Heat of Night Read Online Free

now he was trying to compound it here in a room behind Jake’s Bar. There was so much he wanted to tell her but all he could say was, “Mortal sin. Mortal sin.”
    He ran down the alley, tears spilling from his eyes, whispering it over and over as he ran.

3
    A L V ENZINO slowed the Chevy on the black macadam road when he saw the first signs of Dead Bay village ahead.
    His hands tightened on the wheel and a sudden warm rush of nostalgia for this place flooded through him along with the urgent need to hurry into the town.
    The morning sun was already making of it a burning cauldron two hours before noon; it was so hot not even the bottle flies would be stirring. But he had the urgent anticipatory feeling that he was coming home again after a long time, that he was a kid again and not thirty, that he was going to wade in the bay and swim to the farthest island and help Big Juan with the nets.
    “Kids have it lucky,” he said, thinking about the children still at home with Big Juan and not even realizing he had spoken aloud.
    “What?” his wife asked. Bea, a stout woman with matronly bosom, was a couple of years younger than Al. She’d been considered one of the prettiest girls in school and she did not forget it though almost everyone else had. Marriage agreed with her. She’d aimed toward marriage since she’d first played house, dominating the game. She was a good woman, and she loved Al, but their backgrounds were different. Marriage to Al was a challenge for Bea and she’d set as her goal making him into the kind of civilized husband she believed he should be.
    Bea’s voice jerked Al back to reality and he remembered that he wasn’t one of Juan Venzino’s vital, primitive kids any more; he was a respectable businessman, with Bea working hard twenty hours a day to make him forget his beginnings.
    “What did you say, Albert?”
    He shook his head. Suddenly he hated her fiercely, the way people learned to hate in this hot village. She was “good people,” she loved him, even her nagging was for his own benefit, but he was sick of it. Why had he married her? Why had he let her drag him away to Tampa and an insurance brokerage? Here he was, thirty years old, with nothing he wanted, not even kids. What was the sense of reminding himself that everything Bea said was for his own good? He was tired trying to be something he was never intended to be. Fairly he had to admit she was right. But this didn’t make him like it.
    He stared at this flat, ugly bay country he loved so terribly and felt a sharp pain in his chest. What’s to love? And he couldn’t answer that. For miles before you reached the village the backcountry road was banked up across soggy marshes of saw grass broken by shapeless pools of tidewater. Where the land rose above bay level nothing grew but cabbage palmettos, cabbage palms, and shabby slash pines; there were no living things but hard-shell gophers and rattlesnakes. What’s here to love, for God’s sake?”
    But he stared at it all hungrily as if it were something he’d yearned for a long time without even knowing it. The backyards of frame shacks, with garden patches in black squares, displayed clothes strung on sagging lines and privy doors hanging open.
    Bea’s nose was quivering the way it always did about here on the way home.
    “I hope you’re not going to stay too long this time, Albert.”
    “What’s too long, Bea?” he asked wearily. “Is twenty minutes too long?”
    “It is for me.”
    “Okay. Okay. Pa said it was trouble. That’s all I know.” He sighed, thinking about her correct parents and correct schools and correct existence, and wondering why she’d ever wanted him? “We’ll leave as soon as we can.”
    “Well, I’m just not staying overnight, no matter what violent crisis your family is facing this time. Those kids screaming and the mosquitoes and the sand fleas. My God, I don’t see how they stand it. You ought to thank God every day, Albert, that you