The Brat (6 page)

Only the bed felt fine. Too fine. I stretched out….

• • •

The monotonous noise of someone winding a watch brought me slowly up out of drugged and heavy sleep. The overhead light still gleamed. The slow winding went on and on, then ceased, and a man cleared his throat.

“Sorry I woke you, Sullivan,” the man said.

I
LIFTED
my head and stared at him. He was seated in a cane-bottomed chair beside the open window. He was smoking a cigar, leaning forward in the chair, watching me. He had his elbows on his knees, the smoldering cigar in one hand, a large gold-plated pocket watch in the other.

“Time you woke up, anyway,” he said. “I’ve just been sitting here thinking. You looked as if you needed the sleep. Couldn’t bring myself to wake you up.”

He grinned shortly, then wiped it out. I knew he’d just got here, woke me purposely. I hadn’t been asleep long. He gave the winder of the watch one last hard wind, flipped the case open, eyed the dial, then put the watch away.

“Who are you?” I said.

“My name’s DeGreef,” the man said. “Hugo DeGreef. You don’t know me, Sullivan. But you will.” He drew on the cigar, inhaled the smoke, exhaled. He nodded. “You will,” he said again.

I stared at him, still coming slowly up out of sleep.

He was a big man. He wore a dark gray suit, and there was a white Stetson hat on the floor beside his feet. He dwarfed the chair, his arms so large they stretched the texture out of the cloth of his suit. He sat there with his legs apart, elbows on knees, eying me from beneath bristling blond eyebrows. The hair on his head was cut so close it looked almost as if it had been shaved, a short, thick bristle, gleaming like the fur of an animal. His color was pale pink and you knew sun would raise hell with him, his lips thick and very broad and flat, his chin heavy and blunt. There were two high spots of color on his cheeks, just beneath the eyes. The eyes were the damndest eyes I’d ever seen: absolutely black, very small, without any sign of pupil, the whites the color of parchment.

“Upstate bulletin came through,” Hugo DeGreef said. “I talked with your home-town cops, Sullivan. Funny thing. I was going to take a vacation, visit my wife in New Jersey. Imagine! She’s up there with her folks. But’s that’s all canceled.”

“What the hell you talking about? Who are you?”

He nodded to himself, sitting there, and drew again on the cigar. He looked at the cigar, then blew the lungful of smoke up across his face, and nodded again. “I’m the sheriff,” he said. He closed his mouth and waited, then said, “Quick action, eh?”

I sat up on the edge of the bed. He did not move.

“Steady,” he said. “May as well warn you. I think I know how you feel, but don’t try anything foolish.”

“What are you here for?”

“Come off it, Sullivan. You know why I’m here.”

I didn’t say anything. Those eyes of his never wavered. They were like ice picks sticking into my own eyes. His voice was slightly guttural.

“Hell, Sullivan. Wherever you’re keeping that money—let’s have it.”

“I haven’t got it.” There was no use playing dumb.

“You’re lying. We both know you’re lying.”

He stood up slowly. He was tall, all right—and damned near as big as they come. The twin spots of color in his cheeks enlarged and became choked with blood. He was a hothead, which was in my favor. You could tell he had difficulty hanging onto a nasty temper.

He was going to be one beaut to deal with.

“When you were sleeping, there,” he said, “I thought how sad it was there are so many jerks in the world.”

“You’re an interesting specimen yourself,” I said.

“Especially of your type, Sullivan. I know your type. You know you’re licked right now, but you want to try something foolish, don’t you? Where’s your wife?”

“I don’t know.”

“I see.” He thought for a moment. “She ran out on you, right?”

“You seem to know everything.”

“It’s just I have no use for people like you,” he said. “The Law says certain things. You know right from wrong. Yet you go ahead, trying to kid the Law. Trying to get away with things. Guys like you. People like you. I don’t like people like you, Sullivan. They make me mad. They irritate me because of their stupidity. They irritate me because they keep me from doing things I’d like to do, like visiting my wife when I’m due for a vacation.”

“Don’t you have deputies?”

He hesitated. There was something he wasn’t telling me, something behind those disturbing eyes that was off beat in an unpleasant way. He wasn’t a native to these parts. I didn’t doubt he was the sheriff. On the other hand, there was something wrong about him.

