Big City Girl (4 page)

Beyond the country store the highway swung west again and dropped toward the river bottom in a long grade. Sewell Neely knew this stretch of road very well and he could picture all of it for the next ten miles his mind as the car gathered speed through the rain. Six years ago he had worked in a sawmill a few miles beyond and had fished a lot in the river on Sundays and days when the mill was idle. When you came this way from the east, there were two small bridges, over sloughs, then the big concrete and steel bridge over the main channel of the river itself. Between the last two bridges, the road ran straight across the bottom on a high fill that was twenty feet above the swamp in some places, and at the base of the fill, on both sides, there was rank growth of young willows and cane that had sprung up since the road was built.

He turned his head and looked out the back window. There were no headlights behind them, and up ahead their own lights bored into the empty night with the rain curving and slanting into them in long silver streaks rushing out of the darkness.

They came down off the grade and over the first bridge going very fast. He sat relaxed in the corner with the manacled hand lying on the seat, seeing the glow of Harve’s cigarette, and waiting. George was driving too fast, he knew, but if you were going to do it this was the best place. It was a good, friendly place because he loved river country and there was something a little like being at home about it, especially at night like this in the rain, with nobody around. It would be a good clean, sudden, and violent thing anyway, and better than a lifetime of slow rot with everything leaking out of you a little at a time instead of all at once, the way it should be.

He had always heard that at a time like this you thought of your home, if you had any, and your family and childhood and things like that, but for some reason the only thoughts that came to him were of the river, this one coming toward them at sixty-live miles an hour, the river on Sunday afternoons in late summer, very slow then, and clear, with white perch biting if you were lucky enough to have shiners for bait. And suddenly, for the first time in years, he remembered the girl who had been fishing there alone one drowsy afternoon toward he end of summer, the way she had run from him, squealing with what he thought was terror until she had stopped and he saw she was laughing, and afterward the primitive violence of the two of them desecrating and destroying the somnolent hush among the big trees of the bottom, the heat, and the sweat, and the one bunded arm outflung along the ground, turning, and the hand clutching agonizingly at the grass.

That’s a hell of a thing to be remembering now, he thought, and rose out of the seat and came forward over George, reaching for the wheel with his left hand. Harve screamed and the rear end of the car skidded sickeningly as it went down off the road and started to roll, going over sideways once and then end-for-end slantwise down the steep embankment and through the young willows like some mortally wounded big insensate mechanical animal in the extremes of its death agony.

He was at home again, lying in his bed close under the sheet-metal roof and listening to the rain coming down at night. There was a vast silence broken only !by the peaceful drumming on the roof above him and he wanted to turn over and go back to sleep again, listening to it, but Mitch had fastened their arms together and then had fallen out of bed and was pulling his right arm out of its socket. It was a crazy thing for Mitch to do, he thought. Get back in bed, Mitch, and listen to the rain. You can’t work in the cotton today. Quit worrying about it and stop pulling on my arm and just listen to the rain.

Then Mitch was gone and it was Harve who was pulling on his arm. Harve was somewhere in the darkness in the rear of the car and he was in the front, lying with his shoulders on the seat and his legs across George’s neck. The car had come to rest almost upright, sitting on its wheels but tipped downward in front and canting over to the left, apparently leaning against a tree. The lights were out and the motor had stopped running and the only sounds were those of the rain and the ticking of the motor as it cooled. Then he could hear Harve beginning to moan softly somewhere in the back. He moved, wondering what was broken, and could feel nothing but the terrible pulling on his arm.

He swung his legs up off George and pulled himself up on the back of the seat to get the weight off his arm and then came suddenly up against the top of the car. It was crushed inward until there was barely clearance enough between it and the top of the seat back for hm to slide over, but he made it and fell onto the floor, feeling Harve under him. Both rear doors were sprung open and he could feel rain coming in on the back of his head.

