He shook his head with a faint smile. “I’m afraid not. Not
at the moment, anyway.”
He asked if he could check the register for any more of
it. There was none, of course. We shook hands and he
drove off. I watched him go up the street, feeling the other
one burning a hole in my wallet. I didn’t do anything,
though, until Otis came out. That was inevitable.
Girl Out Back— 25
“What is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s plenty hot.”
“You can say that again. You couldn’t have raised more
stink if you’d tried to deposit a live bomb.”
“Could be a kidnap pay-off,” I said. “Or bank robbery.
Something like that.”
He turned to go back to the shop. “Well, we sure got a
high class of trade around here. You think I ought to start
wearing a carnation to work?”
As soon as he was inside the shop and at work I crossed
to the office. I sat down and took the one out of my wallet,
reaching for the pad I’d written the number on. They
checked! They were not only close; they were consecutive.
One ended in—23, the other in—24.
I turned it, studying the stain along the bottom and
feeling intense excitement. As nearly as I could tell, it was
exactly the same as that on the other, same place, same
shape. Those bills had been stacked, probably in their
original binder, when this substance—whatever it was—got
on them.
I moistened a finger and rubbed it along the stain. A
minute amount of the reddish-brown came off.
Dried blood? That was dramatic, but improbable. Blood
would be darker, and it would scrape off. This was a stain.
No, my first guess was as good as any. How had he put it?
The mark wasn’t significant, but another one might have it.
It could be rust, plain iron oxide picked up by contact
with rusting metal. If it weren’t significant, that probably
meant it hadn’t been there when it had left legitimate
hands. So perhaps —just perhaps—it had been stored for
some time in a metal container in a place that was slightly
damp.
I lit a cigarette and leaned back in the chair. None of it
made any sense at all. The thought of its having anything
to do with Haig was laughable—but there was the fact his
picture had been among those mug shots. It was a
fascinating puzzle any way you looked at it. And it was
made even more fascinating by the fact that Haig, at the
time he had disappeared off the face of the earth, was
Girl Out Back— 26
carrying with him a hundred and sixty-eight thousand
dollars.
I needed an excuse, and ten minutes before closing time
it came along as if I’d written the script myself. Two
fishermen stopped in on their way back to Sanport. They
had seven bass, the smallest of which weighed three
pounds.
“Where?” I asked, hanging over their icebox.
“Sumner Lake,” they replied.
“With live bait? Or hand grenades?”
“Fly-rod bugs. Cork poppers. . . .”
“Cut it out,” I said. “In August?”
“It’s the truth,” they said. “We found an underground
spring. The water was this cool. . . .”
Otis had come out too. He glanced resignedly from the
fish to me and sighed. “How long’ll you be gone?
“Where?” I asked.
“Hah,” he said mournfully.
Sumner Lake was perfect. It was ninety miles in the
opposite direction. “Well, if you insist. But I wouldn’t knock
off go fishing for anybody but you.”
“You want Pete to come in?”
Pete was his boy, the fourteen-year-old who looked like a
Sherman tank. During summer vacations he sometimes
filled down here when I went fishing.
“Sure,” I said. I went back in the shop and picked up the
3-h.p. motor I used on rental skiffs. I put it in the back of
the station wagon, along with a can of fuel. We locked up.
“I’ll be back Wednesday night or Thursday,” I said. “And,
look. If another of those twenties comes in, call the F.B.I,
in Sanport. They want us to watch for them; here’s the
serial number of the other one.”
I drove home. When I pulled into the drive under the
oaks I saw her Chrysler was in the garage. So she was
home, and probably loaded to her silken ears with my
inhumanity to dear Mr. Selby. Here we go again, I thought.
She was in the kitchen writing a check for Reba for the
day’s housecleaning, wearing a lightweight knit thing that
Girl Out Back— 27
looked as if she’d been built into it by an oriental sybarite
with a do-it-yourself kit. It was strange; her clothes were
never tight on her but you didn’t have any trouble sensing
that their occupant wasn’t a collegiate pole-vaulter. Well,
maybe there a Turk somewhere back in my ancestry and I
was just sensitive to the voluptuous wave-form of her
particular radiation. She’d been to the beauty shop, and
her hair-do gleamed like embossed and highly polished
chrome. The full-mouthed and broad-planed face was as
outrageously blonde as the rest of her, faintly sensuous
and at the same time stamped with that strong suggestion
of purely female cussedness that was no lie at all.
