Do Evil In Return

14

She left the following morning long before sunrise. For the first hundred miles she drove along the coast where the road meandered like a concrete river following the curves of the sheer, barren cliffs, blanketed by fog. As the sun rose it swallowed the fog, leaving only a few undigested wisps hiding in the hollows and dips of the road.

The highway turned suddenly inland beyond the reach of the sea, where the heat lay thick over the fertile valley. Here the barren cliffs seemed remote and Charlotte could hardly imagine them only a few miles away from this sudden profusion of growth: acres and acres of silver-green lettuce — greengold, the farmers called it — and groves of oranges too huge to look real and miles of fat tomatoes reddening on the vines.

But the valley ended with the same finality as the cliffs. The road ascended, and the area of the redwoods began, trees so high, so ancient, that their origins dazed the imagination. There was a clearing where the trees had been ruthlessly cut down and hauled away, and from here Charlotte could see two mountains to the northeast, their snowy caps untouched by changes in the weather or by the footprints of men. It was as if nature — and the department of highways — had collaborated to give the tourist the whole scope of California in a few hundred miles.

When she crossed the border into Oregon she had to cut her speed because the noon sun, pressing down through the huge trees, made such brilliant patterns on the road that it was difficult to see any distance ahead or to distinguish the real from the shadow. Now and then she heard a mountain stream chortling furiously, violently, as if nothing could ever stop its mad, hilarious descent to the Pacific.

She reached the outskirts of Ashley a little after two o’clock. A sign informed her that she was about to enter Ashley, the Friendliest Little Town in the West, Population 9,394, Come Early and Stay Late.

She stopped at the first AAA motel that she came to. It was built in a small clearing of trees, two hundred yards off the highway, and it was so new that it still smelled of fresh wood.

A fat man in shirt sleeves was sitting on a kitchen chair tilted against a door marked “office,” fanning himself with a comic book. A dozen other comics were scattered around his chair, half of them without covers, the others brand-new, True Love Comics, Teen-Age Romance, I Was Jilted, Western Love and Romances. The fat man’s face was as innocent and devoid of thought as a marshmallow. He was probably laughed at in school as the fat boy, Charlotte thought. Now he’s getting back, he’s the hero of all the comic books, the lover who jilts, the cowboy who rides roughshod over women’s hearts. Poor man, poor boy.

“Any vacancy?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. Number Four over there. Bath and shower, Beautyrest mattress. Six dollars a night.”

“That will do.”

She parked her car in front of Number Four, and came back to register at the office her name and address and the make and license number of her car. A card on the desk identified the fat man as Mr. Boy H. Coombs, Mgr., La Siesta Motel.

“You a doctor, eh?” Mr. Coombs said. “I see by your car.”

“Yes.”

“I never saw a lady doctor so close up before. In the movies I have, though. Ingrid Bergman was a doctor in a movie once, fell in love with Gregory Peck, only Peck happened to be...”

“Yes, I know. ‘Spellbound.’ ”

“Yes, yes, that was it. ‘Spellbound.’ I don’t know what she saw in Gregory Peck. He’s skinny as a broom, besides being a nut — in the picture, I mean.”

“Have you a phone book?”

The question took him by surprise. He had to stop a moment to make the transition from romance to phone books. “Well, sure we have.”

“I just want to look up an address.”

“Oh. Sure.” He searched around the desk and under the counter for the phone book and couldn’t find it. He stood up, panting from the exertion, and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his pink shirt. “Somebody must have swiped it off of me. That’s low, stealing a phone book.” (But there was a dreamy look in his eye; the fat boy was Dick Tracy, out for revenge, on the trail of the thief who took the telephone book. On his slender wrist, a two-way radio. In his head, a photographic memory.)

“Perhaps you can help me locate someone,” Charlotte said crisply, and Mr. Coombs’s eyes snapped back into focus.

“I should be able to, lived here in town all my life.”

“Do you know Mrs. Myrtle Reyerling?”

“Myrtle? I sure do. Why, Sergeant Reyerling’s one of our war heroes, got his name on a plaque in the First National Bank, corner of Third Street. Myrtle lives in an apartment above Woolworth’s. You can’t miss it. Drive straight into town and there it is.”

“Thanks.”

The Woolworth store had a bright new façade but the apartments above it were dark and airless and smelled of last month’s grease and last week’s cabbage.

