Big City Girl (10 page)

Joy lay on her bed in the hot, close-pressing darkness and listened to the soft breathing of the younger girl across the room. It had been almost a half hour since she had heard the sibilant scuffing of Mitch’s bare feet on the sand in the back yard and had seen the light glow through the battenless crack in the back wall of the room. She knew he had come up on the back porch and lit the lantern for something, then there was the retreating snup, snup, snup of his feet going away toward the barn, and the light had faded away.

What was he doing out there at this time of night? she wondered. There wasn’t even any way of knowing what time it was, for she had been lying awake for hours, long after Jessie had gone to sleep. She wondered if the hatred would ever let her sleep again. Closing her eyes, she could see him now, going somewhere with the lantern, down the trail toward the bottom perhaps, lank, straight-backed, bitter-faced, and hateful, and the vision made her sick with rage. Her mind swung, hate-lured, to one of the facets of her dream. She was driving a Cadillac along a tree-shaded boulevard, young and radiant in a gold lamé evening gown, while a handsome young millionaire made love to her at her side, and saw Mitch lying in a ditch beside the road with an arm outstretched in beseeching agony and the thin, harsh angularity of his face bearing the ravages of some loathsome disease like leprosy. She stopped, the car and went back to bend over him, and when he looked up in supplication she spat full in his face and laughed, and went on laughing with contempt and scorn, pointing at him so the young man in the car could laugh too. Oh, God, she thought, isn’t there anything I can do to him? If there was something, if there was some way to hurt him I could sleep again.

Suddenly she heard the faint sound of an automobile across the oppressive stillness and wondered whose it was. It came on down the sand-hill road leading in from the highway, and then turned, going along the hill toward the Jimerson place. It was probably Cal or Prentiss, she thought, coming home from a dance. It went on, the sound fading away, and then it stopped. She was sure she had heard the motor sound die abruptly. But why would anybody stop up there? She must have been mistaken. It had probably just gone around a bend in the road.

Minutes dragged by and she forgot about it. I’m going to the if I don’t go to sleep, she thought. If there was just some way I could hurt him, and see I was hurting him, and have him know I was seeing and was doing it on purpose so he would know how much I loathe and despise him and hate him and have ever since the first time I ever saw him, and that I was just making fun of him and laughing at him when I did that, when he shoved me. Oh, God, help me do it.

She held her breath a moment and lay still, listening. What was it she had heard, out there in the yard? Terror ran through her for an instant and she wanted to scream, but held it in. Was it Mitch, still wandering around outside? No, there it was again and it was not the sound his bare feet had made or the sure, arrogant, fast-legged walk of Mitch at all. Whoever it was seemed to be walking erratically; there would be two or three steps in hurried succession and then a sudden and pregnant silence as they stopped. She sat up in bed, thinking again of the car and the way the motor had stopped.

“Joy!” The hoarse whisper floated in through the window. She turned and could see nothing in the blackness. Oh, it’s that stupid Cal Jimerson, she thought with a sigh of relief. That was his car up there in the road. He must be drunk, or crazy. Is he dumb enough to think I’m going to go out there when Jessie’s right here in the same room?

She slipped silently out of bed and stepped to the window on bare feet, hurriedly, to stop him before he could make any more noise. She put her hands on the sill and looked out. It was too dark to see anything but the shadowy bulk of him against the night.”Hush, you crazy fool!” she whispered. “Go away.”

“H’lo, Joy,” he said, not whispering, but low-voiced. She could smell the sour stink of the whiskey. “Got drink in the car. Come out, let’s talk. Want to talk to you.”

“Go home, you crazy idiot,” she hissed fiercely. “You’re drunk.”

Then she heard Jessie stir on the bed behind her. Panic seized her and she leaned forward with an arm outstretched to put a hand over his mouth, if she could find it, before he could speak again.

Jessie was sitting up in bed. “Joy, what is it?”

At the same instant she felt Cal’s hand close over her arm and start to pull, and in a bursting flash of inspiration so fast it was almost pure reflex she cried out with terror in her voice, “Mitch! Turn me loose, Mitch. Please!”

Her thigh and knees bumped the sill as she fell through the window on top of the stupidly weaving Cal. He caught her and staggered, almost falling. When her feet were on the ground she swung a hand, hard, and it exploded against his face with a sharp slap audible across the clearing. She wrestled out of his arms and hit him again and he moved back; then, as it began to penetrate his drunkenness that there was too much noise and everybody was going to be awake in a minute, he turned and started running toward the road.

She fell, sobbing, to the ground just as Jessie came running around the side of the house.

“Joy, where are you? Are you hurt?” the younger girl was crying anxiously. She saw the white blur of the night gown and knelt down hurriedly beside the figure sprawled in the sand.

