Brown-Eyed Girl (12 page)

Chapter 13
Up a Slippery Slope

He was starving. He rolled her over. “Wake up, love. Do you want ...”

“Oh, honey,” she murmured, her face against his neck. “I think I'd split in half.”

“No. Later, I mean. Er, what I mean is, do you want breakfast?”

“That'd be good.” She sighed, trying to go back to sleep. “I've got coffee. Some great banana bread.”

“No eggs?”

“Huh?”

“No potatoes? Bacon?”

“Nope.”

“Make you a deal. You get up and make some coffee and I'll run to the store and come back and cook you breakfast.”

“Most important meal of the day,” she mumbled, an old inside joke from when Hawk had been trying to found a cult of breakfast as a miracle diet. “Take my car. Keys on the dresser.”

He hadn't noticed the car. Very cherry '64 Mus-TANG. He tried to act like it was no big deal, but it was a sweet machine. Somebody had restored this baby to a fine hum, and he appreciated Sally ever the more for having put it in his hands. Brakes were pulling a little, though. She probably ought to get it into the shop.

At the Albertson's checkout, he ran into Delice, who was buying donuts. The Langhams were famous in Laramie for their love of donuts. It was known that Delice liked cream-filled, Jerry Jeff liked chocolate frosted, Mary liked jelly, Josh liked plain, Dwayne liked crullers, Nattie pretended not to eat them, but considered glazed donuts a diet variety of the species. Dickie adored every kind of donut, as was apparent from his burgeoning gut. Hawk noticed that Delice had bought some of that overpriced fat-free Entenmann's blueberry squiggle coffee cake. Maybe she was trying to reform her brother. Hawk's own cart was obviously full of more breakfast than one skinny man was liable to eat.

“Hey Hawk,” Delice said, “what's shakin'?”

“Not much,” he said, looking at her stuff on the conveyor belt. “Lotta donuts.”

“Health food brunch at Dickie and Mary's,” she explained. “Looks like you're still trying to start that breakfast cult,” she remarked, eying his eggs and bacon and juice and potatoes and tortillas and a bottle of tabasco sauce.

“I tell you, Delice, it's scientifically proven that if you eat a good breakfast every morning, you burn more calories all day because it puts the system to work. I call it the Eat Bacon and Grow Thin Diet.”

“I know, Hawk. You've been flogging the bacon a long time.” She smiled sweetly. “So how the hell are you?”

“Can't complain,” he said, trying to suppress a shiteating grin.

But Delice had her radar on. “Seen Sally?” she asked.

“You'd better pay the lady, Dee,” he stalled. “Or they'll arrest you for shoplifting.”

“You'd better lose the grin, Hawk,” she countered, collecting her change, picking up her bag, and clearly logging the conversation for discussion as soon as she got to Dickie and Mary's. “Or they'll arrest you for something else.”

“Damn,” said Delice as she walked to her car. She and Mary had a bet going on the Sally–Hawk reunion. Delice had bet on a replay of the Cold War. Mary, however, had bet on something like the expression on his face now. Dickie's wife, of course, understood that time made some things easier. “I'm out twenty bucks,” Delice snarled, tossing the bag of donuts on the seat, climbing in, and putting the key in the ignition. And then she began to chuckle.

Hawk paid, got the stuff, walked out to the Mustang and got in. Delice was just pulling her Explorer out of the parking lot, and she gave him a wave and a shit-eating grin of her own. He bet that before the day was out, Sally's phone would be ringing, and Delice would be trying to find some casual way of finding out whether history was repeating itself. As the Mustang's engine thrummed alive, he could almost hear the gears of the Laramie rumor mill grinding into action.

Sally said that she still wanted to climb the Peak, especially once she had such a good breakfast in her. Hawk decided he wanted to go along. She was wearing hiking shorts, and he thought it would be fun to walk behind her and watch her legs work on the steep spots.

And he knew they needed time, in a pretty place, on the first day of their next thing. They had demonstrated adequately that they were still attracted to each other. They still had a hell of a lot of past to account for and considerable present to feel out. To be honest, they didn't really know each other any more. Long ago, she'd been terrific, and put him through hell, and vindicated his notion that ultimately, you couldn't trust anyone. He wished they could get by on sex and breakfast.

