by Jerry eBooks
They caught Marilla in a blind alley. He was sitting in a corner with his knees drawn up and his head resting on his knees, and he was whimpering and crying, and his voice would rise now and then to a thin scream of terror, and the men who found him first almost beat him to death before the police came and took him away. Right after that, the next day or so, they began to say he was crazy, that he was just a crazy kid only twenty years old, and the psychiatrists had big words for the kind of craziness it was supposed to be, but I knew that nothing they could say would do him any good at all, because he had killed a man and a woman in the drug store and the shoe shine kid on the street, and above all he had killed Freda in her new pink coat.
They asked him why he had killed all those people, and they didn’t even make any distinction between Freda and the others, and he said he hadn’t hated any of them or anything like that, hadn’t even wanted to kill them at all, but had killed them anyhow because he’d been told time and again to do it and finally had to do as he was told. They asked him who had told him to kill the people, just any people, and he said it was a thin little man with a pointed nose and a pointed chin who wore yellow pointed shoes. The man had appeared in all sorts of odd places and told him to go out and kill some people.
It was part of the big lie, of course, that ridiculous part about the man coming and telling him to kill some people, it was part of the plan to keep him from paying for killing Freda, and anyone could see right through it, it was so transparent. You can buy some psychiatrist to verify something like that any time you’ve got the price, and I knew they’d hang him in spite of what any psychiatrist said, because God wanted him to hang just as much as I did, God and I hated him equally for what he’d done to Freda right when she was so happy.
I waited for them to try him, and finally they did, and I went and sat in the court room every day to watch him and to feel the yellow hate like pus inside me. He sat at the long table with the lawyers who defended him, and he always sat with his head bowed and his hands folded on top of the table in a posture of prayer, but once in a while he would look up briefly into the crowd, and the light of terror and inner cowering were there in his great liquid eyes, and I felt a fierce exaltation that he was suffering, and that the suffering he now felt was only the beginning of the suffering he would feel before he was through. He looked very small in the chair by the big table, hardly larger than a child, with narrow shoulders slumped forward and a slender neck supporting a head that was too big for his body, and the head looking even bigger than it really was because of the thick black shining curls that covered it. I kept watching him sit there like he was praying, and I kept thinking that he could pray all he wanted to, but God wouldn’t hear him, and that he could plead and lie and try all the tricks he could think of, but no one would believe him or pity him or do anything to help him, no one at all.
They put him on the stand at last to tell about the man who had come to tell him to kill, and he described the man again, just as he had to the psychiatrists, his pointed nose and pointed chin and yellow pointed shoes, and he spoke in a very soft voice that could barely be heard but contained all the time, somehow, the threat of rising abruptly to a shrill scream. It was all put on, part of the plan, but he was very clever, a great actor, and he told how the man had appeared the first time while he was standing on a bridge looking down at the water, and had sat down beside him another time in a movie theater, and had met him another time while he was walking along a path in the town park, and had then begun coming to his room late at night to knock softly on the door. No one was supposed to believe that the little man had actually come to him in those ways, or in any way at all, but everyone was supposed to believe that it had happened in his mind, that the little man was an hallucination of insanity, but I knew it hadn’t happened that way either, that the man hadn’t even appeared in Marilla’s mind, and that it was all a story made up to get him out of it. I knew they’d hang him, and I tried to feel within myself the way he’d feel while he was waiting, and walking out to the scaffold, and standing there in the last instant with the black hood over his head and the rope around his neck.
But in the end they didn’t hang him at all.
They let him out of it.
They said he wasn’t guilty because he wasn’t in his right mind and wasn’t responsible for his acts, and they sent him off somewhere to a place with cool white rooms and a cool green lawn and doctors to look after him and nurses to wait on him.
I thought a lot about the twelve people on the jury who let him out of it, and I began to hate them the same as Marilla, and I wished they were all dead, dead as Freda, but the more I thought about them the more they seemed like all other people, and after a long time I realized it was because they really were like all other people on earth. Freda was dead, and no one cared, all the people on earth had said it was all right because of a ridiculous story about a little man with a pointed nose and a pointed chin and yellow pointed shoes who had told a man named Marilla to kill her. Always I saw the face of Marilla and the face of Freda, and they seemed to get mixed up with other faces that I’d never seen before, and I wondered if I was insane myself, but I wasn’t, of course, any more than Marilla was.
And now I lay in my room in the hot and humid night, and across the interval between houses, behind the futile beating of blades, Mrs. Willkins’ gross body stirred in her black and gasping room.
And there was something else. Something new.
A man was walking the dark and airless streets of town beneath layers of lifeless leaves.
He walked with mincing steps, and he was far away in the beginning, when I first saw him, and I lay on my bed in my room and followed his progress with cat’s eyes through light and shadow across the pattern of the town. At times he was swallowed completely by darkness, and then no eyes could see him but mine, but the people who stirred in wakefulness in the houses he passed could hear the echo of his mincing steps, and he moved with surety of purpose and a pace that never varied through the silent, dappled streets until he came at last to the corner above my house and down the street to the house itself. Without moving from my bed, I could see him standing on the sidewalk below with his face lifted into the milky light of the moon, and then he came up across the porch into the house and up the stairs into the hall and stood outside my door.
