A Hidden Place

Chapter Four

Travis thought often of Nancy Wilcox. But his thoughts returned almost as often to Anna Blaise, to what Nancy called “the mystery.”

Creath let him borrow the Model A for an evening (after he’d promised to bring it back with the tank full—it was three-quarters empty when he’d climbed in) and he picked up Nancy at the Times Square. They drove far beyond the town, driving for the sake of putting miles in back of them, Nancy watching with a kind of rapt eagerness as the road unfolded. “Like flying,” she said. “I wish we could just keep going forever.”

September was already a week old. The wind that carried back her hair was cool and fragrant. When they were thirty or forty miles out of Haute Montagne, Travis pulled over and parked them under a stand of bur oaks. There was no other traffic on the road and the stars seemed immensely bright. They had escaped the aura of the town; it was easier to breathe here, Travis thought.

“See much of Anna?” Nancy asked. He had expected the question. She had taken an interest almost as intense as Travis’s own. She’s one of us, Nancy had said the week before, whether she knows it or not. An outcast. It’s like the three of us are connected somehow.

“The usual,’ Travis said. She nodded. “I’d like to meet her sometime.” “I don’t know if I can arrange that.” “You don’t think she’d come? Or don’t you want to ask?”

“I don’t think Creath would let her.” “How do you mean?”

He hesitated. But then he thought: well, why not tell her? He had come to trust Nancy a damn sight more than he trusted Creath or his Aunt Liza. If he owed his loyalty to anyone, he thought, it was to her.

“It’s Creath. He uses her. And I think he’s scared somebody might find out.”

He explained about the late-night visits up the stairs.

Nancy was wide-eyed, then thoughtful. She put her hands behind her head and gazed up at the canopy of oaks. “The princess in the tower,” she said faintly. “She’s a prisoner.”

“She doesn’t give him any argument.”

“Doesn’t matter. Maybe he’s blackmailing her. Maybe he threatens her.” She shook her head. “Jesus! I never did like the man. But this—!”

“We still don’t know why she’s there. Where she came from.”

“Find out,” Nancy said. Her features were suffused with new purpose. Her eyes seemed to shine in the dark. “She’s a prisoner. We know that much. And—you know what else, Travis? Maybe we can rescue her.”

He came home late, parked the car carefully, went upstairs and fell at once into a dazed half-sleep. The footsteps brought him awake again.

It was a Friday night—Saturday morning, he guessed—deep in the hinterland between midnight and dawn. Travis came awake groggily. He felt the house sighing and shifting, the wind talking in the chimney flues. It was a few days into September, the days were as hot and dry as ever but now the nights brought some small measure of relief, moon-cooled winds blowing in across the grasslands. He pulled the sheet more tightly around his shoulders and drew a deep, shuddering breath. Sleep was only a heartbeat away. But the footsteps came again and they were just beyond his door.

Creath, he thought miserably, and was overcome for a moment with an unbearable sense of oppression. It was late and dark and he felt sapped, powerless. But wait, he thought. The footsteps continued. They were light, delicate, almost inaudible. He would not have heard if they had not hesitated in their rhythm directly outside his door.

Not Creath’s footsteps. Anna’s, then. And they were headed down the stairs.

He sat up slowly. The sheet fell away.

Long moments passed. Then he heard the front door latch rasp open, the screen door yawn and subside.

His room was dark. Naked, he went to the window and raised the sash an inch.

Anna Blaise appeared on the front walk.

She was dressed in a summer blouse and skirt. His first thought was: she must be cold: The wind tousled her hair. Her eyes, shadowed, seemed to give back the obscurity of the night sky. She hesitated a moment at the sidewalk, her head turning back and forth with dreamlike fluidity, like a hunting dog, Travis thought, fixing on a scent. Briefly, she looked up at the window. Her gaze held there a moment, though it was not possible that she could have seen him. Travis did not breathe. Then, slowly, slowly, she began to move westward along DeVille into the black shadows of the box elders.

He hesitated only a moment. He threw on his pants, laced his shoes, buttoned a rough cotton workshirt. He was as gentle as he could be moving down the stairs, but he was heavier and clumsier than Anna and in his haste some noise was unavoidable. On the dark landing he jammed his knee into a newel post and suppressed a curse.

“Travis!”

His Aunt Liza’s voice whipcracked into the silence.

“Travis, is that you?” He froze.

He hadn’t made it past her bedroom.

She took him down into the front parlor. It was dark, but she ignored the light switches. In her nightgown and robe, Travis thought, his aunt resembled something amphibian, crudely draped, caught in the midst of some unspeakable transformation. Her double chin spilled over a lacy collar, her teeth were in a glass upstairs, her expression was vacant. Christ God, Travis thought, I have to leave this place— Anna—!

But his aunt said, “She is not for you, you know, Travis,” with a calm equanimity that made him wonder if she could read his thoughts.

