“He’ll be angry with both of us. Angry with you for giving, angrier at me for taking.”
“Crap!” Eddie yelled. “What gave you that idea?”
“I know,” she said, and her voice was impervious.
“Well, suppose that’s true. Just suppose. I’ll be angry with you if you don’t take it.”
“Put it back. I don’t like guns. I don’t know how to use them. If something came at me in the dark the first thing I’d do is wet my pants. The second thing I’d do is point it the wrong way and shoot myself.” She paused, looking at Eddie solemnly. “There’s something else, and you might as well know it. I don’t want to touch anything that belongs to him. Not anything. For me, I think his things might have what my Ma used to call a hoodoo. I like to think of myself as a modern woman . . . but I don’t want any hoodoo on me when you’re gone and the dark lands on top of me.”
He looked from the gun to Odetta, and his eyes still questioned.
“Put it back,” she said, stern as a schoolteacher. Eddie burst out laughing and obeyed.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Because when you said that you sounded like Miss Hathaway. She was my third-grade teacher.”
She smiled a little, her luminous eyes never leaving his. She sang softly, sweetly: “Heavenly shades of night are falling . . . it’s twilight time . . .” She trailed off and they both looked west, but the star they had wished on the previous evening had not yet appeared, although their shadows had drawn long.
“Is there anything else, Odetta?” He felt an urge to delay and delay. He thought it would pass once he was actually headed back, but now the urge to seize any excuse to remain, seemed very strong.
“A kiss. I could do with that, if you don’t mind.”
He kissed her long and when their lips no longer touched, she caught his wrist and stared at him intently. “I never made love with a white man before last night,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s important to you or not. I don’t even know if it’s important to me. But I thought you should know.”
He considered.
“Not to me,” he said. “In the dark, I think we were both gray. I love you, Odetta.”
She put a hand over his.
“You’re a sweet young man and perhaps I love you, too, although it’s too early for either of us—”
At that moment, as if given a cue, a wildcat growled in what the gunslinger had called the brakes. It still sounded four or five miles away, but that was still four or five miles closer than the last time they heard it, and it sounded big.
They turned their heads toward the sound. Eddie felt hackles trying to stand up on his neck. They couldn’t quite make it. Sorry, hackles, he thought stupidly. I guess my hair’s just a little too long now.
The growl rose to a tortured scream that sounded like a cry of some being suffering a horrid death （it might actually have signalled no more than a successful mating）。 It held for a moment, almost unbearable, and then it wound down, sliding through lower and lower registers until it was gone or buried beneath the ceaseless cry of the wind. They waited for it to come again, but the cry was not repeated. As far as Eddie was concerned, that didn’t matter. He pulled the revolver out of his waistband again and held it out to her.
“Take it and don’t argue. If you should need to use it, it won’t do shit—that’s how stuff like this always works—but take it anyway.”
“Do you want an argument?”
“Oh, you can argue. You can argue all you want.”
After a considering look into Eddie’s almost-hazel eyes, she smiled a little wearily. “I won’t argue, I guess.” She took the gun. “Please be as quick as you can.”