Big city girl

by Charles Williams

  Mitch began to comprehend some of it then. Sewell’s been shot on the radio, he thought. He’s in this river down here, but it’s actually the radio river, or he can’t make up his mind which it is, and they’re hunting for him on the radio, and there can’t none of it really happen anywhere except on the radio. He can’t make up his mind whether it’s really Sewell they’re looking for or whether it’s a radio game called Sewell Neely.

  “What do I want to listen to the news for?” he asked quietly.

  “Why,” Cass sputtered, “to find out what’s happened. To see if he’s been—been—”

  “And what,” Mitch asked slowly, “do I do after I find out?”

  Nineteen

  “Ain’t you going to do anything? Anything a-tall?” Cass cried out piteously.

  “Yes,” Mitch replied, still speaking quietly. “I’m going to keep on piling dirt on this levee. You see that water over there?” He pointed with the shovel. Just three or four inches below the top of the levee in places now, it waited, poised, straining, and heavy, the dark surface of it quiet except for the dimpling of the rain. “You know what’s going to happen to that cotton back there if it goes out?”

  “Cotton?” Cass repeated blankly. “Cotton? Don’t you understand, Mitch? Ain’t I telling you? Sewell’s shot. Won’t you listen? He’s shot. In the river.”

  As he swung his head to look at the cotton whose existence he did not even recognize, water sprayed off the brim of the old greenish-black hat. Reaching up, he removed it and took it in his two hands and began wringing it out as naturally and as unconsciously as some pixie-like old crone of a charwoman wringing out a mop. A discolored stream of water sprayed across his feet.

  He began to cry, still twisting the hat. In a moment he unwound it and put a hand inside the crown to open it up again, and then placed it, misshapen and crosswise, upon his head. Mitch heard the sudden gurgle of water and turned to see a small stream gushing from another gopher hole in the levee. Snatching at the shovel handle, he leaped toward it and began throwing dirt across onto the front face of it until it stopped.

  Cass bounded after him, bandy-legged, weeping, importunate. “I been bereft,” he cried. “I been berefted by everybody. One of my boys is killed in the river and the other one’s so hardhearted he don’t even care. It’s a judgment. It’s a judgment on me.”

  Mitch stopped the fury of his shoveling and turned, a savage impatience in his face, and started to lash out at him to go on back to the house, but he bit the words off and his expression softened as he looked at the hopeless ruin of the man, the futile eyes wet with tears and the faded doll’s face, too weak even for tragedy, lost, hopeless, uncomprehending, under the grotesquely comic misshapen hat. It’s all mixed up for him, he thought. It should have stayed on the radio. As long as it was all on the radio, it was a Sewell Neely game and they gave five hundred dollars to whoever guessed the answer, but now part of it’s got away from him and it’s his own boy that’s lying on the bottom of the river, or at least part of the time it is, and he don’t know what to do about it.

  “You go on back to the house, Dad,” he said gently. “Just listen to the radio and wait. That’s all you can do. I’ve got to get to work.”

  “It’s the sin of the world,” Cass cried out. “Hard-heartedness is the sin of the world.” He turned away and started to run, going toward the river. One hand came up to clasp the brim of the obscenely comic hat as if a sudden gale had sprung up and he had to hold onto this last of his earthly possessions to keep it from blowing away. Discovering after a dozen bounds that he was going in the wrong direction, he stopped and wheeled about, and then came back, charging past Mitch, unseeing, oblivious, head bent forward as if into a gale and still holding onto the hat. Then he was gone, running up the hill into the edge of the timber, going toward the house.

  Mitch looked after him for a moment, then bent to the shovel again.

