Her beauty caused Ulman to draw in his breath sharply. The remoteness of the situation sent very evil thoughts darting across his mind, thoughts which he quickly dispelled, for Ulman was a poetic if not a literate man, a man who appreciated beauty and was at the same time bound by the peculiar morality of his type.
As he watched, the woman set the cat down and smoothed her dress sensually, seductively, with her slender hands. Ulman backed away from the window, frightened by the lust that was pounding through his veins, knowing to what it could ultimately lead. He turned and made himself walk quietly away. Then he made himself run.
Just after sunrise the next morning, Ulman rose from his cramped position beneath a tree, stretched, brushed off his canvas windbreaker, and began walking toward the farmhouse.
The house appeared more squalid in the daylight than it had the night before. Ulman noted that the fields surrounding it were grown over with weeds. He saw no stock except for a hog near the barn and several chickens in the barren farmyard. Then he noted two more hogs on the other side of the barn, but his eyes were trained on them for only a second. They switched immediately to the woman, still wearing the print dress, hanging a breeze-whipped line of wash.
She was aware of him, Ulman could tell, but she pretended not to notice him as she stretched upward to fasten clothespins as he approached. He stood silently for a moment, taking her in with his eyes, aware of the sharp, scrunching sound of wood and rope on wet cloth as she jammed down the final clothespin to hold a sheet to the line, then turned. There was no surprise or fear in her blue eyes, and this made Ulman even more ill at ease in the face of her beauty.
"Your mister at home?" he asked. He knew the answer to that.
"Ain't no mister here," she said, shifting her weight to one foot and staring frankly at him.
"I, uh, wonder," Ulman said, "if you could spare a bite of breakfast. I'd be willin' to work for it."
She ignored the question. "You hopped of'n that freight went by here last night, didn't you?"
Ulman's heart leaped. Had she seen him at the window? He decided to play it casually. "Sure did, missy. On my way to a job in California."
"California's a long ways."
"Sure is." Ulman rubbed his chin. 'How'd you know I come off that freight?"
"Lots of fellas do," she said. "For some reason they don't want to ride all the way in to Erebville."
"Railroad dicks," he said bitterly. "Always ready to lay a club alongside a man's head."
The woman smiled suddenly. "My name's Cyrila."
Ulman returned the grin, ashamed of his soiled clothes and dirty face. "Lou Ulman."
"Well, Mr. Ulman, you can wash up there at the pump an' I'll fix us some eggs."
Ulman grinned again, his eyes involuntarily running up and down the woman. "I appreciate it, ma'am."
Surprisingly the breakfast of scrambled eggs, bread, fresh-brewed coffee, and a tall glass of orange juice looked delicious. Ulman sat down across from the woman at the table and began to eat with enthusiasm as he discovered the food to be as tasty as it looked. After the first few bites he realized she was staring at him.
"You say you live here alone?" he asked, wiping a corner of his mouth with a forefinger.
Cyrila nodded, her blue eyes still fixed on him intently. "Husband died five years ago."
Ulman took a large bite of bread and talked around it. "Quite a job makin' ends meet for a woman, ain't it? What do you raise?"
"Pigs, mostly. A few chickens."
Ulman nodded. "Them's nice lookin' pigs. How many you got?"
The woman sipped her coffee. "Bout a dozen. Hard to keep more'n that in feed. I sell 'em in the fall when they're fat enough and use some of the money to buy piglets."
"Start all over again then, huh?"
The woman nodded, smiling her beautiful smile. "Toilin' in the fields ain't woman's work," she said with a hint of coyness. "Pigs is about all that's left in these parts. Good profit in 'em if you can afford to feed 'em all summer long."
Ulman finished his eggs and licked the fork appreciatively.
"More, Mr. Ulman?" Her eyelids fluttered exaggeratedly and he suspected she was trying to use her feminine wiles on him, trying to lead him on.
He thought, looking at her,
I
ain't that lucky.
