Chapter 13: That girl from The South
Mrs. Warton glanced over, her gaze curious, bearing its
usual nosy humor.
The young woman smiled and held out her small hand.
"My name is Laura, what's yours?"
Her southern drawl made her that much more attractive, not
like the phony accents from bad movies about the Civil War, but deeper,
carrying whole history of the south in word.
I told her my name, and then told her I had come from New
York.
"New York?" she said, exaggerating the words so
that they sounded like some other town from the one I meant. "Why that's
where I just came from. Not directly, mind you. I had to stop at my cousin's
house in Mary-land, and then my grand-daddy's house in Delaware. I couldn't
just pass them both by since I had come north and all. It wouldn't have been
polite."
"Where exactly
are you from?" I asked.
"Well, can't you
tell from my accent?" she teased.
"I'm not much of a person for recognizing
accents," I said. "The closest I can come is to say you're from the
south."
‘I have an accent, really?”
“I would say so.”
“You and everybody else I’ve been in contact with lately,
though to tell you the truth, it's all you people who have the accent. I talk
just like everybody talks where I come from."
“It must be delightful to live wherever you live if
everybody talks like you do,” I said, awash in visions of slow-moving rivers,
late spring evenings, and fresh magnolia blossoms.
"I don't suppose you've ever heard of a small town
called Eubank?" she asked, with just a hint of hope on the last rising
syllable.
"I'm afraid
not," I said.
"Now there's the
problem," she said with a long, clearly manufactured sigh. "Nobody
has. It's so small a town that nobody even bothered to put it on a map until
very recently, and that's only because the city fathers wrote to the map
company to insist."
"You sound like
you don't like the place," I said.
"Like it?
There's nothing there to like or dislike, so plain and boring. I got family
there all right, my uncle, George, and his brother-in-law, Fester. I got some
female relations, too, but they's all about as boring as the boys are. I spend
most of my time dreaming about what it would be like if I got out."
"Didn't you just
come back from New York?" I asked. "You could have stayed
there."
Again, came the bell
sound of her laugh, the tinkling filling the close air of the bus. Others were
entering now, and finally, the new driver, followed by the new hostess.
Mrs. Warton and her husband looked pleased as they watched
us from across the aisle, but neither thought to interrupt.
"My Uncle George
wouldn't hear of that," she said. "He'd drive the whole way north to
come and get me, whether or not his lumbago was acting up, and he'd drag me
back by the ear, telling me no niece of his was going to go off to live a life
of sin in such a city as that."
"But you're a
grown woman," I said. "Did you want to stay in New York? Did you like
it?"
"No," she
said. "I can't say as I liked New York much. To tell you the truth, it
scared me. Not the part that Uncle George thinks I should have been scared
about. We've got muggers and whores even in a town as small as ours is, or just
down the road some anyway at the county seat. No. It was all that concrete and steel,
just hanging up, taking up all the room where the sky should have been. I'm not
sure I'd want to live any place where when I woke up in the morning, I couldn't
find the sky."
I nodded. The bus
began to move.
"I'm surprised
your uncle let you go to New York at all, if he was that dead set against,
you're living there," I said.
Laura giggled.
"Well, I can't
say he actually knows where I went off to," she said. "You see I
fibbed a little when I told him I was coming North. Instead of saying exactly
where I was going, I said I'd be visiting My cousin Lily, who lives up the road
from here in Canton. And I did. What I didn't say is that Lily had called me to
invite me on a trip to New York and that the moment these feet touched her
porch, they was walking back to the bus station for the bus to New York. Her Pa
didn't mind nearly so much as my Uncle George did, because he said he had
raised his child right and knew she wouldn't get off to any mischief if let
loose on her own. But I could see from the look in his eye that he was mightily
relieved when I'd come along to accompany her."
"Did he know how
your uncle felt?"
"I don't know
for certain, but it's my guess he did, but was willing to wink an eye over it
as long as I kept his daughter from making any foolish mistakes. You might call
it a kind of agreement. If I kept Lily safe, he would keep his mouth shut when
it came to my Uncle George. And he did. He told my uncle I was out at a local
fair when Uncle George called to find out about me. That wasn't too much of a
fib either. New York is a kind of fair, only it just isn't local. Not by Canton
standards anyway."
For a moment, Laura
fell silent, but it was only to catch her breath. When she spoke again, it was
on the sly, as if she was allowing me in on a great secret.
"To tell you the
truth, I was scared a little bit about the hippies, kind of apprehensive about
what they would do when we came down to Green-witch Village. From all I'd heard
on the radio down where I'm from, I thought I would find them rolling in the
street making love."
"That didn't
happen?"
