Ten miles back there was a secondary road taking
off to the north. There were no cars in sight when he
made the turn. The road was narrow and in poor
condition, not safe for over forty miles an hour, but it
wound north, in the direction he wanted to go. A few
miles farther along another one led off to the right
and he took that, swinging east again. If I can keep
heading north and east, he thought, I ought to hit the
highway going north. He looked at the clock on the
dash. It was almost two.
He wound for miles through the maze of country
roads, past dark farmhouses and through desolate
second-growth timber. The worn macadam pavement
gave way to gravel in places, and then went back to
macadam again.’He was on a graded dirt road when
the rain began. I got to get out of this mess and back
on the highway before it begins to get slick, he
thought. If I get stuck out here I’ll be in a hell of a
mess.
Then, shortly after three o’clock, he came into a
small town and there was the pavement going north.
Big City Girl — 96
The town was asleep, dark in the rain, except for an
all-night filling station. He turned left and picked up
speed again.
I’m going toward home now, he thought. When I
cross the river up there I’ll be within fifteen miles of
the old place. I hope they don’t expect me to drop in
for a visit. He grinned coldly. Time’s going to be kind
of pressing for that. I wonder what the old man’s
selling these days, now that he’s diddled off
everything he ever owned.
The rain was coming down harder now, and it
reminded him of that other night a week ago with
George driving and himself in the back seat shackled
to Harve, going to the penitentiary. God, he thought,
was that only a week ago? It seems like a year.
Remembering Harve, he thought of Joy, coldly and
regretfully. Ain’t no help for it, he thought. I couldn’t
find her. And if I get out of this mess alive, that’ll be a
miracle itself.
Long miles rushed back in the darkness and the
slanting gray lines of the rain, and the country towns
dropped behind one by one, huddled darkly beside
the highway. He slowed a little going through the
towns and then hit the accelerator again when he had
passed them, feeling a grim satisfaction in the smooth
surge of power under his foot.
Then it happened. He was going through one of the
small towns, slowly, around thirty-five, and saw the
light streaming out into the rain from an all-night cafe
and the four or five cars parked in front of it. The last
one was a patrol car and it started to back out into
the street as he went past. He swerved out, feeling
again the icy shiver along his back, and went on at
the same speed so as not to draw attention to himself.
The patrol car backed on out and straightened up,
and for an instant its lights were full on him. The
muscles of his back were bunched up in a cold knot
and he fought down an almost overpowering impulse
to bear down on the accelerator and flee. Maybe they
hadn’t paid any attention to him. Maybe they didn’t
even have a bulletin on him yet. Maybe . . . And then
Big City Girl — 97
the siren snarled, then screamed, as the cruiser shot
toward him.
It had terrific pickup and was gaining on him. He
gave the big motor wide-open throttle and held it, and
when he passed ninety he could see he was gaining
back a little of the ground and he began to draw
slowly away. It’s just a question of which one of us
piles up first, he thought. This ain’t no hundred-mile
highway, to begin with, and at night like this, in the
rain . . . Somebody’s going to leave it on one of these
curves.
They slammed on through another town, and in
going out on the other side had to make a rightangled
turn. The big Lincoln skidded sickeningly, then
straightened. The cruiser was within a half mile of
him and it was growing light. I won’t be able to pull
any turnoff this time, he thought, coldly examining his
chance’s.
Then, suddenly, he had no chance, and knew it.
They were waiting for him at the river. He went
slamming down a long turn coming off the hill and
saw the river bottom spread out below him in the
gray wet dawn, the river in flood and spread out over
the bottom, the long fill going across, the big steel
bridge black in the rain, and the two patrol cars
drawn up and waiting for him. He took it all in in one
flashing fraction of a second at ninety miles an hour,
coming down off the grade. Jesus, what a sweet
setup, he thought. What a stinking, lousy sonofabitch
of a thing to run into.
He was going too fast to stop and get out of the car
and make a run for the timber on foot. The other car
was right behind him. And the two up ahead were
pulled part way across the road, one at each end of
the bridge, He saw all the terrible beauty of it in one
quick, coldly assaying glance. It was perfect. If he
shot past the first car and got onto the bridge, the
other one would pull squarely across the other end of
it and he would be trapped like a fly in a bottle. And
even if he could pull down to a stop before he hit the
bridge, he would be caught between the car at this
end and the one following him.
