“What time is it?” Nadine said, waking.

  Jules pressed his face against her back. They had not undressed the night before, sleeping without covers in this southern autumnal heat, and so there was never any real sleep for them, Jules thought, always this uneasy, temporary resting, as if they were both prepared to jump up and run out of the cabin at a moment’s notice.

  “It’s early,” said Jules.

  “Shouldn’t we get started?”

  “In a while.”

  She twisted to look at him. Her face was puffy with sleep. How she trusted him, her lover Jules! It was a sign that never in her life had anyone offended her, manhandled her, betrayed her, and that her body had passed through seventeen years of life in America without having been insulted. He loved this about her, her stupid purity. He loved her trusting him as she did. What was entrusted to his hands, so completely, was a gift of his own opinion of himself—a good person after all, not vicious, able to fall farther in love than he had ever imagined.

  She slid her arms around his neck. They kissed. Jules, his pain newly awakened and eager, looked at her misty, half-closed eyes and wondered if he would get out of this alive.

  “Today let me drive. Please,” she said.

  “You don’t have a license. What about the police?”

  “Why should they stop us?”

  Jules, driving a not-very-new Ford that looked exactly as if it might belong to a kid who looked like him, still felt danger everywhere. He was astonished at how many police he saw. Whenever they passed through small towns he was sure to slow down, for there the police were, two or three idle, uniformed men in a squad car, behind a billboard and doing nothing except staring out at traffic and quick to note out-of-state license plates; on the deserted highways Jules sped along at the best speed his car could make, around sixty-five, and there the state troopers were—lean, anonymous men wearing sunglasses, patrolling endlessly, making illegal U-turns to speed back after some lawbreaker or imagined lawbreaker, having nothing to do with their days but cruise up and down the highways, enjoying life, given over entirely to cruising, assessing, clocking. He feared their pulling up alongside him and shouting, “Get over to the side!” And there, at the side of the road, they would lean into his window and shout, “Where did you get that girl from?”

  He imagined Nadine crying, “He made me come with him, he kidnaped me from Detroit!”

  She sat up. “Before we start out we should buy some food. And some shampoo. I want to wash my hair.”

  “Does it need washing so soon?”

  “I want to be clean. Could you get those things?”

  Wearily he tested his legs; they moved. “I wish you loved me,” he said sadly.

  “I do love you. What do you mean?”

  He swung around to get up. Everything changed and yet each morning was the same: he had faith in the future and believed that eventually they would come to an ideal landscape, something to please Nadine, but it was not here. Arkansas, or Texas, whichever state…a condition of the sky and earth that was somehow not right…it didn’t test right to Jules. His instincts told him he had to keep running; he was irritated to recall a dream he’d once had, of a wilderness and a clearing like an island in it—for how could there be a clearing in a wilderness without someone’s labor? Without someone being betrayed?

  “Where am I going to get money from, my love?” Jules said. “I’m down to two dollars.”

  She said nothing.

  “All right, I’ll be back in half an hour,” Jules said.

  He dabbed water onto his face in the smelly little lavatory with its damp, dripping shower stall. Everywhere there were the remains of bugs, and a few bugs that moved sluggishly. When he went out Nadine was lazily drawing her hair back from her face, smiling at him.

  To have her with him, traveling with him as if she belonged to him—what triumph!

  He never got out of the reach of his love for her. It followed him around, it was breathed in and out by his aching lungs, it gave to the hollowed cheeks of old women on the streets an enchanted look. On this morning, a warm September morning, everything looked mistily enchanting, cast into an off-golden hue, both threatening and promising. Really, Jules thought, walking fast along the highway toward a small town nearby, really he was an enchanted person. Nadine would someday wake up to his love for her; he had faith in her intelligence. It seemed to him that she was truly extraordinary, that the very intensity of her strangeness corresponded to something in him, a wildness he had never exactly acknowledged. Surely the two of them were marked for a special fate.

  Special fates were of two kinds, both miraculous, but one leading to wealth and power and prominence, the other leading to sudden death, a throat slit by a stranger’s knife or a hard, resistant skull sheared off half an inch at the top. You had to pay a kind of price for your fate. Jules thought amiably, Jules Wendall is my fate, knowing it was not Nadine who shaped him but himself—for another man wouldn’t have fallen in love with her…only Jules could have loved her so violently.

  Nadine fed his idle dreams of becoming rich as if he were giving her the words himself. He would become rich, she felt sure, how could he fail? “Because there are so many stupid people I know who are rich,” she told him. And Jules, who had brains and good luck, could not fail. Jules secretly agreed with her. He had faith in an automatic upward swing, once he got really on the bottom; clearly, there was no future not open to him. Why not? He would locate himself in the Southwest and begin in a growing area…a salesman, for insurance? real estate? oil? With his looks and his brains, he thought, why couldn’t he make as much money as his Uncle Samson had made? That is, on his way to becoming a millionaire?

