Big City Girl (14 page)

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 south 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.

Mitch shook his head again. “There’s still one car up there. I didn’t see ‘em, though. They’re probably up the river.”

He said nothing about the men from the newspaper. The whole scene up there on the porch, the grotesque cheapness and cruelty of it, made him sick when he thought about it, and he pushed it out of his mind. All she was thinking about was getting her goddamned picture in the paper, he thought, and now she’s going to get a hundred dollars out of it on top of that for some lousy bunch of lies. It’s too bad there ain’t some way she could get the reward money, too, so she could make a good profit while she’s at it. I’m glad, though, that that dude with the notebook stepped up when he did, because I might have killed her if I’d got my hands on her and started. I lost my head, I reckon. The same way I did with Jessie. Or not the same way, either, but I lost my head. I just made things worse again. Every time I try to talk to Jessie I just ball it up worse. I don’t know why the hell I can’t talk to her calm and reasonable, instead of losing my head and starting to shake her or something. I reckon I get too scared thinking about it and then start to go wild. I got to stop that. If it ain’t too late. . . . Tomorrow night, she said. I got to talk to Jessie, but next time I’ll keep my head.

Water started to drip in on them again and he looked up. Them damn sacks are leaking, he thought. I got to straighten ‘em out. He backed out and straightened up, then whirled around in despair as he heard Cass’s voice crying his name.

“Mitch! Mitch, it’s Sewell,” the old man was shouting, turning off the trail and running toward him.

Oh, God, Mitch thought, there ain’t any way I can keep him away from here now. He’s seen me, and the sacks, and he’ll find Sewell, and his yowling and screaming’ll bring every damned cop in the county.

He turned and ran toward Cass, trying to head him off. “What you yelling about?” he demanded.

“It’s Sewell,” Cass said, still stumbling forward through the underbrush, and raising one arm to point outward toward the river. “It’s Sewell. Just come over the radio.”

Mitch stopped, recognizing the identical gesture and the repeated words, the whole thing like the second playing of a phonograph record or a motion-picture reel being rerun. We’re going to go through that whole thing again, he thought with horror. He’s forgot he told me once already and he’s going to do it all over, or else he’s heard it on the radio again on a different station and thinks Sewell drowns all over again every time they say it.

“Stop yelling!” he commanded harshly. I got to shut him up some way, he thought.

Cass came up to him but could not stop, and continued to pace up and down as he had before. If he takes off that silly hat and wrings it out, Mitch thought, I’ll go crazy and jump in the river. I can’t stand no more.

“It’s Sewell,” Cass said wildly. “He’s out there in the river.” And then, suddenly, he stopped, thinking, I done all this before and Mitch was building a dam, but this time he’s got cotton sacks hung up like a tent in that windfall. I done all of this before and Mitch knows about it but he’s so hardhearted he kept right on working on his dam even when he knew my boy was drowned in the river.

He had ceased his pacing and Mitch watched him stare at the cotton sacks and then turn to look at him with that same baffled wonder like an imbecile child lost and forlorn in the rain. “What you got under them sacks, Mitch? What you doing?” he started to say, and then the wildness came into his eyes and he whirled and ran toward the tree, crying out, “Sewell! Sewell!”

He was throwing the sacks back and kneeling blindly in his haste as Mitch leaped after him, very near the border line of panic and shouting now himself.

“Don’t touch him! Goddammit,
don’t touch him!
Don’t touch his arm. Leave him alone!”

He got his hands on the old man’s shaking body and held him just as Sewell opened his eyes again and looked up at them.

“What’s all this racket?” he asked angrily, not recognizing them at first. Then he saw the weeping Cass held back and restrained just beyond his legs. “What the hell’s he doing here? Is this a party?”

“What’s the matter with his arm, Mitch? What’s happened to his arm?” Cass was asking over and over.

“He’s been snake-bit,” Mitch said roughly. “A rattler bit him.”

“Have you called a doctor? We got to get the wagon and get him out of here. Go get the wagon. Oh, my poor boy!”

“For Christ’s sake, make him shut up,” Sewell said brutally. “He’s making more noise than an old woman. He’ll have the whole county down here.”

Mitch shook him, not wanting to do it, but knowing he had to get the noise stopped some way. “Shut up,” he said savagely. “Shut up! There’s men down here in the bottom looking for him.”

“But he’s been snake-bit,” Cass cried out, struggling. “We got to get him to a doctor.”

Ain’t there no way I can make him understand? Mitch thought with desperation. “We can’t take him to a doctor. It wouldn’t do no good nohow. Do you want Jessie to see him like that? Do you want to turn him over to the law? Ain’t you had enough of that damned circus?”

“Tell him to shut up and mind his own business,” Sewell said coldly.

