Loving Women by Pete Hamill Read Free Book Online Page A

me and slept against me and had gripped my flesh and now she was gone. Like that. While I slept. I didn’t even remember falling asleep and cursed myself for weakness. And then thought: Maybe it was a dream. Maybe I made this up. Maybe my desperation for a woman had invented her, brought her on board this bus on a lonesome New Year’s Eve, with her oval face and rough veined hands and wild hair . But I checked the ashtray. And like one of those scenes at the end of a fairy-tale movie, there was physical proof of the angelic visitation: her crushed Luckies.
    So I gazed around, full of her leaving (even now, all these years later, I fear a woman’s departure during sleep). And angry with myself. I was such a goddamned kid that I didn’t find out where she was from and where she was going. I hadn’t even found out her name. I stared at the passing country, my eyes drowned in a billion shades of green. Dark, bright, rich, glossy. On all sides of the road as the bus rushed along on its ribbon of tar. She’s out there somewhere , I thought, as the meshed greens rose like walls when we picked up speed on a downslope, and then separated as the bus settled. I could see foliage at the edge of the road and beyond that a swampy river, and, away off, a haze hanging in the branches of the forests. She’s here in the green southern world .
    This was before I knew the names of the natural world. But I was looking at broom grass and blackjack oak, elder and sassafrass, honeysuckle and sycamores and water oak and willows. And in a blur I felt her hand move in the drowsing dark, holding my cock, her voice small and fearful, my hand led under the black turtleneck to the fullness of her breasts. That was real. Or it was a dream. I’m uncertain even now. I looked for reassurance to the Luckies in the ashtray. And turned away to see the river moving sluggishly in its swampy channel, and saw (but did not recognize) banks of abandoned sugar cane, Spanish moss draping live oaks, sudden movements in the darker green, insects hovering like helicopters and then suddenly jabbing the surface of the opaque water. Her veined hand, her breasts . I saw abrupt saddles of dry land covered with shivering grass as her voice shivered in the blur and then we were again in the darkness of the swamp. Trees rose monstrously, blocking the sky. There were mangrove trees among them, their roots plunged into the water, gnarled and knuckled, like huge hands frozen while searching for some smooth and agile quarry. I will find her .
    And then the swamp was gone and the bus moved into a zone of luminous blond light. The earth itself was lighter, sandier, the grass bleached, and I began to see houses off in the distance, made of silvery unpainted boards, with plumes of blue smoke drifting up from brick chimneys. In the lee of a small hill, three crumpled-looking cows lay under a giant shade tree and beyond them a white boy galloped bareback on a chestnut horse.
    I had no sense that any of these things were real. The woman who had sat beside me in the night: Was she real? And were these real rivers and trees and swamps and insects, real shacks and cows and horses? I wished I could stop the bus and wander around in this strange new morning world. This South. Wander until I’d found her. Please stop the bus, driver. Let me touch the South. Let me find my woman . I wanted to see it with her, understand it, read books and maps, ask a million questions, find out the names of the trees and the towns and the people. I wanted to know what armies had fought across the landscape and who the heroes were. And the villains. And the explorers. And the wild men. The South. I’m in the South .
    I swore that I would find her. Track her down. Discover where she got off and retrace the steps. Just like a detective. Like Canyon. Or Buz Sawyer. Like Holmes or Philip Marlowe. Ask people and describe her. And finally meet her at dusk somewhere, and she’ll say, How old are you? And I’ll