Hill girl

by Charles Williams

  “Then, in Christ’s name, Angelina, why did you do it?”

  She was quiet a long time and I thought she wasn’t going to answer. After all, it wasn’t any of my business. Then she said quietly, “Does there have to be a reason?”

  “Well, hell, there ought to be a reason for everything.”

  “Maybe I just wanted somebody to say he loved me, even if he was lying. And I guess I didn’t care much, anyway.”

  I lay there for a while, wondering what it was like not to care when you’re eighteen.

  I got up and mixed another drink and sat in the chair by the window while she was getting ready to go out. After I finished the drink I got a clean shirt out of the bag and put it on and finished dressing and wandered impatiently around the room waiting for her, feeling irritable about the heat but not quite as savage about it as I was a while ago.

  When she did come out I wasn’t quite prepared for the shock of her altered appearance. I don’t know whether it was the new clothes or the new expression in the eyes, but Angelina had a different look. And that look was lovely.

  She had on the brown linen suit and it fitted her perfectly. She was wearing a soft yellow blouse with the suit and had on a pair of very sheer nylons and the high-heeled white shoes. She could have been any girl you’d see on a college campus except for the hair. She had it rolled into a soft knot at the back of her neck, and while it was difficult to get used to the idea of a young girl with long hair, I found myself wondering why women had to cut it off anyway.

  She turned completely around, turning her head to keep watching me, and there was that teasing smile in her slightly almond-shaped eyes. “Well, how do I look?”

  “Wonderful,” I said.

  “How do you like my stockings now?”

  “Fine, You have beautiful legs.”

  “Thank you. You know, Bob,” she went on, “you’re nice. Why are you so hard to get to know?”

  “I’m antisocial. Let’s get going. You remember, don’t you? The justice of the peace?”

  “Do you still want to do it?”

  “What do you mean, do I still want to? I never did.”

  “Well, thanks a lot! If I’m so repulsive, why do you insist on going on with it?”

  So we’re going through all that again, I thought wearily.

  “Come on, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Let’s get married.”

  She looked at me distastefully and turned toward the door. “I give up,” she said. “I’ll never understand you. You say something nice about me with one breath and then get mean again with the next.”

  It was three o’clock and the streets were scorching under the midafternoon sun. We walked slowly along toward the courthouse with Angelina craning her neck to catch glimpses of herself in shop windows. She couldn’t get over the way she looked in her new clothes.

  The J-P.’s office was hot and not very clean, and he mumbled on forever through a ragged mustache that was brown-stained on the bottom, and there were two political hangers-on for witnesses. When the mumbling was over I handed him an envelope with ten dollars in it and we came back out on the street. We stood for a minute on the courthouse steps in the shade and I began to realize it. I wasn’t a single man any more. I was married. I laughed, and Angelina looked at me queerly.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “I just thought of a funny story, that’s all,” I said. “It seems there were two Irishmen and one of them was named Pat and I’ve forgotten the name of the other one but I think it was Morris—”

  “Do you realize that we are married?” she interrupted.

  “Why, no,” I said. “I hadn’t given it a thought.”

  “Sometimes I think you’re as crazy as a bedbug.”

  “Where do we go from here?” I said.

  She looked at me blankly and I knew that neither of us had thought of what was going to happen after the ceremony. The thing had been forced on us and we had been rushing toward it to get it over, or at least I had, and now that we had reached it and the marriage was an accomplished fact we were left standing there on the steps with nothing but an empty feeling. There was nowhere to rush to now.

  “I guess this is as far as we go, isn’t it?” she asked emotionlessly. She was looking out into the street.

  “I guess so. Are you going back home?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’re your own boss.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  We were silent for a moment and then she said, “Where are you going? But I guess it isn’t any of my business, is it?”

  “New Orleans, I think.” But that part of it seemed to have lost its interest. I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for it. “I’ll start on tonight. You can stay at the hotel. I’ll go back and get my stuff and clear out.”

  She shook her head, still not looking at me. “No. It’s your room and I don’t want to owe you anything. I owe you too much now.” She gestured toward the linen jacket.

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “Yes, I do too. I would promise to pay you back for it, but I don’t know whether I’ll ever be able to.” There was a queer streak of stubborn honesty in her, I thought.

  We stood there uncomfortably a little while longer. Then she turned to me and said, “Well, thank you for everything. Good-by.”

  “Good-by,” I said.

  She turned and walked down the steps and out into the traffic on the sidewalk, paused for a second as if undecided which way to turn, and then went on up the street. I watched her, feeling like hell for some reason, noticing how straight she held her shoulders and the clean, beautiful lines of her legs as she walked and the proud tilt of her head. She was a lovely girl and very proud and stubborn, and more alone than anyone else in the world, and she probably had about twenty dollars. She wouldn’t ever go home and she didn’t know any way to earn her living except the way she would probably wind up by earning it, and there was something too tough in her to let her cry.

