would have killed you. You’re a rich man and you’re still alive — and you want to stay that way — I think you better get away from this town for a while. You find another doll in some other town. All I ask. You want no more trouble from me or Juan — you take a little trip — ”

“I’ll tell her goodbye — ”

“You tell nobody goodbye. Mister, you maybe got no idea how serious this is. We’re trying to keep from having trouble. We don’t give a damn if you’re killed — but you keep pushing Big Juan and he’ll kill you. We do care about that. Now I give you the word, mister. You come near that house once more — I’ll have Juan’s gun waiting. I’ll kill you, so help me God.”

He glared around this room where Hollister had brought Dolores. He’d said all there was to say. It was up to Hollister now. If he was a fool he’d come around one more time. If he were smart he’d clear out and let Dolores forget him. This was up to Hollister.

Al turned and walked out. He crossed the foyer, went out the front door.

The rain was beating down now, smacking the drive and bouncing like spilled coins. Flashes of lightning suddenly turned the whole dark wet world dazzlingly white.

16

GOOD LORD, VENZINO,” the sheriff said. He was a rotund man, as tall as Big Juan but with many chins and a beefy, over-fed look. He’d been sheriff for over twenty years. “This is a devil of a time of night to wake a man.”

“I am sorry about this,” Juan said. His face was set, voice cold.

“Well, I can see you’re not a damn bit sorry. But it’s all right. Nobody could sleep on a night like this. You ever see such a storm, Juan? We got a real twister a-blowing here. You got all your boats tied up?”

“I got them tied up. It don’t matter. They no good anyhow.”

“Well, shake out of that slicker and come on in. I’m getting my death of cold standing here in this doorway. Wind’s about to blow off my nightshirt.”

Big Juan removed his slicker, tossed it on a porch rocker. He followed the sheriff into his parlor. The dress was still clenched in his fist but now it was a soggy wad.

He glanced about the sheriff’s living room. This man had done well for himself; he was a man who gave his family the nice things they should have. The television was new, the couch was a very modern thing, with spindly legs. Juan wondered if it would support the sheriff’s weight. He saw it never had to since the sheriff had his own large easy chair under a reading lamp. Very old, the head rest was discolored by time and oils from the sheriff’s hair. Some arguments about keeping this old chair in this fine room, Juan supposed. The sheriff sank into his chair and waved a round arm at Juan.

“Sit down, sit down, if you can find a comfortable chair in this fool room. You know when we was kids, Venzino, a house was a place to be comfortable in. You didn’t own furniture so the neighbors would be impressed while you yourself had to go to bed if you wanted a comfortable place to squat.”

“Is nice,” Juan said. “Is all very fine.”

“Yeah,” the sheriff said. “Very fine. But this ain’t what you come to talk about.”

“No.”

“Then let me have it. People come here to see me when they got woes. When they want to be friendly — hell, I don’t know where they go.”

Juan nodded. “It is about this man Hollister.”

“Mal Hollister? The contracting engineer?”

“Is right. He have fool around with my girl.”

The sheriff whistled through his teeth. “Dolores, eh? The blonde one?”

Juan nodded. The sheriff whistled again.

“She’s a mighty pretty girl, Juan. You can’t expect men not to look at something like that.”

“The look, I don’t care. The touch, I care. He touch.”

“Wow. What kind of charges you want to make?”

“What kind of charges you got?”

The sheriff sighed, listening to the wind wailing around his house, lashing the palm fronds.

“Hollister is a big man, Juan,” he said.

“I’m a big man, too.”

“He’s rich. Mighty powerful.”

“This gives him no right to do what he do to my girl.”

“No. I guess you got a point there. Still, it does mean we got to be mighty careful of what we’re doing before we do it.”

“Does being rich give him the right to — ”

“I never said that, Juan. But you got to make up your mind. No matter what you’ve heard. The rich in this here country are just the same as they are anywhere else. They rule, they own, and they use it just about the way they want to. Anything else you hear is bull.”

“He hurt my girl. He’s going to pay.”

“All right, Juan. I’m just trying to tell you. It’s a tough row. You got to be dead sure.”

“I’m dead sure.” Juan shook out the limp wet rag of the dress but even soaked and wadded as it was, the sheriff could see how it had been ripped.

He whistled again. He frowned and struggled up to his feet. He waddled to Juan, took the dress, stood looking at it. He shook his head. “Juan, it just don’t make sense. No matter how wild she drove him — ”

“He already wild. She don’t have to drove him — ”

“I’m not blaming your daughter — ”

“Be sure you don’t.”

“Still, Juan, you got to face the truth. Hollister is a respected man. I mean, there’s never even been a whisper of anything like this about him. I mean it, Juan, not a whisper — ”

“You don’t believe what you see?”

“I’m trying to believe it. I’m trying to stack it up against what I know about Mal Hollister, too. It just don’t make sense.”

“It not make sense a man like that fooling around with my girl. I try to tell him, I warn him. Now you see — ”

“Juan, listen, we’ll have to have a doctor examine the girl — ”

“What’s this examine?”

“You’re saying Hollister raped her, aren’t you?”

“I’m say he tear clothes off her. Her face is all bruise. Yes — he rape her, too, if I need to say it.”

“You’ll have to prove it, Juan. I’m not trying to make it tough. In this state rape calls for the death penalty. This is a respected, wealthy man you’re charging. I’m trying to save you a lot of trouble, your daughter a lot of embarrassment — ”

“Embarrass? A girl should be embarrass when a man does this — ”

“Juan, if it’s like you say — no. But — ”

“What other way you think it is, huh? This great fine man. He’s very respected. How about my girl? You hear any talk about her she is not respected, too?”

“I never did, Juan. I never suggested I did.”

“All right. This man we fix him. If we not get him for rape without embarrass my girl — and examine her — we get him for something else. You got something else? Just — what you say — assault her?”

The sheriff nodded, then scratched himself. “That’s a wild charge to make against a man like Hollister.”

Juan stepped close to him. He took the ripped dress, shook it in the sheriff’s face.

“I tell you this — you do something — or I do something. I not a respected man like Hollister — when I do something the charge you make will not be wild. You believe me?”

“I believe you. In fact, I’m pleased you came to me first, Juan. So. I promise you. You go back home. You stay there. You behave yourself. First thing tomorrow, I’ll go talk to Hollister. Tell you what. You leave the dress here. I’ll confront him with it — I’ll get the truth. If you’ll wait and trust me.”

