Six
Joyce Blair parted the Venetian blinds in her bedroom
at dawn and watched perplexed as the son of her next door neighbor
wandered off across the slope. She couldn't imagine why David should be
up and about so early, but it left his hunk of a father alone in the
house.
She stood gazing out into the hazy morning assessing
the moves open to her on the chessboard of life. John and David Hartman
had just buried their wife and mother. They still grieved terribly. How
could she even think of making a play for John so soon?
The throbbing bruise on the side of her face was
sufficient motivation to try. She was going to get the shit kicked of her
again in about four hours otherwise. What else could she do? She needed
help. Who else but John Hartman fit the bill?
Roy Rockingham was a trucker and came home weekends
to drink and sleep. He had his way with her from Friday night to
Monday morning, that in exchange for food, clothing, and shelter. It had been an
equitable arrangement for the past two years. The hitting, though, was
something new. It was getting worse, and it had to stop.
She thought of simply asking John in polite fashion
for help, except he'd be a fool to get involved for no good reason. He'd
just send her to the sheriff, and they’d just tell her to leave, except
that she had nowhere to go.
John would need considerable motivation to stand up
to a man of Roy's size and temperament. Could she give him that? She had
turned his head now and then, even as a happily married man. As an expert
at gauging the intensity with which a man's hormones percolated, she
judged John's to be near the boiling point after a long hot summer without
a soft body in his bed at night.
Would he be up to it? John had been a local deputy
sheriff himself not so long ago, but he had a drinking problem of his own,
and he had been hurt in the accident that had killed Marlene. Joyce knew
about psychological injuries that showed no wounds to the world. She had
incurred more than her share of those herself. Those kinds of hurts may
have taken a lot of the wind out of John's sails.
She turned away from the window with her pulse
beating a bit quicker. She could do nothing but try, although Marlene
would be a tough act to follow. Regardless, a freshly scrubbed feminine
body smelling of jasmine would be hard for even grief and
self-recrimination to held at bay. She turned away from the window to
dress down to the occasion.
She hummed tunelessly as her bathwater ran, thinking
that any move she made to wile her way into John's grace in this manner
would be patently transparent, although it would not pay to be coy. Given
but a single opportunity, John must not misconstrue her intent. It was
bad enough that he felt pity for her. He could not have helped but hear
her screams and Roy's boisterous roaring Saturday night.
It was as likely, though, that he loathed her
weakness. Marlene Hartman had told her time and time again to simply walk
away from the relationship. John would reason the same way. Neither had
understood the subtle ways Roy had undermined her independence and how
effective his strategy had worked over the long haul. He had given her
everything she needed. She had never held a job, or balanced a checking
account. She knew nothing of how to function in the world, skills most
people took for granted.
She had developed but one skill in life. She knew
how to keep a man from getting bored with her. John's wife was gone and
he was hers for the taking. She had no recourse but to make the
cold-blooded attempt, and she slid naked into the soapy water hoping that
Roy would get his at long last. Alcoholics tended to hate one another.
Pitting one against another had to be something of a stroke of genius.
She finished her bath and donned her skimpiest bikini
and a whispering satin robe with a loosely tied sash. She then wandered
the house in search of an appropriate and believable strategy with which
to present herself to her next door neighbor. First impressions counted
for everything. She needed a touch of drama to pull off the most
important seduction of her life.
She eyed Roy's half bottle of whiskey on the kitchen
counter. She rushed to the counter and swiped it aside in a surge of
anger, leaping out of harm's way as it toppled off the counter and
shattered on the torn linoleum floor in a shiny glitter of broken glass.
She then crouched and selected a shard of tinted glass between thumb and
forefinger.
Desperation called for desperate measures. She
splayed a trembling hand, lined up a clear edge of glass, and made a quick
slice across the fleshy heel just above the wrist. She watched blood ooze
from the wound and drip to the floor with a trembling smile.
"Goodness gracious, I seem to have cut myself." She
mocked a sigh of exasperation. "And I'm darned if I can find a bandage
anywhere. I guess I'll just have to borrow one from the nice man next
door."
She trotted out the back door in bare feet and across
the lawn between the houses. A tap at the back door fetched the
bare-chested specimen of masculinity from the deeper shadows of the
house. He had pulled on a pair of pants and sneakers, but his laces were
undone.
John Hartman had a rugged face and short hair
peppered with gray. His athletic body stirred the passions of the most
inveterate spinsters on the Ridge. She tried to ignore the evidence of
drinking in his disheveled appearance. "John, hello," she murmured in her
most melodic tone of voice.
"Joyce." He said her name a bit too curtly. At
least he remembered it. "What can I do for you?"
She held up her bleeding hand. "Got a Band-Aid?"
He eyed the wound with suspicion, then shoved the
door open the rest of the way. "I think I can fix you up."
Be my guest, John Hartman. Fix me up good.
She followed him to the kitchen sink. He placed her
hand on his right arm, moistened a paper towel with his good hand, and
dabbed at the wound. He then fetched a tin of bandages featuring Taz and
Bugs Bunny from the cupboard and dumped its contents onto the counter.
