Big city girl

by Charles Williams

  “Oh, there you are, honey,” Joy said, babbling, paying no attention to the other’s heart-wrenching quiet. “Will you help me for a minute? Hold the mirror lot me, will you? And see if you can find my lipstick.”

  Jessie came on into the room and took the mirror, her eyes still sad and now a little self-conscious as well, faintly embarrassed as always by the older woman’s near nakedness. “What is it, Joy?” she asked dully.

  “Reporters,” Joy rattled on, full of excitement, pulling the comb through her hair in long sweeps back over her shoulders. “From some paper. They’re going to take my picture, and write about us in the paper. Maybe they’ll take yours too. I don’t know what paper it is; I forgot to ask them. Maybe it’s a Houston one. Say, you know what?” She paused in mid-stroke to look up with bubbling inspiration. “If they’re from Houston, maybe they’ll give us a ride. We can go back with them.”

  In spite of herself, Jessie began to feel some of Joy’s excitement. “Do you think they’d let us?” she asked.

  “Of course, honey. Certainly they would,” Joy rambled on, by now fully convinced that Shaw and Lambeth were from Houston. The whole thing was an actuality, no longer even faintly conjectural. She possessed a great deal of Cass’s happy facility in the art of making facts agree with her and for making up her own if necessary.

  “We’ll get a ride with them, and when we get to Houston we can stay with this friend of mine down there, the one named Dorothy, you remember, the one who’s a model, only maybe she isn’t modeling now, I don’t know. I haven’t heard from her for a long time. Maybe she isn’t working as a model right at the moment, but that part doesn’t matter. Anyway, we’ll stay with her, she’d love to have us—she’d just love it, we’re such great friends. We’ll stay with her until we get jobs, and then we’ll get our own apartment.”

  Jessie had caught onto her excitement for a moment and then had slid back, with the misery returning to her eyes. She tried desperately to listen, to follow every word, and to go along with Joy in appreciation of this enchanting vista, but her mind kept turning back to the brooding theme of her own unhappy thoughts.

  “Joy,” she asked now, suddenly, with a quiet and still-laced intensity, “do you think he had time to ask forgiveness?”

  What on earth is she mumbling about? Joy thought. Christ, here I’ve been rattling on miles an hour and I thought she was listening. “Who had time to ask what?” she asked absently. “Baby, do you know where my lipstick is? I can’t find my purse.”

  “It’s in your suitcase somewhere, I think,” Jessie said.

  Let’s see, Joy was thinking. I’ll wear my nylons. I’ve only got one pair without runs, but this is important and if I’m careful they’ll be all right. I’ll have to have them on, it seems to me they always want to get your legs in the picture. I’ll wear that dress with the bows, it’s the only one that’s halfway decent. No. No, I can’t do that, damnit. It’s ruined, it’s all full of sand and it’s wrinkled. The last lousy, stinking thing I had that was fit to be found dead in, and now it’s ruined. That’s the one I had on when that stupid, ugly, mean-faced bastard pushed me. Well, he’s going to pay for that, all right. I’ll wear my white slippers with the French heels and the ankle straps; I think they’re clean. They’ll look nice in a picture, really smart.

  Springing up, she ran over to the suitcase and began throwing dresses around again in a sort of despairing frenzy. “Jessie, Jessie, what can I put on? Help me, honey.”

  Jessie followed her quietly. “Why not that white summer dress you had on this morning, Joy?”

  “It’ll have to do, I guess.” She snatched it up frantically. Oh, why aren’t there any hangers around this awful dump? she thought. It’s all wrinkled. Well, it’s the only one. Hurriedly, she slipped into it, rummaged through the rat-nest confusion of the suitcase until she found her purse, and made up her face. Then there was another explosive upheaval among the powder-sifted brassieres, pants, dresses, handkerchiefs, and stockings while she matched the two remaining unsnagged nylons. She slowed down and put them on, very carefully, and slipped into the white shoes.

  At last she was ready. She took one last look in the mirror and shook back her hair. Jessie followed her onto the porch, alternately caught up into the excitement of it and then slipping back into her own gray and lonely sadness.

