Black Diamond Read online

  ‘And then?’

  ‘They found out about it, of course. Big scenes. Lower-class thug and how could I demean myself and so on: I was doing it to shock, I didn’t really have any interest in him, so on, so forth, trying to make him look bad. I thought I was supposed to have a whiskey here. What is this – gin?’

  ‘It’s a light whiskey.’

  ‘Brucie, this is so light, it could pass for white in Alabama. Put something in it.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I thought I was so smart. We both did. You know how the legal age for marriage varies from state to state? In Arkansas it’s something like fourteen for the girl and sixteen for the boy, but if you’ve got your parents’ consent, it’s about twelve and fourteen. South Carolina, too. I think so.’

  ‘That was supposed to be the Church’s answer to the illegitimacy rate: if you let them get married young, at least all the children would be legal.’

  ‘I thought if I got pregnant, they couldn’t object. I got a copy of my birth certificate and just waited. Where’s that drink?’

  ‘Him?’ he said, suddenly understanding. ‘It was the same guy you’re married to?’

  ‘What about that drink, bartender?’

  He took her glass, poured out more water and handed it to her. As he sat back down in the chair, his hand brushed against her bare leg.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Pretty dumb. I’d underestimated how much they hated me. Some parents do. They’re forced to have kids because of the social conventions – it’s something they need, like a car or a house, to show they’ve made it. But they don’t want them. Maybe I was doing it back, too. Anyway, I waited for it to show, and then they laid it on the line: I was no better than a whore, my moral behavior reflected on them, but I was underage and they were in charge of me and if I didn’t agree to have the baby adopted, they’d call the police and have Ray arrested for statutory rape. That’s what they can do to a man who screws around with a girl who’s –’

  ‘Under eighteen, I know. You should have gotten to the next state before you broke the law.’

  ‘Oh, what I should have done. They’d have caught us under the Mann Act, or something else. You can’t win against people like that. They’d locked me in my room. I wanted that baby so bad. I couldn’t believe they’d be able to do it to me. I figured, if I could just get away, get to Ray, I could give birth by myself and it would be okay. I looked old enough, so we could pass for man and wife. I –’ She sat up, with her hands to her cheeks.

  ‘Yes?’ he said. He thought she was going to choke, but she started to cry, and to scream, and to shout the rest of her story.

  ‘Those bastards,’ she shrieked. ‘Doing that to their own child. Took me in to that adoption place and I fought all the way. Told me how many years he could get behind bars if I didn’t cooperate. Till finally, I gave in. I thought – well, we could get married in two and a half years – in a lot of states. And then we could sue, get the baby back, and it would be better than him going to jail. The other girls sitting there in the waiting room – my God. I can still remember them: Cheryl and Pat. Cheryl was engaged to a boy who was just making his way up the office ladder; they were supposed to have their wedding the next April. But his parents and her parents decided that a baby just then would come at the wrong time for everybody. And Pat – she’d had one boyfriend who’d run out on her and another one that said he’d marry her if she got rid of the baby the first one left her with. I really wonder how that place could have pretended it was helping people. I know what they were doing: they were selling merchandise. They got me into their operating theater and I fought. Everybody was screaming, including me. All those papers they have on their walls, to say how they’ll heal the sick and be as good as Jesus Christ – you should have seen the whole gang of them on top of me, sticking their needles into me like I was a pin cushion. When I woke up, it was all over. The baby was gone. They were nice enough to tell me it was a boy; that was the only decent thing they did: imagine going through all that, and never even knowing? Anyway, I was too weak to put up much resistance afterwards. I kept passing out and crying. My parents got the doctors to tell me that if I didn’t pull myself together, I’d be in the hands of the psychiatrists for the rest of my life. I could even be committed. You know, if you’ve got the money, you can buy a doctor like anything else. That’s what they were afraid of, see – that Ray was after their money. My mother kept saying, “You’re doing it on purpose, I know you are.” I guess she was scared people would find out how they’d treated me. I was on the edge of going crazy: I could feel it right next to me. And I was scared, too. But I finally reached a point where I could think. It was like being one step away, and if you got too near, you’d be standing in the shadow. I knew that if I could get my health back, and just keep living, in a couple of years I’d be in the clear: I’d be with Ray, and we’d get the baby back, and we’d have a lot of others, too. It was a good thing I didn’t find out till later what they’d really done. They’d had him arrested, of course. He was there in jail, all the time, paying his debt to society. Nice, huh?’

