River Girl

by Charles Williams

  She saw me head back to the landing and started rowing in herself. I tied up at the float and dumped the catfish out of the wet tow sack into the water. They were still alive. After looking the seat over carefully to be sure there was no blood on it, I put the motor back on the stern. She came alongside in a few minutes and I made the boat fast and helped her out.

  “I’ve just got one more thing to do,” I said. “It won’t take more than about twenty minutes.”

  She came very close to me there on the float and looked up. “I’m sorry I went to pieces on you,” she said quietly. “But I’m all right now, Jack. Hold me for just a minute before you go back and I won’t cause you any more trouble.”

  When I reached out for her and tipped her face back I could see that a little of the color had come back into it and that the dead, washed-out agony was leaving her eyes. “Jack,” she whispered, pleading, “it’ll be all right with us now, won’t it? Tell me it will.”

  I knew what she meant. It wasn’t the police she was thinking of. I kissed her, holding her very tightly, then ran a hand along her cheek and through the straight, dark hair. “Yes,” I said. “It’ll be all right. It’ll be just like it was before.”

  “For always, Jack?”

  “For always,” I said.

  There were two water buckets in the kitchen. I found a big dishrag and a scrubbing brush and set to work, spilling some water on the floor where he had lain, mopping it up with the rag and wringing it out into the bucket. When I had used up all the water I went down to the lake shore for more, throwing the dirty water out into the lake. Then I used soap and the stiff scrubbing brush over a wide area and carefully mopped up all the soapsuds, wiped the floor as dry as I could get it with the cloth, dumped the soapy water in the lake, washed out the buckets, filled one of them with water, and brought them back to the kitchen.

  I stood there in the front room for a minute, looking around. The floor would be dry in a few hours and everything else was in order. I saw her purse lying on the dresser where she had left it, and picked it up. Then I gathered up the gun, wrapped the wet cloth around it, and stuck both in a pocket so I could throw them in the lake. It was as I was just starting out the door that I again felt that disturbing and uneasy awareness of having forgotten something absolutely damning. It was picking up the gun that reminded me of it. The gun was an automatic, and somewhere in this room was the ejected cartridge case, which I had completely forgotten. I stopped, feeling the hair prickle along the back of my neck. I was too slipshod about things like that.

  It wasn’t anywhere. I looked all over the floor, under the dresser, under the bed, and on top of it, and I couldn’t find it. It had to be here, and it wasn’t. You couldn’t lose anything as large as a .45 case in this bare room I told myself. It’s impossible. I stood still by the dresser, sweating, afraid again, hearing the ticking of the clock beat its way up out of the silence and the dead, empty air and the heat. Frantically I jerked the gun out of my pocket and unwrapped it, and pulled the slide back until I could see the cartridge in the chamber. It was unfired, as I had known it would be, for the gun hadn’t jammed. The empty case had come flying out, as it was supposed to, and now it was gone. Had one of the dresser drawers been open, I wondered? Maybe it had flown in here. I yanked them open, one by one, and pawed through them. It wasn’t there. Hold onto yourself, I thought. Don’t start coming apart like an old maid with the vapors. You’ve already lost your head once in this room and killed a man, and if you lose it again you may kill yourself. There’s a good explanation for it if you’ll just cool off and look for it. Nobody’s been here, so it’s still here. It has to be.

  He was there, I thought, coming off the wall and going toward the bed, and I was right here in front of this dresser. The gun would have been along a line like this, with the slide over on this side… Christ, I thought, the door! Shoving the gun and the cloth back in my pocket, I hurried outside. It was lying near a clump of grass, glinting in the sun. I took a deep breath. When I came back to the boat she said nothing, but I could see the question and the pleading entreaty in her eyes. “Yes,” I said. “We can go now. It’s all finished.”

  She gave a little cry and caught my arm. I helped her in and shoved off. When we were well out in the lake I tied the gun up securely in the cloth, which would still show bloodstains in a laboratory, and dropped them over the side.

