The Watchman (19 page)

It's the moon, say the old river-men, said Jason, That's what old man Ernst who used to be wharfmaster told me. The moon's fullness, he says. That's what brings them up to dance. And maybe they're looking for their oceans again. Waiting. Maybe they dream someday those oceans will come back—think of it, Jill! A thousand feet above that highest hill out yonder in Ohio—a quarter of a mile above that orchard ridge: waves breaking and spindrift blowing in sea-winds, and old gulls calling.

It's awful, she said. It's beautiful in a way, I guess. But it's scary, Jason! Look there! That big one! Lord, Jason, he must be five feet long.

He said: It's like standing down here on the floor of the ghost of the sea. With whales' and dolphins' spirits rolling in the flashing waves two thousand feet above our heads! Did you ever gather sea shells on a mountain? I did, Jill!—and when I was five! It was back up there on Roberts' Ridge where my uncle's orchard used to be—pocketfuls of sea shells from a hilltop, Jill!—shells from the floor of the sea! Can you imagine?

She did not answer him. For Jill just then was imagining nothing: her face turned just a little away from him, her head atilt, eyes flashing, and her lips smiling slyly as if she were eavesdropping on matters now astir in the wind: nothing that he had heard, had sensed. Yet still she heard and sensed, her face uptilted now with an ear to the wind, to the hills behind them and to the dark: to a less than sound: a thrum too faint for his perceptions, a murmur from behind the very night itself.

Do you want to go back to the road? he said. It's getting cold.

And stiU she was silent, her face turned round to darkness now, her nostrils shivering as if to the spoor of some waiting beast among the moonday's long shadows: a presence that kinned and creatured her to itself and to the heart of night.

There's a north-bound bus due along soon, he said. We can flag it down and ride on in, Jill?

Hush, she whispered.

Jill?

Oh, hush, Jason. Listen, she said softly.

Listen to what? he said.

Can't you hear it? she whispered, radiant with perceptions and smihng faintly still, her nerves all listening as if to a hand now fumbling at the moon as if it were a silver-latch: the creaking footfall of a boot heel on that dusky, shimmering floor of meadows to the road.

It's him, she said. I can always tell. No matter how softly he comes I can always tell his tread.

Jill, there's nothing. You're imagining.

Am I? she laughed softly in his face. Imagining. Or maybe mad. Is that what you mean, Jason?

Not that, he said. I only mean there's nothing but the river and the wind.

But listen, Jason, she whispered. Can't you hear it?—the barest, faintest sound in all the world tonight! A deep, soft murmuring. Jason?

And so he set himself, hopelessly, to listening hard for a spell, then shrugged.

Nothing but river, he said. And wind. And the faraway sound of the towboat—miles and miles away downstream by now.

Oh, no, she said. It's not the boat. The boat sound stopped coming long ago. Can't you heart it, Jason? Wait till the wind changes.

And so, listening still again, straining his ears to catch the sound of something he did not believe in anyway and yet now, faintly, suddenly at the fall of the wind and in the instant of its rise again, deep and perceptible, it seemed to him, not to his ears at all but to some organ of apish, aboriginal intuition long-atrophied in humankind but now, through some queer empathy with her, resurrected to keenness and alarm among his wits.

Is it someone up on the road? he said.

Yes!

A car, he said. But I can see the road in the moonlight— clear as a bright ribbon—there's no car on the road, Jill.

No, she said. It's driven down into the meadow. It's down there in the timothy.

She drew her hand away from his touch and laced her fingers, touching their tips to her chin.

No matter where I go, she whispered, in a voice of exultant.

enthralled devotion. He has to come and watch me—^to see that nothing hurts me.

Who, Jill? he said. Who is it there?

Oh, she laughed softly. You know. You know, Jason.

Her dark eyes, moon-touched to brilliance and yet flashing, it seemed to him, from some other lights within, held their fixed, adoring regard upon some presence, pinpointed among the anonymous and shadow-peopled vagueness of the meadow: something she saw quite plainly that he could not see, as she had first heard what his ears never learned to tune to.

I can hear it, he said. The car. Jill, is it your father? What does he want?

He wants me safe, she said. Always safe. No matter where I'd wander in the world he'd come and find me and look to see me safe. Even here, Jason. On what you say's the floor of the ocean—he comes here to watch over me. His girl Jill in the deeps of sea-fathoms, Jason, and he comes to watch me. Oh, no one ever had such a beautiful fatherl Isn't it beautiful, Jason?

