River Girl

by Charles Williams

  It was late when I rounded a long turn and saw just the place where I wanted to camp. The lake was about a hundred yards wide here, with an open bank under a towering wall of oaks on the right, and dead snags and big patches of pads along the left. The sun was gone now and the water lay still and flat like a dark mirror except for a boiling rise where a bass smashed at something near one of the snags. I cut the motor and started drifting in, and silence seemed to pour out of all the vast solitude and came rolling over me like a wave. I worked fast in the daylight there was left, stringing the trot line between two of the old snags and baiting it with the liver I had brought, then went ashore and built a fire to cook supper. After I had eaten I washed the dishes and sat down on the bedroll in the darkness, smoking and looking at the fire. The big bullfrogs had opened up their chorus and I could hear the whipporwills’ lonely crying up in the swamp, reminding me of the nights I had camped on the lake when I was a boy. The Judge and I had fished a lot in those days. My mother was dead, and there had been just the two of us for a long time. He taught me to use the fly rod, how to drop a cork bug forty feet away beside a sunken log and to set the hook when the surface heaved, exploding with the strike, and how to release a bass after it was whipped. He never kept them. Tomorrow, I thought, I might catch one the old boy had in the net and then released to fight some other day, and then I knew it wasn’t likely. He’d died six years ago, while I was overseas. It would have to be a very old bass to have fought the Judge.

  I took off my shoes and clothes and lay down on the blankets, but it was a long time before I got to sleep. I kept thinking of the fights with Louise and the endless bickering over money. Nothing had seemed to have any point to it after I came back from the Army, I had just seemed to drift aimlessly, taking the path of least resistance. I was twenty-three when I came back, and for a while I’d thought of going back to school under the GI plan, for I had finished two years at the state university before the war, but that had gradually fizzled out when I started going with Louise. Then Buford offered me a job as deputy as a favor to some people who had been friends of the Judge, and before long Louise and I were married. We had gone into debt for the house, and then there was a new car, a Chevrolet, and before that was two years old we bought the Olds. It wasn’t too hard, after a while, to start taking money from the same places Buford was taking his.

  Maybe it’s just as well the Judge isn’t here any more, I thought. He never cared that much for money.

  It was a beautiful morning, very still and cloudless, with patches of light mist hanging over the lake in the early dawn. I got up and picked up a towel and ran down to the boat. Stepping into it, I pulled out into the channel with the oars, took off the shorts, and dived in. The water felt warm, but it was clean, and I swam down until I felt the bottom under my hands and then came shooting up, bursting clear of the surface like a seal playing. Beyond the wall of the oaks along the bank I could see the sky in the east growing coral now, and across the vast and breathless hush of early morning I heard the explosive smash as a bass hit something among the pads along the other shore.

  I pulled hurriedly back to camp and got the fly rod and some bugs and came back, letting the boat drift silently among the snags. Tying on a cork bug with a dished-in face, I began working out line with false casts and dropped it thirty feet away in a pocket at the edge of the pads. It lay cocked up jauntily on the surface with its white hair wings erect, perfectly still like some big green-and-white insect trying to make up its mind what to do next. I twitched the line and the face dipped down and gurgled with a bubbling sound and little rings spread outward from it toward the pads. I twitched it again, quite gently, then the water bulged upward and swallowed it. I raised the rod tip and felt the weight that meant the hook was in, then he came out of the water glinting green and bronze in the early light and shaking his head to throw the hook. Bugs aren’t so easy to sling as big plugs, however, for there isn’t the leverage, and when he went down he still had it. He didn’t like it a bit, and made a run for the pads, but I managed to get him turned in time, and began taking in line as he came nearer. He jumped twice more, tiring himself, and in a little while I had him close up to the boat. I was reaching for the net when he saw me and was off again, making the reel sing. The next time he came in he was about done for and lay weakly on his side as I slipped the net under him, I lifted, and he flapped in the net in the bottom of the boat, a beauty that would go three pounds. Slipping the hook out, I lifted him over the side into the water. He lay quietly, then flipped his tail and swam out.

  I missed a few strikes, and then quit feeding. Going over to the trot line, I ran along it, pulling hand over hand along the line. There were three catfish on it, one small one that would be just the right size for breakfast, and two others of two or three pounds each. I was wondering if I would be able to keep them alive until I went home, when I heard an outboard motor suddenly break the silence of the lake. It surprised me, for I hadn’t thought there was anyone else up here. I looked up and saw it coming around the bend, three or four hundred yards distant. It was coming fast, and as it approached I saw it was a big skiff probably sixteen feet, with only one man in it, and that he apparently had no intention of stopping to swap fish stories. As he came abreast I waved. He looked at me once, lifted a hand in a gesture that was almost curt, and went past. Then his motor sputtered and died. I had started to row back to camp when it quit on him, and I watched the boat drift along on its momentum for a little way and then come to rest. He was looking at the motor. I turned and started over. “Trouble?” I called out.

