Murder in the Wind Read Free Page B

beers, and then walked home feeling bigger than the night, walked home thinking about Krisnak’s sister and the way she walked.
    The old man sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee. The old man hadn’t worked in a couple of weeks. He sat there and he looked shrunken. He sat there in his pants and underwear, with cords on his neck and wattles under his chin, hair wispy on the naked skull, eyes dulled and chest hollow. Hal stood at the sink and pumped a glass of water and then turned around, sipping it, looking at the old man with a cold objective eye. The only thing big about the old man was his hands. They grew tough from the end of white wrists, tough and curled, horny and thickened. So this was what had been the laughing giant, strong enough to carry him all the way up the hill.
    Old bum. Too damn dumb to hold a job. Stinking house in a stinking mill town. No car, no clothes, no future.
    Not for me, he thought. Not for me. Not this crappy life, All A’s and one B last year. All A’s next year, I swear, because that’s the only way out. And I want out. I want out so bad I can taste it.
     
    He drove the wagon through the heavy rain and he said to himself, “Old man, forgive me. I stood at your grave on that bright warm day. I felt affection, and regret, and contempt. Forgive me for the contempt.”
    A sudden burst of rain slapped hard against the left side of the station wagon. The gust of wind swayed the wagon. Pine tops dipped and swayed.
    “It’s getting windier,” Jean said.
     
    [Windier. A cross wind pushing the flat side of the station wagon, so that the driver has to make quick little compensating twists of the wheel.
    North, in the wind, in the rain, in the great anonymity of the highway. Even in the best of weather the roads of the land are curiously impersonal. In a day of heavy travel you see forty thousand cars, but you do not look at them as cushioned compartments in which ride humans as vulnerable as yourself. You see them as obstacles, as force and danger… a flash of chrome and roar of engine. But rarely you see the other person. Something fixes your attention. The fool who blocks your way. The top-down blonde at the light. The old crate full of kids and pots and pans, with crated chickens on top.
    The man in the station wagon drives through the rain and the wind. A low sleek car passes him at high speed, startling him. The boy asks what it is. The man tells the child it is a Mercedes, and even as he says it he feels the dull burn of envy, and for no other reason he hates the driver.
    Later he sees the car again. It is parked by a small restaurant. A young couple hurry through the rain to the restaurant door. He wonders if he will see the car again. Sometimes it happens that way on a long trip. The faster driver makes longer stops, and two cars leapfrog north.
    He increases his speed. He wants to be as far north as he can get before the sleek car comes up behind him again.]

 
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    Bunny Hollis awoke before nine in a motel on Route 19 and he lay there listening to the hard roar of the rain. It was a rain so intense that when you listened to it carefully it seemed to be increasing in force from minute to minute. It was a muggy gray morning. He wondered what morning it was. He counted back and decided that it had to be Wednesday, October seventh. He stretched until his shoulders creaked, knuckled his eyes and sat up. There was a faint pulse of liquor behind his eyes, a sleazy taste in his mouth. He sat naked on the edge of the bed and took his pulse. Seventy-six. And no suggestion of a premature beat. Lately when he smoked too much and drank too much the premature beat would start. He had been told by a very good man that it was nothing to worry about. Just ease off when it started.
    He turned and looked at his bride in the other bed. She lay sprawled as if dropped from a height, a sheaf of brown hair across her eyes. She had kicked off the single sheet in her sleep. The narrow band of white