Harvestman Lodge (33 page)

“Wow! And this is the guy who took a key to my car’s paint job.”

“You need to look out for him, Eli. So do I. Most likely nothing will really happen – I’ve noticed worst-case scenarios almost never come about – but even so … ”

“I’ll be watching for him. Even though I wouldn’t know him if I saw him.”

“Look his picture up from his football days. Or look at just about any other Parvin whose picture you might find. They all have a similar look about the eyes, the men, anyway.”

“The sports guys probably have images of him in a file. Believe me, I’ll find out what he looks like. If he ever comes my way, I want to know it’s him.”

THEY CONSIDERED A STOP for coffee, but having had some at the meeting and also being hesitant to give Rawls Parvin a chance to confront them if he happened to be following, decided to go on directly to Eli’s apartment. As he pulled into his drive, he pondered the odd and utterly unanticipated experience of having his girlfriend come home with him, with no indication yet she had any intent of leaving.

He stopped the car and was about to open the door when Melinda said, “Eli.”

“Yes?”

“I realize my coming home with you like this is probably not something you anticipated.”

“It wasn’t, no.”

“Not for me, either. And even though it’s kind of awkward, I owe it to you to make sure you understand what’s going on here. And what isn’t.”

She could have stopped at that point and he would have already gotten the message. She was going to tell him that she was coming to his place for the sake of their mutual protection, not for any kind of consummation of, or “next step in,” their relationship.

“Okay, go on,” he said.

She told him, in cautious and gentle terms, exactly what he’d expected to hear. This was to be an evening of prudence and not prurience, caution and not carnality. He smiled and nodded and told her he understood, hoping he was hiding his disappointment. Given her dedication to her values, he wasn’t sure what detrimental effect it might have on her attitude toward him to realize he was perfectly willing to have an intimate relationship with her, traditional values be damned. She wasn’t a typical post-sexual revolution young woman, as Allison had been, and if he wanted to be with Melinda, he would have to remember that and follow her standards, not his own.

So he said a line he’d picked up in a junior high sex education course: “Some things are just worth waiting for,” he told Melinda like a true good little boy.

She leaned over from the passenger side and gave him the best kiss she’d given him yet. “Wow,” he said. “A kiss like that could be enough to change my mind about waiting.”

She took it as a joke and laughed. “I know what you mean,” she said. “Me too.” That was as far as it went.

Oh well,
Eli thought.
Like they say in that Christmas special, there’s always tomorrow for dreams to come true.

They exited the car, and at the same moment noticed a pickup truck passing on the street. Slowly.

A car coming the other direction caught the truck in its headlights and for a couple of seconds illuminated the face of the driver. He was looking at Eli and Melinda with the most intense and glaring gaze Eli had ever seen on a human countenance.

Melinda said, “It’s him, Eli. That’s Rawls Parvin. He followed us.”

Chapter Nineteen

ELI SPENT MOST OF the night in a chair beside a darkened window that gave him a good view of the driveway and some of the road. It had been a long day and he was tired, but the jolt of having actually seen Rawls Parvin’s hateful face overwhelmed his need for sleep. For the first hours, anyway.

When Rawls Parvin failed to come back, when no heavy foot sounded on the outside stairs or kicked in the door, guard duty became dull and stupifying. When morning came, Eli awakened to find himself no longer on the chair by the window, but stretched out on the sofa, still fully clothed except for shoes. Melinda, also clothed, was asleep beside him, her arm across his chest. He was so surprised he jolted up and nearly tumbled both of them off the sofa like silent movie comic actors.

Melinda for maybe two moments also seemed perplexed by their situation, but she fast pulled herself and her thoughts together.

“Rawls never came back,” she said. “And you went to sleep in that chair and looked so pitiful all slumped over there that I decided to get you to the couch. Yesterday was a long day. You needed your rest.”

“How did you get me over here?”

“I carried you.”

“No you didn’t. No way.”

A laugh. “I shook you about one-quarter awake and persuaded you to come to the couch by telling you I’d lie down with you. You kind of sleep-walked over and collapsed. You looked kind of … I don’t know, abandoned, lying there. So I just lay down beside you for a few minutes, fell asleep instead … and now here we are.”

Eli rubbed his eyes and face. “At the moment I don’t think I even remember yesterday. Except for the Rawls Parvin part.” He mulled over the fact they had wakened in each other’s arms. “Melinda … did we … ”

“We’re both completely dressed, Eli. No, we didn’t do anything except fall into a dead sleep.”

“Well, I never have been that good at recognizing and taking advantage of life’s opportunities.”

“If you’d tried, I’d have slapped the crap out of you, and you know it, big boy.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Eli shook his head fast, trying to come back to life. “Funny … yesterday is such a blur. And last night is mostly a blank. You’re absolutely sure we didn’t, you know for sure that … ”

“Eli, I hate to think that you believe something like that could have happened and you’d describe the memory of it as a ‘blank.’ Surely I’d make for a more memorable experience than that!”

“Yes indeed.” He looked down at his rumpled, day-old, fully intact clothing. “Yeah. It’s obvious. We did nothing.”

“You have coffee, my dear window guardian?”

“Upper shelf near the sink. The coffee maker is on the counter.”

“Be a happy little ray of morning sunshine and make us some, then. Fortunately we woke up early enough to get ready for the day.”

“What will you wear? Your clothes are as rumpled as mine.”

“Do you have an iron?”

“A hand-held steamer. Bathroom closet. My iron burned out three weeks ago.”

“I’ll steam out what I’ve got on and wear it again. If anybody notices I’m wearing the same thing I had on yesterday, it’ll just have to be put down as one of life’s little mysteries.”