  I could see him shake his head. “Just out of gas.” As I came up alongside I saw the motor was a big Johnson with a lot of power. He was filling the tank from one of those Army surplus jeep cans, and I looked at him, wondering if he might be anyone I knew. He glanced up briefly and went on pouring gasoline. I didn’t know him, but for just a fraction of a second I had that feeling there was something familiar about his face; then it was gone. Maybe I just ran into him on the street sometime in town, I thought.

  He didn’t look as if he lived in town, though, or even went there very often. His face was deeply tanned, almost black from the sun, and the dark and graying hair was long above the ears and growing down his neck into the collar of the sweaty blue shirt. It was the lean, bony face of a man somewhere in his forties, with haze-gray eyes faintly bloodshot, as if he had not slept, and full of an infinite sad tiredness like those of a man who has been looking for too long at something he doesn’t like. The face was tired, too, and intelligent, but completely expressionless, and it was frosted along the jaws and chin with a beard stubble that was grayer than his hair. He wore a floppy straw hat and faded overalls rolled halfway to his knees, and I could see he was barefoot. His shoes, however, were up in the bow of the boat out of the inch or so of water sloshing around in the bottom. Lives up here, I thought. Probably makes a little whisky and traps some during the winter. His hands were shaking badly and he was spilling some of the gasoline.

  “How’s fishing?” I asked.

  “All right.” He screwed the cap back on the gasoline can and set it up forward by his shoes. Then I noticed the tow sack in the bottom, under the seat, and wondered if it didn’t have whisky jars in it until I saw the dorsal fin of a catfish sticking through.

  “Taking them down to the highway?” I asked. I knew the restaurant at the foot of the lake specialized in fried catfish and that they bought the fish from the swamp rats who lived up here in the sloughs.

  He nodded.

  “Here,” I said, glad to find somebody who could use the ones I had. “Take these along. I’ve got more than I can eat and they won’t stay alive until I go home.”

  He glanced up briefly and shook his head. “Don’t need ‘em.” Then, as an afterthought, “Got all he’ll take. Thanks.”

  I shrugged. “O.K.”

  He was ready to go and was about to crank the motor when he paused. “Pretty far up the lake, ain’t you?”r />
  “Yes,” I said. “Why?”

  “Nothing. It’s easy to get lost up here, though.” The motor caught and he was gone.

  I kept thinking about him as I cleaned the catfish for breakfast. His face was familiar somehow. I thought, but I knew I’d never seen him before around here. And there was something else I couldn’t get out of my mind. He looked like a swamp rat and dressed like one, but the speech didn’t ring true. He used the right words but he said them differently, the way they would sound if you were reading dialect out of a book.

  I wondered how far up he lived, then suddenly remembered the odd way I had first noticed the sound of the boat. He must have just started it when I heard it, which meant he hadn’t come from much farther away than around the next bend, possibly half a mile.

  Three

  I probably would never have gone up to the cabin if it hadn’t been for the accident.

  It was one of those stupid things that seem to happen only when you’re fishing alone. It was about midmorning and I was casting a white streamer fly for crappies near an old windfall at the edge of the lake along the other shore when I must have let my backcast drop too far and touch the water. At any rate, when I came forward with the rod I felt the line slap my back and then the sting of the hook.

  I untangled the line from around my neck and tried to reach the fly. It was between my shoulder blades, and I could just touch it with my fingertips. Thinking it had only nicked me, I tried to shake it loose by jiggling the leader, but it stuck. I cursed myself for a clumsy fool, getting tangled up in a fly line like somebody who’d never had a rod in his hand before. After trying to dislodge it by poking at it with a small stick, I began to realize I was solidly hooked. It didn’t hurt much, but any movement of my arms irritated it, because the shirt would move and shift the hook.

  I cut the leader with a knife so I wouldn’t have the fly line dangling from me, and sat there while I smoked a cigarette and thought about it. I hated the idea of starting back down the lake looking for somebody to get it out for me. On a weekday like this I’d probably have to go the full twenty miles to the highway before I met anyone. Then I thought of the man who had gone by early in the morning, but I knew that even if he went down and straight back he’d be another three or four hours at least, and might not be back until night. Suddenly I remembered again the way I had first heard his boat, as if he had started it up just around the bend. Maybe his cabin was nearby and there might be somebody there.

  I went back to camp with the hook digging painfully into my back with every stroke of the oars, and got out the small pair of diagonal pliers I carry in the tackle box. Then clamping on the motor, I started up the lake.

  At first glance the long reach of the lake above the bend seemed to be empty and deserted, a continuation of the miles below it. There was the same wall of oaks, the weed beds and gaunt dead trees, and the water flat and brassy in the sun. A big slough led off into the timber on the right and I was almost past it before I saw the small boat landing just inside the entrance.

  I wheeled about and turned in, cutting the motor and drifting up alongside the landing, which consisted of two big floating logs with boards nailed across them. There was a live box made of rabbit-wire netting alongside the float, and I could see a few catfish swimming around in it.

