A Hidden Place

He said faintly, “Aunt Liza, I—”

“Go up now.” She sank back into the easy chair as if some sustaining energy had been consumed. “Go up and sleep and don’t let on to Creath that we talked.”

The trail was cold. A

He slept almost instantly… and was still asleep in that hour before dawn when A

Friday next he drove Nancy back to the stand of oaks on the highway out of Haute Montagne. The prairie spread out around them, grain fields whispering toward a meager harvest. With the motor of the old Ford off and the shrilling of the locusts all around, they might have been a thousand miles from home.

Tonight was special, Travis thought. He felt a special wildness in Nancy. She would glance at him, glance away, and then her eyes would find him again.

Her eyes, when the contact held, were very blue and very wide.

Travis himself felt victim to a kind of unfocused randiness. Nancy’s warmth next to him on the lumpy seat of the Ford stimulated a painful and persistent erection. He wanted her so badly that his knuckles had gone white on the steering wheel.

He guessed it was understandable. He had fallen into the rhythm of his work at the ice plant, and the days passed easily enough—more easily than the nights. Often, though, he would stop what he was doing, shake his head like a man coming out of a dream, and a deep panic would flood him. He imagined himself growing old in Haute Montagne, growing fat and sedately cruel, growing into the shape of Creath Burack like rubber poured into a steel mold. He felt at such times that he must push back at the barriers that confined him—push, or go mad.

He guessed Nancy felt the same way. She had been pushing a long time. There was that bond between them.

He stopped the car and they climbed into the truck bed and made pillows of empty burlap sacks. Travis touched her lightly. She’s anxious, too, he thought. She wants to touch. Push down the walls. But she lit a cigarette, her hand shaking, and waved the match at the darkness. Her lips trembled as she exhaled. “Tell me about A

He told what there was to tell. For a time even Travis was distracted by it, the memory of Liza and of A

“Strange,” Nancy whispered.

“Passing strange,” Travis said.

“Obviously,” Nancy said, “she needs our help more than ever.”

“She hasn’t asked for it.”

She looked at him from behind the glowing tip of her cigarette. “You think I’m butting in.”

“No____”

“You do. Admit it.”

“No. Rushing in too fast, maybe. Remember, Nance, we still don’t know anything about this girl. She was out on a highway, naked. Creath picked her up. Maybe she wanted it that way. Maybe she likes things the way they are.”

Nancy scrunched down in the shadowy pickup bed, drawing herself inward, musing.

“Before I got this diner job,” she said, “I would go over with sewing. Mama would send me over. I’ve seen the girl, Travis. Seen her up close. I’ve looked her in the eye.”

He nodded. “So have I.”

“Have you? And you can sit there and suggest maybe she likes what she’s doing?”

Well, no, he couldn’t—not honestly. There was that desperation in A

“Bound to be. That’s why we have to find out.”

“How?”

“Talk to her. Follow her.” She exhaled a cloud of smoke, tossed the butt out into the roadway, a small cometary arc. “See where she goes.”

She could not have missed the attraction Travis felt toward A

Maybe it was her way of testing him. Or, he thought, of testing herself.

He thought of what she had said in the strawberry fields last month: I believe it’s possible to love more than one person…

“It’s chilly these nights,” she said suddenly. Far off, the westbound train wailed. Travis pressed up close to her, put his arm around her protectively. Her cotton dress was like silk under his big hand. She turned toward him, and they kissed, and there was something in the urgency of it that made Travis aware that she had decided to go all the way with him tonight.

He touched her small, perfect breasts. After a time his hand worked up under her dress. He was almost feverish with the wanting, and when she laid herself back against the burlap sacks and he entered her it was like an electric shock of pleasure. He climaxed rapidly. Nancy shuddered under him and he realized, distantly amazed, that she must be experiencing some equivalent fulfillment. Gasping, he told her he loved her.

Maybe he did. It was not a lie; she would have recognized a lie. But he was far less certain than he made himself sound.

Doubt had crept into him even as he performed the act. He loved her, at the very least, for what they had done together, but even that was compromised: it had been too easy he thought, she gave herself too easily. Women ought not to do that. He looked away as she straightened her skirt. What disturbed him, and what he found hard to admit even to himself, was that the face that had flashed in his mind in that moment of climax had been, not Nancy’s, but A

Chapter Five

September crawled on, the cries of the trains acquiring that special autumn melancholy, and at first Liza Burack believed she might have contributed toward the salvation of her sister’s son.

If not the salvation of his soul (he refused to go to church with her, claimed his mother would not have approved), then at least his worldly salvation. She had savored the thought, troweling in her backyard garden those long last-of-summer afternoons. I have helped save him, she would think, down on her knees among the gladioli and the fragrant black earth. It was a good thought and in those moments she could almost believe it made everything worthwhile… her fall from grace with the Baptist Women, her sister’s death-in-sin, even Creath’s terrible and unacknowledged private weakness. Even that. I have helped save him.

But she lay awake now in the postmidnight silence of the bedroom, her eyes like beacon Lights, moonlight shining on her oaken dresser and Creath beside her like a dead weight; and when she heard A

She started up after him. By God, she thought, he doesn’t understand! If he understood he would not be chasing after her! If he understood—!

But no. She had told him once. And she had known by his eyes that he did understand. This was no normal woman and his feelings for her were not normal feelings.

And yet he had chosen to follow her.

Strange words flashed in her mind.

Witch. Demon. Succubus.

She went to the door of the bedroom, opened it a crack. There went Travis, a black shadow past the stairwell. And there, hear it now, the click and whine of the front door.

Liza Burack sank back into the bed, defeated.

Travis is lost, she thought, the sound of her own thought grown singsong as sleep too long denied crept up from the overheated crevice of the blankets… Travis is lost, is lost, is lost…

She dozed dreamlessly, and the nightwind came in her window like a tide.

Talk to her, Nancy had said. Follow her.

It had sounded so simple.

Travis paced down the moon-bathed street, making good on the promise at last, and it seemed much less so.