The Watchman (5 page)

Now what are you doing? he yelled.

Moving a picture, she saixl with her mouth holding small nails. I'll bring you your aspirin in a minute.

He shrugged, smiled, mashed out his cigarette in the sea shell ashtray. Then he loosened his necktie, got up carefully and moved toward the bedroom.

Never mind it, he said. The headache's gone.

He wondered if they would make love and he wondered which Cristi she would be that night.

She's always had to make it on her own, Jason used to tell himself in rare moments of understanding. She's always had to be on her own: alone. And when you are little and have to be alone and if you're brave and lucky you grow up learning to accept what you are with every bit of energy you have to give. Because what you are is all you have to give anybody. And if you're little and alone you learn how to give it because it's the only way you can keep the world from smashing you, stoning you, running over you like small gray dogs whose color nobody can ever remember afterward when they go home to their good dinner. But then he would spoil it all by telling himself later: I can't fall in love with her though. You can't fall in love with somebody that's always different. And you surely can't fall in love with somebody you feel pity for. When what he really meant was: She's unpredictably different. She scares me. And she's not the kind of girl you marry. Not the nice kind like Cole has. Not like Jill.

As for Cristi she was constantly warning him not to fall in love with her.

If you want to spoil everything, she said one night, just fall for me. Everybody has their own kind of sickness and I guess that's mine. Remember what we promised each other the first time? No love—just fun. Just understanding. I'm holding you to that, Jason.

In one way the arrangement satisfied him: the illusion of noninvolvement. In another way it made him feel that she was holding something back. Something she was saving for someone else. Though, of course, he was mistaken.

Why do you think about us like that, Cris? he asked that night.

Why? she smiled, darting him a suspicious look. Because I simply can't stand the idea of being owned. It's like being a slave or a cat or something. Besides—I despise the idea of owning anybody else. I've always been that way. Once you begin to own somebody they begin to matter. And then—you lose them. I promise you one thing, Jason —I'll never lose anybody. Nobody will ever die and leave me—nobody will ever go away and leave me.

He leaned against the door jamb watching her sitting on the bed glaring at her left hand: a tiny split in one of the pale ovals of her immaculate manicure. She was very much just then a girl at an age in which every hopeless treason and conspiracy of life seemed precisely reduced to such microcosmic proofs of a whole world set against them: a moment in the minds of very young girls and madwomen when a broken fingernail, a ruined stocking, periods, a new freckle, lip rouge on a dress fresh from the cleaners seem in almost paranoiac outrage to be clues to the universal plot against their contentment. He was almost sober now: he thought of making love to her. But she frightened him. The old uncertainty of which Cristi she would be seized him afresh. He never knew which one.

No! Leave the light on. I want it on! she cried sometimes from the bed, naked as shameless Eve and not even trying to cover herself so that he blushed and had to undo his shirt buttons with his back to her. I want you to see me because I am beautiful and I want to see you because you are so beautiful, Jason. Don't touch the light. Leave it on. I want to watch your face while we love each other so that I can see the moment come when your face lights up with me. And I want you to see me, too. Mirrors! That's what we are, Jason—mirrors to watch each other's faces in! Oh, hurry, Jason! Hurry hurry hurry!

Or there would be a night when she would wait for him in total darkness, warm and deep as the womb that once shaped him: a whispering, enchanted Cristi, murmurous and whimpering and her voice husky with the foreknowledge of sadness that something they would be together would presently ebb and flow away.

Other times he would find her pouting and sulky and teasing as a River Road rip; other times laughing like a small child: tearing her clothes off as an infant tears the joyously rustling wrappings off a Christmas present: an innocency and bashlessness that sometimes frightened him.

And yet that night when he sat beside her on the bed all of the lust suddenly ran out of him and was gone. She gave him his aspirin and water and then laid her fingers softly on his hand. TTien she sat like a boy, leaning on her knees and blowing cigarette smoke between her ankles into the flowers of the hooked rug she had made three autumns before in Abilene, Kansas.

