The Watchman (18 page)

Did you just hear how he talked to me? I ne-ever! A body tries to be friendly and Christian with one of their kind and look how they serve you. A convict, tool Did you hear what he said? I declare!

Captina! droned the bus driver. You folks want off here?

A long, tight, edgewise sidling for these two then through half the bus' length; the doors tipped folding in, hissing, open, and Jason and the girl stepped down into the oceaned dark

of moonrise country night. And then alone in that profound, still freshness: the bus gone growling south in a reek of fume: the convicts and their unsparingly charitable and well-wishing inquisitors borne off to their already sorted and star-fixed lots. Idling, unhurried and, for the moment, unpursued, they walked, unspeaking and among no sound but that country silence, the soft and wordless flow of wind, the gritty whisper of their kicking, lazing shoes along the crushed shale of the road's edge. The moon, as if provoked by faint and distant hound barks behind the quilted, sleeping farms, had moved out from the high-ridge apple boughs and stood now above the river.

In the dark, said Jill suddenly, you can be anyone you like.

He smiled at that, grunting agreement for the reason that he did not understand it.

Who would you like to be? he said.

Oh, first of all Me, I guess, she said uncertainly. But things get bad sometimes and that's never good enough somehow. And so I find a dark like this where I can be whoever I like. Maybe so that I can be the someone-else that people I want to will understand and love me and take care of me.

It's Jill I love, he said, and swallowed his heart back quickly to the place from which it had bounded up at the thought that he had never told her that before.

Sometimes, she said strangely, I like her—I've never loved her—not Jill. And so in the dark I can be the someone I always knew would be loved no matter what she did—no matter if she did something unspeakable and heartless—like dying. Mama. In the dark I run my hands across these lovely old clothes I wear—I touch my hair and my cheeks with my fingers and run my hands along my genteel wrists and I really and truly become her. Mama.

You're Jill, too, he said. More Jill than anyone else.

No. It's a strange magic, Jason, she said, heedless. I really believe that if someone had eyes that could see me in the dark when that feeling comes over me—they would not see me, at all. They'd see Mama. Mama's clothes, her eyes, her hair, the way she moved. And when I feel like I'm Mama, Jason, I never want the light to come and spoil it—a lying light in which I only look like me. Because, Jason, inside me —I am Mama. I'll always be. That's why you should try to understand poor Daddy a little more.

I'll try, he murmured lamely, and pushed from his mind the sudden thought of scissored courthouse letters pasted into a

menacing conundrum of origins, driving from his mind the momentary vision of something deadly beneath all Cristi's nice, fragrant laces. And Jill seemed to sense someone in his thoughts.

Why did Cristi try to stop you tonight, Jason? she said, and he could feel the smile on her face by the sound of the shape of her words.

Jealousy, 1 reckon, he said. What else would it be?

Goodness! she chuckled, pleased suddenly, and yet she had known the answer he told her before she asked. Will wonders never cease!

She was industriously silent for a while; he could sense her wits working quickly behind a frown of racing concentration.

Is Cristi in love with you, Jason? she asked, disingenuously, for it was one of the indestructible certainties of Jill's curious and sensory logic that her sister was incapable of love; yet still she could not ask Jason what the question really was intended to tell her, if he was in love with her sister.

Cristi and me, he said cautiously. The thing between us j was never like it is with you and me, Jill. At least, not as far as my feelings are concerned.

Was, Jason? she said softly. Does that mean you and Cristi are finished?

We had a talk, he began. I guess so. If you want it to be.

Now she was quite silent for a long shuffling while, cunningly, most secretly silent, kicking her shoes along through the shale.

But, Jason, she said presently. I don't want it to be.

You want me to keep on seeing Cristi? he said.

Yes, she said.

And seeing you at the same time? he said.

Yes, she said.

Don't you have a funny feeling about things being like that though? he blurted, his reason now in full rout.

Why should I? she said airily, and kicked a big stone flying into the polkweeds on the berm.

Then you must not care about me at all, he said miserably. Not even a little.

Yes, but I do, she said warmly. That's what you can't understand, I suppose. Jason, you don't know it but in the httle time I've had to get to know you, I like you more even than I liked Cole Blake.

