Springing up, she ran over to the suitcase and began throwing dresses around again in a sort of despairing frenzy. “Jessie, Jessie, what can I put on? Help me, honey.”
Jessie followed her quietly. “Why not that white summer dress you had on this morning, Joy?”
“It’ll have to do, I guess.” She snatched it up frantically. Oh, why aren’t there any hangers around this awful dump? she thought. It’s all wrinkled. Well, it’s the only one. Hurriedly, she slipped into it, rummaged through the rat-nest confusion of the suitcase until she found her purse, and made up her face. Then there was another explosive upheaval among the powder-sifted brassieres, pants, dresses, handkerchiefs, and stockings while she matched the two remaining unsnagged nylons. She slowed down and put them on, very carefully, and slipped into the white shoes.
At last she was ready. She took one last look in the mirror and shook back her hair. Jessie followed her onto the porch, alternately caught up into the excitement of it and then slipping back into her own gray and lonely sadness.
Joy forgot to introduce the two strange men, and she stood quietly back out of the way. The man with the camera was fussing with its knobs and funny dials and taking light bulbs out of a leather bag. She wondered where he was going to plug them in, and thought with embarrassment of his finding out at the last minute that there wasn’t any electricity.
Maybe God would have forgiven him, Jessie thought, if he’d had time to ask. Maybe he did. Maybe the last thing he did on earth was to pray for forgiveness of his sins. It seemed so important, and she couldn’t understand why Joy didn’t wonder about it too. It must be more important than having your picture taken.
She wished she could ask Mitch about it. She had always consulted him about things like that, but now she couldn’t because she didn’t ever want to speak to him again. It was lonely, though, not having Mitch to ask about things.
Twenty-three
Mitch came up the trail past the barn walking fast in the rain, and went into the old smokehouse. He dried his hands on a shirt hanging on the wall and found the cigarette papers. I’ll roll two or three while I’m here, he thought, and put ‘em in a Prince Albert can with some dry matches. It’ll be easier that way than trying to toll ‘em in the rain.
Trying to force himself to be calm, he sat down on the box and set to work with tobacco and papers. His fingers were still too wet and the paper stuck to them and tore. Cursing, he got up and dried them again, and started over. Water ran out of his rain-soaked hair and spilled across the cigarette. He threw it away and tried again, holding it out and away from him. His fingers were shaking badly and he spilled more than half the tobacco, but he finally got one rolled and kept on until he had three more. Placing them in a can with some matches, he got up, ready to run back down the trail.
He ought to have more over him to keep off the rain than that old raincoat, he thought. Cotton sacks. I’ll take a couple of cotton sacks. I got to have something when— Sick revulsion ran through him and left him weak and shaking, and he put the picture out of his mind. Just to put over him to keep off the rain while he smokes a cigarette, he thought, and ran to the barn. Snatching up two long canvas sacks, he rolled them into a tight bundle. He was ready to go.
He came out the door and then stopped, thinking suddenly of Jessie. I got to talk to her, he thought. I can spare a minute, just one minute, if I can get her away from that yellow-headed slut long enough to get a word in. Wheeling, he ran through the rain toward the house. There was no one in the kitchen and he stopped and looked around, spilling water onto the floor from his saturated clothing. He seemed to be running forever through some horrible dream, trying to catch up with something ahead or eternally fleeing from some disaster behind. He stared at the empty kitchen, aware that it caused him no surprise at all. There was a feeling in him that if everyone in the house had suddenly evaporated like gasoline on a hot day or blown away like smoke there would no longer have been anything strange in it.
Then above the monotonous sound of the rain he could hear the radio in Cass’s room, the soft, insidious, forever-flowing river of its exhortation and admonition as unstoppable as time and unavoidable as death, but knew he could accept this as no evidence the house was still inhabited. It just goes on forever like that river down in the bottom, he thought, and it ain’t no wonder the old man can’t make up his mind which one of ‘em Sewell is drowned in. If you dropped it in a bucket of water it’d keep right on talking. He could see it now in his mind, lying unquenched, eternal, deathless, at the bottom of the bucket, the ceaseless outflowing of its word secretion unhalted and the words flowing up through the water in big bubbles like the balloon-encased conversations of comic strips.
There must be somebody here. Then there was a strange flash of light, or rather the reflection of a flash, sudden, sharp, incredibly fast, and gone. What the hell was that? he thought. Lightning? No. It was like lightning, but it wasn’t. Then he heard voices somewhere in front, and he went down the hall with his leathery feet rasping, shup, shup, shup, against the time-worn pine to emerge upon the porch like some drowned cadaver walking up out of the sea into the midst of a beach party.
It was Joy’s greatest hour. She lay reclined in the swing with her back against one arm and her long silken legs slightly raised and outstretched across it in the classic pose of all calendar art. The hemline of the short and frilly summer dress was carefully arranged across her knees while she awaited word from Lambeth as to whether he wanted more grief this time or more leg, and the reporter stood at the end of the swing taking notes on a small dime-store note pad.
“I won’t even have to wait for authorization, Mrs. Neely,” he was saying excitedly. “It’ll be all right, I know. A hundred dollars. I’ll write the story, under your name, of course. You just furnish the facts and I’ll write it down. It’ll be in the form of a first-person story of your life with Sewell Neely, how much you loved each other, your marriage, all the waiting here while you didn’t know he was trying to come back to you, the tragedy, and all that stuff. And under vour name, of course. By Joyce Neely, it’ll say.”
“A little more leg this lime,” Lambeth said. He was squatted down near the door with camera and flash holder.
Joy looked up and saw Mitch standing there in the door, smiled triumphantly at him. and hiked the hemline of her dress another three inches for his benefit rather than Lambeth’s.
“Hello, Mitch,” she said sweetly. “These gentlemen are from the paper. They’re going to give me and Jessie a lift, when they go back down lo Houston tomorrow night.”
Mitch took in all this grotesque Saturnalia of sickening cheapness in one terrible glance, seeing Jessie quietly watching from the edge of the porch near the step, and his mind swung back to the ballooning and discolored agony of Sewell’s dying down there in the rain. He had no way of knowing that at least part of the sexy and heartless bitchiness of it was an act put on instantly, at this very moment, for his benefit alone, and felt nothing but the black wind blowing inside him as he started toward her. He had taken one step when, unknowingly, the reporter probably saved her life.