The Watchman (6 page)

No no, he said. Cris, I don't think about you that way.

Yes, you do, she said. But it's all right. And you're right— thinking that way.

Chris, you're my girl, he cried suddenly, embracing her with bewilderment and sorrow. I bet I could have got a girl like Jill if I'd wanted that. But I didn't, Cris. It's you I want.

I know. I know, she said. The way things are, Jase. The way things are. It's all right. I'm glad to be whatever I am to you. Even if it's only for a while.

And suddenly it was there among them, so strong now that he felt like crying; stronger than it had ever been. He tore at her sweater and the gesture was like tinder: a spark in a warehouse full of flammable gas. There was no more

talk now. And they met swiftly so that their teeth struck against each other and breath stormed beneath their nostrils and there was the small, coppery taste of blood in their mouths. Cristi could hear voices whispering, urging; and from a great distance she could hear the rayon rip and elastic snap and textile whispering in the air which was suddenly filled with garments which rose and drifted and fell. Voices shouting seemed far off: voices not their own. What woman's voice was that moaning, screaming? thought Cristi in the moments after they both tumble backwards and seek each other savagely now and then someone inside her laughs: It was me. Oh, dear Maker, what loveliness! Oh, how beautiful is a man!

But it was gone so quickly; over so soon. And she lay long, rousing, listening to the subsidence of her breath, hearing their two breaths falling to a common rhythm. Yet, curiously, still the shouting. Someone in the streets. She listened a moment to be sure of it.

Who's that? he murmured, half asleep. Someone's out there yelling, Cris.

I'd go see, she whispered, but I don't think I can move.

It doesn't matter, he said drowsily. Let them yell.

She lay quiet a moment longer and then got up and went naked into the darkened parlor and listened at the window to the men below on the sidewalk. Jason fell asleep for a second. When he wakened it seemed like she had been gone for hours.

Cris?

But there was no answer. He struggled out of the sheets and went to the doorway and saw her pale figure on the studio couch. She held her head in her hands.

Cris, what's wrong?

She shook her head quickly and mumbled something: he could tell she had been crying. He went over and sat down, laying his hand on her bare shoulder.

Cris, what is it? he said.

Oh, my God, she whispered. My poor little Jill.

Cris, what were they shouting? he said, shaking her shoulder till she turned to him.

Jason, I can't tell you, she sobbed. Give me a minute. I can't tell you. Not yet, Jason.

Cris, has something happened? he said.

She nodded fast, three times, started to cry again and made herself stop.

Cris, what is it? he shouted.

It's Cole Biake, she mumbled in a dumb trance. They found him shot to death on the Mound two hours ago.

Wide awake and staring indignant at the knifepoint of new moon which blazed in the edge of the windowpane, Dede Moonshine cursed among her quilts and struggled up. Someone was prowling yonder in her yard. Loud as a drum beat had been the stumbling bootfall on the oak planks which covered the cistern beneath Dede's rose of Sharon. Angrily she snatched her dentures from the bedside water glass and clapped them into her mouth. She glared at the window a moment, gumming them into place. At eighty-five Dede's eyesight was perfect. Yet it was her belief that when times came to rouse out of bed and search for prowlers in her yard she could see nothing without her teeth. She sat upright for a spell, grumbling, the cold plates warming in her jaws. Yonder in the kitchen the Welsbach mantel of the bubbling gaslight cast a faint dust of gold illumination: a light of softly greenish and submarine cast, as if that low-raftered chamber in her century-old Water Street house still kept within it the ghosts of river floods with which it had recurrently been filled throughout the obstinate invasions of more times than she cared to remember. Presently the old woman fetched from beneath her spooled bed the Delco lamp which she kept there close beside the flowered china chamber pot. She creaked out of the bedclothes.

Damn them sons of bitches! she croaked softly in the dimness. Damn them drunken Polacks! Drunken bastards stumbling home and mashing down my nasturtiums!

She darted the white beam of the torch before her across the rag rugs scattered about upon the cold, stone basement floor.

Who's yonder out there? shouted Dede Moonshine. Damn you—show your face!

In the open door, her old toes aching on the chill of the time-smoothed sandstone stoop, she stabbed the light beam helter-skelter through the tapestried wilderness of her dark: a white finger moving and bouncing up and down among her sunflowers and hollyhocks and the rose of Sharon.