  ‘Perfect. How did you get back at them?’

  ‘I used to think about that a lot. It started to take me over. I couldn’t think about anything else. I had less and less of my own life left: they covered everything. Then he got out of jail. He said to forget it; we’d just leave and get married and start our family.’ She sniffed. He handed her his handkerchief. She said, ‘You know, it’s funny: in a way they were right. I mean, I love him, but he’s kind of a lunkhead. And I don’t even know if he’s always on the right side of the law. We don’t have anything in common. Honest to God, I’m lonely as hell sometimes.’ She started to sob again. She sat up from the sofa, tried to pour out some bourbon and sloshed it over the table and floor. She fell on top of him. He grabbed her around the waist, to keep her from sliding to the floor. She tried to kiss him. Then she tried to hit him in the face. She yelled, ‘For Christ’s sake, are you going to sit there all day like a store dummy? Aren’t you going to take me to bed?’

  He got a firm grip on her and stood up, holding her in his arms. The chair fell over backwards behind him. The glass slipped out of his left hand on to the floor, and broke. He said, ‘Okay.’

  He carried her out of the porch, through the living room and into the hallway. He knew where all the rooms were. It would have been best, and appropriate, to take her to the room she and Ray slept in, but that was upstairs and too far away. He lugged her towards one of the downstairs guest rooms and lurched across the threshold with her.

  He almost stumbled, hitting the door with the side of his arm. ‘Whoops,’ she cried gaily. He left the door open. It didn’t matter; there was no one else at home. As he turned around to drop her on top of the bedspread, her wrist caught the lamp on the night table and knocked it over with a crash.

  She was out of her dress in seconds, tugging at his clothes. Twenty minutes later they were still making love when Ray ran into the room and started to shout at them. They turned and broke apart.

  Ray was looking at them down the barrel of a shotgun. He fired at Bruce, who fell – deafened, blinded and bleeding – down the side of the bed. Joanna screamed at him to stop, but Ray pulled the trigger again. The blast shot half her face away.

  Bruce clenched his jaws against the pain, trying not to make a noise. His hands clutched the blankets down on the floor. Everything was wet. Everything smelled like blood. He heard Ray cursing, and another cartridge going into the barrel. He tried not to breathe. But he had no reason to be afraid: Ray turned the gun around, put the barrel into his mouth and blew the top of his head off.

  It took Bruce several minutes to crawl to the telephone. He was sure, all the way, that he’d bleed to death before he got there.

  *

  It made the papers in a big way. The county hadn’t had such a crime of passion for years. The two daughters came back from their school trip to find both parents
dead, their lover in the hospital and the police telling them that he’d been discovered in bed with their mother.

  The younger girl, Didi, slashed her wrists but, being ignorant about the correct method, only managed to make two shallow cuts with a breadknife across the backs of her hands, which she then held up dramatically, declaring that she wanted to die and, look: she’d cut her wrists. Her older sister, Mandy, had more intelligence. She loaded one of her father’s pistols and went to the hospital, gunning for Bruce. The policeman on duty there stopped her before she got to his room. The nurses gave her a sedative.

  The sheriff himself arrived to ask Bruce for his story. It was one of those things, Bruce told him weakly: they’d started drinking heavily and before they knew it, they were in bed and her husband was standing in the doorway.

  Alma came to see him. She sat in the chair and held his hand. His voice was faint and he spoke slowly, but he kept her fingers in a tight grip. ‘So many transfusions,’ he said. ‘Blood. The source of all my troubles. I keep bleeding and they keep pouring it into me. Comes in those jars. Looks dark. Looks brown, like my dream. Could be mud.’