Harve was moaning under him and he tried to find out which way he was lying, running his free hand along his body and feeling for something he would recognize. He found Harve’s tie and followed it up to his throat and then went back along the torso looking for the gun belt. He found it, feeling the leather loops with the cartridges in them, and moved his hand on around. For a second it reminded him of running his hand along a girl’s body and he laughed, thinking of the grotesque idea of Harve’s slapping him, and wondered if he had been knocked crazy by the shock.

The gun was jammed in the holster between Harve’s leg and the floor and it took him a long time to work it free. Harve was regaining consciousness now.

“Get off me, you sonofabitch,” the deputy said thickly.

Sewell had the gun free now and he cocked it, doing it awkwardly with his left hand. Harve recognized the sharp metallic click as the hammer came back and caught and then he screamed.

“Jesus Christ, Neely, don’t! For God’s sake!”

Sewell could see nothing at all in the absolute blackness, but he brought the gun up in his left hand guided by the open and screaming mouth so near his face. Harve’s right arm must be pinned under him, he thought, or he would have grabbed my hand by this time. The gun was inches in front of his own face and he remembered to close his eyes against powder burn.

“Oh, God!” Harve cried out, and then he shot, feeling the gun jump in his hand.

When he felt Harve’s body strain upward and then go suddenly limp and relaxed under him, like some grotesque travesty on coitus and its climax, he felt slightly ill for a moment and wanted to get away. He had killed two men in his life but never one in this way before. One of them had been in a fight with another hoodlum and he had felt nothing at all afterward except relief that he hadn’t been killed himself, and the other was a man he had shot in a holdup, but the man had not died until two days later and he had not seen him die. He had only read about it in the papers.

But now he wanted to get away from Harve as soon as possible and he backed out the opened door, dragging the deputy’s body after him by the handcuff, and let it fall into the mud beside the car. With his left hand he began going quickly through the pockets in search of the handcuff keys, and then he suddenly thought of George. He stood up, sliding the body of Harve along through the mud so he could reach in the front window. The car was only a darker mass than the night, blurred and indistinct, but he could make out that it was tilted quite far over toward him and resting against the bole of a tree just in front of the door, the fender and hood pushed in by the tree and the whole weight of the car supported by it. He felt for the door handle, but it had been broken off and the door had been jammed when the top was crushed down. He leaned his head and shoulders and left arm in through the shattered and constricted window, being careful of the slivers of glass remaining. George was slumped forward with the broken steering wheel in his chest, and when he placed a hand on his throat there was no pulse at all and the head slewed sideways with an ugly limpness that made him take the hand away.

He hunkered down beside Harve and began searching for the key again. Rain sluiced down and the clothes were soaked and it was difficult getting his hand into the wet pockets. Ankle-deep mud sucked at shoes, and when he turned Harve over to get at the his pockets they were full of mud too. He found some loose change and a wallet, and he opened the wallet up, feeling in it for the picture he was sure was in it and not even remembering about the money until hours afterward when it was too late. His fingers located the slick surface of it and drew it out, and he threw the wallet into the mud. It was too dark to see whether it was the right picture, but he was sure it was, and he slipped if into the breast pocket of his coat, grinning coldly in the darkness and all the sick feeling gone. Maybe I’ll live long enough to give it back to the lousy bitch, he thought.

There,was a pocketknife and, at last, a key ring with four keys on it. He began trying to fit them one at time into the slot on the face of the handcuffs, feeling the slot with his forefinger to locate it and orient the key and then bringing the key against it and turning gently in an effort to insert it. When each one proved to be too large he slid it carefully around the ring clockwise, counting, and tried the next one. After he had gone around twice he knew they were all too large and were car keys and door keys and he threw them into the mud, cursing. Harve did not have it.