“Did he hurt you? Are you all right?” She put a hand on Joy’s heaving shoulder, but got no answer except sobs. She slid an arm tenderly under Joy’s head and helped her to sit up.

“Can you stand up?” she asked. “Put your arm over my shoulder, honey. And raise up when I stand up.”

Joy got to her feet with her arm about the young girl’s shoulders and they went around the corner and into the house, walking slowly while she still shook with crying. She collapsed on the bed in tragic and shaken helplessness while Jessie struck a match to light the lamp.

Soft yellow light flooded the room and Jessie went over to the window and pulled the curtains, then closed the door. Joy lay listening to her, and when Jessie came over to the bed she turned on her back and drew a hand across her eyes to wipe away the tears.

“I—I’m all right, honey,” she said shakily. “It was just the—the awful scare. He ran away, and the fall didn’t hurt me.”

“Are you sure?” Jessie implored anxiously. “Are you sure you didn’t break anything?” She pulled down her nightgown and brushed sand from the sheet, fussing over her.

“Yes,” Joy said bravely. “I’m all right, honey.”

Jessie’s fright was over now and her smooth child’s face was growing white with anger. The nostrils of the pert nose were pinched and pale, and her chin was more stubborn than Joy had ever seen it. The large blue eyes did not look like those of a child at all.

“How did it happen, Joy?” she asked ominously. “I just heard you scream as I sat up in bed, and the next thing you fell out of the window. You screamed something about Mitch. Was it him?”

This is where I have to do it right, Joy thought. It would be so easy to overdo it and botch it. And I wish I didn’t have to do it. Not to this kid, because she
is
sweet, but I’d do anything to her or anybody else I had to if it was the only way to get even with that bastard.

“I—I don’t know, Jessie,” she said. “I don’t think it was. It must have been somebody else. I don’t think Mitch would do a thing like that.” Her voice quivered.

“But I
heard
you say Mitch! That was what you screamed just as you fell.”

Joy shook her head, nobly and with an infinite sadness. “No, that wasn’t— I mean, what it was, I must have just screamed to Mitch  help. I mean, he’s the only man around, and—”

“Joy! Trying to cover up for him is all right, and I might know you’d do it, you’re so sweet; but I know what I heard. And I haven’t forgot what he was trying to do when you went out there to the well tonight. I saw that!”

Joy gave way to tears again for a minute, but regained control of herself. She had just heard Cal’s automobile start up there on the road. “No, Jessie,” she said wanly, “I just don’t know. It’s such an awful thing, I wouldn’t accuse Mitch of it unless I was absolutely sure. I just don’t think it was.”

“We’ll see,” Jessie said ominously. She got up off the bed and started toward the door.

“Where are you going?” Joy asked in alarm. “Out to his room. I’ll find out.”

“No, Jessie,” Joy urged piteously. “Don’t go out there. Whoever it was might be still around. It’s too dangerous.”

“They won’t bother me,” Jessie said, her eyes snapping with anger. She opened the door and went out.

If Mitch is there, Joy thought, if he’s come back, all I have to do is say I told you so, I knew it wasn’t Mitch. And if he
hasn’t
come back I don’t have to say anything. Nobody would ever be able to convince her it wasn’t him, especially after that thing tonight. He’s a stupid cluck; he’d fall for anything.

Jessie was back in a minute. “He wasn’t even there,” she said angrily. “And you were trying to cover up for him, Joy!”

“I just didn’t know for sure, honey,” Joy said sadly. “Maybe it was just a joke.”

“A joke!”

Jessie stood in the middle of the room with her whole small body radiating anger for a minute; then she went slowly over to her own bed and sat down. Her shoulders slumped, as if with tiredness, and she seemed to collapse in some odd manner without changing size or position, just as if the fierce energy of her spirit had suddenly wilted and let her fall in on herself. She did not cry or say anything for a long time. The wide blue eyes were dry as she looked down at her scuffed, unlaced shoes, but there was an uncomprehending look of hurt in them that was worse than tears.

Joy left her alone. She lay on her bed, waiting. There’s no use in saying anything more now, she thought. Let her say it. I’m a lousy bitch, all right. I guess I always have been. But there wasn’t any other way to get even with him.

After a while Jessie looked up. “Joy,” she asked quietly, “when you get the money from your friend, and get ready to leave, do you think I could go with you?”

“Do you want to leave here, honey?”

“Yes. I want to go away.”

“Of course you can go with me, baby. We can make out some way.”

They turned the light out in a few minutes and Joy lay for a while thinking about it. So he thinks I’m not good enough for the kid to be around, she thought. Well, I guess now he’s right, but he sure as hell ain’t going to like it, knowing he is.