Charlotte paused before a door marked in pencil on a torn slip of paper, M. Reyerling. The transom was open and there were sounds inside the room, not sounds of quarreling, but of two women vociferously agreeing with each other about a third who wasn’t present

“I told her. I told her time and again.”

“I know you did, you bet you did.”

“But no, no, she was headstrong. Always believing the best of people. The best. Huh. I know now there’s no best in anyone. Only better. And them damn little better than the worst.”

“You’re absotively right, Myrtle, but don’t let it get you down.”

It was Myrtle Reyerling who opened the door, a tall, thin woman in her late twenties, with a six-inch pompadour that listed slightly to one side like a schooner in a high wind. Her mouth was pinched-looking, her jaw hard, but there was something pathetic about her eyes; they were questioning, bewildered.

“Mrs. Reyerling?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Charlotte Keating, a friend of Violet’s.”

The woman turned away, swallowing, swallowing again, before she spoke. “I guess you know about her then?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Come in if you want to. This here’s my girlfriend, Sally Morris.”

A dark-haired young woman with a wiry body and big muscular legs acknowledged the introduction with a nod.

“It’s all over town,” Mrs. Reyerling said. “Whisper, whisper, whisper, about how Violet was in the family way and not by Eddie. I don’t believe it. Violet was a good girl. My kid sister. Was a good girl and don’t anybody say different.”

“Now take it easy, Myrt.”

“She was a good girl.”

The young woman called Sally made a little gesture of impatience. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, good girls can do a lot of the same things as bad girls. I just told you, I saw her with my own eyes. She was in that bed, sleeping. And there were signs — know what I mean?”

“No!”

“Now Myrt, you know me, I’m no gossip, but I’m no dumbbell either. I’ve been working around there long enough to know the signs.”

Charlotte interrupted, “Signs of what?”

“Well, you know.” There was an embarrassed silence before the girl broke out again: “In the first place what was she doing there, sleeping at eight o’clock in the morning in a man’s room? The man was already checked out — he left the key in the lock outside like it says on the door to do when you check out. Well, I saw the key and I figured I’d get the room made up early. I went in, and there was Violet sleeping peaceful as a baby. I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t any of my business. I just walked out again and rapped on the door real hard to wake her up. Then I beat it. I didn’t even tell Myrtle about it until today. She always made so much fuss when Violet did anything wrong, even when she took a drink or smoked a cigarette.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Mrs. Reyerling whispered. “I didn’t. I had to look after her, she was my kid sister. I wanted her to grow up to be a lady.”

“Sure. Sure, I know, Myrt. I’m not blaming you. It’s life, is all. We all got to take it on the chin.”

“How many times do I have to take it? How many chins you think I’ve got?”

“Now, Myrt.” The girl turned to Charlotte. “I work at a motel, see? Rose Court, it’s called; on the other side of town. That’s where I saw her, in this guy’s room.”

“Do you remember the man?” Charlotte asked.

“I didn’t see him. But when I was making up the room afterwards I found a tie he’d left behind in the john. I never saw a tie like it before. It was blue with gray coins on it and little wee dice with red eyes. I thought I’d hook it to give to my old man, maybe it’d bring him luck in a crap game. But I got cold feet, and turned it in to my boss, Rawls. Rawls is as honest as the next guy, which isn’t saying much, because he started to wear the tie himself, instead of mailing it to the man who’d left it behind.” She hesitated a moment. “I’m not saying anything against Rawls, exactly. If he found a wallet he’d probably turn it in to the police minus a few bucks for his trouble. But this tie — he couldn’t resist it. He thinks he’s a pretty classy dresser. Around town they call him Adolphe Menjou.”

Mrs. Reyerling had gone to the window and was looking down into the street below, her arms folded across her breasts.

“Here’s how I figure it,” Sally said. “If it happened once it could have happened plenty of times, so maybe this man who left the tie had nothing to do with Violet’s being in the family way.”

“It never happened at all.” Mrs. Reyerling didn’t turn. She addressed the window pane as if it was some land of impersonal umpire. “The kid was Eddie’s. He said it wasn’t because he was sick of Violet. He was playing around with somebody else and he wanted to drive Violet away.”

