Untamed Lust Page 9

  “He’s a long way from being dead,” Eddie said. “Of course he could kill himself with the booze, but I doubt it. That kind never die.”

  She turned to put the cigarette out and he kissed the back of her neck, letting the kiss trail down to the warm spot between her shoulders.

  “There has to be some way,” she said, spreading herself out beside him. “He made me go down into the woods with him this afternoon, running myself into the ground trying to chase a rabbit toward him. There were a couple of boys there. I asked him about it, and he said they came almost every day and he didn’t mind. They both had guns, and it would be easy for one of them to shoot him by mistake.”

  “It’s not very likely.”

  “Well, it’s happened, hasn’t it? Read the papers in the fall and see how many people get killed that way.”

  “Yes, it happens.”

  “And it would be called an accident. Nobody would get in any trouble over it.”

  “He might not get killed.”

  “Most likely he would if he was hit in the head. And when I talked to the boys today I told them to bring other boys with them. They said they would. That makes the chances greater.”

  Although it was hot in the room, Eddie shuddered. There was something here that he didn’t understand, a hard and savage something that spoke of death.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re shaking the bed.”

  “Am I?”

  “You know it as well as I do.” She rolled over on her side to face him, her breast touching his arm. He could feel the breast, the nipple sleeping just like a peaceful child, waiting to be aroused into sudden life. “Eddie,” Kitty murmured urgently, “we have to do something. This can’t go on, Eddie. I can’t want you so much, need you so much, and remain sane. And after being with you I can’t stand the sight of him, can’t bear to think of doing some of the things for him that he’ll want me to. Tonight I almost threw up when I saw him naked on the bed, a drunken slob with no thought of anybody but himself. Yet — Eddie, I can’t just walk off and throw everything away. I married him, and part of what he has belongs to me. I don’t want Carole’s share, but I’ve earned my share and I want it. I want it for us, Eddie. I want to see you in nice clothes and a nice car, and I want to love you and love you and love you. I want your babies inside me, getting fat with them, my belly so big you wouldn’t be able to put your arms around it.”

  She kissed him several times on the chest, then pressed her lips briefly against his mouth.

  “You have to believe me,” she cried, clinging to him. “It hasn’t always been easy for me. You dance and sing in clubs, and every man thinks you’re an easy touch, to be made for a few drinks. You fight them off, and then you eat at some rotten soda fountain to save what few dollars you have. Clothes cost money, but the people who run the clubs don’t care about that. If they do care they want you to sleep with them, so you tell them to go to hell and you do the best you can. Then you marry a man older than you are, thinking that it’s love at last, wanting so terribly for it to be love, but you find out on your honeymoon that the man is a beast and that a woman’s body is only the tool of his desire. That’s bad enough, but then he becomes a cripple and he isn’t a man any more, not even half a man. He — ”

  “Don’t carry on so,” Eddie warned her. “You’ll only wreck your nerves and it won’t do any good. There has to be a way, some way, and we’ve got to find it.”

  She smothered him with a kiss.

  “It’s all that’ll ever count, Eddie. Together. The two of us. That,” she added, “and the money. There isn’t anything for anybody without money. The poets say there is, but poets don’t pay their bills. The poets dream and life isn’t a dream. Life can be wonderful but it can also be cruel.”

  The shudder passed through him again, causing his heart to pump rapidly, the blood in his veins first hot and then cold. He returned her kiss, but he had a vision of Jennings in the woods, his body slumped in the wheel chair, a bullet through his head, several million dollars piled at his feet.

  He wasn’t much of a man that night and he knew that she was disappointed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said afterward.

  She kissed him tenderly.

  “That’s all right. It can’t always be the best.”

  He tried to go to sleep after she had gone but he couldn’t.

  9

  EDDIE DIDN’T like Roger Swingle and tried to avoid him. But Roger was like the itch; you attempted to ignore it but it was always there.

