He turned off on this lease road and then that one, backing out, hardly seeing where he was going. “What are you looking for!” Beth Ann demanded shrilly.
He drove around for twenty minutes, a whole crisscross of dead ends and false leads. He could not find the stockpond where Sissy had died. Finally he pulled up not far from a thumping pumpjack and turned off the motor. The night was clear, the sky high and milky with stars. He got out of the car. There was a little pond there, but it was not much more than a puddle. It couldn’t be the one where Sissy had waded in to await the blast from her father’s gun.
He ran back to the car, on the passenger’s side, and pulled the door open. “Davy!” Beth Ann cried, as he reached down to grab Sissy’s notebook. She followed him out of the car, down beside the puddle of dank, dark water. He squatted on the ground and tore out a page.
“That’s her notebook, isn’t it? Give me that, David Puckett!” She grabbed, he pulled it out of reach, she fell abruptly onto the ground. “Ow!”
He struck a match and the page caught fire immediately. He held it for a moment, then dropped it onto the ground in front of them, where it was quickly extinguished.
“I want it!”
“You said to get rid of it. Here I go.”
“I wanted to read it first.”
In a singsong voice, he said, “David kissed me and he wanted to. I saw David in the hall today. I want to die. I’m crazy, crazy craz—”
“Oh stop it, stop it right now!” She put her hands over her ears.
He had several pages wadded into a ball on the ground, he tore out more pages. Soon he had a little pile, for a bonfire. He struck several matches, trying to light it, but they blew out. He lit a single page, then held it to the pile until it caught. With a whoosh! the balls fell apart, one of them burned for a moment, then they were all out. The smell of smoke made his nose itch. “Damn,” he muttered. Furiously he tore out more pages and ripped them into tiny pieces and threw them into the air. There was a breeze, and it caught some of the pieces and took them a few yards away, but mostly the paper fluttered down around them like heavy snow.
Beth Ann reached for the notebook and tore pages out, too. She ripped them into long strips, as he remembered doing years ago in school, for a papier maché project. They had made little dinosaurs with pipe cleaners for the skeleton, then pasted on the wet newspaper strips.
He kept lighting matches and setting pieces of paper alight until the matches were gone. Some pages caught and burned to ash. Most burned part of a corner away, then sputtered out. He was too hasty, too careless. He could not make paper burn!
He picked the notebook up, what was left of it, and grabbed sheets of paper that were loose, he took up all he could hold and went over to the water and shoved all of it under with both hands. The cold water shocked him. He saw himself at the edge of the puddle, pushing under Sissy’s notebook, and he saw himself for the idiot he was. Beth Ann crouched beside him. “Will it rot in there?” she whispered.
He grabbed her shoulders. “No, summer will come and the water will dry up, and the pages will still be there, and they’ll dry too, and a dusty wind will pick them up and carry them all the way back to town!”
She began crying.
He got up, pulled her to her feet. “Of course they’ll disintegrate in there. And what if they didn’t? Who goes around oil leases looking for things to read? Snap out of it. I’ve done what you wanted me to do.” He snapped his fingers. “Wait, done half of it.” He ran to the car and got his own notebook, then ran back to the water. He took his shoes and socks off, and then, on second thought, stripped off his trousers, too. He waded to the center of the little puddle and laid the notebook on the water’s surface. It floated, one end dipped, very visible in the starlight. He lifted his foot and stamped it down. The water was about eight inches deep, and muddy. His feet sank into the soil.
He came out of the water and took a length of fabric from one of the boxes in the back of the station wagon, and used it to wipe his legs and feet and hands. All the while, Beth Ann followed him around like a dog. She had picked up his clothes. Silently, she handed them to him, and he dressed.
He started the car and dug out fast. He turned right on the highway and headed towards the sandhills.
“It’s good you did that,” Beth Ann said in a few minutes. Her voice was clear, almost piping, like a child’s.
He drove as fast as the car would go, which obviously was not as fast as a Kimbrough car, because Beth Ann did not protest. He pulled off at the base of the hills and they got out and headed off into them. He trudged ahead of her, until she called to him to wait for her. She had taken off her expensive flats and carried them. His shoes and socks were gritty with sand. They came over a small crest and down into a valley between the dunes. From here, there was sand in all directions, sand and sky and stars.
If he had been alone, he would have lain in the sand and thrown his arms out and given himself up to the night. He would have slept and waited for morning.
He kissed Beth Ann hungrily. He knew he was frightening her. He felt her body grow tense. Her hands on his back dug into his flesh, not with passion, but for balance.
He began to sob. Soon his body was racked. He fell away from Beth Ann, to his knees in the sand. He put his face in his hands. He wept for all the sadness, the cruelty, the awful resolution of his friends’ lives.
He wept for himself.
In a little while he was tired, and dry. He sat back, his eyes closed, his hands on the sand by his hips.
“Davy,” Beth Ann said softly.
He opened his eyes. A few yards away, she was taking off her clothes. She did this slowly, letting her blouse drop off her shoulders like liquid, letting her slacks fall down around her feet. She stood above him in her white bra and panties. Her hair was loose around her face and shoulders. She smiled at him, then ran past him and started up the dune.
He crawled up onto his knees facing in her direction, part of his weight on his hands flat in front of him. He felt the force of gravity holding him there.
She reached the crest of the dune, and walked along it slowly, putting one foot in front of the other carefully, toes pointed, like a performer on a high wire. She stopped, reached behind and unhooked her bra, and let it fall down onto the sand below her. Her white panties gleamed. Her breasts shone, as fish do deep in the sea.
“Davy, Davy,” she called. She held her arms out. “Come up here with me, Davy.” She was long and slim and straight, like a blade of prairie grass.
He said nothing. There was a long moment. She pulled her arms back to her body slowly, crossed them in front of her breasts. “Davy,” she called again, her voice quavering. She stuck her head forward a little.
He sat back on his heels, staring at her. She looked ghostlike, beautiful, up there. He felt dizzy. As he stared at her she seemed to be receding, as if the dune ebbed, like a wave on the sea that once was here. She floated away. He blinked, and the dune was there again, in front of him. She was riding its crest.
“You come down here,” he answered. “You come to me.”
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1992 by Sandra Scofield
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1205-8
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Walking Dunes Page 27
