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“I promise I’ll talk to him,” her sister said. “Sure, I’ll talk to him. Mikie, thanks for paying … you know, for writing the check. I don’t know when we can pay you back. We don’t have that kind of money …”

  “What do I need with money in Lytton?” Mike smiled. “Forget it, Dee.”

  In the backseat, Duck Wingo vomited again. DeeDee put her face into her hands and sobbed. She cried all the way home, and when Mike stopped the Cadillac in front of the dreadful, stark little ranch house beside the mobile home park, she was still crying.

  26

  THE TELEPHONE WAS RINGING AS SHE CAME UP THE DRIVEWAY, and Lavinia Lester came into the front hall to meet her when she walked into the house.

  “Mr. Sewell is on the phone from Boston,” she said. “He’s been talking to Mr. Winship and now he wants to talk to you.”

  “Thanks, I’ll get it upstairs,” Mike said. She flew up the stairs and snatched the telephone from its cradle in the old-fashioned niche in the wall of the upstairs hall.

  “Bay?”

  “Hello, Mike,” he said in his soft, deep voice. “Can you talk?”

  Mike heard the telephone downstairs being replaced. “Yes,” she said.

  “I’ve missed you so much I’ve been doing unspeakable things to my pillow these past few nights,” he said. “I want to come home and do them to you now.”

  “Well, come on home,” she said, her voice vibrant with joy. “I’ll show your goddamned pillow a few tricks.”

  “Oh, God, Mike, I want you.”

  “Me, too. Oh, Bay, me too. When are you coming home?”

  “Tonight, late. It will probably be Monday afternoon before I can see you, but I’ll be there then. Don’t let anything get in the way, Mike.”

  “Oh, no. Oh, no. Has it been a good trip? Is it going to work out for Sally at Silver Hill?”

  “No. I can’t leave her up there, Mike. It’s too … sharp-edged, too northern, or something. She’d shrivel and die there. And they don’t have the long-term medical facilities for her, either. Her liver is in really bad shape, according to Gaddis. She’s been getting booze from somewhere right along; Opal found all the empties in the crawl space just before I left. I’m going to have to have her watched more carefully. She’ll die if she doesn’t stop drinking.”

  “Where is she getting liquor?” Mike said.

  “God knows. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Opal was bringing it to her; how else could she possibly get it? But that’s crazy … well, anyway. I need to say this, Mike, so don’t try to stop me. I’m sorry for being such a horse’s ass when I left. You’re right. You help your dad with his campaign till doomsday, if you want to. It’s worth it just to see you two getting close again.”

  “Oh, Bay, it’s all right …”

  “No, it isn’t. I was miserable, and I made you miserable, and it’s not all right. It’s just that I worry so about John. But DeeDee says it’s doing him good. How is he really, Mike? Is he talking much to you? Anything new about the DOT I ought to know?”

  “Just the same old stuff. But oh, Bay, the most awful thing happened at the club today, and they’re going to tell you, so I want to myself, before you talk to anybody else. Poor DeeDee, my heart just broke in two for her …”

  She told him about the dreadful scene around the country club pool, and about DeeDee’s terror and tears.

  He sighed loudly over the phone. “Good Christ, what a mess,” he said. “My fault for going off and leaving him to that goddamned poker game. I’ve been covering for him all spring, but I guess I knew something was going to have to be done about him, and I should have done it before it blew up in DeeDee’s face. The damned fool! She’d be better off without him; she’s absolutely right, but I don’t know what on earth she’d live on. There’s not a cent between them, and she can’t go back to teaching. Not in the shape she’s in. Mike, listen. She’s fixed all right when John … goes, isn’t she? I mean, she’s said she’s getting the homeplace land and your dad’s house. Is that still true?”

  “Why … sure, I guess it is,” Mike said. “She told me that, too, when I first came, and I don’t imagine anything’s changed. Daddy knows what Duck is.”

  “He wouldn’t have … changed his will or anything? He’s getting very close to you, Mike, and you just don’t know what old, sick people are apt to do …”

  “Oh, I’m sure not,” Mike said. “He knows I’m not staying. I’m sure he knows I don’t want the land.”

