Bob Mason squinted into the thick sheets of rain. Before them, a gasoline truck crept along at a snail's pace. Behind them, bearing down, was a semi with a load of new Fords. They passed, on their left, one of the better known vineyard's tasting room, a landmark he'd been looking for. Over the next rolling hill a large gray structure materialized gradually out of the storm, a giant old barn which long ago had lost all evidence of having ever worn a coat of paint. Faded letter's above the loft at one end of the structure read Dr. Jackson's Special Syrup, and advertisement dating back to prohibition, for a cure-all medication, no longer existent, which like so many other medications of that period owed whatever success it had enjoyed to the fact that it consisted of something in the area of fifty percent alcohol. He put on the blinker to signal a left turn and slowed, waiting for a clearance in the oncoming traffic.
"Bob?" Cathy said beside him in a hesitant voice.
"Yeah, hon'?"
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a kind of desperation in her face.
"Do we really have to stop?"
"We don't have to, but there's no reason why not either? Why?"
"I don't know. The rain. Oh, I don't know."
In the other lane the line of the cars broke and he cut swiftly across onto a gravel road running between rows of vines. Before them loomed the gray shadow of the barn. Beyond it, up a hill, he could just make out the red brick ranch-style house that had replaced the old wooden home he'd known when he used to come here, as a small boy, with his father.
Relieved of the pressure of driving under these almost intolerable conditions on the congested highway, Bob sighed, glancing at his troubled young wife with a reassuring smile. He let his gaze drift slowly down the length of her slender body teasingly outlined in her loosely clinging cotton dress, then dropped his right hand casually onto her thigh. He frowned as she tensed slightly beneath his touch.
"Watch the ditch," she said.
"I am watching the ditch." He glanced out at the deep drainage ditch that flanked the gravel road on his left, then squeezed Cathy's thigh and looked back at her strained but lovely face. "Relax, baby. Anyway, you must know the real reason I wanted to stop here? Hunh?"
"Well what do you think?"
"I don't know."
"Because I wanted to show you off to Giulio. I'm proud of you, nitwit."
She sat sulking, refusing to look at him. He squeezed her thigh again. Before them on the gravel road a small wooden bridge appeared. He slowed to cross it, noting that the little creek it crossed was flowing deep and swift, a torrent of swirling brown water.
"What's the matter?" he said, eyes again on his wife.
"Nothing." She stared straight ahead, sulking. Then suddenly her eyes widened. "Bob!"
He turned his own gaze back to the bending road, cut sharp to the right to avoid going into the ditch with the left front tire. He felt the tail-end spinning in the gravel and mud, swinging hard to the left. He tried to cut back that way to correct it. Beside him Cathy screamed. He had to cut again to the right. He could feel the car fish-tailing. There was a sudden drop, cut short, like a fall in a dream that stops suddenly when one awakes. They were stopped dead, tires still spinning, black smoke pouring from the rear of the car where the rubber burned. He jammed it into first, gave it gas. Nothing happened. He cursed under his breath and cut the engine, staring angrily ahead into the falling rain. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Cathy, glaring at him as if he's just confessed to some heinous crime.
"Damn it," he said finally, turning to look at her sheepishly.
"I knew it," she said.
He felt the anger surge in his chest, half at her, half at himself. "You knew what?"
"I knew something would happen if we stopped here. I felt it."
"Yeah. Well it's not the end of the world!"
He slung the door open and stepped suddenly out into the pouring rain, almost slipping into the ditch himself before he seized the door handle to maintain his balance. He bent over and peered at the back rear tire, which sat completely off the road and into the ditch, washed over by the brown rushing water. He stood staring downward, as though oblivious to the storm. His gaze drifted slowly across the ditch and fixed at last on an old grayed piece of lumber lying there in the mud. Then he walked around the car, conscious of Cathy still glaring at him sulkily, leaped the ditch and retrieved the board and did his best to jam it up beneath the left rear tire. Then he jumped back over the ditch and moved around again to climb, soaking wet, back behind the wheel.
"I'll give it a try," he said. "But anyway it's not the end of the goddamn world. Giulio can tow us out with his tractor if he has to…" He paused, staring impatiently at his sulking wife. "Honey, what's the matter with you? Tell me."
"There's nothing the matter with me," she hissed, staring at him through eyes that were glossed with tears.
Then, as he started to reach out to touch her arm she suddenly flung the door open, jumped from the car into the sweeping rain, and started at a run up the road toward the barn. Bob cursed under his breath, staring after her for a moment, then angrily started the engine, jammed the transmission into first, and resumed the futile spinning of the tires.
Behind her Cathy could hear the racing of the engine. Instantly she felt drenched to the bone. Her heart was pounding so furiously she thought it would explode. A strange, involuntary animal sound issued from her throat, half the sound of breathing, half horrible lunatic wail. It was her breathing and her crying, merged as one entity, as though a primitive communication of a most horrible and primal despair. She was half running and half stumbling along in the blinding, wind-swept rain. Though her voice-breath said one thing, her mind was saying another, over and over and over, perhaps not really a separate thought, but rather a mental, silent and more sophisticated verbalization of the wail:
What's wrong with me, what's wrong with me, what's wrong with…?
She felt her feet seem to fly from under her. The brown dirt and gravel of the road raced toward her face. She lashed out toward it in reflex, broke the fall and skidded on the hard pebbles and soft mud. She got to her feet, hearing the engine racing behind her, looked back and saw that the car, with the black smoke pouring up from its rear, had not moved. Then she lunged onward, reached the wide front doors of the barn, pushed them open and slipped through.
