“What is it?” he shouted back, throwing another
shovelful of dirt on a low spot on the levee. For a man
who’s so stove up in the legs he can’t get around, he
thought, he’s making pretty good time.
“It’s Sewell,” Cass shouted, reaching the upper end
of the levee and puffing on through the rain atop it
like a man walking a log. Goddamnit, Mitch thought,
does he have to walk up there and tear it down as fast
as I get it built up?
Then it hit him. It was as if the levee and the rising
water and the desperate urgency of holding up this
straining bulwark against disaster, together with the
somber and uneasy dread in his thoughts of Jessie,
had occupied every corner of his mind to the extent
that there was no room for anything else, and it took
time for any other idea to filter in and find room for
itself.
Big City Girl — 120
“Sewell?” he demanded. He stuck the shovel in the
ground and looked at his father. “What about
Sewell?”
Cass could not come to rest. He slid down off the
top of the levee and continued walking up and down
past him, holding his hand over his heart and
breathing with the difficulty of a wind-broken horse.
Taking an old bandanna out of his overalls pocket, he
dabbed at his eyes and blew his nose, and then bent
over again with his hand over his heart.
“It’s Sewell,” he panted, holding out one arm to
point toward the river. “Just come over the radio.”
“What just come over the radio?”, Mitch asked
furiously. What’d he come all the way down here for if
ain’t going to make no more sense than that?
”He’s in the river. Out yonder in the river
somewheres,” the older man gasped, beginning now
to get some of his breath back. “He had a fight with
the shurf’s men up at the highway bridge and he’s in
the river.”
“Well, what in hell is he doing in the river?” Mitch
burst out. “Is he shot? Did he fall in? How do they
know he’s in it?”
“I’m trying to tell you, as fast as I get my breath,
that’s where he is,” Cass rushed on, for some reason
still pointing out toward the river as if to keep this
incredible fact established. “Three, lour hours ago,
along about daylight. They was chasing him in a car
and he ran into a whole passel of the shurf’s men on
the highway bridge, and they penned him up there
where he couldn’t get away in the car, and then there
was a gun fight and they shot him once with a rifle,
but he jumped off the bridge into the river and every
time he’d come up they was ashooting at him.”
“Well, where is he now?” Mitch asked savagely.
“What’s the rest of it?”
“He’s in the river somewheres. That’s what I been
telling you.”
“Did they hit him? Or did he get away?” Ain’t there
any way, he thought, that I can get it out of him?
Big City Girl — 121
“That’s what they don’t, know for sure,” Cass said,
having to take down the frozen, pointing arm to get
the handkerchief out of his pocket again. He put it up
to his eyes and started shaking his head from side to
side. “They don’t know what happened, because they
shot three or four times while he was going down the
river, every time his head would come up for air, and
the last time they shot just as he was going under and
they never did see him come up no more. They went
down the river for a mile, looking. The man on the
radio said there wasn’t no way he could have come
out, because there was a bunch of ‘em on both sides
of the river and they never did even see his head
come up no more after the last shot. He’s been shot,
or drowned in the river.”
Mitch stood quietly in the rain, holding onto the
shovel handle and looking down at his feet in the
mud. I been trying to tell him for a long time, he
thought, that sooner or later he was going to hear
something on that damned radio he didn’t want to
hear.
Cass began walking back and forth again. “Well,
come on, Mitch. Gather up your stuff and let’s go,” he
said wildly.
Mitch stared at him. “Go where?” he asked.
Cass stopped pacing and looked at him blankly, like
a bewildered and sodden-hatted kewpie doll left out
in the rain.
“Where?” he asked.
“Where? Well, surely you ain’t going to stay down
here in the field. Don’t you understand what I been
saying? Sewell’s in the river. He’s been shot. You
can’t just stay down here and not do nothing.”
“Just what do you expect me to do?” Mitch asked.
“Do? Why—why—” Cass said incredulously, “why,
come up to the house. Listen to the radio. To the
news.” It was as if the whole course had been
perfectly clear in his mind until Mitch had begun
asking his stupid questions, and then he had to cast
about for the answer himself.
