The Brat (2 page)

I
T HAD BEEN
early autumn, two years ago. I remembered the fading summer before I met Evis. Life had become useless, dredged of new interests. A girl I loved and planned to marry had vanished from my side one midnight in a vicious rending of tangled steel and smoking tires, dead in the new Olds I’d bought for us.

A drunk had pulled out to pass in the oncoming lane of traffic and we struck, engine to engine. She was broken and dead. I was thrown clear, unscratched. The other driver was killed.

After that my life was a hollow beating back and forth across the country, away from my home in Florida, seeking nothing, slowly spending what money I had.

I remembered how I planned the fishing trip on the Florida River. I camped out alone and took the canoe down gradually along the mangrove- and cypress-shrouded beginnings of the Everglades. I saw the misting flat and endless monotonic miles of brown saw grass, the distant black-fingered shape of a single tree. I didn’t suppose there existed another further revelation of the ‘glades. There was. When I found it, drifting down the murk-banked tropical river, I seemed to forget and I returned to life.

And she came … Evis. Seated on the wharf at a small landing—Hagar’s Point—she was a human magnet to me and she knew it, understood it, from the instant we crossed grazes. It was hypnotic and unmanagable. She was everything I had to have. I was exactly what she’d been waiting for.

Not patiently—rather with the forced resignation of tightly clamped teeth. That was how she had waited.

“Hello, there. For goodness’ sake—what are you doing ‘way in here all alone?”

“Nothing—just nothing.”

A thick mop of ash-blonde hair. Long, tight roundings of thigh beneath scant, clinging white cotton. A proudly curved shoulder. Impossibly slim waist, with a lush perfection of hip. Lips naturally very red, slightly parted across even white teeth, deep blue eyes touched with a kind of bold, unalarmed puzzlement. High, full breasts that were bare under the smoothly taut cotton.

“Why don’t you come and sit with me a while?” she said. “I’m all alone, too.”

She stood up and walked to the edge of the wharf, looking down at me, a soft, warm swamp wind tugging her skirt in an upswung flare, revealing carelessly. There was an awkwardness to her otherwise casually assured movements that warned you she was a very bold piece. She possessed an unstudied grace, an alarming and obvious sensual potency that grabbed at you and drew you to her as she watched, smiling.

“All right. Guess I will.”

It was like diving at her through the air. Nobody else around. No sound, save for the steadied and myriad swamp confusion. Like a dream, with the yes, yes, yes of her eyes and mouth and body under the too thin, too tight cotton—bare and ripe under the cotton.

And then you see the intelligence, the knowing, the completely casual assurance and control.

She was a peculiarly contradictory being to me, even then; blonde and without the thick accent of the swamps, without that nervous shyness seen in the occasional pretty girl from that country. She was not pretty. She was a fused explosion, a direct wallop.

I didn’t think those things then, though.

It was like being struck, then—hot and hard.

“Where are you from?”

I told her.

“There’s absolutely nobody around here—not for half a mile, at least,” she said. “Isn’t that nice?”

“Yes. Let’s cut this out, though. Look, what—”

She smiled at me. “What do you want?”

“Why are you here?”

“Waiting,” she said. “That’s all. Would you like something?”

I knew what she meant. I kept thinking of swampers with knives, lurking in the bushes. It was crazy. The way she stood there watching me, frowning very slightly so her eyes wrinkled at the corners, not impatient, but with all that hot display violently poised on the edge of acceptance.

“It’s as if I know you,” she said, speaking softly. “Is it so difficult to understand.”

I thought maybe she was crazy. Only I knew she wasn’t. I was reacting and my will couldn’t stop that. There was no will left—already. In the midst of the swamp, nothing—then abruptly, this. Completely open, for God’s sake. Right there, saying: “There’s nobody around, really.” Not moving at all now, just watching me, smiling. The blue eyes growing darker and darker. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

She laughed quietly. She looked at me. “There’s surely no use in pretending.”

“I’ll be damned—”

“Yes,” she said. She lifted one hand and her fingers slowly unbuttoned the thin cotton dress down the front. “Well?” she said again, and I went over and took her in my arms, still half expecting to get shot in the back, only she meant it….

