The Bride's House (35 page)

Joe turned and frowned at Susan for a second. Then he saw the snake, and in an instant, he was beside her. He grabbed the rattler by the tail. Then he pulled back his arm and popped the snake like a whip. The snake’s head snapped off, landing in the dirt not far from Susan, and Joe yelled, “Don’t touch it. There’s venom in the fangs.”

He put his arms around her, holding her up, making Susan feel safe. She looked over his shoulder at the head of the snake. Its eye stared unblinking at her like a living thing, and she gulped air. Joe patted her back and said, “It’s okay. You’re all right. The snake’s dead.” Susan began to shiver, holding on to Joe, afraid he would let her go, but he led her to a rock and made her sit down. He glanced around, searching for other snakes.

“You saved my life,” Susan said. She balled up the tail of her shirt with her hand.

Joe frowned and looked at his hands. “You’d have been okay.”

“No, really. You popped off its head,” she whispered in awe. “How did you know to do that?”

“I don’t know. I just did it.”

“That’ll teach him.”

Joe laughed. “You want to see the rest of him? You know, a little like getting back on a horse after it’s thrown you?”

Susan didn’t, but she forced herself to stand up, and holding on to Joe’s arm, she went to where the snake’s body lay and peered down at it. The snake was stretched out and looked alive, because at first, she couldn’t see that the head was gone. She stared for a long time at the body, which looked like a tree branch, then turned and put her face against Joe’s chest, closing her eyes, as he held her again. She wanted to stay there all day.

“It’s an old snake. You can tell from all the rattles,” Joe said. Then he asked, “Do you want them?”

“The rattles? You mean cut them off?”

“Why not?
He
doesn’t need them.” Joe took out his pocket knife and leaned over the snake, but Susan stopped him. “Let me,” she said. She was not sure just why she should cut the rattles, but it seemed to her that she, not Joe, should do it. Whatever the reason, she squatted down beside the snake, taking the rattles in one hand and lopping them off with the knife she held in the other. She shook the rattles, and they gave off a dead sound. They felt dead, too, no longer menacing, and she wrapped them in waxed paper from the lunch and placed them in the picnic basket. “I’ll have to remember to take them out before I get home. Mrs. Warren would have a fit if she found them there.”

Joe raised an eyebrow.

“Of course, I could always leave them.” And they both laughed, Joe because of the joke, Susan because she was relieved. She hoped that when she thought of this day with Joe, she’d recall the sun and the scent of wild roses instead of the snake. But she wouldn’t. She had wanted it to be a day to remember, and it was, but in a horrible way.

“I can’t believe that I couldn’t even move,” Susan said, as they started back down the trail toward the truck, Joe staying close behind her. “I was transfixed.”

“I thought you were brave.”

“Yeah, like the time I went halfway up that pine tree in front of the Bride’s House and couldn’t get down.” She shouldn’t have brought that up. It was one more thing that would make Joe think she was stupid.

“You went halfway up. That’s farther than I’d gone, and Peggy never made it more than four or five branches. I really do think you’re brave. What other girl would touch a dead snake? You actually cut off its rattles. That’s pretty impressive.”

Susan turned around, gripping a branch of an aspen tree, because the slope was steep. “I really was scared.”

“Yeah, but you faced it.” He paused and said, “I don’t know what I’d have done if it’d bitten you. I couldn’t stand it if something happened to you.” He stared at her for a long time, and Susan shivered again, this time at Joe’s words, not the snake.

He opened the passenger door of the truck, and took her arm to help her on to the running board. But then he stopped. “Hey,” he said. When Susan turned around, he kissed her. She’d waited almost half of her life for that moment, had dreamed of being in the moonlight with Joe when he took her in his arms. This was not what she had imagined; it was better. She loved that Joe had kissed her there in the mountains with the sun shimmering off the aspen leaves. She closed her eyes and kissed him back. Then Joe pulled away a little and smiled at her, running his finger down the bridge of her nose. He kissed her again, then let her go, put the picnic basket into the back of the truck, and climbed into the driver’s side. “You okay?” he asked, waiting for her answer before he turned on the engine. Susan nodded, too happy to say anything.