“I enjoy my work,” he said, leaning forward a little. “I’m playing this my way. I’d as soon see you dead. I’d rather see you dead. It wouldn’t matter a damn to me. If you try anything, I’ll kill you, as sure as hell. Only, Sullivan, I’m going to recover that money.”

“Why should you worry?”

“Never mind. I’ll recover the money. This is my work, and I hate it. At the same time, I like it. Most of all, I hate guys like you, Sullivan. Guys like you really gripe me.”

I didn’t say anything, watching him, trying to figure him. He was a long shot from a typical sheriff. He sounded a little off his rocker.

“So, dead or alive, I’ll come out with the money, Sullivan. Get that through your head. Make it easy on yourself. We know you’ve got it. You know you’ve got it—and you know we know.”

“You’re bucking.”

He stared at me, the eyes smiling a little at the corners. I’d hit that right on the head. He had it to himself down here; at least for a while. He was going to make a name for himself. The worst type of man I could possibly run into at a time like this.

Somehow I had to get away from him. He undoubtedly had a gun. There was the light of fanaticism in the man’s eyes. He was a man you would dislike intensely on meeting, and hate completely after a moment or two. He was bitter—the sound of his voice, every movement he made, rubbed the wrong way.

“How’d you find me so quickly?”

He laughed. It sounded as if he were clearing his throat.

“I took some guesses,” he said. “I been in police business a long time, Sullivan. Been in it long before I ever came down here. I know guys like you. I know how they think. Women like your wife, too. Wasn’t hard figuring where you’d come. All the little things. Trying to get money from that woman who worked for you in St. Pete. Afraid to spend the loot, Sullivan? Then the cops up there asked some questions. They know your wife lived down here. This is were you met her, in fact.”

He looked at his cigar, deliberately turned his back to me and walked over to the window and hurled it out. It struck an unseen screen and bounced back into the room. It was comical, after all his stolid seriousness.

I laughed. “You’re worried about elections?”

He whirled and looked at me with stagelike disgust. Then he stepped on the cigar and ground it into the floor.

He spoke with that same guttural slowness, serious and deadly. “I had a brother who was like you,” he said. “He killed a man and lied to me—pretended innocence, Sullivan. I finally found him out. Ever since then I’ve trusted no one but myself.”

He was either naive, or crazier than I thought.

“One of these days,” I said, “if you don’t watch out, you might stab yourself in the back.”

“I’d like to see you make a break for it,” he said. “I’d enjoy that.”

I stood up, watching him. We faced each other about four feet apart. “There’s one thing, DeGreef. I want you to hear this for the record. I don’t expect you to believe me. Guys like you don’t believe anybody. Eventually they wind up not trusting even themselves. They end up in mental wards.”

“Say it.”

“I didn’t take any money. I didn’t kill anybody. That’s for the record. I don’t give a damn what you think. But when the time comes and you find you’re mistaken, that grand castle you live in is going to fall apart.”

“I’ll worry about that.”

“Who’s in on this with you, DeGreef?”

“I’ll worry about that, too.”

I walked across the room, away from him, then back toward him, so he’d get used to my moving around. I knew he wasn’t going to let anything get by him if he could help it.
But I had to get by him
.

“When you expect to get in touch with your wife?”

I said nothing.

He kept watching me closely. “She did run out on you, right? With the money?” He slowly shook his head, the light glinting off his fuzzy dome. “How sad. Well, the two of us will have to see what we can do about that.”

DeGreef was raising hell with my nerves. There was also a good chance that he wasn’t here alone. There might be some swamper deputy right outside that bedroom door. I had no way of telling. If not, others might be coming down to Hagar’s Point. There was the insurance company to count on, too. I knew that if I ever did get past DeGreef, he’d never rest until he had me under the club.

I walked around him and past the window. Beyond the sheen of the screen, I saw the gentle slope of roof. It wasn’t under the window. I kept on moving around the room again, until I stood by the foot of the bed.

“Where you plan to meet her, Sullivan?”

“No place. I told you, you’ve got it all wrong.”

The light switch for the room’s overhead light was by the door. I got as near to that as possible, looking at him all the time, trying to hold his gaze.

“What makes you think I plan to meet her?”

“Don’t be a fool!”

He was getting hot. A sheen of sweat stood on his brow. He was figuring something. I stepped closer to the switch. He was getting nervous as hell, but he still thought everything was under control.

“You’re wrong about a lot of things, DeGreef.”

