River Girl

by Charles Williams

  “You know,” I said, “you shouldn’t swim in that swamp at night. It’s dangerous.”

  “It’s all right. I know all the water and it’s safe enough. I’m a good swimmer.”

  “Doesn’t your husband ever swim with you?”

  “No. He doesn’t care for it.”

  “I can’t understand his letting you do it,” I said, and again I was conscious of walking on ground where I didn’t belong. “I mean,” I went on hurriedly, “I realize it’s not my business, but doesn’t he worry about you?”

  “No—” she said, cutting it off as if she had started to say more and then had changed her mind.

  “Do you go to town very often?” I asked.

  “No. I’ve never been to town since we came up here.”

  “Not in a whole year?” I asked in amazement. “Doesn’t your husband take you at all?”

  “He doesn’t go either. He goes down to the store at the foot of the lake twice a week, and that’s all.”

  “What days does he go?” I asked, and after the words were out I knew why I had asked, and wondered if she did. She probably had noticed that I’d waited three whole days to go back after the pliers.

  She knew, all right. She looked at me with that intense stillness and made no reply. It occurred to me then that I knew anyway, for he had gone first on Tuesday and this was Friday.

  “No certain days,” she said, and then I knew she had realized the same thing and that she wasn’t telling the truth. “Just whenever they ask him to bring some fish.”

  I began to understand a little about her then—a little, and, as I found out later, I hadn’t even begun. Loneliness was driving her mad. She wanted to talk to me or to somebody, but she was afraid to. She didn’t know, if she started something like that, whether it would get out of control. But, as I say, I didn’t know half of it then.

  “Look,” I said, “I come up here fishing quite often. Would you like me to bring you some magazines? I’d be glad to do it.”

  She shook her head and smiled a little. It was the first time I had ever seen her smile, and it made her look even younger and prettier. I felt again that powerful desire I had this afternoon to pick her up in my arms. “No,” she said. “Thank you. But he brings me things to read from the store. It was nice of you to offer, though.”

  ‘It wasn’t as nice as you think it was,” I said, leaning forward a little. “It was partly because I wanted an excuse to come and see you again.”

  “You know you can’t do that, don’t you?” she asked quietly.

  “No,” I said.

  “You can’t. Is it because I stopped here? Did that give you the idea—”

  “Nothing gave me any idea. I wanted to see you again.”

  She stared at the ground. “Don’t say that!”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll have to leave if you’re going to talk like that.”

  “All right. I won’t say it. But there’s no way you can stop me from thinking it.”

  “You can’t. I shouldn’t have come here. It’s crazy.”

  “Of course it’s crazy,” I said. “Does that change it?”

  She put down the coffee cup, still looking at the ground, and made that same desperate gesture, that utterly hopeless quick movement of the hand across the side of her head and down her neck, that she had made the other day—only now it wasn’t through her hair, because she still had on the rubber cap.

  “Don’t come back,” she said, staring.

  “Why not?”

  “You can’t.”

  “You don’t want me to?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Are you enjoying this?” she asked. Her face was white and she had forgotten to smoke the cigarette. It burned slowly up toward her fingers, the long gray ash precariously clinging.

  I wanted to reach out and put my hands on her arms, to take hold of her, but her eyes held me away. I could see the battle going on behind them.

  “You came down here to tell me to stay away, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I hadn’t said anything then. Before you came tonight.”

  “Do you think I’m blind?” she said harshly. “Don’t you think I could see, there at the house?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And you weren’t the only one who could see. There were two of us there.”

  “Stop it!” she lashed at me.

  I threw the cigarette in the fire. “Tell me,” I said I quietly. “Where is he?”

  “He’s at the house.”

  “He knows you’re here, doesn’t he?”

  “No.”

  “How could he help knowing it?”

  The face was as white and still as smoke. “Because he’s drunk. He’s passed out.”

  “You can’t go back—”

  “Why not? I’m used to it.”

