Hill girl

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Maybe we just found out things we didn’t know about each other.”

  “What did you find out about me?”

  “That a lot of the things I thought about you were wrong.”

  “Do you think we could have fun together if we went to Galveston like you said? I mean, for us to pretend we were like other married people and on our honeymoon?”

  “I think we could, don’t you?”

  “But it’d be fun for you only just the times you were staying with me—you know—wouldn’t it?”

  “No. I don’t think that. But how about you? Do you think you’d enjoy it?”

  “Yes, I know I would. I’ve always wanted to see the ocean. And I like being with you more than anything when you’re not sarcastic or mean.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said.

  “Then we’ll go, won’t we?”

  “Yes, we’ll go today.”

  “Why couldn’t we start right now? Don’t you think that would be nice? To start in the dark, I mean, while it’s cool? Sort of exciting.”

  “You’re exciting enough. Do we have to have more?”

  “I’m not either exciting. What makes you think so?”

  “I have ways of knowing.”

  “But how about starting for Galveston now? I’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “It’s a crazy time to start anywhere. But maybe we’re crazy anyway. Let’s go.”

  When we had checked out and had the bags stowed in the back of the car and were started out of town we pulled up at an all-night café for a cup of coffee. The place was deserted except for a sleepy counterman. While he was getting the coffee I looked at our reflections in the mirror back of the counter. Angelina was excitedly looking all around the place and I studied her face in the glass, and wondered why I had thought there was no animation or sparkle about her. Maybe there hadn’t been, back there on the farm, but there was now. Her eyes were shining. She looked into the glass and caught my glance on her and our eyes met, and she smiled at me.

  “We look nice, don’t we?” she said.

  “Yes, we do, don’t you?”

  “Your eyebrows are white. Isn’t it funny we’re both blonde?”

  “We might be sisters,” I said.

  “You know, I don’t know anything about you. How old you are, what your middle name is, the things you like and don’t like. Do I?”

  “When I write my memoirs I’ll send you a copy.”

  “Did you play football?”

  “Yes.”

  “In high school? Or in college?”

  “Both.”

  “You certainly are talkative. Why do I have to worm everything out of you? I’ll bet you were a good football player.”

  “I played in the line. Nobody ever asked me to dedicate a stadium. I was down in the fine print, listed as Crane, RT.”

  “What does RT mean?”

  “Right tackle.”

  “Did you carry the ball and make lots of touchdowns?”

  “No. Not in that conference.”

  “Why not?” she demanded. “You probably could have carried it better than anybody.”

  I grinned. “I don’t know. Nobody ever gave it to me. I guess I wasn’t popular.”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “Let’s forget about football. Nothing’s as dead as last year’s football games.”

  It was still dark when we rolled out of town on the highway. I stopped and put the top back and the wind felt cool on our faces. I watched the tunnel the headlights made in the night and turned now and then to look at Angelina. She always sat with her hands in her lap, the way she had before, only now there wasn’t any sullen defiance in her eyes and they would smile happily at me when I looked around.

  In another half hour it was growing light. We came over a hill and started down into the river bottom ahead of us and the east was flushed. It was still and cloudless with the summer morning’s promise of heat to come, but the air was cooler in the bottom and there were patches of mist near the ground. I stopped the car off to the left side of the road at the end of the bridge and we could see the river below in the gray light. There was a big pool there under the bridge and a long sand bar below where the water went over shallow and clear. The big white oaks out across the bottom were hazy and dark in the scattered patches of mist and on the ones nearby we could see the gray-brown rings that marked the high-water levels of the winter floods. A mockingbird was coming awake and his song was the only sound above the low gurgle of the water over the sand bar below us.

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “There’s something about rivers.”

  There was no traffic along the road and we had the whole long bottom to ourselves, just the two of us and the mockingbird. Neither of us said anything for a long time as we sat there in the early-morning light watching the river, and the silence remained unbroken even after I was aware that we were no longer looking at the river, but at each other. She had turned toward me and sat with her head tilted back against the top of the seat and her cheek pressed against the leather, her eyes on my face. I looked down at her a long time and I had never known anything like it before and I knew what it was going to be like with us from this time on and then I had my arms around her and was kissing her, feeling the wildness of it and trying to be gentle with her at the same time. Her eyes were closed and I kissed them.

  “Do that again, Bob,” she said softly. “I love it when you kiss me like that.”

  It might have been what she said. Or it might have been some sudden and perverse awareness of the fact that I was making love to her in the car this way and of whose car it was. I don’t know which it was, but my arms stiffened and I felt sick down in my stomach the way you do when you take a foul punch. That thing Lee had said—”Jesus, but she enjoys it. She’ll beat you to death in the seat of a car.”

  She felt me stiffen up and she looked up at me questioningly as I shoved her back and got on my side of the seat under the wheel and fished out a cigarette.

  “Bob, what is it?” she asked, her eyes troubled.

  “Nothing, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “I just wanted a smoke.”

  “Something happened. Please tell me.”

