It’s hard to make anyone understand the shock we felt. As if someone had accused a goddess of abominations.
Es lit another cigarette with shaking fingers, and finished up.
“I don’t want your pity, Helen. I don’t want Gene married off to me for the sake of appearances, like some half-discarded mistress. I like you, Helen, but not enough to let you take Gene away from me and then toss him back—or half toss him back. No, I draw the line at that.”
And she stopped as if her emotions had choked her.
As I said, the rest of us were thunderstruck. But not Gene. His face got redder still. He slugged down the rest of his drink and looked around at us, obviously getting ready to explode hi turn.
Helen had listened to Es with a half smile and an unhappy half frown, shaking her head from time to time. Now she shot Gene a warning, imploring glance, but he disregarded it.
“No, Helen,” he said, “Es is right. I’m glad she spoke. It was a mistake for us ever to hide our feelings. It would have been a ten times worse mistake if I’d kept that crazy promise I made you to marry Es. You go too much by pity, Helen, and pity’s no use in managing an affair like this. I don’t want to hurt Es, but she’d better know right now that it’s another marriage we’re announcing tonight.”
I sat there speechless. I just couldn’t realize that that drunken, red-faced poppinjay was claiming that Helen was his girl, his wife to be.
Es didn’t look at him. “You cheap little beast,” she whispered.
Gene went white at that, but he kept on smiling.
“Es may not forgive me for this,” he said harshly, “but I don’t think it’s me she’s jealous of. What gets under her skin is not so much losing me to Helen as losing Helen to me.”
Then I could find words.
But Louis was ahead of me.
He put his hand firmly on Gene’s shoulder.
“You’re drunk, Gene,” he said, “and you’re talking like a drunken fool. Helen’s my girl.”
They started up, both of them, Louis’s hand still on Gene’s shoulder.
Then, instead of hitting each other, they looked at me.
Because I had risen too.
“But.” I began, and faltered.
Without my saying it, they knew.
Louis’s hand dropped away from Gene.
All of us looked at Helen. A cold, terribly hurt, horribly disgusted look.
Helen blushed and looked down. Only much later did I realize it was related to the look she’d given the four of us that first night at Benny’s.
“... but I fell in love with all of you,” she said softly.
Then we did speak, or rather Gene spoke for us. I hate to admit it, but at the time I felt a hot throb of pleasure at all the unforgivable things he called Helen. I wanted to see the lash laid on, the stones thud.
Finally he called her some names that were a little worse.
Then Helen did the only impulsive thing I ever knew her to do.
She slapped Gene’s face. Once. Hard.
There are only two courses a person can take when he’s been rebuked by a goddess, even a fallen goddess. He can grovel and beg forgiveness. Or he can turn apostate and devil-worshipper.
Gene did the latter.
He walked out of the Blue Moon, blundering like a blind drunk.
That broke up the party, and Gus and the other bartender, who’d been about to interfere, returned relievedly to their jobs.
Louis went off to the bar. Es followed him. I went to the far end myself, under the writhing television screen, and ordered a double scotch.
Beyond the dozen intervening pairs of shoulders, I could see that Es was trying to act shameless. She was whispering things to Louis. At the same tune, and even more awkwardly, she was flirting with one of the other men. Every once in a while she would laugh shrilly, mirthlessly.
Helen didn’t move. She just sat at the table, looking down, the half smile fixed on her lips. Once Gus approached her, but she shook her head.
I ordered another double scotch. Suddenly my mind began to work furiously on three levels.
On the first I was loathing Helen. I was seeing that all she’d done for us, all the mind-spot, all the house of creativity we’d raised together, had been based on a lie. Helen was unutterably cheap, common.
Mostly, on that level, I was grieving for the terrible wrong I felt she’d done me.
The second level was entirely different. There an icy spider had entered my mind from realms undreamt. There sheer supernatural terror reigned. For there I was adding up all the little hints of strangeness we’d had about Helen. The Stranger’s words had touched it off and now a thousand details began to drop into place: the coincidence of her arrival with the flying disk, rural monster, and hypnotism scare; her interest hi people, like that of a student from a far land; the impression she gave of possessing concealed powers; her pains never to say anything definite, as if she were on guard against imparting some forbidden knowledge; her long hikes into the country; her aversion for the big and yet seldom-visited coal pit (big and deep enough to float a liner or hide a submarine); above all, that impression of unearthliness she’d at times given us all, even when we were most under her spell.
And now this matter of a ship sailing at midnight. From the Great Plains.
What sort of ship?
On that level my mind shrank from facing the obvious result of its labor. It was too frighteningly incredible, too far from the world of the Blue Moon and Benny’s and cheap little waitresses.
The third level was far mistier, but it was there. At least I tell myself it was there. On this third level I was beginning to see Helen hi a better light and the rest of us in a worse. I was beginning to see the lovelessness behind our idea of love—and the faithfulness, to the best in us, behind Helen’s faithlessness. I was beginning to see how hateful, how like spoiled children, we’d been acting.
Of course, maybe there wasn’t any third level in my mind at all. Maybe that only came afterwards. Maybe I’m just trying to flatter myself that I was a little more discerning, a little “bigger” than the others.
Yet I like to think that I turned away from the bar and took a couple of steps toward Helen, that it was only those “second level” fears that slowed me so that I’d only taken those two faltering steps (if I took them) before—
Before Gene walked in.
I remember the clock said eleven thirty.
Gene’s face was dead white, and knobby with tension.
His hand was in his pocket.
He never looked at anyone but Helen. They might have been alone. He wavered—or trembled. Then a terrible spasm of energy stiffened him. He started toward the table.
Helen got up and walked toward him, her arms outstretched. In her half smile were all the compassion and fatalism—and love—I can imagine there being in the universe.
Gene pulled a gun out of his pocket and shot Helen six times. Four times hi the body, twice in the head.
She hung for a moment, then pitched forward into the blue smoke. It puffed away from her to either side and we saw her lying on her face, one of her outstretched hands touching Gene’s shoe.
Then, before a woman could scream, before Gus and the other chap could jump the bar, the outside door of the Blue Moon opened and the Stranger came in. After that none of us could have moved or spoken. We cringed from his eyes like guilty dogs.
It wasn’t that he looked anger at us, or hate, or even contempt That would have been much easier to bear.
No, even as the Stranger passed Gene—Gene, pistol dangling from two fingers, looking down in dumb horror, edging his toe back by terrified inches from Helen’s dead hand—even as the Stranger sent Gene a glance, it was the glance a man might give a bull that has gored a child, a pet ape that has torn up his mistress in some inscrutable and pettish animal rage.