WE got up, after that, and started down the mountain. The wind was cold at our backs, and we hurried. Several times I should have liked to smoke another pipe, but the matches were all gone. I muttered about that annoying fact to Jerry, and was surprised to find that he was very much bothered about it. He was certain that the matches we had used there on the mountain were the last ones in the house. I couldn’t believe it, but he was really worried. He insisted that since he was the one that did the housekeeping, he would know whether there were any more matches, and most assuredly there were not. Neither of us liked the idea of a fireless evening, a cold supper, and a long drive into town the next day. Suddenly he stopped and turned back to me with a grin.
“Say, I know what we can do! We’ll get a fire with a spark from the car battery. Why didn’t I think of that before?”
And we went slogging on down the slope with lighter hearts. Jerry was worried about Selena’s being pretty well frozen by the time we got there, and we hurried as fast as my legs and shortness of wind would permit.
Our path brought us round the shoulder of a ridge and into sight of the house about a quarter of a mile ahead of us. The moment we saw it, both of us stopped. The window at our end, a living room window, was glowing with light. From the orange warmth of it in the shadow of the wall, from the way it flickered, even at that distance we knew the light could come only from the fireplace. Instantly I was disappointed. Probably some primitive survival in the back of my brain, or possibly nothing but a hangover from Boy Scouting, had made me look forward to our firemaking experiment with a perverse sort of anticipation. Now it would not be necessary. Selena had a fire.
The effect on Jerry was different. He looked at the light awhile without speaking or moving. For a minute or two his expression was incredulous, and then it changed, tightened, altered, in a way that I could not analyze.
“Well,” I said, “we won’t have to try our luck with a couple of dry sticks or a pair of battery cables, after all.”
“No,” he said. “She’s lit a fire. She’s lit a fire.” He seemed puzzled and perhaps slightly uneasy.
“Maybe she thought of the battery stunt before we did, or maybe she found a match,” I suggested
“No,” he said, “the car’s still in the shed and there wasn’t a match in the house . . .” His voice trailed off slowly, reluctantly, I thought.
“Oh, well,” I told him, “any fire is better than none. ‘Take the gifts the gods provide.’”
He looked at me. “What’s that? Oh, yes, sure.” But he wasn’t thinking at all about what I had said.
He kept the lead as we went on to the house, but he was no longer hurrying. In fact, it seemed to me that he was hardly moving with any purpose at all. If it hadn’t been the end of a fairly long tramp, I’d have thought him merely strolling. Several times he lifted his head and looked toward the house; each time I noticed how tense his face was, and how remote the expression around his eyes.
Sure enough, when we entered the living room there was a big, crackling fire on the hearth, dried desert wood that burned intensely and was gone to ash in an hour. Selena was sitting on the settle, looking into the flames. There were filaments of fire glow in her pale, bright hair, and a faint flush on her cheeks from the heat.
“Hello,” she said. “Have an interesting walk?”
“Sure,” I said, “only keeping up with a long-legged mountain goat like your husband is no job for one who hath been long in city pent.”
“He does walk fast, doesn’t he?”
I went over and stood with my back to the fire; the heat soaked into my legs and took some of the tiredness out of them. Jerry was standing behind the settle, behind Selena; he took out his package of cigarettes and put one between his lips. His voice was perfectly casual.
“Gimme a match, will you, honey?”
That woman could think, and think fast. Only the smallest trace of some expression went over her face; then she stooped and pulled out from the flames a long twig of mesquite.
“Here,” she said, and held it to his cigarette.
He drew in a long drag of smoke and looked at her across the flame without saying anything except “Thanks.”
She tossed the twig back into the flames and sat down again.
“We were worried,” I remarked. “Jerry was positive there wasn’t a match in the house, and we used our last up on the mountain. But I see you found one.”
Jerry came round the end of the settle and stood at the opposite side of the fireplace, looking down at his wife. “Yes,” he said, with an unsuccessful attempt at lightness in his tone, “where did you find the match?”
She looked up at him and there was a sort of stillness in her face that I shall never forget. “Does it matter?”
“No,” he said, “it doesn’t matter at all where you found it. It matters if you found it.”
The remark made no sense to me at all, and I still don’t understand it, but Selena did. She stood up.
“You shouldn’t have said that.” There was no anger, no sharpness in her tone, only weariness and what sounded to me at the time like despair.
Jerry was staring at her; the look on his face was so thinly sharp, so direct, so full of horror that I was instantly aware that this conversation, which was meaningless to me, possessed some sort of positive and dreadful implication for him. “So,” he said, “so that’s it. I’ve wondered for a long time.”
She looked at him calmly. “I tried to stop you.”
“Yes,” he said. “You tried to stop me. That was kind of you.” He threw his head back and laughed, a short, nervous laugh that had the timbre of fear in it. “That was condescending of you—Selena.”
“No,” she said in a very low voice, “no, Jerry, it wasn’t condescension.”
