We raided all the places. The delegation, headed by Soames, came into the sheriff’s office Saturday afternoon and Buford heard them out with that grave, deferential courtesy of his. “Gentlemen, this office is at the service of the citizens of this county. That is what it is here for. Get the warrants, Jack.”
He asked Soames to come along. The Moss Inn was first on the list, and when we got out there all the dice tables were gone out of the back room and the slot machines had disappeared. The next two places were the same. It was dark by the time we got to Abbie Bell’s, and when we went in all the girls except two were gone. One of them was embroidering a doily and the other was sitting in a big chair in the front room reading Better Homes and Gardens. Abbie was wearing steel-rimmed glasses and working on a set of books.
“Can you tell me what this is all about, Mr. Buford?” she asked coldly. “Don’t I have enough trouble trying to make a living out of this rooming house, with the government and all the XYZ’s and ABC’s making me fill out forms and tell them what I did with every nickel I ever made, without you trying to drive away what few roomers I do have?” She followed us upstairs and we looked in all the rooms, finding no one. The beds were neatly made and the rooms clean, and in one of them a canary in a little wire cage was singing cheerfully. Abbie kept up her outraged scolding, but once when the two of us were alone in the rear she looked at me with the deadpan innocence of a child and said quietly out of the corner of her mouth, “Jesus, I hope the laundry don’t come back while you guys are here.”
I watched Soames to see what he thought of it, and wondered if he could be taken in by a trick as old as this. He said nothing at all during the raids, and afterward he thanked Buford with a courtesy that equaled Buford’s own, but once I saw in his eyes the look of a man who has just drawn the other ace. It made me wonder.
I awoke before dawn Sunday and lay there thinking about it, unable to go back to sleep. I could get her out of there. I couldn’t leave for a few more days, or maybe a week, until we saw which way the grand jury was going to jump and whether Soames had anything else up his sleeve, but I could take her away to wait for me somewhere. It wouldn’t be safe to bring her into town, but I could take her down to Colston and get her a room there. Anything to get her out of that swamp and away from him before something happened or we got caught.
I made a pot of coffee and then drove out, picked up the boat and trailer at the end of the slough, and brought them in. I didn’t want to sell the stuff in town if I could help it, because that in itself might look suspicious, as if I felt the heat and were getting ready to run, but there was a man over a New Bosque, the station agent there, who had been trying to buy my motor for a long time, and I thought he might take it. I loaded up everything, fishing tackle and all, and went over there with it. I was going to give up fishing, I said, if I could get the right kind of price for the stuff; there were too many arguments with my wife about it. He laughed and said he knew how it was, he was married too; and we began. I knew I was going to take a beating on it that way, and I did; it was worth four hundred, even secondhand, and I finally got two-twenty-five. The worst part of it was giving up the Hardy rod the Judge had given me on my nineteenth birthday, but after taking it out of the case and looking at it once I handed it over and left.
I cashed his check the first thing Monday and waited. The grand jury convened that morning, and we sat through the long day wondering what would happen, but nothing did. It was quiet.
To get up the lake to where she was I’d have to go clear down to the south end and rent a boat and motor, now that I’d sold my own, but that was all right. I had it all figured out.
Tuesday morning I didn’t say anything to anybody. I just went. And that was the day that everything fell in.
Ten
I was at the store on the end of the lake by daybreak and rented a skiff and a big outboard. After buying a bucket of shiners from the man who ran the place, I rented one of his cane-pole fishing outfits and said I thought I’d go up the lake a way and see if I couldn’t catch a few white perch. He’d never seen me before, and merely grunted something and looked at me with the casual and almost contemptuous indifference with which fishing-camp proprietors regard all fishermen. By the time it was light enough to see, I was on my way. I wanted to try to get nearly halfway up before I had to duck in somewhere and wait for Shevlin to go by. He would be coming down with his catfish, headed for the store, and with all the turns in the channel he might be right on me before I saw him. I should be able to gauge it within a half hour, for I knew about what time he left.
But something went wrong. Either he had left earlier than usual or had tried to cut it too fine, tried to get too far up before I turned off into a slough and waited. Suddenly, I came around a bend in the channel and saw him up ahead, less than half a mile away. I looked wildly around, but there wasn’t anyplace I could hide. He would have seen me by this time, anyway.
The lake was a little less than a quarter mile wide here, with acres of big weed beds off to the left. I cut the motor and swung hard left into one of the openings through the pads, getting as far out of the main channel as possible, and when I had come to the end of it I dropped the square concrete block of an anchor and grabbed up the cane pole. Not even bothering to bait the hook with one of the shiners, I swung it out, and sat there staring intently at the cork float like all the fishermen in the world.
He came on past, looked toward me only once, very briefly, answered my wave with a curt gesture of his hand, and then was gone. It’s all right, I thought. Even if he saw me duck over here like that, he won’t know me. This is a different boat. Mine was painted green, while this one, like all the rental boats down there, was a dirty white with a number on the bow.