  This was the part now that scared me. There were fifteen miles of lake between here and the slough where I would leave her, and at any turn of the channel we might come across a party of fishermen in a boat. There wasn’t much chance of it, for it was a weekday, and there had been none when I came up, but I still didn’t like the risk. It would be dangerous to have anybody see me taking her out. But there wasn’t any other way to do it. I had to take the boat back, and if I kept it up here to run her down the lake after dark I wouldn’t get back with it until midnight or later, which would cause dangerous talk later when the story broke. So there was nothing for us to do except go ahead and pray we wouldn’t meet anybody.

  Our luck held. I ran the whole fifteen miles with the motor wide open and my heart in my mouth as we came around every turn in the channel, and we didn’t meet a single boat. As I swung into the entrance to the slough where I used to launch my own boat, I breathed freely for the first time and lighted a cigarette, conscious of the way my hand had stiffened around the tiller. It was only then that I realized that neither of us had said a word since we left the landing. At the end of the slough I cut the motor and drifted up to the bank. I looked at my watch. It was five minutes of two. That was good time, I thought.

  I helped her out. “It’ll take me a little over an hour to take the boat back to the foot of the lake and get my car and get back here,” I said. “You can sit down here, or if you want to you can start walking out toward the highway on that logging road and meet me. You won’t meet anybody on it because it’s never used any more. Can you walk in those shoes?”

  She nodded eagerly. “Yes. I’d rather walk. I’d go crazy sitting here. I can’t get lost, can I?”

  “No,” I said. “There’s only one road and it doesn’t branch off anywhere. But if you get to the highway before I get back, don’t go out on it. Wait for me in the timber.”

  I refilled the fuel tank of the motor again from the can in the bow, and dumped most of the shiners in the lake to make it look as if I’d done a lot of fishing. They were dead because I’d forgotten to change the water on them. Of course, I didn’t have any fish to show for my day, but fishing-camp proprietors never expected you to catch anything anyway.

  I shoved off and started the motor, and as I went down the slough I swung around once and looked back. She had turned and was walking along the ruts of the old logging road, very straight and lovely and alone, and suddenly I knew, more than I ever had before, how much I loved her, and that if anything ever happened to her, everything would end for me.

  I’d driven the Olds down this morning instead of the old Ford, and after I returned the boat I blasted it back up the highway to where the logging road turned off. It was slow work there, however, because of high centers, and I’d gone barely a quarter mile before I met her. After she’d climbed in and I turned around I passed her the cigarettes and asked her to light me one. As she handed it over, she said, “You haven’t told me yet what we’re going to do, Jack.”

  “I’m not sure about all of it yet myself,” I said, swinging out of the ruts to get past a high spot in the road. “A lot of it depends on what I find out in town. But right now I’m going to take you down to Colston, where you can get on a bus without being seen by anybody around here and where we won’t be seen together.”

  “But what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to meet you in Bayou City. Day after tomorrow, or that night.”

  On the way down to Colston I stopped at a small town and bought a cheap suitcase and three or four Sunday papers to stuff in it so it wouldn’t feel empty. “You’ll nee
d that to check into a hotel,” I said. “They probably wouldn’t give you a room without it.”

  As I started to get back in the car I suddenly noticed her hair. I mean, I noticed it in the way that someone else would, the way I had when I had first seen it. I had grown accustomed to the way it was chopped up, and to me it was beautiful and I always wanted to get my hands into it and it made my breath catch in my throat to look at her, but everybody else who saw it was going to notice it and remember the girl who’d had her hair cut with a dull butcher knife.

  She saw me looking at it and for an instant the tension went out of her face and her eyes were tender. “You’re still fascinated with my hair-do, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But I wasn’t thinking of my reaction to it. The idea, for the next thousand miles or so, is to blend into the herd, or at least as much as a girl with your looks can do it, and you might as well be leading a couple of pandas on a leash.”

