“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “There’s something about rivers.”
There was no traffic along the road and we had the whole long bottom to ourselves, just the two of us and the mockingbird. Neither of us said anything for a long time as we sat there in the early-morning light watching the river, and the silence remained unbroken even after I was aware that we were no longer looking at the river, but at each other. She had turned toward me and sat with her head tilted back against the top of the seat and her cheek pressed against the leather, her eyes on my face. I looked down at her a long time and I had never known anything like it before and I knew what it was going to be like with us from this time on and then I had my arms around her and was kissing her, feeling the wildness of it and trying to be gentle with her at the same time. Her eyes were closed and I kissed them.
“Do that again, Bob,” she said softly. “I love it when you kiss me like that.”
It might have been what she said. Or it might have been some sudden and perverse awareness of the fact that I was making love to her in the car this way and of whose car it was. I don’t know which it was, but my arms stiffened and I felt sick down in my stomach the way you do when you take a foul punch. That thing Lee had said—”Jesus, but she enjoys it. She’ll beat you to death in the seat of a car.”
She felt me stiffen up and she looked up at me questioningly as I shoved her back and got on my side of the seat under the wheel and fished out a cigarette.
“Bob, what is it?” she asked, her eyes troubled.
“Nothing, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “I just wanted a smoke.”
“Something happened. Please tell me.”
“I just suddenly remembered your advance billing. You’re supposed to be terrific in the car seat.”
“I don’t know what you mean. What’s made you change all of a sudden?”
I don’t know why I couldn’t shut up and leave it there, But the thing had hold of me and I couldn’t stop.
“What the hell are we being so lovey-dovey about, anyway? We don’t have to go through this June-moon routine just to have a little fun in the car, do we? I can’t figure how you’ve managed to keep your pants on in it this long, or is it just Lee you take ‘em off for?”
She moved back as though I had swung at her. “Did you have to say that?” was all she said, and she looked quietly down toward the water.
“Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?”
“No. None, I reckon,” she said dully.
“Of course, you could pretend I was Lee, if you’re in love with him. And there must be some of your old pants lying around here somewhere, in the glove compartment maybe, to make you feel at home.”
She looked around at me then, and the old defiance was coming back into her eyes, that to-hell-with-you-and-everything sullenness, and I grabbed her again, roughly, like a drunken tanker sailor mauling his two-dollar slut, and roughed her up as I kissed her. She hit me in the face, not scratching or clawing the way most girls would, but with her fists doubled up. She could hit hard and I felt my eyes water as she slammed my nose and I could taste the salty tang of blood in my mouth, and I laughed and kissed her again. Her left arm was pinioned against my chest but her right kept slashing at my face and I laughed again and caught it and held her. She quit then and went limp.
“All right,” she said. “All right.”
She looked down at the floor boards and I couldn’t see her face. All I could see was the top of her bent head and the dark honey-colored hair and the hopeless slump of her shoulders. She didn’t cry; I don’t think she could cry if she wanted to. She had always fought back all her life and when she was whipped she accepted it silently, hating it but not crying. She lay there in my arms now, knowing she didn’t have a chance against my strength and indifferent to anything that might happen to her. The nausea and reaction began to hit me and I let go of her and slid back and took hold of the wheel. I noticed my knuckles were white where I gripped it.
She tried to straighten out her rumpled clothes a little and then opened the door and stepped out, picking up her new purse from the seat, and started down the road without looking back. I put my head down on the curve of the wheel and didn’t look after her but I could hear the click-click of her heels on the bridge, going farther and farther away, and then there was nothing but the sound of the water over the riffle down below.
I looked up after a while and she was growing smaller in the distance. The road was straight here, going for a couple of miles through the bottom on a high fill, and I watched her until she was almost out of sight. After a while a car came up from behind me and when it reached her I saw it stop and she got in and then it was gone over the bill on the far side.
Sixteen
The sun came up and the morning heat began while I sat there and a car went by now and then, stirring the red dust of the road and rattling over the bridge. I could smell the dust, dry and tickling in the nostrils, and hear the dry-weather locusts beginning to buzz, things that had always made me happy and glad to be alive in the country in midsummer and reminded me of ripening watermelons and white perch in the river bottoms, but now they didn’t register at all. I stayed in the car for a long time, smoking one cigarette after another, and then I walked down below the bridge and washed the blood off my face at the head of the shallow riffle.
I picked up some driftwood and tossed it aimlessly into the pool and watched the pieces make the slow circuit of the hole in the lazy eddying current and then spill out over the bar at the lower end. My thoughts went endlessly around and around the way the bits of wood did, but there was no way they could escape into another channel. They always came back to a bowed blonde head and a hopeless voice saying, “All right. All right.”
To a bowed blonde head, and why didn’t you use an ax? It would have been a lot nicer weapon. To a voice saying, “Jesus, how she enjoys it. She’ll beat you to death in a car.” And another voice saying with bitter defeat, “All right. All right.” The Crane boys are really an upstanding pair of lads, all right, and capable, too. The two of them together can destroy an eighteen-year-old girl with no trouble at all, as easily as you’d take a hundred-pound tackle out of a play. You did a good job there, all right. You fixed everything. Everything is swell now. Just fine. Well, you’ve got nothing to worry about now. Remembering the thing Lee said about her won’t hurt you any more now. No, of course not. And it won’t hurt her any more either, will it? Probably nothing will ever hurt her very much again. You get her to like you and get her to come out of her protective shell and trust you and then slap her in the face like that with everything you’ve got and nothing is likely to bother her again. No, everything is fine now and you won’t ever remember any of the fine things you’ve discovered about her the past twenty-four hours and you won’t fall in love with her. And there won’t be any more of that corroding jealous sickness like there was there in the car whenever you remember what Lee said. Like hell.
After a while I climbed back up the path and got in the car and started down the road. I thought about going back to Shreveport, but couldn’t think of any reason for it. The car was headed in the other direction anyway, and it was too much trouble to turn it around for the difference it made.