An Eye for an Eye Read online

  He didn’t see how it could be better.

  The house stood by itself between a vacant double lot and the shallow channel of Chance’s Run. It was the traditional four-room house, two rooms up and two down, and what little plumbing there was, was in the cellar. Al had grown up in one exactly like it in Butler, Pennsylvania. It had some broken-down pieces of furniture in it, pretty sad but enough to get by on. Al had rented it from the owner, an old Italian man who lived a couple of blocks away. He had told the old man his name was Harper, and when the old man asked him suspiciously what a single fellow wanted with a furnished house he had told him his wife was coming back from West Virginia, where she had gone to visit her sick mother. He had paid a month’s rent in advance.

  It was the last house on the long winding street. An old Polish couple lived in the next one beyond the double lot. They didn’t speak hardly any English. The old man worked night trick in the mill and slept all day. The old woman practically never came out of the house. The blinds were kept drawn all the time except in the kitchen, so the wallpaper wouldn’t get faded. Al knew the Polish pretty well. The old woman would scrub and scrub all day until the floors glittered and every last thing in the house was so clean you were afraid to look hard at it for fear you’d smudge it. Between that and cooking up big pots of stew and baking bread she wouldn’t have any time to wonder what the neighbors were doing.

  In summer it would have been tougher. People lived on their porches and in their bitty garden patches, and there were always kids roaming around. But all that was over for this year. He wished the straggling shrubs along the fence still had their leaves on for a better screen, but you couldn’t have everything.

  On the other side of the run there was nothing but a hillside with some blight-killed elms and some scrub maple and a lot of brush. A single track ran in a cut high up on it. The only regular traffic was the junction train that took the yard men to work. There wasn’t anything in front of the house but the street and the curving stream and more of the hillside. In back of it the streets angled off so there was nothing too close there, either. Al had spent many hours finding the right place. It looked as though this one was made to order.

  It was going to have to be good enough. Because now he was on his way.

  A surge of intense excitement came over him, knotting his belly, stringing tight the muscles of his arms and thighs. He picked up the two baskets and put them into the back part of his middle-aged sedan, on the floor. He was shaking and his loins were hot. It was a good feeling, a proud feeling. His eyes shone with it. Maybe I’ll go back in and get the gun, he thought. Maybe I’ll decide to kill somebody right now. He swung his big fists in the air and enjoyed the idea. But he didn’t go back for the gun. He had made his plans. Maybe I’ll kill them, he thought, but I’ll say when. And they’ll jump, by God, they’ll jump when I tell ’em.

  He pulled an open pint bottle out of his jacket pocket and drank from it. The whiskey burned in his mouth and down his throat. He caught a deep breath and wiped his mouth and put the bottle out of sight under the front seat. Then he opened the double doors and hooked them back and went jolting away down the rutted alley. It was nineteen minutes after twelve.

  From South Flat, where the house was, he had to drive clear across town to reach Lister Road. The mood of exhilaration he was in stayed with him, but it changed, becoming darker and harder as the sense of forward movement gripped him. He had wasted too much time. Now he wasn’t going to waste any more. Now things were going to be settled once and for all.

  All the way over he could see Lorene in the back of his mind. It was funny, how that was. In front of him he could see the street and the traffic lights, the people crossing at the intersections. And at the same time he could see Lorene so clear and plain that even the little soft reddy-gold hairs on her forearms showed. It made him crazy to see her like that. It made him stamp his feet and twist his head, unable to sit still while he waited for the damned red lights. It made him not want to wait for them. He hated anybody telling him what to do, making him stop when he wanted to go and go fast. Slobs, he thought, looking at the people blocking the street while he sat. Goddamn slobs, what have they got to do that’s so important?

  Nothing. Nothing like what I’ve got to do.

  He passed Courthouse Square on the south side, so that the building was interposed between him and the office of Ben Forbes. But he looked that way and smiled, a smile of incalculable malice.

  You’re the smart boy, he thought. All right, let’s see if your stinking little lawbooks have the answer to this one.

  And you, Lorene. You wait around. I’ll hold you by your pretty red hair and make you wish you’d never been born.

  You’ve got it coming.

  And so has he. I’ll make him sweat. By God, I’ll make him sweat.

  Lister Road was quiet. It was a snotty-looking road. There were thirty-five-mile speed-limit signs all the way along to keep the peasants from going through too fast. That was the kind of a thing that always made him want to do seventy just to show them. But he held it down. This was one time he didn’t want anybody to notice him.

  He had been up and down the road before at different odd times. It had pleased him to drive past the houses he was interested in, spying on them, learning all he wanted to know, and the people inside never guessing it. He passed the house that had Pettit on the mailbox and looked into the garage as he went by. You could see it easy from the road. They had two cars and both of them were gone. Rich bitches. So that was all right.

  The next house was the house. Ben Forbes’ house.

  Something happened that Al hadn’t been looking for. He got such a rush of blood to the head that he was almost blind. God damn it, he thought. God damn it, I ain’t going to fool around, I’m going to kill ’em. Kill every damn one of ’em. That’s what they need, after what they’ve done to me. Blow their goddamn guts out.

