River Girl (8 page)

I cashed his check the first thing Monday and waited. The grand jury convened that morning, and we sat through the long day wondering what would happen, but nothing did. It was quiet.

To get up the lake to where she was I’d have to go clear down to the south end and rent a boat and motor, now that I’d sold my own, but that was all right. I had it all figured out.

Tuesday morning I didn’t say anything to anybody. I just went. And that was the day that everything fell in.

I was at the store on the end of the lake by daybreak and rented a skiff and a big outboard. After buying a bucket of shiners from the man who ran the place, I rented one of his cane-pole fishing outfits and said I thought I’d go up the lake a way and see if I couldn’t catch a few white perch. He’d never seen me before, and merely grunted something and looked at me with the casual and almost contemptuous indifference with which fishing-camp proprietors regard all fishermen. By the time it was light enough to see, I was on my way. I wanted to try to get nearly halfway up before I had to duck in somewhere and wait for Shevlin to go by. He would be coming down with his catfish, headed for the store, and with all the turns in the channel he might be right on me before I saw him. I should be able to gauge it within a half hour, for I knew about what time he left.

But something went wrong. Either he had left earlier than usual or had tried to cut it too fine, tried to get too far up before I turned off into a slough and waited. Suddenly, I came around a bend in the channel and saw him up ahead, less than half a mile away. I looked wildly around, but there wasn’t anyplace I could hide. He would have seen me by this time, anyway.

The lake was a little less than a quarter mile wide here, with acres of big weed beds off to the left. I cut the motor and swung hard left into one of the openings through the pads, getting as far out of the main channel as possible, and when I had come to the end of it I dropped the square concrete block of an anchor and grabbed up the cane pole. Not even bothering to bait the hook with one of the shiners, I swung it out, and sat there staring intently at the cork float like all the fishermen in the world.

He came on past, looked toward me only once, very briefly, answered my wave with a curt gesture of his hand, and then was gone. It’s all right, I thought. Even if he saw me duck over here like that, he won’t know me. This is a different boat. Mine was painted green, while this one, like all the rental boats down there, was a dirty white with a number on the bow.

I sat there waiting, listening for the sound of his motor to die out down the lake. When it was gone completely I pulled in the anchor and started up again. All the rest of the way I kept a sharp eye out for other boats, praying I wouldn’t meet any fishermen, for I didn’t want anyone to see us as I was bringing her out. There were none. Now that he was gone, I had the whole swamp to myself.

I must have been more than halfway up when I met him, for it still wasn’t ten o’clock when I turned in at the entrance of the slough by his boat landing. Not bothering to hide the boat now, for I didn’t want to waste the time, I tied up at the landing and went up the trail, feeling that same suffocating excitement I always felt when I was coming nearer to her, and now there was added to it the knowledge that we would have to hurry. We had to be back down the lake before he started home.

She wasn’t in the house. I walked right in and looked quickly around, and then out the back. She’s swimming, I thought. But no, her suit was on the line. “Doris!” I called out. There was no sound. Beginning already to feel that cold, greasy sensation of fear in my belly that I always had whenever I thought of the two of them up here alone and of what he might do if he knew, I turned and ran along the trail toward the timber. Maybe—she was out there toward the lake. And then I saw her. She had just come out of the timber and was carrying something shiny in her hand.

She saw me and started running. “Jack! Jack!” she cried out, and then I saw what it was she had. It was the gun, that Colt .45 held out in front of her away from her body as if it were a dead snake, her fingertips grasping it by the end of the grip so it tilted slanting toward the ground. As we met, there in the open, sun-drenched clearing, she stooped and placed it carefully on the ground beside the trail, lowering it very gently as if it might explode, and then straightened, looking at me with eyes wild with relief and ecstasy and half crying and trying to smile at the same time. “Oh, Jack!” she said, her voice muffled against my shirt. “What are you carrying that gun for?” I asked. “What is it?”

“I was looking for another place to hide it. Are we going away today, Jack? Now? Isn’t that what you came for?” She looked up at me pleadingly.

“Yes. Right now. I’m going to take you out of here as soon as you can get ready.”

“Oh, thank God!”

“But tell me about that gun.”

