I had the feeling I had been there before, and then I recognized areas of it which had formed the background for the Polaroid poses.

"Raoul and I both love this place," she said. "Neighborhood dogs roam in packs, and he knows they can"t get at him. And I can stretch out in the sun absolutely stark and just bake myself into a stupor. It"s sort of pointless, really, because I can"t ever get a decent tan. My skin resists it. I go pink and then it turns sort of yellow-sallow and then back to white. But I just love the feel of the sun."

I made admiring sounds and she led me back in and back into the living room. "Sit in that chair, dear," she said. "When you put your legs up, it"s fabulously comfortable, really. Do you like Brazilian music? I have this thing about the samba. See, I"ve got it all on these ca.s.settes."

"I like it."

"Good!" As she picked out a couple of ca.s.settes, she said, "A gentleman friend got me a wonderful discount on this stereo ca.s.sette player. He makes his own tapes off records and off the air and then he makes duplicates and leaves them with me when he comes through town. Travis, while you"re waiting for me, would you like a drink? I"ve got practically anything. Gin, vodka, rum, Scotch, and so on. I don"t drink gin, actually. So I don"t know anything about it. There"s almost a full bottle somebody left of something called Bengal gin. Is that any good?"

"It"s excellent."

"I thought it might be pretty good. I"ve been meaning to ask Frank, the bartender, but I keep forgetting. I could fix you a drink like you had at the Lodge. Me, I like to come home and make myself a tall tall Scotch and water with lots of ice, and then take a long hot hot sudsy bath and take a sip of the icy drink every little while. It tastes fantastically marvelous then. I"m going to have the drink, dear, but don"t worry about waiting for me to take a long bath. I"ll make it a quick shower. Can I fix you what you..."

"That would be just fine, Betsy."

So she started the ca.s.sette and adjusted the volume. She came smiling back with a gin and ice for me in a giant crystal gla.s.s tinted green, with grapes and grapevines etched into it, placed it on a cork coaster on the table beside the tilt chair. The cork coaster had small bright fish painted on it. The paper napkin was pink, imprinted with BETSY in red diagonally across a scalloped corner. Beside the drink she put a little blue pottery rowboat full of salted mixed nuts.

"There!" she said above the music of Mr. Bonfa, and went off to get rid of the occupational odor of burning meat, leaving me in my fabulously comfortable chair, next to a drink that would tranquilize a musk ox, semi-rec.u.mbent in a static forest of bric-a-brac, listening to Maria Toledo breathe Portuguese love words at me in reasonably good stereo.

A compulsive strangler would have d.a.m.ned few tactical problems. She had taken my word that Lennie Sibelius was my attorney. She took my word that my semi-arrest was due to bad luck rather than guilt. She went on instinct, and trusted the stranger. But a strangler can look like me. Or thee. The guest could tiptoe in and clamp the sick hand on the soapy throat, and in the moments left to her she could remember an entirely different sequence of motion pictures. Death itself would not be real because it would look like Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k.

In fifteen minutes she reappeared in the doorway. "Look at me!" she wailed. "Will you just look at me!"

She wore a floor-length terry robe dyed in a big bold psychedelic pattern of red, orange, pink, and lemon. She held it closed, one hand at her throat, the other at her waist. Her hair was sopping wet, pasted flat to the delicate shape of the skull.

"I am so dang stupid about mechanical things," she complained.

"What happened?"

"I got out of the shower and bent over and turned it so the water comes out of the faucets, and then I was going to close the drain for a minute, to sort of rinse the tub, and I hit the shower thing, dammit. I didn"t want to get my hair wet. It"s very dense and very fine and it takes like forever to dry. I"m terribly sorry, dear. But I can"t go out like this, really. Would you mind terribly? We could talk here, couldn"t we? And there really aren"t that many nice places to go at this time of night. What time is it? My goodness, it"s after eleven-thirty already! I had no idea."

"I was going to suggest a rain check. Maybe that isn"t the right expression."

"Is your drink all right? Goodness, you"ve hardly touched the surface. Are you sure you don"t mind if we just stay in? At least it isn"t going to give me any big decisions about what to wear. Back in a jiffy dear."

