I came out of the bathroom, buttoning my shirt. She sat on the edge of the bed and said, “Can we stay here all day and travel at night? It will be cooler.”
“No. If they start looking for us, they’ll look for a car traveling at night.”
She sighed. “All right. Go across the street and order breakfast. I’ll join you. But we aren’t going farther than New Orleans today.”
“We have to go farther. Today is Sunday. From New Orleans it’s two days’ travel, almost, to Brownsville, where we cross. Tuesday is too late. I want to be in Brownsville early enough so we can cross on Tuesday morning, as early as possible.”
“This is killing me. The heat.”
“You’ll just have to take it.”
“Where will we stop tonight?”
“Lake Charles. If we go through Baton Rouge and skip New Orleans, it’s only six hundred and eighty-eight miles from here.”
“Only! How do you remember those figures?”
“I have a good head for figures, remember? I used to be a bank teller.”
“Then how far to Brownsville, Kyle?”
“Only five-twenty-five. And then two easy days to Mexico City. We’ll be there Wednesday night. This will be the worst day.”
I went across the street to the diner. I took a booth. Through the window I could see across the highway. I saw her come out of the door of our room, walk by the hood of the green car and down to the office. She was a pale, frail-looking girl with black hair pulled back severely, bright, flimsy, too-tight clothes, no knowledge of how to wear lipstick. The walk was the same as back in the bank, a million years ago, when she passed me at the water fountain. A gliding walk with head up and shoulders straight, and no swing to her arms. All the movement of the gliding tread from the waist down. Imaginary books on her head.
I wondered what she was doing so long in the office. I began to get irritated. I was about to go after her when she came out, walking toward the diner. She stopped and waited for traffic. A car pulled up and a man tried to offer her a ride. I had the crazy feeling that she was going to get in with him and I’d never see her again.
And then she came across the highway and into the diner and down to the booth to sit across from me, eyes hooded, downcast, small hands pale on the menu.
“Just toast and coffee, please.”
“What were you doing in the office?”
“Seeing if they had any aspirin. They don’t. She said to leave the key on the bureau. I want to stop at a drug store.”
We ate in silence. We never seemed to talk at meals. Or at any time. We just seemed to have said all that there was for the two of us to say to each other.
We arrived at Lake Charles at midnight. We found a cabin that smelled of swamp and dampness. Insects banged on the screens, made a deafening racket in the darkness around the cabins. It was well off the highway and traffic sounds were muted.
I took the cot and she took the double bed. She lay exhausted across the double bed. One forty-watt bulb hung from the ceiling on a frayed cord that had been reinsulated in spots with tar tape.
I took off my shirt and tried to find some coolness at the window.
She got up and went to the door.
“Where are you going?”
“For a walk. My legs are cramped.”
“The bugs will carry you into the swamp.”
“They never bite me. You go to sleep.”
I washed and stretched out on the cot. I left the light on. I lay there, naked, in the moist blanket of the night, the end of the sheet draped across my loins. I lay with my arms over my head and I could feel the sweat trickling down my ribs every few moments. I wondered why the resignation I felt was so famiilar. It took me a long time to trace the similarity in my mind. It was like the Army. That seemed an odd comparison, yet strangely valid. The Army had been like this. It picks you up and carries you along. You stop fighting it. You go along with it, and you don’t know where it is taking you, and you don’t care any more.
Sunday night in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Rackety night in the swamplands. She came back at two and glanced at me, as I lifted my arm to look at my watch.
“Still awake?”
“How was the walk?”
“All right.”
I suddenly realized that we never said good night to each other. Never said good morning. I watched her undress under the hanging bulb. Blouse over her head, bra straps down her arms. Step out of the skirt. Strip down the brief pants, the nylon making a whispering sound against the long legs. Bend down and unstrap the sandals. Kick them off. Reach up and pull the light chain, leaving me with the white image of her still impressed on the retina, the breast made bolder by the lift of arm, the flank tautening with the effort of reaching up.
I searched through my mind and my body for some trace of desire, for some want or need for her. I was an old man who at last finds he can leaf through a collection of erotica without the heart’s thud changing its measured beat, without any shallowness of breath. To him the pictures have at last become strange, ugly, and meaningless.
I had traded everything for something that was now of no importance. And yet I could not give her up.
“Good night,” I said softly, after many minutes had gone by. She did not answer. I knew she was asleep.
Chapter Thirteen
I was yanked out of a sound sleep to a sitting position. The windows were gray with dawn. I instinctively lifted my hands toward the harsh pain on top of my head, realizing in the confusion of awakening so abruptly that a man had grasped my hair and pulled me to a sitting position. He was just a vagueness very close to me in the gray morning room. A vast, punishing hardness exploded against my jaw. It drove the world back into night.
I lay spread-eagled at the bottom of a pit and far above me was the pale oval opening through which I had fallen. I looked intently at it and it grew larger, came closer. Something was moving quickly against my chest.
