Hell Hath No Fury by Charles Williams 1953(4)

I hit the door with my elbow and slammed it shut
at the same time I threw the blanket over him. He
straightened, tried to turn, and screamed. There was
Hell Hath No Fury — 63
no chance he had seen me. He fought the blanket
wildly, trying to get his arms up. I pulled them down,
took two turns around him with the line, and tied it
off, then pulled his feet from under him and set him
on the floor and threw two half-hitches around his
ankles. He was still yelling, the sound muffled inside
the blanket.I had the knife out. I pulled the blanket away from
his lower face and quickly cut a hole in it around his
mouth. Grabbing a paper towel out of the container
on the wall, I rolled it into a tight ball and the next
time he opened his mouth to scream I shoved it
inside, hard, and plastered a strip of adhesive tape
across it. I straightened, and wiped the sweat off my
face. It had taken a month.



He could breathe all right, but he couldn’t yell. It
was a lot of trouble, but if I’d tried slugging him I
might have killed him. He was too old.
I opened the door a crack and peered out. It was
clear. No one was in sight anywhere. I grabbed the
coat and stepped out and closed the door. I was in
plain sight of the street now. It was like being naked
in a dream. I made it to the gate in the railing, and
then I was in the vault.
Maybe I’d expected it to be full of currency
stacked everywhere on the floor like cordwood. It
threw me for a second. I didn’t see anything except
ledgers, papers, filing cabinets, and drawers. I
started yanking the drawers open. Some of them
were locked. I got one open at last that was full of
currency in bundles, fastened with paper bands. I
didn’t look at the denominations. Time was running;
I could feel it going past me like the tide. I jerked
the undershirt out of my coat pocket; it had been
tied off with a cord to form a bag, and I started
cramming in the bundles.
I came out of the vault and ran up in back of the
tellers’ cages, bent over and hidden from the street
by the ground glass screen and the counter. In
another thirty seconds I’d be out of here. It was
beginning to get me now. I cleaned out the first one,
Hell Hath No Fury — 64
and moved to the other. It was just a few seconds
now. Then I stopped dead still and listened, feeling
the pulse jump in my throat. There was somebody on
the sidewalk outside.
I dropped, squatting below the counter, trying to
listen above the roaring of blood in my ears. The
footsteps were going on past. Would whoever it was
look inside and wonder why no one was in sight?
Then I froze. I could feel the icy wind blowing right
up my spine. The shuffling footsteps hadn’t gone
past. They had come in. Somebody was inside the
bank, right on the other side of the counter.
I tried to stop the sound of my breathing. And
then, in an agonizing flashback of memory, I thought
of the thing I had done that day when I hadn’t seen
anybody here. I had looked down inside the cages.
He hadn’t said anything. Why didn’t something
happen? I fought desperately to hold myself still, not
give way to the awful compulsion to break and run
for it. Then he moved again. And now I began to get
it. There was another sound beside the scrape of his
shoes. It was the tap, tap, tap of a cane.
“Mister Julian? You theah, Mr. Julian? Wheahbouts
the fiah?”
I could feel myself weaken all over and the sigh
coming up out of my lungs like a balloon collapsing.
I throttled it and tried to hold my breath as I came
slowly to my feet.
It was awful. It could break your nerve. We were
facing each other across the counter and I was
looking right into the dark glasses three feet in front
of my eyes. I was robbing a bank with a witness
standing there so near he could reach out and touch
me, a witness who could send me to the penitentiary
for practically the rest of my life except for the fact
that he was blind.
“That you, Mister Julian?” he asked.
How did he know somebody was here? Did he
know it? I didn’t dare move. And I couldn’t speak.
That was the way he identified people, by their
voices. And I couldn’t stand there forever. He was
Hell Hath No Fury — 65
reaching out an arm, groping for me. I leaned back,
not moving my feet, and the fingers passed an inch
away from my tie.
“Ain’t like you, Mister Julian, makin’ fun of ol’
Mort.” I had to get out. I couldn’t stand it. I moved
one foot back, picking it up and lowering it carefully
and utterly without sound, crepe rubber against tile.
Then I moved the other one. I repeated it. I was out
of the cage. I held the bag out from my legs so I
wouldn’t brush against it. I was past the other cage
now, in the railed-off area where the desk was.
