Big city girl

  A boy with long, slicked-down hair came out of the store and looked at them questioningly.

  “Put in ten gallons,” George said. He was heavy-faced and very smoothly shaven, with a snap-brim hat that bent sharply down in front. When he took the hat off he was always very careful to put it down on the edge of a chair or table so the brim could hang over.

  “Yessir,” the boy said. “It’s wet, ain’t it?”

  “You hear that, Harve?” George asked, turning around to the back seat, “He says it’s wet.”

  Harve wore the white hat that is the badge of the southern law officer. He had a long-jawed, bony face with eyes the color of brown swamp water and two gold teeth that showed only when he grinned. He looked at the boy, who was trying to put on an air of worldliness.

  “You know, maybe we better agree with him, George,” he said. “He looks like a tough bastard.”

  “What would happen if we didn’t think it was wet?” George asked. “We’re strangers around here and don’t want to get in trouble.”

  “Well, heck,” the boy said, still trying to look offhand and smart. “It’s just something you say, like it’s a fine morning.”

  “You see, George,” Harve said. “I told you he was tough. He’s trying to make suckers out of us. He’s got us to say it’s a wet night and now he tells us it’s a fine morning.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to him,” George said. “If he tells you lube oil is sorghum sirup, just pretend like you believe him. I’ve seen guys like him before. All they want to do is start something so they can beat you up.”

  When the boy leaned over to put the cap back on the gasoline tank he looked in the rear seat and saw the handcuff connecting Harve to Sewell Neely and his eyes grew big. Harve saw the glance and winked at George.

  “You see what happens to tough guys?” he asked the boy. “I killed an old lady because she kept beating up me and my pappy, and now they’re taking me to the pen.”

  The boy looked respectfully at Sewell Neely, who had been listening boredly.

  “Are you a deputy shurf?” he asked.

  “No,” Sewell said without interest. “I’m a prisoner. This loud-mouthed pimp I’m tied to is a deputy.”

  Well,” Harve said. “The Mad Dog’s talking again. You hear him, George? Maybe he wants us to vote for him or something.”

  George was counting out money for the gasoline and trying to explain to the boy why he should put fifteen gallons on the receipt instead of ten.

  “Way he talks, maybe he wants some of the gun barrel,” he said thinly.

  “You just don’t understand the Mad Dog,” Harve said. “He’s a big man in the news.”

  “Well, I could take some of that out of him,” George said. He turned around and looked directly at Sewell Neely. “Maybe I will, Neely.”

  Sewell stared at him coldly. “You won’t get no cherry. I been pistol-whipped before.”

  “Maybe you never had a real good job.”

  Inside the store, under the hard lights, a girl came up from somewhere in the rear and stopped near the door at one of the counters. She was drinking a Coke and weaving slightly in time to the music from the juke box. She was a big, dark-haired girl with wide hips and heavy thighs that swelled against the sleazy dress when she moved. Harve looked at her hungrily and gestured with the manacled left hand.”Better take a good look, Mad Dog,” he said, grinning. “That’s probably the last of it you’ll ever see.”

  Sewell Neely ignored him. Harve warmed up to his subject.

  “Mad Dog’s having a good look, George, so twenty years from now he can remember what they look like. He’s laying in a supply. Maybe we better stick around a while so he can fill up good. We wouldn’t want the Mad Dog up there at the pen twenty, thirty years from now blaming us because he’d forgotten what a woman looks like.”

  Neely listened to him with acute boredom and wished he had a cigarette. A smoke would taste good, and there was no use thinking about the girl. He didn’t look at her.

  He was a big man, and even as he sat in the car handcuffed to the deputy and outwardly relaxed, there was about him the faintly signaled warning of poised and latent power, still, unruffled, but forever coiled. He had a large head with thinning red hair, and across the backs of his hands and neck and face there were large, splotched reddish-brown freckles faintly seen through the skin. The rugged, wide-mouthed face was possessed of the type of unsymmetrical homeliness usually suggestive of warmth, but there was no warmth in it and any illusion of friendliness was instantly dispelled by the eyes, marble-hard, eternally watching, and cold. He was being transported to the state penitentiary to begin serving a life sentence for armed robbery, and his name had been much in the news the past few months because of his capture in a running gun battle with police leading half across the state and a sensational trial in which he had been convicted on two out of five counts of armed robbery.

  If I’m going to wish for a smoke, though, he thought, I might as well go whole hog and wish I had a gun. I wonder if these two-for-a-nickel clowns really think they can get a rise out of me. They must think I’m some kid who’s never been worked on before. Next thing, they’ll be offering me a Coke and then taking it away when I reach for it. They’d probably think something like that was new and pat theirselves on the back for thinking it up. They’d go pretty good shoving that pimple-faced kid around, but they should have got me when I was younger if they wanted to have any fun.

  You can see they’re used to handling chicken thieves and guys they pick up in crap games, way they got me in here, with one arm handcuffed to this horse-faced pimplehead and the other one loose. It’s a good thing that old sheriff wasn’t around when we loaded up to start. He’s smart old stud and he knows his business and he’d have chewed their tails out.