She turned the blue eyes on me now and smiled with
sweet deadliness. “Oh. Home so early, dear? I didn’t think
you’d be able to get away.”
This was for Reba’s benefit, and you could see it was
fooling her. She took her check and started retreating
toward the back door before she got blood on her.
I opened the refrigerator and took out a can of beer.
“Oh,” I said. “Something important came up, sweet. I’m
going fishing.”
“Isn’t that nice. Reba, Mr. Godwin is going fishing. Does
your husband fish much?”
“Yes’m,” Reba said. “He fish ever’ now an’ then.”
“Well, I think it’s so wonderful for men to have a hobby,
don’t you?”
“Yes’m,” Reba said. She left. She was forty-something
and had learned what this world does to non-combatants.
The blue eyes flashed. The first pitch was high and inside
and smoking. “Well! Just leave me sitting there like a fool!
You couldn’t get away from your precious toys for five
minutes to show a little consideration for your wife, but
you can drop everything to go fishing. And what do you
suppose Mr. Selby thought?”
She couldn’t make me lose my temper now. I was too
excited about this other thing, and I wasn’t even thinking
about her. “Oh, he didn’t mind,” I said. “Think how he
enjoyed looking at your legs.”
I took a drink of the beer and did a brief impersonation
of the oleaginous Mr. Selby stalking a crossed thigh. He
Girl Out Back— 28
was the devious type, the long-range planner; he
maneuvered into position and then caught the target
obliquely on a passing shot.
“Mr. Selby is a gentleman—!”
“Which is more than you can say for some people you
know,” I said. “Did you bring home that paper you wanted
me to sign?”
“I told you it had to be notarized,” she snapped.
“So you did. Well, by God, that’ll teach me a lesson; the
next time you whistle I’ll dash right over.”
“You enjoy humiliating me, is that it?”
“No,” I said. “It’s actually just confusion. I get busy down
there and forget which way I’m supposed to jump when
you press the button.”
“Oh, you make me tired.”
“Take a rest, then. I’m going to Sumner Lake and I’ll be
gone till Thursday.”
She stared coldly, facing me across the kitchen. “The
Wheelers are coming tonight to play bridge. But that
wouldn’t matter, would it?”
“Tell ‘em to stay home and start their own war,” I said.
“Haven’t they got any initiative at all?”
She whirled and went out. She looked regal as hell. I
finished the beer and went down the stairs to the
basement. The instant I was alone everything else faded
from my mind and the thousand fascinating aspects of the
puzzle came swarming back at once. Did Mrs. Nunn know
that money was hot? She couldn’t have. Then how had she
got it? Why two of those bills? I irritably brushed all the
questions aside. There were no answers to any of them,
and I was merely wasting time. I began gathering up my
camping and fishing paraphernalia—duffel bag with my
fishing clothes and shaving gear in it, tackle box, fly-rod,
mosquito dope, and bedding. I wouldn’t need cooking
equipment or food; my information was the Nunn’s ran a
lunch-room of sorts along with the three old cabins and the
boat and motor rental business.
I carried it all out to the station wagon. It took two trips.
As I was going through the living-room the second time she
came down the stairs from the second floor. I paused, with
Girl Out Back— 29
both hands full, and said, “Well, see you Thursday. . . .”
She stared, stony-eyed, and said nothing. I went on out to
the car, threw the rest of the stuff in, and slammed out of
the drive.
I turned left on Main, going north toward Sumner Lake.
Javier lay to the south and east and this would be a
roundabout way to get there, but when you start lying you
have to be consistent. I stopped at a service station on the
highway at the edge of town and had the gasoline tank
filled and the oil checked. The man who ran it, Wendell
Graham, was a fisherman himself and a frequent customer
at the store.
“Lucky devil,” he said. “Sumner Lake, huh? I hear it’s
been pretty good.”
