Big City Girl — 23
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.”
Big City Girl — 24
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, widemouthed
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
Big City Girl — 25
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.
Big City Girl — 26
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
Big City Girl — 27
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 had 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.
* * *
Big City Girl — 28
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
Big City Girl — 29
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
Big City Girl — 30
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
Big City Girl — 31
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 really
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
Big City Girl — 32
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 agelong
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.
Big City Girl — 33
Five
Mitch lay on his narrow cot in the shed behind the
house and listened to the slow drip of water from the
eaves. The violent downpour of that afternoon was
gone but at dark the sky had been sullen and heavy,
with weeping drizzle that might go on for days.
It was a hot night in spite of the rain, and he lay
there sweating in just his underwear, with no cover
over him thinking of Sewell and of the crop they were
going to lose if it didn’t stop raining, and trying to
think of Joy without seeing her, which he had found
out some time ago was not easy to do. It was a job
that could have been accomplished easily enough by
another woman, this clinical probing into the
troublemaking potentialities of the inner Joy without
being disturbed by the body the lived in, but for a
man twenty-three and too long woman-less it was
almost impossible to achieve. The problem itself was
simple enough. In his opinion she was a tramp and he
couldn’t see how Sewell had married her in the first
place—forgetting, illogically, Sewell’s own flagrant
contempt for morality—but he had, and there it was.
You could see she was a bad influence on Jessie and
she was going to cause trouble with those Jimerson
boys, especially with Cal, if she didn’t quit waving it
at them like that, because there would be trouble and
Big City Girl — 34
plenty of it before there’d be any dogs sniffing after a
hot bitch around the Neely place with Jessie taking it
all in. All that was simple and easy to understand, but
what were you going to do about the fact that you
couldn’t think about it without seeing her and you
didn’t want to see her when you were lying there
alone in the hot darkness with the ache in you. The
mind possessed the ability to sort the accessible and
the inaccessible into two clearly defined and neatly
labeled little pastures with the insurmountable
boundary fence running down between them, and to
illuminate all this neatness and happy segregation
with the clear, bright light of reason, but the sad fact
always remained that this helpful light never
extended any farther south in a man than the bottom
side of his brain, and from there on down the rest of
him was operating in a gorged and distorted sort of
wine-colored twilight where one luscious and longlegged
bitch sticking too far and too tantalizingly out
of a sun suit looked just like any other bitch doing the
same thing.
She could have gone somewhere else, he thought,
driving her off in the darkness. Why in hell did she
have to come here?
He heard running footsteps spatting on the rainpacked
sand of the yard, and a white wraith appeared
n the doorway.
“Mitch,” it whispered. “Are you asleep, Mitch?”
“What’s the matter, Jessie?” he asked. “Come
inside. You’ll get wet there in the door.”
He sat up on the cot and moved his tobacco off the
box and pushed the box out for her to sit on. She
located it with her hands and sat down. He rolled a
cigarette and raked a match across the bottom of the
cot. It flared, and he could see her sitting up very
straight on the box, with her hands folded in her lap,
the long shapeless sack of a muslin nightgown coming
down to her unlaced shoes and her brown hair
tousled and damp with the rain. She looked like a
solemn and somewhat frightened child, and she had
been crying.
Big City Girl — 35
“He was Sewell’s dog, Mitch,” she said defiantly.
“Yes,” he said. Damn Sewell. Damn the old man.
Damn me because I can’t help her.
“He can’t sell old Mexico. You won’t let him, will
you, Mitch?”
“How can you stop him? You know how he is.”
“Can’t you just tell him no?”
Can you say no to the river with a minnow seine?
Mitch thought. Can you hold water in a basket? Water
is soft and wishy-washy and it don’t fight back, but
while you’re holding it in one place it’ll get away from
you somewhere else. It’ll be the same way it was
about that last car. We argued with him till we were
blue in face and he says yes, yes, it’d take some
thought, can’t rush into nothing, reckon we really
can’t afford to buy no car, sliding away from you like
water all the time, and then he goes and spends every
cent of the money on a broken-down bunch of junk
that don’t run a month.
“He’s going to the pen, Mitch. All his life he’ll in the
pen, and now we won’t even have Mexico.” She began
crying very quietly in the darkness and Mitch reached
out and took hold of her hands, feeling awkward and
foolish because she was his sister and raging inside
because there was nothing he could do.
She quit after a while because she wasn’t much
given to crying and because she realized she was just
making Mitch feel worse.
