Wild Midnight (34 page)

“Why isn’t somebody at that damned office you’ve got downtown?” he snarled. “Nobody answers the damned telephone, I had to go all over hell and gone looking for you.”
 

Rachel was stunned by the raw fury in his voice. He was drunk, fully dangerous. “What are you doing here?” she cried.
 

“Do you know what you’ve done to me?” He bit down on his words in a rage. “I’ve got people running bulldozers across my land. Harborside’s coming in that damned road right now. Tearing it up because of you!”
 

“Hey, man,” Til Coffee said. “Take it easy.”
 

“I didn’t do anything to you,” Rachel flung at him. She stared at him, seeing something more than drunkenness in his bloodshot eyes. There was pain.
 

Til Coffee stepped in front of Rachel. “Hey, Beau, lighten up, man. You need to go home and sober up.
 

“Get out of my way.” The words were deadly soft, only slightly slurred. “I’m losing everything because of her. She’s wrecked my life.”
 

“C’mon, Beau,” Til said. “She’s not your problem, man, leave her alone.” Out of the corner of his mouth he said to Rachel, “Why don’t you just ease on out of here?”
 

But Rachel couldn’t move. The beauty in that lean golden body was sullied, dirtied, but still there; it held her with a horrified fascination. How could he do this to himself? was all she could think.
 

Beau Tillson swayed, hands clenched in fists at his side.
 

“The hell she isn’t my problem. I can’t get rid of her, Til—I gave her away and she’s still here.” The glittering goldflecked eyes met the other man’s wary gaze. “I had her, I had her in my bed and I got everything I wanted,” he said ruthlessly. “She’s good. She’s even better than good, Til, but I can’t get rid of her. If you want her, I’ll give her to you.
 

Til’s amber eyes widened. “Man, are you crazy?” he breathed. His gaze slid to the group of farmers just beyond them. “You can’t say things like that.”
 

A hard drunken smile curled the corners of Beau’s mouth. “Share and share alike, Til, hell—we’re related. Don’t you want her? She’s the damned best I ever had.”
 

Rachel cried out as Til lunged for Beau. But the lean powerful figure sidestepped and swung his fist into his stomach. Til doubled up and went to his knees in the dirt. In the distance Loretha screamed.
 

The blow to Til’s belly had been reflexive, a brawler’s instinctive counter reaction. As Beau rocked back on his heels unsteadily, Til got to his feet. His left fist shot out and connected with Beau’s jaw. Beau’s head snapped back, his hat spinning away. He staggered a few feet and the heavier figure of the high school teacher followed him, dancing on the balls of his feet.
 

You should know better than to pick a fight with me, man,” Til said.
 

“You can’t take me, boy,” the other man snarled. “You never could.”
 

“Man, somebody’s got to do it, and it might as well be me. Beau, you got it coming.” Til spoke through clenched teeth. “And don’t call me
boy
—you know who I am.”
 

Loretha had come racing up. “Do something,” Rachel cried, whirling on her.
 

The black woman’s face was a scornful mask, huge black eyes wide. “Let them get it over with. I’m sick of it. Just let them half kill each other!”
 

“Oh, no.” Rachel moaned as Beau Tillson reeled away under the impact of Til’s blow to his face.
 

Beau’s mouth was bleeding. He was slightly taller than the teacher and his whipcord body was not as heavy, but he fought with an almost mindless savagery. Til followed him relentlessly, crowding his lightning moves and pounding him with body blows, trying to take him off balance.
 

There was a thick feel of blood and dust and excitement in the air. Rachel, looking around futilely for help, saw that even her mother was watching with an expression of rather stunned acceptance. The grunts of the two struggling men were met with the complete silence of the watching co-op’s farmers.
 

Beau’s responses were slowing. His hard face was covered with smears of blood from his broken lip. Til’s nose was bleeding, his shirt torn open in front and flapping around the waistband of his cutoffs. They moved like two grotesque dancers locked together, their arms around each other, bulging with tightly contracted muscles. Both men were breathing hard, and Til’s dark face was distorted with pain.
 

