All These Condemned Read Free

and the twin docks and the house walls and the surrounding woods that the gray promise of dawn was suddenly gone and it was full night again.
    I hurried back down to be on the dock again when she was brought in. Judy Jonah was already there. Others were coming. Gilman Hayes, who giggled nervously. Mavis Dockerty, sobbing aloud again. Wallace Dorn, cloaked in solemn dignity. The lights on the boats were going out, one by one. But they did not head for home. They followed the boat in, the boat containing the body of my enemy.
    Steve Winsan climbed up onto the dock from another boat. He glanced at me. His good square face was pulled tight with strain. But even in the urgency of that moment he managed to put something into his look that was for me alone. And warmed me. The bier came alongside the dock. There were two old men in it. Twin Charons, with the reptilian wiriness of old men who do physical work. The trooper in the other boat bawled unnecessary instructions. Trooper Maleski and Steve Winsan knelt side by side to lift the body up. I moved close behind them. I could see down over the broad shoulder of the trooper. I saw her foot, very still and very white, projecting from under the edge of a greasy tarp. Wilma Ferris under a greasy tarp. I could imagine her nose wrinkled in distaste.
    “Hook catch her in the arm,” one of the old men said to all of us. “Slipped when she come up. Nearly lost her, butJimmy, he grabbed her quick. She was about sixty feet off this end of the dock. I’d judge she were in forty feet of water.”
    There was a lot of awkward fumbling. The old men tucked the tarp around her and worked the body up to where Maleski and Steve could get hold of it. They had to move back to make room to put her on the dock, and in doing so the big trooper stepped on the trailing edge of the tarp and half stumbled backward, dropping her legs. Steve held onto the tarp and it came loose and she rolled out onto the concrete dock, white, flaccid, heavy. Her dark long hair was pasted to half her face, and the other half had a blue glow in the lights. I saw for the first time the rumored richness of her body and saw how, even in the looseness of death, her breasts were large and firm, her belly taut, her thighs like Greek marble polished by centuries.
    There was a silence there in the lights that was like a long exhalation. I saw then that her body was visibly changing color, visibly darkening. The trooper and Steve began fumbling with the tarp and Judy Jonah said in her harsh expressive voice, “Cover her up, for God’s sake, you pair of clowns!”
    They got the tarp over her. It was a dead thing. When it had been alive it had taken all I had. Using the weapons of money, of dominance, and of the body’s richness as they were needed.
    There was considerable argument as to whether it should be left on the dock for the coroner’s inspection, or if it could legally be taken up to the house. Boats began to pull away, outboard motors catching and then rattling their tin thunder off the dawn mountains, Deputy Sheriff Fish making apoint of yelling his thanks at each boat. The coroner, an unexpectedly young man with overlong sideburns, settled the argument by arriving, shooing us all off the dock except the officials, and conducting his examination on the spot.
    I felt as if I had soiled myself by going down to look at her in death, and yet I had to be certain she was dead. I had needed an assurance based on more than being told. I looked in on Randy. He slept heavily, his mouth open. What would become of him now? Wilma had forced us to live up to an expected standard. So all we had left from the years of her were debts, a lease on an apartment too big for us, too many expensive clothes, and a large salary that had stopped when her heart had stopped. Somewhere he had to find the nerve, the guts to start again as we had once started together. But it was difficult to think of guts when she had so cleverly eviscerated him over