River Girl (21 page)

I understood him, all right. He was warning me. He knew now what had actually happened up there in the swamp, or he was pretty sure of it, but nothing interested him except that two-bit graft investigation. She could go to the chair for all he cared, so long as he was all right. My mind grew quite clear and I no longer shouted.

“I’m coming back,” I said. “Don’t get in my way.” I hung up the receiver and walked out.

But I still couldn’t go until I knew what she had told the police. It was going to be dangerous enough going in there without being able to get word to her, and having Buford trying to stop me, but it would be simple suicide if she’d confessed and I didn’t know it.

I never did know afterward where I was that afternoon. It was a blur of hot streets and a million faceless people going past while time ran down and stopped like a clock no one had thought to wind. And then somewhere, later, with the sun slanting obliquely through the east-west streets and brazen on the shop windows, I heard the newsboys shouting, “Read about Mrs. Shevlin. All about Mrs. Shevlin.”

I bought one and ducked inside a bar. There was another picture of her, but it was the caption I was looking at. “DENIES CHARGE.” I breathed again. Thank God, I thought. She kept her head. Forgetting the beer I had ordered, I tore into the story, trying to absorb it all at once.

If only they don’t break her down before I can get there, I thought desperately. If she cracks…But I didn’t have time to sit and think about it. Paying for the beer, I got up and took a taxi back to the bus station, got the bag out of the locker, and changed back into the old suit in the rest room. Taking out the plane ticket and the watch so there’d be nothing in it by which they could ever connect me with Bayou City, I shoved the bag back into another locker and left it.

I can’t take the bus, I thought. Somebody might see me getting off at Colston. Too many people know me there. I’ve got to get back into that swamp the same way I got out—without being seen. And I haven’t got time to horse around with freight trains.

Thirty minutes later I was weaving through traffic in the outskirts of the city, headed toward Colston in a stolen car. It had been easy. I just walked up the street until I saw a woman park and leave the keys in the car. When she went inside a store I got in and drove off. Nothing was going to stop me any more.

I stopped once and bought a flashlight in a drugstore. I’d need it, trying to get around in that swamp at night, and at dawn I could throw it in the lake. I worked it out in my mind as I drove, staying just under the speed limit in spite of the impatience riding me. I couldn’t leave the car up there where I had come out of the swamp before, on the deserted country road. It would be picked up eventually, and the state troopers might begin to wonder why somebody would steal a car in Bayou City, drive it to a place like that, and leave it, forty miles from anywhere. But if I wrecked it on the main highway, on the opposite side of the bottom, it would look all right.

It was dusk when I went through Colston, and nearly nine by the time I had passed the store and the boat place on the dam at the south end of the lake. The highway swung and turned north again, along the west side of the bottom. Fifteen miles up, and only three or four miles outside of town, it swung sharply left again, away from the bottom, and here was where I crashed it by the simple method of not making the turn. I had slowed to about twenty-five, and as I went down off the roadbed and through the ditch I took out a section of fence, and then finally came to rest without much damage up against a tree. I picked up the flashlight and started out through the pines. Joy-riding kids, they’d say.

It was a still, sultry night, with no moon but a faint light from the stars. As soon as I was in the timber, however, it was black, and I could see nothing at all. I snapped on the flashlight and started up over the ridge, leaving no tracks in the dense carpet of pine needles. When I came out on top I stopped and looked at my watch. It was nine-thirty.

If I went straight out across the bottom now, I’d hit the lake about five miles below Shevlin’s cabin. But I wanted to go in at least five miles above it, right into the swamp country itself. The best thing to do, then, was to go north here along the high ground for about ten miles and then swing down off the ridge.

It was fairly open up here in the pines and I made good time. At a little before one in the morning I figured I had come far enough, and turned right, going downhill. Before long the sand and pines gave way to big oaks and heavy underbrush. Inside an hour I was drenched with sweat and my clothes were badly torn. I ran into a wide marshy area where the mud and water were up to my knees, and to make matters worse, in the middle of it there was a place a quarter mile wide where a cyclone had gone through years ago. Big trees were piled like spilled matches in a nightmare confusion of tree trunks, limbs, and vines. I scrambled over, crawled under, and fought my way through the muck. Once, clambering along the trunk of a big windfall stacked crisscross above another, I slipped in my muddy shoes and fell into the tangle of big limbs below me, laying open a gash on my head and almost knocking myself out. I scrambled up, cursing and wiping blood out of my face, and then grinned sourly as it occurred to me it wouldn’t be necessary now to fake any signs of violence. I’d look as if Shevlin had worked me over with a ball bat.