  Joy forgot to introduce the two strange men, and she stood quietly back out of the way. The man with the camera was fussing with its knobs and funny dials and taking light bulbs out of a leather bag. She wondered where he was going to plug them in, and thought with embarrassment of his finding out at the last minute that there wasn’t any electricity.

  Maybe God would have forgiven him, Jessie thought, if he’d had time to ask. Maybe he did. Maybe the last thing he did on earth was to pray for forgiveness of his sins. It seemed so important, and she couldn’t understand why Joy didn’t wonder about it too. It must be more important than having your picture taken.

  She wished she could ask Mitch about it. She had always consulted him about things like that, but now she couldn’t because she didn’t ever want to speak to him again. It was lonely, though, not having Mitch to ask about things.

  Twenty-three

  Mitch came up the trail past the barn walking fast in the rain, and went into the old smokehouse. He dried his hands on a shirt hanging on the wall and found the cigarette papers. I’ll roll two or three while I’m here, he thought, and put ‘em in a Prince Albert can with some dry matches. It’ll be easier that way than trying to toll ‘em in the rain.

  Trying to force himself to be calm, he sat down on the box and set to work with tobacco and papers. His fingers were still too wet and the paper stuck to them and tore. Cursing, he got up and dried them again, and started over. Water ran out of his rain-soaked hair and spilled across the cigarette. He threw it away and tried again, holding it out and away from him. His fingers were shaking badly and he spilled more than half the tobacco, but he finally got one rolled and kept on until he had three more. Placing them in a can with some matches, he got up, ready to run back down the trail.

  He ought to have more over him to keep off the rain than that old raincoat, he thought. Cotton sacks. I’ll take a couple of cotton sacks. I got to have something when— Sick revulsion ran through him and left him weak and shaking, and he put the picture out of his mind. Just to put over him to keep off the rain while he smokes a cigarette, he thought, and ran to the barn. Snatching up two long canvas sacks, he rolled them into a tight bundle. He was ready to go.

  He came out the door and then stopped, thinking suddenly of Jessie. I got to talk to her, he thought. I can spare a minute, just one minute, if I can get her away from that yellow-headed slut long enough to get a word in. Wheeling, he ran through the rain toward the house. There was no one in the kitchen and he stopped and looked around, spilling water onto the floor from his saturated clothing. He seemed to be running forever through some horrible dream, trying to catch up with something ahead or eternally fleeing from some disaster behind. He stared at the empty kitchen, aware that it caused him no surprise at all. There was a feeling in him that if everyone in the house had suddenly evaporated like gasoline on a hot day or blown away like smoke there would no longer have been anything strange in it.

  Then above the monotonous sound of the rain he could hear the radio in Cass’s room, the soft, insidious, forever-flowing river of its exhortation and admonition as unstoppable as time and unavoidable as death, but knew he could accept this as no evidence the house was still inhabited. It just goes on forever like that river down in the bottom, he thought, and it ain’t no wonder the old man can’t make up his mind which one of ‘em Sewell is drowned in. If you dropped it in a bucket of water it’d keep right on talking. He could see it now in his mind, lying unquenched, eternal, deathless, at the bottom of the bucket, the ceaseless outflowing of its word secretion unhalted and the words flowing up through the water in big bubbles like the balloon-encased conversations of co
mic strips.

  There must be somebody here. Then there was a strange flash of light, or rather the reflection of a flash, sudden, sharp, incredibly fast, and gone. What the hell was that? he thought. Lightning? No. It was like lightning, but it wasn’t. Then he heard voices somewhere in front, and he went down the hall with his leathery feet rasping, shup, shup, shup, against the time-worn pine to emerge upon the porch like some drowned cadaver walking up out of the sea into the midst of a beach party.

  It was Joy’s greatest hour. She lay reclined in the swing with her back against one arm and her long silken legs slightly raised and outstretched across it in the classic pose of all calendar art. The hemline of the short and frilly summer dress was carefully arranged across her knees while she awaited word from Lambeth as to whether he wanted more grief this time or more leg, and the reporter stood at the end of the swing taking notes on a small dime-store note pad.