  The car slewed onto the berm, throwing gravel.

  The noise startled him. For a minute it sounded like shots hitting the fenders. He set his teeth and wrenched the wheel. The car straightened out. He could see the road again. He could see Lorene, too, the way she had looked that time when she told him he couldn’t ever come near her again. “Never again,” she said, “you hear that? Never.” Screaming at him. Snotty as hell. Swelled up like a toad with her own importance.

  That’s what he taught her, that bastard Forbes.

  Al’s head was pounding. He needed a drink. He had needed one bad before but never like this. He thought he would die if he didn’t get one. He drove along the road, and when he came to a place where there were no houses on either side he slowed down and fished the bottle from under the seat and gulped at it the way a drowning man gulps air. The liquor hit him like a big fist. It dazed him for a minute and then it took hold and steadied him.

  I got it figured, he thought, looking at the brown fields and the bare trees with the sun on them. This is the way. There’s always time for the other if they push me into it. Always time.

  Slowly and sedately he turned the car around and drove back, feeling as though he were made of iron.

  The doctor’s house on this side of Forbes’ was set lower in a dip of the ground and there were trees between. The way the two houses were built you couldn’t see what was going on at Forbes’ back door from the doctor’s place at all. Pettits could, but there was nobody home. Al approached the Forbes driveway. And now he was cool and strong, not excited at all. Everything was right, everything was his way. There was not even a car in sight on the road when he turned in.

  He pulled all the way to the back, letting the car roll easy. Then he set the brake and got out. The motor was still running. He tilted the seat forward and lifted the baskets of potatoes from the floor in the back, making sure that the hinge of the wide door caught right so it would stay open. Carrying a basket in each hand, he went to the kitchen door, which was set in the back wall of the house so as not to show from the road.


  He set the baskets down and knocked.

  She opened the door.

  She looked at the baskets by his feet and then she smiled and shook her head and said, “No, I don’t need—”

  He hit her on the jaw. He could knock a big man out with one punch if the man was set up for it. He caught her as she sagged down. There was still no one in sight on the road. He hauled her fast to the car and hustled her onto the floor in the back, and now his head was hot and pounding again and his hands shook because he knew he had to hurry. Hurry. The tape was all ready on the seat. Tear it. Over the mouth. Around the wrists. Around the ankles. Christ, she’s squirming around, didn’t I hit her hard enough? Hit her again. Hit—Good. That’s good. Now the blanket.

  Now.

  He was halfway into the car before he remembered the potatoes. He ran back to the door. It was standing open, and he struck the flat edge of his hand behind the knob and yanked it shut. Then he picked up the baskets, shoved them onto the floor in the front, and backed out of the drive, onto the quiet peaceful empty road.

  And it was as easy as that.

  five

  The blow had come so fast that Carolyn had not had time to be frightened. Afterward she had not been conscious of anything until now. And the first sensation that returned to her was not fear but a dim awareness of pain and physical discomfort. She tried to move, to turn over and stretch out. But she was in a narrow place, too narrow, and her arms and legs were caught.

  A narrow place.

  Where?

  I must have fallen, she thought. Hit my head. It hurts. Oh, Ben, Ben, what have I done to myself? Ben, come help me.

  There was something over her mouth. There was a smell, one she knew, and yet it wasn’t familiar either.

  Where was she?

  A picture of the kitchen came to her. Herself moving around in it. Getting lunch. Eating it. Washing the dishes, tidying up. Then what?

  The floor. She had swept the floor. She saw the pattern of the linoleum very clearly with the bristles of the broom going over it. They were shiny red bristles, some new kind of plastic. She had finished sweeping and hung the broom and dustpan away and then that car had driven in and she had thought, Another one of those peddlers. She had seen him take baskets out of the back of the car and she had thought, If he has good apples I’ll take some. And she had opened the door, but they were potatoes he had in the baskets and—

  And—

  No, that’s crazy. I’m just dreaming that, making it up. I went back into the house and slipped and fell—

  But I didn’t. I didn’t, I didn’t, I—

  She made a noise. It would have been quite a loud cry but the tape muffled it and made it no more than a whimper. And now she was fully conscious.

  And now she was afraid.

  She was down on the floor in the back seat of a car and the smell she smelled was dust and matting and grease and oily metal, a car smell, but not her car. The car was not moving. It was parked somewhere—inside, she thought—and she seemed to be alone in it. There was a blanket over her, not quite covering her face. It was musty and thin. She was terribly cold. Her face and head throbbed. She wondered if her jaw was broken. She started to cry, but she was too afraid for that, too deeply in trouble. The tears froze in her before they got fairly started.

  She tried again to move, to get up and see where she was and whether there was any hope of getting away. But her hands had been tied some way to her ankles behind her so that she was perfectly helpless. The tape on her mouth shut off a good deal of breath. She was exhausted in a very few minutes and the pain in her face was making her sick. She lay still. Perhaps for a little while she fainted. She murmured Ben’s name over and over, and she thought, He’ll be so frightened, I’ve got to get away—

  It was very strange to be where she was and not to know why.

