River Girl (22 page)

Instead of waving he was swinging around in the seat with something extended in his hands. I saw the glint, then, of sunlight on steel and recognized it as a rifle, the barrel suddenly foreshortening into nothing as he brought it into line. He was directly behind the boat being towed, and even as I was throwing myself down and back in the awful realization that he was going to shoot, I saw that the second boat was carrying Shevlin.

He shot after I was on the ground and rolling. Mud exploded in my face and then I heard the crack of the rifle almost at the same time because he was so near. Before the sound had even died I was on my feet, knowing somehow that I had to get up and over the bank while he was working the bolt or I would never move from there alive. And then I was in the trees, hurtling zigzag through them while the gun cracked again. They had cut the motors and in another few seconds they would be on the bank themselves and chasing me.

I didn’t know where I ran, or how far. There was just the pain in my chest and the crying sound from my open mouth as it gulped for air, and the only thing my mind could hold was the picture of that long, canvas-wrapped bundle like an old rolled-up rug lying in the bottom of the second boat. After a while I fell, unable to move, and lay there in the brush trying to still the tortured sound of my breathing enough to listen. There was no sound behind me now.

I don't know how long I lay there on the ground with nothing but the numbness and the terror in my mind. We were whipped now, and this was the end. They already had her, and I was trapped. They had found him; they knew I had killed him and I was a fugitive with no plan of escape and nothing ahead but futile and senseless flight. Flight? I thought. To where? I looked down at my clothes, at the utter ruin that I had deliberately sought, and thought of the way I would look if I did get out of the swamp, Bearded, bloody, mud-caked, I wouldn’t have a chance. And if Buford got to me first, he’d kill me. I knew that now. He didn’t want me arrested.

Once, though I was not sure, I thought I heard an outboard motor start, far away across the bottom. One of them would go down the lake to take the body in and get to the telephone. The other three would stay here and keep up the search until they began to pile in here with the dogs sometime late tonight. They’d call in the state police cars and swear in a bunch of special deputies to patrol the roads on both sides of the swamp, and everything moving out there would be searched. And I couldn’t stay in here because in another few hours without food or rest I’d be too weak to move.

And what of her? I thought. What will it be like with her when they bring the news that he’s been found? Or was that how they had found him? Had she broken already and told them? But what difference did it make now how they’d done it? It was done, and we were trapped.

We would have been in San Francisco now…I caught myself up, almost savagely, knowing I had to keep away from that or I’d lose my mind. The sun was setting now, and I wondered if, where she was, she could see even a little reflection of it along a wall. This was what I had done to her. I was going to give her everything, and now this was what it was. I had to get up, to move, to do something to shut it out of my mind. Jumping to my feet, I started walking, aimlessly at first, and then, as some strange compulsion began to take hold of me, swinging south and then west in a large circle back toward the lake.

It was growing darker here in the timber and I began to walk faster. The direction I was going at least made a little sense. Since I was on this side of the lake and they would expect me to run east and try to get out to the railroad and catch a freight, it would be better to move west and get across the lake. Suddenly, then, I knew where I was headed. I had about one chance in a thousand of getting there, but I was going toward Dinah’s. There was no use in trying to get home for some more clothes and a car; they’d be watching the house just on the chance I might try it. But maybe to Dinah’s apartment...I wanted to break into a run.

Just at dusk I came out on the bank of the lake a mile or two below where the boats had been. It was breathtakingly beautiful, like dark glass, with the wall of the trees a black silhouette against the sunset afterglow along the other shore, and as I came up I saw a big, spreading ring where a bass had risen, out among the snags. Often when I had been fishing and left the lake just at dusk like this, full of its immense and lonely quiet, I had wondered what it would be like to know that I would never see it again, and now that I was looking at it for probably the last time I was conscious of nothing except that I did not want to think about it. I walked deliberately out into it, and as the water rose to my waist I started to swim. Halfway across I began to wonder if I would make it, exhausted as I was to the point of collapse and weighted with the shoes and clothes, but somehow I kept going. I fought my way through fifty yards of the entangling pads on the other shore and climbed gasping onto the bank. It was dark now, completely black among the trees.

