Chapter 6
Estelle was already awake when Evelyn opened her eyes. Her face was marked with anxiety. "I can't wake him up," she said to Evelyn, indicating Matt's deeply slumbering figure. "I think there's something wrong with him."
Evelyn roused herself, got out of bed and went around to the other side, where she put her hand down on Matt's forehead. "He's running a fever," she said. Then she dampened a handkerchief in the water bucket and returned to press it to his face. Presently, his eyes blinked open and he strained to peer through a lingering haze of sleep. He made an effort to raise himself to his elbows, but upon making contact with the injured arm winced in pain and let himself fall back on the bed again.
Evelyn noted the increase in swelling and discoloration around the edges of the wound.
"It's infected," she said to Matt. "You're going to need the attentions of a doctor." Matt grabbed the brass bedstead and pulled himself to a sitting position. He examined the wound carefully and then he nodded in concurrence.
Estelle helped him on with his clothes and Evelyn, standing by, felt helplessly bereft until Matt said to her, "I'll have to depend on you to do the driving."
Evelyn, her energy strangely renewed, splashed water on her face and began to get into her clothes. As they passed through the outskirts of a modest-sized town, they kept their eyes open for signs hung in front of the houses denoting the presence of a physician. Evelyn spotted one and instantly drew the car up alongside the curb in front of it. All three got out, and Evelyn and Estelle assisted Matt as he made his way shakily up the flight of wooden steps out front.
They followed the instructions above the bell, Ring and enter, and found themselves confronted within a minute or two, in a small anteroom, by a stocky, florid, gray-haired man with a taciturn look. "My sister, my wife and myself were in a car accident yesterday," Matt said. "A broken window slashed my arm. I didn't realize how bad it was."
The man nodded and led him into an examination room. Estelle and Evelyn followed. Inside, the doctor examined the wound under a brilliant light and announced, "I'll have to lance and drain that and get some penicillin inside you." He reached into a linen closet and handed Matt what appeared to be a hospital type gown. "This is going to be kind of messy. So you better take your clothes off and put this on until I'm through." Then he stepped across the room and opened the door to an adjacent room. "Step in here and lie down on the table when you're through. That's where I'll work on you."
Matt removed his clothes and stepped into the other room, Estelle and Evelyn still with him. They waited for close to ten minutes. Matt looked distressed and told Estelle, "Take a peek out there and see what he's doing. I didn't like the way he looked at us. And he's taking a long time to get started."
Estelle had barely left the room when she rushed back in and closed the door behind her and made her announcement: "Matt, we've got to get out of here. There are cops snooping around the car downstairs, and one of them's coming up the steps."
Matt cursed at his own lack of caution and yanked open a window to the fire escape outside it on the side of the building. He pushed the girls through first and then started down himself. "This way, fast." Matt beckoned them and moved toward the backyard which connected an entire block of houses.
They stepped over several small picket fences, and Matt ducked into a garage at the end of a driveway adjacent to a large, gray wooden house with freshly painted blue shutters. There was a car inside it and Matt motioned to them to get into it. All three crouched down out of sight behind the seat. "I left my clothes and my wallet and my pants with all that dough." Matt let loose a string of expletives. "If I weren't so goddamned groggy, I would have been smart enough to know what the hell that bastard was up to. He probably called in the license plate on the car. They'd have a stolen car alarm on it by now."
"I've got about sixty-five dollars" Estelle said, reaching into her bra. "I got it from some of the boys back at that carny."
"That's good, Stell," Matt said. "Now, what I've got to do is this. First, get this car we're in started somehow. And then get some antibiotics from some druggist along the way. Now for clothes-" He raised his head and scanned the interior of the garage and presently, still crouching, stepped out of the car. He returned with a pair of grease-smeared overalls in place of the white surgical gown. He looked toward Evelyn who was still crouched in the rear seat. "Get in here behind the wheel. I'll get underneath the hood and get this thing going. Estelle and me will stay crouched down in the back. Just back her out nice and easy, just as if nothing's happened. Unless someone sticks his head out a window and starts hollering up a storm. Then hit it!"
