“It’s good land. Make a half bale to the acre.”
I nodded, waiting. I thought I knew what was on his
mind and was trying to size him up.
“I looked her over a couple times,” he went on,
rubbing his hands briskly together and holding them
out toward the blaze.
“You live around here?” I asked. I had never seen him
before,
“Nope. I’m from Gregg County. Jest a-visitin’
kinfolks. The Harperses, down the big road about four
mile.”
I lit a cigarette and waited. He refused one, gesturing
smilingly toward the swollen lump in his cheek.
“I’m sorta lookin’ around for some land to farm on
the halves. Ain’t made a crop now in a couple years.
Been doin’ public work mostly, workin’ on the highway
over by Mineola, an’ some shingle-mill work, but it ain’t
like havin’ a crop somehow. Now, I see you got a good
tenant house over acrost the road, leastwise it would
be with a little fixin’ up an’ a few window glasses, an’
you got more land than you can work by yourself. I
kinda reckoned we might make a dicker.” He stopped
and looked at me questioningly.
“Sounds all right to me,” I said. “I’ve been looking
around for a tenant. You’ve farmed before, I suppose?”
“All my life except the last couple years. Give me a
good pair of mules, ain’t air man I ever seen can plow
more ground in a day or do it any better.”
Hill Girl — 65
“I think we could make a deal,” I said.
“You got any stock yet? What kind of mules you got?”
I shook my head. “Haven’t bought any yet. Haven’t
had much time to look around, and thought I’d wait
until I needed them.”
“Fine,” he said. “If’n we get together on this, mebbe I
can help you pick ‘em out. I know mules like I know
myself, an’ we want good mules with a lot of the old
Ned in ‘em. None of them old poky bastards that’s dead
from the ass both ways.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” I said.
He stood up abruptly. “Well, s’pose I come over
tomorrow an’ we work it out. I better hightail now
before the Old Lady freezes out there.”
“Good God,” I said. “Is your mother put there? Why
didn’t you bring her in?”
“Not Ma,” he laughed. “My wife. I call her the Old
Lady. She was kinda bashful about comin’ in, not
knowin’ you an’ all.”
“Bring her in, man,” I told him. “I’ll warm up some
coffee.”
He went down the hall and I heard him at the front
door. “Hey, Old Lady, come on in.” I went out in the
kitchen and picked up the coffeepot and brought it
back and put it on a bed of coals on the hearth.
She was bigger than he, a robust girl with dark curly
hair and happy black eyes that lit up when they rested
on him. She had on an old dress of dark woolen
material and lisle stockings and a coat with some kind
of reddish fur on the collar, the fur looking moth-eaten
and a little shabby. You could see she was destined
always to be a big woman and someday she would be
fat, but that she didn’t much care, for there was about
her face the mark of a sweet and unruffled disposition
and the serene content of a healthy woman who is well
loved and likes it. There was a scrubbed cleanliness
about her and her face was pink-flushed with the cold
and possibly a little from embarrassment as she stood
in the doorway, looking at me and then at him, and
Hill Girl — 66
when her eyes were on him I envied him. It was that
kind of look.
“Honey, this is Mr. Crane,” he said. “We jest about to
make a dicker.”
She put out her hand, man-fashion. “I’m proud to
know you, Mr. Crane,” she said, smiling a little selfconsciously
and staying close to Hubbard.
“I’m sorry we left you out there in the cold,” I said.
“It wasn’t nothin’,” she laughed deprecatingly. “I
don’t mind the cold much. An’ I hadn’t orta come in.
Men don’t want no womenfolks around when they’re adickerin’.”
I brought her a chair and she sat down and I poured
the coffee.
“Do you live here all by yourself, Mr. Crane?” she
asked wonderingly.
“Yeah,” I said. “Incidentally, my name’s Bob. Couldn’t
we drop some of the formality?”
She said hers was Helen. He never called her that,
though. “He jest calls me Old Lady,” she went on,
smiling proudly at Jake.
