A Hidden Place (8 page)

He stood up and turned back when the whistle blew again. When he reached the plant his uncle was waiting for him.

Creath wore an undershirt that stretched taut over the skin of his belly and he was sweating, the sweat glinting in the long hairs of his arms, his chest. His face was ruddy and there was slow anger in his eyes. He pulled a checked handkerchief out of his back pocket and mopped his face with it.

“You were late,” he said.

Travis nodded.

“You were out,” Creath said ponderously, “all last night. Your Aunt Liza was worried sick this morning. You appreciate what you’ve done?”

“It was a mistake,” Travis said.

“Come on in here,” Creath said, hooking a thumb at his office, a wooden cubicle behind the machine shed. “You come in here, we’ll talk about mistakes.”

The room inside possessed a single crude window propped open with a yellow-handled gimlet. The heat was intense enough to smell, a stink like the hot-metal stink of a misaligned gear in the refrigeration machinery. Creath had decorated the walls with calendars: bank calendars, hardware store calendars, feed store calendars, none of them current. The ice plant keys hung on a big ring hooked over a nail next to the door; under them was the truck’s ignition key. Creath sank into the wooden office-chair behind the cheap desk, easing back against its protesting springs, fixing a long stare on Travis. Travis felt a wave of dizzy claustrophobia sweep through him. Because he hadn’t eaten, he supposed … but he felt like he’d walked into a hot sealed box.

“We brought you to this town,” Creath said.

Travis nodded, squinting.

“We paid your way. It that not correct?
Answer
me.”

“Yessir.”

“We took you in.”

“Yessir.”

“Fed you.”

“Yessir.”

“I employ you at this ice plant. Is that not right, Travis?”

“Sir.”

“And now? What have you done?”

Travis closed his eyes. “Come in late.”

“Come in late!
More than that, I believe.”

“Sir?”

The older man sighed. “Travis, don’t bullshit me. I will not be bullshitted. We took you in, and we fed you, and I employed you … and you were out last night, correct me if I’m wrong, chasing after our other roomer.”

Travis said nothing.

“How do you think that makes me
feel,
Travis? That you would do a thing like that? Act filthy like that while you’re living under my roof?”

Hypocrite, Travis thought. You goddamned hypocrite.

Creath waved his hands placatingly. “Now, I understand how it must have been for you. You did not have a normal home. Your mother—”

“My mother doesn’t come into this.”

It was a mistake, he realized immediately. But he could not make himself be quiet. Not in this box.

Creath performed a patient smile. “Don’t take that tone with me. I
knew
your mother, you little peckerwood.”

Keep still,
Travis thought desperately. He focused his eyes on a 1929 calendar, picture of a little girl, gingham dress, field of daisies. The sky in the picture was a deep and impossible Kodak blue, almost turquoise.

“Travis?” Creath grinned broadly. “She was a whore, Travis.”

So many daisies.

“You understand what I’m saying? She fucked for money, Travis.”

You could get lost in that blue.

“She fucked strangers for money, Travis, and I know about it, and Liza knows about it, and the Baptist Women know about it, and I guess by this time just about every dumb shit in town knows about it. You hear me, Travis? She—”

“Shut your mouth.” He couldn’t help it. His head was spinning.

Creath stood up, and his grin widened into something truly awful, a jack-o’-lantern smirk of triumph. “No, you poor ignorant whoreson,
you
shut
your
mouth, how about that?”

Travis raised his foot and kicked the old pine-board desk so that it racked backward across the floor.

Creath fell forward, flailing into a stack of yellow invoices. Travis watched a moment as his uncle struggled up, cursing; then he turned, restraining a rage that ran in him like blood; he yanked open the door. His hand rested momentarily on the lower of the two keyrings, the one on which Creath carried the key to the truck.

Well, why not? He had lost his job, had probably lost his room at the Buracks’—had lost all there was to lose in this town.

His fist curled around the keyring.

He left his uncle grunting in the heat.

Nancy Wilcox knew as soon as Travis came through the door that something was terribly wrong. It was the afternoon, for one thing, that lull between lunch and dinner when the grill was allowed to cool and at least a little breath of wind stirred the tepid air of the diner. Travis should have been at work. He should not have been driving his uncle’s black Ford pickup, parked now on a crazy diagonal outside. And if that were not enough, she could tell there’d been trouble just from the look of him: his hair ratty and tangled, his eyes squeezed shut as if against some unbearable vision.