  “Are you certain of that? I need to be sure she’s taken care of, Mike. I can help her, I think, but I need to know that she’s going to get the land before I know what to tell her. That land is her security.”

  “I’m as sure as she is,” Mike said.

  “Who would know for certain? Canaday?”

  “I guess so, if you don’t.”

  “I want you to ask him, Mike. Today, if possible.”

  “I don’t want to ask about Daddy’s will, Bay,” Mike said unhappily. “It sounds as if I’m hoping to get something, and I’m not.”

  She could hear his sigh again over the wire. “Mike, please. I don’t have the time or energy to fight you on this, too. I’ve got problems up here, and Sally is worrying me to death, and I just can’t worry about DeeDee on top of it all.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll find out and tell you when you get home,” Mike said contritely. That heaviness in his voice had never been there before. She could almost see it pressing down on his lean shoulders.

  She approached Sam Canaday with it that evening after they had put John Winship to bed. The pain had been kept at bay under the anodyne of the liquor, but her father stayed very slightly drunk most of the time, and slept a great deal. By tacit consent neither she nor Sam had told Dr. Gaddis about the drinking. As J.W. had said, what difference did it make now?

  Sam narrowed his eyes at her through the curling steam from his coffee when she asked him about DeeDee’s inheritance.

  “You getting interested in the homeplace now?” he said.

  “No. That was just such an awful scene at the club. I wanted to make absolutely certain she was taken care of.”

  “Yeah, it was a bad scene, all right,” Sam said. “Son of a bitch ought to be shot; she’d be a lot better off. What made you think I’d know about John’s will, Mike?”

  “Well, I just thought since you’re his lawyer, and Bay didn’t know …”

  “Ah,” he said. “I thought so. Sewell. Bayard the Good. Well, you tell Sewell he can stop worrying. DeeDee’s going to be taken care of.”

  “I’m glad,” Mike said. She refused to take offense at his tone. Bay’s imminent homecoming sang too loudly and joyfully in her blood.

  Sam finished his coffee in silence and left without saying good night. Mike started to call him back, and then didn’t. She really couldn’t help it if he had a fixation about Bay. It was not her problem. At that moment, with Bayard Sewell in the air somewhere over Atlanta, Mike had no problems that amounted to more than wisps of high white clouds on a summer day.

  * #x002A; #x002A;

  “I have to apologize again,” Bayard Sewell said, when he could say anything at all. His breath was ragged, and Mike could see the thunderous pounding of his heart in the pulse in the hollow of his throat. His entire chest, sweat-slick and pale in the dim light of the bedroom, shook and surged with it. When he had first rolled off her onto his back in the bed, the breath had literally sobbed in his throat, and he had gasped and choked, and she had been afraid that he was having a heart attack. Her own heart was hammering down toward a manageable level, but her temples and wrists still felt turgid and stiff with rushing blood, and she could not have moved her slack, tumbled limbs if someone had lit a fire in the bed. This time her reaction was not that of slaked passion and fulfilled yearning, she realized. For a moment, at the very height of his climax, she had felt something akin to fear. She did not wish to realize, but did, nevertheless, that their intercourse had very nearly been rape.

  She had bee
n waiting for him in the cool, dark bedroom, the air conditioner booming as it always did, her father sleeping in his fog of liquor and illness below, the house quiet, and she had been feeling a delicate languor, a slow and delicious voluptuousness, that had turned her wrists and eyelids heavy and her breath soft and short. They would undress each other very slowly, she thought, savoring the feeling of their hands on each other’s starved flesh, letting the tumbling, frantic little spate of words wash over them, tasting and touching and smelling until they could stand it no longer, and would fall into the cool, fresh bed and begin the longest, deepest, and slowest act of love they had ever shared. She had not even undressed, in anticipation of the formal and prurient little ritual of harlotry that he loved, and was not at the door of the room to meet him, as she usually was, but sitting on the bed, arms and legs demurely crossed, when he came into the room. The blouse and skirt that she had worn lay on the floor beside the bed where he had torn them from her, and her lace bikini panties were still at her ankles. He himself still wore his shirt. He had thrown her down and torn her legs apart and been on and in her before she had gotten a word out, and had stopped her cries with his hand, and had bitten her mouth until she tasted coppery blood, and had bruised her arms and legs and reamed the tender, secret parts of her brutally. He had finished quickly, but not without hurting her rather badly. Mike did not feel anger, but she did feel humbled and vulnerable, as if she wanted to curl herself into a ball, so that her nakedness would be hidden from him. And she felt ragged and edgy. She had not achieved her own climax.