Big City Girl — 122
Mitch began to comprehend some of it then.
Sewell’s been shot on the radio, he thought. He’s in
this river down here, but it’s actually the radio river,
or he can’t make up his mind which it is, and they’re
hunting for him on the radio, and there can’t none of
it really happen anywhere except on the radio. He
can’t make up his mind whether it’s really Sewell
they’re looking for or whether it’s a radio game called
Sewell Neely.
“What do I want to listen to the news for?” he asked
quietly.
“Why,” Cass sputtered, “to find out what’s
happened. To see if he’s been—been—”
“And what,” Mitch asked slowly, “do I do after I find
out?”
Big City Girl — 123
Nineteen
“Ain’t you going to do anything? Anything a-tall?”
Cass cried out piteously.
“Yes,” Mitch replied, still speaking quietly. “I’m
going to keep on piling dirt on this levee. You see that
water over there?” He pointed with the shovel. Just
three or four inches below the top of the levee in
places now, it waited, poised, straining, and heavy,
the dark surface of it quiet except for the dimpling of
the rain. “You know what’s going to happen to that
cotton back there if it goes out?”
“Cotton?” Cass repeated blankly. “Cotton? Don’t
you understand, Mitch? Ain’t I telling you? Sewell’s
shot. Won’t you listen? He’s shot. In the river.”
As he swung his head to look at the cotton whose
existence he did not even recognize, water sprayed
off the brim of the old greenish-black hat. Reaching
up, he removed it and took it in his two hands and
began wringing it out as naturally and as
unconsciously as some pixie-like old crone of a
charwoman wringing out a mop. A discolored stream
of water sprayed across his feet.
He began to cry, still twisting the hat. In a moment
he unwound it and put a hand inside the crown to
open it up again, and then placed it, misshapen and
crosswise, upon his head. Mitch heard the sudden
Big City Girl — 124
gurgle of water and turned to see a small stream
gushing from another gopher hole in the levee.
Snatching at the shovel handle, he leaped toward it
and began throwing dirt across onto the front face of
it until it stopped.
Cass bounded after him, bandy-legged, weeping,
importunate. “I been bereft,” he cried. “I been
berefted by everybody. One of my boys is killed in the
river and the other one’s so hardhearted he don’t
even care. It’s a judgment. It’s a judgment on me.”
Mitch stopped the fury of his shoveling and turned,
a savage impatience in his face, and started to lash
out at him to go on back to the house, but he bit the
words off and his expression softened as he looked at
the hopeless ruin of the man, the futile eyes wet with
tears and the faded doll’s face, too weak even for
tragedy, lost, hopeless, uncomprehending, under the
grotesquely comic misshapen hat. It’s all mixed up for
him, he thought. It should have stayed on the radio.
As long as it was all on the radio, it was a Sewell
Neely game and they gave five hundred dollars to
whoever guessed the answer, but now part of it’s got
away from him and it’s his own boy that’s lying on the
bottom of the river, or at least part of the time it is,
and he don’t know what to do about it.
“You go on back to the house, Dad,” he said gently.
“Just listen to the radio and wait. That’s all you can
do. I’ve got to get to work.”
“It’s the sin of the world,” Cass cried out. “Hardheartedness
is the sin of the world.” He turned away
and started to run, going toward the river. One hand
came up to clasp the brim of the obscenely comic hat
as if a sudden gale had sprung up and he had to hold
onto this last of his earthly possessions to keep it
from blowing away. Discovering after a dozen bounds
that he was going in the wrong direction, he stopped
and wheeled about, and then came back, charging
past Mitch, unseeing, oblivious, head bent forward as
if into a gale and still holding onto the hat. Then he
was gone, running up the hill into the edge of the
timber, going toward the house.
Big City Girl — 125
Mitch looked after him for a moment, then bent to
the shovel again.
