Girl out back

by Charles Williams

  “Oh . . .”

  I turned then and grinned at her. “I know you must think I’m crazy. I’m sorry. I didn’t have any right to make personal remarks like that. But it’s just—well, you’re touchy about the things you’re sensitive to, that’s all. I happen to think tall women are very beautiful to look at when they move right, and too few of them do. So meeting one who does is apt to be a little startling. You can put your foot in your mouth before you think, if you’re not careful.”

  “Oh.” She thought about it for a moment, and then she said, “Well, it really wasn’t anything to get mad about, anyway. Was it?”

  She made no move to return to the sweeping. The sullenness had disappeared; there was something almost pathetically wistful in the way her face was opening up and in the tentative friendliness of her voice.

  You’re a dirty son of a bitch, I thought.

  * * *

  Her name was Jewel Tennison before she was married, and she was twenty-four. She had lived all her life in Exeter, the county seat, except for one whole year with an aunt in New Orleans when she was about twelve. Her mother and father were both dead. She had a brother who lived in California, in Barstow. No, the name wasn’t spelled like Lord Tennyson’s. She remembered about him. She’d had him in high school. That was with a “y,” wasn’t it? They’d had a house in Exeter, nearly half paid for, when he lost his job in the sheriff’s department, and they’d sold it and bought this camp. She had also put in twelve hundred dollars her mother had left her. She had been a drum majorette in high school and she missed television out here. They could probably put up high enough an antenna to get the two Sanport channels, but there wasn’t any electricity. She liked I Love Lucy.

  No, she’d never thought about her hands that way. It was awful the way dishwater made them so rough, but she hadn’t paid much attention to the way they were made underneath. Did I really think they were expressive? Where had I learned to notice things like that about women, little things like their hands and the way they walked? Not that way about the way they walked—she knew I didn’t mean it like that. It was different, kind of, wasn’t it? Most men just—well, you know.

  No, she didn’t like fishing. The fish themselves gave you the creeps. They felt cold, and scaly. You know. And they’d fin you if you didn’t watch out. She swam a little, but there were water moccasins in the lake. She’d played tennis some, in high school, but she didn’t think women should take athletics too seriously. They got muscles. Nobody liked women with muscles. Especially in their legs.

  Oh? Well, uh—I mean, thank you. It was funny, wasn’t it, the way I could say things that should make you mad but they didn’t really, somehow. They just didn’t seem fresh, the way I said them. Oh, then maybe that was it. Just the way you would admire any other work of art, like a poem, or a symphony? She’d never thought of it that way. But I was just teasing her now, of course. Work of art! But it was nice, the way I said things.

  She didn’t talk about Nunn. I noticed it. From the depths of that sullenness she was slowly drowning in she was capable of making the crack about “being a trusty,” of making it to a total stranger, but now it was different. It wasn’t an act, really, I thought; when she was talking to somebody who took the trouble to recognize her as a human being, the hard shell of churlishness and defiance softened and she was no longer bound by that Procrustean compulsion to trim all her utterances to fit it. I doubted very much that she was any longer in love with Nunn, but when she was opening her petals this way and feeling good inside she realigned herself with the soap opera dogma that you didn’t discuss your mate with outsiders, no matter what kind of a sad bastard he was.

  There was no difficulty in reading between the lines, however. She was dying out here. She was going crazy with loneliness. The trees were closing in over her and burying her alive. She was starved—not love-starved, at least in any physical sense, for you felt Nunn would collect his marital accounts-receivable as they fell due even if he probably did approach the bed with the subtlety and finesse of Machine-gun Kelly looting a bank—but just starved for companionship and understanding and perhaps a little gentleness. One tender gesture, I thought, would buy you a season pass. Not here, probably, and certainly not now in broad daylight, but it could be arranged. However, that was a matter to be shelved for possible future consideration; right now all I was after was information.

