“Young women just getting by don’t keep imported beer at home unless a man buys it for them. That’s the professor’s Tuborg, isn’t it?”
“What if it is?”
“I think he’s a predator.”
She took another sip from the bottle. “Here we go again.”
“You told him you were fired?”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes going away from mine.
“Did he want to talk to your employer?”
“Like I said, it wouldn’t do any good. It would just cause harm.”
“Did he ask if he could?”
“No.”
She went to the sink and poured the beer down the drain, then dropped the bottle in a trash bag under the sink. “You sure know how to rain on the parade. Even when there’s no parade to rain on.”
“When you let me in, you looked out at the road like you were worried.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You think Rueben Vickers might be sending someone out here?”
“It’s a very good possibility.”
“I feel bad about what’s happened to you, Jo Anne.”
“Come here.”
“What for?”
She ripped an ice tray from the freezer compartment and dropped it into the sink. “Get the ice cubes out. I’ll get a towel and a rolling pin from the pantry. Give me any more trouble and I’ll use the rolling pin on your head.”
* * *
SHE CRUSHED THE ice cubes inside the towel, then tightened and retied the corners of the towel and walked me into her bedroom and pushed me down on the pillow and sat beside me and touched her improvised ice bag to the welts on my face and head. Then she stroked my forehead and cheek and eyebrows. Her fingers were as light and cool as refrigerated air, and she did something no girl or woman had ever done to me before. She leaned over and kissed each of my eyelids and my mouth, then continued to stroke my hair with her nails until I felt myself drifting away, free of all pain and age, free of the evil that undid Eden and set brother against brother and left us forever wounded and benighted and at war with ourselves and the earth.
I wanted to reach up and hold her, but she didn’t allow me to. She got beside me and held my head against her breast and hummed a song as though comforting a child. I saw myself descending into a garden filled with palm and orchid and fruit trees and animals and flamingos and swans and herons and parrots and peacocks whose fanned tails were embroidered with purple and green eyes that seemed as numerous as the stars but made no judgment of us.
I could feel her thighs spread on either side of mine, feel her hand place me inside her, and feel her breath against my ear, her tongue in my mouth, her hands trembling on my face when we both came.
I dropped away into a place I never wanted to leave, and did not wake until the sun faded and died like thunder in the hills and hailstones clattered on the hardpan as far as the eye could see.
Chapter Seven
I WROTE JO ANNE a note and left early in the morning, ashamed that I had caused her to lose her job and dragged her into a dangerous world occupied by men like Rueben Vickers. And rather than arrive at her house as benefactor and friend, I had become the pitiful victim upon whom she had to take mercy when she owed me nothing and I had nothing to give her in turn.
I walked and hitched a ride to the bank in Trinidad where I had saved up almost six hundred dollars. I withdrew it all and closed the account, then took a city bus to a used-car lot and paid two hundred dollars for a sa
lt-eaten 1952 Chevrolet. It had no radio or heater; the paneling inside the doors was cardboard. The owner of the car lot, Put-Some-South-in-Yo’-Mouth Fat Johnny Dean, also owned the diner and the pawnshop across the street. After the paperwork, he walked me to the car and opened the driver’s door. “We have a scavenger special every day,” he said. “Tell your friends.”
I rubbed the spray of rust on the hood. “I think I saw this car in Galveston. After the last hurricane.”
He crimped his mouth, his face reddening, like he had stopped breathing. Then his mouth burst open, his eyes watering while he slapped his thighs. “You don’t like the way it drives, come back and I’ll give you a shovel to bury it.”