The Price of Salt

by Highsmith, Patricia

  Carol raised her voice. "Are you going to tag along the rest of the way?"

  "Are you going back to New York?"

  "No."

  "I think you will," the detective said, and he turned away slowly toward his car.

  Carol stepped on the starter. She reached for Therese's hand and squeezed it for a moment in reassurance, and then the car shot forward. Therese sat up with her elbows on her knees and her hands pressed to her forehead, yielding to a shame and shock she had never known before, that she had repressed before the detective.

  "Carol!"

  Carol was crying, silently. Therese looked at the downward curve of her lips that was not like Carol at all, but rather like a small girl's twisted grimace of crying. She stared incredulously at the tear that rolled over Carol's cheekbone.

  "Get me a cigarette," Carol said.

  When Therese handed it to her, lighted, she had wiped the tear away, and it was over. Carol drove for a minute, slowly, smoking the cigarette.

  "Crawl in the back and get the gun," Carol said.

  Therese did not move for a moment.

  Carol glanced at her. "Will you?"

  Therese slid agilely in her slacks over the back seat, and dragged the navy-blue suitcase onto the seat. She opened the clasps and got out the sweater with the gun.

  "Just hand it to me," Carol said calmly. "I want it in the side pocket."

  She reached her hand over her shoulder, and Therese put the white handle of the gun into it, and crawled back into the front seat.

  The detective was still following them, half a mile behind them, back of the horse and farm wagon that had turned into the highway from a dirt road. Carol held Therese's hand and drove with her left hand. Therese looked down at the faintly freckled fingers that dug their strong cool tips into her palm.

  "I'm going to talk to him again," Carol said, and pressed the gas pedal down steadily. "If you want to get out, I'll put you off at the next gas station or something and come back for you."

  "I don't want to leave you," Therese said. Carol was going to demand the detective's records, and Therese had a vision of Carol hurt, of his pulling a gun with an expert's oily speed and firing it before Carol could even pull the trigger. But those things didn't happen, wouldn't happen, she thought, and she set her teeth. She kneaded Carol's hand in her fingers.

  "All right. And don't worry. I just want to talk to him." She swung the car suddenly into a smaller road off the highway to the left. The road went up between sloping fields, and turned and went through woods. Carol drove fast, though the road was bad. "He's coming on, isn't he?"

  "Yes."

  There was one farmhouse set in the rolling hills, and then nothing but scrubby, rocky land and the road that kept disappearing around the curves before them. Where the road clung to a sloping hill, Carol went round a curve and stopped the car carelessly, half in the road.

  She reached for the side pocket and pulled the gun, out. She opened something on it, and Therese saw the bullets inside. Then Carol looked through the windshield, and let her hands with the gun fall in her lap.

  "I'd better not, better not," she said quickly, and dropped the gun back in the side pocket. Then she pulled the car up, and straightened it by the side of the hill. "Stay in the car," she said to Therese, and got out.

  Therese heard the detective's car. Carol walked slowly toward the sound, and then the detective's car came around the curve, not fast, but his brakes shrieked, and Carol stepped to the side of the road. Therese opened the door slightly, and leaned on the window sill.

  The man got out of his car. "Now what?" he said, raising his voice in the wind.

  "What do you think?" Carol came a little closer to him. "I'd like everything you've got about me—dictaphone tapes and whatever."

  The detective's brows hardly rose over the pale dots of his eyes. He leaned against the front fender of his car, smirking with his wide thin mouth. He glanced at Therese and back at Carol. "Everything's sent away.

  I haven't a thing but a few notes. About times and places."

  "All right, I'd like to have them."

  "You mean, you want to buy them?"

  "I didn't say that, I said I'd like to have them. Do you prefer to sell them?"

  "I'm not one you can buy off," he said.

  "What're you doing this for anyway, if not money?" Carol asked impatiently. "Why not make a little more? What'll you take for what you've got?"