They drove back down the trail and turned onto the highway, not talking. Joe hummed a little. Susan couldn’t look at him, because she felt giddy. She thought about the kisses, but her mind kept going back to the snake. She envisioned it again, not only stretched out on the rocky ground but coiled, striking, and by the time they reached Georgetown, she’d begun shaking again and couldn’t stop. “You’re in shock,” Joe said. “Come on. I’ll help you.” He half dragged, half lifted Susan out of the truck, and picking her up, he carried her to the porch, then banged on the screen with his elbow and called, “Mrs. Curry.” Pearl rushed into the foyer from the office, Charlie behind her. “She almost got snake bit, biggest rattler I ever saw,” Joe said, although Susan knew it wasn’t. “She’s in shock.”

“The rattles are in the picnic basket, in waxed paper,” Susan told her mother, her voice high and out of control.

Joe carried Susan upstairs to her bedroom and set her on the bed. Then he returned to the foyer, where Charlie stood, the picnic basket at his feet and a wad of waxed paper in his hand. The old man held up the rattles. “That was some snake. We’ll put these in the cabinet with the ore specimens. Some of them came from snakes, too.” He chuckled.

Upstairs, Pearl sat down in a chair beside Susan as the girl stared at the shadows on the wall made by the sun coming through the blinds. She stared at them a long time before she closed her eyes. She shivered under the quilts her mother had piled on the bed, and at last, she went to sleep. When Susan awoke, her mother was still sitting beside her. On the dressing table was a vase of wildflowers. “Joe brought them,” Pearl told the girl. “He said to tell you he wanted you to have something better than snake rattles to remember your day.”

But she already did. She had the memory of Joe’s kisses.

CHAPTER 15

I
N THE FALL
, S
USAN REGISTERED
at the University of Denver. But Joe Bullock wasn’t there. He had transferred to a school in California. In late August, he’d come by the Bride’s House to tell her. Susan had fixed iced tea, and they sat in the gazebo, across from each other on stone benches, Joe with his hands between his knees, looking at the floor. “I got a scholarship, and I want to go to law school there later on. I’m really sorry. I was going to show you around. But you’ll like DU anyway. I can still fix you up with one or two of my fraternity brothers.”

“Why would I want second best?” Susan asked, trying to sound lighthearted, although the truth was that she was crushed. She’d had such great plans. The two of them would go to football games and dances together, to fraternity and sorority exchanges. They’d get pinned and then engaged. Maybe they’d marry after Joe graduated. She’d had no business dreaming such dreams, of course, because there’d been nothing more between them than a few kisses. But that hadn’t stopped her. And now she was faced with how foolish she’d been in basing her future on Joe. She smiled at him, said she was disappointed but wished him well, all the time digging her nails into the palms of her hands, making little half-moon indentations in her flesh. Then she asked, “Did you just find out?”

Joe hung his head. “I’ve known since June. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you.”

Susan looked at him sharply. “You should have. You should have told me.” She couldn’t say more for fear Joe would know she’d picked a college just because of him.

“You mad?” he asked, and she shook her head, although she was. After he left, she went upstairs to her room in the Bride’s House, angry at Joe for going to California, sure that she was only a summer diversion and he didn’t care about her, and stared at herself in the mirror, muttering, “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

The next month, back in Chicago, Susan packed her clothes and college gear, and she and Frank drove to Denver in a new cream-colored Mercury convertible that he had purchased for her. She registered for classes, wore the stupid little freshman beanie for a week, and pledged Pi Beta Phi. And to her surprise, she loved the university. Still, she was disappointed and very much annoyed that Joe was not there.

Just a few weeks after school started, Susan met Peter Fanshaw, met him on the Colfax streetcar, of all places, since it had stormed that morning and she wasn’t used to driving her car on ice. So she’d taken the streetcar to her friend’s house where they were planning to study for an exam.