“You’ll need to take those things off if you’re going to steam them. May I help?”

“You never quit, do you! I can handle it all myself, in the bathroom, with the door closed. That’s the steamiest thing that’s going to happen here today, my friend: me steaming the wrinkles out of my clothes.”

“Aren’t your folks going to wonder why you didn’t come home last night?”

“I called home from the extension in the kitchen last night, late, and told Mom I was at Amy’s house. You’ve heard me talk about Amy, right? My good friend? It’s not uncommon for me to stay over at her house, or her to stay at mine. I’ll talk to Amy today and bring her into our little conspiracy. She’ll go along.”

Eli, for the moment having had the fears and tensions of the prior night mostly washed away in the sunlight of morning, grinned at his girlfriend. “Can’t I tell people I slept with you?” he asked. “Because, technically, snoring on the same couch with you has to count as – ”

“You most certainly cannot say you slept with me.”

“But we just now woke up together, so … ”

“Eli … ”

“I know. I know. I was just kidding anyway.”

“We’ve got a working day ahead,” Melinda said, glancing at her watch. “We’d best get started. You want the shower first?”

“We could save time and water if we both – ”

“Oh my gosh, Eli. Give it a rest. Please!”

“I wish you weren’t so straight-arrow, Melinda. Would it really by the worst thing in the world if … ”

“Not going to happen, so shut up. You want the shower or not?”

“You go first. You’ll need more time to dry your hair and all that. Fresh towels and cloths are in the linen closet just inside the bathroom. Go ahead and get started … I’ll make the coffee.”

Five minutes later, Eli was pondering the very bizarre reality that, in his own bathroom at that very moment, one of the most beautiful young women in the entire region, one in love with him at that, was taking a shower. And all he was doing with that situation was sitting and drinking coffee.

“Time to turn in my Man Card,” he muttered to the kitchen table.

NO FURTHER DAMAGE HAD BEEN done to the Rambler out in the driveway overnight, and Melinda’s Bronco was still safely parked where she’d left it in the church parking lot, untouched except for a knockout rose tucked beneath one wiper blade. It had been taken from a bush in a nearby yard. “Rawls used to do that when we were dating,” she told Eli as she flung the rose away like it carried disease. “He’d leave me flowers on my windshield like this. It seemed kind of sweet at the time. Now it just gives me a chill.”

Eli stared at the rose lying on the pavement. Deliberately he walked over, put his foot on it and ground it into red and green fragments.

“We’re not going to let him ruin what we have,” he told Melinda. “We’re not going to let some low-life get control of our lives and divert our attention.” He pointed at the key scratch on his car. “And he’s going to make that right. Somehow or another I’m going to see to that.”

“Don’t get into a war with Rawls Parvin, Eli. He’s the kind to do whatever it takes to win. He was sacked in a game once, and the guy who did it talked trash to him. He found out where the guy lived, went to his town, and slashed two of his tires with the car parked right in the guy’s driveway. After it was all over with Rawls and me, I started learning things about him and his people, things my friends hadn’t wanted to tell me because I had liked him. Even Amy, my best friend, knew some things. After the breakup, she admitted to me she’d been keeping a close watch on Rawls and me, looking for any sign that he might have hurt me. She told me she had learned, from people she trusted, that Rawls had taken part in the gang rape of a girl, and probably more than one.”

“You think that was true?”

“Amy was completely confident of it, and she’s a tough-minded person, not a gullible easily-misled type. The rape she said she was most confident of having really happened had been a molestation engineered by older cousins and uncles of Rawls. His father, too. A real family party, huh? They lured a naïve Minnesota teenager, a black girl, away from her family’s campsite at the Israel Kincheloe Birthplace Park State Historical Area. They used liquor and pot and flattery and their own version of ‘Southern charm’ to bait her. After they were done with her they turned her loose near the campground after and made her vow never to tell what had happened, because they had kin in Minnesota who would hunt down her family and kill them all. One phone call would do it, they told her. Apparently the girl was gullible and kept quiet, because nothing official ever came out of the rape incident. No arrests, police reports, charges, investigations. But word got out here via the redneck grapevine … you know, macho hillbilly drunks bragging to each other in bars about what big, virile men they are.”

“And Rawls was involved in this? No question about it?”

“He was definitely involved, according to Amy. Though apparently it was his father and one of his uncles who were the ring leaders, so to speak.”

“Do you think it might be just rumors, the kind of talk people spread about families with poor reputations?”

“Maybe. But after the way Rawls attacked me right in my own home, even though I was someone he cared about, I don’t doubt he could have done worse to a girl who meant nothing to him.”

“Personal question, I know, but do you think Rawls actually had it in mind to outright rape you that night your father walked in on him and you?”

“No doubt at all about it. The evidence was right out in the open, so to speak.”

Eli said, “Okay … I get it. And I have to say, hearing that makes me wish your father had shot Rawls in the head instead of the leg.”

Melinda shuddered. “I’ve heard my dad say the same thing, when he’s thinking about it. So I’ll tell you the same thing I tell him: I understand and, in a way, appreciate the sentiment behind that wish, but if he’d killed Rawls it would have been something never to be gotten past the rest of his days. There would have been consequences, legal ones and otherwise, with lifetime ramifications. I’d not have wanted Rawls killed. That’s not the way my mind works.”

“You’re mature beyond your years, Melinda,” Eli said very sincerely. “A lot of people in situations like that forget to think with their brains and start following impulses and emotions and preconceptions.”

“You’ve just described my father.”

It was a perfect opportunity to ask the question that had been hanging in Eli’s mind for too long. “Melinda, why have you not had me over to meet your parents?”

“You’ve noticed, huh?”