“You want them money-hungry bastards getting hold of him?” Mitch asked roughly. “You want that woman to go on making a side show out of it, like her husband getting killed was just for her benefit so she could get her picture in the paper?”

“Snake-bit! I tell you he’s been snake-bit,” Cass was still saying wildly, not hearing one word he had said.

Sewell had grown deadly quiet. “What’s that, Mitch? Who did you say?” he asked softly.

“Joy,” Mitch said, his face dark. “I don’t care if she is your wife, she ain’t going to make no circus . . .” Then he stopped, realizing for the first time that Sewell probably didn’t even know she was here. “She’s been here about a month. She’s up there at the house now with them men from the paper, making a circus out of it.”

“We got to get the wagon, Mitch,” Cass cried out again. “Can’t you see—”

“Shut up,” Mitch commanded, feeling sick. It would have been all right, he thought, with just the two of us. We could have stood it. and there wouldn’t have been no fuss to get you started. It would have been all right if he hadn’t come along and started crying. “Shut up! We ain’t going to get no wagon.”

“Mitch, wait a minute,” Sewell said, speaking with great difficulty. “Maybe you better—”

“What?” Mitch asked, puzzled.

Sewell’s eyes were closed and he lay very still. “I’m getting awful sick,” he said faintly. “I’m afraid of it. I-I thought I could pull through, but I don’t know.”

Mitch stared at him. He must be out of his mind, he thought wildly. A doctor ain’t going to do him no good.

“You want me to get the wagon and take you up to the house?” he asked, leaning very close.

”Yes,” Sewell answered faintly. “It may be too late now. I’m afraid I’m going to die. Mitch, I—” He stopped, as if the effort were too great for him. Mitch waited, hardly breathing. “I—I don’t want to die down here in the rain.”

They were gone now. They had left hurriedly, running up the hill toward the house to harness the mules and bring the wagon down. Sewell lay very still for a minute, thinking. It’s in my right-hand coat pocket and I got to get it out of there some way and into the left one. I can’t use the right hand at all. I can’t even move it.

So she was up there all the time and I didn’t know it. Well, I ain’t got no time to think about that. I ain’t got much time left for anything. Get it out of the right-hand pocket and into the left one. And then maybe it won’t even shoot. It’s been in the water. But it’s different from a shotgun. Shotgun shells will get wet, but this is solid ammunition, in brass cases, and it might still be dry inside. There ain’t no way to tell till I get there. But I got to move the gun to where I can use it.

He raised his left arm and started swinging the hand across to fumble awkwardly with the coat pocket next to the swollen and immovable right arm, and then he was lying in the sand somewhere on a summer night with the surf running and Joy was just beyond him in the starlight, very lovely in her bathing suit. She turned her head to look at him, and disappeared, and a siren was wailing somewhere behind him while the windshield wipers were going swock-swock, swock-swock, with the wet pavement rushing and swooping endlessly back and past him through the dark-framed tunnel of light.

How long had they been gone? He had come back from somewhere far off and was lying there with his left arm across his chest. I got to hurry, he thought. I may have been out for half an hour. He twisted the hand into the pocket, bumping the right arm once and feeling a nauseating ocean of pain, and then he had hold of the gun and brought it out, I wonder if it’ll shoot, he thought. Well, there’s only one way to find out, and I will if I can hold on that long and don’t blank out.

Mitch reached the barn first and was feverishly throwing harness on the mules when Cass came puffing up and went on by, bent forward and holding onto the hat as if running into a gale.

“I found Sewell! I found him, I found him! I found my boy!” Mitch could hear him shouting from the depths of his grief or madness as he ran across the yard. Then he-was gone inside the house.

There was instantaneous eruption. Mitch was whirling the team about before the wagon and thinking. What made him change his mind like that? What happened? Then Shaw and Lambeth came running around the side of the house followed closely by Jessie. There was no sign of Joy. Well, she wouldn’t get her hair wet, Mitch thought, in some detached portion of his mind.

“What happened?” Shaw asked with wild excitement, bareheaded and oblivious of the rain. “We can’t make any sense out of what he’s saying.”

I wouldn’t think so. Mitch thought, ducking in behind the mules to fasten the trace chains. He’s got it so mixed up in his own mind, the radio part of it and this part, that’s he’s probably gone in there now to listen to the radio to see if he can get straightened out himself.

He threw the lines into the wagon and turned to face them. “He’s down there in the bottom.” he said harshly. “I’m going after him in the wagon, but I got to have some help to get him in it. And one of you better go out on the highway and phone the damned sheriff’s office and tell ‘em to send an ambulance or a doctor. He’s been snake-bit.”

Jessie had run up now and she cried out in anguished accusation, “He said you had Sewell down there and wouldn’t bring him to the doctor. He said you wouldn’t bring him to the house.”