He was watching her, I noticed. His eyes never moved from her face. I saw, too, that he was trembling, that his hands, at his sides, were twitching, and that his lips, which had suddenly become thin and gray, were quivering slightly. He licked them. “I would have found out sometime,” he said to her at last. She made no reply. “But sometime is now.”
“Yes,” she said, and her voice was impersonal.
Suddenly he was in complete command of himself. “Do you know what I am thinking?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Am I right?”
She nodded her head gravely. “You know that too.”
“All right,” he said, as though agreeing to something, and turned to me. “Bark, you don’t know what this is all about, do you?”
“No,” I told him.
“That’s good,” he said, and there was affection in his voice. “I want you to do me a favor.”
“Sure,” I told him.
He left the fire. “I want you to take something to Dad from me when you go. I’ll write it out now . . . before I forget it.” He went into the study, and I followed him somewhat uncertainly. The whole thing was confusing, and for some obscure reason I felt frightened. Selena followed me, but she stopped in the doorway.
Jerry was sitting at the desk in there. The last gray light from the east came through the window behind him and lighted the room with a dull, unlovely color. He was writing by the time I reached the room, with a swift, racing drive of his pen as though to finish before the light faded entirely. I watched him a minute, conscious of Selena white and glimmering in the dusk of the door behind me. All at once, with a quick, impatient gesture he crumpled the note and flung it into a corner.
“Hell,” he said, with a swift, tight grin at me. “It’s not so important, after all.”
The rest happened before I knew it. The gun must have been there in the desk drawer, ready to his hand. He simply put it up to his head and pulled the trigger.
The crash of the shot in that small room made my eardrums ring. The revolver clattered to the floor beside his chair; his arms went out across the desktop, and his head sank forward between them. It seemed to me that for an instant after the shot his eyes were looking at me. Then I couldn’t see them any more.
For a long time, an unmeasured sequence of nothingnesses, I stood there in the room and stared at him. There is no way to explain how I felt, for I don’t suppose I felt at all. My only sensation was one of having ceased to live, and a horrible tightness in my throat.
I was aware that Selena was moving past me. She walked to the desk slowly but without uncertainty, and her face was perfectly quiet, the face of an angel who knows neither sorrow nor loss nor death nor anything else that quickens the pulse of living men and women. She placed her hands, palm down, on the surface of the wood and leaned forward a little, looking down at him silently. Then she put her hand, her long hand with the strong white fingers, on his hair, so lightly that she scarcely touched his head. The next instant she was across the room and stooping to pick up the crumpled note in the corner. I watched her take it up and go out of the room. A moment later I heard the front door open and close again.
Of course, I did all the things that you think of to do. He was dead, but I felt his heart to make sure. It was still warm inside his shirt. Some cheaply melodramatic instinct made me wrap up the gun in my handkerchief; afterwards I was glad I’d done so. It saved a lot of trouble with the sheriff. I carried his body into my own room, and laid it out on my bed; I could not imagine taking it into the room he had shared with Selena. Closing his eyes was the hardest part. Then I went into the living room and built the fire up high and lit all the lamps. The whisky bottle was in the kitchen; I found it easily enough, but I did not drink much. It seemed to stick in my throat. There was nothing else to do till morning; that long and twisted road into Los Palos would be indecipherable in the dark.
As I sat there I began to wonder if Selena was coming back. I kept listening for the sound of her step outside the door. But there was silence except for the strong rush of the wind past the house and the steady crackle of my fire on the hearth.
Nothing that I thought or felt through that long night is of the least consequence. In reality I was simply waiting, in a chaos of loneliness and sorrow and fear, for one of two things: Selena’s return or the first light of morning. After a long time the eastern window began to show gray; I went at once to start the car. In the dusk outside, the great loom of the mesa over my head made me shudder in spite of myself. I looked up where I knew the line of steps to be, wondering if she was coming back to the house. But there was no one there.
The car started easily enough, and I got it round to the front door, as close as I could. When I went inside again, I left the engine running. I liked the sound it made. Getting him into the tonneau was horrible enough, but I was past the ability to feel any more. Before I left, I put out the lamps and the fire, and left the door open, in case she came back. Then I blew the horn, over and over again. Its harsh, deep yell went echoing up and down the valley and came back flatly from the face of the mesa behind and above me. She did not come. I put the car in gear and rolled slowly down the road toward the desert and Los Palos, seventy miles away.
The rest of it isn’t important, though it was tedious enough, and long before the formalities with the sheriff and the undertaker were over the numbness that had got me as far as Los Palos without agony had worn off. I don’t know why they all took my story so readily at its face value, but, of course, there was the gun and the powder burn on his forehead. The sheriff went back with some of his men to try to find Selena, but she wasn’t there, and he told me the house was just as I had left it. He managed to make me admit that Jerry hadn’t been entirely happy with his wife, and that seemed to satisfy him and the coroner’s jury. They let me go quickly. There wasn’t a plane reservation to be had, and anyway it was a half day’s travel to the nearest airport, so I simply caught the morning transcontinental out of Los Palos three days later. The only stop I made was at my apartment. I wanted to put Jerry’s ashes in the silver urn.