It's hellish and suspicious, he murmured.

Oh, you don't understand it! she cried. Not if you say that.

It's spying, he said. It's ugly-minded, jealous eavesdropping!

No, no, she laughed, too happy to be even angry with him. It's love for me, Jason! His love for me that's always watched over and cared for me Uke a shepherd guards his lamb!

And now Jason's eyes had found what she had seen at once: the shape of the station wagon some hundred yards away: nothing of it showing but the dull gleam of the moon dusk on its top; all fenders hidden in the high grass: nothing but a disguised and sinister volume loomed up in rounded angles from the rippling timothy; small as a plaything at that distance, and yet nothing suggestive of play about it: something rather of a juggernaut resting, a relentless and menacing projectile seen in stopped-motion on its hurtling inrushing assault, and Jason, seeing the big shape of the man beside it, like a figure roughed out swiftly in charcoal among the piebald patterns of moon dusk: the shadow and the light: just standing there, watching, perhaps waiting in a gathering and as yet irresolute deliberation, drifting its decision, as it were, toward the abruptness of some violent, despairing gesture. And Jason thinking, angered at it: angered at the car and him: her father; more angry perhaps at himself than even at these that he should be frightened now almost beyond the

point of standing still and wanting to take to his heels in panic down the dam-wall parapet toward the far asylum of the lock tower. Jason thinking: Then if he's come—if he's there—and if it's all so aboveboard and fine and fatherly why aren't there lights or is he too ashamed or something worse than ashamed? Where are the lights of his car? he thought and then, as if his thought had triggered off some obligingness from the figure there were those different, unexpected lights: the three-quick burn of them in the dark and the holed black in their aftermath like the darkness scorched and almost in the same fragmental instant the flat crack of the pistol shots and the smack of slugs into the concrete six feet to either side of him, the bullets angling in obliquely and singing off the stone like insensed, steel-winged insects into the river sky: all of it so swift, so unbelievable and stunning that he scarcely saw or heard or, would afterwards, even remember the three shots more, these striking, too, with the same accurate and threateningly placed trajectory, slamming into the stone two yards away from him as if, unquestionably, they had been so aimed and so fired to strike just there and not an inch to either side: bullets not to kill but to intimidate, to warn: like punctuations emphasizing the bleak, un-uttered threat of the presence there of the man and the car themselves.

And yet, for an instant, as she turned, covering her face, and stumbling into his chest, Jill, he thought, is hit. My God, he has killed her and when she lifted her face there was nothing in its bloodless and mesmerized countenance to make him think other: her now against him, her mouth pressed out of shape against the harshness of his tweed, her hands digging his back as if she were dying, and all the while whimpering something indistinctly among his wadded, bunched-up jacket-front: a word, a name, a something: an iterant singsong of hysterical sameness. And then the car lights banged noiselessly on and, more faintly, the illumination from the instrument panel: a dusky scarlet that lit, however faintly, still unmistakably, the ravaged and disordered face of Luther Alt. The lights moving now, stabbing up and down as the car maneuvered savagely around and jostled, backfiring, up the furrowed ruts through the polkweed and goldenrod and highgrain toward the road-berm and then at last on the silvered asphalt itself and off, as if in some new and more ferocious pursuit of the headlight beams that raced, diminishing and in terror before it. And then he thought

suddenly, seeing she was not hurt, that he had been hit himself somewhere in the body by one of the bullets; the sudden, palsied slackness in his legs: as if all bones in them had gone, all strength and warmth gone hemorrhaging out of him as through some welling wound. Yes, it was that sound which she whimpered fast and reiterant: Cole. Cole. Cole. Her voice rising now and then, as suddenly, falling to stillness, her head bowed as if she stared intently at something of great interest behind the shocked veiled unseeingness of her wide-staring eyes. Then abruptly, shrill as screaming, she began to laugh through her unmoving, unshaping lips, until his slap brought her round. Brought round however not to any consciousness more reasoning than before; only a shocked, stunned madness that was as still as the other had been rioting. And all the while he led her up the high, wet grass to the road again, stumbling and holding her up who seemed to need no propping at all: she moved with a stricken elegance, straight and sure-footed, guessing out each plough-ditch even before her toe had touched it, her face pulled back to the moonshine in a bleached and peaceful mask of passive misconstruction of all and everything around her: an expression full of that incedulous, disoriented and uncaring placidity of survivors walking away from train wrecks, and all the while speaking in a kind of soft, savage and concentrated accuracy to herself, to her mind, certainly not to Jason who for all purposes of her understanding, was not even there; talking quietly to herself and quite carefully placing the words one after the other as a child stacks wooden blocks fearful of their tumbling: No. We shouldn't have, Cole. Of all places not here. You know what everyone knows boys bring girls to the Mound for and you know I won't I can't do that. Cole. No. Now see what you've done—It's torn. Oh, Cole, why can't it be the other you I love and not this Cole that brings me here for this. Cole, I won't, I told you, No. Why are we all not home where it's warm tonight with Mama. We'll sing songs and play the harmonium and crack pecans for the Christmas cake. No, go back go back! Oh, my God Jesus, Cole, look at you now with your face all jelly in the moon. No, Christ, no. Mama, can you buy new heads for dolls at the Mexican bazaar because look, Mama, my doll's head. Cole? Oh, Cole, put your face back again so I can see your eyes and hear your mouth say you don't hate me for the thing I won't, can't do.