“I’ve had it hidden out in the woods. For days now. One night he was drunk and I was out of the house, and when I came back way after midnight he was passed out, and the gun, which had been in that drawer ever since we came up here, was lying on the table just beyond where his hand was. I didn’t know what he had intended to do with it. But I was so scared I took it and ran out in the woods and hid it. Then, yesterday, he was out there a long time and I began to have the horrible thought that he had managed to find it and was just letting me go on thinking he hadn’t. So I thought about it all night and decided to throw it in the lake. And then this morning after he was gone I changed my mind and thought maybe I was just being silly, and that I’d hide it somewhere else.”

Holding her and feeling the shaking of her body, I knew she wasn’t telling me all of it. She was afraid of him and had been bringing it back to hide it in the house where she could get it if she had to. I thought of the way she had been carrying it and felt a little sick, knowing just how much good it would have been to her if she’d had to use it. She wouldn’t even know how to shoot it.

I picked it up and we walked back to the house. I put it on the dresser, thinking we would take it with us and drop it in the lake, and then I turned and looked at her standing there with her face flushed and her eyes shining with the thought of leaving and wanted to take hold of her again and knew there wasn’t time. There was never any stopping when we started that, and we could both feel the minutes slipping past, hurried and driven by the remorseless ticking of the clock.

“No,” she said. “I want to go, Jack. We’ve got to go.”

“I know,” I said. “Where are your other clothes, and your shoes and stockings?”

She went to the dresser and opened the bottom drawer. They were all wrapped in newspapers, the white, high-heeled shoes, the one pair of nylons, and the under-things. The little summer dress had been ironed and then folded inside a newspaper clipped together around the edges with pins. She carried them over and put them on the bed.

She looked down. “I’ll have to wash my feet before I can put on the stockings.”

“Wait.” I went out in the kitchen and brought a basin of water from the bucket and found a bar of soap. She sat down in one of the rawhide chairs and washed her feet. I watched her, smoking a cigarette and listening to the hot dead silence of the room being chopped off in sections by the clock. I’ll buy her stockings, I thought, and bathrooms with tile floors, and clothes, and…We’ll be gone from here and she can live like other women and somehow I’ll make her happy.

“I’ll wait out in the kitchen,” I said when she had dried her feet and was ready to put on the stockings. I went out and sat down by the table, throwing away the cigarette and lighting another. She didn’t bother to close the door and I could hear her changing clothes, the soft rustle of cloth and as she pulled off the old dress and put on the new one and the sound of the shoe heels against the floor.

“I’ve sold my boat and outfit,” I said. “The one I’m in is a rental boat from the foot of the lake. I have to take it back, but this is the way we’ll do it. I’ll turn off down there at the slough where I used to launch mine, and leave you there. We’ll wait there until he goes by, going up the lake, then I’ll go on down and take the boat back and pick up my car. Then I’ll come back by the old logging road and get you. That way nobody’ll see us. Then I’ll take you down to Colston and get you a room. You can wait there until I can get away and then we’ll leave for Nevada.”

“All right, Jack,” she said quietly. “I’m about ready. You can come out now.”

She had gone over to the dresser and was combing her hair at the mirror. I stood behind her, looking at her reflection in the glass. The dress was a blue one with short sleeves and trimmed with white at the collar, and I thought it was almost the color of her eyes.

“I just want to look at you,” I said, and turned her part way around, holding her there at arm’s length. My back was toward the door and she was facing it, looking up at me with her eyes shining. Suddenly I saw them change and could feel my back go cold as I saw the terror in them. I heard her little in-drawn gasp, as if ice water had hit her from behind, and at the same instant I heard the heavy shoe rasp against the flooring of the porch. His eyes were crazy. He stood framed in the doorway, not moving or saying anything, just looking beyond me as if he saw only her and didn’t even care that I was standing there, and I’ll never live long enough to forget his eyes.