  Bay rolled over on one elbow and looked down at her. His face was slack and pale, and there were darker circles and deeper etches around his eyes. His black wings of hair were wild.

  “I feel like a Hun,” he said. “There was no excuse for that. It was just that it’s been such a hideous week, and I’d been wanting you so bad for so long, and there you were, and you just looked so beautiful. Can you forgive me? Want me to go back and make it good for you? Christ, what a bull elephant you must think I am.”

  She shook her head. At the sound of his beautiful, familiar voice, all the strangeness and pain and the small shards of fear evaporated, and she felt the old peace and love and spreading sense of home.

  “It ain’t rape if she’s willing,” she said. “Glad I could be of service. I’m sorry you’ve been having such a bad time. What’s going on with this business deal of yours? Is it a real problem?”

  “No,” he said. “Not yet. Just a matter of timing. They’re pushing me hard, though, and I don’t need that on top of the mess with Sally. I just don’t know what to do about her, Mike. It’s as if she’s determined to kill herself no matter how hard we watch her, and she’s getting so sly about it. It’s just so constant. And then there’s the business about DeeDee … sometimes I wish I could just dump everything overboard and leave. Cut out and go somewhere on the other side of the world and be totally free, some city where nobody on earth even knew my name.”

  “I know the feeling,” she said. “It’s the best thing about a city; it’s what I miss most. You don’t have to worry about Dee, by the way; Sam says she’s taken care of.”

  “Ah,” he said. “What else did he say?”

  “Just that. She gets the property, just like we thought. It should keep her going if she does decide to leave Duck.”

  “Good,” he said. “That’ll make things a lot easier.”

  They lay in silence for a little while, and then she said, “Did you ever think about really leaving? Taking Sally and going somewhere else and starting over from scratch? Who knows what a change like that might do for her …”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t. Oh, of course I’ve thought of it. But I don’t think Sal could live away from Lytton, and I’m not sure I could either, now.”

  “Is it that important to you?” Mike said. “I can remember when you were on fire to leave it.”

  “It was never Lytton I hated, particularly,” he said slowly. “Just small towns in general. I don’t guess I ever told you, really, but before Mother and I came to Lytton, we lived in three or four different small towns around Georgia, and in every damned one of them we were the official municipal charity. Every holiday, here would come the committees and the preachers with the baskets and the barrels of canned peas and carrots. And the hand-me-downs. I couldn’t have told you what size clothes I wore until I got to college. Christ, I remember one town that always had a church Christmas tree, and everybody drew names and exchanged gifts, and old Santa Claus called out your name and you ran down and got your gift, and you held it up and thanked whoever had drawn your name. Mother and I always got at least fifty gifts, when everybody else only got one, and ours were always useful gifts, and they always came from ‘A friend.’ I’d trot down there and hold mine up time after time grinning like a possum in the middle of a cow plop, and sing out, “Thank you, friend,’ and everybody would grin back and applaud and say what a good boy I was, and how I was going to amount to something one day. And Mother would beam. I found out later that we were that town’s Needy Family of the Year. Thank God we moved the next year. I think I might have gone down to the altar and pissed on the Christmas tree. After that, it got to be a real obsession with me, not to be beholden to anybody ever again, not to be chained by gratitude.”

  Mike’s eyes filled with tears. “I never knew all that,” she said. “Oh, God, I hope you never felt that way about Daddy, or me, or Lytton. You honestly don’t feel tied here? Not by Sally, or your home, or any of it?”

