“Until it comes, if it does, maybe we’d better kind of stick together, I mean when he’s around. With the two of us together he won’t be so apt to—well, be carried away like that. I mean, you’re his sister, honey, and he has too much respect for you to try anything like that in front of you. I’m sure he has. Nearly any man would. Oh, honey, I hate to be such a big baby, but I’m so scared. It wouldn’t be so much, by itself, but what with not having any money and being sort of dependent, and worrying about Sewell and wondering where he is . . .”
* * *
Mitch came up from the barn at dusk. Jessie was putting supper on the table, and as he sat down she glanced at him distantly and said nothing.
“What’ve we got, Jessie?” he asked. “I’m hungry.”
“Why don’t you look?” she asked coldly, putting a plate in front of Joy.
Now what’s eating her? Mitch thought, and then forgot about it while his mind went back to the river. It had still been rising a little when he knocked off in the field at sundown.
“Still ain’t no news about Sewell,” Cass said, after he had hobbled painfully in from the front room.
“Poor Sewell,” Joy said sadly. “It’s so tragic.”
She picked a hell of a time to find out how tragic it is about poor Sewell, Mitch thought. Where’s she been the past three years?
”You and Sewell were always very close, weren’t you, Mitch? I mean, before he went away. You must think about him a lot.” She smiled wanly at him, and he saw Jessie look toward him once and then quickly away.
It must have just come over her all at once, like something out of the sky, that everything ain’t just exactly all right with Sewell, he thought. Well, better late than never, I reckon. But what the hell’s the matter with Jessie?
When he had finished eating, he went out into the darkness of the yard to smoke a cigarette, and suddenly heard the far-off rumble of thunder in the west. The air was still and oppressively hot, like that in a tightly closed room with the windows sealed. God, he thought, not with that river already up like it is now.
Jessie was starting to wash the dishes. Joy went over and looked in the water bucket and saw with inner satisfaction that it was almost empty. “I’ll get some more water, Jessie,” she said helpfully. “You’ll need some more for rinsing.”
Jessie shook her head. “No, you leave it alone, Joy,” she said. “Mitch will bring some.”
“Oh, I want to help,” Joy said, going toward the door.
Jessie looked at her anxiously, nodding toward the yard. But Joy smiled, shook her head deprecatingly, and went on.
Mitch had his back turned and was looking out over the bottom as she went down toward the well. She drew up a bucket and filled the cedar water pail and started back, walking slowly and watching him standing there just beyond the light streaming from the kitchen door.
He saw her. “Here, I’ll take that,” he said gruffly. If she wanted to do something, why didn’t she help Jessie with the dishes?
“It’s all right, Mitch,” she said, and then suddenly set the water down and bent forward, holding a hand on her back just above the hip.
“What is it?” he asked, stepping quickly to her side.
“I—I think just a catch in my back,” she said faintly, still bent over as if in pain.”Can you stand up?” he asked. He took hold o? her arm.
She cried out sharply, the sound cutting across the night, and swayed as if she would fall. He caught her, and as they were blended into one figure in the edge of the light for an instant she could see Jessie standing in the door, drawn by her outcry. She pushed him back violently with her hands, scooped up the bucket, and ran toward the door.
Twelve
Sewell Neely hopped off the freight as it was coming into the yards at Houston and walked across the acres of tracks in the dark. It had been almost twenty-four hours now since he had come up out of the river bottom onto the highway. He had caught a freight coming through the bottom shortly after he had crossed the highway bridge, and had ridden it until daybreak. Then he had left it and hidden out all during the day under an abandoned farmhouse. Sometime after nightfall he had been able to board another.
He had on a raincoat he had stolen from a helpless and passed-out drunk in a boxcar. With the coat buttoned up to hide the ruin of his clothing and his hand in the pocket to keep the handcuff out of sight, he could get by as long as he kept moving and no one got a second look at him. I might be any bum unloading from a freight, he thought, unless somebody gets a good look at my face in the light. It’s probably in every paper in the state.
It was a long walk, keeping to side streets and away from lighted areas. I hope she’s home, he thought. If she’s still working the four-to-midnight, she ought to be. Unless she’s got a date. Probably not, though. She’s a funny one. Guys coming in to eat, trying to date her up all the time, and she brushes them off.
It was upstairs over a motorcycle salesroom in a rundown neighborhood. There was a drugstore, still open, on the corner. A prowl car slipped past, cruising, and he could feel the tingling along his spine and the tightening of the skin across the back of his neck like a dog’s hackles rising. I can feel ‘em, he thought. If I live long enough, I’ll be able to smell ‘em, like a wolf. If one went by in the dark while I was asleep I’d wake up and growl.
The sign said, “Hskpg. Rms. & Apts.” There was a„ dark stairway going up, and the hallway at the top was dimly lit with two small unshaded bulbs, one at each end. The first door was marked “Mgr.” and there was a bell, with a printed cardboard sign, the kind they sold in dime stores, saying. “Ring for Manager,” stuck on the plaster above it with Scotch tape. There was no one in the hall and he walked down the center of it, going softly like a big cougar on the worn carpet, smelling the odor of ancient dust and stale cooking that always clung to places like this.
It’s going to be rough if she’s not at home, he thought. I can’t stand around here in the hall at one o’clock in the morning. Or if she’s moved and somebody else answers the door. Sorry to wake you up, Jack, but I’m looking for a girl named Dorothy, and don’t look at my face, you might recognize me. I think the reason they always catch you in the end is that they wear you out. They get you tired. They work in shifts and you work all the time, and when you get a chance to go to sleep your nerves are still working. Well, if you want to take a vacation you can always go and give yourself up. They always got the welcome sign out for cop-killers. Take a long rest in the back room with the light in your eyes.
It was the last apartment on the right. There was a crack of light under the door and he could hear, very faintly, the sound of music. It sounds like Dorothy, he thought. She does that. It’s against the rules to play a radio after ten-thirty, but she always does, turning it way down and getting up close to it to listen.
He knocked softly and waited. There was no answer. He rapped on the door again, a little louder. There was the sound of someone moving, and a girl’s voice on the other side of the door said, “Who is it?”
“Lufkin,” he said. He had first met her in Lufkin when she worked in, a restaurant there and he was working in a sawmill. It was a long time ago, before he got in trouble with the law the first time, but she would know who it was.
The door opened and he stepped inside quickly and she shut it. Nothing had changed in the apartment. It was one room, with a window looking out into the alley, but the shade was pulled now. On the right there was a door going into the tiny kitchen, and on the other side there was a bathroom door, closed now, and the bed was on that side, a cheap iron bedstead with the enamel flaking off. On the right side of the room, between the closet and the kitchen door, there was an old velvet-upholstered sofa with sagging springs and the nap worn off the cushions. At the head of the bed, by the window, there was a little table with a dime-store lamp on it, and the cheap AC-DC radio in its white plastic case, the case broken and patched with Scotch tape. Late at night after she had come home from work she would sit on the bed with her face close to the radio and listen to it, to the music of the dance bands in big hotels across the country.
She was always very quiet, and now she stood back from him without saying anything. There was something