And that, whatever else it might have meant or done, came

like a shadow against him, a cold and unforgiving shade that, for the moment, seemed to dim her luster, to hide from his eyes her shiningness.

You can't mean that, he said. I don't even like to hear you say that, Jill.

Why shouldn't you? she said. Tell me why?

Well, because Cole was something else to me, he said. Different from anyone! Cole was everything good I ever believed in. He was things I couldn't be if I lived to be three times my father's age. So when you say you like me more than Cole it makes me feel like I was cheating him out of something. And after he's dead, too, which makes it worse. Or else it makes me think you just haven't gotten to know me for what I really am.

Oh, I know you, Jason, she said softly. I know you very well. I know both of you.

What do you mean exactly? he said. Both of who? Both me and Cole?

No, she said. The both of you that is you. Like I knew the both of Cole that was Cole. Everybody's two people, Jason. Two people—as if they were split down the center. Cole. Yes, Cole. There were nights when he was the Cole I loved and wanted him always to be: wanting to be with me for the clean, good reasons: poems and music, beauty and love. And then, maybe the very next night, he'd be that other Cole. I could tell by his face when I'd see him walking toward our window through the dusk of Lafayette Avenue. And I'd cringe and curl up like the scared, angry baby armadillo Daddy let me keep when I was little in Texas. Because I'd know it was the wrong Cole coming to me that night—the Cole who couldn't keep his hands off me, the Cole who kept whispering awful things to me and my head would start to ache till I saw black stars bursting. And I'd hardly know he was even there I'd be so mad and scared.

Cole loved you, Jill, he said.

The good Cole did, she said. But the other one didn't. You can't love people and want to do things to them that will make them horrible and dirty and maybe even die!

She seemed so affrighted at the rememberance of that twinned vision that she lengthened her strides and moved on ahead of him several yards, then stopping to wait for him to catch up, while she stood with her arms dangling sadly by her sides, staring off downriver to the lights on the locks of

Dam Fourteen. And when he took her fingers and squeezed them, she shuddered.

Always pawing me, she murmured. Always whispering to me, begging me, and there didn't ever seem to be any way to put him off the subject—nothing that he could ever believe was No. But then, she said, more gently, there was the other Cole. And that was the one I loved.

And are there two Jasons, Jill? he asked. Sure, she laughed softly. And that's why I don't mind. Because I have the one that's best—the gentlest, sweetest one —the lovely one that understands me. And the other me? he said.

She picked a seared, dry stem of grass and took it jauntily in her teeth, swaying on ahead of him a ways once more.

Cristi takes care of him, she laughed. It's the only nice thing she ever did for me!

He stayed a moment away from her, not wanting to get too near her until the frightening feeling passed: unreasonable, savage and unaccountable it had come and kindled in him like a fever because of what she had said: the first strong surging want, in full ferocity, that he had ever felt toward her physically. Oh Lord, he thought. Don't let me spoil it all now. Make me stop feeling that about her. Because it's not like that with her and me—I won't let it be. Because she is right—it would be wrong. Even Cole should have known. He stood stock-still with his eyes closed, waiting for it to go, and started when he felt her hands suddenly fold round his: she had slipped swiftly to where he waited in her wake, and now he could see her face uptilted and smiling in the moonshine: something of tease and beauty and tantalizing ambiguity: all of it there in her upraised face, flashing there in the sea deeps of her great and black-lashed eyes, playing there like the paws of kittens at the corners of her lips.

Kiss me, Jason? she whispered.

He stood looking at her mouth a moment, her lips now shaped for his and her eyes closed, her whole face and self raised. He suffered and wanted to run. But then quickly he kissed her lips with a quick, light, brushing shiver, as he might anemically, at twelve, have kissed his first partner at Miss Lydia's Dancing School.

Daddy was away all day, she said suddenly then, striding ahead with her back to him, kicking the weeds and striking, as she passed, the steel-blue blossom tops of the iron-weed

with her stick. He went down the river to Marietta on the Ohio side.

Something to do with the chase? he said.

No, she said.

What did he go for? he asked.