I waited in the hot stillness, and after a while he knocked softly, and I got up in the dark, and my hand, swinging out, struck the tumbler on the table by the bed and knocked it to the floor with a sound of brittle thunder that rocked the room. I waited until the reverberations had diminished and died and the soft knock was repeated, and then I crossed to the door and opened it.
The warm fog inside my skull pressed closely on my brain, and though my head didn’t ache exactly, it felt very light and queer. The man in the hall looked at me and bowed in a peculiar, old-fashioned way from the waist and smiled politely.
“Excuse me for disturbing you at this hour,” he said, “but I must talk with you about a number of people. About Mrs. Willkins first of all, I think. May I come in?”
He was a little man with a long pointed nose and a pointed chin. He wore yellow pointed shoes.
I saw Marilla from my window. He was walking in the yard below with the same man in white who comes now and then to my room, and he sat for a while on a bench under a tree, and I could see him quite clearly. The queer thing is, there was no hate, no longer any hate, and I’m thinking that perhaps I will be allowed to walk in the yard soon, and that Marilla and I may meet and sit together under the tree and talk about these things that happened. It will be pleasant to talk with someone who knows and understands . . .
SWAMP SEARCH
Harry Whittington
I noticed the blue-gray Caddy on my road, but had no time to watch it twist and bounce the twenty miles through Everglades sawgrass, palmetto and slash pine from the Tamiami trail to my place.
I’d been out all morning in the helicopter hunting for strays
and just as I glimpsed the Caddy, I saw one of my Santa Gertrudis heifers caught in a bog. Lose a cow in that ooze, you never see her again. I needed every cow I had, every penny I could earn on my farm. I was in hock, even paying for the ‘copter on installments.
I engaged the pedals, the wings rotated slowly and I hovered over the bawling cow. The pinch-rig I’d made was an ice-tong affair of steel and leather I let down on my cable.
“Take it easy, baby,” I told the cow. “You’re too valuable to lose in that goo.”
The cable winched down, I closed the pincher about her belly and started upward. The sucking noise of the ooze and bawling of the cow rose above the revving of my motor.
I let the heifer swing a moment to impress her, then set her down in high grass, cussed her once for luck, reeled in my line and peeled off toward the house where the Caddy was parked in the yard.
She was sitting in the Caddy looking around when I walked toward her. What she saw was bare sand yard without even a slash pine growing in it, brown frame house of four rooms and porch, coal-oil lamps and outhouse. Rugged, but beautiful to me. It had belonged to my folks. They’d died while I was in a Chinese prison camp. It got so this lonely place was what I’d dreamed of coming back to.
“How’d you get this far off the trail?” I said. “My road is hard to find.”
She got out of the car, smiled. Except for her shape she wasn’t terrific; wavy brown hair, deep-set brown eyes and squared chin. “Not as hard to find as your house. I had a ball getting here—the car scraped between the ruts.”
“It’s been dry or you’d never have made it.”
“I’d have made it.” Something about her voice made me look at her again, closer.
Her gaze touched my helicopter, and didn’t move on. She smiled again. “You Jim Norton?”
I nodded and she said, still watching the ‘copter, “I’m Celia Carmic . . . Mrs. Curt Carmic.”
Carmic. I stared. The whole state had been alerted in a search for Curt Carmic. He had crashed in his private plane on an Everglades hunting trip. After a week of intensive searching, the Coast Guard had abandoned him as dead.
I invited her up on the porch. “I’m sorry about your husband, Mrs. Carmic.”
“Yes.” She shook her head as though still unable to believe it. She made a wad of her handkerchief. “Curt and I were—very happy, Mr. Norton. He was—well, several years older than I, but he was a vital man, had the world in his hand.” Her head tilted. “I don’t say Curt didn’t have enemies. Every strong man does.”
Her eyes were moist, her voice sounded full of tears. She told me about Carmic. She glossed over the way he got a discharge from the Marines in 1943, but said that from 1945 he’d had great success, headed two companies making parts for the Korean police action, Carmic Defrosters.
“Curt was due in Washington on the Monday following his trip. They were investigating his war profits. Curt was ill at this injustice, his doctor told him to rest. His idea of rest was a weekend hunting trip in the Everglades. But more than anything, Mr. Norton, he wanted to come back and clear his name.” Her chin quivered. “I can’t believe Curt is dead.”
I didn’t know what to say. All I wanted down here was peace, and a chance to make a living my way. I’d been in the world she talked about. I’d had it.
“They searched for Curt for a week. I know they were thorough and didn’t find a trace. I can’t give up. Can you understand that, Mr. Norton? I’ve got to find him. That’s why I came to you.”
I waited, not knowing why I didn’t want to get mixed up in this thing. She said, “I’ll give you a thousand dollars—and pay all expenses if you’ll help me search for him.”
