River Girl by Charles Williams(6)

“I’m going to tell you good-by here,” I said,
“because I’m going to drop you off a block or so from
the bus station and run. There will be a bus for
Bayou City sometime this evening, around seven, I
think. You’ll arrive there a little before midnight. Go
to the State Hotel. It’s a small one, quiet, and not too
expensive, but still not crumby enough for the cops
to have their eyes on it. Register as Mrs. Crawford
and just wait until I show up. Try to buy yourself a
few clothes, but make the money go as far as
possible, because we’re going to have to travel by
bus. I won’t be able to bring the car the way things
are going to work out. And be sure to remember
this: When I get there, don’t recognize me. It may be
safer for us to travel separately until we get clear
out of the state. You can slip me the number of your
room on the quiet, but don’t let anybody see that you
even know me.”
I took her face in both my hands. “I won’t see you
for forty-eight hours, and after that we’ll be together
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for the rest of our lives. So this is two days’ worth of
good-by, and then there’ll never be another one.”
She held onto me, and when she finally stirred and
pushed back on my chest her eyes were wet.
“Jack,” she whispered, “I’m afraid.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I said. “Just hang
on.”
“But you’re up to something.”

River Girl by Charles Williams(5)

I could see her fighting to get hold of herself.
“We’ve got to go,” she whispered frantically. “We’ve
got to get out of here! Oh, Jack!” She started to
River Girl — 88
break up again and I shook her a little, holding her
very tightly until she stopped.
“I’m sorry,” she said weakly. “I’ll be all right in a
minute so we can go.”
“No,” I said, not wanting to do it but knowing I had
to. “We can’t go now.”
She stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. “We can’t
go? But Jack, we’ve—we’ve got to.”
“It won’t do any good to run now,” I said. My mind
was working enough to see that.
“But it’s the only thing we can do.”
“No,” I said. “You saw what it did to him; being
hunted, I mean. We can’t do it. We wouldn’t have a
chance of getting out of the country, in the first
place, and if we did we’d just be running the rest of
our lives or until they caught us.”
“But what are we going to do?” she cried out
piteously. “What can we do now. Isn’t he—?” I could
see in her eyes the question she couldn’t ask.
“He’s dead,” I said bluntly, trying to get it on the
line so we could look at it and know where we had to
start.
“But you couldn’t help it, Jack! You couldn’t!
Wouldn’t they see you had to do it, that you were
trying to protect me?”
I shook my head, not wanting to do it, but knowing
there wasn’t room enough for even one of us in that
fool’s paradise. I hadn’t done it because I had to. I’d
done it because I’d lost my head, gone completely
wild when I saw him start for her.

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.