She surprised herself by thinking,
Now it begins.
She had sensed in Travis even that first day in July a tremor of wild energy, pent up, volatile as a blasting cap. And maybe that was what had drawn her to him, that wildness. He was like a freight train carrying her down some dangerous track and away from her childhood. Now it
begins.

She untied her apron—her fingers trembled— and said, “Travis?”

“Come and talk,” he said. “I need to talk to somebody.”

She nodded and put the apron on a stool. The only customer, an unemployed bank clerk spooning mechanically at a bowl of Campbell’s soup, gazed at her in mute incomprehension.

“Back by dinner, Mr. O’Neill!” she called out, and moved to leave before O’Neill, the owner, could stir himself from the kitchen. Maybe she would lose her job. Probably she would. But that was part of it. She would shed all that: job, town, her mother, respectability. Become some new thing. The bell tinkled behind her as she eased the door closed.

They drove down The Spur toward the railway tracks.

“I followed her last night,” Travis said. Far out this old dirt road he pulled over. The tracks lay baking in the Indian-summer heat, oily and bright. His voice was hoarse. “Followed her up here.”

Nancy nodded. “What happened?”

“I don’t know.”
He frowned and shook his head as if there were some dream there he could not dislodge. “She watched a train go by. I fell asleep. I guess that’s all that really happened. But it seemed like
—”
He looked pleadingly at her. “Like she
talked
to me. Said that something big was on the way, and she was at the center of it, and she needed my help. And in a way it was like I said yes, gave her my promise. Ah, Jesus. I don’t know how to say it—”

“I understand.” Hadn’t she had the same feeling herself? Sensed it, perhaps, the first time she saw Anna Blaise standing huge-eyed in the doorway of the Buracks’ shuttered house? Nothing specific; nothing as intense as what Travis had experienced; but that feeling of the woman’s helplessness, unmistakably, of coiled mysteries waiting to be unsprung. “I said so all along.”

“I lost my job at the plant. Had a fight with Creath. Likely be kicked out of the house, too.” He looked at her. “I should go to her while I still can.”

She could not mistake the implication in that.

“You love her?”

“Nancy … I can’t say.”

“You love me?”

He gazed at the bright slash of the railway tracks cutting the horizon.

Even this was not as painful as she might have expected. She believed in free love, yes, love given freely and perhaps as freely taken away. But it was not that: the thing was, curiously, she
did
understand it … understood, at least, that what had drawn Travis to Anna Blaise was not sex or love in any ordinary sense, was not something she could hope to compete with.

She loved Travis. She had admitted that to herself weeks ago. But he was more than that: he was her freight train, she thought grimly, the vehicle of her destiny. There was little enough in him of pleasure or of happiness; she had learned that. But for better or worse she was bound to him. She had to hang on.

“So how do we help her?”

He looked giddy with gratitude.

“Talk to her,” he said. “We talk to her.”

Now,
Nancy thought.
Now it begins.

He started the engine.

“Travis!” Aunt Liza exclaimed. “Thank God you’re safe!”

She stood in the dim light of the parlor, dusting, wearing an old housecoat, her hair pinned up. Travis regarded her with a mixture of wariness and compassion.

“We’re going up to see Anna, Aunt Liza.” He felt Nancy clutch his hand.

“Travis?” She frowned. “Why aren’t you at work? Are you ill?”

“We can talk later, Aunt Liza.”

Her expression hardened. “It’s that thing upstairs, isn’t it? That female thing.” She blinked. “You
stay away from her.”

“Later, Aunt Liza.” They moved past her and up the stairs, and Travis wondered briefly whether he might not be insane—whether he had allowed an hallucination to drive him to this extremity. He squeezed Nancy’s hand and pushed through the door to the attic room.

He thought at first it was empty. The single brass bed was carefully made-up, the rose-patterned bedspread folded at the foot of it. The window shades were down; the yellow light swam with dust motes. Anna, he saw then, was sitting primly in one corner, in a straight-backed cane chair, her hands folded in her lap. She looked up at Travis and then at Nancy. Her face was expressionless,- when she spoke the words were precise and clipped. “Close the door.”

Mute, Travis obeyed.

