Don't Speak to Strange Girls Read Free Page A

thirteen he’d thought the land stark, the life arid, but now he let his mind dwell on Colonel Ben, the quarter-horse the colonel had given him, the .410 gauge shotgun on his tenth birthday, and the time the colonel had caught him with the little girl from the neighboring farm on the outhouse floor, doing it the only way they knew — the way they’d seen the horses and cattle and hunting dogs doing it. He still remembered hunching over her, putting all the strength and sick sweet urgency of his hands on her shoulders, trying to draw her head back to him so he could inhale the fragrance of her hair. They hadn’t even known Colonel Ben was in the world until they heard the colonel’s burst of prideful laughter just before he brought his belt down across Clav’s back.
    For many years every decision Clay Stuart made, every direction he turned was motivated by the compelling need to escape that raw land. Out there a man kissed infrequently — his bride only while she was still his bride, and then they lived together until they died, or killed one another, and seldom kissed again. A man might buss his mother’s cheek in a shamed way if she were absent from the house for more than a year, and kiss his grandchildren if they were small and no one was looking. A quick handshake was about as emotional as those people ever got.
    Clay watched the leaf bobble across the water. It seemed to him he’d always been a wad of emotion, crying when his pet chicken was killed for Sunday dinner, holding on to things he loved.
    He had the sudden memory of the day Colonel Ben assaulted the drummer on Main Street. The salesman rented a Stuart horse, rode it to death and then called young Clay a liar when he accused him.
    Maybe a twelve-year-old kid should have kept his mouth shut, but a blind man could see what the drummer had done, and Clay felt ill watching that suffering animal die.
    The Stuart women talked long and urgently to Colonel Ben and he finally agreed he would not speak of the matter with the drummer; the horse was dead, nothing could restore it, the colonel’s temper was violent and impossible to curb once roused.
    And the colonel kept his word, would have kept it forever if only the drummer had been smart enough to keep his mouth shut. Clay walked at his father’s side on Main Street, heard the colonel suddenly sniffing, blowing hard through his left nostril the way he always did when agitated.
    Clay hadn’t known what was the matter until he saw the drummer approaching them on the same side of the street. Colonel Ben kept his face straight, sniffing and blowing, but determined to keep his pledge and pass the drummer without speaking.
    But the drummer called Colonel Ben’s name, an arrogant man, an arrogant voice alien to the plains. Colonel Ben sniffed, swung as he turned, clouting the drummer on the side of the head. The drummer staggered, stumbling ten feet before he fell. Colonel Ben pounced on him, saying nobody called his son a liar. He never mentioned the dead horse, seemed not to care. And even then Clay saw how violent his father’s emotions were, and how hard the colonel worked to keep anyone from seeing how different he was inside from his hewn-faced neighbors.
    Clay smiled, remembering the way his father had fought the drummer in the dust of Main Street. It took five men to pull the colonel off. All this happened in 1921. There were less than a dozen automobiles in the whole county.
    • • •
    Now Clay heard a door close behind him and he stiffened rigidly in his chair, as though setting himself for some mortal combat instead of a casual encounter fixed and secured by old habit and long association. He listened to the precise steps on the flagstones and spoke without moving.
    “Hello, Kay.”
    “You always know when I’m near, don’t you?”
    “Don’t forget, you’ve been walking up on me for over thirty years.”
    She stood beside his lounge chair and he glanced up at her. “Don’t say that so