Hill Girl

Four

The speedometer of the big roadster climbed up to sixty as we came over the crest of Five Mile Hill. I watched it as we started down. It went to sixty-five and then seventy, and then it hovered just under seventy-five. Lee lounged behind the wheel in a big hunting coat and fished in a pocket for a cigarette, brought out a lighter, and snapped it, and for a brief instant the little flame lit up the lean Indian face and the polished smoothness of the brown head. He grinned at me around the cigarette and winked and said, “We’ll knock ‘em dead, son,” and went on trying to hum “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” He couldn’t carry a tune any more than I could.

It was in the cold half-light of dawn, with a growing strip of pink in the east, and the Buick seemed the only thing alive. The countryside was still and ghostly under a heavy mantle of frost. The side curtains were up on the car but still I had to shove my hands in my pockets to keep them warm. When we crossed the little creek bottom below the Eiler’s place there were patches of low-lying and filmy mist that hugged the ground and were torn apart and swirled into the boiling red dust behind us. We left the loose boards of the old wooden bridge ringing their complaining clatter on the still air of the morning, and shot noiselessly up the hill where I had met Sam Harley, the car eating up the miles of the clay and gravel road like a red-tailed projectile.

There had been an argument before we started. I had wanted to go out to the old Crane farm and hunt over it so I could have a look at the buildings and the land at the same time. The farm was mine now and I wanted to see what kind of shape it was in, but Lee had insisted that we come this way. I couldn’t understand why, but had given in to him. I found out later what the attraction was over here.

Mike sat between us, peering out interestedly through the windshield at the scenery flashing past. He would be a surprised dog, I thought, if he ever rode with anybody else and found out that cars can travel at thirty and forty miles an hour. He turned and licked Lee on the face. Lee cuffed him on the head while we swept around a long curve with that delicately balanced feeling you have just before the car begins to skid.

“You old cold-nosed bastard, I’ll throw you out and make you walk,” he said affectionately.

He stopped the car and turned it around and parked off the road on top of a long hill five miles beyond. I got out on the side of the road and old Mike jumped down and went racing around in ecstatic circles.

“Go get ‘em, Mike,” Lee said, and slapped him playfully in the ribs.

Mike gave him a look of sheer adoration and cleared the burrow pit beside the road with one bound and disappeared down the rows of old cornstalks and pea vines that lay downhill. We loaded the guns and followed.

The sun was just coming up over the top of a far-off ridge to the east and it felt good on my back and strung the frosty vines with diamonds, and the red-gold shafts of light broke against the far hill ahead of us in a spreading extravagance of color among the dogwood and hickory and red oak. October’s blue haze of smoke was in the air and the unforgettable smell of it was in our nostrils, and our breath was steamy in the absolutely still air.

“He’s found birds,” Lee said happily. I looked up ahead and saw Mike had slowed and was coming along the edge of the field stealthily and his very pose said as plain as words, “They’re here. And close.” Then he stiffened in a point.

It was a small covey and they got up from the pea vines almost at our feet, half a dozen or so small brown-feathered bombs that ripped the hush of the morning apart with their explosion. Lee knocked one down with an effortless swing of his gun, but I was jumpy and missed with both barrels, missed clean without drawing a feather, which is the only way to miss if you have to.

“I used to know a guy once,” Lee said gravely as Mike brought up his bird and he stowed it in the game pocket.

“Yeah? You did?”

“Quite a hunter, this guy was. And what he always did was to shoot at the birds. Or at least in their general direction.”

“All right, all right.” I grinned. “So I missed one.”

“You missed one?” He grabbed my coat collar and shook it affectionately. “Why, you big Swede, you couldn’t hit a Jersey cow in the ass with an ironing board.”

And that was the way it went most of the morning. Mike would find the birds, we would kick them out, Lee would get one and sometimes a clean double, and I would miss. By noon I had only two birds in the game pocket of my coat. I couldn’t get the old swing back, and Lee kidded me unmercifully.

“They went that way, mister,” he would shout excitedly, pointing after a vanishing covey after I had missed two shots on the rise.

All hunters have days like that, even exceptional shots, and I have lots of them, so I didn’t mind. The day was beautiful and it was all right just to be out with Lee like this after an absence of two years.

He was in high spirits. “Damn it, Bob,” he said, “I’m sure glad you’re back. We’ve missed you around here. I don’t see why you couldn’t have gone to some school around home. They’re always just as much in the market for beef as that place you went. And I always wished you and the Major could have got together some way.”

“Well,” I said, “it was just one of those things.”

“I think it got to worrying him the last year. The way the two of you had split up, I mean. He used to ask me right often if I’d heard from you.”

“He did?” I tried to work up some interest in it, but it was pretty thin.

“You missed a lot of fun, Bob.” He stopped and lit a cigarette and grinned at me in the sunlight. “Don’t go so fast. We’re not hunting birds for a living.