Did I tell you what my pa gave me for my birthday? he asked.

Tell me, she said, though he had told her a half dozen times that night and forgotten.

He wants to make a Man of me, Jason said. So he gave me four tickets—one pair to go see My Fair Lady tonight up in Wheeling and the other pair to go watch them electrocute that man up at the pen. He said he knew ahead of time which I would choose but he wanted to prove he was right about me. Well, Cris, he was right about me.

Poor Jase, she murmured.

Never mind poor Jase, he said. Never mind that bunk.

All right then, she said. Poor Cristi. Poor Everybody.

She stood up suddenly and strode to the window, scowling out through the curtains.

I didn't mean that, she said. I don't feel sorry for myself so why should I feel sorry for everybody. I mean that. I look at myself in a very truthful way. As nearly as I can, I mean. The way I've grown up I've had to do that, Jase. You see I never really had what they call the in-between years. One morning I had pigtails hanging down to my waist and the next morning I looked under those pigtails and saw breasts. It was a shock. Because I had never seen breasts before. It took me a good couple of months to figure out what they could possibly be good for. Now I've learned to look in the morning mirror and say, "Look, woman,

you're this but you're not that. You can be one thing but you can't ever be something else. And if you try you'll only break your heart. You know how to do one thing beautifully—beautifully—and there's not much else you can do." See?

He nodded silently, feeling a warmness for her that strangely drove out the last heat of wanting.

After we'd left Texas—me and Papa and Jill—I grew up in five towns—five states. No. It was more than that. Sometimes I forget. Arkansas, New Mexico, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa. I forget how many. Now, isn't that ridiculous? How many? It doesn't make any difference. It was always the same. There was always Papa and Jill. And there was Cristi.

All this time, he said. You know all this time—us together—I never knew what Cristi was short for. Christine? Cristabel? What's it short for?

It's short for Nothing, she said. It's just Cristi, that's all. It's part of the name of the town I was born in. Corpus Christi, Texas. It means Christ's Body in Mexican or Latin or something. It was Papa's idea—naming me that. Mama died when I was bom and it was all pretty sad, I guess, and it sure wasn't the best foot forward in the world for me. I think Papa must have reckoned that with a bad start like that I might not turn out very well. So he hung that name around my neck in hopes I'd improve.

Your mother dying, Jason said. He couldn't very well blame you, Cris.

Not blame me? she said. Tear your mother's body open coming into the world and see if they don't blame you. Because it doesn't matter to people that you were a baby and couldn't help it and maybe didn't really want to be born anyway. I know how he must have felt. I don't blame him for it. Thank God I didn't have to live in one town all these years. Having people blame me for Mama's death all this time. I long ago learned to stand Papa's blame. I don't know if I could have stood theirs, too. All the towns. My God, all the towns. But it was good that way. Anonymous. Nobody knew that about me. Whatever else they knew they never knew that. All those towns. It was good. Because they were all the same town, really. I was me and Jill and Papa were what they were to each other. And Papa was always the Sheriff no matter what town it was. We were always packing up and catching the next bus out. I never Uved in one town long enough for anybody to ever find out

that about me. They might have gossiped everything else about me. But not that. They couldn't say I'd killed Mama. I reckon I couldn't have stood that. But maybe it wouldn't have mattered after all. I remember sometimes I'd hate to leave one town more than another because instead of just one movie theater it had two or three. When I was little I think I would have died if it hadn't been for movie shows. I used to eat Milky Ways till I would fall asleep in a kind of a candy stupor but it didn't matter because I'd wake up and see the whole show through—the parts I'd missed. Sometimes I'd stay in that theater from the hour they opened in the morning till late at night when they took down the big letters that spelled the movie's name out front. I used to hide in movies like they say bears hide in caves when winter comes. Like people hide in churches or bomb shelters. Because nothing was really real except having to go to the ladies' room or having to change seats all the time.

Did the usher—?