  No, their business was mostly just fishermen. Some of them came and stayed three or four days, and a few hired George for a guide. The groceries were mostly for people who liked to go on up the lake and camp out for a day or two while they fished, but once in a while they did sell some to the people who lived around in the bottom, mostly when they ran short of something and they didn’t want to make the long trip in to town. Like this morning. One of the Hildebrand boys had driven over for a can of baking powder and some evaporated milk. Yes, just before I came in.

  Keep going, honey.

  Up on the road out of the bottom, and one of the boys had a dog named Trixie? No, that wasn’t the Hildebrands. Those people were named Sorensen. The Hildebrands weren’t really boys, they were grown men, actually, twins, about twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and meaner than cat’s milk. Their names were Jack and Judson. Judson had been in the penitentiary for cutting a man up in a fight. They lived over on the west side of the lake with their father and they raised ribbon cane that they made syrup out of in the fall, and lots of people thought they made moonshine, too, all the year around. No women at all; neither of the boys was married, and their mother was dead. They did their own cooking, and it was probably pretty bad. Maybe that was what made ‘em so mean. Did they trade here much? No, very little. They didn’t get along very well with George. They went to town every Saturday and the old man made them buy the groceries and put them in the car before they started getting liquored up and looking for a dance where they could start a fight. . . .

  The Hildebrands didn’t sound too promising. They wouldn’t have spent as much here as those two twenties, to begin with. And if they’d got hold of a lot of money suddenly in some way, the F.B.I, wouldn’t have had any trouble finding it out long before this. There’d have been a steady stream of it being loosed on the countryside through cat-houses, beer joints, and crap games, not to mention large amounts through fines for disturbing the peace. Granted, one of them had been in prison, but where was the connection with Haig? Of course he d been in the sneezer once himself, but that was two thousand miles away in San Quentin.

  But who was left? The man who had passed me on the lake? No one else?

  The upper end of the lake? Yes, there were a few people living up there, mostly men, but you didn’t see much of them. Except that weird one, of course. And he was gone. But really gone. No, he hadn’t moved away; not that kind of gone. In fact, he was down here this morning. I might have seen him pass in his boat. What she meant was weird gone. You know, not quite right. Oh, he was harmless, and you felt sorry for him, but there just wasn’t any sense trying to talk to him. Yes, he was around a lot. He came down about twice a week after his groceries and his comic books. . . .

  Comic books? I remembered them then. So that was why they were here. Well, you could certainly scratch him. But, God, there must have been somebody else. I went on listening; maybe she would come up with the right one after awhile.

  George called him Two-Gun, but his real name was Cliffords. She thought it was Walter Cliffords, or was it Wilbur Cliffords. Well, it didn’t matter, anyway. Even to him. About half the time he thought he was Sergeant Friday and then for a while he’d be Wyatt Earp. When he was Wyatt Earp he wore a big straw sombrero and a gun-belt and holster with a six-shooter. . . . Yes, a real one. George said it was a .36 or a .38 or something about that size. He shot snakes with it. He’d been up there for years, as far as she knew. Used to work for the Southern Pacific, didn’t he, or something like that—anyway, he had a disability pension and he didn’t do anything but hunt and fish all the time, living alo
ne like a hermit, and it was no wonder he was a little, well, you know. It must be a pretty good pension, too, because it was actually a fact he must buy at least twenty or thirty dollars worth of comic books and true detective magazines from them every month, to say nothing about his groceries and the shotgun shells and bullets for the thirty-six to shoot snakes with, and he always paid for everything with a ten or twenty dollar bill. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that with plenty of money to live on that way he’d want to be in town where he could have a television set and civilized people to talk to. . . .

  If you live out of your hat for a sufficient number of years, you develop another sense. It’s a little like a built-in Geiger counter that can trip itself and start clicking faintly even when the rest of your mind is half asleep, and after a while you learn to heed it. I heard it now.