Noon came and went with the sodden drumming of
rain while he fought the rising water with the shovel
like some lost soul before the fuel piles of hell. He
stopped endless gopher holes and built up all the low
places, and then started across building the whole
levee higher. When he had gone the full length of it
he started back again, still piling up more dirt. Now
and then he would stop for a moment to catch his
breath and stare bleakly at the water, still rising, but
more slowly now beyond the levee. His fingers would
be stiff and curved into the form of the shovel handle
and would ache when he straightened them. And
whenever he paused like this, even for a few seconds,
his eyes, after sweeping across the threatening and
precariously held wall of water beyond him, would
start to swing outward toward the river while his
mind turned uncontrollably to the picture of Sewell
lying somewhere on its bottom with his face in the
mud and the flood rolling over him. It ain’t going to
do no good to cry about it, he would think, and I can
maybe do some good here. He would tear himself
away from it and go back to the endless scoop, lift,
and swing of the shovel.
After a while the searchers came down the hill and
passed him, going into the bottom, two at first, then
one, and later on two more, white-hatted, blackslickered,
carrying rifles in the crooks of their arms,
and he cursed them bitterly and went on with the
work. They would ask the same unvarying, inevitable,
and stupid questions and listen without violence—
knowing who he was—while he cursed them. He
could think of no reason for his bitterness and the
bleak-faced tirade of curses other than that they were
looking for the dead body of his brother, either for the
five-hundred-dollar reward or because they were
officers of the law and paid to do it. Maybe, he
thought, I’m going crazy too.
Possibly, though, it was because at last they were
men, like himself, and capable of accepting and
returning violence on a reciprocal plane no higher
Big City Girl — 126
and no lower than his own, and he wanted to fight
them if they would. He had been struggling too long,
infuriated, raging, and impotent, against the
unconquerable and the intangible, trying to come to
grips with and defend himself against an unbeatable
and overwhelming river, a half-demented old man,
and a bitch.
In the dismal rain of afternoon the straining levee
held, while the water grew and waited.
* * *
For no other reason than that you went on living until
you had to die, you went on walking until you had to
fall for the last time. There was no sense to it; it was
utterly without reason. A thousand miles back the
world consisted of nausea and retching sickness,
unnumbered incalculable millions of identical wet,
black, pain-distorted tree trunks, a knee-deep
highway of leaf-surfaced unmoving dirty water, and
the eternal gray dreariness of rain, and a thousand
miles ahead it would be exactly the same. You could
fall for the last time here in this spot, or you could
stagger on through this agonized and unvarying hell
for another mile, and the difference in distance and
time would be no more discernible here than the
same mile and the same elapsed period of time
measured, after you dropped, against all infinity and
eternity.
Some critical and still lucid portion of Sewell’s mind
examined this phenomenon with curiosity. I was born
and raised in this bottom, he thought, and I lived in it
for twenty-one years, fishing for catfish and white
perch and hunting coons in it, and I know every bit of
it, but now it all looks the same. Maybe I’m already
dead and don’t know it. Maybe this is hell and I’ll see
Harve again and can wait here for Joy. Maybe it’s just
that everything looks funny now because of the
poison, or the pain. I never knew pin oaks and white
oaks to look like that before, all the same and all
black, and swollen up like that.
Big City Girl — 127
Here’s your picture, I’d have said, Harve don’t need
it no more, and maybe when you think about it I
reckon he never did because what do you need the
picture for if you’ve got the bitch it was took of? It’s
too bad you won’t be around long enough to give it to
somebody else, which was Harve’s trouble too, but
anyway, when they come in here after you begin to
stink, and find it stuck in your mouth like that, they
can pass it around and show it to their friends, if they
got friends. And they ought to have lots of friends,
with a picture like that. I guess you made a lot of ‘em
with it, and got made by ‘em, till you run into Harve’s
trouble. Anyway, you still got both hands, and a
picture in your mouth, which is more than Harve’s
got.
What the hell am I muttering about? he thought, his
mind becoming clear again. I sound like some highschool
punk telling what he’d have done if he’d
caught up with the other guy. I didn’t find her. I had a
whole week and I didn’t find her, so why go on about
it? Forget it. Maybe I’d like to have a boat to go down
the river in, one of them shiny glassed-in ones like I
used to see in Galveston with a guy in a white coat
going around serving drinks. I got as much chance of
that as I have now of finding her, so why don’t I wish
for it too?