  “You’re another stump-jumper,” Roger said to Eddie who, at the time, was watching the movements of Carole’s body as she undulated across the lawn toward them. “Just make sure you don’t try to jump the wrong stump.”

  “Since when have you been my boss?”

  “Maybe I’m not your boss but I’ve got eyes. You’d like to, wouldn’t you?”

  That much was true. Eddie still wanted Carole, but not exactly in the way he had before. He only wanted to see that fantastic body, and he doubted very much if he would touch her. Sex came to him around midnight in the form of Kitty Jennings and she was all one man could handle. Nor would she let him take the usual precautions.

  “Not with me you don’t,” Kitty said. “I want your kid and I want it fast. Frank thinks I’m seeing a doctor and he asks me every day if I’m going to spring in about nine months.”

  “It’s good he doesn’t object.”

  “How could he? He can’t do anything about it. He even asks me if I get a cheap thrill when the doctor does it to me. The bastard.”

  Eddie found out a lot about Kitty during the nights that she came to him. She knew a lot of four-letter words and she used them freely. But he overlooked it. She had been brought up in a tough world of poverty and struggle, and some of it had rubbed off on her. She was an excellent love partner, constantly demanding, and when she exploded it was like throwing a stick of dynamite into an empty barrel. All of her flying apart at once, her moans breaking into sharp cries of ecstasy.

  Sometimes before their love-making, and always afterward, they talked about Frank Jennings. The two boys she had talked to that first day had brought more boys around, and the chances for an accident were greater than before. Wilson objected to so many boys being in the woods with twenty-twos, but Jennings insisted it was all right. One day Jennings killed a young deer and he got drunk all over again because he had been successful.

  “I chased it out for him,” Kitty said.

  “Wear something red when you go in the woods,” he advised.

  “Oh, I do. I wear red shorts and a red halter. The halter that you like. The one that hardly covers me upstairs.”

  “I like you better this way. Naked.”

  “Aren’t I always naked when I’m with you?” She giggled. “If I weren’t you’d soon have me that way.”

  Eddie didn’t see much of Joan and she spoke to him almost as though he were a stranger. She kept pretty much to herself, going to town to see her lawyer on her day off, and sometimes staying over for the night. Jennings had told her that she could have Wilson or Eddie drive her in, but she always hired a taxi.

  One morning she followed him outside. “I’ve got to see you,” she said anxiously.

  “So you’re seeing me.”

  “No. Alone. Get the station wagon and we’ll go down to The Ferns tonight.”

  “What do we have to talk about?”

  Her face colored slightly. “You’d be surprised, Eddie.”

  “Some other time, huh?”

  “No, tonight.” She lowered her voice. “I followed Mrs. Jennings one night and I know where she went — right where I thought she was going. I could cause you trouble, Eddie.”

  He had a hell of a time on his traps that day. Nothing went right and the catch was poor. Even the turtles were down to two.

  “You get those days,” Jennings said when he reported. “Jim had a lot of th
em.”

  “I haven’t had many.”

  Jennings had a bottle in his lap, but he didn’t offer Eddie a drink.

  “What are you doing about hawks and owls?” he asked.

  “Nothing yet.”

  “You know how to trap them?”

  “Sure. You put up a pole in the middle of a field and you fasten a trap to the top of it. You don’t need any bait. They land there to look things over.”

  “Then get with it, will you?”

  “Right.”

  But he went over to Goose Lake that afternoon and set traps in the swamp, most of them for foxes but a couple of them for otter. There were plenty of otter signs around.

  He had no special motive for coming back by way of the beach but he did. He had been thinking about Joan, of the concern in her face when he had talked to her that morning, of the obvious necessity for meeting her that night. He didn’t like it one bit that she had followed Kitty. He was only fortunate that it hadn’t been Carole. He hadn’t talked with her in days. He guessed she had been looking for him but he had avoided her, putting her off as long as he could, not knowing what he could say to her. He couldn’t sell Kitty out for five thousand dollars — or for any amount of money. She was too much a part of him now, her kisses imprinted on his lips, her body a tactile memory along his nerve ends.

