Chapter 10

Back in. New York, Harry Fields was drunk; crazy, roaring drunk. He had been for three days, now, ever since he learned that Lena Troy had sold her business and skipped town. The dirty little double-crossing bitch, he thought. How dare she do something like this to me.

It was the one event that Harry Fields hadn't counted on. He hadn't even thought of it, really. He didn't know why it had never occurred to him. Actually it was a perfectly plausible thing for her to do, he supposed. He cursed himself for being such a stupid, short-sighted clod.

But he'd fixed her, God damn it. He really had. He'd learned that she'd been having an affair with Bart Laramie and that Laramie had told all his friends he was crazy about Lena and wanted to marry her. Well, Bart wouldn't want to, now. Yesterday, Harry had bumped into Bart at a bar and told him the whole bit about Lena. Bart had promptly told him that he was lying, a dirty-mouthed, lying little bastard, he'd called him. And then slugged him cold with a solid right to the jaw. But Harry didn't care much about that. He was pretty sure that Bart would realize it was the truth, that nobody could think up a story like that. So, at least he had screwed that bitch, Lena Troy, out of something.

But the frustration and anger had been building up in Hairy Fields during this three days, too. It compounded itself, the more he drank. It was just waiting for a release, when the doorbell rang and it was Corinne. She looked prettier than he'd ever seen her. She looked luscious to his drunken eyes, that moment. He hadn't seen her for several days now, ever since he'd arranged that show she put on with Van Jagger. He wondered where the hell she had been.

"Come in, Baby, come on in," he welcomed her. He took her arm and pulled her into the apartment. The door shut behind her but didn't quite close tightly. He led her into the living room, swaying a little. "God, am I glad to see you, honey," he told her. He reached up to fondle her breast but she pulled away from him.

"Don't, please, Harry," she pleaded. "You're drunk."

He started to get mad but then the obviousness of her silly remark struck him funny and he grinned, instead. "No kidding?" he said, sarcastically. "Corinne, your powers of observation are amazing. Listen, I asked you where you'd been. God damn it, how come when I need you like crazy, you run off some place, huh?"

"I've been with Van," she said quietly. There was a strange, almost beatific look on her pretty doll face that puzzled Harry and at the same time began to infuriate him.

"With Van! You mean Van Jagger? All this time? For Christ's sake! What the hell would he want with you all this time for four days?"

Her fingers plucked at each other nervously. "Well, you see, Harry, somethin' happened. You see I I fell in love with Van and "

His roar of laughter interrupted her. "Love?" he bellowed, choking on his drunken laughter. "Baby, I'll show you what love is. Take your damned clothes off. I want you. Right now!"

He reached out and started to unbutton the front of her dress. She knocked his hand away and stepped back. "No, Harry," she said, in a firm but slightly frightened voice. "That's what I came to tell you, that it's all over with you and me. I can't do it with you no more, Harry. Van and me "

T don't want to hear about you and that jerk, you silly little slut!" he interrupted. "And I'll show you what you're going to do or not going to do." He stepped toward her, his eyes glittering with wild, drunken anger and desire, mixed. His arm swung and he slapped her so hard she fell to the floor. As she started to cry, he kicked at her. The blow caught her in the breast and she clutched at the injured part, gave a wail of pain.

She tried to roll away from him, crying out: "No Harry, please. No more, Harry!"

He went after her, bent and grabbed the front of her dress, ripped. The whole front came apart in two pieces. The sight of her, naked now, without a bra, as usual and wearing only dainty, lace trimmed panties, somehow infuriated him all the more. He reached down and grabbed the waist of her panties, ripped them clean away from her in two sections. He saw the bruise on her small, lovely formed breast where he had kicked her. He also saw that her nipples had stiffened out long and sharply.

"Oh, you cute, stupid little bitch!" he said.

All Corinne could do, now, was to cry.

"Spending all that time with that jerk, Van, when I needed you, giving me that bit you ain't going to perform for me any more. I'll show you who's boss."

He reached down and took the smooth, soft, plump white flesh on the inside of one of her thighs and pinched it, cruelly, leaving the red and already turning black-and-blue imprint of his fingers there. Corinne screamed with pain. He bent and slapped her hard across the face again.

"No screaming!" he ordered, his voice almost falsetto with mixed anger and excitement "No God damned screaming!"

She continued to make muffled sobs behind her fist stuffed against her mouth as she stared up at him, frightened as a child.

"I'm going to fix you good, this time, Corinne," he told her. "Thinking you can walk out on me just because I haven't got a job anymore, just because I'm having a hard time finding another one, because of that stinking female of a boss of mine. I'll fix her and you, both, all females!" His voice rose shrilly, at the end.

He reached down and grabbed Corinne by her short blonde hair. He dragged her across the room as she moaned and groaned and sobbed with pain and humiliation. He lifted her and flung her into a chair. He stood in front of her.

"All right," he said. "Now, give me a show. A good show. You know the kind I like. Put your hands on those pretty little things, squeeze them, tell me how much I'll like 'em."

When she didn't obey right away, Harry Fields whipped off his belt. He said: "All right. I'll teach you not to do as you're told."

"No, Harry!" she cried out. "All right, Harry. I will, Harry. I will!"

Her hands flew to her small, pretty breasts. She fondled and squeezed the pert little mounds, her thumbs rubbing against the stiffened, popped-out tips, while she quickly mouthed invitations to him.

After awhile of watching her, Harry said: "All right, now do the other thing to yourself that I like!"

