Chapter 11

Evelyn entered the cottage and walked past Matt's mother, who was completely attired in coat and hat. She went immediately to the telephone and asked the operator to connect her with the local bus depot. "I can tell you when the buses are leaving," Matt's mother said to her. And Evelyn turned around to see two suitcases beside the woman. "I'm leaving," she said, "you don't have to go."

"I'm not leaving because of you," Evelyn said.

The deepening lines on the older woman's face showed a troubled weariness. "You shouldn't leave him. He loves you."

These words and the woman's entire attitude were totally incomprehensible to Evelyn, especially coming at this time. "You're mistaken," Evelyn said. "More so than you can possibly realize."

The woman shook her head. "I'm not mistaken. I knew that from the moment I received a letter from him, telling me to come to this place. He wrote me then that there was someone else with him, someone other than Estelle. And he said it was someone who was very fine and that it was someone he knew that I could become close to. How incredible a thing that was for him to say, only I know. In all of his life, he has never had such regard for a person or ever believed that human closeness was possible at all."

"But Estelle-" Evelyn began.

"No," Matt's mother said. "You don't understand. Estelle has just been someone to have in his presence. The way people keep pets, a cat, a dog, occasionally throwing it a bone of affection for the sake of some living presence." Now she averted her face in an effort to conceal her distress. "I never said anything to him about her. When there is nothing, the touch of another body has importance." She turned again and leaned forward anxiously, placing her hand on Evelyn's arm.

"He needed something, at least, so he would not exist as a child stillborn." For some reason or other, as the woman made reference to the sexuality of the body as a detached object, a needed service, a nourishment, an image of the brother who led her to the mentally retarded giant, as if he were taking her presence to him as a light in self-consuming darkness, came to her. Evelyn's hand returned the pressure of the older woman's. "But Matt hates me."

"No, it isn't you that he hates. He hates because he does not believe that anything else is possible." Now she pressed the fingers of her hand against her lips in despair. "How can I explain it to you? You see, he grew up very close to me as a child. We had a fine home and we never were at a loss for material things. My husband was a man very much involved in business. Quite successful, always arranging corporations, mergers, away from home weeks at a time. He was an attractive man and he had the faults of..."

She shrugged. "I suppose the essence of Man himself. Interests away from home, other women, drinking. But do not imagine that I am speaking of some kind of reprobate. My husband was very respected, highly regarded, in the church, in business. Of course, I wept, was hurt, complained. We argued, and when he was away I carried on as if I never wanted him to return.

"Matt saw, he heard all this. And as I said, he was very close to me. A brilliant boy, a remarkable student. Perhaps you find this difficult to believe. But this didn't last very long because there was hatred inside him for all the things that his father was and represented. This he received through me." The woman closed her eyes for a moment and drew her hand across her face. She looked up to Evelyn. "I remember one time that my husband was away for many weeks and he had brought home with him several men for some kind of a business conference. They were in the study, and Matt came in for a book on the shelf, I think it was. They were talking and they didn't notice him. And mention was made of a party they had arranged with prostitutes, I suppose to help inveigle some group into a business merger. Something like that.

"And Matt, who was perhaps thirteen years old, or fourteen at the most, turned upon them. All the stored-up rage and vehemence. I remember I even heard his voice from upstairs, and as I came running down, I heard his words. 'You're all a bunch of phonies. Hypocrites,' he was saying. 'Business-it's just like thievery and criminality. Drinking and being dirty with other women and then a lot of church-going to cover it all up. You stink. All of you stink. The whole damned world of people stinks.' I managed to get him out of the room. He wouldn't let my husband reason with him, talk to him, put a hand out to him.

"And it all grew 'way out of proportion with each passing year. He left school. He went out on his own. There was to be no normal life for him. To steal meant nothing. Only he wanted to keep apart from the sickness in the world he said existed around him. To plan was pointless. To live or die was of equal unimportance.