Inside it was dark, at first almost pitch dark. Drenched, her thin cotton dress clinging to the sensuous curves of her flesh, she waited for her eyes to adjust. She gasped to catch her breath. The racing of the engine, already distant-sounding, suddenly ceased. She heard herself sobbing and with conscious effort she stopped it. The silence had a sudden thick quality, yet with it came upon her a strange sensation of peace. Around her, the interior of the barn was beginning to take shape. She was standing in a semi-circle of massive dark forms that gradually materialized as huge wooden barrels, wine barrels fifteen feet tall, eight or ten feet in diameter, oppressive, overbearing. The chant of thought in her mind progressed. She thought:
What did go wrong with me then? Why did I do that? Why did I talk to him that way, run out into the rain, lose… my mind?
Suddenly she felt tired and weak and cold. She squinted about in the darkness. On an upright wooden pillar that supported, or helped to support, the loft, she distinguished the switch and the electric wire that lead, she saw finally, to a naked light bulb hanging almost directly over her head. She stepped toward the switch and reached up to flick it on.
The jolt was like a crackling sound inside her own head transposed then to her lips in a sudden wretched cry as she fell straight backward onto the straw upon which an instant before she'd stood, the static tingles still running up and down her arm, the barn around her still dark as she lay stunned and trembling, realizing only then that what she'd just experienced was an electric shock that resulted from the fact that she had touched the light switch while she was soaking wet from her mad little dash in the rain.
Then still feeling dazed, she sat up, got to her feet, looked around as she heard the rustling of straw behind her. And then the phantom gray-brown shadow swept suddenly into the field of her vision, hooded and masked like a night-rider in the nightmare of a runaway slave, floating ghost-like down upon her as she screamed, retreated back against one of the tall round barrels, her hand lashing out. Her wrist was caught in a firm grasp, then her other wrist as she tried to lash with that hand. She shoved her knee up hard and heard a grunt as she made contact, then her body was shoved hard against the barrel by a hard male body pressed against hers. In the dim light she could see fierce-looking eyes glaring into hers. Her wrists were pinned back against the rough wood of the barrel. Realizing her helplessness, she let her body go limp. The man's face pressed closer to hers. She stared, wide-eyed, as his mouth covered over her lips, pressing hard, almost bruising them against her teeth. A low mewl issued from her throat. Again she strained to free her wrists; finding it still impossible, she again relaxed, resistance leaving her as her supple body pressed, almost melted into the body of the stranger who held her.
Then suddenly she was released. The hooded man stepped back. An instant later the doors of the barn flew open and Bob came tearing through and stopped, just inside, gaping, framed against the comparative brightness of the light behind him.
Breathless and trembling, Cathy stared at the man. As he pushed the hood of the raincoat from his head she saw that his hair was gray at the temples. His face was rugged, not handsome; it looked like chiseled stone. He was Bob's height, with massive shoulders that appeared even larger because of the heavy coat. In this light she could not see the color of his eyes, but she could feel them burning into her, almost consuming her, as if Bob, and the storm and the rest of the barn and the rest of the world even, did not exist. Then abruptly, he turned away. "Who are you?" Bob said. "Who are you?" "Why'd you scream?" Bob said to Cathy. "Did he – "The light switch. I tried to turn it on, and it shocked me." "Twice?" Bob said, moving forward. "He… scared me," she said. "He came out of the dark."
The man turned and looked at her again, then turned back to Bob. She was still trembling all over, partly from the cold, partly from the fright she'd undergone, partly from the fluttering of excitement she felt down in her belly and loins.
"My father was a friend of Giulio's," Bob said. "We stopped to say hello and pick up some wine. Now who are you?"
"You mean old Martinelli," the stranger said. "He's in Hawaii."
"Hawaii?" Bob took another step forward. "Then what are you doing here?"
"This is my place. I bought it from the old man a couple of years ago."
There was a silence. Cathy looked at Bob. At the man. At Bob again. Then, with a deep sigh, Bob said:
"Oh."
Again all was quiet. She could still almost feel the man's body against hers, his hands holding her wrists, his lips crushing hard over her mouth. There was something animal about it, the way he'd grabbed her, held her. And she could almost have cried for shame at the illicit thrills it had somehow prompted to course through her loins.
"My name's Bailey," the man said. "I see your car's stuck." He glanced at Cathy, whose soaked dress clung almost transparently to her skin. "Look pretty well drenched too." He thought this over. "Come on up to the house; we'll straighten out over a glass of hootch an' figure out what to do about the rest of your problems."
"Yeah," Bob said. "All right, thanks."
Bailey started to pull off his raincoat. Cathy watched him lowering it from his shoulders, then realized it must be intended for her.
"No!" she said suddenly.
He hesitated, staring at her.
"No." She shook her head and turned away toward the door. "I don't need it; I'm already wet."
She walked before them out into the wind and the rain. She looked down once at the car, still sitting where it had been when she'd bolted from it, with the rear tire hanging over into the ditch. Then the men caught up to her and flanked her, one on either side, and with her eyes straight ahead she walked hurriedly between them, up the sloping road to the new ranch-style brick house. And as she walked she was thinking about what had happened just before Bob got to the barn, and not only about what had happened because that was easy enough: Bailey had frightened her, she'd fought him, he'd kissed her and subdued her and she'd stopped fighting him. But she was trying to understand what it meant – to herself, and wondering what it might have meant to him. And she knew that one way or another he must be thinking about the same thing now, however it was men thought about things like that.
And Bob couldn't have been thinking about it, because he didn't even know about it. And though that wasn't really his fault, as there wasn't any way he could have known about it unless he was a mind-reader, she still couldn't help thinking of it as an ignorance on his part that set him apart from her and the stranger.