“Get back!” I yelled. “Stand back!” He didn’t even hear me. Suddenly he made a lunge for the gun, still lying on top of the dresser. I beat him to it with my right hand and threw up the left to shove him back. He slid back against the wall and then I heard her run from behind me, going toward the other side of the room, and the scream that had been trying to fight its way out of her throat came free at last, going up higher and higher in a thin knife-edged column of sound slicing into the silence. He came off the wall and started for her and she stopped and turned to face him, helpless, with her legs against the bed. I felt the gun kick in my hand and he stopped then as if he had seen me for the first time, and put his hand up to his chest, still looking at me, and started to fall. The scream cut off as if the noise of the gun had chopped it in two, the way they blow an oil well fire with nitro, and then she began to sway.

I looked at him lying on his face with the little searching trickle of blood running out from under his shoulder and curling indecisively across the incredibly clean silvered white planks of the floor she had scrubbed so long and then I put the gun down on the dresser and went out the front door into the yard and was sick.

There was just the humming of insects in the drowsy heat and the old hound watching me sadly with his red-rimmed eyes as I clung to the post at the corner of the porch. The noise and the violence had washed back like a receding wave and left me stranded here in the sundrenched peace of the clearing while I fought down the sickness and tried to get hold of myself enough to go back inside the room. I had to snap out of it; she was going to be bad enough without both of us going to pieces. If she waked up lying there like that and looking at what she would see not three feet in front of her eyes ... It wouldn’t be pretty.

I straightened up and retched again and spat, trying to get the taste out of my mouth, and walked back into the room on unsteady legs, looking across and beyond him to where she was lying. She had almost fallen onto the bed, but her legs had bumped it as they doubled under her and pushed her out and away so she had crumpled to her knees and then slid down, and now she lay partly on one side with an arm under her face like a child asleep. I knelt down beside her with my back to him but still feeling him there behind me as if I were looking at him out of the back of my head. The blue dress had slid up as she fell past the bed and the long legs were bare above the stocking tops, smooth and ever so faintly tanned, even fair now against the sand-colored stockings and the dress, and I looked at them, but not in that way, not even conscious of the loveliness of them, only busy at shutting him out of my mind. Her eyes were still closed as I rolled her on her back, and I noticed, in the fury of concentration of trying to see only her and not him there behind me, how long and dark the lashes were against the wax-candle paleness of her face. I smoothed the dress down very gently and picked her up.

The sickness rolled over again in my stomach as I had to step across him to go toward the door, and then I was in the open with her. I put her down on the porch in the shade, and as I was easing her shoulders back against the floor she stirred. Her eyes opened.

For an instant she stared at me blankly, not remembering. “Jack,” she whispered. “What happened?” Then, as I had known it would, it hit her. I could see it come pushing up into her eyes and she cried out, grabbing my arm. “Where is he? Jack, where is he?”

I knelt with my arm still around her shoulders and held her with her face against my chest while the crying shook her body. This is what I’ve done to her, I thought; I was going to make her happy and this is the way I’ve done it. I could feel the helplessness and time going by and the trap closing around us, and all I could do was kneel there in agony of numbness with only that one little corner of my mind still working, telling me over and over that I had ruined her. When the shaking subsided I took a handkerchief from my pocket and wiped away the tear stains as well as I could.

“It’ll be all right,” I said. “Don’t cry, Doris. It’ll be all right.”

I could see her fighting to get hold of herself. “We’ve got to go,” she whispered frantically. “We’ve got to get out of here! Oh, Jack!” She started to break up again and I shook her a little, holding her very tightly until she stopped.

“I’m sorry,” she said weakly. “I’ll be all right in a minute so we can go.”

“No,” I said, not wanting to do it but knowing I had to. “We can’t go now.”

She stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. “We can’t go? But Jack, we’ve—we’ve got to.”

“It won’t do any good to run now,” I said. My mind was working enough to see that.

“But it’s the only thing we can do.”

“No,” I said. “You saw what it did to him; being hunted, I mean. We can’t do it. We wouldn’t have a chance of getting out of the country, in the first place, and if we did we’d just be running the rest of our lives or until they caught us.”

“But what are we going to do?” she cried out piteously. “What can we do now. Isn’t he—?” I could see in her eyes the question she couldn’t ask.

“He’s dead,” I said bluntly, trying to get it on the line so we could look at it and know where we had to start.

“But you couldn’t help it, Jack! You couldn’t! Wouldn’t they see you had to do it, that you were trying to protect me?”

