Fourteen
When he had cleared the outskirts of the city, headed east, he looked at the gasoline gauge. It was low, below a quarter full, and he began looking for a station. It was after midnight now but there would still be plenty of them open along the highway. If I was going to steal a car, he thought, why couldn’t I have stolen one with a full tank? It was a good car, though, a late-model Lincoln with lots of power.
He passed two or three Stations, large, brilliantly lighted, watching for a smaller one. In them big stations, he thought, even when you stay in the car you got light coming at you from all directions. One Lincoln looks like any other Lincoln, at least till they get it on the pickup list, but my face has been in too many papers.
He hit the open country, and then there was a small town, asleep now except for the flashing caution light across the highway, an all-night café and a constable making his rounds, and on the far end of the darkly huddled cluster of buildings he saw what he wanted. It was a small station, set back slightly from the street, with only one light over the driveway.
The door of the station was open and a youth in grease-stained white sat at a desk looking at the pictures in Life. Sewell stopped under the light in the driveway and the young man came out, smiling.
“Yessir,” he said eagerly. “Fill her up?” He had friendly gray eyes and big shoulders, and the arms below the rolled-up white sleeves were tanned and heavy, rope-muscled. Football player, Sewell thought.
“Think it’ll take about twelve or fifteen,” he said, bending his head down and pretending to be looking for something in the glove compartment.
“Regular or ethyl?”
“Ethyl,” he said over his shoulder.
The young man went around to the back of the car and took the hose off the hook. Then, suddenly, he was back at the window.
“The keys to the gas tank?” he asked pleasantly.
It’s little things, Sewell thought. Always little things. You can’t think of ‘em all. Lots of people forget to give ‘em the key, sure, but it just takes a little thing like that to start one of ‘em thinking. What kind of dope is it that don’t even know his own car’s got a lock on the gas tank?
“Oh, yeah,” he said casually, still looking down at the road map he had taken out of the glove compartment. He slipped the ignition key out of the lock and passed the leather key container out the window. But suppose it’s not in there? he thought. When the attendant went back around to the rear he shot a hand into the glove compartment again. There it was, a key tied to a small plastic tag.
The attendant was back at the window, handing in the leather key case and smiling apologetically. “None of them seem to fit.”
“Yeah, here it is,” Sewell said, passing the other key out with his left hand. “It was in the glove compartment. Wife uses the car,” he grumbled. “You never know where the hell anything is.”
The gasoline pump stopped ringing and he took out the wallet Dorothy had given him and held a five-dollar bill out the window. The youth gave him the key and went inside for the change. The cash register clanged and he waited impatiently. The car was directly under the single light in the driveway and inside it he was in partial shadow, but the longer this took the more chance there was that the fellow would get a good look at his face. He took the change with his left hand and stowed it in his pocket. The attendant reached for a rag hanging on the pump.
“Never mind the windshield,” Sewell said.
“Lot of bugs spattered on it,” the other urged hesitantly, reaching for the water hose.
“The hell with—” he began, and then stopped. Never attract attention. Never start ‘em thinking. They don’t see you unless you start ‘em thinking. “O.K.,” he said. “Thanks.”
He folded the road map, keeping his face down. He glanced up only once, swiftly. The youth was leaning over the fender, working on the windshield, looking at the bugs on the glass. Or was he looking in? Go on, kid, he thought. Get nosy. Get yourself killed.
I’m just jumpy, he thought. The kid ain’t seen anything. If he’d recognized me it would be on his face.
The youth finished with the windshield and stepped back. He started the motor and slid out of the station, and as he started to swing back on the street he glanced once at the rear-view mirror. He could see the white figure standing under the light, looking after him. Reading the license number? he thought. Maybe I ought to go back and blast him. No. No. Probably just wishing he had a Lincoln himself. It’s this forever wondering that gets you after a while.
The highway straightened out and he eased the accelerator in slowly and smoothly, feeling the power. Fifty, sixty, sixty-five . . . Louisiana in another couple of hours, he thought. The only thing, though, is having to get out before I found her.
Back in the station the young man sat down at the desk again with the copy of Life, looking at the pretty girls. All those big brown freckles, he thought. I never did get a good look at his face because he was always fooling with that map, but those big splotches on the backs of his hands . . .
He got up and went to the phone on the wall and lifted the receiver off the hook.
“Give me the sheriff’s office,” he said.
* * *
Mitch awoke in the night, feeling the charged and swollen darkness and the heat. There had been no sound, and as he lay there the stillness was something he could almost hear. There was no accustomed rustle of leaves in the post oaks or sighing of breeze among the pines around the house. The door was only an oblong of lighter blackness than the walls around him, and on beyond he could see no stars above the black line of the trees. In a moment there was a nervous flicker of lightning, far off, because there was no thunder.
He sat up and rolled a cigarette and lit it, the match blinding, brilliant for an instant, and then the night rushed back and swallowed him. It’s like waiting for something, he thought. Like waiting. But for what? For rain? It’s been threatening ever since dark and ain’t rained yet. Maybe it won’t. But it’s too still; it’s a weather-breeder. He thought of two men moving slowly around each other inside the ringed and silent faces at any gathering when there was about to be a fight, the two of them circling and poised, each waiting for the other to make a move. Why the hell do I keep thinking of that, he thought? I ain’t been in a fight, or about to be in any that I know of.
He wondered what time it was, knowing he would not be able to go back to sleep. He was as taut and tightly wound as the night. When he had finished the cigarette he threw it out the door and put on his clothes and went toward the back porch of the house.
As he passed the spot where Joy had put down the water bucket and cried out he thought about it. What the hell did she do a crazy thing like that for? he thought. When I tried to help her she shoved me off like I was trying to rape her. Well, who knows why women do anything? And especially that one.
He lifted the lantern off its nail by the door and lit it, and started down the trail past the barn, going toward the bottom, thinking of the river and worried about it. He had lived here above the river all his life and loved it as an old friend, but he knew its moods and its strength and the things it could do when it had the mind. Twice he had seen it rise without rain, and it was a frightening thing to watch, like seeing a dead body mysteriously come to life and move.
The trail dropped down toward the level floor of the bottom where the lantern threw long pendulum-swinging shadows of his legs against the towering columns of the oaks, and then suddenly there was the sinuous weaving of deadliness ahead of him in the trail, almost under his feet. It was a big rattler, diamond-marked, cold, and silken-flowing, moving up the trail toward higher ground. He caught up a dead limb and smashed it across the head, killing it, and threw the body off the trail. It was a had sign. There were few rattlers in the bottom, and when you saw one coming up out of the low ground like that it meant high water coming.
He hit water before he got out to the river’s bank. When he came to the old wagon road coming downriver and going out to the ford there was muddy water in a low spot in it. He was barefoot, so he stepped in and waded across. It was only a little over his ankles, but it meant the river was spilling up against the tops of its banks in places.
He came out to the ford and stood holding the lantern above his head. As far out as he could see in its feeble circle of light the brown flood slipped past, silent, swollen, bearing on its surface the telltale flotsam of drift, twigs, limbs, and small logs. A big bridge timber came by, slowly turning end for end on the dark and turgid bosom of the current. It’s just like it was that last time, he thought, the year Sewell went away. No rain here at first and it just kept coming up all the time, getting higher and higher every hour, going past quiet like that, like a river of oil, and then when it started to rain it came right out of its banks and over the bottom.
Another foot and it’s going to be pushing on that levee we built across the head of the field. And I ain’t got my fresno this time to build it up any higher. That road camp we borrowed it from is gone now.
I still got a shovel, though, he thought, silently watching.