April North

12

“Who,” said Craig, “is that?”

She was still staring, open-mouthed in wonder. It’s my knight in shining armor, she wanted to say, my knight on a charger of nuts and bolts.

She said: “It’s Bill.”

“Bill?”

“Bill Piersall,” she said. “The boy who made his own hot-rod. I was telling you about him.”

“And what’s he doing?”

“Chasing us,” she said.

Craig laughed. “Chasing a Mercedes in a home-made job? He must be out of his mind.”

Craig had the accelerator on the floor but the rod was coming on in hot pursuit. They were pulling away from Bill, moving away, and she felt almost as though she were being torn in two. Because she realized all at once that she wanted Bill to catch them, to draw ahead of them and force the Mercedes to stop. Bill still loved her, she thought. He still wanted her.

“I’ll show that whelp what a real car can do,” Craig was saying. “Watch this, April.”

She was watching the hot-rod instead. She thought of the way she had contrasted Bill and Craig by contrasting their cars. But she had had it all wrong, she knew now. Craig was a rich man’s son who bought the car he wanted with money he had inherited. But Bill had built the car he wanted, had put it together with his own hands and his own sweat. Any rich man could buy a Mercedes and drive hell out of it. Not everyone could build a rod like Bill’s.

And, amazingly, the rod was gaining on them. She stared at it, saw Bill at the wheel, concentrating on his driving with single-minded attention. He was pulling almost even with the Benz, his hands riveted to the steering wheel. It amazed her that a car so sloppy in appearance could be capable of such a burst of speed.

Well, appearances were deceiving. She had misjudged Bill’s car just as she had misjudged Bill, and now she was just beginning to see the light when it was almost too late to do any good. They were careening down the dirt road now, the rod just a few feet behind the Mercedes, with Route 68 not far ahead.

“Dammit!” Craig was shouting. His face was flushed and the effort was telling on him. “That little bastard—”

Craig swerved sharply to his left, brushing the nose of the rod in an effort to spin the rod off the road. But Bill held on, sweeping to his left and putting on an extra burst of speed to draw even with the Mercedes. He went out in front, then slashed sharply across in front of the Benz. April saw the look of horror on Craig’s face, saw the nose of the Benz moving toward the tail of the rod, and she knew they were going to crash.

The rod did it neatly. Bill tickled the Mercedes’ nose, then spun forward. But Craig did not make it. The car careened out of control, spilling over the side of the road.

April held her breath...

She was thrown up over the side of the car and into a pile of brush at the side. Her arms and legs were scratched and her head ached but she was alive and more or less unhurt. She raised herself onto one elbow, and then she saw Bill.

His car was parked on the road ahead, miraculously unhurt. And Bill was at the Mercedes, working feverishly. He managed to lift the unconscious Craig, dragged him off to one side.

The Mercedes burst into flames, burning like a beacon at the roadside. The racy automobile was no longer a dream car, no longer a car at all — just flaming metal and leather.

She ran to Bill, calling his name.

Sweat coursed down his face. He lowered Craig into wet grass and stood for a moment, looking at him. He checked Craig’s pulse, listened to his heart beat.

“He’ll live,” he said.

“Bill—”

“Are you all right, April?”

“I’m all right.”

“Are you positive?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m positive.”

“I wanted to tear Danny’s head off,” he said. “When he told me what he was setting up I blew my top. I wanted to take him apart and throw the parts away.”

“He told me.”

“I had to find you. He didn’t tell me where he was keeping you and I started chasing around looking in likely spots. I remembered the barn and got here just when you and this jerk were pulling away.” He sighed. “I guess I got here just in time, huh?”

She could say nothing. She looked at Bill, remembering the hurtful things she had said to him, and realizing how wrong she had been about him from the beginning. He was a good person, a fine person. He was not Danny Duncan and he was not Craig Jeffers.

He was something special.

“I’d better get you home,” he said.

“I can’t go home.”

“Why not?”

Haltingly she told him about the pictures. At first she was sick with embarrassment, but as she talked she realized that she would never have to be embarrassed with Bill. He respected her; moreover, he was able to accept her for what she was and at the same time to honor her for what he felt she could be. She explained how impossible it would be for her to stay in Antrim.

“I can see that,” Bill said. “You can’t stay here. And neither can I, April.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have to be where you are, April. I can’t be alive unless I’m with you. See?”

“Bill—”

“I love you, April.”