Big City Girl — 98
He was going too fast. He was right on top of the
first car and still doing fifty. They were shooting now;
he heard the guns and saw a hole appear in the
windshield. Then he slammed into the car. There was
a crash and a scream of metal as the right side of the
Lincoln tore off the front end of the patrol car. Then
he was skidding onto the bridge. The Lincoln was
completely out of control. It raked one guard rail, shot
across the pavement into the other, then spun end for
end and stopped, facing back the way it had come.
Before it was stopped he was out on the bridge in
the rain with the gun in his hand. The bridge was
about five hundred feet long and he was near the
center of it, over the main channel of the river. The
patrol cars had both ends of it blocked now, the one
chasing him having come up and stopped. They knew
it was down here, he thought, and slowed down
enough to get under control.
There was no panic in him now that he had finally
been trapped, only a cold and terrible concentration
as he looked swiftly around at the river bottom and at
the two ends of the bridge to see how many men
there were. He could see two at one end and three at
the other, and now they were pulling rifles from the
cars.
No protection behind the car, he thought, because
they’re on both sides of me. And this .38 ain’t no good
against them rifles. Couldn’t even hit a barn with it at
this distance.
He put the gun back in his pocket and ran for the
rail. There was the sudden impact of something
crashing into his arm and he spun around and fell,
hearing the rifle shot crack in his ears. He got up and
made it this time and climbed over, holding to a
slanting steel girder. They were running toward him,
but not all of them at once, for the rifles cracked
twice more and lead slammed into the girder to go
flattened and screaming off into the rain. He looked
down. The muddy and drift-laden surface of the flood
was about twelve feet below him. He let go and
dropped.
Big City Girl — 99
He took a deep breath before he hit the water and
let himself go deep into it, and then began kicking
downstream, going along with the current and
pushing upward with his hands to keep from coming
to the surface. When his lungs could stand no more
he swam upward and felt his head go above water. He
took another breath and went under again as a small
geyser exploded just beyond his face. This time he
changed course slightly and went quartering down
the current in order not to come up too near to where
they would be expecting him.
They’ll be coming down the river, he thought. The
current’s carrying me along and two or three more
dives and I’ll be out of range of the bridge, but they
ain’t going to stay up there like it was a shooting
gallery. The river’s overflowed the main channel but
they can still get along the banks all right. It won’t be
over knee-deep. One of ‘em will stay on the bridge
and there’ll be a couple of ‘em coming down each
bank, and there ain’t no way in Christ’s world I can
get out of here. And I sure as hell can’t swim from
here to the Gulf of Mexico underwater.
He came up again. This time with the swift intake of
breath he took a quick and sweeping look around
across the drift-laden, roily surface of the flood,
seeing the two men in black slickers splashing along
the bank. One of them spotted his head out in the
current and stopped to raise the rifle, yelling, and he
went under, but not before he had seen the drifting
sweet-gum tree some thirty feet to his left and slightly
upstream. Just as his head went under he heard and
felt the sharp concussion as a rifle bullet hit the
surface and glanced off. A half second later, he
thought, and my head would have been busted open
like a green gourd.
He turned underwater and fought his way across
the current toward the place the tree had been. It was
a small sweet gum, not much more than a sapling, but
he knew there would be submerged branches he
could locate if he could come near it underwater.
They’ll be looking for me downstream, he thought.
The thing is to find it and come up inside the limbs. If
Big City Girl — 100
I can hold straight enough I may be able to do it.
Must have come twenty feet now, and it should be
right ahead, not more’n another ten feet. Can’t figure
out about that arm. It was hit, but I don’t feel nothing.
Hardly nothing at all. Must not have hit the bone,
because I can swim with it. If it had, the bone would
have been busted all to hell. They weren’t shooting
22’s. Well, I ain’t in any hurry to feel it. When the
shock wears off I’ll get it all right.
I must have passed that tree. Come fifty feet
anyway, and I must have got off the course and
missed it. And it ain’t going to do no good to make a
second run at it, because when I come up over here
instead of downstream they’ll know what I’m up to
and they’ll start blowing the tree out of the water. I
missed it, that’s all. Then leaves and small twigs
brushed the top of his head and he felt a surge of
hope.
