“Not enough to actually object,” I said. I leaned over and lifted the tone arm with trembling fingers.
“Hey, you were in church,” she said grinning a little. She had noticed my necktie and striped trousers. “I like you in those clothes. You look sort of classy and oldfashioned. But isn’t it early for church to be out?”
“Yes.”
“What did you go there for anyway? I don’t think they want you there.”
I nodded.
“They think you tried to kill yourself.”
“That’s not all they think.”
“Don’t let them bug you. You and old man Hovre are in real good, aren’t you? Didn’t he invite you to his house?”
The bush telegraph. “How do you know that? Did I tell you?”
“Everybody knows that, Miles.” I sagged back into the couch. “Hey, it doesn’t mean anything. Not really. They just talk.” She was trying to lift my mood. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for the positive thinking. Did you come over just to play the records?”
“You were going to meet me, remember?” She pulled her shoulders back, smiling at me, and put her hands in the small of her back. If the clothing she wore had seams, they were straining. Her blood smell hovered between us, neither increasing nor decreasing. “Come on. We’re going on an adventure. Zack wants to talk to you.”
“Women would make great generals,” I said and followed her back outside.
Minutes later I was driving past the church. The sound of singing carried all the way to the road. She looked at the cars in the parking spaces, stared at the church, and then turned to look at me with genuine astonishment. “You left early? You walked out?”
“What does it look like?”
“In front of everybody? Did they see?”
“Every single one of them.” I loosened the knot of my tie.
She laughed out loud. “Miles, you’re a real cowboy.” Then she laughed some more. It was a pleasant, human sound.
“Your pastor seems to think I’m a sex murderer. He was shouting for the noose.”
Her high approving good humor suddenly died. “Not you not you,” she said, almost crooning. She twisted her legs up beneath her. Then she was silent for a long time.
“Where are we going?”
“One of our places.” Her voice was flat. “You shouldn’t have gone. It just makes them think you’re trying to trick them somehow.”
It was better advice than Polar Bears’, but it was too late. She let herself slump over so that her head rested on my shoulder.
I had undergone too many swift alterations and swings of feeling, and this gesture nearly made me weep. Her head stayed on my shoulder as we drove toward Arden through the rising, sun-browned hills. I was looking forward to seeing her march into Freebo’s as though beneath her sandaled feet were not wooden boards but a red carpet. This time, I considered, we would both need the mysterious protection of “who Zack was” to get into Freebo’s.
Yet it was not Freebo’s to which she was taking me. A mile outside of Arden we approached a juncture I had not yet permitted myself to notice, and she straightened up and said “Slow down.”
I glanced at her. Her head was turning, showing her blunt profile beneath the choppy blond fringe of hair. “Left here.”
I slowed the Nash to a crawl “Why here?”
“Because no one ever comes here. What’s wrong with it?”
Everything was wrong with it. It was the worst place in the world.
“I’m not going up there,” I said.
“Why? It’s just the old Pohlson quarry. There’s nothing wrong with it.” She looked at me, her face concentrated. “Oh. I think I know why. Because it’s where my aunt Alison died. The one I was named after.”
I was sweating.
“Those are her pictures in your upstairs room, right? Do you think I look like her?”
“No,” I breathed. “Not really.”
“She was bad, wasn’t she?” I could sense her heating up again pumping out that odor. I stopped the car. Alison said, “She was like you. She was too freaky for the people around here.”
“I suppose.” My mind was working.
“You in a trance or something?” She biffed my shoulder. “Get out of it. Turn up. Turn up the path.”
“I want to try something. An experiment.” I told her what I wanted her to do.
“You promise you’ll come up afterwards? You won’t just drive away? It’s not a trick?”
“I promise to come up afterward,” I said. “I’ll give you five minutes.” I leaned across and opened her door. She crossed the deserted road and began to march stiffly up the track to the quarry.
For two or three minutes I waited in the heat of the car, looking unseeing down the highway. A wasp flew in, all business, and bumped his head against the windshield several times before losing his temper and zooming by accident out the window on the other side. A long way down the highway a broiler farm occupied the fields to the left, and specks of white which were chickens moved jerkily over the green in the sunlight. I looked up toward a flat blue sky. I heard nothing but the mindless twitter of a bird.
When I got out of the car and stood on the sticky tar of the highway I thought I could hear a faint voice calling; if it was a voice, it seemed indistinguishable from the landscape, coming from nowhere in particular; it could have been a breeze. I got back in the cir and drove up the track to the quarry.
The day I had returned to the Updahl farm I had expected a surge of feeling, but experienced only flatness and disappointment; the act of stepping out into the terrific heat of the flat grassy area near the quarry hit me with an only half-anticipated force. I anchored myself in the present by placing the palm of my right hand on the baking metal of the top of the Nash. It all looked very much the same. The grass was browner, because of the summer’s dry heat, and the outcroppings of speckled rock appeared more jagged and prominent. I saw the same flat gray space where the workmen’s sheds had stood. The screen of bushes above the quarry itself had grown spindly, the small leaves like brushstrokes, dry and brown, papery. Drawn up nearer to them than my car was a dusty black van. I pulled my hand off the hot metal of the car and walked on the path through the bushes to the rocky steps down to the lip of the quarry.
They were both there. Alison sat with her feet in the water, looking up at me with expectant curiosity. Zack, a bisected white exclamation point in his black bathing suit, was grinning, snapping his fingers. “It’s the man,” he said. “It’s my main man.”
“Did you shout?”
Zack giggled. “Wowee.” Snap-snap of his fingers.
“Did I shout? I screamed my head off!”
“How long?”
“A couple of minutes. Couldn’t you hear?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “You screamed as loud as you could?”
“I’m practically hoarse,” she answered. “If I yelled any longer, I would have ripped something.”
Zack bent his legs and sat down on the black pile of his clothing. “It’s the truth, man. She really hollered. What’s it about, anyhow? What’s your stunt?”
“No stunt,” I said. “Just finding out about an old lie.”
“You’re too hung up on the past, Miles.” His grin grew more intense. “Jesus, man, look at those clothes. What kind of clothes are those for a swim?”
“I didn’t know I was going swimming.”
“What else do you do at a quarry?”
I sat down with my legs before me on the smooth hot lip of rock. I looked up at the bushes overhead. They would have been hidden up there, waiting to jump down. That was where they had been. I wanted to be anywhere but where I was. I could smell the water and it was Alison’s smell.