Big City Girl (11 page)

The danger in the river bottom could wait no longer. Mitch left them and ran through the back yard, grabbing up a shovel as he went. He was getting nowhere here, and this would have to wait now.

By the time he reached the bottom the river had overflowed into the low ground where the old channel had been. It was backed up half knee-deep against the levee on the upper side of the field and still rising. There was no current here; that was beyond, where the river made its wide bend, pushing water out over the bottom. But if it got high enough to take the levee out, there would be current, a small river of it going out across the field, knocking the cotton down under the piled driftwood and silt and leaving absolute ruin.

It lay still and dark like an overflowed lake out among the trees beyond the fence, the surface quiet except for the pockmarks of the rain. He had not been a moment too soon. Even as he came out into the field he heard a gurgle of water behind him, and turned swiftly to see it boiling up springlike out of an old gopher hole in the cotton rows six feet behind the levee. Running along the top, he peered down at the water line on the upper side until he found it, a small sucking whirlpool disappearing into the ground. He sprang back and began throwing dirt onto the whirlpool until it stopped, then jumped in to pack it down with his feet. Those small holes could be dangerous.

The old levee had been there for seven years and he knew it was crisscrossed and undermined with gopher runs and the burrowings of moles. As the level of the water rose on the other side it would find them and start pouring through, cutting larger and larger with every minute. And there were low places that needed building up, trails worn across by the passing feet of seven years of going to and from the field. He swung the shovel, oblivious of the rain and the passage of time, going up and down the levee building up the low spots and weak places and watching for leaks. The raincoat was too awkward to work in, so he took it off and threw it on the ground, and in a few minutes he was soaked. The waterlogged old straw hat sagged in front of his face, making it difficult for him to see, and he yanked it off and threw it after the coat.

There would be no help, and he expected none. Cass was beyond helping or being helped. It was not so much the physical disability of what had apparently become a permanent affliction of “the miseries” in his legs as it was his almost complete withdrawal from reality. It ain’t like he was even here any more, Mitch thought. It’s more like he wasn’t just sitting in front of that radio now waiting for it to come out to him, but was trying to get in there where it was. He don’t like this world no more because you get beat up so damn much in it, so he’s finding himself another one.

And all the while, below the dark and violent surface of the battle against the river and a disaster that could be recognized as such and fought against with weapons he could hold in his hands, there ran the apprehensive undercurrent of his fear for Jessie. She can’t go away with that no-good slut, he thought. She just can’t. She’d be safer with a rattlesnake. She’d be better off dead. He wanted to throw the shovel down and run all the way to the house and tell her, make her understand. But how? Hadn’t he just told her? And what good had it done? He’d just made it worse.

He couldn’t leave the river, anyway. Water was still piling up beyond the levee, waiting with its dark treachery to find some small leak the moment his back was turned. A trickle somewhere, untended, could take the whole thing out in a matter of minutes, and they would lose the crop. He stood up for a minute with his yellow hair plastered down to his skull by the rain, his face harsh and implacable, and cursed it all, the river, the water above the levee, and the rain. And damn her too, he thought.

The river wanted the crop, and Joy was going to take Jessie away. You could fight the river with a shovel, or with your bare hands if you had to, but what could you fight Joy with? Where did you start? Or was it too late now even to think of starting? God knows Jessie would be better off somewhere else, he thought, away from this long-gone, share-cropping, hungry-gut ruin of a farm that the old man’s let dribble through his fingers, somewhere where she could go to school and have decent clothes like other girls her age, but that wasn’t with Joy. It wouldn’t ever be with that conscienceless and unprincipled round-heeled bitch if he could help it, not with Jessie idolizing her that way and copying everything she did.

What does she want Jessie to go with her for, anyway? he thought, attacking a leak in the levee with bitter fury. You can tell by looking at her she don’t care anything about anybody but herself, and never did, lt just don’t make sense to me that she’d want to be saddled with a fifteen-year-old country girl that hadn’t even been nowhere. The way she looked at me once there in the swing, you almost got an idea of what she was driving at. It was me. She wanted to do something to me. Well, she is, but it ain’t over yet. If she’s got it in for me, she’s perfectly welcome to take it out on
me
any way she can or wants to, but she ain’t going to take it out on Jessie. God knows, the kid never had much chance to grow up like a girl, as it was, with no mother after she was a year old and only a couple of hard-tailed and knot-headed brothers to look after her while the old man wandered around in a cloud and hardly even noticed whether she was a boy or a girl, but she’s going to have what little chance there is.