The pale oval came so close that I saw smudges so placed on it that they resembled features. And they became features, and it became Emily’s face as she bent over me. Her mouth was intent, her eyes remote. I realized that she was buttoning my shirt. That was the movement I had felt.
As I reached to touch her hair, her cheek, I sensed movement beside me. I turned and looked up at a man, immensely tall, towering over me as I lay on the floor. I saw his leg swing back and I tried to turn away from it. There was a thunderous crack against the side of my head. It spun me away into darkness. I was flattened against a huge soft black phonograph record. At it spun, whirling me, it kept dropping, like an express elevator, sickening me.
And the next time I was shrewd, with the shrewdness of an opossum, which ceases to breathe, lies limp, when there is no escape. I kept my neck lax, permitted my chin to keep bumping against my chest. The car motor was a familiar sound. It went around a rough curve and I let myself slump to the right. I felt her push me erect and I could smell the spice of her perfume. She pushed me too far and I pressed against someone else who was behind the wheel.
“Keep him off me,” a deep voice said. When you have your eyes shut in a moving automobile, voices have a different timbre, but it was easy to recognize the voice of Ralph Beckler.
She pulled me back. He shifted to low gear and the motor strained. The car rocked and bucked as it went up a steep incline. I heard stones slide under the wheels. I risked opening my eyes a fraction of an inch. Through my eyelashes I could see the grayness of early morning, an arch of lush green over a narrow road.
He put on the brakes suddenly and flung his arm across me, forcing me back as I toppled forward. By tentative movements I found that my ankles were tied loosely, my wrists free. Beckler had no fear of any fight in me. He just didn’t want me to run.
I heard the rasp as he pulled on the parking brake.
“Here?” she asked tonelessly.
“Good as any. Over there on the left.”
“Can we tie him and leave him, Ralph?”
“Chickening out, honey? You knew the score.”
“Don’t call me honey!”
“With that load in the back end, I think I’ll start calling you sugar. Keep an eye on him while I take a look and see if it’s as good as it looks from here. Yell if he starts to twitch. What you ever saw in him!”
“I saw money. Hurry up and get it over with.”
“Nervous? You want to watch it, don’t you? Maybe it’s something you never saw before. I’m a qualified expert, honey. Years of practice.”
“Hurry up!” she said, almost screaming.
He got out and the door chunked shut. I heard his foot kick a stone that rattled on other stones. I opened my eyes again. He walked up ahead of the car. He walked about twenty feet beyond the hood and stood with his hands on his hips staring down at something to the left that was out of my line of vision.
The motor was running. I rehearsed what my moves had to be, how fast they had to be. Yank the automatic shift lever into low, releasing the brake with the other hand at the same moment. Tramp the lashed feet down against the gas.
And one motion to make first. I made it. I swung the back of my right hand against her face with all my strength, and wormed behind the wheel, releasing brake and pulling the shift arm into low at the same moment, just as he turned.
I tramped too hard on the gas. The back wheels skidded as he stood frozen. I let up on the gas and the big car shot ahead. Beckler made a wild leap to the left. I wrenched the wheel. The left front portion of the car caught him on hip and thigh, bunted him out over the drop that I saw almost too late. I wrenched the wheel the other way and the back end skidded, the back left wheel going over the drop. The car tilted, paused, then clawed its way back onto the road. I jammed on the brakes, yanked the parking brake. I went out of the car, forgetting my tied ankles. I fell flat. I sat up, hunched back, reached up, and caught the door handle to pull myself to my feet.
Emily had slid behind the wheel. She was just releasing the hand brake. She turned her face toward me, eyes wild above a broken mouth. I reached in and turned off the key, pulled it out. She slumped behind the wheel and buried her face in her hands.
My ankles were tied with a necktie. I unknotted it and unwrapped it. I went cautiously to the brink. A forty-five degree shale slope ended at deep black stagnant water. Beckler had evidently bounced off the slope into the water. His clothes were slimed. He had regained the shale. His leg was broken. He was just beginning to pull himself up the slope, his underlip pulled down away from his teeth, his mouth an inverted U with the pain and effort.
No one who has never killed a man can possibly know how difficult it is, how tough the human body is, how desperately it clings to life. There were big rocks along the edge of the fill, rocks as big as my head. I was above him. I could not possibly miss him. But by the time he at last ceased to attempt to crawl senselessly up the slope, by the time his impossibly broken body slid back and the face with its mouth still twisted sank slowly beneath the black water, becoming a vague paleness and then a nothingness, my palms were torn by the number of bolders I had thrown. I was breathing so deeply that I was vocalizing each exhalation. It had been a nightmare. I knew that his brain had given up long before the body. I knew that after he had forgotten why it was so important for him to reach the top of the slope, after he had forgotten the source of the great blows that broke him, the indomitable body still continued to drag itself out of the water and reattempt the impossible task.
The cramp of sudden illness dropped me to my knees. I was sick. Sweat, cold-beaded on my forehead, ran into my eyes. I knew about the dreams I would have. Black water moving like heavy oil with the slow thrashing of his body. In a thousand dreams he would keep climbing up toward me and then there would be a dream where there were no more boulders and no place to run.