It was nearly four when I hit the first sizeable channel of open water. I flashed the light out across it, saw that I was going to have to swim now, and stopped to light a cigarette. There wasn’t any necessity for swimming it before dawn, which would be in about an hour. I sat down against a tree and went over it in my mind. This was—What day was it, anyway? Time had been alternately stretched and compressed for so long I didn’t even know. Let’s see, I thought, I went into the lake Wednesday morning. That night at midnight I was in Bayou City. The next afternoon, then, when the story first broke, would have been Thursday. Then today was Friday. No, I corrected myself, it’s almost daylight Saturday morning. Then I’ve been lost in here for three night and two days, assuming that I tell them it wasn’t until very late Wednesday that I arrested Shevlin. It had taken me nearly all day to find his house, and I didn’t get started out with him until nearly sunset. That would make his being able to jump me and get away a lot more plausible, anyway; it’d naturally be easier in the dark.

He’d banged me with the oar, and when I came around I was in the bottom of the boat tied up like a pig with the anchor rope. It was dark and I was down there where I couldn’t see anything anyway, so I had no idea where he took me except that we went a long way. He put me ashore somewhere hours later, with my hands still tied, but not very tightly, and I’d managed to get them worked loose before daylight. The only thing, though, was that I was lost. I kept looking for the lake, and there wasn’t any; there was nothing but a thousand small sloughs and the marsh and flooded areas. After a while I’d run across some tracks and started following them, thinking somebody else was up here and I might find a cabin, and then I had lost my head completely when I found I was going in circles and that they were my own. They wouldn’t have any reason to doubt it; at least one man I knew of had been lost up here and never had found his way out. I shivered, thinking about it. I was taking a long chance. And not only of getting lost, either. I thought. Suppose they broke her down while I was in here?

I shook it off with rough impatience. It was just a chance I had to take. I lighted another cigarette, knowing that as soon as I swam the slough they’d be ruined anyway and I might as well use them up. Would I look as if I’d been lost up here for nearly seventy-two hours? Yes, there wasn’t much doubt that I’d look the part. My clothes were in ruin already and sweat-soaked and bloody from the cut on my head. Of course, I had shaved on Thursday morning, but I never had got around to it on Friday and would have a forty-eight hour growth of beard, ugly enough to convince anybody. All I had to do now was fight my way down through the swamp until I ran into some of the searchers. They would probably have a camp set up somewhere down there below and be firing guns, still hoping to guide me in. I listened now but there was no sound except that of the frogs.

The darkness was beginning to fade now and I could see the weed-choked dark water in front of me. I stood up, threw the flashlight out into the water, and waded in. Mud sucked at my feet and I pushed forward and started swimming. It was only a few strokes to the other side, where I climbed out and began beating my way through the brush again. Inside an hour I had lost track of the number if times I had to swim. I made no effort to turn aside when open water blocked my path, for it I didn’t move in a straight line I wouldn’t get out of here. When the sun came up I was able to check my direction, going due south with it on my left. My progress was agonizingly slow and the cut places on my head began to throb. Vines tripped me and I fell, and at times I had to wade for hundreds of yards through water and mud up to my waist. Most of the channels I had to swim were matted with pads, and the long, twining underwater stems wound around my arms and legs and threatened to pull me under. There was no way to know what time it was any more, for my watch was long since drowned and stopped, but the sun was climbing higher. As midday approached it was harder and harder to tell direction, for the sun was almost directly overhead.

Noon came and went and I was conscious now of beginning to weaken from hunger. I’d eaten nothing since Thursday night, and the back-breaking struggle and the heat were beginning to wear me down. Suddenly I was again in the midst of the piled windrow of down timber where the tornado had left its path through the swamp, and for a while my mind was black with panic. I was lost. I was going in circles and had come back to the place I had fought my way through nearly twelve hours before. Collapsing against the trunk of an uprooted tree, I fought to get hold of myself. It couldn’t be the same one. Tornadoes play leap-frog through a place like this, I told myself desperately, and this is another one. It had to be. I’d been going steadily south for hours. But how did I know I was going south? Part of the time the sun had been invisible down here in the timber, and for the past two hours it had been so nearly overhead it was impossible to tell direction from it.

And why didn’t I hear any guns? There hadn’t been a sound all morning except that of my own desperate plunging through the swamp. If I’d been going in a straight line for all that time, I should be somewhere near Shevlin’s cabin and the main channel of the lake itself, and there would almost certainly be a camp set up there for the searchers. I listened now, trying to hush the sobbing sound of my breathing, and heard nothing but the infinite silence of the swamp.

