Charles Williams - Hill Girl

“So long.”

“I’m sorry about everything.”

“It was just one of those things.”

“I’m going to stop by and apologize to her and say good-by.”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t care. But she won’t want to see you.”

“I know. But I’ll try, anyway. I’ll feel better about it.”

“Suit yourself.”

He shifted into gear, hesitating a little, and looked up at me.

“Well, I won’t see you again, Bob,” he said, still waiting.

I didn’t move except to pick up the lines. “So long.”

He let out the clutch and moved slowly ahead and turned once before he shifted into high and got rolling fast. I watched him until he was out of sight around the bend at the top of a long grade ahead and tried not to think about how it had been between us long ago.

Twenty-four

We plodded slowly on up the long grade and down on the other side and crossed the upper reaches of Black Creek on the concrete highway bridge. The sun was down now and the air was chill in the bottom.

I thought about our not having to leave here now that Lee was gone and I was glad about it, but there was sadness in it too. I wondered where he was going and what he would do and knew that I’d probably never know because he didn't write letters. He would be in touch with the bank and the lawyers over the divorce and property settlement, but he’d never write to me.

Away from here and in a new place where he wasn’t known he might change. Away from here ... I was just kidding myself and knew it, but there was some kind of happiness in at least trying to believe it.

Next summer maybe we could get away for a week in Galveston. I remembered again that last night we were there and thought of the bonfire on the beach and the roaring of the surf and of the way she had been when I had kissed her, holding her in my arms there on the robe by the dying fire.

I was within a mile of the road junction where our country road turned off the highway and up the hill to go past the farm when I saw a Ford coming toward me along the bottom with a roll of red dust boiling up behind it. When it was closer I recognized it as mine. I stopped and Jake climbed over the door and got out. Helen was with him, dressed for town.

Jake looked from Helen up to me uncertainly. “Me and the Old Lady thought we’d go to the show.”

“Fine,” I said. I wondered why he was so hesitant about it. He didn’t have to ask me where he could go, and he was always welcome to use the car.

“If'n you’d rather, I could take the team on in an’ you could drive the car on home.” He didn’t look up.

“No,” I said. “You’d be late for the show by the time you got the mules home.”

“I jest thought mebbe you might be in a hurry to git home for supper.”

“It’ll wait,” I said. He continued to look down at his Sunday shoes, which were getting dusty in the powdery red surface of the road. “Did you see Lee?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. He turned and glanced toward Helen. I couldn’t see her face under the top of the car.

“He’s leaving,” I said. What the hell does Jake care what he does? I thought. But I had to say something because the silence was becoming awkward.

“I know.” He nodded. “I seen him a minute or two jest before we drove off.” He stopped.

I waited. He wanted to say something else but gave it up and turned back toward the car.

As he started to climb in over the door he paused once more and this time he looked squarely up at me.

“You sure you wouldn’t like for me to take the team in, Bob? I’d be glad to do it.”

I got the look in his eyes then and they were worried. I swung a leg over the side of the cotton frames and climbed down. There was no use asking him about it. He wouldn’t talk, but he wanted me to go home.

Helen got out of the car. “I think I’ll ride along with Jake, if you don’t mind, Bob,” she said. “It’s a pretty night for a hay ride with your best beau.” She tried to laugh at the joke but it didn’t quite come off.

“When you get in with the team I’ll unharness,” I said. “You can still make the second show.” Nobody said anything. We weren’t thinking about the show any more.

I backed the car up fast and swung it around and started up the road. The dusk was thickening now and I switched on the lights. When I made the turn off the road and started up the hill I had to go into low and the lights brightened up with the engine speed. Whatever it was that was scaring Jake hadn’t happened yet because he would have told me. It was just something that might happen. At the top of the hill I let the Ford back into high again and pulled the gas lever all the way down.

When I swung around the last turn I breathed again. There was a light in the kitchen, and somehow there isn’t anything more peaceful and reassuring than light streaming from the window of a farmhouse kitchen. It was dark now and as I made the turn off the road my lights flicked across Lee’s roadster parked in front of the house and for some reason I could not fathom I reached down and cut both lights and motor and let the Ford roll to a stop.

All sound and motion died with the car and I was alone in the night with only my heartbeat in my ears. I turned and went around the side of the house rather than through it. I don’t know why. Maybe I was afraid of the dark part of it and wanted to go back to where the light was.

As I stepped up on the back porch I could hear someone talking. It was Lee. I couldn’t make out the words, but he was talking quietly and slowly and didn’t sound as if he were drunk. The tightness across my chest relaxed a little. I opened the door and went in.

The lamp that was burning was the one with the dark shade and it made a cone of light across the table with the rest of the room in partial shadow. Lee was on one side of the table with his arms resting on it and Angelina sat across from him, deathly quiet and moving only her eyes.

There was a bottle of whisky in front of him and a glass half empty just beyond his left hand, but he wasn’t very drunk. At least, not as drunk as I have seen him. Except for the eyes as he half turned toward me I would have said he was sober. The eyes were blazing.

“Sit down, Bob,” he said. “There by the door.”

“Thank you,” I said. “If you’re leaving, don’t let me keep you.”

I was still blinking in the light and then suddenly the cold began to run down across my shoulder blades and into the small of my back. His hands were lying flat down before him on the table in the edge of the shadow beneath the lamp and under the right one was the flat ugly slab of a .45 automatic. It was mine, and I knew it was loaded.

I sat down—slowly, the way a man would carrying an armful of eggs. There was a delicate balance about the whole thing there under the yellow cone of light and it gave you the feeling the slightest movement one way or the other might tip into chaos. There was something about it that caught you by the throat, even though he wasn’t wild drunk and cursing or waving the gun. Any of those things would have scared me, because you never know about a drunk with a gun, but they wouldn’t have scared me the way this did.

I kept it out of my voice as well as I could.

“All right,” I said. “This is all very dramatic. But do you suppose I could have some supper now, or do we go on rehearsing the high-school play?”

He ignored me. There wasn’t the slightest indication he had heard me or that he even remembered I had come in. He just went on talking. And he was talking to Angelina, or to himself. It was hard to tell which.

“Your hair is different now that you’ve cut it. But it’s beautiful that way and it still shines the same under lamplight. I wonder why I never did write a popular song about it and call it ‘The Beautiful Bitch with the Lamplight Hair” and maybe be famous all over the country and have a banana split named after me when I’m dead, instead of saving strands of it like a high-school girl or a man that’s sick. Maybe the next thing I’d be saving your discarded clothes, and they have a name for people like that but I can’t think of what it is and I don’t want to think of it and you don’t know and there isn’t any way you can know how much I don’t want to think of it and how much time I spend just not thinking of it.”