Alice turns the slim blade over in her hand. “How’d you learn to make arrowheads?”

“Well, its a long story. I found my first one when I was five. A little white one about like that. It was broken, though, not much count. I got off my horse and picked it up, and then I picked up another piece of that same white flint, and later on I started knocking pieces off of it. I just kindly taught myself how. For a while I worked down there at Tahlequah making arrowheads for a tourist shop.”

“I can’t get over that. That’s something.”

“Oh, it isn’t. We used to make ever kind of thing, when I was a kid. We’d make blowguns out of river cane. Heat it over a fire, straighten it out. You blow a little arrow through there, it’s good for killing a bird or a squirrel.” Cash laughs.

“Not that good, though. Now I use a rifle.”

Alice wonders what it would be like to have a man go out and kill food for you. She opens the door and steps down from the truck before she can let herself think about it too long. Cash gets out too, and lifts one of the heavy pails out of the truck bed.

“There’s a stomp dance coming up, Saturday week,” he tells her.

“I know. Sugar’s been talking about it.”

“You planning on going?”

“I could.”

“You want to plan on driving over there with me? I’d be happy to take you.”

“All right,” she says. “I’ll see you.”

Alice feels his eyes on her as she retreats to Sugar’s front door. When she hears the truck kick up again, she turns and waves. His glasses twinkle as he pulls away with his arm trailing out the window.

Alice doesn’t recall the sensation of romantic love; it has been so long she might not know it if it reared up and bit her. All she knows is that this man, Cash Stillwater, chose her. He saw her somewhere and picked her out. That single thought fills Alice with a combination of warmth and hope and indigestion that might very well be love.

26

OLD FLAME

ON THE NIGHT OF THE stomp dance, Cash comes to fetch Alice at a quarter to twelve. It had seemed to Alice a late hour to begin a date, but Sugar has assured her that the dances start late and run all night. “Cinderella wouldn’t of had a chance with this crowd,” Sugar tells her. “She’d of gone back all raggedy before anybody important even showed up.”

Alice snaps on her pearl earrings and hopes for better luck.

In Cash’s truck, she teases about the hour as they drive through the woods. “I’m not so sure I know you well enough to stay out all night,” she says.

“We’ll have about two hundred chaperones,” he says, a grin widening his broad face. “If I know my sister Letty, they’ll all be keeping a pretty good eye on us.”

Alice feels strangely excited by the idea that people are talking about herself and Cash.

“Can I ask you a question?” she asks.

“Shoot.”

“I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I’m sorry, I can’t remember the first time we met.”

He glances at her, and the dashboard lights glint on the curved lower rims of his glasses. “First time I seen you was on Sugar Hornbuckle’s front stoop, the day we went berry picking.”

“Well, how in the world?” Alice doesn’t quite know how to go on.

“Did I think to call you up?” Cash asks.

“Yes.”

“Letty told me.” He looks at Alice again, bringing the truck to a complete, unnecessary stop at a quiet intersection on a thoroughly deserted road. Alice has her window rolled all the way down and can hear birds in the forest, fussing themselves into whatever activity it is birds perform at night.

“She let me know you was interested,” Cash says finally.

Alice is stupefied. “Well, I would have been, if I’d known you from the man in the moon, but I didn’t. Sugar told me, she said Letty said…” She can’t finish.

Cash begins to laugh. He tips his straw cowboy hat far back on his head, smacks the top of the steering wheel with both his palms, and laughs some more. Alice merely stares.

“You have to know my sister Letty.” He runs his index finger under his lower eyelids, behind his glasses. “Oh, law,” he says. “If she had free run of this world, she’d like to get that Pope fellow fixed up with some nice widow woman.”

Alice blushes deeply in the dark.

Cash reaches across and brushes Alice’s cheek with the back of his hand before driving on. “And every once in a while,” he says, “the old gal chases a pair of folks up the right stump.”