We were sitting in the Chevrolet, in a roadside park not far from the entrance to a horse ranch that had no buildings on it, only windmills and stock tanks and horses nickering in the sun’s afterglow. “?‘Come around’ how?” I asked.
“Calling me up, hanging around the restaurant, following me home. He had it in for Henri, too. He called him a cradle robber in front of people at the college.”
I moved closer to her and put my hand on the back of her neck. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back and moved her neck back and forth against my hand. Her skin was warm, her hair soft on the backs of my fingers. I wanted to kiss her, but I was feeling guiltier and guiltier about my behavior. I was a hypocrite. I had taken her employer to task for wronging a fine girl, forgetting that our differences in age and education had not deterred me from accepting the gift of Jo Anne’s body. As I had these thoughts, I longed for her again.
“Jo Anne?”
She opened her eyes. A gate on a cattle guard was tinkling in the wind, the horses blowing in the grass. “What?”
“Think I’m taking advantage of you?”
“You’re about to get a slap.”
“Oh?”
“Oh, my foot. Talk down to me like that again and see what happens.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
She picked up my hand and folded her fingers inside mine. “You don’t have to worry about me, Aaron. You’re a good soul. It’s in your eyes. But you don’t know your own mind. I think that’s going to bring you a lot of grief.”
“It’ll be my grief, then.”
“You’ve stirred up Rueben Vickers,” she said. “He tried to take me home once.”
“Rueben Vickers? Not the son?”
“He was waiting outside the restaurant at two in the morning. He said he wanted to give me a ride. That a storm was coming.”
“What happened?”
“I told him no thanks, I had my own car.”
“That was it?”
“The next day the state police found a barmaid’s body outside Clayton. Her neck had been broken. She’d also been raped.”
“Clayton is more than a hundred miles from Trinidad.”
“I need to go home, Aaron. I don’t feel well.”
* * *
BUT OUR EVENING wasn’t over. Up the Pass, between two craggy, steep-sided mountains, were the ruins of a Spanish-style church with a small bell tower. The stucco walls were yellow in the moonlight, and the ceiling had caved in, and tall deep-green pine trees had grown out of the rubble inside. “You know what that is?” Jo Anne said.
“A Jesuit mission?”
“It was paid for by John D. Rockefeller in 1917, three years after his goons killed the miners at Ludlow. My father would never let us buy gasoline from a Standard Oil filling station.”
“Your dad must have been quite a fellow,” I said.
“I think one day he’s coming back. I still can’t believe he’s gone.”
I looked at her, even though I shouldn’t have taken my eyes off the road. She was staring at my headlights tunneling up the canyon, her face transfixed. “Jo Anne?”
“What?”
“Are you okay?”