"You see, my dear." The older woman's voice softened. "He grew up to see the world through a woman's eyes, because of his closeness to me. A woman's sensitivity, a woman's heart, a woman's insight. He learned to hate what women hate in all men, but he wasn't a woman, so he could not lose his mind in his body, as a woman does with her loved one. Because what he could not understand was that for all of this, I loved my husband so deeply that when he passed away, I would have given my life just to have been possessed by him again ..."

Her voice trailed off into a deep sigh, before she began again. "I suppose it was a mother's resentment that I reacted as coldly as I did to you. I had never known him to feel like that about anyone, not even myself, and I wanted to find a way to talk to you. But when I saw how distant Matt had become, I felt, I suppose, that I had been replaced and I disliked you all the more. But I see how stupid it all is, that it can bring us only further unhappiness and, God knows, the world is full of that.

"So I've decided to go away. I have enough to take care of myself. My husband left more than enough, but Matt would never touch a penny of it." Matt's mother covered Evelyn's hands with her own. "Of course, I am saying all of this out of a mother's selfish interest. I have no right. For you to stay with him, the way he lives, could ruin your own life. But I want him to have something. To know at least why he is alive." With that, the woman drew back, lifted her two suitcases and walked out the door.

Evelyn was deeply shaken. She felt herself caught up in a buffeting, crushing storm that intermittently brought a lapse and a lull, allowing the hopeful beginning of a recovery, and then struck again with a more crippling force. But through it all, she fixed her mind on one thought-that single clue of Matt's mother, which had come to her as a revelation. It explained why, among all of the people in the world she had ever known, it was only Matt that she felt as close to as her father. Matt's mother had said, "He sees with the insight and sensitivity of a woman's mind."

The slamming door behind her wrenched her from her troubled musing. Matt had entered the cottage and now moved about in a hurried swirl of activity. He opened drawers and flung the contents down on chairs. "Your mother just left," Evelyn told him.

"I know," he said curtly without looking up. "Has Stell come back yet?"

"No," Evelyn started to say, and then was surprised to see Estelle stepping out of one of the rooms.

"Here I am, Matt. When you took off with her," she said, alluding to Evelyn, "I just had to head straight back for the cottage." The uncharacteristic coldness in her reference to Evelyn had taken Evelyn aback. Estelle had never shown any signs of jealousy before.

"I've had it up to here with this place. We're going to start moving again. Help me pack," he instructed Estelle. Her face immediately brightened and she fell to her chores with a zest, pausing only to ask Matt as an afterthought: "Is she coming with us?"

Evelyn stiffened expectantly. Matt did not acknowledge the question and Estelle persisted. "Is she?"

Matt showed annoyance. "Come on, Stell, shake your ass. We want to get out of here." She did as he bade, and then turned and made her way hurriedly to the door. She paused at the threshold. "I'm going up to the main house to get our laundry."

"To hell with it," Matt said.

"It'll only take me a minute," Estelle said. "I've got something there that I want." She went out and they heard the hurried click of her heels along the walk.

During the ten minutes of her absence, Matt and Evelyn maintained a pregnant silence. He moved now, packing and assembling things, as if driven by some internal holocaust. Evelyn noted with uneasiness the fluent ease of his hands as he examined and prepared for their taking, in quick succession, a rifle, a shotgun and two revolvers that she knew he had obtained from George Ostrakhan.

Estelle's heels clicked even more rapidly up the walk, and the door opened. "Matt, we've really got to move now. Her kid came back and she must of told her mother what you did to her out there on that horse. I heard her old lady calling the cops. You know, that kid's jailbait."

Matt abruptly terminated the efforts at packing. "Okay. Forget this crud. We'll pick up what we need when we get clear of this area."

Estelle was abnormally animated. "We'll be making a run for it, Matt, just like we used to, the two of us." She paused and then looked significantly at Evelyn again. "You can't take her now, with the cops on our tail. Besides, if they grab us with her, it's kidnapping, isn't it?"