I shook my head, not wanting to do it, but knowing there wasn’t room enough for even one of us in that fool’s paradise. I hadn’t done it because I had to. I’d done it because I’d lost my head, gone completely wild when I saw him start for her. No jury on earth would ever believe I’d had to shoot an unarmed man twenty pounds lighter and fifteen years older than I was just to keep him from hurting her or to defend myself. I could have stopped him with one hand. And if by any stretch of the imagination they could ever manage to swallow that, there was still the fact that I was in his house, where I had no business, and that she was his wife. I gave it up and tried to close my mind on it. There wasn’t any way out in that direction.

I fought at the numbness in my mind like a drunk trying to sober up enough to think. The trails ran outward from here in all directions, crossed and crisscrossed and tangled, and if we took any of the wrong ones we were finished. We couldn’t run without being fugitives the rest of our lives. I couldn’t go back to town and report it, because no matter how you tried to dress it up as something else, it was going to come out as murder. But wait! Suppose, I thought, grabbing at everything, suppose I had been fishing out there and had heard her screaming and had come to help and found him beating her. I’d tried to stop him and he’d got the gun out and in the fight over it I’d killed him. I was a deputy sheriff and I’d be within the law in butting into something like that. Would it work? Maybe, I thought. And then I thought of her on the stand and the district attorney tearing her to pieces the way I’d seen them do it. A woman as beautiful as she was, and her husband killed by another man under peculiar circumstances? He’d start to tie it up into a triangle killing before he’d finished looking at her legs. Had she ever seen me before? Was she sure she hadn’t? Wasn’t it rather odd that a man who hadn’t been fishing for months should suddenly go four times in two weeks and to the same place every time, even neglecting his job to run off up there? I was beginning to think a little more clearly now, and in my mind I could see the succession of witnesses and the facts. And wasn’t it a little odd, also, that I had sold all my fishing gear to the station agent at New Bosque because I’d given up the pastime, and then two days later I was up the lake again with a rented outfit, a cane pole and live bait, according to the testimony of the fishing-camp proprietor, and this in spite of the testimony of the other witnesses that I hadn’t used an outfit like that since I was a boy in grammar school? And consider this other strange coincidence, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the fact that somehow this man was always up the lake fishing on just the days that this woman’s husband happened to be away at the store. Are you sure now, Mrs. Shevlin, that you never saw this man before in your life? No, I thought. That isn’t it; we’d just be walking right into their arms.

I thought I had her quieted down, but now she started shaking again and pushing back on my chest with her hand. She got to her feet, swaying unsteadily, and then ran off the porch before I could stop her and started across the clearing toward the boat landing. “Doris!” I called out. “For God’s sake!” I ran up behind her and caught her arm but she didn’t even notice I was there. I gave up trying to stop her then; maybe if we got completely away from the house she could get hold of herself.

In spite of the high heels, she was walking faster and faster. We left the bright sunlight of the clearing and then suddenly she jerked away from me and started running down the path through the trees. Both the boats were drawn up at the float, one on each side, and she stopped at the end of the trail and stared at them wildly. I caught her arm again and then for the first time she noticed me.

“Let’s go, Jack,” she cried out frantically. “Start the boat!”

I swung her around and caught hold of both arms.

They were shaking as if she had a chill. The touch of lipstick she had put on her mouth, hardly noticeable a while ago when I had held her in exactly this way to look at her, was now a violent slash of carmine across the dead pallor of her face, and her eyes were staring with shock. I wanted to take her in my arms and just hold her until it wore off, but there wasn’t time for that any more. I shook her almost roughly, and then when she screamed I let go of her arm with the right hand and slapped her, hard. It was like kicking a puppy.

The scream cut off and she put a hand up to her mouth, backing away from me. “Doris!” I said. “Listen! You’ve got to listen to me. Are you all right now?” Then I thought of that old football question. “Listen, what day is this?”

She stared at me as if I’d gone crazy. Maybe I have, I thought.

“Doris, do you know what day this is?” I asked again. She moved the hand from her mouth around to her cheek where I’d slapped her, still looking at me. She was beautiful and she was hurt, and more than anything in the world I wanted to reach out for her and just pick her up and take her away from here, but I had to keep my head. It was losing it that got us into this mess in the first place.