  She looked at herself in the rear-view mirror. “Can you run back in the drugstore and get me a package of bobby pins?”

  She worked on it while I drove. It was long enough to roll into a knot on the back of her neck, and when she got through none of the ragged ends showed. “How do you like it now?” she asked, turning to lean toward me.

  “Fine,” I said. “Now you’re just another beautiful girl. Women will look at your clothes and men’ll look at your legs. You’re safe enough.”

  “Do you like it better this way? I could wear it like this.”

  “No,” I said. “I liked it better the other way. Somehow, it was easier to imagine being lost in it and never finding my way out.”

  She looked over at me with her eyes soft and reached out to pat my hand on the steering wheel.

  “Warn me when you’re going to do that while I’m driving,” I said. “You’ll get us both killed.”

  When we got to Colston I pulled off into a quiet side street under the big trees and stopped. Taking out the wallet, I handed her a hundred and fifty of the money.

  “I’m going to tell you good-by here,” I said, “because I’m going to drop you off a block or so from the bus station and run. There will be a bus for Bayou City sometime this evening, around seven, I think. You’ll arrive there a little before midnight. Go to the State Hotel. It’s a small one, quiet, and not too expensive, but still not crumby enough for the cops to have their eyes on it. Register as Mrs. Crawford and just wait until I show up. Try to buy yourself a few clothes, but make the money go as far as possible, because we’re going to have to travel by bus. I won’t be able to bring the car the way things are going to work out. And be sure to remember this: When I get there, don’t recognize me. It may be safer for us to travel separately until we get clear out of the state. You can slip me the number of your room on the quiet, but don’t let anybody see that you even know me.”

  I took her face in both my hands. “I won’t see you for forty-eight hours, and after that we’ll be together for the rest of our lives. So this is two days’ worth of good-by, and then there’ll never be another one.” She held onto me, and when she finally stirred and pushed back on my chest her eyes were wet.

  “Jack,” she whispered, “I’m afraid.”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I said. “Just hang on.”

  “But you’re up to something.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not anything dangerous. Not as dangerous as running now would be.”

  “But what is it? Don’t you see I have to know?”

  “All right,” I said. “But it may not pan out. That’s the only reason I didn’t want to tell you. It all depends on what I find out in town. I’m going to try to make it look as if he killed me.”

  Thirteen

  It was nearly seven when I got back to town. The sun was down, but the air was still and heat lay stagnant and suffocating in the streets. I started to go on up to the courthouse, but remembered it would be closed now, and since I’d have to get the custodian to let me in the building there was no use in hurrying. He probably wouldn’t be there to start cleaning up until nearly eight. Impatient and savage at the delay but still trying to tell myself there was no hurry, that I had all night to find out what I wanted to know, I turned in at the house. At least I could get out of the sweaty fishing clothes and take a shower.

  As I was turning the key in the back door I heard the telephone ringing inside. The key stuck for a minute, and while I worked with it I could hear the ringing going on with that shrill, waspish insistence a telephone always has in an empty house. Just as I got the door open and started through the kitchen it quit. Well, the hell with it, I thought.

  There was a postcard from Louise, the usual picture of a yellow beach covered with parasols and a Prussian-blue ocean in the background. “We’re having a fine time,” she said. I threw it in on the bed and started to undress for the shower. At least, I thought, she didn’t ask for money this time. The shower felt wonderful. I turned it on hot, then cold, then hot again, feeling my nerves begin to unwind and a little of the tightness go out of me. And then, in the middle of it, the telephone started in again. Oh, for Christ’s sake, I thought, and let it ring. It went on, seeming to grow shriller and more angry as the seconds passed, and finally I turned off the water and reached for a towel. Just as I came out of the shower stall it stopped.

  I dried myself, wrapped the towel around my waist, and went out in the kitchen. Getting a couple of ice cubes out of the refrigerator, I poured a glass half full of bourbon and ran a little water in it. By the time the first two swallows had gone down I could feel myself settling like a punctured balloon. I hadn’t realized how taut I’d been now for hours. It’ll be all right in a few days, I thought. It’ll wear off, and I won’t think about it. I know I won’t. The telephone started again.

