Girl Out Back (5 page)

As abruptly as it had started, the fishing went dead. I changed lures a half-dozen times with no success. I stopped casting, and just as I was lighting a cigarette I heard an outboard motor somewhere to the northward of me. Nunn, I thought. Apparently he wasn’t finding the fishing any better and was moving around. Then I became aware the sound was coming from the channel directly ahead of me. I looked around over my shoulder and saw the boat as it came into view around the first bend. It was a skiff with a small outboard. There was one man in it. He came on out into the open lake, changed course slightly, and passed about seventy-five yards away, headed toward the inlet at the lower end where the camp was located. I waved, and he lifted a hand momentarily in greeting, a small man in overalls and a big, floppy straw hat. It wasn’t a rental boat; all of Nunn’s were green. Probably a local, I thought; he apparently had no fishing gear with him. A few people lived up there in the swamps, mostly muskrat trappers and perhaps a moonshiner or two.

I took up the rod again and went on fishing, but I was only going through the motions now, while my mind returned to the same old questions. The sun grew brassy, and was reflected with an eye-searing glare off the surface of the lake. After a while I saw the man in the big straw hat come out of the inlet in his boat, headed back up lake. He went past some fifty yards off, lifted his hand in a brief greeting, and entered the channel from which he had come in the first place. He had what appeared to be a carton in the forward end of the skiff. Shopping, I thought, remembering the small stock of groceries they kept at the camp.

The morning dragged on. I had a few desultory strikes from panfish, but the bass had apparently gone to sleep for the day. I began to be thirsty. This was a waste of time; the whole thing was stupid, anyway. Just what I expected to find? And how? The absurdity of it caught up with me and I cranked the motor with a feeling of disgust. Go on back to town and forget it.

I headed down lake and looked at my watch as I entered the mouth of the narrow inlet. It was after eleven. Returning to town now after reserving the cabin and boat for two days was going to look a little odd, but I’d just say I didn’t feel well. What difference did it make, anyway? I cut the motor and began gliding up the float in the shade of the trees along the bank, and in the sudden silence I thought I heard a car somewhere out in the timber beyond the clearing. It sounded as if it were going away, and then it faded out and I wasn’t even sure I’d actually heard it. I made the skiff fast to the float and started to loosen the clamps to remove the motor from the transom. Never mind, I thought; it could wait. Right now I was too parched and dehydrated to think of loading the station wagon before I’d had something to drink.

The somnolent hush of midday lay over the clearing. I crossed to the large building and entered. Jewel Nunn was sweeping the floor of the lunch-room. She turned, with something tense and apprehensive about her face, but it was gone instantly when she saw who I was. “Oh,” she said.

I wondered what she had been afraid of. And why had she kept her back to the door, if she
were
afraid? She certainly must have heard me stepping up on the porch.

“You have anything cold to drink?” I asked.

“Just cokes,” she said.

“I’ll have one. And a glass of water, if I might.”

She went around behind the counter and opened the icebox. I tried again to think of some way of broaching the subject of those twenty-dollar bills without causing her to wonder why I’d ask about an odd thing like that. There didn’t seem to be any. Maybe I was slowing up.

She uncapped the bottle and poured me a glass of water from a jar in the icebox. I took a long drink of the water and then began on the coke. She started to return to her sweeping. I took out my wallet and extracted a ten-dollar bill, intending to settle up for the cabin and boat.

She glanced at it, and reached under the counter for the cigar box. Setting it on top, she opened it and glanced inside. “Haven’t you got anything smaller?” she asked.

She thought I merely wanted to pay for the drink. I started to explain I was leaving, but then it occurred to me I ought to take one more look into that box before committing myself. That was what I’d come out here for, wasn’t it? I moved a casual step nearer and glanced down.

There was no twenty in it, new or old. Besides the silver it contained only some ones, a couple of fives, and a ten. Well, I asked myself disgustedly, are you satisfied? Ready to go home now?

