Hill Girl

Twenty-four

We plodded slowly on up the long grade and down on the other side and crossed the upper reaches of Black Creek on the concrete highway bridge. The sun was down now and the air was chill in the bottom.

I thought about our not having to leave here now that Lee was gone and I was glad about it, but there was sadness in it too. I wondered where he was going and what he would do and knew that I’d probably never know because he didn't write letters. He would be in touch with the bank and the lawyers over the divorce and property settlement, but he’d never write to me.

Away from here and in a new place where he wasn’t known he might change. Away from here ... I was just kidding myself and knew it, but there was some kind of happiness in at least trying to believe it.

Next summer maybe we could get away for a week in Galveston. I remembered again that last night we were there and thought of the bonfire on the beach and the roaring of the surf and of the way she had been when I had kissed her, holding her in my arms there on the robe by the dying fire.

I was within a mile of the road junction where our country road turned off the highway and up the hill to go past the farm when I saw a Ford coming toward me along the bottom with a roll of red dust boiling up behind it. When it was closer I recognized it as mine. I stopped and Jake climbed over the door and got out. Helen was with him, dressed for town.

Jake looked from Helen up to me uncertainly. “Me and the Old Lady thought we’d go to the show.”

“Fine,” I said. I wondered why he was so hesitant about it. He didn’t have to ask me where he could go, and he was always welcome to use the car.

“If'n you’d rather, I could take the team on in an’ you could drive the car on home.” He didn’t look up.

“No,” I said. “You’d be late for the show by the time you got the mules home.”

“I jest thought mebbe you might be in a hurry to git home for supper.”

“It’ll wait,” I said. He continued to look down at his Sunday shoes, which were getting dusty in the powdery red surface of the road. “Did you see Lee?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. He turned and glanced toward Helen. I couldn’t see her face under the top of the car.

“He’s leaving,” I said. What the hell does Jake care what he does? I thought. But I had to say something because the silence was becoming awkward.

“I know.” He nodded. “I seen him a minute or two jest before we drove off.” He stopped.

I waited. He wanted to say something else but gave it up and turned back toward the car.

As he started to climb in over the door he paused once more and this time he looked squarely up at me.

“You sure you wouldn’t like for me to take the team in, Bob? I’d be glad to do it.”

I got the look in his eyes then and they were worried. I swung a leg over the side of the cotton frames and climbed down. There was no use asking him about it. He wouldn’t talk, but he wanted me to go home.

Helen got out of the car. “I think I’ll ride along with Jake, if you don’t mind, Bob,” she said. “It’s a pretty night for a hay ride with your best beau.” She tried to laugh at the joke but it didn’t quite come off.

“When you get in with the team I’ll unharness,” I said. “You can still make the second show.” Nobody said anything. We weren’t thinking about the show any more.

I backed the car up fast and swung it around and started up the road. The dusk was thickening now and I switched on the lights. When I made the turn off the road and started up the hill I had to go into low and the lights brightened up with the engine speed. Whatever it was that was scaring Jake hadn’t happened yet because he would have told me. It was just something that might happen. At the top of the hill I let the Ford back into high again and pulled the gas lever all the way down.

When I swung around the last turn I breathed again. There was a light in the kitchen, and somehow there isn’t anything more peaceful and reassuring than light streaming from the window of a farmhouse kitchen. It was dark now and as I made the turn off the road my lights flicked across Lee’s roadster parked in front of the house and for some reason I could not fathom I reached down and cut both lights and motor and let the Ford roll to a stop.

All sound and motion died with the car and I was alone in the night with only my heartbeat in my ears. I turned and went around the side of the house rather than through it. I don’t know why. Maybe I was afraid of the dark part of it and wanted to go back to where the light was.

As I stepped up on the back porch I could hear someone talking. It was Lee. I couldn’t make out the words, but he was talking quietly and slowly and didn’t sound as if he were drunk. The tightness across my chest relaxed a little. I opened the door and went in.

The lamp that was burning was the one with the dark shade and it made a cone of light across the table with the rest of the room in partial shadow. Lee was on one side of the table with his arms resting on it and Angelina sat across from him, deathly quiet and moving only her eyes.

