Эд Макбейн - Barking at Butterflies and other stories

Valletta often wanders into the woods looking for her.

He circles the spot where two autumns ago her blood seeped into the earth. The area is bursting with fresh spring growth now, but he circles and sniffs the bright green shoots, searching, searching. He will never find her, of course. She is wrapped in a tarpaulin and buried deep in the woods some fifty miles north of where the three of us once lived together, Carrie and I and the dog.

There are only the two of us now.

He is all I have left to remind me of her.

He never barks and I never speak to him.

He eats when I feed him, but then he walks away from his bowl without once looking at me and falls to the floor just inside the entrance door, waiting for her return.

I can’t honestly say I like him any better now that he’s stopped barking. But sometimes...

Sometimes when he cocks his head in bewilderment to observe a floating butterfly, he looks so cute I could eat him alive.

The January wind was blowing fiercely as he put the key into the unfamiliar door lock and then twisted it to the right with no results. He turned it to the left, and the door opened, and he pushed it wide into the motel room, and then stepped aside for her to enter before him. She was wearing a short beige car coat, the collar of which she held closed about her throat with one gloved hand. Her skirt, showing below the hem of the coat, was a deeper tan. She was wearing dark brown leather boots, almost the color of her shoulder-length hair. Her eyes were browner than the boots, and she lowered them as she stepped past him into the room. There was an air of shy nervousness about her.

Fumbling to extricate the key from the lock, Frank almost lost his homburg to a fresh gust of wind. He clasped it to his head with his free hand, struggled with the damn key again, and finally pulled it free of the lock. Putting the key into the pocket of his overcoat, he went into the room, closed the door behind him, and said immediately, “I hope you won’t misinterpret this.”

“Why should I?” she asked.

“Well, a motel has connotations. But I couldn’t think of any other way.”

“We’re both adults, Frank,” she said. “I don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible for two adults to take a room and...”

“That was precisely my reasoning,” he said.

“So please don’t apologize.”

They stood just inside the entrance doorway, as though each were reluctant to take the steps that would propel them deeper into the room. There were two easy chairs on their right, in front of the windows facing the courtyard outside. A table with a lamp on it rested between the two chairs. On the wall immediately to their left, there was a dresser with a mirror over it, another lamp on one end of it. An air-conditioning unit was recessed into a window on the wall opposite the door. The bed was covered with a floral-patterned spread that matched the drapes. Its headboard was against the wall opposite the dresser. A framed print of a landscape hung over it.

“Millie,” he said, “I honestly do want you to see this film.”

“Oh, I honestly want to see it,” she said.

“We talked about it so often on the train that it just seemed ridiculous not to show it to you.”

“Of course,” she said.

“Which is why I mentioned it at lunch today, and suggested that maybe we could take a room someplace, for just a few minutes, a half-hour maybe, so I could show you the film. Still, I don’t want you to think the only reason I asked you to lunch was to show you the film.” He grinned suddenly. “Though I am very proud of it.”

“I’m dying to see it,” she said.

“I’ll just be a minute, okay?” he said, and went to the door, and opened it, and stepped outside into the windblown courtyard, leaving the door open. She debated closing the door behind him, and decided against it. She also debated taking off her gloves, and decided against that as well. Outside, she heard the sound of the automobile trunk being slammed shut. A moment later, he came into the room carrying a motion picture projector.

“I was wondering how you were going to show it,” Millie said.

“I had this in the trunk,” he said, and put it down on the floor.

“Do you always carry a movie projector in the trunk?”

Smiling, he said, “Well, I can’t pretend I didn’t plan on showing you the film.” He took a small reel of film from his coat pocket, held it up for her to see, and then put it on the dresser top. Taking off his coat, he went to the rack in one corner of the room, and hung it on a wire hanger. He took off the homburg and placed that on the shelf over the rack. He was wearing a dark, almost black, shadow-striped business suit.

“Did your wife say anything?” she asked.

“About the projector? Why would she say anything?”

“I guess she wouldn’t,” Millie said. “I guess lots of men take movie projectors to work in the morning.”

“Actually, she didn’t see it,” Frank said. “I put it in the car last night.” He looked around the room. “I was hoping the walls would be white,” he said. “Well, maybe the towels are white.”

“Did you plan to take a bath first?” she asked.

“No, no,” he said, walking toward the bathroom door. “I just want to make a screen.” From the bathroom, he said, “Ah, good,” and was back an instant later carrying a large white towel. “Let’s see now,” he said, “I guess I can hang this over the mirror, huh? Move the table there, and set my projector on it. Um-huh.” As she watched, he went to the dresser, reached up over it, and tucked the towel over the top edge of the mirror, covering it. She had not moved from where she was standing just inside the door. Turning to her, he said, “Wouldn’t you like to take off your coat?”

“Well... is it a very long film?” she asked.

“Sixty seconds, to be exact.”

“Oh, well, all right then.”

She took off her gloves and her coat. She was wearing a smart, simple suit and a pale green blouse. As she carried the coat to the rack, Frank took the lamp off the table, moved the table, set the projector down and plugged it into a wall socket.

“Isn’t sixty seconds very short?” she asked.

“No, that’s the usual length. Some are even shorter. Thirty seconds, some of them.” He looked up from where he was threading the film. “You don’t have to hurry back or anything, do you?”

“No, no,” she said. “As long as I’m back before dinner.”

“What time is that, usually?”

“Seven-thirty, usually. But I have to be back before then. My husband gets home at seven, you see. And he likes to have a drink first. So I should be home around six-thirty, seven. Not that I have to account for my time or anything, you understand.”

“Well, even if you did,” Frank said, “there’s nothing wrong with two adults having lunch together.”

“If I thought there was anything wrong with it, I wouldn’t have accepted.”

“In fact, it seems entirely prejudicial that a man and a woman can’t enjoy each other’s company simply because they happen to be married to other people — you didn’t tell your husband, did you?” he asked.

“No. Did you tell your wife?”

“No,” he said. “I never even told her I’d met you on the train.”

“It’s really silly, isn’t it?”

“It certainly is,” he said. “But you know, the truth of it is that most people just wouldn’t understand. If I told my wife... or anyone, for that matter... that I’d taken you to lunch...”

“And to a motel later...”

“To show you a film...”

“Who’d believe it?”