The wind wailed about the Venzino house. Frequently a palm frond was slapped against the walls or the roof. The rain beat against the boards, thunderous in the wind.

Bea held Dolores in her arms, soothing her, whispering to her.

She wanted Dolores to talk to her. She’d long ago learned it relieved you to speak out the hurts inside you, lowered the pressures in you, even if the problem remained unsolved, insoluble. But she could sense that whatever was on Dolores’ mind, it wasn’t anything she could talk about, put in words. Dolores was drawn into herself, drawn inward, sick and without hope, hardly aware of what was going on around her.

“It’s all right, Dolores,” she said. “All of us get hurt sometime. Lot of us most of the time. It’ll be all right.”

“No. I’ve lost him — I couldn’t face him now.”

“Who, Dolores? Who have you lost? Why can’t you face him?”

But Dolores was crying again, softly and deep within herself. She buried her face against Bea’s matronly bosom. I feel like a mother, Bea thought, and I never had a child, probably never will. She was thinking about Al, his desire for many children, feeling sorry for him. She’d been selfish, self-centered. She pulled her thoughts back to Dolores.

“Oh, Bea. God. You ever felt — you didn’t want to live?”

Bea tried to laugh. “You mean there’s some other way to feel?”

“I’m so alone.”

“Darling, we’re all alone. Every woman who ever loved a man is alone. You never know what to do, or say, or think. Don’t worry about it. It’s just par for the course.”

Dolores rolled away from her, buried her face in the pillow. “I’m tired,” she said. “I’m so tired.”

“You want to sleep now?”

“Yes.”

“You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m all right.” Dolores’ voice was dead.

“I’m right in Al’s room. You want me, you call. Hear?”

Dolores mumbled something. Bea stood there a moment in her gown, staring down at the sobbing girl. There should be something she could do, something she could say. She knew better. She bent over, smoothed Dolores’ hair. Then sighing, she straightened. After a second she turned off the light, stood listening in the storm. What fool thing was Al doing right now? Where was he? She had to admit though, whatever he did, he was trying to do what was right.

Alone, Dolores rolled over on her back.

She stared at the ceiling, eyes unblinking. She did not even flinch when lightning crackled, turning the room blazingly, fearsomely white.

She wanted to sleep. Her eyes burned and she longed to forget what had happened to her. She was afraid to sleep. She might scream again. She could not know what she’d do if she fell asleep. She had to hold herself taut like this, if not, she would scream and wail, louder than the storm, more terribly.

The room was too small for her, the house was too small and the world was. She could not breathe any more lying on the bed. She sat up, gasping loudly through her opened mouth. She swung her feet over the side of the bed, got up, still unable to fill her aching lungs.

She moved slowly to her door, went out into the front room. She could hear the children snoring or whispering or turning in their beds. She listened for a long time for a sound from Al’s room where Bea was. There was nothing or she could not hear anything above the storm.

She walked wearily into the kitchen. She closed the door and snapped on the light. The dishes were washed, the water glasses the kids had used lined the drainboard. And there was the knife.

She moved to it woodenly, picked it up, closing her fingers about its handle. She stared at it a long time and then pressed the point between her breasts at the soft place in her solar plexus. She tightened her mouth thinking that it took only a little courage to thrust the knife hard into her. It gleamed so sharply, like a surgeon’s instrument. If she closed her eyes, drove the knife into her, it would all be over. She held her breath, waited … and could not do it.

She felt tears burn her eyes. She hadn’t the courage it took to do it. Not because she was afraid to die but because the pain might be so terrible she’d stop instinctively before she’d thrust it into her heart. Suppose she could not do it all the way — this would be worse. No. She dropped the knife on the drain, the sound of its clattering fall lost in rumble of thunder.

It had seemed an easy way to die but now she knew better. It took strength and it took courage when the pain fought against your desires, and it had to be all the way. She couldn’t do it because it was almost like drowning yourself, you would fight for your life despite your desire to die, your need to die.

She looked about the wanly lighted kitchen. There had to be some way, a way which when started couldn’t be stopped.

She went to the cabinet, opened it. The small box was marked, “Rodent Exterminator, poison. Keep out of reach of small children and pets.” The carton was old, label smudged, the list of antidotes long ago torn away. She stared at the box, thinking that if it were started, no one could stop it in time. They wouldn’t know how.

She took down the carton with its red top.

She thought about Rosa and her eyes brimmed with tears. To take one’s own life was a sin to Rosa. But Rosa’s beliefs no longer touched Dolores. She couldn’t reconcile herself to a religion that denied her the man she loved, no matter who he was, what human mistake he’d made. If God was a gentle father He wouldn’t deny His children a chance at happiness on this earth.

She got a glass, set it on the drainboard. Her hands shook. If she drank this quickly there could be no turning back. Once started, nothing could stop it.

This was what it had to be. She poured the powder into the glass and carefully replaced the box on the high shelf where the children couldn’t get to it.

Then she turned and ran water into the glass, stirred it quickly.

She closed her eyes and drank it down. She felt her mouth and throat scald, felt instant nausea. She heard the glass drop from her fingers.

She turned, moving away from the fallen glass, going toward her room. If only she could get back to her bed, no matter how great the pain she would not cry out. She would stuff something in her mouth. Her mouth burned so horribly.

She stumbled and sprawled out on the floor.

She tried to get up and could not, she tried to move and she could not. The sharp pains grabbed at her stomach and twisted. She bit the back of her hand to keep from screaming. She tried to think about Mal.

The kitchen door was thrown open. Bea stood looking down at her, then her gaze touched the glass, flew back to Dolores’ face.

Dolores’ mouth was swelling, seared.

Bea screamed.

Abruptly the dogs were yowling again at the kitchen door, the children bounced from their beds.

Bea raged at them to get back in bed and most of them obeyed. They’d never seen Aunt Bea as wild as this before, never heard her speak so loudly.

Luis and Linda were trying to help her get Dolores to her bed when Al came in the front door.

17

NOBODY SPOKE. None of them moved. The wind hurtled in past Al in the open doorway. Finally he closed it, leaned against the door, staring at Dolores.

At last Bea was able to speak. She stared at AI, her eyes bright with tears. “She tried to kill herself, Al. She drank poison.”

At the sound of Bea’s voice, Al was able to move. He strode forward, shoved the children out of the way.

Dolores’ swollen mouth moved. She said, “Mal.”