“Who on earth cooks for you?” she asked then.
“I do my own,” I said. “It’s pretty bad.”
“Why, man,” Jake put in, “you cain’t do that an’
handle a crop too. Man’s got to have vittles ready for
him when he comes in at night. He’s too tar’d to be
putterin’ around cookin’.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “But I don’t
know of any answer to it. I don’t know what— Wait!
Maybe I do.
“How does this strike you?” I went on. “I turn over
half the land to you to work on the halves, with the
usual arrangement, with me to furnish the tools and
the seed and stock and so on. But instead of you living
over there in the tenant house, why don’t all three of us
live in this one? It’s big enough. There’s another
bedroom up front. Helen could do the cooking for the
three of us and I could pay half your grocery bill. That
sound O.K. to you?”
Hill Girl — 67
They smiled enthusiastically. “Say, that sounds good.
An’ the Old Lady can shorely cook, too, you jest wait
an’ see.” And then the same idea must have hit them
both, for they looked at each other and frowned.
“Well, now, I don’t rightly know,” Jake said. “Sounds
like a right smart idea except fer one thing. You see—”
He stopped uncertainly.
“What is it?” I couldn’t imagine what had come over
them.
“Well, it’s jest that we don’t much cotton to the idea
of livin’ with anybody in the same house. Oh, it ain’t
nothin’ agin you, Bob. But we had to live with kinfolks
the first few months we was married an’ it kinda
disheartened us. You understand, it ain’t you,
personal?” He looked at me earnestly.
“How long have you been married?” I asked.
“About six months,” Helen said, blushing.
I began to see what was troubling them and went on,
“Well, if you want it that way, we can still fix up the
house across the road and you can live over there. That
is, you can sleep there, and we can use the kitchen and
dining room here. How’s that?”
They liked that and we let it stand that way. I found a
deck of cards after a while and we played rummy until
ten o’clock and Helen made us some more coffee. It
was the first good coffee I’d had since I had been out
here.
They both came over early the next morning and we
went to work on the house across the road. In two days
we had it in good condition, and a week later they
moved in.
The day after they moved in I bought a secondhand
crosscut saw and Jake and I went to work on the new
ground in earnest. We worked early and late and when
we would come back to the house in the cold dusk with
the bite of frost and the smell of wood smoke in the air
Helen would have supper ready for us.
* * *
Hill Girl — 68
I saw Angelina in February. I had walked across the
bottom with some plow points to see if Sam would
shape them up for me in his home blacksmith shop, and
found the family butchering a hog. It was a clear day
with a cold northwest wind blowing and Sam was
cutting up the hog on a table on the south side of the
house. Mrs. Harley was helping him, dicing up the flat
strips of fat for the lard-rendering kettle. The two little
girls, bundled up in heavy coats and with their noses
running, were standing around underfoot, and when I
came up they backed away and regarded me silently
with fright in their brown eyes.
“Howdy, Bob,” Sam said. Mrs. Harley nodded, a little
shyly. She was a big woman, but somehow colorless
and beaten-looking, and she always seemed to be
trying to stand behind somebody or something when
she was talking to you.
“You’re just in time for some spareribs. You all could
use some over there, couldn’t you?” He had met the
Hubbards already; Jake was a fellow fox-hunter.
We talked about the plow points and he said he
would do them for me, and when I was ready to go he
chopped up the spareribs and said, “Look jest inside
the kitchen, Bob. They’s some brown paper to wrap ‘em
in.”
I went around the corner and in the back door.
Angelina was sitting at the kitchen table cutting a big
sheet of newspaper with a pair of scissors. She had on
a heavy blue woolen dress with long sleeves, and it was
bigger than that thing she’d had on before, and looser,
so she didn’t seem about to burst out of it in so many
places. But even as loose as it was and as poorly as it
fitted, it couldn’t disguise that figure. Her hair was
down over her shoulders in two blonde braids, tied at
the bottom with little wisps of pink ribbon. She didn’t
look quite so much like a sex crime looking for
somebody to happen to, but her eyes were still the
same. They regarded me sullenly and she didn’t say
anything.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello.”
