When she could she would meet him at night. He cached blankets in the hollow at Mormon Springs and wrapped in them he would lie in the lee of the limestone rocks and await her. Dry leaves shoaled in the hollow and he could hear a long way off. It would be warm in the blankets and the night imbued Winer and the girl with a desperate sense of immediacy, or urgency, they lay tired but not sated for they were learning that there were hungers that did not abate.
Laughing she slid down the length of his body and took him into her mouth. The blanket slid away and he could see her dark head at the Y of his body like some spectral succubus feasting while beyond them the trees reared and tossed in the wind and the throb of the jukebox and the cries of the stricken and the drunk came faint and dreamlike like cries from a madhouse in a haunted wood. His hand knotted in her hair and pulled her atop him he could feel her heart hammering against him through her naked breast.
“You used to drive Lipscomb crazy,” he told her once. “He used to find excuses to see up your dress.”
“I know it. I wanted you to look though.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just wanted to make you hard, all right?”
“It’s all right with me,” he said.
Her face was pale and composed in the moonlight. Black curls tousled as if she slept in perpetual storm. His finger traced the delicate line of her jaw.
“Briar Rose,” he said.
“What?”
“I think I’ll call you Briar Rose. I like it better than Amber Rose and besides I like briar roses. They’re sweet and I like the way they smell. And you do look like somebody out of a fairy tale.”
“Like somebody’s wicked stepsister or something?”
“You can be a princess in mine.”
A new, soft world of the senses here she ushered him into. A world of infinite variety he had but heard rumored. On these sweet urgent nights he came to feel he was indeed living out an erotic fairytale, the dark prince who’d stolen the princess from the evil king. And like the protagonists of a fairytale they played out their games in a country of intrigues and secret corners and fierce inclement weather where nothing was what it seemed.
“You look like a man pickin cotton,” Motormouth told him. “Cept you grabbin trouble with both hands and stuffin it in a sack and never once lookin over your shoulder.”
“What you are talking about, Motormouth?”
“Listen at ye. You may not be as slick hardy as you think you are.”
Motormouth sat in Winer’s living room. He crouched on the edge of the sofa with a glass of 7-Up and bootleg whisky in his hand. The drink had the smoky, oily quality of nitroglycerin and he held it carefully as if dropping it might annihilate them both.
“I never was one for parables and hard sayings,” Winer told him. “You got anything I need to hear just say so straight out.”
“You think you’re in tight with him. But when he finds out, and he damn sure will, he will kill your ass and hide you or rig it up so it looks like he killed you in self-defense.”
“I’m still kindly left in the dark.”
“A little bird flew down and lit on my shoulder and whispered in my ear. It said, ‘You better warn little Nathan. He’s buyin trouble by the pound and he’s got about all he can go with.’”
“That little bird, did it have a name?”
“You seen one of these little old birds you seen em all.”
Winer didn’t say anything.
“Hardin wanted her hisself,” Motormouth said.
“You did too,” Winer said. “But you never got her.”
Motormouth arose and stretched. He looked about the room. There was an air of time about it, as if folks had grown old and died here. I BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF THE LIVING GOD, a glittercard above the fireplace said. “I got to get on,” Motormouth said. “Hell. I’m goin to Chicago or Detroit or somewhere. Someplace got some size about it. I’m burnt out on this damn place anyway.”
That was what he said but the only place he quit this night was Winer’s front room.
“This is nothing but trouble,” Winer told her. She lay against him beneath the blanket. “I’ve got to get a car somehow. A way of getting around so we can get away from him.”
Her hair was a soft black cloud against his cheek. She was warm in his arms, he could feel the delicate bones beneath her flesh. She was like some small beast he’d caught in the woods, held too roughly, felt jerking with hammering rabbit’s heart in his hands. He was afraid if he held on to her he’d hurt her but there was no way now he could let her go.
“This is all right,” she said against his throat. “You take everything too serious.”
“It’s better than all right but we’ve still got to get a car. If we had one we could drive into town anytime we wanted.”
She seemed to be thinking over the idea of a car. Then she said, “Or anyplace else we wanted to go.”
“It seems like I have to be with you all the time. When I’m not it’s like I’m drunk or on dope or somethin. I just drag through the day waitin for night to come. Everything else just seems dead.”
She didn’t reply. Everything seemed to be moving her closer to the line she didn’t want to get to. She guessed sooner or later everyone was going to have to know but she’d just as soon it was later. Slipping out would be easier than openly defying Dallas Hardin. Experience had taught her that defying Dallas Hardin was something best done from as great a distance as possible.
Then he went one night and the blankets were gone from the stumphole, the leaves kicked aside. He sat on the stone anyway waiting and the night crept by like something crippled almost past motion until the rind of moon set behind the blurred trees. The jukebox played on and approaching cautiously he could see the oblique yellow light falling through the trees and hear the sounds of merriment but she never came. He sat crouched in the darkness until his mind began to play tricks on him. He could hear feet kicking through the dry leaves, her soft laugh, see her face, conspirator’s finger to her lips. He grew apprehensive and felt something was watching him out of the dark with yellow goat’s eyes but if it was it never said so.
That was on a Sunday night and all the next week he wondered at her composure, at the duplicity flesh seemed capable of. Watching her move serenely across the yard he hardly knew her as the girl who lay against him in the dark, who cried out his name and clung to him as if she were drowning, being sucked downward into a maelstrom of turbulent water. Who whispered nighttime endearments the daylight always stole away from him.
When Hardin paid him off on Friday he said, “Winer, me and you got a pretty good business arrangement goin. You work to suit me and I pay to suit you. And I got other plans for us too, plans got some real money tied up in em.”
Winer didn’t ask when plans or in fact say anything. He had been waiting all week for this and he recognized Hardin’s speech as mere preamble.
“I don’t want to make you mad. But you kindly steppin on my toes here slippin around with that girl and I’m goin to have to put a stop to it. I thought you’d do me straighter than that.”
Winer folded the money and slid it into the pocket of his jeans. “You? I don’t see that it’s got anything to do with you.”
“Say you don’t? I told you I had plans. Son, I got plans workin in my head ever minute and they don’t all concern you. I got plans for her too.”
“What kind of plans?”
“What they are ain’t nothin to you. I’m just telling you we got to keep things on a business footin here and leave all this personal shit out of it.”