Caterpillar Dogs by Tennessee Williams

Author:Tennessee Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811232333
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:01+00:00

* * *

Till One or the Other

Gits Back

She was a woman of the hills, born and bred. Her face was a smooth, pale yellow like rich milk, and her deep-set eyes were flashing blue like the sky seen between the tops of tall cedars. Her face was drawn so sparely that the beauty of it did not come out until you caught it unawares, like a shy, perfect animal, hidden among leaves its own color. Her body was still more thinly chiseled, the breasts standing out like wooden knobs, and the flanks lean and attenuated like the flanks of a running hound. There was something about her, swift and elusive and subtle, that excited and frustrated desire, that was like seawater to the lips of thirsty men. You wanted to lay your hands on her flesh, but when you caught her and held her, there was nothing there but the hardness of sinew and skin and bone. You released her with a feeling of sick impotence. And then, instantly, you caught hold of her again with the water dripping from your lips. She was such a woman.

She stood now at the door of the house looking out, her lean, saturnine face outlined against blue dusk. It was toward winter and dry leaves swept in the door around her and rattled across the bare pine floor. She slammed the door shut and pushed her hands down her lean sides, and looked into nothing for a moment or two.

Then she opened her narrow lips and called, “Git ready, Bill! Long ’bout this time he mought be startin’ back!”

Her long fingers fluttered along her cheeks and coiled brown hair in a manner that was anomalously feminine.

“Bring down your gun,” she yelled more sharply. “I’ll fetch them lanterns frum the barn.”

The man came lumbering heavily down the stairs. He wore high boots. His big form moved woodenly and the butt of his double-barrelled gun trailed along the steps with a clanking that made the woman stiffen.

“Cain’t you tote thet gun?” she hissed.

The man’s eyes looked uncommonly large and pale in his narrow brown face and his yellow hair hung over his forehead. With a startled movement he hoisted the gun to his shoulder and then stood waiting as though unable to stir without her command.

“Don’t stand there like a stick!” she yelled. “Git moving!”

She stood bristling a moment, then darted toward the rear of the house. The man glanced around him like a frightened animal, as though he were seeking some less perilous means of egress than the dark doorway that the woman had taken. But there was apparently no other way out.

Shortly afterwards, the man and the woman climbed onto the high front seat of an old Ford parked behind the house. The woman carried two lanterns and a can of coal oil. The man carried his gun. They drove a piece down the Missouri State Highway and then they stopped. Before them was that sharp turn in the road that was locally known as Dead Man’s Curve.

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