Anna drew in a deep breath, sighed.

“Help me,” she said. “I need your help.” Gazing at Nancy: “Both of you.”

Nancy stepped forward—bravely, Travis thought; though surely there was nothing here to be frightened of?

“You’re sick,” Nancy said, “is that it?”

“That’s one way of thinking of it. Though not exactly correct.” Anna tilted her head. “I can’t explain everything at once. I’m sorry.”

Travis nodded. He was transfixed once more by the perfection of her. Her skin was terribly pale but seemed almost luminous—smooth as jade, alabaster-white. Even her smallest motions were fluid and deliberate. She stood in wild contrast to the barren room, the black Singer sewing machine hunched over the floorboards like an insect.

He hated himself for the thought, but next to her Nancy was gross, plain, thickly ordinary.

“All I need,” Anna Blaise went on, “is time. I’m not certain how much. A few weeks … a month, maybe. I need time and I need privacy. It’s not precisely an illness, but I’ll be helpless. And I’ll change. I apologize for not being more exact.” She stood up. “If I stay here I could be in danger. You understand? That’s why I need your help. The Buracks—”

“I know,” Travis said.

He told her about his fight with Creath, about losing his job.

“Then we have very little time,” Anna said. “Is there somewhere I can go?”

“The shack,” Nancy said. “The old switchman’s shack out by the railroad. Travis? We could fix it up for her. If it’s only for a couple of weeks, I mean, while the weather’s warm.”

“It’s private?” Anna asked.

“It’s that, yes.”

“Then it will do. Travis, can you take me there?”

“Now?”

“Now would be best. While I’m still in control.”

The implications of that disturbed him, but she seemed very sure of herself, so he said, yes, the truck was just outside; but then the front door slammed, an echo that resounded through the old house. Creath was home.

T
hey squared off in the second-story hallway.

Creath, obstructing the stairs, wore a deeply aggrieved scowl. He looked at Travis steadily, appraising him. “You have a lot to answer for,” he said slowly, “you sorry son of a bitch.”

Travis told Nancy to wait for him outside. She shied past Creath, who allowed her to go, all his attention fixed on Travis. Anna was still upstairs, hidden.

“I’m taking her out of here,” Travis said.

“You have more gall than I expected,” Creath pronounced. “You! What would you do with her— pissant farmboy like you?”

“You’re using her,” Travis said.

“Shut up. Shut your dirty mouth. Your aunt’s down these stairs.”

Travis felt his own outrage well up. “You think she doesn’t
know!
Doesn’t know you sneak up here to rape the girl these nights—?”

“Rape!” Creath laughed, his eyes rolling. “Rape, you call it? What are you, her white knight?” He advanced, his fists clenched, his thick arms showing swarms of muscle under the layered fat. Sweat showered off him. “She wants it, boy-o. Don’t kid yourself. She wants it, or else why would you be chasing her all over town these nights? Sure, I’ve been up there … and maybe Liza knows as much about me as that Wilcox girl knows about you, you think perhaps? Oh, we are that much the same. The
difference,
boy-o, is that I own this house, and this house is where she lives, and I decide who’s putting it to her—you understand?
I
decide.”

“I’m taking her out of here.”

“You poor dumb shit,” Creath said, and struck him.

Travis fell back through the door of the second-story bathroom. His hand caught on the medicine cabinet and a shelf of Aunt Liza’s specifics came tumbling out: Cuticura, Bromo Quinine, Winter Pep cough syrup in an opaque blue bottle. He steadied himself on the edge of the sink, blind with pain. The mirror was broken.

He will beat her, Travis thought. If I fail at this he will beat her, maybe kill her. The instinct that had drawn Creath to her had turned terribly ugly. There was nothing protective in it now, only a huge injured pride and the formless desire to hurt. He forced himself back into the hallway.

Creath had already started up the steps. Travis leaped forward and drove his fist into the small of the man’s back.

Creath whirled, enraged. “You cheap little bastard, “ he began. But then Travis hit him hard in the mouth, wanting desperately to silence him,- hit him again when the older man dropped his guard and staggered back, and then again and again, until his fists seemed to acquire an energy and a rhythm of their own. Travis made himself stop when he realized that Creath was not even trying to defend himself: he was prostrate on the stairway, his eyes gone wide with pain and disbelief.