I looked at him, and that was when I began to go
to pieces. It wasn’t human. He had moved. He had
walked along the front of the counter and now he
had stopped beside the railing, and he was tracking
me. He couldn’t see me, and no pair of ears on earth
could have detected any sound, but he was following
me as unerringly as radar. I moved, and the gaunt
black face and sightless eyes moved with me. “You
got no business in heah!” he said. I ran.
Hell Hath No Fury — 66
8

The street was clear, and there was no one in the
alley. I got the trunk of the car open, threw in the
bag, tossed the coat on the back seat, and made a U
turn, throwing gravel, and shot across Main Street.
This way I’d come in behind the Taylor building.
They’d have the other street blocked by now, and I
had to get into the thick of it without anyone’s
seeing me drive up. I slammed ahead two blocks and
turned left.
Smoke was pouring into the sky. I hit a jam of
abandoned cars, pulled over to the curb, and got
out. The crowds were all ahead of me in the street
and beginning to push on to the vacant lots around
the rear of the building. The fire engine was around
in front, in the middle of the worse jam. I circled,
keeping to the rear of the crowd. Nobody paid any
attention to me. The whole second floor of the
building was roaring now, throwing flames into the
air. I shoved my way into the knot of people pressed
around the fire engine. They had a hose run out,
playing a stream on the roof on the other side, and
now they were trying to get one on this side.
Everybody was yelling and getting in the way. I saw
the chance I was looking for and latched on to the
Hell Hath No Fury — 67
hose, up near the nozzle, as they fought to get it
strung out through the crowd.
They gave us the pressure before we got set. The
hose stiffened, bucked, and threw the man who was
carrying the nozzle. The man next in line went for it,
got his hands on it, but he was too light and it
slapped him off. Two more lunged for it. I piled into
them.
“Look out!” I yelled. “Let me at the damned thing!”
I collided with one of the men, knocked him off his
feet, and then fell over him on to the hose. I was
soaked, drowned, covered with churned-up mud. It
was perfect. It was just what I wanted. I got both
hands on the nozzle, dug my feet in, and got up. I
held it, and started going forward. I could hear the
crowd yell.
We had two streams on the fire now, but we might
as well have been squirting a burning oil well with
water pistols. The whole thing was going up like a
Roman candle. A big section of the roof caved in and
sparks and embers went exploding upwards in the
smoke. The crowd was pushing in across the vacant
lot all around us. I swung my head and through all
the confusion I could see the deputy sheriff and two
more men running along the line trying to force
them back. I jerked my head at the two men behind
me.
“Slide up here and take this!” I yelled. They
clamped their hands on it and I let go, ducked back,
and made for the deputy. I got him by the arm and
yelled in his ear.
“That wall’s coming down any minute! We got to
get ‘em out of here.”
“What you think I’m trying to do?” he roared back.
“Look! Go tell ‘em to cut the water on this hose.
Then get as many men on it as you can. Pick it up.
We’ll shove ‘em back.”
He got what I meant, and ran towards the fire
engine. I turned and plowed my way back to the
nozzle. Just as I got my hands on it the hose went
Hell Hath No Fury — 68
limp. I started running, dragging it, down alongside
the wall and out into the vacant lot at the rear, as far
as it would reach. Men were falling in behind me
now, picking it up. I started swinging it out and
away, like hauling a fish seine. The deputy was
yelling and motioning backwards with his arms.
They began to back up, and every time they gave a
step we dragged the hose against them. In a couple
of minutes we had the whole crowd shoved back
across the street.
The wall didn’t fall outwards after all. It sagged a
little and went on burning. But I had accomplished
the thing I wanted. That deputy, and at least a half
dozen others, would remember me all right. My
clothes were a mess; I looked as if I’d been fighting
fire for a week. There wasn’t much to do now except
to keep it from spreading to the houses along the
street. We put out fires in the weeds and sprayed
water on some of the nearer shacks. And all the time
I was waiting. It would break any minute now.
Then I heard a siren, pitched low and merely
growling. Another highway patrol car was inching its
way through the crowd jammed in the street. The
driver got out and waved his arm towards the deputy
sheriff. The deputy went over, while people pressed
around them. Then I saw some of them break away
and start running towards Main.