“I wanted—” I began, and then stopped suddenly, my eyes riveted on the ten-dollar bill. It was on top, in plain sight. And along one end of it was a narrow, reddish-brown stain.

Maybe it had been there all the time. The only thing I’d been watching for was a twenty, so I could have overlooked it. No. I thought swiftly. Last night there had been nothing in that box except ones and fives. This morning the other fisherman had paid for his breakfast with another single, while I’d given them a five.

Somebody had come in here and paid for something with that ten, receiving one of the fives in change.
And it had been this morning.
I could feel the hair prickle along the back of my neck.

“Haven’t you got anything smaller than that?” she asked again.

I snapped out of it. She was staring at me curiously.

“Oh, I said. I poked a hand in my pocket and found a quarter. “Here you are. And give me another one while you’re at it. I’m really thirsty.”

I still had my own ten in my hand when she turned to open the refrigerator. It took only a fraction of a second to drop it in the box and pick up the other one. When she swung back around I was putting it in my wallet. I put the quarter on the counter and she gave me a nickel from the box in change, entirely unaware of the switch. There was no reason she should notice it; that stain was so narrow along the end you’d never pay any attention to it unless it had some significance for you. I was wild to examine it, but it’d have to wait. Right now there was something more important.

I sat down on one of the stools and took another drink of the coke. She walked back to where she’d left the broom leaning against the wall near the small window at the end of the room.

I lit a cigarette and swung around on the stool. “Did you ever model clothes?” I asked.

The broom stopped. She turned. “No. Why?.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. The way you walk, perhaps. You never had any training at all?”

She shook her head. Her eyes watched me, but you couldn’t read anything in them. “What made you think I had?”

I gestured with the hand holding the cigarette. “Form. Line. Flow. Call it anything. Look. Walk over to the door and back.”

Her eyes were hard and suspicious at first, and I thought she was going to tell me to go to hell. She didn’t, however. She leaned the broom against the wall and did as I said. I watched her. She’d had some natural grace to begin with, but now it was all broken up and jagged with self-consciousness. Well, I’d make her self-conscious.

“Bring those feet together!” I snapped. “What are you doing, straddling a fence?”

She stopped and gasped.

I didn’t give her a chance to say it. “I
am
sorry, Mrs. Nunn,” I said hurriedly. I smiled, and held up a hand in a mock gesture of defense. “Look, I mean . . . Forgive me, won’t you? It just slipped out. It’s a hard thing to explain. . . .”

“What do you mean?”

I shook my head and smiled at her again. “I’m sorry I barked like that. I didn’t stop to think. But look at it this way: the impact of a minor flaw in anything is intensified in direct proportion to the flawlessness of the rest of it. You understand, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure,” she said.

She wasn’t sure of anything now. Any of them over the age of three can see through flattery the way you can through a pane of glass—when they want to. But they can’t cope with a change of pace. Destroy their frame of reference just once and they never get oriented again, especially if you keep crossing them up.

You could see her deciding things were getting out of hand and that it was time to blow the whistle. “Well!” she said. “I must say you’ve got a nerve.”

When retreat is indicated, attack.
Toujours l’audace.
It can get you many a fat lip, but plenty of times it’ll work, if you know precisely where to stop the offensive. I fastened the slow stare on her, starting at her ankles and going north across the long bare legs and the denim shorts, the sucked-in waist, the curves at the front of her shirt, and finally coming to rest on a white face and a blazing pair of eyes. It was deliberate, and infuriatingly obvious. She drew in a sharp breath.

“Oh,” I said in sudden confusion, as if it had just dawned on me. “Please, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way at all. It was just the reverse, in fact. I was imagining you in an evening gown.”

She circled this warily, looking for a place that wasn’t loaded.

“Women who can wear clothes,” I said, “look so wonderful wearing them.” I stared at her thoughtfully and then went on,

“What’s that?” she asked wonderingly.

“Robert Herrick,” I said. I picked up the other bottle of coke and walked casually over and put it in her hand. She looked up at me a little cautiously, still trying to figure it out. I left her standing there as I strolled over to the screen door and stood gazing idly out at the sun-blasted clearing.