Al swung her up in his arms, cursing. He cursed Mal Hollister, he cursed himself because he hadn’t killed him.

He moved through Dolores’ bedroom door with her in his arms. Gently he placed her on the bed.

Bea was at his heels. “It was my fault, Al.”

Al was staring at Dolores’ blistered mouth, trying to think what to do — take Dolores to a doctor, bring one here. His mind was numb, he was helpless.

“Your fault? Your fault? What kind of fool talk is this?”

“I should have stayed with her. But I thought she wanted to be alone. She was so miserable … I thought she would sleep. I should have stayed with her.”

“Forget it. It’s not your fault.”

“I should have stayed with her.”

“Nobody would have thought she would do a thing like this,” Al said. “Nobody.”

He stared at Bea, needing her strength. Suddenly he saw that in their marriage it was Bea who made the decisions, who had the will. But now when he needed her, she stood numbed with shock and horror, unable to think.

“What are we going to do, Bea?”

She stared at Dolores; she shook her head.

“We got to do something for her. Bea, what are we going to do?”

“Mal.” Dolores whispered it again.

Al felt his rage rise at the sound of that name. He spun around, facing Linda who was in the doorway.

“Where’s Mama? Where’s Papa?”

“I don’t know.” Linda was crying, clinging to the gold cross at the end of the chain about her neck.

“They left when you did,” Bea told him. “Al, we must get a doctor. You go for a doctor.”

Al nodded. This was what he needed. Bea must think, tell him what to do. Dolores was dying and he was helpless with the horror of it, but if Bea could keep him moving, he could do anything. He nodded again, spoke to Dolores. “I’ll get a doctor.”

She did not even hear him. She whispered Mal’s name again. Al yelled at her. “Goddamn Mal. Goddamn him, you hear me?”

Bea said, “You think that helps any, Al? Get her a doctor.”

He nodded, contrite and ashamed of himself. He pushed past Linda. He said, “Where’s Luis? Where’s the kid? Wasn’t he here a minute ago?”

Linda shook her head. She did not know. Now Bea said, “Hurry, Al.”

He nodded again. He moved toward the front door.

It was thrust open and Juan and Rosa came in. Linda cried out and ran to Rosa. Linda threw herself in Rosa’s arms, clinging to her. She sobbed, unable to speak.

Juan stared toward Bea in Dolores’ doorway.

His face went ashen. He recognized trouble so quickly now. Some terrible thing had happened here. He was afraid to ask what it was.

Al moved his gaze from Juan’s face to Rosa’s. He shook his head, knowing he was unable to tell them what had happened. He did not want to be in this house when Rosa heard that one of her children had attempted to take her own life.

He said, “I’m going to get a doctor. Right now.”

No one heard him but he wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular anyway.

Juan managed to speak. “Bea, what happened?”

Al was trying to get past them to go out the front door.

Bea said, “Dolores drank something. It was poison. I’m afraid — ”

Rosa moaned aloud. She moved forward, half-dragging Linda with her.

Al got to the door. “I’m going for a doctor,” he said again.

Juan stumbled across the room. He felt as though he were being beaten about the head. Juan stood beside Dolores’ bed, looked down at her. He cried out, a sound that dwarfed the thunder. He stood there shaking his head.

Rosa turned suddenly, ran to the front door, threw it open. Outside she heard Al grinding the wet motor, trying to start it.

She screamed his name. When he finally answered, she shouted across the porch to him. “Alberto! The priest! When you go to the doctor, also you get the priest to come! You hear me, Alberto?”

He shouted something at her and she closed the door She leaned against it and did not move. She did not do anything because such a thing as this had never happened in her life before and she was powerless. She did not even know what to do.

Juan came from the bedroom, walking like a man in a trance. Linda was huddled on the couch. Lightning flared at the window. The windows shook in their frames, the sashes rattled, bouncing in the thunder and the house trembled on its foundation.

Juan said, to no one, “The bay is almost to the house. The first time I have ever seen it so high.”

“My baby,” Rosa whispered. She was praying with her lips barely moving, eyes upturned.

Bea said from the bedroom doorway, “There ought to be something we could do.”

Dolores cried out in agony. The sound was sharp and hurting. Bea stared at Juan and Rosa, then went to the bed. Her face was contorted because she was helpless and she did not want to stay in here helplessly, but she must stay here with Dolores, unable to help her at all. She waited, but the others did not come to her.

Juan said, “Linda. Go to bed.”

The child wanted to protest but at the look on Juan’s face, she changed her mind. She nodded and got up. She padded into her room. After a moment she darted back into the parlor.

She said, “Luis is not in his bed.”

Juan hardly heard her, did not understand her. “Get in bed.”

“Luis is not in bed.”

They heard her this time. They both ran into the children’s big room. After a moment they returned to the parlor. Juan stood in the center of the room and roared Luis’ name.

The pound of rain, the scream of wind was the only answer.

Rosa sagged on the couch, shoulders slumped, arms clasped between her knees.

She looked up. “Papa. What terrible thing is this that has happened to us, Papa?”

Juan licked his lips. He glanced toward Dolores’ room, toward the room where Luis’ bed was empty.

“Why has God turned from us?” she cried.

He shook his head.

“What is God’s will?” Rosa cried. “If I know His will, I do it. He must know this. Why He turn against us like this?”

“Is not God, Mama,” Juan said. “Is me.”

“Is you, Papa? What are you talking about?”

“It’s all my fault, Mama. All this. All my fault.”

She shivered, seized with cold.

“No. Oh, no.”

“But it is,” Juan said. “I must tell you Mama. You got to understand. It is what I have brought upon us, with my sin.”

“You sin, Papa?”

He nodded. “It was — ” he winced. “It was the whore down at Jake’s Bar.”

She went tense, squeezing her eyes shut, not wanting to hear him, wishing she never had to hear him.

Juan went on, voice relentless and dead. “I was drinking, Mama, and I was all mix up — all mix up about — our girl in there and that divorce man. I was all mix up. Worried. Mama. You understand, Mama? All mixed up. Drinking. Worry. Hardly know what I was doing.”

They watched Bea move from the bedroom across to the kitchen. For that instant they were silent.

“I’m not saying I wasn’t wrong, Mama. Or that I didn’t sin. I sinned. Now I pay for my sin with hurt to my child. In my heart I did what was wrong. She — pull off this dress and showed bare — and they were young and full and I tried but I could not stop my hand from touching at them, and the way she showed it all to me and it was lovely and I was all mix up. So mix up. Mother of God. Mother of God.”