Matt managed to get the car started, and Evelyn, sitting stiffly at the wheel without glancing right or left, concentrated on controlling the trembling of her hands on the steering wheel. But she backed out of the driveway slowly as instructed, without event, and drove down the street. "Get right into the main drag of the town as soon as possible," Matt said, and Evelyn cut across several intersections until she came to a wide thoroughfare and followed it in the direction of the town.
They drove on through and went about thirty miles until they reached the next town, where Evelyn parked before a drugstore in their quest for antibiotics. Matt told Estelle, "You go in and see if you can sweet-talk him into selling you some of the stuff over the counter without a prescription." When Estelle was unsuccessful at two attempts at different establishments, Evelyn took some money from her hand at the next stop and said, "You had better let me go in this time."
Evelyn entered the store as its sole customer was just leaving. The pharmacist was a large, hefty man with the loud-mouthed joviality of a road salesman. He eyed Evelyn's wrinkled and somewhat disarrayed state, obviously impressed by her stunning figure. Something in the elegance of her manner put him off until she dropped her voice and smiled with the obvious softening overture of someone requesting special favors. "My brother, he hurt himself the other day, and it's bothering him now. Nothing serious, and we'd like to save the time of visiting a doctor because we're traveling to meet my-"
"Hold it, beautiful. Relax now. I've been around for a while and you don't have to be afraid to level with me." He came around the counter to stand before her, grinning into her face. "I can see you're in some kind of trouble. But what kind isn't any of my business. If I can help out a cute little lady in distress, it's no skin off my teeth, now is it?" He rubbed his hands. "Now, tell me what you want."
Evelyn described Matt's condition and then requested the antibiotics. The druggist looked toward the door, and seeing no one in sight, raised his hand and pressed it against Evelyn's breasts. Instinctively she began to pull away, but then, arresting the action, forced herself to hold her ground, talking quickly and proffering the money for the antibiotics as he ran his hands along the length of her body. "Boy, you really got something there, haven't you?" he exclaimed, with ogling appreciation. He brought his hand to his chin musingly. "Now, you know that kind of an infection needs a lot of antibiotics if they're going to be taken orally. Now that's expensive," and as she extended the money, he added, "and you know, I'd be taking quite a chance letting you have them without a prescription."
Evelyn looked up anxiously, imploring. "Well now," he said, and he drew her by the wrist in the direction of the partition that blocked off the back of the store over which was hung the sign, Prescriptions. "Why don't you and I have a little private tete-a tete to see what we can do about this."
Once he had her in the back, he came up against her and encircled her with his arms. She could feel the stolid impress of him insinuating itself into her, against the promontory of her sex totally outlined beneath her skirt. His hand reached down to trace his finger along the line of her curvaceous buttocks. His breathing was heavy and quick. "Well, will you give me the antibiotics?" Evelyn was saying. "Will you?" She clung to the words, concentrating on them, trying to seal off her mind from the sensation of her thighs beneath the progressive raising of her skirt. She received the hot, impatient fingers coming up beneath her panties, which, with fumbling fingers, he awkwardly attempted to draw aside in order to effect the intimate entry.
"Yes, yes," he almost gasped the words. "I'll give you the antibiotics." Unable to gain his objective through his initial fumbling tactic, he jerked back and drew her panties down to below her knees, completely baring the desired target. But in his greedy haste, he began to spill his desire prematurely, and seizing her about the hips drew her against him so that his masculinity was pinned against the silken contours of her thighs, throbbing.
Several minutes later, an inordinately pale Evelyn opened the car door and resumed her position behind the wheel.
"Did you get the medicine?" Estelle blurted out hurriedly.
Evelyn nodded. She felt the pressure of Matt's fingers against her back, just for the slightest instant. "Thanks," he said. The impress of his fingers burned into Evelyn's skin for a long time after he had removed his hand.