“This is a beautiful place here,” I said.

There was no answer for a moment.
Whoever it was in that car,
I thought, the one I’d heard as I came up to the slip. But maybe there’d been somebody here before that.

“Why . . .?” she asked behind me. “I mean, what was that you meant about my feet?”

“I wish you’d forget that,” I said. “It was nothing, really, and I’m sorry.”

“But why did you say it? Most women walk with their feet about that far apart. Don’t they?”

“That’s right,” I said. “And on most women it doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Why?”

“Because they walk like pack animals to begin with.”

“Oh . . .”

I turned then and grinned at her. “I know you must think I’m crazy. I’m sorry. I didn’t have any right to make personal remarks like that. But it’s just—well, you’re touchy about the things you’re sensitive to, that’s all. I happen to think tall women are very beautiful to look at when they move right, and too few of them do. So meeting one who does is apt to be a little startling. You can put your foot in your mouth before you think, if you’re not careful.”

“Oh.” She thought about it for a moment, and then she said, “Well, it really wasn’t anything to get mad about, anyway. Was it?”

She made no move to return to the sweeping. The sullenness had disappeared; there was something almost pathetically wistful in the way her face was opening up and in the tentative friendliness of her voice.

You’re a dirty son of a bitch, I thought.

Her name was Jewel Tennison before she was married, and she was twenty-four. She had lived all her life in Exeter, the county seat, except for one whole year with an aunt in New Orleans when she was about twelve. Her mother and father were both dead. She had a brother who lived in California, in Barstow. No, the name wasn’t spelled like Lord Tennyson’s. She remembered about him. She’d had him in high school. That was with a “y,” wasn’t it? They’d had a house in Exeter, nearly half paid for, when he lost his job in the sheriff’s department, and they’d sold it and bought this camp. She had also put in twelve hundred dollars her mother had left her. She had been a drum majorette in high school and she missed television out here. They could probably put up high enough an antenna to get the two Sanport channels, but there wasn’t any electricity. She liked
I Love Lucy.

No, she’d never thought about her hands that way. It was awful the way dishwater made them so rough, but she hadn’t paid much attention to the way they were made underneath. Did I really think they were expressive? Where had I learned to notice things like that about women, little things like their hands and the way they walked? Not
that way
about the way they walked—she knew I didn’t mean it like that. It was different, kind of, wasn’t it? Most men just—well, you know.

No, she didn’t like fishing. The fish themselves gave you the creeps. They felt cold, and scaly. You know. And they’d fin you if you didn’t watch out. She swam a little, but there were water moccasins in the lake. She’d played tennis some, in high school, but she didn’t think women should take athletics too seriously. They got muscles. Nobody liked women with muscles. Especially in their legs.

Oh? Well, uh—I mean, thank you. It was funny, wasn’t it, the way I could say things that should make you mad but they didn’t really, somehow. They just didn’t seem fresh, the way I said them. Oh, then maybe that
was
it. Just the way you would admire any other work of art, like a poem, or a symphony? She’d never thought of it that way. But I was just teasing her now, of course.
Work of art!
But it was nice, the way I said things.

She didn’t talk about Nunn. I noticed it. From the depths of that sullenness she was slowly drowning in she was capable of making the crack about “being a trusty,” of making it to a total stranger, but now it was different. It wasn’t an act, really, I thought; when she was talking to somebody who took the trouble to recognize her as a human being, the hard shell of churlishness and defiance softened and she was no longer bound by that Procrustean compulsion to trim all her utterances to fit it. I doubted very much that she was any longer in love with Nunn, but when she was opening her petals this way and feeling good inside she realigned herself with the soap opera dogma that you didn’t discuss your mate with outsiders, no matter what kind of a sad bastard he was.

