I nodded. “That’d be best. Then we can see what we’re doing.”
She got a small pair of manicure scissors out of the dresser and slit the shirt around the hook. I unbuttoned it and slid it off, and turned my back to the mirror to look over my shoulder. I was deeply tanned from the waist up and wore no undershirt. The streamer fly was a vivid slash of white and silver tinsel against the sun-blackened hide, and as well as I could tell, the barb was deeply embedded. I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror and for the first time remembered I hadn’t shaved since yesterday, and wondered what kind of thug I must look like to her, big, with the flat, sun-darkened face rasping with black stubble.
I motioned with a hand and passed her the diagonal pliers. “Pinch the muscle and skin up with your fingers and run it on through as if you were baiting a hook,” I instructed.
“It’ll hurt,” she said quietly.
“Some,” I said.
I turned my back toward her and felt the slight, trembling pressure of her fingers, pinching the skin. There was a fiery bite of pain, and when I looked in the mirror again the barb was through in the open and a thin trickle of blood ran down my back. She snipped off the barb and backed it out.
“Just a moment,” she said. She pulled open one of the dresser drawers and brought out a bottle of iodine and a Band-aid and applied them to the punctures.
“You should have been a doctor,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”
“Don’t mention it.”
I am six feet one, and the top of her head came up just a little past my chin as she stood there when she had finished. She’d be taller in high heels, I thought. Barefoot! Why? And why, in God’s name, did she ever let somebody hack her hair up like that?
I reached for the cigarettes in my shirt hanging over the back of a chair. “Do you smoke?”
“Yes. Thank you.” She took one and I broke a match on my thumbnail and lit it and then mine.
The blue eyes were devoid of any expression as she looked at me through the cigarette smoke. “You can put your shirt on,” she said.
You couldn’t get behind her voice any more than you could behind the eyes. The way she said it, it might have been only a reminder that I had forgotten to put it on, or it might have been a flat command. I thought about it, remembering that she had wanted to change out of the bathing suit into that hopeless sack of a dress before she would take the hook out for me. She turned and looked out the door as I slipped it on and tucked it inside the trousers.
The room was perfectly quiet except for the same monotonous ticking of the cheap clock and the faintly drowsy hum of summer insects out across the sun-baked clearing, but there was nothing peaceful about it. Somehow, the whole mood of the place seemed to come from her, as if the air itself were charged with that same tension you could sense behind the contained, set stillness of her face.
“My name’s Jack Marshall,” I said.
She turned back from the doorway and stood just inside it, leaning slightly against the frame, looked at my face for just an instant with an odd, intense glance as if she were trying to remember something, and then resumed the expressionless blankness. “I’m Mrs. Shevlin.”
“Have you lived up here long?”
“About a year.”
“I guess you swim a lot?”
“Every day. Except in winter.”
“You must like swimming,” I went on, in spite of the fact that it sounded more like a police investigation than it did a conversation.
“Yes. I like it. Fortunately.”
“Fortunately?”
“Yes. There isn’t much else to do.”
“I guess you’re pretty good at it. I’m not much myself. I just dog-paddle.”
Oh?” It was polite and nothing more. Why does she want me to get out of here? I thought. You can hear the loneliness screaming there inside her.
There was no way I could keep from staring at her hair. We faced each other across six feet of hot, explosive silence in the room and I could not look away. It wasn’t any of my business and I had no business here at all now that the hook was out, but it was like one of those terrible compulsions in a dream where you can’t stop whatever it is