Girl Out Back by Charles Williams Page B

demanding at the same time, and I was kissing her too roughly. A little more suave in the salve, Godwin, I thought; you could make chairman of the board. Then I wondered why I never seemed to make sense any more, even to myself; I’d married her because she had money and I’d done nothing but bitch about it since. I was a melon-head.
    I put my right arm down behind her knees and picked her up. She was a lot of woman, but the way I felt at the moment I could have carried her up six flights of stairs and through the roof like a berserk elevator. The eyelids parted just slightly and she regarded me roguishly from under the lashes.
    “Do you think you’d better? It’s a long way up there.”
    To the kitchen?” I said. “I thought we’d scramble some eggs.”
    She murmured a naughty word from behind the Mona Lisa smile and gently swung her feet. A slipper fell off. It was among the more unnoticed events of the year.
    I was going through the living-room when I felt her begin to go rigid in my arms. “You don’t have to show off your strength,” she said. “I know you’re younger.”
    Jesus, not now, I thought. “Shucks, ma”am,” I said. “It ain’t hardly nothin’ at all. Little ol’ triflin’ armful like you.”
    “Don’t overdo it,” she said. “You’ll scare me. I’ll take your word there were no girls out there.”
    I gave it the old fourth-quarter try. “Stop fighting me, you alabaster houri. I’ve got my arms full.” I kissed her, but it was all nothing now. She’d retreated into the cave to paw over her wrongs, whatever they were. Well, she’d certainly picked a strategic time for it. I went on up the stairs, feeling savage about it, and dropped her on the bed. She could go to hell.
    “Well?” she asked sweetly.
    “Well, what?”
    “This is the old professional? Where’s the technique?”
    “I lost my way,” I said. “We should have gone out and climbed on the back fence.”
    “You would feel more at home there, wouldn’t you?”
    ”Is there anything else?” I asked.
    “What?”
    “It’s Thursday,” I said. “The help’s night out.”
    She clenched her hands down by her thighs and looked up at the ceiling. “Go away,” she said in a thin, quiet voice. “For the love of sweet Jesus Christ, go away. Go away, go away.”
    I went away. I drove over to the store, let myself in, and savagely attacked the accumulated paper work. There was usually some release and satisfaction in that, because I liked the place. I’d built it up to what it was. The first time I’d ever seen it, one afternoon a little over two years ago when I’d dropped in for some item of tackle I needed on a fishing trip, I had recognized its potentialities and it had interested me. She’d come in about that time to say something to the inept and lethargic old gaffer who was running it for her, and she had interested me even more. Well-to-do widows with sex appeal are rare enough to be collector’s items in this vale of tears, and here was a real jewel. I gave her a good sales talk about what I could do with the place, quit the public relations outfit I was working for in Sanport at the moment, and moved in. Both phases of the project were wide open for an operator with any talent at all; inside of sixty days the business was in the black and I was in her bed. Four months later we were married. Not that she was particularly a patsy; but we did hit it off well in the hay, and she was in the market for a romantic and suggestively tragic figure who never talked much about his past. It’s stock, but easy.
    It was ten p.m. when I ground out the last of the letters and finished checking the receipts and making up the bank deposit. I slammed the door of the safe and stood for a moment looking around the dim interior of the showroom. Mrs. Jessica Roberts McCarran Godwin, I give it to you. Cherish it, and guard it well in that old classic repository of the fervent resignation and the disenchanted farewell. From now