Evelyn drove outside of the town and turned off the road where Matt told her to. Here, he took the bag of medicinals from the drugstore-Having minored in biology at the junior college which she'd attended, participating later on as a suburban housewife in Red Cross first aid courses, Evelyn knew what had to be done. She had prepared for it accordingly by taking the necessary bandages, antiseptic, and a razor blade in addition to the antibiotic capsules. Sitting in back alongside Matt, as he washed down the wound with alcohol, she made the fine incision along its festering border and kept up the pressure with her fingers to remove its putrescence. Then she bandaged the wound and gave Matt the first considerable starting dosage of the antibiotic. Matt maintained a stoic demeanor throughout, but when she was through, he allowed himself to sink back on the seat, exhausted by the ordeal. Within a matter of minutes after, he gave Evelyn road travel directions and sank back into a feverish sleep.
"I had to give that bastard at the drugstore thirty dollars," Evelyn said, surprised by her own uncharacteristic use of profanity. "That leaves us just about enough for a motel. I think that's what we'd better find right now so he can get a decent bed to sleep in. The traveling can come later."
Estelle's vigorous assent was admiring. "Gee, I'm sure glad you came along with us, Evelyn." Evelyn smiled for the first time since she had stepped across the threshold of her home, which seemed whole lifetimes ago.
Once settled in a small, twelve-unit motel, Matt undressed and got under the covers. Evelyn delimited the whole compass of her life to the single-minded purpose of nursing this man who was now inert and defenseless in her presence. There was no longer any way to rationalize her continued captivity. She looked up at the door. It was only a matter of a dozen footsteps and she could be out of his grasp. Even Estelle was gone, having vaguely muttered something about getting them some eating money. But even as he lay there on the pillow, his face aquiline, bonily handsome with a thick, blue-black stubble accentuating the prominence of the cheekbones and the bold, square-cut chin with the slightest suggestion of a cleft, Evelyn knew she was still his hostage. In some unfathomable way, he seemed to hold the key to some question her life she had never known previously existed, that demanded a solution before she could leave him. It was senseless and irrational to contemplate. The utter insipidity of her position appalled and angered her. She resolved that entirely with the thought that whatever he had been previously, he was now reduced to the role of a suffering human being and she could at least remain with him until his fever broke. Who was she to be his judge, anyway? In some obscure way, he seemed to be already receiving his punishment. Then, as always in those moments of crisis in her life, she thought of her father.
When she was fourteen years old, they were in their summer place near Apanacko Bay. Her father called her to tell her that he had hired a heavy, brutishly muscular man as a handyman on the grounds, and both his aspect and manner were frightening to Evelyn. When she found out from the housekeeper that this man was an ex-convict, Evelyn was even more disturbed and took her fears to her father. He quieted them and reassured her. But an incident occurred soon after which was terrifying.
Her father went out into the greenhouse one morning where the handyman was working alone and somehow they got into an altercation and he began beating her father. Evelyn heard her father's cries and ran out to see the handyman going after him. She screamed, but then she saw the man stumble and fall. He lay there on the ground, the prongs of a rake having pierced his ribcage, and he was bleeding profusely. Her father knelt to attend him, and she recalled distinctly with how much tenderness he managed to bring him back to the house, and when he passed out, how painstakingly he undressed him, removed every last garment from that massively muscular and hairy torso. How he washed him, stayed with him in the same room, administered to all his needs for the two weeks until the man was back on his feet. And when Evelyn asked how he could deal with him so after the man had virtually attempted to kill him, her father had said, "Oh, my dear, what he tried to do is past now. There is enough grief and meanness in this world without our contributing to it. It's just a matter now of someone sick and needing attendance and someone healthy and well who can help him. It's so little a thing to do. Would you have me deny him this?"
Evelyn having drawn her parallel, was now satisfied to blunder on in her dark and more complex quest. Through what other unforseen labyrinths it would lead her became evident when Estelle returned several hours later in the company of two men.
Both were well-groomed and expensively tailored. Although there was a difference of perhaps fifteen years in their ages, the older man, about fifty, was vigorous, bright-eyed and in as good a physical condition as the younger man. He carried himself with the stride of an athlete, and as Evelyn was to discover, he was, in fact, a professional golfer. The younger man was as strikingly handsome as a Hollywood actor. If anything, his appearance suffered from an over-perfection of features, a slightly feminine cast. "I met these gentlemen at the bar up the road," Estelle said, introducing them to Evelyn. "I told them to bring a bottle back here and maybe we could have a little fun," adding with a mischievous look of a naughty high school sophomore, "for a price. I told them my girl friend was real beautiful and they wanted to see for themselves."
