The Big Both Ways Read Free Page A

that she was only partially listening but he didn’t mind. He stopped talking, thinking she was asleep. But as soon as he did she opened her eyes, staring intently toward the stove.
    “I don’t mean to talk so much,” he said.
    She closed her eyes softly once and then opened them again. In the darkening room he noticed she had faint scars under both eyes, fishhook size, right in the spots where the bruises were rising.
    “What do you do?” he asked softly, not sure he really wanted to know. A bird walked on the tin roof, its small claws ticking into the room.
    Ellie looked straight at him. “Let’s not talk about what we do.”
    “All right,” Slip said, and he pretended to be looking over his fingernails as if he had some intention of cleaning them.
    “I want to fly an airplane,” she said. Even though her voice was soft and sleepy, there was resolve running underneath.
    “I was up in one once. On the takeoff I thought the whole thing would fall apart right there rolling along the ground. But then …” and she raised her hand slowly out over the edge of the cot, “we rose into the air.” She was smiling out into the atmosphere of the room.
    “Did you fly it yourself?”
    “Oh my no. It takes lessons, lots of lessons to learn to fly. I was with a barnstormer, a guy just passing through. I married him.”
    “Did he teach you to fly?” Slip asked.
    “No. He … well … he took off with another young girl.” And then she smiled ruefully, the curled scars under her eyes strangely bittersweet.
    “You got a family?” Slip kicked his feet out toward the cot a bit more.
    “I had a sister but now she’s dead.”
    She took a deep breath and shifted so the springs shrieked. She looked at Slip, curled on the floor. His eyes were open, staring at her as if he knew her, but of course he didn’t.
    “I’m sorry,” he said once again, the words turning sour in his mouth.
    “No,” she said. “That’s all right. She was married. She and her husband died in a house fire.”
    “That’s hard,” was all he could think of to say. But his mind wandered to his parents’ graves alone in a dusty field now wholly owned by the bank.
    “I’m tired of talking. I need some rest,” Ellie said. “Just a little bit. Then we’ll get going.”
    And she closed her eyes.
    It was dark when he woke up and the tin stove was barely warm. She was lying against him on the floor, her arms curled aroundhim. She gripped him tightly with the same surprising strength he had felt in her handshake.
    “What time is it?” she asked, her breath warm in his ear.
    “I don’t know. It’s dark.”
    “We better get going,” she said, and she sat up, pulling her coat around her shoulders. “I need to take care of the car.”
    They stood up and awkwardly straightened their clothes. Slip fussed with the stove, doing anything he could to get past the anxiety of waking on the floor with this woman he did not know.
    Outside, the river kept at its work and the rocks tumbled one after another down the riverbed. The lights from the gas station spattered up through the trees and Slip could see the red taillights of cars gliding down the road.
    He grabbed up his bindle and toolbox, then walked out the door behind Ellie. She walked directly to the driver’s side door and Slip walked around the back end of the car. A sliver of light cut through the trees from the gas station and ran across the car, which was parked on an incline, its nose facing uphill toward the cabin. As Slip walked past the trunk, he stopped short. There was a sour smell in the air, like the musk from a big animal, a black bear or a dead bull in a ditch. The breeze stirred and the smell of the cool river slid around him. Then he looked down at the rear end of the car where the light sparkled on the bumper.
    The Lincoln had a carriage-style trunk, and down near the latch a dark line of liquid traced along the bumper and a fat blob of liquid hung from the edge of the