  “I won’t even have to wait for authorization, Mrs. Neely,” he was saying excitedly. “It’ll be all right, I know. A hundred dollars. I’ll write the story, under your name, of course. You just furnish the facts and I’ll write it down. It’ll be in the form of a first-person story of your life with Sewell Neely, how much you loved each other, your marriage, all the waiting here while you didn’t know he was trying to come back to you, the tragedy, and all that stuff. And under vour name, of course. By Joyce Neely, it’ll say.”

  “A little more leg this lime,” Lambeth said. He was squatted down near the door with camera and flash holder.

  Joy looked up and saw Mitch standing there in the door, smiled triumphantly at him. and hiked the hemline of her dress another three inches for his benefit rather than Lambeth’s.

  “Hello, Mitch,” she said sweetly. “These gentlemen are from the paper. They’re going to give me and Jessie a lift, when they go back down lo Houston tomorrow night.”

  Mitch took in all this grotesque Saturnalia of sickening cheapness in one terrible glance, seeing Jessie quietly watching from the edge of the porch near the step, and his mind swung back to the ballooning and discolored agony of Sewell’s dying down there in the rain. He had no way of knowing that at least part of the sexy and heartless bitchiness of it was an act put on instantly, at this very moment, for his benefit alone, and felt nothing but the black wind blowing inside him as he started toward her. He had taken one step when, unknowingly, the reporter probably saved her life.

  Looking up and seeing Mitch, he started forward. “Hello,” he said eagerly. “I guess you’re the brother. Mitchell, isn’t it? Now, I wonder if we could get a statement from you? And a picture or two.”

  Mitch hit him in the face and he fell over backward into the swing against Joy’s posed and silken legs while she screamed. A look of ineffable surprise and disbelief spread slowly over his face, and a trickle of blood ran down out of the corner of his mouth. Mitch whirled then on Lambeth, but the photographer had been through too many of these sudden melees to be caught napping and had swung aside, out of reach, with the camera protected against his stomach like the hidden football in a tricky backfield play.

  “Stop it! Mitch, stop it!” Jessie cried out, and then he had her by the arm and was pulling her, protesting, after him down the hall.

  “I want to talk to you,” he heard himself saying above the roaring in his ears. “You hear me? You hear me?” he seemed to be repeating over and over. How long have I been saying that? he thought. “You listen to me, Jessie! You ain’t going anywhere with that woman, tomorrow or no other day.”

  They were in the kitchen and she was beating on his arm with an outraged fist. “Turn me loose, Mitch! You’re hurting my arm. And I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want anything to do with you. I’m going with Joy. You’re acting like a crazy man.”

  He released her wrist and moved to take both of her arms in his hands to shake some sense into her, to tell her, to make her understand. Christ, I got to make her see, he thought in some far-off detached portion of his mind that was still calm in the midst of all this madness. I got to make her see. The cotton sacks dropped from under his left arm and unrolled across the floor just as Cass came running out of his room.

  “Turn me loose, Mitch!” Jessie screamed.

  He felt the hand then upon his own arm and turned to see Cass standing there, and he thought. Does he think he has to keep me from hurting Jessie? Would I hurt Jessie? Am I hurting her? But Cass was paying no attention to Jessie at all. From under the soggy and impossible hat he was looking in a sort of calm bewilderment at the long canvas sacks unrolled across the floor.

  “What you doing with them cotton sacks, Mitch? You can’t pick cotton in the rain.”

  Mitch stopped then, releasing Jessie, and stepped back to stand stock-still for a minute in the suddenly quiet room where there was no sound now but his own breathing and the drumming monotony of the rain. Oh, my God, he thought, the words going around and around in his mind like a drunken and insanely spinning carousel in a bad dream. You can’t pick cotton in the rain. You can’t pick cotton in the rain. You can’t . . . We got no cotton. It’s June and we haven’t got no cotton and we likely won’t ever have none when the river gets through with it and he just stands there and tells me we can’t pick it in the rain. I got to get out of here. I got to get back to Sewell. What am I standing here for? He had to run, to get out of the kitchen before it closed in on him and strangled him. Snatching up the sacks, he fled out the door and down the trail past the barn.