"No, no thank you, ma'am. I'm full up."
"If you will, call me Cyrila," she said, toying with her coffee spoon.
Ulman hesitated, then smiled. "Sure will," he said, "Cyrila."
"There's a stack of firewood out behind the barn," she said smiling. "It does needâ"
"Now, Cyrila," Ulman interrupted, "I said I'd work for my food an' I meant it. Just show me where the axe is."
After he'd chopped wood for an hour, Ulman found himself scything down the tall weeds behind the house, then mending the crude wire fence that surrounded the pigpen on the other side of the barn. Most of the time he worked he sang to himself, all the time watching for Cyrila as she worked in the house and yard. Now and then she'd smile and wave to him from a window, or turn from getting water at the pump and give him a warm look.
It must get lonely out here without a man, Ulman muttered, wielding the heavy hammer. It must.
It was almost sundown when he finished. He washed up at the pump while she stood gracefully on the porch, watching. He let the still-hot sun dry him briefly, slipped on his shirt, slicked back his hair with wet fingers and walked toward her, following her into the house.
It was cooler inside the house, and dim. The reverberating slam of the rusty screen door rang through the heavy air and left them in silence.
"You surely did a good day's work," she said. Her smile seemed a little forced this time, and she held onto the back of the old sofa as if for support.
He grinned and shrugged. "I guess you need a man around here, is all."
"Don' I know it, now?" She stepped away from the sofa. "I bet you sure worked up a thirst."
"Thirst? Well, yeah. It's close to that ol' bewitchin' hour, though, an' I gotta be on the other side of Erebville to jump that train. But if you got somethin' around..."
"I think there's some still in the cupboard," she said, the smile still set on her face. "It'll be old. Jus' use it for guests and medicine."
Ulman followed her into the kitchen. "The older the better."
His eyes roved up her as she stood on her toes to reach the top shelf. There were some cans and three bottles up there, two off-brand whiskeys and a more expensive bourbon bottle half full. She got down the expensive bottle and turned, handing it to him.
Ulman took a long swig, savoring the smoothness and warmth of the bourbon. The woman was watching him. He moved to hand the bottle back to her and her hand closed on his, squeezing the fingers about the neck of the bottle as if she meant for him to keep it. He was surprised to see that she was on the verge of crying.
"You're right, Mr. Ulman," she said, looking up at him. "I surely do need a man around here." She buried her head on his shoulder, sobbing, her body pressed against him. With his right hand Ulman held the bottle, with his left Cyrila's warm back. With his foot he kicked open the bedroom door.
It was pitch dark in the farmhouse when Cyrila rose. She stood by the bed, stretching languidly, then walked barefoot into the kitchen. She placed the bourbon bottle back in the cupboard, aside from the other bottles, and slipped into some old coveralls, rolled up at the sleeves.
Then the only sounds in the darkness were a heavy thump in the bedroom and the squeak of the rusty wheelbarrow axle. Sometime later, from the area of the barn, came the uneven gnashing of the chicken feed grinder working on something hard, amid the loud, thoroughly satisfied grunting and rooting of the pigs.
An hour later Cyrila was standing on the farmhouse porch. She had on her flower-print dress again, and behind her every light in the house blazed. A far-off wail, like a forlorn siren, rolled through the night. She stood listening to the approaching thunder of the distant train, heard it slow momentarily, then with a blast of new thunder begin to regain its speed. Gradually it left her in silence. She unconsciously smoothed the dress over her hips, sighed, then turned and walked into the house. The midnight train roared westward through the inky darknessâbut Ulman wasn't on it.
H
ere, a hundred and fifty feet high on the ancient stone Tower of Saint Marcos, Hector Gomez felt free. The wind whipped about his lithe body, threatening to snatch him and hurl him out into high, cool space above the sea. A pelican flew past, lower than Hector, and gazed obliquely at him between wingbeats then soared in an ascending arc toward the sun. Below Hector the waves rolled in and became graceful ribbons of white surf, then boiling white water, against the rocks.
