Big city girl

by Charles Williams

  Sewell tried to raise the arm. “Twice,” he said faintly. “Once on the wrist and once on the hand. Little after daylight this morning.”

  “Did you get any of the poison out?”

  Again there was that faint shake of the head. “I didn’t have a knife to cut it with.”

  Mitch sat quietly, avoiding his eyes. “You’ll be all right,” he said, knowing he was lying. There wasn’t one chance in a hundred, even for a specimen like Sewell.

  The old sardonic gleam came momentarily into Sewell’s eyes. “Don’t give us that, kid,” he said with the pain showing under his voice. “We ain’t got time for any crap.”

  Mitch started to break then, just once. “Look,” he said urgently, his voice very thin and harsh, “a doctor could still fix it. I’ll go up and get a wagon and send one of them goddamned deputies after a doctor.”

  Sewell looked at him quietly. “Cut it out, kid.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Sewell!”

  “Knock it off. In the first place, it’s too late. In the second, if he could fix me up I’d go to the chair. I like it better here.”

  Mitch looked down at the mud. He nodded his head slowly.

  “You want to stay down here, then?” he asked. “That’s right.”

  “All right,” Mitch said quietly.

  They were both silent for several minutes, listening to the monotonous tattoo of the rain on the spread raincoat. Then Mitch said, “What about, if—?”

  “Not if. When.”

  “All right,” Mitch said. He always had to be tougher than anybody else, he thought. I guess being tough was the only religion he ever had. And I reckon it’s as good as any, if it lasts. Got help you, though, if it ever quits on you. “All right, then. When.”

  Sewell looked at him. “You still got a shovel on this shirt-tail farm? Or has he sold that too?”

  Twenty-one

  Mitch nodded his head, and the thing was done.

  There had always been a deep and unspoken understanding between them. So unlike in many ways, the one corrupt, professionally violent, and criminal, and the other with his bitter honesty and a sort of harsh and thorn-protected, inarticulate capacity for love, they had always been able to meet on this common ground of a hard and unflinching realism. Courage was a quality each recognized and respected in the other; perhaps it had been passed on to them by their mother as valor is said to be in the breeding of fighting bulls, or perhaps it had been forced upon them by long association with the pitiful contrast of their father’s weakness. At any rate, they understood each other now, and nodded, glad there had to be no further talk.

  For Sewell there was in it the final guarantee that he would never be taken alive to go to the electric chair, and the grisly humor of one last supreme victory over the forces of the law he hated. The five-hundred-dollar reward forever unclaimed by any money-hungry deputy and the forever unsolved mystery of his disappearance would constitute the farewell expression of contempt he would leave them. Mitch had enough insight into the working of his brother’s mind to be aware of this, but for him the reasons were different, although they came to the same conclusion.

  There was a proud, unbending strain of clannishness in him, clannishness in the true sense of love and loyalty to family, which excluded the law, or at least came first, before the law. If Sewell owed a debt to law and to society for his misdeeds—and Mitch was too honest to deny this—Sewell would have paid it when he died, as surely as if he had paid it on the gallows or in the electric chair, and with the payment of this debt what was left of Sewell or the memory of Sewell was no longer society’s concern. It was strictly a matter for his family. And since, besides himself, the family consisted of a half-demented old man who lived in a dream and a girl too young to understand and too vulnerable to grief, he would accept the full responsibility. Damn the law now that the debt was being paid; it no longer had any concern in the matter. Damn the radio and newspapers, the publicity, the tumult, and the money-hungry scramble for reward. There had been enough of Roman carnival. It could end here in a hidden grave on this remaining and pitiful remnant of the land the Neelys still possessed.

  He crouched now, wooden-faced, quiet, unwinking, below the edge of the sheltering raincoat and looked at Sewell, half ashamed of the weakness of his outburst a few minutes ago. There for a moment it had been hard to take, almost too hard, but now it was over and the grief was contained where it should be, below the surface and out of sight.

  “How do you feel now?” he asked.