The hand and the wrist were badly swollen and
darkened now, and he supposed the whole arm was
too, but there was no way he could tell inside the coat
sleeve. The arm was very painful, and would bend
only with difficulty, and it seemed to be swelling out
against the sleeve like an inflated inner tube inside a
tire. The left arm was growing stiff from the flesh
wound through the muscle of the forearm, and the
shock had worn off now, leaving it excruciatingly
painful. Periodically, the awful chills would sweep
over him and leave him drenched in a cold and
clammy perspiration, while his heart fluttered like a
bird’s. But it was the falling that was worst. Suddenly
and without warning he would find the whole river
bottom tilting on end and flying up at him like the
opening of a cellar door, and he would be wallowing
Big City Girl — 128
in the muddy and leaf-congested water struggling to
rise. After a passage of time that he was never able
even to estimate, he would be back on his feet and
staggering on. There’ll be one of ‘em pretty soon, he
thought, when I won’t get up.
Then he was on the beach at Galveston again with
Joy, on their honeymoon, when she still thought he
was a big-shot gambler and not a cheap purveyor of
hired and professional violence. He would feel the
great sea wind blowing and hear the booming of the
surf at night, with his face in the fragrant loveliness
of her hair.
I wonder if I’ve passed the farm yet, he thought. I
seem to be on that side of the river and it’s funny I
wouldn’t have recognized it if I’d gone by. Well, it
don’t make no difference. I wouldn’t stop there.
Here’s your picture. And this other thing’s a gun.
You ought to recognize a gun, but maybe you never
saw that end of one before.
Big City Girl — 129
Twenty
It was midafternoon. The searching officers had come
and gone, on into the bottom, and later Mitch had
seen three of them come back out and go up the hill
toward the house, where presumably they had left
their cars. The other two, he supposed, had gone on
up the river and would come out higher up, by the
Jimerson place. Looking for a dead man on the bottom
of the river, he thought bitterly, like a bunch of
hungry turtles.
The river seemed to pause in its attack. For the past
half hour the water level on the upper side of the
levee had been almost at a standstill, and now it
hung, poised, just below the top, like a toy balloon
inflated to the bursting point. Was it the crest? Had it
reached the peak, or was it merely resting, gathering
its force for a new assault? If it’d just drop off a little,
even a quarter of an inch, he thought, watching
tensely, I’d know I held it. But if it comes up any more
it’s gone.
Like Sewell, he thought, the black despair
reawakening and moving inside him like something
cold but still alive in his stomach. But Sewell’s been
dead ever since he killed that deputy and butchered
him up like that; he’s just been borrowing time since
Big City Girl — 130
then. He knew it, and I knew it, and I ought to be
used to it by this time.
He turned, looking out across the rain-smeared
bottom. Water was backing up into the field on the
lower end, but there was no current in it and it was
standing quietly in the furrows between the rows of
cotton. If the river went back down before too long it
would cause little damage.
His eyes swung back, and then suddenly stopped. A
man had emerged from the edge of the timber out
along the river, beyond the end of the levee, plowing
along bareheaded and without a slicker, head down
and lurching drunkenly from side to side. That ain’t
one of them deputies, lie thought, and then the man
fell and struggled weakly in the flood.
Before the man had hit the water he was running.
Oh, my God, Mitch thought, lunging across the field.
He came to the fence and slid through between the
strands of barbed wire, hearing the rip of torn
overalls and feeling but not even noticing the wire
raking into the flesh of his leg, and then he was
splashing through the slowly moving discolored flood
toward the weakly floundering man still fifty yards
away in the rain. The water came up to his knees,
slowing him down. And then Sewell had his head out
of the water.
Mitch rushed up to him, panting, and tried to take
his arm. Sewell, on his knees with his head down, felt
the hands upon him and heard the splashing and tried
to pull away. Mitch grabbed the collar of his coat and
heaved mightily upward and Sewell came to his feet
and stood, facing downriver, not knowing who it was.
