Hill girl

  “Do you think Sam got home before she got back, and caught her going in?”

  “No. Not a chanc’t. I walked real slow the rest of the way, like I was awful tar’d, an’ kept him back. She got in ahead of him, all right. This time.” There was a significant emphasis on the last two words and I knew that Jake had said all he intended to say on the subject and considered his obligation at an end.

  I finished the cigarette and threw it away and got up. “Thanks, Jake.”

  That night after supper I got in the car and drove in to town. Lee wasn’t at home and Mary said she hadn’t seen him since around noon. I finally found him in the back room of Billy Gordon’s café, the second time I went in there. He and Peewee Hines were shooting craps. He was drinking beer, but he wasn’t drunk.

  “Well, if it isn’t the old clodhopper himself.” Lee grinned as I walked in. “Have a bottle of beer. It’s bad for your kidneys.”

  “Hi, All-American,” Peewee said and grinned at me. He was in high school about the time Lee was and I never did care a lot for him. He always grinned as if he were watching something through a keyhole. He was a little guy with a fresh way of looking at you.

  “Excuse us, Peewee,” I said. “I want to talk to Lee a couple of minutes. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Not at all. Go right ahead.” He threw down the dice and sat down at one of the tables, leaned back, and put his feet up.

  “It’s private,” I said.

  “And this is a public place. Or maybe you own it?”

  “Beat it, you little sonofabitch.” I reached for him and he jumped up and made for the door.

  Lee looked at me. “You’re going to get yourself killed someday, talking to people that way.”

  I sat down. “Well, when I do, it won’t be Peewee Hines. And speaking of getting yourself killed, maybe you know what I’m here for.”

  “I have no idea. Maybe you just came in so I could refresh myself looking at your beautiful face. When I’m shooting craps with people, I don’t appreciate having ‘em chased off when I’m four bucks in the hole.”

  “Sam Harley damned near caught you with that Angelina the other night,” I said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  “No. Except that you must be nuts. I haven’t seen that wench since we were hunting in October.”

  “That’s your story?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Lee,” I said. “Use your head. Stay away from there. Can’t you see he’s going to be laying for you now? What do you think he’s going to do when he catches you? Write a letter to his Congressman?”

  “Look, Bob, I don’t know what you’re talking about. And if it’s what I think it is, you’re all wet, and why don’t you mind your own business?”

  “O.K.,” I said. I got up and started for the door. I stopped once and looked back at him sitting there and started to try once more.

  “For Christ’s sake,” he said, picking up the bottle, “why don’t you learn to knit?”

  Ten

  It was the first week in July and we were almost finished laying by the cotton. There was only about two days’ work left, plowing out the middles, and then we would be through with it until picking time.

  It was a hot night. Jake and Helen had gone across the road to their house at about eight-thirty and I had taken a bath out in the mule lot and gone to bed. But I was restless and had a hard time getting to sleep. The work had been slacking off the past week and I was getting that old feeling of being overtrained and stale and wasn’t even comfortably tired when night came. I had been staying too close to the job and away from dances and girls too long, and as long as the work kept up at that grueling pace and I was worn out at night it was all right, but now it was beginning to catch up with me.

  I awakened and reached for my watch on the table beside the bed. It was one o’clock. The room was stifling and I was sweating, and I lay there a few minutes savagely restless, hating the waking up and knowing I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep.

  I cursed and got up and went out on the back porch, still naked, the way I had been sleeping, and went down to the well. I drew up a bucket of water and had a drink of it and marveled at the coolness of it and then upended the wooden bucket over my head and poured the whole thing over myself. It felt deliciously cold as I stood there in the hot blackness with the short grass springy under my feet. I could hear the mules walking around down by the corn crib and heard one of them kick at something and thud against the planks of the barn. I felt that way myself. I wanted to kick at something.