  Noon came and went with the sodden drumming of rain while he fought the rising water with the shovel like some lost soul before the fuel piles of hell. He stopped endless gopher holes and built up all the low places, and then started across building the whole levee higher. When he had gone the full length of it he started back again, still piling up more dirt. Now and then he would stop for a moment to catch his breath and stare bleakly at the water, still rising, but more slowly now beyond the levee. His fingers would be stiff and curved into the form of the shovel handle and would ache when he straightened them. And whenever he paused like this, even for a few seconds, his eyes, after sweeping across the threatening and precariously held wall of water beyond him, would start to swing outward toward the river while his mind turned uncontrollably to the picture of Sewell lying somewhere on its bottom with his face in the mud and the flood rolling over him. It ain’t going to do no good to cry about it, he would think, and I can maybe do some good here. He would tear himself away from it and go back to the endless scoop, lift, and swing of the shovel.

  After a while the searchers came down the hill and passed him, going into the bottom, two at first, then one, and later on two more, white-hatted, black-slickered, carrying rifles in the crooks of their arms, and he cursed them bitterly and went on with the work. They would ask the same unvarying, inevitable, and stupid questions and listen without violence—knowing who he was—while he cursed them. He could think of no reason for his bitterness and the bleak-faced tirade of curses other than that they were looking for the dead body of his brother, either for the five-hundred-dollar reward or because they were officers of the law and paid to do it. Maybe, he thought, I’m going crazy too.

  Possibly, though, it was because at last they were men, like himself, and capable of accepting and returning violence on a reciprocal plane no higher and no lower than his own, and he wanted to fight them if they would. He had been struggling too long, infuriated, raging, and impotent, against the unconquerable and the intangible, trying to come to grips with and defend himself against an unbeatable and overwhelming river, a half-demented old man, and a bitch.

  In the dismal rain of afternoon the straining levee held, while the water grew and waited.

  * * *

  For no other reason than that you went on living until you had to die, you went on walking until you had to fall for the last time. There was no sense to it; it was utterly without reason. A thousand miles back the world consisted of nausea and retching sickness, unnumbered incalculable millions of identical wet, black, pain-distorted tree trunks, a knee-deep highway of leaf-surfaced unmoving dirty water, and the eternal gray dreariness of rain, and a thousand miles ahead it would be exactly the same. You could fall for the last time here in this spot, or you could stagger on through this agonized and unvarying hell for another mile, and the difference in distance and time would be no more discernible here than the same mile and the same elapsed period of time measured, after you dropped, against all infinity and eternity.

  Some critical and still lucid portion of Sewell’s mind examined this phenomenon with curiosity. I was born and raised in this bottom, he thought, and I lived in it for twenty-one years, fishing for catfish and white perch and hunting coons in it, and I know every bit of it, but now it all looks the same. Maybe I’m already dead and don’t know it. Maybe this is hell and I’ll see Harve again and can wait here for Joy. Maybe it’s just that everything looks funny now because of the poison, or the pain. I never knew pin oaks and white oaks to look like that before, all the same and all black, and swollen up like that.

  Here’s your picture, I’d have said, Harve don’t need it no more, and maybe when you think about it I reckon he never did because what do you need the picture for if you’ve got the bitch it was took of? It’s too bad you won’t be around long enough to give it to somebody else, which was Harve’s trouble too, but anyway, when they come in here after you begin to stink, and find it stuck in your mouth like that, they can pass it around and show it to their friends, if they got friends. And they ought to have lots of friends, with
a picture like that. I guess you made a lot of ‘em with it, and got made by ‘em, till you run into Harve’s trouble. Anyway, you still got both hands, and a picture in your mouth, which is more than Harve’s got.

  What the hell am I muttering about? he thought, his mind becoming clear again. I sound like some high-school punk telling what he’d have done if he’d caught up with the other guy. I didn’t find her. I had a whole week and I didn’t find her, so why go on about it? Forget it. Maybe I’d like to have a boat to go down the river in, one of them shiny glassed-in ones like I used to see in Galveston with a guy in a white coat going around serving drinks. I got as much chance of that as I have now of finding her, so why don’t I wish for it too?