Right under it, he thought. He raked upward with
his right arm and felt a limb, still underwater, and
began following it up, forcing himself to go slowly in
spite of the pain in his lungs. Then there was the
trunk of the tree directly over his head. He held onto
the limb under the surface and came up slowly until
his face was just out of the water. He took a deep,
gasping breath and opened his eyes. It was perfect.
The tree was eight or ten inches in diameter here,
with a couple of inches of it out of the water. Several
limbs took off at this point and his head was in a
cluster of leaves and small twigs. Through breaks in
the foliage he could see the two men on the near
bank, standing now in knee-deep water and intently
searching the surface of the flood downstream,
waiting for him to come up. It fooled ‘em, he thought,
and started to swing his head slowly around to look
out at the opposite bank for the other two when he
heard an ominous and terrible buzzing just back of
his ear like an egg beater whirring in a pile of dead
leaves and felt all his nerve ends turn to ice in one of
the few moments of absolute terror he had ever
known.
Big City Girl — 101
Cold fury looked at him six inches in front of his
face, and the deadly triangular head drew back to
strike. The big rattler had been stretched along a limb
as high as it could get out of the water it hated, and
his movement or the pull of the current had disturbed
the balance of the tree and rolled the limb downward
toward the water. There was no time to pull his head
back or submerge. One more slightest move and it
would strike him full in the face. He brought a hand
up and took the deadly, loathsome impact of it on his
wrist and felt the puncture of the fangs. His hand
closed over the body just back of the head and he
pulled it below the surface, squeezing terribly with all
his strength, feeling the sinuous, thick-bodied power
of its threshing, and then the fangs pierced his hand
once more before it stilled. He let it go and vomited
into the water in front of his face.
Big City Girl — 102
Sixteen
Joy lay on her bed in the hot, close-pressing darkness
and listened to the soft breathing of the younger girl
across the room. It had been almost a half hour since
she had heard the sibilant scuffing of Mitch’s bare
feet on the sand in the back yard and had seen the
light glow through the battenless crack in the back
wall of the room. She knew he had come up on the
back porch and lit the lantern for something, then
there was the retreating snup, snup, snup of his feet
going away toward the barn, and the light had faded
away.
What was he doing out there at this time of night?
she wondered. There wasn’t even any way of knowing
what time it was, for she had been lying awake for
hours, long after Jessie had gone to sleep. She
wondered if the hatred would ever let her sleep again.
Closing her eyes, she could see him now, going
somewhere with the lantern, down the trail toward
the bottom perhaps, lank, straight-backed, bitterfaced,
and hateful, and the vision made her sick with
rage. Her mind swung, hate-lured, to one of the facets
of her dream. She was driving a Cadillac along a treeshaded
boulevard, young and radiant in a gold lamé
evening gown, while a handsome young millionaire
made love to her at her side, and saw Mitch lying in a
Big City Girl — 103
ditch beside the road with an arm outstretched in
beseeching agony and the thin, harsh angularity of
his face bearing the ravages of some loathsome
disease like leprosy. She stopped, the car and went
back to bend over him, and when he looked up in
supplication she spat full in his face and laughed, and
went on laughing with contempt and scorn, pointing
at him so the young man in the car could laugh too.
Oh, God, she thought, isn’t there anything I can do to
him? If there was something, if there was some way
to hurt him I could sleep again.
Suddenly she heard the faint sound of an
automobile across the oppressive stillness and
wondered whose it was. It came on down the sand-hill
road leading in from the highway, and then turned,
going along the hill toward the Jimerson place. It was
probably Cal or Prentiss, she thought, coming home
from a dance. It went on, the sound fading away, and
then it stopped. She was sure she had heard the
motor sound die abruptly. But why would anybody
stop up there? She must have been mistaken. It had
probably just gone around a bend in the road.
Minutes dragged by and she forgot about it. I’m
going to the if I don’t go to sleep, she thought. If
there was just some way I could hurt him, and see I
was hurting him, and have him know I was seeing and
was doing it on purpose so he would know how much
I loathe and despise him and hate him and have ever
since the first time I ever saw him, and that I was just
making fun of him and laughing at him when I did
that, when he shoved me. Oh, God, help me do it.
She held her breath a moment and lay still,
listening. What was it she had heard, out there in the
yard? Terror ran through her for an instant and she
wanted to scream, but held it in. Was it Mitch, still
wandering around outside? No, there it was again and
it was not the sound his bare feet had made or the
sure, arrogant, fast-legged walk of Mitch at all.
