When the waitress saw Belle’s face she glowered at us like she was trying to figure which one had done it to her—and looked ready to bite whoever it was. Belle read her expression and said, “These fellas are real nice. They fixed the one who…” She gestured at her bruises.
“That so?” the waitress said. “Well, I hope you all fixed the sumbitch good.”
We had big bowls of chili beans that stung our mouths, huge hamburgers with all the trimmings, baskets of thick french fries slathered with ketchup. Tall glasses of lemonade with mint and lots of crushed ice. After nothing but a nibble of breakfast and a couple of bites of a cheese sandwich for lunch, Belle finally showed an appetite. Russell nudged me and nodded at her. She was bent over her plate and wolfing the burger, the juices running out of the bun and down her wrists. Charlie and Buck were watching her too. She stopped chewing and looked up at us.
“Welcome back among the living,” Russell said.
She blushed through her bulging smile, her cheeks full of burger. Charlie reached over with a napkin and wiped a smear of mustard off her lip.
For dessert we had slabs of peach pie thick with fresh peach chunks and rich grainy sugar. Then Buck went to have a chat with the manager. In a little while he came back with the irksome news that there was no hooch to be had at this place. But an oil camp about twelve miles north was said to have its own still, and the crew was said to sometimes be of a mind to sell a little something to a fella in need.
We finished our coffee and went outside and stopped short. The whole world was steeped in a dying daylight so deeply red and darkly yellow it seemed unreal.
The manager stood in the door behind us and said, “Does it every time. I come out here from Ohio near to twenty-five years ago and still can’t believe it. It’s like the light’s made of blood and gold.”
I smiled and said, “You’re a poet, mister.”
“Not me, son,” he said. “I’m just glad to see it with my own eyes and hope to do it again tomorrow.” He flicked away his cigarette and went inside.
Buck drove off in the Model A and the rest of us went to the cabins. After a long shower and a change of clothes I went outside into the gathered darkness. The air smelled of dust and cooling stone. At the foot of a nearby rise I found a low flat boulder that made a good bench. A narrow streak of violet still showed above the western mountains, but the rest of the sky had gone black and glimmered with early stars. The first fireflies were out and flashing softly. The moon was up in the east, nearly full, the color of a new penny.
Highway traffic was sparse. You could see the lights of an approaching vehicle from a long way off before it finally went whirring by. A series of high yowls rose somewhere to the distant south, and it took me a minute to realize they must be coyotes.
“I heard them before.” I started at the sound of her voice in the darkness slightly behind me—then made out her vague silhouette about ten feet away. “Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to spook you.”
“How long you been there?” I said.
“Only a little bit.”
“I didn’t see you come out.”
“Huh?”
“Out of your room,” I said. “I didn’t see you come out.”
“Oh, you mean you didn’t see me from out here. Well, no, you couldn’t’ve seen me come out from out here. I already was.”
“What?”
“I already was out here.”
“You were already out here when I came out?”
“It’s what I just said. Is there something wrong with how I’m talking?”
“I know what you said. I mean, why didn’t you say something?”
“What do you mean? Jeepers, I did say something. I said I’d heard—”
“No, before.”
“Before when?”
“When I first came out here, goddammit. Why didn’t you say something right away instead of lurking in the dark? Jesus Christ, what a conversation.”
“You don’t have to swear at me,” she said. “And I wasn’t lurking. And I could say the same, you know—about this conversation.”
I blew a long breath, surprised at my own agitation. “Yeah,” I said. “I suppose you could.”
“All right, then,” she said.
There was a faraway keening of a train whistle. The highway lay dark in either direction.
“I didn’t say anything before,” she said, “because…well, you don’t talk as much as the others. I thought maybe you don’t care to. That answer your question?”
I nodded and said, “Utterly.”
She only half succeeded in suppressing a snicker. “I don’t guess this chat’s going to do a whole lot to change your attitude about not talking much.”
It was the first time I’d heard her try to be even a little bit funny, and coming when it did it struck me as so funny I busted out laughing—and she did too, laughing hard, from deep in the belly, like she hadn’t done it in a hell of a while.
I moved over on the boulder and patted it for her to have a seat beside me. She accepted an Old Gold from the pack I offered. She smelled freshly clean, and when I struck a match to light the cigarettes, I saw that her hair hung damp and straight. She took a small puff and coughed. She was no practiced smoker.
“You never even smoked a cigarette before?”
“In secret a couple of times with this girl back home e didn’t have all that much chance to get good at it.”
“What about that boyfriend you had? You didn’t smoke with him?”
“He didn’t smoke, he chewed. I wasn’t about to try that.”
“I guess love has its limits, huh?”
“Maybe,” she said. “It anyway wasn’t love, I don’t believe, not really. I think I was only…I don’t know.”
In the ensuing silence I sensed she was embarrassed at having told too much, so I said in a tough-guy rasp, “Well, stick with me, kid, and you can practice at smoking all you want. I’ll show you all the fastest ways to hell.”
“Look who’s calling anybody kid,” she said. “How old are you—eighteen, nineteen?”
“Right the second time,” I said.
The high cries of the coyotes rose again and seemed keener in the greater darkness. She said she used to hear them all the time at her grandparents’ farm in Comanche County when she was a child.
“They sound different ways if you listen really careful,” she said. “Sometimes it’s like they’re having a high old time, and sometimes like they’re trying to tell you something you’ll never in the world understand.” There came a long solitary howl and then another right behind it from another coyote and of different timbre. “And sometimes it’s like that—like the loneliest talk there is.”
We sat and smoked in the dark, our cigarette tips glowing red among the pale green sparks of the fireflies, our smoky exhalations mingling in the light of the rising moon. We stayed like that for a long time without speaking. Russell and Charlie had remained in their room and I figured he was making up for what he’d missed the night before. The thought of them going at it made me keenly conscious of Belle’s nearness. I thought I could feel her body heat on my bare arm. I lit another cigarette and she asked if she could have one too.
I struck a match and she touched my hand as she leaned forward to accept the light. She looked up at me from under her lashes, her good eye wide and bright and a little scared. Then blew out the flame and took away her hand.
And then here came headlights down the road, brightening as they approached—and sweeping over us when the car turned into the parking lot. The Model A halted in front of the cabins and the engine shut off and the door opened and then banged shut. Buck called out, “You all come on down here and see what I got us.”