  He reached the beach before he realized it, was practically on top of them before he knew. He stood still, hardly breathing, not sure what to do.

  They were in intimate embrace, and intimately arguing.

  “Hurt me,” Carole was begging. “Hurt me the way I want to be hurt. Hurt me, Roger. Hurt me the way you’ve never been able to hurt me before.”

  “You know I can’t.”

  “What the hell is the matter with you?” she flung at him. “Aren’t you a man?”

  “Maybe you need somebody like that big trapper, huh?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t. Don’t tell me he wouldn’t. He’d rock you in a second if you gave him a chance. He’d — ”

  “Oh, stop talking, won’t you? Talk is for when you have nothing better to do.”

  Feeling his belly crawl, Eddie turned and sneaked away, hardly able to keep himself from breaking into a run.

  Once in the woods he felt better and he walked slower. Carole had lied to him on the beach, lied about her purity, and that made him mad. She had held herself up to be a real lady and she was nothing but a cheap tramp. Probably the men really hung around her when she went to that nudist camp, and he was inclined to believe that most of them had their fun. He was willing to bet that it was nothing but a sex party for her, and that she didn’t turn many down.

  He hadn’t been able to see much of her a few minutes before, most of her was hidden by Roger’s bare back, but what he had seen had been good, her legs moving like a couple of wounded snakes, her whole body heaving and twisting. From what she had said Eddie knew that Roger didn’t please her very much. That was fine. Eddie was sure that he could please her. He would hurt her if she wanted to be hurt, hurt her until she screamed. One night he had made Kitty scream, and she had been like a thing possessed by some almost impossible desire.

  He found the trail leading to the house and walked on. He shouldn’t be thinking of Carole that way, not for a second, but he couldn’t help himself. He had never been with a girl built like Carole, and he wanted to experience the thrill of it just once. It didn’t have to mean that any of his feelings for Kitty would change. Nights when they just stretched out on his bed, tired from love-making, it was wonderful to be with her, to know that he could reach out and touch her, to know that her lips would accept his mouth. She was his woman and she belonged to him, and there wasn’t anything that he wouldn’t do for her. He only wished that she wasn’t so crazy over the money that Jennings would someday leave her. But when she talked about it he could see her point of view. Jennings had used her as his slave, not as a wife, and she had a right to some compensation. He was sixty now but he might well live another ten, twenty, even thirty years. Neither the fact that Jennings couldn’t walk, nor his constant drinking, had anything to do with it. A lot of drunks seemed to live forever.

  As he neared the house he heard shooting from the woods to the right of the field, high-pitched reports followed by the heavy boom of a shotgun. That would be Jennings, drunk and mean, every nerve in him crying out to kill something, anything at all. There were some ducks around the lake, both young and old, and it was odd that he didn’t go after them but he didn’t. Eddie guessed that the only thing Jennings liked was the ducks.

  Eddie thought of Kitty down there in the woods with him, and he turned cold all over. Jennings treated her like a dog most of the time, although in his own peculiar way he seemed to love her, and if he ever found out that she was cheating on him it was hard to tell what he might do. He could kill her in the woods and it would be called an accident and he could get away with it. Eddie felt even colder as he crossed the field.

  After he showered he changed his clothes and went outside. Kitty was just crossing the lawn and Jennings was nowhere in sight. She saw him and waited.

  “I can’t keep on flushing birds and animals out for him,” she said as he came up to her. “Frank just screams and hollers and blasts away. He doesn’t care where he shoots. Even the kids are getting scared.”

  “He’s nuts,” Eddie said.

  She smiled up at him.

  “And I’m nuts, too, Eddie. I happen to be nuts about a guy named Eddie Boyd.”