  He folded his arms. "I told you everything's sent away. You'd be wasting your money."

  "I don't think you mailed the dictaphone records yet from Colorado Springs," Carol said.

  "No?" he asked sarcastically.

  "No. I'll give you whatever you ask for them."

  He looked Carol up and down, glanced at Therese, and again his mouth widened.

  "Get them—tapes, records or whatever they are," Carol said, and the man moved.

  He walked around his car to the luggage compartment, and Therese heard his keys jingle as he opened it. Therese got out of the car, unable to sit there any longer. She walked to within a few feet of Carol and stopped. The detective was reaching for something in a big suitcase. When he straightened up, the raised lid of the compartment knocked his hat off. He stepped on the brim to hold it from the wind. He had something in one hand now, too small to see.

  "There's two," he said. "I guess they're worth five hundred. They'd be worth more if there weren't more of them in New York."

  "You're a fine salesman. I don't believe you," Carol said.

  "Why? They're in a hurry for them in New York." He picked up his hat, and closed the luggage compartment. "But they've got enough now. I told you you'd better go back to New York, Mrs. Aird." He ground his cigarette out in the dirt, twisting his toe in front of him. "Are you going back to New York now?"

  "I don't change my mind," Carol said.

  The detective shrugged. "I'm not on any side. The sooner you go back to New York, the sooner we can call it quits."

  "We can call it quits right now. After you give me those, you can take off and keep going in the same direction."

  The detective had slowly extended his hand in a fist, like the fist in a guessing game in which there might be nothing. "Are you willing to give me five hundred for these?" he asked.

  Carol looked at his hand, then opened her shoulder strap bag. She took out her billfold, and then her checkbook.

  "I prefer cash," he said.

  "I haven't got it."

  He shrugged again. "Ail right, I'll take a check."

  Carol wrote it, resting it on the fender of his car.

  Now as he bent over, watching Carol, Therese could see the little black object in his hand. Therese came closer. The man was spelling his name.

  When Carol gave him the check, he dropped the two little boxes in her hand.

  "How long have you been collecting them?" Carol asked.

  "Play them and see."

  "I didn't come out here to joke!" Carol said, and her voice broke.

  He smiled, folding the check. "Don't say I didn't warn you. What you've gotten from me isn't all of it. There's plenty in New York."

  Carol fastened her bag, and turned toward her car, not even looking at Therese. Then she stopped and faced the detective again. "If they've got all they want, you can knock off now, can't you? Have I got your promise to do that?"

  He was standing with his hand on his car door, watching her. "I'm still on the job, Mrs. Aird—still working for my office. Unless you want to catch a plane for home now. Or for some other place. Give me the slip.

  I'll have to tell my office something—not having the last few days at Colorado Springs—something more exciting than this."

  "Oh, let them invent something exciting!"

  The detective's smile showed a little of his teeth. He got back into his car. He shoved his gear, put his head out to see behind him, and backed the car in a quick turn. He drove off toward the highway.

  The sound of his motor faded
fast. Carol walked slowly toward the car, got in and sat staring through the windshield at the dry rise of earth a few yards ahead. Her face was as blank as if she had fainted.

  Therese was beside her. She put her arm around Carol's shoulder. She squeezed the cloth shoulder of the coat, and felt as useless as any stranger.

  "Oh, I think it's mostly bluff," Carol said suddenly.

  But it had made Carol's face gray, had taken the energy out of her voice.

  Carol opened her hand and looked at the two little round boxes. "Here's as good a place as any." She got out of the car, and Therese followed her. Carol opened a box and took out the coil of tape that looked like celluloid. "Tiny, isn't it. I suppose it burns. Let's burn it."

  Therese struck the match in the shelter of the car. The tape burned fast, and Therese dropped it on the ground, and then the wind blew it out.

  Carol said not to bother, they could throw both of them in a river. Carol was sitting in the car, smoking a cigarette.

  "What time is it?" Carol asked.

