Where Is Janice Gantry? (2 page)

I slept deep in a heartbreak dream of the girl that was lost and gone, of my wife Judy, no longer mine, no longer wife. In my dream I looked out of blackness into a lighted room where she smiled upon a faceless man the way she had always smiled at me. I bellowed and pounded on the thick glass between us but she could not hear me. Or would not.

I came bursting up out of the dream, tense, sweaty, wide-awake, searching through all the turmoil of the west wind for some sound that did not fit the night. There was moonlight, coming and going between a scud of clouds. The curtain whipped and writhed in the moonlight. I did not know what
I listened for until it came again, a sly scratching against the copper screening three feet from my head.

I slid open the bottom drawer of the nightstand, reached into the back of it and fumbled the oily cloth open to take the gun into my hand, feeling more assured but self-consciously dramatic, remembering the last time I had used it, months ago, to pot a palm tree rat eating from the bird feeder. It was loaded, as guns should always be. As I rolled off the bed toward the window, one knee against the harshness of the rattan matting, the scratching sound came again, and this time I heard the voice almost lost in the wind sounds, hoarse, urgent, cautious, speaking my name.

“Sam! Sam Brice!”

As I angled closer to look out, the moon was suddenly gone. “Who is it?”

“It’s Charlie, Sam. Charlie Haywood. Let me in. Don’t turn on any lights, Sam.”

I went through the small living room and out onto the screened porch and unhooked the door and let him in. I smelled him when he went by me into the dark living room. He stank of the swamps, of sweat and panic and flight.

“Something I can sit on, Sam? I’m a mess. I don’t want to ruin anything.” His voice was a half whisper, and I could sense the exhaustion in him.

He sat in a straight chair near the kitchen alcove, sighing as he sat down. “You know about me, Sam?”

“I read the papers. You’ve been news for five days, Charlie.”

“They making any guesses, about where I am?”

“The dogs tracked you south from the road camp before they lost you. They think you’re heading for the Keys.”

“Those goddam dogs! I circled back, Sam, after I bitched up those goddam dogs. I didn’t know if it would work. An old-timer told me it would. A pint bottle of gas I drained out of one of the trucks. When I got to a piece of open water big
enough, I spread it thick on the shore where I went in. They snuff that, it’s supposed to put them out of business for an hour. I did some swimming, Sam. My God, I did some swimming. Have you got any cold milk? A bottle of it. I’ve been thinking about cold milk ever since I can remember.”

I thumbed the top off a new bottle and handed it to him, and sat near him, hearing the sound of his thirst.

“My God, that’s good! I’d forgotten how good.”

I went back into the bedroom and stowed the gun away and looked at the luminous dial of my alarm clock. Twenty after three.

When I turned he was close to me, startling me.

“I wouldn’t want you to use the phone, Sam.”

Anger was quick. “You made the choice, boy. You came to me. If you figured it wrong, it’s too late now, isn’t it? If I’m going to turn you in, you can’t stop me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said humbly. “I’m not thinking very good, Sam.”

We went back and sat and he finished the milk.

“Nice of you,” I said, “to count me in on this. It’s just what I need.”

“Don’t be sore, Sam.”

“I didn’t know we’re such close friends, buddy.”

“I went through the list fifty times, Sam, and it always came out to be you.”

“Why?”

“I knew I’d have to have help from somebody. I had to take the chance you’d still be living out here, a place I thought I could get to, and still living alone, Sam. I knew you wouldn’t scare easy. And, working for yourself, you’ve got more freedom to move around. And I don’t know if you remember it, but one time you hinted about the dirty deal you got—just enough so I guess you know how it feels to … get sent up for something you didn’t do. The way you feel so helpless.”

“For something you didn’t do!”

“I know how that sounds, Sam.”

“It sounds as if you’d lost your mind, boy.”

On the basis of all the known facts, Charlie Haywood was going to have all kinds of trouble peddling that story. Over two years ago he had been a car salesman at the Mel Fifer Agency here in Florence City, and the business I own and operate had brought me in contact with him. He was a reasonably likeable kid, about twenty-three, a little too dreamy and mild to be a very good car salesman, but, because he lived with his widowed mother who had a small income and also rented rooms to tourists, he didn’t have to make much to get along. I’d had a few beers with him several times and cased him as one of those optimistic, idealistic kids who, if he could find a bride with enough drive and guts, might find enough on the ball to make himself a tidy happy life.

