Two-lane blacktop had turned to one-lane gravel. They swayed in the ruts and Christo had to swing sharply right to avoid the limbs of a freshly fallen tree. Soupy mud thrummed in the wheelwells. Christo stopped short and cut the ignition.
“What’s the deal?”
He turned to her and wiped his eyes. Tildy stared ahead, shoulders square, arms folded under pointy breasts perfect as two chrome bumper guards.
“This doesn’t go anywhere. I think you’d better turn around.”
Rain fell softly now and through a meager canopy of trees the sky showed veins of yellow breaking through.
“I sort of like it here. Tranquil.”
“Let’s go.”
Christo watched her hand dip into a pocket of her baggy slacks, reappear holding a pale, slender object which she tapped against the window glass. It was a straight razor.
“What’s that for?”
“Protection.” She depressed the thumb lever and the blade, spotted with iridescent tarnish, emerged from its mother-of-pearl housing.
“You don’t need it from me, Tildy. Relax. Whatever you might be thinking right at the moment, I’m a real get-along guy. Dogs love me.”
“You’re a thief and a liar, and that’s only what you’ve admitted to. How do I know you’re not some maniac who’d like to tie me up and carve his initials in my thigh?”
“You don’t, not conclusively. But that’s part of my charm.”
“This ride was your idea, don’t forget, not mine.”
“I’d call that coy, but if you put that thing away, I’ll agree.”
Tildy shoved the razor back in her pocket. “This doesn’t mean I trust you.”
He swung the door open, put one leg outside. “We’re both too jumpy for close quarters. Let’s walk.”
Separated by a wide corridor of air, they tramped through the drizzle without speaking. The road dipped and turned past a gravel mound, an overgrown rubbish site: tires, jerry cans, rubber pipes, a tilting stove.
“We could make a fire if you want,” he said, turning up the collar of her jacket for her, feeling for the first time the sleek texture of her skin as his knuckles grazed her neck.
“With what?”
“I don’t know. Money. I read once about some people up in Minnesota who got caught in a blizzard. They burned twenty-dollar bills to keep from getting frostbite.”
“Just keep walking,” Tildy said, more vehemently than she meant to.
Their shoes squelched with every step. Tildy began purposely to slog through the deepest water she could find, kicking it in all directions. She stopped in a puddle that was shin-deep and brought her foot down hard, splashing Christo’s legs. He nodded his head, smiling, and she did it again.
“Okay.” He bent, filled cupped hands and emptied them on her chest.
She winced and leaned over, pulling the sodden T-shirt away from her skin. Christo, taking advantage of her poor balance, gave a slight shove and she toppled backward into the slop.
“Thank you,” she said. She removed a sneaker, filled it with water and gradually, so as not to spill a drop, swaggered over and poured it on his head; while he was still blinking, she dropped a cold oyster of mud down the front of his pants.
Christo checked them into the Windjammer Motel as Mr. and Mrs. Leif Lucky of Detroit. The room overlooked the parking lot of a discount hardware store. The carpeting was mildewed, the bathtub drain clogged with hair. They showered separately, got under the covers, got nowhere.
“A lot of trouble you took to not get it up,” Tildy said, lighting her only dry cigarette.
They stared at cracks in the ceiling, shared the hollow silences and prickly, irregular flushes that accompany sexual nonfeasance. Down below someone was beating his dog.
Christo reached for the cigarette, puffed. “At least we’re dry.”
“I know I am,” Tildy said, delicately probing herself with an index finger.
Christo pressed the disadvantage. “See. I’m no kink, like you said before in the car. No madman from out of the cellar. I didn’t scratch you or crank your arms or pound on you like a piece of veal. There’s nothing I can’t seem to be, but this is your place, right? Abnormal is normal. Can you tell the difference now?”
Tildy rose on the right angle of one lean elbow and drew out from beneath her pillow the razor, balanced it on her palm like a small stick whittled clean. “Just in case. I stashed it while you were in the shower.”
“A wrong move or two and I could have been nutless, huh? Jesus.” Christo cupped his groin. “Jesus. You’re a tough little item, you know that? Ought to wear a bell around your neck.”
“It’s all right. I wouldn’t have cut anywhere below the shoulders.”
“You’ll just have to excuse me. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in bed with a woman.”
She pulled the sheet over her head. This is it, she thought. Here the stale revelations come, the me-matter in all its weary detail from the first jumbled episode of Mom scrubbing his back to that perfect sexless sweetie who wounded his heart…. She did not want to know about his past. She did not even want him to have one.
“Listen, it wasn’t up to me. They don’t give you a whole lot of options in a mental hospital. Dating therapy is one thing they haven’t tried yet.”
Tildy jumped up, toes digging into the woven loops of the carpet, shouting through a sudden flurry of little stinging tears, “Why do you do it? Why do you tell me these things? Don’t you know when it’s time to shut up?” She fled into the bathroom.
“Come on out.” Christo chattered his nails on the door, thin composition board he could have put his fist right through. “You should feel good. You probably know more about me than a lot of my friends.” He heard water running full force in the sink. “Hey, this is a thoroughly cornball scene, me talking through the door and … Look. I move around a lot. I do things that are against the law and sometimes when I get jammed up, I have to take a few months in the bin. But there’s nothing out of whack in my head. I don’t commune with furniture. I don’t go around on the freak with rubber bands in my mouth and the end of my necktie hanging out my fly … I’m just a small-time outlaw. Where’s the harm in that?”
Jerking the door open, Tildy locked eyes with him briefly, then brushed past. Her wild brown curls spilled down her back like a gallon of dead bees. “I think I would like to go home now,” she said, stepping into her pants.
“Bullshit.” In annoyance Christo took a swipe at her fresh wake, perfumed with pink motel soap. “I interest you and you interest me, why kid around? I’ve been square with you more or less from the jump, so let’s make it even. Home obviously is the last place you want to be. Don’t you know I sniffed out your action before I was in that hash house two minutes? You got all the signs, sweetie, and believe me, I’ve been on the run long enough to recognize somebody else with the same disease. You need to bust the hell out and I think you ought to do it. I think you ought to come to New York with me.”
Tildy’s head came poking out the neckhole of her T-shirt, brows arching then flattening out, two dark valves above her glinting eyes. “That may be true.”
“You know it.”
“But don’t try those slimy intimidation tactics with me. I’m no plastic dolly and I won’t stand still for it. I never have. You don’t know how many bozos I’ve had try and intimidate me into things. All my fucking life. Pushing at me, poking at me … ‘I know what you want, sister, I got what you need.’”
“Man, but you could boil water with those eyes,” Christo said admiringly. He had been dressing while she talked, now buttoned the cuffs of one of Rechette’s blue cambric tab-collar shirts, pulled on ribbed black socks of see-through nylon. “I wasn’t trying to push you, just keep you honest. We had kind of a saying, too, back there at Milford State: ‘Don’t mess with a psychotic, you can’t win.’”