But how do you go about it? he thought, full of a gray and hopeless rage. Ordering Jessie to stay here and telling her she ain’t going won’t do any good. She’s got a mind of her own, and I can’t keep her tied up. So far, I’ve just balled things up worse. When I lost my head there on the porch and slapped her damned leg off me, I just made a worse mess out of things. I reckon that was just what she was trying to get me to do and I walked right into it. So now Jessie thinks I was trying to beat her up. Something like that would make a big hit with Jessie, too.

He did not even see Cass until the old man was almost upon him, hurrying down the hill in an old greenish-black felt hat and a useless raincoat ripped up one side almost to the armpit. When he heard the shouts he straightened up and turned around, watching while his father motioned with his arm and yelled again.

“What is it?” he shouted back, throwing another shovelful of dirt on a low spot on the levee. For a man who’s so stove up in the legs he can’t get around, he thought, he’s making pretty good time.

“It’s Sewell,” Cass shouted, reaching the upper end of the levee and puffing on through the rain atop it like a man walking a log. Goddamnit, Mitch thought, does he have to walk up there and tear it down as fast as I get it built up?

Then it hit him. It was as if the levee and the rising water and the desperate urgency of holding up this straining bulwark against disaster, together with the somber and uneasy dread in his thoughts of Jessie, had occupied every corner of his mind to the extent that there was no room for anything else, and it took time for any other idea to filter in and find room for itself.

“Sewell?” he demanded. He stuck the shovel in the ground and looked at his father. “What about Sewell?”

Cass could not come to rest. He slid down off the top of the levee and continued walking up and down past him, holding his hand over his heart and breathing with the difficulty of a wind-broken horse. Taking an old bandanna out of his overalls pocket, he dabbed at his eyes and blew his nose, and then bent over again with his hand over his heart.

“It’s Sewell,” he panted, holding out one arm to point toward the river. “Just come over the radio.”

“What just come over the radio?”, Mitch asked furiously. What’d he come all the way down here for if ain’t going to make no more sense than that?

”He’s in the river. Out yonder in the river somewheres,” the older man gasped, beginning now to get some of his breath back. “He had a fight with the shurf’s men up at the highway bridge and he’s in the river.”

“Well, what in hell is he doing in the river?” Mitch burst out. “Is he shot? Did he fall in? How do they know he’s in it?”

“I’m trying to tell you, as fast as I get my breath, that’s where he is,” Cass rushed on, for some reason still pointing out toward the river as if to keep this incredible fact established. “Three, lour hours ago, along about daylight. They was chasing him in a car and he ran into a whole passel of the shurf’s men on the highway bridge, and they penned him up there where he couldn’t get away in the car, and then there was a gun fight and they shot him once with a rifle, but he jumped off the bridge into the river and every time he’d come up they was ashooting at him.”

“Well, where is he now?” Mitch asked savagely. “What’s the rest of it?”

“He’s in the river somewheres. That’s what I been telling you.”

“Did they hit him? Or did he get away?” Ain’t there any way, he thought, that I can get it out of him?

“That’s what they don’t, know for sure,” Cass said, having to take down the frozen, pointing arm to get the handkerchief out of his pocket again. He put it up to his eyes and started shaking his head from side to side. “They don’t know what happened, because they shot three or four times while he was going down the river, every time his head would come up for air, and the last time they shot just as he was going under and they never did see him come up no more. They went down the river for a mile, looking. The man on the radio said there wasn’t no way he could have come out, because there was a bunch of ‘em on both sides of the river and they never did even see his head come up no more after the last shot. He’s been shot, or drowned in the river.”

Mitch stood quietly in the rain, holding onto the shovel handle and looking down at his feet in the mud. I been trying to tell him for a long time, he thought, that sooner or later he was going to hear something on that damned radio he didn’t want to hear.

Cass began walking back and forth again. “Well, come on, Mitch. Gather up your stuff and let’s go,” he said wildly.

Mitch stared at him. “Go where?” he asked.

Cass stopped pacing and looked at him blankly, like a bewildered and sodden-hatted kewpie doll left out in the rain.

“Where?” he asked.

“Where? Well, surely you ain’t going to stay down here in the field. Don’t you understand what I been saying? Sewell’s in the river. He’s been shot. You can’t just stay down here and not do nothing.”

“Just what do you expect me to do?” Mitch asked.

“Do? Why—why—” Cass said incredulously, “why, come up to the house. Listen to the radio. To the news.” It was as if the whole course had been perfectly clear in his mind until Mitch had begun asking his stupid questions, and then he had to cast about for the answer himself.