They packed up the banana bread, apples, cheese, and water . They kept touching each other and smiling. Sally let Hawk drive. He was grateful. Hawk was a skilled and careful driver, and she was a maniac who had terrorized him every time he'd been her unfortunate passenger. They stopped off at his house to get boots and clothes. She told him what a pretty house it was. For the first time, it struck him as odd that he had no furniture whatsoever.

They gassed up at the Diamond Shamrock, went inside to pay and buy candy and Coca-Cola, and ran into Dwayne Langham, who was picking up a box of Little Debbie cakes and a quart of milk to take to that brunch at Dickie's. He might have gotten rich as a banker, but Dwayne still thought like a musician. That rumor mill was going to be cranking full steam by tomorrow.

As they headed out into the Centennial valley, Hawk and Sally held hands. He kissed her fingers. She pointed out antelope grazing. The Mustang's engine kept missing: it wasn't tuned to the altitude. He said he could adjust her carburetor, if she wanted. She smiled and told him he already had. Told her no, seriously, maybe he'd take the car in to a mechanic and get the carburetor looked at and have the brakes adjusted. He was not at all happy with her brakes.

They slowed down through Centennial, past the Old Corral, where Sally had once made the ill-advised decision to agree to a request for “Ode to Billy Joe,” a song Hawk termed “a real room-clearer.” As they rolled through town and up the grade, Sally took a breath and said, “Technically, I never lied to you.”

“Technicality,” he declared. “I never asked.”

“You should have,” she told him.

“I know,” he answered.

After a minute, she said, “If you'd asked, it might have been different. I wondered sometimes, lots of times, when you were gone, if you really cared.”

A minute more. “I did,” he said.

“I know,” she answered.

Two heartbeats. “You should have known then,” he said very quietly. “I told you I loved you.”

“Yeah, you did. It stayed with me a month maybe, and then I started wondering again. It wasn't the first time somebody told me he loved me, and I was inclined to take the words for what they were generally worth. It took me a while to realize that those words were hard for you to say, and by then it was way too late.”

Hawk drove on, waiting for more.

There was more. “You left me alone a lot,” she said. “I was pretty needy in those days, Hawk.”

He nodded. “I didn't understand what that meant. Didn't know what I was supposed to do.” And he knew, of course, that he hadn't tried all that hard to figure it out. Wasn't love supposed to
solve
problems?

“You were supposed to get the idea and settle down and move in with me.”

“It wasn't an option, then.” He took a curve a little too wide, but fortunately there was no oncoming traffic.

“Oh,” was all she said.

Hawk thought a bit, then took a breath of his own. “I have one main question. You always said Sam Branch was a slimeball. Why in hell would you go to bed with him?”

“He was a slimeball,” Sally said. “He undoubtedly still is. I made an error in judgment. I think the three major variables were loneliness, tequila, and a high degree of persistence on his part.”

Three major variables. She really was cut out to be a college professor. Now a tougher question. “Did you happen to repeat that error?” he inquired, keeping his hands carefully steady on the wheel as the road wound up the mountain. He tossed a glance her way, as if to say: Moral reckoning, Sally. What's the point in lying?

“Actually, I did.” The car swerved slightly, but not dangerously. “Look at it this way, Hawk. After you walked out, the loneliness wasn't exactly going to go away. For that matter, neither was the tequila.”

The memories had dulled over time, but now they were sharp as knives. Still, he was a long way from the torment he'd endured then. “I didn't want to talk to you. I told everyone that they were not, under any circumstances, to tell you where I was. Sometimes I thought I should just drive back to Laramie and shoot Branch or shoot you or shoot you both, or at least have a big screaming scene. But after a few weeks it didn't matter anyway, because I decided I had to look for a job as far away from you as possible, and I got hired to log well data in Argentina.”

“So you were gone and I was lower than whale snot,” Sally continued. “And then there was the fact that Branchwater had a bunch more gigs around the state that winter, and there's nothing lonelier or more conducive to the tequila solution than a winter weekend at some puke-hole in Newcastle, Wyoming, playing ‘Jaded Lover' to snowbound coal miners, then laying up at some godforsaken motel with the radiator banging and the lights from the cars on the main drag and the motel sign glaring in your window all night long. You can only watch so much cable TV. Only smoke so many joints. Do you have any idea what it's like to live on Tombstone pizzas?”

