River Girl

by Charles Williams

  Oh, hell, I thought, she’s probably stolen plenty of things before. You could see what she was like, couldn’t you? You didn’t teach her anything; nobody could. She was born that way.

  It’ll be all right now, I thought. At least, until something else starts to break loose. Suddenly I wanted to get in the car and just go on driving the way it was headed, go so far I could never find my way back. And it wasn’t only Buford and the grand jury I could feel behind me. What was she doing now? Was she down on her knees in soapy water trying to beat all desire out of herself with a scrubbing brush, or was she looking for another withered leaf on that scrawny and pitiful vine?

  Seven

  Sunday morning I went to church to hear the Reverend Soames, and after I was there I wished I’d stayed away. There was something about him that made me uneasy, gave me that same feeling an escaping prisoner must have when he hears, far behind, the first baying of the hounds as they pick up his trail. He was a big, impressive man with a manner about him that kept reminding me of Buford, and his voice had a quality of persuasiveness and irresistible power that you could not escape no matter where your mind would turn. It brought you back and held you there and made you look at what it had to show.

  He didn’t rant or raise his voice, but he talked from information. “If the law-enforcement officers of this community will come to me, I will be glad to tell them where to find these places that have so far eluded their vigilance and that apparently only boys in their teens can find. I will point out the slot machines and gambling places, and give them the addresses of the brothels operating openly in this town, and give them the names of the women running them.”

  The church was packed, and I glanced around at the people sitting near me. They were completely absorbed, their faces serious. How many of them will be on that grand jury? I thought. When it ended I went home. People were standing around in front of the church in little groups, talking. Maybe it was only my imagination, but I thought I could feel their curious, cold glances on my back.

  I switched on the light at the side of the bed and looked at my watch. It was two in the morning. I had been lying there, smoking one cigarette after another, for three hours without ever approaching sleep. At every turn of my mind she stood before me, still-faced, un-speaking, very beautiful in her shapeless, terrible clothes. There was no way to get around her; she blocked every path of thought, every escape I tried. I could shut my eyes and see her, and when I opened them she was there looking at me from the darkness.

  I’ve got to stop it, I thought. I can’t go on like this. I’ll be crazy as that big kid. She’s just a woman who is being killed by loneliness in that swamp, and what woman wouldn’t be? What’s different about her? Is this going on and on until I go back there and see her again? And would it stop then, or get worse? I cursed, and got up to go into the bathroom to find Louise’s sleeping tablets. I took two of them and lay down again. I tossed and turned for what seemed like hours. It must have been about three when I finally got to sleep.

  Monday was an endless flat plain of heat, and of hours that seemed to go on forever. I walked through stagnant time like a man in a dream, hoping the day would end and dreading the night that had to come when I would have nothing to do but lie in the darkness and fight it again.

  Buford had been tickled with the way I had got rid of that girl. “That was a good job,” he said. “She won’t be back.”

  “You can’t tell,” I said. “A girl like that is capable of anything. You don’t know what goes on in her mind.” I didn’t want to talk about it. Everything irritated me. I sat eating lunch in Barone’s cafe without knowing what I ate and not even caring.

  I went to a movie after supper and walked out before the end of it. I went home because I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. I sat there in the empty house, turning off the radio because I couldn’t stand the noise, and then turning it on because I couldn’t stand the silence.

  I went out in the hall and looked at the telephone. I could call him, I thought. Call Buford. Just tell him I might not be in tomorrow. I wouldn’t have to go up the lake. I could still show up for work even though I’d said I might not be there. It wouldn’t mean I was going, would it? No. It didn’t make any sense. I wouldn’t call him. Then I had the telephone in my hand.

  “Elks Club,” a voice said. I couldn’t even remember asking for the number.

  “Is Buford there?” Maybe he wouldn’t be. That would be fine. Then I would have that on my side. If I didn’t locate him I couldn’t go.