John caught her studying the clever sequence of moves
that enabled him to work with one hand. She turned beet red with
embarrassment. "Is it getting any better?" she asked clumsily.
His held his mangled hand to view. "It's not going
to get any better."
He peeled the backing off the bandage with his
teeth. When she raised her hand for him to apply the bandage to the cut,
her sash slipped. The red satin robe parted, and John Hartman's paused in
reaction to the sight of a nicely contoured torso exposed to the glow of
morning filtering from outside.
"Whoops." She said it with a conspiring whisper and
a smile. She fought valiantly with one hand to close the robe, all to no
avail. "Sorry. I was planning on doing some sunbathing."
He applied the Band-Aid and patted it in place with a
flourish. "You'll have to wait until the sun comes out, won't you?"
He gave her a strained smile. It could go either way
from here despite her oversight. She shucked the robe entirely and draped it over one arm. "I
was just trying to be modest, but all the girls run around in these
outfits nowadays." She looked down at herself. "Aren't they outrageous?"
"It's never the clothing," John said with a wane
smile. "It's always the content."
Joyce basked in the compliment. "I'm glad you think
so."
Their eyes met, and his smile faded. "That's a nasty
bruise you have there."
She turned her face to one side to show him the full
array of abuse she had suffered. "Roy hit me last night."
John ran his fingers along her cheek, frowning as he
gauged the severity of the injury. "You know what they say. The first
time, shame on him. The second time, shame on you.”
"Trite," Joyce spat. "It's not that easy."
"How so? A restraining order usually works."
A surge of humiliation brought tears to her eyes.
"It's his house. He won't give me any money. He won't let me work to
save any. Where would I go?"
John had only to give the challenge a moment's
thought. "You'll have to try for a shelter in Portland.”
She knew about the shelter, a place of strangers in a
strange town. "I called once. They didn't have room for me."
His expression hardened. "They'll make room, if you
show up on their doorstep. They'll help get you settled somewhere."
She nodded reluctant agreement and looked down at the
floor. The shelter wasn't what she wanted. It would have to do if she
had no alternative. What she really wanted was somebody to take Roy's
place. John, perhaps.
John surprised her by snatching a paper towel from a
roll on the wall and dabbing at the tears on her cheeks. She stepped away
from him, too filled with shame to continue with her charade. "I'm not
fooling you a bit, am I?"
"That's a nice tan you have there," he said quietly.
"You shouldn't toast yourself in the sun so much. I hear it's not good
for the skin."
She burst into laughter that he could treat her so
kindly. "Oh, I know, but I hate white boobs and butts!" She pulled down
a strap of her bikini top to show her shoulder. "See? No white marks."
John met her gaze and said nothing.
Joyce lifted a strap of her bottom to show the curve
of her hip. "None down there either."
Someone burst into the kitchen. The screen door
slammed against the wall, and she lunged into John's arms for protection.
"Dad! There's a monster on the slope!"
David Hartman stared at her in astonishment. To be
caught red-handed in the middle of her tasteless seduction by John's son
was more humiliation than she could bear. She turned and brushed past the
boy, fleeing the house sobbing.
Racing across the lawn between the houses and through
the side door, she made it halfway across the kitchen before a sharp edge
of broken glass bit into her right foot. She had forgotten about the
shattered bottle. She fell screaming, certain she was about to lacerate
her naked body from head to foot on shards of razor-edged glass.
Impact knocked the wind from her lungs. She lay
gasping, not daring to move. She waited for a twinge of pain to register,
or the warm sensation of blood flooding beneath her.
Time hung suspended in the deathly stillness. A hand
slipped beneath her arm. John Hartman gently hauled her to her feet.
"Watch the glass," he murmured.
She looked down at her bare midriff in a horrified
search of injury. John scooped her effortlessly into his arms, carried
her into the living room, and sat her on the couch. Only when she put her
foot down did a stab of pain remind her of the injury to her foot. She
crossed her leg over her knee and extracted the offending shard of glass
from her skin.
Her habit of going barefoot in the world had paid a
modest dividend. The sliver had buried itself in callused skin without
drawing blood. She dropped the shard in an ashtray and looked at John
then, surprised and more than a bit pleased that he had rushed to her
rescue so promptly.
His dark eyes held her a willing captive. He reached
behind her back, loosened the slipknot of her bikini top, and slipped it
from her shoulders. He rested his hand on her shoulder. "You really do
have a nice tan," he said gently, eyeing her exposed breasts with
deliberation. "I don't see a tan mark anywhere."
He stood and backed away. "Excuse me, but I've got a
ten-year-old and a monster out on the slope to contend with."
She wanted desperately to run after him and throw
herself into his arms. To do so would ruin everything. John Hartman
would be untouchable until she had gained his respect.
But the offer had been presented to him, and he’d
know the nature of the trade she had in mind. It wasn't one he could
lightly dismiss, and one he had just made clear did not offend him.