He sank beside the couch on his knees. Rosa touched his head, soothing it. “Is all right. Is all right.”

They saw Bea hurrying back into the bedroom carrying something in a glass but they were too numbed to know what she was doing.

Juan held to Rosa. “No. Is not all right. About my head I bring all this ruin. To break your heart. I only touched her and I ran away. But God knows…. In my heart … God is punishing me … this … all this … God’s punishment.”

• • •

The front door was pushed open and Al came through it, water dripping from him.

Rosa looked up, searching for the miracle. She did not find it. Al was alone.

He closed the door behind him.

“The doctor?” Rosa said. “Where is he, Al?”

Al cursed and then, clenching his fists at his side, he forced himself to smile. “I saw him. He said — he would come — if the rain lets up.”

“She’ll die!”

Al cursed again. “I did all I could, Mama. I couldn’t drag him out. He asked what she drank. What kind of poison? I didn’t know. I could not tell him. He said we should give her something to make her throw it up.” Al cursed again. “He said he would come. If the rain lets up.”

Juan whispered, “Oh, God, if the sin is mine, let me be punished. You hear? I can take. But not the child. The sin is mine. Damn, oh damn, then strike me dead, but let her live.”

Al stared about helplessly. “He said he would come — if the rain let up.”

He was silent and they listened to the rain battering the roof, slashing against the house, the sound like bitter cosmic laughter.

Rosa licked her mouth, staring at Al, afraid to ask. “The priest, Al? You saw the priest?”

“I saw him.”

“What did he say, Al? When is he coming?”

Al cursed. “In this storm? He will come. When the rain lets up enough to get through. He said to promise you this.”

Rosa sank to the couch. She did not move or speak. They heard Dolores cry out from the bedroom. They heard the name and they all cringed against it.

“Mal,” Dolores cried. “Mal.”

18

MAL WAS PACKING in his bedroom. Through the sounds of the storm and the walls he could hear Stella’s lawyer declaiming wildly and drunkenly to himself in the guest room. Well, he was pleased if Norcross was happy, even if it took a fifth of Scotch to accomplish it.

He threw a shirt in the suitcase on his bed. Tomorrow he’d put this place up for sale. He’d clear out. He was too tired to fight any more; it was all a fight, the politicians and the crooks all day, the Venzinos, the lawyers and the ex-wives. The hell with it, he was tired. He couldn’t promise he’d forget Dolores Venzino just because he’d gotten the word. It wasn’t something you could turn off when you got orders. Best he could do was make the effort — for the sake of his own sanity.

He heard the doorbell and at first he decided it was the bells he heard in weariness. Then he decided the hell with it, he was too tired to answer it. Wasn’t it undoubtedly Big Juan Venzino? Big Juan he could do without. He could do without the whole damned family. He wanted to marry their daughter and they’d rather kill him than allow it. It would be comic if it weren’t so damned senselessly sad.

The doorbell rang again.

All right, damn you, Big Juan, I’ll answer you, and I’ll tell you what I think of you, you ignorant, benighted, superstitious, narrow-minded, bigoted old devil.

He strode out of his bedroom and went down the steps, listening to the lawyer in the guest room. His anger mounted through the weariness in him as he crossed the foyer. He snapped on the porch light, threw open the door.

He stared. At first there was nothing, then his gaze was pulled down to the child, barely tall enough on tiptoe to reach the doorbell.

“Luis,” Mal whispered. “My God, child. Is that you, or is that a drowned rat?”

Luis’ teeth were chattering. Mal caught him up in his arms, brought him inside, kicking the door closed behind him. He carried him to a downstairs bathroom, rubbed him dry with a towel. He found an old robe and wrapped the child in it. Luis was still shivering.

“What are you doing here? Don’t tell me you’ve thought of another funny joke to tell me?”

Luis stared at him, brown eyes wide. “Is Dolores.”

“What is Dolores? What’s the matter with Dolores?”

“She is sick. Very sick. Something. She drank something. Her mouth. All a blister.”

“Jesus. Poison! Why did she do that?”

Luis shook his head. “I don’t know. I think it is you she need. She call for you. Over and over. I run out. I come to get you. I think she need you.”

“Poison.” Carrying the child, Mal strode toward the front door. “All right. Come on. We’ll go down there. Maybe we better get a doctor first. Huh?”

Luis was quiet. He was turning the whole matter over to Mal Hollister now. Mal ran through the rain to his car.

Luis said, “You handle?”

“Okay.”

Luis sighed and snuggled against the seat. He said, “Some car. This some fine car, all right.”

Mal pushed the heater knob. They moved out of the yard and he felt the car warming up.

Mal glanced at the boy, spoke with a soft laugh. “Think of it, Luis. How smart you are. How dumb a man like me can get. Here I was, tired out, ready to quit. You know? Things were tough. I was pretty low. Thought I didn’t have a chance — and then, here you come, in the rain, to invite me back in the human race.”

“I’m sleepy,” Luis said.

Mal nodded. They did not speak again all the way to the doctor’s house.

• • •

The doctor shook his head. “I’m sorry. Not in this storm. We’d never make it. I’ve already explained this to Venzino.”

“Yes. Well, I’m not Venzino.”

The doctor jerked his head up, staring at Mal. “I’m not going out in this storm.”

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t argue about it.” Mal’s calm voice was hard. “It will save both of us a lot.”

“What could I do?”

“That’s up to you. There better be something. I already hate to think that Venzino has been here looking for you and that you’ve wasted this much time — ”

“This storm.”

Mal shrugged his shirt up on his shoulders. “I am now out of patience. I’ll give you just two minutes, doctor, to get your bag — ”

“Couldn’t you bring her here?” Then the doctor paused, reading something in Mal’s face. “All right. All right. I’ll get ready. Just a minute.”

• • •

Al opened the door when he heard them cross the porch. He took Luis from Mal’s arms. He did not at once see the doctor.

“Thought maybe it was the doctor,” Al said. “I thought I told you to stay away from here. You forget quick.”

Mal said, “Where is Dolores?”

“Get out of here. We got all the trouble we can stand. We don’t need you.”

“He brought the doctor,” Luis said.

Al flushed, seeing the doctor. He stepped back out of the doorway. The doctor entered the house ahead of them, shook out of his slicker. He looked questioningly at Al who nodded toward Dolores’ bedroom. Carrying his medical kit, the doctor crossed the parlor. The children stared at him from the doorway of their bedroom.

