The Snare

17. WEEKEND

17. WEEKEND The blur was clearing. They were all in the country, the four of them, on a beautiful day. She woke in the room she had been in for what had been left of the night, and got up slowly. The windows were broken and fallen in. One had a curtain nailed across it. There were flies in the room, in sunlight, and these had waked her. She had a feeling they were near the Mississippi River and that she had been in the house for a long time. But maybe it's just the next morning, she thought. Jake, she thought, just the way she always did. They've done something with . . . But she looked across the room and there in a second bed, painted white in almost hospital style, like her own, Jake Springland was lying, heavy and gravid, face down. "Jaker Did she say it aloud? She ran to him, pulling at him, turning. "God." He stirred at last, flinging himself over heavily, tasting his mouth. "Oh, my God." Overgrown bushes, shrubbery once, she guessed, pressed to the windows. The windows were low to the ground, almost as low as doors would have been; one had a stick to prop it up. Everything needed paint except the beds. The one chair in the room (her dress lay across it) was dull, worn, unpainted wicker with flowered cretonne cushioning now ripped and faded. Somebody had picked it out once, she guessed, just as somebody had once put a curtain in a window. These presumed human actions seemed about as much encouragement as she 34i 342 T H E S N A R E could wring out of a situation that had had nothing in it, she was beginning painfully to recall, but debauchery without resistance. She saw then she was standing on the edge of where he had been sick in the night. If there was pain for her in the act of leaning toward him, of touching back with her hand and fingers the hair along his brow, she knew it was because the motion realized the truth of her body again and made it know where it had discovered itself the night before. Springland caught her hand and pressed it, genuine in the gesture. The pain flared up worse than ever and she turned her head away. "Don't," he said. "Don't worry. Please don't think about it. I'm forgetting about it myself. It was pretty bad all right. But don't remember. Call it another hangover. It was just what they gave us, made us take." "We're nothing like that. Not like that." She was halfsobbing , and spinning around, grasping herself across the belly with both hands crossed. "The baby." Jake caught her arm. "If it's there at all, it's okay still. Listen to me." She listened and believed. The stench of vomit came on more strongly. "Let's clean it up at least." Her mouth came wanly up at the corners. "Let's find an old wasp nest to pull down and nibble on, and forget." "You weren't any worse than the rest of us." "If there was any worse to get," she murmured, weary and half-faint in the increasing morning heat. "What self have I got but a body? Oh!" It was gasp and sigh at once. And knowledge. That none can break loose from words spoken or from action done. "Does he hypnotize?"she asked, a faint hope. "I never knew, but after what we let him give us, there's nothing impossible to " "Why did we let him do it? No guns, no razors. By then he'd calmed down." "We just did it, that's all." Looking across the room, across the pool of drying vomit, he saw her back to him, Elizabeth Spencer 343 her body writhing against the white-painted iron bedstead. "Look, Julia. Let's clean up." His voice, she knew, was trying to erase it all, like a blackboard, and I wish to God he could, I wish there was a way to let it happen but I can't believe there is. She moved, stiff, seeking a bathroom door and finding one the other side of Jake. Inside she found a bath towel, faded and frayed like everything else here, and wet it; found an old bucket too and filled it with water from...