Hill Girl — 69
“Sam said there was some brown paper here.”
“Right there.” She nodded curtly to the end of the
table. I walked over and picked it up.
It was warm in there, and the kitchen was clean, the
pine boards of the floor gleaming white from long
scrubbing, and there was the smell of boiling turnip
greens coming from the pot on the cookstove. I could
hear the big clock ticking out in the front room and the
occasional crackle and pop from the fireplace, and I
lingered a moment, glad to be in out of the cold, and
feeling again that same unaccountable urge to get her
to talk that I had felt before. She always puzzled me.
And, too, she was a girl, and when you’re twenty-two
and have lived for four months alone there’s something
about even one you don’t like. She ignored me and
went on working with the scissors.
“What’s that you’re cutting out?” I asked. It couldn’t
be some clipping she wanted to save, for she was
cutting it diagonally across columns and in every
direction. “Aren’t you a little old for paper dolls?”
Her eyes looked up and hated me. “It’s a pattern.”
“Pattern for what?”
“A blouse I’m going to make.”
“What color is it going to be?” Clothes interested me
very little, clothes of any kind, and hers not at all, but I
wanted strangely to keep the conversation going.
“I don’t know.”
“Did you learn it in school?”
“Learn what in school?” she asked without looking
up.
“How to make clothes and things.”
“No.”
I went out and closed the door. There wasn’t any use
in trying to talk to her.
Hill Girl — 70
Nine
The days are long in April, longer in May, and longer
still in June, but they are never long enough. They
begin with dew on the grass and the long-legged
shadows of sunrise and end with whippoorwills calling
in the darkening bottoms and swallows circling and
diving at dusk. And all day long, through the hot,
sweaty hours, the work goes on.
I lost weight and grew harder as the weeks went by. I
was in better condition than I had ever been in college,
even with the football and fighting. I took to leaving my
shirt off, a few minutes the first day and increasing the
time gradually until I was burned black. I liked the
work, as I had liked it when I was a boy, and I liked the
dog-tiredness, the peaceful feeling of exhaustion at the
end of the day that left the mind pleasantly at rest and
made the simple act of stretching out on the dark back
porch and listening to Jake and Helen talk a sensation
of absolute luxury. And after they had gone across the
road to the little house I would go down to the well and
draw up a tub of cold water, strip down on the shortcropped
grass of the mule lot, and splash myself free of
the sweat and caked dust out there in the open with
just the privacy of the black June night about me. Then
I would go back to the house naked except for shoes,
which I would kick off when I sat down, and would
Hill Girl — 71
stretch out on the clean sheet and wonder if I wanted a
cigarette badly enough to stay awake to smoke it.
Sometimes I would think of Lee and Mary and wonder
what Lee was going to do with himself, but it would be
a short thought and I would be asleep in the middle of
it without ever getting to Angelina. It was a beautiful
feeling of exhaustion.
It was down there in the bottom one day in June that
I saw Angelina again. I was running the cultivator and
when I came out to the end of a row and turned around
she was there in the edge of the timber. She had on a
long-visored sunbonnet and was carrying a lard pail
half filled with dewberries. She was barelegged and I
could see where the briars had scratched her legs,
little red tracings in the golden tan of her skin.
I stopped the mules and wiped the sweat off my face.
“Hello,” I said.
She looked at me distastefully. I was bareheaded and
stripped to the waist, burned black by the sun, and
shiny with sweat, and dust was caked on my arms.
“You must think that’s fun,” she said.
“It is.”
“Anybody that’d farm when he didn’t have to is crazy.
The sun must have cooked your brains. If you ever had
any.”
“Did anybody ever tell you,” I asked, “that what you
needed was to have that lovely backside of yours
tanned with a razor strap?”
