The Murderer Vine

by Shepard Rifkin

  “I can’t,” she hissed. “I told everyone how much I missed you.”

  So I kissed her back. It started out as a supporting role for my Academy Award friend, but after two seconds it got out of control. I realized the lady was serious. She was pressing her breasts against me. She was wearing a thin nylon blouse of an apricot color, and a thin nylon bra underneath. I was wearing a thin cotton jacket on top of a thin drip-dry blue shirt, and I could feel her nipples bulging into my chest as hard as cherry candy.

  I finally pulled away. The first thing I saw was a thin elderly lady staring at us only a few feet away. Her pulse was beating rapidly in her throat. This must be Mrs. Garrison, the landlady.

  For the first time I noticed Kirby wasn’t wearing her horn-rims. The small of her back was soaked with sweat. She was breathing quickly with her eyes averted. I put my hand at the small of her back and felt those long flat muscles tense under my palm.

  “I missed you, honey-lamb!”

  “Me, too.” I was stiff and self-conscious. This was good. Canadian males should be embarrassed at public displays of affection. It made me look all the more convincing.

  “Gimme one more kiss,” she said. She couldn’t bear to leave the limelight without at least one encore.

  I let her have it. Good as she was, this kiss was sedate by comparison. We both were beginning to realize that the other kiss had far more reality in it than the situation called for.

  Kirby broke away. “This is Mrs. Garrison,” she said, “and this is mah husband.”

  “I’m delighted to meet you,” she said shyly. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “I found us a lovely apahtmint,” Kirby said. I bent down to pick up my luggage. She grabbed the attaché case, talking enthusiastically about the apartment, the trees, the people she had met, how nice they all were. I let her take the case and I followed her out to the car. I didn’t like her carrying it. And that shows you how stupid I was. I thought somehow she’d be less involved if she wouldn’t have touched it. As if she wasn’t in it already like someone caught in quicksand.

  The Wilson car was parked carelessly at an angle to the curb, unlike every other car in the block. The parking meter said Expired. Leaning against the meter was a fat cop in wrinkled khaki pants and a dirty white shirt. He wore a western-style gun belt with a pearl-handled .45 low on his right hip. Sloppily pinned above his heart was a sheriff’s badge. I could see it was a good one, a Blackinton, made out of 24-karat heavy gold plate with an anti-corrosion finish. They didn’t care much for uniforms in Okalusa, but if all their police equipment was as good as the badge, it meant they had a good mayor or police chief. Well, maybe not good, but at least he took care of the boys.

  He was wearing a cheap broad-brimmed straw hat. When he saw Kirby, he straightened up and tipped it.

  “Afternoon, Mis’ Wilson. I expect this is your car.”

  “Yes, it is, Mr. Hungerfo’d. I want you to meet mah husband. Mah husband, Hal Wilson, soon to be Doctor Wilson!”

  He shook hands, looked at the angle parking, at the expired meter, and then grinned.

  “Mebbe I better let it go,” he said. “Mr. Wilson, welcome to Okalusa. Mebbe I better start callin’ you Doctor right away.”

  “I — ” I began, then stopped. I was speechless.

  “They all take on like that, Mr. Wilson. Pay it no nevermind. You tell Mis’ Wilson to park nice an’ put in a dime now an’ then in the meters, an’ I wish you folks have a nice time in Okalusa.” He tipped his hat and ambled ponderously away.

  We drove past the courthouse square with the iron park benches and the usual statue of the Confederate rifleman. Then three blocks of stores and offices, then the residential district began.

  “We have a lot of good houses here,” Mrs. Garrison said. “A lot of planters like to live in town, it’s so pleasant, an’ there are so many things to do, not like those big lonely plantations with neighbors too far away. Mr. Garrison an’ I, we owned one, but it got too big for us, an’ there was a few bad years in a row. He knew cotton, an’ when the guvvamint told him to div — div — diversify, he wouldn’t. He said all he knew was cotton an’ that was that. So the fourth year came an’ we didn’t have a penny. So we lost it all, but we did have the town house, an’ now we rent it out upstairs an’ maybe one or two rooms. We try to get a nice class of people, no children, an’ that’s why we’re glad to get such nice people as you an’ Mrs. Wilson.”

