Hill girl

by Charles Williams

  “Won’t somebody be apt to steal it?”

  “That would be fine.”

  “Oh.” There was silence for a minute, and then she said, “You don’t like the car, do you?”

  “It’s something like that, I guess. I don’t like for us to be in it.”

  “That was what it was when we had that fight by the river, wasn’t it? It was the car that suddenly made you remember things, that made you mad.”

  “Let’s don’t talk about it.”

  “We won’t, if you say so, but I’d rather talk about it than to have it coming between us. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not ashamed.”

  “You shouldn’t be. I think I understand it all, Angelina. Let’s just bury it.”

  The next morning I was awake in the early dawn. It was cooler, with a light breeze blowing off the water and the low-flying clouds that mean a clear day later on. The sea wall was deserted and quiet and the low sound of the surf beyond was peaceful. Angelina was sleeping quietly beside me, with her cheek on the crook of her arm and the cloud of hair spreading across the pillow. I leaned over and kissed her on the throat and she opened her eyes and smiled.

  “You need a shave. Your whiskers stabbed me on the throat.”

  “It’s a fine day,” I said. “We’ve got lots to do.”

  “Oh, can we plan now?”

  I grinned. “At the moment, yes.”

  “All right. What do we have to do?”

  “First we have to cash a draft. We need some more money.”

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I’ve still got about fifteen dollars of your money. I meant to give it back to you.”

  “My money? Haven’t you realized yet what that man was mumbling about back there in Shreveport the other day? It’s our money now.”

  “All right, smarty, I’ll keep it. But you say we have to have some more? Why? And how do we get it?”

  “We have to have more because I’ve only got about seventy-five left and we’re going to be here a week. And we’ve got to buy you some more clothes and a traveling bag and a bathing suit and”—I gave the sheet a sharp tug—”a nightgown. Look at you.”

  She smiled at me lazily, uncovered to the waist. “Do I need a nightgown? Why?”

  I looked at her and began to feel less like the great planner. “I’ll be damned if I know now.”

  “Go on and tell me why I need one.”

  “Well, we could get you one eight feet long and made out of canvas with a drawstring at each end, so I could think out our schedule.”

  She pulled the sheet over her, clear up over her head, with only one brown eye looking out. “Now go ahead. I can see your thinking is too easy to interrupt. The teenciest little thing upsets you.”

  “And after we get all this stuff done, we’ll go swimming in the surf,” I went on.

  “Couldn’t we go this morning? There was a sign on the pier saying they rented suits.”

  “Put you in one of those gunny sacks? Like hell we will. It’d be a sacrilege, like dressing Helen of Troy in a burlap bag.”

  “I knew it.” The one brown eye regarded me impishly.

  “You knew what?”

  “That when you did want to, you could say nicer things than anybody.”

  “Nuts,” I said. “I’m a great oracle and I speak only profound truths.”

  “Great oracle yourself. You’re just sweet.”

  “That’s no way to speak to oracles. I’ll take it up with the union.”

  She bobbed her head out from under the sheet. “Is there any room in this big schedule of yours where I’m going to get my hair cut?”

  “You don’t seriously mean to cut it off, do you?” I said.

  “Of course, silly. Haven’t I been telling you for the last two or three days? I’m going to have it cut real short. I saw a girl on the street the other day and hers was cut that way and curled up in little curls close to her head and it was the cutest thing you ever saw, and mine is naturally wavy so it wouldn’t be hard to make it stay and that’s the way I want to do it, and I almost went up to her and asked her where they did it and—” She was talking faster and faster and started to sit up in bed, carried away with the project. I put a hand over her mouth.

  “Relax,” I said. “Saying hair to you is like breaking a fire main.” She bit my hand.

  “I can get it cut today, can’t I?”

  “I don’t think you ought to cut it off. I think it’s beautiful the way it is.”

  “Yes, but how do you know what it’ll be like cut short? It’ll be lots prettier.”

  “No. It couldn’t be.”

  “It’s my hair, Bob Crane, and I’ll do what I damned please with it.” She hitched away from me on the bed with the sheet up to her ears ‘and her eyes angry. There was that stubborn-mule look in them.

  “You’ll like hell do what you please,” I started, and then caught myself and shut up. After all, it was her hair, and Sam Harley had been telling her she couldn’t cut it all these years and trying to browbeat her, and look where he had wound up in her eyes. You couldn’t get anywhere by trying to bully her. She didn’t bully worth a damn. You might get your way if you overpowered her, but it wouldn’t be worth what you lost in the process.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “We’ll have it done today. I didn’t mean to get tough about it. It’s just that I think it’s so lovely the way it is.”

  “I’m sorry, too. Oh, Bob, I don’t want to be stubborn about it, and I won’t do it if you absolutely don’t want me to. But I know you’ll like it better the other way. And all my life somebody has been telling me what to do with it and I didn’t like it when you started to sound like Papa.”

  I grinned. “Well, it’s all set I don’t want to wind up where Papa did.”

