“Oh, now my heart’s like a electric blanket around it. I wish I could feel like this all the time. I feel so sleepy but I want to do just everything.”
I moved in and put my arm on the seat behind her. “The most wonderful thing in the world is the meeting of two bodies, in the night,” I said. I was tight as a coot What did I have on my mind?
“You silly old boy.”
“Don’t be afraid when I touch you. It is a disease to be afraid of being touched.”
“If it’s a free country you can still pick out the one you want to touch you, isn’t it?”
“Give me your lips.”
“You thought I was waiting on that? I know who I want. to kiss me. You imagine you going to teach me a lot of stuff, treat me like a virgin that sponged up ever word you said, but if you think I’m a virgin, you’re pitiful.”
Now, one o’clock, she got out of the car and slammed the door. As she passed the fender, a light went on in the house. I put my head out the window. “Come here.” She came back and dragged her foot around.
“I just wonder if dear old Peter honors your monthlies in any way or just humps on through with no vacations. Just watch it. I happen to know that somebody is going to get him. You wouldn’t want that moment to find you …” Her face snapped up.
“I lie!” I cried. I crank the car and backed out, thinking never to see her again.
Driving the T-bird to Mother Rooney’s, I had the sense of someone wanting to be let out of the car when I stopped for the lights. I do not invite ghosts; so far I’ve never needed them. But this was real. I thought I might still be imagining Catherine sitting in the seat by me. But when I parked in front of the rooms, it had not diminished and it was no afterimage of Catherine, I knew. I reached over and opened the opposite door. Of course there was only silence. Then a voice spoke in my head: “That wasn’t even mean. That was petty. I’m leaving.” Ah, Geronimo! I begged him to give me the definitions distinguishing mean from petty. I didn’t quite know. I pronounced the name, Ge Ron I Mo. Two iambs, rising at the last with a sound which might be blown forever through some hole in a cliff in Arizona by the wind. A name which in itself made you want to cast off, even being landlocked, and kick off the past history that sucked you down. This wasn’t petty, this Indian, Apache. I knew that. Oh, I knew that at the last he joined the Dutch Reformed church, grew watermelons, and peddled the bows and arrows that he made. But at the very last, he’d been kicked out of the church for gambling, he’d had six wives, and died of falling off a wagon, drunk, in his eighties. And that was not petty, whatever. But I was petty. All the letters of Monroe could be found in his name, a coincidence which would have bored him extremely, as did most language and English especially. He’d give a belch and a yawn.
I walked to my bed feeling like a tick, a something which scuttled around in the sheets, waiting on the body of a true warm man.
6 / So In July
The afternoon I quit the pharmacology school, I rode out to the Ross Barnett Reservoir, north of Jackson. I wore my lab coat. It was a windy day, so I kept the coat on. I’d called her, asked her out, and she seemed happy to hear from me in a remote, incredulous way. I wanted to say at least one more thing to her. I wanted to reclaim myself from being the tick I was that night with her. But she said her daddy and mother were up from Mobile spending the week with them and that they were out at the Reservoir every night till nine and then they were up to eleven cleaning the fish. That was all her daddy wanted to do while he was in Jackson. I asked where they fished, and she told me.
I parked just below the dam and walked down the hill to the spillway. Through my sunglasses, the water was a foggy boiling green, hissing down the dam wall, pooling in the deep basin of rocks, and rushing down in the Pearl River bed. The pool water was full of suds. Boats full of fishermen wallowed around at the foot of the dam; other people were fishing from the big rocks on the shore.
I saw her with her family. Only the old man was fishing. Her mother sat on a piece of slag a few feet from the water, watching the man. He had a cane pole and flicked it toward the dam, trying to get the cork way out. He leaned over the water. Her mother was jabbering at him and motioning with her hand. Catherine sat up the rise and in back of them on a piece of slag rock. She sat with her arms around her knees. She had on sky-blue tapered pants and a white blouse. Down here, five-thirty in the evening with the vapor from the dam blowing on you like a sea breeze, it was cool, as if you’d found a pit of chill in the smoldering heat. I made it down the rocks unnoticed and looked over her shoulder. Her bare forearm was frail, a little sunburned, and covered with chilly-bumps, and the downy hair on it was erect. This moved me. I came up right next to her. She’d been out here five afternoons straight.
“Hello,” I said.
“You silly old boy,” she said. She didn’t turn around. But she knew who was behind her. I sat down by her. I asked her how the fishing was going. She said her daddy had caught a lot of white perch all week; that he was fishing with minnows.
“You need this coat. You can keep it,” I said. I took off the lab coat and draped it on her.
“Thank you, honey,” Catherine said. She’d never called me that before. She was never so easy with me. I asked her what kind of time she was having. She said, “I do love the water. I don’t care about catching fish out of it like my daddy does. I like the waterfall on the dam. We eat supper out here and everything.”
“It beats the heat.”
The water slapped down loudly just a few yards away. You couldn’t hear things the first time they were said. She pulled me up so I could speak right in her ear. I’d never known her to do anything like this. She pulled the lab coat close to her and nestled her cheek against the shoulder of it. She turned her face toward me, her hair blowing. “Harry the doctor. With that beard you look cut out to be a famous doctor on a rocket ship to Mars. With those sunglasses.”
In this rocky valley where it was so shady and cool, I didn’t care if it never changed. I asked her if her mother and daddy ever turned around or if they watched the cork like that all week. I asked her didn’t she want to introduce me to her folks. They were just a few feet down from us. She said she didn’t want to. I asked her, What if they turn around? She seemed scared, and in reply she took off my coat and handed it back.
Over the noise of the falling water, I could barely hear her mother talking. But she had been harganguing the old man ever since I’d been there. He had been moving out farther into the water, holding the pole in a strained way. He wore leather shoes and the water was over his ankles. The back of his head was balding in a messy way, with gray and brown strands losing out to pale splotches of scalp. The woman stood up, and I took the hint from Catherine and moved off as if I was not with her. Her mother’s cheek, the left one, was burned, I mean fire-burned, from some accident, and the other was covered with tiny freckles. Her teeth were brown, and she was clamping down on a Pall Mall — the pack was in her hand — one eye shut to the smoke. She saw me standing twelve feet or so from Catherine. I was trying to get a grip on the rock incline. I’d put my coat back on, and I was showing an innocent disregard for Catherine.
“Arrrrrrrr!” the woman said as she sat down by her daughter. Then she broke wind, helplessly. Almost simultaneously, she cranked her face toward me to stare and check on my reaction. She had a hurt look. I gazed away like a statue. She drew her shoe down, scraping the rock in front of her to make a fartlike noise so if I’d heard I would understand that this is what made the noise when she sat down.