“I’ll let you know,” I said.
Eight miles north of town I turned off the highway on to
a secondary road going east. It was a little after six. I met
few-cars. Twenty miles ahead the road connected with
another north-south highway, State 41, after skirting the
edge of the wild and heavily timbered country at the upper
end of the lake. State 41 passed along the east side of
Javier at a distance of two to three miles. There was an
access road in from that side, but it ran through swampy
bottom country and was passable only in dry weather.
There were a few more cars after I turned on to 41,
though traffic wasn’t heavy. It was not one of the principal
routes to the coast. Once as I topped a slight rise I could
see the unbroken wildness of the bottom country to the
west, though I could not see the lake itself. It was broken
into channels and inlets this far up and they were out of
sight in the timber. It was superb duck hunting country in
winter, but the only way in then, aside from walking, was
to leave your car at the camp on the south end and go up
by boat. At the foot of the grade was the poorly banked Scurve
that had killed five people in the past three years. I
slowed automatically, even though the road was dry, idly
noting the white crosses the Highway Department had put
up on the shoulder where cars had gone off the road due to
excessive speed or drunken driving. I frowned thoughtfully,
trying to remember something that nibbled at the edge of
my mind. Then I was past. It wasn’t important.
Girl Out Back— 30
Fifteen or twenty minutes later I turned right again,
leaving Highway 41 and taking to the country road that
wound through the area to the south of the lake. The sun
was gone now and warm summer dusk was thickening out
through the timber. When my headlights sprayed against
the three rural mailboxes and the old sign on my right I
slowed and turned in through a cattle guard to a pair of
dusty ruts going north across an old field long since
abandoned to weeds and nettles. It hadn’t rained for a long
time and the growth beside the road was powdered with
dust. In a few minutes the road began to lead downward
through increasingly heavy timber where fireflies winked
in the darkness.
I passed some cleared land on my left and an old
farmhouse sitting back off the road. A dog barked with
bristling outrage and came hurtling out of the darkness to
chase the car. A boy’s voice yelled, “Come back heah, you
crazy Trix!” The faint light of a kerosene lamp glowed at a
window. The R.E.A. hadn’t penetrated here; it was too
thinly settled to warrant the lines. There was one more
farmhouse beyond it about a half mile and then the road
was lost in the immensity of timber. I crossed the stream
that was the outlet of the lake on a rattling wooden bridge.
Low places in the road had been filled with gravel to make
it passable in wet weather. My headlights swung in huge
arcs, splashing against the trunks of trees, as I followed its
windings. The vastness and solitude of it made me feel
good; I had always liked wild places. A little less than a
mile beyond the bridge the road forked, one pair of ruts
leading off to the left. The sign had fallen down, but I
remembered it had pointed to the right. In a few minutes I
came into the clearing. When I stopped and cut the motor I
could hear the frog chorus along the shore of the lake.
There were four buildings, three small ones huddled
darkly together at the edge of the inlet on my left and a
larger one just ahead and to my right. Hot light streamed
from an open doorway. I saw only one car, the station
wagon Mrs. Nunn had driven this morning. I cut the
headlights and got out.
“Who is it?” a man’s voice called. It came from outside
the doorway. He was standing to one side of it, away from
the light.
Girl Out Back— 31
“Godwin,” I said. “From Wardlow.”
“Oh,” he said. He stepped before the door then and
opened the screen. “Come on in.”
I followed him. The illumination inside the crudely
finished room came from a hissing gasoline lantern
suspended from a rafter with a length of wire. Insects
whirled about it in a frenzied dance, butting their heads
against the shield. On the left was a short counter with
three stools before it and beyond the end of the counter
was a glass-topped showcase containing items of fishing
tackle. There was a small screened window at the other
end of the room and an open doorway at the left behind the
pass-through between the ends of the counter and
showcase. This presumably led to their living quarters in
the rear of the building. Behind the counter was a small
icebox and a bottled gas stove which had two burners and
a hamburger grill. On the shelves above the stove and
icebox were some cartons of cigarettes, cans of soup,
condensed milk, small cereal boxes, and some doughnuts
in cellophane bags. Some shelves along the right-hand wall
held a small stock of staple groceries, a few cheap
magazines, and a large stack of comic books. I glanced at
the latter, faintly puzzled. Well, maybe he read them
himself. I didn’t particularly like him.
