Robert Alter - Swamp Sister

It wasn't a woman she saw so much as a creation of ego. Every minute detail contributed a little to the whole-the meticulous scarlet lips, the lacquered nails, the closely cropped raven hair deliberately messy at the foretop where it blossomed, the svelte dress with the single pin, and much more. All of it done for effect, a part of the purpose, like her speech, her mannerisms, gestures. She was acutely aware of her perfection, her breeding and poise. She was a product of the ruling class, whose birthright stretched back to before the coming of Christ. Only now the thing to which she belonged was dead, finished, outmoded and useless, superannuated by phiistines, men like Larry and Shad. Shad .

The image of her porcelain face barely changed when she smiled coldly. "You perverse bitch," she said quietly.

A thirty-eight-year-old dilettante in love with an ignorant swamp boy. _Fool. Silly fool_.

And suddenly the mirror showed her something she didn't want to see, something that was like death, only to her-worse. She saw a woman who was no longer a glittering show piece, no longer a fragile glass gift to the world. Only a weary female who was slowly being prodded into her forties by time's wrinkled shoulder. She turned from the mirror without sense of direction, feeling a kind of horror.

It grew. It was the swamp. It was the endlessness, the mystery of the swamp. It was the heat and the violence, violence that spun on always around her and that no one except herself seemed concerned with. It was the people and the animals and the hostility, hostility that was in a league with the swamp billies and the alligators, the coons, the cottonmouths, the Negroes, the climate, the stinking mud and rotting swamp flowers.

What if I can never escape? What if I must go on spending my life in this Confederate madhouse? Stay here until it is too late?

For a vivid moment it seemed that her nerves were going. She wanted to tear a scream from her body, leap wildly through the window, run away from the swamp, to a city, any city, to lights, movement, music, and gaiety.

She took a few aimless steps to nowhere and stopped, realizing the unit cigarette was in her hand. She found a match, then went to the bar (Shad had built it after the door, when she needed a reason to keep him around the house) and hurriedly mixed a martini.

She felt better after the drink. And mixed a second.

The money was the problem. There was never any escape for her class without money. Even then escape was a word covering a certain deadness that could lead to suicide, if you thought about it. A symbol-word that led to more boredom, more small talk-a particular apathy of reaction to the world and everyone in it. But at least they were all a shaving from the same whittled stick (as Shad put it), and there was comfort in that, a miserably disenchanted comfort.

Larry wrote three "boys' books" each year, under three separate _nom de plummes_ (the _Adventures of Tab and Red_ being the most popular), one detective paperback, and numerous action short stories for men's magazines. It was a living – here in the swamp, a comfortable living. But it wasn't escape. It wasn't even worth divorcing over. _Money_.

She went back to the long bay window and looked at the swamp across the lake. Eighty thousand dollars was out there somewhere. And now there was a rumour that Shad had found it- Larry had come back from the country store at noon with a mildly excited look in his eyes. Iris had been sitting before the window with her first martini for the day, sitting with her cigarettes and glass, staring at the swamp, wondering when Shad was coming back.

"Darling," Larry had said, "there's quite a fascinating little story going in the village."

She hadn't looked at him. "Someone's cow give birth to a two-headed calf?" she inquired with cold politeness.

He came over and stooped to peck her forehead.

"No, no," he chuckled. "You remember Ferris' airplane? The one these people call the Money Plane? They say Shad Hark has found it. I got that from Joel Sutt himself. They're all a-whisper with the story in the village."

Outwardly she hadn't shown any emotion. Inwardly a certain excitement had begun to snowball.

"Whisper? Why are they whispering about it?"

"Because they say the Hark boy hasn't admitted it. But he's been passing out ten-dollar bills like a New Yorker on a spree. 'Course it may not be true – you know how these swamp vifiages thrive on gossip. Still, it's rather interesting, don't you think? Might even be a story there, somewhere."

"Yes," she said absently. "Tab and Reb, the latter-day rover boys find the Money Plane."

He'd blinked at her, pausing in a reflective turn before the window. "Eh? Oh, why no; I was thinking more of an adult paperback. You know, using the gimmick-"

But she wasn't listening. She seldom did. It was a trick she'd learned to save her sanity. Practice made perfect. She would stare at somethmg as though considering his words, nod at practically the correct time, say hmm at the pauses, and raise her brows from time to time as if saying, "Oh. I see." But she seldom listened. Shad had found the money. The eighty thousand. He was being stupid, of course. That was to be expected. Passing the money around like an idiot. But he wasn't admitting it.

She sank easily under a deeper surface of thought, remembering all the long afternoons and short nights when they'd been together in her shadowy room, and she'd prompted him with, "Shad, when you're out there looking for your brother – you look for that airplane too, don't you?"

"Shore. Ever' man and boy that goes into that old slough keeps one eye and half a mind on the Money Plane. But ain't nobody going to find her. Know why?"

"Why?"

"Because she ain't nowhere where a-body kin find her. Else one of us would've done it by now."

"But you'll keep looking, won't you, Shad? You'll keep it in your mind (if we may call it that) when you're out there. Eighty thousand dollars, Shad. We could go away with that money. Just you and I."

She didn't need or love Shad as a person. Shad was only a simple boy, unworldly. She controlled him. She could work him around, work the money from him and leave. Perhaps it wasn't pretty, but it was escape-.

She came back to the sullen afternoon, back to the big lonely living room. She was standing at the window, looking across the lake. She waited for Shad.

He hadn't consciously noticed he was being followed that morning. It hadn't meant anything special to him when Sam Parks fell into his wake after he left Mrs. Taylor's. He didn't like Sam, so he'd pretended to ignore him. Sam had tailed him down to the store.

Joel Sutt had acted standoffish when he took Shad's order for sheets, food, and miscellaneous whatnot. So had the two or three others hanging around in there. They'd watched Shad, not speaking to him nor to each other; and when he looked at them, they shifted their gaze and tried to look like men killing time with nothing on their minds. With them it was a convincing trick.

Shad hadn't cared. His head was full of plans, full of Dorry and the money. He nodded to them, said, "Thanks, Joel," and walked out. He couldn't remember Joel saying anything.

Hert Reade, a fifteen-year-old, had moseyed along after him all the way back to the shantyboat. It was only when he reached the gangplank that he realized Hert was hanging around near the pond.

"Y'all want something, Hert?" he called.

But the boy shook his head, not looking at him, pawing at the bank-ooze with his bare toes. "Naw. Just fooling around some."

For a while Shad fussed with the idea of hiding his remaining thirty-some dollars somewhere in the shanty, but let the scheme go when he recalled the way Jort Camp had eyed his money the night before. Then, too, there was always the worry of Sam Parks tooling around in the bush. Sam could sift himself through a keyhole like a skinny beam of sunlight, and would too, if he thought there was anything worth picking up on the other side of the door.