A Hidden Place (7 page)

“She hasn’t asked for it.”

She looked at him from behind the glowing tip of her cigarette. “You think I’m butting in.”

“No …”

“You do. Admit it.”

“No. Rushing in too fast, maybe. Remember, Nance, we still don’t know anything about this girl. She was out on a highway, naked. Creath picked her up. Maybe she wanted it that way. Maybe she likes things the way they are.”

Nancy scrunched down in the shadowy pickup bed, drawing herself inward, musing.

“Before I got this diner job,” she said, “I would go over with sewing. Mama would send me over. I’ve seen the girl, Travis. Seen her up close. I’ve looked her in the eye.”

He nodded. “So have I.”

“Have you? And you can sit there and suggest maybe she
likes
what she’s doing?”

Well, no, he couldn’t—not honestly. There was that desperation in Anna Blaise like an underground fire; it was impossible to miss. But he said, “There’s more to it than we know.”

“Bound to be. That’s why we have to
find out.”

“How?”

“Talk to her. Follow her.” She exhaled a cloud of smoke, tossed the butt out into the roadway, a small cometary arc. “See where she goes.”

She could not have missed the attraction Travis felt toward Anna. Travis was a poor liar. And yet, he thought, she is capable of suggesting this.

Maybe it was her way of testing him. Or, he thought, of testing herself.

He thought of what she had said in the strawberry fields last month:
I believe it’s possible to love more than one person….

“It’s chilly these nights,” she said suddenly. Far off, the westbound train wailed. Travis pressed up close to her, put his arm around her protectively. Her cotton dress was like silk under his big hand. She turned toward him, and they kissed, and there was something in the urgency of it that made Travis aware that she had decided to go all the way with him tonight.

He touched her small, perfect breasts. After a time his hand worked up under her dress. He was almost feverish with the wanting, and when she laid herself back against the burlap sacks and he entered her it was like an electric shock of pleasure. He climaxed rapidly. Nancy shuddered under him and he realized, distantly amazed, that she must be experiencing some equivalent fulfillment. Gasping, he told her he loved her.

Maybe he did. It was not a lie; she would have recognized a lie. But he was far less certain than he made himself sound.

Doubt had crept into him even as he performed the act. He loved her, at the very least, for what they had done together, but even that was compromised: it had been too easy, he thought, she gave herself too easily. Women ought not to do that. He looked away as she straightened her skirt. What disturbed him, and what he found hard to admit even to himself, was that the face that had flashed in his mind in that moment of climax had been, not Nancy’s, but Anna’s: her pale china skin; the eyes huge and dark, violated but aloof; her strangely unassailable purity burning in him like fire.

S
eptember crawled on, the cries of the trains acquiring that special autumn melancholy, and at first Liza Burack believed she might have contributed toward the salvation of her sister’s son.

If not the salvation of his soul he refused to go to church with her, claimed his mother would not have approved), then at least his worldly salvation. She had savored the thought, troweling in her backyard garden those long last-of-summer afternoons. /
have helped save him,
she would think, down on her knees among the gladioli and the fragrant black earth. It was a good thought and in those moments she could almost believe it made everything worthwhile … her fall from grace with the Baptist Women, her sister’s death-in-sin, even Creath’s terrible and unacknowledged private weakness. Even that.
I have helped save him.

But she lay awake now in the postmidnight silence of the bedroom, her eyes like beacon lights, moonlight shining on her oaten dresser and Creath beside her like a dead weight; and when she heard Anna’s small footsteps on the landing and then, a few moments after, Travis’s—then she knew she had in fact lost.

She started up after him. By God, she thought, he doesn’t
understand!
If he understood he would not be chasing after her! If he understood—!

But no. She had told him once. And she had known by his eyes that he
did
understand. This was no normal woman and his feelings for her were not normal feelings.

And yet he had chosen to follow her.

Strange words flashed in her mind.

Witch. Demon. Succubus.

