What of Terry Conniston?

Chapter Nine

Terry Conniston sat like a taut-wound watch spring in the shade of the sagging porch overhang. Near the perilous breaking-edge, she felt as if at any moment she might start screaming and not be able to stop; and so she kept herself rigidly under control, all her movements slow and cautious, all her decisions ponderous. Her slender fingers clenched and opened at regular intervals; she watched a domed anthill which squatted naked like a cancerous boil on the face of the ground below the porch. The brutal little monsters had denuded the surrounding earth of everything but rocks and sand.

Overhead little gray birds flitted soundlessly from rooftop to rooftop and the indifferent sun burned down like brass; the desert heat was thick and close. The young sandy-haired one called Mitch sat against the wall at the far corner of the porch, making a point of not watching her. His face was not cruel like the others’; he seemed willing to respect her desire to be left alone. At first she had been surprised by the casual way they had of keeping desultory watch on her but not confining her at all. Only gradually had it dawned on her that since she didn’t have keys to either car her only means of escape would be afoot across the desert, and they would be able to see her on the flats anywhere within a mile of the ghost town. It was a far more effective prison than bars.

About noon by the sun, with a look compounded of the irascible and the hangdog, Mitch uncoiled his length and went inside, leaving her alone. She didn’t stir. In a little while he returned with an army-style mess kit of cold food out of cans, handed it to her without a word and went back to his post.

Floyd, the dark evil one, came out and stood on the porch and stretched like a cat. When he glanced at her she felt mesmerized by his cold eyes. Floyd had a driving, brutal, elemental thrust of granite personality. His magnetism, in spite of it, was uncanny — repellent and fascinating at once: the charismatic impact of raw unshielded masculinity, erotic and frightening.

The pulse throbbed at Terry’s throat. She addressed herself to her meal, keenly aware that Floyd was watching her with cynical vicious amusement.

The girl, Billie Jean, appeared behind Floyd, filling the caved-in doorway with her body, all meaty thighs and bovine lactic breasts which bobbed and surged with her movements. She studied Floyd’s back for a while before she stepped out and passed Floyd with a slow flirt of the shoulder, grinning. Floyd casually reached out and rubbed her breast. “You’re a fire hazard, Billie Jean.” It made her laugh.

“How about a jab in the fun hole, Floyd?”

“Later... later.”

Disappointed, Billie Jean moved away, dropping off the porch into the sunshine and wandering aimlessly up the street. Floyd said, “Stay close.”

“I ain’t going nowhere,” she said petulantly.

“If you hear an airplane or a car duck inside a building and stay out of sight.”

“I know,” she pouted, and ambled away.

Floyd turned toward Mitch and spoke as if Terry weren’t there: “I’m going to make a phone call, arrange for the drop. Keep things under control.”

“What if I can’t?”

“That’s up to you,” Floyd said. “If you fall you break, Mitch. Law of gravity.” His unrevealing eyes touched Terry briefly; his mouth smiled frighteningly and then, according to his bewildering intricacy of thought, it was time to go: he jumped catlike from the porch and trotted across the street into the barn. Shortly he came out, driving the dusty Oldsmobile, and put it into the central powder of the street, rumbling away.

In the stretching quiet that followed, an overwhelming anxiety slowly poisoned what was left of Terry’s willed patience. Unable to remain still any longer she got up. Her knees felt weak. She stepped hesitantly toward the edge of the porch, waiting to see how Mitch would respond. He didn’t get up; only his head turned to indicate his interest in her movements. She stepped down into the sunshine and walked very slowly along the street.

She had gone twenty or thirty paces when Mitch caught up with her. He didn’t touch her; he fell into step beside her and said, “I hope you don’t mind if I walk along with you.”

A sharp report rose to her lips but died stillborn. When she looked at him, his eyes were kind. She thought, I need any friends I can get. Yet in the back of her mind she couldn’t help thinking of stories she had heard about policemen and confidence men and spies — evil men working in teams, one partner softening you up with friendliness while the other stood ready to pounce. She couldn’t see what they stood to gain by that kind of tactic in her case but just the same she couldn’t begin to trust Mitch. He was, after all, one of them.

She searched his face with an odd intensity. “You hate him, don’t you?”

“He makes it easy.” Neither of them mentioned Floyd’s name; it wasn’t necessary. Mitch said, “For seven cents he’d hang his own mother on a meathook.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To keep you alive.” He laughed dispiritedly. “This wasn’t my idea, this kidnaping thing. I want you to know that. I tried to stop them from doing it. Well, maybe I didn’t try all that hard, but I didn’t want them to. I wanted to get away. I didn’t want anything to do with it.”

The words tumbled out of him. She said afterward, “I’d like to believe you but you’re here. You haven’t run away. Nothing’s stopping you.”

“You are,” he said. “If I bug out who’s left to keep Theodore away from you?”