“But you did miss a lot of fun,” he went on. “You know how much money he used to give me when I was going to Rice. And the parties we used to throw the last few years before he died, when I was working for him. That last one, in Houston, sweet Jesus! He had a whole suite of rooms at the Rice Hotel and I don’t know how much whisky—the real McCoy, too, no moonshine—and I had all the telephone numbers from the days when I was going to school down there. And for a man who was crowding fifty, he was quite a lad with the gals. A little on the salty side, especially when he’d had a couple of snorts, and sometimes they didn’t quite know how to take him, but he was a good sport. You remember how he used to be sometimes when he’d had too much, he’d think about when he was in France with the Engineers, and he’d start talking French to the girls, and it’s a damn good thing none of ‘em ever understood anything he was saying. And then he’d sing the Engineers’ song, you know, the one about ‘Oh, the Engineers, with hairy ears, they live in caves and ditches,’ and when he’d come to the third line it was a little too rough for some of ‘em unless they had a snootful too, and if they got too snotty about it he’d let out a roar and say, ‘Lee, take these goddamn campfire girls back to their sorority house and go down on Congress Avenue and dig us up some women with guts,’ and then I’d have to pacify everybody all over again.”

“You must have had your hands full,” I said absently. I was trying to keep an eye on Mike, who was cutting around the edge of a blackberry patch.

“I’ll say I did. And say, speaking of girls—”

“We were?” I said. “What are girls?”

“Speaking of girls, you sap, I want to take you out to Sam’s sometime soon so you can see this Angelina. Until you see that, you haven’t lived, I’m telling you.”

“Lay off,” I said. “Forget this Angelina stuff. You know what Sam Harley’d do if he caught you fooling around with one of his girls.”

“What a sucker!” He grinned. “If I ever get a chance to get into that, d’you think I’m going to do it on the courthouse lawn and give out invitations to everybody in the country?”

“For Christ’s sake, Lee,” I said. “Quit talking like that. You’ll have me believing you mean it before long.”

“O.K.,” he said. “O.K., Grandma. But when you see her, don’t say I didn’t warn you. There’s a lot of fun there in one pair of flour-sack pants, for the guy that can get it.”

“Speaking of sport,” I said, “did you ever hunt any quail? Now, back where I come from, it’s a lot of fun. You have a dog, see, and a shotgun; and this dog goes out and finds the birds—”

“All right, all right. Maybe we had better get going, or I’ll be whinnying and pawing the ground, just thinking about her. Let’s go.”

We would hunt over a field and then move the car down the road to another bit of good cover and go over that. By noon we were close to the field where I had met Sam Harley the day before. We started across a piece of pastureland near the road, headed for a spring branch below, where we could eat the sandwiches we had brought. Mike found a big covey of quail in the blackberries along an old fence row and Lee connected again. I shot and missed.

“Now, you take croquet. That’s a nice game I could recommend,” Lee said as we sat down at the base of a big oak beside the spring. “I knew a man once. Just like you in a lot of ways. Had eleven thumbs and three left feet and he got to be a hell of a player. Maybe All-American.”

“You certainly know a lot of people,” I said. “Any of ‘em named Joe?”

“Sure. All of ‘em. Joe’s a nice name.”

“Had a kind of green mole on the left side of his face, just under the eye?”

“No. This guy had an aunt named Irma who used to dance at Elk stag parties.”

I shook my head. “Must be another guy.”

“You’re nuts. I’m glad you’re home, but you’re nuts.”

I threw a chunk of rotten wood at him and he ducked and it went into the spring and splashed a little water on Mike, who looked at us sitting there on the ground laughing like hyenas. He whined eagerly deep in his throat and started up out of the ravine, padding noiselessly on the damp brown leaves where the frost had melted, and his manner clearly indicated that he’d had enough of this stalling around and thought we should get back to the pressing business of hunting birds.

Lee whistled at him. “Don’t work so hard, Mike,” he said. “You’ll just get promoted to a better job and then you’ll have worries.”

He lay back at full length on the steep incline of the bank, with an arm crooked under the back of his head to keep it off the wet ground and leaves. The sunlight of a cloudless autumn day poured through an opening in the trees above and he stretched lazily in the warm rays and bit enormously into a sandwich.

“This is the life,” he said.

It was, all right, I agreed silently. And I was happy to see him enjoying it so much and I tried to pretend to myself that I didn’t know he would be bored with it before the day was over. There wasn’t enough excitement in hunting quail to keep him interested for a full day.

After lunch we went on down the road and stopped to hunt over the field where I had met Sam yesterday. But, as I had known, he began losing interest in it. He didn’t kid me any more about the shots I missed and he took less and less pleasure from even the difficult ones he completed.

The silence between us lengthened out. I tried to keep him going by bringing up people we knew and funny things that had happened, but it was no use. He was growing moody and irritable.

By two o’clock we were down by the little creek at the lower end of the big Eilers field and the car was a long way back, a mile or more. Beyond the creek was a wooded ridge and I remembered that there were a few scattered sandy fields and open pastures up on top of it but that it wasn’t good bird country. I couldn’t understand why Lee kept turning in that direction.

“There’s no use in crossing the creek,” I said. “Let’s go back to the car.”

“Oh, come on. There are some fields up there, over by Sam Harley's house.”

I began to see the light, but I followed him. There wasn’t anything else to do. He had the car keys. And he was already crossing the creek on the foot log, and he stalked across the swampy bottom without looking back.

“I’ll tell you,” I said, “you and Mike go on along the ridge here, cutting back toward the highway, and I’ll go back and pick up the car and meet you.”

“No,” he said shortly. “It’s only a quarter mile on to Sam’s. Let’s go on over there and get a drink and he’ll drive us out to the car. I want to pick up a quart.”

I shrugged. “O.K.”

It was easy to see now where the hunting trip was going.