He felt as if her eyes were on him now.
Anna, Travis thought.
He shook his head to clear it and crawled forward a yard or so.
She was gazing directly toward the patch of prairie grass where he lay. Her eyes were unnaturally bright. The westbound freight streamed by behind her, a clangorous black banner.
Weariness came over him again, suddenly. He felt a stirring of alarm, but it was muted.
There’s something about her, Travis thought. Something had changed in her. He could see it in the arch of her back, in the way her fists were clenched.
She had shaken off some of that passive helplessness. In her eyes, Travis thought, there was something he had not seen there before: an expectation, possibly a hope.
But the weight of his body was immense. The night air seemed to press him down.
Anna, he thought sleepily. Anna… Her gaze bore into him. He closed his eyes.
When he woke the sun was standing over the eastern horizon. There were dust motes in the raking light and his bones ached with chill. And he was alone.
Chapter Six
He brushed off his shirt and pants and walked back toward town until he could hail a ride. He knew he was late for work. By the position of the sun he was at least an hour overdue. But that didn’t matter. Something important had happened the night before. It was mysterious, not altogether clear even in his own mind. He was sure, however, of one thing: that Anna Blaise did in fact need help, and that in some way she had chosen Travis to help her. The feel of it burned inside him. He hitched with a jut-boned farmer as far as the south end of town and then walked the remaining quarter mile to the ice plant. His reflection in the dusty windshield of the truck had been wild, his hair askew and blazened with hayseeds, his beard grown out in stubble, his fingernails ringed with black crescents. At the plant he clocked in, threw a little water on his face at the chipped porcelain basin out back, and ran his fingers through his hair. Then he took up his broom and began sweeping the raucous machine shed.
She must not stay at the Buracks’, he thought. That much was clear. For whatever reason, she had been tolerating Creath’s abuses of her. But that would stop. He could not say he knew these things, but he knew that something had changed in her last night. Maybe Creath would see it, too.
He worked steadily and alone. When the noon whistle blew he realized he didn’t have a lunch with him, that he had missed breakfast, too, and that the heat of the day was pouring down like molten glass. He wandered through the gravel lot, back of the loading dock, to the grassy bank of the Fresnel and sat with his arms wrapped around his knees, watching the brown water flow and curl. So, he thought, what about Nancy? Did he love her or didn’t he? And what did that imply in this skewed and mysterious new world he had entered?
Love was unfathomable. He did not understand it. Nancy was a concentration of good and bad things, wild impulses and dangerous urges. He had loved her, he thought; had loved her, at least, in that reasonless moment when he slaked himself in her body. If you could call that love.
He knew only that there was this different thing he felt with Anna Blaise, an undifferentiated longing that seemed to rise up in him like summer heat, not passion so much as a kind of ache, as if her perfect body were that garden from which the first man had been cast out and to which all men longed to return. It was as powerful as that. “Love” was inadequate, a merely human word.
He stood up and turned back when the whistle blew again. When he reached the plant his uncle was waiting for him.
Creath wore an undershirt that stretched taut over the skin of his belly and he was sweating, the sweat glinting in the long hairs of his arms, his chest. His face was ruddy and there was slow anger in his eyes. He pulled a checked handkerchief out of his back pocket and mopped his face with it.
“You were late,” he said.
Travis nodded.
“You were out,” Creath said ponderously, “all last night. Your Aunt Liza was worried sick this morning. You appreciate what you’ve done?”
“It was a mistake,” Travis said.
“Come on in here,” Creath said, hooking a thumb at his office, a wooden cubicle behind the machine shed. “You come in here, we’ll talk about mistakes.”
The room inside possessed a single crude window propped open with a yellow-handled gimlet. The heat was intense enough to smell, a stink like the hot-metal stink of a misaligned gear in the refrigeration machinery. Creath had decorated the walls with calendars: bank calendars, hardware store calendars, feed store calendars, none of them current. The ice plant keys hung on a big ring hooked over a nail next to the door,- under them was the truck’s ignition key. Creath sank into the wooden office-chair behind the cheap desk, easing back against its protesting springs, fixing a long stare on Travis. Travis felt a wave of dizzy claustrophobia sweep through him. Because he hadn’t eaten, he supposed… but he felt like he’d walked into a hot sealed box.
“We brought you to this town,” Creath said. Travis nodded, squinting.
“We paid your way. It that not correct? Answer me.”
“Yessir.”
“We took you in.” “Yessir.” “Fed you.” “Yessir.”
“I employ you at this ice plant. Is that not right, Travis ?” “Sir.”
“And now? What have you done?” Travis closed his eyes. “Come in late.” “Come in late! More than that, I believe.” “Sir?”
The older man sighed. “Travis, don’t bullshit me. I will not be bullshitted. We took you in, and we fed you, and I employed you… and you were out last night, correct me if I’m wrong, chasing after our other roomer.”
Travis said nothing.
“How do you think that makes me feel, Travis? That you would do a thing like that? Act filthy like that while you’re living under my roof?”
Hypocrite, Travis thought. You goddamned hypocrite.
Creath waved his hands placatingly. “Now, I understand how it must have been for you. You did not have a normal home. Your mother—”
“My mother doesn’t come into this.”
It was a mistake, he realized immediately. But he could not make himself be quiet. Not in this box.
Creath performed a patient smile. “Don’t take that tone with me. I knew your mother, you little peckerwood.”
Keep still, Travis thought desperately. He focused his eyes on a 1929 calendar, picture of a little girl, gingham dress, field of daisies. The sky in the picture was a deep and impossible Kodak blue, almost turquoise.
“Travis?” Creath grinned broadly. “She was a whore, Travis.”
So many daisies.
“You understand what I’m saying? She fucked for money, Travis.”
You could get lost in that blue.
“She fucked strangers for money, Travis, and I know about it, and Liza knows about it, and the Baptist Women know about it, and I guess by this time just about every dumb shit in town knows about it. You hear me, Travis? She—”
“Shut your mouth.” He couldn’t help it. His head was spinning.
Creath stood up, and his grin widened into something truly awful, a jack-o’-lantern smirk of triumph. “No, you poor ignorant whoreson, you shut your mouth, how about that?”
Travis raised his foot and kicked the old pine-board desk so that it racked backward across the floor.
Creath fell forward, flailing into a stack of yellow invoices. Travis watched a moment as his uncle struggled up, cursing; then he turned, restraining a rage that ran in him like blood; he yanked open the door. His hand rested momentarily on the lower of the two keyrings, the one on which Creath carried the key to the truck.