“No,” she went on before he could answer. “There is no need to explain. I know what goes on in a man’s mind where that woman is concerned.” She sighed. She had settled into Creath’s easy chair, her head cocked in an attitude of icy, bottomless cynicism. The mantle clock ticked out seconds as she regarded him. “You’re not the only one. Did you know that? Oh, yes. There was that Grant Bevis. A married man, a respectable man, owned the hardware store over on Beaumont. He used to come sneaking around here—sneaking after Anna. Wife left him. Took the kids. Still he came.” She smiled humorlessly. “Left town when I threatened to expose him before the church. His letters to her still come in the mail, though. All different postmarks. All the same. “His ‘undying love’. Love! As if love entered into it!” Her smile faded. “And of course there is Creath. I guess you know. Don’t shake your head! This is a small household. We cannot truly keep secrets one from another. Maybe Creath believes so. Maybe he has deluded himself into believing so. But it is impossible. I’m not a heavy sleeper, Travis. I know when he goes to her. I know. …”

“If you know,” Travis whispered, “then why—?”

“Why stay with him? Why stay here in this house?” She laughed suddenly, a shrill bray, Travis worried that it might wake up Creath and bring him down here. “Stand on my entitlements, like that Bevis woman? It got her nowhere, you know. It got her alone and with children to raise in a world that does not welcome hungry mouths. Love, says the vow, and honor, and obey. Maybe love goes. Maybe honor goes, even. But there is that last. I can have that much of a marriage. I can obey.”

Shell be gone now, Travis thought. Gone wherever she is going.

“She can see into him,” Liza was saying. “She thinks to conceal it from me, but I know. I know. There is something in Creath that is drawn to her. Something left over from his childhood. Something stupid and foolish in him.” She added, a whisper, “I know that part of him. There was a time when he would look at me that way. The way he looks at her. But that was a long time ago. Years gone, Travis. Years gone. She has no right.”

“Who is she, Aunt Liza?”

“I don’t know.” She sighed again, remembering, as if she were not fully awake. Her voice took on a distant quality. “It was Creath’s doing. An odd thing. He doesn’t ever stop for hitchhikers or tramps. We were driving back from your mother’s place… that last time we visited, when it became obvious we could not visit ever again. It was late, it was after midnight, and we were on the road coming into Haute Montagne—there was no traffic—and Creath was tired of driving. And suddenly there was this woman. She stood on the sandy margin of the road. Just stood there. Not thumbing. Not doing anything. Standing. And—Travis, she had no clothes on. Can you credit that? A naked woman on the verge of the highway white as a statue in the moonlight?” She clucked. “I thought there must have been an accident. I would have urged Creath to stop… but he had already slowed down, he was pulling over before the words were out of my mouth. ‘Get a blanket,’ he says. ‘There’s one in the trunk.’ I did so. I covered her up. Creath was just staring at her like a man struck blind… and she was staring at him. I covered her up with that old woolen blanket and I led her into the car. We—took her home.”

She let her breath in and out, a papery sound. Travis had forgotten—almost—about following Anna. He stared at Liza now, her face round and pale in the faint light that filtered through the lace curtains from the street.

“I don’t know what it is!” she whispered. “I truly don’t! The way she looks, maybe. Something in her eyes. Something in the raw smell of her. She does something to men … makes them helpless. They go to her. And she—she—”

“Aunt Liza,” Travis said placatingly.

“No!” Her voice was shrill again. “Don’t comfort me, Travis Fisher! Don’t place yourself above me—or Creath!” She groped her glasses into place. Her eyes were suddenly magnified. “Don’t pretend you weren’t down here following her, following her wherever she goes these moonlight nights! Some nasty place. You and the Wilcox girl getting along just fine, yes? But here you are. Sniffing after that dirty creature.”

The accusation was unfair, Travis thought. But he felt an involuntary rush of guilt nevertheless. His cheeks burned.

“Travis,” his aunt said, “listen to me. I grew up with your mother. To me she was always Mary-Jane—my little sister. I lived with her and I watched her go bad. Not as bad as she ended up. But bad inside her. Bad to the bone, Mama used to say. Bad like a rotten tooth. She would not do what she was told.

Took a pleasure in contrariness. In her own wicked shamelessness. We warned her about that man who became your father, oh, yes. He is rootless and insincere, Mama told her. Mary-Jane, we said, you must not squander your life on him. But she did. She ran off west. And he left her. Left her gap-toothed from all the times he got drunk… left her with you to feed. She could have come home anytime. Could have! But would she? No! Not Mary-Jane. Anything but admit defeat.”

Travis squirmed on the sofa.

“You have that heritage,” Aunt Liza said, her eyes blazing. “You must be aware of it, Travis. Know it, or it’ll hurt you. You have your father’s blind anger and your mother’s stupid passions. Leave that woman alone! She is nothing you know or understand. You don’t need her… whatever your body might tell you.”

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. Anna was gone. He went upstairs, dazed.

He slept almost instantly… and was still asleep in that hour before dawn when Anna Blaise crept silently back into the house, cold blue fire playing like sheet lightning about her body.

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 Anna.”

He told what there was to tell. For a time even Travis was distracted by it, the memory of Liza and of Anna’s night walk welling up in him like a cold sea-current.

“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 Anna Blaise like an underground fire_; it was impossible to miss. But he said, “There’s more to it than we know.”

“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 Anna. Travis was a poor liar. And yet, he thought, she is capable of suggesting this.

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 Anna’s: her pale china skin; the eyes huge and dark, violated but aloof; her strangely unassailable purity burning in him like fire.