Free Ladies From Hell by Keith Roberts Page A

session, honey. Because I ain’t going no place. And you ain’t going to
get
no place, not by the looks of you. Not for a long, long while.”
    She produced a pack of cigarettes, lit up carefully and extinguished the match. She leaned her head against the doorframe and blew smoke. “Fact is,” she said, “I’m in kind of a fix. I’ve gotta get out of sight for a time, maybe a good time; and there ain’t nowhere better than here. So we’d best get working on some kind of relationship, huh?”
    The other made no response; and she sighed again. She said, “Are you a deafy? Or are you just plain crazy?
Do
you understand what I’m saying? If you do, nod your head.”
    Nothing.
    “Do you live here on your own? What’s your name?” Nothing.
    “I guess I forgot,” said the newcomer. Names don’t rate much with you folk, do they? Maybe you never even had one.” She smiled. She said, “I’ve got a name. All my very own. But maybe that don’t matter neither.” She paused. “I’m from America,” she said. “That’s one heck of a long way off. You ever heard of America?”
    No reply.
    The other blew smoke again, carefully. “Well,” she said, “We’re going to have to try something out. This is the way it’s goin’ to work. There was an old guy once, back in my home town, found a year-old pup wired up to a tree, way out in the woods. Alsatian pup, she was. She was close on dead; and boy, had she been treated rough. And you know what he did?
    The old guy? He got her in a van, first off. And fedher in there, two, maybe three weeks. On account of he couldn’t get near. So what he done instead was sit and talk. Just talk, like I’m talking to you. Nice and easy. And you know what? In the end that pup got to be one of the nicest damn dogs you ever could meet. Just by talking. That’s what I’m goin’ to try with you. Because honey, I’ve got all the time in the world as well …”
    The sun was higher now, beating on the tin roof, and the temperature in the little shack had increased. The Rural felt her eyelids droop. There was something in the Thunder-thing’s voice, something calm and sleepy … The knife point dropped; and she shook herself awake again, with a little jump. But the strange personage had not moved. “No way, honey,” she said. “Not just awhiles, at least. You might not be all that smart; but I guess you’re pretty quick with that thing. You just go on fighting me your way, huh? And I’ll tell you all about the old man’s dog. The dog he rescued. She had a name too. Do you want to know what it was?”
    The voice went on and on, tinkling and chuckling, like water over stones. The words made sense, a sort of sense. They reminded her of things she had forgotten. The brook, now. Surely she had not always lived here. There had been a house by a brook, a house with a garden of flowers. At the bottom of the garden a wooden bridge on which you could lean, see the great shadows of fish in the green water below. Cool green, gliding green, set with weed banks that waved and waved in the current, forward and back, like flags. While the sun-sparkle on the water danced too, made little bright skeins of reflection that moved forward and back, forward and back …
    Her eyes had quite closed that time. She jerked them open, with a little harsh cry of alarm; but the other still sat by the doorpost, a fair-haired young woman in a bright anorak, her hair tied back behind her ears like the tail of a horse. She didn’t somehow seem quite so frightening now. Perhaps … perhaps she wasn’t the Thunder-thing after all. But she had come with the thunder, so she must be. The Rural stared through the window, begging mutely for help; but the Convolvulus Kingstill reared his great head outside, his eyes still watched white and calm.
    “It’s gettin’ to you, honey,” said the American girl. “It’s gettin’ to you. You know something? Sure as God made little apples, I’m going to win. All I got to do