  Maybe, though, if you look at it another way, it ain’t such a good thing for ‘em, at that. If he’d been there to tell ‘em how to transport a prisoner, maybe this time tomorrow night they’d be back there shaking down the hustlers around the beer joints and picking their teeth front of the courthouse, and I’d be starting a life sentence in a place I couldn’t get out of. You both better take a good look at her, boys, because there’s three of us that likely ain’t ever going to see none of it again.

  Four

  Beyond the country store the highway swung west again and dropped toward the river bottom in a long grade. Sewell Neely knew this stretch of road very well and he could picture all of it for the next ten miles his mind as the car gathered speed through the rain. Six years ago he had worked in a sawmill a few miles beyond and had fished a lot in the river on Sundays and days when the mill was idle. When you came this way from the east, there were two small bridges, over sloughs, then the big concrete and steel bridge over the main channel of the river itself. Between the last two bridges, the road ran straight across the bottom on a high fill that was twenty feet above the swamp in some places, and at the base of the fill, on both sides, there was rank growth of young willows and cane that had sprung up since the road was built.

  He turned his head and looked out the back window. There were no headlights behind them, and up ahead their own lights bored into the empty night with the rain curving and slanting into them in long silver streaks rushing out of the darkness.

  They came down off the grade and over the first bridge going very fast. He sat relaxed in the corner with the manacled hand lying on the seat, seeing the glow of Harve’s cigarette, and waiting. George was driving too fast, he knew, but if you were going to do it this was the best place. It was a good, friendly place because he loved river country and there was something a little like being at home about it, especially at night like this in the rain, with nobody around. It would be a good clean, sudden, and violent thing anyway, and better than a lifetime of slow rot with everything leaking out of you a little at a time instead of all at once, the way it should be.

  He had always heard that at a time like this you thought of your home, if you ha
d any, and your family and childhood and things like that, but for some reason the only thoughts that came to him were of the river, this one coming toward them at sixty-live miles an hour, the river on Sunday afternoons in late summer, very slow then, and clear, with white perch biting if you were lucky enough to have shiners for bait. And suddenly, for the first time in years, he remembered the girl who had been fishing there alone one drowsy afternoon toward he end of summer, the way she had run from him, squealing with what he thought was terror until she had stopped and he saw she was laughing, and afterward the primitive violence of the two of them desecrating and destroying the somnolent hush among the big trees of the bottom, the heat, and the sweat, and the one bunded arm outflung along the ground, turning, and the hand clutching agonizingly at the grass.

  That’s a hell of a thing to be remembering now, he thought, and rose out of the seat and came forward over George, reaching for the wheel with his left hand. Harve screamed and the rear end of the car skidded sickeningly as it went down off the road and started to roll, going over sideways once and then end-for-end slantwise down the steep embankment and through the young willows like some mortally wounded big insensate mechanical animal in the extremes of its death agony.

  * * *

  He was at home again, lying in his bed close under the sheet-metal roof and listening to the rain coming down at night. There was a vast silence broken only !by the peaceful drumming on the roof above him and he wanted to turn over and go back to sleep again, listening to it, but Mitch had fastened their arms together and then had fallen out of bed and was pulling his right arm out of its socket. It was a crazy thing for Mitch to do, he thought. Get back in bed, Mitch, and listen to the rain. You can’t work in the cotton today. Quit worrying about it and stop pulling on my arm and just listen to the rain.

  Then Mitch was gone and it was Harve who was pulling on his arm. Harve was somewhere in the darkness in the rear of the car and he was in the front, lying with his shoulders on the seat and his legs across George’s neck. The car had come to rest almost upright, sitting on its wheels but tipped downward in front and canting over to the left, apparently leaning against a tree. The lights were out and the motor had stopped running and the only sounds were those of the rain and the ticking of the motor as it cooled. Then he could hear Harve beginning to moan softly somewhere in the back. He moved, wondering what was broken, and could feel nothing but the terrible pulling on his arm.

  He swung his legs up off George and pulled himself up on the back of the seat to get the weight off his arm and then came suddenly up against the top of the car. It was crushed inward until there was barely clearance enough between it and the top of the seat back for hm to slide over, but he made it and fell onto the floor, feeling Harve under him. Both rear doors were sprung open and he could feel rain coming in on the back of his head.

  Harve was moaning under him and he tried to find out which way he was lying, running his free hand along his body and feeling for something he would recognize. He found Harve’s tie and followed it up to his throat and then went back along the torso looking for the gun belt. He found it, feeling the leather loops with the cartridges in them, and moved his hand on around. For a second it reminded him of running his hand along a girl’s body and he laughed, thinking of the grotesque idea of Harve’s slapping him, and wondered if he had been knocked crazy by the shock.

  The gun was jammed in the holster between Harve’s leg and the floor and it took him a long time to work it free. Harve was regaining consciousness now.

  “Get off me, you sonofabitch,” the deputy said thickly.