  “You can double that.” Then, “Can I use the station wagon tonight?”

  She frowned.

  “I don’t think I can get away very early.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. Joan says she has to talk to me and she won’t do it here. I think it’s just an excuse for her to get away from here and go down to The Ferns and get a load on.”

  “Or make love with you?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “She hadn’t better. And you hadn’t better. We’ve got something good, Eddie, and we’re going to keep it. All I have to do is think about you and I see that bed, feel what you do to me. If it isn’t love I don’t know what love is. I never felt this way about Frank or any other man.”

  Together they walked toward the house and separated near the back porch.

  “I’ll be a good girl tonight,” she said. “I’ll sleep alone.”

  “Okay.”

  “And hate every second of it.”

  Mary had a good supper waiting for him but he didn’t eat much of it. He pawed through the meat and potatoes, fried potatoes which he usually loved, and he made a mess of his plate. As he was lighting a cigarette with one hand and stirring his iced coffee with the other, Clark Wilson came in.

  Wilson’s blue work shirt was stained with sweat, and he walked with a pronounced limp.

  “Damned day,” he said, sitting down at the table.

  Eddie tasted the coffee.

  “Rough, huh?”

  “It’s no fun pushing a wheel chair through the woods. And those kids aren’t any help. They’re all over. I keep telling the boss that somebody is going to get killed down there, but he won’t listen. If I had my way I’d kick every kid off the property. They just shoot to shoot, and who can tell where the bullets are going to go?”

  “Jennings get anything?”

  “Well, Mrs. Jennings cut a woodchuck off from his hole and chased it out, but the boss missed it. Missed it with a shotgun — isn’t that something? But I tell him you can’t drink and hope to shoot straight.” Wilson sighed. “I guess I shouldn’t complain but I’ll be glad when I can retire.”

  Eddie got out of the kitchen before Mary could scold him for not eating more. He walked down to the beach, sitting on the sand and smoking. Joan wouldn’t be free until nine or later, and this was as good a place to wait as any.

  About half an hour later he heard someone coming up behind him. When he turned he saw that it was Carole. Sh
e was alone and she was wearing that two-piece black bathing suit that hugged every line of her body.

  “You look lonesome,” she said, sitting down on the sand beside him.

  He studied her legs and thought of the power in them, legs that could close around a man like a vise.

  “Not very,” he said. “Sometimes you want to be alone.”

  “Sorry if I intruded.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “You’ve been avoiding me, Eddie.”

  “Have I?”

  “You know you have. You see me coming and you go the other way. I don’t like that, Eddie.”

  “You’ve been busy with Roger.”

  “Not that busy.”

  He grinned at her. She had been busy that afternoon on the beach, real busy.

  “How are you making out with Kitty?” she inquired.

  “I’m working on it.”

  “But I want results. I want her nailed for what she is, a no-good she-dog. And it’s up to you, Eddie. Keep me waiting much longer and you won’t have a job.”

  There it was again, the thing that he feared. He could stall her just so long. If, after lying to Carole, Joan should tip his hand both he and Kitty would be out and there wouldn’t be any five thousand dollars. There wouldn’t be anything at all. The dreams of millions would be gone.

  “It isn’t easy to make her,” Eddie said carefully. “She may look easy, but she isn’t going to go down flat on her back for the first man that makes a pass at her.”

  “That’s your problem.”

  “I know it. I’m just telling you.”

  There was a slight breeze blowing across the lake — perhaps it was a warning of a coming storm and the water lapped steadily against the shore. Far off in one of the swamps a fox barked.

  “You never take a full day off,” Carole said, apparently satisfied that he was doing his best with Kitty. “Why is that?”

  “I don’t want to see the animals suffer more than need be. I asked your father about showing Wilson where my traps were set, so he could check them when I was off, but Wilson wouldn’t have any part of it. That means I’m stuck and stuck good.”