The Seducer

21

Buddy Jensen was neither a philosopher nor a theologian. He had never wasted his time speculating about any life other than the one in which he was enmeshed, and he did not waste it now.

There was, indeed, very little time left for anything, since he had made up his mind to die, but it was not for this reason that he refused to speculate about his possible future, if any. It was simply that the speculation did not interest him. If he had any conviction along that line at all, it was only that matters could hardly be worse for him elsewhere than they already were where he was. He had his tragic aspects, but he was no Hamlet compounding his despair by anticipation.

His decision to die had nothing of the character of grim resolution. Dying was something he had to do, and he had neglected to accomplish it sooner because he was simply too apathetic.

This morning, however, he had wakened with the realization that this was the day, his day for dying, and that there was absolutely no point in hanging around any longer in a world where he was wanted by no one, and no one was left to want.

He owned a.22 caliber revolver, a small gun he had picked up long ago in a pawn shop, but he had no bullets for it. Therefore he had been compelled to go to a hardware store to buy some, and then he had kept on walking out of town with the gun and the bullets in his pocket, and here he was now, early in the afternoon, sitting on the bank of a small creek.

The gun was in his hand, and six of the bullets were in the gun. He would only need one, of course, but it seemed neater to fill the cylinder. Now, before shooting himself, he was waiting for a minute or two, taking his time, but he didn’t really know why he was waiting, for there was really nothing worth waiting for.

There was quite a lot of water in the creek as a result of spring rains. A tree had fallen across the stream onto the lower bank on the opposite side, forming a rude and sharply-inclined bridge. In a field beyond there was a small hay barn. Between the barn and the creek, moving slowly closer,’ was a woman walking.

The sight of the woman acted upon Buddy as a mild catalyst. Her approach gave him a kind of measure of time — the few minutes it would take her at her present rate to reach the creek — in which he must rouse himself sufficiently from his lethargy to do what he must do.

And so he sat and watched her come a minute nearer, growing in dimension in the rough field, and then he lifted the revolver and pressed the barrel against his temple and pulled the trigger.

Cornelia York, the woman in the field, heard the shot but thought nothing of it. It was, after all, not unusual to hear shooting in the country, and she did no more than lift her eyes in the direction of the sound.

Reaching the creek, she started across it on the fallen log, and it was then that she saw the figure of a man lying on his back on the higher bank. She thought nothing of this, either, for it was a warm May day, and she herself, not long ago, had lain on her back for a while in the sun to watch the clouds.

Next seeing the ragged bleeding hole in his head and his staring eyes, she still felt no more than a dull shock and a slight quickening of her pulse. Having lived for so many weeks with horror, she had become nearly immune to horror’s effects.

She had lived, indeed, through two terrible traumas. One was the new and disruptive knowledge of her own character, the deep and deadly malice which had made it possible for her to rejoice in the death of Madelaine, who had been her lover’s wife, and in the ruin of Brad, who had been her lover. The other had been the long and corrosive fear of contamination, the daily dread that her own intimate relationship with a murderer might be discovered in the process of investigation and indictment and trial. This latter trauma was still alive and intense, and anything was now compatible with the quality of her life and expectations.

She thought, however, that she had better tell someone about the dead young man, probably the county sheriff, and so she hurried away to do so.