And then she took off the rest. The brassiere first and then the cotton pants. Her breasts were small and up-pointed, and her ass was hardly even there. I didn’t look much at the rest of her. Though I could see then — or so I thought at the time — how young she was by how she stood on her pale thin legs, with her thin arms, and how she turned only at the waist and looked at me, so she could be sure I saw her, too. Like a girl. Younger, maybe even than I was, younger than Claude.
But it did not matter because she was already someone who could be by herself in the world. And neither Claude nor I were anything like that, and we never would be, never if we lived to be old men. Maybe she was born that way, or raised to it or had simply become that in the last two days. But it embarrassed me at that moment — for myself — and I know I looked away from her.
“What’s next?” she said.
“What do you think you’re good for now,” Claude said, sitting in the grass, looking up to her. “Everybody thinks they’re good for something. You must think you are. Or are you just good for nothing?” And he surprised me, because I didn’t think he was taunting her. I think he wanted to know the answer — that something about her seemed odd to him, maybe in the way it seemed to me.
“A lot of this seems a lot alike to me,” she said and sighed. “You can take me back to the motel. I ve had all the fun I’m going to.” She looked around at her clothes on the ground, as if she was trying to decide what to pick up first.
“You don’t have to act that way,” Claude said. “I’m not mad at you.” And his voice seemed strange to me, some soft voice I hadn’t heard him speak in — almost as if he was worried. “No, no,” he said. “You don’t.” I watched him extend his hand and touch her bare ankle, saw her look at him on the ground. I knew what was going to happen after that, and it did not involve me, and I didn’t feel the need to be there for it. Claude had a serious look on his face, a look that said this was for him now. And I just turned and walked back toward the Buick at the edge of the cottonwoods.
I heard Lucy say, “You can’t ever read other people’s minds, can you? That’s the trouble.” Then I quit listening to them altogether.
I will say how all of this turned out because in a way it is surprising, and because it did not turn out badly.
In the car I didn’t wait a long while for them. They were not there long. I thought I wouldn’t watch them, but I did, from the distance of the car. I happen to think it is what she wanted, though it might seem she wouldn’t have. In any case I don’t think she knew what she wanted from me. What we did, I thought, didn’t matter so much. Not to us, or to anyone. She might’ve been with me instead of Claude, or with Claude’s father, or another man none of us knew. She was pushing everything out. She was just an average girl.
I turned on the car radio and listened to the news from the Canadian station. Snow and bad weather were on their way again, it said, and I could feel the evening grow colder as it went to dark and the air turned blue. Trout moved against the far willow bank — swirling, deep rises that weren’t like other fish, and created in me a feeling of anticipation high up in my chest. It was that way I had felt early in the day, when we’d driven down to this very place to fish. Though the place now seemed different — the creek, the tree line, the millshed — all in new arrangements, in different light.
But I did not, as I waited, want to think about only myself. I realized that was all I had ever really done, and that possibly it was all you could ever do, and that it would make you bitter and lonesome and useless. So I tried to think instead about Lucy. But I had no idea where to begin. I thought about my mother, someplace far off — on a flyer, is how my father had described it. He thought she would walk back into our house one day, and that life would start all over. But I was accustomed to the idea that things ended and didn’t start up again — it is not a hard lesson to learn when that is all around you. And I only, at that moment, wondered if she’d ever lied to me, and if so, what about, wondered if she was someplace with a boy like me or Claude Philips. I put a picture in my mind that she was, though I thought it was wrong.
After a while the two of them walked back up to the car. It was dark and Lucy had her shoes and her stockings and her sack, and Claude had his fishing rod and his one fish he put behind the seat. They were drinking another beer, and for a minute or so they were quiet. But then Lucy said, just in a passing way, straightening her green dress, “I hope you aren’t what you wear.”
“You are judged by it, though,” I said. Then that tension was over, and we all seemed to know what was happening to us.
We got in the car and drove around over the wheat prairie roads at night, drove by my house, where it was still dark, then by Claude’s, where there were yellow lights and smoke out the chimney, and we could see figures through the windows. His father’s truck was parked against the house side. Claude honked as we passed, but didn’t stop.
We drove down into Sunburst, stopped at the Polar Bar, and bought a package of beer. When Claude was inside, Lucy said to me that she hoped to rise in the world someday. She asked me in what situations I would tell her a lie, and I said not any, then she kissed me again while we sat waiting in sight of the dark train yard and the grain elevator, ribboned in its lights, and the empty motel where I had seen her first that day. The sky was growing marbly against the moon, and she said she hated a marble sky. The air in the truck was cold, and I wondered if Sherman was already on his way to town.
When Claude came back with the beers, we all sat and drank one, and then he said we should drive Lucy to Great Falls, a hundred miles away, and forget all about Sherman. And that is what we did. We drove her there that night, took her to the bus station in the middle of town, where Claude and I gave her all the money we had and what Sherman had given him as the shut-up money. And we left her there, just at midnight, going toward what and where neither of us knew or even talked about.
On the drive back up along the Great Northern tracks we passed a long train coming north, sparks popping off its brakeshoes and out its journal boxes, the lighted caboose seeming to move alone and unaided through the dark. Snow was beginning to mist in the black air.
“Sherman wouldn’t have come back.” Claude was watching the train as it raced along beside us. “She wanted to stay with me. She admitted that. I wish I could marry her. I wish I was old.”
“You could be old,” I said, “and it could still be the same way.”
“Don’t belittle me now,” Claude said. “Don’t do that.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
“And don’t belittle her.” And I thought Claude was a fool then, and this was how you knew what a fool was — someone who didn’t know what mattered to him in the long run. “I wonder what she’s thinking about,” Claude said, driving.
“She’s thinking about you,” I said. “Or about your old man.”
“He could never love a woman like I can,” Claude said and smiled at me. “Never in his life. It’s a shame.”