She held herself rigidly aloof from him. “You don’t know how much I want to believe you. But—”

She didn’t finish it, and Mitch said dryly, “Yeah.” They went on, twenty yards in silence. “Well,” Mitch said awkwardly, and trailed off again. Then suddenly he stopped and frowned at her. “You worry me. You’re not behaving according to Freud.”

“Having hysterics, you mean? I’m on the verge of it, believe me.” She stepped closer to him and glanced back toward the mercantile. No one was in sight. “He terrifies me, honest to God. The weight of his eyes can buckle you — that horrible cold look of his. Is there anything we can do?”

“It’s hard to talk to Floyd. He listens to his own little voices — the line’s always busy.”

“He’s filth,” she said furiously. When she tilted her face down her hair swung out languorously; she brushed it back and laughed dispiritedly. “I’m putting myself on, aren’t I? Clutching at straws.”

“What straws?”

“Hoping for a minute that you were on my side.”

“I am,” he said. “But I don’t know what to do about it.”

“We could run for it. Both of us — right now.”

“Fat chance.” He was looking back the way they had come. When she followed the direction of his glance she saw the two men standing on the porch — Georgie in his candy-striped shirt; Theodore, tugging at a thick black hair in his nostril. They were watching with fully focused attention. Mitch said, “We’d better get back before Theodore decides to start something. Like find out how much of a beating I can take.”

“Would he?”

“Sure.”

“Why?”

“Who knows. He gets uptight easy. Sometimes he doesn’t remember things from one hour to the next but when it comes to grudges and sex he’s got a one-track mind like an elephant. Only he doesn’t think with it. He thinks with his fists.”

“Has he got a grudge against you?”

“More than one. For one thing he thinks he’d like to — well, wrestle you a little, you know?”

Rape me is what you mean. She folded her arms and hugged herself, flashing a quick furtive scrutiny at Theodore on the porch, trying to catch some hint of expression on his asymmetrical crippled face.

Mitch was still talking:

“He could use a few inhibitions. I don’t think he’s got any at all. The only thing that’s slowing him down is I’ve got this crummy kitchen knife in my belt and he’s not too sure how good I am with it. He knows he can take me regardless but he doesn’t want to get carved up in the process.”

“How good are you with it?”

“Probably lousy. The only thing I’ve ever used a knife for was peeling potatoes. Fortunately he doesn’t know that. But he keeps gnashing his teeth and sooner or later he’ll boil over and try something. He hates everybody — it’s only a matter of degree, it doesn’t take much — if your face isn’t all mangled and scarred up like his that’s enough to make him hate you, by itself.”

Terry shuddered involuntarily. They were walking very slowly back toward the store. On the porch Georgie Rymer said something to Theodore and turned back inside with a quick over-the-shoulder look, like the hasty bright-eyed glance of a heister peddling hot wristwatches near a traffic cop. Theodore watched him disappear, then pulled his head around toward Mitch and Terry. He had large greasy pores on his nose. His one good eye was bold and fierce. She glanced at Mitch and saw sweat burst out in beads on his upper lip.

When they reached the porch Mitch took the initiative, throwing Theodore off balance: “You let him go inside by himself — he’s probably rooting around trying to find the dope where Floyd hid it. You know Floyd told you not to let him alone in there.”

Taken aback, Theodore canceled whatever it was he had intended to say. He rolled his tongue around his misshapen lips; she saw spittle run from his mouth. He said, “Shit,” and wheeled inside, ducking to clear the fallen beam.

Mitch’s face hardened, bleak and guarded. He made a half-hearted signal with his head; Terry obeyed, returning to her place at the corner of the porch and sitting down. Georgie came out with Theodore right behind him; Theodore said crossly, “He wasn’t noplace near it.”

Georgie had a cunning look on his face; he turned an innocent glance on Mitch but his eyes were at odds with his lips. The three men stood in an awkward triangle for an intolerable length of time before Georgie stirred nervously and said, “I got to” — and glanced at her with a tentative smile — “relieve myself?”

Theodore’s eye rolled toward Terry. She tried to ignore him. He said to Mitch, “Okay. You better go with him.”

Theodore fixed her with what passed for a smile. She held her breath until Mitch said, “I guess not,” and slowly went past Theodore to the inside of the porch, where he put his shoulder blades against the wall and hooked both thumbs in his pockets. “You go with him if you think he can’t do it for himself.”

“It ain’t that,” Theodore said. “He needs watching.”

“What for?”

“He just does.”

“Then watch him yourself.”

Georgie said waspishly, “I don’t need no nursemaid,” and walked off the porch. He hurried up the street toward a half-crumpled shack. Theodore made as if to follow him, but changed his mind. He circled toward Mitch — and stopped, frowning, as if he had forgotten what he was going to say. He shook his head in exasperation. Looking past Mitch he spotted Billie Jean up the street, making circles in the dust with the toe of her shoe, and abruptly Theodore swung that way, saying out of the side of his mouth, “Both of you stay put.”

Terry let her breath out. When Mitch came over to her and sat down she had to fight down the impulse to burst out wailing. She drew her knees up and rested her chin on her knuckles and heard Mitch say as if he were a long distance away, “Ever have the feeling the world was falling down around your ankles?”

