"Tell who?" I asked.
"Mr. Harshaw." Her voice began to tighten up again. "I"ve been stealing from him, Harry. I"ve stolen nearly two thousand dollars from him." It caught up with her again.
It"s fine, I thought. It"s wonderful. Harshaw should write a book about his faith in the human race. His wife"s a tramp, I"ve been helping her with it, and now this. And then I knew it didn"t fit. Two of us were guilty, but Gloria didn"t belong in the crowd.
There was nothing to do until she recovered, and then I said gently, "All right, baby. You just tell me what it is. We"ll straighten it out. There are two of us now." I lighted her another cigarette and pulled her back to where she could rest her head against my arm.
"I"m sorry, Harry. But I think I"m all right now. I don"t think I can make you understand why I did it, because you"re not the kind of coward I was, but I"ll tell you the best I can. It"s been going on for nearly a year now. I keep paying the money back, but I can"t catch up with it because of the interest-"
She"s unique, I thought. She tells me she"s a thief, but still she"s paying interest on the money she stole.
"I won"t try to tell you what it"s like," she went on quietly, with that hopelessness in her voice. "Just trying to keep going, I mean, trying to keep the books straight, paying back a few dollars here and a few there, and then having to write out another fake note to cover one that has to be paid. It all comes to over fifteen hundred dollars, and the interest on it takes up nearly half of what I can pay back out of my salary each month. And then there"s always more. Something new. Another twenty or thirty or fifty dollars. But I guess I"d better tell you where it all went, where it goes-"
"That I already know, honey," I said. "What I want to find out before I go to talk to him is why."
She shook her head with frantic entreaty. "No, Harry. No! Don"t you see that"s one reason I haven"t told you before? I mean, for fear of what you"d do. He might hurt you, or you might get into trouble over it."
"You can tell me, baby." I said. "And don"t worry about it. We"ll just have a little talk. It"s just possible I speak his language a little better than you do."
She hesitated a minute and then she said unhappily, "All right. But there isn"t anything we can do. Except to go and tell him. Mr. Harshaw, I mean. Once I can get up the courage to do that... but I might as well start at the beginning. It"s about a girl, or a woman rather, who came hereabout this time last year. Her name was Irene Davey. She was a teacher. She"d been hired to teach high-school maths-algebra and plane geometry, I think-and to coach the girls" basketball team. School didn"t start until September, of course, but she came along late in August to find a place to live. I met her on the tennis court one day just after she came.
"She was several years older than I was-I guess she was twenty-six or twenty-eight-but she was very good at sports. She was crazy about all kinds of games. She could always beat me at tennis without even trying, and kept asking me about places to swim around here. I understood she had been on the swimming team in college, and had won a number of diving compet.i.tions. She seemed to take a great liking to me right from the first. She called me a couple of times and asked me to go to the show with her. I introduced her to a few boys I knew, but she didn"t seem to be much interested in them."
She stopped, and then she said, "This is a lot of explanation, Harry, but I have to tell you all of this before you"ll understand what happened. It was awful. But I didn"t know-"
No, I thought, she probably didn"t. I was beginning to have an odd feeling about it, a kind of premonition. What I was remembering was the scene that Sunday morning when they had me trapped up there in that old barn.
15
She went on. "Anyway, Miss Davey came by the house one Sat.u.r.day afternoon when I was home alone and wanted to go swimming. I told her I didn"t like the idea of swimming in the river because it had snags in it and there might be snakes, but she seemed so anxious to try it I finally gave in. I put my bathing suit on, with slacks over it, left a note telling my sister where I"d gone, and we started down here. We went in her car. I thought about this place because I remembered there was a pool just below the bridge.