She went away. The music stopped. I went over and flipped the ca.s.sette and cut the volume back by half, and threaded my way back to the leathery refuge. She was not, I decided, devious enough to shove her hair under the water and go into an act. Nor, having been asked out, could she step out of her own obligatory role and say it would be cozier if we stayed in. Doubtless it had happened just as she described it. But the mistake, though deliberate, was on a subconscious and inaccessible level. It was all part and parcel of the meet-cute. The entry in the locked diary-and it would be inconceivable for her not to keep one-would say, "Actually, probably nothing at all would ever have happened between us if I hadn"t been so stupid and soaked my hair that way. Then again, maybe it would have happened anyway, but not so soon, not on the very first night I met him. There was something inevitable about Travis and me, and I guess somehow I sensed it from the very first minute."

She came out in about a jiffy and a half. She had wound a coral-colored towel around her wet hair and tucked it in place. Instead of the mini-brief, leggedy outfit I antic.i.p.ated, she wore an ivory white corduroy jump suit, with a kitchy arrangement of wide gold zippers and small gold padlocks on the four pockets, a gold chain around the waist, and a concealed zipper from larynx to crotch. After she had moved through the room a couple of times, straightening and patting, I found myself reacting to the outfit, and decided that, given her figure, it was more provocative than had she worn what I expected.

She took my drink away and "freshened" it, and made herself another tall pale Scotch. She sat on a blue nubbly couch a yard from my leather lair, pulled her long legs up, and said, "I guess I"m a terrible party p.o.o.per, Travis, but I"m just as happy not to go out. I guess my little nest is really why I don"t leave this town. When I"m here, I"m not really in Cypress City. I could be anywhere, I guess. Because if I were anyplace else, I"d build another nest like this one, with all my own things around me. I"m kind of... of... an inward sort of person. I don"t really pay a lot of attention to what goes on... out there. So I don"t know if I can tell you the sort of things you want to know, actually."

I started her off by telling her I thought Sheriff Norman Hyzer a strange one. So she told me his tragic life story, and how everybody understands why he is so withdrawn and cold and precise. But a fair man, really. Very fair. And they say he is real up-to-date with all the gadgets and advances in police work. He lives for his work and they say he"s got it now so that the job pays so little money, really, that n.o.body else tries to get elected. He puts all the money into the department, into pay for the deputies, and patrol cars and radios and all that.

"Well, I know some Baithers, because there are a lot of them around the south county, dear. There was one rotten Baither boy in junior high with me. He got killed in Vietnam years ago. His name was Forney Baither. I don"t know what relation he was to Frank Baither. But they were the same kind, I guess. Forney got a choice of going to state prison or enlisting. I"d say that a dead Baither isn"t much of a loss to anybody, and I guess nearly everybody would agree with that."

I could feel a little Bengal buzz. She wasn"t going to give me anything useful unless I found the right door and blew the hinges off. I looked at her blurred image through green gla.s.s.

"Penny for your thoughts?" she said.

"I guess I was thinking about the Great Sheriff, the tragic figure, the miracle of efficiency and public service. Why would he keep an animal on his payroll?"

"What do you mean?"

"A brutal, s.a.d.i.s.tic, degenerate stud animal like Lew Arnstead?"

She put her fingers to her throat. Her mouth worked and her eyes went wide. "Lew? But he"s just..."

"Just the kindly officer of the law who put my gentle friend of many years in the hospital for no reason at all, and would have killed him with his hands if Billy Cable hadn"t stopped him."

"That doesn"t sound like..."

"He"s suspended and facing charges, and I hope Hyzer makes sure he"s sent away for a long long time. I"d like to get to him first, for about one full minute."

"But he isn"t..."

"Isn"t such a rotten kid after all? Come on, Betsy! I"ve been checking him out... while I was looking for him. He"s been running up a big score in the Cypress County female population. Romping them and roughing them up, and entertaining his buddies with his bare-a.s.s Polaroid souvenirs."

Her eyes went wide-blind, looking at me and through me as she added it up, her long throat working as she swallowed again and again. The ca.s.sette had come to the end. There was no automatic turnoff. There was a small humming, grinding sound as the tape drive kept working. This was her sweet nest, all bric-a-brac and make-believe. A talented lady once defined poetry as a make-believe garden containing a real toad. So I had put the toad in Betsy"s garden.