  “I just suddenly remembered your advance billing. You’re supposed to be terrific in the car seat.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. What’s made you change all of a sudden?”

  I don’t know why I couldn’t shut up and leave it there, But the thing had hold of me and I couldn’t stop.

  “What the hell are we being so lovey-dovey about, anyway? We don’t have to go through this June-moon routine just to have a little fun in the car, do we? I can’t figure how you’ve managed to keep your pants on in it this long, or is it just Lee you take ‘em off for?”

  She moved back as though I had swung at her. “Did you have to say that?” was all she said, and she looked quietly down toward the water.

  “Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?”

  “No. None, I reckon,” she said dully.

  “Of course, you could pretend I was Lee, if you’re in love with him. And there must be some of your old pants lying around here somewhere, in the glove compartment maybe, to make you feel at home.”

  She looked around at me then, and the old defiance was coming back into her eyes, that to-hell-with-you-and-everything sullenness, and I grabbed her again, roughly, like a drunken tanker sailor mauling his two-dollar slut, and roughed her up as I kissed her. She hit me in the face, not scratching or clawing the way most girls would, but with her fists doubled up. She could hit hard and I felt my eyes water as she slammed my nose and I could taste the salty tang of blood in my mouth, and I laughed and kissed her again. Her left arm was pinioned against my chest but her right kept slashing at my face and I laughed again and caught it and held her. She quit then and went limp.

  “All right,” she said. “All right.??
?

  She looked down at the floor boards and I couldn’t see her face. All I could see was the top of her bent head and the dark honey-colored hair and the hopeless slump of her shoulders. She didn’t cry; I don’t think she could cry if she wanted to. She had always fought back all her life and when she was whipped she accepted it silently, hating it but not crying. She lay there in my arms now, knowing she didn’t have a chance against my strength and indifferent to anything that might happen to her. The nausea and reaction began to hit me and I let go of her and slid back and took hold of the wheel. I noticed my knuckles were white where I gripped it.

  She tried to straighten out her rumpled clothes a little and then opened the door and stepped out, picking up her new purse from the seat, and started down the road without looking back. I put my head down on the curve of the wheel and didn’t look after her but I could hear the click-click of her heels on the bridge, going farther and farther away, and then there was nothing but the sound of the water over the riffle down below.

  I looked up after a while and she was growing smaller in the distance. The road was straight here, going for a couple of miles through the bottom on a high fill, and I watched her until she was almost out of sight. After a while a car came up from behind me and when it reached her I saw it stop and she got in and then it was gone over the bill on the far side.

  Sixteen

  The sun came up and the morning heat began while I sat there and a car went by now and then, stirring the red dust of the road and rattling over the bridge. I could smell the dust, dry and tickling in the nostrils, and hear the dry-weather locusts beginning to buzz, things that had always made me happy and glad to be alive in the country in midsummer and reminded me of ripening watermelons and white perch in the river bottoms, but now they didn’t register at all. I stayed in the car for a long time, smoking one cigarette after another, and then I walked down below the bridge and washed the blood off my face at the head of the shallow riffle.

  I picked up some driftwood and tossed it aimlessly into the pool and watched the pieces make the slow circuit of the hole in the lazy eddying current and then spill out over the bar at the lower end. My thoughts went endlessly around and around the way the bits of wood did, but there was no way they could escape into another channel. They always came back to a bowed blonde head and a hopeless voice saying, “All right. All right.”

  To a bowed blonde head, and why didn’t you use an ax? It would have been a lot nicer weapon. To a voice saying, “Jesus, how she enjoys it. She’ll beat you to death in a car.” And another voice saying with bitter defeat, “All right. All right.” The Crane boys are really an upstanding pair of lads, all right, and capable, too. The two of them together can destroy an eighteen-year-old girl with no trouble at all, as easily as you’d take a hundred-pound tackle out of a play. You did a good job there, all right. You fixed everything. Everything is swell now. Just fine. Well, you’ve got nothing to worry about now. Remembering the thing Lee said about her won’t hurt you any more now. No, of course not. And it won’t hurt her any more either, will it? Probably nothing will ever hurt her very much again. You get her to like you and get her to come out of her protective shell and trust you and then slap her in the face like that with everything you’ve got and nothing is likely to bother her again. No, everything is fine now and you won’t ever remember any of the fine things you’ve discovered about her the past twenty-four hours and you won’t fall in love with her. And there won’t be any more of that corroding jealous sickness like there was there in the car whenever you remember what Lee said. Like hell.

  After a while I climbed back up the path and got in the car and started down the road. I thought about going back to Shreveport, but couldn’t think of any reason for it. The car was headed in the other direction anyway, and it was too much trouble to turn it around for the difference it made.

  Late that afternoon I was in Beaumont, and after wandering aimlessly around for a while I took the coast highway to Galveston. I checked in at the hotel about nine o’clock and went up to my room and took a bath and changed clothes. I couldn’t stand the empty room afterward, though, and came back down. It was funny, I thought; I’d spent only one night in a hotel room with her in my life, and now it seemed that all rooms were going to be empty without her.