  “Just a minute.” There was a long silence. She was crying when she said he was drunk, I thought, crying with the dry sound of tearing something inside her throat. She didn’t want to tell me. “Hello. No, he’s not here.”

  That settled it. That settled it once and for all. I couldn’t go because I couldn’t find Buford.

  I called Barone’s,

  I called the Eagles.

  I was sweating, and cursing under my breath. I shook the telephone like a woman with a sick baby trying to get a doctor late at night. I put it down and sat there looking at it, feeling my nerves jumping. I wanted to tear it loose from its wires and throw it down the hall.

  Lorraine! I thought. Maybe I could get her.

  I could hear it ringing. She’s not at home either, I thought, and began to have the crazy idea that all the rest of the human race had disappeared and I was left here alone to go mad beside a telephone that didn’t go anywhere or connect with anything.

  “Hello,” a girl’s voice said.

  “Is this Lorraine?” I asked stupidly.

  “Yes. Oh, is that you, Jack? What is it?”

  “This is Jack Marshall,” I said, and then realized she already knew who it was.

  “Yes. What is it?”

  “I-ah—” What the hell did I want with Lorraine? Then, suddenly, I had the crazy idea she must think I was calling her up to ask her for a date because Louise was out of town. Why would she think a crazy thing like that? I thought angrily. Had I ever done—

  I began to function again. “Oh. I just wondered if you’d tell Buford in the morning that I might not be in. I can’t locate him.”

  “Why, yes. I’ll tell him.”

  “Thanks.”

  It wasn’t until I had hung up that I realized I hadn’t given any reason at all. Well, what of it? I thought. What difference does it make? If you’re going twenty miles back in a swamp because you can’t stay away from another man’s wife, why worry about a little thing like not making up a lie for your employer?

  I stood there for a minute in the hall and then, without even thinking about it, as if I had planned it for a week, I took a flashlight and went out in the yard, along the wall of the house where the vines were growing. There were some morning-glories, and when I found a young, small one I dug it up with a butcher knife, taking a lot of dirt with it, and packed it in a small cardboard box. I went back inside the kitchen with it and poured some water on the soil, then stood there looking at it with a sort of stupid and unaccountable happiness like a kid who suddenly feels good for no reason at all.

  What the hell am I doing this for? I thought. Am I losing my mind?

  * * *

  The sun was coming up now. I could see shafts of yellow light filtering through the dense canopy of timber like those in the pictures of the interiors of dim cathedrals. I sat very quietly in the boat, drawn far back under the overhanging trees where the slough came out and joined the main body of the lake. From where I was hidden I could not see up the lake at all, only a short section across and down, toward the south, but there was no reason for looking—I would hear the motor long before he came into sight.

  I looked at my watch. He must have left up there over an hour ago, at least, which meant he should be down here in less than an hour. With his motor he could make it in that much time; it would take me at least three or a little over. I lit a cigarette and smoking it in fierce, quick puffs, impatient at the slow dragging of time. A water mo
ccasin swam across the flat mirror of the slough, an undulating dark head at the apex of a spreading, V-shaped ripple on the water. It came up past the boat, paused, looking at me for an instant with the cold, unwinking, incurious eyes like little chips of stone, then submerged, dropping from sight without effort into water the color of tea.

  Maybe he wouldn’t come. Maybe she had been telling me the truth when she said he had no certain days for going to the store. I looked at the watch again; less than five minutes had passed. Why hadn’t I brought at least a semblance of fishing tackle with me? What would I look like if I met someone up here, a man going up the lake in a boat for no reason at all, not fishing because he had nothing to fish with? Suppose I met him, or he saw me? There was nothing in the boat except that ridiculous cardboard box of moistened earth, shoved as far back out of sight as possible under the seat in the bow. I’m crazy, I thought. I’m insane. No man in his right mind would be doing this.