“Do you think he did it. Mitch?”
“Did what?” he asked.
“All those horrible things they said he did. Do you
think it’s true? You knew him better than anybody
else. Do you think he held up people and shot at the
police and beat up people for gamblers? What do
gamblers want people beat up for? And if they had to,
why didn’t they do it themselves and not get Sewell
mixed up in it? Do you think he did those things?”
“Yes,” he said. She’d know it if I tried to lie to her,
he thought.
“But why? Why, Mitch?”
Big City Girl — 36
“Jessie, I don’t know.”
“He used to make wagons for me. At Christmas.
With wheels sawed off the end of a round sweet-gum
log.”
I reckon an argument like that wouldn’t hold up in
court, he thought, but it would take a long time to
explain to her why it wouldn’t.
“Do you remember the wagons, Mitch?”
“Yes,” he said, dropping the cigarette on the ground
and looking down at the red coal. “I remember.”
“And the rawhide harness he made for Mexico to
pull the wagon with? That was just one year. I was too
big the next year for Mexico to pull me.”
It’s fine, Mitch thought, when you’re as tough as
Sewell and they can’t hurt you. Sewell’s so stinking
tough nobody can hurt him.
* * *
After Jessie had gone out Joy lay on her back in the
dark room in her bed, across from the small one
Jessie slept in, and wondered if it was going to
happen again tonight. For some time, and especially
the past few weeks, she had had trouble in the dark.
It would begin with the gradual appearance before
her, whether her eyes were open or closed, of a bust
of herself something like the one there had been in
the high-school library of Shakespeare or maybe it
was Daniel Webster or some other famous writer,
except that it was unclothed and somewhat more
comprehensive as to detail below the neckline and a
little longer to include a full view of her breasts. Then
the horrifying part of it would start. It wouldn’t
matter that she had looked at herself, or this much of
herself, quite searchingly and thoroughly in the
mirror not an hour ago, just before she went to bed. It
would still happen. The breasts would be leathery and
sagging, and her face would be lined, not really
wrinkled like that of an old, old woman, but just
faintly tracked across by time, like the face of a
woman in her late thirties or forties in too strong a
light. It would be the same face, there would be no
Big City Girl — 37
mistaking that, with the little brown beauty mark of a
mole just beyond the corner of the slightly pouting
red-lipped mouth, but there would be now the
revealing evidences that flesh has weight and can fall,
and the skin would be coarser and all the pathetic
camouflage of make-up would not be able to hide
entirely the pitiless erosion of the years. Then would
begin the panicky urge to fly from the bed and turn
on the light to look in the mirror and drive it away.
She would lie perfectly still and try not to think about
the mirror, the way a man with bladder trouble would
try not to think of the bathroom so far away down the
hall. It’s not true, she would tell herself. There’s no
sign of it. And then she would start to hear again the
brutal laughter of Sewell there in the jail.
Three years ago he wouldn’t have done that, she
thought. Not even two years ago. I could have
anything I wanted then. God, do you suppose I’ve lost
that much of it in three years? I couldn’t have. I can’t
tell any difference at all when I look in the mirror. I
look just the same. I do. I know I do. I had a picture of
myself then an held it up alongside the mirror, they’d
look just alike.
Didn’t that man in the bus station try to pick me up
when I asked him how to get out here? Didn’t he get
that old look in his face and offer to drive me out? Oh,
hell, he was forty-five, and one of those small-town
smart alecks that’ll make a pass at anything that’s
alive as long as ain’t his own wile. The wheezy old
bastard, smelling like tobacco juice. Then making me
walk the last hall mile.
But there was that deputy sheriff up there where
Sewell was in jail, the one named Harve. He wasn’t
even married and he didn’t seem to think I was any
old relic. He was a great kidder and a lot of fun to go
out with and he could make a girl feel like somebody
still wanted her, even if he did have that funny habit
of laughing sometimes when nobody had said
anything. And that photographer from the Houston
paper who came up to take pictures of the trial and
wanted me to pose without any clothes on for his
private collection. I guess he thought I still looked all
Big City Girl — 38
right, because who ever heard of collecting pictures
of old bags? I guess he knew a good-looking girl when
he saw one, even if he was a kind of screwy sort of
stew bum and said things that didn’t make sense, like
calling me Narcissus all the time like that was my
name. Narcissus. That does have a cute sound. He
was cute, too, in a way, even if he was a stew bum.