  The tourist court they were staying in looked shabby in the daylight, and along the highway, off the raw, red, eroding shoulder of the road, various buildings shared that look. Jules scanned the flat horizon and could locate nothing anywhere of promise. Where was the beauty he had waited for? There were scatterings of pine trees but they looked anemic and second-rate. The blighted elms of Detroit were not less beautiful. He passed a bowling alley that looked closed. On its gravel driveway boys were playing, riding bicycles. Their shouts excited Jules. Hadn’t he also been a child, in the country? But this was not the country. It was not the city either. Raw, gaping hunks had been cut out of the earth—in preparation for a shopping plaza maybe—and trees were overturned, dried out. Vacant fields. A tavern painted pink. The neon lights, turned off, looked chipped in the daylight. As he stared at the tavern the sun came out, or burned through the mist, and a sudden blow of heat struck him. He was truly in a foreign country. He was a stranger; it wasn’t necessary not to understand the language.

  Though he took care to wash himself every night, anxious not to disgust Nadine, still the southern sun made his pores ache with sweat. He felt filthy almost right away: there was nothing he could do to stay clean. Nadine was fastidious about herself, as careful to keep her hair and face and body clean as she was to keep herself, Nadine, clean of the pollution of love. She washed her hair every other day, that head of long thick black hair he loved, and let it dry, and brushed it out, thoughtfully, frowning, like a child to whom the troubles of the world are scaled down to snarls in a brush; something to be worked over and solved. He loved her so much!

  Loving her, alone in this strange country, he walked in a warm humid daze. The sun caressed his back the way Nadine naïvely caressed him. He was certain that she did love him, but she was afraid of him. Certainly she should be afraid: there was too much in him waiting for her, too much violence. But he wanted to give her the pleasure that was stored up in him, for her alone, to wrap her in his arms and deliver her over to an abandonment of love, losing her in love. His own desire for her, which was slowly driving him crazy, was partly a desire to please her and make her a slightly different person, a young woman in love. Still, she said self-pityingly, “You want to hurt me,” and he tried to explain to her that he would never hurt her—except, of course, he would have to hurt her a little. “But why do you only think of that?” she said uneasily. “Isn’t it enough for us to be friends? Close friends? Don’t you love me enough this way?”

  As he walked, trucks and cars threw bits of dust onto him. The dust stuck. His shirt was wet already and he was just entering the town. He found himself staring at a farm girl in a truck, in the passenger’s seat, looking out at him. She waved. The truck roared past. Jules felt a pang of excitement, wondering if she thought she knew him or whether it was just a friendly sign, a sign of his being handsome, likable. The affection of other people was like a fishhook in Jules. He could be drawn up eagerly by any kind word. And might it happen that Nadine, carried farther and farther south, would turn affectionate and buttery to his touch as the memory of Detroit faded? In Texas, in a small town, she would become his bride the way the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls of the South became brides, without much fuss.

  He walked by a laundromat. A whiff of air from inside nearly suffocated him—what heat! A few housewives, girlish and chattering, stood around inside, stuffing laundry into holes, dragging laundry out. A little girl squatting in the doorway smiled at Jules: a good sign. Now he passed a Piggly-Wiggly store. Shopping carts were bunched up outside, against the building. A few were scattered around the lot. As soon as he got money he would buy some food in this store, right here. It looked safe.

  He walked on, trying for the shade when he could get it, passing parked cars and strolling shoppers and kids, passing a drugstore, crossing a street, his eye attracted by a woman in slacks and a yellow blouse who was talking to a cop. Jules couldn’t look away from her, he had to turn his head, passing her, though he thought this might be dangerous—after all, the man was a cop. He had a head of brown-blond hair, very curly. He was chewing gum. He did not notice Jules.

  Excitement had entered Jules in a rush. Jumpy, his vision jumpy, he hesitated in front of a sporting-goods store and pretended to be interested in camping outfits. Fishing rods of glass and metal…high boots…mosquito netting…It seemed to him prodigious, all these things, unthinkable; their maleness pleased him. In the store window he could see, reflected clearly, the shapes of girls passing behind him. His blood surged with ambition for the future—he would sell oil wells, he’d be an architect and build buildings, spectacular skyscrapers, he’d be a politician, a governor, a senator, he’d speak on television and nothing would be beyond his grasp…

  He came to a cigar store. It reminded him of Detroit and so he went in, liking the masculine odor of tobacco and newsprint. A rack of magazines caught his eye. He pretended to be seriously interested, frowning. He should be on his way but still he lingered. The covers of paperback books attracted him. Lust and Love was the title of one book; Jules thumbed through it, hoping for some advice, some consolation. Another cover showed a girl with wild red hair stepping on a man who lay in chains, a man with a face something like Jules’s. What a fate! Jules moved on reluctantly. Magazines on display, a hundred covers. Detective Annals—on its cover a girl in a tight red skirt being dragged into a taxicab. “The Lust-Mad Cabbie of Memphis” was a headline. Jules picked up the magazine and leafed through it nervously. The pulp pages did not move with grace. He came upon another story: “Jail-Bait Slashed, Raped, and Slain in Boise.” The story was illustrated with several photographs of a fourteen-year-old girl with a snippy face, long blond hair, a strange, demonic pleasure evident in her mouth, her parted lips. Her mother went into hysterics when police….Neither parent knew of her secret life….Hitchhiking up and down the highway for fun…. Jules scanned the story, looking for a crucial paragraph, but he had no luck, and when he tried to turn the page he turned too many pages. The girl was lost to him. He came upon another story, trembling: “My Baby’s Father Was Killed in My Arms!” A photograph of a muddy trailer, a woman in slacks, her face undistinguished, men in the background who looked like state troopers. One minute after my baby was conceived his father was shot to death in my arms—my ex-husband broke in and killed him, pumping five bullets into him! Jules scanned this story, feeling both excitement and disgust. He scanned the paragraphs that led to the couple’s meeting, their wandering back to the trailer court, their love-making, and, finally, the blast of bullets, the end. Then, in disgust, he put the magazine back. He felt dizzy. All around him were photographs of girls, on magazine covers, on book covers, on cards propped up for display, girls without clothes and unprotected even against Jules’s anguish. He stared at them, sweating.

