Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Austen—”

  He turned back to face the girl at the desk.

  “—Mr. Glenn is in a staff meeting. If you could stop by this afternoon—?”

  “It’s all right,” he said, automatically raising his guard against a display of disappointment. “Not important, anyway. Just tell him that I dropped in.”

  “I surely will, Mr. Austen.” Her voice sounded tape recorded from Chapter III of the Corporation Associates manual on public relations.

  Out on the street again, he looked at his watch. It was ten thirty-two. Too early to go to the bank. He stood for a moment, attempting to think of some way that an hour might be filled. Then, still without an idea, he walked briskly toward Broad Street in a perfect pretense of purpose. No one, seeing him, would ever guess that he was a man who didn’t know where he was going.

  10

  The flat disc of the earth tilted, slowly revolving, and Cash’s voice in the earphones said, “Fasten your seat belt, we’re landing.”

  His voice shattered the thin shell of reverie and she looked down to see wooded hills rapidly gaining dimension, the detail of individual trees becoming visible as the ridges swelled upward from the valley floor below. A mountainside streamed past, restoring perspective, and then it was the plane that was moving, not the earth, and she caught her breath as the wing-tip went up and up, reaching for the zenith. The plane leveled and rocketed in through a narrow gap in the sheer face of a high cliff. There was the blur of treetops and then the blue-black ribbon of a landing strip streamed out ahead of them across the flat floor of a faintly green-tinged valley. The plane settled, touched, lost the grace of flight, became a mechanical behemoth lumbering ahead to an awkward stop. The motors snuffed out and there was the vacuum of silence. She looked away from him, out across the valley, afraid that he would say now what had not been said before … apologize for having kissed her … and she braced herself against the need of reply.

  But he only asked, “Know where you are?” and after a moment of recovery, tempted to reply again that it didn’t matter, she said, “I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

  For a suspended instant it seemed that he had heard the silent words of her thought instead of the words her lips had spoken, but the movement of his body was only the act of standing. He helped her up from the seat and the touch of his hands was no longer the firebrand of madness but was now the silent promise of eventual fulfillment, unquestioned and unanswerable, accepted.

  They walked together back through the cabin and at the door, denying hope, he did not hesitate but immediately touched the control button. The sunlight flooded in as the steps went down and, momentarily blinded, she did not see, until after she heard a strange voice, the gray-stubbled face of the old man who sat grinning up at them from the front seat of a battered pickup truck.

  “Whyn’t you let a fellow know you was coming?” the oldster shouted in a poor pretense of anger. “Didn’t have no warning at all, ’cept them guinea hens cackling as if there was a chicken hawk around. Like to broke my fool neck getting down here in time. Hadn’t been downhill all the way, I’d never made it.”

  Cash laughed an affectionate greeting, turning back to her as she came down the steps. “Lory, this is Abe Jefferson, direct descendant of Abe Lincoln and Tom Jefferson—not to mention a little Indian blood that he picked up from the queen of the Cherokees.”

  Abe howled gleefully, rattling the loose steering wheel of the old truck. “Don’t you go believing a word of it, miss!” He long-legged out without opening the door, extending a gnarled hand. “Warning you right now, I’m a no-good liar and ain’t to be trusted. Sure pleased to welcome you, miss.”

  “Hello, Mr. Jefferson,” she said, talking his hand, feeling the crackling texture of old parchment.

  “If Cash here’d only let me know you was coming I’d a shaved—even if ’tis only Friday.”

  She found it astonishingly easy to laugh. “But this isn’t Friday, Mr. Jefferson, it’s Wednesday.”

  “’Tis?” He looked appealingly at Cash.

  “That’s right, Abe.”

  “Which Wednesday? Don’t do no good to tell a man it’s Wednesday if you don’t say whether it’s last Wednesday or next Wednesday. Doggone, Cash, whyn’t you bring me a new calendar? One I got’s so old ’tain’t even got Armistice Day on it.”

  “Don’t know when Sunday comes, do you, Abe?” Cash asked.

  Abe slapped his thigh in high glee. “Cora still ain’t got over that one. You see, miss, she wakes up on this morning Cash is talking about and nothing would do but she’s got to have her soul saved. I argues it’s Friday but she’s so all fired sure it’s Sunday that right then and there we gotta hitch up the mules and drive clear down to Shell Creek for services. Know what day it is when we get there? Tuesday!”

  “Wait a minute, Abe,” Cash interrupted. “That isn’t the way you told it before.”

  “That so?” Abe asked, elaborately innocent. “Well, I got different ways of telling it, depending on who’s listening.”

  Cash accused, “You told me Cora was taking you down to make you marry her.”

  “Nope, you got that wrong, Cash. This particular time there was three of the kids with us. Time we went down to get married there was only one!” He interrupted his own quick laughter. “You two figuring on fishing? No use if you are. Trouts gone plumb lazy. Can’t get more’n eight or ten without moving to a different pool.”

  “Even have to cast for them, huh?” Cash asked.

  “Ain’t had one jump ashore by hisself all this week.”

  “Thought the fishing season didn’t open until the fifteenth.”