He never wanted anything except to take pictures of
me like an artist’s model, and I liked that. Men are so
damn messy and rough, always wanting to go to bed
with you. But he was nice. It was a cute picture, too,
and I wish I’d kept it, the copy he gave me, but Harve
wanted it so bad I just had to give it to him.
I haven’t changed a bit. I just worry too much,
being stranded in a dump like this without any money
and not knowing how I’ll ever get out of it. Imagine,
thinking I’m beginning to look faded and washed out
when I’m only twenty-five. That’s a laugh. I don’t
know why I get to imagining these things. Why, right
now, as much as I detest him, if I even just smiled at
Mitch he’d be pestering me all the time. God knows, I
wouldn’t have him on a bet, but if I gave him any
encouragement he’d be following me around like an
old dog. Him and his stuck-up airs, pretending to look
right past me like I wasn’t even there and acting like
he thought I wasn’t good enough to be around that
kid when all I’d have to do would be to crook my little
finger at him and he’d be hanging around till I’d get
sick of the sight of him. I’d do it, too, if it was worth
the trouble.
* * *
It was sometime after midnight when Sewell Neely
came up the steep, slippery incline of the road bed
and onto the pavement. Rain was still coming down
and every thread of his clothing had been saturated
and drowned for hours. Water ran out of his hair, and
sloshed in his shoes when he walked, and ran into and
stung the ugly cut on his arm where the glass had
raked it. Harve’s gun was a comforting, hard weight
in his coat pocket, and the handcuffs dangled from his
Big City Girl — 39
right arm. They were still locked, but the other cuff
was empty.
I wouldn’t never want to do it again, he thought.
But there wasn’t any other way. In the movies they
open locks with guns, but I don’t think these here are
movie hand-cuff’s and I’ve often wondered where all
that hot lead goes when it splatters off of steel locks.
But if it had to be done, I’m glad it was Harve.
Nobody ever appreciated a good joke like Harve did,
and he’s got one now that’ll stay with him. He was a
great clown, all right, even if most of his ideas was
old before he ever heard of ‘em, all except that one
with the picture. That was a pretty good one, and
Harve was just the boy that could help you along with
it.
He turned right and started walking in the direction
the car had been traveling when it crashed. When he
reached the middle of the long bridge and could hear
the river going by down below, he took the knife out
of his pocket and threw it as far as he could into the
darkness.
Big City Girl — 40
Six
The rain had stopped sometime during the night and
dawn had been gray with mist coming up from the
river and hanging wet and dripping among the pines
along the hillside. It was midmorning now as Mitch
came up toward the house from an inspection of the
fields, anxiously watching the sky for some sign that
the sun was going to break through. If it cleared now
it would be two days before they could work in the
upper fields and nearly a week before the bottom was
dry enough to plow.
He came up past the barn and turned the mules out
to pasture, thinking impatiently of all the work that
cried out to be done if they were to save the crop and
could not be started until the ground began to dry. If
it rains any more we’re goners, he thought. It’s got to
stop. We won’t even pay off the credit and we’ll be
rooting for acorns like the hogs this winter if it keeps
on. He cut across the yard, walking silently on the
white, hard, rain-packed sand, and nodded a solemn
greeting to Mexico as the big hound came out from
under the house. Mexico approached him with the
stately dignity of age and high rank and shoved a
moist black nose against his palm in courtly
salutation.
Big City Girl — 41
Mitch gave the pendulous chops an affectionate
slap with his hand and went on toward the house,
hearing now the excited rattle of voices somewhere
out in front.. He turned and started around the corner
and was hit a glancing blow by Jessie, running full tilt
along the side of the house. She bounced off him,
frozen-faced, unrecognizing, her eyes full of the
horror she was running from, and ran on toward the
barn. He saw her go at full flight into the door and
turned and ran after her. She was nowhere in sight in
the gloomy interior among the empty stalls, but the
door of the corn crib was open and he bent over and
went in. She was huddled on the pile of unhusked
corn with her face in her arms against the wall, not
crying, for there-was no sound of crying, but her body
was shaking as if with chill.
“Jessie, what’s the matter? What is it, Jessie?” he
asked, afraid, and conscious of the old helplessness
he always felt when confronted with her problems
because they were never the same as his and he could
not understand them or cope with them, no matter
how much he ached to help her.
She did not answer and he knelt down awkwardly
beside her and put a hand on her shoulder. It was still
shaking badly and she drew away from his touch as if
she would burrow into the corn and escape from
sight.