"When we got here it was still early in the afternoon and the sun was awfully hot. We took off the clothes we had on over our swim-suits, but she didn"t seem to be nearly as eager to swim as she had been. She wanted to talk. We sat in the car and smoked a cigarette, almost in this same spot we"re in now, and she told me how much she appreciated my being so nice to her and that she liked me very much. It was a little embarra.s.sing, but I just thought she was lonely and eager to make friends here and I didn"t want to be too stand-offish and rude and hurt her feelings. But then she started telling me I was very pretty, and how I looked in a bathing suit-"
She broke off then. I could feel her shudder slightly. "It"s awfully hard to tell you this, Harry," she said hesitantly.
"It"s all right, honey," I said. "You can skip most of it if you want to. There"s nothing new about it, and I can guess the rest."
"I"m glad you understand," she said. "I-I guess I was awfully naive. I was just uncomfortable and wanted to get out of the car because some of the things she was saying were so personal. And then- It was horrible. She was trying to kiss me. I was so absolutely frozen with terror I couldn"t do anything at first, and then I tried to get out. She was talking to me and trying to hold me back, and I began to fight at her. She was terribly strong. I was crying by this time and trying to get the door open and push her away all at the same time when suddenly she stopped and looked around the other way, out of the window on her side. There was a man standing there in the road. I didn"t know him then, but it was Mr. Sutton.
"He looked just the way he did that time we saw him out at the oil well. He hadn"t shaved, and he had the gun in his arm and was carrying a dead squirrel by the tail.
"He stood there looking at us for a minute with that awful, filthy grin, and then he said, "Well, girls, a little lovers" spat, huh?"
"I couldn"t do or say anything. I wondered if I was going to faint or be ill right there in the car. And then she tore into him, cursing just like a man. I don"t think I"ve ever heard such things as she called him. And all the time he just stood there and grinned. Then he said, "Well, girls, I won"t interrupt you. You go ahead and kiss and make up." And then he walked on away.
"I don"t know yet how I got away. I must have just grabbed my things and run, out into the timber. The next thing I knew I was all alone, lying in some leaves with my slacks and things in my arms, sobbing for breath. After a while I got up and put them back on over my bathing suit and started walking. I found the road all right, and a Negro woman in an old Ford came along and gave me a ride to town. When I got home Sister still hadn"t returned, so I tore up the note I"d left. I would never tell anybody about it."
"And that was all?" I asked. "I mean, until he came and looked you up?"
"No." She shook her head. "That was just the beginning. The terrible part was the next day, and Monday. She didn"t come back to town that night. Somebody at the boarding-house notified the Sheriff"s office that she was missing, and late Sunday afternoon Sutton came to town and reported the car had been parked there in the river bottom all night. He apparently didn"t say anything about having seen it before or knowing whose it was, or anything. They went out there, and when they found her slacks and shoes in the car they decided she must have gone swimming, and had drowned. They started looking for her in the river.
"I was scared, Harry. I was scared to death. Twice I tried to get up the nerve to go to the Sheriff and tell him about it, but I just couldn"t do it. How could I explain why I"d run off and left her? And then early Monday morning they found her. Right in that pool below the bridge. Only they didn"t think she had been drowned. They said she might have been killed by a blow on the head."
I whistled softly. It was a mess, an ugly one. "Did they find out who did it?"
"No," she said. "Of course, I was frantic by then. Now I couldn"t tell them I"d been down there. But n.o.body knew about it-except Sutton. Around noon on Monday, after they"d brought her to town, he came into the office. Mr. Harshaw was out and I was there alone. He pretended he didn"t know who I was at first, and just said he wanted to borrow five hundred dollars. I was so scared I didn"t know what I was doing, but I did ask him the usual questions, about security and co-signers, and so on, and got out the forms. And all the time he was watching me, as if he couldn"t remember where he"d seen me before. Somehow-I"ll never know how-I got the papers ready for him to sign. And that was when he did it.
"Just as he picked up the pen, he pretended to recognize me. "Now, I"ve got it," he said. "I knew I"d seen you somewhere before, and I couldn"t figure out how I"d forget a pretty girl like you." You know that awful grin he has. "It"s too bad about your lady friend, isn"t it? I wonder if they"ll ever find out who did it?"