  A half hour passed while I smoked cigarettes chain fashion and listened for the motor. Then I heard it, or thought I did, and held my breath to listen. Yes, there it was, still far up the lake. I waited while the sound grew in volume, and pulled farther back under the overhanging limbs into the shelter of the leaves. The boat came past the entrance of the slough, and then for a moment I could see him, less than fifty yards away, sitting up straight in the stern with the big floppy straw hat set exactly level on his head and looking neither left nor right as he went on down the channel. My boat rocked gently in his spreading wake and then he was gone, the sound of his motor dying away in the distance down the lake. I pushed out from under the trees and started up.

  It was after ten and the sun was brassy on the water when I went past the place where I had camped. As I came around the bend I wondered if I would see her swimming in the long stretch of the lake above, but there was no sign of her, the water flat, unbroken, and shining like a mirror in the sun. I throttled the motor down and turned into the entrance of the slough, feeling my heart beating and conscious of the tightness in my chest. Without even thinking of it, I went on past the boat landing, around a swing of the slough, and pulled up at the bank under the low overhang of a tree. Even before you will admit to yourself that you are a criminal, I thought, you begin to act like one without conscious thought. I tied the boat up and stepped ashore with the cardboard box cradled in my arm.

  Pushing through the timber and underbrush because the trail was below me, to my left, I came out into the clearing, seeing the brown, dry grass and the weathered ruin of the house squatting in the sun. I was out of breath and had a feeling I had run for miles. Would she be swimming? Or would she be at the house? What would she be doing?

  I went on across the clearing in the hot sun like a man walking across an endless plain in a nightmare he cannot stop. Why, it hasn’t changed at all, I thought. It looks exactly as it did before, and then the realization came that it hadn’t been years since I was here last. I had been four days.

  I stopped in front of the porch, not seeing the old hound this time, or any sign of life. A grasshopper sang in the still, bright heat, and out at the edge of the timber a crow cursed me with raucous insolence and flew away. I stepped up on the porch. “Hello,” I said. “Doris, where are you?”

  There was the soft sound of bare feet from the rear of the house and I stepped to the door. She had come into the front room, apparently starting to the door to see who it was, but when she saw me she stopped. She had on a different dress this time, of another color at least, but an identical shapeless sack of cheap cotton too large for her, and she was still barefoot.

  “Doris,” I said. “I—” The words quit on me and I stood there foolishly with the clumsy box in my arms. She said nothing at all. Still standing unmoving in the center of the room with her arms down at her sides, she stared at me with the fixed intensity of someone in a trance.

  “I brought you another vine, Doris,” I said idiotically, not knowing what to do with it now that it was here. “You see, it’s very green and fresh. I think it’ll live.” When she still made no move, I shifted it awkwardly to my hands and set it on the dresser.

  She spoke then, though her voice was still little more than a whisper. “Why?”

  “Well, I—I mean, the other one was dying.”

  “No,” she said in the same strained and tightened voice. “Why did you come back?”

  I stepped toward her and still she did not move. She watched me with that tortured intensity of the eyes, like someone suffering pain or grief and trying not to show it. The dark hair, uncombed but still lovely in its disarray, framed and intensified the paleness of her cheek, and her face, tipped slightly up to look at me, was blank, tightly held, as devoid of emotion as the hot, choking, and explosive silence about us in the room was devoid of sound.

  “I came back,” I said quietly, “because I had to. It wasn’t because I didn’t try. There wasn’t any way I could stay away from you. You don’t have to tell me what I’m doing, I know what I’m doing.”

  I reached out and took her by the arms and then began to go wild. I had my arms around her and was kissing her. She held onto me like someone drowning, and I could feel the trembling of her arms about my neck.

  Her face was against my shoulder and her voice was muffled, but through the wildness of it I could hear her say, “Not here. Please, not here,” the voice breaking as if she were crying.

  Eight

  We lay on old leaves in mottled shade, very close together, touching but not talking, the lake a sheet of stainless steel seen here and there through openings in the trees and time arrested and held motionless across the dead center of noon. Her head was on my arm, her face turned toward mine with her eyes closed, and I brought up a hand and ran it spread-fingered through the dark disorder of her hair.

