River Girl

by Charles Williams

  I followed her through the small kitchen into the front room. The floor was bare except for a small rag rug, rough pine planks worn white with scrubbing, and there was a small mud fireplace neatly swept. There were a couple of rawhide-bottomed chairs, and an old iron bedstead standing in the corner by the fireplace, and across on the right between the window and the front door there was a dresser with a milky and discolored mirror. The air was hot and still inside the room, and I could hear the ticking of the tin alarm clock on the mantel above the fireplace. There was a photograph of her next to the clock, apparently taken not too long ago, but at least it was before her hair had been butchered up like that.

  “Do you have a razor blade or a pair of scissors?” I asked.

  “Yes. Do you want me to cut the shirt away?”

  I nodded. “That’d be best. Then we can see what we’re doing.”

  She got a small pair of manicure scissors out of the dresser and slit the shirt around the hook. I unbuttoned it and slid it off, and turned my back to the mirror to look over my shoulder. I was deeply tanned from the waist up and wore no undershirt. The streamer fly was a vivid slash of white and silver tinsel against the sun-blackened hide, and as well as I could tell, the barb was deeply embedded. I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror and for the first time remembered I hadn’t shaved since yesterday, and wondered what kind of thug I must look like to her, big, with the flat, sun-darkened face rasping with black stubble.

  I motioned with a hand and passed her the diagonal pliers. “Pinch the muscle and skin up with your fingers and run it on through as if you were baiting a hook,” I instructed.

  “It’ll hurt,” she said quietly.

  “Some,” I said.

  I turned my back toward her and felt the slight, trembling pressure of her fingers, pinching the skin. There was a fiery bite of pain, and when I looked in the mirror again the barb was through in the open and a thin trickle of blood ran down my back. She snipped off the barb and backed it out.

  “Just a moment,” she said. She pulled open one of the dresser drawers and brought out a bottle of iodine and a Band-aid and applied them to the punctures.

  “You should have been a doctor,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  I am six feet one, and the top of her head came up just a little past my chin as she stood there when she had finished. She’d be taller in high heels, I thought. Barefoot! Why? And why, in God’s name, did she ever let somebody hack her hair up like that?

  I reached for the cigarettes in my shirt hanging over the back of a chair. “Do you smoke?”

  “Yes. Thank you.” She took one and I broke a match on my thumbnail and lit it and then mine.

  The blue eyes were devoid of any expression as she looked at me through the cigarette smoke. “You can put your shirt on,” she said.

  You couldn’t get behind her voice any more than you could behind the eyes. The way she said it, it might have been only a reminder that I had forgotten to put it on, or it might have been a flat command. I thought about it, remembering that she had wanted to change out of the bathing suit into that hopeless sack of a dress before she would take the hook out for me. She turned and looked out the door as I slipped it on and tucked it inside the trousers.

  The room was perfectly quiet except for the same monotonous ticking of the cheap clock and the faintly drowsy hum of summer insects out across the sun-baked clearing, but there was nothing peaceful about it. Somehow, the whole mood of the place seemed to come from her, as if the air itself were charged with that same tension you could sense behind the contained, set stillness of her face.

  “My name’s Jack Marshall,” I said.

  She turned back from the doorway and stood just inside it, leaning slightly against the frame, looked at my face for just an instant with an odd, intense glance as if she were trying to remember something, and then resumed the expressionless blankness. “I’m Mrs. Shevlin.”

  “Have you lived up here long?”

  “About a year.”

  “I guess you swim a lot?”

  “Every day. Except in winter.”

  “You must like swimming,” I went on, in spite of the fact that it sounded more like a police investigation than it did a conversation.

  “Yes. I like it. Fortunately.”

  “Fortunately?”

  “Yes. There isn’t much else to do.”

  “I guess you’re pretty good at it. I’m not much myself. I just dog-paddle.”

  Oh?” It was polite and nothing more. Why does she want me to get out of here? I thought. You can hear the loneliness screaming there inside her.

  There was no way I could keep from staring at her hair. We faced each other across six feet of hot, explosive silence in the room and I could not look away. It wasn’t any of my business and I had no business here at all now that the hook was out, but it was like one of those terrible compulsions in a dream where you can’t stop whatever it is you’re doing.

  “Who did that?” I asked.

  “Did what?” She knew, though, what I meant.

  “Gut your hair that way,” I said, still with that feeling of being unable to stop myself.

  “Are you a barber?” she asked coldly.

  “No. But I could do a better job than that.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of troubling you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know it isn’t any of my business. I just couldn’t help it.”

  She shoved a hand through the dark confusion of the hair and turned abruptly away from me. “It’s all right,” she said. “I—I guess I’m just nervous.” She walked over in front of the fireplace and threw the cigarette in it, remaining there with her back to me.

  “I guess I’d better run along,” I said tentatively. There was no answer except the ticking of the clock as my words hung and died in the stillness of the room. I turned toward the door.

  “Thanks again for taking the hook out.” She said nothing at all and didn’t even turn around. I went on out, across the clearing in the hot sun, and down the trail to the boat.