She went to the door of the bedroom, opened it a crack. There went Travis, a black shadow past the stairwell. And there, hear it now, the click and whine of the front door.

Liza Burack sank back into the bed, defeated.

Travis is lost,
she thought, the sound of her own thought grown singsong as sleep too long denied crept up from the overheated crevice of the blankets….
Travis is lost, is lost, is lost….

She dozed dreamlessly, and the nightwind came in her window like a tide.

Talk to her, Nancy had said. Follow her.

It had sounded so simple.

Travis paced down the moon-bathed street, making good on the promise at last, and it seemed much less so.

Anna Blaise moved ahead of him like a shadow, a lithe and graceful dancer in a shadow ballet. For long moments Travis would walk blindly, certain that he had lost her … then she would appear again half a block away, gliding through the umbra of a tossing willow.

Travis wore a thick cotton workshirt and a jacket over that, and a jet of autumn air set him shivering. Anna wore only a blouse, a skirt, navy blue go-to-church clothes (though that was something she did not ever do), shadow-colored.

He followed her, a sick excitement rising in him. There was, at this hour, simply no reasonable destination for a woman like Anna. The town was asleep. Travis had overheard talk at the ice plant about a roadhouse called Conklin’s out beyond the granaries, that a man could get a discreet drink there after midnight … but it was late now even for that, and in any case Anna was headed the wrong way, toward the nearer margin of town, toward the railway tracks.

Far out DeVille Street the blacktop faded to dirt. There were no houses here, no trees but scrub oak, nothing beyond but farmland and prairie grass.

Travis slowed when Anna slowed. She had come to the place where the railway crossed the road, moonlight glinting off the hard arc of the tracks. She stood suddenly still—and Travis dove down, feeling foolish and ashamed, into the high grass in the gully by the road. When he peered ahead through a thicket of buckbrush he was able to see Anna Blaise outlined against the morning stars like a sentinel, her bare arms shining, her head moving left and right in that oddly sensual hunting-dog motion.
Christ God,
Travis thought,
if she sees me—I
But her attention was focused elsewhere.

Her arms were stiff at her sides, her head erect.

Listening,
Travis thought.

He was suddenly aware of the small hairs prickling at the back of his neck. His breath caught in his throat.

Far off in the depths of the night a small-hours freight express sounded its whistle. Westbound, he thought, tracking over the curvature of the earth—it sounded that distant.

Anna Blaise was marble and ice, listening.

Travis felt the day’s warmth seeping into him from the dry earth under his belly. Crickets chirruped in the gully all around him. He gazed at Anna and thought: Why, she
reminds
me of somebody.

She reminded him of, of—

—he closed his eyes, fumbling for the memory—

—of his mother.

Deep currents stirred in the prairie grass.

The night obscures her features, he thought. It was that profile that did it: the head held high, a gesture both defiant and somehow hopeless. It made Travis think of his mother in a way he had not thought of her for years. He remembered—so vividly now he could taste it—a night like this, that first chill of autumn cutting through the air, when he was no more than six years old.

He had been in bed, awake when he should not have been. The farmhouse was quiet. The effect however was not of peace but of foreboding, of imminent danger: because Daddy was out late, which meant Daddy was drinking, which meant he could come home any minute full of a sour and implacable hostility.

Travis could not sleep with this turmoil of emotions in him: the relief of his father’s absence, the threat of his return. He lay in bed listening to the trees talk outside his window and attempted to recreate in his mind the plot of
Treasure Island,
which Mama had been reading to him that night. He had almost achieved sleep when he heard the front door slam.

That other, quiet, sound might have been Mama’s indrawn breath in the bedroom across the hall.

He covered his ears when the shouting began. At the first thump and stifled cry, he buried his head under the pillow.

Mama, he thought, oh, Mama….

And when it was over she came to him.

She did it always. It was her way of saying
It’s okay, Mama’s okay,
not needing the words or the ugly admissions they might contain.

