Read Online Girl Out Back by Charles Williams - Free Book Online Page A

a moment. Whoever it was in that car, I thought, the one I’d heard as I came up to the slip. But maybe there’d been somebody here before that.
    “Why . . .?” she asked behind me. “I mean, what was that you meant about my feet?”
    “I wish you’d forget that,” I said. “It was nothing, really, and I’m sorry.”
    “But why did you say it? Most women walk with their feet about that far apart. Don’t they?”
    “That’s right,” I said. “And on most women it doesn’t mean a thing.”
    “Why?”
    “Because they walk like pack animals to begin with.”
    “Oh . . .”
    I turned then and grinned at her. “I know you must think I’m crazy. I’m sorry. I didn’t have any right to make personal remarks like that. But it’s just—well, you’re touchy about the things you’re sensitive to, that’s all. I happen to think tall women are very beautiful to look at when they move right, and too few of them do. So meeting one who does is apt to be a little startling. You can put your foot in your mouth before you think, if you’re not careful.”
    “Oh.” She thought about it for a moment, and then she said, “Well, it really wasn’t anything to get mad about, anyway. Was it?”
    She made no move to return to the sweeping. The sullenness had disappeared; there was something almost pathetically wistful in the way her face was opening up and in the tentative friendliness of her voice.
    You’re a dirty son of a bitch, I thought.
    * * *
    Her name was Jewel Tennison before she was married, and she was twenty-four. She had lived all her life in Exeter, the county seat, except for one whole year with an aunt in New Orleans when she was about twelve. Her mother and father were both dead. She had a brother who lived in California, in Barstow. No, the name wasn’t spelled like Lord Tennyson’s. She remembered about him. She’d had him in high school. That was with a “y,” wasn’t it? They’d had a house in Exeter, nearly half paid for, when he lost his job in the sheriff’s department, and they’d sold it and bought this camp. She had also put in twelve hundred dollars her mother had left her. She had been a drum majorette in high school and she missed television out here. They could probably put up high enough an antenna to get the two Sanport channels, but there wasn’t any electricity. She liked I Love Lucy.
    No, she’d never thought about her hands that way. It was awful the way dishwater made them so rough, but she hadn’t paid much attention to the way they were made underneath. Did I really think they were expressive? Where had I learned to notice things like that about women, little things like their hands and the way they walked? Not that way about the way they walked—she knew I didn’t mean it like that. It was different, kind of, wasn’t it? Most men just—well, you know.
    No, she didn’t like fishing. The fish themselves gave you the creeps. They felt cold, and scaly. You know. And they’d fin you if you didn’t watch out. She swam a little, but there were water moccasins in the lake. She’d played tennis some, in high school, but she didn’t think women should take athletics too seriously. They got muscles. Nobody liked women with muscles. Especially in their legs.
    Oh? Well, uh—I mean, thank you. It was funny, wasn’t it, the way I could say things that should make you mad but they didn’t really, somehow. They just didn’t seem fresh, the way I said them. Oh, then maybe that was it. Just the way you would admire any other work of art, like a poem, or a symphony? She’d never thought of it that way. But I was just teasing her now, of course. Work of art! But it was nice, the way I said things.
    She didn’t talk about Nunn. I noticed it. From the depths of that sullenness she was slowly drowning in she was capable of making the crack about “being a trusty,” of making it to a total stranger, but now it was different. It wasn’t an act, really, I thought; when she was