Al set Luis on his feet. “Get to bed. You pray that your mama and papa are too busy to notice you tonight.”

“I had to go get him.” Luis pointed at Mal.

Mal nodded. “That’s right. I was invited here. By the only member of this family with good sense.” He moved toward Dolores’ room.

“Albert — ” Bea came out of Dolores’ room. “Who is it? Oh, Mr. Hollister. Come in. Dolores has been calling for you — over and over.”

“I told him,” Luis said from his doorway.

“I came as quickly as I could,” Mal said.

“He’s just leaving.” Alberto’s voice was savage. “He got her in this mess. Now let him get out of here.”

“Please forgive my husband, Mr. Hollister,” Bea said. “He’s upset — we all are here tonight.”

“My sister is dying.” Alberto’s voice broke. He stared at Mal as though seeing him through a red mist. “You still here?”

“I told you. I came to see Dolores. I’ll be here until I see her. Take another poke at me if it pleases you — but I better tell you, I’m not going to stand here and take it this time.”

Bea spoke quickly. “Of course you want to see Dolores.” She moved between him and Al. “Come in here, Mr. Hollister.”

Al sucked in his breath but did not speak. Mal followed Bea through the bedroom door, feeling the thunder shake the house on its foundations.

Mal stopped at the foot of the bed. He stared at Dolores, feeling sick. Who could have made her do such a thing to herself, a simple little girl with her simple belief in goodness. He clenched his fists. The poison had scorched her mouth. The doctor’s face was grave as he gave her an injection.

Her parents knelt beside the bed, praying. They did not look up when Bea and Mal entered the room. The doctor ordered immediate emetics made up of mustard, egg-whites, soap, hot coffee. Bea nodded, hurried out to the kitchen.

Al stood in the center of the front room. His face was ashen, eyes fixed on nothing. Bea said, “Go in your room, Al. Lie down. I’ll call you.”

He nodded, without the will any longer even to think for himself. He moved into his room, closed the door and fell across the bed.

Bea worked swiftly in the kitchen. Mal appeared. “Is there anything I can do to help you?”

She gave him the emetics she’d prepared, told him to carry them to the doctor while she made black coffee.

“She’s not going to die,” Mal said. He seemed to be speaking to himself.

Bea didn’t answer.

Bea sat in the front room on the couch. She could never remember having been so tired. She heard something move on the front porch. She was sure it was her imagination; she was overwrought, jumpy. Perhaps one of the dogs had run around there in the rain.

She heard it again. Frowning, she got up, crossed the room and opened the door.

“Ric.”

She stared, hardly recognizing him slouching there, completely soaked, clothing hanging sodden on him.

“Ric. Come in.”

“No.” He shook his head, leaned against the porch wall. He looked old, defeated. Bea turned on the porch light, stepped through the door, closed it after her.

“Ric. What’s the matter with you? Are you ill?”

He shook his head, staring at her. His hair lay dripping and lank down the sides of his head. His shirt clung to his muscled chest, showing the dark skin, thick dark chest hairs. But he no longer looked handsome. He looked evil, unwholesome.

“Are you drunk?”

“I’m sober now. I was never more sober.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I got to see Doll.”

She shook her head. “She’s ill, Ric. Very ill.”

“I know that. My God, I know that. I got to see her.”

“How do you know she’s ill?”

He shook his head, unable to meet her gaze. His whole body shuddered. “It don’t matter. I know. You got to let me see her.”

“She can’t see you, Ric. She’s — dying.”

A tortured sound was pressed from Ric’s throat. He staggered about on the porch as if he wanted to run away but didn’t know where to go any more. He bumped a chair, knocked it over. His canvas shoes dripped when he took a step.

He moved back to the front door, leaned against the wall beside it. He rested his forehead against the boards, rolling his head back and forth, whispering her name.

Finally he could not stand it any more and began to cry, whimpering, striking the wall with the side of his fist. Bea stared at him in horror. He sank to the floor, pressed against the wall, desolate, and he cried inconsolably.

She was frightened and wanted to call out for help but she could think only of Mal Hollister who might be of any assistance. She was sorry for Ric, even this pitiable hulk of what he had been. He wouldn’t want anyone to see him like this.

“Ric, don’t,” she said. “It’s not your fault.”

He turned up his head, his voice was odd, empty. “It’s my fault. If she dies, I killed her.”

His body shook again and his face was twisted, becoming hideous with agony. “I got to make it up to her,” he sobbed. “I want you to tell her. I was crazy. I was. She begged me not to. I wouldn’t listen.”

Bea felt her own legs go weak. She looked around, afraid she’d fall, too. “You did that, Ric? To her?” Then she knew she’d believed this from the first time she heard Dolores say it. It had seemed wrong that Mal Hollister would rip Dolores’ clothes, batter her face, attack her. Looking at Ric, she saw it made sense like this. It was the crazy, drunken, violent crime Ric Suarez might commit.

At last she nodded. This was the way it had to be. She stared at him, huddled on the floor, penitent, weak and repulsive. She shivered. She barely dared trust herself to speak. “You better get out of here, Ric.”

He pulled himself to his feet but still leaned against the wall.

“I got to see her. I got to tell her.”

“I’ll tell her, Ric. But you better get out. If — they find out it was you — ”

She did not finish this. She saw him shiver, shaking his head. “The storm. I’m scared in the storm. It’s — like God is after me.”

She stared at him. “Take your chance on the storm, Ric. And on God. You’ve got a chance with them. You’ve got none — here.”

He looked about as though he’d never seen this place before, would never see it again. Lightning crashed white about them and she saw him cover his head with his arms. He opened his lips to speak to her, then shook his head. He stumbled down the steps, headlong, shoulders braced against the driving wind and rain.

She watched him sloshing through the ankle-deep water. Then he was lost in the darkness, suddenly gone, as though he’d never existed. Her first reaction was to run into the house and tell them all that Ric had hurt Dolores, as Dolores had tried to tell them, only she would make them listen, make them believe her. And she moved toward the door, and stopped. Al and Juan would race into the night, chasing down Ric. It would not solve anything to tell them now, only start some new horror. It was enough that she knew the truth. Only she wished she didn’t know it. She looked about at the stormy night, feeling frightened and lonely.

“Al,” she whispered. He was her strength, and she’d never known it until now. She turned quickly, hurrying into the front room.

