River Girl (24 page)

The roaring and the flight chopped off, straight-walled and clean, against the edge of vacuum. Then I was on my knees in the broken bushes while dam and lake and sky settled into place and sound returned. It was a juke box in the beer joint wailing “Falling in Love with Love” out across the water in the early morning sun, and men were running. I watched them disinterestedly, from far away, wanting only to go to sleep. Then I turned my head a little and saw the car, and I tried to scream.

It had smashed through the young willows and was lying on its side some twenty yards ahead of me, tail down along the front slope of the dam with the rear end of the trunk some four feet above the water. It was balanced precariously on its right, the open seats facing me with all the top and windshield gone, and I could even see the keys dangling from the ignition lock. And it was settling, slipping a little on the smashed greenery beneath and then hanging up, poised, precarious, to break and slip again, trunk first, toward the surface of the lake. I got somehow to my feet and began to run, holding out my arm to point, my body bursting with all the horror of the sound I couldn’t make. The men had almost reached me, running past the car but up on the road above it, ignoring it because they could see no one was in it now. I was almost there when the vanguard piled down off the road and reached me. Plunging into and through them, I took them with me, fighting, pushing, dragging them forward, still moving, trying to reach the keys and trying to form words to tell them, but making only hoarse animal sounds deep inside my throat. I saw the car slip again, and poise, hanging by a whisper to the slope just above the water where it dropped away to a depth of twenty feet against the steep face of the dam.

They thought I was crazy now, but they couldn’t shoot because we were all so tangled together in a writhing mass of men. I could see the saps swinging in the sunlight, and the blows, and could even feel them faintly, like a gentle rain, painless, unreal, without effect, like something happening in a street riot I was watching in a newsreel.

It slid once more. The rear bumper was in the water now and I could see the whole front end rise a little as it balanced, teetering, ready to plunge.

And then, somehow, my voice came back and I was screaming “The trunk! The trunk!” I could hear it, going up and up, above the blaring of the juke box and the meaty sound of fists falling and the raggedness of breathing and all the roaring in my ears. “The trunk! Get her out of the trunk!”

They must have understood, somehow grasped the fact that she was not here and they had not seen her. Some of them broke away from the heaving mass of us and lunged for the keys dangling in the lock.

They got her out just before the car slid into the water. I took five of them down there with me and got my hands on her as they lifted her, but she was already dead. Her neck was broken.

In the exact center of the moving wheel there is no movement. It is winter now, or late autumn, and one day is very much like the rest. The leaves of the trees outside the window were full of autumn color for a time, but now they are mostly gone, and I can look up the street through the naked limbs in the early morning and see the frost across the lawns. It looks very much as it did when we used to walk to school that year when she lived here, when they had the pictures of blue eagles inside the glass windows of all the stores around the square.

People come to see me and talk a while and go away. Abbie Bell comes every Sunday morning and brings me a carton of cigarettes. She recovered from the knife wounds and the case against Waites was finally thrown out of court when she didn’t press the charges or testify against him. She says she feels sorry for men, and I don’t know whether she means Waites, or me, or just all men together.

“You know, Jack,” she said once, looking at me through the door, “it just doesn’t seem possible to me that in only eleven million years, or however long they’ve been here, men could have got as stupid about women as they have. They must have practiced somewhere before. Imagine them trying to do anything to that poor bastard, when someday he might even get that girl back.”

I never see Buford. He ran. But he’ll be back.

They got Dinah’s car out of the lake. She came up to see me the day it came back from the garage where they fixed it up, and said she was leaving that afternoon for California. I told her I was sorry about the car, but she just looked at me and said it didn’t matter, and after a while she went away.

They brought me down here for the district court. There has been one trial, but something was wrong with it, and there’ll be another. Or so the lawyer says. He is very earnest, and explained it all to me, but I guess I wasn’t paying much attention. He comes in nearly every day, sometimes alone and sometimes with the other men, the doctors or psychiatrists who are working with him. They ask a lot of questions, tap me on the knees, and try to find out whether I know right from wrong, and go away after taking down a bunch of notes. They are all very earnest and seem to be trying so hard you want to help them.

Somehow, they seem to think it matters.