Hill Girl

Nineteen

Those six days were wonderful.

We would go swimming in the surf in the early morning, sometimes before sunrise, and lie on the sand afterward and talk and come in at nine or later, ravenous for breakfast. She never seemed to tire of battling the surf or of marveling at the existence of it. It was a source of continual surprise to her that the Gulf was never calm, and she would never call it the Gulf, but always the ocean.

Most of the girls who came down to the beach were content to wade out a little way and then come back and drape themselves attractively around on the sand, but Angelina wanted more of it than that. The water fascinated her and she seemed to derive some strange exhilaration from fighting with the rollers, and the higher they came, the better she liked it. And the strange part of it was that she couldn’t even swim at first. I took her to the pool up the sea wall every afternoon and gave her lessons and she learned fast.

She turned heads whenever she appeared on the beach and shed the yellow robe, and she knew it, all right, but just lounging around on the sand was always secondary with her to the thrill of the waves. When she did finally tire of it we would go up on the sand and sprawl and I would always lie down near her and smoke a cigarette and watch her while she took off the white bathing cap and shook out the curls.

She would grin at me. “Why do you always lie where you can see me, and look at me like that?”

“Now, that’s a brilliant question,” I said. “You wouldn’t have any idea at all how you look in that suit, would you?”

“Do you like it?”

“Just when you’re in it. Or should I say, when you’re partly in it. I can’t look at you without running a temperature of a hundred and four. That’s sex at its very worst, isn’t it? And still it all seems good and right. Maybe the symptoms are all wrong and we are pure and our love is platonic.”

“What’s platonic?” she asked, and I told her.

She laughed. “Well, I guess it hasn’t been very platonic so far, but we could begin now, couldn’t we?”

“Right now,” I said. “We’ll begin this morning.”

“It sounds like fun. I always wanted to sit on a pedestal. I’ve read about it in books. How long do you think we ought to try it?”

“At least as long as we’re out here on the beach. We want to give it a fair trial.”

We were silent for a long time and finally she threw a handful of sand on my shoulder and said, “What are you thinking about? You’re so solemn.”

“Angelina. Your name. It’s so musical and has a sort of rippling sound to it. Why did they name you that? Is it after the river?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was born in the Angelina River bottoms, when Papa was renting a farm there. Do you think it’s silly?”

“I think it’s beautiful. I’m glad you were born there. Suppose you had been born up north. On the Penobscot or the Schuylkill.”

“Would you have loved me?”

“I would have loved you if you’d been born on the north fork of the Yangtze Kiang.”

One night when we were lying in darkness in the room, late, after the noises out on the sea wall had died away and there was only the eternal sound of the Gulf and I thought she was asleep, she suddenly threw her arms about my neck and pressed her face against my neck. “Bob,” she whispered, “let’s don’t ever go back. Can’t we always stay here?”

“It has been wonderful, hasn’t it?” I agreed.

“Oh, it isn’t just that, Bob. I was so miserable back there, and all this has been so—so—I don’t know how to say it, but I always kind of choke up when I think about it, and about you, and I’m afraid to go back. Is there any way we could stay?”

“No,” I said. “I have to go back to work.”

“But you don’t have to work there, do you? You could work here or somewhere else, couldn’t you?”

“No. Remember, the farm’s there and we have to live on it.”

“But you don’t have to live on a farm. You could do a lot of things. Think of what you learned in college.”

I grinned in the darkness, thinking about what I’d learned in college. Opening up holes in the line or knowing how to counter a left hook wasn’t exactly valuable in later life, particularly when you weren’t good enough for the pros in either one.

“I’m sorry, Angelina,” I said. “But I like living on the farm, and I’m going to show you how to like it too. It’ll be different from what you’ve known of it.”

She sighed. “I know that, Bob. Anywhere I lived with you would be fun and I want you to be happy, and I won’t say any more about it. Only sometimes I get scared when I think about going back.”