I shoved into the knot of men. The word was
traveling faster than another fire. “What’s up?” I
yelled at a man squeezing his way out.
“Bunch of men held up the bank! While everybody
was over here at the fire they stuck it up and got
away with ten thousand dollars!”
“Did they catch ‘em?” I tried to grab his arm.
“Not yet. They got away in a car.” He was gone
past me.
By the time I got back to the lot it had grown to
four men with sub-machine guns and thirty thousand
dollars, and the car was a black sedan. I didn’t pay
much attention to it. This was the kind of rumor
you’d expect; the men who were working from facts,
Hell Hath No Fury — 69
over there at the bank, wouldn’t be saying what
they’d found out. It was just a matter of time till they
got the hunch the fire was rigged and start at it from
that angle. As far as I could see it had come off
without a hitch; I hadn’t left a track.
The letdown began to catch up with me. I told
them I was going over to the room to change
clothes. What I really needed was a drink. As soon as
I got out of the shower I dug the bottle out of the
suitcase, poured a stiff slug in a glass, and collapsed
on the side of the bed. It had been rough. I had lost
all track of time. I took a jolt of the whisky, felt it
explode inside me, and wondered how much money
there was out there in the trunk of the car. I couldn’t
even guess.
I went back to the lot. The whole town was in an
uproar. It was the biggest thing since V-J Day. The
Sheriff and two more deputies had just arrived from
the county seat twenty miles away. Highways were
being blockaded in all adjoining counties. The story
was already spreading across town that the fire had
been a decoy. The next rumor was that two experts
from the insurance company were already on their
way up from Houston. Well, they’d have a hard time
proving it, and if they did they wouldn’t be much
better off except that it’d point a little more to
somebody here in town.
It was hard on the nerves, thinking of that money
still in the trunk of the car, but the only thing I could
do was ride it out until after dark. I went up and
mixed with the crowd gawking round the bank.
Julian was all right, they said. He hadn’t been hurt,
just a little shaken up and scared. He was inside
there now, with the police. But he couldn’t give any
description of the man, or men; all he’d seen was a
blanket flopping down over his head. He hadn’t
heard any voices, though; which might mean there’d
been only one man. Old Mort, the Negro, was a
sensation. He’d been so close to one of the robbers
he could hear him breathing. He was that close, he
said, measuring with his hands. He could of reached
out and touched him.
Hell Hath No Fury — 70
I sweated out the afternoon some way, and after it
was dark I eased out of town, driving south on the
highway. Nobody stopped me, or even seemed to
notice. Before I turned off on to the dirt road I
looked back for lights. There was nobody behind me.
The moon wasn’t up yet, and it was partly overcast
and very dark. Just before I got to the abandoned
farm up on the sandhill among the pines, I pulled off
and cut my lights. I wasn’t being followed. When my
eyes were accustomed to the darkness I pulled back
into the road and went on. At the gate I turned
sharply left and went on around behind the old
sagging barn and stopped the car where it would be
out of sight of anyone going past out in front.
Fighting the impatience, I waited a few minutes to
be sure. Nuts, I thought; there’s nobody within
miles. I got out, opened the trunk, and carried the
bag inside the barn before I switched on the
flashlight. My hands were beginning to tremble a
little and I was conscious of a wild excitement. I
went inside the corn crib and closed the door. I
didn’t notice the heat now, or the sweat on my face.
I upended the bag and let the bundles and loose bills
cascade on to the floor. It was wonderful.
I didn’t try to count all of it. Most of the bundles
were fifties, twenties, and tens. Without any of the
loose bills or the ones it came to $12,300. I whistled
softly. A wild impatience began to get hold of me. I
wanted to get going, to put it back in the car and
run.

Run where? I thought.
The world wouldn’t hold me, and I knew it. It
wouldn’t take them an hour to figure it out if I
disappeared now. They could add too. I couldn’t
leave. The only way I could beat them was the one
I’d known from the first, and that was to keep my
head down and wait it out. After a month or so,
when the heat began to die down… I gathered the
bag up and went out the door of the crib.
