She walked away, but still he stood there. He picked up a piece of pine bark and sailed it at the water. It flipped and parried off, catching on the surface as he stood thinking. Everybody he met had a different dream. Every dream was strong and secret and clung-to and hoped for with all the dreamer’s might. One wanted a little patch of good soil, another folding money on the section, another a hazel-eyed baby with a burblous laugh, another rescue rolling in from a far country. Each thought he could find his soul’s satisfaction in a single scrap of creation. . and build his life on it. But the air or water or bit of ground that separated you from the dream. . how could you cross it?
He climbed the bank and walked back to the car where she sat waiting. He had hoped she would look up, look away from where she had stored herself these last moments, look at him with delight, but she only looked half pleased at seeing him, half annoyed at having to wait. He got in the car and leaned toward her to kiss her anyway, but halfway there he stopped and smiled at her. It was a forced smile that felt cracked and stiff on his face.
“You know,” he said, “I think you and I fit together better than any two. .” And then stopped. He slumped back into his seat as she started the car. She didn’t need a crank, the machine fired right up.
“I like you,” she said, understanding everything, he thought, seeing right into him, “but I am older than you. I feel kind of sisterly toward you.”
Oh no, he wanted to say and raised his hand as if to stop her: Don’t talk that way. “You and I would be perfect together,” he said.
“None are perfect,” she said, “and we both have other plans, other lives we want.”
He turned away, for the moment defeated. The car chugged, creaking and shaking up the bank and stopped; the bank was too steep. She gave him a scared look. He told her to drive it back down and turn around. After she did this he took the wheel and backed it up the slope, something he had seen a driver do before. Her face was flushed a hidden, rising red, strongest in the point of her cheeks, and a bead of sweat slid down under her ear. At the top, after he’d wheeled around and stopped, as he leaned back in the seat under big mossy oaks, a smoothness, a calm in his body, she darted in and kissed him on the cheek. They changed places and then sat a minute on the grassy shoulder. The dirt road was a soft orange dusty color. She looked as if she wanted to kiss him again but she only put the car in gear and they started out.
“That was too scary,” she said.
“Wadn’t much to it.”
“I’m so thankful you knew what to do.”
“Me too,” he said and smiled.
“You’re a curious boy.”
“Not in a bad way.”
“No, no, I don’t mean that. It’s just. . you’re out here in the world wandering around on your own.”
“I got the professor. I got a job.”
“I don’t mean to insult you.”
“It’s all right.”
They were silent. The pine woods streamed by. A distant hawk, drifting in its singleness, tipped and slid off to the west.
“Thank you for telling me everything you have,” she said. “I love listening to you.”
“You said you didn’t really want to become a doctor. What is it that you want to be?”
“I’d like to do something like you’re doing,” she said, reaching over and touching his hand. “I’d like to ride around showing people things.”
“Why don’t you come along with us?”
She smiled at him and then she tossed her head in an artificial way. “I probably will become a doctor if they’ll let me. A nurse if that’s all they’ll allow. And then I’ll travel around helping sick people.”
He could offer her a lot of things better than that, he thought.
“What people really want,” he said, “is to hook up with somebody they feel comfortable with and then get on with living.”
“I don’t really think much about that,” she said.
“But you don’t have to. We got it in our nature already. You don’t have to cozen it up.”
“But I have other things to do first.” She smiled again, fondly; distantly. “And so do you.”
“No,” he said emphatically, hurriedly. “The somebody you hook up with goes right along with all this other business we got to do. They’re a natural fit. One helps the other.”
“Still, I don’t think I quite would be. .” She stopped talking. They were passing a small cane syrup mill. The press turned by a single gray mule attached to the end of a long pole. A white man wearing overalls and no shirt fed stalks of purple cane into the mill.
“You want some syrup?” Delvin asked.
“Oh, I’d love some. . but I don’t know.”
“Sho. Pull on in.”
She parked on the road shoulder just beyond the cooking shed and they got out and the man watched them walk back to him as he continued to stuff stalks into the press. He was a thin white man, his skin clammy pale where it showed under the overalls.
“Could we buy a jug of your syrup, mister?” Delvin asked.
The man went on feeding the long purple stalks into the press. Delvin could see his left nipple, like a dark brown button, slip in and out of view as he worked.
“Excuse me, suh.”
The man just looked at them and went on feeding in the stalks. The mule, head down, had nothing on his mind but muleness.
“Do you sell cane syrup, mister?”
The man stopped feeding, stepped to the press, unsnagged the full bucket of dark juice from under the slot and walked with it past them to the cooking shed. He poured the juice into the kettle, stoked the fire with a billet of whiteoak wood and then stood looking across the fields that were planted in cotton. He did not appear any longer to be aware of their presence.
They got back in the car. They drove a couple of miles down the road before Delvin said, “Sometimes a white man will act like a human being, sometimes he won’t.”
“He didn’t like to see negro folk riding around in their own fine car.” She laughed and then they both laughed. It seemed so funny and ridiculously humiliating to be treated like that, so crazy to them both, that they couldn’t help but laugh. He reached over, fumbled with her face, managed to turn it toward him and kissed her partially on the lips.
She smiled again, the fond now slightly askew distant smile, and said, “That’s sweet.”
He drew instantly back and looked straight ahead at the road that seemed to be running through exotic green country. He didn’t feel any more like laughing.
Soon they were back in town, bumping along the main street of the quarter. The day was hot. Two lines of sweat ran down her face as she laughed at his story about a peg-legged man who, in Fitzgerald, Georgia, had challenged him to a foot race and beat him.
“He wanted to wrestle,” he said, “but I told him I didn’t think I could take being mortified twice.”
They parked behind the van, through the open door of which the prof could be seen sitting in his collapsible canvas chair drinking from a tall glass. Without getting up he waved at them. They didn’t get out of the car.
“You think you want to have children anytime soon?” Delvin asked.