  Several blocks further we stopped at a big yellow frame house. Scrollwork ran all the way around the roof.

  “Know what that is?” Kirby demanded. “That’s Carpenter Gothic. That’s why I picked this house to live in. You know why? Because that’s the way the house where I was born looked like.”

  A wide veranda ran all around the house. A porch swing sat at one end, at a corner surrounded by four old magnolia trees. A huge live oak shadowed the second-story bay window. Kirby pointed to it and said, “That’s our window!”

  We walked up the walk. Mrs. Garrison thanked Kirby for the ride and left us in the hallway.

  We went up the carpeted staircase. The room was big, with the bay window under the branches of the live oak. I stood there and watched a squirrel run up a branch, sit down, and stare at me with a look of astonishment.

  Kirby said, “He wants to know what a Yankee is doin’ in this house.”

  I smiled. The room possessed an enormous double bed with a quilted bedspread. Kirby said Mrs. Garrison’s grandmother had stitched it together when times were bad after the Civil War. A smaller room to one side had a little desk and a couch. My study. I walked in and put the attaché case on the desk. The study had a worn Persian rug on the floor. It had once cost a lot of money. The room was immaculate. I heard birds in the tree. The light filtered through the branches and made a soft yellow glow on the desk. An old lamp with a green glass shade stood on the desk. I snapped it. It filled the room with a gentle light. It occurred to me that if I were really working on my Ph.D. I could not ask for a better place than this.

  Kirby sat on the bed as I started to unpack. “We’re in!” she said. “They love me. I’ve apologized to everyone for you being a Canadian. They’ve forgiven me, specially since I told them that when you were in England — ”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “When was I in England?”

  “Three years ago,” she said promptly. “You were a Rhodes Scholar and you went to Oxford.”

  “All right. Go on.”

  “When you were in England, you saw how badly black immigration was working out. You don’t like it, and you’re glad that Canada has been spared this problem.”

  I was amused to see that when she became serious and when she was talking to me she lost her Southern accent.

  “I play dumb Southern bunny with the sheriff. I’ve already asked him for road directions several times when any three-year-old idiot would have understood them the first time, but all Southerners like their upper-class women to look cool, elegant, and helpless.”

  I moved quietly to the door. I opened it suddenly. No one was there listening. I didn’t think that Mrs. Garrison looked the type, but people in small towns have so little to do that even nice people kneel at keyholes to get material for gossip.

  I came to the bed. Kirby sat motionless, staring up at me. I bent close to her. Later I could see how my actions might easily have been misunderstood by anyone. Her mouth parted and the color flushed her skin. “Oh Joe, oh, Joe — ” she said, and put her arms around my neck.

  I pulled them away. Her face flushed with embarrassment.

  “From now on,” I said quietly, “no confidences in the room. Maybe the Garrisons aren’t nosy. We can’t assume it. We have to assume that they are nosy, that the room will be bugged. The only time we can talk freely will be in the car, or when we’re out walking alone in an empty street. All right?”

  “All right.” She was looking down at the rug and tracing one of the arabesque patterns in it with her right shoe. “Y
ou wash up. I’ll be back.”

  I had finished unpacking and had changed into a fresh shirt and slacks when she tapped on the door and came in with Mr. and Mrs. Garrison. He was a thin pale man with a full head of white hair and a shrewd, sour face. He congratulated me on my lovely wife. He said he knew a good woman when he saw one. That’s why he grabbed Mrs. Garrison.

  “When I married Ethelda-Grace,” he went on, “she lived on one side of the Chickasaw an’ I on the other. An’ when I went to fetch her for the weddin’ day, why, they’d been a flood an’ all the bridges was down. So Ethelda stood on one side, all impatient in her sunbonnet an’ umbrella, an’ we were married on both sides of the river.”

