“Good morning.” She stopped, with water still dripping from the suit into the powdery dust at the edge of the trail. She was a little over average height, with square shoulders, and quite slender, with long, smooth legs, not deeply tanned, and the suit pulled tightly across her breasts. Her eyes were deep blue and faintly questioning, and there was something incredibly quiet and still about the face. There was no way of knowing what color her hair was under the bathing cap. She might be any age, I thought, from twenty to twenty-eight.
I knew I had been staring and tried to smile to cover it up. It was awkward, because she somehow gave the impression she didn’t care whether I stared or not, and didn’t care a great deal, as a matter of fact, whether I was even there.
“I was just looking for a little help,” I said.
“Yes? If there’s anything I can do ...” She let it trail off, still looking at me quietly, and I was conscious of that same puzzling impression I had had about the man. The speech didn’t fit, somehow. It wasn’t what you would expect to hear up here in the swamps.
I turned around so she could see the fly sticking in my back, feeling like a fool because it was such a stupid thing to have happen. “I can’t quite reach it,” I said.
She stepped closer and examined it, touching the shank of the fly gently with her fingers. “I can’t tell because of the shirt,” she said, “but I think the barb is caught.”
“I think so,” I said. “It’s not hard to do, though. The thing to do is push it on through, cut off the barb, and then back it out. I brought some pliers.”
I think I can do it,” she answered. “Will you wait a minute until I change clothes?”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “Go ahead. I’ll wait out here.”
I turned back around and she unfastened the chin strap of the cap and peeled it off, running her fingers through her hair and shaking it out. It was straight and dark brown, almost black, falling in beautiful disarray across the side of her face, and I stared at it with almost the same sense of shock or outrage you might have at seeing a beautiful painting defaced, for it had been badly mangled by some clumsy attempt at cutting it. Whoever had cut it must have used a lawn mower, I thought. She shook the cap to get the water off it and went in the kitchen door, straight-backed and unhurried. The door swung shut and then I heard the front one close.
I lit a cigarette and squatted on my heels in the shade of the walnut tree, listening to the ratcheting buzz of the grasshoppers and thinking of the way she had looked and of that strange stillness about her face. It wasn’t the blank emptiness of stupidity or the quietness of inner serenity—there was something about it that made you think of the dangerous and unnatural surface calm of a city under martial law.
In a few minutes the door opened and she came out with the wet suit, which she threw across a clothesline. She had on a shapeless old cotton dress too big for her and hadn’t bothered to put on any make-up or comb her hair, and she was barefoot like any backwoods slattern. She couldn’t have made herself look any worse if she’d tried, I thought, and got the impression somehow that she had tried.
“You can come in now,” she said.
I followed her through the small kitchen into the front room. The floor was bare except for a small rag rug, rough pine planks worn white with scrubbing, and there was a small mud fireplace neatly swept. There were a couple of rawhide-bottomed chairs, and an old iron bedstead standing in the corner by the fireplace, and across on the right between the window and the front door there was a dresser with a milky and discolored mirror. The air was hot and still inside the room, and I could hear the ticking of the tin alarm clock on the mantel above the fireplace. There was a photograph of her next to the clock, apparently taken not too long ago, but at least it was before her hair had been butchered up like that.
“Do you have a razor blade or a pair of scissors?” I asked.