THEIR FEET RESTING ON THE GRASS BEYOND THE EDGE OF their towel, Stella and Darl sat close together, kissing each other on the cheek, the neck, the lips, turning their bodies more and more inward with each address. She had forgotten the discomfort of sitting on sticks in the grass.
“Let’s get up a minute,” Darl said and started to stand. Stella got up but she was sorry that he had disrupted what she was enjoying so much. His voice was tight.
They stood, and he shook out the towel, repositioned it so that it lay lengthwise with the slope of the hill. “Now,” he said, “let’s lie down.” When they were lying on their sides, their faces ten inches apart, he asked, “Do you like it here?”
“It’s wonderful,” she said and felt shaky, like froth, like a pink soda was inside her.
She reached out her hand toward his shoulder, and instantly their bodies clamped together. His hands were all over her back, holding her close, but he only kissed her, over and over, his clothed body straining against hers till they were panting as they kissed.
Suddenly he rolled away from her, onto his back, gazed up at the moon.
“Why is this kind of moon called gibbous,” he asked in a low, intimate voice almost a whisper. Such intense trust in his voice, asking something he actually wanted to know, trusting her to be able to tell him. But who was he, and what did she know about him? How different were people who grew up in Norwood from those in the West End?
She replied softly, “Because its back is hunched, curved like a gibbon, an ape.” She listened to her lips come together and part as she spoke. Sweet little sounds in the still, magnolia air. Like the extra sounds her fingers made on the fingerboard when she played the cello. She had ridden the cello through high school. In college, she’d wanted a new adventure.
She propped up on one elbow, looked down at Darl’s beautiful moonlit face. His freckles were so close together, just a freckle-breadth of white skin between each dot. Then she saw a movement beyond him, on the other side of the dark magnolia. The sound of moving feet was so slight that she wouldn’t have noticed had she not seen the movement.
Feet as quiet as fingers scurrying up the fingerboard, but human feet had moved. The sound of a slight scuffling. Someone crouched now under the skirt of dropping magnolia branches.
She reconstructed the sounds, retrospectively. Feet had brushed quickly over the tops of grass blades. A man had ducked under the skirt of the magnolia, had stopped still upon seeing them, was squatting there now. Waiting. Yes, that was what she must have seen—all of it so quick and quiet, barely lit by the moon, it seemed almost not to have happened. Now the dark man must be quieting his breathing, after running.
Stella leaned over Darl’s face, as though to kiss him, but her lips went to his ear.
“There’s somebody hiding under the magnolia tree behind you.”
“What?” Darl said, quietly, and began to raise himself on his elbow. How she admired his poise, the forced languor of his movements.
Then she saw a group of colored men coming up the slope. “Yes,” she said, and stood up. She spoke in a normal voice, “There they are.” And Darl quickly stood up.
The group of four stopped still, surprised to see them.
“Good evening,” Darl said formally, a formal dignity, neutrality, in his voice.
“Y’all taking a walk out here?” one of them asked, just an edge of assertiveness in his voice.
“Yes,” Darl said. “We like to come here sometime.” His voice was without emotion, flat, conveying information without affect or clue as to who they were. They might have been monuments, shrubs. Something just there. Like the blank towel, abandoned and silly on the grass.
“That your scooter parked out by the gate?” another asked.
They were big; young men really, not boys. Though she was fleet, if she ran they could probably catch her. She said nothing. Stood ready to try to outrun them.
“Did the cops get the bike?” Darl answered, and she knew he was trying to create a mutual enemy.
“Naw, it still there,” one said.
The young men were constantly moving, restless. She and Darl stood very still. One of them nervously took a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket.
Another said, “Hey, you got a quarter or something?”
Without speaking, Darl slowly reached in his trousers and then held out a coin at arm’s length. He made no comment.
Better not to comment, Stella thought.
Then Darl took a pack of Camels from his pocket. Slowly he withdrew a cigarette for himself. “Got a light?” he asked evenly, his eyes fixed on the man who took the coin.
One of them, not that one, tossed him a lighter, which Darl snapped from the air with a quick downward pounce. He thumbed the wheel, looked down, and slowly leaned into the light. The little flame showed his brow pulled together, concentrating, dragging on the cigarette.
“Mind we have a smoke?” one asked.
He held out the lighter and his pack to them.
When they were all smoking, all but Stella, one of them asked, “Y’all see anybody come through here?”
Stella could still see the lone man crouching within the darkness of the tree.
“No,” Darl answered.