  Sewell had the gun free now and he cocked it, doing it awkwardly with his left hand. Harve recognized the sharp metallic click as the hammer came back and caught and then he screamed.

  “Jesus Christ, Neely, don’t! For God’s sake!”

  Sewell could see nothing at all in the absolute blackness, but he brought the gun up in his left hand guided by the open and screaming mouth so near his face. Harve’s right arm must be pinned under him, he thought, or he would have grabbed my hand by this time. The gun was inches in front of his own face and he remembered to close his eyes against powder burn.

  “Oh, God!” Harve cried out, and then he shot, feeling the gun jump in his hand.

  When he felt Harve’s body strain upward and then go suddenly limp and relaxed under him, like some grotesque travesty on coitus and its climax, he felt slightly ill for a moment and wanted to get away. He had killed two men in his life but never one in this way before. One of them had been in a fight with another hoodlum and he had felt nothing at all afterward except relief that he hadn’t been killed himself, and the other was a man he had shot in a holdup, but the man had not died until two days later and he had not seen him die. He had only read about it in the papers.

  But now he wanted to get away from Harve as soon as possible and he backed out the opened door, dragging the deputy’s body after him by the handcuff, and let it fall into the mud beside the car. With his left hand he began going quickly through the pockets in search of the handcuff keys, and then he suddenly thought of George. He stood up, sliding the body of Harve along through the mud so he could reach in the front window. The car was only a darker mass than the night, blurred and indistinct, but he could make out that it was tilted quite far over toward him and resting against the bole of a tree just in front of the door, the fender and hood pushed in by the tree and the whole weight of the car supported by it. He felt for the door handle, but it had been broken off and the door had been jammed when the top was crushed down. He leaned his head and shoulders and left arm in through the shattered and constricted window, being careful of the slivers of glass remaining. George was slumped forward with the broken steering wheel in his chest, and when he placed a hand on his throat there was no pulse at all and the head slewed sideways with an ugly limpness that made him take the hand away.

  He hunkered down beside Harve and began searching for the key again. Rain sluiced down and the clothes were soaked and it was difficult getting his hand into the wet pockets. Ankle-deep mud sucked at shoes, and when he turned Harve over to get at the his pockets they were full of mud too. He found some loose change and a wallet, and he opened the wallet up, feeling in it for the picture he was sure was in it and not even remembering about the money until hours afterward when it was too late. His fingers located the slick surface of it and drew it out, and he threw the wallet into the mud. It was too dark to see whether it was the right picture, but he was sure it was, and he slipped if into the breast pocket of his coat, grinning coldly in the darkness and all the sick feeling gone. Maybe I’ll live long enough to give it back to the lousy bitch, he thought.

  There,was a pocketknife and, at last, a key ring with four keys on it. He began trying to fit them one at time into the slot on the face of the handcuffs, feeling the slot with his forefinger to locate it and orient the key and then bringing the key against it and turning gently in an effort to insert it. When each one proved to be too large he slid it carefully around the ring clockwise, counting, and tried the next one. After he had gone around twice he knew they were all too large and were car keys and door keys and he threw them into the mud, cursing. Harve did not have it.

  He stood up and put his head and arm into the front window again. George had to have it now, but reaching into and searching all his pockets was going to be slow and laborious, if not almost impossible, having to do it from this window, with one hand, and with the heavy weight of Harve pulling on him. He knew it I would be absolutely impossible to get George out of the car, with the doors jammed shut and only one hand to work with, and he could not reach the body at all from the other window. But he had to have the key. He was beginning to react to the urgency of it, aware of just how many more hours he had until daylight and knowing he had to be far from here by the time the wreck was discovered. A man less tough would have been going to pieces with panic by now. .

  He began with the pockets of the coat, not re
ally expecting to find the key in any of them, but because he had to eliminate them in order to narrow the search and because they were easy to reach and the logical place to start. The shirt pocket was next, but there was nothing there except a package of cigarettes.

  It took a long time to get into the right-hand trousers pocket, reaching across and bending his wrist and working into it a little at a time. He pulled the pocket lining out, feeling everything very carefully as it dropped onto the seat. There was some change and a knife, but nothing else.

  He was wondering how he was going to get into the left-hand pocket, with George leaning against the door because of the way the car was tilted, when he remembered the watch pocket. He hurriedly slipped two fingers into it and then felt a wild burst of elation as the fingertips brushed against a small sliver of steel at the bottom. He hooked it with the fingers and drew it out and knew by the shape and feel that it was the key and that in a minute he would be free of the hated weight of Harve and could run. He withdrew his head from the window and started to bring out his arm with the key held between the fingers, but he forgot the jagged splinters of glass still remaining in the doorframe. One of them sliced into his forearm, cutting through the coat sleeve and raking deeply into the flesh, and he jumped.

  There was a tiny, musical tinkle as the key bounced once on the doorframe, and then there was an age-long void of waiting with only the sound of the rain and the pounding of blood in his ears. It was gone somewhere into the mud and the impenetrable blackness around him.