Oh, sure, there was one usher. But usually it was some amazingly well-dressed and respectable-looking man who had the seat next to mine and sooner or later, it never failed, he'd be trying to get his hand up under my dress. I used to go half crazy trying to figure out what it was—how he knew I'd be there—why he picked me out. But in every town, in every movie house, all the way across the continent, there'd always be that man there in the seat by mine and that nervous, creepy hand. I used to have dreams it was the same man, following me all the way across America. And then one afternoon in Sioux City, Iowa, in a movie house called Dream Palace—I'll never forget that name, Dream Palace—this man started the business and I just decided I wouldn't put up with it any more, I'd fight back, and the only way I could think of to fight was to scare him half to death. It was a movie with Jane Russell in it and I memorized a line where she said to John Wayne or somebody, "Then go ahead and kiss me, you big, wonderful idiot!" only in a very intense, sexy voice, and when the man started the business I just sat there and let him go ahead and when he was really enjoying himself I sprang out of my seat, stood up in his lap, and I grabbed him by the head with both hands and yelled out in this screechy little ten-year-old voice: 'Then go ahead and kiss me, you big wonderful idiot!" Well, at least I got to see him and know that thing about the man following me all the way across America wasn't true. It was somebody who'd

always lived in Sioux City so it couldn't be that. Because I saw his collar.

What about his collar?

It was our minister. You know—one of those collars on backwards.

So you really fixed him?

No. He ran out of the theater like a panther was after him but in the end he won out.

Didn't you tell your father?

I didn't have the chance. The preacher got to him first. He got home even before I did and he told my father that he thought it was his Christian duty to report that he'd seen me out in the tool shed that morning with a boy named Homer Skeen and both of us were naked.

And your father believed it?

Sure he believed it, she said. Why not? Because the preacher dragged Homer along with me to our house.

But then couldn't you deny it? he said.

Why should I, Jase? she laughed, with a breezy little shrug, and turned to look at him. It was the truth, wasn't it?

She looked at him a second, then came and clasped his face in her fingers.

Here I am, she said. Doing the thing I'm always picking on you for doing—feeling sorry for myself.

No, he said. Just telling me about yourself. You hardly ever told me anything about yourself, Cris.

She straightened and turned away.

I hardly ever tell anyone about myself, she said in a queer, tight voice. You know more about me than anyone I've ever been with, Jase.

That makes two, he smiled at her.

Two?

Two people I know about, he said. Two people in the whole worid I care about. Deeply. Two people that have told me things about themselves they never tell anybody else.

The other one is Cole, isn't it? she said.

He nodded quickly, not looking at her.

You love Cole, don't you, Jase, she smiled.

No, he said. Cole is my friend. He's closer to me than anyone—except you. Men don't love each other,

I know, she said. That's one of the things that's wrong with us in the world.

You know what I mean, he said. Cole's something different.

He tcx)k the two pair of tickets out of his inside pocket and looked at them,

I think I'll have these framed, he said. A choice. Tickets to watch people sing and dance. Tickets to watch a man killed.

Throw them out, she said gently.

He was silent, staring at them there in his fingers.

Throw them out, Jase, she said again, more softly, moving to sit by him on the bed and trying to take them from his hands.

No. Let me keep them, he said. They're a birthday present from the Major. My father's gift to me.

He put them back carefully into his pocket and looked at his empty hands.

I wish Cole was my brother, he said. I mean my blood brother. I'd be pretty proud of that. It would make up for something.

You love him like a brother, she said. That's better than a lot of blood brothers can say.

He's just about everything I always wanted to be and never made, Jason said. Best in school. Better looking than me. Better brains. He even got the best—

She smiled kindly and touched his reddening cheek again with her fingers.

Go on, she said. Say it, Jase. The best girl. I don't mind. Go on and say it. We're only friends. Remember?

I didn't mean that, he said.

Yes you did, she said. But I don't care because I know how you meant it. I know how you think about Jill. I know how you think about me, too. I want it that way. The nice girl—the bad girl.