Hill Girl

Fifteen

Something awakened me in the dark and I looked at the luminous dial of my watch. It was three o’clock. And then I felt again the thing that had brought me out of my sleep; it was a hand running softly along my arm and across the shoulder. It was a small hand and smooth and cool and its touch was caressing.

“Are you awake, Bob?” she asked softly.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry I waked you up.”

“It’s too hot to sleep anyway.”

“What time is it?”

“Three. I must have been asleep for a couple of hours. It was about eleven when we came back from getting something to eat, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know. You keep track of the time for us. But I’m real sorry about waking you up. I was feeling all the muscle in your arm. And behind your shoulder. There’s regular ropes of it. Why are you so strong?”

“Clean living. Avoiding alcohol and tobacco and loose women.”

“You always joke about everything, don’t you? Bob, have you decided yet what we’re going to do? Are you going to New Orleans today?”

“No. I don’t want to go to New Orleans now.”

“Why not? I thought you wanted to go.”

“Not now,” I said.

It was very quiet outside now, with only a lone car going by in the street now and then. We lay there in the dark without anything over us, listening to the humming of the overhead fan.

“Bob,” she said after a while.

“What?”

“I want to know why you changed your mind about going down there.”

“I don’t know why. I just lost interest in it.”

“Is it because you think you have to take care of me? You don’t have to, you know.”

“No,” I said. “That isn’t it.”

“But you don’t want me around, do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t ever lie, do you? You don’t ever say things you don’t mean just to keep from hurting people’s feelings. You could have said you did and it would have sounded nice even though it didn’t mean anything.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m not very smooth.”

“But we don’t have to pretend with each other, do we? I was sort of forced on you and you don’t have to play like you like me. You don’t like me, do you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“How much, Bob?”

“I don’t know how much.”

“You told me this morning you didn’t.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“It seems like years, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“We’ve both changed, haven’t we?”

“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.