  “O.K.,” Sewell replied. They were both aware of the lie.

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “No. I wish I had a cigarette, but I reckon yours are ruined too.”

  “The tobacco’s still dry. It’s in a can. But the papers are wet.”

  “It don’t matter.”

  “I’ll run up to the house and get some more papers.”

  “Never mind,” Sewell said.

  “It won’t take a minute.”

  He slid backward out of the dead tree and stood up in the rain. For a moment his gaze swung outward over the water backed up below him. What was it doing? Was it still rising, or had it reached the crest and begun to fall? Then he turned away; there was no time for it now. Just for an instant a great bitterness welled up in him. It seemed somehow that for a period of time that went back farther than he could remember—and was actually just since daybreak this morning—he had been caught up in one desperate and inconclusive struggle after another. First there had been the argument with Jessie, which he had had to abandon in a hopeless mess when he ran to fight the rising water trying to engulf the crop, and now in turn that was swallowed up in the larger disaster of Sewell. Maybe the old man’s right, he thought. The thing to do is to find a world of your own. Then he shook it off and started up the hill toward the house.

  * * *

  The cars had been arriving and departing since mid-morning. Three of them had come and gone by now, and there was one still parked in the front yard while its two occupants searched the river bottom. As each arrived and began to disgorge its slickered, white-hatted men with rifles, Cass would leap up from beside the radio and run out into the rain in an antic frenzy of lamentation with the burlesque and monstrous hat athwart his head.

  “He’s drowned,” he would wail. “It said on the radio He didn’t come up no more. I’m his daddy and I tried to raise him up a Christian, but he’s drowned in the river.”

  “We don’t know,” the men would say. “And we don’t believe anything until we see it.”

  “But it said so on the radio,” he would cry out, trotting after them as far as the barn and unable to grasp the fact that these men in the field were the ones who fed the information in the first place into radio’s all devouring gut and were uninterested in its digestive rumblings.

  And then, as they left him, he would stand for a moment lost and uncertain in the rain and call out after them the repeated theme and password of his incipient madness: “I’m his daddy. He was my boy.” Whether this was a misguided bid for fame or the tortured admission of a sense of guilt they had no way of knowing—if they cared.

  Joy sulked in her room and looked with contempt upon all this frenetic exhibitionism. I’m only his wife, she thought. Nobody cares enough to ask me how I feel. The silly old idiot, making a fool of himself like that. I think he’s going nuts. But you’d think somebody might have heard that he had a wife.

  The last car, which had a press sticker on the windshield, rolled into the yard in midafternoon carrying two men, neither of whom had raincoats. They got out and ran up on the porch, one of them carrying a bulky camera case. The reporter was a lean-faced young man with closely cropped dark hair and alert gray eyes, and an air of eager impatience about him like a hunting dog on a frosty morning. The photographer was older, around forty, sloppily dressed in an old gray suit with food stains on the vest. The vest itself was closed with only one of its buttons, which was in the wrong buttonhole, causing it
to extend down some two inches lower on one side than on the other. He was dark-haired too, but the hair was long, with a few strands of gray, and would never stay combed, springing up wildly on both sides of the part and giving him a perpetual air of having just got out of bed. The face was gaunt, long-jawed, with cavernous eye sockets, and the eyes themselves were gray, with an expression of detached and somewhat cynical boredom. His name was Lambeth, and he was half drunk.

  Cass was sitting on the bed in the front room listening to the radio when they arrived. Springing up, he ran into the hall and onto the front porch just as they leaped upon it from out of the rain.

  “There’s news coming in.” he said excitedly, pausing only for an instant in his headlong orbit. “Got to listen to the news. I’ll talk to you in a minute.” Then he whirled and was gone, disappearing through the open window back into his room again.

  They started, and looked at each other. They could hear the radio’s voice inside the room.

  “Looks like one of the listening audience,” Lambeth said, unslinging the camera case and leaning boredly against the wall.

