A Garden of Earthly Delights (17 page)

People kept coming in. Clara noticed a man with blond hair at one of the back tables; her heart gave a lurch, she thought it might be her father. But when he turned she saw it wasn't, thank God. He was maybe twenty, maybe twenty-five, she didn't know. She forgot him and then saw him again and felt the same tripping sensation around her heart. He sat leaning back precariously in his chair, legs crossed at the knee, listening to what his friends were saying but not saying much himself. Reminded Clara of a hawk: just waiting.

Nancy liked to play cards, solitaire. Slapping the sticky cards down. You were supposed to value the king the highest but Clara had an eye for the jack. Jack of spades was her favorite.

The blond man had a look of the jack of spades, Clara thought. She smiled, biting her lower lip. One of the blond man's friends had nudged him, he'd turned to look in her direction, but not smiling as you'd expect; eyes narrowing as if he didn't much care for what he saw, a scrawny-armed blond girl in a cast-off cotton dress staring at him like she knew him, had some claim on him. LeRoy slid his heavy arm around her shoulders in clumsy possessiveness. “Honey, know what you are? A pretty li'l cat.” LeRoy stroked her disheveled hair and Clara shoved at him with the beer bottle she was holding, struck him on the chest. Observers, men who'd been watching the two, laughed.

“Get your hands off, you. I ain't no cat to be petted.”

By this time the blond man had turned back to his friends. Something rushed into Clara's head, hot and pulsing, desperate. LeRoy was sullen for a while then began jabbering and laughing at his own damn-dumb jokes, and Clara just stood and walked away. Pressing the sweating bottle against her cheek. Somebody collided with her and Clara seemed hardly to feel the impact. Her eyes were fixed on the blond man, dilated. A wild shrill sensation rose in her, a sense that she was in danger of losing her balance, falling; as at the church she might have suddenly run up to the front bawling like the others, and gave her heart to Jesus, and to the Reverend Bargman. But she'd stayed where she was. She'd knelt on the floor at her
pew and prayed for Rosalie, and that was it. That wildness that's dangerous, but you have to trust it. She was feeling it now, suffused through her body; could have done something crazed with her hands, her nails, even her teeth. She was approaching the blond-haired man. The man reminding her of the jack of spades. From where she now stood, about ten feet from him, it seemed to her that the God of whom the minister had spoken was present, in this place. He was this hot pressure that hung over her, this force lowering Himself into her body. That God was still hungry, the hamburgers hadn't done Him any good, and He made her think of all those nights she'd lain and listened to Carleton and Nancy—not hating them, not hating Nancy, but just listening and listening to know how it would be with her someday, since when it happened to her she wouldn't be able to know any more than Nancy knew.

There was one woman at the table and three men. Clara looked at her once and then forgot her. The blond man's head seemed to become vivid in the dim light, just as she watched. Waves of heat seemed to tremble about it, the hair pale like her father's, but the man's shoulders stronger than his, younger and straighter, a different person—he was a different person. Clara's lips were dry. She stared at that man and stood lost in a trance, a little drunk, sweaty and tired, her eyes aching from all the smoke. She might have stood there all night if he hadn't turned around. He did not smile. After a moment he got to his feet.

“You looking for someone, little girl?”

He came right up to her and bent to look in her face. Clara stared at him. He was a little different than she had imagined—his eyebrows were strange, hard and straight so that they almost ran across his forehead in a single line. His chin was square. Clara wanted to cry out in terror that she had wanted someone else— someone else! But she said nothing. Her eyes felt glassy.

“You here with anyone?” he said. He looked around. “What are you doing here alone?”

Clara brushed her hair back out of her eyes. She could not think of anything to say.

“I'll drive you back to where you're going,” the man said.

“I don't want to go anywhere.”

“I'll drive you there.”

He took hold of her arm and pulled her along. Clara hurried to keep up with him. They stepped out into a cloud of moths and mosquitoes. The man said, “Are you from around here?”

“From Texas,” Clara said.

“What are you doing here, then?”

He looked at her in the blast of light from the neon sign. At his car he opened the door for her and pushed her inside, the way children are pushed here and there, as if it were easier to just push them than to explain what they should do. He got in beside her. He said, “You're not from Texas or anywhere near. You don't talk like it.” He backed the car around. “Now, which way do you want to go?”