The gun was in his right-hand coat pocket and he
wondered vaguely, with some far-off, detached
portion of his mind, whether it would still fire even if
he could get it out with the stiff, venom-swollen hand.
Then he turned, and they looked at each other for a
long minute, the thin and hard-faced man in drowned
overalls and shirt with his butter-colored hair
plastered to his skull, and the bigger, heavy-
Big City Girl — 131
shouldered one in the ruin of his city clothes, and
neither of them showed any sign of emotion.
“We can’t stand here in the open,” Mitch said at
last. “There’s still some deputies down here looking
for you.”
“Not to the house,” Sewell replied, swaying. He
seemed to be having trouble keeping Mitch fixed in
his gaze.
“No,” Mitch said quietly. “Not to the house.”
“Just in the trees. In the big, black trees. They got
bigger since I was here.”
Mitch looked at him piercingly. He’s out of his head,
he thought. They got him somewhere. “Where you
hit?” he asked, keeping his voice quiet and steady. If I
start going to pieces, he thought, I’ll never get him
out of here. “Where did they hit you?”
”In this arm,” Sewell said dully. “Didn’t hit the
bone.”
The right arm was hanging straight down out of
sight beyond him and Mitch did not see it for a
moment. He looked at the sickness in his brother’s
eyes and the white, ghastly, unhealthy pallor of his
face and thought. Being shot through the arm didn’t
make him like that. They got him somewhere else he
ain’t talking about. But I got to get him out of here.
We can’t stand here in the open like a couple of damn
fools talking about the crops. I got to get him into the
timber. For Christ’s sake, I got to get him moving
before somebody sees us or he falls in this water
again.
He moved around to the other side of the swaying,
precariously upright figure. “Put your arm across my
neck,” he said, and started to reach for the wrist to
pick it up. Then he saw it, the obscenely swollen
balloon-fingered travesty of a hand puffed blackly out
of the end of the coat sleeve like an inner tube
swelling out of a ruptured tire casing, and he felt his
stomach turn over with the sickness of it. Snake, he
thought wildly. Half the goddamned police in the
state looking for him, and a snake got him. He spent
twenty years in this river bottom living with ‘em and
Big City Girl — 132
then he gets back in it for half a day and one of ‘em
gets him. They couldn’t have got him another time,
when he could go to a doctor. It had to be today. It
had to be now. Of all the dirty . . . But what the hell
difference does it make? He couldn’t get out of here
no how. I got to stop this. I’m getting as flighty as an
old woman. I got to get him into that timber. What’s
the matter with me?
It was Sewell who snapped him out of it. “What’s
the matter, kid? You getting sick?” he asked, and
Mitch stiffened as if he had been sluiced with a
pitcher of ice water. He looked at his brother’s face
and saw the cold, ferocious grin and the sardonic eyes
watching him.
He’s all right again, he thought. His mind was
wandering, but it’s all right now. He’s the one with
the poison in him and I’m acting like a kid or an old
woman.
“Come on,” he said, deadly calm now. He moved
around to Sewell’s left to keep from jarring the
swollen arm, put his arm around Sewell’s waist, and
started walking. We don’t dare go across the field, he
thought. We got to go in above the levee, through that
water, where we can stay in the trees.
They pushed through it in the gray and dismal
crying of the rain. In places the water was up to their
waists, and Sewell walked falteringly, several times
almost falling before Mitch could steady him. Once
the sickness came upon him and he bent over,
retching, and tried to vomit. He had been sick so
many times and for so long there was nothing to the
vomiting except the dry and terrible retching.
After what seemed like an hour to Mitch they came
to the end of the water and started up the incline
going out of the bottom. He guided Sewell away from
the trail to where, some hundred yards away, there
lay the crown of a big oak he and Cass had felled for
stovewood early in the spring. Sewell fell to his knees
and lay down back among the branches, out of sight
of anyone going along the trail. Mitch sank down
Big City Girl — 133
beside him and helped him to straighten out. Then he
thought of the raincoat.
