“Out?” Helen said.
“Here,” he said, with a great appearance of casualness. He motioned his hand to the side of the road. “Look at all that land, the hills. It’s a warm night. It’d be nice to sleep out.”
“My God!” Helen had cried. “You’re not serious?”
“I just thought.”
“The damn country’s running with snakes and bugs.
What a way to spend the night, getting burrs in my stockings, tramping around some fanner’s property.”
“No one would ever know.”
“But I’d know, my dear,” said Helen.
“It was just a suggestion.”
“Dear Tom, you were only joking, weren’t you?”
“Forget I ever said anything,” he said.
They had driven on in the moonlight to a boiling little night motel where moths fluttered about the raw electric lights. There had been an iron bed in a paint-smelling tiny room where you could hear the beer tunes from the roadhouse all night and hear the continental vans pounding by late, late toward dawn….
He walked through the green forest and listened to the various silences there. Not one silence, but several; the silence that the moss made underfoot, the silence the shadows made depending from the trees, the silence of small streams exploring tiny countries on all sides as he came into a clearing.
He found some wild strawberries and ate them. To hell with the car, he thought. I don’t care if someone takes it apart wheel by wheel, and carries it off. I don’t care if the sun melts it into slag on the spot.
He lay down and cradled his head on his arms and went to sleep.
The first thing he saw when he wakened was his wristwatch. Six forty-five. He had slept most of the day away. Cool shadows had crept up all about him. He shivered and moved to sit up and then did not move again, but lay there with his face upon his arm, looking ahead.
The girl who sat a few yards away from him, with her hands in her lap, smiled. “I didn’t hear you come up,” he said.
She had been very quiet.
For no reason at all in the world, except a secret reason, Thomas felt his heart pounding silently and swiftly.
She remained silent. He rolled over on his back and closed his eyes.
“Do you live near here?”
She lived not far away.
“Born and raised here?”
She had never been anywhere else.
“It’s a beautiful country,” he said.
A bird flew into a tree.
“Aren’t you afraid?”
He waited but there was no answer.
“You don’t know me,” he said.
But on the other hand, neither did he know her.