She made a lost, hollow, plaintive cry, sprang to her feet, and ran for shelter. Miraculously, in her pell-mell dash for her bathroom, she did not smash a thing. The door banged. I heard distant kitten-sounds. I got up and ejected the tape and put a new one on.

You are a dandy fellow, T. McGee. All the lonely, wasted, wistful ones of the world have some set of illusions which sustains them, which builds a warm shelter in the wasteland of the heart. It does them no good to see themselves as they really are, once you kick the shelter down. This one was easy bed-game for any traveling man who wanted to indulge her fantasies by playing the role of sentimental romanticism, with a little spice of soap opera drama.

So, while you are digging up whatever might be useful out of the little ruin you have created, at least have the grace to try to put the make-believe garden back in order. If you get the chance.

First step. Go to bathroom door. Knock. "Betsy? Betsy, dear? Are you all right?"

Blurred and miserable answer. Something about being out in a minute. Fix a drink.

Fixed two. They looked the same as before. But hers was real and mine was tap water.

She came out at last, walking sad, shoulders slumping and face puffy, saying something about being sorry, terribly sorry.

Moved over to the couch. Sat beside her. Took her hand. She tried to pull it away, then let it rest in mine. Her eyes met mine, then slid away.

"Betsy, may I make some very personal remarks?" Shrugged, and nodded. "I think you are a fine, generous, warm-hearted woman. People are going to take advantage of those qualities sometimes. But you shouldn"t feel bad, really. When... a human being never takes any emotional risks, then she never gets hurt. But she isn"t really alive, either, is she?"

"I... don"t know. I wish I was dead."

"When I opened my big mouth, honey I had no idea that you could have been involved with Lew Arnstead."

"I wouldn"t have been. But he... but he was in trouble and he felt so lost and miserable."

"Why don"t you tell me about it? That might help."

"I don"t want to."

"I think it would be the best thing to do."

"Well... the background of it... and it took him a long time to trust me enough to tell me... he"d always had girls, before he went in the service and while he was away and after he came back. And he fell in love with Clara Willoughbee. Really in love. And I told him the trouble was probably some kind of guilt about all the other girls, and feeling unworthy or something. But after they had plans to get married and everything, he couldn"t do it with her. He"d want her terribly, and then it would just get... he couldn"t do anything."

She became more animated and dramatic as she got into the story. He and the Willoughbee girl had broken up. He had tried going back to prior girl friends, but he was still impotent. And one night, off duty, he had gotten drunk at the Lodge, too drunk to drive. She drove him around in the cold night air in her little car. He had cried and cried and said he was going to kill himself. He pa.s.sed out and he was too heavy for her to manage, so she had to leave him in her carport asleep in her car. In the morning he was gone. He came back to find out what he had told her. Then he would stop by, just to talk to her. Finally he told her what was wrong. That was in October of last year.

"I have... a kind of condition," she said. "It"s a sluggish thyroid gland, and that gives me low blood pressure, and makes me feel kind of listless and depressed. I used to have to take thyroid extract, but it made me too jittery sometimes, and made my hands ice cold and sweaty. So a couple of years ago Doctor Grinner gave me a renewable prescription for something called an energizer. I take one every morning of my life. I noticed that sometimes if I get mixed up and take a second one on account of forgetting I took the first one, it makes me feel... well, terribly s.e.xy. I might as well say it right out. Anyway... I told Lew how they made me feel, and he came over one Sunday afternoon and I gave him two of them, and about an hour later he thought he could. And so... You understand I was helping him. He was so terribly depressed. Well, it worked. He was so happy and laughing and all. And so grateful to me. And we kept making love after that, and fell in love with each other."

"He kept taking your pills?"

"Oh no. He didn"t have to, not after the very first time. It was all in his mind, actually. You know. Guilt and fear."

"Then you broke up? Why?"

Her eyes narrowed. "We were having a little bit of a quarrel. It wasn"t serious at all. Then he slapped me, much too hard. And then he kept right on slapping and hitting me until he knocked me unconscious. I woke up right over there on that little white rug, and he was gone. I was all cut inside my mouth and my face was terrible. The next morning I was sore in a hundred places, and I could hardly get out of bed. I was off work for four days. I reported him, then withdrew the complaint. I told them I fell off a ladder, hanging a picture. And I had to wear dark gla.s.ses for a week until my black eyes didn"t show anymore."

