Nothing In Her Way Read Online Free PDF

matter of having it explained to me once. I had to be coached in it. We went over it for hours. We adjourned for lunch, and then came back and went at it again. I went out in the afternoon and visited the bank, and bought the few props I’d need, and returned to my hotel to pack.
    Bolton disappeared somewhere. Charlie and I took Cathy out to dinner, and I stayed with her until she was back in her hotel. I was still thinking of Donnelly. We didn’t see anything of him.
    We left early in the morning. She was driving a ‘51 Cadillac, and she rode it hard. We talked very little. She was concentrating on the driving, and I was trying to stay off the “do-you-remembers.”
    Once she said, “You’re not sorry, are you, Mike?”
    “About what?” I asked.
    “That you came in with us?”
    “No. Of course not. I want Lachlan as badly as you do. And Goodwin too, for that matter.”
    “That’s the only reason, then?”
    I turned and looked at her. “I don’t know,” I said.
    “We had a lot of fun, didn’t we, Mike?”
    “And a lot of fights.”
    “Do you know why I’m going to San Antonio?” she asked.
    “Why?”
    “We might get to see each other once in a while. It’s not too far to Wyecross. And, of course, I couldn’t stay in Wyecross with you, because Charlie thinks I’m Goodwin’s niece.”
    “You hope.”
    We got into San Antonio around eight p.m. She went to a hotel, while I took my bags around to the bus station and checked them. The next bus going west was at ten-forty-five. I met her in the lobby and we went out for dinner, both of us a little quiet.
    Afterward we climbed down the steps at the end of one of the bridges and walked along beside the river. It ran through the middle of the city in a series of little pools and falls, with stone walks and benches along the banks. The night was brilliantly clear and a little frosty, and straight up beyond the glow of the city you could see the cold shine of desert stars.
    She was wearing a gray fur coat with the collar turned up against her cheek, and a crazy little hat was perched on one side of the tousled red hair with a sort of schoolgirl carelessness. She was very lovely.
    We stopped and watched the shine of lights on the water.
    “Mike, do you remember—” she began.
    “No,” I said. “I have a poor memory.”
    “Why?
    “It broke down. Overload, I think.”
    “It’s too bad.”
    “Isn’t it?”
    According to the best scientific theories, a girl has no glamour, enchantment, mystery, or attraction for the man who has known her since she was three years old and who has fought with her and played cowboys with her and swum off sand bars with her under the blazing sun on tropical rivers the color of coffee and who has been married to her and has fought with her again and who has been divorced from her and has forgotten her entirely in two years. It’s very scientific. I made myself watch the lights.
    “What time does your bus leave, Mike?”
    “In about an hour.”
    “Do you have to go tonight?”
    There wasn’t anybody else around. I turned away from the lights on the water and they were shining in her eyes until she closed them, and the lashes were very long like shadows on her face when I raised my head after a while and looked at her.
    “No,” I said.

Four
    When I began to see the sand I knew I was almost there. Beyond the rusty strands of barbed wire it stretched away toward the horizon on both sides of the highway in desolate and wind-ruffled dunes, with only a tumbleweed or gaunt mesquite here and there to break the monotony of it. Then I could see the water tank up ahead.
    Wyecross was a bleak little town lost in the desert like a handful of children’s toys dropped and scattered along the highway. It was afternoon now under a sky like a blue glass bowl, and the three blocks of the business district were half asleep in the glare of the sun. I climbed down at the bus station and stood on the high sidewalk while the driver dug the