“Out that way,” Clara said, pointing down the road.

“Nobody lives out there.”

He paused, not looking at her. Then he drove out onto the road and turned back toward town. He had not looked at her since they'd left the tavern. “You're not thumbing your way through here, are you? Because you better be careful doing that.”

“I can do anything I want to,” Clara said.

Before he came to the town he turned into a drive. The house there was a big, three-story building with a wide veranda; lights were on in some rooms and off in others. “I'm in and out of this place myself,” he said. “Tomorrow I'm leaving.” He turned off the ignition. Clara waited. Something hot and swollen was inside her head so that she could not think right. “You're on your way to Miami, probably, but I'm not,” he said.

“Ain't goin to Miami,” Clara said.

He turned off the headlights and turned to her. Clara smelled whiskey around him; it reminded her of Carleton. He took hold of her and would have hurt her shoulder if she hadn't twisted free. She was breathing hard and her head ached. But the dizziness inside her made her want to press forward against him, hide herself against him and fall into sleep. It wanted to stop her seeing anything and thinking anything. The man reached over and opened the door on her side and pushed her out, and slid out with her. Standing out
in the driveway, where everything was dark and quiet, he put his arms around her and kissed her and then let her go, his breath nervous. “My place is around back,” he said, pulling her along. Clara stumbled on boards propped up around the corner, against the house. The man opened a door in the dark and they went in together. There was another door right inside.

The room must have been an addition on the back of the house; it was made of boards that were just boards, rough and unfinished, and the floor was the same way. A cool draft came up through cracks in the floor even though the night was warm. There was a bed and a stand with a basin on it that had a rusty bottom; there was just a little water in it. On the floor there was a hot plate with just one burner.

The man shut the door and nudged her over toward the bed. He was as tall as Carleton. He took off his shirt and his chest was covered with dark blond hair. Clara stared at his chest as if hypnotized. She felt the cool air rising between the floorboards.

“How old are you?” he said. “Seventeen or eighteen or what?”

Clara shook her head.

“Or thirteen?”

He screwed his mouth up into a look that meant he was judging her. She had seen people from town, or farmers who owned land, looking at her and her family that way. They looked at everyone that way who lived in the places she lived and did the work she did. It did not occur to Clara that they might have looked at her another way. She felt sleepy, and so she lowered her head and moved toward this man. She closed her eyes against his hot, damp skin. When his mouth pressed against her throat she drew in her breath sharply, thinking that she would not have to do anything at all; she would just press herself against him. But she must have stumbled backward because she knocked the basin over. The man kicked it against the wall, laughing. He pulled her over to the bed and they fell down together. The bed had been made up, just sheets and a pillow but still someone had made it. It felt cold. The ceiling and the wall wavered over Clara, seen through her hair or through his hair and then blotted out by his face. He was lying on top of her just as Clara
had imagined someone lying on her, years before she had ever seen this man. And she held her arms right around his neck just as she had imagined she would.

She caught sight of his face in the shadow and saw that it was sleepy like her own, slow and hungry. Something ached in her to see him like that. She clutched against him wildly. “Do it to me, don't stop,” she said. “Don't stop.”

But he did stop. He fell back beside her. She heard him breathing and in that moment her body just waited, suspended and frozen in a daze of sweat and disbelief. He said, “How the hell old are you?”

“I don't know—eighteen.”

“No, you're just a child.”

That word was one that had nothing to do with her—she exhaled her waiting breath in a sound of contempt. “I'm not a— child,” she said angrily. “I'm not a child, I never was.”

He swung his legs around and sat on the edge of the bed. “Christ,” he muttered. Clara watched him. Far away there was the sound of a car horn fading. Clara felt how alone they were and how dark it was outside, how easy it would be for them to be lost from each other. A pool of darkness seemed to open at her feet, chilled by the night, and this man could fade away into it and be lost.

“I love you,” Clara said bitterly. “I never was any child.”

He looked around back at her. There were little lines around his eyes, as if he was used to squinting too often. She could see fine light stubble on his chin, she wanted to touch it, to move her hand over it. But she did not dare. His skin was damp, his hair damp. Looking at him, she seemed to be seeing more than he wanted her to; he made a face and turned away.