  "Twenty to twelve." She got back in the car, and Carol started immediately, back down the road toward the highway.

  "I'm going to call Abby in Omaha, and then my lawyer."

  Therese looked at the road map. Omaha was the next big town, if they made a slight turn south. Carol looked tired, and Therese felt her anger, still unappeased, in the silence she kept. The car jolted over a rut, and Therese heard the bump and clink of the can of beer that rolled somewhere under the front seat, the beer they had not been able to open that first day. She was hungry, had been sickly hungry for hours.

  "How about my driving?"

  "All right," Carol said tiredly, relaxing as if she surrendered. She slowed the car quickly.

  Therese slid across her, under the wheel. "And how about stopping for a breakfast?"

  "I couldn't eat."

  "Or a drink."

  "Let's get it in Omaha."

  Therese sent the speedometer up to sixty-five, and held it just under seventy. It was Highway 30. Then two seventy-five into Omaha, and the road was not first class. "You don't believe him about dictaphone records in New York, do you?"

  "Don't talk about it!—I'm sick of it!"

  Therese squeezed the wheel, then deliberately relaxed. She sensed a tremendous sorrow hanging over them, ahead of them, that was just beginning to reveal the edge of itself, that they were driving into. She remembered the detective's face and the barely legible expression that she realized now was malice. It was malice she had seen in his smile, even as he said he was on no side, and she could feel in him a desire that was actually personal to separate them, because he knew they were together. She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist.

  "I'm thinking of that check," Carol said.

  It fell like another stone inside her. "Do you think they're going over the house?" Therese asked.

  "Possibly. Just possibly."

  "I don't think they'd find it. It's way under the runner." But there was the letter in the book. A curious pride lifted her spirit for an instant, and vanished. It was a beautiful letter, and she would rather they found it than the check, though as to incrimination they would probably have the same weight, and they would make the one as dirty as the other. The letter she had never given, and the check she had never cashed. It was more likely they would find the letter, certainly. Therese could not bring herself to tell Carol of the letter, whether from plain cowardice or a desire to spare Carol any more now, she didn't know. She saw a bridge ahead. "There's a river," she said. "How about here?"

  "Good enough." Carol handed her the little boxes. She had put the half-burned tape back in its box.

  Therese got out and flung them over the metal rail, and did not watch.

  She looked at the young man in overalls walking onto the bridge from the other side, hating the senseless antagonism in herself against him.

  Carol telephoned from a hotel in Omaha. Abby was not at home, and Carol left a message that she would call at six o'clock that evening, when Abby was expected. Carol said it was of no use to call her lawyer now, because he would be out to lunch until after two by their time. Carol wanted to wash up, and then have a drink.

  They had Old Fashioneds in the bar of the hotel, in complete silence.

  Therese asked for a second when Carol did, but Carol said she should eat something instead. The waiter told Carol that food was not served in the bar.

  "She wants something to eat," Carol said firmly.

  "The dining room is across the lobby, madame, and there's a coffee shop—"

  "Carol, I can wait," Therese said.

  "Will you please bring me the menu? She prefers to eat here," Carol said with a glance at the waiter.

  The waiter hesitated, then said, "Yes, madame," and went to get the menu.

  While Therese ate scrambled eggs and sausage, Carol had her third drink.

  Finally, Carol said in a tone of hopelessness, "Darling, can I ask you to forgive me?"

  The tone hurt Therese more than the question. "I love you, Carol."

  "But do you see what it means?"

  "Yes." But that moment of defeat in the car, she thought, that had been only a moment, as this time now was only a situation. "I don't see why it should mean this forever. I don't see how this can destroy anything," she said earnestly.

  Carol took her hand down from her face and sat back, and now in spite of the tiredness she looked as Therese always thought of her—the eyes that could be tender and hard at once as they tested her, the intelligent red lips strong and soft, though the upper lip trembled the least bit now.