  It wasn’t until I was all the way back to camp that I suddenly remembered the pliers. I had left them there.

  Four

  I should have broken camp and got out of there, but I didn’t. Fishing had lost its magic and I was only going through the motions, but still I stayed. I kept seeing that disturbing picture of her coming across the clearing in the wet bathing suit with that deadly stillness in her face. Who was she? And what were they doing here?

  I awoke once during the night, and for an instant I could have sworn I heard the rhythmic beat of someone’s swimming past out in the channel, and then I knew I must have been mistaken. I lay on my back looking up at the stars, and then for some insane reason I couldn’t understand I suddenly saw that forlorn and pathetic morning-glory vine before me in the darkness, its base freshly watered, and the girl walking up that long trail from the lake carrying bucket after bucket of water to pour on it to keep it from dying like the rest of the pitiful flower bed. I’m going nuts, I thought.

  It was the second night before I would admit it to myself. I was waiting for him to go back down the lake. Why? I thought. I never did a thing like that before.

  Friday morning I awoke at dawn, determined to pack and leave. I’ll get out of here before he goes down the lake again, I thought, and never come this far up again. I was still lying there twenty minutes later when I heard the sudden cough and sputter of his big motor up the lake. The boat came on around the long bend and then it was going past the camp, and when I looked up I saw him sitting with his big floppy hat in the stern of it, turning his head to stare at me. Neither of us waved. I lay there listening to the sound of the motor going farther away, getting fainter and fainter in the distance, and even after it was miles down the lake I kept imagining I could hear it. I should have gone, I thought.

  I fought it until ten o’clock before I knew for certain I’d never leave here unt
il I saw her again. I tied the boat up at the landing and went up the trail and along the dusty path through the grass. She wasn’t swimming this time. As I came near the house sprawled dejectedly in the hot morning sun I could hear her inside, making some repetitious, scraping sound that rasped across the drowsy quiet of the clearing.

  “Hello,” I called out, as I had before. There was no answer but that same sound, that whusk, whusk, whusk from the front room. The old hound came around the corner and looked at me with listless indifference and then went back to the shade of the walnut tree. I stepped up on the porch and looked in the door. She was down on her hands and knees in the center of the floor of the front room with a bucket of soapy water and a stiff brush, scrubbing the floor with such an absolute fury of concentration she hadn’t even heard me. She had on the same old sloppy dress and was barefoot again, and the wealth of lovely, dark, and mutilated hair swung untended and forgotten down the side of her face. There seemed to be something of fanaticism or driving anger in the way she swung the brush, as if she were determined to wear out the floor or herself.

  I stepped back softly so as not to frighten her and called out again from the edge of the porch. The whusk, whusk ceased. “Come in,” she said. I stepped up to the door. She had half straightened and was upright on her knees, and now she brushed the hair back out of her face with the back of a hand.

  “Hello,” I said, smiling. She’s beautiful, I thought. Even like that she’s beautiful. I had a strange and almost overpowering impulse to walk into the room and pick her up bodily, out of that mess of soapsuds. Cut it out, I thought. Cut it out.

  “Hello,” she said, nodding slightly. She made no effort to stand. There was no surprise in her face, and I wondered if she had been expecting me. Then on second thought, I realized there wasn’t anything else in it either—no hostility, welcome, friendliness, anger, or anything.

  “I forgot my pliers the other day,” I said as the silence stretched out.

  “They’re there in my dresser drawer.” She gestured with a hand.

  “Thanks.” I stepped inside to the dresser and started to pull open the nearest drawer, the one on the left.

  “No,” she said hurriedly, gesturing. “The other one.” But I had already pulled it out before I could stop. As I shoved it back I couldn’t help seeing what was in it—some khaki shirts, two or three bottles of whisky, and the cold, slablike bulk of a Colt .45.

  Well, practically everybody up here in the backwoods has a gun, I thought. I gave no sign I had seen it as I opened the other drawer and got out the pliers.

  “Would you like a cigarette?” I asked.

  She was still on her knees with one hand on the bucket. She shook her head. “No. Thank you.”

  I lit one for myself and threw the match out the door. She made no move to ask me to sit down or to get up herself. It was awkward, and I knew I should go.

  “How is your morning-glory vine?” I asked. Realizing how stupid it sounded, after I had said it, I went on lamely, “I got to thinking about it the other night. You carry water up from the lake for it, don’t you?”

  She looked at me oddly. “You noticed it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The other day. It had been watered.”

  She stared down at the floor. “I water it at night. But I guess it will die, like the rest of them. Maybe the soil isn’t right. I don’t know.”

  Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about the vine any more. It was strange, but I had a queer feeling it was more than just a flower to her, that it was a personal tragedy of some kind and not for me to blunder into.

  “How does it happen you’re not swimming today?” I asked, to change the subject.

  “I was busy. And sometimes I swim at night.”

  I looked at her, somewhat startled. “You do? In this swamp? Isn’t it dangerous? I mean—well, can you see where you’re going?”

  “You can see all right out in the middle of the lake.”

  “Where do you swim?” I asked. Suddenly I remembered that odd sensation the other night when for a moment I had been sure I had heard someone going by out in the channel.

