Oh? Well, uh—I mean, thank you. It was funny, wasn’t it, the way I could say things that should make you mad but they didn’t really, somehow. They just didn’t seem fresh, the way I said them. Oh, then maybe that was it. Just the way you would admire any other work of art, like a poem, or a symphony? She’d never thought of it that way. But I was just teasing her now, of course. Work of art! But it was nice, the way I said things.
She didn’t talk about Nunn. I noticed it. From the depths of that sullenness she was slowly drowning in she was capable of making the crack about “being a trusty,” of making it to a total stranger, but now it was different. It wasn’t an act, really, I thought; when she was talking to somebody who took the trouble to recognize her as a human being, the hard shell of churlishness and defiance softened and she was no longer bound by that Procrustean compulsion to trim all her utterances to fit it. I doubted very much that she was any longer in love with Nunn, but when she was opening her petals this way and feeling good inside she realigned herself with the soap opera dogma that you didn’t discuss your mate with outsiders, no matter what kind of a sad bastard he was.
There was no difficulty in reading between the lines, however. She was dying out here. She was going crazy with loneliness. The trees were closing in over her and burying her alive. She was starved—not love-starved, at least in any physical sense, for you felt Nunn would collect his marital accounts-receivable as they fell due even if he probably did approach the bed with the subtlety and finesse of Machine-gun Kelly looting a bank—but just starved for companionship and understanding and perhaps a little gentleness. One tender gesture, I thought, would buy you a season pass. Not here, probably, and certainly not now in broad daylight, but it could be arranged. However, that was a matter to be shelved for possible future consideration; right now all I was after was information.
No, their business was mostly just fishermen. Some of them came and stayed three or four days, and a few hired George for a guide. The groceries were mostly for people who liked to go on up the lake and camp out for a day or two while they fished, but once in a while they did sell some to the people who lived around in the bottom, mostly when they ran short of something and they didn’t want to make the long trip in to town. Like this morning. One of the Hildebrand boys had driven over for a can of baking powder and some evaporated milk. Yes, just before I came in.
Keep going, honey.
Up on the road out of the bottom, and one of the boys had a dog named Trixie? No, that wasn’t the Hildebrands. Those people were named Sorensen. The Hildebrands weren’t really boys, they were grown men, actually, twins, about twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and meaner than cat’s milk. Their names were Jack and Judson. Judson had been in the penitentiary for cutting a man up in a fight. They lived over on the west side of the lake with their father and they raised ribbon cane that they made syrup out of in the fall, and lots of people thought they made moonshine, too, all the year around. No women at all; neither of the boys was married, and their mother was dead. They did their own cooking, and it was probably pretty bad. Maybe that was what made ‘em so mean. Did they trade here much? No, very little. They didn’t get along very well with George. They went to town every Saturday and the old man made them buy the groceries and put them in the car before they started getting liquored up and looking for a dance where they could start a fight. . . .
The Hildebrands didn’t sound too promising. They wouldn’t have spent as much here as those two twenties, to begin with. And if they’d got hold of a lot of money suddenly in some way, the F.B.I, wouldn’t have had any trouble finding it out long before this. There’d have been a steady stream of it being loosed on the countryside through cat-houses, beer joints, and crap games, not to mention large amounts through fines for disturbing the peace. Granted, one of them had been in prison, but where was the connection with Haig? Of course he d been in the sneezer once himself, but that was two thousand miles away in San Quentin.
But who was left? The man who had passed me on the lake? No one else?
The upper end of the lake? Yes, there were a few people living up there, mostly men, but you didn’t see much of them. Except that weird one, of course. And he was gone. But really gone. No, he hadn’t moved away; not that kind of gone. In fact, he was down here this morning. I might have seen him pass in his boat. What she meant was weird gone. You know, not quite right. Oh, he was harmless, and you felt sorry for him, but there just wasn’t any sense trying to talk to him. Yes, he was around a lot. He came down about twice a week after his groceries and his comic books. . . .
Comic books? I remembered them then. So that was why they were here. Well, you could certainly scratch him. But, God, there must have been somebody else. I went on listening; maybe she would come up with the right one after awhile.
George called him Two-Gun, but his real name was Cliffords. She thought it was Walter Cliffords, or was it Wilbur Cliffords. Well, it didn’t matter, anyway. Even to him. About half the time he thought he was Sergeant Friday and then for a while he’d be Wyatt Earp. When he was Wyatt Earp he wore a big straw sombrero and a gun-belt and holster with a six-shooter. . . . Yes, a real one. George said it was a .36 or a .38 or something about that size. He shot snakes with it. He’d been up there for years, as far as she knew. Used to work for the Southern Pacific, didn’t he, or something like that—anyway, he had a disability pension and he didn’t do anything but hunt and fish all the time, living alone like a hermit, and it was no wonder he was a little, well, you know. It must be a pretty good pension, too, because it was actually a fact he must buy at least twenty or thirty dollars worth of comic books and true detective magazines from them every month, to say nothing about his groceries and the shotgun shells and bullets for the thirty-six to shoot snakes with, and he always paid for everything with a ten or twenty dollar bill. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that with plenty of money to live on that way he’d want to be in town where he could have a television set and civilized people to talk to. . . .
If you live out of your hat for a sufficient number of years, you develop another sense. It’s a little like a built-in Geiger counter that can trip itself and start clicking faintly even when the rest of your mind is half asleep, and after a while you learn to heed it. I heard it now.
. . . and somebody to look after him, the poor old man. He really was nice, even if there was never any sense to the way he talked, and she felt sorry for him. She always tried to get him to drink a glass of fresh milk when he was down here, if they happened to have any, that is, and if George wasn’t around. George called him Two-Gun and made fun of him. But when you thought about it, if he wanted to live up there by himself, it was his business, wasn’t it? She’d live in New Orleans, herself. It had probably changed a lot since she was there when she was a girl, but it was the most wonderful place. She remembered she used to go down along the river and look at the ships from all over the world with flags she didn’t even recognize. Of course, being so young, she hadn’t been in any of the night clubs or the big restaurants, but she had heard about them. . . .
Mr. Cliffords? Oh, sure; she could understand how a strange case like that could intrigue you if you were interested in people. No, she was sure he’d been up there longer than just a year, or a year and a half. Of course, they’d only been here a little less than a year themselves, but she knew definitely he’d been living there three years at least because it was about that long ago when George had met him for the first time. He had come out here in the swamp to arrest a Negro who’d killed another man for—well, you know, running around with his wife. He’d come across Mr. Cliffords then and he’d told her about it when he got back to town, about the funny character who’d wanted to go along and help him round up the Negro and had used funny words like posse, and police cordon, and apprehend the killer, and so on. It was a real scream, George said. It was three years, all right; she knew because it was just a few months after she and George were married.