In the morning, at breakfast, she was surprisingly cheerful and wryly apologetic: “I don’t know how you put up with me. It’s just that I’ve started getting these attacks of total self-disgust, when I realize what I’ve let them do to me, make of me. So they put me in prison; it wasn’t the end of the world. Gutless Ellershaw! No damn courage at all!”
She’d come a long way from the bitter woman at the penitentiary gates obviously blaming the whole world for her tragic condition. I told myself that I was letting myself get too involved with watching her fight her way back out of the gray limbo into which they’d thrown her, perhaps because at the beginning I’d really thought she was lost for good. But it was no business of mine. I should be concerned only with making sure she didn’t slit her throat until she’d served our purposes, and that nobody did it for her.
I said, “Don’t be too sure of that. With the help of your wealthy and loving parents, you’d got along on determination and hard work and a lot of brains. What occasion had you ever had to use your courage, in that sheltered lovely young life of yours? Like letting a gun lie rusting unloaded in a locked drawer. When you suddenly hear a burglar downstairs in the middle of the night, it’s too late to get it out and load it even if you can find the key and the cartridges. And the action’s probably too gummed up to fire after the years of neglect. And without any practice you’d probably miss your target anyway.”
“You mean, it takes practice to be brave?” She smiled at me. “Well, maybe I’ll be a real lioness by the time this dangerous expedition is over, but I’m not counting on it. Matt?”
“What?”
“May I drive today? We should get to Santa Fe this evening, shouldn’t we? And I’ve got to do something to keep from thinking about the people I’m going to meet there, people I used to know who’ll remember what I was, and… and how they’ll act when they see what I am now after serving my sentence, a shabby, flabby alumna of Fort Ames U.” She grinned. “Oh, God, there’s the self-pity girl again. Please, Matt?”
It was wide-open country now, the real plains, treeless and desolate except along the infrequent watercourses. Even the occasional irrigated areas were bleak and bare at this time of year. It was the kind of country that used to drive eastern women mad with loneliness when their land-hungry eastern men dragged them out here to settle; sometimes it drove the men mad, too. I guess if you get hooked on trees and grass at an early age you can develop quite an addiction and the withdrawal symptoms can be bad. Hell, even now when they move out to New Mexico—and lots of them do—they insist on using our scarce water to grow the damned little green lawns they can’t seem to live without. But even though I no longer live out there on a permanent basis, whenever I leave the dull, safe, fertile Midwest behind, and enter this endless arid landscape with its fine hint of menace, I still feel I’m coming home.
“I forget, when do we see the mountains on this road?”
I glanced at Madeleine behind the wheel—she’d been driving steadily since morning with pauses only for gas and lunch—and I saw that in spite of the ordeal that awaited her, she shared my feeling of homecoming.
I said, “Not until we pick up the backs of the Sandias ahead, and maybe the Sangre de Cristos off to the north.”
“There should be snow on the peaks,” she said.
“The ski runs were hurting last year,” I said. “I don’t know if they’ve had any good snowfalls this year. But the higher peaks should be white, yes.”
She said, “Matt, I don’t like, the smell of it.”
Still a western girl no matter where she’d spent the past eight years, she’d noted it too: the oppressive stillness of the air, the sinister darkening of the sky.
I said, “I’d better have a look at the road map.” I spread it out and frowned at it. “Nothing for forty miles except one little town called Riker’s, and that’s just a speck on the paper… Oh, Jesus, there it comes!”
We’d topped a slight rise, and there was the storm ahead—a sooty black band across the horizon topped by boiling masses of dirty-gray clouds. I saw some little dots of buildings off to the right of the road about two-thirds of the way to the threatening cloud wall that blotted out everything behind it.
“That must be the town, such as it is,” I said, pointing. I reached over and hit the trip odometer, setting it back to zero. “I figure about ten miles across the valley. Go for it, Mrs. Leadfoot. Let’s see how close we can get while we can still see the pavement.”
“Don’t you want to—”
“Don’t waste time talking, goose it!” As the car accelerated obediently, setting me back in my seat, I said, “I’ll take it if we have to fight our way through the deep stuff. You probably haven’t played around much in heavy snow lately. But we should make it before it starts piling up too high.”