And I guess it flattered me a little to be with him because he hadn’t recovered from the fact that I was one of his childhood heroes. When he had been in grade school I’d been Sam Brice, fullback, the big ground-gainer in the West Coast Florida Conference, with offers from every semi-pro college team in the East. And he was willing to forget that out of my own arrogance and stupidity I had let the wide world whip me and I had come home after three seasons with the National Football League with my tail tucked down and under.

Anyway, as the newspapers had brought out, Charlie Haywood had been acting gloomy and erratic for several weeks before he got in the jam. He drove out onto Horseshoe Key late one March afternoon, broke into the luxurious beach residence of a Mr. Maurice Weber, who had recently been a customer of the Fifer Agency, and had been apprehended while trying to pry loose a wall safe set into the rear wall of a bedroom closet. Mr. Weber had found him there, had held a gun on him, disarmed him and called the Sheriff’s office.

Charlie had spent three weeks in the County Jail awaiting
the next session of the Circuit Court. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years. I heard that after a short indoctrination period at Raiford Prison, he had been transferred to one of the state road camps down in the ’Glades.

Though he had been gone over twenty-eight months, I could remember the gossip at the time he was sent up—how Weber had paid for a new car with cash, so it was possible there was more cash at the house. They said Charlie had been drinking a little too much, and his performance had been so poor the sales manager had warned him to straighten out or be fired.

“I haven’t lost my mind, Sam. I pleaded guilty. I had to. I couldn’t tell the whole story. It was the only thing I could do. I mean that was the way it seemed at the time. But … I’ve had a lot of time to think. And one day, a month ago, it all seemed to come together in my mind, all the loose parts of it, and I knew I’d been the worst damn fool the world has ever seen, and I knew I had to get out and come back here.”

“And do what?”

“Prove it was all lies, everything she said to me.”

“Who?”

“Charity Weber. The hell with bringing you into all that, Sam. It’s my problem. I’ve got to do it my own way.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I want clothes and sleep and a chance to get clean. Nobody will ever know I was here, Sam. I swear I won’t tell anybody. I’m in terrible shape right now, but I’ll come back fast. They did one thing for me, Sam. They made me tough enough, mentally and physically, for what I’ve got to do. That guy you used to know, Sam. He doesn’t exist any more.”

“This puts me in a hell of a spot.”

“I know that. I didn’t tell you one of the reasons I came here. It’s because I’d do the same thing for you.”

There is no good answer to that statement.

After a long pause I said, “Okay, Charlie. But I wish I knew more about all this.”

“All you have to know is I give you my word I’m not guilty. And the reason I said I was is because … if it would have helped her in any little way to stick my hand in a fire, I would have held it there and grinned while it roasted. I’d had a good big taste of her and I would have died for her—and she knew it and so did he—so five years seemed like a little favor, something I was anxious to do. I wasn’t … equipped to handle a woman like that.”

His words brought Judy back into my mind, so vividly I knew she had been in my dreams in all the windy night.

I had a commitment I did not want, and I could smell the trouble coming; but I told myself it would be entirely reasonable to let him get the rest he needed, so that when he was himself again, I could quietly talk him into letting me call Sheriff Pat Millhaus to come and get him.

The bathroom light did not alarm him, so while he showered and used my razor, I put on pants and sneakers and carried the foul wad of his prison clothing and ruined shoes out behind the garage to a corner out of the wind, dug a hole in the loose, sandy soil, buried the stuff deep and stomped the soil flat. I tossed a pair of my pajamas into the bathroom. I was making up the spare bed in my bedroom when he came back out.

There was a first gray of dawn in the room, just enough so that I could see him for the first time. He had been slender, with a round boyish face. He was leaned down to emaciation, his face drawn tight against sharp bones. Road work in the tropic sun had tanned him deeply. His face was scabbed, lumped, welted by the swamp insects that had bitten him during his flight, and his eyes were drowsy. He sat on the bed and said, “Made it. More than a hundred miles across that crazy empty country. Sloughs and hammocks and saw-grass.”
He lay back and pulled the sheet and the single cotton blanket up, sighed deeply, and went to sleep.

