did. I remember one day-pore lil' fella couldn't ben but eight- they tied cans to his lil' tail and chased him home to his ma. Like a dog, Shad.
'So you see? One day he found out he could catch him little crawly things, things that couldn't fight back, and he started taking some of his hate out on'em. Hate got to come out someways, Shad. It shore God do.'
Shad stared at the table, thinking about hate. Then he grunted and stood up. 'Mebbe,' he said, not wholly convinced. 'But I just think he's dangerous as a walleyed bull.' From his jeans he dug some of the dollar bills Joel Sutt had given him for change.
'You put that money away, Shad Hark. I ain't setting up no coffee shop here, you know,' Mrs. Taylor said crossly.
'What give you the idea hit's fer you?' Shad wanted to know.
He put five of the dollars down on the table, letting them stack crisscross one on the other. 'Here. Give 'em to that old fool Toll woman. You don't have to tell her I give 'em to you.'
Mrs. Taylor looked at the money. Her eyes turned damp when she smiled, and he thought it was funny the way you could catch some people that way.
'Why, Shad,' she said. 'You got a soft spot in you wide as a boat-bottom.'
'Go on,' he snapped. 'You gitting foolish along with your other ailments. Bet in another year Rival won't be able to tell the difference 'tween you'n Edgar – if'n Edgar goes to not wearing his pants.'
Mrs. Taylor let out another holler of laughter, and her voice followed Shad out the door and onto the porch. 'Shad, don't you go to showing all that money of yourn to those girls you always chasing after. They'll take it off you in one night. You hear me, Shad?'
He felt pretty good when he went into the yard.
9
In the great square frame house with the high-peaked roof, in the house that was incongruous to the ratty peppering of shanties and the vivid wilderness, like a little girl's new doll standing alone in the weeded backyard of an abandoned property, Iris Culver moved distractedly across her living room. She passed the long wall of books- her books-Larry read trash – and went to the front window. Her highheels left the rug and the house-stillness seemed to shudder and recoil from the hollow sound of the heels tapping the wooden floor. The soft purr of the air conditioner followed her. It was a faulty old relic that Larry had picked up somewhere on sale.
Outside the air was sun-warmed, flower-scented. It was the day which last night had presaged – early summer, cool in the shadows, glass-clear. The cabbage palms stood tall and separate. The sky, ragged on the horizon, showed itself detached and whole, going on around.
She turned from the window in an abrupt, deliberate pivot, a movement that would have looked awkward, afflicted, from any other but a woman of her kind. Nerves. She went to a fiddletop table-one made by a local swamp billy and Larry had purchased it for five dollars. Iris hated it. From a jade box she took a cigarette. She stood for a moment looking back at the window, through the screened porch, across the saw-grass lawn and road to the lake, seeing the swamp beyond. She tapped the cigarette on her thumb. Where was Shad?
The three-word sentence stood in her mind like a wall, or like the swamp water out there that was just as much a barrier between them. She hated it, hated the tupelo and titi and gator-thunder; hated the sticky heat and mosquitoes, the free wandering hens and pigs, the dirty abysmally ignorant children and the distorted speech of their elders. Hated Shad; herself for needing him.
She crossed the big living room again, passed through a swinging door, pausing to hold it in her hand. Shad had made it for them. Shad had come to the house a year ago to make the swinging door. Larry had hired him because he was young and smart and because his work was cheap. Later she'd laughed at that, later, when Larry was out in his barn typing-and Shad was in her bed.
The view from the kitchen window was partially blocked by a hillside meadow. She opened the door and looked out. From the back porch she could see the meadow ending in a line of trees against the sky. The barn- Larry's Ivory Tower – was midway in the line of trees, like a white ship drifting to its moorings.
He was still up there, she thought. He wouldn't be bothering her for a while. Perhaps this was her lucky day. She might not have to hear his latest deathless chapter until night. The latest trials and good-natured adventures of Tab and Reb, those one hundred per cent red-blooded allAmerican boy rovers.
She slammed the door and click-clacked back through the kitchen, returned to the living room and went to the tall gilt mirror over a maple table holding a vase and flowers. The flowers were wilted.
She studied the image of Iris Culver, the surface Iris.
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.
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.'