I went back to the car. She was gone. I looked down the road, behind the car, and saw her, a tiny figure in the gray morning, hurrying away, walking down the narrow road with swamp on either side, glancing back over her shoulder from time to time.
I drove a half mile away from her before I found a place to turn around. And then I came back, not glancing toward the place where he had died as I topped the small hill, more knoll than hill. Blood from my torn hand slicked the steering wheel.
In the distance I saw her start to run. She fell and scrambled up and ran some more. And as the car roared close she turned and slid down a small bank into slimed water that came halfway up her thighs.
I stopped the car and looked out the window at her, just six feet away. Over her broken mouth her eyes were cold and bold.
“Get in!” I said.
“If you’re going to do it, do it here.”
“Get in.”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Yes. Dead. Now get in and let’s get out of here.”
Her eyes changed. “You aren’t going to … do it to me?”
“If I killed you, Emily, what would be left?”
“You’ll go on, just as if this never happened?”
“What else is there to do?”
“I phoned him from Harrisburg in the morning while you were asleep. I wired him from that place in Chattanooga while you were in the diner. I told him to wait in the bus station in Lake Charles. Last night when I went for a walk I phoned him at the bus station and told him to come after me just before dawn at the cabin. When I phoned him from Harrisburg, I told him to fly to New Orleans. He told me the hotel he’d be at. I wired the hotel from Chattanooga.”
“Please come and kill Cameron.”
“No. I just wanted to take the keys and leave you there, and go with him.”
“But he wanted to be thorough.”
“I couldn’t stop him. When he gets … got an idea, you couldn’t stop him.”
“You didn’t want me killed. For old times’ sake or something.”
“Your eyes still look funny, Kyle. I don’t understand what you want. Do you really want us to go on, just the way we were going to?”
There wasn’t any other way. I couldn’t explain it to her. If I left her there, standing in a muddy ditch, where would I go and what would I do? There was nothing left but Emily. In a way, she was the only justification I had, the only rationalization, good or bad. She qualified me as thief and murderer, by being the cause.
“Come on,” I said wearily.
New confidence brought her head up a little. She pulled her feet out of the mud, balanced herself by touching her hands to the top of the little rise as she came up onto the road. One sandal was gone. She turned and looked back at the mud, used one foot to pull the other sandal off. She kicked it into the water. She got into the car, bringing with her the swamp stink, the sick smell of rancid water that I would never forget.
The highway we came out on was the main route to Beaumont. I stopped by running water and we went down under a small bridge. She stood in the water and rinsed the slime out of the hem of her skirt. I held my hands in the water and it stung my torn palms. Her mouth had stopped bleeding, but the lips were badly puffed.
She seemed strangely shy with me, as though she had given me a new evalution. She came out of the water and wrung out the hem of her skirt. “If you could go up and get the gray bag, I could change and put on the other sandals.”
I got the bag. Though we were only a few feet from the highway, we were out of sight. Under the bridge itself there was a place just about four feet high where grass grew on a slanting bank down to the edge of the stream.
I sat out and watched her in there. She had an awkward time peeling off the blouse and skirt because she couldn’t stand up straight.
She knelt by the open gray suitcase, and as she took out the fresh skirt she glanced over at me. I knew then what it was that had changed her. Death among male animals during the mating season is common. The female animal shows preference only after victory is clear. What I had done—the deed that had sickened me—had made some deeply savage impulse in her respon
d. Her preference, while Beckler and I both lived, had never been clear.
I went to her in that shadowy place under the concrete arch. The early traffic slammed across the bridge, tearing the air. I took what I had won, the way any animal does. Fox and vixen, on the moist morning grass on the bank of a fast-running stream. There was a new subservience about her, a new yielding to domination. Her lips bled again. Her arms flashed hungry-white against the grass.
It was an ultimate in degradation. Murder in the gray of morning, an animal mating under the first slant of sun. It was a degradation that I wanted. I wanted a foulness. I wanted to sink lower than ever before. No more illusions about myself. I had learned what I was. Or what she had made me. Perhaps in everyone there is a little river of evil, contained between neat flood walls of convention and conscience. The little river can express itself only in thoughts that are sometimes frightening, impulses that are immediately denied. And then, somehow, the flood wall is breached and evil is uncontained and nothing can ever be the same again. I had tried to fight clear of her a dozen times. It had not worked.
We were back on the road. Beaumont. End of swamp country. Glitter and bustle of Houston. Then the 230 mile stretch of cityless flats of baked rock and dust and mirage that ended at Harlingen, Brownsville, the valley of the Rio Grande.
Chapter Fourteen
Monday evening, in the daylight, we stopped at a motel five miles north of Brownsville. The room was air-conditioned. The place was called, unfortunately, Southern Manner. Beyond the arched entrance were two long parallel courts facing each other. We had one of the middle rooms on the left. We could park the car directly in front of our door.
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