He gave her a narrow sidelong glance, watching the road. “And Sam continued to be persistent,” she said.

Sam Branch was the human version of a Tombstone pizza, as far as Hawk could tell. This whole thing had really pissed him off, from time to time, for seventeen years, and it was at this moment freshly infuriating. But Hawk had, after all, just spent an extremely memorable night in her bed, conducting a field trial on Professor Marvin Gaye's theory of Sexual Healing. He was determined to get to the other side of something painful that had happened so long ago that he had put it in the context of worse things that had come before, and after. He reminded himself that this was pretty much old news, and he had no plans or obligations for the future. He was willing to listen.

She seemed relieved to see his willingness, and so told him the rest of the story. “It ended very definitively. I was sick of his games and his ego, and I'd had it with the road and the band. I was really involved with women's studies at the U by then, and I decided that I had to get out from under the sexist crap in my life. I had this inkling Sam might be treating me sort of badly. At the time he was fucking half the women in Laramie and using my phone to make long-distance dope deals. How clueless was I?” Hawk declined to offer an opinion.

“I was still gigging with Penny Moss sometimes, and he hated her. He told me one night while we were packing up at the Gallery that if I wanted to play with some dyke, that was fine with him, but he didn't want people thinking that Branchwater's chick singer was a lesbian. I told him I had lots better things to do than drive seven hours to Buffalo to sing the same goddamn songs and watch a bunch of brain-dead rednecks get commode-huggin' drunk. He told me to fuck myself, because I was probably already doing that anyway, and I was fired. He went out to put his guitar in his truck, and I just went out and got in my truck and chased him down Grand Avenue, trying to run him down.”

“You might have had a few,” Hawk offered, vastly enjoying the mental image.

“I might at that.” She grinned faintly. She had taken her hand out of his and was now sitting with both hands in her lap, looking out the window. Now she reached for him again, a question aching in her eyes.

“All right,” he said. “It's okay.” That was the best he could do.

She closed her eyes, for a long moment, opened them, gazed at him. “I look at you now, and all I can think about is how much I want to make love with you.” She almost smiled, but her eyes were too bright.

“No fair appealing to my libido, Sal,” he joshed.

“And I'd like to know why in hell not,” she retorted, sliding her fingers up his leg.

This made it hard for him to assess the costs and benefits of giving her another chance. “Okay. Say we use last night as Day One. It wouldn't be a bad thing to use some of it as a kind of template.” He thought a minute. “If we do this thing again, there have to be rules,” he told her. “No tequila. It evidently shuts off the flow of blood to your brain. And if Branch starts hitting on you again, I break his fucking neck.”

She took a breath. “I guess I ought to tell you that I ran into him at that stupid Hasta la Pasta! place at lunch Friday, and he's already started hitting on me.” Hawk stared hard at her. She gripped his quadriceps muscle, on the high side. “He must be suffering from amnesia. It's the only thing that can explain it. Or maybe it's just blinding ego. Anyway, he's anything but tempting, believe me. He's a frigging
Realtor.
He's a
Republican.
He's probably in the Aryan Nation. Hey—if you want me to, I can try to run him over again. He made me want to throw up the lunch I hadn't managed to get down. And I have a confession.”

“Another one?” Hawk asked, apprehensive.

“The whole time he was coming on to me, I was thinking of you. The food and the service and the atmosphere at Hasta la Pepto were so bad, all I could think about was how much fun it would be . . . to hear you trash the place.” He laughed. “I missed you. I've missed you badly, on and off, for seventeen years.”

“I've thought of you from time to time, too,” he considered with a wry look. “Especially when I was confronted with a truly terrible meal.”

They had reached their destination. They pulled off the road, into the parking lot at the Peak trailhead. They were off on a tangent about one of their long-ago favorite topics of conversation, horrible food they'd eaten in interesting places. But as they got daypacks out of the backseat, putting on sweaters and windbreakers against the high mountain chill, tightening up the laces of their boots, she asked, in a low voice, “What about the loneliness, Hawk? I mean, it's not a constant thing. I've gotten to where I need a fair amount of time by myself. I've discovered that I need the solitude so that I have time to think. But if I let you back into my life, you're gonna make me lonesome when you go.”