He stood up and put his head and arm into the front window again. George had to have it now, but reaching into and searching all his pockets was going to be slow and laborious, if not almost impossible, having to do it from this window, with one hand, and with the heavy weight of Harve pulling on him. He knew it I would be absolutely impossible to get George out of the car, with the doors jammed shut and only one hand to work with, and he could not reach the body at all from the other window. But he had to have the key. He was beginning to react to the urgency of it, aware of just how many more hours he had until daylight and knowing he had to be far from here by the time the wreck was discovered. A man less tough would have been going to pieces with panic by now. .

He began with the pockets of the coat, not really expecting to find the key in any of them, but because he had to eliminate them in order to narrow the search and because they were easy to reach and the logical place to start. The shirt pocket was next, but there was nothing there except a package of cigarettes.

It took a long time to get into the right-hand trousers pocket, reaching across and bending his wrist and working into it a little at a time. He pulled the pocket lining out, feeling everything very carefully as it dropped onto the seat. There was some change and a knife, but nothing else.

He was wondering how he was going to get into the left-hand pocket, with George leaning against the door because of the way the car was tilted, when he remembered the watch pocket. He hurriedly slipped two fingers into it and then felt a wild burst of elation as the fingertips brushed against a small sliver of steel at the bottom. He hooked it with the fingers and drew it out and knew by the shape and feel that it was the key and that in a minute he would be free of the hated weight of Harve and could run. He withdrew his head from the window and started to bring out his arm with the key held between the fingers, but he forgot the jagged splinters of glass still remaining in the doorframe. One of them sliced into his forearm, cutting through the coat sleeve and raking deeply into the flesh, and he jumped.

There was a tiny, musical tinkle as the key bounced once on the doorframe, and then there was an age-long void of waiting with only the sound of the rain and the pounding of blood in his ears. It was gone somewhere into the mud and the impenetrable blackness around him.

Mitch lay on his narrow cot in the shed behind the house and listened to the slow drip of water from the eaves. The violent downpour of that afternoon was gone but at dark the sky had been sullen and heavy, with weeping drizzle that might go on for days.

It was a hot night in spite of the rain, and he lay there sweating in just his underwear, with no cover over him thinking of Sewell and of the crop they were going to lose if it didn’t stop raining, and trying to think of Joy without seeing her, which he had found out some time ago was not easy to do. It was a job that could have been accomplished easily enough by another woman, this clinical probing into the troublemaking potentialities of the inner Joy without being disturbed by the body the lived in, but for a man twenty-three and too long woman-less it was almost impossible to achieve. The problem itself was simple enough. In his opinion she was a tramp and he couldn’t see how Sewell had married her in the first place—forgetting, illogically, Sewell’s own flagrant contempt for morality—but he had, and there it was. You could see she was a bad influence on Jessie and she was going to cause trouble with those Jimerson boys, especially with Cal, if she didn’t quit waving it at them like that, because there would be trouble and plenty of it before there’d be any dogs sniffing after a hot bitch around the Neely place with Jessie taking it all in. All that was simple and easy to understand, but what were you going to do about the fact that you couldn’t think about it without seeing her and you didn’t want to see her when you were lying there alone in the hot darkness with the ache in you. The mind possessed the ability to sort the accessible and the inaccessible into two clearly defined and neatly labeled little pastures with the insurmountable boundary fence running down between them, and to illuminate all this neatness and happy segregation with the clear, bright light of reason, but the sad fact always remained that this helpful light never extended any farther south in a man than the bottom side of his brain, and from there on down the rest of him was operating in a gorged and distorted sort of wine-colored twilight where one luscious and long-legged bitch sticking too far and too tantalizingly out of a sun suit looked just like any other bitch doing the same thing.

She could have gone somewhere else, he thought, driving her off in the darkness. Why in hell did she have to come here?

He heard running footsteps spatting on the rain-packed sand of the yard, and a white wraith appeared n the doorway.

“Mitch,” it whispered. “Are you asleep, Mitch?”

“What’s the matter, Jessie?” he asked. “Come inside. You’ll get wet there in the door.”