Matt started for the door and snapped back at Estelle, tensely. "Whether she wants to stay or come along, that's up to her. Let's get out of here."

Estelle opened the door and went immediately after him, and Evelyn went through it before it closed.

Matt was gunning the motor now, swerving sharply around hairpin turns on roads dividing the various estates. Having studied the maps of the area in detail, he knew precisely where he was going. "We'll cut up north to the river," he said. "Then we'll dump the car and grab one of the launches or cruisers, anything with an outboard motor docked out that way, and head for the other side. But we'll continue along the coastline for about thirty miles. I know that region real good, and once we latch on to another car they can just whistle Dixie."

They were all sitting up front, with Estelle in between, now looking morose and unresponsive. As they crossed an intersection and sped past a gas station on their left, they heard the sound of police sirens. Matt made no comment, but Evelyn saw him glance over his shoulder and then heel the floorboard. By the sound of the wailing sirens, it became clear that he was outdistancing the police car. But then as they shot across another intersection, Evelyn cried out, "There's a police car coming down that road!"

Matt yelled, "Hold on!" and zigzagged between two cars ahead, cutting off a large gasoline truck which swerved and applied its emergencies with a shrieking of hot rubber. Matt looked back to see the massive vehicle darting across the road, blocking both lanes. "That'll give us a breather," he said grimly.

But within the space of several minutes, the siren sound came again within earshot, this time, gradually, relentlessly, rising in volume. Evelyn sat with her fingers tightly pressed into her thighs. Estelle whirled for a look. "They're closing in on us, Matt!"

"This lousy wagon," Matt muttered. "I'm giving her all she can take right now. All we have to do is make it to the river, and we're getting close now."

Several shots rang out. "Get down," Matt yelled. There was another volley, the ping of metal on the fenders. "They're going for our goddamned tires," he said. "Must have goddamned telescopic sights. They're too far away to shoot that accurately otherwise."

Matt cut the wheel at the next turnoff, and the car swerved, spun half about as if it were going to flip over, tilting up on the wheels of one side before it righted itself again. "We're coming to the waterfront area. Thought I'd better snake in and out of some of these side streets so they can't-" A shuddering of the vehicle cut him off.

"Son of a bitch! They plugged one of our tires back there." He pitched the car around another turn, but by now the tire was dragging, flopping on the naked rim. He swung off the road, flung open the doors, grabbed the weapons which were in reach and motioned to the others. "Come on, we'll cut in and around some of these buildings and try to make it into one of those waterfront warehouses. We can crawl in and out of those things till doomsday, and they'll never find us. We've got one break, at least it's Sunday, and the whole goddamned area is like a ghost town."

He led them through what appeared to be a vacant parking area, helping them clamber over a wire fence which both girls, wearing high heels, negotiated with difficulty. Estelle, the heavier and the less gracefully adept of the two, found the going rougher. They cut across a loading depot area, and Matt pushed through a gate boldly emblazoned with No Trespass signs. "Come on, come on," he urged them. "Quickly. We should be hitting the river area any time now."

All three were breathing heavily by now, Estelle breaking into spasmodic coughing gasps for air. The siren sound came up close behind them and fanned out in an immense wail, followed by screeching brakes. "They found our car," Matt said and cast about frantically for the likeliest refuge. Matt pointed to his left to a steep, diagonal concrete structure, just beyond a sheet-metal Quonset type building and rising at least seventy-five feet above it. "That's some kind of a coal or loading chute," Matt said. "There should be steps on the other side of it going right down to the river front."

He started running toward it and waved them after him. He paused before a concrete wall about five feet high and, flinging down his weapons, helped them clear it, each in turn. On the other side, there was a narrow, concrete, vehicle passageway, then a wrought-iron picket fence, with ornate, wickedly protruding bars.