He’d been at various times a town constable and deputy
sheriff until some political shake-up had pushed him away
from the trough for good, and it was said he was crooked.
It wasn’t this latter, however, that had rubbed me the
wrong way the two times we’d met; moral indignation was
a little out of my line. It was just that he seemed too
impressed with his own toughness, as if he could still feel
that holstered gun banging against his thigh.
He went behind the counter, hung a cigarette in his
mouth, and struck a match on his thumbnail. Maybe he
picked it up from reading private eyes; it was stock gesture
93-B, Hard Case Lighting a Cigarette. He was about my
height, but rail-thin, with a bleak and angular face that
seemed to have been stretched too tightly over the bone
structure behind it. There was no warmth in the sherrycolored
eyes. He dropped the match on the floor, still
watching me through the smoke with no expression at all.
They must nave an interesting home life, I thought—the
Girl Out Back— 32
two of them staring at each other and dribbling a fall-out of
dead matches around the place.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I’d like one of your cabins,” I said. “And a boat, for a
couple days’ fishing. How’s it been?”
“So-so.” He shrugged indifferently. “You never been out
here before, have you?”
“Once or twice,” I said. “Duck hunting. It was before you
bought the place.”
“So you decided to try the fishing, huh?”
“That’s right,” I said. He didn’t appear to be the gushing
type that fell all over a new customer, but I wasn’t paying
much attention to him. I was trying to figure out where
they kept their cash and made change. There was no
register in sight.
“Anything else you want?” he asked.
I turned back to him. The harsh angularity of his face
was broken into planes of highlights and shadow by the
overhead light. From the waist up he wore nothing but a
sweaty undershirt, and his arms and shoulders looked like
a muscle chart from an anatomy textbook. There wasn’t
enough subcutaneous fat to smooth the contours; he was
as functional and uncluttered as an axe blade. The stare
said nothing at all.
”How’s that?” I asked.
“Motor? Bait? Guide? You need anything besides a boat?”
“No,” I said. Maybe if I didn’t ask for too much he’d let
me stay.
“Take the cabin on this end,” he said. “It’s not locked.”
I still had to get a look inside their cash-box, wherever it
was. I hadn’t driven this far just to sleep. “How about a
sandwich and a cup of coffee?” I asked.
“It’s pretty late.”
“I know it is,” I said. “But I haven’t had any dinner. I
drove out here right after work.”
“You must have been in a hurry. Really like to fish, huh?”
“Yes,” I said. I was beginning to like him even less.
Girl Out Back— 33
Without turning his head toward the door behind him, he
called out, “Jewel!”
There was no answer. The room was silent except for the
hiss of the lantern and the faint spatting sounds of the
insects bumping against it. He started to turn, as if to call
out again. She came through the doorway, dressed in a
man’s blue shirt and a pair of dungarees. She gave an
almost imperceptible start when she saw me, but then the
surprise or whatever it had been was gone and her face
closed up like a drawn Venetian blind.
“Fix Mister Godwin a hamburger,” he said curtly,
without turning his head.
“At this time of night?”
“Never mind what time it is; I got a watch. He come off
without his supper.”
She stared silently at the back of his head for an instant,
and then walked over in front of the icebox. I sat down on
one of the stools. She lighted the burner under the grill
and slapped down the meat patty she had taken from the
icebox. He watched her flatly for a moment and then
turned away. A bug banged into the lantern overhead and
fell to the counter where he lay on his back, buzzing his
wings. The meat began to sizzle after a minute or two and
she turned it with the spatula, leaning forward slightly with
the tawny mane of hair swinging downward across her
cheek. A cockroach came up from somewhere and walked
along the edge of the counter. It looked shiny in the white,
hot light. She stared at it, and then pushed the hair back
from her face with her hand.
“Grease,” she said, almost in a whisper.
His eyes turned, but he made no other movement.