  "Do you?" Therese asked, and she realized suddenly it was a question as big as the one Carol had asked her without words in the room in Waterloo.

  In fact, the same question.

  "No. I think you're right," Carol said. "You make me realize it."

  Carol went to telephone. It was three o'clock. Therese got the check, then sat there waiting, wondering when it was going to be over, whether the reassuring word would come from Carol's lawyer or from Abby, or whether it was going to get worse before it got better. Carol was gone about half an hour.

  "My lawyer hasn't heard anything," she said. "And I didn't tell him anything. I can't. I'll have to write it."

  "I thought you would."

  "Oh, you did," Carol said with her first smile that day. "What do you say we get a room here? I don't feel like traveling any more."

  Carol had her lunch sent up to their room. They both lay down to take a nap, but when Therese awakened at a quarter to five, Carol was gone.

  Therese glanced around the room, noticing Carol's black gloves on the dressing table, and her moccasins side by side near the armchair. Therese sighed, tremulously, unrefreshed by her sleep. She opened the window and looked down. It was the seventh or eighth floor, she couldn't remember which. A streetcar crawled past the front of the hotel, and people on the sidewalk moved in every direction, with legs on either side of them, and it crossed her mind to jump. She looked off at the drab little skyline of gray buildings and closed her eyes on it. Then she turned around and Carol was in the room, standing by the door, watching her.

  "Where have you been?" Therese asked.

  "Writing that damned letter."

  Carol crossed the room and caught Therese in her arms. Therese felt Carol's nails through the back of her jacket.

  When Carol went to the telephone, Therese left the room and wandered down the hall toward the elevators. She went down to the lobby and sat there reading an article on weevils in the Corngrower's Gazette, and wondered if Abby knew all that about corn weevils. She watched the clock, and after twenty-five minutes went upstairs again.

  Carol was lying on the bed, smoking a cigarette. Therese waited for her to speak.

  "Darling, I've got
to go to New York," Carol said.

  Therese had been sure of that. She came to the foot of the bed. "What else did Abby say?"

  "She saw the fellow named Bob Haversham again." Carol raised herself on her elbow. "But he certainly doesn't know as much as I do at this point.

  Nobody seems to know anything, except that trouble's brewing. Nothing much can happen until I get there. But I've got to be there."

  "Of course." Bob Haversham was the friend of Abby's who worked in Harge's firm in Newark, not a close friend either of Abby's or Harge's, just a link, a slim link between the two of them, the one person who might know, something of what Harge was doing", if he could recognize a detective, or overhear part of a telephone call, in Harge's office. It was worth almost nothing, Therese felt.

  "Abby's going to get the check," Carol said, sitting up on the bed, reaching for her moccasins.

  "Has she got a key?"

  "I wish she had. She's got to get it from Florence. But that'll be all right. I told her to tell Florence I wanted a couple of things sent to me."

  "Can you tell her to get a letter, too? I left a letter to you in a book in my room. I'm sorry I didn't tell you before. I didn't know you were going to have Abby go there."

  Carol gave her a frowning glance. "Anything else?"

  "No. I'm sorry I didn't tell you before."

  Carol sighed, and stood up. "Oh, let's not worry any more. I doubt if they'll bother about the house, but I'll tell Abby about the letter anyway. Where is it?"

  "In the Oxford Book of English Verse. I think I left it on top of the bureau." She watched Carol glance around the room, looking anywhere but at her.

  "I don't want to stay here tonight after all," Carol said.

  Half an hour later, they were in the car going eastward. Carol wanted to reach Des Moines that night. After a silence of more than an hour, Carol suddenly stopped the car at the edge of the road, bent her head, and said, "Damn!"

  She could see the darkish sinks under Carol's eyes in the glare of passing cars. Carol hadn't slept at all last night. "Let's go back to that last town," Therese said. "It's still about seventy-five miles to Des Moines."

  "Do you want to go to Arizona?" Carol asked her, as if all they had to do was turn around.