“Wait a minute,” he said hurriedly. He ran down
into the field and came back with the coat, Spreading
it across a pair of limbs, he made a sort of tent of it to
break the rain. Then he sat down, with his head under
the edge of the coat, his face dark and still as if
chopped out of walnut.
He looked at the arm. “Moccasin?’’ he asked
quietly.
Sewell lay with his head on a small limb, his face
deathly white except for the brown splotches of the
big freckles, and his body rigidly still save for the
hurried and shallow breathing. He shook his head
slightly.
“Rattler,” he said.
Oh, God, Mitch thought. It couldn’t have been
worse, but now it is. God knows how many hours ago,
and a rattler on top of that, instead of a moccasin.
“Where?” he asked, still with that same quietness,
as if he held onto his emotions with the same
tenacious and indomitable grimness with which he
was trying to hold back the thought of his brother’s
dying. “When?”
Sewell tried to raise the arm. “Twice,” he said
faintly. “Once on the wrist and once on the hand.
Little after daylight this morning.”
“Did you get any of the poison out?”
Again there was that faint shake of the head. “I
didn’t have a knife to cut it with.”
Mitch sat quietly, avoiding his eyes. “You’ll be all
right,” he said, knowing he was lying. There wasn’t
one chance in a hundred, even for a specimen like
Sewell.
The old sardonic gleam came momentarily into
Sewell’s eyes. “Don’t give us that, kid,” he said with
the pain showing under his voice. “We ain’t got time
for any crap.”
Mitch started to break then, just once. “Look,” he
said urgently, his voice very thin and harsh, “a doctor
Big City Girl — 134
could still fix it. I’ll go up and get a wagon and send
one of them goddamned deputies after a doctor.”
Sewell looked at him quietly. “Cut it out, kid.”
“For Christ’s sake, Sewell!”
“Knock it off. In the first place, it’s too late. In the
second, if he could fix me up I’d go to the chair. I like
it better here.”
Mitch looked down at the mud. He nodded his head
slowly.
“You want to stay down here, then?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
“All right,” Mitch said quietly.
They were both silent for several minutes, listening
to the monotonous tattoo of the rain on the spread
raincoat. Then Mitch said, “What about, if—?”
“Not if. When.”
“All right,” Mitch said. He always had to be tougher
than anybody else, he thought. I guess being tough
was the only religion he ever had. And I reckon it’s as
good as any, if it lasts. Got help you, though, if it ever
quits on you. “All right, then. When.”
Sewell looked at him. “You still got a shovel on this
shirt-tail farm? Or has he sold that too?”
Big City Girl — 135
Twenty-one
Mitch nodded his head, and the thing was done.
There had always been a deep and unspoken
understanding between them. So unlike in many
ways, the one corrupt, professionally violent, and
criminal, and the other with his bitter honesty and a
sort of harsh and thorn-protected, inarticulate
capacity for love, they had always been able to meet
on this common ground of a hard and unflinching
realism. Courage was a quality each recognized and
respected in the other; perhaps it had been passed on
to them by their mother as valor is said to be in the
breeding of fighting bulls, or perhaps it had been
forced upon them by long association with the pitiful
contrast of their father’s weakness. At any rate, they
understood each other now, and nodded, glad there
had to be no further talk.
For Sewell there was in it the final guarantee that
he would never be taken alive to go to the electric
chair, and the grisly humor of one last supreme
victory over the forces of the law he hated. The fivehundred-
dollar reward forever unclaimed by any
money-hungry deputy and the forever unsolved
mystery of his disappearance would constitute the
farewell expression of contempt he would leave them.
Mitch had enough insight into the working of his
Big City Girl — 136
brother’s mind to be aware of this, but for him the
reasons were different, although they came to the
same conclusion.