Picking a spot near the rear wall of the crib, inside
one of the stalls, I scraped the old manure out of the
Hell Hath No Fury — 71
way with a piece of shingle, and started to dig. The
ground was sand, and easy to gouge up with the
shingle. I was careful to place all the loose dirt in
one pile. When I was down about eighteen inches, I
rolled the bag of money into as tight a ball as I could
make it, and shoved it into the hole. Then, just
before I started scooping the dirt back in, I thought
of something. I lifted it out and began looking over
the undershirt. There was a laundry mark on it, all
right. Taking out my knife, I sawed out the piece of
cloth and stuck a match to it, then ground the ashes
into the bottom of the hole. If anybody did happen to
stumble on to it I’d lose the money, but they’d never
tie it to me.
I put it back in the hole and began filling it,
tamping the dirt down with my fist until it was as
firm as the rest of the ground. The little which was
left over I spread evenly around, then raked the
dried manure and old straw back over the whole
area.
Snapping off the light, I went back to the door. The
old house was just a faintly darker shadow in the
night, off there to the left, and as I looked towards it
I thought for the hundredth time of that other day
and what Sutton had said to her and the way she
detested and feared him. There was something
insane about it. You could keep trying for years to
add it up and you’d never come out with an answer
that made sense. She wouldn’t even know Sutton.
The hell she didn’t—!
I shook them off angrily. What business was it of
mine? But, as always, when I gathered her up and
threw her out of my mind there was a little of her
left over, the way there is in a room a girl has just
walked through.
I went out and got in the car, but instead of
heading right back to town I drove on down to the
river and went swimming by the bridge. When I did
go back I stopped in at the restaurant to get a cup of
coffee. The waitress looked at my head and smiled.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Did I forget to put
Hell Hath No Fury — 72
on my hair?”
She grinned. “No. But it looks like you left it out in
the rain.”
“I been swimming,” I said. “They caught the bank
robbers yet?”
“No. But they got enough cops around here to
catch Dillinger.”
“You don’t even remember Dillinger,” I said. “You
were just a kid in a three-cornered Bikini.”
She laughed, tickled about it. I went back to the
rooming house, took another drink, and lay down on
the bed, feeling the tension go out of me. I was in.
The money was buried, and I hadn’t left a track
behind me.
* * *
The next day was Saturday, but there wasn’t much
business transacted. They might as well have closed
the whole town except that there wouldn’t have
been any places for people to congregate and rehash
the robbery. The place was full of cops. The whitehaired
Sheriff from the county seat was in town with
two of his deputies besides the one who lived here,
and there were some more with plain-clothes cop
written all over them, probably from the detective
agency or insurance company. Everybody was wild
to get at the remains of the fire and start pawing
through it for evidence, but a lot of it was still
smoldering and too hot. Special deputies had been
sworn in to keep people away from the place. I had a
hunch the Sheriff and the detectives had already
junked the out-of-town gang idea and were playing it
cagey, going through the motions of looking for the
getaway car while they waited for somebody to stick
his head up or make a slip. That much money would
be burning somebody’s pockets and he’d have to
start throwing it around. All right, I thought; go
ahead. I know about that one too.
All I had to do was keep playing it down the
middle. I stuck around the lot and talked robbery
with anybody who drifted in. And then Harshaw
Hell Hath No Fury — 73
pulled a funny one on me. Around noon he called me
into the office. He was chewing a cold cigar and
oiling a big salt-water reel on his desk.
“Sit down,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”
I perched on the side of a desk, wondering what
was coming. “What’s up?” I asked, as casually as I
could.
“I want you to take charge here for a while. My
wife and I are going to Galveston for a week.”
“What’s the matter with Gulick?” I asked.
“There’s nothing the matter with Gulick,” he said
impatiently. “Except that he’s a little slow and he
won’t take responsibility. You can use your own
judgment about trades. Do you want it, or don’t
you?”
“O.K. with me,” I said. For once I couldn’t start an
argument.
“You can run an ad if you want to,” he said. “The
paper comes out early in the week.”
“What’ll I use for money? My own?”
He sighed and shook his head. “You’re a tough nut
to get along with, Madox. Why in hell would I ask
you to pay for the ad out of your pocket? They can
send the bill to Miss Harper. Or tell her to give it to
you out of petty cash.”

“O.K.,” I said. At least he was taking that over-ripe
bundle of sex with him this time.