  “No,” he said. “Not here. And never by your dad. He was all the father I ever knew. I owe him everything, literally. Lytton’s been good to me. There’s a lot here for me. There’ll be a lot more. I can’t leave Lytton. I don’t want to.”

  He was silent for a while, and then he said, “Mike … would you stay? Do you think you could stay in Lytton? I honestly do not know before God how I can let you go again.”

  Here it is, thought Mike. I guess I always knew this would come.

  “How can I stay, Bay?” she said. “Nothing of my life is here. Rachel, my work—and Daddy … he can’t last too much longer. I can’t just stay here after he’s gone and be your mistress.”

  “Could you go to Atlanta, then? Could you make that your base, if you need to be in a city? It’s a good city, it’s growing fast. We could get you an apartment; I could handle that, till you get on your feet. Hell, I could handle that indefinitely. You could have your daughter come there; the city schools are as good as any in the country, and there are fine private schools. I’m in Atlanta almost every day when the legislature’s in session; nobody would think a thing if I started staying over, instead of driving back and forth. Most of the guys do that anyway …”

  “No, Bay, that just wouldn’t work; I can’t just sit back and let you keep me,” Mike said, feeling as though all the corners of her life were rushing in toward her. Oh, why had he had to bring this up now? Why couldn’t he have just been content to live in the pure, timeless, mindless bubble of sensation that had surrounded them so far?

  “We’ll find a way,” he said. “It’s not as farfetched or impossible as you think. Not by a long shot. I can work this out.”

  “Please!” Mike cried aloud. “Don’t! Can’t you see what hoping for that would do to me? Please just let it go, Bay. For now, anyway.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’m sorry. For now I’ll let it go. Just for now, though, Mike.”

  He got out of bed and washed and dressed in the green dimness of the bathroom. Mike listened to the splash of water and drifted slowly and deeply down toward sleep. He came back into the room as fresh and cool in his seersucker suit as if he had just dressed that morning. Mike thought again how impossibly, almost laughably handsome he was.

  “You’re too beautiful to be a guy,” she said drowsily.

  “You’d be in deep shit trouble if I was anything else,” he said. “Should I go knock on your dad’s door, do you think? He wasn’t tracki
ng too well when I talked to him Saturday. I don’t want him to think I’ve abandoned him, but if he’s sleeping well these days, I want to let him do it.”

  “Oh, he’s sleeping well,” Mike said. “Booze is the answer, apparently. Let it go until tomorrow, why don’t you? He’s seemed tireder than usual lately. I really ought to try and cut him down on this letter-writing business. I’m not so sure this delaying stuff is such a good idea anymore …”

  “What delaying stuff, Mike?”

  His face was still, and his voice was different, somehow. Sharper, lighter, dryer.

  “Well,” Mike said, reluctant without knowing why, “that’s what Sam’s doing with the price negotiations on the homeplace. That’s about all he thinks he can do, really …”

  “Tell me, Mike.”

  Mike told him.

  She watched as his face paled underneath its tan and then darkened again, as if he had been slapped. His teeth clenched so hard that the muscles around his mouth stood out in hard white ridges. His hands, jammed into his jacket pockets, clenched, too.

  “I ought to have that bloody goddamned fool put in jail for what he’s doing to your father,” he whispered, and the sound frightened her in its reptilian sibilance. “It’s worse than criminal, and by God, he’s not going to do it anymore.”

  He was across the room and at the door before Mike could gather her wits. She bounded off the bed and dashed after him. Why on earth was he so angry? As Sam had said before, her father seemed to be thriving on the course he had charted with the Department of Transportation.

  “Bay, wait a minute,” she cried. “It isn’t hurting anything! Sam wouldn’t hurt Daddy …”

  “You’re goddamned right he won’t,” he said, almost exultantly, and jerked the door open and slammed it behind him, and was gone down the stairs before she even reached it. She heard the front door slam, and then silence.

  She trotted out onto the landing in bewilderment, looking down from the head of the stairs toward the empty downstairs hall and the closed front door. The noise of its slamming seemed to vibrate endlessly in the still, hot air. Outside her bedroom, the stored heat of the day was fierce. Mike wore nothing but her pants and bra, but her body was already wet with perspiration.