Whoever it was seemed to be walking erratically;
there would be two or three steps in hurried
succession and then a sudden and pregnant silence as
Big City Girl — 104
they stopped. She sat up in bed, thinking again of the
car and the way the motor had stopped.
“Joy!” The hoarse whisper floated in through the
window. She turned and could see nothing in the
blackness. Oh, it’s that stupid Cal Jimerson, she
thought with a sigh of relief. That was his car up
there in the road. He must be drunk, or crazy. Is he
dumb enough to think I’m going to go out there when
Jessie’s right here in the same room?
She slipped silently out of bed and stepped to the
window on bare feet, hurriedly, to stop him before he
could make any more noise. She put her hands on the
sill and looked out. It was too dark to see anything
but the shadowy bulk of him against the night.”Hush,
you crazy fool!” she whispered. “Go away.”
“H’lo, Joy,” he said, not whispering, but low-voiced.
She could smell the sour stink of the whiskey. “Got
drink in the car. Come out, let’s talk. Want to talk to
you.”
“Go home, you crazy idiot,” she hissed fiercely.
“You’re drunk.”
Then she heard Jessie stir on the bed behind her.
Panic seized her and she leaned forward with an arm
outstretched to put a hand over his mouth, if she
could find it, before he could speak again.
Jessie was sitting up in bed. “Joy, what is it?”
At the same instant she felt Cal’s hand close over
her arm and start to pull, and in a bursting flash of
inspiration so fast it was almost pure reflex she cried
out with terror in her voice, “Mitch! Turn me loose,
Mitch. Please!”
Her thigh and knees bumped the sill as she fell
through the window on top of the stupidly weaving
Cal. He caught her and staggered, almost falling.
When her feet were on the ground she swung a hand,
hard, and it exploded against his face with a sharp
slap audible across the clearing. She wrestled out of
his arms and hit him again and he moved back; then,
as it began to penetrate his drunkenness that there
was too much noise and everybody was going to be
Big City Girl — 105
awake in a minute, he turned and started running
toward the road.
She fell, sobbing, to the ground just as Jessie came
running around the side of the house.
“Joy, where are you? Are you hurt?” the younger
girl was crying anxiously. She saw the white blur of
the night gown and knelt down hurriedly beside the
figure sprawled in the sand.
“Did he hurt you? Are you all right?” She put a hand
on Joy’s heaving shoulder, but got no answer except
sobs. She slid an arm tenderly under Joy’s head and
helped her to sit up.
“Can you stand up?” she asked. “Put your arm over
my shoulder, honey. And raise up when I stand up.”
Joy got to her feet with her arm about the young
girl’s shoulders and they went around the corner and
into the house, walking slowly while she still shook
with crying. She collapsed on the bed in tragic and
shaken helplessness while Jessie struck a match to
light the lamp.
Soft yellow light flooded the room and Jessie went
over to the window and pulled the curtains, then
closed the door. Joy lay listening to her, and when
Jessie came over to the bed she turned on her back
and drew a hand across her eyes to wipe away the
tears.
“I—I’m all right, honey,” she said shakily. “It was
just the—the awful scare. He ran away, and the fall
didn’t hurt me.”
“Are you sure?” Jessie implored anxiously. “Are you
sure you didn’t break anything?” She pulled down her
nightgown and brushed sand from the sheet, fussing
over her.
“Yes,” Joy said bravely. “I’m all right, honey.”
Jessie’s fright was over now and her smooth child’s
face was growing white with anger. The nostrils of
the pert nose were pinched and pale, and her chin
was more stubborn than Joy had ever seen it. The
large blue eyes did not look like those of a child at all.
Big City Girl — 106
“How did it happen, Joy?” she asked ominously. “I
just heard you scream as I sat up in bed, and the next
thing you fell out of the window. You screamed
something about Mitch. Was it him?”
This is where I have to do it right, Joy thought. It
would be so easy to overdo it and botch it. And I wish
I didn’t have to do it. Not to this kid, because she is
sweet, but I’d do anything to her or anybody else I
had to if it was the only way to get even with that
bastard.
“I—I don’t know, Jessie,” she said. “I don’t think it
was. It must have been somebody else. I don’t think
Mitch would do a thing like that.” Her voice quivered.
“But I heard you say Mitch! That was what you
screamed just as you fell.”
