I didn"t want to go. We stood there facing each other across the counter. "What are you going to do tomorrow?" I asked.
"Nothing special. Go to church in the morning, I expect. And in the afternoon I thought I might go out and try to sketch the Buchanan bridge."
"Where"s that?"
"It"s in the river bottom, below the one where-" She paused, confused, and I knew what she was thinking. "Below the one we crossed going out to the oil well."
"Could I go, too?" I asked.
She nodded. "Why, yes. We could make it a picnic."
"That"s fine. I"ll get the restaurant to make us a lunch to take along."
"No. Let me do that," she said. "It"s no trouble."
"What time can I pick you up?"
"About twelve would be all right."
"Great," I said. "I"ll be looking forward to it."
I started out and then paused, when I reached the doorway, to look back at her. She was still watching me, and had just started to turn back to the desk.
It was awkward, somehow. Both of us were a little confused. "Was- I mean, is there anything else?" she asked.
"Oh," I said. "No. I guess not." I turned and went on out into the street.
When I got over to the lot the two deputies were gone and Gulick didn"t say anything about them.
9
I drove over around noon. It was a blazing, still day of white sunlight, and the shadows under the trees were like pools of ink. She was sitting on the front porch waiting for me, dressed in white shorts and a blue T-shirt, and surrounded by painting equipment and the box of lunch. I got out and loaded it all into the back seat. The c.o.c.ker spaniel was running eagerly up and down the walk.
"Can we take s.p.u.n.ky?" she asked. "He likes to run rabbits."
I looked at s.p.u.n.ky"s short legs and big paddle feet. "Did he ever catch one?"
She smiled. "No. But he"s still hopeful."
"Sure," I said. I lifted him in through the rear window and held the door open for her. As we went down Main Street a few people were cl.u.s.tered in front of the drugstore and the restaurant.
"They"re still talking about the bank robbery," she said. "Do you think it was somebody around here?"
I didn"t want to talk about it. "I don"t know," I said. "It could have been."
When we were on the highway going south I cranked the wing windows open and swung them around front to scoop in a little breeze. She sat back in the corner of the seat, facing towards me with one leg doubled under her, and the big violet eyes were happier than I had ever seen them before.
The road was a mile or so beyond the one which went over to Sutton"s oil well. It wasn"t much more than a pair of ruts struggling through the sand and stunted post-oak in a generally westerly direction towards the river bottom, and looked as if it hadn"t been used in months.
"Where"s it go?" I asked.
"Nowhere, any more. The bridge isn"t safe and it"s all washed out beyond, on the other side of the bottom. We can get as far as the bridge, though."
When we got down among the big oaks in the bottom there was more shade and it was a little cooler. The road wound erratically, skirting the dried-up sloughs. Once we almost ran over an old boar which came charging out of some bushes into the road ahead of us.
"That looked like a wild pig," I said.
"Some of them are," she said. "They get lost down here and after a while they sort of go native."
"You"d better warn s.p.u.n.ky they"re not rabbits. They could slice him up like salami."
When we finally got to the river it was worth it, and I could see why she had wanted to come here. It was beautiful and remote and there was a feeling of peace about it as if they"d forgotten to wind the clock and it had run down fifty years ago. There was no concrete or steel about the bridge; it was a sagging ruin of oak timbers and loose planking weathered to the bleached-out whiteness of old bones against the dark wall of timber beyond it, and tilted a little as if it would go out with the next high water. There was a jam of whitened logs on the upper side and the water ran dark, almost like black tea, out from under the jam, boiling up a little and swinging around in a big hole on the downriver side. The road approached from below the bridge and where I pulled the car off and stopped in the shade of a huge pin oak there was a clean sandy bank sloping down to the sandbar below the pool.
She looked across the river and then at me. "It"s lovely, isn"t it?"
"It"s perfect," I said.
We got out. s.p.u.n.ky ran down to the sandbar to get a drink and then took off to investigate the surrounding country. I took the water jar down to the river"s edge and filled it for her, and when I came back she was looking around for a place to sit down in the shade.
"Wait," I said, "I"ve got-" And then I chopped it off suddenly, feeling cold chills down my back. I"d almost said blanket. It had been a near thing, and thinking about it scared me.
She looked at me questioningly. "What is it?"
I got hold of myself. "Nothing," I said. "False alarm. I started to say I had a Sunday paper in the car that you could sit on, but I just remember I didn"t bring it."
"Oh," she said, "I don"t need anything. This is nice sand, just like a beach."
She sat down with the block of paper on her legs and took up one of the charcoal sticks, looking meditatively at the bridge. Then she glanced around at me where I"d stretched out on the sand, just smoking a cigarette and watching her.
"Do I make you nervous?" I asked. "Watching you, I mean?"
She shook her head. "No. But I was just thinking you"d probably be awfully bored."
"Take my word for it," I said, looking at the lovely face and the big, serious eyes. "I"m not bored."
"You know, you"re awfully nice," she said quietly.
"You"re not at all like I thought you were at first. I-"
She broke off and looked out over the bridge. "I mean, does that sound like too shameless a thing to say?"
"You"re a solid bra.s.s hussy," I said.
She smiled, trying to cover up the confusion in her face. "Don"t make fun of me, please. What I"m trying to say is that you have been nice and the least I could do is acknowledge it, after the mean things I thought about you at first."
