“I believe her,” Nancy said.
“Maybe she picked us because we’d believe her. Not Creath, not Aunt Liza, not anybody else in town.”
“Because we’d understand.” Oh, Travis, she thought, I’ve touched her, I know—but how to explain that? “Out at the tracks that night, she saw something in you, a goodness—”
“Or a gullibility.”
“Travis, what is it? Why does she frighten you so?”
He was a long time answering. The answer had sprung up in him but there was no way to articulate it: because of what Mama was, he thought, because of how she died; because of what he had done with Nancy and what he had wanted to do with Anna Blaise. The whole sour mess of it. He felt torn inside: some wound there had been opened. Fundamentally, he distrusted the femaleness of the Anna-thing; like all femaleness it concealed too much.
“It had to be us,” Nancy was saying. “She took a chance, you know, telling us anything at all. But she needs somebody. She can’t live out these two weeks without somebody to bring her food, somebody to help her through the Changes—somebody who’ll know and somebody who’ll do it anyway. You know anybody else who’d do that? Anybody else back there!”
“It’s only a town,” Travis said. “They hate us.”
He looked at her. She was skinny and dragged-out looking. Her hair was tangled. “You still believe that? You’re too good for them?”
She straightened defiantly and her eyes went shiny with tears. “This town,” she said, “this goddamn town—I am too big for this town!”
And a look of surprise washed over her.
“That’s why she picked us,” Travis said gently. “We’re alone. Cut off.”
“Like she is.”
“Maybe.” He added, “When wolves go after a sheep, the first thing they do is cut it off from the flock.”
“That’s just crazy. She’s so weak!”
“What about this Bone? What if they do get together?” He thought of his vision of Anna Blaise— wet wings unfolding behind her. “They don’t care about us.”
“Come tomorrow,” Nancy said. “Talk to her.” She said, her voice rising, “I told you what you wanted to know!”
“I didn’t make any promises.”
“Travis, the only goddamn wolves around here are the ones in Haute Montagne, and they are circling, and they have cut me off—both of us—and, Travis, maybe you can ride away from it all, but— goddammit—I can’t, and they’re gonna bring me down!”
He thought of Anna Blaise in her damp shack, her pale skin stretched fine, her eyes huge and burning; he thought of this Bone, hardly human, tracking her across the night. He closed his eyes. The Jeweled World. He trembled, thinking of it: of what she had been and what she might become. And what he stood to lose or gain in the process.
“Tomorrow,” Nancy said.
“Maybe,” he said softly. “Maybe.”
Chapter Twelve
Creath Burack nodded, not cordially, at the sullen-faced boy who had come through the door of his office.
He felt content, alone here in this pineboard room. There was the reassuring rumble of the compressors, the metallic smell of the dust, the calendars tacked on the wall like pieces of mosaic. He had spent much of his life here. He sat in the wooden reclining chair with his feet on an upturned waste-basket. Too long in this position and the narrow bands of the back-support bit into his spine like teeth. He was getting older; comfort, like most things, could be taken only in moderation. He stirred dully, sat up, blinking.
“Heard you might have a job free,” the boy said.
Creath Burack squinted.
“You,” he said, “you’re Greg Morrow, aren’t you? Bill Morrow’s kid?” He nodded to himself. He remembered Bill Morrow, a fat granary worker who used to show up at the First Baptist stinking of flax and bathtub liquor, sullen little dark-skinned wife who had died of rheumatic fever three years back— yeah. “Yeah, I seen you before. Aren’t you working over at the mill?”
“Got laid off,” the boy said. “Heard about your job.”
My Christ, the older man thought, but he is not handsome. Round ugly face. And his lip curled like that. Creath felt a swelling resentment of the boy’s youth, plainly misspent. He could think of no good reason not to show this kid the gate. But play him, first, he thought—like a fish on a line. “What job’s that?”
“The one the shit-heel farmboy lost,” Greg said, maybe sensing that he was not welcome here.
“Shit-heel farmboy, huh.” Creath was secretly amused. “You got a strange idea how to beg for a job.”
“Fuck it, I’m not begging,” Greg Morrow said. He turned to the door.^
Some instinct made Creath say, “Hang on a minute.”
Greg hesitated.
“It’s not much of a job,” Creath said. “Pick up trash, stand in on the machine sometimes, deliver sometimes, lift and load always.” He smiled. “It pays shit.”
Greg remained sullen but appeared confused, as if he had been praised and scolded both at once. That was good.
“Try it out,” Creath said. “See if you can get a handle on it.”
“Now?” The kid brightened. “Right now.”
That had been before lunch.
The kid worked straight through, mopping down the loading docks with scalding water and ammonia. Then the work crew filtered back, gazing at Greg with mute curiosity, at the enthusiastic way Creath played foreman to him,- slowly they had caught on, finding him scutwork of their own, lolling against the limp boards of the icehouse while Greg Morrow manhandled the big slabs in and out with an inadequate pair of tongs. The muffled laughter became audible, and at one point Greg looked around with a dark, startled suspicion in his eyes. But everyone had turned away.
After the five o’clock bell he showed up back in Creath’s office, steaming wet and obviously exhausted. Natural enough, Creath thought. He had done the work of two men.
“What time do I come in tomorrow?”
“Sleep late.” Creath grinned at him. “The job’s not available.”
“What the fuck—”
“We’re not hiring. Thanks anyway.”
“You bastard, you owe me a day’s pay!”
“I don’t remember signing anything,” Creath said mildly. “And watch your dirty mouth.”
Greg did a long slow burn but he did, at last, turn to leave. Creath felt an immense, perverse satisfaction. Damn but hadn’t the kid done a job with that mop!
But Greg hesitated and turned back to him now, smiling faintly, and his posture took on that easy insolence again. Creath said, “You too dumb to find the door?”
“Maybe I’m good for something after all.” Creath was instantly suspicious. “I don’t get it.” “You want her back?” “Want who back?” “You know.”
The insinuation was plain.
Creath felt beads of sweat break out on his forehead. Guilt and doubt gusted over him both at once. By God, he thought, I have put all that behind me.
Demons of lust, he thought. Demons of—of—
“I can find her,” Greg Morrow said, and he was smiling now, a secret and insinuating smile. “I know where she is. I can find her.”
I have put all that behind me.
“I don’t want to know,” Creath said faintly. “I don’t want to know!”
“Maybe you don’t. That’s okay. I’ll get lost.” He opened the door.
“No,” Creath heard himself say. “Wait. …” “Huh?”
“Be in at nine,” Creath said weakly.
Greg Morrow only nodded.
The kid was gone, then, and Creath sat back, swabbing his forehead with his big checked handkerchief. After a moment he took out the bottle of Saskatchewan corn whiskey he kept in the bottom drawer, Volstead Act or no Volstead Act; he drank from the neck of the bottle. Backsliding. But there were worse demons than Demon Drink.