He got no answer out of her to that, so he tried erudition on her.
‘I’m the intellectual type,’ he confided. ‘Here’s an example: Did you happen to know that Indians don’t react to lie detectors?’
‘Maybe Indians don’t lie.’
‘You always got an answer. Answer me this: Did you know that Navajoes eat grasshoppers?’
She worked up a mild astonishment. ‘Imagine that.’
‘I’ll tell you why, too. If you really want to know—’
‘Why?’
‘Because they come from a different culture. That’s why.’
‘So would you if you did,’ Terasina assured him, putting a lettuce-and-tomato sandwich before him in which she’d replaced the lettuce with cole slaw.
‘Will you warm this up?’ – he shoved his half-empty coffee cup toward her – ‘just a wee bit?’ Terasina pointed to the new warning; he saw too late that filling the cup would cost him another nickel.
‘What are you trying to do?’ he asked, ‘be the richest woman in the cemetery?’
Yet he tickled her palm when he left, the simple chocolate pieman.
They weren’t exactly stallions made of moonlight, these kings of truck and trailer. They were clods whose vices ran over weakly like coffee into their saucers. Over-eaters, over-drinkers, snuff-chewing chiselers, doers of great sins to hear them tell it, though tilting the pinball machine was actually their greatest. Their conquests were many, they let it be known. How to deal with the envy of lesser lovers their perpetual problem. Yet when she pretended to one that the weekend trip to Matamoros really sounded interesting, he changed his plans. It wasn’t to Matamoros, after all, but only to Brownsville. Not for a weekend but just for the day. And naturally he would have to bring his family.
The only man she’d met in ten years whose flattery she found difficult to resist, because it was unintended, was Dove’s. In his eyes she read dedication.
‘Is that fresh choklut pie?’ he asked as if thinking it might be banana cream.
She slapped a bar of Bon Ami down. ‘Call this pie.’
He went to work on the windows – loveless, shoeless, choklut-pieless. When the windows were done she handed him a flyswatter – but had not reckoned he would keep track of the score.
‘Uno!’ he reported from the kitchen. ‘Dos! Tres! Cuatro!’ He was lying; she could tell by the swish of the swatter he wasn’t hitting a thing. Yet listened to his triumphs mount as he mounted the high dry stair – ‘Seis! Siete! Ocho!’ He was nueve from the top, diez would bring him to the bedroom door, once would bring him to the bed, at doce she heard him swatting above her head, pretending to pursue a greenbottle that wasn’t there, around the bed and around. He feinted it this way – she heard his feet reverse in a dramatic presentation of a man fooling a fly on the wing – then vaulted right over the bed and brought the swatter down smash as though pinning it to the floor. Then silence.
A silence in which she ached to cross her ankles behind his back on that same good hard bed. And leaned her head on her hands, made half sick by that natural goodness of body and heart she had been taught was mortal sin.
‘En Jesus tengo paz,’ she tried to pray the good hard bed away.
No warm-ups, the sign behind her warned: No wee bits.
While on the bed Dove waited for her.
He came downstairs at last swinging the swatter disconsolately, hung it where it belonged and pushed out the door.
‘Now I give you pie,’ she tried to call him back.
He spat through his teeth to lay all dust and was gone.
Gone in the silver end of day under a sky emptied of the last pelican.
Terasina abandoned her friend on the wall that night. It was no night for virgins, that was all.
Closed inside and shuttered out, alone in the shuttered dark she heard a small clock say ‘sick sick sick’; a prim little clock alone as herself yearning the small second hand around for the long silken lunge that could ease her. For the stroke to fill the wellsprings of her unused delight.
What a devilish kind of clock, to tick and tick as if minutes spent lying chastely alone were the only actual sin.
She breathed in a season without sound, not a breath of wind nor cricket to chirp. But only a clock offering alibis for playing the beast with a boy half her age.
Till the very stillness took pity, and sleep tossed her about for a while.
Wearing a low-backed evening gown of midnight blue spangled with green sequins but disgustingly smeared with chocolate, she asked ‘Which way to the church?’ of an elegant little humpbacked gentleman in black tie and tails, – ‘I wish to become a nun today.’
‘I am a great admirer of nuns,’ the elegant little gentleman assured her, and bowed even lower, ‘in fact, my father was Bishop of Seville. Our family knew yours well, Señora.’
‘Sire,’ she replied respectfully, ‘our family and yours descend from Cortez. Perhaps you remember my father?’
‘Of course. He was a lame pimp from Puebla.’
‘There has always been a good pimp in our family,’ she reported with quiet pride.
‘There has always been a good whore in ours,’ he boasted modestly in turn. ‘Perhaps you remember my mother?’
‘Who could forget that royal lady who kept the pool tables where one might sleep for no more than the price of three games? How is she?’
But before she could hear how the royal lady fared the dream trailed off and she lost her way to the church.
She was sitting in her black lace slip, on the bed’s edge, the following morning when Dove pushed in, both arms heaped with firewood for an excuse, without troubling to knock.
‘Take the doors down,’ she told him, ‘we don’t need them any more.’
He evaded her eyes, yet her own stayed hard upon him: she saw the hand holding the match tremble slightly, waiting for the flame to take hold. When it took, the weaving light flowered down his countrified face.
Then within her a valentine of gladness struggled bravely up, there was no use denying fire.
‘You come to me here you,’ she ordered him, and he came to stand at attention like a summoned private. Looking past her shoulders at something outside; prepared for any order. Submitting himself so completely that it came to her heart sweetly as an old revenge.
She pushed the suitcase slyly with her toes until it touched his own.
‘Why do you stand so? Do you expect me to decorate you for bravery?’
‘Never been in no army, m’am.’
‘Why not? So afraid of being a soldier?’
‘Aint afraid to soldier. Never been asked.’
‘I see. Afraid only of Terasina.’
‘I respect you most mightily, m’am.’
‘Then you have changed mightily since yesterday. Then your hand did not respect me’ – abruptly she seized both his hands in hers, turned them palm upward and flung them from her in feigned dismay – ‘Why! The very same. Only dirtier by a day. Why do you always disappoint me?’
The stove door opened and blew an orange-colored passion across his face. His face so young yet so old.
‘Don’t intend to disappoint you, m’am.’ And in the arm he placed about her she felt a commanding gentleness.
‘What is a woman to do with such a cunning man?’ then waited for him to begin apologizing and so spoil everything.
Instead he hauled her shoulder straps down as though he had paid for her clothes, cleared her of everything to her waist, and made her lean against him. Then lifted her breast to study it: a brown melon tipped with pink. Apparently satisfied with that one, he replaced it and studied the other.