“That’s not funny,” she muttered.

“Sorry.”

“I just can’t stand it, sitting here — waiting. Not doing anything.”

“I know.”

“My car’s right there in the barn. Couldn’t we at least try—”

“Floyd has the keys in his pocket.”

“Well, they hot-wire them or something, don’t they? When they steal cars?”

“I wouldn’t know how. Maybe if I had a couple hours I could figure it out if I didn’t electrocute myself trying. But we couldn’t walk from here to the barn without getting Theodore all over us.”

“You’re not a hell of a great big lot of help, you know that?” Her eyes filled and she blinked furiously.

“Look, I’m just as scared as you are. What do you want?” He gave her an angry look. “Damn it, cut that out. I don’t know what to do when girls cry.”

“I’m not crying.”

“Oh. I suppose it’s hay fever.”

“Suppose what you like,” she snapped. She sniffed and rubbed her eyes. “Oh, hell,” she bawled softly. “Oh, hell and damn and shit. I don’t want to be killed, Mitch. I want to live. Jesus, I want to get married and have kids and live in some little town someplace with a husband who comes home every night at five thirty and mows the lawn on weekends and every once in a while tells me how beautiful and cuddly I am.”

She blew her nose. Mitch said, “That’s not so much to ask.” He looked clumsy and savage with brooding anger.

“It isn’t,” she said. “It isn’t. God damn it, it’s just not fair!” She thrust her hair back from her face with an angry swipe of her hand. He was watching her gravely, even tenderly. She whispered, “Oh, Mitch.”

That was when Floyd’s Oldsmobile wheeled into the street, trailing dust. Billie Jean and Theodore gathered at the barn door with Georgie, who came along dreamy-eyed, not too steady on his feet. Billie Jean kept carping like a magpie until Theodore slapped her on the rump and barked at her. Floyd drove into the barn, leaving a hazy pall in the air. Terry watched them all the way she would have watched a circling school of barracuda. Mitch slowly got to his feet and stood above her protectively; he was trying to smile. She felt distantly grateful, slightly warmed; it only lasted an instant. Fear had kept coming all day in waves, at intervals she could never anticipate; now it welled up like bile in her throat. She had difficulty breathing, difficulty keeping her eyes in focus, and there was a taste on her tongue like dry brass.

Floyd appeared in the barn door with an armload of equipment that looked like a telephone repairman’s gear. He was smiling coolly. He walked forward with a springy, cocky stride. The others trailed him toward the porch. He climbed up and stood two paces from her, vibrating like a time bomb; he watched Georgie stumble up into the shade and then he wheeled and grabbed the front of Mitch’s shirt in his fist and dragged Mitch up on his toes. Floyd’s eyes glittered frostily. He said in a very gentle voice, “Who gave him the stuff?”

“What?”

“Georgie’s had his fingers in the cookie jar.”

Mitch’s glance whipped around toward Georgie, who stood gaunt and oblivious and smiling oafishly. “I told Theodore to watch him.”

“I don’t like excuses, Mitch. I can tolerate mistakes, but not excuses.”

“He’s your brother. You take care of him. I’m not his keeper.”

Floyd still had Mitch’s shirt bunched in his fist; he seemed indifferent to the effort it required to hold Mitch off the floor. Mitch colored and batted his arm up against Floyd’s arm; Floyd let him go with a gesture of contempt. “You’re forgetting, my fine buffoon, who owns the air you breathe. I can cut it off — any time.”

“Go ahead, then,” Mitch said bitterly. Terry backed up until her shoulders were pressed against the wall.

Georgie snuffled nervously and darted inside. Theodore stood behind Floyd, leering at Terry with his ugly eye until Floyd said over his shoulder, “Get in there and watch him. And this time do it right.”

Theodore, with a low growl, turned inside. Floyd stepped aside to let Billie Jean pass but instead of following them in he stopped to rest his frightening eyes on Terry. “You won’t have too much longer to wait, Sweetness.”

“You talked to my father?” Her voice sounded like a stranger’s.

“Mais certainment. He’ll make the drop in the morning. After that you can go home. How does that sound?”

She shook her head, mute, distrusting. She didn’t believe him for a moment. They had treated her too casually, keeping no secrets from her; a part of her mind knew they wouldn’t let her go free — and another part refused to believe that, either. She felt chilled and dismal.

Floyd said casually, “Funny thing. Your daddy was pretty tough on the phone — almost as if his interest was less passionate than pecuniary. I almost had the feeling he’d rather part with you than the half million dollars.”

He smiled, and after a beat he added, “But he’ll go through with it.” And went inside lugging his lineman’s gear.

A cold knot tightened inside her. Floyd’s words echoed — she almost wanted them to kill her. It would punish her father — the only kind of punishment he would understand.

Mitch stirred and said to her in his soft kind voice, “Maybe you’ll get out of this yet.”

She was no longer certain she wanted to.