  I leaned forward and took her wrist in my hand and lifted the cigarette from her fingers. “You’re going to burn yourself,” I said, and threw it in the fire. She pulled back on the arm and I could feel my fingers shaking as they tightened. She hit me with the other hand, across the mouth, and stood up with her face held together only by an effort of will, and I could hear the dry sound of the crying in her throat. “Listen,” I said. “Doris—” She jerked away from me and ran through the darkness toward the edge of the lake. Before I could get there I heard the splash as she went in, and when I got down to the edge of the water she was gone. I could hear her swimming away in the darkness.

  Five

  There was no use trying to sleep. I built up the fire enough to see by, packed everything and stowed it in the boat, and went out and picked up the trot line. It must have been around two o’clock when I started down the lake on the oars. After about five miles I could see light in the east, and when the darkness over the water had begun to wash out to the thin gray of early dawn I cranked the outboard. She’s back at the house, I thought, lying there beside a passed-out drunk, looking up at the oak shakes and waiting for another day to start.

  I was back home by eight o’clock. Parking the old Ford and the boat trailer in the back yard, I went in through the back door, taking a long time to find the right key. Louise wouldn’t be back until the middle of next week. I noticed she had left the light on in the kitchen, and when I went into the bedroom her nightgown and robe were dangling from the back of a chair and the bed was unmade. I undressed and went into the bath. There were some pants and a pair of nylons hanging on the curtain rod in the shower. I grabbed them off and threw them in on the bed. After a hot shower and a shave, I dressed and went out in the kitchen, remembering I hadn’t had any breakfast. There were some unwashed dishes in the sink, and I couldn’t find any orange juice in the refrigerator. The hell with it, I thought. I’ll eat in town. I got a bottle of whisky out of the cupboard and poured myself a big stiff drink for a bracer because I hadn’t had any sleep.

  I sat down at the kitchen table as I drank it, trying to put her out of my mind. I’ve got to stay away from there, I thought. Somehow I’ve got to do it…There’s no way out of a thing like that. Without any way that I could stop it, my mind was thinking, this is Saturday. There’s Sunday, and Monday, and Monday night…I won’t go back, I thought. And then I could see the white, unhappy face and hear the dry sound of her crying.

  I went out and backed the Olds out of the garage. Forty-five-fifty a month from now until the time we need a Cadillac, I thought. It was already hot in the square and the town was beginning to fill up with people coming in for Saturday. I parked and started into the courthouse and met Buford coming out.

  “Hello, Jack,” he said, smiling. “Catch any fish?”

  “A few bass,” I said. “No catfish, though,” I went or lying, because I had promised to bring him one and hadn’t.

  “How about a cup of coffee?”

  “Fine,” I said. “I haven’t had any breakfast yet.”

  “Come on. Let’s go over to Barone’s.�
�� Buford was a handsome man somewhere in his forties, but he looked younger than that. He was big, about my size, with coal-black hair graying at the temples and very assured gray eyes and a quiet, poised demeanor that made women crazy about him. He was a college graduate and smart, but he always wore a big white hat with the brim turned sharply up at the sides like any ham politician, and he would lift it clear of his head in a courtly gesture to every woman of voting age that he met, even when he was driving a car. Men liked him just as well, and people who must have known he was crooked would vote for him.

  We crossed the square, dodging cars, and went down the street to the big neon sign that said, “Barone’s.” It was full of chrome and big mirrors and the clattering sound of dishes, with a counter and a row of booths upholstered in imitation leather. In the back, next to the swinging doors going out into the kitchen, a heavy oak door bore a sign reading, “Members.” It was supposed to be a club, and I guess in a way it was, but the membership was limited to anyone who could prove he had the price of a drink.

  We went on in, and it was quieter here and the lights were less garish. The room had a small bar along one side and some more booths, with a stand at the back holding a half-dozen slot machines. Up front there was a juke box. There was no one in the place except the bartender and a large blonde in a tight black dress talking to him. It was the owner herself, Billy Barone.

