Seventeen
When would it start?
It was like waiting for an explosion after the fuse had been touched off, The four small needle-like punctures in his wrist and hand were nothing, like a fuse burning, and not very painful, but somewhere inside him the mysterious chemistry of the venom waited to begin its slow-burning explosion that would swell and blacken his body and bring death in the end.
Even in that chilling first minute after the snake had hit he had not even considered calling out to the men and surrendering. It had not occurred to him, and if it had he would have brushed it aside. It did not matter that they could have rushed him to a doctor for treatment and saved him. For what? he would have thought. The electric chair?
The tree swung lazily in the eddying brown sweep of the current and he held onto the limb with only his face out of the water, watching the hooded banks and the timber go slowly past in the rain. He could see the men in black raincoats still splashing through the water along the banks, running downstream and intently searching the surface of the flood for him, and knew the trick had fooled them. As long as he did not move or come too far out of the water among the leaves of the small sweet gum, they would not discover him, and with the current carrying him on down the chances were very good that in another mile or less he would be beyond them and they would go on back to the highway and he would be alone with the river.
No, not alone, he thought. I got the snake in me. I’m about as much alone as a woman seven months gone. I got nobody to talk to, but I got company just the same.
Them bastards with the black slickers will go back to the highway after a while, he thought, and they’ll think I drowned or that they got me with that last shot, but that ain’t going to mean they’ll quit looking for me. They’ll go right on till they find something, even if it’s just rotten meat. I couldn’t never get out of here, even if I didn’t have the snake in me.
There was no fear of dying, only a cold and terrible anger at it and regret at the thought of Joy. I had a whole week, he thought, and I never got close to her. A whole week to get her, and it’s all gone now.
The tree swung around a wide bend in the river and for a moment he could see both banks at once behind him. The men with the guns had stopped. He drifted on around the bend and they were out of sight behind him.
Then in a few minutes he began to shake as with a chill and he could feel the first faint, whirling giddiness of nausea pushing upward inside his stomach. So that’s how it starts, he thought.
* * *
At dawn it had begun to rain, and the river was spilling over its banks. Mitch came up out of the bottom, walking fast with the extinguished lantern swinging in his hand and urgency prodding his thin-shanked, furious stride. He hung the lantern and his raincoat on the porch and went into the kitchen, the calloused soles of his feet rasping against the worn and silvered planking of the floor. Jessie was cooking breakfast, and looked up without greeting.
“I ain’t got time to eat,” he said. “You got any coffee ready, Jessie?”
She looked through and beyond him, still-faced, un-recognizing. “No,” she said with distant coldness.
He stopped, his mind coming back from the river. “What’s the matter with you?” Then he noticed she was wearing the homemade play suit, which amounted to little more than a pair of too short rompers and a halter.
“I thought I told you to burn that thing,” he said.
“Did you?” she asked without interest.
“I certainly did. Go in there in the bedroom and put on some clothes and hand me that thing. No sister of mine is going around looking like a half-feathered jay bird.
”There was disgust and a cold and infinite contempt in the glance she gave him. “Well, you’ve certainly got a nerve.”
Mitch had never been one to heed warning signals or ask any discreet questions. Frontal assault was the only tactic he had ever learned. Women, even his adored younger sister, were of another race, and the oblique and sometimes devious courses of their mental processes met with no understanding and only scant interest in his forthrightly masculine and uncomplex philosophy. She was his sister, he was older than she was and consequently knew better what was good for her, he loved her, and the clothes she was wearing were indecent—these were all the facts in the case as far as he was concerned, and were sufficient for action. He was no more equipped to cope with the idea that Joy might have put her up to it for the forseen and calculated effect of his inevitable reaction than he was to play a dozen simultaneous and blindfolded games of chess.
“Did you hear what I said, Jessie?”
“I heard you.” She went right on turning over eggs in the frying pan.
“Are you going to do what I told you?”
Now she put the egg turner down in the pan. “I am not. I’ll wear what I please, and if I wanted to I’d go naked. It wouldn’t be any of your business.”
His face darkened and he took her by the arm, propelling her toward the bedroom. Surprisingly enough, she went without protest. She walked in and sat down on the bed.
“You can get your own breakfast,” she said with sullen defiance.
“Never mind breakfast. Are you going to change those clothes?”
“No. And you might as well get used to doing your own cooking. Joy is leaving in another day or so and I’m going with her. If it’s any of your business.”
He had closed the door to give her a chance to change. Now he yanked it open with furious suddenness. She was still sitting in the same position on the bed.
“You’re what?” he demanded, not believing he had heard her correctly. “What did you say?”
“I said,” she repeated coldly, “that I was going with Joy. We’re going,to live together in Houston. In an apartment.”