"No way,"
she said, giving me a kind of wave with her hand. "If there was any of
that hanky-panky going on, it was behind closed doors, just like it is back in
my neck of the woods."
"You sound
disappointed," I said.
Laura blushed, seemed
to think for a moment, and then nodded. "I guess I am," she said.
"I mean it’s like hearing about a terrible storm that's coming up off the
gulf, full of wind and rain and lightning. You grit yourself for it. You expect
to have the house shake and shake, and then, when it comes, a few limbs move
and a few leaves fall, and nothing else. Well, I guess that's how I felt about
Green-witch Village. I expected to see all kinds of vice, and what I got was a
bunch of odd people saying odd things at me. I'd say I was disappointed. Half
the reason I wanted to go in the first place was to see if my Uncle George was
right."
"The world is
full of illusions," I mumbled, and stared out the window.
"What was
that?"
"Nothing
important," I said. "So where are you getting off?"
"Lexington," she said.
Now I was
disappointed. Lexington was too close, and I suddenly dreaded the miles I would
have to travel after she was gone, miles in which I had no one to talk to but Mrs.
Warton and her husband, Bill, miles to a place where I knew nobody and would
likely talk with nobody once, I got there.
"What about
you?" she asked. "Where are you going?"
"I'm going to
Los Angeles," I said, glancing over my shoulder to where the man with the
grey eyes had sat, and to my dismay, he sat there still, not staring at me now,
but sitting where he should not have been, the mystery of his finding us again
after his supposedly getting off in Cincinnati unexplained.
"Why Los
Angeles?" Laura asked.
"Why not? I've
always wanted to go there."
For a moment, she
just looked at me, studying my face, and then, finally, she nodded.
"Sometimes I
have real envy for folks like you," she said, "People who can pick up
and go and not worry about getting dragged back or held down to a place. I've
wanted to leave home all my life, and never really had the courage to do it,
always thinking about my family and how they would feel, always knowing that
the minute I was gone, they'd be the worse for it, as if they needed me to take
care of them as much as I needed them. Sometimes I feel like I've got a rope
around my waste to keep me from wandering away like some wild hound. The more I
tug on it, the more I hurt inside." She paused, pursed her lips and then
asked: "Does that make any sense to you?"
It made more sense
than I could ever explain, and I found myself staring out the window again,
unable to meet her gaze, fearing she might read from it how much my own rope
hurt and how much pain I had inflicted on my own family with my leaving.
We did not make it far out of Cincinnati when the bus
stopped again, one of those unscheduled rest stops that Mrs. Warton told me
happen from time to time, some sound from the engine the driver didn't like,
some mysterious illness (probably booze) that forced management to replace the
driver before the bus traveled too far and got too many people injured.
We had pulled to a
stop in some small town, I couldn't even guess the state, where the only light
on main street was a flashing signal, and the soft white glow of the bus
station itself, half a coffee shop hurried open to take care of any passenger
who wanted helping.
I got off the bus
here, only because I needed to stretch my legs, and fill my lungs with air not
polluted by my own cigarette smoke and the body order of the other passengers.
The air clean and
sharp and cold, but whatever snow it had contained, it had left in piles on the
ground, a smooth white surface broken only by the wheels of the bus pulling in
and the footsteps of the passengers making their way from bus to the coffee
shop door.
I did not go in, but
stood sucking in the air, realizing for the first time that air could taste
differently in one place than it did in another, and that this air, tasted
sharply different from the air I was used to breathing back east, sweeter,
smelling of some strange winter growth I could not identify by sniffing.
"Isn't it a bit
cold to be standing out here?" Mrs. Warton asked as she and her husband
stiffly descended the steps from the bus, both tentatively looking at the path
in the snow as if wondering if they could make the crossing without getting
their toes wet.
"It's
refreshing," I said. "I need it to wake up."
"Wake up?"
Bill grumbled. "It's the middle of the Goddamn night. We should all be
sleeping soundly, rather than sitting in the middle of nowhere waiting for
someone to do something about what we know nothing about. I wonder if we've
broken down and if we have to wait for someone to repair the bus before we
actually get going again."
Then, I saw the man
with the hard, grey stare, standing near the door to the coffee shop talking
with the bus driver, that man I had thought myself rid of back in Cincinnati,
and he was staring straight at me. I felt my stomach heave, and though I had
eaten nothing in hours, I felt the nearly irresistible urge to vomit.
My head filled with
the ramifications, the unfolding of a plot that his presence here seemed to
make real. The bus was not disabled.
The driver was not drunk. This man was a cop, or some private detective,
assigned to Pittsburgh to look out for me, and to ride with me until he was
certain of where I was going so that he could call back to my family or to the
police in New Jersey to alert them, driving after the bus after making his
calls in Cincinnati to pull it over and wait for the police to come and collect
me.
