Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

He took five hundred out of his savings account the next day, during his lunch hour. The nick it made wasn’t too bad. There was still plenty to cover the honeymoon expenses and the first few months of married life. And he was making a good salary.

Then right in front of the bank, coming out, he met Dime; Allie’s brother. Dune glanced up at the bank facade, then at him, and said, “Look, if you could use a little extra — I know how it is at a time like this, I went through the mill myself three years ago.”

Bing! another two hundred and fifty from Dune, smack in his palm. His face didn’t even change color. After all, they were both going to be in the same family, weren’t they?

First, he thought, I’ll put two fifty of my own back. Then he thought, why be a rat — let her have it all, it’s only money. So she was coming out pretty good for a last year’s leftover crush; she had no kick coming. She’ll fall all over my neck, he thought complacently. But no fooling around tonight; I’m going to unwind her arms and give them back to her.

The bungalow was ’way out at the end of nowhere — dim in the growing darkness. Even the road in front of it wasn’t paved yet, just surfaced with some kind of black stuff. But there were going to be other bungalows — he could just make out the skeleton frames of some of them already starting up in a straight line past hers, getting thinner as they went along, until there were only foundations, then just a bulldozer.

She had it fixed up real pretty, the way women like to do, even women with broken hearts. Chintz curtains fluttering out the windows, like vermilion lips coaxing to be kissed.

She didn’t even give him a chance to get onto the porch and ring the bell. She was waiting there for him. She had on a little apron to match the curtains. Last year’s love, playing house all by herself.

“I wasn’t sure you were really coming.”

He raised his brows. “Did I ever break my word to you?” “No,” she said. “Not your word. Only—”

She had cocktails frosting in a shaker.

“You used to like martinis best,” she said.

“I don’t like martinis any more,” he said, — and let that sink in.

She traced a finger on the frosting of the shaker and made a little track, shiny as a mirror. “I’ve got to talk to you.”

“We don’t have to,” he said. “This talks better than anything. This talks best.” He’d taken the money out and laid it down.

“What’s that for?” she said, her face suddenly white with shock and insult and hurt

“Well, if you don’t know why, don’t ask me.”

She sat in a chair for a few moments getting over it — or, it would be more correct to say, getting familiar with it. She had a slow temper. Until this moment, as a matter of fact, he hadn’t known she had any temper at all.

Then she got up, and her face was unlike any face he’d ever seen her wear before. She flung the words point-blank at him.

“You don’t have to do this to me! You don’t have to do this!”

“Then what else is there?” In all honesty he couldn’t understand her outrage. He’d lost her train of thought, and the situation was becoming an irritant.

“What else is there? You have to stand by me, that’s what else there is! I can’t go it alone!”

Now his voice went up, almost into a wail of incomprehension. “Stand by you! What does that mean?”

She took her open hand and slammed it down on the table, so hard that the ice in the shaker went tlink! “I’m going to have your baby, that’s what that means!”

The shock was dizzying. He had to reach out and hold on to something for a moment “How do I—?”

“There never was another man in my life, that’s how you know.” And he did know.

“All right,” he said.

“All right what?”

“I’ll take care of everything. Hospital and—”

Now finally she screamed piercingly at him in her passion and torment, and she wasn’t the kind to scream. “Hospital? I don’t want a hospital, I want a husband!”

The second shock, on top of the first, completely unbalanced him. The rest was just physical reflex, not mental reaction at all.

She said only one thing more in her life. In her entire life. “You’re going to marry me, do you understand? You’re going to marry me!”

The object was suddenly in his hand, as though it had jumped into his hand of its own accord. He hadn’t seen it before, hadn’t even known it was in the room.

She died at almost the very first blow. But he kept striking on and on and on, to the point of frenzy, to the point of mama, to the point of sheer hallucination. And then she was gone, and it was over. And the thing that a hundred other men, a thousand other men, had done, and that he’d thought he’d never do — now he’d done it too. And the thing he’d read about a hundred times, a thousand times, now he wasn’t reading about it, he was living it. And he liked it much better the other way.

He looked at the object he was still holding, and he realized he actually didn’t know what it was even now. What could have been more unpremeditated than that? Some sort of long curving blade, razor-keen. Then at last he identified it — more by hearsay than by actual recognition. A Samurai sword, souvenir of the long-ago war with Japan. He remembered now she had once mentioned she had a brother who had served in the Pacific theater — only to come back and die in a car crash not long after. Many men had brought these back with them at the time.

He let go, and it dropped with a muffled thud.

After a while he located the bracket she had driven into the wall. It must have been hanging up there. When he went over to it he found, on the floor underneath, the severed cord it had hung by and the empty scabbard. His subconscious mind must have recognized it for a weapon, for he had no recollection whatever of snatching it down, and yet he must have, in the blinding red explosion that had burst in his brain and ended in murder.

In the beginning he was very mechanical, as the glaze of shock that coated him all over slowly thawed and loosened. He tipped the cocktail shaker into one of the two glasses and drank. He even ate one of the two olives she’d had ready at the bottoms of the two glasses. Not calloused. His instinct told him he needed it, if he wanted to try to live. And he wanted to try to live very badly. Even more so now that he’d looked at death this close with his own eyes. Then he poured a second one, but let it stand. Then he emptied what remained in the shaker down the sink.

It seemed hopeless. There seemed no place to begin. The room was daubed with her, as though a house painter had taken a bucket of her blood, dipped his paint brush in it, then splashed it this way and that way and every which way all over the walls. He was splattered himself, but fortunately he was wearing a dark suit and it didn’t show up much; and that part of the job could wait until later.

The first thing to do was to get her out of here. All the little things of hers... He went to her closet and found a number of opaque plastic garment bags — even more than he needed, in fact... and finally he zippered them up securely and let them lean there a moment.

Then he went out to his car, opened the trunk compartment, and made room. He went around to the front seat, got the evening newspaper that he remembered having left there, and papered the entire trunk with it, to prevent any errant stains or smears. It was so incredibly unpeopled out here that he didn’t even have to be furtive about it. Just an occasional precautionary look around him.

Then he went in again, brought out the garment bags, put them in the trunk, and locked it He stepped back into the bungalow to put out the lights, took her key with him so he’d be able to get back in again, got in his car, and drove off.