  It was only about seven-thirty when we came out of the hotel, so we walked along the sea wall a long way before we went downtown, with Angelina excitedly asking questions about the shrimp boats offshore and whether any big ships tied up at the swimming pier and laughing at herself when I explained that the water was only about four feet deep under it. She insisted we go down on the beach and look for shells. After a while we came back and caught a streetcar and had breakfast at a restaurant near the interurban. She wouldn’t eat anything except some sliced bananas and kept telling me how we looked in the mirror that was on the wall across from our table.

  We hunted up a beauty shop and I left her there while I went off to see about the bank draft. When we parted in front of the place, she said, “What on earth are you looking at, Bob?”

  “Your hair,” I said. “I’m seeing it for the last time and I want to remember what it looked like if this new business is a flop.”

  She laughed. “You’ll be back in about an hour, won’t you? I don’t like you to be away from me.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But you’ll probably be in there two hours or longer. You may have to wait, because I think you’re supposed to have an appointment.”

  I looked up an old friend of the Major’s who was in a cotton firm and he went down to his bank with me and helped me cash a draft. I bought a traveling bag for Angelina and had her initials put on it and told the shop to deliver it to the hotel and then went to a florist’s shop and ordered some flowers. When I had finished this I walked down Market to 24th and the car was still there across from the bar. One of the taxi drivers in front of the cab stand next door grinned at me as I went by and said, “Say, ain’t you the guy that tangled with Jack the other day?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “He’s been telling it big about what he’ll do if you ever show up down here again. Says the reason you haven’t picked up your car is because you’re afraid to come back.”

  I went on to the car. His eagerness to see a free fight was a little disgusting. In front of the place I hesitated and wondered if I should go in, but then I remembered I was supposed to meet Angelina in about a half hour and went across the street and got in the car and drove off, feeling proud of myself as a
married man with responsibilities. I wondered at it a little. Before, the prospect of another fight with Big-mouthed Jack would have had an irresistible allure.

  I parked across the street from the beauty shop and waited. After a while she came out of the shop and stood looking up and down the street. I felt warm and happy watching her and waited a minute before I hit the horn and waved at her. The close-cropped hair was a shock, as I had known it would be, but now with the sun on it and striking fire in the curls I could see that it was going to be easy to live with and that by the time she got ready to change it again I would be just as outraged as I had been this time. I got out and went across the street and she waited for me eagerly.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I was talking through my hat all the time. It’s lovely.”

  “Feel,” she said. I put my hand on the side of her head, very gently so as not to muss anything, and felt the brush of the ringlets against my palm.

  “Let’s go back to the hotel,” I said.

  She grinned at me. “No. You have too much trouble working out your schedules back there. Let’s stay downtown until we get finished.”

  We went around to one of the department stores and picked out a blue bathing suit and a woolly beach robe of canary yellow and some sandals and a bathing cap. I bought some bathing trunks for myself while she ran ecstatically through their stock shopping for more clothes. We filled the car with bundles and went back to the hotel. The flowers were there in the room when we came in. She put her arms up around my neck and pulled down hard, with that way she had, like a drowning swimmer, and with her lips against my ear she whispered fiercely, “Hold me tight like this, Bob. Don’t ever let me go.”

  Nineteen

  Those six days were wonderful.

  We would go swimming in the surf in the early morning, sometimes before sunrise, and lie on the sand afterward and talk and come in at nine or later, ravenous for breakfast. She never seemed to tire of battling the surf or of marveling at the existence of it. It was a source of continual surprise to her that the Gulf was never calm, and she would never call it the Gulf, but always the ocean.

  Most of the girls who came down to the beach were content to wade out a little way and then come back and drape themselves attractively around on the sand, but Angelina wanted more of it than that. The water fascinated her and she seemed to derive some strange exhilaration from fighting with the rollers, and the higher they came, the better she liked it. And the strange part of it was that she couldn’t even swim at first. I took her to the pool up the sea wall every afternoon and gave her lessons and she learned fast.

  She turned heads whenever she appeared on the beach and shed the yellow robe, and she knew it, all right, but just lounging around on the sand was always secondary with her to the thrill of the waves. When she did finally tire of it we would go up on the sand and sprawl and I would always lie down near her and smoke a cigarette and watch her while she took off the white bathing cap and shook out the curls.

  She would grin at me. “Why do you always lie where you can see me, and look at me like that?”

  “Now, that’s a brilliant question,” I said. “You wouldn’t have any idea at all how you look in that suit, would you?”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Just when you’re in it. Or should I say, when you’re partly in it. I can’t look at you without running a temperature of a hundred and four. That’s sex at its very worst, isn’t it? And still it all seems good and right. Maybe the symptoms are all wrong and we are pure and our love is platonic.”

  “What’s platonic?” she asked, and I told her.

  She laughed. “Well, I guess it hasn’t been very platonic so far, but we could begin now, couldn’t we?”

  “Right now,” I said. “We’ll begin this morning.”

  “It sounds like fun. I always wanted to sit on a pedestal. I’ve read about it in books. How long do you think we ought to try it?”

  “At least as long as we’re out here on the beach. We want to give it a fair trial.”

  We were silent for a long time and finally she threw a handful of sand on my shoulder and said, “What are you thinking about? You’re so solemn.”