  Back in the house I slipped on a pair of shorts and lit one of the kerosene lamps and sat down at the oilcloth-covered table to try to read, but I couldn’t keep my mind on the book. I was just getting ready to blow out the lamp and go out on the porch and smoke a cigarette in the dark when I heard a car coming up the road fast and it turned into the driveway. The headlights flashed down the hall for a short second as it made the turn. The brakes squealed and the car slid to a stop out in front.

  I started to get up when I heard the front door open and somebody was coming down the hall, walking fast. It was Lee. He had on a white linen suit and white shoes and he looked as expensive and patrician as ever except that his face was almost as white as the suit and his eyes were scared.

  He stopped in the doorway to the dining room. “God, I’m lucky to find you at home,” he said. “I was afraid you’d be gone too.”

  “You’re lucky, all right,” I said. “I just got back from the Mediterranean in my yacht. Where the hell did you think I’d be?”

  “All right, all right. But this is no time for wisecracks, Bob.” He wouldn’t sit down and he couldn’t stand still. He was walking jerkily back and forth and stopping to lean on the doorframe and then he’d move again. He lit a cigarette and then after one drag or two on it he went around me and threw it out the back door. His face was greasy with sweat.

  “You got any money around here? I need a little, and I need it bad. And fast.”

  “What’s the gag? Don’t tell me you’ve already gone through all the dough the Major left?”

  He gestured impatiently. “Oh, I’ve got money. I’ll pay you back. But I can’t get into the bank until nine. And I’m flat broke and I’ve got to get out of here fast. I need dough for gasoline. You’ve ten or twenty, haven’t you?”

  I went into the bedroom and fished in a suit and found my billfold. I came back and handed him a twenty and a five, all I had in the house. He shoved it into his pocket nervously. I could see that fear still crawling in his eyes but his nervous pacing subsided a little when he had the money in his pocket. He muttered a short thanks and turned as if in a hurry to get started. Then he hesitated again and turned back.

  “How bad is it?” I asked. I sat down at the table again and lit a cigarette.

  “Sam Harley’s after me.”

  The match burned my fingers. “He finally caught you?”

  “Caught me? I hope to hell he caught me. It was awful.” He was shaking and he came over and sat down across from me under the light of the kerosene lamp and drummed on the table with his fingers. I thought of the old saying that animals could smell fear, and wondered how he would smell to one of them right now.

  He just had to talk. I didn’t want to ask him about it because I didn’t want him to waste any time. With Sam Harley after him he wasn’t in any position to be dawdling around with small talk, because he was in a bad spot and it was getting worse with every minute. It was something I had been trying to tell him for a long time but he had to find it out for himself and now he was doing it the hard way.

  But he had to get it out of his system. I knew it had been bad, from the way he had to talk. “Now, for God’s sake, don’t preach to me, Bob. I’ll admit I’ve been getting to that Angelina and you warned me about it, but dammit, don’t preach to me.” I hadn’t said a word.

  “He almost caught me once before. Or somebody did. But I got away with it. Only I didn’t have sense
enough to stay away. I can’t. Christ, if I only could. I tell you, that girl’s a witch.”

  “Or anyway, something that sounds almost like it,” I said.

  “He got wise, all right. Because he was laying for me this time. But I had the car parked farther up from the house, and we weren’t in it. I took a blanket out there with me and we had it spread out in a pine thicket fifteen or twenty yards from the car. Because she enjoys it. Jesus, how she enjoys it! She’ll almost beat you to death in the seat of a car. So I brought this blanket. She’d been getting word to me the nights he was going foxhunting and she was sneaking out. She has a room of her own and her mother is a sound sleeper. Only this time I guess he wasn’t going hunting, or else he sneaked back and found she was gone. Anyway, he was looking for us, and I guess he found the car. But he never would have found us if that damned girl didn’t make so much noise. You’d think she was being killed.”

  “Look,” I said, “I’ve been living out here alone for a long time, and I mean alone, so would you mind leaving out some of the stuff about how much she likes it and how much noise she makes?”