  “Don’t believe him,” Mrs. Garrison said severely. “We were married in a house, like Christian people. Well, we’d best be getting along, Mr. Wilson. You want anythin’, you jus’ give a yell. I hope you enjoy livin’ in Okalusa.” They left.

  “Nice people,” I said. I stood up. “How about you giving me a lecture tour around Okalusa and the suburbs and then we’ll go out for dinner?”

  She was delighted. When she started the car, she said, “Are we casing the joint?”

  “Yeah. We’re casing it.”

  I thought that in my soon-to-arrive retirement it might be fun to build up a good library of books on slang and argot and cant. A man can’t go out fishing twenty-four hours a day. Maybe books on English dialects as well. I could skip the queer symbols. It might be very interesting to look up the origin of criminal slang like “case the joint,” for example. Why “case”? I remember once looking into the thirteen volumes of the Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary when I was killing time in the library of some rich client. When he came in, I asked him how much the set was worth. He told me he had paid three hundred dollars for it.

  At the time I thought, who the hell could fork out three hundred bucks, just like that?

  Well, I could. In about three weeks.

  21

  But when I got downstairs I felt as if I had been sandbagged. I had had too little sleep for two nights. That and the unaccustomed heat did me in. I went back upstairs, took my shoes off, and lay down on the sofa for a brief nap. When I woke up it was morning, there was a sheet over me to protect me from the early morning chill, and I smelled bacon a-fryin’ in spite of what the mechanic had said about Milliken County.

  Breakfast was ready. Thick bacon, cooked brown and crisp, corn bread sticks soaked with sweet butter, and superb coffee steaming on the table. And a tall glass of ice-cold orange juice, freshly squeezed.

  “I’m sure glad I married you,” I told Kirby.

  “Oh, yes. I’ve nevah regretted it even a teeny lil bit.”

  We ate in silence. While she washed up, I took out the few papers and books from the educational side of my attaché case. I arranged them neatly on the desk in my study. Beside them I set the books she had taken down in the car. I put out a few pads of long yellow sheets of legal paper. It looked like a serious Ph.D. candidate was about to start work.

  I picked up the case and we went downstairs to the car for my delayed tour of Okalusa. I tossed the case casually onto the back seat. It had become such a part of me that she didn’t even really notice it. I wasn’t worried about anyone opening it. It was locked. But I was getting tired of carrying it around, and I had better find a good place to hide the nasty contents.

  The gas gauge was almost empty. “Let’s gas up at your favorite station,” I said. Several blocks east she pulled into a Texaco station. The guy there came out of a grease pit and gave her the big hello.

  “I want you to meet mah husband, Mr. Sanderson,” she said, with that eager little thrill in her voice I was beginning to realize she saved up for these occasions.

  “Pleased to meet you, sir,” he said. He didn’t even look at me and I knew he didn’t mean a word of it. I didn’t blame him. Kirby was something special in those days. I suppose the excitement she felt in playing a role gave her a marvelous coloring. If she were around, I wouldn’t waste time in looking at someone else.

  He filled the tank, checked the oil, checked brake-level fluid, checked transmission fluid, cleaned the windows till they shone and sparkled. They had never been cleaned like that for the whole life of the car. He liked the front window especially because that gave him the chance to look at her the longest.

  I asked her lazily, “Where did you fix the spare?” I had noticed early that morning that it was still flat.

  Her mouth opened as she realized she hadn’t had it fixed. “Oh, oh. I plumb forgot.”

  So I had Mr. Sanderson fix that. I noticed a rack of new tires. Below that was a rack of secondhand tires. I smiled. I had just solved a minor problem.

  “Honey,” I said, making sure that Sanderson was within hearing, “you’ve been driving out around town. How are the back-country roads?”

  “Not good.”

  “Gas stations pretty far apart?”

  She nodded.