“I guess this is the place for you, all right,” she said
spitefully. “You ought to be a farmer.”
“And a farmer is a type of criminal, as far as you’re
concerned?”
“No. A type of idiot. I guess Lee was right. Four years
in college was just wasted on you.” She realized then
what she’d said, but it was too late.
I turned around and got out from between the
cultivator handles and started toward her. “Who?” I
said. “Who did you say? Where’ve you been seeing
Lee?”
Hill Girl — 72
She backed away from me. “It’s none of your damn
business.”
“I’ll make it my business,” I said. “You goddamned
little heifer. Lee’s married. And he’s alive. And he won’t
be either one if he gets to fooling around with you.”
She was like an old she-coon at bay. She backed up
against a tall ash and held the lard pail like a weapon,
ready to hit me if I came nearer.
“Who said I saw him? Maybe I got a letter from him.”
“You got a letter from him, all right. He never wrote
a letter in his life.”
“Who told you to run my business for me?”
“You little punk,” I said. “I ought to slap your ears
off.”
She gave me a glance full of seething dislike and
turned and disappeared down the trail.
* * *
During those months I began to think of Jake Hubbard
as a man of whalebone and rawhide. The days were
never long enough for Jake, and he highballed from
sunup to sundown behind a fast pair of mules and he
sang as he worked, and once or twice every week he
would go “fox-huntin’” and chase around the
countryside all night. He hated slow mules and walked
behind the cultivator with a bouncing spring in his
step, singing and talking to Big Lou and Ladyfingers
with loving blasphemy.
“Haw, dammit, mule. Lou, you big ignorant hunk of
muleheaded bastard, one more bobble out’n you an’
I’m gonna skin you alive. Ain’t got no time to waste
fiddle-faddlin’ around like this. Grass growin’ in the
cotton an’ you draggin’ along like an old sow that’s
down in the gitalong.”
It was June and the chopping was all finished and
Jake and I were running the cultivators in the long
twelve-acre bottom field. The sun was halfway down in
the west and as hot as it had been at noon. There was a
light breeze blowing, just enough to stir the dust we
were raising, and it felt good on our sweat-soaked
Hill Girl — 73
backs when the little puffs came by. The dry-weather
locusts were buzzing in the trees up on the hillside
between us and the house. I turned around at the end
of a row and stopped just as Jake made the end of the
tenth or twelfth row over.
“Let’s get a drink, Jake,” I said.
We wrapped the lines about the cultivator handles
and walked down toward the little spring branch that
ran down past the end of the field. There was shade
here and I felt cool in my wet clothes. We lay down on
the sand and drank out of the little stream.
We sat down for a minute in the shade and Jake bit
the corner off a plug of Brown’s Mule, wiped his face,
and grinned.
“She’s a-comin’ along, Bob. That there cotton’s
growin’ nice. An’ it’s good an’ clean.”
“Looks good, doesn’t it?” I said. “Where we’ve swept
it up, I mean.”
We were silent for a moment, enjoying the sitting
down and the coolness. Once or twice Jake seemed on
the verge of speaking, as though there were something
he wanted to say but didn’t know how to bring it up.
“Say, Bob,” he said.
“What’s on your mind, Jake?”
“I always been a man fer mindin’ my own business. I
mean, I got a long nose, but I ain’t one to stick it in
other people’s doin’s.”
“That would seem to describe you, Jake,” I said.
“Let’s have it, though. What is it?”
“Well, I thought mebbe I ort to tell you this. It ain’t
none of my business an’ you can tell me so an’ I’ll shut
up. But it’s about your brother. Lee, his name is, ain’t
it?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Well, I hear he’s quite a stud around the gals. But
that ain’t what I’m drivin’ at. I always figger a man ort
to get all he can, an’ where he gits it is his own
business. Unless,” he looked up at me and his eyes
were suddenly serious, “unless he’s a brother of a good
Hill Girl — 74
friend of yourn an’ he’s in a fair way of gittin’ hisself
kilt. Then mebbe something ort to be said.”