"How did he act when he was beating you up?"

"He didn"t seem mad at me or anything. I was screaming and begging and trying to get away from him, but he didn"t hear me, sort of. He looked... calm. Sometimes I have bad dreams about it."

"And you"ve never seen him again?"

"On the street and in the dining room. But not like before. Not that way. I wouldn"t! He could come begging and I wouldn"t ever let him touch me. I wrote him never to come here."

"Are you in his Polaroid collection?"

"Of course not!" Too emphatic. Quick sidelong glance to see if I believed her.

"He could have tricked you somehow."

"Wall... one Sunday afternoon, we had a lot of b.l.o.o.d.y Marys and we got kind of wild and silly and he had that camera and got it out of his car. They use it for accident investigations, and I sort of remember him taking pictures of me out in the back in Raoul"s yard. But I tore them up." She was frowningly thoughtful. "At least I think I tore them all up. He took lots and lots. I certainly wouldn"t willingly let Lew or anybody walk away with... pictures of me like that in his pocket, would I?"

"Of course not!"

She looked grateful for my indignant emphasis. She took her tall drink down several inches. She smiled sadly. "Why anybody should want nude pictures of me is something else again. I"m built kind of weird, practically enormous up here and skinny everywhere else, like I"m thirty-nine-twenty-four-thirty-two. Well, now you know what kind of an idiot I can be, dear."

"I think you ran into a crazy, Betsy." There was no point in telling her that she had, by curing Arnstead"s temporary impotence with a strong stimulant, put him well on the road to hooking himself or, more accurately, habituating himself. He matched the cla.s.sic pattern of the amphetamine user. Mercurial moods, hilarity and depression, little sleep, weight loss, enhanced s.e.xuality, inability to consistently carry out responsibilities, recklessness, increasing tendency toward violence and brutality.

"Lew didn"t seem like a crazy person."

"The world would be a safer place if you could pick them out at first glance, Betsy."

"Like he could be... put away?"

"The odds are better that he"ll kill somebody, and get put away for that."

"You"ve been looking for him?"

"Yes. I talked to his mother. He hasn"t been home since Thursday noon. Got any ideas?"

"I suppose he could be with some woman someplace."

"Who has he been running with lately? Got any idea?"

She turned and held my hand with both of hers. "Oh G.o.d, Travis, he could be out there in the night right now! We don"t know what could be going on in his mind. He might even blame me for all his trouble. He could be... waiting for you to go. Please don"t leave me. Please!"

Mousetrapped. A device just as real-unreal as the soaked hair episode. Contrived, yet not contrived. Sincere, yet insincere on some level of mind and emotion she had no access to. We were trapped in her garden of make-believe. I told her she would be all right, that there was no cause to worry, but tears stood in her tragic eyes, and she said I could not leave her.

Ten.

WHEN I awakened the first time on Sunday morning, I was able to give myself a long period of ironic amus.e.m.e.nt by reviewing the long chain of coincidence, episode, mousetraps, or delusions which had levered me into Betsy"s bed at about two-fifteen in the morning. She had Doris-Dayed our coupling far out of the range of any casual accessibility. She had woven such a fabric of myth that I could have torn myself loose only by tearing away her illusions about herself. Sometimes there is an obligation to play the role that is forced upon you. She had indulged in a considerable drama. Tears and protestations. Retreats which made the reactive approaches obligatory.

She wrapped us in her compensatory aromas of fate, tragic romance, inevitable loneliness of human beings. She wept real tears for a variety of reasons. She made us both special people in a world of clods, because otherwise she would have been merely a dining room hostess who had brought the tall stranger back home for what the British sometimes call a bit of slap and tickle. I had, in short, so won her reluctant heart that she could not help herself. And we had to live forever with our sense of guilt and human weakness. It happened, of course, because it was written in the stars that it had to happen.

