Chapter 2
If Jim asked himself a million times why he yelled like that, he would never be able to come up with the real answer. He refused to look at the real answer. He couldn't possibly be still in love with Maria, could he? How the hell was that possible after what he had done? How could even one drop of love come in to the world that had been fashioned for him by Arlene?
But he had yelled at Arlene. He didn't want to see her playing again with Maria, doing with Maria the things she did with other women. Those things which he had watched-and which, he had to admit, though he didn't want to - he got a kick out of.
Why had he yelled?
He watched Arlene's sharp eyes examining him. He watched her full lips twist into a sarcastic, knowing smile. He wanted his strength back, but he couldn't find it. He had some small remaining fragment of something which he once was, and he felt Arlene's fingers twist around it and choke it back into sudden submission. He looked pleadingly at Maria. He tried to tell her to resist.
"So, Jim, boy," Arlene said, "you're coming back to life - you're coming up from the dead, lover. Is that what you want to do?" Arlene's voice stroked him. Her words fingered him with the coldness of her white bony digits.
"Let's cut out of here," he said and tried to pull her up.
"No!"
"Jim, please get her out of here-please!"
It was the way Maria's voice pleaded with him that got him the most. He couldn't stand to see her crying so silently under the smooth exterior of her face. She was just barely keeping everything back. Arlene had been too cruel to Maria, had used her too much and too often.
"Jim, please. Please, Jim!"
What could he say? What could he do? He looked at her, and he tried to find one word which would comfort her, but of all the words he knew or had ever learned or had ever used on her, he didn't have one now that would do any good.
"Go ahead, Jim, say something nice to her. Go on, can't you find even one word?" It was terrifying how completely Arlene got inside his thoughts. Even tight inside his own brain, he couldn't escape her. He now knew, could see in that instant, why Arlene had come to him. She had come to him those years before wanting Maria, because Maria fitted her pattern.
Arlene's wide, beautiful mouth could swallow up sex with a hunger which was never satisfied, but it was not a hunger for men. And though it feasted on all women, it was not a gnawing hunger for all women. No, it was only one thing. A great exquisite hunger tore across Arlene and dominated her, and it was a hunger for only one woman.
That hunger had always dominated her.
Arlene wanted only the soft richness of a woman who had grown up in the Vermont hills.
Maria Wyzerk!
When Jim had thought about it after its happening, he knew partly why it had happened, but he had never dared touch the thought with his mind too long. Frankly, he didn't have the guts for it. But Arlene had spun, coldly, with her own beautiful body, a thin steel web. It was a cold, brilliant web, and it stayed hard and unbreakable. She had caught him with it first, and then she had fingered for and found satisfaction to a hunger which encompassed her small world. She had caught Maria in its toils like one sick and buzzing fly.
Arlene had told him often enough how it had happened. He insisted on not listening, and she had insisted on telling him. Her words would have come through to him, even though the concrete covering on his ears had been a mile thick.
"She was so lonely up there in the hills, and I got you to go up and bring her down to go out with us. Don't you remember, Jim, don't you remember, how we took her dancing? And how you used to square dance with her? She felt so soft and comfortable in your arms, remember? Then think of how she felt in mine. I had to feed on that, Jim... It was my only hope. My whole life, feeling that wonderful maddening body."
"Shut up!" He had said.
"Why should I shut up? So you can have other dreams in other places? No, Jim, you'll listen, because it excites you. It excites you to know how I knew you, and how I got you married to Maria Wyzerk, and then how, when you went to war, I got close to her. You don't want to hear it. But Jim, you can not stop hearing it - ever!"
He could never forget those years. He had been captured completely by Arlene Harte. She was the most attractive woman in all Lemon Creek County. He had watched entranced as she dominated men. He had watched her perform, watched the effortless way she danced, watched how she probed with her eyes into her partner's eyes and how, when she danced with him, she slipped her small pink tongue tip in slow circular motions over her half-opened lips.
"Want a quick taste?" She would ask.
He would not answer her then, but later in the car he would tell her he loved her, and he would feel the wet slippery movement of her lips engulfing him... as if she would eat him up, too.
Then something had happened. Maria seemed to be with him more and more frequently. He slept with Arlene and took Maria to the dances, and Arlene had somehow suggested-and he could never remember exactly how she had twisted words and sentences - that maybe he should marry Maria, and not her. And then- in that summer of unbearable heat-he had married Maria.
A few months later, drafted, trained, yanked away from the hills, he went to Korea. He had learned the thin, sad face of the Orient, its slimy war and the red splash of red death in black mud. In Tokyo, on leave, he had thrown himself into as many whorehouses as he could find, trying to forget.
I And that was the funny part of it, for he was trying to forget not Maria, but Arlene. He had to forget her. He had to get her out of his blood stream. Forget her voracious, all-consuming hunger... but he could not forget.
He knew later, from Arlene, after she had split him away from Maria, hoping to tie all three of them together - somehow, someway, in that mad fashion of hers - what had happened when he was overseas. Arlene had pulled Maria off to dance after dance in the hills. Those dances were real swinging jobs, and Jim knew how the men and women loaded booze into the backs of their old cars and went for a good blast.
He could visualize Arlene, laughing, joking, sitting close to Maria in a back seat, telling Maria wild risque stories, and she would be showing Maria how to drive hard-faced, hard-muscled country boys crazy with her twisting, turning, ever-tormenting body.