All right, I thought a little later. So it’s crazy. But I wasn’t going to let her go, because just looking at her was enough to make my toenails lift a little. Stranger, swamp-whore—no matter who she was, or what she was, I no longer cared. I had found her—and that
did
matter.

“I would be glad to act as your guide, Lee. I know the swamp country I’ve lived here all my life.”

“So you sit here waiting for somebody to come along?” I said. “You get so itchy you can’t stand it any more?”

She said nothing, expressionless now.

“That it?”

“No.”

I had to find something to nail it on, and it wouldn’t have to be much. I could get used to whatever reasons she gave. I knew that. Whatever else had been in my mind before I saw her, was gone. Maybe that was an important part of it, in the beginning.

“Nothing like this ever happened before,” she said. “I just made up my mind when I saw you. Believe what you like. I wanted it from you. I was waiting.”

“It could have been somebody else.”

“Yes, it could have. But it wasn’t.”

“Doesn’t it seem a little screwy?” I said. “I never saw you before. It’s a case of rape, any way you look at it.”

“Didn’t you want me?”

“For hell’s sake.”

“Well?”

So she knew how I felt then and later, and how I would always feel. She knew all I had to do was look at her, and if I touched her I’d go blind. It was like that. The juice was turned on. I didn’t want to turn it off. I couldn’t have turned it off. I had to believe her because it didn’t matter whether I believed her or not.

“We’ve got to get to know each other now, Lee.”

I stared at her.

She smiled and started to dress, talking, watching me, and I didn’t want her to stop talking. Not yet. “It’s up to you,” she said. She looked away now, standing there. “I mean, we don’t really know each other. It doesn’t matter, you see? It’s all up to you. You can get in your canoe and go away and never come back and it won’t matter.”

“And you’ll sit here waiting for somebody else? How often do they come by?”

“I told you about that,” she said. “I don’t want to tell you again. As I said, it doesn’t matter. It’s up to you. Are you interested in staying around with me? Or are you going to get back in your damned canoe—”

I didn’t speak.

“Well then, we’d better accept what we’ve got.”

“What in hell have we got?”

“We’ll find out.”

“We know one thing we’ve got.”

“Which is very important, Lee.”

A bird screamed out across the dark water, lifting into the air with a thunderous roar of wings.

“It’s still crazy,” I said.

“Lots of things are crazy.”

• • •

And even though she soon revealed how venomous her hate was toward her family, she didn’t seem to care a whit what I thought. As for me, my responses immediately became instinctively animal, utterly unrelated to what I thought.

“They are clods, Lee. I endure them. Look at me. Look! I’m not like them.”

She wasn’t.

She took me to them and put them on display as if they were caged in a sunlit corner of a zoo. It was difficult to understand her—to realize that the flimsily locked door of her bedroom was a shield against intrusion on a frantic dream.

Not alone to get away. Not alone to leave home. Or to leave the people she had lived with and understood—and despised. It was more than that.

“Do you like me, Lee? Do you like my body? Feel how smooth the skin is here on my thigh. Hold me, Lee—hold me. Lee … I have waited and waited for you.”

There were the books in the bedroom, hidden from her family, books they wouldn’t comprehend even if they did see.

The magazines—old ones—were treasured like flimsy bits of pressed gold. The magazines of the Outer World. The romantic books of the people and the cities and the life which existed not so very far from where she lived and was trapped by ancestry and the deep, patient belonging.

“Do you like my breasts, Lee? See? They are for you. I am for you. Touch me again, Lee—touch me.”

Just to go away would have been simple. A few miles would have brought her to a main highway; two hours and she would have been in a large, civilized town.

But Evis Helling had to leave the right way. So she could come back some day and laugh at her home and then go away for good. A kind of true escape.

She didn’t just hate her family. It went much deeper than that. To get away was compulsion.

She explained it to me. It was hard to grasp; the devious meanings were hidden in her mind—even from herself.

Evis Helling had to leave—so she could return to leave again.

“Evis, daughter, you have left your mind.”

Leave with the right one. Lee Sullivan.

“Evis, daughter, you always was a strange creature.”