19

BEA CROSSED THE FRONT ROOM, aware of daylight pale against the windows. The storm seemed to have abated slightly, she couldn’t be sure; she’d been listening to the wind for so many hours it was as if the howling were inside her head now.

She glanced into the children’s room; all were sprawled asleep in their beds. She smiled at them, liking them for the first time. She stroked her hands along her arms against the chill, went slowly to Al’s bedroom. She closed the door behind her.

Al was lying on the bed, eyes wide and dry. He stared at the ceiling. He did not speak. She lay down beside him and they were silent.

After a moment, Dolores’ bedroom door opened and Mal stepped into the front room, followed by Juan and Rosa.

Juan waited only until the bedroom door was closed. “Why are you here?” he said to Mal. “Haven’t you done enough?”

“I came to see Dolores,” Mal said. “She needed me and I came to see her.”

“Please, Papa. We no fight now. He bring the doctor. Doctor promise Al he come, but he bring him.”

“For this I thank you.” Juan’s voice was cold. “Now if you go.”

“Papa.”

Juan made a sharp downward gesture at her. Rosa sank to the couch, laid her head back. After a moment, she sat forward. “Where is the priest? He promise to come.”

“Electric wires are down, Mrs. Venzino,” Mal said. “The road is washed out, trees blown across them. Maybe he couldn’t come.”

“He promise. We need him. He promise.” She glanced up at Mal, puzzled. His voice was soothing, reassuring; he had brought the doctor. It was as if she had prayed to God only to have the devil answer her prayers. “The ones we need — we are helpless and we need them, of all these people — you come to help us.”

“What you say? Why shouldn’t he? He cause all this terrible thing,” Juan said.

Rosa shook her head at him. “This we don’t know, Papa.”

Juan went across the room, got the Colt .45. Mal watching him, spoke sharply, voice steady. “Put that thing away.”

“Oh, no, Mr. Hollister. You and me, we have a little chat but you know I mean what I say. You know when I tell you to stay away from here, I kill you if I see you again.”

Mal moved unhurriedly but without hesitancy to him. “Give me that gun, Juan.” He kept his voice level.

“I tell you for the last time. You stay away from my girl.”

Rosa kept her face down, gaze fixed on the floor. She murmured something about the priest but she did not move.

“Give me the gun.” Mal closed his fingers on Juan’s right wrist. With his other hand he clasped the gun, wrenched it free.

“What kind of fool are you?” Juan cried.

“I don’t know. Only way I know to keep you from doing an insane thing is to take this away from you, Juan.”

Juan was deeply troubled now, this was evident in his face. For the first time in his life something had been taken from him by a stronger force than his own. He hadn’t known Mal had the courage to come near him, nor the strength to wrest the gun from him.

He shook his head, voice low. “I didn’t want to kill you. I only wanted you dead.”

“How nice.”

“I wanted you to see that gun. To know that if I must, I use it to keep you away from my girl. You have hurt her — make her not want to live no more. You have cause big trouble in my house. The gun does not matter — if I cannot keep you away, I kill you with my hands.”

Mal looked down at the gun, stared at Juan a long time. “All right, but first you better hear what I have to say — it may save you a mess that you can’t ever straighten out. I’m going to stay away from your daughter.”

“I don’t want lies.”

“I’m telling you the truth. When I leave here today, you won’t see me any more. I’m putting the house on the bluff up for sale. I won’t come back to Dead Bay any more.”

Juan frowned and Rosa turned on the couch, watching.

“Will that make you believe me? But there’s more. I don’t expect it to get through your thick skull but I love Dolores. As much as you do — more. But I’ve thought it over, and you’re right. I’m too old for her. Everything is wrong for us, everything — I was a fool, but sometimes when you want someone so terribly you don’t think straight.”

Juan chewed at his lip, remembering Ruby down at Jake’s Bar. He did not meet Mal’s gaze.

“I didn’t think straight because if I had, I’d have known I was wrong without you and Rosa telling me so. But I loved her. And I do love her. If I didn’t love her so much, I — wouldn’t — I couldn’t walk out of here and leave her. But if I’ve done that to her — ” he nodded toward her bedroom where the doctor struggled to save her life, “I’ll get out before I hurt her any more. That’s it, Juan. If I’ve hurt you people, I’m sorry — I can’t ever make it up — I don’t ask you to forgive me … but if only you could understand that I loved her so terribly.”

In Al’s bedroom, Bea was sitting up on the side of the bed, listening to the people talking in the parlor, but mostly she heard the hard tones of Juan’s voice.

She turned, grasping Al’s arm. “Al. Get up.”

He sat up, running his hand through his thinning hair. “What’s the matter?”

“They’re arguing in there. Juan may kill Mal Hollister.”

“So? I should have killed him.”

“Oh, you fool. You’ll sit there and let Juan kill him and wreck everything in the world for him and Rosa and Dolores — for you and me and for the kids. And why?”

“Because my sister is dying.” But Al was holding his breath, listening to the voices in the front room.

“Sure, because of what happened in there. Because of Dolores’ ripped dress and the way she tried to kill herself. But Mal Hollister had nothing to do with that — with none of it. You want to know the truth? You want to know why Dolores tried to kill herself?”

Al stared at her.

“It was because she thought she wasn’t good enough for Mal any more — after what happened to her. What happened to her last night — after she left Mal.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m trying to tell you the truth. I’m trying to make you go in there and stop Juan before he makes a terrible mistake that can’t ever be corrected — Mal had nothing to do with hurting Dolores. Ric did that. Ric was waiting for her — when Mal brought her home. He hit her, and he tore her clothes and he attacked her.”

“Oh, fine. Where’d you ever hear a wild thing like that? Or is it something you dreamed?”

She laughed at him, her voice rose. “Get out there, Al. You know I’m telling the truth. It didn’t make sense from the first that Mal would do that. Not to me — and in your heart, not to you. But Ric showed up here a while ago. He’d been wandering around in the storm. He was wild, wanting to see Dolores, to tell her how sorry he was — ”

“Where is Suarez? Where is that guy?”

She shook her head. “Never mind him. You don’t want to start new trouble. You want to stop Juan — you want to stop and think. Just one time, Al. Just once.”

• • •

The door to Dolores’ bedroom opened and the doctor stepped through it, closing it behind him. In the light from the windows, the gray light of a stormy dawn and in the faded electric light, his face was gray.

