April Evil by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online

primitive conscience made him try to “help out,” but his efforts were fragmentary and soon forgotten. He seemed to have the attention span of a small child, but all the sexual energies of a healthy young ram. And he was in ram heaven. A solid roof, a lot of food, a firm-bodied young wife and the privilege of sleeping until noon.
    For some time Paul Tomlin wasn’t able to draw the girl out. When at last she began to talk he found that his plaintive hope had been correct. She had sharp native intelligence. She’d had very little schooling. Her manners and her sensitivity were innate. And this was a house of books and of music. This was a house of a thousand new doors, all open to her. It both pleased and amused the doctor to see the avidity with which she entered the new worlds, to sense her hungriness for new intellectual experience. He subtly guided her reading, the music, their conversations. At dinner Joe Preston would gulp his coffee and leave the table, glad to be away from conversation that bored him.
    Laurie had taste and imagination. It was fun to talk to her. It underlined a loneliness within himself that he had never suspected.
    He remembered the things she said. “I don’t dig this Bartok. I mean I think I see what he’s trying to do, but I don’t think I like it.”
    “What do you think he’s trying to do?”
    “Make music into arithmetic. Sometimes the notes sound like … like a roof where a bunch of icicles hang off. They’re all different lengths, and different sizes, but they’re all icicles. There isn’t anything to melt them. I don’t mean music has to be schmaltzy. But … there has to be more than tricks.”
    Or—“Maybe I can see what this Hemingway is doing, Doctor Paul. He could take the very same scene and by describing it a different way each time he could make you feel differenteach time, make you feel like the people in the scene feel. That keeps him from having to try to tell you what the people are thinking.”
    Or—“The thing I like best in the books and in the poetry and in the music is when all of a sudden something comes up that makes you feel all prickly, the back of your neck and the backs of your hands, and you can’t breathe deeply. It’s like you recognize something you knew all along. Is that what they try to do to you?”
    “That’s what they want to do, yes. But few people ever respond that way. Too few people, Laurie.”
    They talked together a great deal. Paul Tomlin was able to ignore the depressing presence of Joe Preston for the sake of the delight he took in watching this girl grow and unfold and flourish. She made the more immediate relatives, Dillon and Lenora Parks, poor things indeed. As she grew in stature, the efforts of his guidance became more visible. He began to feel possessive, and also felt growth and change within himself.
    He became more resentful of Joe’s claims on her time and her body and her emotions. The quiet evenings would end when Joe would, with surly insistence, take her off to bed. It seemed shameful to him that this perceptive girl, this sensitive organism, should be chained to crassness, vulgarity and appetite.
    One March day as they sat together on the garden bench, Paul Tomlin asked her about her husband.
    “How did you meet him, Laurie?”
    She looked at him and looked quickly away, and he suspected that she sensed the disapproval behind his words. She shrugged. “I was in a little town named Crystal, California. I was with my aunt. She’s dead now. She was run over last year. I was seventeen, and I had to quit school. I worked in the lunch room in the bus station. Joe came to town with a crew. They were mapping some kind of irrigation project. I went out with him a few times. He got into trouble and they fired him. He was stranded there. He seemed so helpless. He wanted to get married. So … we got married.”
    “He doesn’t seem right for you, Laurie.”
    “How can you say that? What makes a person right for