The Watchman (15 page)

of a hawk and the face of a transfixed Saint Sebastian, your voice rippling with the dying fall of Richard Mansfield—By God, Will, you made me see for one split second the glory of Nijinsky's eight-foot flight out of the window in what was it? Petrouchka? L'apres-midi? No matter. It was beautiful— Beautiful!

And he struck his cupped hands booming together three more times, his black eyes flashing with naughty pleasure.

Perhaps, Colonel Bruce, you see the humor in Alt's virtual threat to kill my boy like the Blake boy died! snapped the Major. Maybe the interesting significance of that esacpes you. Colonel.

Nothing escapes me, Willie. Drop this false modesty and stop attributing all the best lines to a lesser player. The Sheriff spoke for a continent of fathers. He said he'd guard his daughter's virtue.

And what he said, Colonel, suggests nothing of interest to you about the Blake murder. Does that escape you, Colonel?

Wilhe, sit down and hush. Nothing escapes me. I'm a lawyer still and you're nothing but a chestful of green medals set to molder in the attic. It was you, Will Hunnicutt, who came in here spluttering and fuming virtue. Full of speeches about preserving intact the hymen of your son Jason's socioeconomic genitaha. I'm a great admirer of that man Luther Alt, Will, so kindly respect an old man's unaccountable tastes! I hate all lawmen as I hate all soldiers, prosecutors, judges, executioners and ex-excutioners (and, Matthew Hood, I hope you will take that in the spirit it was meant—as the expression of a generic revulsion and nothing personal) —but, by God, I love that man Luther Alt! There's a man fit to keep peace because he loves peace, would take spit in his face for the sake of peace, would be deviled past the point of ordinary, human sanity for the sake of peace and the proof of his love for peace. Will Hunrlicutt, is the fact that, long before he hung you on the wall beneath the clock, he didn't jam yonder brass cuspidor down your gullet and make you swallow it. And now come sit there beside Mister Jib-bons and join the rest of the dodo-birds. Will!—we need you to make the display com.plete: a horse trader in an age of the machine, a hangman whose arts have been nudged aside for the refinements of the electric, and now you, Major— a soldier in an epoch of abrupt, and, to you, wholly incredible obsolescence: a man whose thirty-thousand-year apprenticeship in the skiUs of foot-soldering has overnight been rock-

eted aside to make way for the hornrimmed, haggard and hunch-shouldered figure of a livid-skinned and flabby-muscled Florida intellectual in a vulgar sport shirt from Bur-dine's bent over a row of apocalypse buttons at Cape Canaveral. Join the dodo-birds, Willie. Shake hands with the hangman. Major—his rope's as ragged as your puttees! And his ass is dragging like your forty-and-eight choo-choo train!

Colonel Bruce, I wish to hell you were forty years younger.

Major Hunnicutt, I thank God I'm not, for when I consider what I could do to you now it frightens me to think what I'd probably have done to you then. Come, Willie, sit and be amiable. You've had your curtain calls tonight and good reviews to boot. Now wash the grease-paint off your indignation before it begins to run in those tears of self-pity which ill-become you.

For the Major it was, in any event, an impossible exit. He fled out the door and home through the fog, leaving the Colonel, still chuckling and flushed and filled with all the spiteful joy like a tonic to keep him living for another month; ignoring the hangman and Jibbons who shambled up the steps to bed and lay awake a while, perhaps, to finger the snarled skeins of bathos and revelation that the evening had tossed into their laps.

two

Parting the curtains of the little window in Cristi's second-floor parlor Jason could see through the cool, gold light of late afternoon to the window of tiie eater-cornered Mound Hotel and the vague, forlorn figure of Jill waiting for him at their table. He could hear Cristi still swearing under her breath and throwing her French heels into the clothespress. He went back to the door and looked at her again.

No, he said. You're wrong. You don't understand anything at all about it. I'm the one who understands it because it happens to be perfectly plain and obvious—you're jealous. You are furious and spiteful jealous since you found out about me taking Jill out.

She stared at him, her bare feet planted apart like a boy's, her fists knuckling into her naked hips. She shook her head, hopelessly, and folded her arms under her breasts.

