“No, mam,” I got out. No, I didn’t know she was anything as deluxe as that. Ann laughed.
“They say I am. I am the girl whose butt don’t often hit the mattress, they say. Some guy was looking in a window and observed that when I didn’t know it.”
While she was saying that she was taking me all in, probably for the first time. I was exhausted by all I’d found out about her. I’d always thought of her as my private discovery.
“You come back around when you grow up some,” Ann said. “I haven’t got anything against you.” She got out of the car.
“What do you think of Malibu, California? I’ve got love for you. I’ve got money!” I yelled when she seemed to be leaving the car. She came back and put her red-haired head in the window.
“Don’t think I ain’t dreamed of all that money with you … Harry … Everybody knows love is the loveliest word there is, also. Don’t throw it around like you do.”
She went in. By God, I wanted her more than ever. She had a little intelligence, which surprised the daylights out of me. You bet I’d wait around and grow until I was man enough for her. I’d grow hair all over. I’d seen what a woman she was when I talked to her. All set Ann and I would wait on each other. An enormously profitable way to spend your spare time, waiting, growing, for Ann.
Two weeks later I drove the car up in the garage and there was the old man. It was twilight. He was sitting on the hood of his Buick. I knew by his weak smile that he was after me.
“That’s the way to park that old caroobie,” he yelled. I knew something was on his mind, like a ton of bricks. The old man gets friendlier than a faggot Japanese when he approaches me on bad trouble. He wants to establish that all is normal except one tiny thing, and that thing is the business at hand.
“Guess what Mr. Mick told me the other day?” he says. No relation to anything. I am alarmed. Mr. Mick is Ann’s wino father. Her name is Ann Mick.
“He said the reason he gave up wine the last time was that the air from the paper mills in Dream of Pines was so bad it cut into his wine and ruined it the minute he pulled the cap off. It was like mixing wine with raccoon dung, he said.” Big laughing in the garage. I’m struggling toward the house but the old man has got a great humorous cuff on me.
“It’s a shame about Mr. Mick,” I say. Let me go, old man.
“His daughter goes to your high school,” says my father. His voice has the crisp delight of profundity in it. What am I supposed to do? Deny that she attends the school? “She works for me on the sewing machines. She’s the worst worker I have. She smokes in the shop. Somebody told me she does something worse than that with somebody else back of the stacks at coffee break. I’m thinking of letting her go.”
“You know I have a crush on her,” I admit.
“I’ll say a crush. With dreams abut her, and singing songs to her.” He lifted out of his vest pocket the very note I gave her in the Film Room. It was the blue-lined note-book paper with ripped ringer holes, and then it was very crumpled and folded and almost yellow. “You don’t want me to read it, do you?”
I snatched it out of the old man’s fingers.
“You put our phone number in there,” he mused.
“Did Ann give this to you?” I asked.
“No. It’s been through several people before it got to me. You’ll be happy to know that. First, she gave it to her father, and he thought it was such a precious joke that he handed it over to Harley Butte, his foreman. Then Harley kept it a week, thinking about it, and finally decided I ought to see it He gave it to me. He said he thought I wouldn’t think it was very funny, and he was right. I don’t think this note’s very funny. With all the fine girls you could be interested in…”
He had me down. He began accusing me of trying to embarrass him. He said he didn’t need that, and that my mother Donna, who was a very fine lady, didn’t need that He said it was a slander to her name that Ann Mick was the first girl I chose to show any interest in, because (he whispered) Ann Mick was a little “harlot” that everybody knew about. He finally got so upset, saying we wouldn’t mention any of this to Mother, and that this matter was “Closed. Closed, you hear?” I couldn’t understand him. I’d agreed to everything he said long ago, out of sheer fright and humiliation. But he was forcing himself into a nervous panic, still holding onto my arm, and looking out into the dark back yard as if there was some specter there which yet threatened his life and family. I do believe he was holding to me protectively and not just to keep me from running in the house. I’d seen the old man nervous and full of clamor before, but never like this.
The old man was a converted Presbyterian and was occasionally flooded by the idea of being morally circumspect He’d quit smoking and use up a bottle of Listerine in one week trying to expunge every hint of the weed within and without his body. He’d begin drinking worlds of milk and throw out the one bottle of sherry in the house, which he and my mother touched only about twice a year anyway. He’d walk to work and back, a distance over all of five miles, with his hair combed neat and slick and a modest pin-on bow tie at his throat — other days he despised bow ties as menial-looking — and he would have some book in his hands: a dictionary, or a book of poems by a Presbyterian missionary to China, what did it matter. He never cracked it, but made sure to have his name signed gloriously on the flyleaf, and all he wanted out of it was the sober sanction that a piece of literature in the hands gives one. He’d get home drunk on sunshine, goodness, and his own sweat. He would be concerned about his family name, which meant that he was concerned about me. He called me into the kitchen, where he’d have two glasses waiting. There he began, “Well. Tell me what you’ve been doing,” and engaged me in a sort of contest at milk-drinking while we waited for the answers to come out. It all ended with our drinking so much milk we were ready to puke; the old man churning himself into a dull butter of meditation about my life. Not one understandable sentence having passed between us.
So I thought after I left him in the garage that he was only being a Presbyterian again, with all this business about the family name and so on, but that was not it. Or that was only partly it. I think I saw into this matter later.
I went to his office again one afternoon to look at Ann. He did not see me come in. The old man was sitting on a stool near the shop window and peering down at someone very concentratedly. I walked over — I suppose quietly — and looked past his shoulder. There was Ann bent down at her machine. I know he wasn’t looking at the middle-aged women around her.
“You didn’t fire her, did you?”
He jerked around coming out of a very soulful smile. Then he seemed to become concerned over what he was doing. He squirmed around right-face on the stool. He bit his lips, closed his eyes, and failed once at crossing his arms.
“Who?” he said weakly.
Oh, Daddy, oh, Ode Elann Dupont. You’ve been in love with her too, haven’t you? Or at least you like to look at her very much, don’t you? I do not think I was wrong about it. The fishiest grin I’ve ever seen popped out on his mouth. I looked past his shoulder down to Ann on the floor, and seeing her, blooming heavily forward, unbrassiered, under her tee shirt as I’d never seen her before, her legs crossed, her hairstrands falling over into her eyes like wispy copper as she bent to the machine doing her little bit, I knew she was too much woman for me, for one thing, and for another, no man could look on her without becoming a slobbering kind of rutting boar; she did not enchant you: she put you in heat. You thought of a pig-run alley full of hoofmarks running between you and her — lots of hoofmarks, dried deep in the clay — for after all, she was known to have mated with others. She was at the edge of a water hole, bending down for a drink with her feminine parts up in the air. I thought of the old man looking at her.