I had to go straight ahead, but how? Five or six miles due west I would begin to hit the rising ground and the pines, but all the intervening distance was flat, unvarying bottom country full of sloughs and heavily timbered, with no landmarks and only glimpses of the stars. With my back against the lake shore and facing the direction in which I wanted to go, I studied the sky a moment to line up the few constellations I knew, then plunged into the darkness. I lost track of the number of times I fell and the number of sloughs I waded and swam and finally just wallowed through. I bumped into trees and entangled myself in vines, and each time I plunged to the ground it was more difficult to rise again. A dreamy lassitude would begin to flow over me like warm water and I would want to lie there in the hope that if I slept and then awoke the whole horrible dream would be gone and I would open my eyes to find that we were on the plane to San Francisco and were circling over the bay ready to land in the early dawn. Then the terror would come sweeping back and with it the bitter knowledge that if I did not get out of here before daylight I was finished, and I would force myself to rise and go staggering on. By daybreak they would have the dogs in here and I would no longer be able to hide, and of course I couldn’t get across the highway and into town except very late at night, if I could at all.

It was a dream at first, and then a nightmare, and at last an eternal and monotonous black hell without fires or light where I was doomed to go staggering forward and forever falling. After a while I began to believe I was losing my mind, because for long periods she would be moving along beside me. Once I turned and called her name aloud. The sudden sound of my voice in the silence of the forest shocked me into consciousness of what I had done, and terror took hold of me again and I thought for a moment I would cry out and run.

Time had no meaning now. It might have been an hour since I had left the lake and it might have been five. I could have covered four miles, or I could be walking in circles and be almost back there again. But then, suddenly, when I fell again I felt the dry, aromatic slickness of pine needles under my face and threw my hands about wildly, grasping at them. I had come out of the bottom and was beginning to mount the ridge.

An almost insane urgency took hold of me and I wanted to run. I had come this far, across that black maze of bottom, and suppose now that daylight should catch me before I got to Dinah’s? The difficult part, the almost impossible part, lay behind, but ahead was all the danger. I had to get into town, where everybody knew me, and being seen by anyone would mean disaster. After I got up on the ridge in the fairly open pines I could make better time, and before long I began to see the winking of lights below me and knew I had reached the highway. I turned and plunged downhill.

What time was it? That was the only thing in my mind now. I still had nearly four miles to go to get into town, and then I had to get around it, skirting the back streets and alleys, and if daybreak caught me I was done for. There were very few cars on the road now and I took a chance on walking along the pavement, rather than out in the trees, to make better time. When I would see a car ahead or behind I would run into the roadside bushes and hide until it had gone past. Then I would come back out onto the road, feeling the urgency driving me, and start hurrying again, trotting and then walking and then trotting, my legs numb and without any feeling now that they were even mine. I had been walking for so long I couldn’t stop. I had the insane feeling that if I fell down and went to sleep my legs would keep right on moving because I no longer knew how to turn them off.

I turned and looked behind me, toward the east, searching for the telltale fading, the beginning of the coral flush I had watched so many times from duck blinds and fishing boats. It was still as dark as ever there, but even the thought of dawn drove me forward desperately. A car topped the slight rise ahead and the sudden, searching lights were almost upon me before I could run and plunge down off the road. I’ve got to get there first; I’ve got to beat the daylight. It ran through my mind in a sort of endless chant I couldn’t turn off any more than I could the walking movement of my legs. A gun, a car, these were the things I had to have. She had a whole roomful of guns and the fastest car in town.

The old familiar streets were quiet, the street lamps at the corners the only pools of light. I swung left, keeping to the outskirts and slipping along the alley, feeling my skin crawl and prickle with sudden cold at the barking of a dog or the sound of a car somewhere on another street. I wanted to run. I was naked, skinless, a light-tortured organism fleeing toward the dark. It was less than a dozen blocks now. Ten more. Nine. I wanted to stop counting them and couldn’t. At any one of them a car might swing around a corner, its lights flashing.…

I cut through one more alley and I was on Georgia Street and broke into a run. The windows of her apartment were dark. Suppose she wasn’t there? She must be. She had to be. She was home when I telephoned this afternoon. No, that was yesterday. It wasn’t even yesterday—it was the day before, because now it was almost dawn on Sunday. I ran up the walk and pressed the bell, waiting, listening for the sound of movement or of footsteps and hearing only the pounding of blood in my ears.