"Don't kiss them," she would say, and she would turn her full mouth towards Maria, "just give them a lick and a promise, that's all. You know what, don't you, dear? They love it!"
He had grown used to hearing long sequences of past events drawn clear for him. He had grown used to hearing Arlene's voice dwell on the most intimate details. "Jim, she was so innocent and naive. She believed everything I told her. You know, she thought J was the one who brought you home safely. I convinced her. It was easy."
Arlene described how she had played on Maria's tight-knotted, deeply ingrown core of fear and belief. Maria Wyzerk had been brought up by Polish-American parents. Her father worked in a marble quarry, and her mother still read the old sign-books. Arlene knew that. Arlene had convinced Maria she knew everything that there was to know about the world of secret signs and symbols, and while he - Jim - was in Korea, Arlene had brought out one new scare after another.
Arlene went to Maria with a special purpose in mind. She went in the full round moon of those months. When the Vermont land lay thick and silver, like thick custard topping a lemon pie, she met Maria at the dark, broken-down shape of old man Wyzerk's farmhouse gate.
"Come on, darling, well walk a little ways..."
"Jim!"
He dropped the voices of the past. It disappeared, and he listened to the voice of the present. His confused thoughts shot bright machine-gun patterns through Jim's head, and he heard Maria saying his name, and he looked up at her.
"Jim, please...!"
"What?"
"The mayor, Andy Cohler, is coming with the police chief. For god's sake, Jim, keep her shut up."
He saw Arlene looking towards the doorway, and she seemed to radiate more than heat when the two men walked quickly in from the sidewalk. One was stout and wore a wrinkled business suit, with a large buckled belt holding up his sagging pants.
His face seemed both kind and rugged at the same time, and he had none of the air of the usual police official. But Jim knew him to be the police chief. The other man wore a neat black suit and bore himself very carefully, as if old age might be too much for him. But his voice was quick and cheerful, and he greeted Maria with great enthusiasm.
"Hi, Sugar, how's my baby today? You got some good Danish? By the way, Sugar, when are we getting married?"
Maria managed a small smile. "You're forgetting your wife, aren't you, Mayor?"
"No - not me. Did you ever hear of two wives hurting anybody?"
Jim listened to their quick dialogue, and he knew why he didn't like it. He knew exactly what was wrong with it. Whatever those people talked about, it would still be good and clean, like the majority of German homes in Hollyhock. They would all be neat and belong to the established order.
But he and Arlene did not belong, and now, as he glanced over to watch Maria's movements, he could see an almost mysterious change in her. After he and then Arlene had entered her world of the German Coffee House, they had contaminated its cleanliness. They had put her back into that same deep hole from which she had escaped, and Jim recognized the fact and felt sorry.
He wanted to tell her his findings, but he had to keep silent and watch. He could only barely control his anger, when Arlene swung around and looked full at the two men with a gleam of crazy interest in her eyes.
"We're new here," she said. "Just got in last night, but we'd like to spend our vacation in your town. My husband's in the hardware business, and we have a whole month. I was wondering if you knew of some place we might rent."
The mayor smiled quickly. "I don't keep up with that sort of thing, but my friend, Jerry Williams here, could fix you up. He's supposed to be the Police Chief of this town, but he's got his hands in all sorts of doings. Right, Jerry?"
The heavy face looked condescendingly at his friend, and the chief put down his cup. "I sure wished I had your gall when it comes to talking to pretty ladies, Mayor. If I did, I'd be hung with more than one bigamy rap, that's for sure."
"Cut it out, Jerry. You suppose you got an address for these nice folks?"
"Sure thing. Old Mrs. Steinhauer is gone away for the summer, and they could have her place real easy like. In fact, I've got the keys right with me, now. You want to take a look at it."
Arlene smiled. "A little later, if it's no bother. We're just having our breakfast now, and we want to look around town a little bit. Looks like a real nice place you've got here, Chief."
"We like it, well enough."
"Any crime?" Arlene dropped her two words like silver coins in the air, but they settled peacefully enough into the Police Chiefs understanding.
"Naw, not a thing. It's lucky I've even got a job, and as for the Mayor, here, he doesn't have a damn thing to do from one day to the next."
When Jim looked at Maria, he saw her coming back from the booth, and she seemed to be struggling to control an immense, growing anger. She stepped swiftly behind the counter and leaned over close to Arlene. "Look," she whispered, "you leave my friends alone."
Arlene did not whisper back. She spoke up loud and clear. "Maria, dear. I wouldn't dream of hurting them. I think they're both charming people, and I'm glad I've got to know them. I think we'll have a long happy friendship, don't you, Chief?"
She turned rapidly and directed the last part of her statement at the busily eating Chief, who smiled at her happily.
Jim realized his isolation. He had retreated across too many worlds. He had lost his fingerhold in his high climb up a tall mountain and had slipped into the depths. Arlene's words repeated themselves in his mind. She had uttered them a week before they had left his Massachusetts store. She had spelled it out, illustrating with clear-cut gestures.
"Lover, I like them when they're young and soft. They're like sweet milk, and they've never had time to turn sour, and they taste so wonderful..."
He thought of all her words, and of his ten years' living with her, and the dead buzzing of the fly lingered in his mind like the bad sick taste of something rotten.