There was a proud, unbending strain of
clannishness in him, clannishness in the true sense of
love and loyalty to family, which excluded the law, or
at least came first, before the law. If Sewell owed a
debt to law and to society for his misdeeds—and
Mitch was too honest to deny this—Sewell would have
paid it when he died, as surely as if he had paid it on
the gallows or in the electric chair, and with the
payment of this debt what was left of Sewell or the
memory of Sewell was no longer society’s concern. It
was strictly a matter for his family. And since, besides
himself, the family consisted of a half-demented old
man who lived in a dream and a girl too young to
understand and too vulnerable to grief, he would
accept the full responsibility. Damn the law now that
the debt was being paid; it no longer had any concern
in the matter. Damn the radio and newspapers, the
publicity, the tumult, and the money-hungry scramble
for reward. There had been enough of Roman
carnival. It could end here in a hidden grave on this
remaining and pitiful remnant of the land the Neelys
still possessed.
He crouched now, wooden-faced, quiet, unwinking,
below the edge of the sheltering raincoat and looked
at Sewell, half ashamed of the weakness of his
outburst a few minutes ago. There for a moment it
had been hard to take, almost too hard, but now it
was over and the grief was contained where it should
be, below the surface and out of sight.
“How do you feel now?” he asked.
“O.K.,” Sewell replied. They were both aware of the
lie.
“Can I get you anything?”
“No. I wish I had a cigarette, but I reckon yours are
ruined too.”
“The tobacco’s still dry. It’s in a can. But the papers
are wet.”
“It don’t matter.”
Big City Girl — 137
“I’ll run up to the house and get some more
papers.”
“Never mind,” Sewell said.
“It won’t take a minute.”
He slid backward out of the dead tree and stood up
in the rain. For a moment his gaze swung outward
over the water backed up below him. What was it
doing? Was it still rising, or had it reached the crest
and begun to fall? Then he turned away; there was no
time for it now. Just for an instant a great bitterness
welled up in him. It seemed somehow that for a
period of time that went back farther than he could
remember—and was actually just since daybreak this
morning—he had been caught up in one desperate
and inconclusive struggle after another. First there
had been the argument with Jessie, which he had had
to abandon in a hopeless mess when he ran to fight
the rising water trying to engulf the crop, and now in
turn that was swallowed up in the larger disaster of
Sewell. Maybe the old man’s right, he thought. The
thing to do is to find a world of your own. Then he
shook it off and started up the hill toward the house.
* * *
The cars had been arriving and departing since midmorning.
Three of them had come and gone by now,
and there was one still parked in the front yard while
its two occupants searched the river bottom. As each
arrived and began to disgorge its slickered, whitehatted
men with rifles, Cass would leap up from
beside the radio and run out into the rain in an antic
frenzy of lamentation with the burlesque and
monstrous hat athwart his head.
“He’s drowned,” he would wail. “It said on the radio
He didn’t come up no more. I’m his daddy and I tried
to raise him up a Christian, but he’s drowned in the
river.”
“We don’t know,” the men would say. “And we don’t
believe anything until we see it.”
“But it said so on the radio,” he would cry out,
trotting after them as far as the barn and unable to
Big City Girl — 138
grasp the fact that these men in the field were the
ones who fed the information in the first place into
radio’s all devouring gut and were uninterested in its
digestive rumblings.
And then, as they left him, he would stand for a
moment lost and uncertain in the rain and call out
after them the repeated theme and password of his
incipient madness: “I’m his daddy. He was my boy.”
Whether this was a misguided bid for fame or the
tortured admission of a sense of guilt they had no way
of knowing—if they cared.
Joy sulked in her room and looked with contempt
upon all this frenetic exhibitionism. I’m only his wife,
she thought. Nobody cares enough to ask me how I
feel. The silly old idiot, making a fool of himself like
that. I think he’s going nuts. But you’d think
somebody might have heard that he had a wife.
The last car, which had a press sticker on the
windshield, rolled into the yard in midafternoon
carrying two men, neither of whom had raincoats.
