The Watchman (25 page)

Jill, don't wait. In a minute you'll change your mind, he cried, bending over her.

She turned her gaze to him, her face illumined and beautiful with fresh kindled resolution; yet still some darkness behind the wide, dilated pupils of her eyes suggested a savage effort at what her stumbling mind seemed now regarding as a last chance, a fevered, valiant thrust toward some terminal try for safety and love.

We'd hve together in a little room like this—just the two of us, she cried softly. With little pretty things set round on shelves and tables—things we both love. Mama's picture somewhere always where you could look at it and see me when I was gone to the store to buy things for our supper. Oh, Jason, I can vision it so clearly. Just the two of us— children living forever in a playroom full of love. We'd play games and tell stories and read great poems to each other and hear grand music on our little victrola. Jason, can you see it? You wouldn't mind Mama's clothes I wear, would you, Jason? I keep them so clean—and I mend them when the seams give or when they get holes. Would you, Jason? You wouldn't mind?

No, he said. You know I wouldn't mind. I wouldn't care what you wore.

Oh, but I'd always be dressed to look pretty, she said. I'd buy little scatter-pins and flowers so the old things would look different every day. Jason, we'd be like children in a playhouse all our own! And we'd fix a Uttle bed for BamBam to sleep in the corner where the morning sun comes in the window. She loves the light! Oh, Jason, I can see it.

And presently, he said, there'd be a new Jill for us to love. Maybe a new Jason. Would you name a boy for me, Jill?

A boy? she murmured. Jason, why would there be a boy with us? Jason, what do you mean?—a new Jason for us to love?

A baby, he said. Jill, we'd have a baby.

She turned her eyes to the picture on the dresser scarf, staring at it a moment, then seized her full lower lip in her white teeth and shook her head slowly.

Oh, no, Jason, she said. I don't see that at all. Oh, Jason, no! No! Never!

But, Jill, we'd be married, he said, sitting on the bed beside her. Jill, people who love each other always have that.

You don't understand, she said. Jason, no. That's not how it would be at all. We'd be together—Jason, children in a room our own. We'd love each other and be kind. We'd feed each other from our fingers and it would be love, Jason, love. It wouldn't—it couldn't be that, because that's not love! Jason, tell me you didn't mean that about babies. Oh, please, Jason. No.

He felt cold now; cold as she had been in the wind, in the light of the warmthless moon; but he shrugged and smUed, looking at her, shamed by the shame she was making him feel.

Jill, I just couldn't live in a room with you all the time, day and night, and not want to make love to you, he said.

I see, she said. Well, I see. Then it's not like I saw it then. Then it's not like that at all. Isn't there any boy on earth who could want to be with me like that?—in a room where we could love and sing and play with BamBam and tell each other stories by the windowsill on nights of moon?—just that —just love.

Jill, you're just frightened of it now, he said. I'd be so easy and gentle. I'd teach you.

Teach me what? she said in a voice suddenly softly harsh. Teach me what, Jason? To die?

No, Jill, he said. I'll be patient. We'd have time—you'd have years to learn. Not to die either, Jill. To learn to live. Something new and more wonderful than anything you ever dreamed.

No, Jason, she sobbed suddenly, and then her face resumed its mask of resolute control. Nothing wonderful— nothing new either. You're the same as all the others. And for a while tonight I thought you were different.

He stared at her an instant, bowed his head suddenly to place a swift kiss on her cringing mouth, and then got up and walked briskly back to the rocker.

It can be Uke you want, he lied. If you want, I'll make it the way you dreamed it. I won't touch you.

Oh, but I can't believe you now, Jason, she said.

I'll prove it, he said. Jill, come away with me and I promise I won't touch you for months. Not for as long as you want it like that. Jill, I swear never if you don't want me to. And if ever once I break my promise you can leave me.

He was sweating now, despite his chilled hotness: and every cell of his body ached and swelled with a scalding want. He felt ashamed. And the shame grew sharper when the thoughts which he could not restrain came goatish and lustful, leaping the fences in his mind.

He got up and went to the bed's edge again, looking down at her with his face fixed in a split visage of ambiguity: his lips trembling with love and tenderness while his eyes above were hot with the Janus contradiction of a furious and unappeasable affront.

You want a child to marry you, Jill. You don't even want a boy to marry you—much less a man. You want a child playmate in that little room somewhere. Jill, I'm not a child. I'm a man. You've got to learn that now.