Oh, to buy something he needs in his job, she said idly. I guess you could say it has to do with the case. I know it was something he hated buying. I know how his face looked when he told me he was going down there this morning. Sometimes when Daddy's got to do something he hates his face looks forty years younger—like a baby you want to comfort.

What was it he had to buy? Jason said, now making talk with her indifferently.

A new gun, she said.

A new gun?

Yes, she said. He lost his old one. Just day before yesterday. You should have seen him when he found out. It was the day after poor Cole's death and the execution of that man and Daddy was all upset enough anyway. And then on top of it all—and with everyone in Adena saying disgusting, mean, slanderous things about him not tending to his job—^he lost his gun. Isn't that really pathetic, Jason?

Where did he lose it, Jill?

I don't know. He just lost it, that's all, she said with a shrug and broke a milkweed pod with a slash of her stick, filling the moon-bright air with a drifting cloud of lustrous, shimmering-white fluffs, sailing down the wind like an elfin flotilla. Maybe, she said, he left it somewhere—maybe it fell out of his holster. Lord knows, maybe someone stole it. He was awful worried, I know. And hating to buy another one— a new gun: I think he'd rather go out somewhere and cut off a finger. Not for the money's sake either. But because he hates guns so.

Jason felt his eyes hot, veiled; his thoughts hurrying round the stage of his mind, scurrying to hide behind painted trees, then scuttling away to hide again behind a painted rock.

Come on, he said, pulling her hand. Let's go down to the Dam and see if they're there tonight.

Who, Jason? she cried, smiling up at him now with her great, wide velvet-violet eyes.

The ones who've been here longer than the rest! he cried. Longer than us—than anyone.

Who? Who? she laughed, running after him, now racing in

high bounds down through the mist-moist timothy and Queen Anne's lace of the meadow.

Guess! he cried, taunting. It's a riddle, Jill! Guess their names and I'll give you a kiss for free!

Who? Who? she shouted. Oh, Jason, you're the world's worst old tease!

The Pittsburgh towboat, herding her ordered brood before her; black steel barges like a line of children nudged by an anxious, gasping mother down along the glittering street, had moved into midstream and downriver now, blowing her claxons for the tricky bend and feeling for the channel with her radar-cunning, and the squawking voices of her ship-to-shore. The massive concrete of the lock-wall shone white as a promenade before them. It was cold there: the water gave up a liquid emanation, a chill of invisible and deep, motionless dark. They stood, fingers laced, breathless and breathing in the watery air like a dippered coolness from a winter cistern, watching the diamond-flash of moon and searchlight flutter crystals on the wind-roughed riffles of the stream. Jason stood spellbound; she felt the shiver of his hand and knew it for wonder and not chill.

Look yonder, Jill, he said suddenly. There by the dam-gate. Where the light sparkles on the waves. Did you see it?

Oh no! she cried, disappointed. Oh, Jason, what was it?

There, he said. Another one. There's more! See! They rise and show their faces for a minute and then dip plunging back like they say the dolphins do. There!

Jason, I saw\ she cried out. What was it? That ugly, awful face! What was it?

Why, the catfish, he said. The big—the ancient catfish.

Oh, Jason, they're so homely —wide thick lips and big rubber whiskers on their heads! Jason, look! Oh, there! Did you see?

She shivered now in a real chill that was more than the cold of those remembered seas, and the tugging, watered gusts of the river's winds.

Always, said Jason. They've been here always. Since the beginning. Since the oceans went away, I guess.

Think how proud they'd be if they could know\ she gasped. Oh, what awful snobs they'd be. Worse than those old rich Catletts up on Crystal Street, I'll bet!

And then they fell silent, at the brink of the concrete wall, at the brink of something far more, peering over the edge into the fathomed, mist-wisping blackness of millen-

niums and the immeasurable infinities of epochs which total the long sum of millenniums. Almost without sound, a breaking upwards, a hurled handful of moon-bright crystal drops, the blunt, Silurian faces lifted for an instant to the shine, the barest ripple, and the big backs, scaleless and smooth, arcing for a moment as if in immemorial ritual, before they sank plunging noiselessly beneath the waves again.