Then, for the first time since Mitch had shoved her contemptuously into the dirt, she dropped off to sleep.

When would it start?

It was like waiting for an explosion after the fuse had been touched off, The four small needle-like punctures in his wrist and hand were nothing, like a fuse burning, and not very painful, but somewhere inside him the mysterious chemistry of the venom waited to begin its slow-burning explosion that would swell and blacken his body and bring death in the end.

Even in that chilling first minute after the snake had hit he had not even considered calling out to the men and surrendering. It had not occurred to him, and if it had he would have brushed it aside. It did not matter that they could have rushed him to a doctor for treatment and saved him. For what? he would have thought. The electric chair?

The tree swung lazily in the eddying brown sweep of the current and he held onto the limb with only his face out of the water, watching the hooded banks and the timber go slowly past in the rain. He could see the men in black raincoats still splashing through the water along the banks, running downstream and intently searching the surface of the flood for him, and knew the trick had fooled them. As long as he did not move or come too far out of the water among the leaves of the small sweet gum, they would not discover him, and with the current carrying him on down the chances were very good that in another mile or less he would be beyond them and they would go on back to the highway and he would be alone with the river.

No, not alone, he thought. I got the snake in me. I’m about as much alone as a woman seven months gone. I got nobody to talk to, but I got company just the same.

Them bastards with the black slickers will go back to the highway after a while, he thought, and they’ll think I drowned or that they got me with that last shot, but that ain’t going to mean they’ll quit looking for me. They’ll go right on till they find something, even if it’s just rotten meat. I couldn’t never get out of here, even if I didn’t have the snake in me.

There was no fear of dying, only a cold and terrible anger at it and regret at the thought of Joy. I had a whole week, he thought, and I never got close to her. A whole week to get her, and it’s all gone now.

The tree swung around a wide bend in the river and for a moment he could see both banks at once behind him. The men with the guns had stopped. He drifted on around the bend and they were out of sight behind him.

Then in a few minutes he began to shake as with a chill and he could feel the first faint, whirling giddiness of nausea pushing upward inside his stomach. So that’s how it starts, he thought.

At dawn it had begun to rain, and the river was spilling over its banks. Mitch came up out of the bottom, walking fast with the extinguished lantern swinging in his hand and urgency prodding his thin-shanked, furious stride. He hung the lantern and his raincoat on the porch and went into the kitchen, the calloused soles of his feet rasping against the worn and silvered planking of the floor. Jessie was cooking breakfast, and looked up without greeting.

“I ain’t got time to eat,” he said. “You got any coffee ready, Jessie?”

She looked through and beyond him, still-faced, un-recognizing. “No,” she said with distant coldness.

He stopped, his mind coming back from the river. “What’s the matter with you?” Then he noticed she was wearing the homemade play suit, which amounted to little more than a pair of too short rompers and a halter.

“I thought I told you to burn that thing,” he said.

“Did you?” she asked without interest.

“I certainly did. Go in there in the bedroom and put on some clothes and hand me that thing. No sister of mine is going around looking like a half-feathered jay bird.

”There was disgust and a cold and infinite contempt in the glance she gave him. “Well, you’ve certainly got a nerve.”

Mitch had never been one to heed warning signals or ask any discreet questions. Frontal assault was the only tactic he had ever learned. Women, even his adored younger sister, were of another race, and the oblique and sometimes devious courses of their mental processes met with no understanding and only scant interest in his forthrightly masculine and uncomplex philosophy. She was his sister, he was older than she was and consequently knew better what was good for her, he loved her, and the clothes she was wearing were indecent—these were all the facts in the case as far as he was concerned, and were sufficient for action. He was no more equipped to cope with the idea that Joy might have put her up to it for the forseen and calculated effect of his inevitable reaction than he was to play a dozen simultaneous and blindfolded games of chess.

“Did you hear what I said, Jessie?”

“I heard you.” She went right on turning over eggs in the frying pan.

“Are you going to do what I told you?”

Now she put the egg turner down in the pan. “I am
not
. I’ll wear what I please, and if I wanted to I’d go naked. It wouldn’t be any of your business.”

His face darkened and he took her by the arm, propelling her toward the bedroom. Surprisingly enough, she went without protest. She walked in and sat down on the bed.

“You can get your own breakfast,” she said with sullen defiance.

“Never mind breakfast. Are you going to change those clothes?”

“No. And you might as well get used to doing your own cooking. Joy is leaving in another day or so and I’m going with her. If it’s any of your business.”

He had closed the door to give her a chance to change. Now he yanked it open with furious suddenness. She was still sitting in the same position on the bed.

“You’re what?” he demanded, not believing he had heard her correctly. “What did you say?”

“I said,” she repeated coldly, “that I was going with Joy. We’re going,to live together in Houston. In an apartment.”