They maneuvered against each other, their boots kicking up dust in the powdery soil.
 

“I ought to kill you, Til,” Beau gasped. “You need killing, you black bastard!”
 

“Are you crazy?” The words were torn from Til’s throat in a wild roar. “Are you totally out of your crazy mind? Do you want to hurt somebody—you want to hurt
me—her?
” Whatever control remained in the black man gave way with a surge of blind rage. “Here, white boy—feel what it’s like!”
 

In a powerhouse swing that connected with Beau’s head and nearly took him off his feet, Til took the offensive. He charged, head down like an enraged bull, and smashed blows into the other man’s midriff, his powerful arms working like pistons. Beau’s knees sagged and he would have fallen except that Til drew him into his body with one arm and rained punches against his lower back and kidneys.
 

One of the white farmers broke from the group.
 

“Lift your hands, Beau,” J.T. Yonge shouted. He kept coming. “Don’t let him take you, son!”
 

The fighters turned as one, hanging onto each other. “Get the hell out of here, J.T.,” Beau gasped. “He’s my damned
brother
. He can beat on me if he wants to!”
 

The elder Yonge had stopped in his tracks. There was a complete silence as Beau laid a bloody forearm against Til’s neck and took a deep, unsteady breath. The other held him tightly to keep him from falling. “Til, I’m too goddamned drunk to fight,” he said thickly. “You better take me home.”
 

It had all stopped so suddenly that Rachel, both hands pressed to her mouth, was not quite sure what had happened.
 

“Hey ... hey, man.” Til could hardly speak, still gasping. “What do you want to start these things for?”
 

“How the hell should I know?” Beau Tillson shook his tawny head, trying to clear it. “I mean it, Til, I’m stinking drunk. Get me out of here.”
 

Their hard, good-looking faces were inches apart, noses almost touching, as they stared at each other. Til wrapped his arms around the other man’s body, supporting him now as his knees sagged.
 

“I haven’t been this damned drunk in a long time,” Beau muttered. “Not since after ‘Nam.” He lifted bleary eyes and searched the crowd, finding Rachel standing with Loretha’s hands clamping down on her arm to hold her steady. “Keep her away from me, Til.” His words were slurring heavily. “I don’t know what to do about her, she’s tearing me apart. I don’t know why in the hell she doesn’t go away and leave me alone. You understand?”
 

“Sure, man,” Til murmured.
 

They started toward the jeep, Beau’s feet stumbling over the rows. He was sagging heavily against the arm around his shoulders, which held him up.
 

“I’m going to get an injunction,” Beau’s harsh, drunken voice floated back to them. “Close off that road to everybody.”
 

“Yeah, Beau,” Til said patiently.
 

Loretha finally let go of Rachel’s arm. “I just wish they’d get it out of their systems,” the black woman muttered enigmatically. “But they’re not going to do it, not ever, honey, at least not as long as they stay here.”
 

Rachel was hardly listening. She was still trembling. Violence always upset her, she abhorred the very idea of it. She couldn’t understand a tenth of what had happened, it had all seemed to explode like a violent low-country thunderstorm around them. There were blood spots in the dust, she realized, staring at the trampled ground where the fight had taken place. She had never really seen a fistfight before, not a real one—she couldn’t even bear to watch boxing matches on television. She was almost in tears.
 

The jeep was leaving the field, Til driving, Beau slumped down beside him with his hat drawn over his face, long legs and knees in dirty jeans propped against the dashboard.
 

“Yes,” Loretha was saying as Elizabeth Goodbody came up to join them, “I gotta get that man out of here. Anybody with eyes can see why.”
 

Chapter Nineteen

“Life is not as uneventful here in the South as one might be led to expect,” Elizabeth Goodbody observed as Rachel’s Toyota turned into the access road to the DeRenne County airport. “In fact it’s been rather hectic.”
 

“How is your sunburn, Mother?” Rachel asked dutifully.
 

