Tears Are for Angels Read Free Page A

taken more pains with my appearance than with her own. She surveyed me then, the white linen suit I had had to have specially tailored for my lanky frame, the new Panama, the Oxford cloth shirt, a dark blue tie knotted neatly under its wide collar, and the brown and white shoes.
        "You'll do," she said. "You look all right for a lady to go to church with."
        "Nobody will notice me," I said. "They'll be too busy looking at you."
        Her blonde hair waved softly around her head, under a spring hat that wasn't a hat at all, but that must have been made or grown or created just for her head alone, under which her blue eyes, smiling at me, seemed to mirror the very sky. A navy-blue gabardine suit, exactly matching the shade of my tie, clung to her full figure, not loo tightly, but in all the right places, and my gaze swept on down along the slim, lovely legs, and I thought that no woman in the world could wear high heels like Lucy.
        We got into the Pontiac and went to church, the breeze and the coming spring and the awakening blossoms all about us, and I thought that after all the world was a small place because I could reach out and touch it, every bit of it that mattered.
        I remembered all of that, sitting there against that tree by the spring, and the thoughts clawed at me. nameless marauders scaling the wall I had built around all those old days and nights. Lucy, I thought. Lucy. Were you thinking about it even then? Even that day?
        I opened my eyes to get away from the images that darted at me out of the blackness and I looked in the spring again. Revulsion hit me with solid body blows and the shame was all over me now, all through me, and I got up quickly and took two steps toward the shack.
        She was standing there looking at me, across maybe ten yards of bare sand, darkness nearly on us now, the shadows from the four abandoned, lonely derrick posts falling around us and the red ball of the sun fading slowly to the dunes.
        I wanted to hit her, I wanted to beat that smooth face to a bloody pulp, close those eyes forever, because she had seen me like I was, because of the contempt in her lace when she looked at me. I stood there, some tremendous swelling coming inside of me, and yet, inexplicably, I did not move.
        "I wasn't always like this," I said, my voice a child's, my ears incredulous at my own words.
        And then the contempt and the hardness went out of her face, something else filling her eyes, and suddenly I knew she too, whoever she was, was lonely. She had it in her too, the loneliness and the despair and the awful absence of hope. Behind the flippancy and the hardness, something had eaten everything else out of her too.
        "I know it," she said. "I know you weren't. Come on and get some beans."
        We sat there and we ate the beans, and for the first time in two years I tasted them. Oddly enough, they were good. When I pushed my plate away she was already finished.
        "You know what I'm going to do?" she said.
        "No telling."
        "I'm going to scrub hell out of here. I don't have to stay here but one night, but that's what I'm going to do."
        "Go to it," I said. "It's your funeral."
        There was plenty of water and a bar of strong lye soap I hadn't used in months and an old rag or two lying around. She rolled up the slacks above her knees and kicked off her loafers. Then she went out to her car and got a kerchief and bound up the short blonde hair and went to work scrubbing the floor.
        I had made up my mind to shave after supper, but in order to keep out of the way, I stretched out on the bunk and lit up the pipe I sometimes smoked and watched her.
        It was funny. It did something to me. There I was, like any other man, taking it easy after supper, and there she was, like any other woman, doing the housework. Only it wasn't really like that at all. I'm going to get cleaned up, I thought,