Joy shook her head, nobly and with an infinite
sadness. “No, that wasn’t— I mean, what it was, I
must have just screamed to Mitch help. I mean, he’s
the only man around, and—”
“Joy! Trying to cover up for him is all right, and I
might know you’d do it, you’re so sweet; but I know
what I heard. And I haven’t forgot what he was trying
to do when you went out there to the well tonight. I
saw that!”
Joy gave way to tears again for a minute, but
regained control of herself. She had just heard Cal’s
automobile start up there on the road. “No, Jessie,”
she said wanly, “I just don’t know. It’s such an awful
thing, I wouldn’t accuse Mitch of it unless I was
absolutely sure. I just don’t think it was.”
“We’ll see,” Jessie said ominously. She got up off
the bed and started toward the door.
“Where are you going?” Joy asked in alarm. “Out to
his room. I’ll find out.”
“No, Jessie,” Joy urged piteously. “Don’t go out
there. Whoever it was might be still around. It’s too
dangerous.”
“They won’t bother me,” Jessie said, her eyes
snapping with anger. She opened the door and went
out.
Big City Girl — 107
If Mitch is there, Joy thought, if he’s come back, all
I have to do is say I told you so, I knew it wasn’t
Mitch. And if he hasn’t come back I don’t have to say
anything. Nobody would ever be able to convince her
it wasn’t him, especially after that thing tonight. He’s
a stupid cluck; he’d fall for anything.
Jessie was back in a minute. “He wasn’t even
there,” she said angrily. “And you were trying to
cover up for him, Joy!”
“I just didn’t know for sure, honey,” Joy said sadly.
“Maybe it was just a joke.”
“A joke!”
Jessie stood in the middle of the room with her
whole small body radiating anger for a minute; then
she went slowly over to her own bed and sat down.
Her shoulders slumped, as if with tiredness, and she
seemed to collapse in some odd manner without
changing size or position, just as if the fierce energy
of her spirit had suddenly wilted and let her fall in on
herself. She did not cry or say anything for a long
time. The wide blue eyes were dry as she looked
down at her scuffed, unlaced shoes, but there was an
uncomprehending look of hurt in them that was worse
than tears.
Joy left her alone. She lay on her bed, waiting.
There’s no use in saying anything more now, she
thought. Let her say it. I’m a lousy bitch, all right. I
guess I always have been. But there wasn’t any other
way to get even with him.
After a while Jessie looked up. “Joy,” she asked
quietly, “when you get the money from your friend,
and get ready to leave, do you think I could go with
you?”
“Do you want to leave here, honey?”
“Yes. I want to go away.”
“Of course you can go with me, baby. We can make
out some way.”
They turned the light out in a few minutes and Joy
lay for a while thinking about it. So he thinks I’m not
good enough for the kid to be around, she thought.
Big City Girl — 108
Well, I guess now he’s right, but he sure as hell ain’t
going to like it, knowing he is.
Then, for the first time since Mitch had shoved her
contemptuously into the dirt, she dropped off to sleep.
Big City Girl — 109
Seventeen
When would it start?
It was like waiting for an explosion after the fuse
had been touched off, The four small needle-like
punctures in his wrist and hand were nothing, like a
fuse burning, and not very painful, but somewhere
inside him the mysterious chemistry of the venom
waited to begin its slow-burning explosion that would
swell and blacken his body and bring death in the
end.
Even in that chilling first minute after the snake
had hit he had not even considered calling out to the
men and surrendering. It had not occurred to him,
and if it had he would have brushed it aside. It did not
matter that they could have rushed him to a doctor
for treatment and saved him. For what? he would
have thought. The electric chair?
The tree swung lazily in the eddying brown sweep
of the current and he held onto the limb with only his
face out of the water, watching the hooded banks and
the timber go slowly past in the rain. He could see the
men in black raincoats still splashing through the
water along the banks, running downstream and
intently searching the surface of the flood for him,
and knew the trick had fooled them. As long as he did
not move or come too far out of the water among the
Big City Girl — 110
leaves of the small sweet gum, they would not
discover him, and with the current carrying him on
down the chances were very good that in another
mile or less he would be beyond them and they would
go on back to the highway and he would be alone with
the river.
No, not alone, he thought. I got the snake in me. I’m
about as much alone as a woman seven months gone.
I got nobody to talk to, but I got company just the
same.