He helped Evelyn clear it first. Then, getting behind Estelle, he put his hands under her dress, grabbing her under the buttocks and lifting her to secure a foothold, but her heels kept getting in the way. "Get rid of those goddamned spikes," Matt said, as she finally managed to pull herself up beside Evelyn. A narrow concrete wall bordered the wrought-iron fence. Matt grabbed up his weapons and started running along it in the direction of a rise of concrete steps that seemed to lead to the concrete structure. "I'll run ahead and get set up at one of the windows up there, where I can cover you if they head this way before you two can make the climb."

Matt cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted back to them as he started up the steps. "Steady on that wall. You've got those goddamned spikes alongside it!" Then, furiously, "Kick off those stupid heels!" Evelyn immediately removed her shoes, but Estelle refused to be parted from hers. "I don't want to take a chance on losing them," she said, and added insipidly, "Suppose I have to end up tangling with one of those dumb stupid cops to get them off our backs."

Evelyn made her way cautiously, with Estelle stumbling and cursing behind her. Matt was about three-quarters of the way, and Evelyn, less than ten feet from the concrete steps, heard Estelle trip and scramble for a hold. Evelyn turned to see her lose her balance and go off to the side. Her outcry, shrill and piercing, was cut off in mid-air as her body struck the fence.

The sequence of motions had occurred so rapidly that Evelyn had not, in that instant, comprehended the fatality of the mishap. And then she saw Estelle skewered, the black, crimsoned spike thrust completely through her chest. She was frozen, horrified, in to immobility. The impaled young woman jerked her hands and legs like a stricken insect, and her movements forced Evelyn back to her senses. She leaned over and extended her hand. "Stell-Stell. Give me your arm."

Stell's eyes fluttered grotesquely, and she did make an attempt to raise her arm but then dropped it weakly. She seemed at once to know that her injury was fatal. There wan an immense outpouring of blood. Looking up, she fixed her eyes glassily upon Evelyn's face. Her voice was a barely audible whisper. "I-I was the one-to call the cops. I... I... heard what Matt's ma said-about my being like a dog or a cat ... that he loves you. I thought if the cops-chasing us, he would leave you and be ..."

Her eyelids began to flutter, and the air rushed out of her in a deflating gasp. Evelyn knew from the waxen glaze of her open, unblinking eyes that she had expired. The identical look of her father's eyes on the day he died had never left her.

Matt's warning shout from above blared out, and she turned at once and began to run up the concrete steps. The unsteadiness of her trembling legs caused her to stop several times, despite Matt's continued urgent shouts. Struck by a sudden dizziness, and terrified that she might tumble down, she knelt and continued her ascent on hands and knees. It seemed for her an endless ordeal, and at one point she allowed herself to collapse, face against the cold concrete, trying to regain her breath.

Then she felt him lifting her up, and for the last fifteen or twenty steps he carried her into the shelter. When Matt set her down, she wanted to sink to the floor, but he held her up, shaking her. "Come on, now, snap out of it." He grabbed up his weapons and pointed one of them through the window overlooking the vantage point from which they had come. "We've got to find a way to get out of here now, down to the riverside. This is a break because this place is built up over a wall that's a dividing line running several miles along the waterfront. In order to get at us, they've got to circle all the way around."

Evelyn muttered brokenly, "Estelle-down there-" She felt the tight support of Matt's hands on her arms.

"I saw it happen," he said, small muscles working in his jaws. His eyes, gray and unwavering, held hers, steadying her. He took her arm and they moved to a doorway, where all light was shut out. "Stay where you are," Matt said. "I can't see a damn thing. Let me see where this leads."

For several minutes there was silence except for the sound of his shuffling footsteps in the darkness as he felt his way, probing ahead with his hands. From somewhere below, a voice, unnaturally amplified, thundered through the silence. The "police, chancing upon Estelle, easily identified the fugitives' sanctuary. "The other side is completely walled up. The only way down is right here, the way you came up. Do you hear me? You're cornered."

Matt came out of the darkness. She knew by the look on his face that it was true. "They must have abandoned this place and boarded it up." He walked back into the section of the structure they had first entered and stood again by the window. He looked down to see three police cars and a scattering of men, some uniformed, some not.