He sat up on the cot and moved his tobacco off the box and pushed the box out for her to sit on. She located it with her hands and sat down. He rolled a cigarette and raked a match across the bottom of the cot. It flared, and he could see her sitting up very straight on the box, with her hands folded in her lap, the long shapeless sack of a muslin nightgown coming down to her unlaced shoes and her brown hair tousled and damp with the rain. She looked like a solemn and somewhat frightened child, and she had been crying.

“He was Sewell’s dog, Mitch,” she said defiantly.

“Yes,” he said. Damn Sewell. Damn the old man. Damn me because I can’t help her.

“He can’t sell old Mexico. You won’t let him, will you, Mitch?”

“How can you stop him? You know how he is.”

“Can’t you just tell him no?”

Can you say no to the river with a minnow seine? Mitch thought. Can you hold water in a basket? Water is soft and wishy-washy and it don’t fight back, but while you’re holding it in one place it’ll get away from you somewhere else. It’ll be the same way it was about that last car. We argued with him till we were blue in face and he says yes, yes, it’d take some thought, can’t rush into nothing, reckon we really can’t afford to buy no car, sliding away from you like water all the time, and then he goes and spends every cent of the money on a broken-down bunch of junk that don’t run a month.

“He’s going to the pen, Mitch. All his life he’ll in the pen, and now we won’t even have Mexico.” She began crying very quietly in the darkness and Mitch reached out and took hold of her hands, feeling awkward and foolish because she was his sister and raging inside because there was nothing he could do.

She quit after a while because she wasn’t much given to crying and because she realized she was just making Mitch feel worse.

“Do you think he did it. Mitch?”

“Did what?” he asked.

“All those horrible things they said he did. Do you think it’s true? You knew him better than anybody else. Do you think he held up people and shot at the police and beat up people for gamblers? What do gamblers want people beat up for? And if they had to, why didn’t they
do
it themselves and not get Sewell mixed up in it? Do you think he did those things?”

“Yes,” he said. She’d know it if I tried to lie to her, he thought.

“But why? Why, Mitch?”

“Jessie, I don’t know.”

“He used to make wagons for me. At Christmas. With wheels sawed off the end of a round sweet-gum log.”

I reckon an argument like that wouldn’t hold up in court, he thought, but it would take a long time to explain to her why it wouldn’t.

“Do you remember the wagons, Mitch?”

“Yes,” he said, dropping the cigarette on the ground and looking down at the red coal. “I remember.”

“And the rawhide harness he made for Mexico to pull the wagon with? That was just one year. I was too big the next year for Mexico to pull me.”

It’s fine, Mitch thought, when you’re as tough as Sewell and they can’t hurt you. Sewell’s so stinking tough nobody can hurt him.

After Jessie had gone out Joy lay on her back in the dark room in her bed, across from the small one Jessie slept in, and wondered if it was going to happen again tonight. For some time, and especially the past few weeks, she had had trouble in the dark. It would begin with the gradual appearance before her, whether her eyes were open or closed, of a bust of herself something like the one there had been in the high-school library of Shakespeare or maybe it was Daniel Webster or some other famous writer, except that it was unclothed and somewhat more comprehensive as to detail below the neckline and a little longer to include a full view of her breasts. Then the horrifying part of it would start. It wouldn’t matter that she had looked at herself, or this much of herself, quite searchingly and thoroughly in the mirror not an hour ago, just before she went to bed. It would still happen. The breasts would be leathery and sagging, and her face would be lined, not really wrinkled like that of an old, old woman, but just faintly tracked across by time, like the face of a woman in her late thirties or forties in too strong a light. It would be the same face, there would be no mistaking that, with the little brown beauty mark of a mole just beyond the corner of the slightly pouting red-lipped mouth, but there would be now the revealing evidences that flesh has weight and can fall, and the skin would be coarser and all the pathetic camouflage of make-up would not be able to hide entirely the pitiless erosion of the years. Then would begin the panicky urge to fly from the bed and turn on the light to look in the mirror and drive it away. She would lie perfectly still and try not to think about the mirror, the way a man with bladder trouble would try not to think of the bathroom so far away down the hall. It’s not true, she would tell herself. There’s no sign of it. And then she would start to hear again the brutal laughter of Sewell there in the jail.