He finished cleaning the reel and put it in a flannel
bag with a drawstring. “Well, if you can’t think of
anything else to bitch about, I’ll leave it with you,”
he said, starting out the door.
“What are you going after?” I asked. “Tarpon?”
“No. Hammerhead sharks. They got some big ones
around the jetties down there.”
After I came back from lunch I went out on the lot
and picked out about a half-dozen cars that would
make good leaders in an ad, made some notes, and
started writing it up. At first I was just doing it to kill
time, but the thing began to grow on me as I went
Hell Hath No Fury — 74
along and after the second or third draft I had some
pretty good stuff whipped into shape, slicing the
down payments as low as they would go and playing
up all the accessories. I took it up the street to the
newspaper office, paid for it and got a receipt,
intending to go by the loan office and collect from
Gloria Harper.
I had started back to the office before I
remembered it was Saturday and they closed at
noon. Well, I could collect on Monday; it didn’t
matter. But I was conscious of a vague
disappointment, and knew the money was only part
of it; what I’d really wanted was an excuse to go in
and talk to her.
I was angling across the street towards the lot
when I happened to glance around towards the loan
office and saw her through the window. She was
sitting at a desk behind a pile of paper work. I
turned abruptly and started back, and just as I did I
noticed that Gulick had company on the lot. Two of
the deputy sheriffs were talking to him.
Well, it wasn’t anything. They were talking to
everybody in town. There was nothing unusual about
it. But still I wished I hadn’t turned right there in the
middle of the street; it might look as if I had turned
back to avoid them. But there wasn’t anything I
could do about it now. If I kept switching back and
forth in the middle of the street I would attract
attention.
The door was open and there was a big electric fan
blowing across the office. She nodded as I came in,
but the smile itself was a little forced and there was
something very tired about her face. I wondered why
she was working overtime.
She got up and came over to the counter with tall
unhurried grace.
“It was terrible about the bank, wasn’t it?” she
said. “And the fire.”
“Yes,” I said. I wasn’t even thinking about the
bank. And then I remembered what I had come in
for. “Harshaw said to take it out of petty cash,” I
Hell Hath No Fury — 75
said, shoving the receipt across the counter and
explaining what it was for.
She wrote out a slip and got the money out of the
safe. “Thanks,” I said, putting it into my wallet.
“Why don’t you knock off? You look tired.”
“I will pretty soon.”
I didn’t want to go. We stood there facing each
other across the counter. “What are you going to do
tomorrow?” I asked.
“Nothing special. Go to church in the morning, I
expect. And in the afternoon I thought I might go out
and try to sketch the Buchanan bridge.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s in the river bottom, below the one where
—“ She paused, confused, and I knew what
she was thinking. “Below the one we crossed going
out to the oil well.”
“Could I go, too?” I asked.
She nodded. “Why, yes. We could make it a
picnic.”
“That’s fine. I’ll get the restaurant to make us a
lunch to take along.”
‘No. Let me do that,” she said. “It’s no trouble.”
“What time can I pick you up?”
“About twelve would be all right.”
“Great,” I said. “I’ll be looking forward to it.”
I started out and then paused, when I reached the
doorway, to look back at her. She was still watching
me, and had just started to turn back to the desk.
It was awkward, somehow. Both of us were a little
confused. “Was— I mean, is there anything else?”
she asked.
“Oh,” I said. “No. I guess not.” I turned and went
on out into the street.
When I got over to the lot the two deputies were
gone and Gulick didn’t say anything about them.
Hell Hath No Fury — 76
9
I drove over around noon. It was a blazing, still day
of white sunlight, and the shadows under the trees
were like pools of ink. She was sitting on the front
porch waiting for me, dressed in white shorts and a
blue T-shirt, and surrounded by painting equipment
and the box of lunch. I got out and loaded it all into
the back seat. The cocker spaniel was running
eagerly up and down the walk.
“Can we take Spunky?” she asked. “He likes to run
rabbits.”
I looked at Spunky’s short legs and big paddle
feet. “Did he ever catch one?”
She smiled. “No. But he’s still hopeful.”
“Sure,” I said. I lifted him in through the rear
window and held the door open for her. As we went
down Main Street a few people were clustered in
front of the drugstore and the restaurant.
“They’re still talking about the bank robbery,” she
said. “Do you think it was somebody around here?”