To Hector's right was the Avenue Del Mar, where three
turista
buses were parked in a line at the side of the road. Along the top of the stone wall above the sea, Mexican vendors had their glittering handmade wares displayed on blankets for sale to the Americans.
Directly below Hector was a tiny, semi-isolated portion of the sea. Saint Marcos Cove. The swells roared into the miniature cove regularly and smashed in white foam over jagged rock along the shore. The sides of the cove, less than a hundred feet apart, were also lined with sharp rock. Only in its center, for brief moments, was the water relatively calm.
Three times a day, Hector Gomez dived from atop the Tower of Saint Marcos into the center of the tiny cove. He had to time each dive perfectly with an oncoming swell, hitting the water just as the wave rolled into the cove. Otherwise the water in the cove was only about four feet deep, and the bottom was lined with hard pebbles rolled smooth by the waves. It was indeed a matter of delicate timing, Hector's dive. And a matter of courage. Everyone, tourist and native alike, knew that the dive was extremely dangerous.
And Hector knew the danger. With the detachment and freedom he felt before each dive came the accompanying price of fear.
Below him the
turistas
were
all out of the buses, staring up at him, pointing, focusing their cameras. Sunlight glinted off Mexican silver spread along the sea wall, off the windows of the buses and off upturned camera lenses.
Hector's feeling of freedom passed. It was time for business
;
he had Maria and their two children to feed and shelter. And the bus driver-guides below had by now finished telling the
turistas
the manufactured legend of Spanish gold hidden somewhere at the bottom of the cove. Perhaps someday the brave diver would emerge with a handful of doubloons and no longer have to risk his life; the prospect, said the guides, was what compelled him to face death daily, even though the gold was cursed.
Hector let the first two swells roll into the cove and break; they were too small and the water in the cove wouldn't be deep enough for the dive.
The third wave appeared large enough. Fear tried to crawl up Hector's throat again as he raised his right arm in a signal to the
turista
s that he was about to dive; that they should ready their cameras. Now there was no turning back and still living a man's life with self-respect.
When the glittering emerald swell was at just the right point, almost ready to roll into the cove, Hector swallowed his near-panic, flexed his knees, and hurled himself off the tower.
The freedom again. The fear. He had to leap far enough out to clear the outcropping of cliff below. Had to keep his back tightly arched before going into the vertical position, or he might flip over too far backward and land wrong, on his back, breaking himself on the water even before he struck the cove's bottom. Yet if he didn't straighten his body in time, there was the cliff.
He timed it,
uno, dos, tres...
and he aimed his outstretched arms forward and down and brought his feet up, legs strained straight and rigid. He willed his body out away from the cliff, clenching his teeth so hard that a sharp pain shot through his jaws.
The tops of his tucked-in toes brushed the outcropping of rock seventy feet above the water, and he knew it would be a good dive.
Barely had he realized this when his fists broke the rushing surface of the wave rolling into the cove. There was a crash of water that he heard only for an instant. He arched his back again, flattening out quickly beneath the surface to slow his descent. Still he struck bottom hard, scraping his chest and thighs even though he pushed
away from the smooth pebbles with his palms. His breath rushed out from between his lips in a graceful swirl of pearl-like bubbles, his blood pulsed in his ears, and he forced himself to stay calm as he rose to the surface.
The
turistas
were applauding. Even in the sun's heat, Hector felt the warm glow of their appreciation; they had been entertained. The Americans didn't know that this part of his act, reaching shore without being smashed against the rocks, was almost as dangerous as the dive.
Hector stroked cautiously toward where the surf broke over the rocks, watching warily behind him for the next wave to come crashing in through the mouth of the cove. When it came, he prudently ducked beneath it and let it roll over him, feeling its force pass him by, rather than let it carry him tumbling out of control toward the jagged rocks. As the wave receded and the water again became momentarily calm, he raised his head and stroked again for shore.