He started to speak. I hit the light switch. It was the only thing I could do. I ran straight at him.

“Fool!” he shouted.

I swung with everything I had at his shadow outlined against the paler light of the window. I caught him in the stomach and it was like hitting cement. My wrist cracked. He spun around, falling toward the bed. I ran for the window, kicked savagely at the screen. It ripped. I kicked at the screen frame and it popped off and spun out into the night. The roof was about three feet to the right of the window.

As I turned, he pulled a gun. I dove at him, hard, and the gun clattered to the floor. He cursed and we piled, rolling across the room. He grunted a lot and his arms were like the trunks of small trees. I kicked backward, sinking my heel into his shin. For an instant his grip loosened.

I went at the window, running, got through, hung over the dark emptiness and leaped for the roof.

It caught me across the chest. For a brief instant I knew I would fall—that it was all over. It was a sickening sensation.

I grabbed for the edge of the roof, scraped downward, caught it with my fingers and swung there.

“Sullivan!”

I began swinging down the sloping edge of the roof. I felt as if I were mad, as if the world had gone cockeyed. The roof was covered with tarpaper and it was rotten. Small hunks of wood crumbled away in my hands.

“I’m going to shoot, Sullivan!”

I took one look up there against the star-washed side of the hotel. DeGreef was thrust halfway out the window, and I saw the gleam of his gun. He fired.

I dropped. There was nothing else to do.

I crashed heavily into thick bushes, hitting hard, but the pitch of the roof had brought me at least a couple of yards down. The moment I struck, I started running around the side of the hotel, scrambling through hedges. My back felt broken and my knees sagged with painful weakness. I kept running, tears in my eyes from the pain.

DeGreef fired twice more. The shots were wild, the slugs crashed through trees and branches toward the river, splitting wood. One ricocheted, whining wildly into the sky.

Around front, the convertible was gone. I could hear DeGreef ramming down the hotel stairs inside, his pounding feet echoing.

I ran on across the front of the hotel, then cut back toward the river. The front door of the hotel slammed back, shattering against the wall. I heard him shout.

“Sullivan!”

I kept running until I was deep among the trees down along the riverbank.

T
HE PAIN
began to go away. The shock of the fall from the roof hadn’t broken anything. But now there was a stitch right under my heart.

That country was suddenly unfamiliar. Everything I had learned during those days when I’d been down here with Evis was gone. It was abruptly a lonely, deadly country in which only those survived who understand its ways. I was a foreigner here, and knew it the moment I approached the banks of the river.

I kept running in the direction of the Hellings’ home. But it seemed either way I turned, backwards or on ahead, it was equally dangerous.

DeGreef could easily be the lesser of two hells. It wasn’t close enough to morning for the ground layer of mosquitoes to have ceased. Another hour and they’d go away for a time, reappearing slightly after sunup. I’d been one hell of a fool to stop at the hotel for rest.

I kept my fingers clenched into the flesh under my heart, trying to ease the pain. I tried to recall if there was any path along the river in the direction I was headed. All I could remember was the dirt road beyond that field of palmetto and cabbage palm and slash pine, but aside from that there was only the riverbank itself.

A boat. A canoe. A dugout. A skiff would have been a dream, even knowing the tortures of the river waters.

I sprawled on the edge of the black bank of earth and roots, listening, trying to ease the pain in my side. I cursed them all, a little out of my head for the moment. Gradually, the pain began to dissipate as I caught my breath, lying there. There was no sound from back toward the hotel. I had run farther than I’d figured. There wasn’t even the sound of a car’s engine. And it was now that I became, for the first time, conscious of the insects all around.

The river led on down past the Hellings', and just at that point melded with swamp channels. The swamp itself lay just beyond the far bank of the river, or at least this section of it. And out of it, now, roofing the night like some cacaphonous dirge, came the staccato bursts and shrieking eddies of swamp sound. Nearby, a large bird found its way out of the water, black wings flapping heavily, splashing into the darkness.

I scrambled to the top of the bank and started moving.

Since DeGreef was sheriff down here, he’d know where the Hellings lived. He could drive over there and be waiting for me.

At the same time, I had to go, whether I wanted to or not. I had to find her. She’d played me for the biggest kind of sucker. Just thinking that way seemed to bring on more strength, the old adrenalin pumping.

