how you and your friends live when you’re off to yourselves. That’s why I wouldn’t let him go on that hunting trip with you last November.”
She paused and he only sat there, a half-eaten slice of Wonder Bread in one hand, steak juice on his chin. She thought that the only thing keeping him from springing at her was his total amazement that she should be saying these things at all.
“So I’ll trade with you,” she said. “I’ve got you that chainfall and I’m willing to hand over the rest of the money to you—lots wouldn’t—but if you’re going to be so ungrateful, I’ll go you one more. You let him go down with me to Connecticut, and I’ll let him go up to Moosehead with you come deerhunting season.” She felt cold and prickly all over, as if she had just offered to strike a bargain with the devil.
“I ought to strap you,” he said wonderingly. He spoke to her as if she were a child who had misunderstood some very simple case of cause and effect. “I’ll take him hunting with me if I want, when I want. Don’t you know that? He’s my son. God’s sake. If I want, when I want.” He smiled a little, pleased with the sound it made. “Now—you got that?”
She locked her eyes with his. “No,” she said. “You won’t”
He got up in a hurry then. His chair fell over.
“I’ll put a stop to it,” she said. She wanted to step back from him, but that would end it too. One false move, one sign of giving, and he would be on her.
He was unbuckling his belt “I’m going to strap you, Charity,” he said regretfully.
“I’ll put a stop to it any way I can. I’ll go up to the school and report him truant. Go to Sheriff Bannerman and report him kidnapped. But most of all . . . I’ll see to it that Brett doesn’t want to go.”
He pulled his belt from the loops of his pants and held it with the buckle end penduluming back and forth by the floor.
“The only way you’ll get him up there with the rest of those drunks and animals before he’s fifteen is if I let him go,” she said. “You sling your belt on me if you want, Joe Camber. Nothing is going to change that.”
“Is that so?”
“I’m standing here and telling you it is.”
But suddenly he didn’t seem to be in the room with her any more. His eyes had gone far away, musing. She had seen him do this other times. Something had just crossed his mind, a new fact to be laboriously added into the equation. She prayed that whatever it was would be on her side of the equals sign. She had never gone so much against him before, and she was scared.
Camber suddenly smiled. “Regular little spitfire, ain’t you?”
She said nothing.
He began to slip his belt back into the loops of his pants again. He was still smiling, his eyes still far away. “You suppose you can screw like one of those spitfires? Like one of those little Mexican spitfires?”
She still said nothing, wary.
“If I say you and him can go, what about then? You suppose we could shoot for the moon?”
“What do you mean?”
“It means okay,” he said. “You and him.”
He crossed the room in his quick, agile way, and it made her cold to think of how quick he could have crossed it a minute before, how quick he could have had his belt on her. And who would there have been to stop him? What a man did with—or to—his wife, that was their own affair. She could have done nothing, said nothing. Because of Brett. Because of her pride.
He put his hand on her shoulder. He dropped it to one of her breasts. He squeezed it. “Come on,” he said, “I’m horny.”
“Brett—”
“He won’t be in until nine. Come on. Told you, you can go. You can at least say thanks, can’t you?”
A kind of cosmic absurdity rose to her lips and had passed through them before she could stop it: “Take off your hat.”
He sailed it heedlessly across the kitchen. He was smiling. His teeth were quite yellow. The two top ones in front were dentures. “If we had the money now, we could screw on a bedful of greenbacks,” he said. “I saw that in a movie once.”
He took her upstairs and she kept expecting him to turn vicious, but he didn’t.