The hand and the wrist were badly swollen and darkened now, and he supposed the whole arm was too, but there was no way he could tell inside the coat sleeve. The arm was very painful, and would bend only with difficulty, and it seemed to be swelling out against the sleeve like an inflated inner tube inside a tire. The left arm was growing stiff from the flesh wound through the muscle of the forearm, and the shock had worn off now, leaving it excruciatingly painful. Periodically, the awful chills would sweep over him and leave him drenched in a cold and clammy perspiration, while his heart fluttered like a bird’s. But it was the falling that was worst. Suddenly and without warning he would find the whole river bottom tilting on end and flying up at him like the opening of a cellar door, and he would be wallowing in the muddy and leaf-congested water struggling to rise. After a passage of time that he was never able even to estimate, he would be back on his feet and staggering on. There’ll be one of ‘em pretty soon, he thought, when I won’t get up.
Then he was on the beach at Galveston again with Joy, on their honeymoon, when she still thought he was a big-shot gambler and not a cheap purveyor of hired and professional violence. He would feel the great sea wind blowing and hear the booming of the surf at night, with his face in the fragrant loveliness of her hair.
I wonder if I’ve passed the farm yet, he thought. I seem to be on that side of the river and it’s funny I wouldn’t have recognized it if I’d gone by. Well, it don’t make no difference. I wouldn’t stop there.
Here’s your picture. And this other thing’s a gun. You ought to recognize a gun, but maybe you never saw that end of one before.
Twenty
It was midafternoon. The searching officers had come and gone, on into the bottom, and later Mitch had seen three of them come back out and go up the hill toward the house, where presumably they had left their cars. The other two, he supposed, had gone on up the river and would come out higher up, by the Jimerson place. Looking for a dead man on the bottom of the river, he thought bitterly, like a bunch of hungry turtles.
The river seemed to pause in its attack. For the past half hour the water level on the upper side of the levee had been almost at a standstill, and now it hung, poised, just below the top, like a toy balloon inflated to the bursting point. Was it the crest? Had it reached the peak, or was it merely resting, gathering its force for a new assault? If it’d just drop off a little, even a quarter of an inch, he thought, watching tensely, I’d know I held it. But if it comes up any more it’s gone.
Like Sewell, he thought, the black despair reawakening and moving inside him like something cold but still alive in his stomach. But Sewell’s been dead ever since he killed that deputy and butchered him up like that; he’s just been borrowing time since then. He knew it, and I knew it, and I ought to be used to it by this time.
He turned, looking out across the rain-smeared bottom. Water was backing up into the field on the lower end, but there was no current in it and it was standing quietly in the furrows between the rows of cotton. If the river went back down before too long it would cause little damage.
His eyes swung back, and then suddenly stopped. A man had emerged from the edge of the timber out along the river, beyond the end of the levee, plowing along bareheaded and without a slicker, head down and lurching drunkenly from side to side. That ain’t one of them deputies, lie thought, and then the man fell and struggled weakly in the flood.
Before the man had hit the water he was running. Oh, my God, Mitch thought, lunging across the field. He came to the fence and slid through between the strands of barbed wire, hearing the rip of torn overalls and feeling but not even noticing the wire raking into the flesh of his leg, and then he was splashing through the slowly moving discolored flood toward the weakly floundering man still fifty yards away in the rain. The water came up to his knees, slowing him down. And then Sewell had his head out of the water.
Mitch rushed up to him, panting, and tried to take his arm. Sewell, on his knees with his head down, felt the hands upon him and heard the splashing and tried to pull away. Mitch grabbed the collar of his coat and heaved mightily upward and Sewell came to his feet and stood, facing downriver, not knowing who it was. The gun was in his right-hand coat pocket and he wondered vaguely, with some far-off, detached portion of his mind, whether it would still fire even if he could get it out with the stiff, venom-swollen hand.
Then he turned, and they looked at each other for a long minute, the thin and hard-faced man in drowned overalls and shirt with his butter-colored hair plastered to his skull, and the bigger, heavy-shouldered one in the ruin of his city clothes, and neither of them showed any sign of emotion.
“We can’t stand here in the open,” Mitch said at last. “There’s still some deputies down here looking for you.”
“Not to the house,” Sewell replied, swaying. He seemed to be having trouble keeping Mitch fixed in his gaze.
“No,” Mitch said quietly. “Not to the house.”
“Just in the trees. In the big, black trees. They got bigger since I was here.”
Mitch looked at him piercingly. He’s out of his head, he thought. They got him somewhere. “Where you hit?” he asked, keeping his voice quiet and steady. If I start going to pieces, he thought, I’ll never get him out of here. “Where did they hit you?”
”In this arm,” Sewell said dully. “Didn’t hit the bone.”
The right arm was hanging straight down out of sight beyond him and Mitch did not see it for a moment. He looked at the sickness in his brother’s eyes and the white, ghastly, unhealthy pallor of his face and thought. Being shot through the arm didn’t make him like that. They got him somewhere else he ain’t talking about. But I got to get him out of here. We can’t stand here in the open like a couple of damn fools talking about the crops. I got to get him into the timber. For Christ’s sake, I got to get him moving before somebody sees us or he falls in this water again.
He moved around to the other side of the swaying, precariously upright figure. “Put your arm across my neck,” he said, and started to reach for the wrist to pick it up. Then he saw it, the obscenely swollen balloon-fingered travesty of a hand puffed blackly out of the end of the coat sleeve like an inner tube swelling out of a ruptured tire casing, and he felt his stomach turn over with the sickness of it. Snake, he thought wildly. Half the goddamned police in the state looking for him, and a snake got him. He spent twenty years in this river bottom living with ‘em and then he gets back in it for half a day and one of ‘em gets him. They couldn’t have got him another time, when he could go to a doctor. It had to be today. It had to be now. Of all the dirty . . . But what the hell difference does it make? He couldn’t get out of here no how. I got to stop this. I’m getting as flighty as an old woman. I got to get him into that timber. What’s the matter with me?
It was Sewell who snapped him out of it. “What’s the matter, kid? You getting sick?” he asked, and Mitch stiffened as if he had been sluiced with a pitcher of ice water. He looked at his brother’s face and saw the cold, ferocious grin and the sardonic eyes watching him.
He’s all right again, he thought. His mind was wandering, but it’s all right now. He’s the one with the poison in him and I’m acting like a kid or an old woman.