The mangroves weren’t thick along here—if I’d had to plow through them, I might not have made it. As it was, it was bad. The mosquitoes started at me out of the dark. Once they found me, they descended in roaring swarms. I was wearing a shirt and trousers. I buttoned the cuffs of the sleeves and neck and turned the collar up and kept moving.

Out there in the dark, the river purled silently, moving down and down into the swamp. Tall cypress trees hovered against the paling sky, and the jungle gradually began to thicken. I’d left the last of Hagar’s Point behind now. I knew that sooner or later I’d have to take to the road over there to my right….

DeGreef was something. A real character. It was no good being on his list. He was out to get me, or know the reason why. A local sheriff with the ambitions and maybe even the abilities of a metropolitan police inspector. What the hell was he doing down here? Everything about him read deadly. I wondered if it read right?

Then I remembered Berk Kaylor. Some of the sickness began to stir inside me, building and building.

I paused for a moment in the darkness, standing against the smooth side of a banyan. Trailing roots prowled the heavy, motionless air. You could almost hear things growing in the rich, choking, jungle damp. There was the strong smell of musky rot and fresh green birth.

Here I was. The car was gone—DeGreef most have seen to that. Losing the car might be one of the worse things. I thought of trying to find it, and for a moment, panic touched me. I was alone, and the loneliness abruptly was pronounced.

And I was sick. Sick deep down inside, all of it caused by what was in my mind. I shoved away from the tree and started across a field of palmetto, thinking about the time Evis told me of a certain snake that inhabited these parts. It came out only at night. In your bare feet, you would step on it, and it would bite between the toes, and you would die.

The river curved in and out, meandering, high-banked, black. Pushing through underbrush and occasional jungle growth, I heard the sounds of things in the river. The low, throaty grunt just at that moment when silence ruled. The splash and settling of a colossal body.

Finally the going became too rough. I was making no headway at all, and thoughts of what I was walking through and into began to play on my imagination so badly I decided to take to the road.

I kept thinking about Evis. Dwelling on her. How it would be when I saw her. How she would look. And it was one crazy hellish thing, the way she was still inside me; the way I hated her, but could still remember and feel the way it always was when I touched her, when we kissed. You think of all those things and none of it helps. I was plenty tired, and I was strained on her and what she’d done to me. Hellish urgency got inside me, building all the time. I was a little crazy with it. When a branch or bush touched me, I fought against it. I just kept getting hotter all the time now.

For a time I couldn’t locate the road. Panic sifted down through the night and I forced myself to take time, considering everything as seriously as I could.

I found the road, began jogging along. It was a narrow, deeply rutted stretch of sand and clay, with high growths of grass forming an island in the middle. It was best to run along the shoulder, or on the humped island, because there was no telling what animal hunkered in those deep, shadowed ruts.

• • •

Dawn had already stretched a hand of pink white across the eastern sky when I realized I was near Evis’s old home. The road shallowed. I had passed numerous cutoffs leading into fields or walled jungle.

I passed an old shack leaning against the gray dark like a collapsed shroud.

Spouts of mist and fog clung to the ground, the fields, the road, mushrooming in absolute stillness until I disrupted them by walking through them. Ground mists held in fantastic forms across the sinks and slopes.

A rooster crowed, and dawn pulled light quickly across the sky. Birds called. The mosquitoes were gone. The world was silent, with only the bird cries rending it, like sharp, clean knives.

Scuffling footsteps reached me. I looked up, saw a man rounding a bend in the road just at the edge of the clearing by the river shallows, where the Hellings lived.

It was Luz Helling, Evis’s old man. He came along the dirt road, rubbing both eyes with the heels of his hands, chewing tobacco. He wore what looked like a clean khaki shirt, worn blue jeans, and he was barefooted. He had once been a big man, standing well over six feet and he must have been heavy-muscled years ago. It was all gone to gross flab now. His pale hair was sparse and his skull sun-blistered and freckled.

Luz blinked his eyes, saw me, and stopped walking. I hadn’t wanted to meet anybody until I made sure DeGreef wasn’t around. Luz stood on the edge of the road, chewing slowly.

“Morning, Luz.”

He didn’t speak, waiting as I came up to him, never altering the rhythm of his chewing.

In the cleared yard beyond which he stood, I saw the well-remembered cypress-sided house, and the river down there beyond the sloping bank. The pier. And standing in the yard, a battered old Pontiac sedan. Fogs shredded and slowly lifted around the sides of the house. Chickens pecked in the morning. A hound wallowed in the dust.