I suddenly was sick
of the cold and made my way into the crowded coffee shop, where I settled onto
a stool and ordered myself some coffee. A moment later, the man came in after
me, glanced around the room until his grey gaze caught me, and then he came
over, sat down a stool or two away from me and he ordered coffee, too. I took
mine to go, the liquid sloshing in the container as my hand shook, as I made my
way to the door again and sought once more the comfort of the cold.
When the door opened
behind me, I thought it was him, only to find the lovers parading out, arm and
arm, their attention so focused on themselves they bumped into me before they
saw me, both apologizing profusely as they worked their way around me and made
for the bus.
When the door opened
again, it was the man, limping out into the open, wearing a brown suit and a
brown tie, both looked more wrinkled than I expected a cop's clothing to look,
both looked somewhat frayed at the edges. The door closed behind him, leaving
us both lost in a sudden quiet.
A car passed on the
road, its headlight illuminating the grey-eyed man's face for a moment. A wind
blew at his hair, stirring up a tuft of hair from his forehead.
I almost called out
to him, demanding to know who he was and what he wanted, yet kept the silence.
It was as if we stood each other down like gunfighters, only it would be the
first of us to break our silence that lost.
So intense was that
struggle that I became only vaguely aware of someone standing at my side and
jerked with surprise as if expecting to find another, more conventional kind of
police officer standing there, one waving handcuffs at me.
Laura looked puzzled at my reaction then smiled at me as we
both made our way back to the bus and up the steps.
"You know you don't have to go to Los Angeles right
this minute," Laura said as the bus rolled into Lexington, and the city's
lights illuminated the faces of the passengers looking out, giving each that
look people get when watching television or a movie, the flicker of the
projected story told in hints on each face. Many of those who slept previously
woke up as if the light had reached into their dreams and drawn them out.
"What do you
mean?" I asked, half asleep myself after miles of dark road.
"I mean my
family would be more than pleased to put you up at our place," she said.
"While you're a northerner and all, you'd fit in right well with my uncles
and cousins, and maybe after they'd met you, they'd have a different opinion of
New York. After all, if New York could come up with a man as fine and
upstanding as you are, there's got to be hope for the place yet."
Each word of the
complement stabbed at me with guilt.
"What about your
uncle, George?" I asked. "I'm sure he'd mind, just on
principle."
"He'd get used
to you," Laura said.
I was more than a little tempted to take her up on the
offer. Until that moment, I journey from
darkness into darkness, unknown pursuit behind me, an uncertain future ahead,
and her she offered me respectability, even invisibility since my family would
never think to look for me in such a world as hers.
Again, I felt the intense loneliness of a strange city
waiting for me in Los Angeles, and the potential for rejection from Louise when
after all the miles and all the doubt I managed to get to Boulder to see her.
Only I was not respectable, and I could no more look her
Uncle George in the eye than I could my own Uncle Harry.
"I'm afraid I
can't do that," I told Laura finally. "I've got to get to Colorado
eventually, and it's bad enough that I'm stopping off in Los Angeles first.
Eubank is just a little out of the way."
I touched her hand gently and looked into her soft eyes.
"Besides, if I came with you now, I might never
leave."
"Is that such a
bad thing, really?" she asked, her voice full of hurt.
"No," I
said. "It would be a great thing. But I have things I have to do before I
can ever think of that, things that need to get settled."
"Another
girl?" she asked.
I nodded solemnly.
"I should have
thought as much," she said and turned her head away, so as not to allow me
to see her expression.
When she spoke again, she continued to stare away.
“I want you to know you'll be welcome in my home any time,
and that if when you get to that girl of yours in Colorado and things don't
work out, you just come and look me up here in Kentucky. You hear me?"
I told her I would, just as the bus’s brakes hissed and the
driver steered it off the highway, rolling into the city like a conquering
army, the bright lights making it seem as if the city was already in flames,
with something odd and sad about the place that I hadn't expected to find. Each
home, each store, each bank and official building bore a strangely blank
expression, that small town closed-in sensibility that showed no welcome for
strangers.
Even the small station to bus pulled into seemed grim, and
Laura rose reluctantly, looked down at me for a moment, then -- without warning
-- bent and kissed me squarely on the lips, holding that kiss for a long time
before she withdrew and ran, her bag slapping at the sides of the seats as she
fled. I saw her head for a moment along the other side of the bus as the driver
fished out her remaining luggage from the belly of the bus. A thud marked the
opening of the storage compartment's door, another thud marked its closing.
The driver climbed
back up into the bus and behind the wheel, shaking off the cold like a dog did
water, shifting the bus into gear for what was for me a gratefully quick
escape.
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