Charles Williams - Hill Girl

I finished the cigarette and threw it away and got up. “Thanks, Jake.”

That night after supper I got in the car and drove in to town. Lee wasn’t at home and Mary said she hadn’t seen him since around noon. I finally found him in the back room of Billy Gordon’s café, the second time I went in there. He and Peewee Hines were shooting craps. He was drinking beer, but he wasn’t drunk.

“Well, if it isn’t the old clodhopper himself.” Lee grinned as I walked in. “Have a bottle of beer. It’s bad for your kidneys.”

“Hi, All-American,” Peewee said and grinned at me. He was in high school about the time Lee was and I never did care a lot for him. He always grinned as if he were watching something through a keyhole. He was a little guy with a fresh way of looking at you.

“Excuse us, Peewee,” I said. “I want to talk to Lee a couple of minutes. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Not at all. Go right ahead.” He threw down the dice and sat down at one of the tables, leaned back, and put his feet up.

“It’s private,” I said.

“And this is a public place. Or maybe you own it?”

“Beat it, you little sonofabitch.” I reached for him and he jumped up and made for the door.

Lee looked at me. “You’re going to get yourself killed someday, talking to people that way.”

I sat down. “Well, when I do, it won’t be Peewee Hines. And speaking of getting yourself killed, maybe you know what I’m here for.”

“I have no idea. Maybe you just came in so I could refresh myself looking at your beautiful face. When I’m shooting craps with people, I don’t appreciate having ‘em chased off when I’m four bucks in the hole.”

“Sam Harley damned near caught you with that Angelina the other night,” I said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

“No. Except that you must be nuts. I haven’t seen that wench since we were hunting in October.”

“That’s your story?”

“That’s it.”

“Lee,” I said. “Use your head. Stay away from there. Can’t you see he’s going to be laying for you now? What do you think he’s going to do when he catches you? Write a letter to his Congressman?”

“Look, Bob, I don’t know what you’re talking about. And if it’s what I think it is, you’re all wet, and why don’t you mind your own business?”

“O.K.,” I said. I got up and started for the door. I stopped once and looked back at him sitting there and started to try once more.

“For Christ’s sake,” he said, picking up the bottle, “why don’t you learn to knit?”

Ten

It was the first week in July and we were almost finished laying by the cotton. There was only about two days’ work left, plowing out the middles, and then we would be through with it until picking time.

It was a hot night. Jake and Helen had gone across the road to their house at about eight-thirty and I had taken a bath out in the mule lot and gone to bed. But I was restless and had a hard time getting to sleep. The work had been slacking off the past week and I was getting that old feeling of being overtrained and stale and wasn’t even comfortably tired when night came. I had been staying too close to the job and away from dances and girls too long, and as long as the work kept up at that grueling pace and I was worn out at night it was all right, but now it was beginning to catch up with me.

I awakened and reached for my watch on the table beside the bed. It was one o’clock. The room was stifling and I was sweating, and I lay there a few minutes savagely restless, hating the waking up and knowing I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep.

I cursed and got up and went out on the back porch, still naked, the way I had been sleeping, and went down to the well. I drew up a bucket of water and had a drink of it and marveled at the coolness of it and then upended the wooden bucket over my head and poured the whole thing over myself. It felt deliciously cold as I stood there in the hot blackness with the short grass springy under my feet. I could hear the mules walking around down by the corn crib and heard one of them kick at something and thud against the planks of the barn. I felt that way myself. I wanted to kick at something.

Back in the house I slipped on a pair of shorts and lit one of the kerosene lamps and sat down at the oilcloth-covered table to try to read, but I couldn’t keep my mind on the book. I was just getting ready to blow out the lamp and go out on the porch and smoke a cigarette in the dark when I heard a car coming up the road fast and it turned into the driveway. The headlights flashed down the hall for a short second as it made the turn. The brakes squealed and the car slid to a stop out in front.

I started to get up when I heard the front door open and somebody was coming down the hall, walking fast. It was Lee. He had on a white linen suit and white shoes and he looked as expensive and patrician as ever except that his face was almost as white as the suit and his eyes were scared.

He stopped in the doorway to the dining room. “God, I’m lucky to find you at home,” he said. “I was afraid you’d be gone too.”

“You’re lucky, all right,” I said. “I just got back from the Mediterranean in my yacht. Where the hell did you think I’d be?”

“All right, all right. But this is no time for wisecracks, Bob.” He wouldn’t sit down and he couldn’t stand still. He was walking jerkily back and forth and stopping to lean on the doorframe and then he’d move again. He lit a cigarette and then after one drag or two on it he went around me and threw it out the back door. His face was greasy with sweat.

“You got any money around here? I need a little, and I need it bad. And fast.”

“What’s the gag? Don’t tell me you’ve already gone through all the dough the Major left?”

He gestured impatiently. “Oh, I’ve got money. I’ll pay you back. But I can’t get into the bank until nine. And I’m flat broke and I’ve got to get out of here fast. I need dough for gasoline. You’ve ten or twenty, haven’t you?”

I went into the bedroom and fished in a suit and found my billfold. I came back and handed him a twenty and a five, all I had in the house. He shoved it into his pocket nervously. I could see that fear still crawling in his eyes but his nervous pacing subsided a little when he had the money in his pocket. He muttered a short thanks and turned as if in a hurry to get started. Then he hesitated again and turned back.

“How bad is it?” I asked. I sat down at the table again and lit a cigarette.

“Sam Harley’s after me.”

The match burned my fingers. “He finally caught you?”

“Caught me? I hope to hell he caught me. It was awful.” He was shaking and he came over and sat down across from me under the light of the kerosene lamp and drummed on the table with his fingers. I thought of the old saying that animals could smell fear, and wondered how he would smell to one of them right now.

He just had to talk. I didn’t want to ask him about it because I didn’t want him to waste any time. With Sam Harley after him he wasn’t in any position to be dawdling around with small talk, because he was in a bad spot and it was getting worse with every minute. It was something I had been trying to tell him for a long time but he had to find it out for himself and now he was doing it the hard way.

But he had to get it out of his system. I knew it had been bad, from the way he had to talk. “Now, for God’s sake, don’t preach to me, Bob. I’ll admit I’ve been getting to that Angelina and you warned me about it, but dammit, don’t preach to me.” I hadn’t said a word.

“He almost caught me once before. Or somebody did. But I got away with it. Only I didn’t have sense enough to stay away. I can’t. Christ, if I only could. I tell you, that girl’s a witch.”