I sat there waiting, listening for the sound of his motor to die out down the lake. When it was gone completely I pulled in the anchor and started up again. All the rest of the way I kept a sharp eye out for other boats, praying I wouldn’t meet any fishermen, for I didn’t want anyone to see us as I was bringing her out. There were none. Now that he was gone, I had the whole swamp to myself.
I must have been more than halfway up when I met him, for it still wasn’t ten o’clock when I turned in at the entrance of the slough by his boat landing. Not bothering to hide the boat now, for I didn’t want to waste the time, I tied up at the landing and went up the trail, feeling that same suffocating excitement I always felt when I was coming nearer to her, and now there was added to it the knowledge that we would have to hurry. We had to be back down the lake before he started home.
She wasn’t in the house. I walked right in and looked quickly around, and then out the back. She’s swimming, I thought. But no, her suit was on the line. “Doris!” I called out. There was no sound. Beginning already to feel that cold, greasy sensation of fear in my belly that I always had whenever I thought of the two of them up here alone and of what he might do if he knew, I turned and ran along the trail toward the timber. Maybe—she was out there toward the lake. And then I saw her. She had just come out of the timber and was carrying something shiny in her hand.
She saw me and started running. “Jack! Jack!” she cried out, and then I saw what it was she had. It was the gun, that Colt .45 held out in front of her away from her body as if it were a dead snake, her fingertips grasping it by the end of the grip so it tilted slanting toward the ground. As we met, there in the open, sun-drenched clearing, she stooped and placed it carefully on the ground beside the trail, lowering it very gently as if it might explode, and then straightened, looking at me with eyes wild with relief and ecstasy and half crying and trying to smile at the same time. “Oh, Jack!” she said, her voice muffled against my shirt. “What are you carrying that gun for?” I asked. “What is it?”
“I was looking for another place to hide it. Are we going away today, Jack? Now? Isn’t that what you came for?” She looked up at me pleadingly.
“Yes. Right now. I’m going to take you out of here as soon a
s you can get ready.”
“Oh, thank God!”
“But tell me about that gun.”
“I’ve had it hidden out in the woods. For days now. One night he was drunk and I was out of the house, and when I came back way after midnight he was passed out, and the gun, which had been in that drawer ever since we came up here, was lying on the table just beyond where his hand was. I didn’t know what he had intended to do with it. But I was so scared I took it and ran out in the woods and hid it. Then, yesterday, he was out there a long time and I began to have the horrible thought that he had managed to find it and was just letting me go on thinking he hadn’t. So I thought about it all night and decided to throw it in the lake. And then this morning after he was gone I changed my mind and thought maybe I was just being silly, and that I’d hide it somewhere else.”
Holding her and feeling the shaking of her body, I knew she wasn’t telling me all of it. She was afraid of him and had been bringing it back to hide it in the house where she could get it if she had to. I thought of the way she had been carrying it and felt a little sick, knowing just how much good it would have been to her if she’d had to use it. She wouldn’t even know how to shoot it.
I picked it up and we walked back to the house. I put it on the dresser, thinking we would take it with us and drop it in the lake, and then I turned and looked at her standing there with her face flushed and her eyes shining with the thought of leaving and wanted to take hold of her again and knew there wasn’t time. There was never any stopping when we started that, and we could both feel the minutes slipping past, hurried and driven by the remorseless ticking of the clock.
“No,” she said. “I want to go, Jack. We’ve got to go.”
“I know,” I said. “Where are your other clothes, and your shoes and stockings?”
She went to the dresser and opened the bottom drawer. They were all wrapped in newspapers, the white, high-heeled shoes, the one pair of nylons, and the under-things. The little summer dress had been ironed and then folded inside a newspaper clipped together around the edges with pins. She carried them over and put them on the bed.
She looked down. “I’ll have to wash my feet before I can put on the stockings.”
“Wait.” I went out in the kitchen and brought a basin of water from the bucket and found a bar of soap. She sat down in one of the rawhide chairs and washed her feet. I watched her, smoking a cigarette and listening to the hot dead silence of the room being chopped off in sections by the clock. I’ll buy her stockings, I thought, and bathrooms with tile floors, and clothes, and…We’ll be gone from here and she can live like other women and somehow I’ll make her happy.
“I’ll wait out in the kitchen,” I said when she had dried her feet and was ready to put on the stockings. I went out and sat down by the table, throwing away the cigarette and lighting another. She didn’t bother to close the door and I could hear her changing clothes, the soft rustle of cloth and as she pulled off the old dress and put on the new one and the sound of the shoe heels against the floor.
“I’ve sold my boat and outfit,” I said. “The one I’m in is a rental boat from the foot of the lake. I have to take it back, but this is the way we’ll do it. I’ll turn off down there at the slough where I used to launch mine, and leave you there. We’ll wait there until he goes by, going up the lake, then I’ll go on down and take the boat back and pick up my car. Then I’ll come back by the old logging road and get you. That way nobody’ll see us. Then I’ll take you down to Colston and get you a room. You can wait there until I can get away and then we’ll leave for Nevada.”
“All right, Jack,” she said quietly. “I’m about ready. You can come out now.”
She had gone over to the dresser and was combing her hair at the mirror. I stood behind her, looking at her reflection in the glass. The dress was a blue one with short sleeves and trimmed with white at the collar, and I thought it was almost the color of her eyes.
