“Sir?” Chick said. “I meet her in Christian’s drugstore after school and give her the book and tell her you’ll try to get there but not to wait. And buy her a soda. Why dont I just give her the book at school and save time?”
“Certainly,” I said. “Why dont you just give me back the dollar?”
“And buy her a soda,” he said. “Do I have to pay for that out of the dollar?”
“All right,” I said. “Twenty-five cents then. If she takes a banana split you can drink water and make a nickel more.”
“Maybe she’ll take a coke,” he said. “Then I can have one too and still make fifteen cents.”
“All right,” I said.
“Or suppose she dont want anything.”
“Didn’t I say all right?” I said. “Just dont let your mother hear you say ‘she dont’.”
“Why?” he said. “Father and Ratliff say ‘she dont’ all the time, and so do you when you are talking to them. And Ratliff says ‘taken’ for ‘took’ and ‘drug’ for ‘dragged’ and so do you when you are talking to country people like Ratliff.”
“How do you know?” I said.
“I’ve heard you. So has Ratliff.”
“Why? Did you tell him to?”
“No sir,” he said. “Ratliff told me.”
My rejoinder may have been Wait until you get as old as Ratliff and your father and me and you can too, though I dont remember. But then, inside the next few months I was to discover myself doing lots of things he wasn’t old enough yet for the privilege.
Which was beside the point anyway now; now only the afternoon remained: the interminable time until a few moments after half-past-three filled with a thousand indecisions which each fierce succeeding harassment would revise. You see? She had not only abetted me in making that date with which I would break, wreck, shatter, destroy, slay something, she had even forestalled me in it by the simplicity of directness.
So I had only to pass that time. That is, get it passed, live it down; the office window as good as any for that and better than most since it looked down on the drugstore entrance so I had only to lurk there.
Not to hear the dismissal bell of course this far away but rather to see them first: the little ones, the infantile inflow and scatter of primer- and first-graders, then the middle-graders boisterous and horsing as to the boys, then the mature ones, juniors and seniors grave with weight and alien with puberty; and there she was, tall (no: not for a girl that tall but all right then: tall, like a heron out of a moil of frogs and tadpoles), pausing for just one quick second at the drugstore entrance for one quick glance, perhaps at the empty stairway.
Then she entered, carrying three books any one of which might have been that book and I thought He gave it to her at school; the damned little devil has foxed me for that odd quarter.
But then I saw Chick; he entered too, carrying the book and then I thought how if I had only thought to fill a glass with water, to count off slowly sixty seconds say to cover the time Skeets McGowan, the soda squirt, would need to tear his fascinations from whatever other female junior or senior and fill the order, then drink the water slowly to simulate the coke; thinking But maybe she did take the banana split; maybe there is still time, already across the office, the screen door already in my hand before I caught myself: at least the county attorney must not be actually seen running down his office stairs and across the street into a drugstore where a sixteen-year-old high school junior waited.
And I was in time but just in time. They had not even sat down, or if they had she had already risen, the two of them only standing beside the table, she carrying four books now and looking at me for only that one last instant and then no more with the eyes you thought were just dark gray or blue until you knew better.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said. “I hope Chick told you.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I have to go on home anyway.”
“Without a coke even?” I said.
“I have to go home,” she said.
“Another time then,” I said. “What they call a rain check.”
“Yes,” she said. “I have to go home now.” So I moved so she could move, making the move first to let her go ahead, toward the door.
“Remember what you said about that quarter,” Chick said.
And made the next move first too, opening the screen for her then stopping in it and so establishing severance and separation by that little space before she even knew it, not even needing to pause and half-glance back to prove herself intact and safe, intact and secure and unthreatened still, not needing to say Mister Stevens nor even Mister Gavin nor Goodbye nor even anything to need to say Thank you for, nor even to look back then although she did. “Thank you for the book,” she said; and gone.
“Remember what you said about that quarter,” Chick said.
“Certainly,” I said. “Why the bejesus dont you go somewhere and spend it?”
Oh yes, doing a lot of things Chick wasn’t old enough yet himself to do. Because dodging situations which might force me to use even that base shabby lash again was fun, excitement.
Because she didn’t know (Must not know, at least not now, not yet: else why the need for that base and shabby lash?), could not be certainly sure about that afternoon, that one or two or three (whatever it was) minutes in the drugstore; never sure whether what Chick told her was the truth: that I actually was going to be late and had simply sent my nephew as the handiest messenger to keep her company until or when or if I did show up, I so aged and fatuous as not even to realise the insult either standing her up would be, or sending a ten-year-old boy to keep her company and believing that she, a sixteen-year-old high school junior, would accept him; or if I had done it deliberately: made the date then sent the ten-year-old boy to fill it as a delicate way of saying Stop bothering me.
So I must not even give her a chance to demand of me with the temerity of desperation which of these was right. And that was the fun, the excitement. I mean, dodging her. It was adolescence in reverse, turned upside down: the youth, himself virgin and — who knew? — maybe even more so, at once drawn and terrified of what draws him, contriving by clumsy and timorous artifice the accidental encounters in which he still would not and never quite touch, would not even hope to touch, really want to touch, too terrified in fact to touch; but only to breathe the same air, be laved by the same circumambience which laved the mistress’s moving limbs; to whom the glove or the handkerchief she didn’t even know she had lost, the flower she didn’t even know she had crushed, the very ninth- or tenth-grade arithmetic or grammar or geography bearing her name in her own magical hand on the flyleaf, are more terrible and moving than ever will be afterward the gleam of the actual naked shoulder or spread of unbound hair on the pillow’s other twin.
That was me: not to encounter; continuously just to miss her yet never be caught at it. You know: in a little town of three thousand people like ours, the only thing that could cause more talk and notice than a middleaged bachelor meeting a sixteen-year-old maiden two or three times a week, would be a sixteen-year-old maiden and a middleaged bachelor just missing each other two or three times a week by darting into stores or up alleys. You know: a middleaged lawyer, certainly the one who was county attorney too, could always find enough to do even in a town of just three thousand to miss being on the one street between her home and the school house at eight-thirty and twelve and one and three-thirty oclock when the town’s whole infant roster must come and go, sometimes, a few times even, but not forever.
Yet that’s what I had to do. I had no help, you see; I couldn’t stop her suddenly on the street one day and say, “Answer quickly now. Exactly how much were you fooled or not fooled that afternoon in the drugstore? Say in one word exactly what you believe about that episode.” All I could do was leave well-enough alone, even when the only well-enough I had wasn’t anywhere that well.
So I had to dodge her. I had to plan not just mine but Yoknapatawpha County’s business too ahead in order to dodge a sixteen-year-old girl. That was during the spring. So until school was out in May it would be comparatively simple, at least for five days of the week. But in time vacation would arrive, with no claims of regimen or discipline on her; and observation even if not personal experience had long since taught me that anyone sixteen years old not nursing a child or supporting a family or in jail, could be almost anywhere at any time during the twenty-four hours.
So