For a change, her laughter was pleasantly lacking in bitterness. “No, darling, I really haven’t had many opportunities for practicing my skiing and snow driving lately… What does that sign say?”
“RIKER’S 8 MILES.” I hit the odometer again, relieved to have a more accurate zero to work from if things got so murky we had trouble spotting the exit signs. At least now we’d know when to start looking. I said, “And they have a motel, thank God. There’s a billboard: MOTEL, CAFE, GAS, SOUVENIRS. We’ve got it made; all we have to do is make it.”
“Does it hurt the speedometer to go over the top?”
I glanced at her. She was concentrating hard on her driving, urging the little car right along; but there was color in her cheeks and her eyes were brighter than I’d seen them—well, since the time we were being shot at. An intriguing and rather disturbing lady.
I said, “Hell, no, that’s just one of the government’s fool ideas. Since your time, so to speak. They have the odd notion you won’t drive over eighty-five if that’s all that shows on the dial. Take it as high as you can hold it. You can trust the tires; they’re brand-new like the car, just barely broken in.”
The RX-7 was howling happily now, driven the way it should be driven, and I watched the miles click by—but we’d already lost the race. Riker’s had disappeared into the menacing black front that was bearing down on us, and the first snowflakes were drifting down from the murky sky. I switched the heater to defrost, turned the fan full on, and switched on the rear-window heating element.
“Windshield wiper on the stalk to the left of the wheel,” I said. “Just twist the knob counterclockwise.”
“Thanks.” Reluctantly, she was letting the car slow down now, as the visibility worsened rapidly. A few shadowy cars and trucks went by going east, on the other side of the wide median, but we could see nothing ahead or astern in our westbound lane. “I’d better turn on the lights, hadn’t I?” Madeleine said.
“Watch out, here it comes!”
Then we were in the thick of it, in the wild twilight of the storm, with the car jolted by heavy gusts of wind, and a full-scale blizzard attacking the windshield with dense formations of swirling white flakes.
“RIKER’S 1 MILE.” I read the passing, sign that was. almost invisible through the blowing snow. “Are you all right?”
“Fine, but I wouldn’t want to buck this clear to Santa Fe.”
I said, “Hell, you know you just conjured up this minor disturbance to put off the evil day.”
“Maybe you think you’re joking, haha,” she said. “Minor disturbance, hell, I can hardly see the front of the car… Ah, there’s the exit sign!”
The snow was already beginning to stick, and the pavement was disappearing from sight as we pulled up in the shelter afforded by a two-story frame building, the motel, and an older one-story adobe structure that was decorated with lovely neon signs—at least they seemed lovely to us under the circumstances—reading RIKER’S CAFE-COORS BEER, and MOTEL OFFICE-VACANCY. It was a small oasis of safety in the screaming white hell of the storm.
“A little adventure for the dull jailbird lady,” Madeleine said. The bitterness was back.
“You’re a real little psycho, aren’t you?” I said. “Up one minute, down the next. Why not just relax and take it as it comes?”
“I’m sorry. I must be a real drag to travel with.”
“And don’t give me that phony-meek bit, either!” I snapped.
She laughed abruptly. “Why are we fighting? Because we were scared? Of a little snow?”
I looked at her and grinned. “I think we need a drink. Luckily I bought a new bottle in Stockville. Come in with me while I register, please.”
“But I’ll get my shoes all…” She stopped, looked at me for a moment, and said in a questioning way, “Matt?”
I said, “The guy might get lucky, if there is a guy. The boys didn’t spot anybody behind you during your shopping spree yesterday, but that could just mean he’s smart and cautious. Right now our protection is out there on the freeway somewhere, counting snowflakes or sliding into a ditch or getting squashed by a skidding semi. And maybe our homicidal friend is out there, too, if there is a homicidal friend. But as I say, maybe he got lucky and, rolling a few miles ahead of us perhaps, ducked into the nearest haven when the storm hit, just as we did. And he happens to see a familiar little car drive up with a familiar female face at the window, and he goes boom once or twice and disappears into the blizzard never to be seen again. Two balls and one strike; but in this business all it takes is strike one and you’re out. It’s the kind of night—well, afternoon, although you’d never know it—when things happen, and I don’t want them to happen to you.”
