“The husband didn’t live. The wife went to my family and told them that if they wanted to continue to work for her they’d have to send me to the city to live. She wanted to force me into prostitution.
“My father and mother had fourteen children. They had to look at the greater good-the well-being of thirteen children versus one child. I’m sure my mother never got over it, but they sent me anyway. I never did go into prostitution. I became a decorator for rich people. I even married a white man, but he could never forgive me for being a ‘high yellow’ as he always called me. Whenever he got drunk he beat me. He couldn’t forgive me for being part colored, and he couldn’t forgive himself for loving me.
“By then my brother had started boxing. I left my husband and traveled around with my brother until Rooney gave him that drink and killed him. And all this led me here, to try to kill Rooney.
“I’m sort of a disreputable woman, wouldn’t you say?”
She said she didn’t mind if he had an after-dinner cigar, so as they strolled along the river, he smoked.
On the dark water, the reflections of yellow and white city lights shimmered. Ducks floated and quacked. Rowboaters angled downstream toward the rush and roar and silver splash of the dam.
A soft breeze flowed over the grassy banks. Fireflies flickered and died. Lost in bushes, and happy to be lost, lovers giggled. An earnest young man in a straw boater sat on a park bench with a bored young woman and tried to impress her with his ukulele playing. An old immigrant sat in rags, despondent, staring at the shimmering water.
They walked upstream past the boat dock and the icehouses and pavilion where church ladies were carting off the last of the picnic baskets from a social.
“Have you even wanted a life like theirs?” Clarise asked Guild.
“I’m not sure.”
“You ever tried it?”
“Sort of, I suppose.”
“Sort of?”
“It’s not worth talking about.”
“Were you married?”
“For a time.”
“Were you happy?”
“That’s the part that’s not worth talking about.”
“I see.”
They walked some more. He finished his cigar, tossing the red eye of it into the black water.
Electric poles hummed and thrummed in the dark night along the graveled river road.
A white-nosed fawn stumbled out of undergrowth like a lost child, standing dazed in a circle of moonlight. Clarise went over to it and fell to her knees and hugged it as if she had borne it, and Guild was moved enough that he, too, went over and knelt and began petting the frightened animal.
At last came the fawn’s mother, a loose-fleshed animal that seemed, seeing them, both scared and angry. You could smell the night’s heat on the mother, and fecal matter.
The fawn disappeared back into the undergrowth with its mother.
Clarise and Guild went on their way.
They walked another mile. The river angled gently east. At its widest point the moon made the surface pure silver. Laughter came sharply from upriver, like gunshots, as two rowboats oared away from them.
They walked over and sat in the long grass on a ragged clay cliff above a backwash.
Clarise picked sunflowers, tucking one behind her ear. The other sunflowers she twirled, tossing them finally into the water below.
He was afraid to kiss her, but he kissed her anyway and she seemed quite pleased about it.
As they lay in the long grass, they could hear night birds and roaming dogs and distant cows. Nearer by, they could hear the soft lap of water on the shore and the wooden creak of rowboat oars and a young man singing a soft song, presumably to his girl.
He was scarcely aware of where his moments with Clarise were leading so suddenly.
“I can’t help the way I am,” Clarise said. “I don’t like most men, and it’s been a long time for me.”
“Will you roll me one of those?”
“Sure.”
“A lady oughtn’t smoke.”
“I suppose not.”
“But then a lady, a real lady, oughtn’t do what I just did.”
“Aren’t we a little old for oughtn’ts?”
She laughed. “Speak for yourself.”
He rolled the cigarettes and got them going red in the dark night. He gave her a cigarette and then lay down again with her. They’d put their clothes back on in case somebody came along.
“You seem like a troubled man, Guild.”
He did not want to talk about the little girl and spoil everything for them. He said, “And you seem like a troubled woman.”
They said nothing for a long time. They just listened to the soft lapping of water on the shore and the reedy sound of breeze through the long grasses.
“I enjoyed myself, Guild.”
“So did I.”
“I guess I don’t care if you think I’m a whore or not.”
“I don’t.”
“That’s what most white people think of us.”
“You want me to tell you what most white people think of me?”
She laughed again. “Look at that moon. You ever wonder what’s going on up there, in the parts that look like continents?”
“Sure. I wonder about that a lot.”
“Wouldn’t it be funny if there were people up there and they were just like us?”
“No,” Guild said. “I hope they’re not. I hope they’re very, very different.”
“In what way?”
He sighed. “I hope they don’t have politicians the way we do, and I hope they don’t let people go hungry, and I hope they don’t kill children.”
He felt her shudder. “Kill children? That’s a terrible thing to think of.”
“Yes,” Guild said. “It’s the worst thing you can think of.”
“Then stop thinking about it.”
She drew him back to her then, and the wonderful softness and heat and moisture of her mouth pressed to his again.
Chapter Thirteen
“Another one?”
“Please.”
“You’re all alone tonight, Mr. Reynolds.” The bar was small, a narrow walk-in just off Church Street. The smell of whiskey and sawdust and stale ham from the free lunch filtered through the air.
“Yes.” He left it at that. He did not want to talk about Helen anymore, or her marriage two months ago to a bank clerk. Everything had been fine with Helen until she learned by accident that he was a thief. She still loved him enough that she had not turned him over to the law, but nothing since then had gone right for Reynolds. Nothing. There had been, for instance, an easy breaking-and-entry job in Milan, Illinois, two weeks ago. He’d been going in through the back window when the entire casement fell down on his head, knocking him out. The incident had very nearly been comic. He’d come to with time enough to get out of the empty house with its walls filled with expensive paintings, its drawers filled with money and silver. Then he had tried breaking into the liquor store over on Harcourt Street. Two steps in he’d noticed a copper walking past the back door, a looming shadow. A copper. He’d cased the job for a week. Coppers were not supposed to come by for twenty minutes. But for some reason one did this night. He’d been forced to flee with nothing. And it all started when Helen told him she was going to marry the boy she’d graduated eighth grade with.
“You going to see the fight tomorrow, Mr. Reynolds?” the bartender asked.