  He didn’t even hear me. He was trying to light a cigarette but his hands were shaking so much he couldn’t strike the paper matches.

  “Hold it over the lamp chimney,” I said. I had to light it for him. He went on, talking jerkily. “The first thing I knew about it was just after we’d got quiet and all of a sudden I heard a footstep in the dark behind us and a gun cocking and he said, ‘Get up from there, Crane. I don’t want to kill her too.’ Oh, Jesus, sweet Jesus.

  “I rolled and got up running and he shot twice but it was awful dark in there in the pines and he missed both times. I heard one of ‘em hit a tree and glance off and whine and I ran that much harder. I hit a tree and took a lot of skin off my hip and I fell down once, but I made it to the car, I’ll never know how. I was lucky I’d left the keys in it instead of in my pants because I was naked except for a shirt. My clothes were back there on the blanket. If he found the car first I’ll never know why he didn’t take the keys himself. If he had, he’d have got me. I guess he didn’t think of it. Anyway, I got it in gear and stepped on the starter and the gas all at the same time, without even shutting the door. I must have thrown sand for a hundred yards, getting started. He shot once more and it went through the back of the top and blew a hole in the windshield. I wouldn’t drive that road again at night at that speed for a thousand dollars.

  “I drove home with just the shirt on and sneaked in a window and got these clothes on and packed a bag and then remembered all my money was there in my other pants. I found Mary’s purse without waking her up, but she only had two dollars in it. I drove over to Billy Gordon’s house and a couple of other places but I couldn’t find anybody home and I couldn’t get away without some money. So I came out here. And just as I was coming through the square, headed this way, I saw Sam’s car coming into town. He didn’t see me.”

  “He’ll be here. You better get going.”

  I couldn’t figure him out. He was scared to death and he knew Harley was going to kill him if he caught up with him and he knew that the only thing that would save him was distance, and still he couldn’t get started. He seemed to want to stay and talk about it.

  “I thought I’d go to Dallas this morning and then as soon as I can get some money through from the bank I’ll go on to California or somewhere for a while.”

  “For a while?” I asked. “For good, you mean. If you come back here five years from now, Sam will kill you.”

  “You’re kidding. He’ll forget it in a while.”

  I shook my head. “I know. I was kidding before, too, wasn’t I? When I said you were going to get in a hell of a mess if you didn’t leave that alone.”

  “You think he’ll remember it that long?”

  “Listen,” I said, “you’re washed up here. You can’t ever come back, as long as Harley’s alive. And I guess you’re finished with Mary, too. How are you going to explain it to her?”

  “I don’t know, Maybe I can think of something.”

  “Well, you’d better get going,” I said. “Sam will be here as soon as he tries in town.”

  Then we both heard it. It was a car coming down the road, and from the way it sounded it was going as fast as they’ll run.

  It turned into the driveway. The lights flashed down the hallway, dim at first, and then very bright as it went into low in the sand. I could see Lee’s face in the flash of it and it wasn’t a pretty sight. A man that sick with fear isn’t something you want to look at.

  “Duck out the back way,” I said, grabbing him by the arm. “He’ll come in here and I’ll try to stall him long enough for you to get back around to the car. You got the keys?”

  He nodded and patted his trousers pocket. He couldn’t talk. Going on out the back door, he disappeared into the darkness and I sat there at the table facing the hall, thinking for a second of what a putrid joke it was to be wearing a white linen suit when you’re playing hide-and-seek in the dark with a man after you with a gun.

  I heard the door of the Buick slam and knew Sam was in there after those keys. He’d missed the boat once tonight by forgetting about them. Thank God, Lee had them with him. And then I heard something else. It was unmistakable. It was the sound you hear in the filling station when the man raises the hood of your car to check the oil. The Buick wasn’t going anywhere for a while now when Sam finished with the ignition wiring. I heard the front screen door open and then his slow steps in the hall. He stopped in the doorway to the dining room and looked at me carefully. Then he thought better of it and came all the way in and stepped to one side and put his back up against the wall.