“All right, Matt.”
I started to open the car door, and stopped, and looked at her again. “For the same reason, and because accommodations are going to be very tight around here tonight with everybody taking shelter from the storm, I’m going to put us into the same room if you think you can stand it. The Mister-and-Missis routine.” I glanced at her, but her prison-trained face told me nothing. I went on: “I have a feeling something’s closing in on us. Why should you have all the telepathy in the party? I got nervous about you last night—”
Her voice was gentle. “I know, I heard you come in and look at me. It made me feel protected.” She grimaced, and continued, briefly bitter again: “No objections, Matt. What the hell difference does it make? It’s not as if that hardened felon, Mrs. Ellershaw, had any reputation left to worry about.”
We signed in for a double room, Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Helm, and made our way to our assigned ground-floor unit, and hauled our luggage inside and shed our white-shouldered coats and stamped the snow off our shoes. It was really howling out there now, shaking the frame building; but once I’d figured out the control console of the all-in-one window unit—air conditioner in summer and heater in winter—we started thawing out pleasantly. It was a good big room, well worn but comfortable, and all the plumbing worked in the bathroom, although the original bathtub drain-closing mechanism had given up the ghost and been replaced by a rubber stopper.
I’d had sense enough to pick up some ice while I still had my coat on—I’d also, since there were no room phones in this desert hostelry, made a call from a chilly outside booth to report our situation—and I set out drink materials on the low round table by the curtained window. Madeleine emerged from the bathroom with her windblown hair tidy once more, but she paused to examine herself in the dresser mirror.
“I seem to have caught up with you, Matt, did you notice?” she said wryly. “I remember that one of the things that made me wary of you when we first met was that you were an older man with more experience.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly. “Nothing makes a man feel great like being called a senile Casanova.”
She was not to be distracted. “But the woman in the office obviously thought we were a nice, well-matched couple just about the same age.” Madeleine made a face at her mirror image. “Well, you can hardly blame her.”
I said, “Come have some rejuvenation fluid, Grandma. Actually, I find older women quite delightful.”
I watched her come towards me and take the glass I held out to her and sink into the other chair, kicking off her damp shoes and tucking her feet under her. I noted that, while she was wearing her by now somewhat travel-creased brown suit, and her pink sweater, she had on her fragile new nylons. Her heavy brown hair in its new soft arrangement still did nice things for her face. But I was disturbed by the realization that these things no longer mattered. I mean, after a couple of days in her company I had stopped judging her by how well or badly she was dressed, or how well or badly she combed her hair, or even how she might not be quite as narrow as she should be in the middle. I knew her too well now—liked her too well, damn it—to worry about such minor external details.
“Tell me about prison,” I said.
Her face changed. “I don’t think that’s a very pleasant subject for the cocktail hour,” she said stiffly.
I shook my head. “You can’t dodge it forever. You’ve told me practically everything else. It’s time you got rid of that, too, by talking about it. What made you decide to kill yourself in there, with a couple of years of your sentence already behind you?”
She licked her lips. “If I wanted to be analyzed, I’d go to a shrink,” she said stiffly. Then she shrugged. “Oh, all right, I’ll satisfy your morbid curiosity. But I’ve already told you. Walter came to see me. Walter Maxon.”
I frowned. “I don’t understand—”
She made an angry gesture. “Of course you don’t understand! You’re not a woman, a woman who was… was once considered rather attractive, locked up in a bleak, destroying place like that for endless years. They thought I was stuck-up,” she said.
“Not surprising.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think I was, not really, except about the educational nonsense—I’d been educated, thanks. But otherwise I was simply scared shitless, trapped in that dingy environment with that kind of angry street mentality I couldn’t really understand, the kind I’d met only a few times before in the line of business. We didn’t get many clients like that, but there were a few.”
“Willy Chavez,” I said. “That hired gun you and Baron defended.”