Though, on the north-bound bus that stopped for them near midnight, she was silent again, almost sleeping, he thought, until they were nearly within sight of the beer hall lights on Lafayette and then suddenly she lifted her eyes to him as if nothing, none of it, had ever happened at all. She even reached over, taking his hand, and squeezed his fingers in a gesture of warming reassurance as if he had been the stricken one. So that he felt it himself: that they were wakening from a dream. That none of it, that nothing had really happened. And yet he didn't want her to say anything yet; wanting her to be very quiet till she was very sure that he was he and not the other, faceless one: his friend, his god. And all the way down Fourteenth Street from Lafayette they were both silent, walking in careless ambling strides like children coming home from a movie whose violence had been only that and no more: a shuttering light of gray and silver dreams, where none of it, where nothing had really happened and there was not the blood of tongue-bitten fear in their throats but only the innocence of salted popcorn lingering round their tongues. In the shadow 'of the carved arched doorway, beneath the trellised honeysuckle spilling down its milk of scent and everywhere in the air's pellucid and crisp freshness the promiscuity of jasmine, insolent with lusts: they did not touch one another for a while, not tactilely at least: touching only with those other more myriad and probing tendrils of bewildered and bashful research into each other's meanings: and searching for, as well, the meaning of the oneness, if any, of their selfless sum. He knew, without question and without suspicion of his senses, and with an accepted knowledge of acuity of his nerves and ganglia, perception caught somehow from her that night, that Luther stood behind the shut door at the top of the stairs. As certainly as if he could hear the restrained, hoarse breathing behind the panels: the breathless exasperation of a man after a long and draining violence. But I don't care, he thought. Let him spy, let him listen, let him come down with his gun and do his worst because I don't care any more.

And something in him both exulted and trembled in the presence of that dangerous indifference.

Because she is here with me, he thought. And we've been through the worst that could be for us this side of dying together. The worst that could be, back there on the dam, at the edge of the meadows on the floor of the moonlit sea with the dark and ancient catfish wandering in the fath-

omless heights a million years above us in the waves. Let him come down. Let anything be but her to call me Cole again and for me to have to see her face like that, not knowing who nor when is now.

Yes, it was as if nothing, none of it -had happened at all then. She rose on fresh, tiptoe innocence like a child to kiss him on the mouth good night. And nothing of the horror was remembered: it had not happened. Because he loved her now with the stoked and glowing slag-pile fires that had been only a scratched match's flame before now. And it was the he she wanted who loved her. As for that other self of him it was seized now, strangely, in the aftermath of dreamed and forgotten gunfire, in a cramp and scald of unappeasable sexual letch. But it seemed to him that it had nothing to do with Jill, that she was safe from that: there was a someone else who would feed her flesh to that tiger burning in the forests of his coiled night; leaving him safe to love. Now Jni's small nostrils breathing a little blowtorch in his ear and in his loins love, like a lake of naphtha fired, bloomed up, billowing flame. But Cristi would take care of that: the sex.

Cristi came in sullen with his plate of eggs and bacon, balancing it in the kitchen doorway, bouncing it a little on her hand.

Don't you want to eat in the kitchen, Jase? she said.

He got up and slunk through the doorway in her brisk and irritably cheerful wake, following her like a child who has been ordered in to supper from his games.

Milk or coffee, Jase? she said.

Oh, water will do, he said.