  She tried to remember the man. But she had not paid much attention to him. He was just a man. Tall, coarse-looking, blondish. A type, but she hadn’t noticed any details. She was sure she had never seen him before. Why would he do such a thing? Was he crazy, a maniac?

  Rape.

  Was that what he wanted? Had he already done it, while she was unconscious?

  In a panic of apprehension and disgust she took stock of her person as well as she could. She was all right. Her clothing wasn’t even disarranged. He hadn’t touched her, except to tie her up.

  Was he saving her for later when she would be wide awake, knowing fully what went on?

  Oh God, let me get out of here. Please let me get out.

  Through the window of the car she could, by twisting her head around, see the upper part of a plank wall. The car was in some land of a shed, probably an old garage. Light came in through the cracks. It was still daytime, then. She thought if she could only make a noise someone might hear her and come. She tried for a while to work the tape off her mouth by rubbing her head against the floor, but it was no use. She tried shouting anyway, but that was no use either. She tried again to get her legs and arms apart. She tried until the effort became a madness, a fury, a blind hysterical striving that lost all meaning and then subsided to a feeble twitching and finally to quiescence.

  Al Guthrie came and looked at her during this period but she didn’t know it. He made sure his tapes and cords were holding and went away again.

  When Carolyn looked for the second time at the cracks of the plank wall the light had dimmed and she knew that it was late in the afternoon. About now she would be driving into town to get Ben. He would wait for her, and wait—

  Poor Ben.

  She did not fight her bonds again. She understood that she was not going to get free of this particular trap until the man who had put her here came and took her out, for whatever reason he might have.

  She waited, lying small, lying still, like a newly caught animal, trying not to think. Not about herself and what might be going to happen to her. Not about Ben, dear beloved Ben who would be out of his mind with worry. Not about anything. Just waiting.

  The light got fainter and fainter and disappeared. It was very quiet. She thought there were sounds of cars and voices and doors slamming, infrequent and far away, but enough so that she believed she was not in the country. Occasionally, much farther off, she could hear train whistles. One thing she was sure of. They could not have come very far from Woodley.

  She lay in the pitch-dark and waited. Calm. Quite calm. I ought to be screaming and raving with fright, she thought. Why am I lying here like this so quietly? Am I so strong and brave as all that?

  I don’t think so. I think I’m just dazed.

  What kind of a person am I, anyway?

  I guess I’m going to find out.

  But I don’t want to. I don’t want to!

  Somebody opened a door.

  Carolyn stiffened. Her heart seemed to shrink down in her as though it were hiding. She thought for a minute it had stopped.

  There was a sound of fumbling and thumping, not loud. Then footsteps crunched on loose slag beside the car. The car door opened. A flashlight beam shone in her face.

  “So you’re awake, huh?”

  She could not see anything of him beyond the light. But she could smell the raw whiskey on him.

  He jerked the blanket from her and threw it aside.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now you listen to me and listen good. I’m going to cut your feet loose and take you in the house, and I don’t want any trouble about it, understand?”

  His voice was heavy and deep, with a mean note in it. She moved her head and he seemed to take that for assent. The light went away from her face. She heard a knife click open and there was a sensation of tugging, but her arms and legs were numb and she couldn’t be sure.

  Something gave. He moved her roughly, straightening her legs so that her feet stuck out the door, and she made a strangled howling under the tape. Water came into her eyes. But she could see him now, a dim hulking shape behind the light, sawing at the tape bands around her ankles.
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  He put the knife away. “Come on. Get up.”

  She tried. He reached in and got her under one arm and pulled. He was strong. She came out of the car like a rag doll and fell onto the slag at his feet.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “Quit the clowning and get up.”

  She shook her head, trying to tell him that her legs were too stiff and dead to work, but all she could do was grunt. He swore and clicked the flashlight off, shoving it in his pocket. It was pitch-dark again. Carolyn felt herself lifted and half shoved, half carried ahead of him through an open door and into a dark yard. The night air was cold but clean. She saw a house some distance away with one lighted window. She filled her lungs to try to call out in spite of the tape, but he must have been expecting her to do that because he gave her a wicked shake and said in her ear:

  “Shut up or I’ll break your goddamn neck.”

  He took her fast across the yard. She stumbled up two or three shallow steps onto a porch, and then he pushed her through a door already standing open into a dark room that she knew from the stale old smells of cooking must be a kitchen.

  “Stand still,” he told her. “Right here.”

  He took his hands away. She heard the door close and heard him turn the lock. He was breathing hard and fast and he stank of whiskey. But somehow she knew he was not drunk in any sense that would help her.

  He found the light switch and turned it on.

  And he was standing there looking at her, his shoulders hunched a little, his big hands hanging at his sides, his head stretched forward toward her. There was a red flush across his cheekbones and on his forehead. His eyes were like an animal’s eyes, a hunting animal, bright with excitement.

  “Well,” he said, “I did it. I sure as hell did it, didn’t I?”

  He seemed to expect her to admire him. He came closer to her and held out one hand with the palm up and laughed.

  “See that? That’s where I got ’em now, right there where I want ’em.”