“What?”
“I said grease. G-r-e-a-s-e.”
“What about it?”
“Nothing. I love the smell of it in my hair.”
“You sure as hell have a hard time,” he said.
“What gave you that idea?” she asked. “Not many women
can go around smelling like they slept with their head on a
rancid hamburger.”
Girl Out Back— 34
Something made her look up then, and she caught his
eyes on her. She stopped abruptly. The room was caught
up in that taut silence again. Then it was broken by the
sound of the telephone—two long and two short rings.
He came around the end of the counter and lifted the
receiver off the hook of the instrument mounted on the
wall near the door. It was an old type, with a hand crank.
“Hello,” he said. “Yeah, this is Nunn . . . Sure . . .
Sure . . . Okay . . . Around daylight . . . Okay, I’ll be ready.
Good-bye.”
Then, before he replaced the receiver, he spoke into the
mouthpiece again. “Jest in case some of you old busybodies
missed part of it, that was a man in Woodside. He wants to
go fishin’ tomorrow, and he wants me to guide him. Any
questions?”
He dropped the receiver on the hook. “Party line,” he
said.
The country was filling up with people he didn’t like.
He’d have to put on another shift, at tins rate, to be
satisfactorily nasty to all of them.
She finished the hamburger and put it in front of me. “No
coffee. You want a coke?”
“All right,” I said.
She opened one and put it on the counter, and then
turned and went back through the doorway without a
word. He leaned on the other side of the counter while I
ate. He didn’t say anything. It was all right with me. I was
caught up on his conversation.
When I had finished I stood up and took the wallet from
my pocket. “How much?”
He shook his head. “Just settle up for the whole thing
when you leave.”
“Might as well keep it straight as we go,” I protested. I
had to get a look at that cash drawer tonight.
He shrugged. “Okay. That’ll be—let’s see—forty-five
cents.”
I took out a five. He lifted a cigar box from a shelf under
the counter, set it on top, and lifted the lid. There were
Girl Out Back— 35
four or five bills in it, but I couldn’t see them all clearly. He
glanced at the five in my hand and shook his head.
“You got anything smaller?”
“I’ll see,” I said. I brought out a single. “Better give me a
packet of cigarettes while you’re at it.”
He turned to get them off the back shelf. I shot a hand
into the cigar box and spread the bills out. There were two
fives and several singles, plus some silver.
There was no twenty, new or otherwise.
He gave me my change. I went out, drove the car up
alongside the end cabin, and carried my gear in. It took me
only a few minutes to unroll my bedding on the lumpy old
mattress. I switched off the battery-operated camp lantern
and lay down. Mosquitoes whined thinly around my ears in
the dark as I lay there smoking a cigarette. Frogs kept up
their chorus along the shore and I heard a feeding bass
splash somewhere out in the lake.
Money? Out here? I must be crazy.
But where had those two twenties come from? Right
here, hadn’t they? I’d seen them myself; there was no
doubt of it whatever. Then I cursed softly and crushed out
the cigarette. The whole thing was utterly absurd. Was I
seriously expecting to find some connection between this
mean and primitive little backwoods camp and the mystery
of the slightly fantastic Bill Haig?
Girl Out Back— 36
Four
They’d have called him Mad-dog Haig except that his first
name was William. Wild Bill was inevitable then, but
inaccurate, at least by connotation. The suggestive
flamboyance of it as applied to race drivers and stunt men
was no more descriptive of Haig than it would have been of
the cold and vicious deadliness of a cobra. He was an
atavism. He belonged back with the Machine-gun Kellys,
the Pretty Boy Floyds, and the Dillingers of the thirties. He
was the embodiment of violence. The odd part of it,
though, was that until the time he flamed across the front
pages two years ago at the age of twenty-six his only
criminal record was that of a petty hoodlum arrested and
convicted once for stealing cars. Apparently he had simply
gone berserk, but berserk with a paradoxically calculated
violence that was aimed at one thing: knocking off banks,
and big ones.