He spoke to neither, Juan nor Rosa. He met Mal’s gaze and there was defiance in his eyes.

The three of them watched him, waiting. He closed his medical kit, snapping the locks. He glanced toward the wanly lit windows. The storm was still slashing against them. He sighed, brought his gaze back to Mal.

“I did everything I could,” he said.

Rosa cried out, biting at the back of her hand. “Will she live?”

The doctor shrugged. “Is there any coffee around?”

“Answer,” Juan roared at him. “Will she live?”

The doctor faced Mal again. “I told you. I have done all I can. She’s conscious, and she keeps babbling some nonsense about Mal Hollister — he won’t love her now, he can’t love her now. I said nonsense, to me it’s nonsense. I’m getting old — and love is a damned unimportant quality to me. Nothing I can analyze in a clinic, it causes a lot of trouble — ”

“You’re trying to tell me something,” Mal said in irony.

The doctor shrugged. “I’ve done all I can. This girl has no will to live. She wants to die.”

Rosa cried, “This is not true. It cannot be true.”

“It’s true all right,” the doctor said. “Unless her will to live keeps her alive — I can’t do anything for her. She calls over and over for Hollister here. If you can give her the will to live, she’ll live. But this trouble is between the two of you — only you can give her the will to live. If you want to do it — ” he shrugged.

Mal stared at him briefly, strode toward Dolores’ bedroom.

There was a fierce look in his face.

Juan said, “Man — ”

Rosa caught Juan’s arm. “Papa, you got to understand. She need him. Not you. Not me. She need him.”

Juan frowned but did not move again. He sank to the couch, face more troubled than ever. The bedroom door closed behind Mal. The doctor said, “Is there any coffee, Mrs. Venzino? I’d very much appreciate a cup of coffee.”

• • •

Bea followed Al into the front room. Al’s face was the color of paste and his legs were weak. He paused inside the parlor, looking around. Juan was alone, sitting on the couch. He was staring at the floor. They could hear Rosa and the doctor talking in subdued voices in the kitchen.

Al walked slowly to where Big Juan sat.

“Where is he?” Al said. “Hollister?”

Big Juan looked up. His eyes were brimmed with tears but the anger had gone from his face. He nodded toward the bedroom door. His voice was puzzled. “Is what she wants. Is what she’s got to have.”

Al licked his tongue across his mouth.

He looked around the room. “What are you going to do, Papa — about him?”

Juan shook his head again. “I don’t know. Is what she needs. Is what she’s got to have. What can I do? Even the fool doctor tell him to go to her…. The fool doctor give up…. Send him in there to her.”

“That’s wonderful,” Bea said. Her smiling brightened her face.

“Shu,” Big Juan said. “So what is wonderful?”

Bea touched Al’s arm. “Al, I want to talk to you.”

“What’s the matter with you? You insisted I come out here and — ”

“That’s it, Al. I’ve changed my mind.” She jerked her head toward their bedroom. “Al, please — ?”

He nodded, actually relieved that he did not have to tell Juan the truth about Ric Suarez. It had been a long night, a long storm. He was tired. He could not remember having ever been so tired. He didn’t want new trouble.

He closed the bedroom door behind him, stared at Bea. She beat hell. She kept him off-base most of the time. “You changed your mind? You don’t want to tell him?”

She moved close to him. “Don’t you see, Al? We can always tell him, if we have to. If we need to, we can tell him. But — I don’t think we’ll have to, Al.”

His fists clenched. “But this Ric. You going to let him get away with it?”

“Oh, sweetheart. You think anyone ever gets away with a thing like that? He’s got to live with himself, knowing what he is, what he did. Oh, no. He hasn’t gotten away with anything.”

He stared at her. “But when he told you — why didn’t you tell us then — why did you let him go?”

“I sent him away — ”

“Why? After you knew what he did to Dolores. For God’s sake, why, Bea?”

She spoke slowly, trying to put into words all the thinking she’d been doing since she’d seen the wrecked hulk of Ric Suarez out on the front porch earlier.

“Because, despite anything you think, I don’t believe that people are really bad — ”

“What he did? Not bad?”

“Not when you think about it. Not when you think about him. Not when you understand him. What he did was frightful and vicious. But he did it because he was helpless — he was driven. He wanted something he couldn’t have. In a way, it seems to me, AI, all of us are bad. All of us want something. Something. What, Al? A swimming pool, a membership in the country club. Most of the time it’s something we can’t have — but still we want it — and wanting it and trying to get it, that’s what makes us appear to be bad — we look bad to the people who oppose us — as they look bad to us. We look bad to people who’d rather judge us than make the effort to understand us.”

He looked at her, puzzled.

“Yeah,” he said. “I wanted something. Sons. Did that make me look bad to you, eh?”

“Maybe — neither one of us has ever really tried to understand the other one, Al. We — we’ve only fought.”

• • •

Juan heard the car pull into the front yard, tires swishing through the hub-deep water. The car pulled all the way to the front steps. Juan got up, walked woodenly to the door. Rosa came hurriedly to him from the kitchen. Her face was wreathed in smiles.

“Juano! Is the priest! Is the priest in his old Ford! The priest! He promise. I know he come.”

She ran ahead of Juan, opened the front door and went out to the porch.

She returned with the priest, holding to his arm, leading him into her house. He was a stout, bald man with a pink, unlined face. His black coat and high collar were peppered with raindrops.

“Power lines down all over town,” he was saying to Rosa. “Roads washed out. I came down your street, not knowing if I was on the road or in the marsh. It was good I had God to guide me.”

Juan tilted his head, voice flat. “It is good that you are closer to God than we are.”

The priest laughed. “I don’t think that, Juano. I’m also a good driver. I go slow. I look sharp. I think that God will help me — but I give Him all the assistance I can.”

The doctor came out of the kitchen with his third cup of black coffee. He and the priest nodded to each other. This reminded the priest of the reason for his visit.

“The young girl,” he said. “Is she living? I pray I am not too late?”

“She’s still alive,” the doctor said. “I got here.”

The priest nodded and sighed. He glanced at Rosa. “Would it please you, Rosa, if I went in and said a prayer for her before I go?”

Rosa glanced at the doctor, then looked at Juan. “What you think, Papa?”

Juan studied his hands for a long time.

Finally he said, “Maybe later, Father. Maybe later.

Now, you understand, I don’t know … I guess after I sit here and think it over that religion — she is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. No? To the doctor here one thing, to Rosa and me, all our life another…. To Dolores in there … well, I guess she’s got her own religion.”