”You get in out of the rain,” Mitch said curtly.

She gave him a look of horror and turned, running back toward the kitchen. He looked after her once, then ran over to the old smokehouse and came out carrying his cot. He went to the woodpile with it, and with a few savage swings of the ax he chopped the legs off to make a stretcher of it.

Throwing it into the wagon, he nodded to Lambeth and leaped up into it himself, while Shaw ran for the car to get to a telephone. As Mitch swung the team around and they started down the hill, Cass emerged from the kitchen and came after them, shouting frantically.

“Wait!” he called. “Wait for me!”

Mitch stopped the mules and held them, feeling a harsh and grating impatience as the old man climbed aboard. Cass sat down on the rough plank across the wagon bed and faced forward into the rain, staring straight ahead.

“Let’s go,” he said in the dead and bankrupt calm that is beyond frenzy. “I got to bring my boy in.”

The wagon swung downward through the darkening timber. It’s getting late, Mitch thought, aware of a faint surprise that this day might end, might have twilight and then cease to be, like other days. It had run on through the span of a lifetime and he had come to accept it as something eternal that would go on and on as long as he could keep running forward without progress across the endless revolving belt of its hours. It’s getting late and he may be dead when we get there. He’s had that poison in him all day.

What made him get scared all of a sudden like that? Being tough is Sewell’s religion, if he has one, and he’s known all day he’s going to die. It was right after I said she was up here; was that just his way of saying he wanted to see her, to be with her when he died? Or can being tough just quit on you like that when you need it worst?

The water was still backed up, unmoving, below the foot of the hill. He glanced at it once, briefly, read it with only half his mind, and forgot it. The fight to save their crop was a thing long past, almost forgotten, and unimportant now.

He leaped down from the wagon bed and wondered if he were really hanging in the air, unable even to fall toward the ground. Sewell lay as he had, with his eyes closed. He knelt beside the still and white-faced figure, feeling for the pulse. It was still there, rapid, faint, and fluttery, like the heartbeat of a captured bird.

Cass was wailing again, beside him. “I got to take my boy in. I lound him. and I got to take him in!”

“Shut Up,” Mitch said, without anger, without even hope that the noise would cease.

He and Lambeth worked Sewell onto the legless, stretched canvas of the cot, and lifted him into the wagon, being as gentle and careful as they could with the poisoned arm. He grabbed up the sacks and the raincoat and threw them across the box of the wagon to keep off the rain. Then they were going up the hill.

Sewell felt the wagon begin to move, and thought. It ain’t much longer now. The trail goes left, then right on a switchback turn, and there’s an oak the lightning struck, and it runs past the end of the hillside field, going up. I saw a fox there, with a chicken in its mouth, one morning going after the cows. There’s a plum thicket beyond the end of the rows and a long time later, after the fox, the fat girl from somewhere, picking cotton, said, “You know there ain’t no plums in October, you dog,” and laughed, and from there you can see the barn, in winter when the leaves are gone. It’s funny how clear you can remember all of that. I hardly even thought of it for seven years. It ain’t much farther, we already made the second turn, and all I got to do is hold on a little longer. Then he was whirling through darkness and the siren was closer now.

Joy and Jessie were watching from the kitchen door as they made the turn around the barn and came across the yard. I didn’t want her to see it, Mitch thought. It ain’t a pretty sight.

Shaw was back. He came leaping off the front porch as Mitch stopped the team in the front yard and jumped down from the wheel. “I found the phone,” he said. “Ambulance should be here in a few minutes with the sheriff’s men.”

”Don’t touch him,” Mitch said bleakly. “Don’t try to move him. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He jumped up on the porch as Jessie came through the door. “You stay inside till I tell you,” he commanded. She stopped, and he turned away from her and went into Cass’s room through the window. Cass had forgotten to turn off the radio, and soft music issued from its loudspeaker. He stared at it silently, for some reason wanting to pick up a chair and smash it, but went on past and began to tear at the bed.

He rolled up the mattress and a quilt and threw them through the window onto the porch in front of the swing. Going back out into the yard, he motioned to Lambeth and Shaw, and the three of them slid the stretcher out of the wagon and carried it to the porch. They slid Sewell carefully off it onto the mattress and pulled the quilt up to his chin. He had not moved or opened his eyes.

I know exactly where I’m lying, Sewell thought, listening for the sound of her voice.

Mitch wanted to quit now, and he had to sit down. Me went back to the end of the porch near the door and squatted down, staring silently at the others. Everything was gone out of him. I’m empty, he thought. I’m just hollow, like a log. There ain’t anything I can do for him now. I can’t even talk to him in front of all these people. Jessie came out of the doorway and went up to Sewell. She knelt beside him for an instant and then got up, going past him quickly and through the door with her face screwed up tight but not crying. She went into the bedroom and he wanted to follow her. I’ll talk to her in a minute, he thought. In a minute, as soon as I can think.