“Well, you can just get that idea out of your head right now,” he snapped. “Any time I let you go off with that—” He stopped. For all his outward assurance he was beginning to feel a vague uneasiness. This wasn’t the Jessie he had always known, sunny, high-spirited, and warmly impulsive. Fiercely independent she had always been, but still levelheaded and loving, and when they had had arguments she had always scolded him like an impudent squirrel. But this sullen-eyed, contemptuous mutiny was something new and a little frightening.
“Where’d you get this crazy idea?” he demanded.
“What business is it of yours?”
He made an effort to control his anger. “It’s plenty of my business. Joy is no woman for you to be around. She’s no good.” Characteristically, out of a hundred possible things he could have said, he had chosen the absolute worst.
Instantly she was a bristling porcupine. “You have got the nerve to stand there and say something like that about Joy? You? Will you please get out of this room?”
“Well, you ain’t going off with Joy. I’ll tell you that.”
“And just how are you going to keep me from it?”
His face was bleak. “I’ll take a harness strap to you.”
“And you think that’ll stop me?”
Suddenly he knew it wouldn’t. Punishing her couldn’t keep her from leaving. How could it? The moment his back was turned she would be gone if nothing except the fear of punishment kept her here.
Joy was at the bottom of this, he knew. Where was she? He whirled out of the doorway, and then he heard the porch swing creaking. Forgotten for the moment was the flooding river and the danger to the crop in the bottom. That would have to wait a little while longer.
He went down the hall in three furious strides and emerged harsh-laced onto the porch. She was lolling in the swing with one leg double under her and an arm thrown carelessly along the back. There was a fresh blue ribbon in her hair and she had on a short, frilly summer dress scarcely down to her knees. She wore high-heeled red shoes, with no stockings, and one bare leg pushed idly against the floor to keep the swing moving.
She let her head tilt back to look up at him with a lazy smile.
“Well, it’s Mitch. My, don’t you look mad?”
“What’s this Jessie just told me?” he asked curtly.
She shook her head, still smiling. “Goodness, Mitch, how do I know? What did she tell you?”
“The hell you don’t know. She says she’s going to go with you when you leave.”
“Oh, yes. Isn’t that sweet of her? She wants to go live with me.”
“Well, she’s not,” he said furiously.
“Why, Mitch? Has she changed her mind?” she asked, wide-eyed.
“I’ll change it for her. She’s not going.”
She dropped the bantering pose for a moment and looked at him with the open hatred in her eyes. “What makes you think so?”
“I won’t let her.”
“And just how do you think you’re going to stop her?”
He was up against the same thing again. He began to feel that the top of his head was going to blow off in the maddening fury of his impotence.
“She’s got her back up about something,” he said, forcing himself to be calm. “I want to know what it is.”
She was smiling again now with an infuriating provocativeness. “Oh, that. She’s mad at you because she thinks it was you that tried to pull me out of the window last night and made me fall.”
“Tried to pull you out of the window? What the hell—”
“Oh, haven’t you heard about that, Mitch? Or have you? Why, just look at what you—I mean, whoever it was—did to my poor legs.”
Still watching him with that tantalizing smile, she reached down and pulled the dress halfway up her long, smooth thighs. “Look at the nasty bruises where I hit the window sill. Now, was that a nice thing for somebody to do? Just to get a girl to come out and play?”
“And you told her I did that?” he asked ominously.
“Oh, no. As a matter of fact, I told her I didn’t think it was you. But she wouldn’t believe me. I don’t know who it was. It just seems to me, though, that it was an awful rough way to try to make a girl. Maybe that’s the only way you could, though.”
For a moment he was speechless with the rage that was clotted up inside and choking him. She made no attempt whatever to pull the dress down, and continued to watch him lazily, with that same calculated seductiveness. Deliberately reaching out the long bare leg, she placed the toe of a red shoe against his knee and pushed, setting the swing in motion again.
“But you were talking about Jessie,” she went on. “You don’t have to worry about her, Mitch. A couple of girls can always get by somehow.”
“You lousy tramp!” His arm swung down and across, and the hard flat palm of his hand smacked against the leg with a retort like the slap of a beaver’s tail. The force of it pushed her around in the swing.
She laughed. “You poor, stupid jerk.”
Then they both heard the rapid tattoo of Jessie’s shoes in the hall. Joy huddled in the corner of the swing, the derisive laughter gone now and replaced with a pitiful and abject terror while she put an arm up as if to protect herself against further attack: Jessie hit him from the back like a hurtling terrier, and when he turned she slapped his face.
Contempt in the eyes of a fifteen-year-old girl, he decided, was one of the worst things he had ever faced in his life.