The priest nodded. “All right. Perhaps I come back later then, if the Lord and I can get through this road.”

The doctor said, “If you’re going back to town, Dominie, I’ll ride with you, if you’ll let me.”

“I’ll be pleased! There must be something we can discuss on our way back to town — without argument.”

The doctor laughed. “I doubt that.”

• • •

In Hollister’s big house, Norcross walked up and down in the upstairs hallway. He carried the Scotch bottle clutched in his arms though it was empty, had for a long time been empty.

“Mr. Hollister!” He shouted, knocking on all the doors along the hallway. “Where are you? I have a decision for you. Decision utmost importance. Decision case Hollister vs. Hollister. Case Scotch. Scotch plaid. I have thought over your case all night, Mr. Hollister. Over delicious Scotch. Change my whole life. Saw the truth. What I am going to do, sir, is not ethical, and probably not priv’leged. Probably be frowned upon. Even I — would frown upon it but cannot get my brows together. I feel, sir, that you are a fine fellow. A man that buys good Scotch can’t be all bad. You brought me and this bottle of Scotch together, sir, and I feel I owe you something, even if it is only the tattered, shabby truth. You must hold out against us, Mr. Hollister. Tomorrow I shall put the spurs to you in the interests of my client. But you must resist. Do you hear me, sir? I cannot repeat this too strongly. This without precedent. Your wife — this woman I represent — have the honor to represent — is a leech. A leech, sir, who has been proposed marriage to by a very rich man who happens to be elderly. So she is making a play — if she can force you to marry her again to keep from paying outrageous alimony — slings and arrows of outrageous alimony — she will throw over this old boy. If not — wham — he gets it — right between the eyes. Do you follow me, sir? You must be firm. You got to fight, sir, and you will be free. Do not worry about Stella. This I have learned, sir, we must never worry about the Stellas of this world. Do you hear me, sir?”

Exhausted, Norcross lay down against one of the doors, having long since despaired of ever finding his own room again in this monstrous place. He rocked the bottle in his arms, crooning to it, until they both fell asleep.

• • •

Al pulled the suitcase from under the bureau and placed it on the bed.

Bea said, “What are you going to do, Al?”

“We’re going home! We got a lot to do. We got my sons to think about.”

She drew a deep breath, ready to give him the old arguments. She exhaled, said nothing. He stared at her, thinking he was going to have sons.

“I understand, Al. It’s been a long night — for me, too.”

“It’s like I suddenly come to my senses, too. What you said — about understanding what people want, and I began to see what you wanted, as well as what I wanted. You didn’t mean Ric — you meant me. And you. Everybody. And then I saw you’ve been wrong, for me, you’ve been dead wrong — ”

“I know, Al. I do know.”

“But I been wrong, too.”

“No. You wanted something — and when you didn’t get it you were hurt.”

“My trouble was I didn’t want anything. I was just against whatever you wanted. I was worse than Ric. What did you ask of me that was so terrible? All you wanted was to be happy — with me. Plenty of women with less cause would have given up and looked for another man.”

“I never wanted anyone else. Only, I wanted you my way.”

“Sure. You wanted me just to be civilized enough so you could live inside a city limits with me — ”

She smiled, looking at him, and thought, all of them had learned something tonight, all of them were changed, none of them would ever again be as they had been before this night. “It’s all right, Al.”

“Hell it is.” He looked at her, thinking she was always running things and that wasn’t the way it should be. But he saw a lot more; she was a good kid. He said it aloud, “You’re a good kid.” He laughed. “Magruder. The country club guy. Got to be nice to Magruder, eh?”

“It wouldn’t kill you, Al.”

“Okay. Tell you what. We got my sons to think about now, eh? So when we get home, why, I’ll be so nice to Magruder that he won’t spit on me.”

• • •

Dolores opened her eyes when Mal sat on the bed beside her.

“Mal.”

“I’m here.”

“You don’t have to, Mal. You don’t have to stay. I don’t blame you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I came in here to tell you I’ve got good news. They’re not going to fight us. Oh, now I don’t pretend they like the idea — no better than they ever did. Maybe they’ve just decided things aren’t all black or all white, sometimes just gray — and that maybe I’m gray. Anyhow, when you’re up and out of here, we’ll get married — and they won’t throw stones.”

She stared at him a long time. She looked in his face for censure, for distaste and she saw only love and need, and after a long time her swollen lips pulled into a smile.

“I can get up right now,” she said.

“Sure you can. But why hurry it? Everything is so peaceful right now, why don’t we just stay here — like this — as long as they’ll let us.”

She closed her eyes, pressed herself close against him. Suddenly she opened her eyes. “You won’t leave me?”

“No.”

She sighed again and closed her eyes, moving closer. “We’re all right,” she said, mostly to herself. “We truly are all right now, aren’t we?”

• • •

Big Juan looked at Rosa. She gave him a tired smile.

“Like we say to each other long time ago, Papa. Maybe he not so bad — for her.”

Juan tried to smile. “For me, he’s not so much. For you, he’s not so much. But for her, he’s much. Eh? Only now we begin to believe it.”

“What we don’t see is — what matters is that he is fine for her, eh, Papa?”

Juan put his arm around Rosa, licking his lips. His mouth was cottony. He spoke with exaggerated weariness but there was no weariness at all in his eyes. “I think I go to bed, Rosa. Eh? I feel tired. Like I haven’t — slept — in a month.”

“Shu, Papa.” She felt his arm drawing her near, felt his hand seeking. “We go to bed, eh? Like you, I very tired.”

They stood up, moved toward their bedroom. He could not resist tickling her hard in the ribs. A burst of laughter sprang from her mouth, the sound of it louder than the receding storm. She hugged Juan, laughing, and he swung her up in his arms. He stumbled slightly under her weight and then he staggered with her into their bedroom. He kicked the door shut with his heel and Rosa’s laughter pealed out, louder than ever.

THE END

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If you enjoyed this Crime title from Prologue Books, check out other books by Harry Whittington at:

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Slay Ride for a Lady

The Naked Jungle

Drawn to Evil

The Brass Monkey

A Woman On the Place

One Deadly Dawn

Call Me Killer

Don’t Speak to Strange Girls

Mourn the Hangman

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This is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 10: 1-4405-4673-8

ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4673-0

eISBN 10: 1-4405-4500-6

eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4500-9