She started to say something but his mouth stopped her words before they could be spoken. All at once he was holding her, his hands damp with sweat, and he was kissing her, his mouth hard against hers. She did not love him. But love was not the most important consideration now.

He gave her an out. If Bill took care of her everything would be all right. She could stay with him, marry him if that was what he wanted, and she would be out of Antrim and safe somewhere else.

Would it be fair to him? It would, she told herself. She could be a good wife whether she loved him or not. She would be faithful and warm, and he would never know that she was not in love with him.

She stayed close to him. He smelled of sweat and axle-grease and masculinity, and she buried her face in his chest and hugged him as hard as she could.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get going, April.”

“Where to?”

“I’ll tell you on the way.”

“What about — him?”

“The jerk with the Merc? To hell with him, April. He’s alive. He’ll get back home somehow. His kind always manage. They step on people and grind them into the dirt and they always come out of it smelling like a rose. You don’t have to worry about him, April. He’ll get along.”

She followed Bill to the hot-rod. She sat next to him, and he started the rod down the road. He turned right on 68, heading toward Xenia and away from Antrim forever.

They sat at a table in the rear of the diner in Yarborough, a few miles east of the Indiana state line. The waitress brought four hamburgers and two cups of black coffee.

“Let’s dig in,” Bill said. “I’m starving.”

She picked up a hamburger and began gnawing it. The meat tasted good — maybe not like a seven-course meal at Kardaman’s, but just as good when you were hungry enough to appreciate it. She devoured the first hamburger, then took a sip of the steaming coffee and made a face.

“I know,” he said. “This stuff tastes like battery acid. It’s slop. But it’ll help keep us awake. We’ve got to do a lot of driving tonight.”

“Where are we going, Bill?”

“I’m not sure. Into Indiana, first of all. Maybe across Indiana and into southern Illinois.”

“And what will we do there?”

“We’ll get married,” he said.

Married. No one else wanted to marry her, she remembered. Not Danny, not Craig. But Bill didn’t even ask her if she wanted a wedding ring. He simply took it for granted that she would marry him.

That sounded wonderful.

“And then?”

He shrugged. “Then we find a little town,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be much, just a little place where we can live our own lives the way we want to. That’s all we need, April. Just a place to live in and each other to live with.”

“How will we stay alive?”

He put down his hamburger. “It won’t be hard,” he said. “I’m a damned good mechanic, April. I can do anything in the world with a car. And a top mechanic can always get a job. There’s not a town in the world without a garage, and there are damn few garages that can’t use a good hand. We’ll find one that can and I’ll have a job.”

“I can work, too.”

“You don’t have to.”

“But I want to,” she said. “I can get a job waiting on tables or something like that.”

“With truck-drivers making passes at you all day long? That doesn’t sound too good.”

“I’ll manage,” she said. “They won’t make passes for long. Because it won’t do them any good. When a girl is lucky enough to be married to the best man in the world, no truck driver is going to tempt her.”

He smiled at her, reached across the small table to take her hand. He squeezed her hand and she thought that love was not so important after all. Whether or not she loved him, she was very lucky to have found him, to be with him. Together they could build a real life. A good life.

“We have to save money,” she went on. “So we can buy a house and fill it with children.”

“Do you want children, April?”

“I want your children.”

“I love you, April.”

“And I love you, Bill.”

The lie came easily to her lips. She would have to repeat that lie for a lifetime, she knew. But she would never let him know that she did not love him. She had to make him very happy; she owed him that much and more.

She ate her second hamburger and smoked a cigarette while Bill got a second cup of coffee. She watched him drink the coffee. When he finished it and set the empty cup back in the saucer, she grinned at him.

“You know,” she said, “you can back out, if you want.”

“Why should I want to?”

“Because you’re getting second-hand goods.”

“April—”

“I’m not exactly a virgin,” she went on. “I’ve done some pretty disgusting things. I’m a mess, Bill. You’re getting used goods and you don’t have to get stuck with them.”

“Maybe I want to.”

“Still—”

His eyes were very serious. “You know my car, April?”

“Of course.”

“It’s a hell of a car,” he said. “It can out-drag a Mercedes, you saw it do that. Funny thing about that car, April. It’s just a bucket of bolts when you come right down to it. The body is off an old Ford that must have rusted to hell and gone twenty years ago. The transmission’s off a LaSalle, and they haven’t made LaSalles since before the second world war. The engine came out of a Chrysler that got knocked to hell in a wreck. Just a collection of broken-down parts.”

