Virginia looked at her husband with clearer sight than she’d ever enjoyed before. “Oh yes,” she said, without a trace of feeling in her voice, “I hear you.”
He seemed satisfied. He slipped off his jacket and went into the bathroom, taking his Bible with him. She heard the door lock, and then exhaled a long, queasy sigh. There would be recriminations aplenty for the exchange they’d just had. He would squeeze every last drop of contrition from her in the days to come. She glanced around at the interconnecting door. There was no longer any sign of those shadows in the air; not the least whisper of lost voices. Perhaps, just perhaps, she had imagined it. She opened her bag and rummaged for the bottles of pills hidden there. One eye on the bathroom door, she selected a cocktail of three varieties and downed them with a gulp of ice water. In fact, the ice in the jug had long since melted. The water she drank down was tepid, like the rain that fell relentlessly outside. By morning, perhaps the whole world would have been washed away. If it had, she mused, she wouldn’t grieve.
“I asked you not to mention the killing,” Earl told Laura May. “Mrs. Gyer can’t take that kind of talk.”
“People are getting killed all the time,” Laura May replied, unfazed. “Can’t go around with her head in a bucket.”
Earl said nothing. They had just gotten to the end of the walkway. The return sprint across the lot to the other building was ahead. Laura May turned to face him. She was several inches’ the shorter of the two. Her eyes, turned up to his, were large and luminous. Angry as he was, he couldn’t help but notice how full her mouth was, how her lips glistened.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to get you into trouble.”
“Sure I know. I’m lust edgy.”
“It’s the heat,” she returned. “Like I said, puts thoughts into people’s heads. You know.” Her look wavered for a moment; a hint of uncertainty crossed her face. Earl could feel the back of his neck tingle. This was his cue, wasn’t it? She’d offered it unequivocally. But the words failed him. Finally, it was she who said: “Do you have to go back there right now?”
He swallowed; his throat was dry. “Don’t see why,” he said. “I mean, I don’t want to get between them when they’re having words with each other.”
“Bad blood?” she asked.
“I think so. I’m best leaving them to sort it out in peace. They don’t want me.”
Laura May looked down from Earl’s face. “Well I do,” she breathed, the words scarcely audible above the thump of the rain.
He put a cautious hand to her face and touched the down of her cheek. She trembled, ever so slightly. Then he bent his head to kiss her. She let him brush her lips with his.
“Why don’t we go to my room?” she said against his mouth. “I don’t like it out here.”
“What about your Papa?”
“He’ll be dead drunk, by now. It’s the same routine every night. Just take it quietly. He’ll never know.”
Earl wasn’t very happy with this game plan. It was more than his job was worth to be found in bed with Laura May. He was a married man, even if he hadn’t seen Barbara in three months. Laura May sensed his trepidation.
“Don’t come if you don’t want to,” she said.
“It’s not that,” he replied.
As he looked down at her she licked her lips. It was a completely unconscious motion, he felt sure, but it was enough to decide him. In a sense, though he couldn’t know it at the time, all that lay ahead-the farce, the bloodletting, the inevitable tragedy-pivoted on Laura May wetting her lower lip with such casual sensuality. “Ah shit,” he said, “you’re too much, you know that?”
He bent to her and kissed her again, while somewhere over toward Skellytown the clouds gave out a loud roll of thunder, like a circus drummer before some particularly elaborate acrobatics.
IN Room Seven Virginia was having bad dreams. The pills had not secured her a safe harbor in sleep. Instead she’d been pitched into a howling tempest. In her dreams she was clinging to a crippled tree-a pitiful anchor in such a maelstrom-while the wind threw cattle and automobiles into the air, sucking half the world up into the pitch black clouds that boiled