“What was his name?”
“I forget his name. Here... here’s the guy that pulled him out. Maybe he knows his name.”
In a second he was surrounded, questions being shouted at him from all sides. He gave them Ike’s name and his own, and they began a frantic search for Ike, but couldn’t find him. Then they decided he was the main story, not Ike, and directed him to pose for his picture. “Hey, not there; not by the ice-cream truck. We don’t give ice cream a free ad in this paper. Over there by the tent.”
He stood as directed, and two or three in the third shift told the story all over again in vivid detail. The reporters took notes, the photographers snapped several pictures of him, and a crowd collected. “And will you put it in that I’m from Spokane, Washington? I’d kind of like to have that in, on account of my people back there. Spokane, Washington.”
“Sure, we’ll put that in.”
The reporters left as quickly as they had come, and the crowd began to melt. He turned away, a little sorry that his big moment had passed so quickly. Behind him he half heard a voice: “Well, ain’t that something to be getting his picture in the paper?” He turned, saw several grins, but nobody was looking at him. Standing with her back to him, dressed in a blue silk Sunday dress, and kicking a pebble, was a girl. It was a girl who had spoken, and by quick elimination he decided it must be she.
The sense of carefree goofiness that had been growing on him since he got his money, since the crowd began to jostle him, since he had become a hero, focused somewhere in his head with dizzy suddenness. “Any objections?”
This got a laugh. She kept her eyes on the pebble but turned red and said: “No.”
“You sure?”
“Just so you don’t get stuck up.”
“Then that’s O.K. How about an ice-cream cone?”
“I don’t mind.”
“Hey, mister, two ice-cream cones.”
“Chocolate.”
“Both of them chocolate and both of them double.”
When they got their cones he led her away from the guffawing gallery which was beginning to be a bit irksome. She looked at him then, and he saw she was pretty. She was small, with blue eyes, dusty blonde hair that blended with the dusty scene around her, and a spray of freckles over her forehead. He judged her to be about his own age. After looking at him, and laughing rather self-consciously and turning red, she concentrated on the cone, which she licked with a precise technique. He suddenly found he had nothing to say, but said it anyhow: “Well, say — what are you doing here?”
“Oh — had to see the fire, you know.”
“Have you seen it?”
“Haven’t even found out where it is, yet.”
“Well, my, my! I see I got to show it to you.”
“You know where it is?”
“Sure. Come on.”
He didn’t lead the way to the fire, though. He took her up the arroyo, through the burned-over area, where the fire had been yesterday. After a mile or so of walking, they came to a little grove of trees beside a spring. The trees were live oak and quite green and cast a deep shade on the ground. Nobody was in sight, or even in earshot. It was a place the Sunday trippers didn’t know about.
“Oh, my! Look at these trees! They didn’t get burnt.”
“Sometimes it jumps — the fire, I mean. Jumps from one hill straight over to the other hill, leaves places it never touched at all.”
“My, but it’s pretty.”
“Let’s sit down.”
“If I don’t get my dress dirty.”
“I’ll put this jacket down for you to sit on.”
“Yes, that’s all right.”
They sat down. He put his arm around her, put his mouth against her lips.
It was late afternoon before she decided that her family might be looking for her and that she had better go back. She had an uncle in the camp, it seemed, and they had come as much to see him as to see the fire. She snickered when she remembered she hadn’t seen either. They both snickered. They walked slowly back, their little fingers hooked together. He asked if she would like to go with him to one of the places along the road to get something to eat, but she said they had brought lunch with them, and would probably stop along the beach to eat it, going back.
They parted, she to slip into the crowd unobtrusively; he to get his mess kit, for the supper line was already formed. As he watched the blue dress flit between the tents and disappear, a gulp came into his throat; it seemed to him that this girl he had held in his arms, whose name he hadn’t even thought to inquire, was almost the sweetest human being he had ever met in his life.
When he had eaten, and washed his mess kit and put it away, he wanted a cigarette. He walked down the road to a Bar-B-Q shack, bought a package, lit up, started back. Across a field, a hundred yards away, was the ocean. He inhaled the cigarette, inhaled the ocean air, enjoyed the languor that was stealing over him, wished he didn’t have to go to work. And then, as he approached the camp, he felt something ominous.
Ike Pendleton was there, and in front of him this girl, this same girl he had spent the afternoon with. Ike said something to her, and she backed off. Ike followed, his fists doubled up. The crowd was silent, seemed almost to be holding its breath. Ike cursed at her. She began to cry. One of the state police came running up to them, pushed them apart, began to lecture them. The crowd broke into a buzz of talk. A woman, who seemed to be a relative, began to explain to all and sundry: “What if she did go with some guy to look at the fire? He don’t live with her no more! He don’t support her — never did support her! She didn’t come up here to see him; never even knew he was up here! My land, can’t the poor child have a good time once in a while?”
It dawned on him that this girl was Ike’s wife.
He sat down on a truck bumper, sucked nervously at his cigarette. Some of the people who had guffawed at the ice-cream-cone episode in the afternoon looked at him, whispered. The policeman called over the woman who had been explaining things, and she and the girl, together with two children, went hurriedly over to a car and climbed into it. The policeman said a few words to Ike, and then went back to his duties on the road.
Ike walked over, picked up a mess kit, squatted on the ground between tents, and resumed a meal apparently interrupted. He ate sullenly, with his head hulked down between his shoulders. It was almost dark. The lights came on. The camp was not only connected to county water but to county light as well. Two boys went over to Ike, hesitated, then pointed to Paul. “Hey, mister, that’s him. Over there, sitting on the truck.”
Ike didn’t look up. When the boys came closer and repeated their news, he jumped up suddenly and chased them. One of them he hit with a baked potato. When they had run away he went back to his food. He paid no attention to Paul.
In the car, the woman was working feverishly at the starter. It would whine, the engine would start and bark furiously for a moment or two, then die with a series of explosions. Each time it did this, the woman would let in the clutch, the car would rock on its wheels, and then come to rest. This went on for at least five minutes, until Paul thought he would go insane if it didn’t stop, and people began to yelclass="underline" “Get a horse!” “Get that damn oil can out of here and stop that noise!” “Have a heart! This ain’t the Fourth of July!”
For the twentieth time it was repeated. Then Ike jumped up and ran over there. People closed in after him. Paul, propelled by some force that seemed completely apart from himself, ran after him. When he had fought his way through the crowd, Ike was on the running board of the car, the children screaming, men trying to pull him back. He had the knife from the mess kit in his hand. “I’m going to kill her! I’m going to kill her! If it’s the last thing I do on earth, I’m going to kill her!”