Charles Williams: Hill Girl

Mike sat between us, peering out interestedly through the windshield at the scenery flashing past. He would be a surprised dog, I thought, if he ever rode with anybody else and found out that cars can travel at thirty and forty miles an hour. He turned and licked Lee on the face. Lee cuffed him on the head while we swept around a long curve with that delicately balanced feeling you have just before the car begins to skid.

“You old cold-nosed bastard, I’ll throw you out and make you walk,” he said affectionately.

He stopped the car and turned it around and parked off the road on top of a long hill five miles beyond. I got out on the side of the road and old Mike jumped down and went racing around in ecstatic circles.

“Go get ‘em, Mike,” Lee said, and slapped him playfully in the ribs.

Mike gave him a look of sheer adoration and cleared the burrow pit beside the road with one bound and disappeared down the rows of old cornstalks and pea vines that lay downhill. We loaded the guns and followed.

The sun was just coming up over the top of a far-off ridge to the east and it felt good on my back and strung the frosty vines with diamonds, and the red-gold shafts of light broke against the far hill ahead of us in a spreading extravagance of color among the dogwood and hickory and red oak. October’s blue haze of smoke was in the air and the unforgettable smell of it was in our nostrils, and our breath was steamy in the absolutely still air.

“He’s found birds,” Lee said happily. I looked up ahead and saw Mike had slowed and was coming along the edge of the field stealthily and his very pose said as plain as words, “They’re here. And close.” Then he stiffened in a point.

It was a small covey and they got up from the pea vines almost at our feet, half a dozen or so small brown-feathered bombs that ripped the hush of the morning apart with their explosion. Lee knocked one down with an effortless swing of his gun, but I was jumpy and missed with both barrels, missed clean without drawing a feather, which is the only way to miss if you have to.

“I used to know a guy once,” Lee said gravely as Mike brought up his bird and he stowed it in the game pocket.

“Yeah? You did?”

“Quite a hunter, this guy was. And what he always did was to shoot at the birds. Or at least in their general direction.”

“All right, all right.” I grinned. “So I missed one.”

“You missed one?” He grabbed my coat collar and shook it affectionately. “Why, you big Swede, you couldn’t hit a Jersey cow in the ass with an ironing board.”

And that was the way it went most of the morning. Mike would find the birds, we would kick them out, Lee would get one and sometimes a clean double, and I would miss. By noon I had only two birds in the game pocket of my coat. I couldn’t get the old swing back, and Lee kidded me unmercifully.

“They went that way, mister,” he would shout excitedly, pointing after a vanishing covey after I had missed two shots on the rise.

All hunters have days like that, even exceptional shots, and I have lots of them, so I didn’t mind. The day was beautiful and it was all right just to be out with Lee like this after an absence of two years.

He was in high spirits. “Damn it, Bob,” he said, “I’m sure glad you’re back. We’ve missed you around here. I don’t see why you couldn’t have gone to some school around home. They’re always just as much in the market for beef as that place you went. And I always wished you and the Major could have got together some way.”

“Well,” I said, “it was just one of those things.”

“I think it got to worrying him the last year. The way the two of you had split up, I mean. He used to ask me right often if I’d heard from you.”

“He did?” I tried to work up some interest in it, but it was pretty thin.

“You missed a lot of fun, Bob.” He stopped and lit a cigarette and grinned at me in the sunlight. “Don’t go so fast. We’re not hunting birds for a living.

“But you did miss a lot of fun,” he went on. “You know how much money he used to give me when I was going to Rice. And the parties we used to throw the last few years before he died, when I was working for him. That last one, in Houston, sweet Jesus! He had a whole suite of rooms at the Rice Hotel and I don’t know how much whisky—the real McCoy, too, no moonshine—and I had all the telephone numbers from the days when I was going to school down there. And for a man who was crowding fifty, he was quite a lad with the gals. A little on the salty side, especially when he’d had a couple of snorts, and sometimes they didn’t quite know how to take him, but he was a good sport. You remember how he used to be sometimes when he’d had too much, he’d think about when he was in France with the Engineers, and he’d start talking French to the girls, and it’s a damn good thing none of ‘em ever understood anything he was saying. And then he’d sing the Engineers’ song, you know, the one about ‘Oh, the Engineers, with hairy ears, they live in caves and ditches,’ and when he’d come to the third line it was a little too rough for some of ‘em unless they had a snootful too, and if they got too snotty about it he’d let out a roar and say, ‘Lee, take these goddamn campfire girls back to their sorority house and go down on Congress Avenue and dig us up some women with guts,’ and then I’d have to pacify everybody all over again.”

“You must have had your hands full,” I said absently. I was trying to keep an eye on Mike, who was cutting around the edge of a blackberry patch.

“I’ll say I did. And say, speaking of girls—”

“We were?” I said. “What are girls?”

“Speaking of girls, you sap, I want to take you out to Sam’s sometime soon so you can see this Angelina. Until you see that, you haven’t lived, I’m telling you.”

“Lay off,” I said. “Forget this Angelina stuff. You know what Sam Harley’d do if he caught you fooling around with one of his girls.”

“What a sucker!” He grinned. “If I ever get a chance to get into that, d’you think I’m going to do it on the courthouse lawn and give out invitations to everybody in the country?”

“For Christ’s sake, Lee,” I said. “Quit talking like that. You’ll have me believing you mean it before long.”

“O.K.,” he said. “O.K., Grandma. But when you see her, don’t say I didn’t warn you. There’s a lot of fun there in one pair of flour-sack pants, for the guy that can get it.”

“Speaking of sport,” I said, “did you ever hunt any quail? Now, back where I come from, it’s a lot of fun. You have a dog, see, and a shotgun; and this dog goes out and finds the birds—”

“All right, all right. Maybe we had better get going, or I’ll be whinnying and pawing the ground, just thinking about her. Let’s go.”

We would hunt over a field and then move the car down the road to another bit of good cover and go over that. By noon we were close to the field where I had met Sam Harley the day before. We started across a piece of pastureland near the road, headed for a spring branch below, where we could eat the sandwiches we had brought. Mike found a big covey of quail in the blackberries along an old fence row and Lee connected again. I shot and missed.

“Now, you take croquet. That’s a nice game I could recommend,” Lee said as we sat down at the base of a big oak beside the spring. “I knew a man once. Just like you in a lot of ways. Had eleven thumbs and three left feet and he got to be a hell of a player. Maybe All-American.”

“You certainly know a lot of people,” I said. “Any of ‘em named Joe?”

“Sure. All of ‘em. Joe’s a nice name.”

“Had a kind of green mole on the left side of his face, just under the eye?”