By God, I see you, she lied to the livid moon. I know who you are, too! Now you just get your damned drunk Dago carcass up and out of my property 'gainst I go and phone for the law!

Still nothing spoke save the river wind, and no things moved but the dry, small scurry of fallen leaves which rushed, as if in close-ranked fright, across the sandstone flags of the dooryard.

Who's there? she cried again, and shivered in her heavy muslin nightdress for the river-wind was heavy with the chill of autumn water.

Answer me, damn you, or take to your heels! I've got a pistol here in my t'other hand and don't never think I'll not use it. Who's that yonder stomping down my mint bed?

And waited, listening to a jew's-harp far away down among the trailer camp on lower Water Street and heard the distant putt-putt of the ferry leaving Portsmouth on the river's Ohio shore. And cursing herself that her long dead brother Armph's government forty-five was back buried beneath yarn skeins and thimbles in the woven basket beneath her sewing machine. Still outrage was a comfort, more so than the Delco: it kept her warm. And she had had the sense, at least, to fetch her teeth. She cocked her head, harking. Maybe it had been only the banging of a loose shutter. She cursed again, switched off the light and stood a moment grumbling in the dark.

It was a sorry day, she said to herself, that I ever let out those upper rooms to that Sheriff and his queer girl Jill. It was like as not one of them.

And she moved back through the gaslight of her kitchen toward her bed again, cursing once more before she crept cautiously in among the quilts and glared with one eye at the insolent moon before she fell asleep.

A sorry, sorry day, said Dede Moonshine, and hugged the old quilts to her chin. Them derned outlanders! I should have knowed!

And now the house was virtually in darkness. All except that corner of the third floor back which was Jill's, a comer which she had made so especially hers that it seemed sometimes not to be part of the rest of the house at all, nor even of the world, but rather a refuge of solitude which she herself had created in space: the small gold of her single open window glowing up there in the riverfront dark. She rocked. Even after she had stopped crying she rocked, her slender naked toes thrusting back and forth against the floor, the prim folds of her nightgown swaying back and forth above her ankles, her fingers pressing the cheap pewter of the pic-

ture frame tight into her clothed breasts. The little white dog slept undisturbed on her cushion by the chest of drawers. Jill shivered. It was for the picture's sake that she had made herself stop crying: and for the sake of the little white dog BamBam. The glass of the picture was already gone from the frame and her tears had already blurred some of the pale colors that had been hand-tinted there once by a Mexican photographer in San Antone, Before the open window the chintz curtains stirred in the chill gusts of the autumn night, rising sometimes to stand like the gauze veils of frightened brides. In the vague dark beyond the window she could see the dim blossoms of the rose of Sharon. Earlier she had switched off the record player, stilling the dirge of the Cesar Franck; listening. Listening because she knew suddenly that a prowler beneath the big willow watched; squatting in the brush-filth of the darkness, his eyes fixed upon that yellow square of window. It could not be the wind, the river sounds. Somewhere beneath the willow's droop someone had come to watch, and after a bit Jill wished she had not turned off the music because, in that blank silence afterwards, there was no mistaking the twig-snap and remote rustle of the night-comer. The stifled gasp of her tears served, for a while, to keep her from hearing. And after that, the sentried whisper of her bare soles and the squeaking rocker's tread. Still she was certain someone was there; someone watching the gold oblong from a spying vantage point in the high grass of the dark yard beneath the willow and the rose of Sharon. She was scared. She was alone. Luther was away. In the depths of her feather tick in the basement's dank bedroom Dede Moonshine slept the sleep of the dead. Jill's feet desperately pushed the rockers back and forth. She pressed the picture closer as if its quaint face, indefinite beneath the Mexican's tints, its face stilted and foolish, might give her reassurance. She lifted it away from her breast and searched its image again. Somehow that made her feel worse, sicken-ingly worse: one tear splatter had given that face of long-past, gala innocence a leer of dissolute and corrupt drunkenness. To see that special face this night that way was surely no comfort. And the prowler now, it seemed to her, sensing her panic, moved yonder among the polk-weeds more brazenly, indifferent of being heard.