“Yes, Chavez was like that, and I never understood his mental processes at all.” She drew a long breath. “But there in Ames we weren’t attorney and client any longer. I wasn’t the fine lady lawyer any longer, merely visiting the dirty jail on business. I was one of them now, I was inside right along with them, just another convicted criminal serving her time, even though it still seemed like a crazy nightmare. No, a mad horror show!” A shudder went through her. “See the gently brought-up, carefully educated, always so well groomed and handsome and self-confident young professional woman… Watch her terrifying transformation into a lank-haired, stoop-shouldered female convict shuffling around dully in an ill-fitting uniform, scared, scared, scared in that ghastly place she’s been sent to waste her very best years, years she’d expected to devote to her brilliant career and her blissful marriage. Scared of all the cheap tough women she’s got to live with now; but more scared of what’s happening to her beautiful life—that was while she was naive enough to think she still had a life! And most of all scared of what’s happening to her, mentally and physically, of what the endless regimented days of that unspeakably degrading and stultifying existence are doing to her.”
She stopped. Outside, the storm was getting noisier, and the windows rattled to the violent gusts. Madeleine looked at her glass, drained it, and reached for the bottle, but it was too far away. I got up and poured more whiskey for her, and for myself, and took the glasses to the bathroom for ice and water. She waited for me to return and sit down again, before continuing: “I could stand my folks visiting me when they could, there in the beginning, but then they got too ill to travel and there was nothing to break the dismal routine. Actually, I was just as glad not to have to make the effort to… to keep myself looking brave and cheerful for anybody. And the hours passed and the days passed and the months passed, God so slowly—and then Walter came.” She licked her lips. “Matt, you can’t imagine what it was like! Like seeing yourself in a mirror after being very sick, all gaunt and gray and stringy… I hadn’t realized how far I’d come, how far I’d sunk, until I saw the expression on his face! The starry-eyed young admirer who’d worshiped the golden girl from afar! Staring with horror at the ugly changes prison had made in me already, and I still had years and years of my sentence left to go! Of course he covered up very quickly and started talking to me as if I were still the same lovely creature he’d known, but afterwards I stood in front of the mirror in my cell and saw myself as he’d seen me. I saw what I’d already lost in the few years I’d been there. I realized that… that all of me, all that really mattered, would be gone long before I got out.”
She gulped her whiskey, not looking at me. A blast of storm shook the building, and we both waited, as you do, to see if anything was going to crack under the assault, but nothing did.
“I made up my mind then,” she said at last. “Why go through that endless grinding misery, all those remaining years of it, just to be tossed back out into the world at last with nothing, nothing, nothing? No marriage, no profession, no friends, no reputation, no money to amount to anything. And no… me. Particularly no me. Just a dull and unattractive lump of a woman who wasn’t me any longer, scratching out a drab living for the remaining hopeless years of her life… So I found a little piece of metal and spent weeks sharpening it, and did it, but they got to me in time and it was so messy and horrible that I could never quite bring myself to try again. I just… kind of let myself go dead inside and wandered through the rest of those dreadful years in an unfeeling and unthinking daze.”
“But you were wrong,” I said. “You were stronger than you gave yourself credit for being. You did survive.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Thanks to you I’m discovering that there seems to be something left inside me after all. Whether it’s enough to build a new life…” She shrugged.
“It’ll be enough,” I said. “And I didn’t have a damn thing to do with it. You’d have worked your way out of that tailspin you were in all by yourself.”
“Would I?” She grimaced. “Don’t be so damn modest and upbeat and therapeutic, Matt, and give me another drink; and if you tell me I’m not used to it and can’t hold it I’ll spit in your eye. You can clean me up if I make a drunken mess of myself. The way you’ve been cleaning me up, building me up, ever since you picked me up at Fort Ames.”
“Let me break out the new bottle,” I said.
When I’d refilled our glasses, we sat for a while in silence listening to the blizzard; then she said quietly, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so… unpleasant.”
I grinned. “You sound as if it were something new.”
She glanced at her glass, and drank from it. After a little, she said almost shyly, “I really need this. Tonight. Because I want to ask a big favor of you and I’m embarrassed.”
“A favor? What favor?”
She said, “It’s a wonderful wild night out there, and it’s as if we were the only two people in the world, in here…” She looked at me directly, and I saw her throat work. She licked her lips and said, “I want you to make love to me, Matt, or try. If I can. It’s been so long. I have to know if I still after all these years… if there really is anything left. Please?”