Them bastards with the black slickers will go back
to the highway after a while, he thought, and they’ll
think I drowned or that they got me with that last
shot, but that ain’t going to mean they’ll quit looking
for me. They’ll go right on till they find something,
even if it’s just rotten meat. I couldn’t never get out of
here, even if I didn’t have the snake in me.
There was no fear of dying, only a cold and terrible
anger at it and regret at the thought of Joy. I had a
whole week, he thought, and I never got close to her.
A whole week to get her, and it’s all gone now.
The tree swung around a wide bend in the river and
for a moment he could see both banks at once behind
him. The men with the guns had stopped. He drifted
on around the bend and they were out of sight behind
him.
Then in a few minutes he began to shake as with a
chill and he could feel the first faint, whirling
giddiness of nausea pushing upward inside his
stomach. So that’s how it starts, he thought.
* * *
At dawn it had begun to rain, and the river was
spilling over its banks. Mitch came up out of the
bottom, walking fast with the extinguished lantern
swinging in his hand and urgency prodding his thinshanked,
furious stride. He hung the lantern and his
raincoat on the porch and went into the kitchen, the
calloused soles of his feet rasping against the worn
and silvered planking of the floor. Jessie was cooking
breakfast, and looked up without greeting.
Big City Girl — 111
“I ain’t got time to eat,” he said. “You got any coffee
ready, Jessie?”
She looked through and beyond him, still-faced, unrecognizing.
“No,” she said with distant coldness.
He stopped, his mind coming back from the river.
“What’s the matter with you?” Then he noticed she
was wearing the homemade play suit, which
amounted to little more than a pair of too short
rompers and a halter.
“I thought I told you to burn that thing,” he said.
“Did you?” she asked without interest.
“I certainly did. Go in there in the bedroom and put
on some clothes and hand me that thing. No sister of
mine is going around looking like a half-feathered jay
bird.
”There was disgust and a cold and infinite contempt
in the glance she gave him. “Well, you’ve certainly got
a nerve.”
Mitch had never been one to heed warning signals
or ask any discreet questions. Frontal assault was the
only tactic he had ever learned. Women, even his
adored younger sister, were of another race, and the
oblique and sometimes devious courses of their
mental processes met with no understanding and only
scant interest in his forthrightly masculine and
uncomplex philosophy. She was his sister, he was
older than she was and consequently knew better
what was good for her, he loved her, and the clothes
she was wearing were indecent—these were all the
facts in the case as far as he was concerned, and
were sufficient for action. He was no more equipped
to cope with the idea that Joy might have put her up
to it for the forseen and calculated effect of his
inevitable reaction than he was to play a dozen
simultaneous and blindfolded games of chess.
“Did you hear what I said, Jessie?”
“I heard you.” She went right on turning over eggs
in the frying pan.
“Are you going to do what I told you?”
Big City Girl — 112
Now she put the egg turner down in the pan. “I am
not. I’ll wear what I please, and if I wanted to I’d go
naked. It wouldn’t be any of your business.”
His face darkened and he took her by the arm,
propelling her toward the bedroom. Surprisingly
enough, she went without protest. She walked in and
sat down on the bed.
“You can get your own breakfast,” she said with
sullen defiance.
“Never mind breakfast. Are you going to change
those clothes?”
“No. And you might as well get used to doing your
own cooking. Joy is leaving in another day or so and
I’m going with her. If it’s any of your business.”
He had closed the door to give her a chance to
change. Now he yanked it open with furious
suddenness. She was still sitting in the same position
on the bed.
“You’re what?” he demanded, not believing he had
heard her correctly. “What did you say?”
“I said,” she repeated coldly, “that I was going with
Joy. We’re going,to live together in Houston. In an
apartment.”
“Well, you can just get that idea out of your head
right now,” he snapped. “Any time I let you go off
with that—” He stopped. For all his outward
assurance he was beginning to feel a vague
uneasiness. This wasn’t the Jessie he had always
known, sunny, high-spirited, and warmly impulsive.
Fiercely independent she had always been, but still
levelheaded and loving, and when they had had
arguments she had always scolded him like an
impudent squirrel. But this sullen-eyed, contemptuous
mutiny was something new and a little frightening.
“Where’d you get this crazy idea?” he demanded.
“What business is it of yours?”
He made an effort to control his anger. “It’s plenty
of my business. Joy is no woman for you to be around.
