“Take my colored glasses,” Idabel offered. “Everything looks a lot prettier.”
The grass-colored lenses tinted the creek where nervous minnow schools stitched the water like needles; occasionally, in deeper pools, a chance shaft of sunlight illuminated bigger game: fat clumsy perch moving slowly, blackly below the surface. Idabel’s fishline quivered in the midstream current, but now, after an hour, she’d had not even a nibble, so, rooting the pole firmly between two stumps, she leaned back, pillowing her head on a clump of moss. “O.K., give ’em back,” she demanded.
“Where did you get them?” he said, wishing he had a pair.
“At the travelin-show,” she said. “Travelin-show comes every year in August; it’s not such a big one, but they’ve got a flying jinny, and a ferris wheel. And they’ve got a two-headed baby inside a bottle, too. The way I got these glasses was I won them; I used to wear them all the time, even nighttime, but Papa, he said I was going to put out my eyes. Want a cigarette?”
There was only one, a crumpledWing ;dividing it, she struck a match. “Look,” she said, “I can blow one smoke ring through another.” The rings mounted in the air, blue and perfect; it was so still, yet all around there was the feeling of movement, subtle, secret, shifting: dragonflies skidded on the water, some sudden unseen motion loosened snowdrop bells brown now all withered and scentless.
Joel said, “I don’t think we’re going to catch anything.”
“I never expect to,” said Idabel. “I just like to come here and think about my worries; nobody ever comes hunting for me here. It’s a nice place. . . just to lie and take your ease.”
“What kind of worries do you worry about?” he asked.
‘That’s my business. And you know something. . . you’re an awful poke-nose. You don’t ever catch me prying, hell, no. Anybody else in the country, why, they’d eat you alive, you being a stranger, and living at the Landing and all. Look at Florabel. What a snoop she is.”
“I think she’s very pretty,” said Joel, just to be aggravating.
Idabel made no comment. She flipped away her cigarette, and, forking her fingers between her lips, whistled boylike: Henry, padding along the creek’s shallow edge, scrambled up the bank, his coat shining soggy wet. “Pretty on the outside, sure, but it’s what’s on the inside that counts,” she said, hugging the hound. “She keeps telling Papa he ought to do away with Henry, says he’s got a mortal disease: that’s what she’s like on the inside.”
The white face of afternoon took shape in the sky; his enemy, Joel thought, was there, just behind those glasslike, smokelike clouds; whoever, whatever this enemy was, his was the face imaged there brightly blank. And in this respect Idabel could be envied; she at least knew her enemies: you and you, she could say, such and such and so and so. “Were you ever afraid of losing your mind?”
“Never thought about it,” she said, and laughed. “To hearthem tell it, I haven’t got a mind no ways.”
Joel said: “You’re not being serious. Here’s what I mean: do you ever see things, like people, like whole houses, see them and feel them and know for certain they’re real. . . only. . .”
“Only they’re not,” said Idabel. “The time that snake bit me, I lived a week in a terrible place where everything was crawling, the floors and walls, everything. Now all that was plain foolishness. But then it was a peculiar thing, because last summer I went with Uncle August (he’s the one that’s so afraid of girls he won’t look at one; he says I’m not a girl; I do love my Uncle August: we’re like brothers). . . we went down to Pearl River. . . and one day we were rowing in this dark place and came on an island of snakes; it was real little, just one tree, but alive with old copperheads: they were even hanging off the branches. I tell you it was right spooky. And when folks talk about dreams-come-true, I guess I know what they mean.”
“That’s not like what I was saying,” said Joel, his voice small, bewildered. “Dreams are different, dreams you can lose. But if you see something. . . a lady, say, and you see her where nobody should be, then she follows you around inside your head. I mean like this: the other night Zoo was scared; she’d heard a dog howl, and she said it was her husband come back, and she went to the window: ‘I see him.’ she said, ‘he’s squatting under the fig tree,’ she said, ‘and his eyes are all yellow in the dark.’ But then when I looked there was nothing but nothing.”