He sat suddenly on the bedspread and leaned over her, touching her cold lips with his mouth, waiting, brushing them gently, waiting for some answering press, some warmth, though she did not move: no inch of her, her lips deathlike in a melancholy dream of shut-eyed wakefulness, and he waited still an instant more and nothing of her seemed to hve and hope rose in him then that when he pressed down, embracing her, that it would be a miracle of lifting Lazarus: and now his feeling nothing but her and his flesh leaping toward her hke a leashed and yearning ram toward his ewe in rut: his hands on her now, fumbling at the pathetic, antique pearl buttons of her close-clasped nightdress, her breasts warm on his finger-ends as he pried their tight ripeness jumping free from the cupped underclothes and pressed the cold, risen nipples in his palm.

Jason, my God my God my God, she wailed in a wind of sighs. No. Jason, don't make me die! And the preposterous pleats of her mother's ancient skirts now lifted and tumbling round her slender, clenched thighs and rounded loins and something in himself heedless now, hating himself now more even than that intransigence in her, something in him knowing that he was ruining it all forever between them both but his hands now moving at the petition not of mind but of some other and more heedless, remorseless insistence of wholly endocrine instruction. He heard the taut silk tear, felt suddenly against his fingers with a scalding freshened impulse her moist and cloven gender and the curled, fern-cool fleece of her mystery. When suddenly she seemed to

rouse and now her hands were tugging at his sleeves, seeming to him at first to draw him to her, so that he stopped, lifted his eyes to hers, saw them staring down at him, indifferently almost, uncaring any longer, he thought, but then she was whispering something, her eyes glazed in that limbo beyond the utmost infinities of dread. Then look at me there, she whispered, covering her face then with the backs of her hands, hiding her face's shame and horror from his seeing. Look at me down there. Yes, I mean it. See for yourself. And even lifting her hips from the bed and slipping her body down free from the bunched skirt-pleats so that he might see. Yes, she murmured. You can see them, can't you, Jason? They're still there—those white, ragged lines. They're scars, Jason. And he saw them, as Cristi had told it: the striated and livid web upon her flesh that a strike of lightning might have left: the branching, cicatrice web of them rising Uke a delicate, irregular lace beneath the pink quaking smoothness of her abdomen. Scars, she sobbed again, dry-eyed. And do you know who made them there?

Yes, he said quietly, his passion suddenly subsided beneath the chilled dousing of her icy grief.

No, you don't, she murmured into her knuckles. You couldn't know. It was Cole's fingers who made those scars on Jill. Oh, Jill remembers. Cole Blake's fingers that night she could not keep them away till it was too late and they tore the silk and then tore Jill. Well, are you satisfied now? Or does Jason want to make some more white scars there on Jill. They bleed at first but then they heal imtil they're white. Like a white crocheting down there. Let me up please. Excuse me, would you let me up?

He drew away in a misery and stunned, shameful sorrow, watching as she straightened her clothes, pressing the old, dark pleats down again across her knees and slender calves and rising from the bed, brushing past him as if she saw not him, nothing, lifting her fingers to re-order the tousled, spilling tresses neatly around her shoulders as if she were rising to meet a guest, moving now to the dresser by her mother's picture and humming sofUy to herself in the mirror; her smile belying the shackled frenzy in her eyes.

Cole did that to Jill, she murmured in a lilting singsong to him in the glass. Or was it only Cole? Weren't there three more? Sometimes Jill's memory's just so poorly she can't even manage the grocery Ust. Only Cole? Weren't there three more? Juanita could tell you but Juanita's gone to

Corpus Christi for the morning to shop while it's cool before the heat of the afternoon rises. My, my, these August days. Where's my Httle girl—my darling?

She smiled at him with the smirking, sluttish deference of a morning housewife teasing the iceman.

Mister, you mustn't mind my looks, she simpered, tucking a lock in place. I know my hair's a caution of a morning. My Mister's gone to Austin for some business or other and it's just me and my darhng little honeybaby home here and, of course, my jewel of a maid Juanita. She'll do my hair when she gets back this noon. I declare there's nothing that beats a half-breed Indian woman when it comes to maids and I don't mean one of them whores from the government reservations either. Don't mind my talk. Or does it shock you, Mister? Well now you just best get used to me for I'm purely outspoken and I hold with calling a spade a spade. It's true about them Zuni women though—half of them diseased with gracious knows what all. I'd not let one of them mop my patio. You likely know that though, being a gentleman who looks like he knows his way a little among women. Well now I don't mean indiscriminately, understand, but a lady can tell when a gentleman's been here and there and around. Or, naturally, I wouldn't be talking to you. Heavens, I wouldn't even let you sit on the edge of my bed if I thought you'd ever gone finagling round one of those Zuni whores. Juanita's clean and neat as a pin. You'll hkely meet her this very forenoon!

He watched, aghast, transfixed and silent: her fawn-shy primness vanished now and her body, in its fugue-Uke transition to almost instant, sensuous ease, swaying beneath her clothes in the movements of skillfully undecided invitation: yet rumorous of a confirmed and practiced boudoir expertise.

Jill? he somehow managed to breathe the name.