"Harry, I couldn"t do anything. I couldn"t think. I had to hold on to the counter to keep from falling, I was so weak. He said, "But I"ll tell you something that"s a scream. They"re looking for a man. Ain"t that a laugh, baby?"
"Then he put down the pen, without signing the papers, and said, "I"ll tell you what, honey. All this paper work looks too complicated for an old country boy like me, what with all this fine print and stuff, so why don"t you just give me the money now and you can fix up the fiduciaries and the hereinbefores yourself, like the smart little cookie you are. You see, I want to get out of town before that dam" Sheriff drives me crazy. Just because I live down there he keeps pestering me with a bunch of silly questions about whether I saw anybody else or another car, until honestly I"m just in a pet about it." Then he winked at me and said, "How about it, sweetie-pie? You"d do that for a nasty old man, wouldn"t you?""
She stopped and ran a hand across her face.
I"d told her I wasn"t going to do anything except talk to him, but now I could feel a cold and terrible rage churning around inside me. I wanted to get my hands on him so bad they hurt.
"So he went out without signing it?" I asked. "And he got the money?"
"Yes. I told you I was a coward, Harry. I was in such a panic I couldn"t think. So I had to falsify the books, to cover it up. Naturally, I didn"t have that much money myself. But it was all right. I"d pay it back a little at a time, until I got it paid off."
"And then, the very next day, the Sheriff"s office said they were convinced it was just an accident. They found a big snag in the pool under the bridge, just under the surface, and they believed she had dived off the bridge railing and hit it. It had either killed her outright or knocked her unconscious and she"d drowned. You see, they"d performed an autopsy Monday afternoon, and found a little water in her lungs. If she"d been dead when she fell into the water there probably wouldn"t have been any."
She stopped.
"Well, look," I said, "then there isn"t anything Sutton can do. The whole thing was an accident-"
She shook her head wearily. "You don"t know Sutton, Harry. He came back a week later and got two hundred dollars more. Don"t you see? He knew it wasn"t my money I"d given him the first time, so now he had me there too.
And he was sure I was coward enough to keep on paying him to keep that ugly story from coming out. Don"t you see the suspicion there"d always be if people knew? Maybe it was an accident. And maybe it wasn"t."
She was right. It was sweet, and it was murder. Sutton had it figured from start to finish. And now he"d gouged her for over fifteen hundred dollars, adding a little at a time, so she could never get it all paid back. The only way she could cover it up was with phony loans which called for interest, so trying to whittle down the actual shortage, with this interest and Sutton"s continued bites, was like trying to swim upstream over Niagara.
I gathered her up and kissed her. "All right, you can quit worrying about it. There won"t be any more "loans" to Sutton. And between the two of us we can put every nickel of it back and have the books straight in less than three months."
I wasn"t as optimistic about it as I sounded, but I wanted to get the load off her mind right then, so she could get some rest.
"But, Harry, I"ve got to go to Mr. Harshaw-"
"No, honey," I said. "You can"t. Don"t you see, with his heart in the shape it"s in, you can"t tell him anything like that now? When it"s all over and we"re square with the world you can tell him if you want, but I don"t see any sense in it. Actually, he"ll have been making money on it at around three per cent per month for a year, so he should kick."
"But-" she protested, "there isn"t any reason for you to get mixed up in it-paying it back, I mean."
"Yes," I said. "I can think of one. Maybe I mentioned it before. I"m in love with you."
For the first time, she smiled. It wasn"t much, and she had to work at it awfully hard, but it was there and to me it looked like the sun coming up.
"Come on," I said. "Let"s look for tear stains. I"m going to take you home, and I don"t want your sister to think I"ve been beating you."
I switched on the light, and she repaired the damage.
While she was poking around in her purse, something fell out of it, bounced once on the seat, and fell on to the floor mat. I groped around for it and found it for her. It was a money clasp, apparently of sterling silver and made in the shape of a dollar sign.
"Say that"s a pretty thing," I said.
"My mother gave it to me when I graduated from high school."
