Tears Are for Angels (2 page)

    She moved toward the door.

    "Don't get out that can till I'm out of range," she said.

    "I won't."

    She looked for a moment as if she would say more, and then she went on out the door of the shack. I stood in the door and watched her go toward the old car.

    She walked easily and her hips swayed nicely. Now, when she was leaving, I thought again how it was not to have had a woman in two years. My fingers tingled where they had touched her ankle.

    She got under the wheel and the engine ground into life. The car backed a few feet and then she cut the motor and got out and walked around to the other side of it. Then she came back around toward me and I watched her breasts under the T-shirt.

    "A hell of a note," she said. "A flat."

    Something jumped inside of me. "You have a spare?"

    "Nope. Not even a jack. You wouldn't have a jack, would you?"

    "Afraid not."

    She swore, without anger.

    "This would have to happen."

    "It sure would," I said. "It would have to happen."

    

    

    She looked at me sharply.

    "What would that mean?"

    "Nothing," I said. "Things just happen like that, is all."

    "Oh." She looked again at the car. "Well, I have to get back to town somehow. Any busses come by out there?"

    "No busses."

    "Well, how do you get to town, then?"

    "I walk. When I go."

    "I'm not up to that. How far is it, anyway?"

    "Thirteen miles."

    I grinned at her and a little tinge of red began to come down from the roots of her hair.

    "You might at least offer to try to fix it for me!"

    "I might. If I had anything to fix it with."

    "Well, go look at it! Maybe you can do something, anyway."

    I lounged away from the door of the shack and walked over to the car and looked down at the tire. I didn't even need to get down on my knees.

    The bitch, I thought. The damned bitch. What in hell docs she want with me?

    "Can you fix it?" She had come up close beside me.

    "You know," I said, "it looks as if I'm going to have a guest for the night."

    I watched her eyes when I said it, and it was there, all right. But when she spoke, she was good. If I hadn't caught it in her eyes I never would have known that I had said what she wanted me to say.

    "Don't be silly. I can't stay here. Couldn't I catch a ride?"

    "No cars on that road."

    "Then how could I catch a ride tomorrow?"

    "Dairy pickup truck. Comes by every morning about sunup."

    "Sunup," she said. "My God. You mean I have to spend the night in this hole, then get up with the roosters just because you're not even man enough to fix a simple-flat tire?"

    It got next to me, even though I knew she had fixed it so she had to stay.

    "You got yourself out here," I said. "I didn't send for you. If you nave a better idea, let's hear it."

    She subsided then and I stood there and watched her, her thumbs hooked in the top of the slacks, chewing a little on her lower lip, the small, high breasts outlined by the T-shirt. Then it didn't matter at all that she had a reason, some purpose that couldn't be any good for me, in putting on this show.

    She was a woman, and she had everything that had been coming to me in the night, in sweaty, tossing dreams, coming to me, but never all the way, not quite close enough to touch, forever near and beckoning but always just beyond my fingertips. She had it all.

    "It won't be so bad. You can have the bunk."

    Her nose wrinkled. "I've been on that bunk once. I can make out all right in the car."

    I shrugged. "Suit yourself, lady."

    She swept her hand through the blonde hair again. "How about some supper?"

    "You like beans?"

    "Beans are beans. I can take them or leave them."

    "You take 'em this time. That's all I have."

    "God." She put her head over on one side and looked at me for a long time. "Beans and corn whisky. Is that good for your digestion?"

    I walked away from her, toward the house.

    "Speaking of corn whisky," I said, "won't you join me?"

    She was just behind me.

    "If I have to stay here," she said, "you keep off of that stuff."

    I swung around and she almost bumped into me. I closed my fingers about her arm and I jerked her up against me and the brown eyes widened and her lips parted.

    "All right," I said. "I didn't ask you to get yourself stuck out here. But you're here and you might as well get this straight. These funny cracks about me don't go. I was doing all right till you stuck your nose in, and I'll do all right when you drag your can out of here, which can't be too soon for me. So keep that damn tongue off of me. Just keep that sass to yourself."

    Her face was up close to mine, the brown eyes and the red lips, and suddenly I jerked at her again and bent my lace to hers. Her free hand came against the side of my face with a stinging wallop and I let her go and we both stepped back.

    "And you get this straight," she said. "You keep that filthy hand off me. If you even get those stinking whiskers close to me again I'll let you have it where it hurts the most."

    There was a pure, undefiled fury in her voice that told me that she meant it and that she would know how to do it. The brown eyes snapped at me and the words stung right into my ribs.

    "Fair enough," I said, and walked away from her toward the spring. "The goddamn beans are in the house when you want 'em."

    I walked on, my back to her, but I could feel her watching me. I sat down by the spring, and in a minute she went on into the shack.

    Vague worry filled me. She wants something, I thought, she's out here for some reason, and it couldn't be anything else but that. But she couldn't know. Nobody knows.

    I leaned over and looked at myself in the still, clear water. The wild beard hung to my chest and my hair had not been combed in days. The tattered collar of the faded shirt was twisted unevenly at my neck.

    All right, I thought, I'm no beauty queen. I never was. Let her just keep her damn mouth off of me, is all.

    The water looked back at me silently. I let my hand trail in it and then I quickly looked over my shoulder. She was still in the shack. I took my hand out of the water and ran it through my hair and looked back into the spring.

    So I'm still no beauty queen. So what?

    And then a tide of shame flowed over me and I shut my eyes tightly and leaned back against one of the trees that grew by the spring. Memory rolled up out of the part of me I had locked away and my head began to ache.