Three years ago he wouldn’t have done that, she thought. Not even two years ago. I could have anything I wanted then. God, do you suppose I’ve lost that much of it in three years? I couldn’t have. I can’t tell any difference at all when I look in the mirror. I look just the same. I do. I know I do. I had a picture of myself then an held it up alongside the mirror, they’d look just alike.

Didn’t that man in the bus station try to pick me up when I asked him how to get out here? Didn’t he get that old look in his face and offer to drive me out? Oh, hell, he was forty-five, and one of those small-town smart alecks that’ll make a pass at anything that’s alive as long as ain’t his own wile. The wheezy old bastard, smelling like tobacco juice. Then making me walk the last hall mile.

But there was that deputy sheriff up there where Sewell was in jail, the one named Harve. He wasn’t even married and he didn’t seem to think I was any old relic. He was a great kidder and a lot of fun to go out with and he could make a girl feel like somebody still wanted her, even if he did have that funny habit of laughing sometimes when nobody had said anything. And that photographer from the Houston paper who came up to take pictures of the trial and wanted me to pose without any clothes on for his private collection. I guess he thought I still looked all right, because who ever heard of collecting pictures of old bags? I guess he knew a good-looking girl when he saw one, even if he was a kind of screwy sort of stew bum and said things that didn’t make sense, like calling me Narcissus all the time like that was my name. Narcissus. That does have a cute sound. He was cute, too, in a way, even if he was a stew bum. He never wanted anything except to take pictures of me like an artist’s model, and I liked that. Men are so damn messy and rough, always wanting to go to bed with you. But he was nice. It was a cute picture, too, and I wish I’d kept it, the copy he gave me, but Harve wanted it so bad I just had to give it to him.

I haven’t changed a bit. I just worry too much, being stranded in a dump like this without any money and not knowing how I’ll ever get out of it. Imagine, thinking I’m beginning to look faded and washed out when I’m only twenty-five. That’s a laugh. I don’t know why I get to imagining these things. Why, right now, as much as I detest him, if I even just smiled at Mitch he’d be pestering me all the time. God knows, I wouldn’t have him on a bet, but if I gave him any encouragement he’d be following me around like an old dog. Him and his stuck-up airs, pretending to look right past me like I wasn’t even there and acting like he thought I wasn’t good enough to be around that kid when all I’d have to do would be to crook my little finger at him and he’d be hanging around till I’d get sick of the sight of him. I’d do it, too, if it was worth the trouble.

It was sometime after midnight when Sewell Neely came up the steep, slippery incline of the road bed and onto the pavement. Rain was still coming down and every thread of his clothing had been saturated and drowned for hours. Water ran out of his hair, and sloshed in his shoes when he walked, and ran into and stung the ugly cut on his arm where the glass had raked it. Harve’s gun was a comforting, hard weight in his coat pocket, and the handcuffs dangled from his right arm. They were still locked, but the other cuff was empty.

I wouldn’t never want to do it again, he thought. But there wasn’t any other way. In the movies they open locks with guns, but I don’t think these here are movie hand-cuff’s and I’ve often wondered where all that hot lead goes when it splatters off of steel locks. But if it had to be done, I’m glad it was Harve. Nobody ever appreciated a good joke like Harve did, and he’s got one now that’ll stay with him. He was a great clown, all right, even if most of his ideas was old before he ever heard of ‘em, all except that one with the picture. That was a pretty good one, and Harve was just the boy that could help you along with it.

He turned right and started walking in the direction the car had been traveling when it crashed. When he reached the middle of the long bridge and could hear the river going by down below, he took the knife out of his pocket and threw it as far as he could into the darkness.