Evelyn stiffened, taken aback at the implication. The older man came alongside her, his look undisguisedly admiring. "I certainly must agree with you. She's beautiful indeed."
"And quite chic," the younger man added.
Evelyn turned abruptly and walked into the bathroom. Estelle came up hastily behind her and managed to get in before she closed the door. Evelyn's annoyance was obvious.
"Gee, don't be mad at me, will you? You know, I think you're just terrific. I just thought we might have a little fun and get enough money to keep us going. You know, with Matt sick like that and all, we may be needing more medicine."
Evelyn remained unmollified. Estelle put her hand on her arm. "I'll tell you what. You know, I don't care what I do to help Matt. And to be honest, I'm just a hooker at heart. I love to do it. I'll take care of the both of them and get enough money for all of us. Just come in and like play along, have a couple of drinks, and talk. When it starts to get like, you know what, I'll just tell them you're sick." Estelle smiled guilelessly, as if she were struck with an inspiration, and she drew Evelyn by the arm. Despite her annoyance, Evelyn found herself returning her smile.
Both men had removed their jackets and were pouring themselves drinks. They were not in the least perturbed by the sleeping presence of Matt, and presently Evelyn discovered it was because Estelle had told them, "My brother's in there with us and he's so stoned, he won't wake up for a week." The older man offered Evelyn a drink and she had no desire to reject it because she felt the need for it to steady herself after the ordeal she had been through. The warming liquor coursing through her was comforting.
The alcohol dulled the knife-edge of tension and Evelyn accepted the drink offerings which followed as an anesthetizing relief from the stinging crossfire of doubt that assailed her in between the shifting events. Action, terrible as it was, seemed preferable to inaction and suspension as nerve-wracking as the last brief poise on a suicidal abyss. Movement, participation, brought with it a total absorption in the act of survival. Evelyn sighed deeply and leaned back in the heavily cushioned chair. The suggestive repartee about her passed by her ears as so much unintelligible murmuring. The setting and characters before her were as unreal as movie images. It was only when Estelle rose abruptly and stood up before both men, setting down her highball glass and beginning to sway lasciviously, that Evelyn found a focus of attentiveness. Still, she was like a spectator separated from but pressed to a self-conscious awareness of a filmed scene.
"Sure, I was a professional stripper, really I was," Estelle insisted. "I could do those grinds and bumps and move my-ah, muscles-" At this point she burst into laughter. "All over." She was raising her skirt now, inching it up to her thighs and swaying her body and hips. "This was the routine I had. I mean, it was sort of worked out just for me by one of the guys who booked strip shows."
Estelle, enjoying every moment of her inane performance, laughed as loud as the appreciative males of her audience who, despite their appearance of sophistication, were not a little taken aback by her complete state of exposure by the time she was through.
The younger one's excitement showed in a flushed face and glazed eyes, and he offered no resistance as Estelle carried her ridiculous games further. She knelt and unzipped his fly, and her teasing fingers traced his contours with a professional expertise that at once began to show results in throbbing, rosy rigidity and the restless movement of his hips.
Throughout this little byplay, the attention of the more mature man directed solely at Evelyn. She saw his eyes appraising her limbs, ankles, calves, knees, and then moving upward to envision tracings of the hidden contours. "I can see where you wouldn't need any kind of an act at all," he said, and reached out his hand to touch her thigh. Evelyn leaned forward as if to arise, but she caught Estelle's expression, frantic, pleading, casting her eyes over to Matt's inert form on the bed, recalling their little tete-a-tete in the John, and Estelle's assurance that she would handle the more crucial and ultimate details of the transaction.
Evelyn forced herself to lean back in her chair once again. Both the disinhibiting effect of the liquor and the blatant stare of arousal of the older man had a more exciting influence than Evelyn realized. The warmth of his hand sent an involuntary quiver through her thighs as he dipped under the skirt, moving it upward by slow degrees and the insinuating probings of his fingers. He made no hasty attempt to pry apart her knees. She felt the electric touch of his fingers stroking, stroking along the line of her tightly compressed thighs. Inching, impressing, gently downward, one finger in between, downward and then upward again, a little higher each time, a little closer to that pulsing part of her which now caused her to stir uneasily.