She waited for him to go on. Instead he lit a cigarette and smoked for a few seconds. Words did not come easily to him; he was not as glib as Craig, but when he spoke he said what he meant and meant what he said. And this was far more important than glibness.

“If the parts are good,” he said slowly, “it doesn’t matter a hell of a lot how many wrecks the car’s been in, or what kind of mileage it’s carrying. I guess it’s not flattering to compare you to an old car, April. But you get what I mean, don’t you? I don’t give a damn what you’ve done or who you did it with. All I care about is the kind of girl you are.”

Craig would have spoken the words differently. He would have used an image far more poetic than a simple thing like a hot-rod. But somehow Bill’s words could not make her laugh, or even feel like laughing. She knew that he meant what he said, that his simple words were essentially far more poetic than the colorful lies Craig Jeffers had told her.

She could say nothing in reply. She wished suddenly that she did love him, knowing how much he deserved her love.

But she was not without feeling for him. He was good, he was sweet, he was gentle — and she liked him for these qualities. She liked the person he was, the fine person he was.

“Hell,” he said. “I talk too much. Let’s get out of here and put some miles on the rod.”

The name of the town was Birch Creek.

The town was not so much. There were a few hundred less people than in Antrim, and the summers were a little warmer and the winters not so cold, and southern Illinois was not quite the same as southern Ohio. Aside from that, Birch Creek could have been Antrim all over again. And yet the town was entirely different.

April stood at Bill’s side in the rectory of the small church while the minister said things to them, and when the minister finished saying things Bill put a five-dollar ring on her finger and took her in his arms.

“Some day I’ll get you a better ring,” he told her the night before. “A decent one, with diamonds.”

But she had said, “This is all the ring I ever want. Just this and you. Who needs diamonds?”

So they were married in Birch Creek, and they took a two-room kitchenette apartment on the main street of town above a dry-goods store. They spent their wedding night in a motel three miles from town. Bill had said that you just could not spend your wedding night in your own home, and that the motel would be worth the five bucks it cost them.

It was worth more than that.

It was worth the world.

She learned something that night, something that made her want to laugh and cry at once. She had gone with Bill to get away from the town, to escape her problems and start in fresh. And a very strange thing had happened.

She had fallen in love with him.

This was love, she knew. This was love, and it made the cardboard infatuation with Craig fall away and disappear as if it had never existed in the first place. This was love, and she had been miraculously lucky, managing to get away from Antrim and at the same time finding love as an added dividend.

Because that night someone opened the gates to Heaven and the world went away in a shining pink cloud. That night it was not sex but love, not flesh but a pair of spirits meeting. Everything Bill did to her made her realize how lucky she was, how happy she was going to be.

“Your name is Mrs. Piersall now,” he had said, his mouth close to her ears. “How does it sound?”

It sounded wonderful.

The lovemaking was gentle and fiery at once, a mutual meeting that words would only injure. It was fire and ice, softness and hardness, everything good and nothing bad. Bill was her husband, he had given her a ring, and now she was giving him a ring in return. It was perfection, utter perfection, and it washed away all the ugliness of her past.

The bad parts simply dissolved and disappeared. Danny Duncan was gone now. So was Craig Jeffers. And the night with Margo Long, the lesbian interlude conducted in horrid drunkenness on the chaise in Craig’s garden, simply ceased to exist. It was as though it had never happened at all. There was only Bill, Bill her lover, Bill her husband, Bill her man.

Nothing else.

They would have a good life now. They were in a town that accepted them as a decent pair of newlyweds starting life together. Bill had a good job and she was working part-time in a restaurant. They were saving money, money for a home and children.

Sometimes she lay awake at night after Bill had dropped off to sleep and her mind wandered back to Antrim. She had almost lost Bill. She had come close to running to New York, had come even closer to ruining and wasting her life with Craig.

She had been very lucky.

And she lay in bed snug at Bill’s side, listening to his measured breathing, and she thought about her luck. She had everything she had ever wanted now. She was going to hang onto it. She was going to stay happy forever.

She thought about the happiness that waited for them. The happiness of a house of their own, for example. The happiness of being parents, of having children. The happiness of growing old, not as Craig Jeffers would grow old, alone and bitter, but as two people aging together, side by side, always close, always in love.

She liked Birch Creek and she was incredibly happy there. But the town was immaterial. It might as well have been Cedar Hills or Brackle or Lipton’s Landing. Any town would do.

The background didn’t matter. She mattered, and Bill mattered, and that was all.