I was ripe for the choice. I had given up the searching and found her. Maybe she had given up the waiting. Maybe she had fashioned a crazy game where the next man, even if he were blind, or legless, or even nameless, would be
him
. And Evis was the dream in more than my mind and we were as close together as man and woman can get, in the dark of her bedroom, that very first night.

“It doesn’t matter what they think, Lee. Just talk—tell me how I am!”

Her family was grouped outside the thin bedroom door. They spat tobacco juice, and perhaps listened and softly commented during the long silences, and longingly discussed fish and Fords and Cadillacs and air-boats and last Saturday’s liquor-up at the “forks over to Gladsby’s Sink.”

Her father Luz Helling, vague and maybe even sly. Her mother Neliah, with the gleaming black hair and uncurious eyes. The grandmother in the old rocking chair, with the body of a bird, voicing Biblical curses. And Rona, Evis’s younger sister, who possessed a strangely intense quality of eye and voice and slim young body, watching me, always watching me … Whenever Evis was away for a moment, Rona was there, smiling, watching.

But in the bedroom, with them outside, there was fear, because of the situation itself, and because of ominous intangibles. I couldn’t do anything about it. A sense of despair bedded with us. It would always be that way.

“Will you take me away with you, Lee?” She knew the answer to that. “We’ll be married? Only the paper doesn’t really count, does it? We’d have what we have, anyway.”

“Yeah.”

I knew plenty about her now, but I didn’t care.

Her family hated me. All but Rona, who said, “Take care of her, Sullivan. Or she’ll surely take care of you.”

“What do you mean?”

It was the third day. Rona and I were alone down by the water. It was difficult for me to realize this dark-eyed girl even existed; I was like some kind of hungry machine, waiting for Evis, wanting Evis, having to have Evis …

“You aren’t listening, Sullivan.”

“Sure I am.”

“I haven’t been sleeping, Sullivan.”

“What?”

“I keep thinking about you.”

I turned to her. “Don’t you have a boy friend?” I looked at her. She was young, slender, not filled out yet. But that intenseness of hers was hot and strong-willed.

“I’m waiting,” Rona said.

She simply didn’t exist. “You’d better run along.”

Her eyes lidded, watching me. Her hand came out and touched my arm, and she moved closer. I was to remember. “Sullivan … Sullivan, can’t you give me a thought? Can’t you?”

I frowned at her, and Evis came down the bank. Rona turned and ran off toward the house.

“What was
she
doing?”

“Nothing.”

“What did she have to say?”

“Nothing. Just how I should take care of you.”

Evis turned and looked off toward the house, where Rona had vanished into the doorway. “I’ll bet,” she said softly. “I’ll just bet.”

• • •

It was strange, the few days living there: the lack of acceptance by the family, the enduring, the brooding hate.

I would look at her and see bright wrong, and go ahead anyway. Nothing mattered. Nothing at all.

One morning the family went their usual ways. Rona had kept herself pretty well hidden since the episode by the water. Evis had already told them flatly she was leaving. They showed no excitement.

I took the canoe back to town, picked up my Chevrolet convertible, and drove back to the landing—Hagar’s Point.

I couldn’t find her. I didn’t call her name.

I stepped into the woodshed bright with the noon light.

A black-haired, rawboned man in a flannel shirt and dungarees had her bent back over a bracing two-by-four. They were sucking mouths, moaning like animals. The man’s right hand was clutched like a steel claw on the thrust of her left breast.

It was a fist in the heart.

“Lee? Are you ready?” She stepped toward me, flushed, tucking her white blouse into the taut waistline of a blue skirt. She looked at me, followed me into the sunlight, her lips still smashed.

“I said are you ready, Lee?”

The man leaned against the two-by-four in the pale shadow of the shed, staring at the calves of her legs. His gaze traveled upward, stopping at her thighs and hips. His eyes were clear and black.

For a moment I stopped. It was like the last cold tick of a clock. Then I began to wind up inside, tight and hot.

She stepped over to me, smiling, and took my arm. She was composed. She motioned with one hand.

“This is Berk Kaylor, Lee. A cousin of mine. He just dropped over to see me. He didn’t know I was going away.”