I wish he would follow me and see me get into the car.
I wish he would try to follow us.
I wish he would try to stop me.’
But he could see nothing in the lane.
It was empty, intermittent with treacherous shadows.
Then he heard, from far down the road toward town, the sound of the car.
Looking, he saw presently the glare of the lights.
She was a waitress in a small, dingy, back street restaurant in town.
Even a casual adult glance could tell that she would never see thirty again.
But to Joe she probably did not look more than seventeen too, because of her smallness.
She was not only not tall, she was slight, almost childlike.
But the adult look saw that the smallness was not due to any natural slenderness but to some inner corruption of the spirit itself: a slenderness which had never been young, in not one of whose curves anything youthful had ever lived or lingered.
Her hair was dark.
Her face was prominently boned, always downlooking, as if her head were set so on her neck, a little out of line.
Her eyes were like the button eyes of a toy animal: a quality beyond even hardness, without being hard.
It was because of her smallness that he ever attempted her, as if her smallness should have or might have protected her from the roving and predatory eyes of most men, leaving his chances better.
If she had been a big woman he would not have dared.
He would have thought,
‘It won’t be any use.
She will already have a fellow, a man.’
It began in the fall when he was seventeen.
It was a day in the middle of the week.
Usually when they came to town it would be Saturday and they would bring food with them—cold dinner in a basket purchased and kept for that purpose—with the intention of spending the day.
This time McEachern came to see a lawyer, with the intention of finishing his business and being home again by dinnertime.
But it was almost twelve o’clock when he emerged onto the street where Joe waited for him.
He came into sight looking at his watch.
Then he looked at a municipal clock in the courthouse tower and then at the sun, with an expression of exasperation and outrage.
He looked at Joe also with that expression, the open watch in his hand, his eyes cold, fretted.
He seemed to be examining and weighing for the first time the boy whom he had raised from childhood.
Then he turned.
“Come,” he said. “It can’t be helped now.”
The town was a railroad division point.
Even in midweek there were many men about the streets.
The whole air of the place was masculine, transient: a population even whose husbands were at home only at intervals and on holiday—a population of men who led esoteric lives whose actual scenes were removed and whose intermittent presence was pandered to like that of patrons in a theatre.
Joe had never before seen the place to which McEachern took him.
It was a restaurant on a back street—a narrow dingy doorway between two dingy windows.
He did not know that it was a restaurant at first.
There was no sign outside and he could neither smell nor hear food cooking.
What he saw was a long wooden counter lined with backless stools, and a big, blonde woman behind a cigar case near the front and a clump of men at the far end of the counter, not eating, who all turned as one and looked at him and McEachern when they entered, through the smoke of cigarettes.
Nobody said anything at all.
They just looked at McEachern and Joe as if breathing had stopped with talking, as if even the cigarette smoke had stopped and now drifted aimlessly of its own weight.
The men were not in overalls and they all wore hats, and their faces were all alike: not young and not old; not farmers and not townsmen either. They looked like people who had just got off a train and who would be gone tomorrow and who did not have any address.
Sitting on two of the backless stools at the, counter, McEachern and Joe ate.
Joe ate fast because McEachern was eating fast.
Beside him the man, even in the act of eating, seemed to sit in a kind of stiffbacked outrage.
The food which McEachern ordered was simple: quickly prepared and quickly eaten.
But Joe knew that parsimony had no part in this.
Parsimony might have brought them here in preference to another place, but he knew that it was a desire to depart quickly that had chosen the food.
As soon as he laid down his knife and fork, McEachern said, “Come,” already getting down from his stool.
At the cigar counter McEachern paid the brasshaired woman.