We went dancing nearly every night. She had never danced in her life and I’m no gazelle on the floor, but I taught her to follow in a short time, and with the natural grace of all her movements and a good sense of rhythm she was soon ready for more accomplished dancers than I, not that she ever got a chance at them.

One of the few bad moments I had during the six days occurred while we were dancing. The band was playin “Stardust” and we were swaying close together when she looked up at me and said, “You know, Bob, I was just thinking of how many things you’ve taught me. How to swim, and how to dance, and of course you showed me how to be happier than anybody else in the world. It seems like you taught me everything.”

Every thing but one, I thought, and Lee had to teach her that. I missed a step and almost tripped, and then recovered and went on. I don’t think she noticed.

There was one speck of comfort in it, though, I thought. I noticed that the thing never did get me completely down to the point where I blew up, the way it had that morning by the river. I wondered if I was beginning to get control of it, or whether the ugly shock of it was beginning to wear off with repetition.

I wondered for a moment if that business was the thing she had said she was afraid of, the thing that made her scared to go back. But no, I knew she wasn’t in love with Lee. And as far as anything Lee would do or say—well, after all, he was my brother and we’d have nothing to fear from him.

The only way I could ever account, afterward, for this blindness was just that I didn’t understand how much Lee had changed and was changing.

I didn’t think of Lee and Mary very often those six days. It was too difficult to think of anyone else at all. Once or twice I found myself wondering what was happening back home and if there was a chance that Sam Harley had scared Lee enough to make him stop and think. I hoped so. I was afraid for him if he ever lost Mary, and I know that he could lose her. It had always been Lee for her ever since we were children, but she had a lot of pride, and someday he might hand her more than that pride would let her take.

On the last evening we drove far down the island to a long, deserted stretch of beach, and there, just after sunset, we parked the car and gathered driftwood for a fire. When the fire was burning fiercely and throwing sparks into the deepening twilight we changed into our suits, one on each side of the car, and ran down to the water. There was a strong breeze blowing up from the south and the surf was running high, breaking far out on the first bar with a booming thunder that filled and overrode everything in this world we had to ourselves. We went far out and felt the force of it and the salt taste of it in our mouths and I kept close to her always, trying to see the white bathing cap against the seething white of the breakers in the darkness and feeling her come pounding back against me in the pushing force of the sea, the warm smoothness of her body against me for an instant and then sliding past in the confusion of darkness and water, something silken that had brushed against me and was gone. I would plunge after her and catch her in the backwash and we would stand braced against the pull of the outgoing current, laughing, and I would kiss her, tasting the salt on her mouth, and then another toppling sea would loom over us and break and send us sprawling into the churning white.

We went back up the beach to the fire, which had burned down to a bed of red coals. The big log I had put across the middle of it was burned in two and I piled the ends on the embers and the wind fanned them into flame. We got out the rolls and wieners and the long-handled wire fork I had bought at the five-and-ten-cent store, and roasted the wieners over the coals. Afterward we lay back on the yellow robe and watched the wind searching among the embers and sending the sparks flying out across the empty dunes. The beach was dark for miles and we were the only people on a black, wild continent. She had the bathing cap off and the glow of the dying fire highlighted the curls and warmed the smooth lines of her body.

“I wonder if we’ll ever come back to Galveston again, Bob,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “We can come back.”

“I don’t know whether I want to or not,” she said slowly. “Maybe we oughtn’t. Somehow it couldn’t ever be like this again, because nothing could be, and it would be better if we could always remember it like this.”

I didn’t say anything and we turned from looking at the fire, and it was the way it had been that morning at the river when we couldn’t get enough of seeing each other, only this time there was no Lee or the thought of Lee, and after a long time I kissed her and there was a wildness in her like that of the sea running out there in the darkness, a wildness and a fierce urgency that was like nothing I had ever known before. The booming of the surf was a sound we would both hear as long as we lived.

We left at noon the next day and as I drove the car across the causeway she was quiet. She looked back once and when she caught my glance on her she smiled a little but didn’t say anything.