House of Earth (18 page)

“You know”—Ella May started to talk—“I'm not really afraid that this business of killing of these animals and letting all of this land go idle will actually be the death of me, because I really feel like I will live through it. But I'm just laying here trying to figure.”

“Figure what?”

“Trying to figure up what I'm going to say to this little varmint inside me here when he or she or whoever it is asks
me why it was that we ever did let ourselves do such a silly old trick.”

Blanche did come in at the door like everybody hoped, and she did bring a swarm of the cold wind with her. The quick change in the temperature in the room caused the pasted wallpapers to crack all around the walls. Whirls of dust and dirt circled across the floor like whirlwinds dancing above the ground. Blanche was a large girl, full built, full breasted, and several years younger than Tike or Ella May, and even though she was of larger bone and limb than they, she was faster, more limber, more active than they were. It was due to her restlessness that she was so active, for she loved to keep on the move and hard at work, day and night. When Ella May and Tike slowed down or sat down, Blanche kept moving all about the place doing everything that her eyes could see to do. And her eyes usually found plenty that needed doing around and about this place. The past few cold and freezing days had partly driven her in from chores she had found, invented, and made up to keep her busy on the outside, so she put all of this steam and energy into her work inside the house. She turned moanful and dreary, heavy and sad, when she had been over the room a hundred, two hundred times with fingers and eyes, and there was nothing else to work at. Her white skin, blond hair, pale blue eyes, and full lips shook like shadows on the cliffs of the Cap Rock. Tike and Ella May both sat up on the bed and
greeted her as she put the gunnysack in place under the door and heaved the weight of her shoulder against the door to shut it against the wind.

“Wahoo!” Tike held both arms above his head and kicked his feet together above the bed. “Wahooo! God Almight an' little cottontail rabbits, Blanche! God! I'm glad to see you! I'm just about th' gladdest that any man ever was to ever see any womern! Whew! Come in! Blow in! Watch out there! Your clothes are blowin' plumb off!”

“Tiiike,” Ella May scolded him in his ear. “Don't tease the poor girl. Shut your mouth.” And she smiled as she saw how red Blanche's face was where her hat and her coat did not cover. “Gee. You must just be simply froze, girl. Here. Let me help you to get your coat off.”

By this time Blanche had got her wind well enough to point to Ella May and say, “No no no no no no. You just stay right where you are seated. I'll do my own job of getting my things off.”

“I'll help.” Tike jumped to the floor. “Always did sorta get a big kick outta helpin' a lady to get her 'er clothes off.” His eyes burned like signal lights, or like the headlights of a fast car cutting through the dark of the plains at night.

“Tiikke.” Ella May dropped her eyes and looked at him. “Don't insult the lady. You might run her off.”

“Naw. Just about ever' womern I ever did see got a big bang outta gettin' their clothes took off. Is that right, Blanche?” He tossed her coat onto the back of the cane-bottom chair. He took her wool stocking cap and stuck it
down into the pocket of her coat. Blanche looked away from him for a bit, then she turned toward him, determined not to let him get the best of her. There was so much red on her cheeks from the bite of the outside wind that Tike could not tell how much she was blushing. She shook her head as she took a hairnet off, then whipped her hair through the air to shake the cold out of it. Her eyes shot straight into Tike's as she shook her shoulders and arms and rubbed her neck with her hands. And she told him, “Yes. I suppose that most women like to have their clothes took off, but it must be by the right man. And let me give you to understand, Mister Hamlin, that I have undressed a lot more men than you have women. I went to one of the best nurses' colleges in Amarillo for three years. You couldn't show me anything that I didn't see there already. So don't get it into your head that I get all upset at the sight of naked skin.”

“What are you blushin' so red about, then?” he teased her. “Look at your face. You're so beat right now that you don't know which end is up! Look!”

“My face is red because of the wind, and not you. And even if I am blushing some, then it is only because I'm blushing for your ignorance.”

