An Eye for an Eye Read Online Free Page B

heavy features seemed too large for his face. His hair was light, almost blond, thick and wavy. He was proud of it. His eyes were blue, peering with a shallow brightness from under lids that looked perpetually swollen.
    He picked up his two baskets of potatoes and went out.
    He walked across the hard bare ground in the yard, a distance of perhaps twenty-five feet, to the ramshackle garage. Here he had to put his baskets down to open a door, a clumsy batten construction that had to be propped open with a brick. Otherwise it was liable to blow shut with a bang, jarring the little wooden bar into place and locking you in the garage. Al had paid close attention to details like this since he had moved in six days ago. He propped the door carefully, kicking the brick to make sure it wouldn’t shift. Then he turned and took a brief last look at the layout.
    He didn’t see how it could be better.
    The house stood by itself between a vacant double lot and the shallow channel of Chance’s Run. It was the traditional four-room house, two rooms up and two down, and what little plumbing there was, was in the cellar. Al had grown up in one exactly like it in Butler, Pennsylvania. It had some broken-down pieces of furniture in it, pretty sad but enough to get by on. Al had rented it from the owner, an old Italian man who lived a couple of blocks away. He had told the old man his name was Harper, and when the old man asked him suspiciously what a single fellow wanted with a furnished house he had told him his wife was coming back from West Virginia, where she had gone to visit her sick mother. He had paid a month’s rent in advance.
    It was the last house on the long winding street. An old Polish couple lived in the next one beyond the double lot. They didn’t speak hardly any English. The old man worked night trick in the mill and slept all day. The old woman practically never came out of the house. The blinds were kept drawn all the time except in the kitchen, so the wallpaper wouldn’t get faded. Al knew the Polish pretty well. The old woman would scrub and scrub all day until the floors glittered and every last thing in the house was so clean you were afraid to look hard at it for fear you’d smudge it. Between that and cooking up big pots of stew and baking bread she wouldn’t have any time to wonder what the neighbors were doing.
    In summer it would have been tougher. People lived on their porches and in their bitty garden patches, and there were always kids roaming around. But all that was over for this year. He wished the straggling shrubs along the fence still had their leaves on for a better screen, but you couldn’t have everything.
    On the other side of the run there was nothing but a hillside with some blight-killed elms and some scrub maple and a lot of brush. A single track ran in a cut high up on it. The only regular traffic was the junction train that took the yard men to work. There wasn’t anything in front of the house but the street and the curving stream and more of the hillside. In back of it the streets angled off so there was nothing too close there, either. Al had spent many hours finding the right place. It looked as though this one was made to order.
    It was going to have to be good enough. Because now he was on his way.
    A surge of intense excitement came over him, knotting his belly, stringing tight the muscles of his arms and thighs. He picked up the two baskets and put them into the back part of his middle-aged sedan, on the floor. He was shaking and his loins were hot. It was a good feeling, a proud feeling. His eyes shone with it. Maybe I’ll go back in and get the gun, he thought. Maybe I’ll decide to kill somebody right now. He swung his big fists in the air and enjoyed the idea. But he didn’t go back for the gun. He had made his plans. Maybe I’ll kill them, he thought, but I’ll say when. And they’ll jump, by God, they’ll jump when I tell ’em.
    He pulled an open pint bottle out of