  Well, what the hell, I thought, it’s no skin off my nose. Am I supposed to be running a girls’ school? She got herself into it; let her worry about it. But did she? What about Lee? Well, what about Lee? It takes two to get into a mess like that. If she hadn’t been willing to string along, he couldn’t have got anywhere alone. Yeah, with her experience, she had a lot of chance against Lee, didn’t she?

  Why all this moralizing? I asked myself. What difference does it make? A mess like this isn’t anybody’s fault, so why worry about it? The thing is, she’s nothing to me, so why worry about her? Let her go.

  She was in the middle of the next block before I caught up with her. I came up to her and took her arm. “Wait a minute, Angelina,” I said. “You can’t go off alone like this. Let’s go back to the hotel and talk it over.”

  Fourteen

  She didn’t try to shake off my hand. She just stopped and looked at me stonily. “Why?”

  “How the hell do I know? It doesn’t make sense, but I can’t let you walk off this way. What’d become of you?”

  “Well, what do you care?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I haven’t got good sense.” But I turned her around and she came back with me, not saying a word. Both of us were silent as we walked back to the hotel and went up to the room. She went over and sat down by the window and looked out.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Frankly,” I said, “I haven’t got any idea. But we’ll stay here tonight and try to think of something. The only thing I know is that I can’t leave you stranded here. And you can’t go anywhere without money.”

  “I don’t want your money.”

  I sat down and lit a cigarette. “I don’t give a damn what you want or don’t want. The fact remains that I can’t let you wander off alone.”

  She didn’t reply. She only lifted her shoulders irritatingly and stared out the window. Damn such a pigheaded little brat, I thought. Why couldn’t we get along without fighting?

/>   “Look,” I said, “have you ever been to Galveston? Why don’t we go down there for a week and stay at the hotel right on the beach? We could have a vacation and maybe work this thing out. We might be able to decide what’s to be done with you. Maybe you’d change your mind and go home.”

  She turned around and there was some friendliness in her eyes. “That sounds nice. I’ve never been to Galveston, and I always wanted to see the ocean. I’ve dreamed about it. But I’ll tell you beforehand that you’ll be wasting your time trying to get me to go home. I’m not going back.”

  “You just don’t like it, do you?”

  “I’d rather be dead.”

  “Well, what did you plan to do? After we were married, I mean? You surely didn’t look forward to living with me, the way we fight.”

  “I didn’t plan on anything. I didn’t even plan on marrying you. That was your idea, wasn’t it?”

  “Look, sister,” I said, “if you think you’ve been haunting my girlish dreams all these years, let me set you straight. You know why we’re married, so let’s drop it.”

  “You’re going to go on harping on that, aren’t you?”

  “No, not if I can help it. But it looks as if we’ll go on fighting as long as we’re in the same state. Why in hell can’t we get along together? Which one of us is it, you or me? What about the other people you know? Do you fight with all of them? Did you fight with Lee?”

  “Of course I didn’t fight with Lee. He’s nice. And he knows how to treat girls.”

  “Well, maybe it’s me.” I went over and sat down on the bed close to her. She half turned toward me, raising her eyebrows inquiringly. “Now tell me just what’s wrong with me that we start swinging at each other the minute we get within range.”

  “All right,” she said, “I’ll tell you. You’re always looking for trouble. You’re big and tough, at least on the outside, and you’re sarcastic, and you never try to be friendly, and you don’t want people to be friendly with you. You just want to be left alone, and if people don’t leave you alone you want to fight ‘em. You can say nice things to a girl if you want to, but the trouble is you never want to. Today was the only time you ever did try to be nice, and that only lasted an hour or so. The rest of the time you just make nasty remarks at me and say things that don’t make sense and try to give me the idea that you think I’m a little slut. Well, I’ve told you before it don’t make any difference to me whether you think I’m no good or not, and you haven’t got any right to set yourself up as a judge. Now, does that satisfy you?”

  “Yes, that would seem to answer the question.”

  “You’re stubborn and you think you’re the only one who can be right and you’re too hard-boiled for anybody to get along with and you don’t care what people think, and you go out of your way to say things that hurt because you think it’s smart to make tough remarks like that.”

  Well, I asked for it, I thought, and sat there silently until she finished. Her eyes were angry and flashing and I caught myself thinking they still were beautiful even that way.

  “There’s one more thing,” she said.

  “Haven’t you said enough?”

  “No. It wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t say this too. You could be nicer than anybody else if you wanted to be. There is something awfully nice about you, but you keep it covered up for fear somebody will see it. Now,” she went on, “you might as well tell me what you think of me. If it’s fair for one, it’s fair for the other. What is it about me you don’t like?”

  I studied this for a minute, looking at her, while she waited with her eyes questioning.

  “Well?”

  “I’ll be damned if I know. Maybe it’s because most of the time you’re such a pigheaded little brat. And I was afraid of you.”