  . . . and somebody to look after him, the poor old man. He really was nice, even if there was never any sense to the way he talked, and she felt sorry for him. She always tried to get him to drink a glass of fresh milk when he was down here, if they happened to have any, that is, and if George wasn’t around. George called him Two-Gun and made fun of him. But when you thought about it, if he wanted to live up there by himself, it was his business, wasn’t it? She’d live in New Orleans, herself. It had probably changed a lot since she was there when she was a girl, but it was the most wonderful place. She remembered she used to go down along the river and look at the ships from all over the world with flags she didn’t even recognize. Of course, being so young, she hadn’t been in any of the night clubs or the big restaurants, but she had heard about them. . . .

  Mr. Cliffords? Oh, sure; she could understand how a strange case like that could intrigue you if you were interested in people. No, she was sure he’d been up there longer than just a year, or a year and a half. Of course, they’d only been here a little less than a year themselves, but she knew definitely he’d been living there three years at least because it was about that long ago when George had met him for the first time. He had come out here in the swamp to arrest a Negro who’d killed another man for—well, you know, running around with his wife. He’d come across Mr. Cliffords then and he’d told her about it when he got back to town, about the funny character who’d wanted to go along and help him round up the Negro and had used funny words like posse, and police cordon, and apprehend the killer, and so on. It was a real scream, George said. It was three years, all right; she knew because it was just a few months after she and George were married.

  His age? Oh, he was pretty old. Forty-five or around there. No, he hardly ever went to town. Maybe just once every two or three months to cash his pension checks and buy what few clothes he needed. No, he had never asked them to cash one, but it seemed like the man who’d had the place before did say something about cashing one for him now and then if he had enough money on hand. His mail? Oh, it came in care of the camp, at the rural mailbox out on the county road. He never got anything, though, except the checks. They came in a long envelope with the name of the railroad on them. She thought it was the Southern Pacific. He probably didn’t have any kinfolks at all, the poor old thing.

  When he did go to town he came down the lake in his boat and hitched a ride with George. His cabin was a mile or so above the road that came into the upper lake from the highway, but the road wasn’t open except when it had been dry for a long time, and he didn’t have a car anyway.

  She poured two cups of the coffee she’d been making as we talked, and came back and sat down again. We were swung around, facing each other across the stool in the middle. I was on the left hand one, with my back to the door.

  She took a sip of the coffee and smiled. “I ought to get back to work,” she said. “I don’t know when I’ve talked so much.”

  “I’ve enjoyed it,” I said. “Very much.”

  I took out cigarettes, wondering how to get her started on Cliffords again, and offered her one. We leaned toward each other as I held the lighter. She was quite pretty, I thought, the way she was now with that warm friendliness in her eyes.

  Then her face froze up as suddenly as if I’d hit her. She was looking over my shoulder. I turned just as Nunn pulled open the screen and stepped inside. He must move like a cat, I thought; neither of us had heard him come up on the porch.

  I nodded, lit my own cigarette, and snapped off the lighter. “How’s fishing?” I asked, wondering why he was back this time of day. I hadn’t even heard the boat come into the inlet.

  He stared at me. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, “So-so. And how’s it been with you? You catching a lot of fish?”

  “I had a little luck at first, but it died out.”

  “Maybe you just give up too easy. Or do you?”

  She had said nothing at all, and I was conscious of the tension in the room. There was ugly feeling about it, as if it could blow up if anybody made a bad move.

  He stared bleakly at the two of us and then at the coffee cups. “I wonder if I could trouble you to go get that box of shear-pins?” he said to her. “That is, if you think you could spare the time.”

  She got up from the stool without a word and disappeared through the doorway behind the counter. The silence she left behind her would have been awkward if it had been two other people. We cared so little for each other it didn’t seem to matter.

  “You people do a fine job of overhauling motors,” he said.

  I stared at him coldly. “What seems to be the trouble?”

  “Sheared a pin.”

  “I gathered that,” I said. “But just what do you think those pins are in there for?”