Mitch began to comprehend some of it then. Sewell’s been shot on the radio, he thought. He’s in this river down here, but it’s actually the radio river, or he can’t make up his mind which it is, and they’re hunting for him on the radio, and there can’t none of it really happen anywhere except on the radio. He can’t make up his mind whether it’s really Sewell they’re looking for or whether it’s a radio game called Sewell Neely.

“What do I want to listen to the news for?” he asked quietly.

“Why,” Cass sputtered, “to find out what’s happened. To see if he’s been—been—”

“And what,” Mitch asked slowly, “do I do after I find out?”

“Ain’t you going to do anything? Anything a-tall?” Cass cried out piteously.

“Yes,” Mitch replied, still speaking quietly. “I’m going to keep on piling dirt on this levee. You see that water over there?” He pointed with the shovel. Just three or four inches below the top of the levee in places now, it waited, poised, straining, and heavy, the dark surface of it quiet except for the dimpling of the rain. “You know what’s going to happen to that cotton back there if it goes out?”

“Cotton?” Cass repeated blankly. “Cotton? Don’t you understand, Mitch? Ain’t I telling you? Sewell’s shot. Won’t you listen? He’s shot. In the river.”

As he swung his head to look at the cotton whose existence he did not even recognize, water sprayed off the brim of the old greenish-black hat. Reaching up, he removed it and took it in his two hands and began wringing it out as naturally and as unconsciously as some pixie-like old crone of a charwoman wringing out a mop. A discolored stream of water sprayed across his feet.

He began to cry, still twisting the hat. In a moment he unwound it and put a hand inside the crown to open it up again, and then placed it, misshapen and crosswise, upon his head. Mitch heard the sudden gurgle of water and turned to see a small stream gushing from another gopher hole in the levee. Snatching at the shovel handle, he leaped toward it and began throwing dirt across onto the front face of it until it stopped.

Cass bounded after him, bandy-legged, weeping, importunate. “I been bereft,” he cried. “I been berefted by everybody. One of my boys is killed in the river and the other one’s so hardhearted he don’t even care. It’s a judgment. It’s a judgment on me.”

Mitch stopped the fury of his shoveling and turned, a savage impatience in his face, and started to lash out at him to go on back to the house, but he bit the words off and his expression softened as he looked at the hopeless ruin of the man, the futile eyes wet with tears and the faded doll’s face, too weak even for tragedy, lost, hopeless, uncomprehending, under the grotesquely comic misshapen hat. It’s all mixed up for him, he thought. It should have stayed on the radio. As long as it was all on the radio, it was a Sewell Neely game and they gave five hundred dollars to whoever guessed the answer, but now part of it’s got away from him and it’s his own boy that’s lying on the bottom of the river, or at least part of the time it is, and he don’t know what to do about it.

“You go on back to the house, Dad,” he said gently. “Just listen to the radio and wait. That’s all you can do. I’ve got to get to work.”

“It’s the sin of the world,” Cass cried out. “Hard-heartedness is the sin of the world.” He turned away and started to run, going toward the river. One hand came up to clasp the brim of the obscenely comic hat as if a sudden gale had sprung up and he had to hold onto this last of his earthly possessions to keep it from blowing away. Discovering after a dozen bounds that he was going in the wrong direction, he stopped and wheeled about, and then came back, charging past Mitch, unseeing, oblivious, head bent forward as if into a gale and still holding onto the hat. Then he was gone, running up the hill into the edge of the timber, going toward the house.

Mitch looked after him for a moment, then bent to the shovel again.

Noon came and went with the sodden drumming of rain while he fought the rising water with the shovel like some lost soul before the fuel piles of hell. He stopped endless gopher holes and built up all the low places, and then started across building the whole levee higher. When he had gone the full length of it he started back again, still piling up more dirt. Now and then he would stop for a moment to catch his breath and stare bleakly at the water, still rising, but more slowly now beyond the levee. His fingers would be stiff and curved into the form of the shovel handle and would ache when he straightened them. And whenever he paused like this, even for a few seconds, his eyes, after sweeping across the threatening and precariously held wall of water beyond him, would start to swing outward toward the river while his mind turned uncontrollably to the picture of Sewell lying somewhere on its bottom with his face in the mud and the flood rolling over him. It ain’t going to do no good to cry about it, he would think, and I
can
maybe do some good here. He would tear himself away from it and go back to the endless scoop, lift, and swing of the shovel.

