“Sometimes too much discretion becomes a hindrance.” When she didn’t reply, he said, “If you won’t tell me what you want, then I can’t help you get it. And I do want to help you.”
“Why?”
“I like your face.” He tossed his cigarette to the ground and pressed it out under a polished black shoe. “Would you like to know what I know about you?”
Almost in a whisper: “Yes.”
“Your father was the captain of the Josephina Eterna and was sent to prison. Your mother was lost. You and your brother were sent here to live with your uncle, Wallace Graves, who is an excellent painter, in my opinion, but a drunk and a very bad gambler. Are you impressed? I know you aren’t yet fifteen. I know you’re a good driver and mechanic and that you’re Stanley’s bottle man. Bottle girl. Stanley seems to enjoy the novelty—you’re a sort of flourish for him. He has style, for a small-timer. And you don’t steal, and you don’t talk. As to why you haven’t run into more trouble with feds or the like, that’s partly down to luck and partly down to lawmen being lazy and corrupt. And, for the last few months, it’s been partly down to me.”
She tried not to show how startled she was.
“All because I like your face,” he said. “Even now, when you’re disguised as a boy, however unconvincingly, I like it very much. There’s something Shakespearean about your appeal. You won’t know what I mean.”
“You mean Twelfth Night.”
“And As You Like It. And The Merchant of Venice. I thought you didn’t go to school.”
“There are other ways to learn things.”
“That’s true.”
She stubbed out her cigarette on the sole of her boot, tossed the butt away. Her nervousness had given way to a gathered, deliberate feeling. She knew, without knowing how she knew, how he wanted her to be. Amused, aloof, a little tough. She was aware of the sharp edge of the porch against her fingers, the way he watched when she stretched out her legs.
He went on. “What I couldn’t entirely understand at first was why you would drive for Stanley. For money, yes, but most girls your age aren’t so compelled by money that they leave school and indenture themselves to moonshiners. And since your brother is still in school, the impetus can’t have come from your uncle, or else he would have made your brother leave, too, and go to work. How am I doing?”
“All right.”
“All right. Good enough. So I’ll give you some of my hypotheses and tell you my conclusion, and you can correct me if I’m wrong.” Watching her, he said, “I thought maybe you’d taken it upon yourself to help your uncle with his debts, of which he has many, and more all the time. But I never heard about you trying to pay anyone. So then I thought maybe you’re after thrills. Otherwise, why would you have let Dolly’s girls dress you up like that? You like being disguised. As a whore, as a boy.”
“This isn’t a disguise. It’s practical.”
He smiled briefly, indulgently. “Or I thought you might be saving up to run away. But then you bought a car and didn’t go anywhere. So I concluded the car wasn’t it. There was something else you wanted to buy. And then it came to my attention that you’d been haunting the airfield. I made a few discreet inquiries and discovered that, yes, you’d been hanging around and pestering the pilots for lessons ever since Lindbergh’s flight, which makes it two years. But no one will teach you.”
She hadn’t expected him to be so methodical in uncovering her deepest wish. She hadn’t known it was something that could, with enough patience and persistence, be excavated.
“That must be frustrating,” he said, so gently, “for someone who wants more than anything to be a pilot.”
She was afraid. This fear wasn’t her earlier keyed-up nervousness or the jitters she’d felt in the river with Caleb, not ordinary anxiety but an inarticulate dread, some primal resistance to the thing that roiled between them. “I don’t want to be a pilot,” she said. “It was only something that got into my head for a while. I thought it would be a lark to learn to fly.”
“I wish you would trust me, Marian.”
“A bootlegger I met in a brothel?”
She meant it as a joke, a leavening, but she had misjudged. His face closed. “I’m a rancher,” he said quietly. “That’s important to remember.”
An owl glided overhead. It flapped in among the trees and disappeared. Barclay watched it, scowling.