  There had been little talk between us, no need for talk, or thought of it. There were still the thousand things about her I wanted to know, but they seemed far away, things I could ask her later, after we had been pulled out of the spent and languid backwater and caught up again in the running current of time. Lying there, I thought about it and tried to remember if it had been real or only a dream, that fantastic and unbelievable thing of two people supposedly or at least otherwise sane, walking without a word or a sign, wooden-faced, not even holding hands or whispering, straight out of the house and across the clearing in silence and while sunlight without any cajoling or pleading on the one part or that age-old simulation of reluctance on the other, without any necessity for communication, as if the whole thing had been planned and discussed for months and rehearsed like a big wedding. And when we had reached this place she had stopped and turned. That was all.

  I thought of a fire burning for a long time inside a house with all the doors and windows closed, consuming the interior but still contained, until at last the roof caved in and it burst out with uncontrollable fury. Why? Was it just the loneliness?

  There had been no reproach afterward, no silent accusation in the eyes or any mention of my coming back after she had told me to stay away. She had cried once, but only for a minute, with her face muffled against my arm, and then it had gone away, unmentioned and unexplained.

  She opened her eyes. They were very near, and looked enormous and deeply blue and quiet while she studied me as if she had never seen me before. Reaching up a hand, she ran soft fingertips across my face. “I’m sorry I hit you. The other night.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I knew then I could come back. It wasn’t me you were trying to stop.”

  “You knew that all the time, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. You were fighting yourself so hard you might as well have been carrying a sign.”

  “I know,” she said quietly. “I thought then it would matter. But it doesn’t. I guess it’s like pain when you have it long enough—before you reach the point you can’t stand it any longer you go crazy, or die, and it’s all changed. I’m either crazy or dead.”

  “No,” I said. �
�Just beautiful.”

  “You like my hair-do, don’t you?” It was a joke, but she didn’t laugh. There were just those enormous eyes, very close, watching me.

  “Yes. The first time I saw it I thought that whoever chopped it up like that should be horsewhipped. But now I like it.”

  “I guess there are some things you can’t stop,” she said quietly, more to herself than to me.

  “There’s no way we could have stopped it.”

  “It’s like it was sometimes when I was out there swimming in the lake at night. There’d be just the black top of the water with the stars reflected on it, and I’d wonder why I couldn’t swim down until I drowned, just stay under, as if the water was a black sheet over me. You can’t, though. If you can swim you can’t drown yourself. When I began to hurt I always come up.”

  I could feel the anger begin to flame up inside me. “What did he do to you? Is he mean when he’s drunk?”

  “No,” she said hesitantly. “Only once. We had a fight But I don’t like to talk about it.”

  “I’ve got to know,” I said. “Can’t you see I have to know?”

  “It was the loneliness. I was beginning to go crazy with it, I guess,”

  “It was more than that, I said.

  “No. It was mostly that. We were all right until we came up here.”

  “What did you come up here for, anyway? Neither of you belong in this swamp.”

  “We know that now, but it’s not easy to get out.”

  “But why? I mean, in the first place.”

  “Running,” she said woodenly. “It was a place to hide.”

  Somehow, I had known that. “Him?” I asked. “Or both of you?”

  “Just him. It’s something that happened before I met him.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. He never did tell me. But, as I said, it was all right before we came up here. Between us, I mean. The moving around was bad, all right, and we never had much because he was always changing jobs, but he was good to me and I guess we were still in love with each other. But this place was too much for us. I guess it was more my fault than his, but I couldn’t stand it. We got on each other’s nerves and began to fight, and then he started drinking like that. He won’t leave here because this is the first place we’ve ever found where he didn’t sooner or later see somebody who might recognize him so we had to move again. And it’s getting harder for him to get any kind of job. He looks older than he really is, and of course he can’t ever give any references or say where he worked before.”