“My mum was devastated,” she said. “I, too.”
He moved his left hand to cover hers. For a while, both were silent.
“See this?” he held up his right hand. His thumb had been mangled; his second and third fingers had been joined so that they resembled something fleshy and pliable.
“I’m Four-F because of it, so I came to pitch in on the Al-Can highway to do my part for the effort. As things got underway, Bailey and I bought the Dawson Creek Lumber Camp. It’s the only show in town now, that and the great fishing and hunting.”
“I thought the Al-Can Highway had been completed. Somebody said it was a complete marvel, that it’s as great an achievement as the Panama Canal.”
“And they are right. I was an engineer from Princeton, that’s how I came to work on the highway. Bailey was Johnny-on-the-spot and came up with the lumber camp at the very start. We did The Road in eight months, start to finish. So, I’m back to fly fishing before I leave.”
“Leave? To where?” she asked, trying to quiet a sound of alarm ringing in her ears.
“Back to Florida for a quick trip until it gets too hot, then I’m back here again.”
“When does it get hot?” she asked, relaxing some.
“Soon, but I’m here finishing up with the lumber camp now that The Road is operating.”
“Why? What’s the purpose of it? It leads from nowhere to the very Styx.” she said, her voice lowered for effect, her interest in him was rising with each sip of Scotch.
Not surprisingly, the young girl would come to have a comfortable feeling about highways that led over the horizon. In fact she grew to count on finding that all roads would lead directly away from Rome, not back to it.
“Inland airstrips. The Road gives us an inland supply route out of reach of the Japs. We’ve got mobility, so to speak.”
“My aunt has seen the conning towers off Santa Barbara. She’s actually seen the Japs’ submarines with her own eyes. Everyone is terrified.”
“We’re ready for them,” he assured her and took a deep swallow, closing his eyes as the Scotch burned its way down his throat. He held his glass with his left hand.
“You shot off your own finger?” she asked, shaking her head.
“It was a hunting accident. The safety was off. I always keep the safety off. It’s far better that way. One day my gloves froze on the barrel. I was climbing over a barbed wire fence and the damned thing went off.”
“An accident,” she reconfirmed, looking away from his face as the waitress placed their identical steaks before them.
He got her quite drunk, or she managed to get herself pie-eyed, one or the other. But he was a gentleman to the end and drove her safely home, skidding through the mud. The next morning, when she slogged in to work late and groggy, she felt both enervated and defensive. Who was he to accuse her of cowardice, fleeing her country with the first threat when he’d put his toe on the trigger and blown his hand to bits with his shotgun just to avoid the draft? Four-F indeed! She had seen right through his story and he had attempted to seduce her after he’d gotten quite tight, and they’d kissed, long and lingeringly. She was not that sort of girl, however.
When she asserted this, he laughed.
“I want you to know that I really am asthmatic,” she told him when she looked up from her desk in the two-bit lawyer’s office to find him standing before her. Again he was in no mood to mind the queue, and she found him less attractive that morning than the night before. Her summation was affected by her own hangover. Surely his head throbbed as well because her own pulse pounded in her ears.
And he seemed down but he smiled, and suddenly Phyllis was mesmerized by a vision of herself being courted wearing glamorous clothes in a place without mud. She, his leading lady with the arresting red hair. He, always the gentleman in excellent tweeds.
She felt Russell’s hangover, she felt his attraction to her, and it made her feel momentarily like a queen.
“You may be an asthmatic if you choose. I think you’re a great gal,” he said, smiling at her, squinting. What a bloodshot charmer! And last night with a drink in his left hand, she had been taken by him; he was debonair, intelligent, fit, strong and pitifully, lamentably misunderstood. He’d had a terrible go with wives and now he hoped he’d learned his lesson. He was badly in need of a pure-hearted girl, like herself.
He told her how sweet and nice she was, not selfish and spoiled like the others.
It was clear then that he was to be her fast ride out of Dawson Creek.
When he said, “I’d be happy to teach you how to shoot; that is, if you don’t already know how,” she accepted.
The gun fit her perfectly. A Churchill 29” side-by-side ladies shotgun he’d had lying about.
And he was handsome and rich. And because he found her fascinating, she was.
The lumber camp was only the beginning. He had properties down in the States.
And now, he was being held at the Palm Beach County morgue, being chilled on a slab, waiting for someone to poke him and say, Yes, that’s the one. That’s him, all right.
His death was another chapter. Her grief was incremental once she grasped that she was wealthy in her own right, she preened, certain that the bank account bestowed both wisdom and a lifelong contentment. When she spoke, crowds would quiet, attending to her thoughts. The world would bow to her. She felt powerful and beautiful, the owner of a fine house with rolling lawns and lantana bushes, two cars and a library. A library and the elegant shotgun. Hers was a new delirious future spreading before her like a highway to the horizon.
The pity was that Russell got sacrificed in the process.
Mum and Dad—they’re the sorry ones now. She knew that her aunt would pass on the news in a letter to be sent immediately by air to Aberdeen. The news of her acquisitions would set her above their scorn now, in spite of how her small-minded mother continued to rebuke her, insisting she’d tainted all of them—the family—forever.
And yet, when she thought of him after the morgue ordeal, the theater went dark. She no longer felt his presence. It must have been that he no longer thought of her, buoying and transforming her as always into an alluring being. She was just his lonely redhead now, money in her pocket for the first time. Still she knew that she was more than that, more than the fictional creation of a dead man. How was it that he had left the earthly plane so hastily and not stayed to communicate with her, to encourage her?
To call back his memory, as a legacy, she assumed his hatred and vigorous revulsion for his former wives. Pledging herself as a living memorial to his presence, she fanned the coals of his disgust. Feeling the same tightness in her chest, and his frustrations, she set out to vanquish every woman he’d ever slept with. She owed him that.
But Anissa was the primary target and like a true warrior, she studied the enemy. In his library she accumulated every photo album he had, stacking them on the dining room table.
Obsessed with his past, she filed through old photos and barely paused to examine the ones of his first wife and three children. She yearned to know everything possible about Anissa. She cared less about how his first wife dressed, about how she crossed her legs in what silk upholstered chairs and held her iced tea. Her focus was Anissa, the second wife.
Everything surrounding this last one both mesmerized and repulsed her. There she was, a blonde skier in gabardine pants in St. Anton, Austria, with her wary smile. Then again, photographed often in bars wearing hats with barrier cocktail veils that might burst into flames from cigarettes, or at the very least prevent her from sipping martinis. Anissa in her cocktail veils, little black dresses, beauty parlor hair and manicures before she threw it all over and joined