“Go ‘way, Mitch,” she said in a muffled voice.
“What is it?” he asked again.
“Don’t look at me. Go ‘way.”
“Are you hurt?” She shook her head.
“Do you feel bad?”
She shook her head again and drew away.
“Can I do anything?”
“No,” she said in the same muffled voice. “Only go
away. I’ll be all right in a little while.”
He stood up, wooden-faced, and went back out the
door and across the yard, walking fast. Cass and Joy
were sitting on the steps of the front porch and
Prentiss Jimerson was walking up and down in front
Big City Girl — 42
of them bursting with his story and they all talked at
once.
“He escaped, Mitch,” Prentiss said breathlessly, in a
hurry to get it out before the others could beat him to
it.
“Got clean away. They can’t find hide or hair of
him,” Cass broke in.
“Killed a deputy,” Prentiss said, verbally shoving
Cass aside. “It’s all over the radio, in the news.
More’n it was before. Wrecked the car, shot the
deputy, and couldn’t find the keys to the handcuffs so
he sawed off his hand with a pocketknife.”
“He did what?” Mitch asked.
“Cut the deputy’s hand off that he was handcuffed
to,” Prentiss went on in an eruption of words, too
excited to see the fury in Mitch’s face.
”And you come over here and told that in front of
Jessie? Why, you long-nosed sonofabitch!” Mitch said
with the singing edge of violence in his voice. He took
a step toward Prentiss and the youth backed up with
his hands held out placatingly and shocked
bewilderment on his face.
“Hold on, Mitch,” he pleaded. “I ain’t done nothing.
I just said what was on the radio.”
“You didn’t have to say it in front of Jessie. You
better go on home. When we want any more of your
goddamned news, we’ll send for you.”
Prentiss looked from Mitch over to Cass as if for
support, with his face puzzled and hurt. He had
always been somewhat in awe of both the Neely boys,
and this violent reception of his news, especially after
the way Cass and Miss Joy had hung onto his words,
was disconcerting and a little frightening.
“Well, I didn’t mean no harm,” he said. He looked
around at all of them and turned to go. Cass started
to say something but glanced toward Mitch and
changed his mind.
“Thanks for telling us, Prentiss,” Joy called after
him. She threw a spiteful glance at Mitch.
Big City Girl — 43
After Prentiss had shuffled his deflated way up the
road Cass stirred uncomfortably on the step. “That
was a cruel thing to say to a neighbor, Mitch. You
oughtn’t to talk like that,” he said, not looking up.
Mitch thought of Jessie trying to shut out the sight
and the thought of it by burrowing her face into her
arms out in the barn and felt no sympathy for
Prentiss. It wasn’t his fault, if you thought about it,
but maybe the big-mouthed fool would stay away from
her the next time he had any news like that.
“What about Jessie?” he asked coldly.
“Well, she’d have to know sooner or later. No way
you could help that. Now you’ve insulted him like
that, he won’t come back no more.”
“I can stand it,” Mitch said.
“We won’t hear no more news about Sewell,” Cass
said querulously.
Mitch stared at him. “That’ll be all right, too. I don’t
want to hear no more of that news about Sewell.”
Cass sighed and looked at the ground. “A hard
heart is a sin. You got no feeling for your brother.”
“Listening to it ain’t going to help him.”
“You just got no feeling for him.” Cass brought out
a soiled bandanna handkerchief and dabbed futilely at
his eyes. “I tried to raise my boys up to be
Christians,” he said tearfully to Joy. “But I reckon it’s
a judgment of some kind on me that they’re so
hardhearted. It’s a sin visited on the father.”
I hope the old goat ain’t going to cry, Joy thought.
She patted his arm. “Don’t take it so hard, Cass. It’ll
work out all right.”
“It’s an awful thing,” Cass went on piteously.
“Thinking of that boy out there somewheres running
from the law and prob’ly hurt and hunted down like a
wild animal and we don’t even know where he is and
got no way of finding out. He might be shot right now
with a bullet in him and we’d never know. Got no
radio, and no nothing. I reckon nobody cares, though.
Ev’body’s got to be hardhearted.”
Big City Girl — 44
Mitch looked at both of them with contempt and
turned and went around the corner of the house,
feeling the sickness in his stomach. If we had a radio,
he thought, and could set and listen to the news,
everything would be all right and we’d find out that
Sewell didn’t hold up nobody or kill no deputy or
butcher him up with a knife. That’s all we need—more
news.