  “Ain’t it that yet? Doggone, boy, I told you I needed a calendar.”

  Cash’s change of tone cut off the banter. “Abe, how about letting us use that limousine of yours?”

  “Sure, take her,” the old man said with a magnanimous gesture.

  “We can drop you off at your place.”

  “No, you don’t!” Abe balked in quick alarm. “Cora’s got a idea of me washing windows. I ain’t getting near that place till she settles down. Anyway, there’s a covey of quail needs looking at. Nothing better for a man’s soul than seeing a nice big covey of quail. Beats window washing all hollow.”

  The doors of the pickup proved unopenable. “Safer that way,” Abe explained. “Can’t lose nothing if one of them doors comes flapping open.”

  Unexpectedly, Cash swept her up in his arms and deposited her, breathless, on the front seat.

  Abe grinned, tongue-in-cheek, winking. “Knowed a girl once—that’s what she wanted this feller to do, carry her in the house like that when they got home from the wedding. Only thing was, this gal she weighs about two hundred pounds and the feller was a little half pint no bigger’n a squirrel, so when—”

  Cash had started the motor and Abe broke off his narrative with a sudden windmilling of his arms, dashing around to the back of the truck and dragging out two sets of wheel chocks for the plane. His feet tangled in the ropes and he fell backward, landing in a sitting position, grinning, then waving them on with an expression of happy resignation.

  The motors coughed and clattered, gears ground, and the truck started down the dirt lane that angled off from the runway.

  “What a wonderful character,” she marveled, the words less important than the need for exultation.

  Cash chuckled. “He’s a character, all right.”

  “Where in the world did he come from?”

  “Oh, he was here when I got the place.”

  “You can’t mean—this isn’t all yours?”

  “You haven’t seen it yet,” he said.

  They were driving along a stream now, green-knotted fringe hanging from the bordering willows, and he made a sharp right turn, stopping on a log-railed bridge. The rush of the water was under them, its babbling rustle the only sound after the motor sputtered out.

  “Look,” he whispered, gesturing toward a widening poo
l beyond the bridge shadow. She leaned toward him, her eyes directed by his pointing finger, seeing the sunlighted gravel at the lip of the pool, then the shadowy silhouettes that moved across it.

  “Trout,” he whispered, his voice colored with the little-boy wonder of a youngster impressed with some fabulous phenomenon.

  She tried to capture the quality of his excitement, but her mind would accept no stimulus beyond the realization of how totally different he was from anyone she had ever known. It was impossible to imagine the intonation of his voice being duplicated by another’s lips, even harder to visualize another face that could even partially match his infinite variety of expressions. They were not the simple masks that ordinary men put on and took off to express pleasure or displeasure, acceptance or rejection. His was a living face, the mirror of a mind unshackled by convention, soaring its own free course without apology for freedom, regarding pleasure not as a frivolity to be grudgingly tolerated but as something organically linked to life itself, not as a weakness but as a strength, not as a contradiction of power but as the proof of its existence. He was strong. That was undeniable. No man could stand against him. If she were to touch him now … and it would require only the slightest movement of her head to brush his cheek … that strength would be released … crushing … enveloping …

  But she could not move toward him. Her body was locked in the firm grip of reason, not by the fear of another such rejection as she had experienced that night in Maine, nor even the fear of physical inadequacy that had kept her sleepless on so many brooding nights, but by the calm acceptance of normal woman’s waiting role. It was a rare sensation, this feeling of maturity, this passport to womanhood that he had given her.

  He turned and she turned with him, slipping away, their bodies neither near nor far. The motor started and they drove ahead, the road following the stream again, blue-grass lushly verdant in clumps sheltered under the bank, a red-winged blackbird swaying on the brown stalk of a cattail in a marshy backwater. The road wound tortuously, leaving the stream, and they tunneled into a pine forest, the sun lost as they climbed, restored again as softly filtered light fell hazily through the bare branches of giant oaks. White stars flickered on the forest floor.

  “Bloodroot,” he said, breaking the long silence.

  She nodded, her eyes following the red tracery of a cardinal’s swift flight. Through a break in the trees she caught a quick glimpse of the valley, now far below them.

  “Soon there,” he said, shifting gears to ease the stuttering motor as the road hairpinned a jutting cliff, ending on the flat platform of a red rock, an observation point unscreened by trees.

  They got out and he led her to the edge of the cliff, leaping lightly to the top of a flat boulder, giving her his hand as she climbed. She saw, after a moment of orientation, that they were standing high on the rim of a giant bowl. A circling mountain ridge enclosed the entire valley except for the single break of the notch through which they had flown in. Distance was unappreciated until she saw the plane, now the tiniest of silver insects feeding at the end of a black line ruled across the floor of the valley. The willows along the stream were faintly green vapor rising from a thread of water.

  “See the river?” he asked, directing her eyes with the sweep of his hand. “I’ll show you where it comes from.”

  He jumped down and reached up to lift her from the rock. His hands, open palmed under her arms, left an oddly lingering sensation of pressure, a strange swelling of her breasts that persisted long after the release of his hands, and she was relieved that her face was hidden from him as she went ahead down the path he indicated.