I rolled on my side and propped myself on my elbow. "I told you how that happened. I just got the instructions mixed up. This is Approach No. 2, known as the waiting game. You want me to explain how it works? You take these two citizens, A and B, we"ll call "em-"
She laughed, and picked up the charcoal stick again. "All right. I"ve been warned. But didn"t your instruction book warn you?"
"About what?" I asked.
"That your Approach No. 2, as you call it, won"t work after it"s been explained."
"Killjoy. Now I"ve got to buy a new manual."
She laughed again and started blocking in the outline of the bridge with the charcoal. I lay there and watched her, thinking how beautiful she was, and about the joking, and then beginning to be aware that beneath it there was something serious that had nothing to do with joking at all. I wondered if she had felt it too. What was there about this kid that kept getting under my skin? And then I wondered irritably why I kept insisting on thinking of her as a kid. She was twenty-one. I was nine years older than she was, but that didn"t mean she was sixteen any more.
It was impossible to lie there and watch her sketching without thinking of that other time at the abandoned farm, and that put me right back on the same old merry-go-round with Sutton and the same old unanswerable questions. But I had my mind made up about one thing-I wasn"t going to ask her about it again, at least not today. We were having too much fun, and the mention of Sutton, always spoiled it for her. Maybe some day she would tell me.
What the h.e.l.l, some day? In a month-or two, at the most-I"d be gone from here. As soon as the heat was off a little and the bank job began gathering dust in the unsolved file I"d dig up the money and beat it.
She was squeezing colors on to the plate from little tubes, and dipping her brush into the water jar to mix them.
"I thought watercolors came in little blocks," I said.
"They do," she said. "But the tubes are better."
Just then s.p.u.n.ky came flopping down the bank, soaking wet and plastered with sand, and bounced in between us. I saw what was coming and grabbed him before he could get the shake started, rolling over and tossing him down below us.
She laughed. "That was fast work."
"He"d have made a Navajo sand painting out of it in about one more second."
"You"re nice to have around. Every painter should have one of you."
"It"d never work out," I said. "You run into the same old distribution problems. The pretty ones would soon corner the market."
"You"re very flattering today."
"It"s probably just the moonlight."
She wrinkled her nose at me and went on with her brush. She worked fast, and I watched the picture take form. I knew nothing whatever about painting, of course, but it looked fine to me. It wasn"t exactly like the bridge, but somehow it had that same drowsy feeling of peace.
"I like that," I said. "Will you do one for me sometime?"
She didn"t look up. "Have you wondered who this one is for?"
"You mean I can have it?"
"If you"d like it."
"Of course I would. But why?"
"I don"t know," she said quietly. "Maybe just because it"s my birthday, and I wanted to give you something."
"That sounds crazy somewhere," I said. "But is it really your birthday?"
She nodded, and put down the brush and set the block of paper off her legs on to the sand. "I"ll finish it later. Why don"t we eat our lunch now? I"ll show you my birthday cake."
I went up and got the box out of the car and we started unpacking it, putting the sandwiches and Thermos jugs out on the tablecloth on the sand. She lifted out a small tin candy-box.
"You open it," she said.
I lifted the lid. There was a small cake inside, not much bigger than an overgrown cupcake, covered with white frosting and dotted with what looked like round sections cut out of dates.
"They"re instead of candles," she said.
"Twenty-two?" I asked.
She smiled and shook her head. "You remembered, didn"t you? But it"s twenty-one. I mean, when you asked me, it was so near-"
"Child," I said. "Twenty-and-a-half years old."
I must have looked disappointed, or something. "What"s the matter?" she asked. "Did you want me to be twenty-two?"
"No," I said. "That would be stupid, wouldn"t it?"
"Yes," she answered quietly. "Wouldn"t it?"
"I"m thirty."
"Well, have a sandwich, you poor old man, to keep up your strength."
"Wait," I said. "We can"t eat sandwiches until we drink a toast." I opened one of the Thermos jugs and filled two aluminum cups. It was iced tea.
"To Gloria," I said, "who is twenty-one all the time and beautiful in the moonlight."
I don"t know what happened to the rest of the afternoon. We ate the lunch, and then she worked some more on the picture. We couldn"t go swimming because neither of us had brought a suit, but we took off our shoes and went wading out on the sandbar. Sometime during the afternoon a big swamp rabbit came bounding downriver with s.p.u.n.ky yelping along in his wake and falling farther behind at every jump, and then the next thing we knew the sun was gone. It had dropped out of sight behind the timber and the shadows were long and growing darker out across the bottom.
"I had no idea it was so late," she said. "We"ll have to go. I promised I"d stay with Gloria Two while they went to Bible Cla.s.s."
We gathered up the painting equipment and the lunch box and stowed them in the car, and it wasn"t until we were almost ready to get in ourselves that we realized s.p.u.n.ky was missing. Neither of us could recall seeing him since he"d gone past chasing the rabbit.
We began calling him, but he didn"t come. I walked up-river a few hundred yards, and then down, calling and whistling, but there was no sign of him. When I got back to the car it was growing dark, and I could see she was worried and a little frightened. I could have kicked myself for what I"d said about the wild hogs.
"Harry, do you suppose something has happened to him?" she asked anxiously.
"He"ll show up," I said. "He"s all right."
"But it"s getting dark. I"m scared for him."