Susan glanced sideways at Peter, because he was that handsome in his air force blues—honey-colored hair and eyes as velvety brown as a fawn’s, tall, well-built, stocky, a little like Joe Bullock. Susan thought later on that it might have been his resemblance to Joe that attracted her. She watched him again out of the corner of her eye as she stood up at her stop, wishing she could ride a little farther. Susan didn’t notice that her billfold had slipped out of the pocket of her polo coat onto the seat, and only after she was gone did Peter, who was seated across the aisle, discover it. He called to the driver to stop, then jumped off the trolley, running after her, splashing the slush of the snowstorm onto his uniform, calling, “Miss, wait!” and holding the billfold high in the air.

“Oh my gosh! It’s got all my money. I’d have had to walk home,” Susan said. She wanted to offer the airman a reward, but she was conscious that she might offend him, might depreciate his act of gallantry, so instead, she said, “The least I can do is give you carfare back to the base, since you’re going to have to pay to get back onto the streetcar.”

When Peter refused, Susan astonished herself by saying she would buy him a Coke, and they went into a drugstore whose front was a sleek mix of glass and black and green tile. They sat on stools at a soda fountain and looked into the mirror in front of them, looked through the places where the day’s special was written in black crayon (“tuna salad sandwich with pickle chips 25 cents,”) just below the six flavors of ice cream (“cones 5 cents, double-decker cones 10 cents,”) and a list of ice cream concoctions (“try our Black-and-White Sundae 15 cents”). Susan sneaked glances at Peter through the word “sandwich,” and he stared frankly at her, grinning every time he caught her eye. She noticed then that his teeth were even and white but that a front tooth was chipped.

It wasn’t a date. Girls knew better than to be picked up, especially by military men. Her Pi Phi sisters would have been appalled at Susan’s audacity. But he’d returned her billfold with all her money in it, so she could trust him, couldn’t she? And they were right there in public where anybody could see them. Besides, she wasn’t dating anyone, certainly not Joe Bullock, who’d made it clear that he cared so little about her that he had gone off to California.

So there was nothing wrong with sitting at the fountain with Peter. In fact, it was kind of nice with people nodding at him, one or two saying, “Luck to you,” because the war in Korea was serious and folks admired a young fellow who was fighting for his country. Who knew but whether the police action over there would lead to World War III?

They ordered coffee instead of soft drinks, since with the sun setting, it had grown cold outside. A blue glow had settled over the street, and the slush was turning to ice. Susan drank two cups of thick black coffee that had been sitting on the burner so long that it had boiled down and tasted bitter. Although she tried diffusing it with cream, the coffee was still foul. She finished the second cup, and then not wanting to end the conversation, she ordered a dish of chocolate chip ice cream, which came in a paper cone inserted into a nickel holder. She ate slowly, while Peter talked, hoping he didn’t realize she was dragging out the conversation, hoping he wasn’t bored, because he was older and he’d probably been around.

At first they talked about the storm, whether the snow would melt the next day or there would be another blizzard, then about the trolley, how drafty it was, the wicker seats too hard.

“I wish I had my car. I sold it when I joined the Air Force. If I’d been driving it, though, I wouldn’t have met you,” Peter said.

Susan cocked her head. “Do you pick up a lot of girls with that line?”

“I don’t know. You’re the first I’ve tried it on.”

Peter offered Susan a cigarette, but she shook her head. She wished she smoked, because she’d seem more sophisticated, but she was afraid to start just then, afraid she’d appear like the girls in sorority rush who thought the cigarettes would light if they held them out at arm’s length over a match flame.

“I really don’t approve of women smoking,” he said.

“That’s a double standard,” Susan told him.

“You sound like a suffragette.”

“What if I were?”

“I could handle it.”

Conscious that they were flirting, Susan switched to a safer subject and asked if Peter had joined the Air Force instead of waiting to be drafted into the Army.