“No. This guy had an aunt named Irma who used to dance at Elk stag parties.”
I shook my head. “Must be another guy.”
“You’re nuts. I’m glad you’re home, but you’re nuts.”
I threw a chunk of rotten wood at him and he ducked and it went into the spring and splashed a little water on Mike, who looked at us sitting there on the ground laughing like hyenas. He whined eagerly deep in his throat and started up out of the ravine, padding noiselessly on the damp brown leaves where the frost had melted, and his manner clearly indicated that he’d had enough of this stalling around and thought we should get back to the pressing business of hunting birds.
Lee whistled at him. “Don’t work so hard, Mike,” he said. “You’ll just get promoted to a better job and then you’ll have worries.”
He lay back at full length on the steep incline of the bank, with an arm crooked under the back of his head to keep it off the wet ground and leaves. The sunlight of a cloudless autumn day poured through an opening in the trees above and he stretched lazily in the warm rays and bit enormously into a sandwich.
“This is the life,” he said.
It was, all right, I agreed silently. And I was happy to see him enjoying it so much and I tried to pretend to myself that I didn’t know he would be bored with it before the day was over. There wasn’t enough excitement in hunting quail to keep him interested for a full day.
After lunch we went on down the road and stopped to hunt over the field where I had met Sam yesterday. But, as I had known, he began losing interest in it. He didn’t kid me any more about the shots I missed and he took less and less pleasure from even the difficult ones he completed.
The silence between us lengthened out. I tried to keep him going by bringing up people we knew and funny things that had happened, but it was no use. He was growing moody and irritable.
By two o’clock we were down by the little creek at the lower end of the big Eilers field and the car was a long way back, a mile or more. Beyond the creek was a wooded ridge and I remembered that there were a few scattered sandy fields and open pastures up on top of it but that it wasn’t good bird country. I couldn’t understand why Lee kept turning in that direction.
“There’s no use in crossing the creek,” I said. “Let’s go back to the car.”
“Oh, come on. There are some fields up there, over by Sam Harley's house.”
I began to see the light, but I followed him. There wasn’t anything else to do. He had the car keys. And he was already crossing the creek on the foot log, and he stalked across the swampy bottom without looking back.
“I’ll tell you,” I said, “you and Mike go on along the ridge here, cutting back toward the highway, and I’ll go back and pick up the car and meet you.”
“No,” he said shortly. “It’s only a quarter mile on to Sam’s. Let’s go on over there and get a drink and he’ll drive us out to the car. I want to pick up a quart.”
I shrugged. “O.K.”
It was easy to see now where the hunting trip was going.
Five
We came out of the scrub pine and there in the clearing with the sun behind it was Sam’s place, quiet and apparently deserted. It hadn’t changed any in the two years since I had seen it. The sandy road ran on past it and turned to the left beyond the barn, going on down toward the big bottom country behind the place, and there was a wire gate leading into the close-cropped cow pasture surrounding the house and farm buildings. The house was still the same, the unfinished pine boards silvery gray with age and weather. A large mud and stone chimney stood solidly against the south wall, and there was a long “gallery” extending the width of the house in front.
On beyond the house was the barn and the corn crib and the cow lot enclosed in stripped pine sapling poles, a wagon shed and a crazily leaning rough-board shed where Sam kept his Ford, a big woodpile, and a little well house covered with gray oak shakes.
There was no sign of life. The door of the shed was closed and we couldn’t see whether the car was there or not. We stopped at the front gate and looked around.
“Hello in there! Hey, Sam!” Lee called experimentally.
“They’re all in town,” I said. “It’s Saturday evening.”
“Not like Sam.” Lee shook his head. “He doesn’t go to town much.”
“Well, let’s go,” I said. “No use hanging around here.”
“I wonder where he keeps the whisky,” Lee said.
“Well, not in the house. That’s a cinch.”
“We might take a look around.”
“Sure,” I said. “The sheriff has been trying to find it for ten years, so we’ll just walk right into it.”
Lee swore disgustedly and we had turned to go when I heard the front door open.
Angelina Harley stood there in the doorway, looking out at us. I don’t know how I knew it was Angelina unless it was what I saw on Lee’s face when he turned around. I knew then it wasn’t Sam he had been hoping to see.
She came out on the porch. “What did you want?” she asked. There was no friendliness in her eyes or any word of greeting; just the question.
Her eyes were on Lee and I doubt that she knew I was there, but I felt compelled to reply. Any answer from Lee would have been superfluous anyway. She could see what he wanted. Not that she seemed to mind.
“We were looking for Sam,” I said. “Is he home?”
So this was Angelina. This was the scrawny little girl with the thin arms and legs and chapped knees and the wide, frightened brown eyes I remembered. I felt myself growing uncomfortable and tried to take my eyes off her.
It wasn’t that she had grown so much. She wasn’t big, even now. But it was as if she had received twenty-five pounds or so in the mail with instructions to put it on where she thought she needed it most.
She had on an old cotton dress that she had outgrown in every direction and overwhelmed until it had completely surrendered its cheap shapelessness and lay taut across her hips and breasts in obedient submission, and it was obvious she had on practically nothing underneath that dominated and slavish garment and that she didn’t give a damn.
Her hair was blonde, a little too dark to be called golden, but you could see it was natural, and it was long, thrown back over her shoulders, straight and fine-spun and silky and slightly damp, and it was obvious she had just washed it and had been drying it in the sun in the back yard, for she had an old blue bath towel pinned across her shoulders.
I learned later that her hair was long because Sam wouldn’t stand for her bobbing it. Sam was pretty strong for the Scriptures, aside from his whisky-making, and there wasn’t anything in there about women cutting off their hair. I was to learn that and a lot of other things about this girl before I was very much older.
Her eyes were slightly almond-shaped and brown, but they weren’t soft, as brown eyes usually are, but rather there was in them an almost indefinable expression of smoldering defiance. They seemed to be at once sullen and shy. The face was a little too broad and the full lips too near pouting for beauty, and the whole thing too lacking in animation for charm, but she was damned pretty, or she would have been if she’d had anything in her eyes but that to-hell-with-you stare.
She answered me, still looking at Lee. “No. He’s hauling up some wood. But he ought to be here pretty soon.”
Lee wasn’t saying anything. He was just looking at her, and I’d never seen him act like that around a girl. Usually he just moved in on them like Stuart’s Cavalry. There seemed to be something about her that threw him off his stride. His face was shiny with sweat and he couldn’t seem to be able to get his mouth closed.
“Do you mind if we wait for him?” I asked.
“No. I guess not, if you want to.”