I didn’t want to talk about it. “I don’t know,” I said.
“It could have been.”
When we were on the highway going south I
cranked the wing windows open and swung them
Hell Hath No Fury — 77

around front to scoop in a little breeze. She sat back
in the corner of the seat, facing towards me with one
leg doubled under her, and the big violet eyes were
happier than I had ever seen them before.
The road was a mile or so beyond the one which
went over to Sutton’s oil well. It wasn’t much more
than a pair of ruts struggling through the sand and
stunted post-oak in a generally westerly direction
towards the river bottom, and looked as if it hadn’t
been used in months.
“Where’s it go?” I asked.
“Nowhere, any more. The bridge isn’t safe and it’s
all washed out beyond, on the other side of the
bottom. We can get as far as the bridge, though.”
When we got down among the big oaks in the
bottom there was more shade and it was a little
cooler. The road wound erratically, skirting the
dried-up sloughs. Once we almost ran over an old
boar which came charging out of some bushes into
the road ahead of us.
“That looked like a wild pig,” I said.
“Some of them are,” she said. “They get lost down
here and after a while they sort of go native.”
“You’d better warn Spunky they’re not rabbits.
They could slice him up like salami.”
When we finally got to the river it was worth it,
and I could see why she had wanted to come here. It
was beautiful and remote and there was a feeling of
peace about it as if they’d forgotten to wind the
clock and it had run down fifty years ago. There was
no concrete or steel about the bridge; it was a
sagging ruin of oak timbers and loose planking
weathered to the bleached-out whiteness of old
bones against the dark wall of timber beyond it, and
tilted a little as if it would go out with the next high
water. There was a jam of whitened logs on the
upper side and the water ran dark, almost like black
tea, out from under the jam, boiling up a little and
swinging around in a big hole on the downriver side.
The road approached from below the bridge and
where I pulled the car off and stopped in the shade
Hell Hath No Fury — 78
of a huge pin oak there was a clean sandy bank
sloping down to the sandbar below the pool.
She looked across the river and then at me. “It’s
lovely, isn’t it?”
“It’s perfect,” I said.
We got out. Spunky ran down to the sandbar to get
a drink and then took off to investigate the
surrounding country. I took the water jar down to
the river’s edge and filled it for her, and when I
came back she was looking around for a place to sit
down in the shade.
“Wait,” I said, “I’ve got—“ And then I chopped it
off suddenly, feeling cold chills down my back. I’d
almost said blanket. It had been a near thing, and
thinking about it scared me.
She looked at me questioningly. “What is it?”
I got hold of myself. “Nothing,” I said. “False
alarm. I started to say I had a Sunday paper in the
car that you could sit on, but I just remember I
didn’t bring it.”
“Oh,” she said, “I don’t need anything. This is nice
sand, just like a beach.”
She sat down with the block of paper on her legs
and took up one of the charcoal sticks, looking
meditatively at the bridge. Then she glanced around
at me where I’d stretched out on the sand, just
smoking a cigarette and watching her.
“Do I make you nervous?” I asked. “Watching you,
I mean?”
She shook her head. “No. But I was just thinking
you’d probably be awfully bored.”
“Take my word for it,” I said, looking at the lovely
face and the big, serious eyes. “I’m not bored.”
“You know, you’re awfully nice,” she said quietly.
“You’re not at all like I thought you were at first. I
—“
She broke off and looked out over the bridge. “I
mean, does that sound like too shameless a thing to
say?”
Hell Hath No Fury — 79
“You’re a solid brass hussy,” I said.
She smiled, trying to cover up the confusion in her
face. “Don’t make fun of me, please. What I’m trying
to say is that you have been nice and the least I
could do is acknowledge it, after the mean things I
thought about you at first.”
I rolled on my side and propped myself on my
elbow. “I told you how that happened. I just got the
instructions mixed up. This is Approach No. 2,
known as the waiting game. You want me to explain
how it works? You take these two citizens, A and B,
we’ll call ‘em—“
She laughed, and picked up the charcoal stick
again. “All right. I’ve been warned. But didn’t your
instruction book warn you?”
“About what?” I asked.
“That your Approach No. 2, as you call it, won’t
work after it’s been explained.”
“Killjoy. Now I’ve got to buy a new manual.”