I handed it back to her and she dropped it into her purse. "We can be married any time," I said. "We"ve already got our silver started."
She laughed, and finished rubbing out the tear stains. She felt a lot better, and I kept on clowning so she wouldn"t know the way I was raging inside.
When I left her at the gate it was like pulling off an arm to let her go, but I was anxious to get started before she thought to ask me what I was going to do. I didn"t want to lie to her any more than I had to, and I knew she"d be frantic and try to make me promise if she got an inkling of what was going on in my mind.
When I got over on Main I stopped under a street light and got out and opened the trunk. I found what I was looking for, and threw them in the front seat. They were a pair of leather gloves I"d won on a punchboard one time and kept in the car for changing tires. They were leather all over, very thick and tough. For a job like this they"d save your hands almost as well as having them taped.
I was doing seventy by the time I got out of town. I"d forgotten about Tate and the Sheriff and the fact that they were still keeping an eye on me. If they tried to follow me, they got lost. I had to slow down when I left the highway, but I was crowding it all the way across the sandhills and through the river bottom. I went up over the second ridge bucking along like a madman in the uneven ruts, and when I hit the clearing I drove right up in his yard. And he wasn"t home.
The car was gone, and in the beams of the headlights I could see the cabin door was closed. I sat there cursing for two or three minutes before I remembered it was Sat.u.r.day night. A big sport like Sutton would be in town, or even in the county seat. He had to spend all that easy money some way.
There was no use going back and looking for him around the beer joints and pool halls. The only thing to do was wait. I looked at my watch. It was a little after eleven.
I waited until twelve. And then it was one a.m. Somewhere far off a train whistled for a crossing, and once in a while a little night breeze would rustle through the oaks around the clearing. What was the use of hanging around any longer? He was probably bedded down somewhere by this time and wasn"t coming back.
I gave it up finally at two-thirty and went back to town. I took a shower and lay down in the darkness with an all-night pa.s.s on the merry-go-round. The ash-tray on the floor beside the bed filled up and overflowed, and the sheets stuck to me every time I"d turn. I"d think of him, not satisfied with squeezing her dry with blackmail but having to dress it up with that crawling joke of his and humiliate her for his own particular brand of laughs, and the anger would come boiling up and choke me.
When was it going to end, and where? If I got him stopped, how about Dolores Harshaw? The whole thing was changed now. I wanted to stay here, and I wanted to marry Gloria. So then she"d just wish us luck, and that Sheriff would get off my back and take up raising orchids? There wasn"t any way to guess what she was going to do.
I must have dropped off to sleep sometime towards dawn, for the next thing I knew it was ten-thirty and I could hear church-bells ringing. Sutton was back in my mind with the opening of my eyes, as if he"d never been gone, and even while I was looking at my watch I was rolling out of bed. I dressed and went downtown. Sunlight was bra.s.sy in the streets, stabbing at my eyes. Only a few people were in the restaurant. I ordered orange juice and coffee, and while I sat drinking it a man in a white hat came in and sat down at the second stool on my left. It was Tate. He nodded.
"How"s it going?" I asked.
"All right, I guess."
"Anything new in the bank deal?"
"No," he said. "We"re still waiting." He looked at me, the level gaze devoid of any expression at all, and then went back to the newspaper, "just waiting."
I finished the coffee and put some change on the counter. "See you around," I said, and went out. I could feel him there behind me. Waiting, I thought. They"d wait a long time. I threw my cigarette savagely into the street and headed for the car, forgetting them. He ought to be home by now.
When I crossed the bridge over the river I thought of last night, and of her telling me, and began to ride the accelerator. And then when I hit the clearing I could see the car parked near the porch. He was home. I rolled to a stop in the front yard, grabbed the leather gloves off the seat, and got out.