I tried to sleep but I knew there was no chance. I dressed and made coffee and drank it out on the screened porch. The wind was beginning to die, and suddenly it stopped entirely just as the sun was coming up. In the stillness, the muggy heat was like a stale blanket. I heard a sudden thrash of water down near my dock, and I snatched the spinner and trotted down the path and saw the swirl of some snook working twenty feet out. It was the middle of August, when they work the passes and the bays by moonlight, and these boys were on their way home, with room for a final snack. I dropped the white bucktail a dozen feet beyond them and began yanking it back through the swirls, and it banged hard just when I hoped it would be. Had he scooted under the dock, as too many of them have done, his only damage would have been a sore mouth. But he took off toward open water. I had six pound test, but a lot of it, so he finally turned, losing a little steam, and I walked forty feet down the narrow beach, bringing him back, watching him show twice in the golden slant of the early sun, checking his rushes, finally gentling him up onto the rough broken shell of the narrow bay beach, his gills working, his eyes big as dimes. I saw he would go around ten, maybe a little over. After I had clubbed him and picked him up and was sure of him, I realized that a wolf pack of mosquitoes had found me, and I remembered again that I was entertaining a house guest who was being hunted by every law officer in the state of Florida.

After I had rinsed the rod, cleaned the fish and put him in the small refrigerator, and washed up, I did a few chores and wrote a note to leave for Charlie Haywood. “I’ve locked the place up. I’ve laid out clothes that should fit you. Look around and you’ll find orange juice, coffee, etc. There’s eggs, milk, bacon, fresh-caught snook in the ice box. Help yourself. Nobody
is likely to come here during the day. I’ll make it back in the middle of the afternoon.”

I had laid out a brown knit sport shirt that had been too small for me from the day I bought it, and some khaki pants that had shrunk too small.

After I locked the cottage behind me, I drove the four miles north into Florence City. It was Monday morning, August 15th, getting stickier and hotter every minute. After I got my mail out of my box at the post office, I drove on out across City Bridge to the commercial area adjacent to Orange Beach, parked my old Ford ranch wagon behind the office and walked across the street to Cy’s Lunch and Sundries for breakfast.

“You early as can be, Sambo,” he said.

“It’s Monday, Cyrus. New week. New start. Energy. Git up and go.”

“Oh, sure,” he said sourly, busting my two eggs onto the grill.

I found one small story on the Haywood escape on the lower half of the third page. They were still looking for him. They expected to recapture him any minute. There was a possibility he had stolen a car in Clewiston and abandoned it in Tampa.

When I walked back to the office after breakfast, Sis Gantry had arrived and opened it up. The big rackety air conditioner was just beginning to make its chilly function felt. Actually the cinderblock structure is the place of business of Tom Earle, Realtor. It has one big room, with his private office and the washrooms and storage room behind it, in the rear. There are seven desks in the big room, with six of them used by his associates and his clerical help, and one of them rented to me. I am Automotive Appraisal Associates, which is an overly impressive name for a one-man firm. The monthly figure I pay him covers desk space, phone service (including phone answering service by his gals when I am
out) and the right to have my name in small print, along with the name of my business, painted on the bottom half of the front door.

Sis Gantry faked vast surprise and said, “I get it! That crummy shack of yours must have burned down.”

“My good woman, I caught and cleaned a snook this morning before your alarm went off.”

Her name is Janice, but she is never called anything except Sis. She is a local girl with eight brothers, four older and four younger, so it is a fate she could hardly escape. She is a big-boned brunette, full of life and bounce and sparkle, a truly warmhearted person. She has a wide hearty mouth, a strikingly good figure—firm, rounded and ample—and very dark blue eyes.

Sis and I will never be at ease with each other. It started in the wrong way with us, and after a while it became obvious it should never have started at all. I met her nearly four years ago. They had whipped me and I had come back to my home town, knowing I should give a damn about what happened to the rest of my life, but finding it hard to care. I had been in town a month and I was doing rough carpentry work for one of the local builders when I met her. She was just getting over being whipped. She was twenty-five then, and I was a year older. She had made one of those impossible marriages, to a wild man—psychotic, alcoholic, vicious. A girl with less optimism and vitality than Sis would have gotten out of it in the first year. But she stuck it out for four childless, incredible years, until he shot her in the throat and himself in the roof of the mouth. She survived only because there was a very good man on the ambulance.