  She turned and smiled. “Good morning, Sheriff. Hello, Jack.” Her hair was waved, and looked as if it had been carved out of lemonwood and buffed down with wax.

  We sat down in the last booth and she came over. “What will you officers of the law have this morning?” she asked, still smiling, and giving Buford a long, lazy glance.

  “Black coffee for me,” Buford said. “With a shot of Bacardi rum on the side.”

  “You’ve been a bad boy, Sheriff,” she teased. “And how about you, Jack?”

  “Breakfast,” I said. “Ham and eggs and some coffee.”

  “It wouldn’t be safe to take all that on an empty stomach,” Buford said. “You’d better have something.”

  “All right,” I said. “Bourbon.”

  The bartender brought the drinks over, and in a minute a girl came in with Buford’s coffee. He pushed two nickels across the table toward her. “How about putting those in the juke box?”

  I knew he detested juke boxes and their canned noise, aside from the money they brought him—he owned a part interest in the outfit that controlled them and the slot machines and pinballs. It wasn’t hillbilly music he wanted; it was privacy.

  “Here’s how,” he said. We drank. The juke box hissed, then commenced its blaring.

  He took out a cigar and lit it, then removed it from his mouth and looked at it in the manner of a man who loves good cigars. He’s an odd one, I thought, a queer mixture, and not somebody I’d want to tangle with unless I had to. That nineteenth-century courtliness fronted for a lot of toughness you could see sometimes looking out at you from behind the noncommittal eyes.

  When he talked business he never wasted words. “The grand jury convenes next week,” he said quietly.

  “And—” I said. It had met before.

  “We’ve got trouble. There’s talk. And too many people that a month or so ago would have been asking me for something just happen to be looking in store windows now when they meet me on the street. Most of it is Soames. He’s got his teeth into that business about the Demaree kid, and he knows where the kid got drunk. The word is going around now that he’s going to blast the lid off everything Sunday, and everybody’s going. He’s been doing a lot of looking around. Normally, it wouldn’t amount to much, but just before the grand jury it’s dangerous as hell. Soames, unfortunately, isn’t just another crackpot, and he’s no windbag. People are beginning to listen to him, people who don’t usually pay much attention to rabble-rousers and crusaders with ants in their pants.”

  “All right,” I said. “What do we do?” I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to get out of the whole stinking mess and get a job washing cars or digging ditches, but that’s the bad part of that kind of business—it’s not easy to get loose, especially when the heat starts.

  “We do just what anybody else does with gasoline on his clothes—we don’t light any cigarettes. I want you to tell Abbie Bell and that woman out on Cypress Street to keep the lid clamped on those places, because if we have any more trouble down there I’m going to run them out of town before we all get caught in the wringer. And slip the word to all the rest of them. Sometime today drive out to Moss Inn and tell Carpenter he’d better start looking his customers over a little more carefully before he lets them go back where the games are. There’s no telling who Soames is getting his information from, but he’s getting it straight. However, it’s the cat houses he’s got his guns leveled on right now, and particularly Abbie Bell’s. But the whole thing’s dynamite, at least until after the grand jury adjourns.”

  “O.K.,” I said. “I’ll tell ‘em.” It didn’t show much on his face, but I knew he was worried.

  As it turned out, I didn’t get a chance to tell anybody anything. Trouble started almost before we got back to the office. The telephone was ringing as we walked in the door. Lorraine picked it up.

  “Yes? Yes. He’s here now. He just came in. Hold on a minute.” She handed it to Buford.

  “Yes, speaking,” he said. He listened for a moment. “All right. Just keep your shirt on. Yes, Marshall. Of course I’ll send Marshall. He’ll be there before you can stop screaming.” He hung up.

  “You can get your coffee if you want, Lorraine, I’ll stick around.” She looked at him, grabbed her purse, and left, knowing it was an order.