In that brief period of six months beginning in August
1953 he and his gang had robbed three big-city banks by
direct and brutal assault. Firepower and blind luck had got
him out of all three of them, but it had been gory and not
even very profitable until the last one he hit. He seemed to
know nothing about banks and their protective devices,
and to care even less. Planning apparently had no place in
his modus operandi; he simply went in and then shot his
way out. The first one, in St. Louis, had resulted in the
Girl Out Back— 37
death of a teller and a bank guard, and had netted him less
than nine thousand dollars. The second one was in
suburban Detroit. It gained him eighty thousand dollars for
a few short minutes until the gang member carrying the
majority of the loot was shot down in the street outside the
bank in a gun battle with police. Haig and the other two
escaped with something like fifteen thousand dollars,
leaving behind them a dead patrolman and another with a
bullet-shattered hip. The outcry in the newspapers
crescendoed.
It was in Sanport in February that the realities of life in
the 1950s with their police networks, F.B.I, co-operation,
protective alarm systems, and traffic clogged streets and
highways caught up with him at last. Or maybe it would be
more accurate to say they caught up with his gang. He hit
the Gulf First National with three other men. They killed
another guard, wounded a bank official, and looted it of
nearly a hundred and seventy thousand dollars. The whole
thing caved in on him then, as anybody would know it
inevitably had to, and the getaway became a shambles.
They left the first member, Red Jolley, on the steps of the
bank with a police bullet in his abdomen. The driver of the
getaway car was shot through the head in the first block.
The other man in the front seat shoved him out of the door
and took the wheel. Haig was in the back seat with the bag
containing the loot. Twenty minutes later, on the outskirts
of the city but still inside the crystallizing ring of
roadblocks being set up by the police, the getaway car
slammed into the rear of a slow-moving truck at better
than sixty miles an hour. Both vehicles careened across the
dividing line into oncoming traffic, involving two other cars
in the smash-up before coming to rest. Police were
swarming all over the scene in slightly more than ninety
seconds. The driver of the getaway car was still behind the
wheel, dead of a broken neck. Haig; Haig was nowhere.
It was as if he had calmly stepped from the wreckage and
boarded a flying saucer for Mars, carrying the bag of loot
with him. Nobody saw him. The money was gone. Nobody
had ever seen him again, to this day. That was a year and a
half ago.
It was not so much that it was impossible he could have
escaped in that ninety seconds of wild confusion as it was
Girl Out Back— 38
just unthinkable he could have got completely away and
continued to elude the vast and continuing search for him
that was still going on eighteen months later. There was
simply no place he could hide. He was too hot for the
underworld to touch with a barge-pole. He was a cop-killer,
and he was on the F.B.I.’s “most wanted” list. He couldn’t
have bought protection or concealment from anybody with
any kind of money, with ten times the amount he was
carrying.
And they knew everything about him that there was to
know.
Red Jolley had lived long enough to talk. He told them
who Haig was and where he’d come from. The F.B.I, had
gone on from there and when they were through they
could have written a six-volume biography of him. They
had photographs, descriptions, fingerprints, and a dossier
on his personal habits all the way from his preferences in
girls down to the way he liked his eggs for breakfast. His
picture had been on the front page of every newspaper and
displayed on the walls of every post-office in the country.
And it had all come to exactly nothing. Haig had, to all
outward appearances, evaporated. Along with the entire
haul from one of the biggest bank robberies in history.
I lit another cigarette and lay looking up at the dark,
aware again of the fantastic impossibility that this could
have anything to do with him. But, damn it, the facts were
there, and they were incontestable. I lined them up in my
mind.
One. That money had never been found.
Two. The fact that they were still looking for it proved
that. It also proved that at least part of it was identifiable.
Three. Those two twenty-dollar bills were too obviously
identifiable, on the evidence. The F.B.I, was trying to learn
where they had come from. And they had shown me Haig’s
photograph, among others.
Four. Those two bills had come from here.
But where was the connection? Haig was from San
Francisco. He was a city boy. He wouldn’t be able to
survive all day in this wilderness swamp, even if he’d been
able to get here, and even an idiot would have better sense
Girl Out Back— 39
than to try to hide out in an environment as foreign as this.
He’d stick out like Anita Ekberg at a Hottentot fish fry.
