Hill Girl

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 uproariously 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!”