  The reporter walked to the window and looked in. Cass was seated on the edge of the bed with his face pushed up in front of the radio, rapt, intent, unmoving, while the comic and improbable hat dripped water onto the floor.

  “Are you Mr. Neely?” he asked.

  “Can’t talk to you now,” Cass said, frowning.

  The reporter withdrew his head, he stood still, listening and could hear the news.

  “—no late developments in this sensational man hunt. Police officers at the scene are now almost unanimous in their opinion that Neely is dead, either drowned or killed by a rifle bullet at the time he was swimming down the river. However, the search is being pushed relentlessly and will not be written off as closed until the body is, recovered.”

  The reporter looked in again. “There’s nothing new in that,” he said. “I filed it myself less than an hour ago.”

  Cass looked at him blankly. “It’s the news,” he said. “Can’t talk to you now.”

  “But I tell you,” the reporter said impatiently, “there’s nothing new in it. I wrote it.”

  Cass shook his head. “Don’t make no difference.”

  The young man withdrew his head from the window and looked helplessly at Lambeth, who was leaning against the wall and wishing he had brought the bottle in from the car.

  “Nobody ever believes anything until he hears it on the radio or sees it in the paper,” Lambeth said wearily. “God help the human race.”

  “There must be somebody else around here we can talk to,” the reporter said. He started toward the door to look down the hall.

  Joy had been in the bedroom engaged in changing into another dress when she heard the car drive up. But instead of going on down into the bottom as the others had done, these men had come up onto the porch. It’s about time somebody remembered he had a wife, she thought angrily. All this fuss and hullabaloo and that old cluck running around like a chicken with its head chopped off, and you’d think there wasn’t anybody else on the place or that had anything to do with Sewell at all. Slipping into a dressing gown, she gave her hair a shake back over her shoulders and went down the hall.

  She emerged onto the porch just as the reporter was coming toward the door. He was quite attractive, she thought, and at the same time there was something vaguely familiar about him. She put on her best and warmest smile and started to say something.

  Just then Lambeth heard her and turned.

  “Well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t Narcissus.”

  Twenty-two

  “Oh, hello,” the reporter said. “You’re Mrs. Neely, aren’t you? You remember us, I guess. At the trial? We didn’t expect to see you out here, but I’m glad we ran into you.”

  Joy smiled at them. “Why, yes,” she said. “I remember you, Mr.—er—”

  “Shaw,” the younger man said. “And this is Byron Lambeth.”

  “Oh, I know Mr. Lambeth. We’re old friends, aren’t we?”

  “Mrs. Neely and I have seen a lot of each other,” Lambeth said gravely.

  “Now, what would you like to say, Mrs. Neely?” Shaw asked with professional briskness. “Do you have any idea where your husband was headed when he—uh—”

  “Well, I’m not sure,” she said slowly. “I hadn’t heard—”

  “Don’t you think he might have been trying to come here?”

  “Why, yes. I’ve thought of that. He was coming this way, wasn’t he? I mean, when he— Oh, it’s so awful! You don’t know what it’s been like all day, not knowing.” The idea of Sewell’s coming back to her began to blossom and take shape, and she knew. She just knew. Why hadn’t she realized it before? Why, of course. It really couldn’t have been anything else. He had been headed right this way, hadn’t he?

  Forgetting the two men for a moment, she let her mind run unhampered along this delightful and beckoning pathway, seeing herself as the irresistible beauty for whom men would take incalculable risks. It happened all the time in the movies. And then, even as she was beginning to believe in herself as this fatal beauty, all the terrible tragedy of it came rushing in upon her and she fought to hold back the tears as she thought of how near he had been and she had not known. Sewell had been killed while risking everything just to be at her side for one final, beautiful hour, and she hadn’t known it until too late.

  “Yes,” she said tragically, her face slightly raised like the pictures of Joan of Arc and a mist of tears in her eyes. “He was coming to see me. I can feel it. It’s something you know deep down inside of you. Oh, poor Sewell! To think how near he was and I didn’t know.”