  ‘I’m sorry you were shot,’ she told him, ‘but I’m not sorry you’ve got the time to think. Something had to stop you.’

  ‘I guess. Didn’t stop me soon enough. I was in bed with her.’

  She said, ‘I’m glad Mom isn’t alive.’ She could see as she raised her eyes that it was the only thing anyone had ever said – except perhaps the news of his adoption – that had hurt him. ‘How could you do such a thing?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I felt sorry for her.’ He looked away and yawned, as if bored. ‘It seemed like the natural thing to do. She’d been through so much. What her parents did to her: nobody has the right. They took everything away from her at the beginning. Then she fought her way through, and found out she didn’t have a very good marriage, after all. I think she started to drink when she realized she didn’t love him any more, so it had all been for nothing. She kept talking about her lost child. Well, I just couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t say: I’m it and I’ve been screwing both of your daughters. Could I?’

  ‘The daughters?’

  ‘Nothing special. Neither was she. Except at the end, of course. That was pretty special.’

  ‘I think they want to give you some more blood,’ Alma said.

  ‘Don’t go.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ one of the nurses told her. ‘You can stay.’

  ‘Violent man,’ Bruce whispered. ‘That’s what he was like. Maybe that’s what I’m like, too.’

  ‘Don’t make excuses for yourself.’

  ‘Why not? It’s true what you said. I’ve destroyed myself.’

  ‘And a lot of other people.’

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted. He turned his face to the side, looking towards the door. She thought that his mind had wandered to something else, but after a while he came back to the subject. He said, ‘But they don’t matter.’

  ‘Don’t you feel any sorrow for them?’

  He caught his breath and swallowed in a way that reminded her of when she’d seen Bess for the last time. ‘Isn’t this enough?’ he said.

  The nurses began to wheel a table into the room.

  ‘I’m the one you should have slept with,’ she said.

  ‘Brother and sister?’

  ‘Not by blood.’

  ‘Psychologically.’

  ‘So much the better. In spite of everything, we’re your real family. The others are still nothing to you.’ She wanted to say he should have been able to figure that out a long time ago. But he looked too tired and he’d never been able to stand criticism. ‘Try and get well,’ she told him. ‘You’re the only one I can’t spare.’

  ‘You always loved me, Alma.’

  ‘Always. And if you hadn’t been so scared of it, we’d have been all right.’

  ‘Think so?’ he said.

  The nurses advanced with their bottles and jars and rubber tubing. His eyes dilated. He held her hand harder.

  Alma said, ‘I had a dream about you. And in the dream, you lived.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bank on it. I just saw the doctor walk down the hall. Same son of a bitch that did the other operation on me: the one that didn’t work. Why don’t they let me die?’

  Alma said, ‘Stop talking like that. You aren’t going to die. I’ll be thinking of you every minute you’re in there. I’ll be praying so hard, helping you. You’re going to pull through just fine. And then you’ll get well.’

  A nurse came up to the bed, saying, ‘Miss –’

  Alma wouldn’t pay attention to her. She leaned forward, to catch what Bruce was trying to tell her.

  *

  I had a dream that I was in the hospital and Alma came to see me. My time was running out. I could feel it trickling away from me, all my time.

  She said, ‘You aren’t going to get out of this so easy. You’re going to keep on living.’

  I was so tired that I wanted to sleep. They were going to do an operation on me. I thought I might sleep through that, too.

  A nurse came into the room. Alma said, ‘I’m not leaving,’ but I said to her, just like the tough guys in the movies, ‘Kiss me goodbye, Alma.’

  She kissed me on the cheek. And I said, ‘Not like that. That’s for strangers.’ So she kissed me again.