  I rode downtown on a streetcar and stood around on Market Street for a while, trying to decide to go to a movie, but I knew I couldn’t sit through one. Taking a cab in front of the interurban station, I said, “Down the line.”

  “Any particular house, Mac?” the driver asked.

  “No,” I said.

  He let me out at the little café on the corner. It was the first time I’d been on Postoffice Street in years. When Lee was still at Rice we had gone down there a few times.

  I went up the steps of a big two-story frame house and rang the bell. A Negro maid came in a minute and looked at me through the window and then opened the door. The parlor was on the right of the hall and I went in and there was nobody in it. There were the battered phonograph and the bare floor and the sofas around the walls and the too bright lights in the overhead fixture. I sat down on one of the sofas and lit a cigarette.

  Two girls came in. One of them was a tall blonde wearing a very short dress and gilt slippers without stockings and she was smoking a cigarette in a long holder. The other one was dark-haired and smaller and she smiled at me gaily and said, “Hello, honey. Buy me a drink?”

  “Sure,” I said. They both sat down, the little brunette on my lap and the blonde across the room. The short dress hiked up when she sat down and I noticed a brownish-purple bruise on the front of her thigh just above the knee.

  The Negro girl came in and asked, “What you want? Rye or beer?”

  We all ordered whisky and I wondered indifferently if the girls would get cold tea.

  The blonde said, “You’re awful quiet. What’s botherin’ you?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I was just wondering why blondes in whorehouses are always bruised.”

  “Well,” she said, “I bruise easy. Don’t you want to come upstairs and bruise me a little, Daddy?”

  “Leave him alone, Peggy,” the little one said. “He’s my honey. Ain’t you, baby?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m your honey.”

  “Come on upstairs with me, honey. I like big men. I ain’t ever had one too big.”

  “I’ll bet you haven’t,” I said.

  “What do you mean by that? Why, you big bastard—”

  “Oh, hell, forget it.”

  She got off my lap and went over and put a record on the phonograph. When the music started she came back out to the center of the floor and stood, tapping her shoes and wiggling her hips in time with the rhythm.

  I got up and danced with her. “What’s your name, Big Boy?” she asked, looking up at me. She came only up to my shoulder.

  “Whitey,” I said.

  “Mine’s Billie. Don’t you like me?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I like you a lot.”

  “You sure act like it. What’s on your mind?”

  “Nothing. I just haven’t had time to warm up yet. We need another drink.”

  We had some more drinks and then I danced with Peggy. She would have been a good dancer except for the professional zeal with which she rubbed herself against me. She was too busy drumming up trade to enjoy dancing for its own sake.

  A Coast Guard sailor came in and danced with Billie and when we stopped dancing and had another drink he took Peggy over in a corner and sat down with her in his lap. He was about half drunk and insisted on buying us all a drink, so we had one and then I bought a round. He kept on asking me if I didn’t have a brother in the Coast Guard because there was a fella, he said, when he was up in Alaska on the patrol boat that looked just like me.

  We had some more music and the sailor and Peggy tried to do an apache routine and the sailor fell down and she bounced and skidded into one end of the sofa. They got up laughing u
proariously and went upstairs.

  “He’s her boy friend,” Billie said. “He comes to see her all the time and they fight to beat hell. He’s the one that put the bruises on her, and last month she hit him between the eyes with her shoe. Made both of ‘em black.”

  “Very touching,” I said.

  “You’re grouchy, baby. Come on, let’s have a little fun. Don’t you want to go upstairs with me?”

  “Sure.” What the hell, I thought. We went down the hall and up the stairs to her room.

  When we were inside she pulled off her dress and she didn’t have on anything underneath it. She kicked off her slippers and got a towel out of a dresser drawer and lay down on the bed, watching me. She was a thin girl and rather pretty, and nice in a tomboyish sort of way. I sat down on the side of the bed and lit a cigarette.

  “What’s the matter, Whitey?” she asked. “Come on.”

  “Don’t rush me,” I said.

  “Well, I must be slippin’,” she complained. “It’s the first time I ever took my clothes off and a man could just sit there smokin’ a cigarette.”

  “You’re not slipping, Billie,” I said. I fished a five-dollar bill out of my pocket and tossed it on the bed by her arm and stood up. “I’ll see you around sometime.”

  I opened the door and went out, and as it closed behind me I heard her say, “Well, I’ll be damned. Of all the crazy bastards!”

  Seventeen

  It was about three the next afternoon when I went into this bar on 24th Street, the one where the trouble started. I had the car with me by this time, and I remembered going back to the hotel for something, I wasn’t sure what. I had been drinking steadily ever since I had come into town, but it didn’t seem to have much effect except to make me feel worse.

  It was a cheap sort of place with a rough-board bar and some flimsy tables. A bunch of seamen were parked on stools at the other end of the bar, talking and laughing a lot. I sat down at this end and ordered whisky.

  The bartender was big, about my size, and tough-looking. His whole aspect said “ex-pug” to anyone who knew the signs.