Joe Hill by Wallace Stegner Page A

her skin down, but he was troubled by her now, and he made no comment.
    After another five minutes she stood up. “Well, that’s it.” At the window she stood pulling back the limp curtains. “My God it’s hot.”
    Joe wrote on. In a moment she was beside him. “About done? Want me to do some of these?”
    “There’s only this one left.”
    Now he could definitely smell her, a faint, exciting effluvium of sweat and powder and starched shirtwaist.
    “You write a nice hand,” she said, and in a tone of definite irony she added, “I used to read character from handwriting.”
    His hand paused, embarrassed to go on making letters under her gaze. “I guess my character wouldn’t stand much reading.”
    Then abruptly she seemed to lose interest. “I’m going in and take a sponge bath,” she said. “Stick around a few minutes and I’ll walk over to the hall with you.”
    “All right.”
    Her eyes met his, yellow-flecked, slightly narrowed in her smiling face. He felt as if he could breathe only off the top of his lungs, as if the lower parts were stuck together like sheets of flypaper face to face. He watched her through the door and into the open door opposite, and at precisely the right instant she turned her head and gave him the narrow-eyed smile again.
    The thought of Tom Barnabas kept him sitting still, writing mechanically through the last chorus, but his ears were prickedfor sounds from the other room, and he had shifted his chair slightly so that without turning he had the open doorways in the corner of his eye. For several minutes he neither saw nor heard anything. Then her head appeared around the jamb.
    “Has Tom got any clean towels in there?”
    Joe looked. There were two rumpled face towels and a clean bath towel on the stand. “There’s one, yes.”
    Her head had disappeared again, and he waited, expecting her to come and get the towel. The sticky constriction in his lungs almost deprived him of air. Abruptly, in three steps, he crossed the hall, hesitating in the doorway. Betty was standing with her back to him, near the washstand. The light-crazed green blind was drawn to the sill. She had taken off her blouse, and he saw her bare shoulders, the strong taper of her back. Her head was bent, her hands fussing with something at her waist. In the greenish humid twilight her skin looked waxen.
    Finally she turned her head. Something leaped the arc of space between them, and he was against her, his arm circling her from behind. Her uncorseted ribs rose sharply as she drew in her breath; her face was provocatively twisted, her eyes close to his. Her breast was sticky in his hand.
    “Nice,” he said thickly, almost voiceless, and bent his lips to hers. As he fumbled with her clothes she turned toward him fully, but he was mindless by then. There was only one impatient lucid moment when he waited by the bed and she came toward him from the door where she had turned the key. He saw her then clearly, deep-chested and chunky, strong-armed, flat-bellied, a woman on a man’s frame, but as female as a mare in heat.
    Later, lying quietly, he felt her bodily heat beside him and moved a little to escape the stickiness of her skin. “The strategy meeting will be starting pretty quick,” he said.
    She laughed low and throatily at his shoulder, and nipped his arm. “We’ve already started the meeting with a song,” she said. She nipped him again. “That’s my favorite song.”
    Joe made an inarticulate sound, wanting to be up and gone. Against his back her breath was scalding hot. Her hand came across him, felt up his ribs, across his collarbone, under his jaw,over his chin and mouth, delicately tracing the outline of his lips, and down across his jaw again.
    “You’ve got a hard mouth,” she said. “Is it the scars?”
    At first he had let her hands go over him, not knowing how to brush them away, but as they went on, crawling like insects over his closed eyes and his brows, he rolled his head to be