I lit a cigarette and waited. “All right, Jake. Let’s
have it.”
“Well, y'know I was huntin’ last night with Sam an’
the Rucker boys over beyond Sam’s place, an’ ‘long
around midnight the Rucker boys started home an’
Sam an’ me come on back this way. Well, I was a little
in front of Sam when we hit that little lane that runs
from his house out to the big road. It was up there on
that sand hill in the pines. They was a little moon last
night, you recall, an’ jest as I hit the road I seen a car
parked there, with its lights off. I was only about a
hundred feet from where it was. Jest then Sam’s dog let
out a yip an’ the man in the car must ‘a seen me back
there because he stepped on his starter an’ gunned the
motor an’ started out down the lane like hell after a
man. Sam come a-runnin’ up behind me an’ out into the
lane, but by that time the car was out of sight around a
turn. Sam didn’t see what kind of car it was, but I seen
it plain enough. It was a big roadster, an’ it was a
Buick. I can tell all kinds of cars, jest by lookin’ at ‘em.
It was that car your brother drives, no mistakin’ it. Sam
kept askin’ me if I could tell what kind of car it was, but
I told him no, an’ he got kinda quiet an’ didn’t talk
much more.”
“Just a minute, Jake,” I said. “Did anybody get out of
the car before it started?”
“Well,” he said quietly, “I’ll tell you because I know it
won’t go no farther. I don’t like to tattle on gals an’ I
don’t like to do ‘em no harm, an’ I wouldn’t say nothin’
now only I think you ort to know. They was a gal in
there, all right, an’ she popped outta the car when he
stepped on the starter. She lit out like a greased shoat
into the trees on the other side of the lane. She was
outta sight before Sam got there.”
“How far was this from Sam’s house?”
“Less’n a quarter of a mile. Oh, it was that oldest gal
of Sam’s, all right. They ain’t another house within two
mile, an’ if it’d been some gal from town he’d brought
out there she wouldn’t have got out. Anyway, ain’t
Hill Girl — 75
nobody else in this here country built like that gal.
Good Jesus, jest a-seein’ her scootin’ across the road
with her pants in her hand, an’ thinkin’ about it, I was
so horny I woke up the Old Lady when I got home.”
“Do you think Sam got home before she got back,
and caught her going in?”
“No. Not a chanc’t. I walked real slow the rest of the
way, like I was awful tar’d, an’ kept him back. She got
in ahead of him, all right. This time.” There was a
significant emphasis on the last two words and I knew
that Jake had said all he intended to say on the subject
and considered his obligation at an end.
I finished the cigarette and threw it away and got up.
“Thanks, Jake.”
That night after supper I got in the car and drove in
to town. Lee wasn’t at home and Mary said she hadn’t
seen him since around noon. I finally found him in the
back room of Billy Gordon’s café, the second time I
went in there. He and Peewee Hines were shooting
craps. He was drinking beer, but he wasn’t drunk.
“Well, if it isn’t the old clodhopper himself.” Lee
grinned as I walked in. “Have a bottle of beer. It’s bad
for your kidneys.”
“Hi, All-American,” Peewee said and grinned at me.
He was in high school about the time Lee was and I
never did care a lot for him. He always grinned as if he
were watching something through a keyhole. He was a
little guy with a fresh way of looking at you.
“Excuse us, Peewee,” I said. “I want to talk to Lee a
couple of minutes. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Not at all. Go right ahead.” He threw down the dice
and sat down at one of the tables, leaned back, and put
his feet up.
“It’s private,” I said.
“And this is a public place. Or maybe you own it?”
“Beat it, you little sonofabitch.” I reached for him and
he jumped up and made for the door.
Lee looked at me. “You’re going to get yourself killed
someday, talking to people that way.”