“Well, you can just get that idea out of your head right now,” he snapped. “Any time I let you go off with that—” He stopped. For all his outward assurance he was beginning to feel a vague uneasiness. This wasn’t the Jessie he had always known, sunny, high-spirited, and warmly impulsive. Fiercely independent she had always been, but still levelheaded and loving, and when they had had arguments she had always scolded him like an impudent squirrel. But this sullen-eyed, contemptuous mutiny was something new and a little frightening.

“Where’d you get this crazy idea?” he demanded.

“What business is it of yours?”

He made an effort to control his anger. “It’s plenty of my business. Joy is no woman for you to be around. She’s no good.” Characteristically, out of a hundred possible things he could have said, he had chosen the absolute worst.

Instantly she was a bristling porcupine. “
You
have got the nerve to stand there and say something like that about Joy?
You?
Will you please get out of this room?”

“Well, you ain’t going off with Joy. I’ll tell you that.”

“And just how are you going to keep me from it?”

His face was bleak. “I’ll take a harness strap to you.”

“And you think that’ll stop me?”

Suddenly he knew it wouldn’t. Punishing her couldn’t keep her from leaving. How could it? The moment his back was turned she would be gone if nothing except the fear of punishment kept her here.

Joy was at the bottom of this, he knew. Where was she? He whirled out of the doorway, and then he heard the porch swing creaking. Forgotten for the moment was the flooding river and the danger to the crop in the bottom. That would have to wait a little while longer.

He went down the hall in three furious strides and emerged harsh-laced onto the porch. She was lolling in the swing with one leg double under her and an arm thrown carelessly along the back. There was a fresh blue ribbon in her hair and she had on a short, frilly summer dress scarcely down to her knees. She wore high-heeled red shoes, with no stockings, and one bare leg pushed idly against the floor to keep the swing moving.

She let her head tilt back to look up at him with a lazy smile.

“Well, it’s Mitch. My, don’t you look mad?”

“What’s this Jessie just told me?” he asked curtly.

She shook her head, still smiling. “Goodness, Mitch, how do I know? What
did
she tell you?”

“The hell you don’t know. She says she’s going to go with you when you leave.”

“Oh, yes. Isn’t that sweet of her? She wants to go live with me.”

“Well, she’s not,” he said furiously.

“Why, Mitch? Has she changed her mind?” she asked, wide-eyed.

“I’ll change it for her. She’s not going.”

She dropped the bantering pose for a moment and looked at him with the open hatred in her eyes. “What makes you think so?”

“I won’t let her.”

“And just how do you think you’re going to stop her?”

He was up against the same thing again. He began to feel that the top of his head was going to blow off in the maddening fury of his impotence.

“She’s got her back up about something,” he said, forcing himself to be calm. “I want to know what it is.”

She was smiling again now with an infuriating provocativeness. “Oh, that. She’s mad at you because she thinks it was you that tried to pull me out of the window last night and made me fall.”

“Tried to pull you out of the window? What the hell—”

“Oh, haven’t you heard about that, Mitch? Or have you? Why, just look at what you—I mean, whoever it was—did to my poor legs.”

Still watching him with that tantalizing smile, she reached down and pulled the dress halfway up her long, smooth thighs. “Look at the nasty bruises where I hit the window sill. Now, was that a nice thing for somebody to do? Just to get a girl to come out and play?”

“And you told her I did that?” he asked ominously.

“Oh, no. As a matter of fact, I told her I didn’t think it was you. But she wouldn’t believe me. I don’t know who it was. It just seems to me, though, that it was an awful rough way to try to make a girl. Maybe that’s the only way
you
could, though.”

For a moment he was speechless with the rage that was clotted up inside and choking him. She made no attempt whatever to pull the dress down, and continued to watch him lazily, with that same calculated seductiveness. Deliberately reaching out the long bare leg, she placed the toe of a red shoe against his knee and pushed, setting the swing in motion again.

“But you were talking about Jessie,” she went on. “You don’t have to worry about her, Mitch. A couple of girls can always get by somehow.”

“You lousy tramp!” His arm swung down and across, and the hard flat palm of his hand smacked against the leg with a retort like the slap of a beaver’s tail. The force of it pushed her around in the swing.

She laughed. “You poor, stupid jerk.”

Then they both heard the rapid tattoo of Jessie’s shoes in the hall. Joy huddled in the corner of the swing, the derisive laughter gone now and replaced with a pitiful and abject terror while she put an arm up as if to protect herself against further attack: Jessie hit him from the back like a hurtling terrier, and when he turned she slapped his face.

Contempt in the eyes of a fifteen-year-old girl, he decided, was one of the worst things he had ever faced in his life.