Beebo hesitated a moment, then held out her hand and shook his. “Thanks anyway, Jack. I’ll find you some day and pay you back,” she said. She looked as much afraid to leave him as to stay with him.
“So long, Beebo,” he said, dropping her hand. She walked away from him backwards a few steps so she could keep an eye on him, turned around and then turned back.
Jack smiled at her. “I’m afraid I’m just about your safest bet,” he said kindly. “If you knew how safe, you’d come along without a qualm.”
And when he smiled she had to answer him. “All right,” she said, still clutching her wicker bag in both hands. “But just so you’ll know: my father taught me how to fight.”
“Beebo, my dear,” he said as they began to walk toward his apartment, “you could probably throw me twenty feet through the air if you had to, but you won’t have to. I have no designs on you. Honest to God. I don’t even have a bunch of etchings to show you in my pad. Nothing but good talk and cold beer. And a bed.”
Beebo stopped in her tracks.
“Well, the bed is good and cold too,” he said. “God, you’re a scary one.”
“Did you go home to bed with the first stranger you met in New York?” she demanded.
“Sure,” he said. “Doesn’t everybody?”
She laughed at last, a full country sound that must have carried across the hay fields, and followed him again. He walked, hands in pockets, letting her curb her long stride to keep from getting ahead of him. But when he tried to take her arm at a corner, she shied away, determined to rely only on herself.
Jack unlocked the door of his small apartment, holding it with his foot while Beebo went in. The corridor outside was littered with buckets, planks, and ladders. “They’re redecorating the hall,” he explained. “We like to put on a good front in this rattrap.”
He headed for the kitchen with the bag of sausage and the beer, set them on the counter, and sprang himself a can of cold brew. “What do you want, Beebo? One of these?” He lifted the can. When she hesitated, he said, “You don’t really want that milk, do you?”
“Have you got something—weak?”
“Well, I’ve got something colorful,” he said. “I don’t know how weak it is.” He went down on his haunches in front of a small liquor chest and foraged in it for a minute. “Somebody gave me this stuff for Christmas and I’ve been trying to give it away ever since. Here we are.”
He took out an ornate bottle, broke the seal and pulled the cork, and got down a liqueur glass. When he up-ended the bottle, a rich green liquid came out, moving at about the speed of cod-liver oil and looking like some dollar-an-ounce shampoo for Park Avenue lovelies. The pungent fumes of peppermint penetrated every crack in the wall.
“What is it?” Beebo said, intimidated by the looks of it.
“Peppermint schnapps,” Jack said. “God. It’s even worse than I thought. Want to chicken out?”
“I grew up in a town full of German farmers,” she said. “I should take to schnapps like a kid to candy.”
Jack handed over the glass. “Okay, it’s your stomach. Just don’t get tanked on the stuff.”
“I just want a taste. You make me feel babyish about the milk.”
He picked up his beer and the schnapps bottle, and she followed him into the living room. “You can drink all the milk you want, honey,” he said, settling into a leather arm chair, “before the sun goes over the yardarm. After that, we switch to spirits.”
He turned on a phonograph nearby and turned the sound low. Beebo sat down a few feet from him on the floor, pulling her skirt primly over her knees. She seemed awkward in it, like a girl reared in jeans or jodhpurs. Jack studied her while she took a sip of the schnapps, and returned her smile when she looked up at him. “Good,” she said. “Like the sundaes we used to get after the Saturday afternoon movie.”
She was a strangely winning girl. Despite her size, her pink cheeks and firm-muscled limbs, she seemed to need caring for. At one moment she seemed wise and sad beyond her years, like a girl who has been forced to grow up in a hothouse hurry. At the next, she was a picture of rural naïveté that moved Jack; made him like her and want to help her.
She wore a sporty jacket, the kind with a gold thread emblem on the breast pocket; a man’s white shirt, open at the throat, tie-less and gray with travel dust; a straight tan cotton skirt that hugged her small hips; white socks and tennis shoes. Her short hair had been combed without the manufactured curls and varnished waves that marked so many teenagers. It was neat, but the natural curl was slowly fighting free of the imposed order.
Her eyes were an off-blue, and that was where the sadness showed. They darted around the room, moving constantly, searching the shadows, trying to assure her, visually at least, that there was nothing to fear.
“What are you doing here in New York, Beebo?” Jack asked her.
She looked into her glass and emptied it before she answered him. “Looking for a job,” she said. “Me and everybody else, I guess.”
“What kind of job?”
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “Could I have a little more of that stuff?” He handed the bottle down to her. “It’s not half as bad as it looks.”
“Did you have a job back home?” he asked.
“No. I—I just finished high school.”
“In the middle of May?” His brow puckered. “When I was in school they used to keep us there till June, at least.”
“Well, I—you see—it’s farm country,” she stammered. “They let kids out early for spring planting.”
“Jesus, honey, they gave that up in the last century.”
“Not the little towns,” she said, suddenly on guard.
Jack looked at his shoes, unwilling to distress her. “Your dad’s a farmer, then?” he said.
“No, a vet.” She was proud of it. “An animal doctor.”
“Oh. What was he planting in the middle of May—chickens?”
Beebo clamped her jaws together. He could see the muscles knot under her skin. “If they let the farmer’s kids out early, they have to let the vet’s kids out, too,” she said, trying to be calm. “Everyone at the same time.”
“Okay, don’t get mad,” he said and offered her a cigarette. She took it after a pause that verged on a sulk, but insisted on lighting it for herself. It evidently bothered her to let him perform the small masculine courtesies for her, as if they were an encroachment on her independence.
“So what did they teach you in high school? Typing? Shorthand?” Jack said. “What can you do?”
Beebo blew smoke through her nose and finally gave him a woeful smile. “I can castrate a hog,” she said. “I can deliver a calf. I can jump a horse and I can run like hell.” She made a small sardonic laugh deep in her throat. “God knows they need me in New York City.”
Jack patted her shoulder. “You’ll go straight to the top, honey,” he said. “But not here. Out west somewhere.”
“It has to be here, even if I have to dig ditches,” she said, and the wry amusement had left her. “I’m not going home.”
“Where’s home?”
“Wisconsin. A little farming town west of Milwaukee. Juniper Hill.”
“Lots of cheese, beer, and German burghers?” he said.