After a while the searchers came down the hill and passed him, going into the bottom, two at first, then one, and later on two more, white-hatted, black-slickered, carrying rifles in the crooks of their arms, and he cursed them bitterly and went on with the work. They would ask the same unvarying, inevitable, and stupid questions and listen without violence—knowing who he was—while he cursed them. He could think of no reason for his bitterness and the bleak-faced tirade of curses other than that they were looking for the dead body of his brother, either for the five-hundred-dollar reward or because they were officers of the law and paid to do it. Maybe, he thought, I’m going crazy too.

Possibly, though, it was because at last they were men, like himself, and capable of accepting and returning violence on a reciprocal plane no higher and no lower than his own, and he wanted to fight them if they would. He had been struggling too long, infuriated, raging, and impotent, against the unconquerable and the intangible, trying to come to grips with and defend himself against an unbeatable and overwhelming river, a half-demented old man, and a bitch.

In the dismal rain of afternoon the straining levee held, while the water grew and waited.

For no other reason than that you went on living until you had to die, you went on walking until you had to fall for the last time. There was no sense to it; it was utterly without reason. A thousand miles back the world consisted of nausea and retching sickness, unnumbered incalculable millions of identical wet, black, pain-distorted tree trunks, a knee-deep highway of leaf-surfaced unmoving dirty water, and the eternal gray dreariness of rain, and a thousand miles ahead it would be exactly the same. You could fall for the last time here in this spot, or you could stagger on through this agonized and unvarying hell for another mile, and the difference in distance and time would be no more discernible here than the same mile and the same elapsed period of time measured, after you dropped, against all infinity and eternity.

Some critical and still lucid portion of Sewell’s mind examined this phenomenon with curiosity. I was born and raised in this bottom, he thought, and I lived in it for twenty-one years, fishing for catfish and white perch and hunting coons in it, and I know every bit of it, but now it all looks the same. Maybe I’m already dead and don’t know it. Maybe this is hell and I’ll see Harve again and can wait here for Joy. Maybe it’s just that everything looks funny now because of the poison, or the pain. I never knew pin oaks and white oaks to look like that before, all the same and all black, and swollen up like that.

Here’s your picture, I’d have said, Harve don’t need it no more, and maybe when you think about it I reckon he never did because what do you need the picture for if you’ve got the bitch it was took of? It’s too bad you won’t be around long enough to give it to somebody else, which was Harve’s trouble too, but anyway, when they come in here after you begin to stink, and find it stuck in your mouth like that, they can pass it around and show it to their friends, if they got friends. And they ought to have lots of friends, with a picture like that. I guess you made a lot of ‘em with it, and got made by ‘em, till you run into Harve’s trouble. Anyway, you still got both hands, and a picture in your mouth, which is more than Harve’s got.

What the hell am I muttering about? he thought, his mind becoming clear again. I sound like some high-school punk telling what he’d have done if he’d caught up with the other guy. I didn’t find her. I had a whole week and I didn’t find her, so why go on about it? Forget it. Maybe I’d like to have a boat to go down the river in, one of them shiny glassed-in ones like I used to see in Galveston with a guy in a white coat going around serving drinks. I got as much chance of that as I have now of finding her, so why don’t I wish for it too?

The hand and the wrist were badly swollen and darkened now, and he supposed the whole arm was too, but there was no way he could tell inside the coat sleeve. The arm was very painful, and would bend only with difficulty, and it seemed to be swelling out against the sleeve like an inflated inner tube inside a tire. The left arm was growing stiff from the flesh wound through the muscle of the forearm, and the shock had worn off now, leaving it excruciatingly painful. Periodically, the awful chills would sweep over him and leave him drenched in a cold and clammy perspiration, while his heart fluttered like a bird’s. But it was the falling that was worst. Suddenly and without warning he would find the whole river bottom tilting on end and flying up at him like the opening of a cellar door, and he would be wallowing in the muddy and leaf-congested water struggling to rise. After a passage of time that he was never able even to estimate, he would be back on his feet and staggering on. There’ll be one of ‘em pretty soon, he thought, when I won’t get up.

Then he was on the beach at Galveston again with Joy, on their honeymoon, when she still thought he was a big-shot gambler and not a cheap purveyor of hired and professional violence. He would feel the great sea wind blowing and hear the booming of the surf at night, with his face in the fragrant loveliness of her hair.

I wonder if I’ve passed the farm yet, he thought. I seem to be on that side of the river and it’s funny I wouldn’t have recognized it if I’d gone by. Well, it don’t make no difference. I wouldn’t stop there.

Here’s your picture. And this other thing’s a gun. You ought to recognize a gun, but maybe you never saw that end of one before.