What did you come up with? There were several good
strong probabilities, and the first of these was that Haig
was dead. If he were still alive the F.B.I, would have found
him before this. But that only made the mystery worse.
Why hadn’t his remains turned up? Even his dead body
would be so hot it was practically radioactive. And that still
left the utterly baffling question of how that money had
wound up here—that is, those two twenty-dollar bills.
Suppose somebody had come into possession of it through
some set of circumstances as yet unknown; wouldn’t even
a sub-human intelligence grasp the fact that there might
be just a touch of the unusual about a suitcase full of
money lying around that way and that he’d better be
careful where he tried to spend it? So why two brand new
and consecutively numbered bills of that denomination in a
place where a twenty of any kind would attract attention?
But, wait. She’d said she had spent the night in town.
Maybe she had got the money there. No. That didn’t fit.
He’d told her to pick up the motors, so he must have given
her the money with which to pay for them. That brought it
right back here again. And there were only two
possibilities.
Either the Nunns had that loot themselves, or somebody
who did have it had spent part of it here. You almost had to
eliminate Nunn; he’d been a peace officer and if he were
trying to pass off hot money he’d do it where it wouldn’t
leave such a clearly marked trail. He’d realize the dangers
inherent in the whole thing.
I grinned in the darkness as it suddenly occurred to me
that in all these suppositions and theories I had taken it for
granted that anyone stumbling into the orbit of that
missing bag of loot through no matter what set of unusual
circumstances would automatically be another crook who’d
try to cash in on it, instead of an honest man who’d merely
call the nearest cop and turn it in. This calm assumption
was clearly based on Godwin’s Law of Character Erosion,
which states that the attrition of honesty varies inversely
with the square of the distance and directly with the mass
of the temptation.
Girl Out Back— 40
I tried to think of some way of pumping her as to who
had spent those two twenties. But no matter how obliquely
I went at it I’d arouse suspicion. The circumstance of my
showing up here for the first time within hours of her visit
to the store might look a little odd in itself, without doing
anything else to attract attention. It was a long time before
I went to sleep.
The sound of a car driving into the clearing waked me
just at dawn. I looked around the interior of the crude little
cabin. It was roofed with corrugated sheet metal and its
flooring was of splintery, unfinished pine planks. Aside
from the bed the only furnishings were a sheet metal stove
for heat during the duck season and a wooden packing box
on which stood a pail of water and a wash-basin. I
hurriedly washed my face, dressed in khaki fishing clothes,
and went outside with a dixie cup of water to brush my
teeth. It was one of those rare combinations of time and
place that always made you a little sad at the thought of
dying and never seeing its like again. There was an almost
poised stillness about it, as if the day were waiting to
explode. The surface of the narrow inlet, walled in by highcrowned
and shadowy timber, was unbroken and dark, and
little feathers of mist curled off it to hang suspended
against the backdrop of the trees. Before me and a little to
the right eight or ten skiffs were moored to a float that ran
out from the shore like something lying on a mirror.
Everything was wet with dew.
The man who had driven up in the car had apparently
gone into the main building. I went over and entered. The
lantern was burning again, its white light issuing from the
doorway to blend with the gray tones of dawn. Jewel Nunn,
in shorts and a man’s shirt, was frying eggs on the grill.
She glanced up sullenly as she heard the screen door open,
and I saw that her eyes were puffy and faintly red as if
from sleeplessness or crying. Nunn himself was taking
some spinning lures from the showcase. He nodded curtly.
The other man, presumably the one who had called last
night, was sitting at the counter. He turned his head to
look around at me. I didn’t know him. He was a slender,
graying man in his fifties, neatly dressed in pressed khakis
that obviously were not his standard garb. A doctor, you
would have said, or perhaps an attorney, or bank official.
Girl Out Back— 41
He nodded pleasantly. “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” I said. I sat down on the stool at the left
end of the counter and ordered some coffee and two eggs.
We ate silently.
The other man finished and paid for his breakfast with a
dollar bill. Nunn came out of the doorway leading to the
rear. He was carrying a small outboard motor.
“You about ready, Godwin?” he asked.
