“You get out of here. You got no business here.”
“Just checkin ye out,” he said. “Come back have ye?”
“Yes, I’ve come back but not to you. It’s my house, you know. Daddy gave it to me.”
“Daddy’s welcome to it,” Motorouth said. He took out a cigarette and lit it. He stood shifting his weight from one to the other of his thin legs as if torn between going and staying whether she wanted him to or not. The wind off the stretch of field rippled the tin of the roof and sang softly across the flue. A loose pane of glass tinkled in its sash like a chime. “Turnin cold, aint it?”
“It does most ever year about this time.”
“I look for a bad winter this year.”
“I never knowed of a good one. You still ain’t said what you’re doin here. You know I got papers say you ain’t allowed here.”
“I don’t want much of nothin. I was just drivin by and I happened to think of all them carparts I got in the smokehouse. I wouldn’t want nothin to happen to em.”
“Then get em and go.”
“I will in a minute. Say, are you think about movin back in here sure enough?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Just makin conversation.”
“Make it another place, with somebody else.”
“Are you movin back in here?”
“What if I am?”
“Nothin.” He paused. “By yourself?”
“No.”
“Oh, Blalock too, huh. Is there not enough room in that big old house of his?”
“I told you what we do is our business.”
“You’re still married to me.”
“I won’t be in a few days.”
He thought he might fare better if he changed the subject. “What was you doin peepin in the smokehouse?”
“I was fixin to put up the stove. It’s cold.”
“Lord, you can’t move that heavy old thing. It’s castiron. Why don’t Blalock put it up for ye? That ain’t no woman’s job.”
“He ain’t here. He took off a load of cattle to Memphis or somewheres.”
“Get Clyde to do it then.”
“Him and Cecil got into it. That’s why we’re comin up here. They got into it over me.”
“Well, ain’t you the belle of the ball.”
She didn’t say anything.
“And say Cecil ain’t here?”
“Didn’t I just get through sayin so?”
Hr crossed the room and balanced himself on the arm of the sofa, glanced about for an ashtray and finding none tipped off ashes into the cuff of his trousers. She had not moved, stood watching him reflectively from the door. “Don’t make yourself at home,” she told him. “You don’t be here long enough for that.” But there was no vehemence or urgency to her voice, she sounded almost abstracted, as if other things occupied her mind. She crossed her arms, shook back her long hair from her forehead, he watched the smooth, milky flesh of her throat.
“Maybe we could try it again,” he said. His voice sounded strange to him, a dry croak.
She just shook her head. “There is no way in hell,” she told him. “I am to have Cecil and there won’t nothin stand in my way.”
“Cecil’s rollin towards Memphis,” he said. His mouth felt as though it had dust in it. The wing of red hair fell across her brow again, she blew it away in a curious gesture he had seen a thousand times. The past twisted in him like a knife, sharp as broken glass. Old words of endearment he need not have said tasted bitter and dry as ashes. The thought of Blalock long gone, Memphis seemed thousands of miles away and drifting in the mists of some lost continent. The wind sucked through the cracks by the windows and told him of a world gone vacant, no one left save these two. He thought of his hands on her throat, of his weight bearing down on her, forcing her legs apart with a knee, sliding himself into her. Dark and nameless specters bore their visions through his mind. He thought of her supine in a shallow grave, her green eyes and the sullen pout of her mouth impacted with earth, the cones of her breasts hard and white as ivory, ice crystals frozen in the red hair under her belly. The rains of winter seeping into her flesh, the seeds of spring sprouting in the cavities of her body.
“Why are you lookin at me like that?”
“I ain’t.”
“You look halfcrazy when you do that. You was always doin that.”
The cigarette burned his fingers and he looked at it in wonder. He dropped it, smudged it with a boot into the worn and patternless linoleum. He arose. “Well. I guess I better get on. I just thought I’d see how ye was.”
“This is how I am.”
Although he had stood up to go he made no further move to do so. She was watching him. “That thing weighs nigh two hundred pounds,” he said. “I wish you luck with it.”
“There was anything to you you’d help me put it up. It’s settin right out there where you put it last spring.”
“Yeah,” he said, trying to get a focus on last spring, a definition of it. Spring seemed years ago.
“You help me get it in the back door and I’ll get it the rest of the way myself.”
“I bet it’ll be cold tonight. I may need it myself.” For a fey moment he thought of the heater set up by the riverbank, himself housed only by the walls of the world, the elements. “A few minutes ago you called me crazy,” he told her. “I may be but I ain’t crazy enough yet to put a heatin stove for some other son of a bitch to warm by.”
“It wouldn’t hurt you to help me. It wouldn’t cost you a dime.”
“I made you my best deal. You come back to me and we’ll go to town and get some grocers and I’ll put it up and build a big fire in it.”
“Forget it. Cecil can put it up when he gets back.”
He took a deep breath. “All right then. I’ll tell you what I will do. You give me a little and I’ll put the damned thing up for you.”
“You are crazy.”
“What could it hurt? Ain’t Cecil in Memphis? Ain’t we married?”
“Just in name only.”
“That’s close enough for me,” Motormouth said. He crossed the room, stood beside her. The top of her head did not even reach his shoulder. She did not move away. He knew suddenly with a shock of exultation that she was going to do it.
She undressed at the foot of the bed. He kicked his boots off, shucked out of his slacks and lay watching her. She unhooked her brassiere. A strap secured by a safety pin made her more vulnerable, less remote. She slid out of her skirt, it pooled at her feet. She began to roll down her panties, looked up, and saw him watching her. She flounced her hair back from her forehead and pushed her underwear down defiantly, her eyes hard and fierce. “Get your eyes full,” she told him. He stared at the cool, rounded flesh of her belly, the snarled rustcolored pubic hair. In the cold air gooseflesh crept up the ivory of her thighs, her nipples hardened and elongated.
When he inserted himself into her her face did not change, nor when he began to move inside her. He labored above her as if inch by inch he would force his entire body into her, merge with her, become her, he sweated in the juncture of her body while she lay abstracted, lost in the pattern of the ceiling wallpaper, and he knew she had defeated him once again. Her pale flesh looked pristine, unused. He thought of the countless times he had lain in her arms, that Blalock had lain inside her, that she had lain down with faceless names that were just taunts she had flung a him. Yet none of them had hurt or marked or even touched her. She was unused.
“Why did you quit? Are you done?”
He hadn’t known he had. “I was just thinkin,” he said. He commenced again halfheartedly.
She laughed deep in her throat. “You never could think and do this at the same time,” she said.