“I told her maybe there was pictures in the front but she couldn’t go in there you got that shut up,” the little man said.
Harold said, “You shut up.”
Eve said, “I’m really sorry.” There seemed to be nothing to do but go into her spiel, enlarging it to include staying at the village hotel as a little girl, drives with her mother, the pictures in the wall, her memory of them today, the gateposts, her obvious mistake, her apologies. She spoke directly to the graybeard, since he seemed the only one willing to listen or capable of understanding her. Her arm and shoulder ached from the weight of Daisy and from the tension which had got hold of her entire body. Yet she was thinking how she would describe this-she’d say it was like finding yourself in the middle of a Pinter play. Or like all her nightmares of a stolid, silent, hostile audience.
The graybeard spoke when she could not think of any further charming or apologetic thing to say. He said, “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Harold. Hey. Hey Harold. Do you know anything about some pictures made out of broken glass?”
“Tell her when she was riding around looking at pictures I wasn’t even born yet,” said Harold, without looking up.
“You’re out of luck, lady,” said the graybeard.
The tattooed man whistled. “Hey you,” he said to Philip. “Hey kid. Can you play the piano?”
There was a piano in the room behind Harold’s chair. There was no stool or bench-Harold himself taking up most of the room between the piano and the table-and inappropriate things, such as plates and overcoats, were piled on top of it, as they were on every surface in the house.
“No,” said Eve quickly. “No he can’t.”
“I’m asking him,” the tattooed man said. “Can you play a tune?”
The graybeard said, “Let him alone.”
“Just asking if he can play a tune, what’s the matter with that?” “Let him alone.”
“You see I can’t move until somebody moves the truck,” Eve said.
She thought, There is a smell of semen in this room.
Philip was mute, pressed against her side.
“If you could just move-” she said, turning and expecting to find the little man behind her. She stopped when she saw he wasn’t there, he wasn’t in the room at all, he had got out without her knowing when. What if he had locked the door?
She put her hand on the knob and it turned, the door opened with a little difficulty and a scramble on the other side of it. The little man had been crouched right there, listening.
Eve went out without speaking to him, out through the kitchen, Philip trotting along beside her like the most tractable little boy in the world. Along the narrow pathway on the porch, through the junk, and when they reached the open air she sucked it in, not having taken a real breath for a long time.
“You ought to go along down the road ask down at Harold’s cousin’s place,” the little man’s voice came after her. “They got a nice place. They got a new house, she keeps it beautiful. They’ll show you pictures or anything you want, they’ll make you welcome. They’ll sit you down and feed you, they don’t let nobody go away empty.”
He couldn’t have been crouched against the door all the time, because he had moved the truck. Or somebody had. It had disappeared altogether, been driven away to some shed or parking spot out of sight.
Eve ignored him. She got Daisy buckled in. Philip was buckling himself in, without having to be reminded. Trixie appeared from somewhere and walked around the car in a disconsolate way, sniffing at the tires.
Eve got in and closed the door, put her sweating hand on the key. The car started, she pulled ahead onto the gravel-a space that was surrounded by thick bushes, berry bushes she supposed, and old lilacs, as well as weeds. In places these bushes had been flattened by piles of old tires and bottles and tin cans. It was hard to think that things had been thrown out of that house, considering all that was left in it, but apparently they had. And as Eve swung the car around she saw, revealed by this flattening, some fragment of a wall, to which bits of whitewash still clung.
She thought she could see pieces of glass embedded there, glinting.
She didn’t slow down to look. She hoped Philip hadn’t noticed-he might want to stop. She got the car pointed towards the lane and drove past the dirt steps to the house. The little man stood there with both arms waving and Trixie was wagging her tail, roused from her scared docility sufficiently to bark farewell and chase them partway down the lane. The chase was only a formality; she could have caught up with them if she wanted to. Eve had had to slow down at once when she hit the ruts.
She was driving so slowly that it was possible, it was easy, for a figure to rise up out of the tall weeds on the passenger side of the car and open the door-which Eve had not thought of locking- and jump in.
It was the blond man who had been sitting at the table, the one whose face she had never seen.
“Don’t be scared. Don’t be scared anybody. I just wondered if I could hitch a ride with you guys, okay?”
It wasn’t a man or a boy; it was a girl. A girl now wearing a dirty sort of undershirt.
Eve said, “Okay.” She had just managed to hold the car in the track.
“I couldn’t ask you back in the house,” the girl said. “I went in the bathroom and got out the window and run out here. They probably don’t even know I’m gone yet. They’re boiled.” She took hold of a handful of the undershirt which was much too large for her and sniffed at it. “Stinks,” she said. “I just grabbed this of Harold’s, was in the bathroom. Stinks.”
Eve left the ruts, the darkness of the lane, and turned onto the ordinary road. “Jesus I’m glad to get out of there,” the girl said. “I didn’t know nothing about what I was getting into. I didn’t know even how I got there, it was night. It wasn’t no place for me. You know what I mean? “
“They seemed pretty drunk all right,” said Eve.
“Yeah. Well. I’m sorry if I scared you.”
“That’s okay.”
“If I hadn’t’ve jumped in I thought you wouldn’t stop for me. Would you?”
“I don’t know,” said Eve. “I guess I would have if it got through to me you were a girl. I didn’t really get a look at you before.”
“Yeah. I don’t look like much now. I look like shit now. I’m not saying I don’t like to party. I like to party. But there’s party and there’s party, you know what I mean? “
She turned in the seat and looked at Eve so steadily that Eve had to take her eyes from the road for a moment and look back. And what she saw was that this girl was much more drunk than she sounded. Her dark-brown eyes were glazed but held wide open, rounded with effort, and they had the imploring yet distant expression that drunks’ eyes get, a kind of last-ditch insistence on fooling you. Her skin was blotched in some places and ashy in others, her whole face crumpled with the effects of a mighty bingeing. She was a natural brunette-the gold spikes were intentionally and provocatively dark at the roots-and pretty enough, if you disregarded her present dinginess, to make you wonder how she had ever got mixed up with Harold and Harold’s crew. Her way of living and the style of the times must have taken fifteen or twenty natural pounds off her-but she wasn’t tall and she really wasn’t boyish. Her true inclination was to be a cuddly chunky girl, a darling dumpling.
“Herb was crazy bringing you in there like that,” she said. “He’s got a screw loose, Herb.”