  The proprietor of the store edged toward him. Jules left.

  Oppressive air on the street. The sun had disappeared. The air hung heavily about him as if crowded with the exhaled breaths of too many girls, too many men. A girl of about twenty, passing him, glanced with a country girl’s open friendly interest at his face, and he felt weak immediately, as if struck. He thought of her thighs in her tight skirt, her mouth opened for a scream, photographed. He went on, a little blind. He loved Nadine so much…In front of a Greyhound bus station a woman brushed against him, scolding her kid, and he felt the danger of women like a terrible blow and drew back from her. It was a kind of poison, accidental contact.

  He wandered into the bus station. Walls painted thinly white. A candy machine. A popcorn machine. He pretended interest in them, cagily. He looked around the room. Babies were fretting. An old man leaned over to spit with care on the floor. Jules did not dare to look at any women but confined himself to the faces of the men, which seemed to him gross. Yet his temperature was soaring. Small clots in the blood, like spores from feverish spring plants, dandelions maybe, floating and suffocating in his blood. If only he didn’t love that girl so strongly! He saw a man in a cheap gray suit cross over to the men’s lavatory.

  He went over and entered the lavatory himself. The man was standing by one of the sinks, staring at himself sadly in the mirror—he was an old-looking young man with parchment-like skin. Jules saw his eyes flick onto Jules’s face in the mirror just before Jules moved—Jules grabbed him by his rather long hair and jerked him backward, one hand going over his mouth, and tried to knock his head against the tile wall. He missed. He grabbed the man by the throat and this time did succeed in knocking him back against the wall. The man fell heavily. Jules reached inside his coat to get his wallet, thinking just at this moment that there wasn’t much point in stealing from someone who looked like that; but too late! In a few seconds he was back out in the waiting-room again, on his way out.

  His sweat had turned to a film of frost on his body.

  In the Piggly-Wiggly, like a young husband, he bought a bag of potato chips and some cheese and white bread and a few other items, including shampoo for his young bride, making his way patiently behind lady shoppers. Where else would he be as safe as in the Piggly-Wiggly store? He was dizzied by the bare legs of young wives who dawdled with their shopping carts…but he was faithful to his love, to Nadine, who kept herself faultless and put her childish hands on the back of his neck and talked to him, whispered to him late at night. “Now I never stay awake and cry at night,” she had told him, surprised. She slept while Jules stayed awake, not exactly crying, dry-eyed but very thoughtful. He toyed with the idea of throwing himself upon her and finishing it all, kicking her out, slashing his own wrists—but she was all he had, after all, with her selfishness and her purity. He couldn’t hurt her.

  At the check-out counter he looked through his new wallet, a stranger’s wallet. It was a sign of his confusion that he hadn’t bothered until now to see how much money he had. But a pleasant surprise: two twenty-dollar bills, someone’s, enough money for a while. He was safe. He took out a twenty-dollar bill to pay for his purchases and felt rather proud of himself.

  “Here, your stamps,” said the cashier, handing him some saving stamps; and Jules gallantly turned to the lady waiting in line behind him and offered them to her. She smiled in surprise, thanking him.

  When he returned to the cabin Nadine had the door open and was waiting for him. “I was worried about you,” she said. “Did you get some shampoo?”

  “All kinds of things.” His smile ached but he did not flinch from her embrace. On the way back he’d thrown away the wallet, but certainly he was in danger. “Maybe we could get out of here?” he said.

  “As soon as I wash my hair.”

  “It would be a good idea if we left now.”

  “Jules, please…”

  In the lavatory she bent over the sink with a towel around her shoulders, and Jules himself washed her hair. She had lovely thick hair and he loved even the strands that came loose, wrapping themselves around his soapy fingers.

  * * *

  —

  They drove into Beaumont, Texas, buoyed along by waves of heat on the highway. Jules’s eyes had a permanent parched feel to them—so much land, so much sunlight, all of it mixed up with the swaying of his own brain. These several days with Nadine had resulted in his beginning to talk like her, shaping his mouth like hers. Perhaps the faint delirium he felt was a girl’s hysteria, unavoidable. How could he stop from changing himself into her?