The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [116]
This excitement was in her, and she said something she didn’t mean to say. ‘I would if you would. I dare you to.’
Harry slicked back the dark, wet bangs of his hair. ‘O.K.’
They both took off their bathing-suits. Harry had his back to her. He stumbled and his ears were red. Then they turned toward each other. Maybe it was half an hour they stood there-maybe not more man a minute. Harry pulled a leaf from a tree and tore it to pieces. ‘We better get dressed.’
All through the picnic dinner neither of them spoke. They spread the dinner on the ground. Harry divided everything in half. There was the hot, sleepy feeling of a summer afternoon.
In the deep woods they could hear no sound except the slow flowing of the water and the songbirds. Harry held his stuffed egg and mashed the yellow with his thumb. What did that make her remember? She heard herself breathe.
Then he looked up over her shoulder. ‘Listen here. I think you’re so pretty, Mick. I never did think so before. I don’t mean I thought you were very ugly--I just mean that--’ She threw a pine cone in the water. ‘Maybe we better start back if we want to be home before dark.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Let’s lie down. Just for a minute.’
He brought handfuls of pine needles and leaves and gray moss. She sucked her knee and watched him. Her fists were tight and it was like she was tense all over.
‘Now we can sleep and be fresh for the trip home.’
They lay on the soft bed and looked up at the dark-green pine clumps against the sky. A bird sang a sad, clear song she had never heard before. One high note like an oboe--and then it sank down five tones and called again. The song was sad as a question without words.
‘I love that bird,’ Harry said. ‘I think it’s a vireo.’
‘I wish we was at the ocean. On the beach and watching the ships far out on the water. You went to the beach one summer--exactly what is it like?’
His voice was rough and low. Well--there are the waves.
Sometimes blue and sometimes green, and in the bright sun they look glassy. And on the sand you can pick up these little shells. Like the kind we brought back in a cigar box. And over the water are these white gulls. We were at the Gulf of Mexico--these cool bay breezes blew all the time and there it’s never baking hot like it is here. Always--’
‘Snow,’ Mick said. ‘That’s what I want to see. Cold, white drifts of snow like in pictures. Blizzards. White, cold snow that keeps falling soft and falls on and on and on through all the winter. Snow like in Alaska.’
They both turned at the same time. They were close against each other. She felt him trembling and her fists were tight enough to crack. ‘Oh, God,’ he kept saying over and over. It was like her head was broke off from her body and thrown away. And her eyes looked up straight into the blinding sun while she counted something in her mind. And then this was the way. This was how it was. They pushed the wheels slowly along the road. Harry’s head hung down and his shoulders were bent. Their shadows were long and black on the dusty road, for it was late afternoon. ‘Listen here,’ he said. ‘Yeah.’
‘We got to understand this. We got to. Do you--any?’
‘I don’t know. I reckon not.’
‘Listen here. We got to do something. Let’s sit down.’ They dropped the bicycles and sat by a ditch beside the road. They sat far apart from each other. The late sun burned down on their heads and there were brown, crumbly ant beds all around them. ‘We got to understand this,’ Harry said. He cried. He sat very still and the tears rolled down Ms white face. She could not think about the thing that made him cry. An ant stung her on the ankle and she picked it up in her fingers and looked at it very close. ‘It’s this way,’ he said. I never had even kissed a girl before.’
‘Me neither. I never kissed any boy. Out of the family. ‘That’s all I used to think about--was to kiss this certain girl.
I used to plan about it during school and dream about it at night. And then once she gave me a date. And I could tell she meant for me to kiss her. And I just looked at her in the dark and I couldn’