“You ain’t seen nobody run by?”
Darl just shook his head. He was handling everything just right. Calm, dignified. No bluster.
“We looking for somebody. Somebody who don’t know how to share.”
Darl said nothing for a moment. He drew on the cigarette again, kept it in his lips. Then he said, “I think we’ll go on now,” the cigarette tip wagging while he spoke. He reached down to pick up the towel. As he bent, his eyes no longer held theirs.
He was saving them. He was managing it. For the rest of her life, Stella knew she would be grateful to him. Would remember and respect his savvy, his courage.
“She your fiancée?”
Stella was surprised to hear the black man use the French word so effortlessly.
“Yes,” Darl said. Now his gaze into the other man’s eyes was unflinching.
Stella knew he meant “I’ll fight.”
Darl reached out his hand for her, touched her bare arm. “Let’s go on,” he said quietly and initiated their steps away from the group.
It was hard for Stella to make her foot reach out the first time. She had tried to become a tree. It was as though she were stuck in the moment, and it was hard to step out of the definition of danger.
Her foot and leg must step forward, this second.
That was her part.
She had to move.
And the second step was easier. Then another, and she’d learned to walk again.
Darl steered them down the hill, toward the perimeter. He didn’t look back, but they walked quickly.
After a distance, Stella’s throat opened and she said, “I did see a man go up under the tree.”
“That’s who they wanted,” he said. “Some sort of vendetta.”
“Why didn’t you tell?”
“It wouldn’t be lucky,” he said. “You don’t betray somebody else in trouble to try to save yourself.”
Now she knew she did love him. Admiration and gratitude collided in her heart and scattered throughout her body. From the soles of her feet to the crown of her hair, her nerves tingled with the fallout. But what was luck? And how had it played in her life? She’d never believed in luck of any sort.
They moved through the cemetery, past the plentitude of oaks—the cedars, the holly trees—every tree and monument seemed outlined with a special vividness. Stella’s heartbeat echoed through the canals of her ears; all other sounds were faint and distant. “Everything looks so distinct,” she said, but she couldn’t hear herself well.
Her heart beat hard against all the edges she was seeing and made them pulse.
Darl said nothing, or was his voice muted by her heartbeats? Time between utterances was stretching. Finally she heard him say, as though his voice came through space from a great distance, “There’s the wall up ahead. Then we’ll be safe, when we reach the wall.”
Then it was, Stella knew their lives could have ended. Yet the gang—they weren’t fully men—hadn’t been hunting for them. They had been startled to find them on the grass, lying on the towel, beside the specimen magnolia. Vulnerable. And suppose they had decided to rape her?
Darl would have fought.
We’ll be safe, he’d said, but now she imagined the violence that hadn’t occurred: fighting—her running away, someone catching up, right behind her, reaching out for her arm, her own screams. Kicking. Forced down. Sobbing. Darl might have been killed. First. It hadn’t happened. Then her. Afterward. Events that disappeared into a slit of potential time. Disappeared forever.
Maybe she had manufactured the threat. Got a quarter?
Not the same as rape.
She your fiancée?
Again, she pictured the group of four staring at her. Wondering about her. She wanted to run—now!—past the ghostly white monuments, past the dogwood trees, the monuments like obelisks; instead, she made herself listen for delayed pursuit as hard as she could. She tried to hear if there was pursuit, if the men were coming after her.
“Don’t run,” Darl instructed.
She heard herself gasp, no words. Now that she had imagined it, every instinct was to run. No, the bush ahead was a crape myrtle, not a man.
“There’s the wall,” he said. “See, just ahead. Beyond the holly trees.”
Safety, safety. They closed the distance between themselves and the dark stone wall stretching far out on both sides, demarcating what was the forbidden world of the dead from the normality of living. Home free!
They pushed through the sharp leaves, sat on the wall, dank with humidity, and swung their legs over. Like that, they were outside, safe on the sidewalk. There was the Vespa. With a deft movement, Darl wadded up the towel and stuffed it into the metal side compartment. She mounted her place on the passenger cushion. The key was turning, the motor was beginning to respond with its soft series of putts. He switched on the headlight, lifted his feet, released the clutch, and they began to glide away. She clamped her hands against his sides, could feel the precious warmth of his body coming through his shirt.
Darl turned his face to speak to her. “So we’re engaged,” he said cheerfully.
She leaned an inch forward and kissed the back of his neck. Very chastely. Maybe he was joking. Maybe he meant it.