Heat of Night Read Online Free Page B

bosom. “All the beer he’s drunk, he couldn’t sink even with weights on him.”
    Al allowed himself a smile. He knew she hadn’t intended to be funny at all.
    “You might have a real point there, Bea. I’ll mention it to Big Juan.”
    “Well, don’t tell him I said it. He dislikes me enough as it is.”
    “He doesn’t dislike you, Bea. You’re just self-conscious.”
    “Oh, they all hate me. They know I’m — well, different — ”
    “Better than they are, Bea?” he inquired.
    “Well, I admit I don’t like living as they do. They know it. They resent it. That’s why they hate me.” She dabbed a lace handkerchief at her dry eyes. He’d never seen her really cry, though once he thought she’d cried. Now he knew she wouldn’t soil a lace handkerchief with tears; if she were going to cry she’d use Kleenex. “Oh, Albert, don’t make me stay here too long. We’ve so much to do at home. I want to get the swimming pool started and if we’re not nicer to the Magruders, we’re never going to be accepted in the country club…. Do you hear me, Albert? You’ve got to start being nicer to Ted Magruder.”
    “Okay. Next time I see him, I don’t spit on him.”
    “Now you sound exactly like your father.”
    Albert turned the Chevy along the shell-paved side road that led through mangroves, clustered sea grapes, wild oats and tractionless sand, white as sugar, to the house where he’d been born. He felt his heart pounding faster, an anxiety building in him to be there. He stared out at the bay, calm and flat, and the Gulf beyond the islands and the channel, lying dangerous and enticing as a whore.
    There was an odd emptiness in his voice. “Don’t worry, Bea. Once in a while I might sound like him. “I’ll never be the man Big Juan is.”
    He watched sea gulls screaming out over the piers where some of the kids had tossed fish entrails. A bored pelican perched on a pier support and watched the screaming gulls with one eye. Al could hear the children yelling; one of them was carrying a sting ray, and the others were trying to take it away from him. He was flailing at them with it and screaming as loud as he could. His left leg was bright with blood but his screams were enraged. They were trying to take his sting ray and they were not about to do it. He was going to die fending them off, and die screaming, too.
    But the stillness from the house seemed louder than the screams of the children. It was as if the frame shack sat in a vacuum of its own silence. It was as if someone were dead. No one was dead, yet the silence frightened him and he could not say why.
    He blew the Chevy’s horn loudly, once, twice, three times, not to let them know he was coming — this didn’t seem a vital matter to him — but to break that worrisome silence.
    The kids came shrieking up from the bay, spreading out over the white sand like skittering sand crabs and then crossing through the whiskery growth of sea oats tickling at their bare legs. They were as brown as sea urchins and their teeth gleamed as white as the little stars you found when you snapped open a brittle sand dollar.
    “Albert. Now remember. No money. And don’t you go encouraging your father when he starts talking about diving for treasure — ”
    “All right, Bea. All right.”
    “And no matter what the trouble is, you don’t give them any money. We need every penny we’ve got.”
    “I said all right.”
    “Sure. You said it. You’re not even paying any attention to me.”
    He stopped the car, killed the engine. They were yelling at Albert that a sting ray had slapped its pronged tail into Luis, he had cut away the flesh because this was the only way to get out the prongs that opened like saw teeth after the tail was driven into its victim, and now Luis refused to give up the sting ray. It was his and he was thinking of some way to make it die slowly and painfully.
    They scrambled over the car; the dogs lunged barking and yapping against its