A Hidden Place

Chapter Seven

They squared off in the second-story hallway. Creath, obstructing the stairs, wore a deeply aggrieved scowl. He looked at Travis steadily, appraising him. “You have a lot to answer for,” he said slowly, “you sorry son of a bitch.”

Travis told Nancy to wait for him outside. She shied past Creath, who allowed her to go, all his attention fixed on Travis. Anna was still upstairs, hidden.

“I’m taking her out of here,” Travis said.

“You have more gall than I expected,” Creath pronounced. “You! What would you do with her— pissant farmboy like you?”

“You’re using her,” Travis said.

“Shut up. Shut your dirty mouth. Your aunt’s down these stairs.”

Travis felt his own outrage well up. “You think she doesn’t know! Doesn’t know you sneak up here to rape the girl these nights—?”

“Rape!” Creath laughed, his eyes rolling. “Rape, you call it? What are you, her white knight?” He advanced, his fists clenched, his thick arms showing swarms of muscle under the layered fat. Sweat showered off him. “She wants it, boy-o. Don’t kid yourself. She wants it, or else why would you be chasing her all over town these nights? Sure, I’ve been up there… and maybe Liza knows as much about me as that Wilcox girl knows about you, you think perhaps? Oh, we are that much the same. The difference, boy-o, is that I own this house, and this house is where she lives, and I decide who’s putting it to her—you understand? I decide.”

“I’m taking her out of here.”

“You poor dumb shit,” Creath said, and struck him.

Travis fell back through the door of the second-story bathroom. His hand caught on the medicine cabinet and a shelf of Aunt Liza’s specifics came tumbling out: Cuticura, Bromo Quinine, Winter Pep cough syrup in an opaque blue bottle. He steadied himself on the edge of the sink, blind with pain. The mirror was broken.

He will beat her, Travis thought. If I fail at this he will beat her, maybe kill her. The instinct that had drawn Creath to her had turned terribly ugly. There was nothing protective in it now, only a huge injured pride and the formless desire to hurt. He forced himself back into the hallway.

Creath had already started up the steps. Travis leaped forward and drove his fist into the small of the man’s back.

Creath whirled, enraged. “You cheap little bastard, ” he began. But then Travis hit him hard in the mouth, wanting desperately to silence him, hit him again when the older man dropped his guard and staggered back, and then again and again, until his fists seemed to acquire an energy and a rhythm of their own. Travis made himself stop when he realized that Creath was not even trying to defend himself: he was prostrate on the stairway, his eyes gone wide with pain and disbelief.

Suddenly ashamed, Travis stood up straight.

“Don’t take her,” Creath said. It came out a whisper from his bloodied mouth. “Goddamn you. Don’t take her. She is my—I—”

“Stop,” Aunt Liza said. Travis turned.

She had been watching from behind. There was a terrible, sullen calm in her voice. “You’ve hurt him enough. Get the girl and get out.”

Travis looked down at his own bruised and bloodied fists.

“Aunt Liza—”

“Do it. Do it quickly.”

Dazed, he moved up the stairs.

“I hope you rot,” Aunt Liza said placidly. “I hope she eats you alive.”

They broke the rusted lock on the door of the switchman’s shack and helped Anna inside. She seemed already weak, unsteady on her feet. She is ill, Travis thought.

The shack was barely erect, weathered sideboards flecked with old red-barn-paint, a sagging tar-paper roof. Inside there was a crude wooden shelf and mouldering mattress, a porcelain bowl and mug, in one corner a pyramid of rust-rimmed tin cans. The unaccustomed sunlight through the open door raised up ancient slumbers of dust. Anna slid down to the mattress. Her eyes were distant and she was panting.

Travis went outside with Nancy. “We can’t keep the truck,” Nancy said. He nodded. “We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t have us arrested.”

“This is just the beginning. We bought ourselves a lot of trouble just now, you know that, Travis?” “I guess I do.”

She shrugged at the switchman’s shack. “I suppose I don’t look like much—next to her.” “You look fine.”

It was a consolation, and she nodded, accepting it. “Well. We need to get that truck back before somebody sees it here. Travis? I can drive it back to the house. Creath doesn’t have anything against me.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

“And then come back?” He added, “We need to talk. Make plans.” “Sure.”

She drove away.

Travis went back to the hovel.

It would take some cleaning up. The corners were black with spider webs. Carpenter ants moved in the wallboards. It was for certain not a good place to bring a sick person… but Anna was not sick, exactly, or so she said; and anyway they had no choice. A month, she had said. And then what? What consummation was she waiting for? But he could not force his thoughts that far ahead. The needs of the moment had assumed a dire priority.

He looked at her on the mattress. Her eyes were closed; she might have been asleep. He thought again how delicate she was. Without conscious volition he moved to the side of her, put his hands, gently, on her shoulders. It was the first time he had touched her. Even this trivial intimacy was shockingly intense. Her skin was cool; it was as if he could feel her fragility under his fingers. She stirred but did not open her eyes.

It was strong, he thought, this thing that was special about her—stronger the closer he got to her. Touching her, it seemed as if she had come somehow to embody everything connected with the female sex, was not so much a single woman as an aggregation of femininity, mother and lover, womb and vagina, an exploration and a welcoming home—he blushed at his own thoughts. But it was so. Not merely carnal, as his contact with Nancy had been. There was nothing base in this. The possibility of defilement was not in her. He thought of what Creath had said. And maybe Liza knows as much about me as that Wilcox girl knows about you, you think perhaps! Oh, we are that much the same.

Travis could not deny the truth of it. But here, for now, it had ceased to matter. He stroked her perfect cheek, and she trembled.

“Anna?”

Her eyes were still closed. The tremor in her grew stronger.

She twitched in his arms, then convulsed.

Abruptly he was frightened. “Anna? Anna!”

She was shaking now, rivers of mysterious energy pouring through her. Her eyes came open suddenly—

And Travis gazed into them.

It was a mistake. In that moment she was not Anna Blaise. She was not even a woman.

Not human.

Her skin felt dusty. Moth-wing skin. Her eyes were huge undifferentiated pupils dilated beyond credibility. He squeezed his eyelids together to shut out the vision, but that only made it worse: on some inner movie screen she was even more acutely visible. He saw her, still somehow Anna, stripped of fat until her bones shone like porcelain through parchment skin, those huge eyes radiating blue fire, rib cage palpitating, fibrous veined wings like rice paper unfolding wetly behind her. And she was watching him, watching.

He thought of the carpenter ants at work in the rotting wood. He thought of termites, beetles, night moths banging against window panes.

He stumbled back from the mattress, revulsion searing through him.

She sat up suddenly—now human again, at least superficially—and stared at him. “Travis! Travis, I’m sorry—I couldn’t help it—”

He could not speak. He thought of biting into a ripe fruit and finding some foul decay inside. He thought of stepping into a rotten log. He thought— could not restrain himself from thinking—of his mother vomiting blood into the stained farmhouse toilet bowl, the wages (he had thought then) of sin, of her riding to the doctor when she was almost too weak to survive the journey, of the word “cancer” and of his fear of it as she declined toward death in her stinking bedroom…

…and it seemed to him, in that twisted and infinite moment, that he had penetrated to the heart of things: under female softness, this burrowing nightmare,- under the veneer of life, death…

…and he threw open the door and ran gasping for the air and the clean river water; knowing, despite the way she pleaded from the doorway, that he could not go back there, could not go back in there, no, not ever again.