“Bullies create object lessons,” I said. “If we weren’t the target, it would be somebody else.”
She stood up and took off her nightgown in front of the window shade, her body silhouetted against the red glow of the motel sign.
“You’re the most beautiful woman on earth,” I said.
“You think so?”
“Helen of Troy might have been a contender, but I think you’ve got her beat.”
She knelt behind me on the mattress and squeezed my head against her chest and kissed my hair and ran her hands down the sides of my face. “Oh, Weldon,” she said.
The register in her voice had changed. I felt her tears on the back of my neck. “What’s wrong, kid?”
“I don’t deserve a man like you.”
“Never say that, not under any circumstances.”
“Your goodness fills my life. You fill me with light when you’re inside me.”
“It’s the other way around. I’d only be half a person without you. You’re my sister and lover and wife and mother and daughter and all good things that women are. No one could ever take your place. There’s a glow on your skin. You smell like flowers in the morning. I have romantic dreams about you every night of my life.”
She folded her arms across my chest, her mouth against my ear. I could feel her heart beating, her breath on my cheek. I got up from the bed and undressed and lay down beside her. I kissed her stomach and her breasts and her mouth. “I’ll never let anyone hurt us,” I said.
“It’s you they want to destroy, not me. They’ll go through me to get to you, but I’m of little interest to them. Be careful of Roy.”
“He’s probably a womanizer, but I don’t think he’s an evil man.”
“The men who murdered my family were baptized Christians. No one ever called them evil, not until people saw what they had done. Shakespeare said the Prince of Darkness is always a gentleman.”
“Did you hear a sound outside?” I asked.
“No.”
“It must be the wind.”
“I’m sure it is,” she said. “Even if it’s something else, we don’t care.”
We made love the way friends and kindred spirits do, rather than husband and wife or lovers. Rosita was my navigator and conscience and the source of my strength. She was my Ruth, my Esther, my Jewish warrior queen out of the Old Testament. She smelled like the ocean when she made love. Her skin was warm and cool at the same time, her hair fragrant with an odor like night-blooming flowers, her legs long and strong and warm against mine, her mouth wet against my ear.
When we reached that heart-twisting moment that is like no other experience on earth, I felt released from all my problems, as though I were gliding through a starry galaxy that trailed into infinity. I was determined that I would never allow anyone to harm my heroic Jewish wife, who I believed was descended from the House of Jesse.
At four A.M. I heard someone tip over a tin bucket in the driveway. I peeked through the edge of the window shade and saw a man in a hooded raincoat standing five feet from my automobile, looking straight at me.
I slipped on my khakis and my half-topped boots and went outside, my Luger in my right hand. The driveway was empty, the night still except for the water ticking in the trees. Only three blocks away, under a full moon, I could see the Gulf of Mexico and the alluvial flow of yellow mud from the mouth of the Mississippi channeling its way along the coastline, waves crashing in a ropy froth on a barrier island that a dredge boat was hauling away for construction material.
The man by my automobile had disappeared. Had he placed an explosive charge under my car? Or slashed my tires? Or played the role of voyeur and watched my wife and me during sexual congress?
This is how it will go, I thought. They’ll wage a war of gradual attrition that is the equivalent of death in the Iron Maiden. Their resources will be suspicion and anxiety and inculcation of self-doubt and feelings of personal violation. Like the blindfolded man being broken on the wheel, we will never know where the next blow is coming from. And the men behind all this will do it with a phone call they’ll forget about two minutes after they hang up.
“I think you’re still out there, within earshot,” I said. “I’ve killed men against whom I had no grievance. Think what I’ll do to you.”
There was no answer except the wind blowing in the trees, shaking hundreds of raindrops on a pond that glistened in the dark.
Chapter
16
THE NEXT EVENING Hershel knocked on my motel door. He had a six-carton of Jax in one hand and a greasy brown paper bag in the other. He was smiling awkwardly, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Is Rosita here?” he said.