“I don’t know who he was. Some fat farmer. He’d just come back from sellin his cows or somethin. He was waving his money around and Dallas made me set with him till his money was all gone. I thought he never was goin to pass out.”
“How’d he make you?”
“I don’t know. He just told me I had to.”
“What would he do if you didn’t?”
“I don’t know.” She fell silent.
When she had been a little girl she had tried to think of Hardin as her father. A father was strong and Hardin looked as remorseless and implacable as an Old Testament God, there was no give to him. The man whose blood she’d sprung from was flimsy as a paperdoll father you’d cut from a catalog, a father who when the light was behind him looked curiously transparent. No light shone through Hardin and in a moment of insight she thought he had a similar core of stubbornness in Winer. Somehow you knew without showing him that there was no give to him either.
“You don’t know. How could you not know?”
She was quiet for a time. She remembered the way Hardin had been looking at her for the last year or so, as though he were deciding what to do with her.
“Do you always do what people order you to? What if I’d ordered you to meet me? What would you have done then?”
“Don’t go so fast,” she said. She gave him just a trace of a smile and shrugged. “You’re not quite Dallas Hardin,” she said.
“Have you ever wondered what he’d do?”
Whatever it took, she thought, thinking Hardin was bottomless.
“All this is easy for you to say,” she told him. “You put up your tools every night and go home. I’m already at home. There’s nowhere else for me to go. You don’t know him.”
“I believe I know him about as well as I need to.”
He’d been looking into her eyes and for just an instant something flickered there that was older than he, older than anybody, some knowledge that couldn’t be measured in years.
“You know him better,” she said.
“I know him well enough to know he’s not paying me to shoot the breeze with you. I’ve got to get to work. This has been a long day anyhow.”
“I might could get out on a Sunday. There’s nobody much around here then and Dallas don’t pay me much mind.”
“I’m once a fool,” Winer said. “Twice don’t interest me.”
“I’ll meet you anywhere you say.”
She was studying him and something in her face seemed to alter slightly even as she watched him, somehow giving him the feeling that she had divined some quality in him that he wasn’t even aware of.
He tried to think. His mind was murky and slow, it seemed to be grinding toward an ultimate halt. “All right,” he finally said. “The only place I can think of where nobody can find us is where Weiss used to live. Meet me there Sunday evening.”
Paying his debt to Motormouth, Winer had invited him to stay until he found a permanent residence but Motormouth seemed to have passed beyond the need for shelter and he stayed only three days. He found the walls too confining, the house too stationary to suit him. He was too acclimated to the motion of wheels, the random and accessible distances of the riverbank, the precarious existence that shuttled him from Hardin’s to the river, from de Vries’s cabstand to the highway. Some creature of the night halfdomesticated reverting back to wildness, staying out for longer and longer periods then just not coming back at all.
Then Winer was alone. He put up the winter’s wood and stacked the porch with it. On these first cool evenings he’d build himself a fire and sat before it. He quit worrying and wondering about the future and decided to just let it roll. By lamplight he’d read before the flickering fire and he found the silence not hard to take. He was working hard now trying to beat winter. In bed he would sometimes lie in a halfstupor of weariness before sleep came but he felt that somehow a fair exchange had been made, someone paid him money to endure this exhaustion. I am a carpenter, he thought. He was something, somebody, there was a name he could affix to himself. And there was a routine and an order to these days that endeared them to him, they were long, slow days he would remember in time to come when order and symmetry were things more dreamt than experienced. I am paying my way, he thought, carrying my own weight, and on these last fall days he found something that had always eluded him, a cold solitary peace.
Having finally gotten her alone, Winer was at some loss as to how to proceed. All the clever conversation he had thought of fled, and such shards as he remembered no longer seemed applicable. Her clean profile roiled his mind and he felt opportunity sliding away while he sat with dry mouth and sweaty palms. “How come you quit school?” he finally fell back on asking.
“I just got tired of it. Why did you?”
“I didn’t. I’m goin back next year.”
“I’m not. I wouldn’t set foot inside that schoolhouse for a thousand-dollar bill.”
Below them a car appeared on the winding roadway. She fell silent and watched its passage, studied it until it was lost from sight near Oliver’s house. She turned to Winer. “Did you know that car?”
“Not to speak to,” Winer said.
She arose, smoothed her skirt. “We’re goin to have to go in the house. If anybody sees me up here they’ll tell Dallas.”
“For somebody who can hustle a drunk out of his cattle money and never bat an eye you’re awfully concerned with appearances,” Winer said. But he instantly regretted saying it and arose and held the storm door for her and they passed into the semigloom of the living room. They stood uncertainly looking about then Winer suddenly felt uncomfortable in the abandoned house and he caught her arm and led her through the sliding glass door onto a concrete patio.
“There’s nothin to sit on here,” she complained.
“We can get a blanket or something out of the house if you want to.”
“Why don’t we just stay in there?”
“I just don’t feel right. It’s still Weiss’s house, even if it is up for sale. Besides, it seems like I can hear that old woman breathin in there.”
“That’s silly.”
“I guess so.”
They sat side by side on the edge of the concrete porch with their feet in the uncut grass. Below the long, dark line of the chickenhouses the afternoon sun hung in a sky devoid of clouds.
“This is a real nice place. I guess Mr. Weiss must’ve have been rich.”
“I doubt he was rich. I suppose they lived all right though.”
“It’s the nicest house I was ever in.”
“I got a cousin lives in Ackerman’s Field,” Winer said. “Lives in a house you wouldn’t believe. There’s velvet wallpaper on the walls and all these fancy chandeliers hanging everywhere. And both of them crazy as bessie bugs.”
She sat leaning forward with her arms crossed atop her round knees and imbued with the composed air he had become accustomed to. Studying the pristine lines of her profile he was suddenly struck with a sense of inadequacy, he could not imagine what had brought her here to meet him. She could have had her pick of all of them. Yet there was some inevitability about it, as if it all had been ordained long ago, when he was a child, when she was a child. There seemed to be nothing to say, nor any need for it. She felt it too, for when he touched her she turned toward him as if the touch were something she had been waiting for.
He drew her to him with a kind of constrained urgency until her cheek rested against his shoulder. She remained so for a moment then turned her face up toward him. Her teeth were white against her tanned face. Her eyes looked violet. She closed them when he kissed her, her left hand was a cool and scarcely perceptible weight on the base of his neck, her right hand lay against his stomach.