Cass went past crying, “I found him! I found my boy!” and bent forward at right angles like a jackknife to step through the window into his room. Mitch heard the corrugated washboard of sound from the radio as the dial spun and thought. He wants to find out if he really did find Sewell. He won’t believe it till he hears it.

Shaw was talking eagerly to Lambeth, who was drying his hands on a towel and unpacking the camera again. “I phoned it in, when I was out on the highway to call for the ambulance. So here’s what we do now. We want a few more pics, maybe three or four more. One or two of Neely, and then one when the ambulance gets here. And one of Mrs. Neely kneeling down beside her husband. Then we’re going to scram. She’s going with us. I can get the rest of her story while you drive, and we’ll be in town in time for me to write the story and beat the deadline with about thirty seconds to spare. You all set?”

Lambeth nodded. “Where’s Narcissus?”

“She’s packing.”

It broke across Mitch’s numb tiredness like a sea of ice water. He sprang to his feet and started down the hall. They weren’t going tomorrow. They were going today, now, in a few minutes. He met Joy in the hall and she gave him a glance of pure malice as she went by. Going to have her picture took, he thought with contempt, lunging at the door of the bedroom.

Jessie was folding her few dresses and an old sweater and putting them into a cardboard box. She looked up as he came in and the glance swept on past him, unseeing.

He stopped. “Jessie,” he said. His voice sounded very far away.

She gave no sign she had heard him.

“Jessie,” he said again, coming into the room. “Jessie! Listen to me. You ain’t going with that—” He put a hand on her arm and she pulled away with that stony-faced yet almost imperceptible withdrawal that can be one of the most devastating things on earth and compared to which all male violence of blow and insult is utterly harmless.

I won’t lose my head this time, he thought, beginning even then to lose it. The wild anger and the fright were coming up in him and he started to shake her arm. She offered no resistance whatever, merely standing there and looking at him without seeing him, and when he got hold of himself and stopped she picked up the box and went past him out of the room.

He went out onto the porch and Jessie was holding the box and watching still-faced while Lambeth adjusted the camera. I can hold her when they leave, he thought in the blackness of despair, but she’ll just run away later on.

”Now, Mrs. Neely,” Shaw was saying.

“All right,” Joy said. She started toward the mattress where Sewell lay, next to the swing.

Sewell looked so white lying there like that and she was almost afraid. Her grief was not entirely simulated. She was really sorry for him now, and it was so sad to think of how he had been trying so hard to get back to her when she didn’t know it, and to have him get bitten by that awful snake when he was almost here—it was so terrible. She felt a genuine sorrow as she walked toward him; it was just that she was still practical enough to remember camera angles and the way she would look best in the picture at the same time she was so lull of her grief.

It would be best, since Lambeth was on her left, to have most of her hair swing down on the right side of her face as she bent down, with just enough on the left to frame it. And they wouldn’t want any legs in this pose of a wife grieving for her husband; she must be very demure about the legs, with just enough showing so it would be possible to see that they
were
nice. She halted, and started to kneel beside his shoulders.

I can hear her, Sewell thought. His mind had been going away from him on those long, dark journeys and then swinging back like a pendulum, but it was very clear now with only the pain to bother him and he knew it would all be quite sharp and clean when he opened his eyes. He had his hand on the gun under the quilt and lay quietly listening to her footsteps as she came toward him. I won’t have to open my eyes to know when she’s bending down, he thought. I’ll smell her; you can always smell her when she’s close.

The others had fallen silent, watching the tableau. Jessie looked on with a lump in her throat, thinking how sad it was and how sweet Joy looked in her grief. Mitch watched with contempt and a cold, hard anger, sickened as he had been before by the-cheap, self-seeking heartlessness of it. But still, he thought, why did Sewell change like that when he found out she was up here? If that was what Sewell wanted . . .

Joy bent down. She felt she was going to cry, but remembered to turn her head just a little more to the left. Tendrils of golden blonde hair brushed Sewell’s cheek, and he started to open his eyes and bring the hand with the gun out from under the quilt.

Then it started to go. He fought it but could not hold it off as the blackness came for him again. The sound of the rain on the sheet-metal roof was the running of surf and Joy was leaning over him with her hair a gleaming cascade of loveliness in the starlight.

Just as they heard the sound of the ambulance coming down the sandy ruts of the hill, he brought the hand out from under the quilt, empty, and put it up to touch her.

“Joy,” he said.

She bent down and kissed him and the flash bulb went off. The picture was taken, and she turned her head and smiled at all of them through her tears.