There was a bottle of whisky in front of him and a glass half empty just beyond his left hand, but he wasn’t very drunk. At least, not as drunk as I have seen him. Except for the eyes as he half turned toward me I would have said he was sober. The eyes were blazing.

“Sit down, Bob,” he said. “There by the door.”

“Thank you,” I said. “If you’re leaving, don’t let me keep you.”

I was still blinking in the light and then suddenly the cold began to run down across my shoulder blades and into the small of my back. His hands were lying flat down before him on the table in the edge of the shadow beneath the lamp and under the right one was the flat ugly slab of a .45 automatic. It was mine, and I knew it was loaded.

I sat down—slowly, the way a man would carrying an armful of eggs. There was a delicate balance about the whole thing there under the yellow cone of light and it gave you the feeling the slightest movement one way or the other might tip into chaos. There was something about it that caught you by the throat, even though he wasn’t wild drunk and cursing or waving the gun. Any of those things would have scared me, because you never know about a drunk with a gun, but they wouldn’t have scared me the way this did.

I kept it out of my voice as well as I could.

“All right,” I said. “This is all very dramatic. But do you suppose I could have some supper now, or do we go on rehearsing the high-school play?”

He ignored me. There wasn’t the slightest indication he had heard me or that he even remembered I had come in. He just went on talking. And he was talking to Angelina, or to himself. It was hard to tell which.

“Your hair is different now that you’ve cut it. But it’s beautiful that way and it still shines the same under lamplight. I wonder why I never did write a popular song about it and call it ‘The Beautiful Bitch with the Lamplight Hair” and maybe be famous all over the country and have a banana split named after me when I’m dead, instead of saving strands of it like a high-school girl or a man that’s sick. Maybe the next thing I’d be saving your discarded clothes, and they have a name for people like that but I can’t think of what it is and I don’t want to think of it and you don’t know and there isn’t any way you can know how much I don’t want to think of it and how much time I spend just not thinking of it.”

Angelina’s eyes were fixed intently on his face except for the once she glanced swiftly sidewise at me, begging me to be careful. I sat perfectly still, hating it, and hating the quiet the same way I had the night Sam had been here in this same room. It’s always easier to take when there’s more noise. A moth fluttered stupidly about the rim of the lamp chimney with frenzied gray wings and when it fell inside and was scorched Lee looked in through the glass at it for a long minute with grave speculation and then laughed as if at some joke that only he knew. The laugh wasn’t something you’d want to hear often. I could feel a drop of sweat run down my temple and into the corner of my eye and blinked at the salty sting of it.

He picked up the glass as if weighing it and took a drink. It wasn’t much of a drink, compared to the way he usually did it.

“Just exactly right,” he said. “I should have been a chemist instead of whatever, it is I am, and if we know any long words that are what I am we won’t say them tonight. I should have been a chemist because I’ve got it mixed just right. Or maybe a carburetor. I’m a carburetor that went funny over a bitch with lamplight hair. . . . It’s mixed just right because if I mixed in three more drinks I’d cry and if I didn’t mix in any more at all for a half hour I’d be sober and that wouldn’t be good because we all know what the big word for me is when I’m sober. You know what I’m like when I’m sober, don’t you, Angelina, darling? I run from Sam and hide under the porch and get my nice new white linen suit all dirty. Not nice dirty. Dirty dirty. And things were simple then because I was just like anybody else who took it where he could find it and some of it was good and some of it was better and there wasn’t anything complicated about it like not being able to go away or stay away or sleeping nights because you could always stay away, at least afterward and for a little while.”

Angelina’s face was quiet but I could see her eyes begin to fill. She tried not to blink them. There had been fear and horrified fascination in them, but now there was pity, and all the time she knew as well as I did what he was going to do.

I tried to shift cautiously a little farther out in my chair to get closer to him. He looked at me out of the corners of his eyes.

“Don’t move,” he said. I knew who was first on his list and who would still be first even if I tried to jump him, so I didn’t move.

“Things were simple then but they’re not any more and I can’t go away. I went away this afternoon as far as I could but it was only five miles and then I couldn’t go any farther. Then I saw how easy it would be if you went with me. Just the two of us. And it’ll be easy, just like having your picture taken. Raise your eyes up and look at me and don’t look down there and cry. I’m sorry you don’t like whisky because you should always have one for the road and besides it makes everything easy. Just put your hand out here to me across the table and let me hold it. Here . . .”