All this Idabel seemed to find rather unexceptional. “Oh, shoot!” she said, tossing her head, the chopped red hair swishing wonderful fire, “everybody knows Zoo’s crazy for true. One time, and it was hot as now, I was passing on the road, and she was there by the mailbox with this dumb look, and she says: ‘What a fine snow we had last night.’ Always talking about snow, always seeing things, that Zoo, that crazy Zoo.”
Joel regarded Idabel with malice: what a mean liar she was. Zoo was not crazy. She was not. Yet he remembered the snow of their first conversation: it fell swiftly all about him: the woods dazzled whitely, and Idabel’s voice, speaking now, sounded soft, and snow-hushed: “It’s Ivory,” she said. “It floats.”
“What for?” he said, accepting a cake of soap she’d taken from her pocket.
“To wash with, stupid,” she told him. “And don’t look so prissy. Everytime I come down here, I always take a scrub. Here, you put your clothes on that stump where the fishpole is.”
Joel looked shyly at the designated place. “But you’re a girl.”
With an exceedingly contemptuous expression, Idabel drew up to her full height. “Son,” she said, and spit between her fingers, “what you’ve got in your britches is no news to me, and no concern of mine: hell, I’ve fooled around with nobody but boys since first grade. I never think like I’m a girl; you’ve got to remember that, or we can’t never be friends.” For all its bravado, she made this declaration with a special and compelling innocence; and when she knocked one fist against the other, as, frowning, she did now, and said: “I want so much to be a boy: I would be a sailor, I would. . .” the quality of her futility was touching.
Joel stood up and began to unbutton his shirt.
He lay there on a bed of cold pebbles, the cool water washing, rippling over him; he wished he were a leaf, like the current-carried leaves riding past: leaf-boy, he would float lightly away, float and fade into a river, an ocean, the world’s great flood. Holding his nose, he put his head underwater: he was six years old, and his penny-colored eyes were round with terror: Holy Ghost, the preacher said, pressing him down into baptism water; he screamed, and his mother, watching from a front pew, rushed forward, took him in her arms, held him, whispered softly: my darling, my darling. He lifted his face from the great stillness, and, as Idabel splashed a playful wave, seven years vanished in an instant.
“You look like a plucked chicken,” said Idabel. “So skinny and white.”
Joel’s shoulders contracted self-consciously. Despite Idabel’s quite genuine lack of interest in his nakedness, he could not make so casual an adjustment to the situation as she seemed to expect.
Idabel said: “Hold still, now, and I’ll shampoo your hair.” Her own was a maze of lather-curls like cake icing. Without clothes, her figure was, if anything, more boyish: she seemed mostly legs, like a crane, or a walker on modified stilts, and freckles, dappling her rather delicate shoulders, gave her a curiously wistful look. But already her breasts had commenced to swell, and there was about her hips a mild suggestion of approaching width. Joel, having conceived of Idabel as gloomy, and cantankerous, was surprised at how funny and gay she could be: working her fingers rhythmically over his scalp, she kept laughing and telling jokes, some of them quite bawdy: “. . .so the farmer said: ‘Sure she’s a pretty baby; oughta be, after having been strained through a silk handkerchief.’ “
When he did not laugh, she said: “What’s the matter? Don’t you get it?” Joel shook his head. “And you from the city, too,” she sighed.
“What did he mean. . . strained through a silk handkerchief?”
“Skip it, son,” said Idabel, rinsing his hair, “you’re too young.” Joel thought then that the points of Idabel’s jokes were even for her none too clear: the manner in which she told them was not altogether her own; she was imitating someone, and, wondering who, he asked: “Where’d you hear that joke?”
“Billy Bob told me,” she said.
“Who’s that?”
“He’s just Billy Bob.”
“Do you like him?” said Joel, not understanding why he felt so jealous.
“Sure I like him,” she said, rising up and wading toward land; her eyes fixed on the water, she was, moving slowly and with such grace, like a bird in search of food. “Sure: he’s practically my best friend. He’s awful tough, Billy Bob is.