  The hand and the wrist were badly swollen and darkened now, and he supposed the whole arm was too, but there was no way he could tell inside the coat sleeve. The arm was very painful, and would bend only with difficulty, and it seemed to be swelling out against the sleeve like an inflated inner tube inside a tire. The left arm was growing stiff from the flesh wound through the muscle of the forearm, and the shock had worn off now, leaving it excruciatingly painful. Periodically, the awful chills would sweep over him and leave him drenched in a cold and clammy perspiration, while his heart fluttered like a bird’s. But it was the falling that was worst. Suddenly and without warning he would find the whole river bottom tilting on end and flying up at him like the opening of a cellar door, and he would be wallowing in the muddy and leaf-congested water struggling to rise. After a passage of time that he was never able even to estimate, he would be back on his feet and staggering on. There’ll be one of ‘em pretty soon, he thought, when I won’t get up.

  Then he was on the beach at Galveston again with Joy, on their honeymoon, when she still thought he was a big-shot gambler and not a cheap purveyor of hired and professional violence. He would feel the great sea wind blowing and hear the booming of the surf at night, with his face in the fragrant loveliness of her hair.

  I wonder if I’ve passed the farm yet, he thought. I seem to be on that side of the river and it’s funny I wouldn’t have recognized it if I’d gone by. Well, it don’t make no difference. I wouldn’t stop there.

  Here’s your picture. And this other thing’s a gun. You ought to recognize a gun, but maybe you never saw that end of one before.

  Twenty

  It was midafternoon. The searching officers had come and gone, on into the bottom, and later Mitch had seen three of them come back out and go up the hill toward the house, where presumably they had left their cars. The other two, he supposed, had gone on up the river and would come out higher up, by the Jimerson place. Looking for a dead man on the bottom of the river, he thought bitterly, like a bunch of hungry turtles.

  The river seemed to pause in its attack. For the past half hour the water level on the upper side of the levee had been almost at a standstill, and now it hung, poised, just below the top, like a toy balloon inflated to the bursting point. Was it the crest? Had it reached the peak, or was it merely resting, gathering its force for a new assault? If it’d just drop off a little, even a quarter of an inch, he thought, watching tensely, I’d know I held it. But if it comes up any more it’s gone.

  Like Sewell, he thought, the black despair reawakening and moving inside him like something cold but still alive in his stomach. But Sewell’s been dead ever since he killed that deputy and butchered him up like that; he’s just been borrowing time since then. He knew it, and I knew it, and I ought to be used to it by this time.

  He turned, looking out across the rain-smeared bottom. Water was backing up into the field on the lower end, but there was no current in it and it was standing quietly in the furrows between the rows of cotton. If the river went back down before too long it would cause little damage.

  His eyes swung back, and then suddenly stopped. A man had emerged from the edge of the timber out along the river, beyond the end of the levee, plowing along bareheaded and without a slicker, head down and lurching drunkenly from side to side. That ain’t one of them deputies, lie thought, and then the man fell and struggled weakly in the flood.

  Before the man had hit the water he was running. Oh, my God, Mitch thought, lunging across the field. He came to the fence and slid through between the strands of barbed wire, hearing the rip of torn overalls and feeling but not even noticing the wire raking into the flesh of his leg, and then he was splashing through the slowly moving discolored flood toward the weakly floundering man still fifty yards away in the rain. The water came up to his knees, slowing him down. And then Sewell had his head out of the water.

  Mitch rushed up to him, panting, and tried to take his arm. Sewell, on his knees with his head down, felt the hands upon him and heard the splashing and tried to pull away. Mitch grabbed the collar of his coat and heaved mightily upward and Sewell came to his feet and stood, facing downriver, not knowing who it was. The gun was in his right-hand coat pocket and he wondered vaguely, with some far-off, detached portion of his mind, whether it would still fire even if he could get it out with the stiff, venom-swollen hand.

  Then he turned, and they looked at each other for a long minute, the thin and hard-faced man in drowned overalls and shirt with his butter-colored hair plastered to his skull, and the bigger, heavy-shouldered one in the ruin of his city clothes, and neither of them showed any sign of emotion.

  “We can’t stand here in the open,” Mitch said at last. “There’s still some deputies down here looking for you.”

  “Not to the house,” Sewell replied, swaying. He seemed to be having trouble keeping Mitch fixed in his gaze.