“Where’d
you
come from?” Luz said.

I knew. I looked like hell, and tried to keep the nervousness out of me. Luz had always been a difficult person to talk with. Now the feeling had increased tenfold. I didn’t know what to say to him.

“Supposed to meet Evis.”

“Evis?”

“Yes. Isn’t she here?”

Luz turned and looked back at the house, chewing, and then at me.

“Evis ain’t here.”

He turned abruptly and started shuffling back toward the house, gouts of dust spurting against the sides of his bare feet.

“Luz!”

He paused, looked back at me. I went up beside him. This seemed to trouble him and he increased his pace, as if he wanted to get to the house in a hurry.

“You sure she isn’t here?”

“Said she ain’t.”

A quavering voice rose from the front of the house, lifting like brittle fingers.

“Luz? Luz Helling—where in hell did you get to?”

Luz stopped chewing and bared his teeth at the house.

That had been Grandma Helling’s voice.

The clearing had been enlarged since I’d last seen it, and several shacks of various sizes crowded against the intruding jungle. The yard was littered with rusting and broken farm implements; several Burma fishing poles leaved against the side of the main house. Fish nets were strung in webs across a row of sawhorses just up the riverbank. Down by the pier I noticed an air boat, two skiffs, and a rowboat. With daylight, I could see the beginnings of the swamp now, where the river fanned out. A buzzard, the first of the day, wheeled high and slow in tight circles.

Then I saw Berk Kaylor leaning against the rear corner of the house. Showing just beyond the corner was the rear of a fender-dented Mercury convertible that had once been cream-colored. The top was missing.

Kaylor watched us as we moved toward the house.

“Berk,” Luz said, hitching at his jeans. “Look what come drifting in.”

Kaylor said nothing.

Luz and I paused for a moment in the yard. Kaylor didn’t move. He wore khaki shirt and trousers, the cuffs jammed into worn old Army combat boots. His thick hair was combed slick and back from his forehead, his face burned dark from the sun. He leaned there, hands in pockets, waiting.

“Ain’t you going to say nothing to him?” Luz said.

“I don’t reckon so,” Kaylor said.

“You said you had plenty to say to him,” Luz said.

Kaylor didn’t speak.

“All that damned hollering you done was down a barrel, that right?” Luz said, spitting a string of amber into the cool dust.

Kaylor spat, kept looking at the two of us.

“Sullivan!”

I turned toward the porch at the front of the house. A quickly moving dark-haired girl peered at me across the two-by-four railing, then ran off the porch and over across the yard toward us. Her eyes were on me, as black as her hair, and she was smiling.

It was Rona.

She had changed. She had filled out in what are called the “right places,” and there was something new about the way she moved and spoke. She wore tight blue jeans and a white shirt tucked securely into the slim belted waist. Her moccasins kicked up the dust at she ran up.

“Sullivan! What are you doing here?”

She stopped and stood in front of me, legs slightly apart, hands on hips, head cocked to one side. Her breasts moved full and quick beneath the taut white shirt, and Rona Helling was truly something to see.

“Well?” she said. “What
are
you doing here?”

“Hello, Rona.”

Luz spat.

“I’m looking for your sister Evis.”

Luz said something I didn’t get, and moved off toward the house. I glanced over at Kaylor. He hadn’t moved from the corner of the house. He was staring at the ground in front of his feet.

“Sullivan?” Rona said quickly, softly. She kept smiling at me, standing in the same position, but speaking very quietly, so Kaylor couldn’t hear what she said.

“See the edge of the field, over yonder? Past the far side of the house, by that shed?”

She didn’t turn, or look away. I glanced over beyond the front porch, then nodded.

“You go over there and wait for me. Don’t go in the house, Sullivan. Just do as I say.”

“All right.”

I was plenty worried about Hugo DeGreef showing. I wanted to get out of sight, and I couldn’t figure Rona at all. It was almost as if everything had stopped to wait for me, as if a stage were set.

“Sullivan,” she whispered. “Oh, Sullivan, I’m glad you came back.”

I started to reply, but she turned quickly and moved on around the rear of the house, her body gracefully effortless under the tight, worn denim.

When I looked toward the corner of the house, Berk Kaylor was gone.