They got out and ran up on the porch, one of them
carrying a bulky camera case. The reporter was a
lean-faced young man with closely cropped dark hair
and alert gray eyes, and an air of eager impatience
about him like a hunting dog on a frosty morning. The
photographer was older, around forty, sloppily
dressed in an old gray suit with food stains on the
vest. The vest itself was closed with only one of its
buttons, which was in the wrong buttonhole, causing
it to extend down some two inches lower on one side
than on the other. He was dark-haired too, but the
hair was long, with a few strands of gray, and would
never stay combed, springing up wildly on both sides
of the part and giving him a perpetual air of having
just got out of bed. The face was gaunt, long-jawed,
with cavernous eye sockets, and the eyes themselves
were gray, with an expression of detached and
somewhat cynical boredom. His name was Lambeth,
and he was half drunk.
Cass was sitting on the bed in the front room
listening to the radio when they arrived. Springing
Big City Girl — 139
up, he ran into the hall and onto the front porch just
as they leaped upon it from out of the rain.
“There’s news coming in.” he said excitedly,
pausing only for an instant in his headlong orbit. “Got
to listen to the news. I’ll talk to you in a minute.”
Then he whirled and was gone, disappearing through
the open window back into his room again.
They started, and looked at each other. They could
hear the radio’s voice inside the room.
“Looks like one of the listening audience,” Lambeth
said, unslinging the camera case and leaning boredly
against the wall.
The reporter walked to the window and looked in.
Cass was seated on the edge of the bed with his face
pushed up in front of the radio, rapt, intent,
unmoving, while the comic and improbable hat
dripped water onto the floor.
“Are you Mr. Neely?” he asked.
“Can’t talk to you now,” Cass said, frowning.
The reporter withdrew his head, he stood still,
listening and could hear the news.
“—no late developments in this sensational man
hunt. Police officers at the scene are now almost
unanimous in their opinion that Neely is dead, either
drowned or killed by a rifle bullet at the time he was
swimming down the river. However, the search is
being pushed relentlessly and will not be written off
as closed until the body is, recovered.”
The reporter looked in again. “There’s nothing new
in that,” he said. “I filed it myself less than an hour
ago.”
Cass looked at him blankly. “It’s the news,” he said.
“Can’t talk to you now.”
“But I tell you,” the reporter said impatiently,
“there’s nothing new in it. I wrote it.”
Cass shook his head. “Don’t make no difference.”
The young man withdrew his head from the window
and looked helplessly at Lambeth, who was leaning
Big City Girl — 140
against the wall and wishing he had brought the
bottle in from the car.
“Nobody ever believes anything until he hears it on
the radio or sees it in the paper,” Lambeth said
wearily. “God help the human race.”
“There must be somebody else around here we can
talk to,” the reporter said. He started toward the door
to look down the hall.
Joy had been in the bedroom engaged in changing
into another dress when she heard the car drive up.
But instead of going on down into the bottom as the
others had done, these men had come up onto the
porch. It’s about time somebody remembered he had
a wife, she thought angrily. All this fuss and
hullabaloo and that old cluck running around like a
chicken with its head chopped off, and you’d think
there wasn’t anybody else on the place or that had
anything to do with Sewell at all. Slipping into a
dressing gown, she gave her hair a shake back over
her shoulders and went down the hall.
She emerged onto the porch just as the reporter
was coming toward the door. He was quite attractive,
she thought, and at the same time there was
something vaguely familiar about him. She put on her
best and warmest smile and started to say something.
Just then Lambeth heard her and turned.
“Well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t Narcissus.”
Big City Girl — 141
Twenty-two
“Oh, hello,” the reporter said. “You’re Mrs. Neely,
aren’t you? You remember us, I guess. At the trial?
We didn’t expect to see you out here, but I’m glad we
ran into you.”
Joy smiled at them. “Why, yes,” she said. “I
remember you, Mr.—er—”
“Shaw,” the younger man said. “And this is Byron
Lambeth.”
“Oh, I know Mr. Lambeth. We’re old friends, aren’t
we?”
“Mrs. Neely and I have seen a lot of each other,”
Lambeth said gravely.
“Now, what would you like to say, Mrs. Neely?”
Shaw asked with professional briskness. “Do you have
any idea where your husband was headed when he—
uh—”
“Well, I’m not sure,” she said slowly. “I hadn’t
heard—”
“Don’t you think he might have been trying to come
here?”
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