She sighed and let her lids drop, gradually slipping into the recollection of Estelle's lips, the moist dartings of fire. The last inner chords of tautness began slowly to go slack, accompanied by a deep exhalation. Almost imperceptibly, her knees parted and his hands moved all along the length of her inner thigh. There, the panting tug of his fingers caught her by surprise. The resistance was still there but slipping slightly out of reach.
"Don't worry, I'll take care of the both of them when it comes to that." Estelle's assurance sounded in her inner ear and permitted her to acquiesce just a little further. She moaned as her body absorbed the first reach of his searching fingers. Her loins, awakened now, were making their own demand, and Evelyn's hands were reaching out, tugging at his trousers, grasping at his naked hips and urging the full weight of his body forward-forward.
A cry was rent from her throat at the sudden prodding. She was losing her arms now and her lower limbs; her upper torso was dissolving. All was subordinated, all centered now on that volcanic femininity that undulated in its deepest recess from somewhere in the belly of the earth. And her motions and movements, her grinding contortions, were of the earth, the tidal waters and the enveloping rhythms of all the heavens. "Give it to me-give it to me-more- more-MORE!" The words lashed her own throat, whipped by the frenzy of the long-stifled and now fully awakened female need. She felt his shuddering jolt simultaneously with his hoarse outcry, and at the height of her aroused passion she experienced the cold shock of sudden withdrawal. Her eyes, startled, blinked open as she slipped down in the chair. Her legs upraised and parted, she writhed at the mercy of her womb fire.
Her erstwhile lover, fallen to the side, his hands pressing his groin, was frozen in the contorted grimace of his spending body. Just behind him and just to the left, Evelyn saw his companion standing, hips thrust forward, his distended manhood in Estelle's plying hands. Evelyn's hands beckoned to him, her back arching forward with the wild, jolting thrusts of her inflamed vitals. He came to her instantly. He seized her hips. She arched forward, then almost completely backward, receiving him with a swift succession of convulsive drives. He staggered under the fierce impact and lost his seat, fumblingly unable to regain it in the face of an unnerving experience. Evelyn bounded off the chair, her eyes ablaze and venomous contempt contorting her face. But before she could find words, she saw Matt sitting up in his bed, an alert witness, and she whirled and ran into the bathroom, slamming the door.
She remained there for some considerable time and then, some time later, opened the door slowly, tentatively. Her eyes caught Matt's. He was sitting up, reclining against the bedstead, smoking. "Come on out," he said evenly. "They're not here. I told Stell to take them to one of their rooms to finish the entertainment." Evelyn hesitated, suffering queasiness in her midsection, but his face was calmly noncommittal, and she moved forward into the room. Matt tossed a pack of cigarettes over toward the bed. "Here, have one. It'll do you good."
Evelyn felt an inward rush of relief. The simple gesture seemed to convey an underlying significance that Evelyn desperately sought for in this moment of deep confusion. She sat on the edge of the bed and shakily lit a cigarette. She inhaled deeply, keeping her eyes still downcast. She started, as she saw her own nakedness, to begin to rise with the objective of getting a garment, but his words kept her in her place. "Relax, will you? What's the point of that routine now? You know what you're like." He quickly added with a quietly, softened tone, "It's human. You're alive and you're a lot of woman. A lot of woman has got a lot of need. I saw you go through that whole bit with those guys, and you don't look any different to me. That Mother Superior bit is a fraud. You can't tell yourself any different now. And why should you, even if you could? Look at Estelle. She's had maybe five, ten thousand guys."
Evelyn raised her eyes to meet his. Tears welled, and she fought them back. "I'm not like Estelle," she said. "You don't understand. The way I was raised by my father-the beauty and the sensitivity that he poured into my life." Somewhere from the deepest recesses of her being, the words formed, coming up to bridge the years. Her earliest childhood, the home she grew up in, and the memorable episodes that bound together the threads of her life. She had to talk. She had to let him know, to know herself all that made her what she was, up to that day, that hour when he had stepped into her home out of the night.