  “Up the lake, mostly. Sometimes down this other side, all the way around.” She gestured off toward the right, in the direction of the slough. “This is an island.”

  Devil’s Island, I thought, for no reason at all. Maybe it was the way she said it. “It is? You mean the slough connects with the lake on both ends?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you ever swim down the lake?” I asked.

  She looked up at me. “Yes. Sometimes.”

  “I think I heard you one night.”

  “The day you were up here?”

  I nodded.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “I swam by your camp that night. I could see the remains of your fire.”

  “Do you think you’ll go swimming tonight?” I asked.

  I was standing there by the dresser, still holding the pliers in my hand, and I could feel that strange, tight stillness there had been in the room before, as if the air itself were charged with some meaning that never showed itself on the surface.

  “I don’t know.” She was staring straight ahead, not looking toward me. The hand on the bucket was white-knuckled, as if she were clenching it. “Yes,” she went on, softly almost as if talking to herself. “Yes. I might.”

  That was all there was to it. In a minute she returned to her scrubbing and I went on back to the camp.

  * * *

  It was late. I lay on the bedroll near the still faintly glowing remains of the campfire and looked up at the night sky through the openings in the trees. I had been there a long time, sleepless, waiting, and had watched the constellations swing as the hours dragged by, and had strained my ears toward all the night sounds of the swamp. I heard the deep bass garo-o-om, garo-o-om of the bullfrogs out at the edge of the lake and the whippoorwills calling far away in the night and once in a while a faint whisper in the leaves overhead as a small breeze stirred. I rolled over on my side and held my watch out toward the embers of the fire. It was almost midnight.

  There hadn’t been any use trying to make myself break camp and go on home that afternoon. I knew I didn’t have any business here, waiting for a man’s wife to come up this way just in the hope of seeing her again, but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. I knew it was a foolish and very dangerous thing to do, but I had to see her. Why did her husband let her go swimming around late at night alone in an immense swamp full of old snags and weeds and water moccasins? Did he know it? Or didn’t he care? Who was he, anyway, and why did his face look familiar? Who was she, in fact? She was just as foreign to the swamp as he was. And why had there been that clear and unmistakable but still unnamed tension in the air both times I had been up there? I went around and around with the same old questions, hour after hour, getting no nearer to an answer than I had ever been.

  Suddenly I raised myself on an elbow and listened. Was that the sound I had heard, or imagined I had heard, the other night? It came again, a quiet ripple on the water and a rhythmic swishing that could have been an arm swinging forward and sliding into the water, I sat up. I was sure I heard it now, coming from up the lake, between here and the bend.

  I got up and walked down to the boat. The surface of the lake was dark and still and powdered with stars, and I could see nothing except the black loom of the tree wall along the other shore. I stood still and then heard her quite plainly. Turning in the direction from which the sound came, I studied the darkness intently, and in a moment I could see the reflected stars heave drunkenly and drown in the broken surface. She was almost abreast of where I was.

  “Hello,” I said quietly. I took out a cigarette and lit it, knowing she would see the flame of the match. After the light went out I was totally blind for a moment and couldn’t tell whether she was going on by or not.

  Then, suddenly, I heard a splash right in front of me and there she was not ten feet beyond the boat, her head and s
houlders out of the water as she stood up.

  “Hello,” I said again.

  “Mr. Marshall?” she asked. “You’re up late.”

  “Yes. I was hoping you might come by.

  “Why?” I couldn’t see her face at all, just the white blur of it under the bathing cap.

  “I just wanted to talk to you. Why don’t you come ashore and have a cup of coffee with me? I’ve got some made.”

  She didn’t answer for a moment. “Well,” she said hesitantly at last, “all right.”

  She waded ashore and we went up to the fare. I handed her a towel and she dried her arms and legs while I pushed the coffee bucket up against the embers. I threw a couple of small sticks on the fire, and when they caught and flared up the flames highlighted her face and the lines of her figure.

  “Don’t you want to take off the cap?” I asked. She shook her head. “It’s all right.” I was squatting down, poking at the fire, and I looked up at her. “Please do.”

  She stopped rubbing with the towel and looked at me with that odd stillness in her face. “Why?”

  “Because your hair is beautiful.” I could feel the silence tightening up around us again and knew I shouldn’t have said it. But hell, I thought, a girl isn’t that touchy unless she’s afraid. And it isn’t me she’s afraid of—it’s herself.

  “Beautiful!” she said bitterly.

  “It is.”

  She said nothing.

  I took the other towel and spread it on the bedroll. “Sit down here,” I said. “The coffee will be hot in a minute.”

  “But my suit will get your blankets wet.”

  “No. Not with the towel. Please do. It’s more comfortable.”

  She sat down with her legs doubled under her and I handed her a cigarette. The coffee began to sizzle around the sides of the bucket, making a comforting sound in the night. I poured two cups and handed her one. “Do you like cream and sugar in it? I have some canned milk.”

  “No. Black, please.”

  I sat down across from her, on the ground. “What’s your name besides Mrs. Shevlin?”

  “Doris.”