The Steep and Thorny Way (15 page)

I shook my head. “How on earth do we fight a movement like that?”

He lowered his eyes, and the light from the flame streaked across both our faces. Heat nipped at my cheeks.

I rose back up to a standing position. “Do we just keep running? Find other castoffs and build up a ragtag army against people like Uncle Clyde and the rest of the Klan?”

Joe cracked a small smile in the lamplight. “I like that.” He stood up, too. “An army of blacks, Catholics, Jews, Japanese, and queers would scare the hell out of the fucking KKK.”

I stepped back. “You sure have a foul mouth for a preacher's boy.”

“Yeah, well, I haven't been a preacher's boy in a long while.” He turned back around to our path. “Come on. Let's find a place to camp.”

A mere ten paces farther, we entered a small clearing surrounded by a fortress of trees whose tops disappeared high overhead. We both stopped and inspected the area by the light of the lantern.

“Do you think it's far enough away from the cabin?” asked Joe.

“Well . . .” I cast my eyes toward the darkness that devoured the path back to the building. “It is nice to know the cabin's within running distance, in case rain arrives. Or a bear.”

“What?” He gasped. “You think we'll encounter a fucking bear?”

“Jeez, Joe! Stop using that word.” I crept over to the outer reaches of the lamp's arc of light and bent down to study the dark outlines of a patch of leaves. “I don't see any poison oak. Or any animal dens.”

He set the lantern by his feet and threw his carpetbag onto the grass. “Holy Mother of God, we'd better not get mauled by any bears.”

“Stop worrying about the damn bears. They're the least of our problems.”

“Why are you getting after me for my language? You swear a lot for a girl.”

“I only swear when I'm pushed into situations like this. And my words are tamer.” I dropped the picnic basket and shook out the tan blanket.

Joe helped me stretch the bedding across the ground until it covered an area the size of two bodies. Then we both stood back up and stared down at the makeshift bed before us. I heard him swallow—or gulp was more like it. I swallowed, too.

“You can lie on it,” he said. “I'll sit against the tree.”

“Don't be ridiculous. You'll get a sore back.”

“I don't think you'd want me lying beside you.”

“I don't hardly care right now.” I tucked the holster beneath the right side of the blanket and stretched myself out on the rough surface that scratched like a burlap potato sack. My hair felt lumpy between my head and the ground, but I didn't feel like pulling out all the pins. “As long as you don't mind lying down beside me,” I added.

“Why do you say that?” he asked.

“Because of my skin color, of course.” I bit down on my lip and then added, “And my sex.”

“Now you're just insulting the both of us.” He plopped down beside me and pulled out an object from his carpetbag.

I rolled onto my side, away from him. “
Am
I disgusting to you?”

“Hanalee . . .”

“Tell me the truth.”

He dropped a woolen garment in front of me. “Here, put this on. You're going to get cold out here.”

“What is it?”

“A coat.”

I patted the sleeves and the buttons in the dark, verifying that it was, indeed, a jacket. “Won't you get cold?” I asked.

“I'm wearing long sleeves. You've got your arms hanging out. You'll freeze to death without it.”

“Well . . .” I tucked the coat over my shoulders like a cape. “Thank you.”

He shifted about on the blanket beside me. “I'm blowing out the lantern now.”

I shrugged. “That's fine.”

He raised the chimney and puffed, and the forest went black. The temperature seemed to drop about thirty degrees, and I found myself shivering in an instant. I slipped my arms inside the sleeves of the coat and buttoned up the garment to my throat. Behind me, Joe wriggled around on the blanket until it sounded as though he faced in my direction. I heard him breathing about a foot away from the back of my neck.

“No,” he said, “you're not.”

I lifted my head. “Not what?”

“Not disgusting to me.” He drew a deep breath that whistled through his nose. “Am I disgusting to you?”

I lay my head back down and tucked my hands inside the warm depths of his coat sleeves. “I haven't yet decided.”

He didn't respond.

“It's not because of the boys thing,” I chose to add. “Although that's still a bit confusing to me, to be most honest.”

Again, he didn't respond.

I cleared my throat. “It's because of the other thing. My original reason for hating you.”

“It's still sometimes confusing to me, too.”

“What?”

He sighed. “‘The boys thing,' as you called it.”

“I . . . I suppose that would be.”

“Everything would be a hell of a lot easier if . . .”

I nodded in understanding, although I supposed he might not have seen me doing so in the dark.

We lay in silence, the subject of our mutual fear of disgusting each other still taking up space in the air around us. Crickets and frogs called out in their desperate frenzy of chirping and croaking, and I wondered how I could possibly sleep with all the ruckus, never mind the other discomforts and worries. A splash sounded somewhere beyond the trees, and for a moment I thought Joe might have caught the urge to swim around naked again. I still imagined him as a woodland creature, swimming down among the submerged grasses, hiding in the darkest recesses far below the water's surface. Maybe he transformed into a fish when I wasn't
looking, like the prince in the Creole story. A sleek coho salmon, or even a swift and frightened minnow.

He scooted closer to me on the blanket—not in a bold and forward way, but in a slow and cautious manner, as though he was trying to come nearer for a smidgen of warmth without sounding like he was doing so.