She sighed and turned the flame on beneath the saucepan; watching it with her arms folded, whistling softly to herself. The offkey sharpness of Cristi's whistle was always in precise ratio to the full head of her outrage. And tonight she was sharp by almost half an octave. He ate in guarded silence as she came presently with his coffee and sat across the table from him, staring and tapping her fingers very lightly on the fabric of her folded arms. And when he had finished she asked: Have you finished? and he smiled up brokenly at her and said he had finished and so she said then: Let's talk. You said you came to talk to me. Then talk.

Well, Cris, a person can't just start talking when you put it that way, he said.

Why not? she said. You said you had nightmares and couldn't sleep and had to get dressed and come down here and talk. You certainly must have a lot to talk about: a date with Jill—a bus ride down the river. Were your folks all asleep? Why didn't you talk to your father?

They were asleep, he said quietly, with slumped face. 

And so you came to talk to me, she said. 

Yes, Cris, he said.

She got up quickly, hurried to the stove and poured herself a cup of coffee, keeping her back to him, furious with herself because already she had begun to feel that damned, undoing sympathy for him. And because she was furious with herself she wanted suddenly to hurt him more because he had turned all her anger inward on her. She dumped sugar twice in her black coffee and stirred it savagely thinking: Oh, Christ, sometimes it's rotten to be born a girl. A girl with all those thousand parts of you to feel and understand with and you think you've got the main ones stoppered up against some damned boy and suddenly you discover you've left the very ones he always reaches you with, naked and open and unprotected!

I know what you want from me, Jason Hunnicutt, she sobbed, bitter and dry-eyed to the wall above the stove. But it isn't talk.

Cris, I had to see you.

But not to talk, she said, turning to him suddenly. The only time for talk is afterwards, isn't it, Jason? Cris, he said. We—talk.

Yes, we talk, she said. We talk when you've had your fill of me.

She turned from him suddenly, seized the little kitchen chair, and lifting it, banged its leg-pegs sharply on the floor. Then she turned to him again.

But that's not anything for me to whine about, she sobbed, jabbing angrily at the corner of her eye with the heel of her hand. And I'm not. It's the way I said it was going to be from the first, isn't it? So it's all right that way. We're just two people who use each other, Jase. For that and for that alone. Not for talk or for love—just that. I wouldn't have it any other way. But even to that kind of friendship there are rules, Jase—little rules—not very important ones but rules! Like any kind of game. And one of them is this—God damn it, you just don't hurt the other person and then come back like nothing has happened. You don't take people for

granted, Jase, not even in a game when it's nothing more than bed!

You want me to apologize? he said. Because I took your sister out?

I don't care if you apologize! she shouted. Apologize if it will make you feel better. Or else tell me to go to hell and it's none of my business. Apologize—don't apologize. I don't care! Just say something!—"I'm sorry" or "Go to hell" or something! Don't just walk in afterwards and grin at me and expect me to come over and start kissing you like nothing had happened. And, now that I think of it, what the hell has apologizing got to do with it anyway? You still think I asked you not to go out with Jill because I was jealous? Oh, Jason, Jason, I'm not! My God, I had reasons for asking you that!

Can you tell me those reasons? he said.

I can tell you one of them, she whispered savagely, leaning toward him with her wide eyes wild and brimming. I don't want to go to your funeral!

He smiled and looked at his empty dish, his cold, dark cup. For the first time since the bullets in the meadow he was afraid. And yet he knew it was nothing that was going to change, nothing he would do anything about. And that was the frighteningness of it. It was not that Cristi's words had scared him, nor the vision of the pistol in her silks, nor that Luther Alt had fired on him that night. He was afraid, momentarily, because he was not afraid. He felt as though he were moving into a region of grave peril—to his sanity if not his life—and not resisting that movement; almost welcoming it, as though it were a retribution long overdue, though he could not imagine to whom.

Don't fight with me tonight, Cris, he said. Just seeing you again makes me feel better. Just talking to you. See? You say I never want to talk. And just this little talk's made me feel good again—nightmares forgotten, fears all gone. Come here, Cris. Just sit on my lap—

By God, you're insane! she cried out.

No, I mean just sit. I promise I won't touch you. I won't even try to kiss you, he laughed, beckoning her to him with his fingers.

Jason, I won't, she said. You might as well understand that. Not tonight. So if that's what you came here for you can forget it.

Cris, please, he said, stifling the almost incontroUable welling up of hysterical laughter. Just come sit.