The amplified voice started again. "We know you're heavily armed and we know you've got a woman there with you. We don't want any unnecessary killing. There's no way for you to break out of here. So why don't you let her come out, and then throw your weapons out? I promise you no one on this end will get trigger-happy."

The prouncement of the voice, had a strange effect on Evelyn. It was like a summoning back to another sphere, another place in time, where someone with her face and her body had existed. The cold, inescapable reality rose up to repossess her. She was a married woman, the legal chattel of another man. She had shared with him, and they had lived together for four years, in the intimacy of man and wife. How could that be, she wondered, if, in all that time, he had entered her body but never reached her? She looked at Matt's hard-hewn profile as he maintained a steady ritual at the window. Here was a man, a stranger she hardly knew, who had never entered her, but had reached her.

For a period there was silence before the authoritarian voice boomed out again, contaminating an effort at reasoned persuasion with unctuousness. "We're not in any hurry. We've got food, hot coffee, a lot of police shifts to back us up. What have you got up there? Tell you what. We'll give you a half-hour to make up your mind. You don't really have any choice. And having that woman with you now doesn't do you any good one way or the other. So why don't you just let her walk through that door, back to husband and her daughter, where she belongs? You've tortured her enough."

Evelyn was on her feet. The door was no more than four feet behind her and wide open. Matt turned to look at her. He caught her side glance at the open doorway.

"If you keep her up there and we have to come in and get you, it'll only mean more blood on your hands. Why take it out on her and risk her life? Do a decent thing-" the voice continued to intone in the background.

Matt turned away from her, training his attention on the window. Evelyn understood the action as an unspoken gesture for her release, if she wanted it. She had but to take several steps, and possibly her passage from death to life was open.

She turned inadvertently, facing the open doorway, as these thoughts passed through her, and Matt, interpreting her position as an indication that she was actually going to walk out, spun about with a convulsive start. They faced each other now. The word remained unsaid, and nothing was expressed. They were there, only the two of them, perhaps for the last time. The last time! The words knifed into Evelyn's brain and she began to take a step in his direction, but Matt had already taken several. His arms closed around her with a painful fierceness. Her lips, her teeth, kissed, bit at him in a consuming need. Their hands searched, grasped, seized.

"I want you, Matt-I want you!" The full weight of his demand upon her was crushing. Her knees gave way, her body falling back beneath him. His mouth was a brand on her lips, her bare shoulders, her breasts! His hands reached out, fumbling for her skirt, and she slid down toward him to help him pull away the encumbering garment.

He thrust with the point of his tongue at the rubbing slit and tasted the warm cream of her pussy. He liked the taste. He licked and swallowed. She was aflame with passion as she tossed impulsively and drove her mound thrustingly over his mouth. His lips avidly sucked. He plunged dart after dart into the soft, warm depths of her pussy.

His hands clung to and cupped her grinding buttocks. She shoved her cunt down harder against his gaping mouth and impaling tongue. Her body lurched and her hips revolved. She swiveled violently, lunging down to receive the sharp thrusts of his tormenting tongue. He tightened the hold of his hands on her firm little buttocks and pulled her creaming slit down closer to his hungering mouth.

"Eat me. Stick your tongue in my pussy! Ohhhhh, that's the way!" she cried.

He was making spastic love to her cunt with his mouth and his driving tongue. His tongue drilling in and out between the creaming tips of her heaving pussy lips made her sob with emotion.

She tilted her hips, spreading her legs even wider apart as she sat on his face, offering her cunt to his worshipful lips. Her cunt shamelessly rolled over his mouth. He was digging his fingers into the round, fleshy cheeks of her buttocks. He was shuddering with emotion as his mouth licked and tongued. She was pressed so hard and intimately over his hungering mouth. He felt the pulsing climax of her, felt the restless press of her hot thighs and then the hard throbbing of her completion. His lips drove her into a frenzy of madness. Shudders of spasms hit her and she came, flooding his tongue and his lips and his face with a river of thick, hot cunt juice. He licked and swallowed it all as she came again and again.