Sally didn’t argue. She made a little grimace at Charlotte to indicate that Myrtle was beyond reasoning.

Charlotte said, “Perhaps if I could talk to Mr. Rawls, he might remember...”

“Now wait a minute. You think he’d admit anything? Not on your life! He’d swear black and blue there wasn’t any man or any tie or even any motel. How could he admit about the tie without admitting he’s a crook? Why, if he did, they might take away his AA Approved card. Those AAA people are fussy. They don’t stand for stuff like that. They’re always snooping, around to see if I changed the bath mats and the shower curtains and swept under the beds.” She paused. “Rawls won’t tell you a thing. Besides, I might get fired, see?”

“I see, of course.”

“You won’t go to Rawls, then?”

“No.”

“I should have kept my yap shut, anyway,” Sally said with a trace of bitterness. “I don’t know what gets into me, to talk so much. I just came over here to help Myrt, to cheer her up.”

Mrs. Reyerling turned a flat gaze on her. “Cheer me up... Tell me lies about my own sister.”

“Now listen, Myrt. Don’t go turning against me.”

“Bad lies.”

The girl was beginning to get angry; a red flush crept gradually up her neck like the colored mercury in a thermometer. “You better look into your own conscience. Who was it that got Violet going around with Eddie in the first place? Who was it kept saying, ‘Eddie’s a nice dependable guy. He’ll make some girl a good husband.’ Who was it said, ‘Looks aren’t everything.’ Hell no, looks aren’t everything, he may look like a chimpanzee with smallpox but you’ll get used to it, Violet Once you got Mrs. in front of your name...”

“I didn’t,” Mrs. Reyerling cried. “I didn’t force her to marry him. I didn’t even ask her to. She liked him.”

“You told her to like him.” Her mimicry was sharp, cruel: “ ‘Marry Eddie and love will come later, and maybe he’ll even get over those little habits of his, like pulling the wings off flies.’ ”

“Stop! Stop it!” Mrs. Reyerling put her hands over her ears and ran into the bedroom.

They could hear the thud of her body as she flung herself across the bed. She didn’t weep, but heavy, anguished breathing rose and fell in the humid air, the breathing of a wounded animal.

Sally’s belligerence was gone. She stood scratching the side of her neck where the flush had been, looking ashamed of herself. “I guess I ought to keep my temper more.”

“I suppose we all should.”

“What I said was the truth, but not the whole truth. The whole truth — well, that’s hard to get at, the why of everything. I guess Myrt had her reasons for wanting Violet to be married, to be settled down and safe. It’s not her fault that she judged Eddie wrong.” She lapsed into silence.

“I’d better leave,” Charlotte said. “If there’s anything I can do to help Mrs. Reyerling, I’ll be at the Siesta Motel.”

“I know it. It just opened. We already got so many nobody’s making money any more.”

“Perhaps I can drive you back to work.”

“No thanks. I’m through for the day. I’d stay here and make Myrt some tea. She’ll snap out of it. I looked after her the day she got the telegram about Tom dying.” She added, with a sad little sigh, “Maybe we don’t act like friends, sometimes, but we are.”

Charlotte stepped out into the hall. She had the feeling that the girl had spoken the truth. She and Myrtle had a bond of friendship that would survive the bickerings, as well as the tragedies, of day-today existence.

On the street below, the rays of the late afternoon sun shot through the plate-glass windows of stores and ricocheted off the sidewalks and the white stucco walls of buildings. The heat was palpable, like a layer of jelly, through which the cars crawled and the pedestrians moved sluggishly.

Only the children hurried, boys on bicycles weaving through the traffic with careless ease, and grade-school girls, intent and purposeful, impatient for the next minute, the next week, the next year.

Charlotte unlocked her car. She thought of Violet walking up and down this same street, softer than the other girls, not quite so forceful, so decisive. (And Mrs. Reyerling had known this about Violet, perhaps — had tried to protect her and blundered.)

She had a feeling of discontent, of failure. The further she plunged into Violet’s life, the murkier and more diffuse it became. It was like diving into a strange lake, diving deeper and deeper and gradually realizing that the lake had no bottom, only a constantly moving silt that would never settle. One could reach out and grasp at the silt — as Violet herself had reached out and grasped in her final moments — but when the fist was opened it contained only a few grains of sand and the marks of fingernails on one’s own flesh.