  “Forget it, forget it,” he growled. “You got your money, what do you care?”

  “If the pin didn’t go you’d tear up the propeller when you hit something, or bend the shaft.”

  He struck a match on his thumbnail and lit a cigarette. “Yeah? They’re supposed to have a friction clutch that’ll slip.”

  “The new ones do,” I said. “Not the old models.”

  “Sure. Sure. I knew you’d have all the answers. I’ve had nothing but trouble with those motors since I bought ’em.”

  I finished the coffee, put a dime on the counter, and stood up. “Try taking care of them,” I said. “It helps.”

  I started for the door. He moved aside grudgingly. You could see he was looking for trouble, but he wanted me out of here even more. It was all right with me; I had other things to do myself.

  “You don’t want anything else?” he said.

  I stopped and turned, looking into the bleak hatchet face from a distance of about two feet. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “I just wanted to be sure. That’s all right, ain’t it?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  I went on out and crossed the sun-drenched clearing to my cabin. The argument about the motors was a phony. He probably hadn’t even sheared a pin, or if he had he’d done it on purpose for an excuse to sneak back. He was spying on her. Or on me.

  I wondered why. Did it have something to do with the thing that’d brought me out here? Or did he simply believe she was the thing? It might figure that way, to a mind like Nunn’s, and the way he’d acted all along seemed to bear it out.

  Well, if he wasn’t sure he was keeping her at home, that was his hard luck, not mine. I had other things to think about, such as the fact that while this whole thing might have appeared to be mildly goofy to begin with it was now completely insane.

  You had all these pieces of evidence. They interlocked. You put them all together, and you had the answer. So what was it?

  One of the great police organizations of the world was shaking down North America trying to find the loot from a bank robbery, while some dreamy birdbrain in his second childhood was serenely buying comic books with it.

  Move over, Cliffords, I thought. I’ll bring up an armful and we’ll trade. Dibs on Superman.

  Six

  I cut the motor and ca
me to rest beneath dense overhanging foliage along the bank. It was a little after one p.m. I had come over a mile, I thought, since entering the mouth of the winding waterway up which Cliffords had gone with his boat, and I could as well be lost in some remote back country of the Amazon drainage. No sound broke the stillness of midday. The channel, about a hundred yards wide at this point, materialized out of the timber a quarter of a mile behind me and disappeared around another bend just ahead.

  I opened the tackle box and unfolded the large map of the county. Here was the channel I was on; it was the easternmost arm of the lake, next to the highway and roughly paralleling it at a distance varying from two to three miles. I was about—say, at this point on it. Now. There was the access road coming in from the highway. It turned off the road a mile or so south of that tricky S-bend.

  I sat still for a moment, frowning thoughtfully at the map without actually seeing it. What the devil was it? I shrugged, and lit a cigarette. It didn’t matter. Now, here. The dirt road, merely a thin line on the map, dead-ended on this channel. I glanced at the scale at the bottom of the map and estimated the distance. Say another four miles. And beyond it somewhere was the shack Cliffords lived in. She’d said a mile or two; I wondered if she had ever been up there herself.

  I put the map back in the box and took the ten-dollar bill out of my wallet. It was an old one, creased and limp from the thousands of hands it had been through and like any one of a million others except for that narrow stain along the edge at one end. I compared it with the twenty. The stain was exactly the same color, a reddish shade of brown, and it was on only that one place. Why never anywhere else? There was one very good answer to that, I thought, and the picture it brought to mind made my skin prickle with excitement. Wherever it had been to pick up that discoloration, there had been a lot of it, stacked in bundles so that only this edge was exposed to the contaminating agent. You didn’t need a doctorate in physics to realize that a mere handful of banknotes, thrown loosely into a box or something, seldom stood on end of their own volition or stuck straight out from the side with no support. I moistened a finger and rubbed it along the stain; it smudged slightly and a faint trace of it came off. It was the same stuff.