She sat in the wooden chair by the window with the paper blinds pulled up and out of her way. “How that wind does torment that old tree,” she said, not even checking to see if he was asleep; knowing, maybe, that he was not. Her voice was choked with recent weeping, but beneath it there was still that quality Travis associated indelibly with Mama, silk and sighing, a good sound.

Then, just when her voice had begun to comfort him back to sleep: “Oh, Trav,
look!”

He sat up, squint-eyed, and went to the window.

She held him on the lap of her old print dress, her bony knees under him. The sky beyond the window was vast, clear, wild with stars. The limbs of the willow moved as if in semaphore.

“See, Travis?” Mama said. “Shooting stars!”

He thought at first they were fireflies. But they moved too quickly and too purposefully and they did not flicker. Shooting stars, he thought, sleepy now. Falling stars. Pieces out of the autumn night.

He had fallen asleep thinking of Mama: of the starlight playing on the bruise that lay like a veined map on her cheek; thinking of how when he grew up he would protect her, would not let any harm come to her,- and thinking of those two shooting stars, how they had moved across the dark sky, east and west, as if twinned from a common source.

He felt as if her eyes were on him now.

Anna,
Travis thought.

He shook his head to clear it and crawled forward a yard or so.

She was gazing directly toward the patch of prairie grass where he lay. Her eyes were unnaturally bright. The westbound freight streamed by behind her, a clangorous black banner.

Weariness came over him again, suddenly. He felt a stirring of alarm, but it was muted.

There’s something about her, Travis thought. Something had changed in her. He could see it in the arch of her back, in the way her fists were clenched.

She had shaken off some of that passive helplessness. In her eyes, Travis thought, there was something he had not seen there before: an expectation, possibly a hope.

But the weight of his body was immense. The night air seemed to press him down.

Anna,
he thought sleepily.
Anna….

Her gaze bore into him.

He closed his eyes.

When he woke the sun was standing over the eastern horizon. There were dust motes in the raking light and his bones ached with chill. And he was alone.

H
e brushed off his shirt and pants and walked back toward town until he could hail a ride. He knew he was late for work. By the position of the sun he was at least an hour overdue. But that didn’t matter. Something important had happened the night before. It was mysterious, not altogether clear even in his own mind. He was sure, however, of one thing: that Anna Blaise did in fact need help, and that in some way she had chosen Travis to help her.

The feel of it burned inside him.

He hitched with a jut-boned farmer as far as the south end of town and then walked the remaining quarter mile to the ice plant. His reflection in the dusty windshield of the truck had been wild, his hair askew and blazened with hayseeds, his beard grown out in stubble, his fingernails ringed with black crescents. At the plant he clocked in, threw a little water on his face at the chipped porcelain basin out back, and ran his fingers through his hair. Then he took up his broom and began sweeping the raucous machine shed.

She must not stay at the Buracks’, he thought. That much was clear. For whatever reason, she had been tolerating Creath’s abuses of her. But that would stop. He could not say he knew these things, but he knew that something had changed in her last night. Maybe Creath would see it, too.

He worked steadily and alone. When the noon whistle blew he realized he didn’t have a lunch with him, that he had missed breakfast, too, and that the heat of the day was pouring down like molten glass. He wandered through the gravel lot, back of the loading dock, to the grassy bank of the Fresnel and sat with his arms wrapped around his knees, watching the brown water flow and curl. So, he thought, what about Nancy? Did he love her or didn’t he? And what did that imply in this skewed and mysterious new world he had entered?

Love was unfathomable. He did not understand it. Nancy was a concentration of good and bad things, wild impulses and dangerous urges. He
had
loved her, he thought; had loved her, at least, in that reasonless moment when he slaked himself in her body. If you could call that love.

He knew only that there was this different thing he felt with Anna Blaise, an undifferentiated longing that seemed to rise up in him like summer, heat, not passion so much as a kind of ache, as if her perfect body were that garden from which the first man had been cast out and to which all men longed to return. It was as powerful as that. “Love” was inadequate, a merely human word.