Jase, you used to tell me, he shouted. Jase, go fall in love with any girl in town and I won't mind and if you want to keep on seeing me it will be the same with us and if you don't, that'll be all right, too. Remember?

She nodded, with her pursed lips full of safety pins, and began hanging up her rumpled dress on a quilted hanger. He stared with gathering, baffled fury at her naked buttocks swaying into the shadow of the closet.

Are you listening to me? he shouted. Can't you even sit down and stop doing things while we have an important conversation?

She finished in the clothespress, turned to the dressing table, lighted a cigarette and sitting on the bed, crossed her long legs and looked at him.

If it was anybody, she said. Anyone in the world but Jill.

Oh, I see, he said. The one exception. The one undefeatable competition. Is that it?

No, she said calmly, and bending her head began, maddeningly, to comb her long hair down over her face with one hand; holding the cigarette in the other.

Then would you mind telling me your reasons? he said. Or even just one reason why I shouldn't go out with Jill?

Because, her voice said behind the shimmering cloak of her hair, I don't want you dead, Jase.

He began to pace the room again, barefoot and outraged with a sense of intangible disadvantage in the argument. He was as naked as she. And he was quite too young to know that no male in the history of his gender has ever won a litigation without clothes. It is one of the few inequities, perhaps compensatory, in which women have the absolute, final and total advantage: since to argue successfully a man is helpless without lapels to be tugged, pockets into which hands may be thrust, necktie knots to be dragged open, handkerchiefs to be snatched out for noses to be blown into in bugling exclamation: clothes, the whole visible punctuation of male argument, in short; so that judges are massively, sartorially overdraped to fit the niggling, magisterial senten-tiousness of lofty judgments, or as it is impossible to imagine a nude policeman succeeding at an arrest. Women, on the other hand, possessing every advantage imaginable in unclothed debate, having at their disposal an entire organic idiom of rhetoric, intimidation and cozening guile and though the points to be won by hair-combing, flank-stroking, hip-posturing and the rest of the baggage of tricks being small, women possess by the mere fact of their bared desirability the constant, defeating, indefatigable rebuttal which is to whatever argument, in itself, the heart of the matter being argued. The most innocent man on earth, naked and pallid, dangling livid as bread dough with his own impotence, would in a witness chair make a revolted jury send him to hang as they would surely hang no naked woman, though her slender arms were smeared with incriminating blood. And so while Cristi, done with her hair, now bent to buff her pink nails, Jason could only clasp his hands behind his behind and strut.

I have a date tonight with Jill, he snorted. She's already waiting for me down at the hotel.

What else did you sec down there, Jason? she said quietly.

When you went to my window and saw Jill waiting what else did you see?

What does that mean?

Just what I said, she said. Were you so busy looking at Jill that you didn't see anything else—anything in the street: a parked car with a waiting man across by the movie house, for example?

I did not, he said. The street was empty.

She laid the buffer on her bedside table, looked up at him, shook her head again slowly, sadly, pityingly of all male-kind, and then got up, went to his suit hanging on the chintzy chair and fetched out the folded paper, holding it up again for him to see.

And this? she sighed. You think this is some kind of joke, Jase Hunnicutt?

Some crank, he said, looking at his feet.

Letters scissored out and pasted on. Like a ransom demand, she snapped, her patience crumbling. Black and white letters cut out of the sentences in courthouse forms and stuck on here to spell it out so you couldn't possibly misunderstand, Jase. Here, read it again.

I read it, he said.

No. Damn you, she said. Read it again. Here. I'll read it for you: "Don't see Jill Alt any more. Not any more. Never again. A friend."

Another boy who's crazy about her, he said. You think I'm yellow?

Not yellow, she said. Not even dumb. No, you're not dumb—not in the head. But below the neck you're something just short of feeble-minded. And below the waist you're an idiot.

What exactly would that mean? he said. Below the waist? What's that got to do with Jill. I told you how I felt about her. It's not like you and me.

Jase, sit down beside me a minute, she said, rapidly patting the tufts of the candlewick spread. Jase, listen to me a minute. Come sit here.