I said, “No.”
She got up quickly and walked to the dresser and looked at herself in the mirror, and drank deeply from her replenished drink.
She said in very even tones. “It’s all right. I understand.”
“No,” I said harshly, “you don’t understand at all.” I set my glass aside and rose and went to her, and took her by the shoulders; I wanted to shake her angrily, but I restrained myself. “Why the hell don’t you snap out of it, Madeleine?” I said, speaking to her face, beside mine, in the mirror. “So you’re not a beautiful young girl any longer; who the hell is? You wouldn’t be that by now even if you’d never gone to prison. But you’ve got brains and guts and you can still look better than ninety percent of the women around when you take just a little trouble. You don’t have to ask any lousy man to go to bed with you as a favor, for God’s sake! It makes me sick to hear you!” I drew a long, ragged breath. “Jesus Christ, ever since I set up this cozy one-room deal I’ve been wondering, as a gentleman of sorts and the guy officially responsible for you, how I’d manage to get through the night honorably, to use a very old-fashioned word, without making an unwanted pass… And you humble yourself and say please love me, mister, when all you have to do is snap your fingers! No, I won’t make love to you as a favor, damn it! But if you’re really willing, and if you don’t feel that you’re under any obligation or coercion… If the lady will generously permit him to demonstrate his passionate desire for her, the gentleman will be most grateful.”
She freed herself from my grasp and turned, and studied my face carefully. She spoke rather stiffly: “It’s nice that you’re so concerned about my pride as a woman, since I’ve… kind of got out of the habit.” Then she smiled slowly. “But you certainly take a lot of words to say yes, my dear.”
Suddenly she was in my arms, soft and warm. Afraid to make a mistake that would spoil it for her—well, for both of us—I merely held her for a while, and touched my lips to her hair. At last I felt her arms tighten about me as she gained courage and turned her face up for a real kiss, tentative and exploratory. Her lips had a terrible innocence, reminding me of where she had been and how long it had been for her. Presently I eased her away from me and slipped the jacket off her shoulders and tossed it aside, undressing her tenderly, like a docile child. I started to work her sweater up gently, and she slapped my hands away, making a harsh little sound in her throat.
“Stop patronizing me, damn you!” she gasped. “I’m not a baby and I won’t break!”
The lips that found mine once more were suddenly fierce and adult. It was a grown-up, knowing body that moved hard against mine. The hands that drew me against her were those of a married woman who’d been here before and remembered the loving way of it. We fell onto the nearest big bed together fully dressed, learning each other’s shapes and movements through the rumpled and displaced and soon partly unfastened clothing, delaying too long with these breathless preliminaries, so that in the end we had to hastily, desperately, help each other off with the garments that had to come off, to hell with the rest… After a long, long time I became aware once more of the storm outside.
“Oh, God!” Madeleine breathed at last. “I didn’t know I could still… could still feel… I was afraid that p-place had spoiled me forever! All those deadly loveless years!” Presently she whispered, “Do you know that I love you?”
“Sure, I’m crazy about you, too,” I said.
She giggled, suddenly sounding very young and happy. “Try to say that with a little more conviction! But I really do love you in a way, Matt.”
“What way?”
“The way you love a man who does a lousy job the nicest, kindest way he knows how. I know I’m a decoy for you, and decoys often get shot full of holes, don’t they? I know you’d sacrifice me in an instant if you thought it necessary. But in the meantime you’re just as patient as you can be with the unreasonable and tiresome lady just out of the clink.” She drew a long, satisfied breath. “And now, well, that was an awfully small hamburger I had for lunch and I’m absolutely starving, and all that whiskey needs something to soak it up; but I do think I’d better change first, don’t you? After that uninhibited little interlude, this skirt isn’t fit to be seen in public.”
I laughed. “In the middle of a howling blizzard you’re worrying about a few creases? Everybody’s going to be wet and wrinkled tonight, lady.” Getting up and picking up my pants, I tossed a wad of nylon at her. “Pull your tights back on and let’s go.”