“No, please, I love you. I want you,” Clara said. She spoke violently. A pulse in the man's neck jumped and she could have slashed at it with her teeth. Her body ached for him and he was keeping himself from her, it wasn't right, everyone always said how any man could be ready for a woman anytime. “I want you, I want somethin!” Clara said. “I want somethin!”

“Look, where are you from?”

“I don't know what I want but I want it! I don't know what it is,” she sobbed.

“I sure as hell don't know either.”

After a moment he got up. He went out. Clara heard him in the corridor, heard a door open. She lay still, panting, her jaw gone rigid with anger. She could not remember how he had looked now that he was gone. When she thought of men, of love, she had always thought of an impersonal heavy force, a man that was no particular man but just a pressure, coming against her and letting her fall asleep within it and taking care of her—arms that were just arms to take care of her, a body that was heavier and stronger than hers but would not hurt her—and she would pause no matter what she was doing, dreamy and entranced, a kind of sleep easing over her brain until she had to jerk herself out of it and wake up— Now she felt that languorous sleep move over her, weighing down her eyelids, and the man who had just been with her was no more real than the ghostly men who had come and slipped away when she bent to pick beans or strained up to pick oranges, either way tempting that flood of warm dizziness into her brain that marked the point at which she stopped being Clara and became someone else with no name.

She could ease into that darkness and become a girl without any name: someone who wanted, wanted, who reached out in the dark for someone to embrace her in turn.

The man came back. He was carrying a bucket of water. He closed the door behind him with his foot and went to the hot plate and set the bucket down. He plugged the hot plate in. Clara watched him in silence, wanting to laugh because it was all so strange, so nervous. He squatted by the hot plate and watched the water, his bare shoulders twitching as if uneasy with her staring. But he himself was not uneasy.

He said to her, “Take off your dress.”

“What?”

“You're dirty, take it off.”

Clara's face went hot. “I'm not dirty!”

“Take it off.”

“I'm not dirty—I'm—”

He had blue eyes, a cold blue-green. They were not like her own eyes. His eyebrows made one shadowy ridge over his face. He was squatting a few feet from the bed, one hand lazily on his knee. “I'm dirty too. Everyone's dirty. You want to take that off or should I do it for you?” he said.

Clara sat up. She had kicked off her shoes. “You take it off,” she said spitefully. He did not move at once. Then he grinned at her, a grin that flashed on and off, and got up. She let her head droop forward as he reached under her hair to undo the buttons at the top of her dress. He unbuttoned them and Clara stood so that he could pull the dress off. She snatched it from him and threw it down onto the floor. “What are you going to wear out of here except that?” he said, and picked it up. She was standing in a short cotton slip on which she had sewed pink ribbons. She tore one of the ribbons off before he could stop her. “You said I was dirty!” she cried. “I hate you!”

“You are dirty. Look at this.” He rubbed her wrist and tiny rolls of dirt appeared. Clara stared. His fingers made red marks on her skin. “Your hair too,” he said. “You should wash your hair.”

“My hair's nice!”

“It nice but it's dirty. You're from that fruit pickers' place, aren't you?”

“People always say my hair's nice,” Clara sobbed. She looked up at him as if waiting for him to say something different, something that would show he had only been joking. “Other people think I'm pretty—”

He parted her hair with his fingers and bent near. He thinks I have lice, Clara thought. She felt sick. “Son of a bitch, you son of a bitch,” she whispered. “I'll get my father to kill you—he'll kill you—”

He laughed. “Why would anyone want to kill me?”

She tried to push away but he caught her. He pulled off her slip and made her stand still so that he could wash her. Clara shut her eyes tight. She felt the angry pressure of tears behind her eyes, but another pressure, a sweet feeling, that did not let her cry. She thought that no one had washed her for years. Her mother had washed her years ago but she almost couldn't remember that. Maybe
she couldn't remember it at all. Now this man rubbed soap between his hands and washed her, and she shut her eyes tight with the feel of his warm, slow, gentle hands. She knew that the ache in her loins for him would never go away but that she would carry it with her all her life.