River Girl by Charles Williams(4)

They were slender feet, quite small and beautifully
formed, but rough and calloused on the soles from
going barefoot, and they were dusty from the trail.
Very carefully, with my fingers I brushed all the dust
from them, as if they were very old pieces of
fabulously valuable and very fragile jewelry I had
found gathering cobwebs in an attic. Then I turned
them slightly inward, pressing the soles together up
near the toes, and held them, thinking how small and
breakable they looked, like the delicate feet of a
china doll, in the big, dark hands. I looked up and
River Girl — 69
she was watching me with a misty softness in her
eyes.
“Why are you doing that, Jack?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said.
I looked up again and she was crying, quite silently
and without any movement of her face.
* * *
Time came back for us without any warning. It was
the sound of a motor.

River Girl by Charles Williams(3)

“You took a hell of a long time finding it out,” I
grumbled, but glad he was getting some sense at
last I could still hear the girl inside the room cursing
obscenely and shrilly with the monotonous repetition
River Girl — 45
of a phonograph record with the needle stuck. Afraid
she would get him started again, I stepped over and
stuck my head in through the smashed panel.
“Pipe down,” I said. Then I saw her, and began to
feel scared for the first time. She was sitting on the
bed in a sleazy-looking kimono with her blonde hair
rumpled as if she’d just got up, and if she was a day
over sixteen, I was sixty.
River Girl — 46
Six
She saw me. “Who the hell are you?”
“Never mind,” I said. “Just stop that noise.”
“Why, you jerk!”
I heard the boy behind me and turned around. He
was putting on his clothes, stuffing the shirttail
inside his trousers. He had quit crying, but his face
was white and trembling and I could still see that
wild look in his eyes.

River Girl by Charles Williams(2)

“Yes. Do you want me to cut the shirt away?”
I nodded. “That’d be best. Then we can see what
we’re doing.”
She got a small pair of manicure scissors out of the
dresser and slit the shirt around the hook. I
unbuttoned it and slid it off, and turned my back to
the mirror to look over my shoulder. I was deeply
tanned from the waist up and wore no undershirt.
The streamer fly was a vivid slash of white and silver
tinsel against the sun-blackened hide, and as well as
I could tell, the barb was deeply embedded. I caught
a glimpse of my face in the mirror and for the first
time remembered I hadn’t shaved since yesterday,
and wondered what kind of thug I must look like to
her, big, with the flat, sun-darkened face rasping
with black stubble.
I motioned with a hand and passed her the
diagonal pliers. “Pinch the muscle and skin up with
your fingers and run it on through as if you were
baiting a hook,” I instructed.
“It’ll hurt,” she said quietly.
“Some,” I said.
River Girl — 23

River Girl by Charles Williams(1)

One
It was three in the afternoon and hot. Tar was
boiling out of the black-top paving around the square
and heat waves shimmered above the sidewalks. I
drove on through town and down the street to the
jail with the Negro boy. He was about nineteen and
looked scared to death.
“I ain’t done nothing, Cap’n,” he kept saying.
“O.K.,” I said. “Relax. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
My head still ached from last night and his talking
got on my nerves.
I turned him over to Cassieres at the jail. “Stick
him in the county tank. Did Buford call you?”
“No,” he said. “What’s he booked for?”