  Cass stood looking after him for a moment until he had gone out of sight around the corner of the barn. Then he went over and sat down at the table. He oughtn’t to be doing that, he thought. “A boy twenty-some-odd years old and raising cotton all his life and with me telling him how to do it all these years ought to know better. You just can’t do it. It’s foolish. It rots it.”

  “It rots what?” Jessie asked, staring at him.

  He looked around, surprised. He had forgotten she was there, and hadn’t had any idea he was speaking aloud.

  “Rots the cotton,” he said with waspish impatience. Even Jessie ought to know that. It was something anybody would know that had ever been anywhere near a cotton farm. “You pick it while it’s wet like that and it rots.”

  Jessie continued to stare at him, feeling some of the horror that had taken hold of Mitch.

  “He’s not picking cotton,” she cried out. “This is June and there isn’t any cotton.”

  “Then what was he doing with cotton sacks?” he asked logically. “That’s what you do with cotton sacks. You put cotton in ‘em. You don’t do nothing else with ‘em. That’s all they’re for.”

  But before she could think of any answer he suddenly remembered the terrible thing about Sewell, and the awful knowledge came home to him that nobody had ever told Mitch about it. All this launching around and everybody running around like chickens with their heads chopped off, taking pictures and shaking each other, and nobody had ever said a word about it to Mitch, he thought piteously. That’s the reason he’s going down there in the bottom just going to work like nothing had happened. He don’t even know about it. He don’t know Sewell is drowned in the river. I got to tell him.

  He ran out the door, but Mitch was already out of sight. I’ll follow him down in the field, he thought, and tell him. But it seems to me like I was already down there once today. And wasn’t Mitch building a dam? But what would he want cotton sacks for, if he was building a dam?

  Twenty-four

  Mitch plunged down the trail and cut off to the right toward the old treetop. As he made the turn he swept the backed-up water below him with a quick and searching glance. There was no way of telling whether it was rising now or falling, but the water was still, with no current through it, which meant the levee was still holding. Far out through the trees and the dismal grief of the rain he could see the muddy sweep of the current along the main channel, swinging in the wide bend and pushing water out over the flat and then completing the swing to flow on s
outh past and beyond the edge of the field. It’s holding, he thought. I wish I had a minute to go down there and look at it. I could tell whether it was going up or falling. But there ain’t time. I been gone too long now.

  Sewell lay on his back in the same position, unmoving except for the shallow, rapid rise and fall of his breathing. His eyes were closed. When Mitch came up and squatted down to look in under the edge of the raincoat he opened them, but for an instant there was no recognition in them at all. They were sick, and dull with pain, and now he seemed to be trying to move the swollen arm. Mitch had no way of knowing that he was trying to get the gun out of his pocket, the instincts and reflexes of all those years of living with violence and by violence still afloat and surviving even as the body itself was drowning in its sea of pain. Then the eyes cleared a little and a faint touch of the old sardonic humor came back into them.

  “Hello, kid,” he said weakly. “You look like a drowned rat. Where you been?”

  “I got some cigarettes,” Mitch said. He unrolled the cotton sacks and carefully dried his brother’s face and left hand, not touching the right at all, then laid both sacks across the branches above them for additional shelter.

  He squatted down again and reached up to dry his own hands against the underside of the sacks above them Then he shook a cigarette out of the can and placed it in his brother’s mouth, raked a match head with a thumbnail, and lit it.

  “Ain’t you going to have one?” Sewell asked, inhaling, and then he moved his left hand up to take the cigarette between his fingers.

  Mitch shook his head silently.

  “You see any cops up there?” Sewell asked, his mind very clear now. He had no idea how long Mitch had been gone. He had been lying here for days, or maybe it was only minutes; time had no meaning any more, it was crazy and made no sense. It was like a strange and unpredictable river, lingering interminably in some dark and turgid pool where there was no light or movement or flow, and then plunging headlong into the millrace of some sunlit chasm where everything was clear and very sharply seen but going past at incredible speed. For long periods he wouldn’t even be here at all. He would be back in Dorothy’s apartment listening to the motorcycles in the early morning or fleeing endlessly along a darkened highway in the rain with a siren wailing behind him. Then he would come back out of it and Mitch would be here, or he would be gone. Mitch was hard to hold onto.