She slammed her cunt down again and again to his face as his tongue drove in and out of her dripping, throbbing cunt lips. He was surrounded by her hot flesh and the matted tickle of her cunt hair.

And then she was through. She sat on his face, panting, his tongue still in her vagina, licking, laving, drinking her juice of completion. Her wicked face was smiling. She could not see him. His face was still buried under her cunt, trapped by her thighs. There was a glazed look of contentment in her dark eyes.

And then she crawled off his face. His face was flushed and covered with pussy juice. He licked it away from his lips.

And then she lay on her back and he fucked her, his huge young cock filling her, stretching her in-sides, pumping into her, out of her, driving her wild with the thick, meaty feel of it. Long, wonderful strokes in, slow teasing strokes out, until they both moaned and came, locked in each other's arms.

For a time he just smiled down into her face. He stood up, his movements strangely energized. He went quickly to the window, at the same time, drawing up and arranging his clothes. He seized two revolvers and thrust them in his pants pockets. Then he grabbed up the rifle. He leaned down over Evelyn on one knee and spoke, now with a swift urgency. "I'm going to try to get out of here now" he said. And at her show of alarm, he added with an undisguised tenderness, "You see, I've got to get out of here now-because I want to live. I want to be able to be with you."

She sat up quickly and grasped him by the shoulders. "But there is no way out of here. You said that yourself. They'll kill you, Matt- they'll kill you!"

The touch of his hand on her face calmed her. "No, they won't. I think there is another way out of here. A boarded-up coal chute I could probably snake my body down. But you'll have to stay here. Wait until they call for you to come out again. Then do it."

"No, Matt, I don't want to leave you."

"Listen, I'll get out of here. You go back where you came from. Maybe it'll take a month, a couple of months, but I'll work my way back there. That's one place they'll never expect me to show up. We'll go to Mexico-we'll go to South America, somewhere we can ..." He broke off and embraced her fiercely. "I love you, Evelyn. I love you!"

"Matt-Matt, my darling."

He pulled away from her abruptly and ran into the darkened, adjacent area. Though she called to him, he did not respond, but she heard the wrenching away of boards. In an instant he was back, and rushing over to the window. "It is a sealed-up chute and I'm going to go down the other end." He raised his rifle and poked it through one of the windows. "Don't be frightened," he said of her. "I'm going to let them have a few just to get a return of fire," and almost as quickly as he squeezed off two shots, it was followed by a hard, shattering fusillade from below. Then the voice from the megaphone. "We're ready to give it to you any way you want to take it. You still have five minutes."

Matt nodded to the mystified Evelyn. "Now I'm going back there to squeeze off a few shots into the chute just to make sure there's no one on the other side before I let go."

She heard the discharge of fire, and a moment later, no retort. And then his voice. "It's clear back here. I'm going, Evelyn. Take care of yourself-for me." Then he was gone. Evelyn sat in the center of the floor, drawing on her garments, trembling now from the damp coldness of the room. Then a shot rang out, and another shot- from somewhere behind. From somewhere where Matt had gone! Her hands clamped her mouth in horror for a suspended instant, and then the omnipresent voice rang out. "We've got him, lady. Don't worry now. You're all right. Just stay where you are and we'll come to get you. You're going home ..."

It was all a rain of tears after that, hands aiding assisting, solicitous voices proffering hot drinks and cigarettes, bundling her up in warm blankets, reclining her in the large vehicle. Some time before she dropped into a deep, sedatized sleep, she saw Harry's face and Diane's, and she was surprised at the tenderness and compassion of her feelings. So this, she thought, was the meaning of love.

It has been two years since Evelyn returned home. She applied for, and got, a divorce several months later. The last anyone heard from her, she was working as a social worker in a state home for boys. Perhaps looking for another Matt.

Perhaps she will find one.