“Yes,” she said. It was the only hope she had. She was helpless against the workers in the marsh. “But wouldn’t it be divine justice if we could kill all of them?”
“Jesus, you’re bloody-minded this morning,” he said, kissing her and hurrying off to shave and prepare for work. He thought about it as he shaved. By itself, it could be idle conversation, even if it was desperately out of character for a girl as gentle as Gwen. The pup came in and chewed on his foot, and George jiggled it playfully. When he finished, Gwen was sitting in the big room, hands on the arms of the chair, eyes unblinking, straight ahead. He was shocked, for she was directly in the light of the glass doors and the morning sun and her face looked strained, washed out.
“Do you feel all right?” he asked.
He had to repeat the question. “Oh, sure,” she said.
Little things. Her appearance. She was still losing weight. The space between her thighs was back. Her face looked thin. The un-Gwenlike talk about killing. And the house was becoming a botanical garden. Every available inch of sunny window space was occupied by pots containing the flytraps. The demand for insects was so great that George had given up. She fed the flytraps raw hamburger, rationing them to one bit per week. She never seemed to tire of feeding them, dropping the hamburger bits onto the small, black trigger hairs, and watching the trap close. Little things. Her pleasing but rather puzzling reversal in her attitudes toward sex. From a woman who wanted to hide the shameful act under the covers, she’d developed into a wild and wanton sexpot. She liked new things. On Sunday she’d suggested they do it on the lounge on the balcony, in the open air, in broad daylight. Wild, absolutely wild. And then, not once but three or four times, he had come home to find her standing ankle deep in the waters of the clear pond, her head tilted back and her arms hanging limply at her sides. Once he’d seen her swaying in the breeze like a tall sunflower. It was, when you put all the other things together, it was sort of frightening. And that last thing, that was the last straw. The cleared areas were overgrown. He’d gotten out the mower. She, hearing it start, had run out, teased him out it, and taken him inside to distract him. And they’d stayed in bed late that very morning. It was as if she didn’t want him to mow the new growth. He was bedamned if he was going to let the damned jungle move back in and take over all of it after all his hard work clearing it.
Little things. Her moodiness. Sometimes he had to speak to her two or three times before she heard. Sometimes she looked at him without recognition in her eyes. And if he didn’t know better, he’d have been a suspicious husband because of the innovations she’d introduced into their lovemaking. Once, when she suggested a particularly weird position, he said, “What the hell? Are you experimenting with a kooky lover or something?”
“Reading books, darling,” she cooed, urging him into the position, which, he found, was interesting, if rather athletic.
“Gwen, you don’t look so good,” he said one day. “Why not have Doc Braws check you over?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
Then there was the flytrap-gathering expedition. “Honey,” he said, when she went off toward the bog with a small trowel and a basket, “those damn things are eating us out of house and home now.”
“It’ll be cold soon,” she said.
“Hell, they’re used to the cold. They’re tough little beggars. They even live through ground fires.”
He followed her, nevertheless. She scooped up only weak-looking specimens. He tired of it and walked back to the clear pond. He was thinking it might be nice to find some tadpoles somewhere and put them into the pond. The croaking of frogs would, at least, offer a bit of counterpoint to the incessant roar of the heavy equipment. Funny that there weren’t frogs there, anyhow. In all his swimming he’d never even seen a minnow. The only life he saw in the pond was the plants and the mosquito larva. He’d been meaning to talk with the game warden and find out about getting some fingerling bass to stock the pond. Be nice to stand on the balcony and cast for a couple of largemouths.
He walked around the pond idly and saw tracks on the far side. Kids were always coming onto the property. He didn’t really mind, but he didn’t want to think of the little bastards hiding there on the far side of the pond watching them on the balcony. Wow. Here he was the one getting touchy about sex, thinking that they’d better not do it outdoors in the daytime again. Well, what the hell. If she wanted to. Give the little bastards a thrill if they snuck up and saw them. When he was a kid there was this couple in the neighborhood. They got drunk on Saturday afternoons and forgot to close the bedroom shades. A boy could stand in the alley, hidden behind a row of tall okra in the garden, and get an eyeful. He chuckled and turned to see what Gwen was doing. She was on her knees, staring and motionless. She apparently didn’t feel his eyes on her. She was about twenty-five yards away. She was close enough for him to see clearly when she cupped her hand in the black, acid earth, lifted it, looked at it thoughtfully, and then took a bite of the dirt. She just lifted her hand, opened her mouth, and took a bite. Just like that.
He didn’t mention it to her. When she came up to the house, with several new flytraps to be potted in rich, acid soil, he noticed a smudge on her chin. After that he started watching her more closely. He felt like a spy. He felt disloyal. He wanted to talk it out with her, to say, “Honey, why the hell did you eat dirt?”
Instead, feeling guilty and a bit scared, but not too upset—because she was, after all, his Gwen, and he knew her, and she was probably just going through a stage of nervousness brought on by the constant noise of the heavy equipment—he dropped in on Dr. Irving King the next time he had to go to Port City to the electronics supply house. He let it all hang out, as the expression goes. He talked about her former sexual hangups and the great change, the attachment to the flytraps, her loss of weight, the circles under her eyes, her sleeplessness, and her uncharacteristic remarks about wishing all the construction workers dead.
King seemed to be more interested after that. And when George got around to the dirt eating, he was positively avid for more information, asking questions and waving his cigar, animated. One question was a gasser. “Do you have any reason to suspect that your wife could be, ah, indulging in marital infidelity?” the doctor asked.
George felt anger at first, and then he considered it. “No, none at all. She definitely would not do that.”
George talked about the constant noise. King wanted details of the construction project. He got them. He leaned back, puffed on his dead cigar, and then chewed it thoughtfully. “Mr. Ferrier, I think it advisable that you bring your wife in to see me.”
“I don’t think she’ll come,” George said. “I’ve been trying to get her to go in to see our family doctor. She finds a million excuses not to go.”
“I see,” King said. “You once invited me to visit you.”
“Sure,” George said.
“I think I will drop in the first of next week.”
“Let me know and I’ll make it a point to be home,” George said.
“I think not,” King said. “I’ll arrange it to arrive late in the afternoon. Then I can have a chat with Mrs. Ferrier before you come home from work.”
“Well,” George said, “if that’s the way you want it.”
When a man is eighty-two, he feels the days growing shorter. The first of the week can mean Monday, Tuesday, or even, in extreme procrastination, Wednesday. But Irving King’s curiosity was aroused once more, and when you’re eighty-two, if you put things off until Wednesday, Wednesday might never come. He drove to Pine Tree Island on Monday afternoon, arriving at the Ferrier house just after three o’clock. He found it to be a charming place, if a little weedy out front. He walked up the steps to the front deck and looked for a doorbell. There was none. He knocked. Waited. When no one came, he went down the steps carefully and walked around the house. He stood for a long time, with his heart acting up to the point of making him uneasy.