  I tied the boat to the logs and went up the trail through the timber. There was a long clearing, with bunch grass and weeds, dead and brown now in the late summer, with a dust-powdered trail going back to the frame shack at the other end. The house was small, not over two rooms at most, with a sagging porch in front, and covered with old oak shakes the color of tarnished silver. It sat up off the ground on round blocks, and under it I could see the big black-and-tan hound lying in the dust. He rose and stalked dejectedly out as I approached, but there was no other sign of life. Grasshoppers buzzed in the warm morning sun, and there was a peaceful, almost drowsy stillness about the place that made you think of a painting or some half-forgotten fragment of a dream.

  I stopped in front and called out. “Hello. Hello in the house.”

  There was no answer and no sound of steps inside. I could see a feather of blue-gray smoke curling from the stovepipe and drifting straight up in the motionless air, and knew someone must be around nearby if there was still a fire in the cookstove. I tried again. “Hello in the house.”

  The old hound looked at me sadly and gave a listless wag of his tail, but the silence remained unbroken. I could feel the hook pulling at my back and began to wonder impatiently if I would have to go down the lake after all. Damn, I thought. Turning, I walked around the side of the house on the bare, hard-packed ground. Someone had tried to grow flowers in a little bed along the wall, but everything was dead and withered now except the lone morning-glory winding along some white string stretched up past the window. The ground at the base of the vine was damp, as if it had been watered last night.

  There was nothing behind the house except a privy with its door hanging crazily open on a broken hinge. There was no barn, for there were no animals except the dog, and not even a well. They must get water from the lake, I thought. A black walnut tree shaded the corner of the house, and on beyond the privy there was just the dead bunch grass stretching out toward the wall of timber closing it all in. I heard a squirrel chatter across the stillness, and inside the kitchen the fire crackled once inside the stove.

  I was just turning to go back around in front when I saw a sudden flash of color in the edge of the timber and a girl stepped out into the clearing. What I had seen was a blue bathing cap, and now she came on toward me along the trail in the wet bathing suit, seeing me standing there but not changing the unhurried gait. It was a beautiful walk, and I watched her, trying not to stare, conscious of the crazy thought that she could be modeling a bathing suit instead of walking across a backwoods clearing.

  It wasn’t one of those two-piece Bikini things, or even the fancy and highly colored ones usually worn around beaches, and even though it was very small and tight and clung to her like nylon with a static charge, there was still somehow a suggestion of modesty rather than display about it, probably because it was of the kind professional swimmers wear, smooth and black, and cut down for utility rather than advertising. You had an idea, watching her, that she was a good swimmer.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Good morning.” She stopped, with water still dripping from the suit into the powdery dust at the edge of the trail. She was a little over average height, with square shoulders, and quite slender, with long, smooth legs, not deeply tanned, and the suit pulled tightly across her breasts. Her eyes were deep blue and faintly questioning, and there was something incredibly quiet and still about the face. There was no way of knowing what color her hair was under the bathing cap. She might be any age, I thought, from twenty to twenty-eight.

  I knew I had been staring and tried to smile to cover it up. It was awkward, because she somehow gave the impression she didn’t care whether I stared or not, and didn’t care a great deal, as a matter of fact, whether I was even there.

  “I was just looking for a little help,” I said.

  “Yes? If there’s anything I can do ...” She let it trail off, still looking at me quietly, and I was conscious of that same puzzling impression I had had about the man. The speech didn’t fit, somehow. It wasn’t what you would expect to hear up here in the swamps.

  I turned around so she could see the fly sticking in my back, feeling like a fool because it was such a stupid thing to have happen. “I can’t quite reach it,” I said.

  She stepped closer and examined it, touching the shank of the fly gently with her fingers. “I can’t tell because of the shirt,” she said, “but I think the barb is caught.”

  “I think so,” I said. “It’s not hard to do, though. The thing to do is push it on through, cut off the barb, and then back it out. I brought some pliers.”

  I think I can do it,” she answered. “Will you wait a minute until I cha
nge clothes?”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “Go ahead. I’ll wait out here.”

  I turned back around and she unfastened the chin strap of the cap and peeled it off, running her fingers through her hair and shaking it out. It was straight and dark brown, almost black, falling in beautiful disarray across the side of her face, and I stared at it with almost the same sense of shock or outrage you might have at seeing a beautiful painting defaced, for it had been badly mangled by some clumsy attempt at cutting it. Whoever had cut it must have used a lawn mower, I thought. She shook the cap to get the water off it and went in the kitchen door, straight-backed and unhurried. The door swung shut and then I heard the front one close.

  I lit a cigarette and squatted on my heels in the shade of the walnut tree, listening to the ratcheting buzz of the grasshoppers and thinking of the way she had looked and of that strange stillness about her face. It wasn’t the blank emptiness of stupidity or the quietness of inner serenity—there was something about it that made you think of the dangerous and unnatural surface calm of a city under martial law.

  In a few minutes the door opened and she came out with the wet suit, which she threw across a clothesline. She had on a shapeless old cotton dress too big for her and hadn’t bothered to put on any make-up or comb her hair, and she was barefoot like any backwoods slattern. She couldn’t have made herself look any worse if she’d tried, I thought, and got the impression somehow that she had tried.

  “You can come in now,” she said.