All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [173]
She turned her face toward me, not lifting her head from the back of the seat, just rolling it on the leather cushion. She lifted a finger to her lip, and said, “Sh, sh!” Then she took the finger away, and smiled directly and simply across the thousand miles of leather cushion between us.
I sank back. We lay there for quite a time, with that space between us, looking up at the moon-drenched sky and hearing the faintest whisper as the water lipped the shingle along the point. The longer we lay there, the bigger the sky seemed. After a long while I stole another sidewise look at Anne. Her eyes were closed, and when I thought that she wasn’t looking up into that expanding sky, too, I suddenly felt alone and abandoned. But she opened her eyes–I was spying and saw that happen–and again was looking up into the sky. I lay there and looked up and didn’t think of anything in the world.
Back then there was a train that passed the crossing just out of Burden’s landing at eleven-forty-five at night. The train always blew for the crossing. It blew that night, and I knew it was eleven-forty-five. And time to go. So I sat up, touched the starter, turned the car around, and headed home. We hadn’t said a word and we didn’t say a word, until we pulled up in front of the Stanton house. Then Anne slipped out of the car, quick as a wink, poised there a moment on the shell drive, said, “Good night, Jack,” in a low voice and with a last flicker of the smile she had smiled at me across the thousand miles of leather cushion two hours back, and ran up the steps of her house, light as a bird. All of this before I had a chance to begin to collect myself.
I gaped at the blackness of the doorway back in the shadow of the gallery–she hadn’t turned on a light when she entered–and listen hard as though I were waiting for a signal. But there wasn’t a sound except that nameless stir of the night which comes even when there isn’t a breath of wind and you are too far from the beach to get the whisper and riffle that is always there, even when the sea is quietest.
Then, after a few minutes, I switched on the motor again, and exploded off the Stanton property with a grind of tires that must have scattered the shells of the drive like spray. On the road down the Row I just pushed the accelerator to the floor board and let all those drowsy bastards up in those white houses have the works. I was letting that cutout snatch them bolt upright in bed like a cannon. I roared on out about ten miles till I hit the pine woods where there wasn’t anybody to snatch up except hoot owls and some stray malarial squatter who would be lying off yonder as God’s gift to the anopheles in his shack on the edge of the tidelands. So I turned the roadster around and eased on back with the throttle cut down to nothing, just drifting along in the roadster, lying back on the leather, like a boat drifting on a slow current.
At home, as soon as I lay back on my bed, I suddenly remembered–I didn’t remember, I saw–Anne’s face lying back, with the eyes closed and the moonlight pouring over it, and I remembered that day of the picnic long back–the day when we had swum out in the bay, under the storm clouds, when she had floated on the water, her face turned up to the purple-green darkening sky, her eyes closed, and the white gull passing over, very high. I hadn’t thought of that since it happened, I guess, or if had thought of it, it hadn’t meant a thing, but all at once, lying there, I had the feeling