Charles Williams - Hill Girl

“No. None, I reckon,” she said dully.

“Of course, you could pretend I was Lee, if you’re in love with him. And there must be some of your old pants lying around here somewhere, in the glove compartment maybe, to make you feel at home.”

She looked around at me then, and the old defiance was coming back into her eyes, that to-hell-with-you-and-everything sullenness, and I grabbed her again, roughly, like a drunken tanker sailor mauling his two-dollar slut, and roughed her up as I kissed her. She hit me in the face, not scratching or clawing the way most girls would, but with her fists doubled up. She could hit hard and I felt my eyes water as she slammed my nose and I could taste the salty tang of blood in my mouth, and I laughed and kissed her again. Her left arm was pinioned against my chest but her right kept slashing at my face and I laughed again and caught it and held her. She quit then and went limp.

“All right,” she said. “All right.”

She looked down at the floor boards and I couldn’t see her face. All I could see was the top of her bent head and the dark honey-colored hair and the hopeless slump of her shoulders. She didn’t cry; I don’t think she could cry if she wanted to. She had always fought back all her life and when she was whipped she accepted it silently, hating it but not crying. She lay there in my arms now, knowing she didn’t have a chance against my strength and indifferent to anything that might happen to her. The nausea and reaction began to hit me and I let go of her and slid back and took hold of the wheel. I noticed my knuckles were white where I gripped it.

She tried to straighten out her rumpled clothes a little and then opened the door and stepped out, picking up her new purse from the seat, and started down the road without looking back. I put my head down on the curve of the wheel and didn’t look after her but I could hear the click-click of her heels on the bridge, going farther and farther away, and then there was nothing but the sound of the water over the riffle down below.

I looked up after a while and she was growing smaller in the distance. The road was straight here, going for a couple of miles through the bottom on a high fill, and I watched her until she was almost out of sight. After a while a car came up from behind me and when it reached her I saw it stop and she got in and then it was gone over the bill on the far side.

Sixteen

The sun came up and the morning heat began while I sat there and a car went by now and then, stirring the red dust of the road and rattling over the bridge. I could smell the dust, dry and tickling in the nostrils, and hear the dry-weather locusts beginning to buzz, things that had always made me happy and glad to be alive in the country in midsummer and reminded me of ripening watermelons and white perch in the river bottoms, but now they didn’t register at all. I stayed in the car for a long time, smoking one cigarette after another, and then I walked down below the bridge and washed the blood off my face at the head of the shallow riffle.

I picked up some driftwood and tossed it aimlessly into the pool and watched the pieces make the slow circuit of the hole in the lazy eddying current and then spill out over the bar at the lower end. My thoughts went endlessly around and around the way the bits of wood did, but there was no way they could escape into another channel. They always came back to a bowed blonde head and a hopeless voice saying, “All right. All right.”

To a bowed blonde head, and why didn’t you use an ax? It would have been a lot nicer weapon. To a voice saying, “Jesus, how she enjoys it. She’ll beat you to death in a car.” And another voice saying with bitter defeat, “All right. All right.” The Crane boys are really an upstanding pair of lads, all right, and capable, too. The two of them together can destroy an eighteen-year-old girl with no trouble at all, as easily as you’d take a hundred-pound tackle out of a play. You did a good job there, all right. You fixed everything. Everything is swell now. Just fine. Well, you’ve got nothing to worry about now. Remembering the thing Lee said about her won’t hurt you any more now. No, of course not. And it won’t hurt her any more either, will it? Probably nothing will ever hurt her very much again. You get her to like you and get her to come out of her protective shell and trust you and then slap her in the face like that with everything you’ve got and nothing is likely to bother her again. No, everything is fine now and you won’t ever remember any of the fine things you’ve discovered about her the past twenty-four hours and you won’t fall in love with her. And there won’t be any more of that corroding jealous sickness like there was there in the car whenever you remember what Lee said. Like hell.

After a while I climbed back up the path and got in the car and started down the road. I thought about going back to Shreveport, but couldn’t think of any reason for it. The car was headed in the other direction anyway, and it was too much trouble to turn it around for the difference it made.

Late that afternoon I was in Beaumont, and after wandering aimlessly around for a while I took the coast highway to Galveston. I checked in at the hotel about nine o’clock and went up to my room and took a bath and changed clothes. I couldn’t stand the empty room afterward, though, and came back down. It was funny, I thought; I’d spent only one night in a hotel room with her in my life, and now it seemed that all rooms were going to be empty without her.

I rode downtown on a streetcar and stood around on Market Street for a while, trying to decide to go to a movie, but I knew I couldn’t sit through one. Taking a cab in front of the interurban station, I said, “Down the line.”

“Any particular house, Mac?” the driver asked.

“No,” I said.

He let me out at the little café on the corner. It was the first time I’d been on Postoffice Street in years. When Lee was still at Rice we had gone down there a few times.

I went up the steps of a big two-story frame house and rang the bell. A Negro maid came in a minute and looked at me through the window and then opened the door. The parlor was on the right of the hall and I went in and there was nobody in it. There were the battered phonograph and the bare floor and the sofas around the walls and the too bright lights in the overhead fixture. I sat down on one of the sofas and lit a cigarette.

Two girls came in. One of them was a tall blonde wearing a very short dress and gilt slippers without stockings and she was smoking a cigarette in a long holder. The other one was dark-haired and smaller and she smiled at me gaily and said, “Hello, honey. Buy me a drink?”

“Sure,” I said. They both sat down, the little brunette on my lap and the blonde across the room. The short dress hiked up when she sat down and I noticed a brownish-purple bruise on the front of her thigh just above the knee.

The Negro girl came in and asked, “What you want? Rye or beer?”

We all ordered whisky and I wondered indifferently if the girls would get cold tea.

The blonde said, “You’re awful quiet. What’s botherin’ you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I was just wondering why blondes in whorehouses are always bruised.”

“Well,” she said, “I bruise easy. Don’t you want to come upstairs and bruise me a little, Daddy?”

“Leave him alone, Peggy,” the little one said. “He’s my honey. Ain’t you, baby?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m your honey.”

“Come on upstairs with me, honey. I like big men. I ain’t ever had one too big.”

“I’ll bet you haven’t,” I said.

“What do you mean by that? Why, you big bastard—”

“Oh, hell, forget it.”