  “Angelina. Your name. It’s so musical and has a sort of rippling sound to it. Why did they name you that? Is it after the river?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I was born in the Angelina River bottoms, when Papa was renting a farm there. Do you think it’s silly?”

  “I think it’s beautiful. I’m glad you were born there. Suppose you had been born up north. On the Penobscot or the Schuylkill.”

  “Would you have loved me?”

  “I would have loved you if you’d been born on the north fork of the Yangtze Kiang.”

  One night when we were lying in darkness in the room, late, after the noises out on the sea wall had died away and there was only the eternal sound of the Gulf and I thought she was asleep, she suddenly threw her arms about my neck and pressed her face against my neck. “Bob,” she whispered, “let’s don’t ever go back. Can’t we always stay here?”

  “It has been wonderful, hasn’t it?” I agreed.

  “Oh, it isn’t just that, Bob. I was so miserable back there, and all this has been so—so—I don’t know how to say it, but I always kind of choke up when I think about it, and about you, and I’m afraid to go back. Is there any way we could stay?”

  “No,” I said. “I have to go back to work.”

  “But you don’t have to work there, do you? You could work here or somewhere else, couldn’t you?”

  “No. Remember, the farm’s there and we have to live on it.”

  “But you don’t have to live on a farm. You could do a lot of things. Think of what you learned in college.”

  I grinned in the darkness, thinking about what I’d learned in college. Opening up holes in the line or knowing how to counter a left hook wasn’t exactly valuable in later life, particularly when you weren’t good enough for the pros in either one.

  “I’m sorry, Angelina,” I said. “But I like living on the farm, and I’m going to show you how to like it too. It’ll be different from what you’ve known of it.”

  She sighed. “I know that, Bob. Anywhere I lived with you would be fun and I want you to be happy, and I won’t say any more about it. Only sometimes I get scared when I think about going back.”

  We went dancing nearly every night. She had never danced in her life and I’m no gazelle on the floor, but I taught her to follow in a short time, and with the natural grace of all her movements and a good sense of rhythm she was soon ready for more accomplished dancers than I, not that she ever got a chance at them.

  One of the few bad moments I had during the six days occurred while we were dancing. The band was playin “Stardust” and we were swaying close together when she looked up at me and said, “You know, Bob, I was just thinking of how many things you’ve taught me. How to swim, and how to dance, and of course you showed me how to be happier than anybody else in the world. It seems like you taught me everything.”

  Every thing but one, I thought, and Lee had to teach her that. I missed a step and almost tripped, and then recovered and went on. I don’t think she noticed.

  There was one speck of comfort in it, though, I thought. I noticed that the thing never did get me completely down to the point where I blew up, the way it had that morning by the river. I wondered if I was beginning to get control of it, or whether the ugly shock of it was beginning to wear off with repetition.

  I wondered for a moment if that business was the thing she had said she was afraid of, the thing that made her scared to go back. But no, I knew she wasn’t in love with Lee. And as far as anything Lee would do or say—well, after all, he was my brother and we’d have nothing to fear from him.

  The only way I could ever account, afterward, for this blindness was just that I didn’t understand how much Lee had changed and was changing.

  I didn’t
think of Lee and Mary very often those six days. It was too difficult to think of anyone else at all. Once or twice I found myself wondering what was happening back home and if there was a chance that Sam Harley had scared Lee enough to make him stop and think. I hoped so. I was afraid for him if he ever lost Mary, and I know that he could lose her. It had always been Lee for her ever since we were children, but she had a lot of pride, and someday he might hand her more than that pride would let her take.

  On the last evening we drove far down the island to a long, deserted stretch of beach, and there, just after sunset, we parked the car and gathered driftwood for a fire. When the fire was burning fiercely and throwing sparks into the deepening twilight we changed into our suits, one on each side of the car, and ran down to the water. There was a strong breeze blowing up from the south and the surf was running high, breaking far out on the first bar with a booming thunder that filled and overrode everything in this world we had to ourselves. We went far out and felt the force of it and the salt taste of it in our mouths and I kept close to her always, trying to see the white bathing cap against the seething white of the breakers in the darkness and feeling her come pounding back against me in the pushing force of the sea, the warm smoothness of her body against me for an instant and then sliding past in the confusion of darkness and water, something silken that had brushed against me and was gone. I would plunge after her and catch her in the backwash and we would stand braced against the pull of the outgoing current, laughing, and I would kiss her, tasting the salt on her mouth, and then another toppling sea would loom over us and break and send us sprawling into the churning white.

  We went back up the beach to the fire, which had burned down to a bed of red coals. The big log I had put across the middle of it was burned in two and I piled the ends on the embers and the wind fanned them into flame. We got out the rolls and wieners and the long-handled wire fork I had bought at the five-and-ten-cent store, and roasted the wieners over the coals. Afterward we lay back on the yellow robe and watched the wind searching among the embers and sending the sparks flying out across the empty dunes. The beach was dark for miles and we were the only people on a black, wild continent. She had the bathing cap off and the glow of the dying fire highlighted the curls and warmed the smooth lines of her body.