She’s no good.” Characteristically, out of a hundred
Big City Girl — 113
possible things he could have said, he had chosen the
absolute worst.
Instantly she was a bristling porcupine. “You have
got the nerve to stand there and say something like
that about Joy? You? Will you please get out of this
room?”
“Well, you ain’t going off with Joy. I’ll tell you that.”
“And just how are you going to keep me from it?”
His face was bleak. “I’ll take a harness strap to
you.”
“And you think that’ll stop me?”
Suddenly he knew it wouldn’t. Punishing her
couldn’t keep her from leaving. How could it? The
moment his back was turned she would be gone if
nothing except the fear of punishment kept her here.
Joy was at the bottom of this, he knew. Where was
she? He whirled out of the doorway, and then he
heard the porch swing creaking. Forgotten for the
moment was the flooding river and the danger to the
crop in the bottom. That would have to wait a little
while longer.
He went down the hall in three furious strides and
emerged harsh-laced onto the porch. She was lolling
in the swing with one leg double under her and an
arm thrown carelessly along the back. There was a
fresh blue ribbon in her hair and she had on a short,
frilly summer dress scarcely down to her knees. She
wore high-heeled red shoes, with no stockings, and
one bare leg pushed idly against the floor to keep the
swing moving.
She let her head tilt back to look up at him with a
lazy smile.
“Well, it’s Mitch. My, don’t you look mad?”
“What’s this Jessie just told me?” he asked curtly.
She shook her head, still smiling. “Goodness, Mitch,
how do I know? What did she tell you?”
“The hell you don’t know. She says she’s going to
go with you when you leave.”
Big City Girl — 114
“Oh, yes. Isn’t that sweet of her? She wants to go
live with me.”
“Well, she’s not,” he said furiously.
“Why, Mitch? Has she changed her mind?” she
asked, wide-eyed.
“I’ll change it for her. She’s not going.”
She dropped the bantering pose for a moment and
looked at him with the open hatred in her eyes. “What
makes you think so?”
“I won’t let her.”
“And just how do you think you’re going to stop
her?”
He was up against the same thing again. He began
to feel that the top of his head was going to blow off
in the maddening fury of his impotence.
“She’s got her back up about something,” he said,
forcing himself to be calm. “I want to know what it
is.”
She was smiling again now with an infuriating
provocativeness. “Oh, that. She’s mad at you because
she thinks it was you that tried to pull me out of the
window last night and made me fall.”
“Tried to pull you out of the window? What the hell
—”
“Oh, haven’t you heard about that, Mitch? Or have
you? Why, just look at what you—I mean, whoever it
was—did to my poor legs.”
Still watching him with that tantalizing smile, she
reached down and pulled the dress halfway up her
long, smooth thighs. “Look at the nasty bruises where
I hit the window sill. Now, was that a nice thing for
somebody to do? Just to get a girl to come out and
play?”
“And you told her I did that?” he asked ominously.
“Oh, no. As a matter of fact, I told her I didn’t think
it was you. But she wouldn’t believe me. I don’t know
who it was. It just seems to me, though, that it was an
awful rough way to try to make a girl. Maybe that’s
the only way you could, though.”
Big City Girl — 115
For a moment he was speechless with the rage that
was clotted up inside and choking him. She made no
attempt whatever to pull the dress down, and
continued to watch him lazily, with that same
calculated seductiveness. Deliberately reaching out
the long bare leg, she placed the toe of a red shoe
against his knee and pushed, setting the swing in
motion again.
“But you were talking about Jessie,” she went on.
“You don’t have to worry about her, Mitch. A couple
of girls can always get by somehow.”
“You lousy tramp!” His arm swung down and
across, and the hard flat palm of his hand smacked
against the leg with a retort like the slap of a beaver’s
tail. The force of it pushed her around in the swing.
She laughed. “You poor, stupid jerk.”
Then they both heard the rapid tattoo of Jessie’s
shoes in the hall. Joy huddled in the corner of the
swing, the derisive laughter gone now and replaced
with a pitiful and abject terror while she put an arm
up as if to protect herself against further attack:
Jessie hit him from the back like a hurtling terrier,
and when he turned she slapped his face.
Contempt in the eyes of a fifteen-year-old girl, he
decided, was one of the worst things he had ever
faced in his life.
Big City Girl — 116
Eighteen
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
Big City Girl — 117
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
Big City Girl — 118
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
Big City Girl — 119
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.
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