    Memory narrowed, for no reason at all, and my mind closed in on a Sunday, a shell-pink day when all of the world had been in tune and there hadn't been the face swimming in my brain or the loneliness or the dirt or the despair. It had been our last Easter together, over two years ago.

    I had come out on the wide, rambling porch of the house and stood there a moment, waiting for Lucy, looking out across the rich rolling fields that were mine, and I had smelled spring and inside of me something was smiling. Somewhere a bird sang. There were no cars roaring by, no trains whistling and rumbling, no noises at all but the bird and the sound a spring breeze makes in pine trees.

    The door opened behind me and I heard her step. I turned quickly and she was pinker, more beautiful than the day, and I went to her and held out my two hands and she took them, smiling. We stood there looking at each other and I was proud of my wife.

    "Let me look at you," she said. That was the way she had been. My clothes had always had to be just right, and she had almost taken more pains with my appearance than with her own. She surveyed me then, the white linen suit I had had to have specially tailored for my lanky frame, the new Panama, the Oxford cloth shirt, a dark blue tie knotted neatly under its wide collar, and the brown and white shoes.

    "You'll do," she said. "You look all right for a lady to go to church with."

    "Nobody will notice me," I said. "They'll be too busy looking at you."

    Her blonde hair waved softly around her head, under a spring hat that wasn't a hat at all, but that must have been made or grown or created just for her head alone, under which her blue eyes, smiling at me, seemed to mirror the very sky. A navy-blue gabardine suit, exactly matching the shade of my tie, clung to her full figure, not loo tightly, but in all the right places, and my gaze swept on down along the slim, lovely legs, and I thought that no woman in the world could wear high heels like Lucy.

    We got into the Pontiac and went to church, the breeze and the coming spring and the awakening blossoms all about us, and I thought that after all the world was a small place because I could reach out and touch it, every bit of it that mattered.

    I remembered all of that, sitting there against that tree by the spring, and the thoughts clawed at me. nameless marauders scaling the wall I had built around all those old days and nights. Lucy, I thought. Lucy. Were you thinking about it even then? Even that day?

    I opened my eyes to get away from the images that darted at me out of the blackness and I looked in the spring again. Revulsion hit me with solid body blows and the shame was all over me now, all through me, and I got up quickly and took two steps toward the shack.

    She was standing there looking at me, across maybe ten yards of bare sand, darkness nearly on us now, the shadows from the four abandoned, lonely derrick posts falling around us and the red ball of the sun fading slowly to the dunes.

    I wanted to hit her, I wanted to beat that smooth face to a bloody pulp, close those eyes forever, because she had seen me like I was, because of the contempt in her lace when she looked at me. I stood there, some tremendous swelling coming inside of me, and yet, inexplicably, I did not move.

    "I wasn't always like this," I said, my voice a child's, my ears incredulous at my own words.

    And then the contempt and the hardness went out of her face, something else filling her eyes, and suddenly I knew she too, whoever she was, was lonely. She had it in her too, the loneliness and the despair and the awful absence of hope. Behind the flippancy and the hardness, something had eaten everything else out of her too.

    "I know it," she said. "I know you weren't. Come on and get some beans."

    We sat there and we ate the beans, and for the first time in two years I tasted them. Oddly enough, they were good. When I pushed my plate away she was already finished.

    "You know what I'm going to do?" she said.

    "No telling."

    "I'm going to scrub hell out of here. I don't have to stay here but one night, but that's what I'm going to do."

    "Go to it," I said. "It's your funeral."

    There was plenty of water and a bar of strong lye soap I hadn't used in months and an old rag or two lying around. She rolled up the slacks above her knees and kicked off her loafers. Then she went out to her car and got a kerchief and bound up the short blonde hair and went to work scrubbing the floor.

    I had made up my mind to shave after supper, but in order to keep out of the way, I stretched out on the bunk and lit up the pipe I sometimes smoked and watched her.

    It was funny. It did something to me. There I was, like any other man, taking it easy after supper, and there she was, like any other woman, doing the housework. Only it wasn't really like that at all. I'm going to get cleaned up, I thought, just as soon as she finishes.

    She was almost through before she spoke.

    "Tell me about Lucy," she said.

    It broke my thoughts abruptly. It reminded me that I still had no idea what she wanted with me.

    "It was all in the papers."

    "I don't mean about that. I mean tell me about
her
."

    It should have made me mad. It wasn't anything a stranger had any call to ask about. But suddenly I found myself talking about my wife.

    "She was a blonde like you," I said. "Only her hair was long. It came down to here. She was beautiful."

    "I saw that in the pictures."

    "Now you, you're not beautiful. You have what it takes, all right, you're good-looking, but Lucy-well, she was beautiful."

    "Thanks."

    "No offense, just two different types."

    "What was she like?"

    "A lot of fun." I thought a minute. "Most of the time, anyway. Sometimes she'd be sort of quiet. Like she was away off somewhere, but it wouldn't last long. She used to say she was absent-minded, but that wasn't it. That last year I guess she was lonely, maybe bored."

    "On the farm?"

    "Uh-huh."

    She laughed. "I wouldn't be. I always wanted to live on a farm." She wrung out her rag in the bucket.

    "You? You look like a city girl."

    "I am. But I always wanted a farm."

    "Lucy hated it. I think she did, anyway. That must have been it."

    She got up from her knees and looked at her work.

    "That'll have to do, I guess. At least it got the loose dirt." She let the rag drop into the bucket. "Who was the other woman?"

    I almost dropped the pipe. "What other woman?"

    "The papers said there was one."

    "Oh. Yeah." I thought a moment. "None of your business."

    She shrugged. "I don't get it, Harry. The way you talk, you're carrying a torch for this Lucy a mile high. I don't get the other woman."