Free The Watchman by Davis Grubb

one but he is. Maybe he's tired, too. But you and me—we know it's got to be like that. He's got to keep moving.
    And someday it will have to end. We know that, too, don't we, Joe?
    Maybe. Meanwhile, it's like it's always been when he's gone off like this. Like I was one of the family—like a faithful old mama-watchdog guarding the master's baby.
    Jill shivered. She rose suddenly and, reaching out, turned the picture frame face-downwards on the vanity. Then she went back to sit again, hunching into her knees, eyes closed, clench-tight, thinking about that face of her mother, bathed in the lying colors of some long-gone Texas sun of forenoon.
    You ought to get a piece of glass for that.
    No.
    What with dust. What with rain and sunshine and time.
    I hate it. Sometimes I want to take it downstairs and soak it in the sink—drown it—let all the colors soak out till there's no face left at all. Sometimes I hate it. Not her. I mean sometimes I just want to kid myself that there are some things you can send gurgling down the drain—weakness, stupidity, that something in her eyes that tells me she could never say no—that she couldn't keep herself from letting a man use her even if it meant his using her would someday make her die. Oh, I hate that picture sometimes.
    Then how come you keep it there always in plain sight?
    Because I love it.
    Well, that's mighty queer thinking. Now ain't it?
    Sure. To a man it is. To a user, she said.
    But your daddy's a man. By God, there was never more man than your daddy. How about that?
    You wouldn't understand. He loves me. He's always always loved me. He watches after me.
    And when he's not here to watch after you—it's me that watches after you, kitten.
    Don't call me that tonight, Joe.
    Didn't I always call you that when you was scared and lonely? Have you clean forgot that first time—that night when you was only ten, kitten?
    Quit teasing me. Please stop. Oh God, Joe, get out!
    I will. Directly. Kitten. Soft little kitten.

    Stop—that!
    No. Because whenever you was scared and lonesome like this when you was little you was always that. And when I say that name it eases. Now don't it? Didn't it always ease things, little kitten?
    So seeing him now risen, seeing him so now, through eyes blood-burned, and brain flinching under the drum of pulse that hurt her tender temples: watching him as at the far end of the corridor of nearness as slowly he moved toward her down the little space of garish, fevered light with all the hues and definitions of him washed hke the ruined, rain-grieved picture. But this time I won't, she thought, because it never does any good—it never kills its coming back or stops its forever being, rising.
    No, she mumbled, drunkenly. This time no.
    Kitten, she heard him somewhere whisper, a soimd lost among the remote, hurried rustle of polished chino.
    Thinking now: Whose face among the suns of time-far Texas? No, I won't. Oh, mother lost in god-tints whose pigments are not fast-fixed on the half-breed's pasteboard heaven. Oh, God, I will do it because I have to do that or else do the other but no, God, I won't do it because it will not quench forever the fang's renewing milk; the snake eternal, resurrected. Yes, thinking, I will do it, must do it, because there is no other doing but the other. Mother? No, not you, my darling and despised. Hearing dimly the rustle of her chaste, sheathing garments now and, far off, her own despairing, hungering sob and thud of knees as sorrowfully she slid and knelt.
    Kitten, he said.
    Clenching now her eyes safe into the chastity of dark and nothing-feeling. Corpus Christi? Yes. And mother, one-breasted, vanquished, too: and the proud, nippled lift of once firm life gone slack and forever unfeeding in the tinted Texas earth.
    Just don't touch me, she mumbled. I'm a virgin—remember that. Don't touch me. Not any part of me. Don't ever touch me with your hands.
    Cole Blake's funeral took place two days later. For Thomas Peace they