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Page 4.

Tom and Kate Morgan stayed in Chicago for a time. They lived in a cheap apartment near the bay, in a third floor rear walkup with a rear landing and outside stairs. The place was a tenement, teeming night and day with screaming children, roaring drunks, and crying women. It was a veritable Babylon, with every tongue on earth being spoken.

The trains were too hot now to pull any schemes. Kate avidly followed the newspaper stories, reading them to Tom as they sat over coffee and toast for breakfast each morning.

The man Tom had forced to step off the train had landed and crushed his skull on a boulder, dying instantly. She felt a little pang in her gut as she read about this.

Elsewhere, she read about the man Tom had shot. After hours of silence, the toilet where the other railroad detective had died began to ooze a thick, dark liquid from under the door. Porters at first stepped over it and avoided it and told each other to get a mop and a bucket but nobody did, until they realized it did not stink like liquid feces but instead was cold, congealing blood. Tom and Kate were several states away before white-jacketed porters and the Chinaman broke down the door. The case was widely reported with the usual trumpeting of end-times and lax morality, but nobody really knew what had happened. The railroad issued a terse statement that the policemen had probably died in line of duty, since Wanted posters were strewn about the train tracks, but it wasn’t clear who had murdered them. Nobody came forth to offer a clue.

Tom ate a ham sandwich while Kate sipped tea and read to him. Tom said: “Dammit, we have to lay low. And I need money.”

“So?” Kate said. “I don’t think anybody is on to us. Although it was rather stupid of you to throw the posters after the guy.” As she often did, she nervously fingered the gold locket around her neck, and stuck it down her blouse for protection.

“Stupid?” Tom raged. “What choice did I have? What the hell is the matter with you? Do I see you carrying a gun? No, you depend on me to save and protect us both.”

“Dear, you should have stopped to take our poster with us. Then they’d suspect all the others.”

“Or, I take that one out, and they know it’s us. Why don’t you stick to your tea, and I’ll stick to doing the thinking around here.”

“Oh really, honey? And that’s why we’re sitting here in this dump, with breakfast but no lunch or dinner? Good job, honey.”

He made a fist, as if he were going to hit her, and his eyes blazed, but bent angrily over his sandwich. “Go to hell.”

She changed the subject, the way she always did when there was no reasoning with him. “So we stay off trains for a while. How long? A year? Two years?”

“I have an idea,” he said. “Time for you to take another one of those temporary domestic jobs you’re so good at.”

“I don’t have much choice, do I? I have an idea. You stay here and do all that thinking, and I’ll go out to work and support us.”

He reddened. “I’ll support us, Kate. I’ll go out and put my poker skills to use. You’ll see. We’ll do okay.” His look appealed to her, reminding that they had been soul mates growing up in Iowa and ever since.

She sighed and put her paper down. “Oh, all right. Come here.” She opened her arms with that raw sexuality she could radiate so intensely. He rushed around the table to kiss her. As they hugged, spoons and a salt shaker fell of the table. She ran her hands down his back to his buttocks. “Gimme,” she said in a barely audible groan.

He uttered a groan of passion and lifted her to take her to bed. She pulled up her dress as he carried her, and with closed eyes and face turning side to side, gave him a stray thump on the chest. “Come on. “

He threw her down on the bed. She pulled up her knees and was ready for him, with her legs open. She taunted: “Are you man enough?”

He tore her underwear off along pale, smooth woman-legs. Her words rang around his ears, incomprehensible in the beating of his blood—she taunted, she begged, she cajoled.

Tossing her bloomers aside, he stared down into her as he furiously undid his belt and dropped his pants before crawling across the bed toward her. Her savage woman words rained down on him as he ran across the mattress on his knees to throw himself on her and silence her with the rage of his passion. She knew what was coming. She welcomed it. It was part of their rising to the fire, the way the sun rises from shadowy mountains in the morning and sets the sky aflame.

“Yeah!” she snarled, reaching for him with clawed fingers. Her eyes were dark orbs of desire and fury, her face a pale blur, her mouth a dark tear between wet rouge lips. He slapped her across the face, grazing a cheekbone. Stunned, she turned her face aside with the blow, but ready to take the rest of what he would give her. He tried to slap her firmly left, right, left, but she blocked his arm and pinned his wrists in her powerful hands. She spat at his face. His expression became something between rage and hunger. His eyes got huge. The corners of his mouth turned down, and his discolored teeth showed.

It was the only way she could enjoy letting a man take her. He had to defeat her, like an army climbing over ramparts in a hail of arrows. She wanted to be defeated and taken and spread open and ravaged with sex and love and passion. Her eyes fluttered as she recovered from the first blow. He squirmed around on her, grunting like a wild animal and pawing her wetness. Bracing herself, palms down, she made a bridge of her strong, firm, and ample body. She slammed her heels down repeatedly to bounce on the bed so that her bush struck his grasping palm, and wet slaps resounded through the room.

She sat astride him, still in her dress. She rode him like that for some intense minutes. He lay with his eyes closed, enjoying bliss. She felt like slapping him hard across the face in retaliation, but she knew he would go berserk and maybe forget about making love and beat her instead. In one impatient sweep, she pulled off her dress. It slid easily over her smooth, firm skin. She let it flutter away, and with it her slip. Her brassiere followed. “Grab them,” she said tensely. He reached up to grasp the nurturing breasts she offered him, just for him, with thrusting nipples, and nut-dark areolas each studded with a circle of nubbins.

Her pale back was long and curving, shadowed along the fossa of her spine, her waist was full and firm, her buttocks were wide and creamy, her hair tumbled about as she turned her head from side to side in the rhythm of their unity. Tom pulled her gently down to nurse on her, and she grew patient as she looked at him and waited. They had been soul mates since adolescence. They had been making passionate love since long before their youthful marriage amid the grinding barrenness and intolerable boredom and then tragedy of their lives in Iowa. Nowadays, their sex was still always passionate, but the gaps between were growing ever more painful and alienating for her as Tom drank and grew moodier and more violent. He hurt her. He had murdered men, and was growing ever more dangerous, even for a woman like Kate, for whom his dangerous edge made a heady liquor. In the abandon of the love bed, that dark edge upped the ante, like when he pushed more money into one of his smoky poker games. But increasingly, except in little island moments of time like this, that intoxication grew harsh and repellent. Somewhere, deep in her soul, she knew a break was coming. Not now, not with him grasping her, mouth full, mewling under her in need as she suckled him and gently rode up and down on his hungry shaft. Not yet, but soon. She had no idea how or when, but the end seemed near. After that, she had no idea—she could not think beyond the moment. He cried out, forgetting her breasts. He held her by her sides and started thrusting in piston-quick motions. They wailed cacophonously as his savagely thrusting, bony hips slammed up at her in a frenzy, rocked her up and down. She cried out dizzily as they came together in an exhausting blur. Then they lay together, entwined, immobile, hung over from their passion and near unconsciousness as if glutted from a feast in the darkish room. As he snored on his back, she lay with her hands and chin on his chest, regarding the enigma she loved. The arch inside her thighs was gloriously sore, still trembling with the echoes of their unity. Her cheekbone, as it often did, throbbed as it swelled. She sighed deeply, and enjoyed the moment as if it were the last.