What for? So you can keep me here? So you can get me in that bed again and know I won't keep my date with Jill.

Not that, she said. If that's what I wanted you'd know it. No. Just to talk to you a minute. Please, Jase? Then you can go. I wouldn't stop you.

He came to her, mistrustful, defensive, sitting beside her like a child in the presence of a strange nurse, his hands

folded with an almost pathetic primness; like a makeshift fig leaf of fingers.

Listen, Jason. If you think it's jealousy of my sister that

makes me ask you this then I can't help that. Look, Jase, I

know what 1 mean to you—what we are to each other. It's

what I said I wanted it to be when it started. Nothing's

changed. I'm just a very dumb, ignorant girl and I've never

pretended to you that I was anything else. I'm not the brainy

type like Jill. Whatever I've ever learned I learned the only

way I was able to—from lonely people, in queer places, up

old streets, under the light of motel neons saying Vacancy

or Full-up, in all-night movies that smelled like men's room

disinfectant and stale popcorn where I had to watch the

show with my legs pressed together till they ached and my

hands always ready to push away the other fingers with

the big lodge rings on them that were always there in the

dark, or in beer joints where I was lonely and the hands

didn't matter and could do what they wanted. Jill has learned

life from another kind of loneliness—her books, her little

dog—music and poetry. That's good, too, I guess. I won't

knock it or say it's not as good as the way I've had to learn.

Only it's different. I don't even blame my father that Jill has

been, is, and always will be his all and everything. His

feeling that way has simply meant that I've had to be a loner

—always—learn things the bungling way, banging my nose

in the dark and learning to go round that place the next

time. Jill's strange and wonderful brains are all in her head

—like Mama's were, I guess, or else Father wouldn't see her

like he does. My brains are all under my skin, Jase—my

skin and things just under it. Maybe you might say they're

just in my hips or my breasts. Jill's eyes read a book and they

know what that book means and I guess they see the beauty

that they were meant to read there. My eyes are eyes I've

had to grow—eyes all over my body, and the only thing

they can read is what another woman is scheming or what

a man's next move will be. So much for me. Now you, Jason

Hunnicutt, you're a wonderful boy with a good family that's

full of crummy motives. You're strong, too, Jase—stronger

than you know, more than you've ever had to be which is

why you've never been.

She stopped then and lighted another cigarette, blew a blue slow cloud of thoughtfulness into the dusk upon her bedroom window. She laughed then.

Well, okay, she laughed, looking at her nails quickly and

then flushing and looking away to the mirror for an instant before she looked at him again. Okay, we'll let that go at that. And we'll forget all this theory stuff and I'll get to the point. There's someone, Jase, who doesn't want you around Jill and I swear before God that someone isn't me. Jason, there's someone who wants to keep you away from my sister so badly that nothing—absolutely nothing is going to let you be alone with her very much longer. Jase, believe me on my oath—I know. That note you got today was no joke. Oh, honey, if you'd only believe that my telling you this isn't jealousy! I've known about you and Jill for days now. Do you think if I hated you that I'd have gone to bed with you this afternoon?

Sure you would, he said. Because you'd be trying to hold me with something you know Jill would never give me because I wouldn't ask her for it. I wouldn't even want it.

Oh, my God, do you have any idea how sad a thing you just said, Jase? That you'd love a girl and not want that? My God, I think that's even sadder than my wanting that and not wanting love. And if it was any other girl in Adena— in the world—any girl but Jill I wouldn't yell at you like this. But, Jase, you just don't know how it is with Jill. And I just can't tell you. And my father—^you think you know him, and, Jesus, Jase, you don't know him at all. Can't I make you listen to me, Jase?

If you mean can you stop me from keeping my date tonight the answer's No, he said. I'm not that much of a weakling.

Oh, God, I wish I could explain it all to you, she gasped, her lips suddenly hidden in her long, white fingers. All my life I've been so proud never to have told a lie or even half the truth and all I can give you now is less than half, my poor, dear Jase honey!

He got up awkwardly and put his thumbs on his hips, looking down at her in utter consternation.