  Shaw broke in eagerly. “That’s it! That’s the way I see it. He must have been coming here. What else would lie have been doing up there on that bridge? We’ll cover it from that angle. And we’ll want some pictures. You won’t mind posing, will you, Mrs. Neely?”

  “Mrs. Neely won’t mind posing at all, I’m sure,” Lambeth said with the same deferential and still half-drunken gravity. “Mrs. Neely takes a very good picture.”

  “I—I’ll be glad to,” Joy said graciously. She began dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, and looked down appraisingly at the dowdy old kimono. They would catch me in this crummy old rag, she thought. “Oh, but I’ll have to change and fix up a little. I look such a fright. I haven’t even bothered to— I mean, it’s all been so horrible. It won’t take a minute. You won’t mind, will you?” She gave them a wan little smile, and before either of them could answer she had turned and run back down the hall.

  Now, where’s that confounded kid? she thought frantically, rushing into the bedroom and over to the suitcase on the old trunk. What’ll I wear? Any other time she’d be underfoot like some idiotic puppy, mooning at me while I brush my hair, and now when I could use her she’s nowhere around. Not a goddamned thing that’s fit to be seen in, and the picture’ll be in all the papers. Not that cheap, lousy print—it’s wrinkled, anyway. A whore wouldn’t be found dead in it. Just think, he was coming to see me. Wasn’t that sweet? He just had to see me: he couldn’t stay away. She threw the kimono on the bed.

  She began to grab dresses up wildly until she had them all in her arms, and then threw them back into the suitcase in jumbled confusion. Oh, where the hell is that kid? I’ve got to have the mirror. And my lipstick. And I’ve got to comb my hair. She ran into the center of the room and stared wildly around in a sort of frenzied and helpless indecision. Where could she start? And what could she wear?

  She ran out onto the back porch to get the mirror, in her frantic rush forgetting until after she was already out there, in the open, that she had taken off the kimono and had on nothing except her wisps of underthings. Oh, my God, she thought, I’m losing my mind. Snatching the mirror off its nail, she fled headlong back into the room. Suppose they’d seen me, she thought. Not Lambeth, that stew bum. He’s seen me in less than this. But the other one. Shaw, isn’t it? He’s
cute. He’d have thought I was an awful hussy.

  I hope that crazy Lambeth doesn’t get the pictures mixed up and turn that other one in to the paper. Wouldn’t that be a mess, when the editor saw it? And I wonder what Harve ever did with the one I gave him. I hope he didn’t have it with him when he was—uh—when Sewell—er— Think of them finding it and a lot of strange people passing it around. Suppose Sewell had found it when he— God, that would have been terrible. But he didn’t even know about it.

  “Jessie! Jessie! Where are you, dear?” Oh, where is that lousy kid? If she thinks she’s going to Houston with me, she’ll have to be more help than this. What do I want with her, anyway? She’d just be a nuisance. I won’t take her.

  What am I talking about? Of course I’ll take her. I don’t care what she does afterward, but I’m going to take her. Didn’t I see his face there this morning, on the porch? That got him, all right. The lousy bastard. That’ll teach him who he can shove like that.

  She propped the mirror up against a pillow and sat down on the bed to comb her hair. The mirror fell over, and she put her head in her arms, wanting to cry. Stop it, she thought. Stop it! Stop it! Stop itl I’ve got to get fixed lip. They’re going to take my picture, and it’ll be in all the papers. I’ve just got to look my best. I’ve just got to. I don’t want to look like some old bag. Please! The story will say how he was coming back to see me, and people will look at the picture and say, “What was he going anywhere to see an old frump like that for?” Well. I’m not an old frump, and he was coming to see me. He was. I just know he was. Wasn’t that sweet? All that worrying and stewing I’ve done about nothing, afraid I was losing my looks and getting old, when there wasn’t anything to it at all.

  She looked up then and saw Jessie standing in the door. The girl’s childlike face, framed in the aureole of her tousled and rain-dampened hair, was burdened with an overpowering sadness, and the large blue eyes had no spark of their usual spirit and life.