  “No,” Mitch said quietly. “Not to the house.”

  “Just in the trees. In the big, black trees. They got bigger since I was here.”

  Mitch looked at him piercingly. He’s out of his head, he thought. They got him somewhere. “Where you hit?” he asked, keeping his voice quiet and steady. If I start going to pieces, he thought, I’ll never get him out of here. “Where did they hit you?”

  ”In this arm,” Sewell said dully. “Didn’t hit the bone.”

  The right arm was hanging straight down out of sight beyond him and Mitch did not see it for a moment. He looked at the sickness in his brother’s eyes and the white, ghastly, unhealthy pallor of his face and thought. Being shot through the arm didn’t make him like that. They got him somewhere else he ain’t talking about. But I got to get him out of here. We can’t stand here in the open like a couple of damn fools talking about the crops. I got to get him into the timber. For Christ’s sake, I got to get him moving before somebody sees us or he falls in this water again.

  He moved around to the other side of the swaying, precariously upright figure. “Put your arm across my neck,” he said, and started to reach for the wrist to pick it up. Then he saw it, the obscenely swollen balloon-fingered travesty of a hand puffed blackly out of the end of the coat sleeve like an inner tube swelling out of a ruptured tire casing, and he felt his stomach turn over with the sickness of it. Snake, he thought wildly. Half the goddamned police in the state looking for him, and a snake got him. He spent twenty years in this river bottom living with ‘em and then he gets back in it for half a day and one of ‘em gets him. They couldn’t have got him another time, when he could go to a doctor. It had to be today. It had to be now. Of all the dirty . . . But what the hell difference does it make? He couldn’t get out of here no how. I got to stop this. I’m getting as flighty as an old woman. I got to get him into that timber. What’s the matter with me?

  It was Sewell who snapped him out of it. “What’s the matter, kid? You getting sick?” he asked, and Mitch stiffened as if he had been sluiced with a pitcher of ice water. He looked at his brother’s face and saw the cold, ferocious grin and the sardonic eyes watching him.

  He’s all right again, he thought. His mind was wandering, but it’s all right now. He’s the one with the poison in him and I’m acting like a kid or an old woman.

  “Come on,” he said, deadly c
alm now. He moved around to Sewell’s left to keep from jarring the swollen arm, put his arm around Sewell’s waist, and started walking. We don’t dare go across the field, he thought. We got to go in above the levee, through that water, where we can stay in the trees.

  They pushed through it in the gray and dismal crying of the rain. In places the water was up to their waists, and Sewell walked falteringly, several times almost falling before Mitch could steady him. Once the sickness came upon him and he bent over, retching, and tried to vomit. He had been sick so many times and for so long there was nothing to the vomiting except the dry and terrible retching.

  After what seemed like an hour to Mitch they came to the end of the water and started up the incline going out of the bottom. He guided Sewell away from the trail to where, some hundred yards away, there lay the crown of a big oak he and Cass had felled for stovewood early in the spring. Sewell fell to his knees and lay down back among the branches, out of sight of anyone going along the trail. Mitch sank down beside him and helped him to straighten out. Then he thought of the raincoat.

  “Wait a minute,” he said hurriedly. He ran down into the field and came back with the coat, Spreading it across a pair of limbs, he made a sort of tent of it to break the rain. Then he sat down, with his head under the edge of the coat, his face dark and still as if chopped out of walnut.

  He looked at the arm. “Moccasin?’’ he asked quietly.

  Sewell lay with his head on a small limb, his face deathly white except for the brown splotches of the big freckles, and his body rigidly still save for the hurried and shallow breathing. He shook his head slightly.

  “Rattler,” he said.

  Oh, God, Mitch thought. It couldn’t have been worse, but now it is. God knows how many hours ago, and a rattler on top of that, instead of a moccasin.

  “Where?” he asked, still with that same quietness, as if he held onto his emotions with the same tenacious and indomitable grimness with which he was trying to hold back the thought of his brother’s dying. “When?”