  “I think I better get an extra spare.” Sanderson had been listening. He tried to sell me the $31.95 special, a wide-track ground-gripper, mud-and-snow tire, guaranteed against all failures for thirty thousand miles. I listened patiently to this poor man’s version of Harry Gilbert, Madison Avenue’s contribution to the great thinkers of the twentieth century. I didn’t want to make any enemies down here unless I had to. When he stopped for breath, I spoke.

  “Gee, that sounds great! But I live on a student’s budget, and I’m afraid I can’t afford it. Would you have anything else?”

  “We got some worn ones. They ain’t so good, they — ”

  “If they’re cheap, I’ll take one.”

  He sighed and sold me one for four dollars. I picked one with extra-wide tread. He sold me an old rim for another four dollars. When I told him I needed a pump, he knocked two-fifty from a seven-fifty job and he threw in two rusty tire irons for nothing. So I was all set for my taped interviews anywhere in the county, as I assured him with a big, friendly grin.

  We pulled out with Sanderson staring wistfully at Kirby. He reminded me of a big dog looking at a delicious bone hanging high out of his reach. I looked at her as we went through Okalusa. She took the barrette out and let the wind blow and whip her hair around her face. I didn’t blame Sanderson at all. Here was this beautiful bone and I had very carefully stenciled it Poison. Don’t Touch. My intelligence complimented me, but my body thought me stupid. I concentrated on the road.

  I heard her chuckle. She had a deep contralto amused purr when she did that. I never had known any other woman with that same quality. She was looking at the long row of traffic lights that stretched down Main Street.

  “Back home,” she said, “there’s a little ole town name of Shelby. Shelby’s very poor an’ they was real proud when they bought ten traffic lights for the main street. They looked real pretty when they all were green an’ red, an’ the mayor used to stand at the window at City Hall an’ look at them. They cost a mighty big amount. They hadn’t been up a week when a twister came down Main Street an’ took all those traffic lights an’ took them four miles out of town an’ dropped ’em in the swamp.”

  We were in the cotton country. She was looking out the window with her chin resting in the palm of her hand. She suddenly became serious. “I’m gonna sing you a song. You listen careful, now.”

  Oh, I’m a good old Rebel,

  Now that’s just what I am,

  For this Fair Land of Freedom

  I do not give a damn!

  I’m glad I fit against it,

  I only wish we’d won,

  An’ I don’t want no pardon

  For anythin’ I done.

  She looked at me from the corners of her eyes. She had sung it slowly and defiantly. She went on.

  I hates the Constitution,

  This Great Republic, too.

  I hates the Freedman’s Bureau,

  In uniforms of blue.

  I hates the nasty eagle,

  With all his
brag an’ fuss,

  The lyin’, thievin’ Yankees,

  I hates ’em wuss an’ wuss.

  “That was written over a hundred years ago,” she said. “An’ the best way to understand the people down here is to realize they mean every damn word of it. Want some more?”

  I nodded. She lifted her head and the defiant words came from her long throat:

  I hates the Yankee nation

  An’ everythin’ they do,

  I hates the Declaration

  Of Independence, too;

  I hates the “glorious Union,”

  ’Tis drippin’ with our blood,

  I hates their striped banner,

  I fit it all I could.

  “Remember, Joe. They still mean it.”

  “Joe Dunne is number one,” I said. “Are there any more verses?”

  She nodded.

  “Teach them to me,” I said.

  She sang two more stanzas. I filed them away for future reference.

  We came to a crossroads.

  The fields of cotton ended. The road ran through the swamp for three or four miles. Then there was a crossroads, a bridge over a little river bordered with cattails, a few splintered docks, and a little general store with a rotting front porch. Soft drink signs were tacked all over it and probably helped a lot in holding it together. A rusty gas pump was in front. A ramshackle beat-up pickup truck was parked beside the store with the back gate hanging down by one side. A sign was nailed above the side facing the road. It read: BAIT FRESH CATFISH.

  Three Negroes who had been sitting on old kitchen chairs on the porch froze as the car stopped. When I got out, two of them stood up and got into the pickup and drove away. One of them remained in his chair. When I was a few feet away, he stood up and said, “Yessuh?”