Hill Girl — 76
I sat down. “Well, when I do, it won’t be Peewee
Hines. And speaking of getting yourself killed, maybe
you know what I’m here for.”
“I have no idea. Maybe you just came in so I could
refresh myself looking at your beautiful face. When I’m
shooting craps with people, I don’t appreciate having
‘em chased off when I’m four bucks in the hole.”
“Sam Harley damned near caught you with that
Angelina the other night,” I said. “Does that mean
anything to you?”
“No. Except that you must be nuts. I haven’t seen
that wench since we were hunting in October.”
“That’s your story?”
“That’s it.”
“Lee,” I said. “Use your head. Stay away from there.
Can’t you see he’s going to be laying for you now?
What do you think he’s going to do when he catches
you? Write a letter to his Congressman?”
“Look, Bob, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
And if it’s what I think it is, you’re all wet, and why
don’t you mind your own business?”
“O.K.,” I said. I got up and started for the door. I
stopped once and looked back at him sitting there and
started to try once more.
“For Christ’s sake,” he said, picking up the bottle,
“why don’t you learn to knit?”
Hill Girl — 77
Ten
It was the first week in July and we were almost
finished laying by the cotton. There was only about two
days’ work left, plowing out the middles, and then we
would be through with it until picking time.
It was a hot night. Jake and Helen had gone across
the road to their house at about eight-thirty and I had
taken a bath out in the mule lot and gone to bed. But I
was restless and had a hard time getting to sleep. The
work had been slacking off the past week and I was
getting that old feeling of being overtrained and stale
and wasn’t even comfortably tired when night came. I
had been staying too close to the job and away from
dances and girls too long, and as long as the work kept
up at that grueling pace and I was worn out at night it
was all right, but now it was beginning to catch up with
me.
I awakened and reached for my watch on the table
beside the bed. It was one o’clock. The room was
stifling and I was sweating, and I lay there a few
minutes savagely restless, hating the waking up and
knowing I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep.
I cursed and got up and went out on the back porch,
still naked, the way I had been sleeping, and went
down to the well. I drew up a bucket of water and had
a drink of it and marveled at the coolness of it and then
Hill Girl — 78
upended the wooden bucket over my head and poured
the whole thing over myself. It felt deliciously cold as I
stood there in the hot blackness with the short grass
springy under my feet. I could hear the mules walking
around down by the corn crib and heard one of them
kick at something and thud against the planks of the
barn. I felt that way myself. I wanted to kick at
something.
Back in the house I slipped on a pair of shorts and lit
one of the kerosene lamps and sat down at the oilclothcovered
table to try to read, but I couldn’t keep my
mind on the book. I was just getting ready to blow out
the lamp and go out on the porch and smoke a
cigarette in the dark when I heard a car coming up the
road fast and it turned into the driveway. The
headlights flashed down the hall for a short second as
it made the turn. The brakes squealed and the car slid
to a stop out in front.
I started to get up when I heard the front door open
and somebody was coming down the hall, walking fast.
It was Lee. He had on a white linen suit and white
shoes and he looked as expensive and patrician as ever
except that his face was almost as white as the suit and
his eyes were scared.
He stopped in the doorway to the dining room. “God,
I’m lucky to find you at home,” he said. “I was afraid
you’d be gone too.”
“You’re lucky, all right,” I said. “I just got back from
the Mediterranean in my yacht. Where the hell did you
think I’d be?”
“All right, all right. But this is no time for wisecracks,
Bob.” He wouldn’t sit down and he couldn’t stand still.
He was walking jerkily back and forth and stopping to
lean on the doorframe and then he’d move again. He lit
a cigarette and then after one drag or two on it he went
around me and threw it out the back door. His face was
greasy with sweat.
“You got any money around here? I need a little, and
I need it bad. And fast.”
“What’s the gag? Don’t tell me you’ve already gone
through all the dough the Major left?”