Jill? she answered with a brisk and earthy chuckle. I declare I don't know where that child's got to. My lands!—children these days—especially little girls. And especially little Jills. I swear that child's a worse vamp at four than most of those glamour-girl picture stars at thirty. She'll be in directly and you'll see with your own eyes. Jill? Oh, Jill? she yelled. She just will go play with those little Mexican kids down by the docks and there's just nothing I can do nor say to stop her. Well, I don't reckon it'll harm her any. I declare, there's not a drop in the house—Juanita'll be back this forenoon. I'd offer you something cool. Tequila? You fond of

tequila, Mister? What is your name now? Never mind it. No sense you telling me anyways. I declare, I'm the world's worst when it comes to names.

So that for this terrible interval, at least, Jason could not speak to her at all and could not move to touch her. He could only sit in baffled, stunned fascination: seeing her move now, speaking, gesturing and totally existent within the captivity of her hallucination as if forever she had been this illusory, troubled soul and not the reality: the fragile, stilted beauty of the girl he knew: as if this latter her had been a lengthy madness and the other had been her truth. Her voice now sometimes sniggering, cynical, now lowered to the murmurous, honeyed tones of wily, confiding enticement, now ragged and whining with vexation as if at some indecency imputed to her by the spying nastiness of neighbors. And yet for all its frightful authenticity he could perceive beneath it—perhaps no more than the frailest layer beneath it—the child playing its game and wholly believing the game: a Uttle girl in boas and outsized beaded dress, dainty feet in loose and clopping bedroom mules, her child mouth inaccurately smeared with lipstick as if she had been eating red candy, play-housing: though not as a little girl shut in on a rainy day might mime her mother in grown-up clothes but rather a child forced to present with horrible and depraved artistry the tawdry, strutting airs of an accomplished slut; a child-puppet helpless in the grip of a dybbuk-manipulation: the voice of Jill, the delicate and vestal Jill face and fingers, Jill bones and adolescent coltishness of Jill now become and being all that jaded and piteous du-phcity: every inflection, gesture and leer, each thrust of breast and adept roll of trim hips translated with exquisitely accurate and deadly precision into the whole nervous, mincing repertoire of a languid nymphomania. So that Jason could only watch and, watching, move from the initial dreadfulness of incredulity into an even finer torture: belief. Thinking at first that it was a mistake of his own senses, thinking next that it was a joke of her own invention, thinking then that it was a game of her unaccountable capricious-ness, finally reasoning that she was in the grip of some deranged and temporary hysteria. And thioking that, perhaps from seeing it once done in a film, got up and slapped her lightly across her babbling cheeks. She drew back smiling, touched the pink finger-marks with her hand, giggled.

Well now, I like a man, she said, who's just a httle rough

on a lady. Yes, I do. I wouldn't want no man beating me up though—blacking my eyes and marring my beauty. I declare, Juanita says I've got the most delicate complexion she ever saw. Now just look—

She bent a little and made mouths at her face in the glass.

—just look at them four little pink marks you made on me. They'll be there for a whole hour. That's how frag-ile my complexion is. I get the tiniest little bruise on my thigh and it's months before it fades. I just don't dare do heavy housework because of that. My husband's so particular—he says I got the most flawless white body he ever seen. Aren't you awful! Just look at those little red finger-marks you left. A whole hour it'll take for them to fade away. Unless, of course, you kiss them. Not that I'd let you, mind. But if I did, let's say. I know for a fact they'd go away in a minute. I'll bet you haven't the slightest idea how a woman's skin responds to affection. Well, now, you know what I mean by affection. I mean, you just look at so many of these young girls and married women these days—shadows under their eyes, all blotchy complected, well, now, it's all because of this terrible war: all the fine, strong young men off somewhere fighting in Italy and the Philippines and heavens knows where all, and those poor young girls and married women just not getting enough, to put it plain. That's why their skin's that way. It's just like it was tattooed right there on their cheeks in plain words: I'm not getting it steady. Oh, my. I sure wish Juanita was back. I could sure do with something tall and cool and tinkly. Are you comfortable? Why not loosen your necktie. I'm not the least bit stuck-up nor formal. Once you get to know me you'll find out I'm the frankest, easy-going creature the good Lord ever made. Oh, do be comfortable, Mister—Mister—Well, I declare, I never can keep names in this little featherbrain head of mine more than two minutes. Blake. That's it. Mister Blake. Are you comfortable, Mister Blake? Mister Cole Blake. My that's a sweet-sounding name. I declare, it just goes with you some-bow. Cole—like cold. And Blake—something so manly. My Mister's always telling me I'm too skinny. Thins the word he uses and I just can't abide it. You don't think I'm thin, do you? Honestly, now. Do you think I'm too skinny, Mister Hunnicutt?