Russell hadn’t complained about my “rescue” of the girl, as Buck jokingly insisted on calling it, until he realized he’d have to bunk with the two of us, and he berated me for a meddling fool as we finished off the bottle.
“Next time you get a notion to save some chippy from a fate worse than whatever,” he said, “don’t do it—not if it’s gonna get me kicked out of my fluff’s bed.”
Even Buck’s announcement that the San Antonio take came to $290 did little to soothe Russell’s irritation. The cabin had two beds and I didn’t think to argue about which one of us was going to sleep on the floor.
We slept till nearly midmorning but still were ready for breakfast before the girls, so we went to wait for them at the camp’s café. When they finally came in and headed for our booth, we saw that Charlie had made a heroic effort with her makeup kit, but there was only so much she could do for the girl. The swollen black eye was a squint. Her other cheek looked embedded with a small wedge of plum, and her nose was lightly blue across the bridge. But she’d had a bath and her hair had been washed and brushed and showed a shine. She wore one of Charlie’s dresses. It rode high on her legs and was tight across the breasts but otherwise seemed to fit okay. Until now I hadn’t realized just how young she was—she didn’t look more than sixteen. And I could tell that under the bruises the face was a pretty one.
“Like the blind man said when he passed the shrimp docks,” Buck said, “hello, girls.”
“For Pete’s sake, Buck, try to be nice.” Charlie said. She slid into the booth next to Russell and patted the seat beside her for the girl to sit there.
“Belle honey,” Charlie said, “this here’s Buck and that’s Russell.”
She looked up timidly from under her lashes and her eyes cut from Russell to Buck and her lips made a small twitch in what was probably the best she could do for a smile.
“An ass-kicking hurts even worse the day after, don’t it, honeybunch?” Buck said. She lowered her eyes to the table.
Charlie gave Buck a look of reprimand, then touched Belle’s arm and said, “And that’s Sonny.”
She met my eyes across the table for a second and then dropped her gaze again, her ears bright pink.
“My hero,” Buck said, grinning at me. I flicked him a two-finger “up yours.”
“Wish she’d give somebody a chance to get a word in edgewise,” Russell said, smiling at the girl, and her ears got redder.
“She talks plenty,” Charlie said, “when she’s in company worth talking to.”
Russell looked around, checking to see if anybody was within earshot, then said low-voiced, “Ah, exactly how much talking you done with her about us?”
“Enough,” Charlie said. “I thought she ought to know what kind of company she was keeping so she could choose not to keep it if she didn’t want.”
“But here she still is,” Buck said. “You got a thing for bad-asses, girl?”
“Buckman, please?” Charlie said.
“All right, all right,” Buck said. “So now we’re all properly introduced, can we get something to eat? I’m about starved to death.”
He signaled for the waitress. She was an older woman and had probably seen a few things in her time because she never batted an eye at Belle’s face.
When Charlie asked Belle what she wanted to eat, she stared at the table and shook her head slightly. She seemed to be trying hard to make herself invisible.
“Tell you what,” Charlie said, “I’ll get bacon and eggs and you get pancakes and sausage and we’ll eat whatever we want off each other’s plate, okay?”
But all she did was nibble at a piece of toast and sip her coffee while the rest of us ate like farmhands without much pause for conversation.
Then we were on the road again, me at the wheel and Buck in the shotgun seat, Russell at a back window, Charlie between him and Belle. I’d take a look at her in the mirror every so often, and every time she was staring steadily out at the passing countryside like an immigrant entering some strange new world.
Pretty much like us all.
The highway rose and fell and rose again. The towns smaller and fewer and getting farther apart. Hills and cedars and dwarf oaks. The grass turning dull, going sparse, giving way to stony scrub. Mesquites. Low clumps of cactus. The hills shrinking, scattering, the vistas widening, the sky deepening dead ahead.
In the early afternoon we stopped in some burg along the highway to get gasoline. When I shut off the engine the silence was profound. We all sat mute for a moment and all I could hear was the ticking of the hot engine. “Goddam,” Buck said. “For minute I thought I’d gone deef.” We all got out to stretch and use the restroom. I told the attendant to fill it up.
Russell asked the guy how it felt to live in the middle of nowhere. The guy got the pump going and spat a streak of tobacco juice and said, “It’s another four, five hundred miles to anywhere near the middle.”
Belle still hadn’t said a word other than her name the night before. At one point Russell had casually asked where she was from, but she only gave him a spooked look and then turned her face back to the window. “Nice chatting with you,” Russell said. Charlie punched him on the arm and said to leave the girl be. We’d gone along without anyone saying much after that, just listening to the sporadic music we’d pick up on the radio, usually more of the stringband stuff.
While the others were buying the sandwiches and sodas I stood at the side of the highway and stared off into the barrenness ahead, marveling at its vastness. I hadn’t known New Orleans could feel so far away.
Buck came up beside me, sipping from a bottle of Dr Pepper and munching a Clark Bar. “We can at least take her somewhere else,” he said, trying to mimic my voice. “Well…here’s somewhere else. How about we leave her here?”
I didn’t know he was joking and my face must’ve shown it, judging by the way he laughed. “Hell kid, the more I think on how she looked without a stitch, the more I believe we done the smart thing to bring her.” He walked off to the car before I could think of what to say.
Then we were on the road again and pretty soon another station faded off the radio. Buck fiddled with the tuning knob, static rasping along the dial until we picked up a hissing and crackling rendition of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby.” We started singing along—all but Belle, who kept staring out the window for a minute and then put her face in her hands and broke into sobs.
“Honey, what?” Charlie said. She took her in her arms.
“That song…it was playing when those…those men, they were…it was so…awful!”
“Easy, baby,” Charlie said, patting her shoulder, rocking her like a child. Russell arched his brow at me in the rearview and I shrugged and turned the radio down. Buck rolled his eyes and shook his head.
And then she told her story. Told it bit by bit as the miles went by. Told it by fits and starts and mostly out of sequence. Told it with pauses to cry some more and to gently blow her tender nose and take a sip of Charlie’s strawberry Nehi before resuming.
What it came to was this. She was Kathryn Belle Robinson—Kitty Belle, her daddy’d called her—seventeen years old, born and raised in Corsicana, Texas, and every passing mile was taking her farther from there than she’d ever been before. Her daddy had worked in the oil fields. Her mother came from Tyler, where she’d won some kind of rose festival beauty contest when she was in high school, but she hated oil towns and lamented her foolishness in marrying so young and ruining her dream of becoming a photography model. From the time Belle was a child, her mother advised her not to make the same mistake.