Hill Girl — 79
He gestured impatiently. “Oh, I’ve got money. I’ll pay
you back. But I can’t get into the bank until nine. And
I’m flat broke and I’ve got to get out of here fast. I need
dough for gasoline. You’ve ten or twenty, haven’t you?”
I went into the bedroom and fished in a suit and
found my billfold. I came back and handed him a
twenty and a five, all I had in the house. He shoved it
into his pocket nervously. I could see that fear still
crawling in his eyes but his nervous pacing subsided a
little when he had the money in his pocket. He
muttered a short thanks and turned as if in a hurry to
get started. Then he hesitated again and turned back.
“How bad is it?” I asked. I sat down at the table again
and lit a cigarette.
“Sam Harley’s after me.”
The match burned my fingers. “He finally caught
you?”
“Caught me? I hope to hell he caught me. It was
awful.” He was shaking and he came over and sat down
across from me under the light of the kerosene lamp
and drummed on the table with his fingers. I thought of
the old saying that animals could smell fear, and
wondered how he would smell to one of them right
now.
He just had to talk. I didn’t want to ask him about it
because I didn’t want him to waste any time. With Sam
Harley after him he wasn’t in any position to be
dawdling around with small talk, because he was in a
bad spot and it was getting worse with every minute. It
was something I had been trying to tell him for a long
time but he had to find it out for himself and now he
was doing it the hard way.
But he had to get it out of his system. I knew it had
been bad, from the way he had to talk. “Now, for God’s
sake, don’t preach to me, Bob. I’ll admit I’ve been
getting to that Angelina and you warned me about it,
but dammit, don’t preach to me.” I hadn’t said a word.
“He almost caught me once before. Or somebody did.
But I got away with it. Only I didn’t have sense enough
to stay away. I can’t. Christ, if I only could. I tell you,
that girl’s a witch.”
Hill Girl — 80
“Or anyway, something that sounds almost like it,” I
said.
“He got wise, all right. Because he was laying for me
this time. But I had the car parked farther up from the
house, and we weren’t in it. I took a blanket out there
with me and we had it spread out in a pine thicket
fifteen or twenty yards from the car. Because she
enjoys it. Jesus, how she enjoys it! She’ll almost beat
you to death in the seat of a car. So I brought this
blanket. She’d been getting word to me the nights he
was going foxhunting and she was sneaking out. She
has a room of her own and her mother is a sound
sleeper. Only this time I guess he wasn’t going hunting,
or else he sneaked back and found she was gone.
Anyway, he was looking for us, and I guess he found
the car. But he never would have found us if that
damned girl didn’t make so much noise. You’d think
she was being killed.”
“Look,” I said, “I’ve been living out here alone for a
long time, and I mean alone, so would you mind leaving
out some of the stuff about how much she likes it and
how much noise she makes?”
He didn’t even hear me. He was trying to light a
cigarette but his hands were shaking so much he
couldn’t strike the paper matches.
“Hold it over the lamp chimney,” I said. I had to light
it for him. He went on, talking jerkily. “The first thing I
knew about it was just after we’d got quiet and all of a
sudden I heard a footstep in the dark behind us and a
gun cocking and he said, ‘Get up from there, Crane. I
don’t want to kill her too.’ Oh, Jesus, sweet Jesus.
“I rolled and got up running and he shot twice but it
was awful dark in there in the pines and he missed
both times. I heard one of ‘em hit a tree and glance off
and whine and I ran that much harder. I hit a tree and
took a lot of skin off my hip and I fell down once, but I
made it to the car, I’ll never know how. I was lucky I’d
left the keys in it instead of in my pants because I was
naked except for a shirt. My clothes were back there on
the blanket. If he found the car first I’ll never know
why he didn’t take the keys himself. If he had, he’d
Hill Girl — 81
have got me. I guess he didn’t think of it. Anyway, I got
it in gear and stepped on the starter and the gas all at
the same time, without even shutting the door. I must
have thrown sand for a hundred yards, getting started.
