Hot Spot (10 page)

“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 brass 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 hell, 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 colours on to the plate from little tubes, and dipping her brush into the water jar to mix them.

“I thought watercolours came in little blocks,” I said.

“They do,” she said. “But the tubes are better.”

Just then Spunky 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 aluminium 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 Spunky 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 Class.”

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 Spunky 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 upriver 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.”

“He can follow his own backtrail. I’m not concerned about that. But I’ve got to take you home. Your family’ll be worried about you.”

“But we can’t just go off and leave poor Spunky down here alone—”

“I’ll find him,” I said. “You just get in the car. And then give me your shoes.”

She looked at me wonderingly. “My shoes? But why?”

I grinned. “I want something you’re wearing, and I can’t think of anything else you can spare without starting a riot.”

“Oh,” she said. She sat down on the seat and slipped off the wedgies. They had grass straps, and it suddenly occurred to me they were the same as the ones Dolores Harshaw wore. I took them back and put them down on the sand where we’d eaten lunch, and then got in the car.

“We’re just going to leave them there?” she asked, puzzled.

“Yes. And when I get back, Spunky should be asleep with his head on them. It’s an old trick. When you lose a dog, leave something he knows is yours at the last place he saw you. When he comes back he’ll wait by it.”

I wasn’t nearly as optimistic about it as I pretended, but there was nothing else we could do at the moment. My experience when I was a boy had been with hunting dogs—bird dogs and hounds—and as far as I knew these house-bred fluffballs like Spunky might be as helpless in the woods as bubble-dancers.

She was very quiet as we drove back to town. They were waiting on the front porch and you could see they had been worried about her. There was a great deal of excited talk while she tried to explain the shoe trick and why she was barefoot, and then Gloria Two began to cry when she realized Spunky was lost. Robinson wanted to go with me to help look for him when I went back, but I told him it wasn’t necessary. For some reason I wanted to do it alone.

It was slow going, driving back over that road at night, and it was nearly nine o’clock before I got to the bridge. As I made the last turn I expected to see Spunky come bounding into the headlights, overjoyed at seeing somebody again, but the river bank was deserted and silent as it had been when we left. I got out and walked down to where I’d left her shoes. He wasn’t there. I began to be worried about it then. There was no telling what had happened to him. There were thousands and thousands of acres of wild river bottom down here and if he didn’t have any sense of direction or a good nose he might never find his way back.

I picked the shoes up and took them back to the car, suddenly conscious of the presence of Gloria Harper in everything connected with this place and with the whole happy afternoon which had slipped past us so quickly. She was everywhere. I wanted to see her now—but how could I go back and face her without the dog? She would be desolate because Gloria Two was heartbroken and …

For God’s sake, I thought angrily, how silly can you get? I had a sudden, sharp, and contemptuous picture of Harry Madox at the age of thirty struggling to keep from drowning in all this sea of blonde heartbreak over a paddle-footed mop of a dog.

I didn’t leave, though. I called myself eighteen different kinds of a fool, but I stayed and began calling and whistling. I cut the light after a while to keep from running the battery down, and sat there in the dark smoking cigarettes in the intervals when I wasn’t yelling. It was ten o’clock, and then ten-thirty. I’d waste another half hour, and then I’d go back.

I had made a last series of whistles and was about to give up when I heard him. He was barking a short distance downriver. I walked back away from the car and yelled, “Here, Spunky! Here, boy!” and then I saw the shadowy movement across the sand as he ran towards me. He was scared stiff and whining and trying to climb all over me. I picked him up and opened the car door to turn on the ceiling light, and looked him over to see if he’d been snake bitten. He was all right, or appeared to be, except that he was covered with mud.

I shoved him in the back and climbed in myself. He leaned up on the back of the seat and began licking me on the ear while I tried to light a cigarette. I swore at him, but it didn’t do any good, and I finally gave up. I was glad too. Now I wouldn’t have to go back and tell her I couldn’t find him.

The house was dark when I pulled up in front. I knew they’d have returned from Bible Class by this time, so I supposed they were all in bed. They were—all except one. I had just climbed out of the car when she came out the gate, a blur in the darkness in some kind of long, pale housecoat. I knew she had been sitting up waiting for me on the porch.

“Here’s your friend,” I said, pitching my voice down so I wouldn’t wake them up. I scooped him out of the back of the car and dropped him over the fence. When I turned back she was standing beside me and quite near, and my eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness so I could see her face. Her eyes were very big and they looked black in the starlight, and her hair was a rumpled mop of blondeness.

“It was wonderful of you,” she whispered.

“Not at all.”

“I was worried; you were gone so long.”

We were whispering like a boy and girl in a doorway. “He wasn’t there. I had to keep calling him. But he’s all right; he was just lost.”

“I was afraid you were lost.”

“You were?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Thank you for everything. It was a lovely day, wasn’t it?”

“Is it midnight yet?”

“Not quite.”

“Well, happy birthday, Junior.” I took her face in my hands and kissed her. And then they dynamited the dam.

She wasn’t Junior any more and nobody was kidding and the light touch was gone somewhere downriver in the night. Her arms were around my neck and I was holding her so tightly she could hardly breathe. It was crazy and very wonderful. We didn’t say anything. After a long time I let go of her and took her face in my hands again and tilted it up a little, and she put her hands up over mine. I could see the starshine in her eyes as if they were wet.

“It was a wonderful day, wasn’t it?” she asked softly.

“And getting better,” I said.

“I’ve got to go in, Harry.”

“I can’t let you go.”

“I’ll see you in the morning.” Suddenly she pulled my head down and kissed me and slipped away inside the gate. “Good night, Harry,” she said. I watched until she was up on the front porch and then when I heard the screen door open and close I got in the car and drove off.

I don’t know how long I drove around, or where I went. Everything was mixed up and I couldn’t sort it out. Once I remembered standing beside the car somewhere on a dark country road smoking and grinding a cigarette butt under my foot and thinking: I’m thirty years old and she’s just a kid—just a big-eyed, beautiful kid who never says much. That’s all she is. And kissing her is like driving into a nitro truck.

It must have been after two when I got back to the rooming house. I was still in the dream, and only half noticed the strange car parked at the kerb on the other side of the street. I cut my lights and got out, and then the spot hit me right in the eyes.

“Madox?” The voice came from the wall of darkness somewhere on my right.

“It’s him.” That one was on the left.

I couldn’t see anything but the light, and cold was running up my back like a stream of ice water. But somehow I got my mind back in time from the rosy cloud it was in, and I had sense enough not to try to run. I froze up tight and waited.