“Good night, Hanalee,” he said, just a few inches away.

A tear leaked out of my right eye and dampened the blanket below my left cheek. I held my breath for a moment, forcing my shoulders not to shake, and then I answered, in as steady a voice as I could muster. “Good night.”

CHAPTER 12

HOW UNWORTHY A THING YOU MAKE OF ME

IT TOOK A LONG WHILE TO FALL
asleep in such a strange and exposed environment. Terrible dreams bothered what little slumber I could snatch, and at one point I woke up in the darkness, huddled against Joe's stomach and chest with my hands balled between our two bodies. My teeth chattered, and I shivered and whimpered and burrowed against him, while he breathed in a steady rhythm beside me. The air on the forest floor felt as bitter cold as December, not at all like the beginning of July.

Joe tucked his arm around my back and pulled me close. He shivered, too, but his shirt heated my cheek and nose.

“Are you all right?” he asked, his voice thick with sleep.

“It's freezing out here.”

With gentle movements, he scooted the two of us over to my side of the blanket, and then he lifted his arm and wrapped the other side of the covering around us. We had to snuggle close for the blanket to reach around my shoulders, and all I could think was
The world must be mighty atrocious right now if cuddling up with Joe Adder in the middle of the woods seems my most desirable option
.

I DREAMED OF DADDY OPENING UP THE FRONT DOOR
to our house. I stood in our gleaming oak entry hall, upon the green and gold rug, and I gaped at the sight of my father pulling his hat off his head of short, tight curls. He reached out his right hand, smiled, and told me in his deep, honey tones, “There's been a mistake, baby doll. I didn't die after all.”

A sound awoke me—a crack of a twig or some other minor disturbance that jolted me out of the sweetness of the dream. I grabbed hold of a warm hand that rested near my chest and strove to slip back to the place in which my father walked in from the fields, his coveralls streaked in dirt and flecks of hay, everything smelling fresh and clean and earthy.

A twig cracked again.

“What the hell . . . ?” said a nearby voice that made my heart stop. Cigarette smoke wafted into my nostrils.

My eyes flew open, and I found Robbie and Gil Witten standing over us, gawking, their heads cocked, as though they were viewing a two-headed creature with wings and a beak. Cigarettes burned in their right hands. A bottle of a clear booze that must have been gin dangled from Gil's meaty left fingers. Robbie held a
wooden-handled pocketknife with an exposed blade that glinted in the morning sunlight.

I froze beneath Joe's arm.

Robbie closed his mouth and flicked ash from the end of his cigarette toward our feet beneath the blanket. “Hey, jailbird Joe!” he called out.

Joe stirred beside me. He opened his eyes to the faces above us and bolted to a sitting position. “What're you doing here?”

Robbie took a drag from the cigarette and puffed a white cloud of smoke in our direction. “That's precisely what we were about to ask you.”

“We were just coming out here for breakfast”—Gil tapped the bottle of gin against his leg—“and heard someone snoring.”

“I had no idea,” said Robbie, “it would be Elston's most-wanted criminal and sweet Hanalee Denney.”

Gil snickered and turned bright red. “I thought for sure Hanalee would be naked under that blanket.”

Robbie furrowed his thick eyebrows at me. “What are you doing out here with this ex-convict? I warned you, he's depraved.”

“Some breakfast you've got there,” said Joe, nodding toward the gin. “Aren't Klan members supposed to be opposed to bootlegging?”

Gil shoved the bottle into a trouser pocket and averted his eyes from mine. “Who said we were in the Ku Klux Klan?”

“What's more important,” said Robbie, “is what you and Hanalee Denney are doing wrapped up in a blanket in the middle of our Christian family's property.” He sniffed the air. “The whole place reeks of sin.”

Gil snorted and slid his cigarette between his wet-looking lips.

All I could do was lie there, paralyzed, with my hand pressed around the outline of the holster beneath the blanket. The Junior Order of Klansmen pamphlet remained tucked inside my pocket.

Joe combed his fingers through his hair. “Hanalee and I are eloping.”

I kept my face stoic, despite my urge to shout,
What did you just say?

“Oregon won't allow us to marry,” he continued, “so we're running off to Washington. We just camped here for the night before we set out to cross the hills and the Columbia River.”

“
You're
eloping?” Robbie flicked more ash to the ground by our feet.

“That's right.” Joe nodded.

Gil reddened again and muttered to his brother, “Jesus. Does Washington really allow fairies to marry mulattoes?”

“What did you just say?” Joe threw off the blanket and jumped to his feet.

“He said,” said Robbie, lifting his chin, “you two make a highly peculiar pair. Does your bride-to-be know you were caught diddling some other fellow?”

Joe clenched his hands by his sides. “What pathetic lives you must lead if you have to make up vulgar stories about me.”

“It's not true, then?” Robbie wedged his cigarette between his teeth and narrowed his eyes. “You're not a fag?”

“Would you have found me here, wrapped in a blanket with a girl, if I was?”

The twins eyed each other, as if to gauge each other's opinions.
Joe didn't look back at me, but I could tell from the way he rubbed his hands along the sides of his trousers that the Wittens and that pocketknife terrified him. I kept my face and my body still, worried that the wrong expression or word would bring him harm.