brought a basin of water from the bucket and found a bar of soap. She sat down in one of the rawhide chairs and washed her feet. I watched her, smoking a cigarette and listening to the hot dead silence of the room being chopped off in sections by the clock. I’ll buy her stockings, I thought, and bathrooms with tile floors, and clothes, and…We’ll be gone from here and she can live like other women and somehow I’ll make her happy.
“I’ll wait out in the kitchen,” I said when she had dried her feet and was ready to put on the stockings. I went out and sat down by the table, throwing away the cigarette and lighting another. She didn’t bother to close the door and I could hear her changing clothes, the soft rustle of cloth and as she pulled off the old dress and put on the new one and the sound of the shoe heels against the floor.
“I’ve sold my boat and outfit,” I said. “The one I’m in is a rental boat from the foot of the lake. I have to take it back, but this is the way we’ll do it. I’ll turn off down there at the slough where I used to launch mine, and leave you there. We’ll wait there until he goes by, going up the lake, then I’ll go on down and take the boat back and pick up my car. Then I’ll come back by the old logging road and get you. That way nobody’ll see us. Then I’ll take you down to Colston and get you a room. You can wait there until I can get away and then we’ll leave for Nevada.”
“All right, Jack,” she said quietly. “I’m about ready. You can come out now.”
She had gone over to the dresser and was combing her hair at the mirror. I stood behind her, looking at her reflection in the glass. The dress was a blue one with short sleeves and trimmed with white at the collar, and I thought it was almost the color of her eyes.
“I just want to look at you,” I said, and turned her part way around, holding her there at arm’s length. My back was toward the door and she was facing it, looking up at me with her eyes shining. Suddenly I saw them change and could feel my back go cold as I saw the terror in them. I heard her little in-drawn gasp, as if ice water had hit her from behind, and at the same instant I heard the heavy shoe rasp against the flooring of the porch. His eyes were crazy. He stood framed in the doorway, not moving or saying anything, just looking beyond me as if he saw only her and didn’t even care that I was standing there, and I’ll never live long enough to forget his eyes.
“Get back!” I yelled. “Stand back!” He didn’t even hear me. Suddenly he made a lunge for the gun, still lying on top of the dresser. I beat him to it with my right hand and threw up the left to shove him back. He slid back against the wall and then I heard her run from behind me, going toward the other side of the room, and the scream that had been trying to fight its way out of her throat came free at last, going up higher and higher in a thin knife-edged column of sound slicing into the silence. He came off the wall and started for her and she stopped and turned to face him, helpless, with her legs against the bed. I felt the gun kick in my hand and he stopped then as if he had seen me for the first time, and put his hand up to his chest, still looking at me, and started to fall. The scream cut off as if the noise of the gun had chopped it in two, the way they blow an oil well fire with nitro, and then she began to sway.
I looked at him lying on his face with the little searching trickle of blood running out from under his shoulder and curling indecisively across the incredibly clean silvered white planks of the floor she had scrubbed so long and then I put the gun down on the dresser and went out the front door into the yard and was sick.
Eleven
There was just the humming of insects in the drowsy heat and