Rock Island Line David Rhodes (ereader iphone .txt) 📖

you from behind. I’m not kidding, you better stay away from there if you keep running into guys like that.”

“Oh, you,” said Mal, and went into the bedroom and took out her drawing pad.

Despite what July thought was his better judgment—because all the facts, so to say, added up against it—he decided for the last time during lunch hour at the post office that he would go back to the museum—if for no other reason than to confirm his suspicion that she would never come. His dark imagination had few good things to say for her: perhaps she was a whore, or a belly dancer from an incense-smelling bar, or had rich friends—a person to whom enchanting some poor fool was no more than tossing a candy wrapper into a garbage can rather than let it fall on the street. Perhaps she really was a painter, and lived in a world of art, shut up as tight as a princess in a castle tower. What does she expect of me? he wondered. What right has she to make demands on me? If she wants somebody to talk to, let her keep to her own kind, whatever that might be. If she thinks she’s sobeautiful, why doesn’t she stay at home and look at herself in the mirror? With little effort he could begin to feel hatred.

Yet despite these brooding thoughts, he found he could not toss her out of his mind and hardly an hour would pass when he wasn’t trapped between evoking her actual physical presence, her face and smile, the sound of her voice and every word that had passed between them, and berating himself simultaneously for doing it. No, he thought, I’ll go back this one last time and when she hasn’t come I’ll accept that and will just peacefully go to my old ways, no hard feelings or anything like that. I’ll just go in, look around once and leave. It will hardly take a half-hour to go over there and return. There’s no real point in not doing it. Naturally, it’s of little consequence one way or another, but I might as well be done with this once and for all.

In this frame of mind he returned to the museum, calm and unruffled. It was nearly eight o’clock when he arrived. Only an hour remained before closing, and if she were coming at all, she would be there now. He opened the front door with a wide, nearly arrogant swing and stepped inside. The automatic closing mechanism swung the glass door back and fastened it securely with a snap, sealing him in the palatial silence. Immediately he knew she was there, hidden from his view behind one of the many walls. The very air hung with her—a feeling altogether unlike an empty building. His confidence drained from him like water through a dry, cracked rain barrel; he began an infinitely slow and cautious search for her around the labyrinth of partitions.

They met facing each other as he walked into the large, carpeted room where the permanent collection (mostly out of the nineteenth century) was displayed on the walls. He crossed over to her hesitantly.

“Hello,” he said, and immediately lapsed into silence, then smiled. He wondered if he might just run away—if that would be something he could finally live down in his memory.

“Hello,” she returned. “I thought for a while that you weren’t going to come tonight.” Then she laughed and it seemed to Julylike clear-ringing bells. The statement jolted him: it seemed to be so undeniably pregnant with affection; it implied—obviously—that she had been waiting, and thinking about him—it seemed almost obscene in its frankness, and he wondered, in horror, if something of the kind were expected of him in return.

She smiled, her teeth gleaming white and straight.

“No . . . here I am.” Pause. “I see you’re looking at these paintings in this room.”

“Yes. What do you think of them?”

“Well, they’re . . .” July made a gesture of inevitability. “I don’t know. I’m not a painter.”

“You have a mind, though, don’t you? You have opinions.”

“Not really. I mean, sure I do, but they aren’t worth much. See, there’s very little . . .” His voice trailed away unexpectedly.

“What’s your name?”

“What?” he responded, stepping back half a foot.

“What’s your name? Mine is Mal Rourke.”

“My name is July Montgomery,” he said a little too loudly, then added, “I’m twenty-one,” as though he were offering an innermost secret, and blushed.

“This one,” she said, calling his attention to a painting of a harbor at night with the long brown masts of boats, with lines of light over the water and a solitary figure on the dock, his back facing outward, holding a large pail, foggy and still. (It was one of July’s favorites.) “This one is just fantastic. Each time I look at it I notice something else. Did you ever see this cat over here in the corner?” And she pointed to a gray cat no bigger than the tip of a pen.

Back at Mal’s apartment, her roommate, Carol, heard the bell ring and, not knowing who it was, pressed the microphone button. “Who is it?” she asked.

“It’s Gladys Schmidt,” came the returning voice. “And Earl,” she added proudly.

Reluctantly, Carol pushed the release button, letting them into the building, waited and met them in the hall.

“This is my brother Earl,” said Gladys, looking up at him fondly. “We were wondering if Mal was around. She’s been wanting to meet him.” Earl stood in perfect military form, excepting the broad, flat smile which he wore whenever being introduced. “This is Carol Pickney.”

Carol frowned slightly, wishing to be rid of them both. “She’s at the museum. . . . In fact, you might go over there. There’s this weirdo who’d been bothering her, and as long as you’re looking for her anyway, why don’t you go down and make sure he isn’t giving her any trouble?”

Earl immediately became intent. “What’s this guy like?” he asked