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Show 36 ringing in my head, and my feelings were threshing about wildly like a boy fallen into deep water without knowing how to swim. Hurrying inside, I threw myself into the work of loading and everyone thought I panted from exertion. Then that house was locked and abandoned at last, my father and I climbed into the high cab of the borrowed truck where he started and turned and backed and started until we were headed out the driveway. There he stopped, rolling a cigarette from his Bull Durham sack while Mother and the twins and Davy, Henry driving, got settled in the Pontiac and took off. Dad meshed into gear and we rolled slowly down the driveway, both of us glancing over for one last look at her window and her white tumbled bed, and then we were on our way, riding out of that town and to a new house and Kate Cannon for a neighbor and high school and football glory and everything. New worlds. On the highway, recently oiled for the first time, my father flipped his cigarette, settled back and began to whistle. Then he leaned forward, peering up at the sky through the windshield. "Gonna be a nice day," he said. "A real nice day for moving." Yes! Unseen, I grinned like a fool. I had no regrets, I felt no loss. Still my heart was saying thank you to that girl with butter-yellow hair and impossibly beautiful breasts, for hip-curve and burning bush, all of me was saying thank you for a sun-gold vision I would never forget and could never deny. Fainter now I felt that strange ringing in my head, the old Adam in me, and I looked at the man tooting merrily beside me, pursed lips and a jaunty tune, this man who had also looked into that window, had also seen that beauty, had also felt a man's lust. Lucky for me he had, my father. I guess I forgave him then, his grossness. In fact, I had to laugh at us, father and son, window peepers. Such a fright I'd gotten along with the rest of it, thinking I'd fallen in over my head when it was only shallow water after all, just enough to make me want to wade in deeper, deeper, and struggle to swim. |