The Brat Read Online Free Page B

you’re going to be rich. And because I love you—
I do
. Don’t you like it?” The last slyly, with slanted eyes.
    “What are you doing?” I said.
    She had turned, twisting against me as she removed her skirt.
    “Undressing, Lee. You, too—take off your clothes. I want you. Now. Here. Before we leave. I want to pull the curtain on all that, Lee.” She turned, kneeling on the seat of the car. “Right now, Lee.”
    Her flesh was still hot from the flames of her dream.
    We came as far as St. Petersburg, on the Florida west coast. This was supposed to be a stopping-off place, but in two days we had rented an apartment, an expensive one. I had lived nearby before heading for the Everglades, and my savings were here. My credit was good. My family had lived here and their reputation had been sound.
    “How did you earn your money, Lee?”
    “Lot of different things. Nothing special.”
    “But how come the money?”
    “I always tried to save.”
    “I like that.”
    Only there was something wrong with the way she said it. I didn’t know it then, but this was the first move toward one hundred thousand dollars plus, in a concrete-walled safe at the Braddock & Courtland Building and Loan Association’s offices, right here in town.
    First there were the buying sprees, the endless charge accounts, bills fluttering into the mailbox like sacks full of leaves.
    She returned to the apartment day after day, the fresh excitement all through her, with crazy things—book ends priced at two hundred dollars, with no books to put between them. So she bought books, by the hundreds. Then furniture, until the apartment was clotted. Chinaware. Drapes at five hundred dollars a crack, to cover a single window.
    I decided it was time to return to work. The savings had dwindled rapidly, but we loved each other, and I got a kick out of her actions. The money somehow didn’t matter. Everything she did was with intense spirit and a degree of excited happiness I’d never seen. I wanted her happy. It was a giddy world, a world I wanted to keep.
    I took a job in a print shop. I knew the work and liked it. We couldn’t be together as much as we both wanted, but I began to realize we had to head into dock.
    • • •
    “Evis, you’ve got to slow down.”
    She would never change. Not Evis. But her outward appearance had changed. She was in the beauty class now. There was no getting around it, my wife was an absolute knockout. People stared. Men flipped a little when she walked down the street.
    “I know I’ve spent too much, Lee. But I had a reason. We’ve got to have a house. I don’t like small apartments.”
    “We can’t swing a house. I’m not making enough money at the shop for that. They’ve got a lot of new accounts—in fact I got them for them. But I get my salary, and that’s all. How the hell can we buy a house? You nuts or something?”
    “Come here, darling.”
    She was lying on the floor with a bunch of pillows, wearing one of these damned house smocks …
    We managed a house. There still wasn’t enough money, but I had the job, a good salary. We swung a loan for the house. I could see rough sledding ahead the way she went at things. Like a blitzkrieg in tight nylons. I didn’t see black night and no sled at all.
    She came running into the house one afternoon.
    • • •
    “I’m working, Lee! Braddock and Courtland. It’s a loan outfit down on First.”
    You’d think she’d been emancipated, the first woman to earn a buck by working for it. She wouldn’t hear of quitting. It bothered me the way she began talking about wanting more and more money.
    Along about then we got to arguing about her family. Trying to reach her some way, I ridiculed them. Instead of agreeing, she resented it. I’d been drinking more than usual, and I went out that night and got drunk. I met a guy Ed Fowler. He brought me home and we’d been good friends ever since.
    Ed was a writer. He sold adventure articles to the men’s