There were already six inches of snow on the level, and big drifts were piling up against the buildings as we dashed across to the cafe thirty yards away, the neon lights of which were almost invisible through the storm. There were many more cars outside now and several big trucks. I noticed that the motel’s NO VACANCY sign was lighted. Inside, the cafe’s TV told us that the highway was completely closed to the west. There was a pleasant, comradely feeling in the crowded restaurant; we were all stranded travelers together. The steaks were tough but tasty, and the French fries crisp and good. Nobody shot at us coming or going, but I took the usual precautions anyway.
At bedtime, looking almost bridal in her soft old satin-and-lace nightie, Madeleine made it clear that she wanted company in her bed; but then we discovered, laughing, that neither of us was really interested in anything but companionship and sleep. It had been a long hard day. But in the middle of the night I awoke when she stirred in my arms, turning towards me. She moved against me, and I felt her lips touch my face.
“Please?”
It was a sleepy, faraway whisper, and I realized that I wasn’t there and neither was she, really. This was the beautiful young wife who no longer existed requesting love from the handsome young husband who’d probably died nine years ago. I drew her closer and let my body obey the sleepy instructions issued by hers. I knew the moment she came fully awake and knew me. I heard her laugh throatily in the dark, accepting the situation and proceeding to show this new and untrained partner how to do what she wanted done. There was no great explosion of long-repressed emotions this time. It was just a friendly and satisfying act shared by two lonely people in the middle of the night.
“Nice man,” she murmured at last, and fell asleep in my arms.
In the morning, looking out the door, I saw a foot and a half of snow on the ground, and the drifts were enormous. The skies were still gray, but only a few flakes drifted down; the real storm had passed on to the east. The visibility had improved, and I could see the freeway, somewhat higher than we were, several hundred yards away across the gently up-sloping white plain. The big plows had apparently cleared one lane on each side; traffic was moving single file in both directions. A boy in jeans and anorak was shoveling snow off the motel walks.
“I think we’d better take our time with breakfast and wait until they get things sorted out a bit more,” I said, closing the door again.
“What did you say, Matt?”
Madeleine appeared in the bathroom doorway with a comb in her hand. In deference to the weather, she was wearing a plaid wool skirt and stiff new jeans that didn’t do much to flatter her; but even so she was a very different person from the one I’d helped into my car in the penitentiary parking lot. That sad slumped figure was only a distant memory. There was a nice glow to her this morning. Her back was straight, and her shoulders square.
When I repeated what I’d said, she laughed. “I’m in no hurry to get to Santa Fe, darling, you know that. All that’s there for me is a lot of humiliation and a little money. I’ll be through here in a moment if you want to shave.”
But she gave me time to pull on most of my clothes and tuck the gun away under my belt where it belonged. When she came out at last, I went into the bathroom in my undershirt and plugged in the shaver. After a little I heard her say something to me, unclear because of the buzzing of the machine. A moment later I heard a sound I couldn’t identify immediately. Then I realized that I’d heard a door closing; and that what she’d said was that she needed a cup of coffee right away and she’d see me over in the cafe. I knew a moment of sharp anger at her stupidity, or at my own stupidity in not making it absolutely clear to her that she should move nowhere without me…
At the same moment, I knew. This was the killing moment. Of course you get those sickening premonitions a hundred times, in my line of work, and ninety-nine times nothing at all happens; but it only takes once. I was racing through the motel room as these thoughts went through my mind unbidden. I threw open the door and saw her walking away along the shoveled path through the snow, a sturdy figure in her heavy clothes.
I looked for the threat I sensed was there and could see nothing. For the moment nothing moved in the snow anywhere around the motel or restaurant buildings, except for water dripping off the roofs. Starting after Madeleine, I looked farther afield. Traffic was still proceeding along the highway. There was only a stalled car in a snowdrift on the near side; but there would be lots of those this morning.
But there was none of the snow on the roof you’d expect to see on a deserted vehicle after a blizzard; and I remembered that there had been no car there when I looked out earlier. I knew what I had then, being an old long-range sniper myself. I started to run. It was a mistake; she heard my pounding footsteps on the path behind her and, curious, stopped to look back, giving the distant rifleman a perfect standing shot. I threw myself at her in a desperate flying tackle and felt a blow on the shoulder that paralyzed my whole right side as we went down in the snow together.