She let her breath in and out, a papery sound. Travis had forgotten—almost—about following Anna. He stared at Liza now, her face round and pale in the faint light that filtered through the lace curtains from the street.
“I don’t know what it is!” she whispered. “I truly don’t! The way she looks, maybe. Something in her eyes. Something in the raw smell of her. She does something to men … makes them helpless. They go to her. And she—she—”
“Aunt Liza,” Travis said placatingly.
“No!” Her voice was shrill again. “Don’t comfort me, Travis Fisher! Don’t place yourself above me—or Creath!” She groped her glasses into place. Her eyes were suddenly magnified. “Don’t pretend you weren’t down here following her, following her wherever she goes these moonlight nights! Some nasty place. You and the Wilcox girl getting along just fine, yes? But here you are. Sniffing after that dirty creature.”
The accusation was unfair, Travis thought. But he felt an involuntary rush of guilt nevertheless. His cheeks burned.
“Travis,” his aunt said, “listen to me. I grew up with your mother. To me she was always Mary-Jane—my little sister. I lived with her and I watched her go bad. Not as bad as she ended up. But bad inside her. Bad to the bone, Mama used to say. Bad like a rotten tooth. She would not do what she was told.
Took a pleasure in contrariness. In her own wicked shamelessness. We warned her about that man who became your father, oh, yes. He is rootless and insincere, Mama told her. Mary-Jane, we said, you must not squander your life on him. But she did. She ran off west. And he left her. Left her gap-toothed from all the times he got drunk… left her with you to feed. She could have come home anytime. Could have! But would she? No! Not Mary-Jane. Anything but admit defeat.”
Travis squirmed on the sofa.
“You have that heritage,” Aunt Liza said, her eyes blazing. “You must be aware of it, Travis. Know it, or it’ll hurt you. You have your father’s blind anger and your mother’s stupid passions. Leave that woman alone! She is nothing you know or understand. You don’t need her… whatever your body might tell you.”
He said faintly, “Aunt Liza, I—”
“Go up now.” She sank back into the easy chair as if some sustaining energy had been consumed. “Go up and sleep and don’t let on to Creath that we talked.”
The trail was cold. Anna was gone. He went upstairs, dazed.
He slept almost instantly… and was still asleep in that hour before dawn when Anna Blaise crept silently back into the house, cold blue fire playing like sheet lightning about her body.
Friday next he drove Nancy back to the stand of oaks on the highway out of Haute Montagne. The prairie spread out around them, grain fields whispering toward a meager harvest. With the motor of the old Ford off and the shrilling of the locusts all around, they might have been a thousand miles from home.
Tonight was special, Travis thought. He felt a special wildness in Nancy. She would glance at him, glance away, and then her eyes would find him again.
Her eyes, when the contact held, were very blue and very wide.
Travis himself felt victim to a kind of unfocused randiness. Nancy’s warmth next to him on the lumpy seat of the Ford stimulated a painful and persistent erection. He wanted her so badly that his knuckles had gone white on the steering wheel.
He guessed it was understandable. He had fallen into the rhythm of his work at the ice plant, and the days passed easily enough—more easily than the nights. Often, though, he would stop what he was doing, shake his head like a man coming out of a dream, and a deep panic would flood him. He imagined himself growing old in Haute Montagne, growing fat and sedately cruel, growing into the shape of Creath Burack like rubber poured into a steel mold. He felt at such times that he must push back at the barriers that confined him—push, or go mad.
He guessed Nancy felt the same way. She had been pushing a long time. There was that bond between them.
He stopped the car and they climbed into the truck bed and made pillows of empty burlap sacks. Travis touched her lightly. She’s anxious, too, he thought. She wants to touch. Push down the walls. But she lit a cigarette, her hand shaking, and waved the match at the darkness. Her lips trembled as she exhaled. “Tell me about Anna.”
He told what there was to tell. For a time even Travis was distracted by it, the memory of Liza and of Anna’s night walk welling up in him like a cold sea-current.
“Strange,” Nancy whispered.
“Passing strange,” Travis said.
“Obviously,” Nancy said, “she needs our help more than ever.”
“She hasn’t asked for it.”
She looked at him from behind the glowing tip of her cigarette. “You think I’m butting in.”
“No____”
“You do. Admit it.”
“No. Rushing in too fast, maybe. Remember, Nance, we still don’t know anything about this girl. She was out on a highway, naked. Creath picked her up. Maybe she wanted it that way. Maybe she likes things the way they are.”
Nancy scrunched down in the shadowy pickup bed, drawing herself inward, musing.
“Before I got this diner job,” she said, “I would go over with sewing. Mama would send me over. I’ve seen the girl, Travis. Seen her up close. I’ve looked her in the eye.”
He nodded. “So have I.”
“Have you? And you can sit there and suggest maybe she likes what she’s doing?”
Well, no, he couldn’t—not honestly. There was that desperation in Anna Blaise like an underground fire; it was impossible to miss. But he said, “There’s more to it than we know.”
“Bound to be. That’s why we have to find out.”
“How?”
“Talk to her. Follow her.” She exhaled a cloud of smoke, tossed the butt out into the roadway, a small cometary arc. “See where she goes.”
She could not have missed the attraction Travis felt toward Anna. Travis was a poor liar. And yet, he thought, she is capable of suggesting this.
Maybe it was her way of testing him. Or, he thought, of testing herself.
He thought of what she had said in the strawberry fields last month: I believe it’s possible to love more than one person…
“It’s chilly these nights,” she said suddenly. Far off, the westbound train wailed. Travis pressed up close to her, put his arm around her protectively. Her cotton dress was like silk under his big hand. She turned toward him, and they kissed, and there was something in the urgency of it that made Travis aware that she had decided to go all the way with him tonight.
He touched her small, perfect breasts. After a time his hand worked up under her dress. He was almost feverish with the wanting, and when she laid herself back against the burlap sacks and he entered her it was like an electric shock of pleasure. He climaxed rapidly. Nancy shuddered under him and he realized, distantly amazed, that she must be experiencing some equivalent fulfillment. Gasping, he told her he loved her.
Maybe he did. It was not a lie; she would have recognized a lie. But he was far less certain than he made himself sound.
Doubt had crept into him even as he performed the act. He loved her, at the very least, for what they had done together, but even that was compromised: it had been too easy he thought, she gave herself too easily. Women ought not to do that. He looked away as she straightened her skirt. What disturbed him, and what he found hard to admit even to himself, was that the face that had flashed in his mind in that moment of climax had been, not Nancy’s, but Anna’s: her pale china skin; the eyes huge and dark, violated but aloof; her strangely unassailable purity burning in him like fire.