“I just want to look at you,” I said, and turned her part way around, holding her there at arm’s length. My back was toward the door and she was facing it, looking up at me with her eyes shining. Suddenly I saw them change and could feel my back go cold as I saw the terror in them. I heard her little in-drawn gasp, as if ice water had hit her from behind, and at the same instant I heard the heavy shoe rasp against the flooring of the porch. His eyes were crazy. He stood framed in the doorway, not moving or saying anything, just looking beyond me as if he saw only her and didn’t even care that I was standing there, and I’ll never live long enough to forget his eyes.
“Get back!” I yelled. “Stand back!” He didn’t even hear me. Suddenly he made a lunge for the gun, still lying on top of the dresser. I beat him to it with my right hand and threw up the left to shove him back. He slid back against the wall and then I heard her run from behind me, going toward the other side of the room, and the scream that had been trying to fight its way out of her throat came free at last, going up higher and higher in a thin knife-edged column of sound slicing into the silence. He came off the wall and started for her and she stopped and turned to face him, helpless, with her legs against the bed. I felt the gun kick in my hand and he stopped then as if he had seen me for the first time, and put his hand up to his chest, still looking at me, and started to fall. The scream cut off as if the noise of the gun had chopped it in two, the way they blow an oil well fire with nitro, and then she began to sway.
I looked at him lying on his face with the little searching trickle of blood running out from under his shoulder and curling indecisively across the incredibly clean silvered white planks of the floor she had scrubbed so long and then I put the gun down on the dresser and went out the front door into the yard and was sick.
Eleven
There was just the humming of insects in the drowsy heat and the old hound watching me sadly with his red-rimmed eyes as I clung to the post at the corner of the porch. The noise and the violence had washed back like a receding wave and left me stranded here in the sundrenched peace of the clearing while I fought down the sickness and tried to get hold of myself enough to go back inside the room. I had to snap out of it; she was going to be bad enough without both of us going to pieces. If she waked up lying there like that and looking at what she would see not three feet in front of her eyes ... It wouldn’t be pretty.
I straightened up and retched again and spat, trying to get the taste out of my mouth, and walked back into the room on unsteady legs, looking across and beyond him to where she was lying. She had almost fallen onto the bed, but her legs had bumped it as they doubled under her and pushed her out and away so she had crumpled to her knees and then slid down, and now she lay partly on one side with an arm under her face like a child asleep. I knelt down beside her with my back to him but still feeling him there behind me as if I were looking at him out of the back of my head. The blue dress had slid up as she fell past the bed and the long legs were bare above the stocking tops, smooth and ever so faintly tanned, even fair now against the sand-colored stockings and the dress, and I looked at them, but not in that way, not even conscious of the loveliness of them, only busy at shutting him out of my mind. Her eyes were still closed as I rolled her on her back, and I noticed, in the fury of concentration of trying to see only her and not him there behind me, how long and dark the lashes were against the wax-candle paleness of her face. I smoothed the dress down very gently and picked her up.
The sickness rolled over again in my stomach as I had to step across him to go toward the door, and then I was in the open with her. I put her down on the porch in the shade, and as I was easing her shoulders back against the floor she stirred. Her eyes opened.
For an instant she stared at me blankly, not remembering. “Jack,” she whispered. “What happened?” Then, as I had known it would, it hit her. I could see it come pushing up into her eyes and she cried out, grabbing my arm. “Where is he? Jack, where is he?”
I knelt with my arm still around her shoulders and held her
with her face against my chest while the crying shook her body. This is what I’ve done to her, I thought; I was going to make her happy and this is the way I’ve done it. I could feel the helplessness and time going by and the trap closing around us, and all I could do was kneel there in agony of numbness with only that one little corner of my mind still working, telling me over and over that I had ruined her. When the shaking subsided I took a handkerchief from my pocket and wiped away the tear stains as well as I could.
“It’ll be all right,” I said. “Don’t cry, Doris. It’ll be all right.”
I could see her fighting to get hold of herself. “We’ve got to go,” she whispered frantically. “We’ve got to get out of here! Oh, Jack!” She started to break up again and I shook her a little, holding her very tightly until she stopped.
“I’m sorry,” she said weakly. “I’ll be all right in a minute so we can go.”
“No,” I said, not wanting to do it but knowing I had to. “We can’t go now.”
She stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. “We can’t go? But Jack, we’ve—we’ve got to.”
“It won’t do any good to run now,” I said. My mind was working enough to see that.
“But it’s the only thing we can do.”
“No,” I said. “You saw what it did to him; being hunted, I mean. We can’t do it. We wouldn’t have a chance of getting out of the country, in the first place, and if we did we’d just be running the rest of our lives or until they caught us.”
“But what are we going to do?” she cried out piteously. “What can we do now. Isn’t he—?” I could see in her eyes the question she couldn’t ask.
“He’s dead,” I said bluntly, trying to get it on the line so we could look at it and know where we had to start.
“But you couldn’t help it, Jack! You couldn’t! Wouldn’t they see you had to do it, that you were trying to protect me?”