She did that, too and Harry watched, avidly, his breath coming and going now in great gulps, as he stood swaying, drunkenly. He waited until her own mouth was gaping for breath and her hips were beginning to move involuntarily. Then he reached out and seized her by the hair again, yanked her roughly off the chair, sprawling face down on the floor, as he roared: "That's enough, God damn it! Save some for me!"

All of the torn pieces of her clothing were off, now. She was stark naked. Harry Fields stood over her, with the loosely folded belt, with its brass buckle, still in his hands. He looked down at her, at the shining white, smooth rondures of her prominent fanny jutting up at him. He hefted the belt. "I ought to give you a few good licks with this. How would you like that?"

Her eyes were staring, fascinated, at the belt. She said, weakly, without much conviction: "No, please, no, Harry!"

"By Jeeze!" he said, amazed. "I think you do, really want it!"

He saw her marble smooth, round buttocks quiver. A seething, blind excitement seized Harry, then and almost unaware of what he was doing, he raised the belt, the buckle end hanging down and brought it whipping down across her backside. Her body hunched up quivering from the floor and a welt marred the smooth flesh, showing tiny pearls of blood. She let out a half moan, half cry. The sight of her, writhing, twisting, but making no real' effort to get away; the sound of her, increased Harry's sadistic fury and mounting excitement. He swung the belt again. And again. The white flesh was soon laced with welts.

And now Corinne was sobbing out: "Oh, Daddy, Daddy, thank you, Daddy! Now you're paying some attention to me. Now you're whippin' me, just like you do my brother, Johnny! Oh, Daddy, now I know you love me, too!" Her eyes were glazed and unseeing.

Harry Fields applied the belt twice more and this time it landed on top of old wounds and Corinne screamed with pain. Harry didn't even hear her, though. He raised the belt again. But this time he didn't swing it.

Someone grabbed it and yanked it. out of his hands so hard, it spun him around, almost knocked him over. He blinked and stared, unbelieving, at Van Jagger, standing in front of him. Van's big fists were clenched at his sides. His face was almost black with the blood of rage gorging it. He shouted: "You filthy, sadistic bastard! What do you think you're doing to her? How dare you do that to my girl!"

Harry Fields did and said the wrong thing. He laughed. He said: "Tour girl, Van? You must be kidding. That little whore! You shouldn't have stopped me Van, she loved it."

"You stop talking about her that way," Van said, his voice breaking. Strands of thick blonde hair half fell over his eyes. "I know it sounds crazy. I can't help it. After all the women I've known, something happened when I met Corinne. Maybe it's because she is so simple and sad and kind of needs me or something. What the hell's the difference? I don't care. For the first time in my life I'm in love and here I catch you doing "

Harry Fields' almost hysterical laughter stopped him in mid sentence. "Oh, that's too much!" Harry roared.

"You dirty son of a bitch, shut up!" Van said through his teeth. "You hurt her!" He stepped in quickly and his forearm chopped out and the side of his hand caught Harry Fields across the bridge of his nose. The broken cartilage made a crunching noise. Blood came in a gush all over Harry's mouth and chin and down the front of his shirt. Pain was like a wild, bursting bomb, all inside his head.

He lunged at Van Jagger, swinging haphazardly. Van stepped aside and belted Harry a solid left flush into the belly. Harry stopped as though he'd run into a brick wall and bent over very slowly, holding his stomach, his eyes looking as though they might roll down his cheeks. His mouth was a wide O, sucking in breath, or trying to.

Then Van grabbed Harry by the hair and brought his knee up jarring hard into Harry's face. Harry straightened, spitting out pieces of teeth. His mouth was one gaping, bloody wound. Now, Van moved in on him. He pulled his punches just a little, so Harry would stay conscious. He belted him in the ribs, fracturing one of them. He spun him half around, walloped his big fist into Harry's kidney. Harry staggered backward against a wall, moaning. His body was now one huge maw of lightning-flashing pain. The strange thing about it was, Harry thought, murkily, is that it's beginning to feel good; I like it; I like it. It was true. Sadism and Masochism, according to the psychiatrists, are closely related; one often prompts or leads into the other in a strange blending. It was that way with Harry, now, as Van in an uncontrollable rage, held him against the wall and beat him, brutally.

The last thing Harry Fields was aware of, just before one last blow knocked him unconscious, was an almost unbearably exquisite sensation that he had previously known only in connection with a woman.

For several minutes after Harry Fields slumped unconscious, Van Jagger continued to hit him with one hand while he held him up with the other. Now he was whacking him around the head. Van's right fist was a swollen blob from the force of the blows.

It was another minute or so before the sound of Corinne's voice broke through the deafness of Van's rage. He heard her scream: "Stop it, Van! That's enough. You're killing him."

Only then did Van Jagger permit Harry's bloody hulk to slump to the floor.

Van turned slowly, then and looked, almost blindly, at the naked Corinne, then turned toward the doorway, where several neighbors were crowded, gawking, frightened, shock-faced. They had been summoned by the sound of Corinne's screaming, found the front door open a little, as first Harry had left it and then Van when he'd burst in.

"Oh, my God," a woman said weakly. "Look at that poor mail on the floor!"

"The hell with him," a moronic youth snuffled. "Look at that babe without any clothes!"

Then Corinne fainted and Van went to her, bent over her, chafing her wrists, trying to comfort her. That was the way the police found them.

Harry Fields died three days later from brain and severe internal injuries. Van Jagger was held on a manslaughter charge. His expensive lawyers eventually got him off with one year. Corinne later went back to the small Indiana village where she'd been born and married a young farmer who used to carry her books home from the country school house.