He shot once more and it went through the back of the
top and blew a hole in the windshield. I wouldn’t drive
that road again at night at that speed for a thousand
dollars.
“I drove home with just the shirt on and sneaked in a
window and got these clothes on and packed a bag and
then remembered all my money was there in my other
pants. I found Mary’s purse without waking her up, but
she only had two dollars in it. I drove over to Billy
Gordon’s house and a couple of other places but I
couldn’t find anybody home and I couldn’t get away
without some money. So I came out here. And just as I
was coming through the square, headed this way, I saw
Sam’s car coming into town. He didn’t see me.”
“He’ll be here. You better get going.”
I couldn’t figure him out. He was scared to death and
he knew Harley was going to kill him if he caught up
with him and he knew that the only thing that would
save him was distance, and still he couldn’t get started.
He seemed to want to stay and talk about it.
“I thought I’d go to Dallas this morning and then as
soon as I can get some money through from the bank
I’ll go on to California or somewhere for a while.”
“For a while?” I asked. “For good, you mean. If you
come back here five years from now, Sam will kill you.”
“You’re kidding. He’ll forget it in a while.”
I shook my head. “I know. I was kidding before, too,
wasn’t I? When I said you were going to get in a hell of
a mess if you didn’t leave that alone.”
“You think he’ll remember it that long?”
“Listen,” I said, “you’re washed up here. You can’t
ever come back, as long as Harley’s alive. And I guess
you’re finished with Mary, too. How are you going to
explain it to her?”
“I don’t know, Maybe I can think of something.”
Hill Girl — 82
“Well, you’d better get going,” I said. “Sam will be
here as soon as he tries in town.”
Then we both heard it. It was a car coming down the
road, and from the way it sounded it was going as fast
as they’ll run.
It turned into the driveway. The lights flashed down
the hallway, dim at first, and then very bright as it
went into low in the sand. I could see Lee’s face in the
flash of it and it wasn’t a pretty sight. A man that sick
with fear isn’t something you want to look at.
“Duck out the back way,” I said, grabbing him by the
arm. “He’ll come in here and I’ll try to stall him long
enough for you to get back around to the car. You got
the keys?”
He nodded and patted his trousers pocket. He
couldn’t talk. Going on out the back door, he
disappeared into the darkness and I sat there at the
table facing the hall, thinking for a second of what a
putrid joke it was to be wearing a white linen suit when
you’re playing hide-and-seek in the dark with a man
after you with a gun.
I heard the door of the Buick slam and knew Sam was
in there after those keys. He’d missed the boat once
tonight by forgetting about them. Thank God, Lee had
them with him. And then I heard something else. It was
unmistakable. It was the sound you hear in the filling
station when the man raises the hood of your car to
check the oil. The Buick wasn’t going anywhere for a
while now when Sam finished with the ignition wiring. I
heard the front screen door open and then his slow
steps in the hall. He stopped in the doorway to the
dining room and looked at me carefully. Then he
thought better of it and came all the way in and
stepped to one side and put his back up against the
wall.
“Howdy, Bob,” he said quietly.
“Hello, Sam,” I said.
He had on overalls tucked into those big laced boots
and no shirt and was wearing a faded blue denim
jumper that was tight across his big shoulders and wet
with sweat under the armpits and I could see the
Hill Girl — 83
tangled mat of black hair on his chest above the overall
bib, where the jumper was open. In the right-hand
pocket of the jumper was the big bulge of a gun, and I
knew it was a .38 or .45 from the size of it. There was
shiny sweat on his face, and his eyes were like wet
black marble in the lamplight. There was a two or three
days’ growth of black stubble on his face, and now as
he passed his hand across his mouth to wipe off the
sweat I could hear the rasp of it against the calloused
hardness of his palm in the silence.
“Where is he, Bob?” He didn’t raise his voice. He
might have been asking a stranger how to find the
men’s room.
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