I took out a cigarette and lit it and handed it to her. She accepted it mechanically. I led her over and made her sit down with her back against a stump while I squatted in front of her, taking her chin in the palm of my hand so she’d have to look at me.

“It’s Tuesday,” she said suddenly. I had already forgotten about it.

All right, now,” I said. “I think now you know why I asked that, and why I slapped you. We’re in a jam, and if we run without using our heads we’re going to be in a worse one. I’m trying to think, and I want you to help me. Can you answer some questions for me?”

The wild stare of the shock had gone out of her eyes now. She was rational, but I hated to look at the misery in them.

“Yes,” she said dully. “But what difference does it make now, Jack? Everything is ruined.”

“No,” I said, almost roughly. “It’s not. Just keep thinking that it’s not, and after a while you’ll see it. It wasn’t your fault; there was no way on earth you could have prevented it. If anyone is to blame, I am, for losing my head and getting panicky when I saw he was after you, and even that was an accident. Neither of us wanted to do it.” I stopped for a moment, and then went on, talking faster. “And in the end it won’t make any difference. He’s better off now than he was living the way he did. Nothing matters now except us. Nothing matters with me except you, because I love you, and I want to find a way out of this so we can always be together. Now, will you listen and try to help me?”

She had forgotten the cigarette and let it roll from her fingers. I picked it up and took a puff on it, fighting to steady my nerves and to think. “Yes,” she said quietly.

“I’ll try, Jack.”

“All right. Good. Now, tell me, and I want you to think hard. Do you have any idea at all what he was running from?”

She stared at me, puzzled, then shook her head. “No. He never did talk about it.”

“And you never did ask him?”

“Only once. And after the way he looked, I never did again.”

“But you think it was the police? I mean, that was always your impression, wasn’t it?”

She nodded.

“Why did you think so? Try to remember.”

She looked at me helplessly. “I don’t know, Jack. I—I guess it was just because I couldn’t think of anything else a man would run from. There couldn’t be many other things, could there?”

“Yes,” I said. “Probably dozens of them. A woman. Some man who was after him. The draft, during the war. A scandal of some kind. Blackmail. But the chances are that it was the police. Didn’t you tell me once that when you had to run like that, it was usually after he’d seen someone you thought he was afraid would recognize him, and that it wasn’t the same man each time?”

“Yes. That’s right. It happened at least three times. I mean, that many times that I saw the man myself. And it was always a different one.”

“Do you remember anything about these men? How did they look, and so on? I mean, was there anything special about them?”

“No-o. Except that they didn’t seem to be policemen themselves. The first one looked as if he might be a sawmill hand or something like that. Another time it was a better-dressed man standing in a line at the post office. And—oh, I don’t know, Jack. They looked just like anybody else.”

I tried to add it up. There wasn’t much to go on. These people he kept trying to dodge didn’t make much sense except that the chances were they were ex-cons. An ex-convict can be anybody, and you won’t know it or notice him unless, of course, you happened to be one yourself and were there with him and knew him. But why the running? Of course, a man who’s served time and is trying to forget it isn’t anxious to run into any of his old friends who might expose him to the community, but he’s not that afraid of them, at least not to the extent of throwing up his job every time and dragging his wife all over the country. If that was all it was, he’d have probably told her anyway. An escaped convict? A good chance, I thought. And there was still that impression I’d had that I had seen him somewhere before.

I sat still, thinking. My mind was perfectly clear now and I could see all the angles. It’ll have to do, I thought. There’s a good chance that he’s wanted for something pretty bad, in which case we’re in luck. And if he’s not on the lam from something, at least we’re not any worse off than we are now. The thing to do is go back to town and find out. And then, if he is, come back here after him. Killed, resisting arrest.

No, I thought. It won’t work; not that way. It would be tomorrow before I could get back, and by that time he’d have been dead too long. It’d never fool anybody. But I began to see it then, the other way, the perfect setup I’d been looking for. It was a long-shot bet, and it all depended on what he was wanted for and how badly, but if it worked we were out of the woods forever.

“What is it, Jack?” she asked, staring at my face. “What are we going to do?”

“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “I think I know the way now. There isn’t anything you can do, so you just wait here for me, and when I get through we can go. I’m going back to the house.”