  “Howdy, Bob,” he said quietly.

  “Hello, Sam,” I said.

  He had on overalls tucked into those big laced boots and no shirt and was wearing a faded blue denim jumper that was tight across his big shoulders and wet with sweat under the armpits and I could see the tangled mat of black hair on his chest above the overall bib, where the jumper was open. In the right-hand pocket of the jumper was the big bulge of a gun, and I knew it was a .38 or .45 from the size of it. There was shiny sweat on his face, and his eyes were like wet black marble in the lamplight. There was a two or three days’ growth of black stubble on his face, and now as he passed his hand across his mouth to wipe off the sweat I could hear the rasp of it against the calloused hardness of his palm in the silence.

  “Where is he, Bob?” He didn’t raise his voice. He might have been asking a stranger how to find the men’s room.

  “Where’s who?” I asked, not liking it and wondering how he was going to take the stalling. I wasn’t the one he was after, but there was no telling just how much of that simple-minded repartee he could handle, the way he was feeling now and with that gun in his pocket.

  “I don’t want no trouble with you, Bob. We always got along all right I want your brother an’ I know he’s here. Jest for his sake, in case he’s listenin’, he won’t move that car out there right away. I fixed that.”

  I guess I already had my mind made up before he finished talking. Maybe even before he came in. There wasn’t any other way. He’d get Lee sooner or later; he was that kind of man. And there was a damned good chance he’d get him tonight. And there was Mary, and what it would do to her. There wasn’t any other way, but I didn’t feel heroic about it. I felt like a damned fool.

  “Lee’s not here,” I said. “He went to Dallas a week ago.” I still didn’t like it, and the hair on the back of my neck was sticking into me like goose flesh when you have a hard chill. I knew how he was feeling, and when you get like that you’re not in very good condition for cold, rational thought. And what I had to tell him was worrying me. That was the bad part of it. There was no way of knowing whether he was going to be in any mood for a horse trade and I didn’t know how fast his mind worked. He might even believe me and shoot before he got the thing worked out in his mind.

  “Bob, I don’t wa
nt no trouble with you if I can help it. Ain’t no use you lyin’. His car’s right out there in front.”

  This was where I had to tell him. “Oh, the car,” I said. “He left it with me because I’m having mine overhauled. Brake bands are worn out. I’ve been using it.”

  I wondered how soon he would begin to catch on.

  “That’s a goddamn lie!” He got that far with it and then I could see it start to soak in. He was getting it.

  He’s getting it, I thought. Brother, you’re the one who’s getting it.

  Eleven

  He stood there for a minute before he said anything and seemed to be trying to make up his mind. The silence in the room was beginning to get me. I can stand these things better when there’s more noise.

  “You was usin’ that car tonight?” He wanted to be sure we had it all straight.

  I could see then that the thing was going to grow into a beautiful understanding between us.

  “Why, yes, I was using it,” I said. “I hope you didn’t wreck it too badly, Sam.”

  “No,” he said slowly. “I guess we can fix it up all right. Why? Was you figgerin’ on usin’ it today? Goin’ somewhere, maybe?”

  “Well,” I said, “I was thinking of a little trip. To Shreveport, maybe. You see, Sam, Angelina and I have decided we don’t want to wait any longer. That is,” I went on quickly, “with your approval, Sam. I hope we have your permission.”

  “Why, shore, Bob.” His face began to relax a little. “And jest to think, I didn’t even know you two was a-courtin’.”

  Careful now, Sam, you great big understanding son-of-a-bitch, I thought. Let’s don’t make this too great a surprise and spoil all this beautiful act. Surely you remember me, the old faithful suitor of the fair Angelina?

  “Well, sit down, Sam,” I said. “I’ve got a bottle around here somewhere and I think we ought to celebrate.”

  He came over and sat down at the table but I noticed he still was careful not to have his back toward an open door or window. I found the bottle and brought out some glasses.