And, all dramatics aside, when it had begun, when it was an unmistakable reality superimposed on all the devices of any daytime serial, blanking out those devices in sensual energies, she was a steady, hearty workman, strong and limber and so readable that she was easily predicted and easily paced, so obviously relishing it, that I was fatuously gratified by the implied compliment, the implied flattery. So for me, too, it was charade, but I was far more conscious of it as charade than was she. Roleplaying, under an inevitable canopy over the double bed, by the small night light of a dressing table lamp with a rose-colored shade. The he-she game amid yellow sheets with blue flowers printed on them, after a welter of stuffed animals had been exiled to a white wicker divan with cantaloupe cushions which matched the overhead gauze.

Morning irony, flat on my back, feeling the roundness of her forehead against the corner of my shoulder, her deep, regular, warm exhalations against my arm. Could feel the thin slack weight of her left arm across my lower chest, sleeping pressure of a round knee against the outside of left thigh. Turned my head slowly and looked slanting downward, saw disorderly mop of the fine blond hair hiding the face. Could see tip of one ear, half of the open mouth, edge of a pink tongue, two lower teeth. Fanciful sheet down to her waist. The arm across me cut off the vision of one half of the great round whiteness of the left breast. Small veins. blue against the white. Slow, perceptible lift and fall as she breathed.

She sighed audibly and the breathing changed. Then there was a little sound in her throat as she caught and held her breath. Left arm moved, and the hair was thumbed back. Blue-gray eyes looked solemnly up at me as the face turned pink.

"Darling, darling, darling," she whispered, then lunged and hugged herself into my throat, arms winding tight. "Don"t look at me. I must look like a witch."

"You look lovely." The lines are effortless, because the role has been played a thousand times in daytime soap.

"I don"t know what you must think of me," she whispers. "I"m not like this at all. I don"t know what got into me."

An effort to stop the crude and obvious answer. But easy to read the words of the shopworn script. "We just couldn"t help ourselves, honey."

"I love you so," she sighs.

Turn the page. Read the next line. "And I love you, too." How reprehensible is it? To love something is, in some simple sense, to be unwilling to hurt it needlessly. And it was not said to induce the lady to spread her satin thighs, because it had been said the first time after the deed was done, to make her fantasy more real to her.

Stroke the slow length of the white back, down to the uptilt of the b.u.t.tocks. Slowly, slowly, following the instructions in the script, the part in brackets. Until her breath shallows and quickens, her body softens, opens, and she makes a small gritty groaning sound, brings her mouth up to mine, and the engine in her hips begins a small, almost imperceptible pulsation.

When I awakened the second time on that Sunday morning, it was when she stood beside the bed and gave me a quick little pat on the shoulder. Hair tied back with yellow yarn. Little white sunsuit. Eye makeup and lipstick most carefully applied.

"Darling, you can have the bath now. I laid out some things for you. Be careful of the shower. The k.n.o.b for hot turns the wrong way."

Tiny bathroom. Narrow shower stall. Kept whacking my elbows against the tile. Big bar of sweet pink soap. Big soft tiger towel in black and yellow stripes. Tufted yellow bath mat. Mingled pungent odors of perfumes, salves, lotions, sprays, and of natural girl. Yellow curtains across steamed window. Yellow terry cover on the cover to the toilet seat. Glimpsed my tanned, hairy, scarred body in the full-length mirror. Great, knuckly, fibrous hulk, offensively masculine in all this soapy-sweet daintiness. New toothbrush. Mint toothpaste. Sc.r.a.ped beard off using bar soap and a miniature white-and-gold safety razor with a toy blade. Stopped and looked self in the eye in the mirror over the lavatory. Said severely, "Just what the h.e.l.l are you doing here, McGee?"

Don"t get churlish with me, fella. I got caught up in one of the games Betsy Kapp plays. This one was called the bigger-than-both-of-us game. All right. Sure. I could have walked out at any time. Big man. Sorry, honey, I like brighter, funnier, better-looking women. Sorry. You don"t match up. Don"t call us, we"ll call you. Leave your name and address with the receptionist.

"McGee, don"t try to kid me and don"t try to kid yourself. I"m not interested in your rationalizations. It was handy and you jumped it. Right?"

If you want to be crude. But what you are leaving out is that I had every expectation that she would be a very tiresome item in the sack. Once I was committed, I was going to go manfully ahead with it. I expected a lot of elfin fluttering, and maybe a little bit of clumsy earnest effort, right out of the happy-marriage textbook, and some dialogue out of every bad play I can remember.