The Missing Person by Doris Grumbach

even in those boots he could see they were fine legs. Demp watched her drop heavily into a chair at a corner table. She ordered something, he could not hear what, and then the waiter brought her a beer. He watched her sip it. It was hard to see her face under the brim of her canvas cap and behind the wide green sunglasses she wore. He wondered: Why does she need them in here? She must be bats or something .
    He was used to the farm women in Prairie City who dressed in men’s work clothes, but for some reason she seemed different. Under the drab jacket and pants, he sensed a girl, not a woman. He wondered at the bulky clothes. Watching her steadily, he was the first on his feet when he saw her head go down on the tabletop.
    Bill Eddy had risen too. “That guy back there is drunk already. Pretty early in the day.” He looked, then laughed, and sat down.
    Demp moved as fast as if he were avoiding a red-dogging. He was halfway to the back of the room before the others noticed he had gone. He slid into the chair beside the girl. Her head coming down had pushed over her glass. He could smell the spilled beer. Her hat had fallen from her head onto the table; he saw her hair, silk, yellow hair. I knew it , he thought. She’s just a kid .
    â€œAre you all right?” His voice was hoarse with concern. He pushed her hair out of the beer, but she did not move. Then he heard high, wet sounds. She was crying. His heart beat so fast he thought he would pass out, feeling the terror he always had when a woman cried in his presence.
    â€œHey. Hey . Stop that.” He tried to lift her head from the table, but she shook it away from his hands. He sat still, waiting. Suddenly she twisted and lifted her face. Her sunglasses, askew, fell into the beer, and he saw her face. At once he knew who she was—the purity of those eyes, bright and childlike from fresh tears, the unmistakable glow of that face on which the dirt was streaked, the caked pieces of black on her eyelids, that cleft in her left cheek, the sharp, lovely peak of her hairline. He recognized, of course, and at the same time (he was to remember this as long as he lived) he knew, beyond any doubt, that he loved her.
    â€œFranny Fuller,” he said aloud to himself and then, too late, realized his mistake. She heard him, pushed back from the table, and stood up, pulled a bill from a jacket pocket and put it down in the beer. He stood up as she brushed past him. He could smell her—sour, unwashed, female. He gestured to the boys at the table, a low, hip-level wave with his right hand as though warning them off. Behind him he heard someone snicker. But so intent was he not to lose sight of her that he did not respond and, for that matter, never saw those men again on that trip.
    A few doors beyond El Chico’s he caught up to her.
    â€œWhoa there a minute. Wait up.”
    She stopped and whispered, “Leave me alone, Please.”
    â€œI can’t,” he said, feeling his heart turn over with pity. “Let me help you. Please.”
    â€œYou can’t help me. Go away.”
    Demp walked beside her and said nothing. Her shoulders shook, she shuffled along in the thick boots, her blond hair pouring out of the cap she had jammed down over it.
    â€œWhere are you staying?” he asked.
    â€œWhere am I staying,” she said.
    â€œA hotel? What hotel? A house?”
    She hesitated a long time. Then she said: “The Y.”
    â€œOh, come on. Someone like you at the Y?”
    â€œSomeone like me,” she said. There seemed to be some obscure comment in her flat repetition of what he said to her, but he could not understand what she meant by it.
    â€œA movie star, like you.”
    They arrived in front of a building that looked to Demp like a Y. He waited for her to stop but she shuffled on, as though she had not noticed where she was. Or maybe , he thought, she made that up about the Y .
    â€œWhy do you wear all those