  “Afraid?” she asked incredulously.

  “Afraid of what you could do to Lee and Mary if you didn’t stay away from him. They’re two people I happen to like a lot and I didn’t want them to break up, and that’s exactly what would happen if she ever got wise to you. And he needs her.”

  “Since when have you had to run everybody’s business for them?”

  “Skip it,” I said. “What do you say we try to see if we can’t get along the rest of the day without fighting? Let’s pretend we’re a newly married couple on their honeymoon.”

  “We are.”

  “Let’s pretend we’re a newly married—” I started, and then caught myself and shut up. Maybe she was right, I thought. I do look for trouble. If I’d stop riding her we’d have a much better chance of getting along peaceably.

  “I think I’ll have my hair cut,” she said. She had apparently decided to ignore my latest witticism. “I’ll go first thing in the morning and have it bobbed. I’ve been dying to for years, but Papa never would let me.”

  “That’s silly. Your hair’s pretty. What do you want to cut it off for?”

  “Do you really like it?” She swiftly pulled a few hairpins and shook her head and her hair fell about her shoulders in a cloud. “But it’s too long this way, isn’t it?”

  She got up out of the chair and sat down beside me on the bed, sitting close and looking up at me. She took one of my hands and pushed it into the mass of hair and it felt cool and soft and fine. I let it run between my fingers.

  “That’s better than fighting, isn’t it?” she asked. She leaned a little toward me and smiled. I shoved my face into the cascading blondeness at the side of her throat and I could feel the pulse in my temples thumping and making the same kind of noise you make hitting the big bag. One-two. One-two.

  “And I’m going to get some perfume. What kind do you like? I never had any in my life.”

  “You don’t need it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’d be shooting the birds on the ground.”

  “Who’s talking about birds?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Is somebody?” The noises out in the street were closing down now and going far away and there wasn’t anybody left in the world but the two of us and I tried taking a deep breath to see why breathing was so laborious and it just wouldn’t go down. There didn’t seem to be any room in my chest for it. She sounded a long way off and I tried to hear what she was saying. “You can be so sweet when you want to be, Bob.”

  I picked her up in my arms and stood up and walked around the bed away from the window. She let her head tilt back and looked up at me quietly, her eyes wide and dark.

  “You’re not so tough,” I said.

  “I don’t want to be. You make me not tough.”

  “You’re not very big either. Not big enough to be looking for trouble all the time. I could throw you right out the window from here.”

  “Throw me out the window, Bob. Afterward.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  She put an arm up around my neck and drew herself up until her lips were right against my face. “Say something nice to me, Bob,” she whispered. “After a while you’ll probably say something mean, but right now something nice. Just a little nice.”

  “You’re the goddamnedest girl I’ve ever seen.”

  Her eyes regarded me questioningly from a distance of three inches, very soft and wide and lovely. “Is that nice?” she asked. “If it is, I like it.”

  I was having a hard time talking and just nodded my head. She hit me harder than anything ever had before.

  Fifteen

  Something awakened me in the dark and I looked at the luminous dial of my watch. It was three o’clock. And then I felt again the thing that had brought me out of my sleep; it was a hand running softly along my arm and across the shoulder. It was a small hand and smooth and cool and its touch was caressing.

  “Are you awake, Bob?” she asked softly.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry I waked you up.”

  “It’s too hot to sleep anyway.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Three. I must have been asleep for a couple of hours. It was a
bout eleven when we came back from getting something to eat, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. You keep track of the time for us. But I’m real sorry about waking you up. I was feeling all the muscle in your arm. And behind your shoulder. There’s regular ropes of it. Why are you so strong?”

  “Clean living. Avoiding alcohol and tobacco and loose women.”

  “You always joke about everything, don’t you? Bob, have you decided yet what we’re going to do? Are you going to New Orleans today?”

  “No. I don’t want to go to New Orleans now.”

  “Why not? I thought you wanted to go.”

  “Not now,” I said.

  It was very quiet outside now, with only a lone car going by in the street now and then. We lay there in the dark without anything over us, listening to the humming of the overhead fan.

  “Bob,” she said after a while.

  “What?”

  “I want to know why you changed your mind about going down there.”

  “I don’t know why. I just lost interest in it.”

  “Is it because you think you have to take care of me? You don’t have to, you know.”

  “No,” I said. “That isn’t it.”

  “But you don’t want me around, do you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t ever lie, do you? You don’t ever say things you don’t mean just to keep from hurting people’s feelings. You could have said you did and it would have sounded nice even though it didn’t mean anything.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m not very smooth.”

  “But we don’t have to pretend with each other, do we? I was sort of forced on you and you don’t have to play like you like me. You don’t like me, do you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  “How much, Bob?”

  “I don’t know how much.”

  “You told me this morning you didn’t.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “It seems like years, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ve both changed, haven’t we?”