I had plenty of use for a thousand dollars. I couldn’t buy the picture she painted of Curt Carmic. Him I never knew, but I knew his Defrosters and there was a good reason for that Senate inquiry. Still, no man would take to the Everglades even to escape a government investigation.
“How long would you want to search?”
“Until we find him.” She paced my porch. “I’ll pay the thousand dollars for anything up to ten days. After that—” she spread her hands, left that unfinished. Tensely she watched me until I nodded. She cried then. She stood rigid and tears ran down her cheeks.
The rest of the day we studied flight plans and maps. She had all the information she could get on the Everglades and the weather.
I tried to shrug off the feeling of wrong that persisted. Any profiteer who’d sell Carmic Defrosters to his country should have been investigated and any woman who’d lived ten years with him should know that. Yet she spoke of him as though he were saintly. I reminded myself it didn’t matter, it was a thousand dollars to me, but the nagging sense of emptiness stayed.
We set up the first flight pattern, figured mileage, weather and gas capacity and set for seven the next morning. When the time was set, Celia Carmic became a different woman.
First she’d been the bereaved wife, then the cold general over map briefing and weather data. At supper she chatted about her life in Washington. She ate delicately—like a she-wolf with a Vassar education. I’d never met anyone like her; I had to smile.
“Why are you laughing at me?”
I fumbled my fork. “I’m not laughing.”
She stopped eating, touched her lips with a paper napkin. “How old are you, Jim?”
I remembered the war years, the prison. “I’ll be a hundred next April.”
“I’d say twenty-three.”
“Say whatever you like.”
She looked around. “No girl to share all this?”
I shook my head. “The kind that would share this I wouldn’t want. And the other kind—” I stopped. I suddenly knew the only kind of woman I’d ever wanted. We just looked at each other . . .”I can’t afford what I want,” I said.
“What would you do to be able to afford her?”
“Anything.”
“Sure?”
“Anything at all.”
“You might be held to that,” she said. “And soon.”
About five a.m. I heard something stir in the house and jumped out of bed. Sleep-drugged, I staggered across the room. I reached the guest room door before I remembered Celia was there.
I stopped in the doorway, fully awake, realizing I was in my undershorts; it was too hot to sleep in anything more.
She was fully dressed, white shirt, jodhpurs, gleaming boots. She had a handful of maps and weather data. “Sorry I wakened you, Jim. I couldn’t sleep any more. I’m too anxious to get started.”
I mumbled something and backed off. She let her eyes prowl over me and then walked out into the front room leaving me gaping after her. Where was the bereaved wife? Where were those unshed tears?
From that moment there was a sick emptiness in my stomach. But the second the flight started, she was all business.
She sat with the flight pattern mapped on her lap. After I filled all gas tanks at the Lewiston Airport, she watched compass and mileage indicator until we reached the lines marking our first pattern. Coldly serious, she read that country minutely with field glasses.
She never took five, never relaxed. This land was huge bolts of scorched brown, ribboned by black strings of water. Heron took flight, I pointed out a wildcat. Nothing down there but silence and heat waves.
We made our circle, reached the end of the flight pattern. She sat back, dropped the binoculars. Red circles encased her eyes. “We know they’re not in there.”
“We’ll take the second pattern tomorrow.”
She seemed to have lost interest. She was watching me again from the corner of her eyes. I set the ‘copter down in the yard.
“Think I could learn to handle a windmill, Jim?”
“It’s not easy. But I could teach you.”
She looked thoughtful.
After supper she wanted a drink to celebrate the end of our first flight. All I had was a few cans of warm beer. We drank that. She laughed and talked, teasing
me about being a farmer stuck away from the world. Suddenly for no reason we stopped laughing and we stopped talking.
Crickets and frogs screeched outside the windows. It was so quiet I heard mosquitoes frantic against the screens.
I tried not to stare at her, but I couldn’t keep my gaze off her. I asked if she were sleepy. She said no. We sat for a long time and listened to the crickets. That night I didn’t sleep much . . .
Next morning I was out of bed and dressed hours ahead of Celia. I fixed breakfast but not even the odors of coffee and eggs wakened her. I let her sleep. I didn’t trust myself in that room. I remembered why she was here—a husband lost in the swamp. I had to keep remembering that.
At a quarter of seven she came out, voice angry. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
I stared at her, knowing how I’d fought to keep out of that room. “Why didn’t you bring an alarm clock?”
We stood tense across the table. Then she smiled and looked very pleased about something . . .
We’d been flying about three hours and suddenly Celia grabbed my arm. An electric charge went through me at her touch. Maybe you don’t know what it is to want like that. I was sick, wanting just two things: never to find her husband and to have money so I could afford Celia Carmic.
She pointed to something glittering. I engaged the pedals, idled off the engine and we settled in a cleared space six inches above water.
She scrambled out of the plane, ran through muck and saw-grass. I plodded after her. When I reached her, she was swearing, words she shouldn’t even have known.
Somebody had cut open a five gallon oil can, tossed it beside the creek. She followed me back to the ‘copter.
We retraced and she was silent, did not even mention learning to handle the ‘copter. We set down in the yard about four and she walked silently into the house.