"You puttin' on weight?"
"Maybe I am, and maybe I ain't. None of your business, anyway." And he, still lounging at the door, his thumbs still hooked in his pockets and not having moved an inch, said
"It's my business, all right. That little one, boy or girl, is mine, and you'll take care of it." And she, not looking at him, or rather, keeping herself from looking at him with anything more than the corner of her eye
"There ain't no little one."
And he laughed and said
"Sure there ain't."
"There ain't."
"You jus' take care of it. Boy or girl, it's mine. And I'll tell you, it's a boy, too. I know, 'cause I'm a magic man. All the men in my family are magic men. I know it's a boy, and I'll know if you don't take care of him."
And before he left, he went to the jukebox at the side wall, stuck in a quarter, and paid for three repetitions of the Heart song so that she would have to listen to it again, and again, and again, the engine of his truck roaring behind the music, his tires scratching and sliding on the unpaved street as he pulled out, slewed around, and headed on out of town toward the highway and the house of his father.
She heard a siren later on, but she did not think much about it, because there were always a few things that would make Sheriff Wallace turn on his siren, even if he would not turn it on for Jimmy White no matter how often he drove like one who had been snakebit. More than likely it was something simple, something common: someone from out of town who had run the stop sign that everyone knew was hidden behind the ivy bush at Duncan and Main, maybe, or a cat up a tree somewhere, as her own cat had been that April morning when she had gone out to look for it and had found it hanging terrified from the high, leafless branches of the frost-rimed maple into which Jimmy's attentions had driven it the night before when he, afterward, had come scratching at her window, imitating it perfectly as though he had been listening to it for days, planning for just the evening when her mother and her father would be out at the movie theater, planning it so that she herself would open the window so that even if she said anything (and he knew she would not) he could say that she had let him in herself, planning it and waiting and then doing something to the cat to keep it out of the way and coming instead himself.
But when Mr. McCoy's cigar, fresh from the tobacco store (his son Willie having, by adolescent prescience, arrived back in the soda shop just ahead of him so as to continue the deception that he had been on the premises and working the whole time) had driven her into the bathroom to kneel at the stained toilet and heave dryly from a stomach that had already been emptied from just such heaving an hour before, she could not help but think of the wished-for, enforced whiteness in her mind that had been shattered now by Jimmy's visit, by his questions, by the hook of his thumbs in his pockets and the point of his fingers at his crotch, and of the inevitability of what would happen to her, a dictated fate just as inescapable as that which had, last April, been forcing the buds into existence on the branches of the peach and the apple and the dark dogwood of the forests that even Vinty White could not put a mill in for the quicksand that was there; nor could she forget his words that had conveyed that morning, as they had conveyed that April evening when he had come in through her window, that same inevitability: his magic, shared as though consubstantially with his father and his grandfather; his arrogance and his willingness to plant his seed widely and even indiscriminately among the women of Oktibushubee County, knowing as he did so that that same magic, or maybe a different land of magic—the magic of money, the pollinating, fertilizing touch of coin and bill and draft—protected him from all consequence and repercussion; his declaration (for it was a declaration, not a wish, a promise rather than a hope) that there was a child (and there was) and that it was a boy (and it would be); and his unspoken pronouncement, felt by her rather than uttered or maybe even thought of by him, that, as his father was like his grandfather, and as he was like his father, so the child would be like him, and that she would see that child grow to a swaggering manhood in which he would drive a truck and scratch at windows and plant his seed with as much arrogant skill and inevitability as Jimmy himself
or maybe not, for near closing time, when Mr. McCoy had left the soda shop once again, this time to journey up the street for beer with his friends, and Willie McCoy had vanished again too, Mrs. Gavin's old DeSoto came back down the street. But instead of driving by, solemn and funereal, leaving behind it only a white pall as though in token of oriental and cryptic mourning, it pulled to the curb right in front of the soda shop and stopped. And now Mrs. Gavin herself was getting out—furs despite the heat and diamonds maybe because of it (flashing icy in the pall of whiteness)—and coming into the store.
But she was a lady, and she would not sit at the counter like a man or a hoyden, and so she took a chair at one of the marble-topped tables that Mr. McCoy had had trucked in all the way from Biloxi, trucked in and placed on the scuffed linoleum checkerboard of the soda shop floor like tombstones impervious to the chrome and the jukebox; all the colder, perhaps, because of that, and therefore all the more attractive to Mrs. Gavin who was obviously hot and upset. And Mrs. Gavin sat down in the wrought iron chair and stared at the cool marble tabletop as though she would have liked to have laid her flushed face against it and rolled it from side to side so as to bring her sweating cheeks to its cool, polished surface but could not because she was a lady, childless but a lady. Instead, she reached into her purse and extracted a handkerchief that could not have been more than eight inches on a side, dabbing thereafter at her temples like one who wished that she could just damn all and swipe at her dripping, fevered forehead like a convict on a summer labor gang might swipe at his forehead with a bandanna that had perhaps eight times the area of Mrs. Gavin's embroidered and lace-work instrument.
And Greta brought her a glass of ice water because Mr. McCoy had said that that was good business (though not for the boys and girls attending summer school down the street who came in at 3:15 sharp every day with nickels and dimes and quarters, clamoring for Cokes and Pepsis and 7-Ups and some cherry syrup with that and some chocolate in that because they were just children and Mrs. Gavin was a lady), and Mrs. Gavin ordered a strawberry phosphate as though she were herself a girl in school, (though not from any school now, a school, rather, that gave its lessons fifty years ago, when no one had heard of any such thing as an atomic bomb, and people still believed that world wars did not need numbers after them so that you could tell them apart); Greta taking her order with respect but thereafter hurrying to the big book of recipes that Mr. McCoy kept in the back room because for the life of her she did not know what a strawberry phosphate was much less how to make it, which was doubtless because this was only her first summer in the shop, a first job fresh out of high school with nothing before her but a looking forward to—
But she found the book and the recipe, and repeating the litany of ingredients and quantities to herself silently, she went behind the counter and spooned and pulled levers and pushed plungers and mixed until the strawberry phosphate was finished. Then, conscious that Mrs. Gavin's eyes were on her (seemingly looking at her a little more than one might ordinarily look at someone, as though she were, with sixty childless years behind her, seeing something that might have remained... no, probably did [no, more than that, probably had to] remain hidden from most people in the town, remain hidden from all who knew nothing of April evenings and scratchings at windows and the stunned disbelief that gave way to an incontrovertible reality that had to be because it was as no cat paws but the hands of a man grasped the sill and a foot swung over and a face followed it in; remain hidden because, alien thing that it was, it could not be grasped, remain hidden because she was Greta Harlow, remain hidden because her father was respectable and worked at the bank, remain hidden because her mother was respectable and kept house like a proper woman), she brought the strawberry phosphate to the table, and, setting it down before Mrs. Gavin, heard her ask