It was a clear fall night with a sliver of new moon among a drift of scudding clouds. Jill wondered why she did not turn her light out and go to bed, not to sleep but to lie there

for a while until her eyes had learned the dark and she could steal to the sill and peer down through the rose of Sharon and the willow's hair. She might see the man's shape; there might perhaps be moon enough to see his face. But darkness in that room would be, she knew, suddenly full of him. She would sit him out instead, in the light, in the challenge of wakefulness. She fingered the riddle of who he might be, of why he had come, of what he meant to do. It would be easy enough to come into the house: Dede Moonshine never latched her doors.

Who's there? she whispered to the stillness and to herself as if, in that hush, any voice, even her own, might be a sound of restored confidence.

She made her eyes go round the room among her treasures, hoping to distract her thoughts into the illusion of indifference: her little sleeping dog, her books, her record player, her Manolete posters and the framed glossy of the young film star who died violently in the neverland, faraway and glamorous phrase of Paso Dobles. That room, asylum above the spoiled earth of man and the star-crossed streets of his disenchantment: it had always been the one niche of all the universe in which she could be she, be JiU. A hinge whispered. She got up slowly from the rocker, put the framed picture back among the others ranked across the length of the vanity's buckling, crazed veneer, faces galleried like a box of mismated, smiling jurors summoned to hear the case for Loneliness, poorly argued; and fetched the night-robe which was draped across the jail-bars of the brass bed's foot; moving with the stiff, studied languor of someone badly scared: sitting on the spindled chair before the vanity's tall pier glass she began to do her mouth in careful lipstick strokes and when she had finished she slipped her cold feet naked into the whorish high heels which none but those pictures' pasteboard eyes had ever seen her wear: doing these daytime, goodtime rituals as if these had the power to dispel the night-comer, or, at least, her consciousness of his being there; as if, moreover, these gestures might somehow contradict her evening's grief and her stunned horror of the past night's nightmare, smiling back, at last, at the sickly pale image, twin of her spirit, the girl behind the glass as frightened as herself. In the old house somewhere the timber of a joist cried faint as a winter cricket.

Cole's dead, she thought in a grind of quickened anguish; no, whoever in the world crept lightly forward in the dark

and universal yonder it was not Cole: Cole's dead, oh God, dead Cole forevermore. And the eyes of the girl beyond the scarred, time-scorched silver of the pier glass scared as she, livid as milk behind the blood red bow of new-made mouth, more scared somehow than she and no comfort at all. Not Cole, oh God, not Cole; no, nevermore. And this time it was not a sound she heard but somehow somewhere, in the damp rooms below or on the ancient staircase, a subtle shift of the silence itself and this infinitely more dreadful. Humming, she got up and went to the Httle record player, switched it on, Hstened to the small sing of warming tubes. Darling Cole, she said within, dearest Cole, and all her memory of him verified and borne upwards, soaring on the bird-wing rise of the D-Minor. Oh God, the best and dearest among them all—most cherished of them all. And now him dead. And yet, she thought in a moment's instant shame of thinking that, dead Cole more safely irreproachable than living Cole. Ghost of Cole hfted at last above the nasty insistence, the endless, physical arguments that she give him that unforgivable giving.

Her feet had grown warm now in the cold pumps. The face of her In the mirror shone pink. Her smile was real. She told herself suddenly that she had imagined the sounds of the prowler's foot. The little dog would have heard and awakened. There was no one yonder in that tenebrous hush: no one but the river-wind, the scuttle of fall leaf, the old house stirring, like Dede Moonshine, in the memoried turn of innocent and aged hearts' rumor: old houses like old women restive in their sleep. Jill was alone. Only Cole, purified, had come that night to share with her. Fear had gone; there remained only the bittersweet of two-faced grief. She felt as if she had, at last, earned the pleasure of a good cry. Not yet. For now a smoke would be second best and so, lighting a cigarette, she tucked her robe close about her and sat on the stool by the stUl window's darkness, feeling the sweet season's cool good-by kiss upon her face, smelling the river and the smoke of summer leaves. Cole. Oh, Cole gone. Cole finest of them all and yet something in him like them all. Why had he not been different; why must that snakish, turgid hunger always rise? She watched the blue smoke coil out milkish from her rounded lips. And thought, seeing it curdle in the dark above the sill, that if smoke were liquid it would look Uke that: that sickening manstuff that they always wanted to spoil you with. Why? The tip of the ciga-