“My what?”

“Ignorance.”

Then Ella May laughed on the bed and clapped her hands together in her lap. “Go to him, Blanche! Go to him! Eat him up and spit him out alive! He thinks that he can embarrass
every female that walks before his eyes! Tell him! Get him told! It'll do him good! Ha ha!”

Tike looked from one face to the other, then cracked a dry little bashful grin. “Two onto one! Devil's fun!” His fingers scratched the dandruff at the roots of his hair. “Bunchin' up on me! Bunchin' up!

“I'm one. I'm one you'll not get the goat of.” Blanche winked one eye at Ella past Tike's arm. She stood in the middle of the floor with her hands on her hips and imitated a bent, cripply ranch boss or a tobacco-chewing foreman. She moved the end of her tongue around the inside of her cheeks, let her body sway from side to side, eyed Tike up and down, and said, “You think that because I am a young girl that I'm an ignorant girl. You think that because I have no man around that I am all off my nut. You think that I am lonesome. You think that you can get my brain all rattled just by merely mentioning something naked. You have said all kinds of things to me in the ten days I'm here to try and embarrass me. I don't get mad at you even. The men in the hospitals have already said everything to me that you can say, and I don't get mad at them, either. I don't care if they want to undress me and pull me into bed with them ten times a day, I know it is not the men who is to blame. And I know every reason why you say to me what you say, like this, like that, like this and like that. I am a very young and pretty girl and you would give your left arm to lay with me in the hay. I take it as a compliment to me.”

“Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Now! There you go! There's your way out! Mister Lady Killer! Ha ha ha ha.” Ella May doubled over with sharp pains, and felt like she should not really be laughing so hard. But the look on Tike's face as he stood there with one hand in his hair and the other one down in his pocket was the funniest sight that she had ever seen in her thirty-three years of living. “Whooo whoo whoo whoo. Your train is about to leave on track number nine. You'll have to run fast to catch it!”

Tike was not sore or angry. Yet he pulled his face full of worried wrinkles and took out his sack of tobacco. As he blew a cigarette paper loose and rolled the smoke between his thumb and fingers, he acted like the maddest man that ever set foot on the plains. “Women. Runnin' aroun' readin' books. Loose-footin' it off to all kindsa schools. Sneakin' off to colleges fulla naked men.”

“I did not say that the college was filled with naked men.” Blanche winked her eye again at Ella May, then drew her face into a deep seriousness.

“You posotutely did, too!” Tike said.

“I absotively did not.” Blanche removed her coat and cap from the back of the chair and hung them on a nail in the wall. “Did not.”

“Ella May. Lady, you heard her! Didn't she say that she took all th' clothes offa ever' man in that there whole college?” He asked Ella May for her support by holding his hands out toward her like a sweating lawyer. “Huh?”

Ella May disagreed. She shook her head from side to
side as she said, “She said that she took care of all kinds of sick people, men, women, and children, as a part of her hospital training. Not the people that came to the college. Furthermore, she threw you for a twenty-yard loss, Mister Hamlin. You tried your best to embarrass her and you done everything that you could do to hurt her feelings. And then she knocked your props out from under you that she had undressed more men than you have women! Woooheee! Somebody finally did come along to stop old Tike Hamlin's clock! She put a stop to your old dog's barking! Ha ha ha ha!”

“What if ever' shemale womern was to go a-sneakin' off an' go to one of them colleges like that?” He lit his cigarette and felt the nicotine of the smoke sting and bite the lids of his eyes. “What'd it be like to try to live with one of 'em after'ards? Her head'd be so soaked fulla highfalutin notions that they just wouldn't be no livin' amongst 'em. Have no fun outta one.”

Blanche started to move to the middle of the floor, but saw that Ella May was about to say something more. She leaned against the rail of the stairs that led up to the roost that had been Tike's sleeping place since Blanche had been with them. She smelled the smoke from his cigarette and the filthy dust from the whole room, and her nostrils moved on her pained face.

