The Wicked Redhead. Beatriz Williams
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we had rested enough. Go where? I whispered, because I had plumb forgotten where we were supposed to be headed, and he said, Florida, and I guess I might could then have asked him what waited for us in Florida, what lay at the end of our road, what was the nature of this life to which we were fleeing together.
But I did not. Maybe I was scared to ask, maybe I was too numb to care. I helped him clumsily with his coat and shoes, and he helped me clumsily with mine. We woke Patsy and carried her out through the drizzle to the waiting automobile, and I settled us both inside while Anson returned the key to the motor inn’s office. Started the engine and the automatic wipers and rolled back onto the black highway, and we never did stop for the night again. Just drove on, by sun and by moon, catching food and sleep by the side of the road, until the clouds parted and the air commenced to dry out and warm, and sometime in the middle of the third night we came to rest on a stretch of beach they call Cocoa, for no reason that I can properly tell.
And I don’t recount all this history to you now in order to illuminate some measure of what we endured together, Anson and I, before arriving at this earthly paradise. I don’t hold with wallowing in past afflictions; I like to walk into my future looking square ahead. Just to point out, so delicately as I can, that we have yet no actual future to speak of. No covenants between us, no vows of any kind, no physical sacrament to reunite us in the wake of that horrifying rupture at my step-daddy’s hands. Only a blind trust in that thing—that smoke and incense, that benediction, whatever you care to call it—that has taken form in the darkness around us.
Such that whatever lies upon this road along which we presently hurtle, it is surely made from this unknown substance. We ourselves are built of it. For better or worse.
NOW, I have taken to the seas but one other time in my life—if you don’t count the Hudson River ferries, which I don’t—and in that instance, as in this one, Oliver Anson Marshall himself was my pilot.
Then, we traveled in a racing motorboat, and the speed of that craft near enough flattened my chest forever into the fashionable silhouette. And if that boat was your naughty little sister, sleek and fast and amoral, why, this one’s your mama’s lazy uncle. Old and slow and overfed, kind of prone to fits and starts of his engine, if you know what I mean. Still, we’re free, aren’t we, the two of us. Making a white trail toward the ocean, while the sun heats our skin and the draft cools it right back down, and the other craft go about their business, large and small, without paying us any mind. We might be waterbugs on a pond so great as the universe. Free.
As you might expect, Anson’s not best pleased with me for my overturning of his usual neat plans. Gives me a dose of what they call the silent treatment as we head off down the Indian River, disturbing the peaceable green water with all the noise and energy of our sturdy motor. The draft rattles the brim of my hat until at last I remove the damned thing and toss it on a bench, and the sudden freeing of hair is like plunging from a cliff. Exhilarating and messy. “I remember the last time the two of us went on a boat ride together,” I call out, over the noise of the engine. “Was it only last week?”
“Didn’t end so well, as I recall.”
“Oh? I thought it ended pretty well, indeed. Best ride I ever took.”
A slow blush climbs over the top of Anson’s collar and up his neck.
“Now I guess you might have been referring to the fact that somebody shot you,” I continue. “But if that bullet hadn’t grazed you, and the good doctor hadn’t prescribed you a brandy cure for the pain, why, the whole evening might have been ruined.”
He says something I can’t quite make out over the wind and the engine. But he isn’t smiling, so I don’t press him. Maybe he wasn’t talking about getting shot at all; maybe he was thinking about what came after, caught in Duke’s trap, and that none of that horror might have come about if we hadn’t ventured out on the waters of New York Harbor in a high-powered speedboat that evening, hadn’t passed through the Narrows and into the wide ocean, hadn’t afterward spent the night in pleasure as we did.
“I guess we paid for it, all right,” I say, mostly to myself, but Anson has got the ears of a cat, I guess, because he replies, Paid for what? and I say boldly, Joy.
He doesn’t say anything to that. Maybe I was expecting the sound of this word—joy—might cause him to shut off the engine and seize me in his arms and deliver some kind of physical comfort to daub the wounds inside us both, but all I detect is a fresh whiteness at the joints of his fingers that hold the wheel and adjust the throttle. The boat pursues its long, clean course down the Indian River, mangrove passing to the left and the buildings and wharves of Cocoa slipping away to the right. Then the buildings thin out and disappear altogether, and Anson speaks up over the deep, angry throat of the engine.
“I telephoned my parents from Fitzwilliam’s office. Asked how Billy was doing.”
“And? Have they put his poor jaw back together again?”
“Yes.” He pauses. “Seems he hasn’t yet woken up. May be some injury to the brain itself, because of the force of the blow.”
I grip the edge of the seat with my good hand. Feel a little sick. “Poor Billy.”
“Yes.”
“Can’t they do anything? Some kind of operation?”
“I don’t know. It was a bad connection; I couldn’t hear half of what she was saying.”
“You mother, you mean?”
“Yes.”
I stare down at the ugly blue serge covering my knees, against which an image of Mrs. Marshall takes shape, as I last saw her. She stands in the moonlight beside a Southampton swimming pool, consuming a cigarette in swift, fierce drags, and she tells me about her sons. She wears a long, shimmering dressing gown, trimmed in down, and an aspect of fascinating beauty, made of delicate, high-pitched bones and preserved skin. In the tension of her face, I perceive a universe of keen emotion, which might be love but also fear. I swallow back a cup of misery and ask, “How’s she taking it?”
Anson lifts his hand from the throttle and works the brim of the flat newsboy’s cap atop his head. His profile is terribly grim. “How’s she taking it? Her son’s lying in a hospital bed with a broken head. I guess she’s taking it as well as the next woman. Considering she’s already lost another son to the war.”
“I hope you’re not blaming yourself. It’s my fault, if anything.”
“It’s Kelly’s fault, Ginger. And mine, for bringing you into this, first, and then dragging my brother into it because of you.”
I rise from the seat and grasp his elbow. “Don’t you say that. Don’t you even think it. You didn’t mean for that to happen. You were doing your job, that’s all.”
“But Billy wasn’t. Billy had nothing to do with this.”
“No, he got into this mess because of me, and I’ll never forgive myself for that. I should never have taken up with him. A sweet wee cub like that.”
“He wasn’t so naïve as that.”
“No, but he was fallen in love with me, and I let him fall, because I was vain and shallow and flattered by him. Because I needed a little solace. Because I hadn’t met you yet.”
Anson makes a noise in his throat, but nothing else.
“Anyway,” I say, “how was I supposed to know poor Billy was serious about me? Men make all kinds of promises. They’ll say anything. Maybe they even mean it at the time; I don’t know. Every man wants to run away with you, until suddenly he doesn’t.”
“Well, I knew,” he says. “I knew he was serious about you.”
“See here. You have nothing to be guilty for, do