Джон Макдональд - S*E*V*E*N

When he moved his hand precisely as before, she put her right hand on his hand to hold it still but did not pull his hand away. A hungry kiss had been going on for a long time. He moved the band of fabric slightly. Her hand finned each time to stop him. Then it was down far enough for him to cup the abundant, firm, velvety buttock in his big hand and pull her closer. Her right arm lifted and slid around him, and he felt the stub and pull of her fingertips in the muscle of his back, felt rather than heard the sigh of want and resignation she made against his mouth.

The moment of mercy, he thought. Groan and shove her way and show abject remorse. Guilt. Despair. And it will take her fifteen seconds to yank that bikini bottom up and be off the bed and out in the living room, sitting in a chair, knees pressed tightly together, her breath and her body quieting quickly.

No bullet when you pull the trigger. Just a click and a beautifully exposed Ektachrome transparency to project on the screen in the little lab in the back of the mind. Specimen of employee wife, brought right to the point of inevitable copulation and then, out of charity, released to dart back into the thicket of marriage, far warier than before, never to be caught again.

But she was too sweet, too close, too promising. And there was all the roving and rambling to be done, all the newness to be explored. For a matter of perhaps fifteen minutes one portion of his attention stood aside, involved in a cold objective observation of all physiological phenomena, directing, altering, varying his actions so as to flood her sensory inputs. It was a feedback system, precisely aware of the moments when there was a dim and distant alarm within her that dropped her back to some prior degree of mounting tension, so that he could then lift her back up beyond her previous high before risking the next necessary interruption. Lost ground, carefully regained, after the small disruptive acts of tugging the band of fabric off over her feet and dropping it aside, of swiftly and deftly baring her breasts, of hitching and moving around to a head-and-foot orientation with the bed, of peeling his own trunks down and dropping them on the floor, of coupling for the first time, establishing the unmistakable finality of it with a few long heavy strokes before disengaging. Because the objective was not merely the taking of her. That was only a qualified possession, far more easily achieved than the total possession which could come only from turning her face ashen, her lips icy, her expression to agony, from making her breathe like a runner, making her body burst with a sudden sweat, making her go into her hard, deep contractions.

During the second fifteen minutes of her, because all of it took only half an hour from the moment her slow arm went around him and her fingerpads dug into his muscles to the time when she faded slowly down and down into a drugged relaxation when she had ended, the watcher part of him had slowly moved closer and finally merged with his immediate sensual identity and had stopped the weighing and measuring and planning. It was no longer necessary. There was nothing else remaining to set her back. It was all a broad delicious road from there right up to release, knowing his would be all the greater by holding back until her body made its primitive, insistent demand.

Now, leaning on the patio railing in the dying light, he turned his head and saw that Anne Faxton was so far down the beach she was a stick figure, unrecognizable, still walking slowly. I did remember about being merciful, he thought. But too late. Too late for me. Too late for her.

He straightened, slid the door open quietly, parted the draperies, and closed the door. He went to the end of the draperies and found the right cord and pulled them all the way open. All that was left of the day was an ember band across the horizon over the black sea. He turned the small desk lamp on and went over to stand by the bed and look at Mrs. Lee Rountree in her sleep. She lay on her side, facing him. Her palms, pressed flat together, were under her cheek. Her sun-harshed hair spilled across her face, some blond strands stirring with each long exhalation of deep sleep, an exhalation from lips apart. Her leg underneath lay straight toward the foot of the bed. Her left leg was hiked up, knee sharply flexed, the round of the knee braced against the crumpled terrain of the pale wrinkled sheets.

He eased gently onto the bed to sit near the foot of it, turning so that he could look at her. Certainly a great quantity of lovely lady. Close to five eleven in her bare feet, he estimated. Possibly a hundred and forty to a hundred and forty-five pounds. All the creamy tidy luxuries of her were as perfectly in scale and proportion as with some of the remembered women, the few miniatures he had known, a foot shorter, fifty pounds lighter, yet not more delicately and tenderly constructed than this resting Amazon.

And once again he remembered the woodchuck, and the obsession he and his grandfather had shared during most of one of those endless Indiana summers when he had been seven years old. There had been some kind of trouble at home that he had been too young then to understand, and they had sent him out to the small farm for the summer. His grandfather had a bald head with spots on it and a bristling white moustache and a deep scar on his forehead. His grandfather was short of breath, and his left arm stopped midway between elbow and wrist, ending there in a leather thing like a round hoof with a threaded hole in the middle of it into which he could screw different attachments to suit different kinds of work. His grandfather had been wounded and gassed in a war long ago in the history books. The government sent him money every month. There was only one milch cow in the big cobwebby barn. She was brown and her name was Hilda, and she was family. There was a chicken yard with Rhode Island Reds. His grandmother took care of those. His grandfather said they were dumb, nasty cannibals.

There was a kitchen garden, almost an acre, that was the only part of the farm his grandfather worked. The rest grew up to grass, and men came and mowed it and stacked it and carted it away.

“Show you something, Aldie,” his grandfather said the day after his father left him at the farm. They walked a long way up the dusty farm road, at least a mile, and then over to a grassy bank, and his grandfather pointed out the great big round hole with the grass-grown mound of dirt beside it, a hole slanting down on the first uprise of the bank into fearful blackness.

“Right down in there lives the biggest son of a bitch of a woodchuck in creation, boy. Now don’t you say son of a bitch in front of your grandma, you hear?”

“I won’t.”

“We’re going to get him, Aldie. We’re going to by God get that smart old son of a bitch.”

His grandfather planned the campaign carefully. He found the only place where they could lie in wait, a shady little ridge where there were alder and witchhopple and the smell of dampness under big beech trees. It had a clear view of the rich green grassy flat where the woodchuck would come out and graze in the early morning or at last light.

“He’s old and he’s big because he’s so damn smart, Aldie.”

They made precise measurement of the distance from the ridge to the grass flat. It was a hundred and forty yards. Back near the farm, his grandfather found a place where there was exactly the same distance to shoot at exactly the same downward angle. They tacked white paper to a pine board and painted a target on it and staked it on the range. His grandfather rested his Springfield .30 on a feed sack half full of sand, lay prone, and squeezed off ten slow shots. The gun oil and Fourth of July smells, and the wicked crack and distant echo, were all very exciting.