CHAPTER EIGHT
Gray-yellow light poured through the window. Bailey blinked, seeing it out of the corner of his eye. Rolling over in bed, he looked out on the washed hill where the vines, still wet, glistened in the early morning sun. He rolled the other way and looked at his naked, sleeping wife. He lay his hand on her back and ran it lightly down her spine, stopping just at the top of the crack of her lush, rounded buttocks. Now awaking, she made a purring sound. Looking at her, so beautiful and child-like and even innocent-looking in his sleep, he felt his throat tighten with regret. He knew what he had to do. Knowing it, his thoughts never having really left it during the dark of the night so that he'd been reminded of it even during his brief snatches of sleep, he did not even want to arise. But he would have to do it, for better or for worse.
He lay on his back, still and silent, for another ten minutes. If he could have drifted, accidentally, to sleep and let the chance slide by he would have later awakened without regret for the loss. He was not a religious man. He didn't even believe in God. But now, whimsically, he wondered if He might ever have wondered what it would have been like that fateful morning, 2000 years ago in that old story, if He could have overslept there in the garden and missed that betraying kiss that sought him out for his destiny.
But for Bailey that morning the redeeming slumber was not to return. He pressed his body against Sylvia's. She snuggled, sound asleep, warm, against him. She gave a little moan of protest as he slid away and slipped from beneath the covers. He stood up and looked at himself in the mirror, his body spare and hairy, his face rough, aging like the Sphinx. How much easier life for him would be, he thought without genuine envy, if he were like that kid asleep with his prick-tease wife in the other room, still young and dumb and full of cum.
He put on a pair of khakis and a pair of work shoes and tiptoed out the door and down the halt. He paused outside the guest bedroom and listened at the door. There was not a sound. He wasn't surprised. The way those kids had put the booze away last night. They should sleep till mid-morning without a stir. Funny, he thought: a young man could get drunk and if he didn't have something to wake him the next day he could sleep till Kingdom Come. Then at Bailey's age, the more sleep a man needed to get himself back in shape, the less sleep he could get.
He made himself a cup of instant coffee and drank it black, got a couple of 16 ounce beers from the six pack in the refrigerator and walked out of the house, down the road past the barn to the car. He stopped and looked it over, sitting there kind of tilted off to the left with that one rear tire hanging off the edge into the ditch. But it was too easy. Even the kid could figure it out. Just a jack under the rear axle, there at the left extreme to keep it from tilting farther that way. Raise her up a couple of feet and stand with two-by-four on the other side of the ditch and push it off the jack and back onto the road. Rough on the tires, but it wouldn't do any real harm.
He walked on down to the bridge. There was debris caught in under it, right up at the top of the wooden piles. Too bad, he thought, that the damned thing hadn't gone on its own. But they'd never know the difference. They could see the water had gone that high. Twenty-five years old, the old Italian had said, warned him he'd been planning for the last fifteen years to put in a new bridge himself, just because he didn't want to get caught if there was enough rain to wash it away. And now even the rise was almost gone. The water, usually knee-deep, would still fall a few inches short of his waist.
Walking back to the barn he thought, now what if they wake and see me fucking around down here? Then he'd tell them he was just checking, on the car and on the bridge. And if they hear the hammering. He was just trying to fix the sonuvabitch, so they could get away before he got into that blonde's hot little twat for real.
He got the pair of waist-high wading boots and a double-edged ax and the twelve pound sledge and walked back down to the bridge. He stood on the bank, leaning off, peering up under it at the old beam-pillars, redwood, he figured, and the two-by-six supports. With a few supports and the near pillar out it wouldn't be safe to drive across. And it probably wouldn't fall. If it does fall on my goddamned head, he thought, then the sonuvabitch serves me right. And if the kid was an engineer he'd know right away it hadn't been done by the storm, if he even bothered to look, which he probably wouldn't do. Probably be too busy trying to look up Sylvia's skirt. He put on the wading boots and climbed down the bank into the rushing stream.
He was back to the house by nine o'clock. He entered noisily and stalked down the hail. In the guest bedroom he heard the blonde's voice:
"Bob. Bob, wake up. It's morning." Bailey slowed to listen to her. "Bob, we've got to get up and go. Right away."
"Hunh?" he heard the boy say.
"Bob, if you love me, you… you will take me away from this place as soon as possible."
Bailey grinned without real mirth and continued on to his and Sylvia's bedroom. She opened her eyes when he came in, yawned, stretching her arms up over head, the extending of her legs pulling the sheet slowly down off her big arched breasts so the two pink-mauve buds of her nipples peeked out over the top.
"The bridge is out," he said.
She'd been smiling. The smile left her face. She became thoughtful. "Then they can't leave?"
"Not unless they want to walk, or try an Evil Kneivel over the creek."
She shrugged, at last managed another smile. "I guess this is your lucky day. Isn't that what they call an 'Act of God'?"
Bailey set his face, devoid of expression. "I don't think so. I'm the one that knocked the sonuvabitch out and I don't feel very goddamned holy."
He left her stunned and walked out of the room and back down the hall. Passing the guest room he heard the blonde babe putting it to her husband again:
"I'm telling you I know. Just trust me. Bob. We have to leave here."
"They're nice people," the boy said. "And I know we're welcome here."
Bailey smiled, though even he found it too sad to be funny. On second thought, he thought to himself, he wouldn't want to be that young after all.
He went to the kitchen and made himself another cup of coffee, this time with cream, took it to the den and sat down at the table. A few minutes later the kids came in, the boy in front, his blonde wife walking behind him. And though Bailey really couldn't be sure, he had the feeling she was prodding him along, like she had an electric cow-prod, he imagined, or was jabbing her finger up his ass.
"Morning Jack," Bob said. He stopped and stood still and silent for a moment with his wife behind him, hiding, so Bailey couldn't see her face. "We… uh… we've been talking it over and we've decided we'd like to get on the road immediately."
"No breakfast?" he asked.
"Well… Uh… we've really accepted enough of your hospitality and we'd sort of like to get some miles behind us and maybe stop somewhere farther along, if you think there's a way we can get the car out of the ditch."
"That's easy." Bailey sipped his coffee. "Jack the back of her upon the low side, till the tire clears the edge of the road, and shove her over back on the track." Bob frowned and Bailey realized he didn't understand. "But I'm afraid the bridge's out, and that's not gonna be easy."
The blonde moved suddenly past her husband and ran, still without looking at Bailey, to the picture window and looked out. Then she turned back and looked at him for the first time straight in the eyes. "It's not out."
Bailey turned his eyes away from her and lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. "The top half of it's not out, but most of the supports underneath washed away last night. If you try to drive over it before we get it fixed your car's gonna end up sitting in the bottom of the creek."