“Oh, I feel quite warm and flushed, but otherwise I suppose I’ll live.” Her mother paused, carefully considering her words. “I shall write Deenie Butler and tell her I saw her daughter in Draytonville and that I like that nice young man, Jim Claxton. When do you think they will get married?” she asked pleasantly.
 

“Right away, from what D’Arcy says.” She had to admit she was relieved that her mother was returning to Philadelphia. But she knew she would miss her, and miss her even more when she considered all the work that remained to be done, all the loose ends to be tied up in the coming weeks. She didn’t quite know how she was going to handle it alone. “After all these years D’Arcy says she’s not taking any chances. She’s a very determined person, Mother. I think we tend to miss that because D’Arcy covers it so well, but the underlying strength is there.” She had to smile. “She’s going to rule Jim Claxton with an iron hand. And he loves it.”
 

From what she was able to gather from an excited D’Arcy, Admiral and Mrs. Butler had wanted to fly in from Manila and arrange an elaborate wedding that would take several weeks, if not months, preparation. But this had been rejected by D’Arcy and Jim in favor of a small, quick ceremony in historic St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in the heart of Old Charleston. One of Jim’s brothers was getting leave from the Marine base at Parris Island to act as best man, and Sissy would be maid of honor since Rachel regretfully declined because of the co-op’s expanding work.
 

“And the young teacher and his wife, what a nice young couple,” her mother went on. “Do you suppose they will be at the wedding too?”
 

“I guess so,” Rachel said, pulling the Toyota up close to the airport parking lot ticket machine and drawing a stub of pasteboard. “If Til can get away from his work for a day or two to go to Charleston. Things are a little up in the air right now. Billy Yonge tells me he saw Loretha and Til going out together Saturday night and they had their little boy with them. What an explosive day that was,” she said, remembering, and not wanting to go any further. There was no need to discuss again what had happened after Beau had appeared.
 

Rachel pulled the station wagon into a parking slot in front of the airport’s main terminal, a corrugated steel Quonset hut of World War Two vintage, and cut the engine. They still had forty-five minutes until her mother’s connecting commuter flight to Charleston; Elizabeth Goodbody was nothing if not prompt, always.
 

“Rachel, dear,” her mother said, looking down at her hands in her lap. “I feel that you do not think I am experienced with the sometimes turbulent affairs of the heart, and how passion can turn the world on its ear. But surely by now you must know differently. These are all such nice young men and women, I am not at all”—she hesitated—”censorious. Do you understand that?” She reached to pat her daughter’s hand quickly. “Let me tell you something, dear. Many years ago, when your father and I were engaged to be married, I think he was convinced that I regarded him as sweet and loving, but frankly, a little dull. Of course he was, Rachel, in a manner of speaking, but it pained me to know that this could bother him, since he had so many other admirable qualities that would make one love him. Well, one night quite late, your father climbed the trellis to my bedroom window at your grandfather’s summer house in Rose Glen. He was rather a heavy, strong young man, and actually the rose trellis was quite rickety and I don’t know to this day why the whole thing didn’t collapse with him. It was all very innocent, Frank had only planned to sit on the side of my bed and talk, but he’d wanted to do something I would regard as very romantic and dashing. And I suppose it was—I was frightened out of my wits to see him come climbing through the window like that.” Her mother lifted her head, her expression abstract. “Of course, things never turn out as planned. One thing led to another, and to make a long story short, your father spent the night. I still can’t say that I regret it, Rachel, it was lovely. But unfortunately we fell asleep, and in the morning my family was up and stirring and there was no way to get him out of the house without causing a terrible commotion. So we had a moment of silence together to examine our hearts and our resolve. Frank was terribly determined and sweet, and shored me up tremendously—I was quaking like a leaf. Then I brought him down to breakfast. Naturally we had a ... a commotion of sorts, but at least it did have one large benefit. When we could get your grandfather calmed down he insisted we have our intentions read in Meeting immediately, and we were married the very next month instead of being engaged a whole year, as your grandfather had demanded originally.”