There was no difficulty in reading between the lines, however. She was dying out here. She was going crazy with loneliness. The trees were closing in over her and burying her alive. She was starved—not love-starved, at least in any physical sense, for you felt Nunn would collect his marital accounts-receivable as they fell due even if he probably did approach the bed with the subtlety and finesse of Machine-gun Kelly looting a bank—but just starved for companionship and understanding and perhaps a little gentleness. One tender gesture, I thought, would buy you a season pass. Not here, probably, and certainly not now in broad daylight, but it could be arranged. However, that was a matter to be shelved for possible future consideration; right now all I was after was information.

No, their business was mostly just fishermen. Some of them came and stayed three or four days, and a few hired George for a guide. The groceries were mostly for people who liked to go on up the lake and camp out for a day or two while they fished, but once in a while they did sell some to the people who lived around in the bottom, mostly when they ran short of something and they didn’t want to make the long trip in to town. Like this morning. One of the Hildebrand boys had driven over for a can of baking powder and some evaporated milk. Yes, just before I came in.

Keep going, honey.

Up on the road out of the bottom, and one of the boys had a dog named Trixie? No, that wasn’t the Hildebrands. Those people were named Sorensen. The Hildebrands weren’t really boys, they were grown men, actually, twins, about twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and meaner than cat’s milk. Their names were Jack and Judson. Judson had been in the penitentiary for cutting a man up in a fight. They lived over on the west side of the lake with their father and they raised ribbon cane that they made syrup out of in the fall, and lots of people thought they made moonshine, too, all the year around. No women at all; neither of the boys was married, and their mother was dead. They did their own cooking, and it was probably pretty bad. Maybe that was what made ‘em so mean. Did they trade here much? No, very little. They didn’t get along very well with George. They went to town every Saturday and the old man made them buy the groceries and put them in the car before they started getting liquored up and looking for a dance where they could start a fight. . . .

The Hildebrands didn’t sound too promising. They wouldn’t have spent as much here as those two twenties, to begin with. And if they’d got hold of a lot of money suddenly in some way, the F.B.I, wouldn’t have had any trouble finding it out long before this. There’d have been a steady stream of it being loosed on the countryside through cat-houses, beer joints, and crap games, not to mention large amounts through fines for disturbing the peace. Granted, one of them
had
been in prison, but where was the connection with Haig? Of course he d been in the sneezer once himself, but that was two thousand miles away in San Quentin.

But who was left? The man who had passed me on the lake? No one else?

The upper end of the lake? Yes, there were a few people living up there, mostly men, but you didn’t see much of them. Except that weird one, of course. And he was gone. But really gone. No, he hadn’t moved away; not that kind of gone. In fact, he was down here this morning. I might have seen him pass in his boat. What she meant was weird gone. You know, not quite right. Oh, he was harmless, and you felt sorry for him, but there just wasn’t any sense trying to talk to him. Yes, he was around a lot. He came down about twice a week after his groceries and his comic books. . . .

Comic books?
I remembered them then. So that was why they were here. Well, you could certainly scratch him. But, God, there must have been somebody else. I went on listening; maybe she would come up with the right one after awhile.

George called him Two-Gun, but his real name was Cliffords. She thought it was Walter Cliffords, or was it Wilbur Cliffords. Well, it didn’t matter, anyway. Even to him. About half the time he thought he was Sergeant Friday and then for a while he’d be Wyatt Earp. When he was Wyatt Earp he wore a big straw sombrero and a gun-belt and holster with a six-shooter. . . . Yes, a real one. George said it was a .36 or a .38 or something about that size. He shot snakes with it. He’d been up there for years, as far as she knew. Used to work for the Southern Pacific, didn’t he, or something like that—anyway, he had a disability pension and he didn’t do anything but hunt and fish all the time, living alone like a hermit, and it was no wonder he was a little, well, you know. It must be a pretty good pension, too, because it was actually a fact he must buy at least twenty or thirty dollars worth of comic books and true detective magazines from them every month, to say nothing about his groceries and the shotgun shells and bullets for the thirty-six to shoot snakes with, and he always paid for everything with a ten or twenty dollar bill. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that with plenty of money to live on that way he’d want to be in town where he could have a television set and civilized people to talk to. . . .