“No hurry,” I said. “Just tell me which boat.”
“What kind of motor you got?”
I nodded to the one he was carrying. “Same thing.”
“Take number six then.”
He and the other man went out. I heard them collecting
gear from the car as I finished the eggs. I stood up and
took a five from my wallet, moving along the counter until I
was standing over the cigar box as she made change.
There was only the same money in it there’d been last
night. Well what had I expected? The whole thing looked
silly.
I went out. It was fully light now. I went back to the
cabin and draped my bedding over a wire outside between
two trees so it would sun during the day. I unlocked the
station wagon and carried the motor down to the float.
Nunn and his passenger were loaded and apparently ready
to go, but he was fiddling with the motor. He looked up and
nodded to a skiff that had a crudely painted numeral 6 on
the bow. I clamped the motor on the transom and lit a
cigarette before going back for my tackle.
When I came back and began putting the stuff in the skiff
they were still sitting there. The gray-haired man was
looking impatient, but he said nothing. Nunn appeared in
no hurry to start; he was still puttering around the motor
and bailing out the skiff. When I had my gear loaded he
made a couple of half-hearted pulls with the starter rope.
“I thought you overhauled these motors,” he said with a
sour glance in my direction.
“We did,” I said. “Try opening the shut-off valve.”
He grunted and turned it. On the next pull the motor
took hold. “Follow us if you want to,” he said, throttling it
Girl Out Back— 42
down so he could be heard. “Best fishing is up where we’re
going.”
“Thanks,” I said, wondering at this burst of generosity.
His passenger was paying for his guide services; it was a
little strange he’d offer them to me for nothing.
They started up the inlet between the walls, of trees. I
cranked the motor and followed, with no intention of
sticking with them all the way up. I liked to fish alone,
aside from the fact it was discourteous from a sporting
standpoint to freeload where somebody else was picking
up the tab for the guide.
Javier was not a single large lake in the accepted sense
of the word; it was rather a lake system. The only open
body of water of any size was at the lower end, an expanse
of fairly shallow water perhaps a little less than a mile wide
and only slightly longer. Beyond that it was a vast network
of sloughs, channels, and swampy areas in heavy timber,
all connected by waterways passable to outboard craft.
Some of the sloughs and channels were quite extensive,
running up to a quarter mile in width. I wasn’t afraid of
becoming lost: years of hunting and fishing had made me
at home in this kind of terrain, and in my tackle box I
carried a large-scale county map that showed it all in
detail. We came out of the inlet into open water, keeping
close to the weed beds and old snags of trees along the
eastern side. The sun was not up yet, and the air was cool
and fresh. Once I saw a flash of white in the edge of the
timber as we startled a deer drinking in the shallows. The
swirls of feeding bass could be seen now and then among
the pads.
Nunn veered off to the left and entered a channel in the
upper end. I continued straight ahead. In a few minutes I
cut the motor and let the boat drift as I began setting up
the fly-rod. I was near the north end of the open water
myself, but to the eastward of the channel in which Nunn
and his passenger had disappeared. Directly ahead another
winding and timber-walled channel came in, bearing off to
the north and east. The boat came to rest and I shipped the
oars, kicking it ahead now and then between casts into
pockets among the pads off to my left. After five minutes
nothing had struck the silvery streamer fly I was using, so I
removed it from the leader and fastened on a green, cork-
Girl Out Back— 43
bodied popping bug. I dropped it in a small opening thirty
feet away, twitched the line to make it gurgle, and a bass
smashed it, erupting from the water with a head-shaking
leap as I set the hook. I worked him away from the pads,
wore him down, and slipped the net under him to work the
hook out of his mouth. I lost the next two, and then landed
another which I also released. For a half hour I gave myself
up wholly to the sheer joy of fishing, and the baffling riddle
of those twenty dollar bills was gone from my mind. The
sun came up and it began to be hot. There was no breeze
at all and the surface of the lake was like glass.
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.
Girl Out Back— 44
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
Girl Out Back— 45
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.
Girl Out Back— 46
Five
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
Girl Out Back— 47
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 selfconsciousness.
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.
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