She laughed again and started blocking in the
outline of the bridge with the charcoal. I lay there
and watched her, thinking how beautiful she was,
and about the joking, and then beginning to be
aware that beneath it there was something serious
that had nothing to do with joking at all. I wondered
if she had felt it too. What was there about this kid
that kept getting under my skin? And then I
wondered irritably why I kept insisting on thinking
of her as a kid. She was twenty-one. I was nine years
older than she was, but that didn’t mean she was
sixteen any more.
It was impossible to lie there and watch her
sketching without thinking of that other time at the
abandoned farm, and that put me right back on the
same old merry-go-round with Sutton and the same
old unanswerable questions. But I had my mind
made up about one thing—I wasn’t going to ask her
about it again, at least not today. We were having
too much fun, and the mention of Sutton, always
spoiled it for her. Maybe some day she would tell
me.
Hell Hath No Fury — 80
What the hell, some day? In a month—or two, at
the most—I’d be gone from here. As soon as the heat
was off a little and the bank job began gathering
dust in the unsolved file I’d dig up the money and
beat it.
She was squeezing colors on to the plate from
little tubes, and dipping her brush into the water jar
to mix them.

“I thought watercolors came in little blocks,” I
said.
“They do,” she said. “But the tubes are better.”
Just then Spunky came flopping down the bank,
soaking wet and plastered with sand, and bounced in
between us. I saw what was coming and grabbed
him before he could get the shake started, rolling
over and tossing him down below us.
She laughed. “That was fast work.”
“He’d have made a Navajo sand painting out of it
in about one more second.”
“You’re nice to have around. Every painter should
have one of you.”
“It’d never work out,” I said. “You run into the
same old distribution problems. The pretty ones
would soon corner the market.”
“You’re very flattering today.”
“It’s probably just the moonlight.”
She wrinkled her nose at me and went on with her
brush. She worked fast, and I watched the picture
take form. I knew nothing whatever about painting,
of course, but it looked fine to me. It wasn’t exactly
like the bridge, but somehow it had that same
drowsy feeling of peace.
“I like that,” I said. “Will you do one for me
sometime?”
She didn’t look up. “Have you wondered who this
one is for?”
“You mean I can have it?”
“If you’d like it.”
“Of course I would. But why?”
Hell Hath No Fury — 81
“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “Maybe just
because it’s my birthday, and I wanted to give you
something.”
“That sounds crazy somewhere,” I said. “But is it
really your birthday?”
She nodded, and put down the brush and set the
block of paper off her legs on to the sand. “I’ll finish
it later. Why don’t we eat our lunch now? I’ll show
you my birthday cake.”
I went up and got the box out of the car and we
started unpacking it, putting the sandwiches and
Thermos jugs out on the tablecloth on the sand. She
lifted out a small tin candy-box.
“You open it,” she said.
I lifted the lid. There was a small cake inside, not
much bigger than an overgrown cupcake, covered
with white frosting and dotted with what looked like
round sections cut out of dates.
“They’re instead of candles,” she said.
“Twenty-two?” I asked.
She smiled and shook her head. “You remembered,
didn’t you? But it’s twenty-one. I mean, when you
asked me, it was so near—“
“Child,” I said. “Twenty-and-a-half years old.”
I must have looked disappointed, or something.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Did you want me
to be twenty-two?”
“No,” I said. “That would be stupid, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” she answered quietly. “Wouldn’t it?”
“I’m thirty.”
“Well, have a sandwich, you poor old man, to keep
up your strength.”
“Wait,” I said. “We can’t eat sandwiches until we
drink a toast.” I opened one of the Thermos jugs and
filled two aluminum cups. It was iced tea.
“To Gloria,” I said, “who is twenty-one all the time
and beautiful in the moonlight.”
I don’t know what happened to the rest of the
afternoon. We ate the lunch, and then she worked
Hell Hath No Fury — 82
some more on the picture. We couldn’t go swimming
because neither of us had brought a suit, but we
took off our shoes and went wading out on the
sandbar. Sometime during the afternoon a big
swamp rabbit came bounding downriver with
Spunky yelping along in his wake and falling farther
behind at every jump, and then the next thing we
knew the sun was gone. It had dropped out of sight
behind the timber and the shadows were long and
growing darker out across the bottom.