  Be My Guest

  Sandra and her boyfriend, Bert, worked for the same firm. She knew that that was a mistake. She’d known it from the beginning, but mixing business with pleasure was something everybody did. It was just because everyone did it that there were so many warnings against it. Where she and Bert worked, everybody certainly did it all the time. It was convenient. Of course, it was more convenient for people who were married, especially for the men. Bert wasn’t married, but somehow he acted as if he were – as if he had other commitments that she didn’t have the right to question him about.

  On Thursday night they had a quarrel because, having planned – and promised – to take her on a weekend trip, he’d changed his mind and decided to go fishing or hunting, or something like that. He said that he’d be with three other men he’d known from college days. She didn’t believe that, or at least she said she didn’t, because she didn’t want him to break his word to her. If he were really going to trade in a weekend with her for one that meant getting drunk and swapping stories with the boys, then that showed just what he thought she was worth.

  On Friday morning she waited to see if he’d back down and tell her that he wanted to be with her, after all. He didn’t. He took the flightbag and the smaller tan suitcase and he went off to work, without another word to her, as if she’d agreed to it the night before and as if she hadn’t told him, ‘If you do, I’ll know how much you care about me.’ Why had she said that? It made the outcome seem inevitable. She could have waited, quietly, to see what would happen. But anyway, what she’d said only made the matter appear final for her, not for him. He wouldn’t give it a thought. Maybe she’d better spend the weekend mulling over how much it really did matter to her whether he cared, and – if he did or didn’t – whether she ought to get out of the affair. Perhaps she should do another kind of thing everyone else did, too: let things slide and start going out with somebody else on the side.

  When she got home from the office in the evening, she didn’t want to do the laundry or get into the bathtub: Bert might telephone. She walked back and forth, willing the phone to ring, until she couldn’t stand the tension. She made herself a cup of coffee, sat down in the easy chair and turned on the television.

  She watched a comedy serial, two short westerns and an old black-and-white movie from the thirties. She was thinking of switching the set off when a second film followed – a romantic adventure, shot in lush color and set on a tropical island. From the instant the music began, you could tell what kind of story it would be: just her kind. She burrowed more comfortably into the chair.

  At first the film presented a map of the S
outh Seas. Then the printed names and numbers faded, turning into a real picture: a boat, off in the distance. Meanwhile, a mysterious-sounding voice said, Legend tells us that among the atolls of these vast, uncharted seas there lies an island named Mona Zima, the place of the jewel. So potent is the lure of its fame that, though none return from the quest, it continues to draw to it men of passion and daring. Such a one was Joshua Bridgewater in the year 1908. At last, young Captain Bridgewater himself was shown, standing masterfully at the wheel of his ship, The Dauntless, while the ocean grew stormy. His men came up to ask him questions and he barked back orders. The sea became wild and tumultuous. Sandra took two large gulps of coffee.

  As the captain’s plight became steadily more dangerous, the voice went on to tell the story: One of the volcanic islands in a little-known and as yet unmapped chain was populated by members of a secret religious cult. Its worshippers sacrificed to an idol that was inlaid with many jewels, all set around one fabulous diamond: an enormous stone (bigger than a fist) of perfect purity. It would have made more sense for the inhabitants of a tropical island to revere a giant pearl and not a diamond, but that was explained; the jewel had been brought to the place by an Indian prince, who was fleeing from his brother’s army. Just as the maharajah’s ships reached the treacherous reefs, a storm blew up and the seas pounded everything to splinters. All the people were drowned. Nothing survived but a small, ornamental casket that was shaped like a boat and therefore, captainless, floated into calmer waters until it gained the shore. Inside was the diamond. From the moment of its arrival it was considered sacred, not simply on account of its great beauty, but because of the seemingly magical way it had steered itself – as if by conscious will – to a place of safety.

  The cult worshippers thought that the large and still-active volcano on their island could be pacified by the light of the jewel. They also believed that the diamond would bring them good luck in general, that they were meant to guard and protect it and that all strangers wished to steal it. Any foreigner who expressed interest in it was told that it didn’t exist: it was just a story. If he managed to discover the idol and see it for himself, he was killed.