with this in a minute.”
On a small table with the radio stood a pitcher of ice water. I ducked under a wire stretched across the small room from which Stella’s clothes hung and lifted the pitcher. The radio was now saying, “And just half an hour ago this afternoon, at the county jail . . .” and I spilled some of the water in my haste to find another station.
I reached over Stella’s shoulder with the misty pitcher. She upended the iron and took the pitcher in both hands, child-fashion, drank, then brushed the hair back from her forehead. Her hair is coarse, but not stiff and dry, cut at the base of her neck, the edges uneven and curled up slightly. In front the blonde hair is like a great mane that can either sweep over her forehead or be brushed back in a wave.
She put down the water pitcher with a sound of appreciation and looked up at me, her green eyes bright and clear, smiling. She seemed so young that it was strange to remember what the rest of her was like, beneath the slip.
I touched her wet shoulder lightly and took a bath towel from a nearby chair. “A bit damp, lady.” I toweled off the perspiration, then dabbed at her forehead. I kissed her on the tip of her nose.
Her mouth opened slightly and I kissed her again, seeing the look of sleepy pleasure in those green eyes, the subtle touch of woman-wisdom, at odds with her youthful appearance. Her skin is surprisingly youthful and good though not unmarked. It seemed, as I kissed her, that I had known her for so long—much longer than four days—known the quick one-sided smile, the somber shadows of knowledge that crept into her eyes at times, the fine firm body. I felt that I had never really known myself until I had met her.
“Very good,” she said, pleased, when we parted. She made a face at the ironing board. “I hate to iron. Sit down and take a load off those cop’s feet, Bill. Excuse the slip. It’s so hot in this room.”
“There are other places to live,” I reminded her.
“But not as cheap.” She walked barefoot to the bed and sat and looked at me curiously. “What brings you across the river, Bill? Something about Jimmy?”
I hesitated. She was instantly aware of my uncertainty, and a protective wariness narrowed her eyes.
“About Jimmy,” I said. I knew my face must be coloring. “Stella,” I said, not looking at her, “the boy was in a bad way. A couple of previous arrests and the murder confession. It didn’t look good for him.”
I knew I was blundering off in the wrong direction but I couldn’t help it.
Her voice became strident in a way that I disliked. “Jimmy’s lawyer said that maybe they couldn’t prove premeditation. Did he change his mind? Bill . . .” There was a thin sound of fear.
“That’s not what I mean,” I said desperately. “Jimmy . . . I guess he . . . got tired, or scared or something. Of waiting, and not knowing.” Her head came up and she looked at me incredulously. “I don’t know why,” I said. My mouth was very dry. “He hanged himself this afternoon. With his shirt. I don’t know why. But he’s dead. I’m sorry, Stella.”
She stopped breathing for a moment and her fingers loosened in her lap. She was still looking at me with the same uncomprehending expression. She put her hands between her knees and pressed her legs together hard, so that the calves touched, and her head inclined forward, the mane of blonde hair dangling over her forehead. Her breasts moved erratically as she breathed.
“Stella . . .” I said helplessly.
She began to cry, with gulping irregular sobs. She slid off the bed, kneeled on the floor, holding her head like a sick dog, and cried.
I sat beside her on the floor and held her, her face soft against my neck. She smelled of sweat and shampoo and woman-odor.
I leaned back against the bed and held her and felt her tears warm on my cheek, knowing the tragedy of shattered hopes more tragic because the hopes were founded in futility, and it had always been that way for her, because she was a Ridge girl. And that was not all I knew. I knew she was poor and nearly alone when she quit high school her first year because she was tired of wearing the same dress three times a week and washing out the same underwear every night. I knew there was a boy, somewhere in her life, shot dead by the owner of a liquor store during an attempted holdup. I knew she worked nights as a waitress and saved her money patiently for the day when she could leave the Ridge and I knew there was a streak of honesty and independence in her a mile wide.
I knew, most of all, that I had wanted her from the first moment I had seen her, in the hall of the police station, when she had spit in Gulliver’s face because he wouldn’t let her see her cousin.
Holding the good comfortable weight of her against me as she cried I remembered last night, on the edge of the deep silent river. I had taken her there, to my river, where I liked to go and sit on a beached log beside the eddying water and look to the bluffs on the other side and think. The river-washed sand had been fine and smooth. It had been warm and quiet and very dark and there had been a strange terror about being close to the great moving river, so that it seemed almost inevitable we would lie close and eagerly, bonded by the searing kisses. I knew, as a man will know, that she wanted more, much more . . .
She’s not a piece, Gulliver.
Yet she had been prepared for me. She had been prepared to receive me, prepared in a way nice young girls usually are not.
I understood that on the Ridge life is hard and uncertain and there is an attitude of get it while you can. Lust is solid beneath the surface of restless lives and chastity doesn’t exist where there is no reason for it to.
Yes, I knew Stella, yet I didn’t know her. I didn’t know why it had been that way on the bank of the river. Now she squirmed and sobbed in my arms.
“Bill . . . Bill, the poor little guy . . .”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
She turned away from me and rubbed at her reddened eyes. “He was such a little kid,” she said. The violence of her grief had given her hiccups. “Such a little . . . underweight kid. He never had a break, Bill. Never . . . had one goddam tiny break in his whole . . . goddam life.”
She stood up awkwardly and sniffed and rubbed the back of her hand against her eyes and walked out of the bedroom, down the hall to the bath.
I went to the window and looked out, at the acre or so of dumped trash where the city was trying to create a fill, at the patchwork fields beyond and the fringe of trees bounding the river.
I felt as though I had no business being there, in her room, with the hard gun at my side and the badge in my pocket. A Ridge boy had died, and I was intruding on the wrenching grief of someone who had cared for him, who had recognized his consuming need for being wanted and protected. Well, I was a cop. I had put on the badge and I was right. Those, like Jimmy Herne, who made my work, were wrong. It was the only way I could think, the way all of us had to think. When you started making excuses for them, wondering why, your effectiveness as a cop goes. That’s what Gulliver had told me, and probably it was the truth. Never give them a break, Bill. When you start giving them a break, they’ll kill you. One way or another. That’s what Gulliver had said, many times.
Yet I had tried to help Jimmy Herne, in a small way; not because I was sorry for him, but because of Stella.
I had to think about her, and the four days, about her instinctive dislike