I went up on the front porch and in the door without knocking. He wasn"t there. I stood in the middle of the room, looking around, feeling the wicked proddings of impatience and baffled rage. It looked about the same as it had that other time, when I"d come out here with Gloria, the bed unmade and dirty dishes sitting on the table by the rear door. Maybe he"d gone hunting. I turned, looking along the walls. The .22 rifle was lying in a rack near the front door and just above it was a pump shotgun. He couldn"t have gone far. A sudden thought occurred to me and I went over and checked the guns. The .22 was empty, but when I worked the action on the shotgun it was loaded. I jacked the three sh.e.l.ls out on to the floor, picked them up, and threw them under the bed.
I sat down on the bed and leaned back against the wall. Outside I could hear a woodp.e.c.k.e.r hammering on a tree. The air was dead and very hot and I could feel sweat breaking out on my face. And then I heard him coming. He was climbing out of the ravine behind the house. I sat there as he appeared in the rear door, carrying a bucket of water in each hand.
He was wearing overalls, but no shirt, and the black hair on his arms and chest glistened with sweat. The smooth moon face split open with a grin that didn"t get as far as his eyes.
"Come in," he said. "Make yourself at home."
"Sure," I said. I pulled a foot back and put it behind the edge of the small table beside the bed and shoved. It shot across the room and crashed into the kitchen table. An ashtray rolled, spilling b.u.t.ts, and the kerosene lamp hit the floor and shattered. Oil spilled down between the planks. "Sit down," I said.
He looked at the mess. "Tough, huh?" He set the buckets of water on a bench by the door.
"Yes," I said. "Tough."
His eye drifted towards the shotgun.
"It"s not loaded," I said.
"Well, what"ll they think of next?" He looked at me.
"What are we going to talk about? Not that I"m nosey, you understand-"
"Gloria Harper. You"ve been on her back a little over a year now-"
"And you came all the way out here to tell me to get off? Is that it?"
"I"m going to do better than that," I said. "I"m going to help you off."
I got up off the bed and started for him. He waited, not even putting his hands up. I walked in on him, watching the hands, and when they did move at last, the left feinting at my face, I turned sharply on my left-foot and took the knee against my thigh. Maybe he was expecting somebody from the Golden Gloves, I thought, swinging very low and hard into his belly and moving in with it at the end. He bent over, sucking for air and sick, and I put the glove in his face and twisted it. He groped for me with a left, and I hooked a right to his face which spilled him on to the edge of the kitchen table. The legs caved in on one end and he slid down it, getting mixed up with the plates and a bottle of syrup. He tried to get up, the wind roaring in his throat, and I dropped him again. It was five times before he stayed down. I was winded and my hands hurt, and sweat ran down my face like rain. I got him by the bib of the overalls and hauled him up against the slant of the table-top with my knee in his belly and bounced his head against it three times more for a sales talk and then let him slide down and roll around in the dishes. He was a mess to look at. I went over to the water buckets, fighting to get my breath, and poured water over the gloves to get the blood off, then took one of his shirts off the wall and dried them, and threw it on the floor. I poured the rest of the bucket of water in his face.
When I thought he could hear me, I squatted down beside him. "Now get this," I said. "You can"t make trouble for her. But even if you could, there"s nothing you can do to me. I"ll still be here. And h.e.l.l won"t be big enough to hold you. So if you want to go around the rest of your life singing to yourself and s...o...b..ring down the front of your shirt, go ahead and try it."
I went out and got in the car and drove back to town. Maybe I"d sold him, and maybe I hadn"t. The only thing I knew for sure was that next time I"d never get a chance to unload the shotgun.
16
That next week was wonderful. We didn"t see anything of Sutton, and we were together nearly all the time. We had lunch together every day, and I spent a lot of time in the loan office under the pretext of familiarizing myself with the setup. When the other girl was gone we"d turn on to the phony notes, trying to get them organized and establish some sort of pattern for paying them off. She didn"t want to be married until the last one was paid.
"It isn"t just stubbornness, Harry," she explained earnestly. "It has to be that way. You want me to quit work when we"re married, and we both know I can"t quit till all these are paid. They"re my debt, and I have to pay them."