Because he had to be doing something, he went out
to the woodpile behind the house and began splitting
wood for the kitchen stove, attacking the pile of redoak
blocks with a bitter violence to shut out his
thoughts. In a little while Jessie came out of the barn
and went past him toward the kitchen, looking
straight ahead like an Indian. Mexico trotted toward
her but she went on past him and into the house.
Mitch watched her helplessly and left her alone.
There’s nothing you can do, he thought.
He looked up suddenly, and dropped the ax. Cass
had come around the corner of the house carrying a
short length of old plowline in his hand. He stopped a
whistled to Mexico, not looking toward Mitch.
Mitch watched him. Well, he’s got it squared
around his mind till it’s all right, he thought. I should
have known I was just making it easier for him when I
bounced that damn Prentiss out of here. He works it
around in his mind till all the facts agree with him and
then he goes ahead.
He walked over to where Cass was knotting the line
about Mexico’s neck.
“You going somewhere with Mexico?” he asked,
choking on the fury inside him but keeping his voice
quiet because he didn’t want Jessie to hear it in the
kitchen and because he knew he was fighting water
that would flow around him until he drowned in it
without ever finding a solid place to hit.
“I ain’t one to put a dawg ahead of my family,” Cass
said with martyred politeness.
“I didn’t say nothing about that. I said, where you
going with Mexico?”
Big City Girl — 45
“Ain’t air one around here that’s got more regard
for Mexico than I have, but my family comes first with
me.”
You could talk all day and never get an answer,
Mitch thought. “Where you going with Mexico?” he
insisted.
“Maybe it’s my fault that I ain’t hardhearted enough
to just set here and do nothing while they chase my
boy around the state with guns like he was a wild
animal and not do nothing about it and not even know
where he is, but that’s the way I am, and I’m getting
too old to change.”
“You figure that’s going to be a big help to Sewell,
setting in front of a radio and hearing ‘em talk about
him?”
“No. It won’t help Sewell none, unless there’s some
way the Almighty can let him know that there was at
least one of us cared enough about him to try to find
out where he was.”
I could stop him, Mitch thought. It ain’t that I ain’t
big enough to stop him, but it’s what would happen
afterward. Any man can raise his hand against his
daddy if he wants to, when he’s big enough, but he
can’t never live with him any more. Sewell did it when
he sold his guitar, he hit him and called him a name
nobody can call his own daddy and ever forget about
it afterward, but he left when he had done it.
How am I going to leave? I couldn’t take Jessie with
me, working in sawmills and road camps. And what
would happen if I left her here? He can’t work the
crop by himself, even if he would, and you can’t live
on grass.
“Go on,” he said, his face dark with passion. “If
you’re going to do it, go on before she comes out here
and sees you.”
Big City Girl — 46
Seven
“—one of the most intensive man hunts in the history
of the state. As you will recall, Neely escaped three
nights ago after wrecking the automobile in which he
was being transported to the state penitentiary to
begin serving a life sentence for armed robbery.
“There are several factors that go to make this one
of the most sensational crime stories in this area in
the past decade. One of these is the fact that it
concerns Sewell, or Mad Dog, Neely, a gangster and
hoodlum who has almost reached the stature of Public
Enemy Number One, at least in this state. Last year,
it will be recalled, he was on trial for the slaying of
another hoodlum in a gang war between rival slotmachine
syndicates, and he is alleged to have been
involved in a number of brutal beatings in connection
with the slot-machine rackets and their warring
factions. He was acquitted of the murder charge, you
will remember, when one of the state’s witnesses
disappeared on the eve of the trial, probably as the
result of threats and intimidation, authorities believe.
“And another sensational side of the case is, of
course, the fact that it has not been three months
since Neely was once before the object of a vast man
hunt alter a daring, singlehanded attempt to hold up
an express company in broad daylight. In the ensuing
Big City Girl — 47
gun battle a company guard was wounded and Neely
fled in a stolen automobile, but not before he was
recognized. Thus began a three-week chase across a
dozen counties and a series of filling-station holdups
that flared into the proportions of a one-man crime
wave. Then he disappeared, dropping from sight
completely for nearly two weeks, police believe
somewhere in Houston. At any rate, there were no
holdups during this period and Neely was not seen by
anyone, and this when his picture was in every
newspaper in the state and he would have been
recognized almost anywhere. Then he was finally
captured in a running gun battle with police some
hundred miles north of Houston following a tip by a
filling-station operator.
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