“Fun out of one,” Ella May spoke out in very certain words. “Fun out of one. Those four little words show you just about your whole way of feeling toward a woman.
Fun out of one. If it's only by digging at her, poking at her, scratching at her, trying your very best to make her feel hurt and bad and embarrassed, making her feel silly, if this is the only way that you can ever have dealings with any woman, then it is a lot better for you not to have any dealings at all. Fun out of one! Did it ever cross your mind, Mister, to have fun with a woman instead of at her? With? Instead of at? Ohhh. I don't intend to say that you are entirely crazy, Tike, because no matter what you say to me, I know how to pass it off, or how to take it, but you have just simply got to get it knocked into your head that you just cannot, cannot, cannot treat every strange lady that you meet this mean and ornery way. What's more, I am really glad that Blanche did cut your water off just like she did just now. It is a lot better to have it happen right here and right now than to have it cause you, and all of the rest of us, lots more pains and troubles somewhere later on.”

Tike's temper rose as he listened to her speak. He had not been entirely serious in teasing Blanche. He had done it simply to try to put a little sexy fun into the whole situation. He was not really against women reading books, going to school, college, all they wanted to. But his temper was rising because neither Blanche nor Ella May could see that he was just fooling. This was the thing that caused him to fry and boil. And there was a streak of hot pride somewhere in him that would not allow his lips to say, “I was just foolin',” nor to explain the whole thing. This was one of Tike's worst faults and failings. He said things when he was clowning
that he did not mean, and acted his part out so well that people really thought he was serious. One word would lead to another, there would be an argument, and he would not even take one step to cross a hairline and apologize, nor say that he was just kidding.

And Ella May had known him better than anybody else, except for his mama and papa and his two sisters, so she overlooked and forgot these things that other people around Tike kept on holding against him. He had serious disagreements with many of Ella's close relatives, friends, and visitors. She forgot. Others went on remembering. Tike felt a sort of pride about it because it proved that he was such a good actor that he could put it over on people. Most people held it against him, thinking that he would have many more friends to help him if he could only learn to say, “I apologize,” “I was only fooling.” This streak of “acting” Tike had picked up and learned from his folks all over the place, but when anybody did not quite understand if he was serious or being foolish, then his main feeling was that he only shook his head and said, “Hell with 'em.”

Blanche walked across the linoleum floor with her head down, actually waiting for Tike to smile and say that he was only kidding, that he knew better, that he was aware of the fact that the people in her college did not come to class naked, that it was a good thing for the ladies to go to school and to learn, and that he really did not want to hurt her feelings because she did not have a man around. Every step, she waited for him to speak. But Ella May watched and shook
her head because she knew that Tike would not speak up. One word from him would cause Blanche to think he was a very wise man instead of an idiot. The word did not come. And Ella May felt the stabs of pain in her stomach and back because Blanche was forced to lick her lips with her tongue and think, “Go ahead, idiot, be an idiot. Live an idiot and die an idiot.”

Tike sat down on the first step of the stairs and smoked his cigarette. His head was down, then up, then he gazed out over the room, then his eyes followed all of the humps and cracks in his wallpaper, then they counted the worn-out spots down across the linoleum, and then he gazed and stared out the window and into the ice of the night.

“How is your little lodger?” Blanche asked Ella May. She stood on the floor at the bedside for a time, looking down. She touched her hand to Ella May's forehead, then lifted her hand and counted the beat of her pulse. Her eyes were full of thoughts as she sat down on the bed quilt near Ella's feet. “Any new pains?”

“Little ones. Yes.”

“What is the feeling like?”

“Just like everything in the whole world was pushing down on me so hard that I, just, ahhh, I just can't hardly get my breath. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes. It's, well, you see, it's some of your organs and tissues pushing their way down into position so that they can do their part in the actual delivery,” Blanche said.