I pushed the bell again, and then I heard it. Someone was coming quietly down the stairs. The door opened a crack, there was a sharp gasp, and then she was throwing it back and reaching out for me. She led me hurriedly up the dark stairway, still holding me by the arm. There was light in the hallway, coming from the open bedroom door, and now she turned and stared at me, seeing the sodden ruin of my clothing and the blood across my face.

“Jack!” she whispered frantically. “Jack! What have they done to you?”

She had on her nightgown and robe and the coppery hair was tousled from the pillow, but I could see she hadn’t been asleep. “Thank God you’ve come. I’ve been praying…I’ve been praying all night! Ever since I heard. But you’ve been hurt!”

“No,” I said. “It’s nothing. I fell.” I swayed and almost fell now, and leaned against the wall. The whole apartment seemed to be swinging in that big whirlpool which had caught me and I wanted to hold onto something.

Then she had hold of me again, towing me down the hall. We were in the bathroom and she was tugging at my coat and then unlacing the mud-caked shoes. “Well leave them right here,” she was saying. “Right here where he’ll see them and know. I want him to know, damn him.” What was she talking about? I wanted to ask her what time it was, but she was busy at the shirt and I was too numb for thought. Then I could hear the shower blasting and she was shoving me into it. I was naked, and it had never occurred to me, and probably not to her, that there was anything odd about her undressing me and pushing me into the streaming water.

“Hot,” she said. “As hot as you can stand it, and then cold.” The water beat down and I could feel the dirt and caked blood and sweat going away and my nerves unwinding, and then I was conscious that she had disappeared. She was back in a minute, holding a glass in her hand. “Drink this,” she said. She turned her head as I stepped from under the water. I took the glass and drained it in three large swallows. It burned going down and exploded into warmth and life in my empty stomach.

I had turned off the water and was rubbing myself with a towel. She returned in a minute and handed me a pair of shorts around the partition of the shower stall. “When you get them on, come outside and we’ll get the other things.”

I slipped them on and went out and looked at my face in the mirror as at somebody I’d never seen before. It was haggard and sunken-cheeked, black with beard, and the cut place on my head was ugly, inflamed and still encrusted with clotted blood. I went into the bedroom and she was taking clothes out of a suitcase on the bed. “They’re his,” she said. “He keeps this bag here for trips to the city.”

Then she was gone again. I couldn’t keep up with her. I heard something rattling in the kitchen and then she came back for me once more, while I was putting on the shoes. She had me by the arm and was seating me at the table. While I was eating the piece of cold steak and drinking the milk she pulled up a chair and sat down, not across from me but just around the corner of the table at my left. She had her hand on my wrist and was talking, very fast.

Her voice was quiet, but still full of that tremendous urgency which seemed to have hold of her now as well as of me. “I’ve done nothing but think about it since I heard the news, about nine o’clock. Just think about it, and pray you’d come, that you could get here. And now you have!”

“Wait,” I interrupted. What was she talking about? And through all the numbness I was conscious there was something I had to know. “How did they find him? How did they know?”

“Find him? Oh. All I heard was what was on the radio. Something about an outboard motor they couldn’t find. He was supposed to be repairing it for the man down there at the store, and it wasn’t there. So they got to thinking about some oil that was on the lake.”

I guess it doesn’t matter now, I thought. There wasn’t any way I could have known the motor wasn’t his. It just wasn’t meant to be. That had ruined it, that and not seeing the picture of her sitting there in front of my face, but what good was there in torturing myself with it now?

Dinah was still going on, her eyes shining, touching me with her fingers. The white, gleaming kitchen and this lovely copper-haired figurine of a girl with her unstoppable torrent of speech were all mixed up now in the endless movement of the whirlpool. What was she talking about?

“I even went down and had the car serviced and filled with gasoline. We won’t have to stop at all for over two hundred miles. My clothes are packed and I’ve got over two thousand dollars in cash in my bag, and I took the money out of your wet suit, too. We’ll leave your old wet clothes right there where he’ll see them, and the muddy shoes, and he’ll know. Don’t you see, Jack? He can’t say anything, or tell anybody. He’ll know you’re gone and that I’ve gone with you and he can’t do anything about it and he’ll have to cover up for us, because he’s afraid to have you arrested. He was going to try to kill you in that swamp if you came back. And I would have killed him, if he had. And now you’re here and we can go, and he’s still down there looking for you.”

I began to get it, even through the numbness in my mind.