She tried to draw back and she wanted to look over at me for help but was afraid to because I might jump for him. He had the gun up in his right hand now and there was no way he could miss if the thing went off, not from that distance. He caught her hand in his left, drew it gently across the table toward him, folded the fingers over into a little fist, and closed his own fingers over it. I could feel a great scream coming up inside me and fought with everything I had to hold it in.

“Lee!” I said, still trying not to scream like a woman. “Put down that gun!” I wondered if I were saying it over and over like a phonograph. Maybe I had been saying it for hours.

He looked at me as if I were a stranger speaking a foreign language. Whatever world he was in, I wasn’t in it and he didn’t know me.

“Lee!” I tried again, still yelling, and it got the same deadpan lack of interest. I fought to get my voice down to the same conversational level as his. “Listen, Lee.”

“Yes?”

I had to get through to him some way. I had to make him listen. He was loaded and ready to go and if there was to be any stopping him it was going to be now. “Listen, Lee.” I leaned forward as far as I could without giving the appearance I was going to jump him.

“Listen and get this.” Afterward I remembered that some part of my mind was off by itself very objectively thinking what a damn fool thing that must sound like, saying, “Listen,” over and over. “I want you to understand. You’re drunk but you can understand me and know what I mean if you try. You can shoot that gun only once before I’ll be on you and I’ll have it. You know that. I’ll break your arm but I’ll have the gun. You’ll have one shot. Just one.” I knew I was saying the thing over and over like a parrot because I could hear my voice somewhere a long way off, coming through the roaring in my ears, and I wondered if I were yelling again or keeping it down so he could understand it or would listen.

“Maybe you haven’t figured out yet what I mean by just one shot with it before I take it away from you. It means that if you shoot her you won’t have time to turn it on yourself the way you think you’re going to. And if you want to try it on me first you’ll be taking a long chance too, because you’re drunk and can’t aim straight enough to get me cold the first time, and there won’t be any second.” He wasn’t very drunk and I wasn’t at all sure he couldn’t hit me in any spot he pleased with one shot, but I hoped he was just drunk enough to believe me.

“But if you shoot her, I’ve already told you I’ll have the gun before you can shoot again. So get this and do your best to get a good picture of what I mean. When I get it we’re going to sit here.”

I watched his eyes to see if it were getting through to him. If it did there was a chance, but if it didn’t we were all done, and I tried not to look at her because I was afraid I couldn’t take it.

“We’ll sit here for an hour or two hours or whatever it takes until you’re cold sober and shaking and scared. And then I’ll shoot you. Sober.”

I stopped. It seemed all time must have stopped too but I could hear the ticking of the clock in the living room. I tried to stop counting. Slowly Lee’s hand opened and I saw Angelina slide hers out of his grasp and pull her arms in toward her on the table.

“Get up, Angel,” I said. “Go into the bedroom and close the door.”

She wasn’t crying now but she was white as chalk and was holding her face together like something made of glass that was already broken and would come apart any minute. She got up very slowly and started around the end of the table. I watched Lee. He still had the gun in his hand and his eyes followed her until she turned at the corner of the table and started across the room toward the door behind him and then he turned his head away, straight forward, and let it slump down.

She went into the bedroom and closed the door and I could feel her there on the other side in the darkness holding onto herself and waiting and trying not to cry out, still standing because I hadn’t heard her fall.

Lee looked up at me. Neither of us had moved. A strand of hair had fallen down across his forehead and it looked like a pen slash in India ink against the dead white of his face. My knees were weak and I could feel the muscles twitching in them.

“Bob,” he said. Only that—”Bob.” He said it as if he were going to add something else, but he never did. He raised the gun until it was just under his right temple and fired. Just at the end, in that last thousandth of a second, he jerked it a little as he pulled the trigger and it went higher man he had aimed but it wasn’t high enough to make any difference.

I heard her fall then but I didn’t go in to her until after I had gone over to where Lee was slumped forward over the table. His right arm was hanging down and I put it up on the table and stood there crying.

THE END