The Awakening (Montgomery/Taggert 11)

The girl had already got out by the time Hank had walked to her side. She was wearing a cheap red satin dress and her lipstick was smeared at one corner of her wide mouth, but the drive seemed to have cleared her head because she was standing on her feet more steadily.

She took his arm and pressed her body close to his. She was well rounded and pleasing now, but in a few more years she’d be fat.

“The gang’s gonna be green w

ith envy when they see you,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Hank Montgomery,” he answered, smiling down at her. “And yours?”

“Reva Eiler.” She pulled a bit on his arm and guided him toward the front door of the tavern.

There were only four customers in the tavern, which was lined with booths around three sides, a long bar on the fourth wall. Half the floor space was taken up by tiny tables and lots of chairs; the other half was a dance area and bandstand. Reva greeted the man behind the bar, but no one else, as she led Hank to a booth in one corner.

“So tell me all about yourself,” she said, taking a compact from a little beaded bag and beginning to repair her face. When she’d finished she removed a cigarette from a silver-plated case with most of the plating worn off. Hank took the matching lighter from her and lit her cigarette as she pushed her heavy hair back. It was cut to shoulder length, and Hank realized that he rarely saw women with hair this short and he liked it. He wondered how Amanda would look with hair like this.

“Not much to tell,” he said. “I teach economics at—”

“Economics!” she gasped just as the bartender set two beers before them. “Thanks, Charlie,” she murmured. “You don’t look like no teacher of economics. I thought maybe you and Amanda were lovers or somethin’.”

Hank took a deep drink of his beer. “You know Amanda?”

She looked at him for a long time. There was something about him that appealed to her. He was good-looking, extraordinarily so; dark blond hair, blue eyes, that nose that gave him the look of a prince—those lips. She liked those lips of his a lot. But there was something else, too. It was…

“You’re rich, aren’t you?” she said, picking a piece of tobacco off the tip of her tongue.

Hank was startled and didn’t speak for a moment.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody if you want to keep it a secret. It’s just that I can smell it on somebody. You develop the sense when you grow up as poor as I have. No, no sympathy, just buy me another beer and tell me what’s going on at the Cauldens’.”

Hank put his hand up to the bartender, then turned back to Reva. “You know Amanda? I mean, do you know the Cauldens?”

She smiled at him. She was young but he sensed that in another few years she wouldn’t be. He didn’t think she’d age gracefully.

“You meant Amanda,” she said. “How is she? Still a brat?”

“Amanda?” he said. “Amanda Caulden a brat? You must mean someone else. Amanda is perfect. She walks perfectly, talks perfectly, discusses only perfect subjects; she eats perfectly healthy food; she loves a perfect man. Amanda is not a brat.”

Reva finished her first beer and started on her second one. “When you were in elementary school, did you have one kid who was your archenemy? Somebody who rubbed you the wrong way no matter what he did?”

“Jim Harmon,” Hank said, smiling in memory. “I thought he was the meanest kid ever born. We fought all the time.”

“Right. Well, Amanda and I were enemies from the first day of the first grade. I still remember it. My old man had been drunk for three days and my mother’d run off again, like she always did when he got mean, so there was just my big sister and me. She dressed me as best she could, but my clothes were torn and dirty and wrinkled and when I got to school the other kids laughed at me. I was used to being laughed at and it was something I understood, but then little Miss Amanda, all clean and white, came up to me and put her arm around me and told the others to stop laughin’. It made me crazy. I could stand bein’ made fun of but I couldn’t stand pity. I pushed Amanda down, jumped on her and started beating her.”

Hank listened to this with great interest. “And what did Amanda do?” he asked, thinking that she no doubt went crying to the teacher.

Reva grinned. “Blacked my eye is what she did. She got in trouble but I didn’t, because the teacher walked out when Amanda was sitting on me and slamming a right fist into my face. We were enemies forever after that—until ol’ man Caulden took her out of school. Nobody’s seen much of her since then. It’s like she moved to another state. Has she changed much?”

Hank couldn’t imagine the Amanda he knew being in a fist fight. What had made her change so drastically? Did she finally realize she was the richest kid in town and that she was better than everyone else?

“She’s changed,” he answered at last. “She’s not the same Amanda she was then. You want another one?”

What I want, Reva thought, can’t be found in a bottle. I want somebody like you: clean, smart, strong, somebody to take care of me. How involved was he with Amanda? “So,” she said, “are you visiting her or somebody else at the Cauldens’?”

For some reason, he was reluctant to mention the unionists that said they were coming to Kingman. He didn’t want the town frightened; people had fanciful ideas of what unionists were and what they hoped to do, so he decided to keep it quiet.

“I’m learning about the ranch. I didn’t know J. Harker had a daughter before I came. And Amanda is engaged to her tutor.”

Reva leaned back against the bench and smiled sweetly at him. “Then you should get to know the people of Kingman. There’s a dance Saturday night,” she said, and there was hope in her voice.