  This time I got to it, still carrying the drink. “Hello,” I said impatiently. “Marshall speaking.”

  “Where have you been?” It was Buford, and I could hear the cold anger in his voice. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours.” I could feel the tightness coming back. Something had happened.

  “I had a little private business to attend to,” I said. I knew I had a bawling out coming to me for going off without telling him, so if he wanted to give it to me now, this was as good a time as any.

  “Well, next time how about letting me know about it? I might have to get in touch with you.”

  “Right,” I said. “I see what you mean.”

  “No. You don’t. You don’t know how much I mean. I want to see you right away.”

  “All right. What’s up?”

  “All hell’s broken loose. But I can’t talk about it over the phone. Get over here as fast as you can.”

  “Where are you?”

  “A friend’s place. That four-story apartment house on Georgia street. Apartment Three.”

  “I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.” I hung up. I had an idea about the “friend’s place,” but I’d never been there or even known where it was. Buford was a bachelor and lived with his mother in a big ugly gingerbread house built by his grandfather back in the eighties, but I’d always been pretty sure he had another place somewhere, for he could disappear right here in town at times and nobody could find him. It wasn’t any of my business, however, and I’d never thought about it much except to wonder once or twice why he didn’t marry the girl, whoever she was. Maybe he didn’t believe in marriage.

  I finished the drink and went into the bedroom to throw on some clothes. The car was still in the driveway, and I backed out and headed across town. Apartment 3 had a private entrance. I pressed the buzzer and the door clicked. There was a short hall at the top of the stairs, and the door to the living-room was on the left. It was a big room on the corner of the building, looking out into both streets, but the curtains were drawn now and the Lights were on, for it was dusk outside.

  It was beautifully furnished, with a beige rug and blond furniture, a big console phonograph, and shel
ves full of record albums and books, but the two things that would hit you in the eye as you walked into it would be first the girl, and then the guns. She was on the sofa with her legs curled under her, and as I came in she uncoiled and stood up with the connected flow of movement of a cat turning on a rug, a small girl with a vital, somehow reckless face and short-cropped hair in tight rings close to her head like curling chips of copper. She was wearing a blue dressing gown that just touched the floor under her feet and was pulled chastely together at the base of a creamy throat with a large silver pin in the shape of an Oriental sword. I had seen her around town a number of times, driving a Lincoln convertible, but never had known who she was except that someone had said she was married to an Army engineer working on something in Alaska. The story had probably been started by Buford.

  “Mr. Marshall?” she asked, smiling. “I’m Dinah.”

  “How do you do?” I said.

  She saw me looking around inquiringly. “Mr. Buford is out in the kitchen mixing a drink. He won’t let me do it; he says no woman should ever be trusted with a loaded gun or a cocktail shaker.”

  I nodded, and looked around at the wall. She must have seen the wonder on my face, for she laughed.

  “How do you like my gun collection?” I looked back at her and saw the amusement in the gray eyes. Somehow you got the idea that the very incongruity of it tickled her probably as much as it did Buford, this idea of a girl’s apartment—traditional in every other respect, secluded, anonymous, tastefully furnished—with one whole wall covered with guns. There were expensive shotguns, which he used during the bird season, rifles all the way from .22’s to large-caliber things I’d never seen before, and a beautiful collection of antique firearms probably going back to Revolutionary days.

  “They’re nice,” I said. Any other time I would have gone over and looked at them more closely and probably would have paid more attention to her, this amazing flame-haired figurine who found amusement in sharing a love nest with an arsenal, but right now I had too many other things on my mind. Impatience was making me jumpy and I wished Buford would come on and tell me what he thought was so damned important and get it over with so I could go on with what I wanted to do, get over to the courthouse and find out what I could about Shevlin.