I don’t know where I am, I thought wildly. I’ll never get out of here. And now, suddenly, I was conscious of the way time was flying past. Every minute of it they would be working on her, firing questions at her, trying to wear her down, and if she broke I’d be better off if I did die in here. I sprang to my feet and tried to run, crazily, the panic washing over me. Again I fell, breaking open the cut on my head. I got up, tearing ahead. Then, somehow, I was past the windfall area, and I plunged headlong into the underbrush. Vines caught me and I collapsed, struggling weakly, like a fly in a spider wed, and sank to my knees and fell.

There was no knowing how long I lay there. Sanity gradually returned, and I began to be conscious of my surroundings and capable of rational thought. Mosquitoes buzzed about my face in clouds, and in the hot, humid stillness among the leaves and vines I was bathed in sweat. Thin shafts of sunlight probed through the dense foliage overhead, and as I watched them I could see they were slanting a little as the sun wheeled over into the west. I’ve got to keep my head, I thought. If I lose it once more I’ll be done. Twenty-four hours have gone by now since they arrested her, and if I don’t find my way out pretty soon she’ll think I’ve run and deserted her and she’ll break. I’ve got to get up and start in a straight line again, going south.

I started again, moving with the shafts of sunlight slanting across my eyes from right to left. Time ran on, like an endless belt, with no beginning and no end and nothing to mark the hours. I noticed I was beginning to fall sometimes now when nothing had tripped me, and wondered if the two blows on my head had affected me that much. No, I thought dizzily, it’s only fatigue, and the weakness of hunger. Five miles through that mud and water and tangle of underbrush were the equivalent of fifty on solid ground, and there was no way of knowing how many miles I had actually walked. At times it seemed as if I were an insect trying to fight its way through a sodden sponge, pressing inward just so far and then being thrown relentlessly back. The swamp gave way before me, swallowed me up, and then closed behind, all of it looking so much alike there was no way of knowing whether I went ahead or was merely raising and lowering my dead-weary legs in some sort of slow-motion and idiotic dance in an endless dream. I began to think of her nearly all the time, forgetting for long stretches to watch the sun or the direction in which the shafts slanted through the leaves. We lay side by side on the ground in mottled shade, whispering to each other; then she was smiling at me, radiant and lovely in her new clothes, while I caught her arms to look at her. I stopped and shook my head, running a hand across my face and seeing it come away covered with dirt and blood. Stop it, I thought. Stop it! Which way was south?

And then, strangely, the forest was more open. Immense oaks towered overhead and the brush was thinning out. The ground here was dry and firm underfoot and walking was easier. I caught a glint of sunlit water off to the right, shining through the trees, and tried to run toward it, but I was too weak and fell again. When I got to my feet I staggered on toward it, the view opening up, and then I knew I had reached the lake. A hundred yards of open water stretched out past me, disappearing around a bend up to my right, and full of big weed beds along the other shore. I looked down at my feet and saw the remains of a campfire, but knew it was an old one even before I knelt frenziedly and ran my hands into the ashes. But somebody had been here! I could find them!

But where were they? Where was the sound of guns? I stared wildly around in the little open glade, so peaceful in the sunlight of late afternoon, and then, suddenly, I began to have the awful feeling that it was somehow familiar. I knew now. The campfire was my own. This was where I had camped on that first trip up here, when I had met her, and there was where the bedroll had lain and I had caught her hand and she had pulled away from me, crying, to run out toward the lake. I was back to where I had started, but now she was in jail and he was dead and I was the one who had killed him. I was conscious of the horrible sensation that I wasn’t just walking in circles in space and time, but that I was actually swinging around the steep black sides of some enormous whirlpool and sliding always toward the center.

But there is a way out, I thought agonizingly. There’s always a way out. All I had to do was locate the searching parties and she would be freed when word was flashed that I had been found. But where were they? I had thought the lake would be busy with motorboats and the sound of guns being fired at intervals throughout the day and night, and here was only the same dead, lost silence I had been fighting through all day. Had they given up? Would I ever get out of here in time, before she collapsed and told them?

And then I heard it—not gunfire, but a motor starting. It was up there to the right, around the bend, sudden, staccato, and very near, so similar to the way I had heard his motor start that morning a long time ago that I was conscious again of that feeling of going around and around in some tightening and deadly spiral. Immediately after it I heard another start, and they were coming nearer. I looked up and saw them appearing around the bend, and there were not two boats, but three. The first had two white-hatted men in it, the second was being towed and was empty, and the one in the rear held two.

I’ve found them, I thought wildly. Shouting and waving my arms, I ran across the small open glade and down to the water’s edge. They had seen me now, and I watched the boats change course a little to swing in toward the bank. I had made it, and in a little while word would be going out that I had been found alive, and she would be freed. The boats were drawing nearer. I didn’t know either of the men in the front boat, but I saw suddenly that Buford was one of the two in the other one.