She looked at him gravely, her eyes Eve-ancient, patient

and time-biding, her face quiet with infinite and uterine

intelligence wearily waiting out the cerebral idiocy of men.

All right, she said. You may as well have the whole cake

as a crumb. Here then!

And she snatched at the cord at her waist, loosening her housecoat, tearing at it, struggling her shoulders and breasts out of it, dropping it at last; standing naked with her ankles in a fallen pool of seersucker.

Come on, she said. You can have me. It's what you came for—I won't back out on contracts once made. You've been with Jill tonight and nothing happened. No, nothing happened because with Jill nothing could ever happen. And now you're all hot and excited and so you come running to me. Here I am, Jason. Why are you sitting there? What's the matter, Jason? You look as if suddenly you didn't want me any more.

He got up quickly and went into the parlor and she heard him lighting a cigarette, dropping his lighter on the rug, fumbling for an ashtray beside the stiff-backed chair by the door where now, she knew, he would be sitting in that posture of clenched, rebuked humiliation she had seen in him so many times. In the small mirror above her stove she stood a moment, watching her weeping, soundless face, the big tears dropping off her cheeks to the rounded tops of her breasts.

Christ, it's awful, she whispered to the glass. Oh Mother of Christ, Oh Mother of Woman, it's so awful to be born a bitch.

When he heard her in the doorway he looked up with his swift, infant smile and then stared back to his knees. The robe was knotted tight at her waist again; she stared down at him with grave, frightened eyes, the corners of her lips quivering to make a smile of atonement.

Cris, why dcHi't we ever know what we want, he said. Till it's not there any more?

She sat on the rug at his feet, resting her cheek with an uneasy humility against his knee, stroking the top of his hand with one finger of her own.

Don't ever think I hate you, she said in a voice he could scarcely hear. Whatever awful things I say or do, Jase, don't ever think that.

He patted the top of her head awkwardly with the rigid palm of his hand, touching its parted, silken roundness gingerly as if his hand were grazing an object of dangerous or unfamiliar fragility: a crystal heirloom or a loosened landmine.

I know, Cris, he said. I know you don't hate anyone.

I can be rotten, Jason, she said. I can be mean and cruel as anyone you'll ever know.

Not you, Cris, he laughed sadly. Not ever.

I can, she sobbed. Oh, I can. If you only knew me, Jase, you'd know. I'm a mean bitch inside me, Jase.

He was still a moment, his face immobile, his mind working up a decent way of saying something like a cancer in his pride.

Well, he said. Think what you will about yourself, Cris. But if it will make it anywhere near even, I'm something even worse—a liar. A liar's worse than a bitch, Cris—any common sense will tell you that. Cris, when I came up tonight I did want that. I guess I should have known you'd know it anyway. I guess being a liar about it was just kidding my pride. I said I only wanted talk and, Cris, believe me I wanted to talk— had to talk to you tonight. But most of all I wanted that.

I know, she mumbled, her lips sticky with weeping, and snuffled, pressing her cheek harder against his knee. I know, Jase. Would I ever hate you for that?

And what you said about our talks, he went on, fumbling, stumbling, anguished—like a man on a high ledge—trying to put his words like footsteps forth in careful judgment. Saying the only time I ever talked to you was after—Cris, I guess that's true. At least, I always want to talk more then. I don't know why. It's like something was out of the way between us and a sort of quiet—a sort of Ustening quiet there between us.

Oh, I know. I'm that way, too! she said.

Isn't that queer? he went on. As many times as we've done that together you'd think it wouldn't always be new and strange. That's why I never can talk—not really talk—till afterwards.

Sometimes you keep me awake for hours and hours talking, she blurted in a laughter that she felt so deep that it ended in a sob that almost set her weeping once more.

You, too, he laughed. Sometimes when I want to sleep. But almost always we're both wide awake, smoking, looking at

the wallpaper on the ceiling. And that's when I think of the things to tell you that I never can before. I wonder why. Something out of the way between us. I mean, lying there in the bed, in the room and the dark and the air full of the strange, beautiful, musky smell of us both and the smell of what we've done—that and the cigarette smell and somehow even the smell of the dark. All of it and the smells of us a-mingling and making that kind of sense in your mind, Cris, where you want to tell someone things you never even told yourself—wild, crazy things you never even thought. That's the only time a person can really talk. So what you said about my never talking except then, Cris—You know?