  They walked without speaking, even the sound of their footsteps finally lost in the deepening cushion of pine needles, and it was in that silence that she first heard what seemed the faint rustling of wings. But as they climbed downward, the sound changed character and she finally identified it as the rush of water. Cash came up beside her, parting a screen of low-hanging hemlock boughs. Then she saw the waterfalls. It was a sight so beautiful that full comprehension came slowly. From high up on the rock-face of the cliff, a torrent of water gushed out into space and fell through an enormous rock chalice until, far below, it feathered into a plume of spray over a foaming green cauldron from which, with almost incredible placidity, the creek flowed out to the valley.

  “The whole river comes right out of the rock,” she finally said, awe demanding the voicing of an explanation. “Does it have a name?”

  “Aurora,” he said. “Aurora Falls—Aurora Valley.”

  “It can’t possibly be real,” she whispered. “It’s something in a dream.”

  “Sometimes I don’t believe it either.”

  “You can’t mean that it’s yours?”

  “That’s what the deed says.”

  “All of it?”

  “The whole valley.”

  “But—” She stopped, lost for words.

  “If it hadn’t been for you, I’d never have found it. That’s why I brought you here today.”

  “I—?”

  “Do you remember that night in Maine?”

  The question came as a blow without warning and her body stiffened against its impact, a wordless protest escaping her lips before it could be stopped.

  Cash looked at her as if shocked by the awareness of error. “I meant that first night at Jefferson Clark’s.” His hands reached out, manacles on her wrists. “But I want to tell you about that other night, too.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she tried to say, uncertain whether the words were actually spoken.

  “It does matter,” he said fiercely. “All that day, every minute of it, I’d been fighting against hope, telling myself that it couldn’t be, that you were thinking of me as an old man, that it was insane to hope that—”

  “I was the one who was insane.”

  “No, Lory, no! You were—”

  She was in his arms, neither a moment too soon nor a moment too late, but the imp of conscience whispered that none of this could be true, that the moment of revealed reality had been dissipated and that they were back in a dream world again.

  But if it had been a dream world he would have kissed her and he did not. Her tense body slackened with the slow subsiding of inner tremor, and then came the dull awareness that it was right that he did not kiss her now. That would have been the end of words. And there was a need for words. Now she hungered for them.

  “After you were gone I realized what a fool I’d been,” he was saying. “I followed you but it was too late. You were gone and I didn’t know where. All I knew was your name. I had only one clue—that you knew the Athersons. When I got back to Philadelphia, Will Atherson was away on a vacation. It was a week before I could reach him. I finally found out who you were, your father’s name, and where you lived. I drove to Suffolk.”

  “You did?” she asked, the words jarred loose by surprise.

  “It was Labor Day. There was a dance out at your country club. You had a date. He was a fine-looking boy—young—at least young enough to have a crew cut and to know how to rumba.” A smile flickered, tentative and testing. “I’m not the rumba type and I was ten years past the crew cut age.”

  She shook her head, not as a gesture of negation but as an attempt to free the choke in her throat. “I wore a silly pink dress and it rained.”

  His smile broadened as if the test had been successful. “And it was very wet rain—particularly outside, looking in.”

  “Why didn’t you let me know? Oh, I wish you had.”

  “I was being very wise, and very sensible, telling myself that it was impossible.”

  “That what was impossible?” she asked, amazed at her boldness.

  “That you could—” He paused, looking down into her eyes.

  She was so certain that he was about to speak of love that the answer was already on her lips. But the words were wasted. Cash squared his shoulders as if it were an act of suddenly demanded self-control and his voice was fi
rmly flattened as he said, “I was going to tell you how I got all this, wasn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “That night at Jefferson Clark’s—” He hesitated as if retesting her composure, going on after she had nodded. “I came back again the next morning, trying to find you.”

  “I’d gone back to Eagle Harbor.”

  “So I found out when I talked to Clark. In the course of our conversation—mentioning Eagle Harbor brought it up—he told me about a paper company up there that was for sale. I had no idea of buying it, but it did give me an excuse to come up there and see you.”

  “Did you need an excuse?”

  “I thought I did. You see—” There was that same shoulder-squaring again, the same determined flatness of his voice. “In any event, I did buy the paper company. Later, I merged it into Paper Enterprises. But during the time I had it, I got digging around in their old records and found a deed for eighteen thousand acres of Pennsylvania land that no one around the place had ever even seen. Old man Dufrene—that was the family that had owned the mill—had bought it thirty years before. No one knew why—maybe he’d had the idea of starting a mill here—but in any event here it was.”

  “You don’t mean this place?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you said it was in Pennsylvania?”

  “Where do you think you are?”

  “But we flew south—Chesapeake Bay—”

  “Didn’t you notice me turn back over Washington?”

  “Something must have distracted me,” she said, guardedly tongue-in-cheek, almost certain that the memory of his having kissed her would break his rigid self-composure. And for a split second it did seem that he was going to smile. But the hope was lost and he went on, his voice even more severely restrained than it had been before. “We’re only thirty-odd miles from the Turnpike—a half hour by air to Philadelphia, maybe twenty minutes to Suffolk.”