  When she was out the door he turned to me. “It’s that Bell woman. Yelling her head off. Some big sawmill hand’s gone berserk and is trying to kill one of the girls. She wants you. For God’s sake, try to get it quieted down without anybody getting hurt.”

  I knew what he meant, and didn’t even get the gun out of the filing cabinet where I’d left it Monday. I don’t like guns anyway; I had enough of them during the war. I was out the door before he’d finished talking.

  I took my own car because there wasn’t time to go to the county garage after one. Traffic was snarled in the square, as it always is on Saturdays, and I had to creep through it, cursing. When I got clear of that I shot down the next six blocks giving it the gun all the way. All we needed now was for somebody to be killed in one of those places and the county would blow up right in our faces. I slid to a stop in front of the chili joint and ran across the street to the hotel. The street was quiet except for the wailing of a juke box in one of the beer joints, and fortunately there wasn’t any crowd gathering. I could hear a noise as of someone hammering in the back of the building.

  Abbie let me in the door and then slammed it shut, fast. She had the filmy blue robe clutched around her with one hand and was waving an empty gin bottle in the other. The tight curls seemed to strain outward from her head as if she carried an electrical charge.

  “Stop the crazy fool!” she was yelling. “He’ll kill somebody!”

  “All right, relax,” I said. “Where is he?”

  “Upstairs. At the end of the hall. My God, stop him!” I went up the stairs on the run, still hearing the pounding. The hallway had no windows at the ends and was dimly lighted with one small, unshaded bulb, and all the doors were closed. I could see him down at the end and ran toward him. He was a big devil, naked except for a pair of shorts and one sock, and he was swinging a small table by one leg like a footstool, hammering on the door with it. He had one of the upper panels already knocked in and was working on the other. Inside the room I could hear a girl’s voice, high-pitched and on the edge of hysteria, not crying or pleading but dredging up obscenity I’d never heard before in twenty-seven years.

  “I’ll get you, you lousy little slut,” he yelled, smashing the table into the door again and splintering the other panel.

  “All right, kn
ock it off, Mac,” I said. “You’ve had your fun.”

  He paused, with the table pulled back for another swing, and looked around at me. I was still ten feet away, moving toward him. In those things you can never let them see any hesitation or you’re a dead duck, but I didn’t feel too sure about it. He was as big as I was, or larger, and crazy with rage, and he appeared to be only around twenty, an age when you haven’t found out yet that you can be hurt. “Drop it,” I said roughly. He stood poised to swing. “You a law?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Give me that.” I reached for the table. I don’t know whether it was because he could see I was alone and didn’t have a gun or whether he was so wild with rage he didn’t care, but at any rate I saw his face go wild again and he swung. I tried to get inside it, but the table caught my arm and shoulder and I fell over against the opposite door. I could hear somebody scream down at the other end of the hall, and realized Abbie had followed me up the stairs.

  “I’ll show her! I’ll show the chippy!” he yelled, swinging the table at me again. I was down on my knees with my left arm numb, and I lunged at his legs, hitting him low and taking him off balance. He came down, and the two of us and the table rolled in a pile on the floor. I could hear the table give up the ghost as one of us rolled over it and the legs started caving in. He landed a big fist on the side of my head and made it ring. I slid clear of the tangle and got to my feet before he did, and as he tried to scramble up he was wide open for a second. I got my feet set and swung, catching him under the jaw, and his feet slid out from under him. He bounced up, too insane with fury to realize he was leaving himself open in exactly the same way he had the first time, and I hit him again. We went through the whole, identical procedure two more times before he finally quit and lay there on the door.

  “I’ll kill her! I’ll get her!” he was saying over and over and beginning to cry.

  I was winded and my left arm felt as if a car had run over it. I had to lean against the wall to steady myself while I fought for breath. He sat up, still crying, and I kicked the wrecked table out of his reach. “Sit right where you are,” I said. He had his chin down on his chest and the big shoulders shook with the silent retching of his sobs. I felt sorry for him even if he had tried to brain me with the table, and wondered what the girl had done to him.